The Good Demon Read online

  You don’t know, I wanted to say, you don’t know what She was like. But I held my peace. From the way he looked at me I felt like Reverend Sanders knew good and well how I was feeling.

  “Look,” I said. “I need to know what I was caught up in. Because I know it was bigger than just me and . . . and the demon.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, the town, for one. I know there’s evil here. I know about the Paradise Society.”

  “Like hell you do,” he said, snapping back upright in his chair. He placed his fat fists on either side of the desk and leaned forward at me, staring down into my eyes. “You don’t have one clue what those folks are up to, how deep that evil goes. At least, I pray you don’t, and Lord help you if I’m mistaken.”

  I couldn’t back down now. I had to be brave. I had to try. I had to do this for Roy.

  “I know about Gaspar,” I said.

  Reverend Sanders scrunched his eyes at me. He doesn’t know who I’m talking about, I thought. He doesn’t know anything about the One Wish Man. That’s good. That might mean Gaspar has nothing to do with any of this. I tried something else.

  “And I know about Kevin Henrikson,” I said.

  Reverend Sanders sucked in a breath and drew back in his chair. This was a name he seemed to know pretty damn well.

  “Now just what exactly did that demon of yours tell you?”

  “Not much, to be honest. I found out about Kevin on my own. He was a demon-possessed kid too, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never spoke to the boy.”

  “But you know about him?”

  “Of course I do,” said Reverend Sanders. “But I don’t have any idea how you should. They sure shut everyone up about that boy, yes they did.”

  “You mean Luther Simpkins?”

  “I mean the whole durn lot of them. I know what I saw. Other folks saw him, too. And I never heard a single word about it. Not in the papers, not on the radio, nothing. What showed up in the newspapers was so bland you would have thought it was just another roadside tragedy, a kid run down by accident.”

  “But it wasn’t that?”

  “Hell no, it wasn’t. I was there, I saw it myself. I was just a boy. But I remember. I remember it perfectly. The traffic was all backed up on Highway 7 and the cars were moving slow, real slow. Everybody rubbernecking, like folks do. I remember the car in front of us braking too fast and my dad bumping them. Not too hard, mind you, but enough to scuff a bumper. My dad was a hothead, you know, he didn’t cotton to being yelled at by some sucker in a Cadillac. Ten seconds later he’s out of the car with his finger in the guy’s face, screaming. And the cops are trying to wave us on, but my daddy won’t get back in the car. My daddy was like that, never wanted to mind anyone, never gave one lick what other people thought. Boy, did he hate folks in authority. Spit on a cop just the same as say hello to one.”

  Reverend Sanders waved his hands at me, talking too fast, his eyes red-rimmed and tired, his fingers a little twitchy. I saw the empty coffee cups littering his desk, the crunched Red Bull cans in his trash bin. Just how long had he been awake?

  “So my daddy’s screaming and the cops are getting huffy and I’m scared he’s going to get thrown in jail again and I’ll have to call my aunt to come and pick me up—and I look over to the side of the road and there’s a body being loaded into an ambulance, a stretcher with a great white sheet over it. And I know immediately what it means: I know I’m seeing the first dead person I ever saw. I wonder if it’s an old man, someone’s granddad who saw it all coming, who had a heart attack on the road.

  “But then the sheet falls back—I don’t know if it was the wind, or if God blew it back just for me to see, for me to bear witness, Lord knows how it changed my life—but I saw the body. It was a boy, a teenager. I saw his blond hair and his blue, dead eyes, his mouth open like he was trying to holler out. And as the paramedics scrambled to get the sheet back over him, I saw everything else. His body savaged. The skin carved on, written in rips and slashes. Crazy things, symbols, some kind of language not meant for people. Even as a boy I knew it was from the devil. I knew in that moment my calling would be to stop this evil of this kind. I would stand between it and the goodness of the world.”

  My heart plummeted. Kevin was mutilated? Carved on, like in some sick satanic ritual? That’s the future his demon promised him—that’s what would happen to Roy, all because She told me to be his friend?

