The Demonologist (19 page)

I
T
’
S A SHORT DRIVE SOUTH OUT OF
L
INTON TO THE CROSSROADS
hamlet of Strasburg, then west a couple miles to the Reyes farm. Not that there’s much growing on the land at the moment. The fields on either side of the property’s gravel lane have been tilled but unseeded, so that only stray weeds poke up from the earth. It leaves the Reyes’ farmhouse to stand out even more than it otherwise would. A white clapboard toy sticking out on the endless horizon.

The same house—the same horizon—as the one Tess drew in her journal.

Out front, the lone tree with a rake leaning against it, the handle split from long exposure to the sun. Under the highest eave, a gray wasps’ nest glued to the wood, a black hole at the bottom seething with furious comings and goings. On the ground, weeds grown thick and thorned as rolls of barbed wire along the front path. It’s as though the entire farm and the work once done on it stopped some
years ago, and now it is halfway to becoming something else, a return to undisciplined scrub.

And me. Now making my way up to the porch, my face stiffened in apprehension.

Tess had seen all of this. Had known I would come.

Poor DADDY.

The front door is ajar. The police? A neighbor dropping off a basket of eggs? For some reason, I didn’t expect competition for Delia Reyes’ time. As I knock on the frame of the screen door I start editing my planned niceties in my head. The longer I take getting in, the greater the odds someone else might show up to haul me out.

I’m about to knock again when the inside door is pulled open to reveal a sinewy woman dressed in what appears to be layers of old sweaters and an ankle-length denim skirt. Her long hair held back in an elastic that leaves the ends bunched and brittle as the head of a broom. Brown eyes wide and alive, flickering with humor.

“Mrs. Reyes?”

“Yes?”

“My name is David Ullman. I’m not with the police. I don’t work for one of the papers.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“I just came here to speak with you.”

“Seems you’re already doing that.”

“I’ll come to it, then. I understand that something unusual has happened to you, in this house, over the last few days.”

“I should say so.”

“A similar thing has happened to me. I was wondering if I might ask some questions to see if you could provide me with some answers.”

“You’ve had someone go missing, too?”

“Yes.”

“Someone close.”

“My daughter.”

“Lord.”

“It’s why I’ve come all this way to show up uninvited at your door like this.”

She pulls the screen door wide.

“Consider yourself invited,” she says.

The kitchen is large and cool, with a butcher-block table in the middle used, apparently, for both the preparation and consumption of meals. An ancient Frigidaire huffing and sighing in the corner. Side-by-side enamel sinks. A spider plant doing its best to block out the light from the window. All of it adding up to a clean, museum-quality old Dakotan farm kitchen. A heartening place if not for the turquoise walls. The color of melancholy. Of grief.

As I stand next to the table the old woman shuffles past to take the seat she was occupying when I knocked. This is what I assume anyway, given the lone coffee cup by her hands. Yet, glancing into it, it appears not only empty but clean, as though pulled off the shelf as a plaything or prop.

“Paula Reyes,” she says, offering her hand. It’s only when I take it that the significance of the name strikes me.

“Paula? I thought you were lost.”

“I was. But I’m found
now
, aren’t I?”

“What happened to you?”

She traces the rim of the coffee cup with a finger.

“I don’t properly know. Isn’t that something?” she says, and answers herself with a short blast of laughter. “Must have hit my head or something. Some old-lady blunder! All I remember is walking in that screen door this morning and Delia sitting right in that seat there, the one you’re leaning on, drinking coffee from this very cup, and the two of us hugging and Delia making me eggs like not a thing had passed between us.”

“That’s Delia’s cup?”

“Um-hm.”

“It’s empty.”

“She finished it.”

“But it looks untouched.”

She looks into the cup’s bottom, then back at me. “So it does,” she says.

“Are you all right?”

She doesn’t appear to hear the question.

“Do you have a sister, Mr. Ullman?” she asks.

“No. I had a brother, though. When I was young.”

“Well, then you’d know the place kin like that keep in your heart. There’s no scrubbing out that kind of stain, is there?” She shakes her head. “Blood runs deep.”

