The Good Demon Read online

  “And what happened then?”

  “I saw a barn full of cat eyes.”

  “Cat eyes!”

  I could see it in my mind, same as if She had spoken it. A million yellow glowing things, like fat, massive lightning bugs floating in the black. Here I was trying to be nice to this kid I didn’t want to be nice to and he had to go and say something actually interesting.

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “Start from the beginning.”

  “Well, I was biking home, like I said. And I was all nervous because the truck almost nailed me. I felt like someone was watching me. You know that feeling? Well, I just couldn’t shake it. I pulled over onto the side of the road and looked around. It was starting to rain pretty good now, and I was getting wet all over. But I couldn’t leave yet, because I knew there was somebody else there with eyes on me. Like how folks at my church feel when they think they’re in the presence of angels or something.

  “Then I saw it. On my left stood a busted old barn, roof caved in, one wall fallen. It was surrounded by a grove of witch hazel trees, you know the kind? Lightning struck somewhere way behind me and from the black of the barn shone these yellow glimmers, little slits of light in the rafters. I walked closer until I could see. Cats, dozens of them, wild things gathered in the barn for shelter, glaring back at me. They were all over, piled on top of each other, hanging from the rafters, rolling around in the dirt. More cats than I ever seen in any place in my whole life. I don’t know. Something about how hungry they looked. How they were staring. It spooked me is all.”

  I liked that. I liked that a whole hell of a lot. It was so hard to get people to tell you stories, especially interesting ones. She used to—that was our favorite thing to do together—but now She was gone. All Larry ever talked about was the good old days, when Luther Simpkins was mayor and our town was on the rise and Larry would go out and punt a football in the yard because he was too poor to do anything else. You couldn’t get a word out of Mom apart from her grocery list, and occasionally something gory from the hospital if you were lucky. But even if Mom or Larry did have something good to say, they didn’t ever do it right. Stories aren’t just what you say, but how you say it. It’s all in the telling. And Roy, backward and ignorant as he was, seemed to know a little something about that.

  Besides, nothing beats loneliness like a good story. I wasn’t sleepy at all, and I knew I’d be up for a few hours longer, at least. There were worse ways to pass the time.

  “Tell me more, Roy,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

  This is the story of the first time She took over my body.

  I was maybe eight years old. It wasn’t too long after Dad died, when I was still trying to understand what life was like without him. We had a week where it was nothing but thunderstorms every day. There was flash flooding all over the place. It got so bad that me and Mom had to put sandbags in front of our door to keep the water out. I kind of loved it a little bit. There was something terrifying about all that water, the way it rose of its own accord, how there was nowhere for it to go but toward us. I wanted it to come into our house, like a guest. I wanted to invite it up to my room to spend the night.

  After the waters went down a little Mom passed out on the couch—Mom was still drunk or stoned half the time back then—and I went stomping around barefoot in the puddles. Me and Her both loved the rain. We loved being outside and doused together, the way my dresses would pool around my ankles like I’d just sprung up from the water myself. In some places the water was still knee-high, and mosquitoes swarmed my shoulders, sucking blood wherever they wanted. I smeared mud on my face and went feral, pretending we were abandoned kids, changelings raised by wolves. She loved this game, it was one of Her favorites. We’d stomp through the puddles and howl out loud, the sun just a glimmer in the thick grey clouds. I saw a winding silver stream of water like a tiny road for frogs and I wanted to follow it. I wanted to splash all the way through it and dive to the bottom of the puddles and come up somewhere new and upside down, the world at the other end of things. I took off sprinting, all laugh and holler.

  And then She stopped me.

  I mean, froze me in the spot. It was like tiny hands inside me clenched up all my muscles, like my blood hardened inside me and I turned to stone.

  Stop it, I thought. Let me go.

  No, She said.

  I mean it. I hate this.

  You will not move, She growled at me.

