The Good Demon Read online

  I waited until Mom and Larry were gone to work—they’d been letting me sleep in lately, and for that I was grateful. I walked downstairs and made myself some eggs over easy, extra hot sauce. They tasted terrible. Everything tasted terrible. The still quiet of the house was so deafening I wanted to scream.

  So I did. I screamed loud enough to shatter eardrums. Eyeball came whimpering up to me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. He just licked my hands.

  I was acting stupid. I couldn’t go on like this. Zombie-ing through my days, not eating, lying awake all night watching the fan whir. Christ, what if that preacher kid came back? No, there was no way She’d want me to go on like this. She’d want me to get out in the world and do something awesome, like how we used to together. And if there was one place I knew She’d want to go, it would be our favorite spot in town, the one me and Her always went to when we were sad, when we needed something to cheer us up. It wasn’t too far, and I could bike there if I needed to.

  I was going to Uncle Mike’s Used and Collectible.

  I took the long way on my bike, just to remind myself how much I hated where I lived. I know most teenagers probably say that about where they grew up, especially if it’s a small town like this one. And they probably mean that their hometown is slow and boring and that nothing ever happens there. Sure, that’s all true about my town, too. The biggest event of every year is the Christmas parade, and that’s just a bunch of men driving old Cadillacs through the square. So yeah, my town is boring, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

  Something’s just off about this place. It’s like the town has a bad heart—cruel, gone wrong somehow. It’s hard to explain.

  You wouldn’t know it from the surface. Riding around on my bike, the town looked the same as any other town down here. We have a historic square that tourists with maps like to loiter around. There’s a really old clothing store with the original marquee, the county courthouse in tall red bricks from before the Civil War, all that kind of thing that out-of-towners seem to find quaint or curious. It’s got “good” parts of town and “bad,” where some people are comfortable and others not. Like I said, passing through on a sunny afternoon, you wouldn’t see anything was wrong with this place. You have to live here to know it. You have to have spent your whole life drinking its water and breathing its air, taking all the badness and rottenness into yourself, making it a part of you, before you’d ever know anything was wrong at all.

  And by then it’s too late.

  I know this is pretty vague, but I’ve got some examples, too. There’s all kinds of things you can learn about a place if you poke around on the Internet, stuff they’d never tell you in school, where they like to present your home as a pretty place full of good people that never had any problems in their lives. But dig a little bit, take a look at the roots of the place, and you start to learn the truth.

  A few things: the Trail of Tears passed through here, and there’s a handy little plaque commemorating it. It’s a simple fact, and it’s wretched. Not to mention how the land was stolen from the Chickasaws in the first place. That alone should be more than enough to curse this town.

  But that’s not all. Not even close.

  Two-thirds of the town was burned during the Civil War, including the old library that was used as a makeshift hospital. So many people died here they dumped them all in a mass grave, soldiers from both sides, and stuck a monument on top. People swear that part of the town is haunted, and I believe them, at least in the way the past affects everything that happens in the present, spoils it somehow.

  It gets worse.

  The KKK used to march here regularly up until the ’60s. I’ve seen pictures of them all gathered around the town square in their hoods like a horde of angry ghosts. It’s crazy to think that some of those people are still alive, that they live here in town, unhooded, that I probably pass them every day.

  Tornadoes hit us, about three or four a year. They almost always take the same path too, curving west around town, skipping the historic district and the rich parts and heading straight for the industrial park, where all the trailers are. You can walk the old abandoned train tracks and see the wreckage from the years, car bumpers wrapped around oak trees, shreds of clothes high in the branches, rusty kitchen appliances strewn about the gravel. People die in those tornadoes—they’re bad ones, they snake down all black and swirling, nimble as a ballerina’s foot.

