The Good Demon Read online

  “Sorry,” he said.

  I sighed.

  “It’s okay. Come on, I’ll help you up.”

  It was getting full-on dark now. My mom and stepdad were supposed to be gone for another hour or two, but you never could tell with them.

  “You want to tell me about that nightmare of yours?”

  “I don’t know if you want to hear it,” he said. “It was kind of a doozy.”

  “Tell me another time, then.”

  “I will.”

  Roy tried to stand up and then vomited again. I rubbed his back while he puked it all out.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think we drank enough for this.”

  “This would probably be the most embarrassing moment of my life if I wasn’t too sick to feel embarrassed.”

  I had to laugh a little at that.

  Roy finished puking and I led him back through the woods, to where we had stashed his bike. But when I got to the house, Mom’s car was parked crookedly in the driveway, the driver's-side door hanging open.

  “Oh shit,” I said. “They’re home.”

  “You going to get caught?” he said.

  I shook my head.

  “They’re wasted, Roy. I mean, look at that parking job. No way they noticed I wasn’t home. Besides, I set up precautions.”

  I pointed up to my window, where a lamp glowed. Faintly you could hear music playing.

  “I left a light on, a record on repeat. If they’re drunk, they’ll leave me be. They only fight with each other when they’re drunk.”

  “Alright,” he said. “I’m real sorry for puking.”

  “It’s fine, Roy.”

  Roy got on his bike and shook his head at me, and I wondered if he’d blow chunks again. But Roy held it in, pedaling off into the night. I waved goodbye to him, but he didn’t see me.

  I should have probably hurried up to my room quick as I could, lest Larry come out for a beer or something. But I was curious. I walked around the side of the house, to where my mom’s bedroom was. The curtains had drifted aside and there was a light on. I peeked in.

  Mom was in her underwear, a black lacy bra and panties. She looked beautiful, in a way I hadn’t seen her look before. Mom smiled, but sadly, while my stepdad lay on the floor, stark naked, weeping, kissing her feet. She reached a hand down and laid it on top of his head, like she was blessing him.

  I had no idea what to think about that.

  I snuck in through the back door and made it all the way up to my room.

  I was pretty freaked out by Mom and Larry. It was kind of one of those things you don’t yet have words for, that you just see and something deep changes in you. It happens to nearly everyone I bet, the moment you finally know that you’ll never escape sadness, that being an adult just means despair. It made me scared that there was nothing on the other side of life waiting for me but misery, stalking like a wolf in the darkness.

  I wouldn’t let that be my life. I would fight that, somehow. I knew there was a way to live differently than Mom had, a way to choose my life so it wouldn’t be a failure. I remembered how happy I had been with Her, how much She had protected me in my life, kept me from loneliness. Because loneliness was the kind of thing that made Mom take up with guys who weren’t good enough for her. Loneliness was probably what drove Larry to drink in the first place.

  All this just served to get me focused again. I had to find Her, and fast. Tonight was as good a night as any to search for the Wish House.

  Mom and Larry were definitely wasted, and once they passed out they’d sleep through anything. I waited until about midnight, until I could hear them both snoring. I snuck into their room and took a peek. They lay on separate sides of the bed, all the way on the edges, as if they couldn’t bear the thought of accidentally touching in the night. It made me sad for my mom, who had come through so much. Another guy who turned out to be half of what she thought he’d be. I wondered if that would always happen to Mom, if that was just a pattern she couldn’t escape.

  Larry’s pants were on the floor, discarded in a hurry. I tried not to remember what I’d seen earlier. I fished the keys out of his pocket and eased the door shut. I coasted the car down the driveway and cranked the engine once I reached the road. The sky was dark but clear, and the stars glimmered faintly above me. The moon was at its quietest, just a bright line in the sky. It was a perfect driving night. I kept the windows down and the music off, listening.

  Night could make even a shitty neighborhood like ours something special. It wasn’t much of a developed area, just a house here and there among deeper patches of wood. When Mom first started bringing Larry around, he would always talk about how the neighborhood “had potential.”