  That’s when I saw the question mark uncurl itself and slither through the water by my feet. A water moccasin, dark green and brown, washed this way in the floodwaters. It was so close to me I could have touched it. My next step would have dropped my foot right on top of it.

  I was so far from the house, and Mom was passed out on the couch. The meanest and most poisonous snake. If it bit me, I might have died. If it bit me, I might not be here at all.

  The moccasin swam past me, floating on top of the water like a miracle, like a snake Jesus crossing the Sea of Galilee.

  Told you, She said.

  And I went back inside the house, crying.

  It was moments like that when I knew She loved me, deeply, down into the core of Herself. I knew that without Her I would be dead already.

  That was the first time She ever took me over, and I was grateful. She always had a reason.

  She did it to protect me.

  Roy and I talked on the phone again the next few nights, each time for hours. I knew there was a reason for these conversations, some purpose that She had thought up long before and I was just now fulfilling. But the truth was, I was starting to enjoy them a little bit, too. Roy was so simple, so naïve. Sometimes it was baffling.

  “So why can’t you have the Internet again?” I asked Roy. “I don’t have it because nobody in this house trusts me with anything, but I want to hear about you.”

  “Because Dad said it would lead to temptation,” he said.

  “What kind of temptation?”

  “You know. From websites.”

  “What kind of websites?”

  “Well, you know, alternate histories of how the world was formed.”

  “What do you mean, ‘alternate histories’?”

  “You know, the Big Bang. That earth is billions of years old. All that junk.”

  “The Big Bang isn’t junk, Roy,” I said. “It’s science.”

  “No, it isn’t. God invented science, so true science has to agree with the Bible.”

  “Don’t people, you know, have different views of the Bible? Like maybe the whole six-day creation thing was just a metaphor?”

  “Sure they do, but they’re heretics.”

  I had to take a deep breath and count to twenty. It wasn’t Roy’s fault he didn’t know anything, I told myself. It was his dad’s. I had to be patient.

  “Never mind,” I said. “But for real, when you said ‘temptation,’ I thought you meant, like, porn or something.”

  “Porn sites? For me and my dad? Of course not.”

  See, it was that kind of thing. The kid was in so deep, had been so thoroughly brainwashed into one way of thinking, that it didn’t do any good to give him hell for it. In fact, I sort of started to admire him a little. I never had faith like that. I knew about the saints and all their miracles, but that was like magic to me, fairy stories, same as John Dee summoning angels to teach him geometry. I hated church the few times I ever went, snotty kids kicking each other under the pews, fighting parents faking happiness for the benefit of everyone else. I knew that magic and demons were real, and that religion had the power to defeat them. I just wasn’t always sure that was a good thing. For whatever reason, I loved talking with him about that stuff. It was fun to disagree together. Besides, sometimes Roy could really surprise you.

  He was viciously antiracist, for one. He said he’d seen too many people of color hollering and prophesying in tongues not to know that God made all people equal, that to hold any one section of humanity back was to hold God Himself b
ack. He also believed that women should preach, that men had just about ruined the church.

  “If it wasn’t for women,” he said, “and I’m talking about Mary Magdalene, all them—no one would have been around for Christ to appear to. No one would have been around to save the church after men had screwed it up so bad.”

  Still, he wasn’t exactly a feminist.

  “Doesn’t the Bible say,” I asked him once, “you know, that women should cover their head in church and wives should be subservient to their husbands and all that? That they are weaker than men?”

  “I mean, I guess,” he said. “I think the point is to take care of each other, right? And men have a particular responsibility to take care of women. That’s just the way that things are supposed to work, and when they don’t work that way, everything is broken. The whole order of the world gets wrecked.”

  I got pretty mad at him after that. I nearly hung up right then and there. Patience, patience, I told myself. One day Roy would learn better, and maybe I’d be the one to teach him. I could do that. I could try, anyway.

