I was sick with the kind of horror one feels upon realizing he forgot to lock the gun safe—the one from which a neighborhood kid steals a handgun and shoots someone. Or upon waking from a drunk to the realization he’s had unprotected sex with a prostitute. It was the kind of fear in which one realizes he has courted danger under the guise of negligent normalcy.
And now a woman lay dead.
I backed toward the curb, the gruesome bouquet of tire rubber, blood, and urine in my nostrils, as the woman in the peacoat administered CPR. Eventually, she sat back on her heels, breathing heavily, arms dangling on her knees.
A fire truck and then an ambulance arrived, sirens wailing. The way the medics left the body where it lay—the way the police shut down the street, took aside the traumatized driver of the car, interviewed some of the bystanders—it all seemed so haphazard. Like a chaotic game of pickup sticks, as primitive as surgery conducted with sharp stones. I had had such faith in this city, in the civic marvel of emergency response and modern medicine, and a woman had just died on the asphalt.
I lingered even after the ambulance drove off, silent and empty. I fixated on the policemen, trying to gather the courage to say something. To tell them that I knew. That I knew who—what—had killed that woman.
I couldn’t stop thinking of those too-old teenager’s eyes, narrowed at her after his staged fall, those young man’s lips murmuring seemingly to himself.
I never got anything to eat. Instead, I found a liquor store and bought a bottle of merlot—a bottle with a screw cap. I carried it home in its paper bag inside my coat and gulped from it in long, less-than-covert pulls on the
I WOKE WITH THE cold claws of panic inside my chest. I had been prone to anxiety attacks in the past and could feel the old eddy now, offering to suck me into the spin cycle.
Queasy and unsteady on my feet, I pulled open my apartment door and stumbled down the stairs to the bank of mailboxes inside the foyer. I averted my eyes from the glare of midmorning sun pouring through the glass double doors; I didn’t want to know what or who I might see standing there, peering in with too-knowing eyes. I snatched one of my neighbors’ paper.
Back in my apartment, the door locked firmly behind me, I folded the
I searched through the rest of the section, but there was nothing more.
I felt infected—by dark words, images, and influences, by my own willingness to expose myself to his particular strain of evil. While his first appearance had been a startling aberration, his presence in my life had become more real, more normal to me than the facts of my everyday existence. Just yesterday I had stepped willingly from the corporeal world into an alien spiritual realm.
What did it mean that a demon could infiltrate my life? And what were the implications for me that I had willingly met with him since? That death followed him even as he spoke of heaven, of God?
Worst of all, I could not erase the memory of that sound. Of a human thrown into a windshield. It should have been hard, the crack of a body breaking. But it had been sordidly dull, as muffled as a gun fired through a silencer.
Someone knocked at my door. I jumped, sweat breaking out on my back. Was that him? Would he come here? I wished I had my laptop open to my calendar. I never wanted to see that cursed
I sat very still. There had been no buzz from the front door, but did that matter? Would he force his way in if I didn’t answer? Somewhere I had a list of this building’s tenants and their numbers. If I called, maybe a neighbor could investigate for me. But no, that was stupid; I wouldn’t know what to tell them to look for. He could be a twelve-year-old selling Girl Scout cookies for all I knew.
“Hello?”
I didn’t move.
“Clay? It’s Mrs. Russo. Are you there?”
