The Good Demon Read online

  But I found nothing on the Internet about this particular Kevin Henrikson. No Facebook, no picture, nothing. If he died, there would be an obituary I could track down. I would have to search through all the old town newspapers that weren’t online. Maybe there was a separate database somewhere for that.

  I walked up to one of the librarians working, a fifty-ish, squatty woman named Mrs. Jenkins. She squinted at me.

  “Hi there,” I said.

  “Got you more of those horror movies you’re always checking out?”

  “Not today,” I said. “Actually I was just wondering if y’all had a backlog of the county newspaper. You know, like a box full of all the old issues or something?”

  Mrs. Jenkins wet her lips and smiled at me.

  “You know what you are?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “You’re in luck, that’s what you are. We had boxes and boxes of old newspapers in the back, maybe two hundred boxes total, and we had to clean them out to make room for new computers. That’s just how it goes. We were going to have to throw it all out. Imagine that, all that history, just—poof! And gone.”

  “That would be awful,” I said.

  “Sure would,” she said. “Mighty durn awful, if you ask me. Except it didn’t happen. No sirree.”

  “You didn’t throw away all the old newspapers?”

  “’Course we did. Got all that grant money for new computers, and we couldn’t let it just go to waste, could we? But we didn’t lose the history. See, this Boy Scout come up here, asking if there’s something he could do for a service project. Wanted to make Eagle Scout, understand? Had to do a service project, take up to a hundred man-hours, he said. So I said, ‘Well, boy, how about you start scanning up all them newspapers we got back there?’ And you know what? He did it, bless his heart. I got it all on a computer in the back. PDFs. Searchable, too.”

  Mrs. Jenkins got up from the desk and motioned for me to follow her. She led me through a locked door and into a room with what looked like an overcrowded office desk. Piles and piles of books and papers and Diet Coke cans and gas station food wrappers. In the midst of the chaos sat an old Gateway computer.

  “It gets messy in here sometimes,” she said. “But it’s all on that machine right there. I haven’t uploaded it to the network yet. Frankly I just don’t know how. I’m hoping another Boy Scout comes along, one who’s good with computers. Now you just go right ahead and search to your heart’s content.”

  “Thanks.”

  “’Course, darlin’. Not many people care much about the past. We don’t get folks your age in here. It’s either the elderly, or parents come in with their hollering little devil kids. Feel more like a social worker than a librarian most days. But that’s life, ain’t it?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Sure it is. You’ll find out soon enough,” she said. “It don’t go the way you think it should, but it goes alright. I’ll be up front if you need anything.”

  I waited till Mrs. Jenkins was gone. She didn’t shut the door, which was annoying, but I could deal with it. I sat down at the computer and typed in Kevin’s name.

  The computer was slow, and it took a decent while to open everything and load the results. I waited with equal parts excitement and dread. Maybe Kevin had just gone quiet, off the grid, living a simple life somewhere, painting maybe. I would hate it if he gave up on his art. Or else something horrible had happened to him. I didn’t know why I thought it had to be one of those two extremes, but in my mind there was no other way it could go.

  Eventually an article did pop up, but it felt like a kick in the belly.

  It was a short little article called “Local Teen Struck by Car.” Kevin Henrikson was dead.

  It kept to the basics: a kid named Kevin Henrikson was hit by a car off Highway 7 while attempting to cross the road. He died instantly. He was eighteen years old at the time. Kevin was survived by his father and mother. There wasn’t much to it other than that.

  I thanked Mrs. Jenkins and walked outside. My hands shook and it was hard for me to light a cigarette. I leaned up against a shady spot on the library wall and lingered there a minute, pretending to be busy, my sunglasses on so no one could see me crying.

  So Kevin was dead, after all that. I finally thought I would have someone to talk to about Her, someone who would understand. This made the orange notebook more precious, like the last living testament of some fucked-up kid who knew what it was like to be me. I was even more grateful to have it now.

  “I’ll take good care of your notebook, Kevin,” I whispered to nobody. “I’ll protect your drawings, all your art.”