  But the best times with Roy were when he would talk about his mom. She had died from cancer about seven or eight years back, around the same time I’d lost my dad. He didn’t like to talk about how she died, but he would tell me about her, about her life.

  “Mom collected umbrellas,” he told me. “My dad has them all stuffed in the upstairs closet now, but she used to have them spread out everywhere, like they were art or something. Red umbrellas, blue umbrellas, pink-polka-dot umbrellas. She would paint them too, bright circus colors, paint them into green lizards and purple blossoms, beautiful things that you were supposed to open. The fancy ones she called ‘parasols.’ She would put them in a vase like cut flowers. She would hang them on hooks all over our walls.”

  Sometimes Roy had a bit of a poet to him, too. I guess he got it from his mom.

  “Did she have any nicknames for you?” I asked.

  “She called me her daylight. She called me her morning star.”

  Then he’d clam up about her, just like that. I got the feeling that he and his dad didn’t talk about Roy’s mom too much, that maybe things had been pretty tough for him ever since she died. I started to wonder how Roy wound up traveling around with his dad, ruining other people’s lives.

  Ruining my life.

  And it would hit me again. I was talking to the boy who stole Her from me, who tore my happiness in half. He trespassed into my room, him and his awful father, and ripped Her right from my heart. I couldn’t forgive that. Suddenly I couldn’t even stand to be on the phone with him anymore. I would tell him I was tired, that I had to go now. Then I would lay in my bed, sweating in the heat, and listen to the leaves rustle outside my window, just hoping to feel Her breeze by me again, the chill of Her fingertips on my spine, the still, soft voice outside my window, begging me to let Her back in.

  I always fell asleep feeling so very alone.

  Pretty soon Roy asked me if I wanted to meet up on a Wednesday evening when his dad was at church. He said a different pastor preached on Wednesdays at six, Dr. Powers, somebody his dad didn’t much care for.

  “I don’t have to go to Wednesday services because Dad doesn’t want my ears getting tainted with Dr. Powers’s sermons. He says they’re pure yellow cowardice. He also goes on too long, like three whole hours. Should be plenty of time to hang out.”

  I was surprised at how good that sounded to me, spending time with an actual person rather than just a voice on the phone.

  “I think that’ll work,” I said. “My mom and stepdad have a date night, so they’ll both either be gone or trashed. We should be fine.”

  I was excited. Not just because it was lonely, sitting around the house all summer day, just me and Eyeball. But also I had figured out a plan to sneak into Uncle Mike’s upstairs room. See, since Uncle Mike lived in his shop, he kept it open so long as he felt like staying up. I just had to hope that he would be awake long enough to let us in for the evening. I was pretty sure Roy could do the rest.

  I didn’t know if I was going to steal the rosewood box for Miss Mathis yet, but I was pretty sure it was worth getting a peek at. Especially if it was something a mysterious person would want to pay a thousand bucks for.

  I went to bed that night excited for the first time in so long. I could feel myself drawing closer to Her, following the strange and hidden map She’d laid out for me, uncovering it one tiny mystery at a time. I was being nice to Roy, that was one clue down. Now I just had to figure out which stories She was talking about, and what the big deal was with June 20.

  “I’m coming back for You,” I whispered in the air, hoping somehow the words would find their way to Her.

  Wherever She was, in whatever world.

  And that night I slept smiling.

  I waited for Roy in the driveway, leaning against my mom’s navy Ford Taurus. It had big stain-looking splotches where the paint wore off, like it had some kind of disease. Mom just said it gave her car character. Pretty soon Roy came riding up on his bike, wearing Dockers and a sweat-rimmed red polo shirt. He looked worn out.

  “Hey, guess what?” I said.

  “What?”

  “My parents are gone and they took my stepdad’s car,” I said. “Which means they left Mom’s car, and I know where she hid the spare keys.”

  I dangled the keys in a way that I hoped was tantalizing.

  “Couldn’t you have just picked me up?” said Roy. “So I wouldn’t have to bike all this way?”

