The Demonologist (30 page)

Do you scream like that when you’re drowning?

I’d doubted it then. Not that my brother might have slipped into the water or suffered an accident that had put him in jeopardy, but that he would make that sound if he had. Because his scream had the tremor of shock more than the summoning for help. The horror of something other than the river taking him down.

An answer comes to me now. One I didn’t know enough to recognize as a boy.

You only scream like that when you’re
being
drowned.

Lawrence watches me emerge from the trees and stop on a flat table of rock. Holding on for me. Wildly kicking against the rocks a foot beneath the surface, straining his neck to keep his mouth from breathing the cold current into his chest. A moment that, at the time of its first happening would have taken a second or less. Yet now in its return engagement has been slowed. Revealing a truth that passed too swiftly at the time, and I too young to read them. A pair of truths.

Lawrence meets my eyes from the far side of the river. The Other
Place we never crossed to. The side we feared and where Tess had stood in her real dream.

The second thing I see is that my father stands over Lawrence. One of his big hands on the small of my brother’s back, the other tight around his neck.

Not trying to pull him up. Pushing him under.

And then he does.

My father has been waiting for me, too. To be a witness. To leave his mark on my soul.

Lawrence thrashes in the shallows. Held down lengthwise as though unsuccessfully learning to swim and my father his inattentive teacher. It is a configuration that led to my misunderstanding at the time. My father unable to get a grip to pull him up, my brother’s struggle hindering his rescue. Confusing enough to build an alternative history around. A lie to tell myself from that point until today.

But when Lawrence goes still and my father looks up to me there is no question what his goggled eyes say. A triumphant hatred. The self-congratulation that comes with three lives taken at once.

It is my father who holds Lawrence down, but my father in body only. Even as I watch, his face alters to show the presence inside of him. A sharp-edged skull. Needle chinned. The cheeks—too wide, too high—bulging against his skin. What the Unnamed actually looks like. Belial’s face.

The demon’s malice was not satisfied even with this.

It released my father from its hold, and I watched him return to himself. Look down at what he’d done. Then look at me.

My father. Not Belial anymore, not a spirit. It was my father who had looked into his youngest son’s eyes and spoken the truth in his heart.

It should have been you.

From out of the darkness, O’Brien’s voice. A far-off shriek.

“
David!
”

I’m running back the way I came. No more than a couple hundred yards, though it feels longer on the return, the river slopping over the
bank and squelching underfoot. My heart a knot of pain finding its way out between my ribs.

Her voice again. Weaker this time. Not really a shout at all, but a hollow echo.

“Run!”

Is she urging me to come faster, or warning me away? Not that it matters. Belial is here. I know that. I’ve
seen
it. But the sound of O’Brien’s desperation has, for this moment at least, swept his influence away.

When I come out from the willows and start up the slope I notice the van first. White, new. A rental. Ontario plates at the front.
YOURS TO DISCOVER
. Just visible around the corner of the cabin and parked in front of the Mustang.

Then I see O’Brien. Lying in the cabin’s rear doorframe, her head uncomfortably propped against the wood and the rest of her splayed out. Her legs leaping in spastic jolts. Her tongue repeatedly licking her blanched lips as though in futile preparation to deliver a speech.

I see the wounds last, so that I’m kneeling next to her at the same time I notice how whatever had been used to cut her had left the pattern of a cross in her chest. The blood coloring through the fabric of her shirt.

“You have to go,” she says. Her voice a series of small cracks.

“I’m not going anywhere. We have to get you to a hospital.”

“No hospitals.”

“This is different.”

“I’m saying I won’t make it even if you try.”

She takes a breath and with it the wounds open wide, pulsing out. I cover her with my hands but there are too many entry points. Her body warm but turning instantly cool in its exposure to the air.

Yet she is calm. Her eyes rolled back to a line staring somewhere just above my head. Not afraid, no evidence of pain. One last squeeze of adrenaline. A final insight or vision, true or false.

