Demon полностью

“You’re obsessed with time, you know that?”

“You would be, too. Maybe you should be.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Come on. It’s a lovely day.”

THE COMMON WAS ALIVE with the desperate festivity that comes with the last warm day of the season. Couples pushed children in strollers. Brownstone Brahmins walked their dogs, and couples dozed, curled up in quilts. A coed football game was in progress on the lawn, and leaves were everywhere, the trees having thrown their autumnal parade seemingly overnight, leaving behind a slew of red, yellow, and orange confetti.

I hadn’t been to the Common since last year’s July 4 when we—Dan, Sheila, Aubrey, and I—had decided to camp out on a patch of grass to get a good view of the fireworks. Aubrey was distant that day, and her moodiness had irritated me. Two days later, I found the e-mail from Richard.

Now here I was again, this time with either a demon or a psychopathic, albeit talented, hypnotist—part of me still clung to the shrinking possibility that an explanation might still be found in this corporeal world—and last year’s Fourth of July seemed as surreal a life as my new one had become.

We were walking toward the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in the direction of the Public Garden, but even now I could see the blackness of Eden, the blaze of light that was Lucifer, the trailing stream of angels that followed him in a fleeing Milky Way of bright bodies. But before I would hear more, I wanted something.

“You said that first night that you came at great risk.” “Yes.”

“What’s the risk?”

Lucian sighed heavily, as though it would take great effort to explain. “Is it not enough that I have assumed it?”

I was silent.

“I’m sure you would agree that this is highly unconventional,” he said at last.

To say the least.

“It would not be looked well upon, my talking with you.”

“By whom?”

“By just about any of them. Us. Enough now. This does not serve my purpose.”

“Your purpose? What about mine? I’ve spent an entire night falling from heaven, and you know what? I’m exhausted.”

“What do you want, Clay?” He sounded weary, and this aggravated me even more.

“I want to know why! If this is dangerous for you—and I have no idea what kind of ramifications this will have for me—I want at least to know why you’re doing it.”

“I told you you were safe. Any ‘ramifications,’ as you call them, will be those of your own making. As for why I’m doing this, I’ve already told you that as well. I’m not going to waste our time answering the same question twice.”

I had hoped, if he answered it again, that I might glean some small detail more because, although I had heard his reasons, I did not understand them. Why would a demon want his memoirs published? And why by me? He had laughed at my first notion, that he was here to strike a devil’s bargain. But despite his irritation at my asking again, I could not help feeling that there was something more.

“I saw Lucifer leading you away, but I didn’t see where he took you.”

The demon tromped alongside me, his pasty skin and black boots a decided 180 after the stylish redhead, the dignified black man. “We assumed he would lead us to a place of our own. A place of his making—as though he had truly become, in that short time, a god. As though he cared for us and would recreate that garden and walk in it among us. But he led us nowhere.” He looked up toward the tops of the trees, their branches like the sparse scalps of aging men.

“There was no other place to go. We hovered on the edge of the earth in fear—fear and silence. And I longed for Eden, settling even then beneath those murky waters, the beautiful facets of the gems within it reflecting nothing but darkness. I was sick for it, would have given anything—if I had had anything to give—to have it all back as it was.”

I remembered the day Aubrey left our apartment.

“But here was the most terrible thing: El went down to Eden and laid himself out over the waters, there to brood in trembling sorrow. And it infused me, this sorrow. It saturated my being. Beside me, seraphim huddled with long faces. Some of them wept. I had never seen such tears before—dark, remorseful, bereft of joy. There was only sadness and dread, that terrible sense that had I been a god, I would have set it all back. I would have erased everything, returned it all to the way it had been.”

“Why couldn’t you?” I said. “For that matter, why couldn’t God?”

The kid gave a jolt of laughter that sounded slightly hysterical, and then his lips curled back from his teeth, and spittle flew out with his words. “I’ll tell you why: Because we were damned! Oh, not that I knew it then—how could I? There was no precedent for any of it. Wrong had never existed. Lucifer had to manufacture that first aberration himself. Until then, there had been one law dictated by the sole fact of our creation: Worship the creator. And now, as surely as Lucifer’s throne had broken into a thousand splinters, we had violated that order.”

“I thought Adam was the original sinner.”