  I don’t know why, but that made me feel a little bit better.

  I still didn’t know what to do about the Bird Tree, or how to find the Wish House. She said the gates would open when the bird becomes real. What in the hell did that even mean? Did it work like a trapdoor, some sort of lever you could pull on the tree and a bird would hop out like a deranged magic trick? Was “magic” even the right word for all this?

  I didn’t understand at all. But maybe I knew someone else who would.

  The sign on Miss Mathis’s door said MADAM IS PRESENT, so I just walked on in. I found her in her easy chair, sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette, sipping on something from a big silver goblet. The radio buzzed jazz music.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” said Miss Mathis.

  “Just come to check in on you,” I said.

  “Sure you did. Christ, you got to be lonely to come see me.”

  Well, she had me there.

  Miss Mathis took a gulp from her goblet. “Sit on down, go ahead. Not like I have anything to do today.”

  I saw the scroll unbound, lying on the coffee table, next to a half-eaten donut. It made me gag in my mouth a little.

  “Any luck with that?” I said.

  “Not a bit,” she said. “It’s all carved up in some alchemic code I can’t make heads or tails of. All the old wizards did shit like that. Like magic was some good-old-boys’ club you just had to hack your way into from the get-go.”

  “You’ll crack it, I’m sure.”

  “Thanks for the faith, missy, but it don’t do much good. There’s got to be some kind of an alphabet to the thing, a key for translating it. If only I could find it.” She gestured with her cigarette over to a pile of leather-bound ancient-looking volumes stacked in the corner, yellow scraps of paper bookmarking all of them. “It ain’t like I haven’t been trying. Wish Cléa was here. That girl was smarter than I’ll ever be.”

  “How did you meet Cléa?”

  “Same as I met you. By happenstance. By fate. By whatever it is that draws all us touched folk together.”

  “Touched?”

  “You don’t have to lie to me, girl. I know you’ve met something from the other side. I can see its fingerprints all over you.”

  I didn’t want to talk about Her to Miss Mathis. Something in my heart told me that would be dangerous. But I was happy that Miss Mathis could see Her on me. I was so happy I still carried a trace of Her with me around.

  “Fine,” said Miss Mathis. “Keep your secrets. As for me and Cléa, well. I introduced her to this life, helped her follow in her mama’s footsteps. Cléa was about the most natural mystic I ever known. Didn’t hardly have to teach her a thing. Just sort of pointed her in the right direction, so to speak. Or the wrong one. Rest in peace, honey.”

  Miss Mathis lifted her goblet and drank.

  “Is that why Uncle Mike hates you so much?” I said.

  “Wouldn’t you?” she said. “I mean, the only person who hates me more than him is me, and that’s saying something.”

  Miss Mathis hacked up a glob and spit it on the floor. The dog yawned.

  “Enough about me,” she said. “Why the hell do you look so glum?”

  I fidgeted a little. Why was it so much easier talking about Her to Roy than it was to Miss Mathis?

  “I lost a friend,” I said. />
  “Haven’t we all.” Miss Mathis raised her goblet in a toast. “And we all will. We’ll lose everyone. And they’ll all lose you. Just the way of it.” She coughed so long, I thought I should get up and pat her on the back or something. “No, no, sit down. I’m not dying yet.”

  We were quiet a minute. The radio and the cigarette smoke and the dog napping on the floor.

  “Of course, Cléa and I weren’t the only ones,” said Miss Mathis. “There were loads of us practicing back then. I myself picked it up from a slew of lovers I had in the early seventies, back when I was into the cocaine.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Don’t look so shocked, little girl. Miss Mathis was quite the wild one in her time. Of course, we all were back then, the circle I ran in. Awful big circle for such a small town, mind you. This town has a pull to it, understand? Ever since it was founded, since the beginning. It’s a magnet for mystical types, the occult, all that. Good business, too. You couldn’t hardly be anyone notable in this town unless you took part. Corruption starts at the top, and don’t you forget it. Ritual and sex and money all go hand in hand, for good or bad. Mostly bad. Orgies, that sort of thing. Never took part in that garbage. Dangerous, I say. Bad juju.”