At the mention of blood I notice, for the first time, the spots on the woman’s most exterior sweater, a cardigan with the pockets hanging off. A fine spatter around her middle. Along with crumbs of earth, field dirt. Smudges here and there on her clothes and under her nails.

“What’s that?”

She looks down. Wipes at the blood and soil with the back of her hand.

“Don’t know how that got there, to tell the perfect truth,” she says, though with what could be a tremble of uncertainty now. “But when you work a farm, you stop wondering how the dirt and such gets on you.”

“Doesn’t seem there’s been much work around here for a while.”

Her eyes look up at me, instantly drained of warmth. “You calling my sister and me lazy?”

“It came out awkwardly. Forgive me.”

“I’m not in the forgiving business, Mr. Ullman,” she says, suddenly smiling again. “You want
that
? Get on your knees.”

I can’t tell if she means this literally or not. Something hard behind her smile suggests this last remark wasn’t a joke, but a command. There’s no choice but to pretend I hadn’t noticed.

“The voices you heard,” I say. “The ones that called you down to the cellar.”

“Yes?”

“What did they say?”

She ponders this. A brow-scrunched search of what seems a distant past, as though I’ve asked her the name of the boy who sat next to her in kindergarten.

“It’s a funny thing,” she answers finally. “But though I know it
was words, I can’t recall them as words. More like a
feeling
, y’know? A sound that put a
feeling
inside you.”

My tinnitus on the drive to Linton.
A sound that put a feeling inside me
.

“Could you describe it?” I ask.

“An
awful
thing. You’d rather be doubled over sick. You’d rather drive a nail through the back of your own hand.”

“Because it was painful.”

“Because it opened you up from the inside out. Made things so clear they were cast in pure darkness instead of light. A darkness you could see
better
than any light.”

No light, but rather darkness visible

Serv’d only to discover sights of woe

“This may seem a strange question,” I say. “But have you ever read John Milton?
Paradise Lost
?”

“Not much of a reader, sorry to say. Other than the Good Book, of course. Too busy with the day-to-day.”

“Of course. Can I go back to that feeling you mentioned? What did you see in that visible darkness?”

“What real freedom could be. No rules, no shame, no love to hold you back. Freedom like a cold wind across the fields. Like being dead. Like being nothing.” She nods. “Yes, I believe that captures it. The liberty of being nothing at all.”

I know something about that. It’s the feeling I carried with me from Santa Croce 3627 to the Bauer Hotel. The disease that infected Tess. Made her fall.
Like being dead
. But worse. An unnatural death because it was more final than death.
Like being nothing
.

“Where’s Delia now, Paula?”

“She went down to the cellar just before you came.”

“The cellar?”

“Said she had to straighten something out. Now that I’d come home and all.”

“Do you mind if I go down and have a word with her?”

“Be my guest. Not that I’ll be joining you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m afraid.” She looks at me like I’m dense. “Aren’t you?”

I don’t answer that. Just move away from the table to the closed door I somehow know opens not onto a closet or pantry or back stairwell up to the second floor, but down into the broad hole beneath the house.

Paula watches me grasp the handle and turn it. The sensation of her eyes on my back, pushing me forward to stand at the top of the stairs. Her finger stroking the ring of the coffee cup faster now so that the ceramic issues a wavering note of warning.

A light switch turns on a pair of bulbs below, though I can’t see them yet from this height, only the two yellow aprons they cast upon the concrete floor. And then, halfway down the stairs, the one to the left goes out. Not the pop that comes from burnout, but the fizzle of being too loosely screwed into the socket. I could walk over through the dark and fix it with a single turn. Yet that’s a less-inviting prospect than keeping my eye on the remaining circle of warmth to the right.

When my feet make it to the floor, I can take in some of the details the light offers. Worktables against the walls, cluttered with tools, shears, Mason jars full of lugnuts and screws. Antique paint cans stacked in teetering towers. Paper yard-waste bags piled in the far corner, their bottoms black from their slowly liquefying contents.

