The Demonologist (29 page)

How did Robert Burton know so much about such things? A cloistered academic in the earliest days of the seventeenth century?
Here’s an answer: the same way I know so much about it now, a cloistered academic four centuries on. Personal experience.

O’Brien coughs herself awake. I slip the photograph between the pages and slap the book shut.

“You want me to drive?” she asks, reading the clouds gathered in my eyes.

“No. Just rest,” I answer, roaring the Mustang to life. “I’ll take us the rest of the way.”

I
CAN
’
T SAY IF
O’B
RIEN
’
S THOUGHTS HAVE TURNED TO THE
P
URSUER
or not, but mine certainly have. Neither of us have mentioned him, in any case. I suppose it’s because there’s little point. O’Brien saved my life by doing what, only days ago, would be an unthinkable thing. She’d gotten out of bed at the sound of his fiddling with the lock and found the only weapon a motel room could offer, then hidden with it against the wall by the door, hoping not to be noticed when he opened it. Then, when he’d pulled out the knife, she’d done what she’d done.

It’s hard to guess at how this act weighs upon her. Perhaps she worries about who they will send after us now. Or perhaps, like me, she only calculates how little time there is left.

W
E CROSS THE BORDER AT
N
IAGARA
F
ALLS IN DARKNESS.
A
T
O’B
RIEN
’
S
insistence we park the car and take a couple minutes to walk to the water’s edge and look over the rail. A smooth collapse of broad river falling away into an exploding cloud of mist, though its gray reach upward lends it the restlessness of smoke more than water.

“That’s us, isn’t it?” O’Brien says, staring at the drop. “Going over the falls in a barrel.”

“Minus the barrel.”

O’Brien takes hold of my hand.

“Whatever we find, wherever we’re going, I’m ready,” she says. “Not reckless but . . . clear.”

“You’re always clear.”

“I’m not talking about the mind. I’m talking about everything else.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Not true. You have Tess.”

“Yes. Except for Tess. She’s the only thing that’s clear for me.” I pull O’Brien against me. “And you, too.”

When the mist finds its way through our clothes to chill our skin we head back to the Mustang and find the highway again. Drive around the western end of Lake Ontario, through the peach orchards and vineyards of the peninsula, then into the growing density of the outlying towns and industrial cities before Toronto. A glimpse of its towers, then the turn north again. The new suburbs looking old. The rolling croplands.

A couple hours later the multiple lanes shrink to an uncertain road, tightening through the wooded curves, the sudden overhangs of blasted rock. We’re past the Muskoka lakes with their multimillion-dollar summer compounds and private golf courses, and past now, too, the smaller, cheaper lakes that follow. Soon we are making one after another of the thousand turns through the unpeopled land. A thread of blacktop teased out over a landscape of endless forest so that there is no decision but to advance or retreat. Which, in our case, means no decision at all.

It’s dawn by the time we pull over onto the shoulder and I get out, stiff-kneed, to haul open the metal gate at Fireweed Lake Lane. Though “lane” hardly suits: an unmaintained trail through the brush, two wheel ruts in the earth and branches shaking hands across the gap. The cover of trees so thick it darkens the way in greenish night.

“How far?” O’Brien asks when I return to the car.

“About a half mile in. Maybe a bit more.”

O’Brien leans over. At first I think it’s to whisper something in my ear but instead she kisses me. A real one, almost warm, on the lips.

“Time to see what he wants us to see,” she says.

Over even the last few hours her skin has been pulled tighter over her cheeks, her chin. Core pounds lost despite the steady
cheeseburger and vanilla shake diet. Yet she is still here. The essence of Elaine O’Brien, the last of her, meeting my eyes.

“I—”

“I told you. I know already,” she says and returns to sit straight in her seat, staring into the shadowed trees. “Now, let’s go.”

T
HE
M
USTANG ROLLS OFF THE SHOULDER AND WE ARE INSTANTLY
swallowed up by the green.

