The Good Demon Page 3

  “She didn’t die, she vanished. Just walked into the woods one day and poof!” The lady waved her hands, like a magician. “No one ever heard from her again.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “What you heard is garbage. A bunch of crap. People are always telling stories.”

  “So what’s this thing of yours she had?”

  “It’s a little rosewood box, like the kind you use for jewelry. It’s got an eye carved into the top of it. It’s mine, see. I loaned it to Cléa, and now I want it back.”

  “What’s in the box?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just some knickknacks. Little things of personal value. It’s in a trunk up there in his attic, I just know it.”

  “So why won’t Uncle Mike give it back to you?”

  “Why not? You saw for yourself, the man hates me.” She coughed real bad again. “He thinks I killed his daughter. He thinks it’s my fault she disappeared.”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course not. She did what she did of her own free will, knowing good and well what would happen.”

  “I don’t totally understand.”

  “And you don’t have to,” she said. “You just have to go in there and take it for me.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you just stole something from Mike already, didn’t you? You have it right there in your purse.”

  I went cold. She meant the dress. I’d totally forgotten about it. How did she know? I’m positive she wasn’t there when I snatched the thing. The old lady laughed.

  “Oh, don’t you go worrying about that,” she said. “I’m Miss Mathis, and I know things. That’s just what I do.”

  “I’m Clare.”

  “Sure you are.” Miss Mathis leaned in close to me. It was spooky staring into those sunglasses, seeing her chipped and yellow teeth so near my face. Her breath smelled like booze and cigarettes. “You do this thing for me, and I’ll make it worth your while.” Miss Mathis shrugged. “How about a thousand dollars?”

  My eyes went wide.

  “A thousand dollars?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

  “You’re fucking with me.”

  Miss Mathis dug a giant billfold out of her purse. It was stuffed with crinkled hundred-dollar bills.

  “Here’s two hundred now,” she said, dropping two balled-up hundreds in my palm. “You’ll get the rest when you bring me the box.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “You better, girly. This is a lot bigger than just you. It’s bigger even than me and Mike.”

  “I said I’ll think about it.”

  “You do that. And when you do decide to bring me what’s mine—and you will, if I’m any judge of character at all—come see me here.” She handed me a torn piece of paper with EUGENIA MATHIS, 19 HOLYOAK DRIVE on it. “That’s my address.”

  “No phone number?”

  “Who needs a phone? Anyone who needs me knows I’ll already be waiting on them.”

  I put the paper in my pocket, along with the hundred-dollar bills. I didn’t want to steal anything from Mike. At least, not anything personal. But money meant freedom, not having to depend on Mom and Larry for everything.

  “Come and see me with the box,” said Miss Mathis. “And the rest of the money is yours.”

  “And if I don’t do it? If I just keep the money?”

  She shrugged.

  “Oh, you’ll do it alright. But if you don’t, I’m old and rich. What’s two hundred dollars to me?”

  “Okay, Miss Mathis,” I said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  I walked to my bike and headed toward the road. Was this part of Her plan? It was too weird not to be. There was something to all this, I was sure of it. I just needed to figure out what.

  I took one last look at Miss Mathis over my shoulder before the road curved. A line of dark grey clouds drifted in the distance, a haze of rain beneath it. A storm was coming, a bad one. I pedaled hard, and despite the heat, I felt a chill. This wasn’t the first time She had taken over my body to do something. I don’t mean just Her being inside me. I mean when She really took me over, like where I couldn’t move anymore on my own unless She moved me, like She had wired Herself into my muscles and sinews and bones, into my brain, where I couldn’t even speak unless She did it through me.

  No, it had happened before.

  All that afternoon and into the night I lay on my bed, thinking over Her message.

  Be nice to him

  June 20

  Remember the stories

  I had no idea what any of that meant. Who in the hell was him anyway? And what was so special about June 20? It was the end of May now, and June 20 was a whole month away, so I had some time to figure that one out. As for the stories, well, She told me a million of them. Which ones exactly was I supposed to remember? And what did all this have to do with Miss Mathis’s crazy offer of a thousand bucks for a rosewood box?

  This was just like Her, leaving me clues, making a game out of something so important. She was always playing games, with me and with everyone else. It was one of the things I loved so much about Her.

  The afternoon storm had been a quick one, loud and brash and then gone, leaving behind a night so still and quiet, it was eerie. I walked to my window and peered out at the empty, unmoving world. It was like I could feel Her presence around me again, like She wasn’t so far away. Like She was just trapped right outside, barred from the house. It was almost as if I could hear Her fingernails tapping on my window, begging me to let Her back in. Then it passed, and I felt the pain again, the stabbing loneliness in my bones.

  I remembered the day they took Her from me, Reverend Sanders and his boy.

  It was simple as surgery. The only tough part was that I locked my door. Reverend Sanders had to bust it down. He crashed into my room, a booming shadow of a man in a grey suit. His son came behind him, quiet, scared, praying. He wore a suit too, same as his dad.

  She didn’t fight them. She wouldn’t even try.