It is these bags that emit the smell. A decidedly organic rot, pervasive and strong. The back-of-the-throat tickle of burnt-sugar icing.

No Delia to be found. She could be in the dark to the left. But even if she sat on the floor knitting socks I wouldn’t be able to see her. Only now does it occur to me that, prior to my turning on the light switch, she would have been in total darkness herself. If she’s down here at all.

What was I thinking, trusting an old lady dirtied with blood and soil who’d just returned from a ten-day sojourn without knowing how she’d spent the time? An old woman with a gift for hearing things the rest of the world prays to never hear? A liar—because no
coffee had touched that cup this morning. There was no smell of it in the kitchen, either, no pot on the stove.

I
wasn’t
trusting her, of course. I have had to dispense with the deliberations that trust requires. There isn’t time. The downside of the headlong advance, however, is skipping straight into a trap. And
this
is a trap. Paula is probably closing the door at the top of the stairs right now. Wasn’t there a latch on the outside, silvery and new? She must be slipping the padlock through even as I back up and make the bottom step. Clicking it shut—

“Over here.”

A voice like Paula’s—but not Paula’s—stops me. Lets me see that the door at the top of the cellar stairs remains half open just as I left it.

As I turn, there is a metallic scrape along the floor. And there she is. Delia Reyes. Pulling an overturned washtub into the range of light and sitting on its edge with a weary sigh.

“Good morning,” I say.

“Morning. Is it? You take the sun away and you can lose track of time down here.”

“You didn’t turn the lights on.”

“Didn’t I? You live in a place long enough and I suppose some things you can see just fine in the dark.”

At first, I’d taken her slouch and hooded eyes for fatigue, the posture that follows the completion of some physical task. Yet, with this last sentence, it strikes me that I am wrong. Despite her friendliness, her words are hollowed out by an immeasurable sadness, reedy and thin. I know because it’s how I hear my own voice now, too.

“My name is David Ullman. I came to—”

“I heard,” she interrupts, lifting her eyes to the ceiling. “
Half
heard.”

“You must be delighted. About Paula.”

She returns her eyes to me. “Are you real?”

“As far as I can tell.”

“What have you done?”

“I’m sorry. Not sure that—”

“If you’re here you must have . . . ”

She lets the thought drift away. Draws a hand over her face as though to pull off a cobweb.

“You find it cold down here?” she asks.

“A little,” I say, though in truth, within the last few moments, the cellar’s temperature feels like it’s dropped ten degrees or more.

Delia rubs her shoulders. “This was always a cold house. Even in the summer it never warmed up, never got all the way into the corners. Like the rooms themselves hated being touched by the sun.”

She appears as though she is about to stand, then changes her mind. A mind that’s been transported to a particular sliver of the past.

“Me and Paula always going around in long coats in August,” she says. “And scarves’ round our ears on Christmas morning!”

Her laugh is reminiscent of her sister’s, but unlike the latter it signals loss rather than amusement.

“A good thing you had each other out here,” I say.

“Maybe so. Or maybe there’s such a thing as being too close to somebody.”

“How’s that?”

“Twins. You can lose grasp of what’s what in a cold house for sixty years. And just another you to talk to. Another you to look at.”

I take a step closer. It’s what she seems to require. A hand on her elbow to help her to her feet. Someone to tell her it’s all over, there’s no need to dwell on some long-ago misgivings down here in the foul-smelling dark. Yet at my approach she lifts a finger to stop me. There’s the curious feeling that she wants not only to finish her thought, but prevent me from coming too close.

“I prayed to heaven to take her away,” she says. “It’s a shameful thing, but it’s true. Since I was a girl I’ve had days when I wished for my sister to get her arm caught in the thresher or fall asleep at the wheel on a drive back from town or get a chunk of stew caught in her throat and not find the air to spit it out. I could
see
the ways it might happen. So simple. Terrible things to wish for! But all of it seeming perfectly natural. Accidents.”

She’s crying now. A messy sound that remains separate from her voice, so that it’s like she is performing an act of self-ventriloquism, sobbing and throwing her speaking voice at the same time.