  “Orgies?”

  “It’s a fancy word for a bunch of people taking what they ought not to have and then sharing it.”

  “I know what an orgy is.”

  “’Course you do. Probably learned about it on the goddamn Internet. That thing’s worse magic than any spell the devil ever conjured up.”

  I figured I might as well just go for it.

  “Miss Mathis, have you ever heard of someone called the One Wish Man?”

  “The what?”

  “He’s this guy who lives in this big house off in the woods, past where people normally go. I mean deep in there, no road or anything. You can’t even find it unless you know what you’re looking for already. It’s called the Wish House.”

  Miss Mathis looked grave a moment. Then she busted out laughing, half knocking the glasses off her face. The laugh led to another coughing fit. I sat there and waited it out, embarrassed and a little annoyed.

  “The Wish House,” she said. “What are you, a seven-year-old? A man in the woods, granting wishes. That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard of.”

  I scowled at her. “You don’t have to be such a dick about it.”

  Miss Mathis sat up straight and adjusted her sunglasses. The cigarette was all ashes in her fingers.

  “It appears I have offended my guest,” she said. “Well, I apologize, Clare dear. But no, not in all my mystic ramblings have I ever heard of such a place like that.”

  We talked a minute longer, but my heart wasn’t in it. Pretty soon I got up to leave.

  I came home with a head full of questions and no one to talk to. Mom was at the hospital, Roy was with his dad, and what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t even get Eyeball to play with me. It was times like this I missed Her the most. If She were here, we could have talked for hours about this stuff, told stories, turned it into a game. We could have watched a movie, a genius old horror film like Basket Case or The Curse of the Cat People, something She loved, and somehow I would fall asleep at the end of the night with all my questions answered and a dozen new ones sprung up to take their place.

  Even if Miss Mathis thought it was stupid, I still believed in the One Wish Man. Kevin Henrikson did too, though I’d never get to ask him about it. And I still didn’t have any idea how to open the Wish House gates.

  The afternoon was hideously hot, that sort of swamped sweatiness that only happens in the deep South. Dogs hid in the shade, panting with their tongues out, birds were scarce, and even the mosquitoes flew slower. I stayed upstairs, my bedroom door shut, lights off, the air-conditioning cranked, while outside the sun glared down at me. Everything was too hot, too humid and wet. I didn’t belong out there. It was like my room was the only bearable place left in the world.

  I lay in bed and tried to put the pieces together. She had left me three clues, another game to play. I had solved two of them already. The “him” I was supposed to be nice to was Roy, and I was doing a pretty good job of that. Without Her around, Roy was maybe my only friend in the world. So, nice, yes, I had that one covered.

  As for Remember the stories, that had to be about the One Wish Man. It was the only batch of stories She’d told me that made sense now that I actually had something to wish for. I had even found the gateway to his house, if only I could figure out how to open it. Maybe the bird was a lock, and there was a key out there somewhere. There had to be something.

  Which left me with the final clue: June 20. It was only two weeks away. If I was supposed to do something on that day, I was running out of time.

  What was so great about June 20?

  I checked the calendar my mom had hanging downstairs in the kitchen. It was pretty anachronistic to have a calendar hanging around now, with everyone having cell phones and all that, but Mom was pretty particular about it. She said it was a good way to “get the family on the same page.” As if we were a family, as if there was any hope of us all agreeing on anything. Still, for her the calendar was important, and she picked a new one out each year.