  What’s the point? She said.

  I wanted to hit them, I wanted to thrash and scream.

  No, She said, filling me with that good feeling, like a sedative. Shhh, now. Be quiet.

  “Please, don’t,” I said, while they prayed, while the reverend and his boy laid their hands on me. “Please.”

  Trust me, She said.

  For a split second, it hurt, oh it hurt—the holy light like a cleaving knife sliced through my insides, white-hot burning pain.

  Then it was all over, and I lay there on my bed like a corpse.

  I remembered Reverend Sanders wiping the sweat from my face, the tears streaming down my cheeks, while his son just stood there in his little matching suit, gawking at me like I was some kind of freak. It made me so mad. I wanted to punch him in the face.

  Be nice to him

  Wait, She couldn’t have meant the reverend’s son, could She? Why of all people would She want me to be nice to him?

  It was so strange how he came to visit me yesterday. The way he just kept staring at me, same as he did when they took Her away from me . . .

  I had an idea.

  I snuck downstairs and grabbed the phone book while Larry slept on the couch. My parents had taken the Internet out of my room, left me with only an old flip phone. That was fine. I remembered the reverend’s name, Cliff Sanders. I found him right away in the phone book. I crept back upstairs with the phone number. I took a deep breath and dialed it.

  It rang and rang and rang. My heart was thudding out of my chest.

  This was a stupid idea. This was not what She intended. This was a stupid idea and I was only making things worse for myself.

  On the sixth ring someone answered.

  “Hello?”

  I took a guess.

  “Roy?” I said. “It’s me, Clare.”

  “Clarabella?” he said.

  I tried not to let it irk me.

  “Ha,” I fake-laughed. “Yo
u just can’t stop calling me that, can you?”

  “It’s a real pretty name,” he said. It was like I could hear him blushing over the phone. “Hold on just a second.”

  What if he went and told his dad right now? What if Larry found out? He would lock me in the attic with a loaf of bread and a bedpan. He’d never let me out of his sight again.

  Come on, Roy, I pleaded. Come through for me here.

  His voice came back on the line.

  “How’d you get this number?” he said.

  “I found it in the phone book. Sorry to call your house. You didn’t give me your cell phone number or anything.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “What?”

  “Dad doesn’t allow them. Says it turns people into morons, staring into a little screen all day.”

  “Weird.”

  “It’s not weird,” he said. “It’s just different. Dad holds me and him to a higher standard than the rest of the world. Because we’re men of Christ.”

  “I guess so,” I said. There was a long silence that I didn’t know how to fill. Just the thought of Roy’s dad made me queasy, like riding on a bad elevator, the feeling that the floor could drop out from under me at any moment. Besides, I’d never talked on the phone with a boy before. I didn’t know exactly how you were supposed to do it. I took a deep breath. “Anyway, I just wanted to know if I could call you sometime.”

  “Call me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You know. To talk.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Just. Can I call you back later? Sometimes my dad’s weird about the phone.”

  “Are you asking for my phone number?” I said.

  Even if I didn’t want to admit it, that felt kind of nice. No one had ever asked for my phone number before.

  “Um, sure,” he said. “I mean, yes.”

  I told him my number and listened while he wrote it down.

  “Call me later tonight,” I said. “Whenever your dad will let you. Doesn’t matter when. I stay up pretty late.”

  “I will.”

  “Roy, does your dad know you came to see me?”

  “Nope.”

  “Talk to you later,” I said, and hung up.

  I lay back down on my bed. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, what bumbling chain of events I had just set in motion. But I felt a stirring inside me, a small light where earlier everything had been dark and empty. I knew that whatever happened next, it was what I was supposed to do, that it was what She wanted, that I had done right. I had to trust Her on this. It was either that or moan around the house, smoking cigarettes, wasting away until I died. I would untangle Her clues, find the path She wanted me to follow, do everything She asked, no matter what the cost. And maybe, just maybe, I could find my way back to Her.

  Now all there was to do was wait.

  Waiting always made me miss the Internet, back when I had a computer in the house, a glowing window in the study that let me into the rest of the world. I especially missed the music and the movies, all of them out there and free if you knew where to look. That was the best part about the Internet. You could teach yourself anything all night, you could put yourself through your own particular kind of school. I hated high school—I never learned anything in any of my classes. Everything I loved and cared about I learned online and from books, all on my own.

  There was a time when I looked for other people like me out there. I mean, people who had demons living in them. But She didn’t much like me digging into things like that.

  If they’re real, She said, they’ll keep quiet about it. Demons aren’t a chatty bunch. Only fakers do the telling.

  “Like in the mafia?”

  Just like that. Squealers get snuffed. They get cement shoes. They get throat-slit and dumped in the river.

  “That’s gross.”

  I’m just kidding, silly. But don’t ever tell anyone about Me. And don’t trust a word about us that you read on the computer.

  So I used the Internet for other things. Books, mostly: poetry and John Dee stuff. I read everything I could find on John Dee. I liked how he could be so many things at once—a magician and a priest and a mathematician too—that no one knew quite where to put him or how to classify him. How maybe he could be anything at all.