“I can see her, David.”

“See who?” I ask, though I already know.

“She’s . . . waiting for you.”

“Elaine—”

“She’s holding on. But it . . .
hurts
. She—”

“
Elaine
. Don’t—”

“—needs you to believe, too.”

O’Brien’s gaze lowers and she takes me in. It is the only way to put it. Her eyes hold me as though she’d lifted me into her arms and pressed me close to feel the last knocks of her heart. She doesn’t have the strength to raise her hand let alone offer her embrace, so she manages it with her eyes. A dimming smile.

By the time I lower myself against her, she’s gone.

It’s quiet. Not in the sense that the birds have stopped singing or the breeze stopped blowing, but quiet in the way it has been quiet all along. There is only the river behind me. The water passing over the stones in continuous applause.

I lean against the doorframe opposite O’Brien. The sky a collection of clouds of the kind you might see animals or faces in, though none show themselves to me. There is the idea that something should be felt now, something clear. Sadness. Rage. But there is just the flat erasure of exhaustion.

And the knowledge that whoever did this to O’Brien is still here.

As if appearing by the power of my thoughts, there’s a figure I hadn’t noticed before ankle-deep at the river’s edge. Bent over, hands in the water. Busying himself with a task I can’t see from here.

For the briefest moment the thought of attempting escape occurs to me. It might be possible to rise unnoticed, slip around the cabin, and get to the Mustang, be the first one to start back along the trail to the road. But he knows I’m here. Knows I’m entertaining these very thoughts and is no more bothered by them than an untied shoelace.

The Pursuer only turns once I’ve walked down the slope to stand a dozen feet behind him. Close enough to see the soiled bandage he’d tied around his head. To see that he’s washing a knife. The blade long, rubber-handled. The knife we’d left next to him on the motel pillow.

He glances over his shoulder and, at seeing me, grins in welcome.
Though there is no warmth in it. It is the look an animal gives another animal to lull it into calmness before doing it harm.

Slowly, he shifts his body around so that all of him faces me. His feet still in the water. Its movement carrying away discolored plumes washed from the knife blade, his pant legs, dripped from the ends of his fingers.

“You came down here just to wash that off or to give me a chance to leave?”

“You’re not going anywhere,” he says. “I pulled the plugs from your car.”

“I could run.”

“You wouldn’t get far.”

“There’s still your van.”

“Yeah,” he says, and pulls his keys from his pocket. Dangles them tauntingly in the air. “There is.”

All at once the fullness of his intentions burns up from my legs, and though I try, I can’t prevent myself from shaking. The Pursuer sees it. Grins his not-grin again.

He pulls one of his feet out of the water and onto the bank.

“Why a van?” I ask, seeing that talking is better than not talking.

“Disposal.”

“I would’ve thought this place was ideal for making a couple bodies go away.”

“Burying isn’t the way to do it,” he says, shaking his head as though still disappointed to hear people make this mistake. “And you know what? I don’t
like
it here.”

The Pursuer brings his other foot out of the water and stands straight. For the first time I notice the blood on his jacket. Not the spray that came from O’Brien—though this is on every part of him, too, his cheeks, the tip of his nose—but a gash in his side, just above his hip. An oval seeping wider through the cotton.

He follows my line of sight. Nods at the hole in his body as if it’s a mildly inconvenient task he’ll have to tend to later. A dry cleaning pickup. An ATM withdrawal.

“Your girlfriend put up quite a fight for a sick lady,” he says.

“You like killing women?”

“There’s no liking or not liking about it.”

“Your employers,” I say. “What are they afraid of?”

“They don’t have to justify their decisions to me.”

“Guess.”

“I’d say you’re too close to something,” he says, and shuffles up to the top of the bank. He stands below me still, but has swallowed up half the distance between us in a single stride.

“Wouldn’t the Church approve of something like the document becoming public?” I say, my mind spinning around, looking for a plan that isn’t there. “Might win a few million converts on the panic factor alone.”