I remember doing this drive in the backseat of my father’s Buick station wagon, a wood-paneled monster that handily managed to jostle through the mud slicks and over the larger rocks on the juicy suspension of yesteryear. The Mustang, however, lets us feel every knock and worry over every tire-spinning hesitation.

We break through a final veil of scrub to have the old Ullman cabin revealed to us. Not that it was ever really ours. Not that it’s really a cabin.

An aluminum-sided bungalow with a pair of squinty, curtained windows, one on each side of the front door. The kind of hastily constructed kit home you find in the downmarket neighborhoods of factory towns, yet in this case plopped in the northern Ontario woods, as though lifted by a tornado and long forgotten about.

We get out of the car and lean against it a moment, breathing the surprisingly cold air and getting our legs back. No other tire tracks
in the leaf-littered yard. No sign that anyone has been here for weeks, or probably longer.

“What do we do now?” O’Brien asks.

“Look around, I guess.”

“What should we be looking for?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’ll find us.”

The front screen door, hinged only at its bottom, swings open in a curl of breeze and utters a rusty yelp. I find myself walking toward it without any clear intention of opening the door behind it. But that’s what I’m trying to do. Hauling on the handle, shouldering into it in case it’s merely stuck in its frame.

“Locked,” I say.

“There a back door?”

“It’s probably locked, too.”

“Let’s have a look-see anyway.”

I follow O’Brien around the corner and the river is suddenly before us, seventy yards down a sapling-dotted slope of waving grass. The current looking stronger than I remember it, whirlpools spinning about at the midpoint, stray branches racing by the shore. Not a wide crossing—maybe a hundred feet or so—but I wouldn’t want to try it. I’m not sure anyone ever did.

On the far side, the dark forest. Gnarled and dry.

“You’re right,” O’Brien announces off to my left, rattling at the rear door at the top of a deck blackened by mold. “Locked tight.”

There’s a football-sized rock on the ground not far from where I stand. I pick it up with both hands and join O’Brien.

“We’ll just have to pick it,” I say, and swing the rock down on the handle, shearing it off. The door swings open half a foot.

O’Brien is the first in. She pulls the curtains open and lets the available light spill onto the floor. Tries the light switches, but none work. Pokes her head into the bathroom I know to be just around the corner from the kitchen. All before I take a step inside.

“This look familiar to you?”

“I was just a kid the last time I was here,” I answer.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It’s all different. In the details. But yes, it’s familiar, all right.”

“So why don’t you come inside?”

“Because it smells like the past.”

“Just smells bad to me.”

“Bingo.”

But I do go inside. And it does smell bad. Damp wood and pine needles that, together, obscure something rank, a once living creature now trapped or poisoned beneath the floorboards or behind the wall. A nasty surprise for whenever the current owners decide to return, if they ever do.

And the kitchen’s turquoise walls. The original color of loss.

“I’m going outside,” O’Brien says as she passes me, looking even more ill than earlier.

“You okay?”

“It’s just hard to breathe.”

“I know. It’s a bit foul in here.”

“Not just inside, but out.” She grips both hands around my forearms. “There’s something
wrong
about this place, David.”

There always was
, I almost say. But before I can help her O’Brien releases me and shuffles out the back door where I hear her pull in a couple gasps as she stands on the deck, hands clutched on her knees.

Now that I’m here I breathe it in. And the life I’d buried fills my lungs in an instant, so that I’m remembering from the inside out.

The first thing that appears is my brother. Lawrence. Standing just beyond reach and looking at me with the same mixture of affection and obligation as he did in life. Two years older than me and always tall for his age, which meant he was often mistaken for being more mature, more able to “manage it,” as my father put it, where the thing to be managed was himself.

He would sometimes call him Larry but I never did. He was no more a Larry than I was a Dave, both of us too serious, too brooding and reserved to properly wear a shortened name. Not that Lawrence was a fearful kid. As we moved from school to school he protected me from every bully, shielded me from the taunts of every clique,
sacrificing his own opportunities for inclusion (he was an athletic kid, and had invitations) in the name of preventing me from being alone.

