7

I was sick with the kind of horror one feels upon realizing he forgot to lock the gun safe—the one from which a neighborhood kid steals a handgun and shoots someone. Or upon waking from a drunk to the realization he’s had unprotected sex with a prostitute. It was the kind of fear in which one realizes he has courted danger under the guise of negligent normalcy.

And now a woman lay dead.

I backed toward the curb, the gruesome bouquet of tire rubber, blood, and urine in my nostrils, as the woman in the peacoat administered CPR. Eventually, she sat back on her heels, breathing heavily, arms dangling on her knees.

A fire truck and then an ambulance arrived, sirens wailing. The way the medics left the body where it lay—the way the police shut down the street, took aside the traumatized driver of the car, interviewed some of the bystanders—it all seemed so haphazard. Like a chaotic game of pickup sticks, as primitive as surgery conducted with sharp stones. I had had such faith in this city, in the civic marvel of emergency response and modern medicine, and a woman had just died on the asphalt.

I lingered even after the ambulance drove off, silent and empty. I fixated on the policemen, trying to gather the courage to say something. To tell them that I knew. That I knew who—what—had killed that woman.

I couldn’t stop thinking of those too-old teenager’s eyes, narrowed at her after his staged fall, those young man’s lips murmuring seemingly to himself.

I never got anything to eat. Instead, I found a liquor store and bought a bottle of merlot—a bottle with a screw cap. I carried it home in its paper bag inside my coat and gulped from it in long, less-than-covert pulls on the T like a common wino. I hissed and then shouted at random buildings on the walk home, calling Lucian out, calling him a murderer. People walking by gave me wide berth, and I let out one of Lucian’s hysterical laughs in response.

I WOKE WITH THE cold claws of panic inside my chest. I had been prone to anxiety attacks in the past and could feel the old eddy now, offering to suck me into the spin cycle. Don’t think about that. Get up. Move.

Queasy and unsteady on my feet, I pulled open my apartment door and stumbled down the stairs to the bank of mailboxes inside the foyer. I averted my eyes from the glare of midmorning sun pouring through the glass double doors; I didn’t want to know what or who I might see standing there, peering in with too-knowing eyes. I snatched one of my neighbors’ paper.

Back in my apartment, the door locked firmly behind me, I folded the Globe open on my kitchen counter, paged past the national section to city and region. There it was, page B2, just a tiny mention: “Woman Dies, Hit by Car.”

A woman was struck by a car and killed yesterday on Arlington Street at about 4:48 p.m. She was pronounced dead at the scene. The identities of both victim and driver were withheld last night pending investigation.

I searched through the rest of the section, but there was nothing more.

I felt infected—by dark words, images, and influences, by my own willingness to expose myself to his particular strain of evil. While his first appearance had been a startling aberration, his presence in my life had become more real, more normal to me than the facts of my everyday existence. Just yesterday I had stepped willingly from the corporeal world into an alien spiritual realm.

What did it mean that a demon could infiltrate my life? And what were the implications for me that I had willingly met with him since? That death followed him even as he spoke of heaven, of God?

Worst of all, I could not erase the memory of that sound. Of a human thrown into a windshield. It should have been hard, the crack of a body breaking. But it had been sordidly dull, as muffled as a gun fired through a silencer.

Someone knocked at my door. I jumped, sweat breaking out on my back. Was that him? Would he come here? I wished I had my laptop open to my calendar. I never wanted to see that cursed L. again, but at least I’d know if I should answer the door or stay here, trembling and silent.

I sat very still. There had been no buzz from the front door, but did that matter? Would he force his way in if I didn’t answer? Somewhere I had a list of this building’s tenants and their numbers. If I called, maybe a neighbor could investigate for me. But no, that was stupid; I wouldn’t know what to tell them to look for. He could be a twelve-year-old selling Girl Scout cookies for all I knew.

“Hello?”

I didn’t move.

“Clay? It’s Mrs. Russo. Are you there?”

I exhaled and moved on slack legs to the door. I had unlocked it and started to pull it open, relieved at the thought of seeing her short gray hair and smooth olive skin, the crow’s feet around her eyes, when I was leveled by a frightening idea: Could Lucian show up as someone familiar to me?

Again the eddy, the cold fingers clutching at my chest.