  That’s something else: in our town, you have all this money and all this poverty rammed together. The Simpkins family, for instance, who have been here as long as this town has, are about the richest people I ever heard of. They have a mansion in one of the “good” parts of town—the best part, actually. Not one mile away from them are the trailer parks. Everyone goes to the same grocery store, the same churches, but they aren’t the same, they aren’t equal. Not even close. And yet this town’s been mentioned in no less than two national magazines as a “quiet little haven” with “that small-town feel we all know and love.”

  That small-town feel. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s what’s so wrong about this place. Maybe every small town in America is just like this, if you dig deep enough. Or maybe not. Who knows? I’ve never even been anywhere else.

  But what’s weirdest of all, what’s strangest and most rotten, are the people. You can’t live here for long before it starts to affect you, before it makes you odd. It’s barely perceptible, a glimmer in the eye, the way a smile at the grocery store cracks and fades at the edges. The town will do that to you, I swear it will.

  It’s done it to me, too. There’s no way around it.

  Maybe that’s why I’m in all this mess. Maybe there wasn’t any choice in the matter for me. I was destined for it, doomed from birth. I wondered if I would carry the scent of this place everywhere I traveled in life, if it was like a scar on my heart, the mark of Cain, something I could never get rid of.

  So I was glad when I finally got to Uncle Mike’s Used and Collectible. It was just about the only place in this whole town that I didn’t despise.

  Uncle Mike’s was an old two-story building with a giant downstairs room absolutely crammed with stuff. It was maybe my favorite place on earth. Broken toys were scattered everywhere, records, dressmaker’s dolls, mannequins, rows and rows of old clothes, suits, high heels, all kinds of junk. Piles of DVDs and VHS tapes, rugs and crappy furniture all over the place, an entire corner of cracked mirrors. There was even a collection of antique doors in the back.

  It was run by an old Greek guy named Miklos, but everyone called him Uncle Mike. He was a shriveled, scowling man in a red fishing cap who sat in a chair behind the counter with his arms crossed the whole time. He lived on the second floor, up a little staircase in the back of the store. You could see the window from the outside. I was pretty sure Uncle Mike never left the junk shop at all.

  “You again,” he said when I walked in the door.

  “As always,” I said. “Your favorite customer.”

  “Favorite customer my ass,” he said. “You’re nothing but a thief.”

  Uncle Mike was crazy paranoid about shoplifters. He had fake video cameras installed all over the store, so cheap they didn’t even have wires running out of them. He had also hung hand-drawn signs everywhere, a big Sharpied eye with GOD WATCHES you written above it. Creepy stuff, but it only made me love the shop even more.

  I did a big elaborate magician’s bow before him.

  “If you didn’t have me to chase around,” I said, “you’d wither up and die, wouldn’t you? There’d just be no reason for you to live.”

  Uncle Mike smiled a little at that. He had a dark sense of humor. It was part of why we got along.

  “Just don’t steal anything this time, eh?” he said.

  Under all that gruff he really was a sweetheart. See, Uncle Mike had lived a pretty hard life. His wife died like forty years ago, and his only daughter died shortly after that. Ever since then he just sat behind the counter and mope
d.

  I strolled through the store, digging through stuff, wondering what exactly it was I was supposed to be looking for. Once I had found a pretty cool warped copy of Out of Step by Minor Threat, which was a miracle considering where I lived, this dumpy little town in the South where there were at least fifteen churches for every grocery store. Uncle Mike’s and the county library were just about the only places where you could find anything worth having. Today I settled for a dress—long and black and billowy—that I liked well enough. I rolled up the dress and stuffed it in my purse. If Uncle Mike caught me, he’d yell and fume and get his daily exercise in. If he didn’t . . . well, free dress.

  I passed a row of old mirrors, most cracked and dusty, and caught a glimpse of myself. I looked like shit. My green eyes were sunken and dark-circled, my hair a greasy black mess. I’d lost weight since they took Her, not that I had too much to spare anyway. I felt odd-shaped, warped somehow, like a record left out in the sun.

  You’re so pretty, She would say. You have the cutest nose. Your cheekbones are so lovely.

