The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (57 page)

“I don’t know,” she said. “What if I call the vengeful demon hordes down on me or something because I did the wrong thing one way or the other? I don’t know how all this goes.”

“The summoning didn’t work?”

Katie shook her head. “They’re going to try again next week. Not like it matters, anyway. Bringing him back won’t make me less pregnant.”

“Maybe it could,” I said. Demons could do a lot of things; they could probably absorb fetuses or whatever.

But Katie gave me a look, and I realized she meant that, even if the baby disappeared, the fact that she had gotten pregnant never would.

For the first time I thought how weird that was, and how sad it was.

Just for a second, I wondered why she’d slept with the demon; as far as I knew, no one had ever actually asked her. Then I looked over at her, and she seemed so alone that I didn’t really wonder anymore.

“I went to day camp over the summer,” I said.

She frowned. “That’s . . . cool.”

“It was awful,” I said, “but I completely fell in love with this guy named Patrick.”

She zipped up her hoodie and looked at me.

“I mean, seriously,” I said. “It was the worst. You can’t imagine how hard it was just to try not to stare at him all the time. I looked like a complete asshole. I will literally never recover.”

After a second, Katie said, “Yeah,” in that tone people use when they’ve decided to really be your friend.

On the way out, the people from her church had taken a vote or something, because they chanted, “All babies are God’s babies!” and “God loves demons, too!” until we were peeling away.

I spent seven weeks at that urban day camp going to historical landmarks and hitting museums and, once, going out to a farm.

Every minute of it was awful, and it was double awful because of Patrick, who had messy hair that he was always pushing back from his forehead.

(Once I got away from the day camp I realized how stupid a thing this was, but when you’re a hostage on a school bus five days a week during your summer vacation, you get Stockholm syndrome.)

He had a crush on Linda Rich, but he thought I was okay, so sometimes we’d sit together on the bus and I would play it really cool and try not to think about the backs of my arms sticking to the seat.

I must have played it really cool, because he shared a joint with me the morning before we got on the bus for the field trip to the City Museum, so by the time I got there I was a little high.

A little high was plenty – I took one look at that huge slinky slide and knew I’d snap my wrist in half if I even tried – but Patrick went up all the slides and found the ball pit and crawled around in the plane fuselage, better than he did anything sober, which I guess tells you some people are just cut out to be high.

When I went up to the roof for air, I saw the bus.

It was on a corner of the building; the back half was planted on the roof, but the front half of the bus just stuck out into the air, and it was open if you wanted to go in it, but you had to trust that the welding or whatever was going to hold you up. Otherwise you were going down eight stories in half a bus.

I sort of wanted to do it. I trusted buses more than slinkys, and I wanted to see what the city looked like when you were high, just in case it was different.

(I hate heights. I must have been pretty high to forget how much I hate heights.)

I made it into the back half of the bus, and I started for the front like a normal person who trusts welding. But with the next step I was afraid, and then I was more afraid, and then I swore I heard the bus pulling free until it was just a huge seesaw with me in the middle.

I ended up at the exact point the bus takes off from the roof (I don’t know how I knew that, but I did). I stood there sweating with terror until, finally, some six-year-old came in and told me to get out because it was his turn, and because I figured his weight would hold down the back half, I was able to scramble back out to the roof.

I couldn’t imagine what Katie was thinking about keeping the baby or not, but I knew what it felt like to be paralysed about something, even when you knew better.

Katie’s parents went out of town to follow up on some lead the coven had found, and they asked my parents if Katie could come over.

“We don’t want to treat her like she’s a child,” they said, “but there is a judgement question here. Plus, it would be better to have someone nearby if something happens with the baby.”

“Of course,” said my mom, even though my dad looked nervous, like the house would be overrun with a business-casual coven taking us all by surprise.

When Katie showed up, my mom looked at her stomach first. She didn’t look any different yet – you’d never guess she was pregnant if you didn’t know – but it still took my mom a second before she made eye contact.

At dinner, my mom talked a lot about my summer camp before she got up the nerve to look directly at Katie. When she asked how Katie was she got a “Fine, thank you”, and that seemed to cheer her up.