  “If they can ever get the economy up and running,” Larry would say, “like it was thirty, forty years back—in the Simpkins days when this town was thriving—maybe we’d have something here. Shoot, all this land? Somebody would want to develop it.”

  It got a little annoying after a while, but it was nice to hear that something we had could get better. Larry had a good job selling insurance and he was real sweet to Mom, even if he wasn’t the most attractive guy. He even made an effort to get along with me, though I could tell he didn’t like me too much. He’d take me comic-book shopping sometimes, laugh when I picked up something weird like Hellblazer or Pretty Deadly or Johnny the Homicidal Maniac.

  “Your mom lets you read this crap?” he’d say, and I would nod.

  Even if I wasn’t a perfect kid, Larry didn’t seem to mind a whole lot. I was pretty happy that Mom decided to marry him, and even more so when he decided to move in with us.

  “My place just isn’t big enough for all of us,” he said. “It would be easier if I just shacked up with y’all.”

  My grandfather built our house and left it to Dad when he died. I figured it would be weird for Larry, living in our old house, all our memories of Dad floating around the house like ghosts, but he seemed to adjust okay. I was thrilled. I loved that house. My whole life had happened there. It was awful to think of who I would have become if only we’d moved when Dad died, if we’d lived somewhere else entirely. I had a feeling things were finally going to take a turn for the better.

  Of course She didn’t believe that, not for a second.

  Larry is a scoundrel, She said.

  “That’s harsh,” I said. “Mom really likes him.”

  No, it isn’t. He’s a scoundrel. You’ll see. You’ll find out soon enough.

  “You’re wrong,” I insisted.

  Wait and see.

  I knew I’d made Her mad. I could feel Her skulking around inside me all day, and it made me nervous. It wasn’t often that She was wrong about these kinds of things.

  But for about a year, all was well with Larry. Mom kept getting prettier and prettier, as if being loved made her bloom. It was a beautiful thing to see. Our house felt warm again, and we all laughed a lot. I wondered if this could be a good place, if we could all maybe one day be happy together. For a while, it actually seemed possible.

  Things only started going to shit when Larry lost his job.

  I never found out why they fired him. Mom wouldn’t tell me. It seemed like it was over something distasteful, though, like maybe he was scamming money from people. I remember Larry drinking, which he’d never done around us before. Mom wouldn’t have married an alcoholic, not after struggling so hard with Dad. But Larry would get drunk and cry. He started getting fat, and Mom started to wither again. She started doing her nervous-hands thing that she always did when Dad would go off for days and not come back. Worst of all, she started drinking, even though she swore to me a long time ago she never would again.

  I don’t really think I could ever forgive Larry for that.

  I only had a vague idea of where I was driving. The memory of the night when She walked me back from the Wish House gates was like a dream, the darks too dark, the roads too long and curvy to ever be actual roads. Even the kind lady who stoppe
d for me seemed unreal, her face blurry, her mannerisms all stolen from an actress on TV. The only concrete details I had were passing Little John’s gas station, and again, later, passing my aunt Pattie’s house.

  Aunt Pattie wasn’t really my aunt, of course. I didn’t have any extended family. She was just my mom’s best friend, and every now and then we’d go over to visit. But she died when I was twelve. Sometimes it seemed like no good thing could last if you were me or my mom. The people we loved either were taken from us or changed into something worse. It was like we were cursed.

  Soon I was ten miles out, turning down country roads, driving deep into the night. The trail had gone cold a little while back. Landscapes change so much, with buildings torn down and strip malls shooting up, just to fall abandoned a year later. Trailer homes ravaged by tornadoes and time and plain old rot. I saw a family of raccoons wander single file into a gutter. Critters could make a home anywhere, I guessed.

  I passed bait shops and churches, endless churches, banks and gas stations. I passed dead ends and cul-de-sacs. I passed gated communities and the mansion we all said belonged to a secret drug dealer in town. But nothing seemed right, nothing felt like a call to magic.