  “My legs are short,” I’d say. “My feet are huge.”

  And the daintiest little collarbones.

  Finally I made it to the book section. It was the most magical place in the whole junk shop. The books had their own little nook, rows and rows of tall bookshelves that formed a sort of walled-off space in the big open room. The shelves were crammed full of books—out of order, stacked on top of each other—piles and piles of books. Cookbooks, mysteries, celebrity biographies, endless volumes of compressed novel classics. You could nearly always find something to look at, even if it wasn’t worth buying.

  My favorite shelf was in the back corner of the room, nearly six feet tall, labeled RELIGION/OCCULT. I picked them out one by one. An old hardback about night terrors with a snarling beast squatted on the chest of a sleeping woman on the cover. Smiling dust-jacket photos of Billy Graham, illustrated Jonathan Edwards sermons, a book on the history of Pentecostalism. Books on Buddhism and Sufism and yoga. Books on divination, on traditions of ancient seafarers and sailors, on how to dowse for water. Books with black-and-white photos of ramshackle poltergeist rooms, of dishes and cups flying, of people laid knocked-out on the floor. Beautiful full-color books on astrology and tarot cards, some written like math books and others like poetry. For weird stuff, the library had nothing on Uncle Mike’s Used and Collectible.

  See, rumor was, Uncle Mike’s wife was kind of a witch, that all of these books were from her private collection. Uncle Mike sold them off because he wanted them gone, as if all this magic junk was exactly what had killed her in the first place.

  I browsed for a bit, but it didn’t look like there was anything new on the shelves. Why would there be? Hardly anyone dropped stuff off at Uncle Mike’s anymore, and most of his stock had about an inch of dust covering it. Months had passed without me even seeing anyone else come in the store. I was wasting my time looking through here. There wasn’t anything about this place I didn’t already know.

  Except for one book that looked familiar, right there at eye-level on the shelf. Oversize and dirty-white, with a small tear down the spine. I knew that book very well, and it wasn’t any religious book. It was a book of William Blake paintings, reprinted in full-color. I pulled it down from the shelf and ran my hand over it.

  It was one of my dad’s old books. I opened up the front cover just to be sure. There it was, my dad’s name scrawled on the inside. It was one of my favorite things he had left me after he died. Even when I was a little girl I loved looking at it, the muscles and exaggerated faces better than any cartoon, their howling looks of joy and fury, the flame-eyed gods and Job cowering terrified before angels like stars. Nebuchadnezzar on all fours like a beast. Dad called it our “dark picture book,” scary stories that didn’t need any story to them. This book should be at home, on the secret shelf in my closet, same as where I kept everything I cared about. How did it get here?

  I flipped to one of my favorite paintings, called The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy. It had a woman in all black, surrounded by an owl and maybe a dragon and this monstrous bat flying out of the darkness toward her. It gave me a million nightmares as a girl but I loved it anyway. I’d always beg Dad to show it to me before bedtime. And, soft as a moth wing, out slipped a torn scrap of paper that fluttered to the floor.

  I picked it up. Scribbled in Her handwriting, all bubbly and little-girly, the way She made my hand move whenever She wanted to write something:

  Be nice to him

  June 20

  Remember the stories

  My hands shook and my breath got heavy and I had to shut my eyes tight and count to thirty in my head. I was afraid to open my eyes back up, afraid all the words would vanish and I’d be staring at a blank meaningless scrap of paper. But no, everything was still there, written by Her and left hidden in this book for me. I held it close to my heart, like I could somehow summon Her back with it. But She was gone now, Reverend Sanders had driven Her far away, “as far as the East is to the West,” he had said. Why would She leave something here for me to find? And what did the note even mean?

  I heard a racket out by the cash register. Uncle Mike was hollering at somebody.

  I peeked my head around the book section to take a look.