  This year’s was all sailboats. Mom had always wanted to go sailing, but Larry hated the ocean, and besides, he was allergic to shellfish. We went to the beach once for a few days, Gulf Shores in Alabama. Mom was so excited. I only liked the beach at night, when the ocean sunk right into the sky in one big blackness so that you couldn’t tell the difference between them. I wouldn’t even go out on the sand if the sun was out. Still, I’m pretty sure it was the best weekend of Mom’s life. She wore this big straw hat and sunglasses and sat under an umbrella all day. At night she’d lie on the bed next to a sunburned Larry and me pouting off in the corner and she’d smile and say, “Isn’t this nice?” It was enough to break your heart, and those were the good days. Even with Mom and Larry working regularly again, we were always somehow almost broke. The beach would never happen again, and sailing was impossible. All Mom had left was her calendar.

  Which, of course, was blank on June 20.

  Except for a few grey letters in tiny print: Summer Solstice.

  I didn’t even really know what that meant. In books and stories, the solstice was when witches held black masses, or maybe the druids slaughtered a virgin or two. That was a magic holiday, right? I didn’t feel like driving back to the library, so I looked it up in my dad’s old Encyclopædia Britannica from the ’80s. Mom kept them up in the attic, even though Larry wanted them thrown out.

  “Why?” Mom always said. “They’re culture.”

  Larry just wanted them gone because they were my dad’s, but he wouldn’t say that out loud. So Mom hid them away, and like everything she hid, I eventually found them.

  I loved the musty smell of the old editions, the tiny print and the full-color pictures. I loved reading out-of-date information, present-tense stories about people who were long dead. I loved seeing the way people thought things would turn out. Articles on countries that didn’t even exist anymore. It was like living in an alternate universe every time you opened one up.

  I pulled out the “S” volume and got to searching.

  Turned out summer solstice was the longest day of the year, the time the sun shone brightest. It meant that every day after that would get a little bit shorter, until deep into winter. It meant that it was the last of the sun days, and the beginning of the moon nights. All kinds of pagan stuff happened on the solstice. In pre-Christian times, it was a pretty big deal. That led me to an article on Midsummer’s Eve, a whole new volume plucked out of the pile. That was an ancient fertility festival still celebrated in some places, with ceremonial bonfires and everything, a time when nature was at its greatest power.

  Holy shit. This was it.

  Maybe the gateway—that beautiful bird scarred into the great oak tree, its big living arms stretched o
ut over the road—would be open on the summer solstice. Why else would She have written that day of all days? It was worth a try. I just had to make sure I had access to a car that night.

  I went searching and found my stepdad’s spare key along with two thousand in twenties tucked into a colorful pair of socks in his drawer. There was no way Mom knew about this secret stash. She was always so worried about money. No, Larry was holding out on her, which meant he was even more of a shithead than I thought. Part of me wanted to rob him blind, right then and there. It would have been so easy. I didn’t do it, though. I had plenty of cash on my own, from Miss Mathis. Also, knowing Larry, he probably counted it all every night after Mom went to bed.

  Miss Mathis didn’t seem to care about money, like it was just something she’d conjured up earlier in the morning, millions more where that came from. The way Miss Mathis talked, this whole town used to be filled with magic folks, occultists and witches and all that. I always knew there was something strange about this place, something wrong with our town.

  All the clues were falling into place now. And in two weeks I would meet the One Wish Man.

  I went to the bird tree every chance I got. Day or night, it didn’t matter, just so long as I had access to a car. Partly it was to memorize the way, but also to check and see if the gates had opened early, if the bird had become real. I didn’t know how it would happen, or even what that actually meant. But I watched for it eagerly, waiting and hoping.

  Also, I dreamed. In my sleep I’d see the bird erupt from the tree in feathers of grey and gold, or a burst in wild squawking colors like a parrot, and it would take off in a rainbow of swirls to the sky. Some dreams it perched on a branch, common as a robin but alert with some sort of ancient knowledge, a guide bird sent to lead the way. In others the carving simply stepped out of itself, a ghost bird, see-through as smoke. Always it was a thing of wonder, an omen of awe and joy. It could be striped like a barber pole or luminescent blue like a jellyfish, an uninvented bird, a wide-winged pterodactyl, a dignified medieval falcon sent out by his lord. In my best dreams it was a snowy owl who turned its face around to watch me pass.