“They’re not in the changing-minds business. It’s about maintaining what they’ve already got. Keeping balance. If it ain’t broke, don’t let some stupid fucker fuck it up sort of thing.”

“Something you’re happy to help them with.”

“I’m a hired man,” he says with a weariness that seems to surprise himself. “I’ve done this quite a few times.”

“A murderer for the Church. That ever trouble the conscience of an altar boy from Astoria?”

“You Catholic, David?”

“My parents were. In name.”

“Still. You know what it is to follow holy orders.”

“Thou shalt not kill.”

“The most frequent exception. But hey, you’re the expert, right?”

His laugh at this is genuine, cut short only by a burning flare in his side that bends him over a moment before he straightens again.

“You could tell them I got away,” I say.

There is nothing in his expression that shows he’s even heard this. Just another sliding step closer. And another.

He expects me to run. His arms held slightly out from his sides, knees bent, ready to get a jump when I start up the slope. He probably figures he’ll be all over me before I have a chance to take a single step.

It’s why he’s startled when I run at him.

Not even thinking about the knife. Not thinking about anything
but speed. Reaching him before his trained responses have a chance of booting up.

It almost works. The flats of my hands slamming into the top of his chest as he raises the knife, so that it passes over instead of into me. Cuts a flap through my shirt. A red line from shoulder to shoulder.

He’s bringing the blade up again—unhesitating, unlike me, who pauses in this quarter-second to uselessly
think
—as I push into him once more. It’s little more than a nudge, the roughness of contact you might have riding the subway at rush hour. But it’s enough for him to wheel back slightly, for one of his feet to try to find firmer ground just behind him. Instead, the foot uproots a clump of turf and slides away. And I run into him again.

We both fall. An awkward embrace neither of us can release the other from. It keeps him below and me on top. Stays that way when we hit the water.

An insane thrashing. Sideways fists. Watery puke.

There is no fight, only the reflex to keep our heads above the surface. Beneath me, I can feel the Pursuer’s fear as acutely as my own. Instead of creating a hesitation in me, his terror gives me a focus. I want him to experience
more
of it. The promise of this moves everything faster.

My knee comes to rest on his elbow so that while the swings of his knife can’t connect with my gut or chest, he can reach my hands that are now clasped around his throat. Finding the windpipe. Pressing down with the weight of my body, arms locked straight. The click of something soft giving way in his neck. But he keeps swinging the knife at me until the blade lands on the base of my thumb. Gains purchase with the first gouge, the exclamation of blood. Then he starts to cut. A steady sawing through tissue. Then bone. Even as his face turns from crimson to purple to near-black he keeps methodically sawing. But I don’t let go. The pain screeches like an animal locked inside me, biting itself, using its claws to get out. But I don’t let go. With a jerk the Pursuer’s knife cuts through to the other side and my thumb drops into the current. It floats away, bobbing playfully, leaving an oily stain upon the surface. I watch it. Feel the life
now draining from me as it has just stopped draining from the man whose head I now plunge underwater. Hold there. Watching his nostrils and lips for bubbles that roar up, then slow. Then stop.

The white of unconsciousness veils over my sight. I don’t let go. Even as I’m slipping forward or back or down, slipping away.

I don’t let go.

W
HITE.

T
HEN, PIECE BY PIECE, THE WORLD AGAIN.

Sitting in a car by a river. A van just ahead of me with Ontario plates.
YOURS TO DISCOVER
.

Blood.

It’s the sight of the blood that quickens the rush of particulars—the steering wheel with
FORD
signatured on the horn, the iPhone on the dash, the hunting knife wetly nested atop the empty coffee cups in the footwell—along with the pain. Adding character as it grows. Improvising.

Your thumb’s been cut off. Tie that up.

A voice in my head. Helpful but urgent.

Stop the bleeding or you’ll black out again and never come back.

Tess’s voice. Never known to be a first-aid expert, never good with
the gross stuff. But right now, she seems to know what she’s talking about.