  No, She wasn’t like that. She couldn’t be. Kevin’s demon was nothing like Her at all. This was all some kind of mistake.

  “By that point the cops were shooing my daddy back to the car. I kept poking at him, saying, ‘Daddy, did you see that boy, did you, Daddy?’ But by then they had the sheet back up, they had him loaded into the ambulance, there was nothing to rubberneck at. My daddy told me to mind my own damned business and drove me off. Nobody ever mentioned the body, what happened to it. Nobody ever said a damn word. That’s how I knew there was evil in this world. That’s how I knew my calling. I began to read my Bible, and I began to go to church. I was a prodigy, mind you, they thought I’d be some million-dollar preacher off in Memphis or Nashville somewhere, in a congregation of thousands. But I never wanted any of that. All I wanted was to save this here town, where I lived all my life, where I first came to know there was such a thing as evil.”

  And now I’d brought this evil onto his son. I felt sick, like I’d puke myself empty right there on his desk. But I choked it back and asked another question.

  “Are you saying that the Paradise Society is bigger than just Luther Simpkins?” I said. “Who all is in it?”

  “Who ain’t is a better question,” he said. “Look around you, girl. Just drive somewhere and see. They’re everywhere. Folks ain’t even evil necessarily, just looking to get ahead. Get money, get power, who cares where it comes from? I used to think they were all gone, but now there’s more than ever. They’re coming back. This is their sign.”

  Reverend Sanders reached into his desk drawer. He held up a long red feather pinched between his fingers.

  “Believe me or not, I don’t care. The police sure don’t. I told them time and time again, and they threatened me with jail. I warned my congregation and they left by the dozens. Half the time my own boy thinks I’m crazy. But I know I’m right. They’re coming back, mind you. Be careful. Especially a girl like you, having suffered what you have. You’ll be like a carcass for those vultures. They’ll eat you up, won’t need to come back for seconds. You, especially, beware. Pray with everything you got. Because something’s coming. Something big.”

  I looked at that feather, the bright red of the cardinal, so like the one crucified to the Bird Tree. Deep in my heart I knew Reverend Sanders was right. Gaspar and the Paradise Society were connected, there was no use denying it now. The cardinal feather was the final clue.

  “I just can’t figure it out,” he said. “I don’t understand where this evil comes from, who controls it. I don’t understand how to stop everything from getting worse.”

  I noticed the picture on his desk. It was Reverend Sanders, much younger and slimmer, all the grey gone out of his hair. He had a little boy in a red collared shirt sitting on his lap. It was Roy, no question. He still smiled the same. And next to him stood a beautiful blond-headed woman. I liked her immediately, I couldn’t help it. People in pictures always seem to be lying, you know? Posing, I mean. Grinning too big for the camera, putting in all the twinkle their eyes can muster, practically begging you to believe they’re happy. But she wasn’t smiling like that. She had a quiet look, a warmth. She was the kind of person you hoped your teacher would be, brown eyes wide with understanding.

  “Is that your wife?” I said.

  Reverend Sanders’s face sank. It was like I’d brought up some kind of old defeat.

  “My wife,” he said, “is none of your business.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can leave.”

  �
��It’s just life, you understand?” he said. “You make mistakes and you make mistakes and Jesus forgives you—He always does. He forgives and forgives and forgives. But that doesn’t fix things. That doesn’t suddenly make them right. Lust and stupidity. The damned weakness of the flesh. And you think you’ll spend your whole life making it right, healing all the hurt you caused. You think, Yes, Lord, I’ll do anything to make it right. And then all of a sudden it’s too late. She’s gone. It’s too late.”

  He seemed so tired, so old, as if he had been fighting this battle in his mind for years and years and there was no winning it, there was no beating back this guilt. I almost reached out and placed my hand on him. I almost touched his hand to comfort him. But then a fire lit up in his eyes and his voice rose to a holler.

  “That’s why I have to fix this. This I can help. I can help this town, my home, this place that I love, despite its black heart. If God can save me, then the town can be saved, too. I have to believe that. I have to work for it with all my heart.”