“And how’s school?”

“The teachers are really nervous about my pregnancy,” Katie said. “I think they’d rather I drop out, especially Ms Parker, since I’m probably not going to do so well in sex ed. this semester. I’m out of orchestra because I’ll be too pregnant by Regionals and they want the chair assignments to last all year, and my church has asked my parents not to bring me until we know if the demon’s going to eat my soul or not.”

My dad was staring at his plate, twirling a forkful of pasta that was already bigger than his mouth.

“At least I can sleep in on Sundays,” Katie said after a second, like she wanted to wrap the story on an up note.

“That’s nice,” said my mom.

“I really loved him,” Katie said.

I was on the floor in my bedroom (pregnant girls get the bed), and when I opened my eyes I was staring at my dresser. I turned so I could look at the ceiling.

“It sounds so stupid,” she said, a little angry, “because of all this shit that happened, but I really did. And I made him use condoms, because I was afraid of getting pregnant, and he just . . . never told me what could happen. I don’t know why he wouldn’t tell me, if he didn’t even want the baby.

“I mean, clearly it was because he never cared,” she said, and now her voice was tight, like she was trying not to cry. “But I just don’t understand it – even if you don’t care, why wouldn’t you warn someone who loves you that much? I was an idiot.”

“I don’t think you’re an idiot,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Tell that to everyone at school who thinks I was just in it for the sex.”

“Everyone says he was really hot,” I said, like maybe it would make her feel better to know some people at school were just jealous of anyone who scored big.

Katie laughed once, into my pillow. Then we were quiet for a while. I turned on my side; I could see her silhouette curled up under my comforter.

“The glamour comes off,” she said, finally, with a sigh. “As soon as you kiss one, the glamour goes.”

The next time I gave Katie a ride to Planned Parenthood, she went in alone.

I sat in the waiting room and flipped through a four-monthold copy of
Seventeen
(the fact that they even stocked
Seventeen
made me seriously sad), and tried not to worry too much, but I kept one ear open for the first sounds of demon calls as they burst through the ceiling of the clinic demanding vengeance for the murder of their ungodly seed.

(I didn’t have any weapons on hand except a rolled-up magazine, but still, I’d fight them if they came.)

But the only thing that happened was the nurse coming out to tell me that Katie was resting after her procedure, and it would be a couple of hours, if I wanted to come back later.

“I’m good here,” I said, and picked up a three-month-old copy of
People
.

Katie looked a little pale, and on the way back she was glancing out the window a lot.

“Do you feel like they’re coming?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said.

She sounded like she was about to cry, and after a second I realized what she must be thinking about.

“I’m sorry he never came back,” I said.

I was quiet after that, and she rested her fingertips on the window and breathed carefully in and out, like her ribs hurt.

After a long time she said, “I’ve been looking at some colleges.”

“That’s awesome,” I said.

The next day, Ms Parker gave us a lesson on the terrors of abortion.

“It’s dangerous,” she said, ticking off points on her fingers. “As with any medical procedure, it has an uncertain outcome.”

“Just like pregnancy,” said Katie.

Ms Parker kept going. “And it has documented psychological side effects. Depression, shame, guilt.”

“I wonder why,” I said.

“Seriously,” said Cody from next to me, the first time he’d said anything in sex ed. class all year, and he and Katie and I smiled at each other for a second, like Musketeers.

During enrollment in the spring, Katie signed up for a bunch of AP classes.

There was some confusion about it amongst the teachers, like getting pregnant had lowered her IQ, but of course she tested into them all.

“Well,” said my mother when she heard, and glanced down the table at me, like maybe I would be more dedicated to my schoolwork if only I’d had a pregnancy scare to motivate me.

The weekend before spring break I took Katie to the City Museum, and we climbed into the bus.

“This is already more fun than doing it high,” I said.

“Problem child,” she said.

There’s a picture I took of her, and even though it’s a little blurry because I took it from halfway back in the bus, you can still see it’s Katie at the wheel, grinning, driving out into the sky.