  Uncle Mike was up off his stool. He had his finger pointed in the face of an old lady with wild grey hair. She wore a pink sweatsuit and big black sunglasses even though she was inside. I snuck up closer to hear.

  “Come on, Miklos,” she said. “I just need a few minutes up there to poke around.”

  “No,” he said. “Absolutely not.”

  “Look, I know you’re angry at me. You got every right to be mad. But something big is happening, Miklos. And I need Cléa’s help with all that.”

  “Cléa is gone,” he said. “And she’s never coming back.”

  “But she might have left something. I don’t know, a clue. Something I could use.”

  “Leave,” said Uncle Mike. “Get out or I call the police.”

  The lady slumped her shoulders. She started to say something else to him, but instead she let out this horrible hacking cough. It was the worst cough I’d ever heard, like a stack of old car parts was falling over inside her. I was scared she’d hock up a lung and die right there. Her sunglasses fell off her face and skittered across the floor. Even Uncle Mike seemed worried about her, like he was going to walk out from behind the counter and give her a hand. But just as quick as she’d started coughing she stopped, scooped up the sunglasses, straightened herself, and marched out the door, her head held high, like it was an act of dignity. I decided I liked this weird old lady. She was kind of a badass.

  I waited a few minutes before walking to the counter. Uncle Mike was just staring off in a daze.

  “You okay?” I said.

  Uncle Mike nodded.

  “Who was that?”

  “A bad woman,” he said. “Very bad.”

  I waited for him to say something else about her, to explain where she came from or why she was bad, but he said nothing.

  “Hey, Mike?”

  He seemed startled, shaken out of some old memory from years and years ago he got lost in. I held up the Blake book.

  “Where did you get this?” I said.

  “First the madwoman, now you,” he said. “What do you mean, where did I get it? You brought it to me. You demanded I buy it from you.” He pointed his hairy white finger at my chest. “I give you five dollars for that book!”

  Cold spiders spun webs all down my back. I was shaking so hard I could barely speak.

  “Was I acting funny when I brought you the book?” I said.

  “You are always acting funny.”

  “I mean, funnier than usual.”

  “Yes, yes. You talked like a little girl. You say over and over again that your eyes hurt. I tell you to go to the doctor, but you don’t listen. Teenage girls never listen.”

  She had done it. She had ta
ken over my body and blanked my mind out and brought the book to Uncle Mike’s, knowing I would find it. I was meant to find it. She had done it before Larry called the reverend to come, like She knew in advance that it would happen.

  Uncle Mike leaned over the counter and peered at me. “Are you on the drugs?”

  “No, Mike,” I said. “I’m not on any drugs.”

  “Even the marijuana,” he said. “Say no to drugs.”

  “I’ll be sure and do that,” I said. “Hey, can I buy this book back from you?”

  “Did you look in it? Scary stuff. Take it, I don’t want it.”

  “Thanks, Mike.”

  I left the store, my brain foggy and confused by what I just learned. Why had She taken over my body like that? What was I supposed to do with this note She left me? I walked over to my bike, prepping myself for the long, hot ride back home.

  “Pssst,” said a voice.

  I turned. It was the old lady. She was over on the side of the building by the trash, I guessed so Uncle Mike wouldn’t see her loitering around. She puffed on a cigarette, a Virginia Slim like what Mom used to smoke before she got on the patch.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  The lady held a finger to her lips and motioned me over. If I was on the lookout for something weird, this was definitely it. I walked to her and fished a cigarette out of my purse. It was always more fun to smoke with another person, and since Mom quit I never got to do it.

  “I got a proposition for you,” she said, like some type of old-lady gangster, standing there in her pink sweats, puffing her cig.

  “Shoot,” I said.

  “You know Mike in there? Me and his daughter were good pals, way back, even if she was a good bit younger than me. Well, she took something of mine, right before she disappeared. She took something of mine, and I need it back.”

  “Disappeared?” I said. “I thought she died. From, like, a car wreck or something.”