Demon полностью

Is that you, Lucian, you devil? I sought the dark glint behind her eyes—that hint of shadow—but jerked away when she might have touched my sleeve. She shook her head and left me there, even as my attention landed on a man in a trench coat. Was he wearing an expensive watch? Or there—that young mother with the curly haired toddler. Or the tourist studying the T map. . . or that woman with the circles under her eyes. Her hands were cracked. Perhaps she worked as a maid in one of the inns off Newbury Street. She looked tired and worn. Was she ever visited by demons?

I eventually became aware of a young man studying me from several feet away. The faint hint of a moustache dirtied his lip. He was as pale as a computer junkie; he had that fueled-by-Fritos-and-Red-Bull look about him. A brown, stubby ponytail spurted from the back of his head, half-obscured by the rumpled collar of his long, open jacket. It hung loosely on his shoulders, oversized on his thin frame. Skinny, dressed straight from a thrift shop, he should have looked like a charity case, but he managed to come off grunge-band cool, his unflappability as much a part of his ensemble as his faded Animals Taste Good T-shirt. I had been intimidated by that brand of tattered-jeans confidence in others when I was his age. As he dragged an appraising look up and down over me like a store checkout scanner, I found that the feeling carried over into adulthood. I suddenly felt grossly inadequate—not to mention pretentious—in my Eddie Bauer jacket and loafers.

“Are we going to stand here all day?” he asked.

I searched for a witty comeback, but I hadn’t had one when Jake Salter had picked on me in high school, and I didn’t have one now. I followed him up the stairs, onto Tremont.

“And you needn’t worry any more about Jake.” His speech and the slight, strange accent were at weird odds with his human mundane. “He died a few years ago.”

I had been on the verge of railing at him for hijacking my dreams but faltered at this news.

“I didn’t know.” The Jake Salters of the world still seemed untouchable to me, their flannel shirts and army boots armor against a society in which the greatest peril was a white-collar eventuality.

The demon shrugged. “Why would you?”

“How?” I envisioned a drug overdose, alcohol poisoning, a motorcycle crash. A knife fight.

He cocked his head toward the same invisible horde of insects I had noticed that first night at Esad’s. I shuddered.

“A boating accident. On the Missouri River. He drowned and left a wife. Ah, and three children. Would you like to know more?”

“No,” I said, numb, and then again, “No.” Family. Kids. Even Jake Salter had his act together. I couldn’t even stay married five years. And then I felt guilty. Act together or not, Jake was dead. Why did it always seem to happen like that?

“It always does seem to happen like that,” he said, far too young in human years to utter such words, far too dispassionate regardless of his true age.

“Stop it! Stop reading my mind! And what was that with the dreams? How dare you!” A couple stopped to stare as I turned on him. I had become one of those people I always steered clear of.

“Do you think I could have done that differently? I couldn’t have. I need you to know. It was the only way.” He had said something similar that first night at the café. I heard the echo of it now, bits and pieces of that first conversation flitting along with it.

“How about just telling me next time?” I said over the iteration and counterpart of our first conversations, as someone shouts with headphones on. I clutched at my head, realized with belated awareness that I was close to hysteria. I hadn’t slept well. I had lost enough weight in the last two weeks that my pants were loose—something I would normally be glad of but under the circumstances found slightly alarming—and was so behind at work that I had started to wonder if my job might be in jeopardy. It had been well over two months since I had brought any proposals to the editorial committee, and I was behind in getting the ones that had made it through ready for the publishing board with sales and marketing. The slush pile on my desk—the queries and manuscript samples sent in by agents and would-be writers—had grown to such a proportion that I had been forced to clear a space on my bookshelf to accommodate what wouldn’t fit on my credenza. I had more than a hundred e-mails in my in-box and fourteen voice mails that I repeatedly resaved under the delusion that I would return them before week’s end.

To top it all off, I just noticed this morning that I had begun to sprout bumpy hives on my chest, underarms, and back.

“I have so much to tell you, Clay. And we’ve so little time,” he said, the echoes of prior conversations subsiding with this statement. There was nothing youthful in the shake of his head.