  I began to get tired. With the windows rolled down, I let myself swelter in the night heat. He’s out there, I told myself, and he wants to see me. The One Wish Man wants to see me. He needs me.

  I didn’t know why, but that seemed true: the One Wish Man needs me. I repeated it, I held it close to me like a talisman, I let the words guide me like a dowsing rod toward hidden water.

  My fingers went slack on the wheel, and the memories kept in my muscles and blood and bones took over. I let myself coast slowly, drifting from lane to lane, my eyes dimming. A low night fog crept over the road. I was getting closer. I turned down a gravel road, unmarked. The trees loomed overhead like elder guardians and the moon snuffed itself out like a candle.

  A black shape slammed into my windshield.

  I swerved the car, almost into a ditch on the side of the road. The windshield was splattered with blood and I couldn’t see through it. I yanked the wheel the opposite way. The back tires spun out, cutting gashes in the dirt road. A creature was caught in the wipers, mashing its wings into the glass. I finally skidded the car to a stop, just in front of a massive oak tree.

  I let my breathing calm, my heart slow itself. I was fine. I hadn’t died. I hadn’t wrecked the car. My stepdad would never know I’d taken it. The wounded creature beat feebly against the windshield, its blood matting in clumps. I had to figure out what I’d hit and put it out of its misery.

  I stepped out of the car, knees shaky. The road was pitch-black on either side, the tree limbs forming a canopy overhead, like I was in a tunnel, like I had somehow burrowed deep into the night itself. The dark was alive with bugs and tree frogs and hidden groaning things, the invisible army that gathered in the woods every night. I bent over the bloody windshield.

  It was a bat. Its head busted open, its wings ragged and torn, its body not much bigger than my fist. Somehow I’d hit it. I never knew you could hit a bat with a car before. They had sonar, didn’t they? They were blind but they could see in the dark. How had I managed to smack this one?

  It squealed at me, that weird chirping hymn of bats. I had to free it. I had to let it die untangled.

  I grabbed it by the body, careful to keep my fingers from its mouth. The bat could be sick—it could have rabies. I shouldn’t be doing this, I thought. I shouldn’t be touching it at all. It struggled in my fist as I pulled the wing out from the windshield wiper. It chittered and shook, it fought me, but I got it free. I carried it over to the side of the road, hopping over the ditch, and I set it in the leaves to die.

  I didn’t know why, but I said a prayer over it. I had been possessed by a demon, but I wasn’t sure if I believed in God, even though I knew She believed in God. She was fearful of him, with a kind of awe. I couldn’t picture God, something so huge and so scary and supposedly filled with love. I couldn’t picture the Father of the World stretching his big arms out, ready to receive all the sick and the dying. I couldn’t picture anything caring that much.

  “God or whoever, take this bat into your arms,” I prayed. “Take it into your kingdom and give it rest. Amen.”

  The bat died. Or at least it stopped moving. I figured something would come along and eat it soon enough. That or it would be gnarled by ants, whittled into bone by a million invisible teeth. I could think of worse ways to go.

  As I stood in the woods that night, fog laid out like a carpet at my feet, I felt a tingly feeling, like little silvery stars falling down my spine.

  I wasn’t alone. Someone was watching me.

  I listened, but there was no crack of limbs or crunch of leaves, not even a night bird’s call in the darkness. Only my own breath, and the low hum of the car engine. I tried to look out into the woods, but I couldn’t see anything, not even with the car headlights. They only seemed to light up the trees. In front of me stood the giant oak, bigger and wider and taller than all the rest, the elder brother of the forest, bent-backed and leering over me. Then I caught my breath.

  Because the car beams illuminated the trunk of that tree. On its bark was carved deep—no, burned—the outline of a bird. Wings spread wide, head back, like it was flying away. This was it. I’d found it.

  The gateway to the Wish House.