  “Yeah,” I said, frowning. “Shit. Guess I should have thought of that. It’s probably not too easy riding a bike all the way here, is it? And you’re all sweaty, too.”

  Sweaty was fine. Sweaty I could use.

  “Why don’t we get you some new clothes? And maybe some ice cream or something, to cool off.”

  “That sounds nice,” he said, “but I don’t really have much money.”

  “Good thing I only ever shop at thrift stores,” I said. “There’s a junk shop that’s been here forever. The owner is an old Greek guy who charges you a quarter to use the bathroom. He’s maybe ninety years old. It’s the best place in the whole town.”

  “Cool,” he said.

  “Cool? Cool? That’s all you have to say for yourself?” I said, dragging him to the car. “I said I was about to show you the best place in the entire town.”

  “Amazing,” he said. “Stupendous. Extraordinary.”

  “That’s a start.”

  “Phantasmagoric.”

  “Much better.”

  I cranked the car.

  “Um, Clarabella?” he said. “Are we going to get in trouble for this?”

  “Maybe.” I shrugged.

  He grinned a little. Maybe there was some rebel to Roy after all. I lit a cigarette as we sped off down the highway.

  Roy was in awe of Uncle Mike’s. You would have thought I’d walked him into fucking Disney World. He kept walking around the entrance, touching clothes, gawking at everything.

  “This is way better than Walmart,” he said.

  “It’s magic,” I said.

  “I didn’t know there were places like this.” He shifted a hologram Jesus painting. Jesus opened his bright-blue eyes at him. “Even our church garage sale didn’t have anything half this weird.”

  Uncle Mike wasn’t having it.

  “You again,” he said.

  “As always,” I said, “your favorite customer. Uncle Mike, this is Roy.”

  “Hi,” said Roy.

  Uncle Mike grimaced.

  “You seem like a good kid,” he said to Roy. “You shouldn’t be hanging around with this thief.”

  “Thief?” said Roy.

  “It’s just a little game we play,” I said. “Right, Uncle Mike?”

  Mike grunted and waved me off.

  When we were good and out of earshot, Roy whispered, “Do you really steal stuff from here?”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But he usual
ly catches me.”

  Roy started to get panicky.

  “Quit worrying,” I said. “I promise you, Uncle Mike loves me. Now come on. You need a new shirt or something. Did your dad buy you that shirt?”

  Roy nodded.

  “Did your dad buy you all your clothes?”

  He nodded again.

  “I can tell. Let’s find you something new, something that suits you just right.”

  “I really don’t know anything about clothes.”

  “It’s a good thing you have me, then.”

  After digging through the racks for a while, I found something that Roy would probably hate, but might actually look good on him.

  “How about this?” I said.

  It was a pink plaid shirt with ripped sleeves. I held it up to him.

  “Really?” said Roy.

  “Really.”

  He was frowning, but he took the shirt from me anyway.

  I had also snatched a couple of things for myself: an old hippie dress, a ripped pair of corduroys, some grammaw’s old yellow muumuu with barn animals stitched on it. The name EMMA was written on the tag.

  “Can you believe I found this here?” I said. “It’s like a Christmas miracle.”

  “Wow,” said Roy. “Who’s Emma?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just hope she isn’t dead. I hate wearing dead people’s clothes. Unless I knew them first, I mean.”

  I grabbed Roy by the hand and brought him to the book section of Uncle Mike’s.

  “You said you didn’t know anything about literature. Well, here’s as good a place to start as any. They got all kinds of first editions and stuff, and cheap, too. You just browse around here awhile.”

  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  “I’m going to try these on,” I said, holding up the clothes. “There isn’t a changing room, so I just go into this little nook in the back where just about no one can see you. There’s no door or anything, so don’t come looking for me or things could get awkward.”

  Roy blushed a little.

  “I’ll wait right here,” he said.