The Monsters of Heaven

Nathan Ballingrud

Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award, Nathan Ballingrud’s story reminds one of a verse from Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday”:

And freely he goes lost
In the unknown, famous light of great
And fabulous, dear God.
Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true,
And, in that brambled void,
Plenty as blackberries in the woods
The dead grow for His joy.

Heaven, after all, might be a dark place, and comfort not necessarily without pain . . .

“Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me,
then show me the place where he was hanged.”

–Lawrence Durrell,
Justine

For a long time, Brian imagined reunions with his son. In the early days, these fantasies were defined by spectacular violence. He would find the man who stole him and open his head with a claw hammer. The more blood he spilled, the further removed he became from his own guilt. The location would often change: a roach-haunted tenement building; an abandoned warehouse along the Tchoupitoulas wharf; a prefab bungalow with an American flag out front and a two-door hatchback parked in the driveway.

Sometimes the man lived alone, sometimes he had his own family. On these latter occasions, Brian would cast himself as a moral executioner, spraying the walls with the kidnapper’s blood but sparing his wife and child – freeing them, he imagined, from his tyranny. No matter the scenario, Toby was always there, always intact; Brian would feel his face pressed into his shoulders as he carried him away, feel the heat of his tears bleed into his shirt.
You’re safe now,
he would say.
Daddy’s got you. Daddy’s here.

After some months passed, he deferred the heroics to the police. This marked his first concession to reality. He spent his time beached in the living room, drinking more, working less, until the owner of the auto shop told him to take time off, a lot of time off, as much as he needed. Brian barely noticed. He waited for the red and blue disco lights of a police cruiser to illuminate the darkness outside, to give some shape and measure to the night. He waited for the phone to ring with a glad summons to the station. He played out scenarios, tried on different outcomes, guessed at his own reactions. He gained weight and lost time.

Sometimes he would get out of bed in the middle of the night, careful not to wake his wife, and get into the car. He would drive at dangerous speeds through the city, staring into the empty sockets of unlighted windows. He would get out of the car and stand in front of some of these houses, looking and listening for signs. Often, the police were called. When the officers realized who he was, they were usually as courteous as they were adamant. He’d wonder if it had been the kidnapper who called the police. He would imagine returning to those houses with a gun.

*    *    *   

This was in the early days of what became known as the Lamentation. At this stage, most people did not know anything unusual was happening. What they heard, if they heard anything, was larded with rumor and embellishment. Fogs of gossip in the barrooms and churches. This was before the bloodshed. Before their pleas to Christ clotted in their throats.

Amy never told Brian that she blamed him. She elected, rather, to avoid the topic of the actual abduction, and any question of her husband’s negligence. Once the police abandoned them as suspects, the matter of their own involvement ceased to be a subject of discussion. Brian was unconsciously grateful, because it allowed him to focus instead on the maintenance of grief. Silence spread between them like a glacier. In a few months, entire days passed with nothing said between them.

It was on such a night that Amy rolled up against him and kissed the back of his neck. It froze Brian, filling him with a blast of terror and bewilderment; he felt the guilt move inside of him, huge but seemingly distant, like a whale passing beneath a boat. Her lips felt hot against his skin, sending warm waves rolling from his neck and shoulders all the way down to his legs, as though she had injected something lovely into him. She grew more ardent, nipping him with her teeth, breaking through his reservations. He turned and kissed her. He experienced a leaping arc of energy, a terrifying, violent impulse; he threw his weight onto her and crushed his mouth into hers, scraping his teeth against hers. But there immediately followed a cascade of unwelcome thought: Toby whimpering somewhere in the dark, waiting for his father to save him; Amy, dressed in her bedclothes in the middle of the day, staring like a corpse into the sunlight coming through the windows; the playground, and the receding line of kindergarteners. When she reached under the sheets she found him limp and unready. He opened his mouth to apologize but she shoved her tongue into it, her hand working at him with a rough urgency, as though more depended on this than he knew. Later he would learn that it did. Her teeth sliced his lip and blood eeled into his mouth. She was pulling at him too hard, and it was starting to hurt. He wrenched himself away.