  Maybe you should let the town go, I thought, and focus on your kid. He’s the one they’re after. But no, I couldn’t say that. I couldn’t let him know about me and Roy. I didn’t dare say a word. I would have to fix this myself.

  “I guess I don’t have any more questions,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me for nothing,” he said. “Don’t you dare thank me for anything at all.”

  And I left his office, wondering what in the hell he meant by that.

  The spirit latched back on to me the second I left the church. I made it to the car and slumped over in the seat. My head hurt, and I puked again out the open door. I cranked the AC, my brain all swirly and confused. Kevin Henrikson, mutilated. The reverend saw it himself.

  Back home I ran upstairs and crawled myself into bed, my light off, door shut, please don’t let anybody bother me now. Everything in my room seemed strange, off somehow, Lady Snowblood glowering down from above me. Nothing brought comfort, as if even my room was infected with despair.

  I had messed up somehow, gotten one of the clues wrong. She couldn’t be asking me to get Roy hurt. That would teach his dad a lesson, sure, but the cost was too great. If Gaspar wanted Roy, it was to do him harm, same as what happened to Kevin Henrikson. And if that was Her plan all along, to put Roy through some kind of torture . . .

  No, no that couldn’t be right. She was the one I trusted, the one who saved my life time and time again, the one who made my life bearable, something worth saving. She was my friend—closer than that. She was my Only.

  “Where are You?” I whispered. “Why is this happening? Why can’t You help me?”

  Nothing answered. Despair spread its wings wide over my house, and the floor seemed to creak and groan, the very building crying out under the darkness.

  Oh, Roy, I thought. What have I done?

  I waited until late that night, when the house was quiet, when everyone was asleep. I took the car again.

  I drove out of my neighborhood, down past the main strip and to the town square, the “historic” part of town, the part they advertised on the tourism pamphlets at city hall. I almost never came here. Sure, the houses were pretty, but it was a throw-back to darker, sadder times, with slavery and the murder of Native Americans and everything else awful that happened in the South.

  There was the clock tower, unburned in the Civil War, the city hall. An old clothing store, what used to be a blacksmith’s shop. Rows and rows of new buildings, restaurants and boutique stores, bars with flashing neon. The moon was high and pale as a spotlight, the clouds river-rushing past it, the buzz of streetlights and cicadas, the night creatures out to hunt. I passed a man limping down the highway, a baseball cap pulled low on his face. Why is a man like that out in the night? Where is he going? How can you live in a place your whole life and still have everyone be a stranger?

  I kept driving into the old neighborhoods, toward the old homes where the rich lived, all porch lights and rocking chairs, sweeping oaks and perfect lawns. I stopped in front of a house I actually like, a favorite of mine, with blue spires that rose from the top like a miniature fairy-tale castle. Someone had left the porch lights on, and they cast an eerie glow over the emptiness.

  That’s where I first saw it. A single red feather hung over the doorway. It glimmered there like a drop of blood.

  I began to notice others, above other doorways. Not always a cardinal feather, sometimes a blue one, or a black one yanked from a crow. House after house after house, I saw them. Sometimes they were fake, painted on, or dyed plumes like the kind you can buy at a craft store. I passed businesses, little feathers painted on their signs, rich-lady boutiques with a bundle of feathers dangling over the CLOSED sign in the doorway. Chiseled above the gates to the county courthouse, visible from the streets, a long spiny feather. Even in the glistering stained glass of the First Baptist church, what I had always taken for a tongue of fire from Pentecost now dangled above the apostles’ heads as a bloodred cardinal’s feather.