Panic is an illusion, a small voice inside me said. Open the door and face her—it—whoever it turns out to be.

I pulled the door the rest of the way open, ready for anything.

A plate of muffins. Blueberry, by the look of them. Across our shared second-floor landing, Mrs. Russo was just closing her door. Upon hearing me, she came back out.

“Well, there you are!” She smiled and retrieved the plate from the mat. I stared, making certain it was the same Mrs. Russo who had brought me lasagna the day I moved in, who had helped me arrange my furniture—which consisted of little more than a few items on sale from Crate & Barrel and a desk my grandfather made for my eleventh birthday—and who had declared the result “elegantly Spartan.” Mrs. Russo, the widow whose husband had died of the kind of complication people sued hospitals over—though I don’t think she did that. It would have seemed beneath the woman who often referred to those things that can and can’t be changed, and to the will of God. Mrs. Russo, whose mail and newspapers I collected when she went to visit her children and grandchildren. Mrs. Russo, who was always baking, warm and homey smells drifting out onto our landing from her apartment as they did now from the plate I accepted from her hands. My stomach cramped.

“Clay, dear, are you all right?”

“I’ve been sick.” It wasn’t far from the truth. Dehydration had taken its toll. I was sure that my face was pasty, my eyes shadowed and hollow. My breath was certainly bad enough.

Have you ever been harassed by a demon? I wanted to blurt.

“Have you? That must explain why I’ve been thinking about you so much these past couple of days.” She reached up to lay the back of her hand against my cheek. Her crisp white shirt crinkled when she moved. A double strand of pearls hung in the neckline like a beady smile around her neck. She was made up for the day, her lipstick the color of new bricks. Her hand smelled like Jergen’s lotion.

“Well, you don’t have a fever.”

I wanted to tell her everything, from the first meeting in the café to the dreams and the accident—the horrible accident—to unload it all like tears spilled in a mother’s lap. But one long, stream-of-conscious sentence out of my mouth and that matronly look would change to alarm or worse. Mrs. Russo would disappear behind her door, and this moment of relative normality would be taken from me as surely as the peace had disappeared from my life that first night in the Bosnian Café.

What peace? I had not been at peace before this. But even my discontent and general aimlessness had been better than this.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” She frowned, her hand going to her hip. Her camel pants were smartly pressed, and I realized she was about to head out for the day. I nodded, angry at finding myself on the verge of tears.

“I think I need to lie down. Thank you, Mrs. Russo, for the muffins,” I said. She looked as if she might say more, but I gave her a weak smile, thanked her again, and closed the door, hoping I hadn’t offended her in my graceless haste.

I SPENT ALL DAY thinking about who to go to. Who I could tell without seeming like a lunatic. And I came up with only one answer.

No one.

I LOCKED MYSELF IN my apartment for two days. I slept in fits on my sofa, refused to open my laptop for fear of what I would find on my calendar, and ate Mrs. Russo’s muffins. Though I had never suffered from agoraphobia, I began to understand how easily I could become one of those people who refused to leave their home. I wondered if any of them had been stalked by demons.

On the second day I found myself rationalizing what happened in the Garden. Lucian really had tripped. When he murmured, he was merely talking to himself, calling himself clumsy and cursing his human body. Maybe he made an appreciative comment—she had been an attractive blonde, after all. That he disappeared when he did meant nothing; he routinely disappeared when I wasn’t ready or whenever I wasn’t paying close attention.

Anything to explain it. The truth was too appalling.

Sometime into the second day, after calling in sick again, I retrieved the stack of notes from my desk drawer. The summary account of my demonic encounters to date consisted of portions of two notebooks, of random pages stuck inside the cover of one, and the backs of a few pages from the recycle box. The last of these pages was scrawled in wild, volatile script. I had started to write about the Common and the Garden the night of the accident but never finished—mostly because I could not reconcile reality with Lucian’s strange behavior and the events that followed.

The other reason was that I was drunk.

Lying on the sofa and reading through my notes up to that day, I began to feel a strange sense of control—over my words, if nothing else, as though I had captured and contained events that defied rationality. The page brought order, a shape to all experience, the comfort of events scripted into story.

I picked up my pen and began to write, chasing reason, meaning, sanity.