  I remember one day spent with her at the Hidden Place, one of the best days of my whole life. It could only have been a few hours, because Mom woke me up afterward for supper, said I had been daydreaming all afternoon. But the time to me had seemed weeks and weeks. We lay in the weeds and felt the sun on our bare stomachs and I asked Her a question.

  “How old are you?”

  As old as never, She said, and as young as always.

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  She shrugged.

  Time isn’t my concern.

  “How does it feel to be so old,” I said.

  Oh, I’m not old, She said. I’m always. It’s much different.

  “You look like a little girl to me.”

  I am a little girl. That’s the always part of me.

  “But why?” I said. “Don’t you want to be older? Don’t you want to be able to do anything you want?”

  You won’t say that when you’re older. You’ll wish you were still like me, always and never, an eight-year-old girl on top of a mountain.

  She hopped to Her feet.

  Want to see something amazing?

  I nodded and She pulled me up by the hand. We walked to the bare edge of the cliff. I had to shield my eyes from the sun. A wide spiral of birds uncurled itself over the waves and I wondered where they were heading.

  Not the birds, She said. Look.

  And from far off on the horizon a ship passed this way, something like a Spanish galleon from a picture book, eight wide white sails billowing in the wind. I watched in awe as it crested a wave and spray exploded from its side, the sun glinting off its cannons.

  “When are we?” I said.

  She smiled at me and took my hand.

  Always, She said. And never.

  That night when I got home I couldn't hardly sleep.

  I knew somewhere far off in the world She was there, dragging Herself through wilderness, calling out to me. When Roy’s dad cast Her out he must have built a boundary between me and Her, some sort of supernatural wall with his words, like he was a king and he had banished Her from me. I needed someone to break down that wall, to summon Her back. All roads pointed to the One Wish Man, and now I had found the doorway into his world.

  But how was I supposed to make it work? I’d spent an hour at the Bird Tree tracing my finger over the scars, hollering out into the darkness for the One Wish Man to open his path to me. Because there was nothing beyond that tree but scrub. Nowhere to go but wandering, and I knew by wandering I could never find the Wish House.

  Around three A.M. I’d driven back to L
ittle John’s truck stop and gassed up. I used the squeegee next to the pump to clean the bat blood off the windshield so Larry wouldn’t know I’d taken the car. It took a while, and a lot of scrubbing, but I got it all off. I coasted the car back into the driveway, engine off, and parked it just how he left it. I didn’t dare try to sneak the keys back into his pants pocket, so I left them on the kitchen counter, as conceivable a place for a drunk to leave them as any. The moon vanished in the brightening sky and the sun spilled its gold over the hills. I smoked a morning cigarette and thought about it.

  There was only one person I knew who I was pretty sure had been to see the One Wish Man. Only one other person in the whole world who might know what I was supposed to do next.

  I had to find Kevin Henrikson.

  That week my mom joined a carpool for nurses at the hospital. She said she hoped it would save us gas money, and maybe she could even make some friends.

  “They have a little group,” Mom said. “These girls go to movies with each other, have a glass of wine and play cards. It sounds nice.”

  I guess I’d never realized how lonesome Mom was. I’d try to do better by her in the future. Still, I was excited. This meant that a few days a week she would leave her car at our house during the day. Mom only had a few hiding places, so I could find the spare key no problem. So long as I gassed up, I now had access to a car for nearly half the week. Since we didn’t have the Internet anymore and there were no Henriksons in the phone book, my first stop was the library.

  The Simpkins Memorial Library—named after Myna Simpkins, the old mayor’s grandmother—was a crazy place during the weekday. It was mostly homeless folks checking their e-mail, or else asleep in the cubicles. It made me sad a little, that there was nowhere else for destitute folks to go. But at least they had somewhere, right? And maybe the books over there on the shelves would provide a little comfort.

  I found an empty computer. The keyboard was sticky from spilled Coke but it worked okay. I googled every Kevin Henrikson in my area, hoping like mad something would pop up. Maybe he still lived around here. I had a million things to ask him.