  I cut down a side street, passing shut businesses and quiet houses, the occasional TV flickering bluely in an upstairs window. I rode past families of raccoons and doddering armadillos scrounging in the night, stray cats stretched out over upturned garbage cans, and stopped at the old town cemetery. I parked on a neighborhood street so the cops wouldn’t see Mom’s car. I took my flashlight and walked through the gates, past all the fresh graves, the dirt piled high and orange, the flowers still in bloom, into the center of the graveyard, where the town founders were buried. The graves were ancient and crumbling, the tombstones jutting crookedly from the earth, so old they seemed like they were a part of the landscape, like they had sprouted roots that spread deep beneath the town. Every single one of their head-stones bore the engraving of a feather. I walked to the heart of the cemetery, where a ring of cedar trees surrounded the oldest of all the graves, the Simpkins family plot. I stood in the middle of them, the trees like tall robed priests surrounding me. The air was colder here. The wind trembled the leaves just slightly.

  A yellow dog peered up at me from among the headstones. It let out a howl, long and mournful. I shined my flashlight at the monument erected in the center of the grove, an obelisk etched with the Simpkins family crest. And below it, in perfect artistry, the outline of a bird, its wings spread wide in the shape of crucifixion.

  Reverend Sanders was right. The Paradise Society had been here from the beginning, and now they were coming back.

  “Where are You?” I said to Her. “How could You do this to me?”

  The night answered with its hum, the secret buzzing like the approach of some far-off army.

  I walked back to Mom’s car. There was one more person I had to see.

  The sign on Miss Mathis’s door had changed. Now it said I HAVE A SECRET. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all.

  Miss Mathis sat in her chair, same as usual. The cigarette smoke was even worse, all the stamped-out butts sticking up in her coffeepot, the dog lying there like the corpse of a dog. She had a half-empty bottle of wine on the coffee table.

  “Hi, Miss Mathis,” I said.

  There was a silence then, just the wheezing of the tiny dog, the long exhale of Miss Mathis and her cigarette. She seemed to be glaring at me through her sunglasses. I knew in some way that I was in trouble, that I had done something wrong.

  “You went and saw him, didn’t you?” she said. “It ain’t no good to lie to me, you know that.”

  I nodded.

  “Figured you would,” she said. “Figured you were that stupid. I bet he even sent something back with you, didn’t he? Bet we’re being spied on right now. That’s fine, that’s fine. Can’t say anything it don’t know already. Now, sit on down, Miss Mathis has to tell you a story. Figured one day I’d have to tell somebody, but that don’t make the telling any easier. You mind refilling me, dear? I don’t think I can say this sober.”

  I poured the rest of the wine in her coffee mug
.

  “Is it about the Wish House?” I said.

  Miss Mathis nodded.

  “It’s about the Wish House, and a hell of a lot of other things, too,” she said. “Mostly though, it concerns this character you call the One Wish Man.”

  “You knew the One Wish Man?” I said.

  “’Course I knew him. But to me, he was just called Gaspar. And believe me, Gaspar was powerful. I mean, he could do anything. Anything. We’d be at one of his soirees out in the woods and he’d be performing miracles like party tricks. Change water to wine, change it back again. Calling up ghosts from all over, the spirits of the long dead and the not yet born, have deceased husbands spill their guts to their still-living wives while all of us clanked champagne glasses and laughed. Gaspar could raise your dead fucking pet if he wanted. See the future too, in the hazy way some of us can. A lot of the money you see rumbling around these parts came from him.”

  “Was that the Paradise Society?” I asked.

  Miss Mathis frowned at me.

  “Where you go hearing a name like that?”

  “I saw Luther Simpkins,” I said. “He’s locked in an attic. He flung blood at me.”

  “My, my, girl,” said Miss Mathis, “you do get around.”

  “I know you’re one of them,” I said. “You’re one of the Paradise Society.”

  “I was one of them,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “And I’ll regret that until the day I die. But you can go ahead and judge me all you want. Hell, I deserve it. Gaspar got a lot of us rich folks even richer. We’re all still living off it, even kids and grandkids. Those will be your pearly-white elites of this town, you understand me? And Gaspar was our leader, more or less. The great intercessor, the one who spoke right through the veil, who talked to demons face-to-face. We always asked him about it, ‘Gaspar, how’d you get your power? How did you learn so much?’ He would just laugh it off. We laughed too, of course. We were living it large. What did we care where the power came from, so long as it came, so long as we were allowed to do whatever we pleased? Well, one day I found out.”