  I also loved reading stories about saints. They were just as good as fairy tales, and sometimes even stranger. The Golden Legend especially, this weird medieval book of saints’ lives. St. Agatha who got saved from burning by an earthquake, St. Cecilia who you could hardly kill no matter how many times you chopped her with a sword. And the people who weren’t quite saints, but should have been—like Julian of Norwich, who had a vision that God showed her a hazelnut that was all of creation, or Christina the Astonishing, who died and came back to life by floating out of her coffin and bonking her head on the rafters. History was full of all kinds of crazy stuff like that, if only you knew where to look for it. I would sometimes read and read all night until the sun came up, until I was worn out and ready for school. She’d be mad at me then, cross for not letting Her sleep any.

  “I didn’t know demons napped.”

  We don’t need to, which is why I love it so much. You ever get better sleep than when you didn’t particularly need to be rested up for anything? When it was just the sheer pleasure of sleeping?

  As always, She had a point.

  When Larry took away the Internet, I had to switch over to going to the Simpkins Memorial Library. It was easily the best library around, but that wasn’t saying much. There weren’t even that many books, to be honest, and what was there was pretty grim. Lots of romance novels and a few classics, most of which I’d already read. But what our library did have was the greatest collection of VHS tapes on the planet.

  They had belonged to this grand old video store called Movie Madness that shut down once Netflix became a thing. The owner was dying anyhow, so he just donated all the tapes to the library. Technically I wasn’t old enough to rent R-rated movies, so I just slipped a different one in the box whenever I needed to. It was great. That’s how I saw Carrie and Eraserhead and Don’t Look Now. That’s how I saw The Wicker Man (the old one) and A Nightmare on Elm Street and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It’s where I tried to rent The Exorcist once and She nearly had a fit.

  Are you crazy?

  “What?” I said. “It’ll be fun. They’ll probably get all the details wrong.”

  I could feel Her panicking in me, terrified and gone vicious, like a wild animal backed into a corner. My stomach flipped over and I nearly vomited right there in the stacks. I fell over on my knees and held my stomach while the pain screamed in me so hard I almost couldn’t bear it. After a few seconds She calmed down, and I could breathe again.

  It isn’t funny.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  It isn’t funny. It isn’t funny to joke about things like that.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  I felt Her relaxing in me. I felt quiet settle over me like the moonrise over still waters. The soothing peace of Her curled up like a kitten in my lap, the purr of Her heartbeat, the warm glow of the two of us, together, alone against the world.

  “I’ll never leave you,” I said.

  I know.

  “I’ll never let anyone split us apart.”

  I remember feeling a little twinge inside myself, like She had flinched at those words. Maybe She already knew, even back then. Maybe She knew it was only a matter of time before they came for Her. Maybe throughout the history of the world there had always been someone to come between something like Her and a person like me. But how could I have known that back then?

  My phone rang. It was Roy.

  “Hi there,” I said, trying not to show that I’d been crying.

  “Yeah. Sorry I’m calling so late. I had to wait for my dad to go to sleep.”

  “It’s not that late,” I said. “Besides, I don’t ever get to sleep before three anyway.”

  “Me either.”<
br />
  There was a pause for a second. I didn’t know what to say. Be nice to him, remember? Okay, fine, I could think of something. Maybe I’d just chat, the same as if it was with Her, as if it wasn’t Roy on the other end of the line at all.

  “I like nighttime the best,” I said. “It’s like my whole brain clicks on when the sun turns off. And then there’s the moon, of course.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The moon.”

  “I always like to think of what it looks like. It’s a different moon every night, you know.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never really thought of it like that.”

  “Go on, try it. What does the moon look like tonight, Roy?”

  He was quiet a moment.

  “I guess it looks kind of like a tooth.”

  “A tooth?”

  “A chipped tooth,” he said. “I have a chipped tooth. I did it playing dodgeball at church.”

  “Well I think the moon looks like a lady,” I said.

  “A lady?”

  “Yep. A maiden. And when a cloud passes by just right, that’s her dress twirling. She’s dancing.”

  “But there’s no clouds over her now.”

  “That’s because she’s naked.”

  Roy went silent. Well that got awkward fast. It was like I could feel him struggling to think of something to say. It was painful.

  “So what did you do today?” he said.

  “What a boring question,” I said. “What a perfectly miserable thing to ask.”

  I was being mean. But if I had to talk to this kid, I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him get away with being dull.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was the only thing I could think of to say.”

  “I rode to the junk shop. I read a book about a ghost baby who is old and wise and sends messages to his dumb, drunk dad. I chased Eyeball around.”

  “Who?”

  “The dog. I did about the same old boring stuff as anyone else. I bet your day wasn’t all that different.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Go ahead. Tell me. Go right ahead and tell me about your dreary little day.”

  “Well,” he said, “I almost got murdered by a berserk pickup truck while I was biking home.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. It nearly ran me right over. I was almost roadkill.”