Who knows how happy he would have gone on to be—how happy either of us might have been—if we’d had a different father. One who didn’t drink so prodigiously, even proudly, as if someone had challenged him to a self-destructive competition and he was damned if he was going to lose. Other than whisky, his main interest lay in pursuing cheaper and cheaper rents in ever more remote places, dedicating himself to lowering our already poverty-level expenses in the way other fathers dedicated themselves to finding better jobs in better towns.

My mother stayed because she loved him. Over the seventeen years that followed before she died, too, of natural causes (what they still called smoking-related emphysema at the time), she offered no alternative reason to me. Though perhaps self-pity held her in its grip, too, a taste for the tragic, the delicious heartbreaks of the could-have-been.

As for our father, while he could never find his way to love us—he was too busy for that, too distracted by the avoidance of collectors, the hustle for advance payment on odd jobs—he was not especially cruel, either. No slaps, no belt thrashes, no time in locked rooms. No punishments at all, really, other than our not having him present in our lives. A mobile emptiness that occupied the space of the living room chairs and head of the kitchen tables and laid upon the bathroom floors we paid a couple months for, then were asked to leave for the months we didn’t.

Nobody called depression a disease then. Nobody called it depression. People were said to have “nerves,” or be “under the weather,” or allowed themselves to waste away in the name of a “broken heart.” Our father, who still hauled a half dozen boxes of books he’d acquired over his earlier years of training and brief career as a schoolteacher and fancied himself a man of underestimated learning, preferred the term
melancholy
on the rare occasions he spoke of it. His drinking was justified on the grounds it was the only way he knew how to hold it
within manageable boundaries. I never realized until this moment that I learned the word from him.

Outside, I find O’Brien sitting on the edge of the deck, her feet swinging through the grass.

“Feeling better?”

“That’s probably too much to ask,” she says.

“Would you rather wait in the car?”

“I’m fine here. I just need to pull my shit together.”

“You need me, just squeak.”

“Where you going?” O’Brien looks up at me.

“Just going to head down to the river. Take a look around,” I say.

“Don’t.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The river.”

“What about it?”

“I can hear it. Voices. A thousand voices.” She reaches up an unsteady hand and grasps the tips of my fingers. “They’re in
pain
, David.”

My toes touch the river and it sings with pain.

Tess heard it, too. And though I don’t, I believe O’Brien does. Which means that’s the way I have to go. A conclusion O’Brien comes to even before I do, as she releases my fingers without me having to pull them away. Returns her gaze to her own swinging feet.

The walk down reveals the slope to be steeper than it looked by the cabin. It has the effect of drawing you closer to the water faster than you want to go, an invisible undertow. This part of the property has been cleared and re-cleared over the years, so that while the forest is halfway to reclaiming it with trees, it’s still a patch of unshaded ground. It blinds me all the way down to the bank’s edge. The river alive with the light of the sun’s rage, so that its surface appears to reach out to me, the water ablaze.

Yet it is only a river. Containing memories and voices only to the extent we contain them.

“The mind is its own place,” I say aloud.

Magic words that bring my brother back. Or if not him, the memory of his scream.

I had walked down the slope I just walked down and stood where I stand now when I was six. Looking for Lawrence, whom my mother had permitted to leave the breakfast table before me. I knew he’d be down here. Fishing maybe, or collecting frogs in a jar. The river was where we’d come to be free of our parents, from the sounds and smells of home that are a comfort in other kids’ lives.

Lawrence could have gone left or right from here. A narrow trail followed the bank for what might have been miles past our lot on both sides, and we had favorite, secret spots along its route. The six-year-old me had stood here, wiping the crumbs from his chin, trying to guess which way to try first. And I’d heard Lawrence’s scream in the eastward distance. Just as I hear it now.

I run with my head down, beneath the arching willow boughs, the tails whipping my back. Twice I almost slip off the moistened path into the water but manage to windmill my arms and regain a lurching balance. And as I go, the same rushing question I’d had the first time.