And to think that in the last year I had done nothing but pass time since my separation and divorce, tossing first days and then weeks and months at the iterant routine of work, of the T. Waiting out the pain, waiting for clarity and direction, waiting for the day that something shoved me from inertia.
And something had.
The demon was driving with one hand on the wheel, the other fingering his watch with more thoughtful delicacy than I would have thought those fingers capable of. “I didn’t understand it yet, of course. I was preoccupied, if unsettled. Each new day brought new wonders to Eden. The next day El spoke again, and the water swarmed—and so did the air.”
“Are you talking about fish—fish and birds?” I saw the distinct image of my own hands—small, as they had been when I was a boy—pasting animals onto a paper earth in Sunday school, something I had forgotten until this moment.
“Yes, and we had never seen anything like them. These were no spirit-beings but strange and alien creatures, swimming in the water and flying through the sky. So queer and diverse. Even Lucifer watched, stark eyed, beside himself with amazement. And I knew, with a vestige of that single accord that we had once shared, that he coveted this strange new world and all the things inside it. He had wanted to be a god, but in that moment I believe he remembered why he was not.
“But now, a stinging blow! El did something he had never done before: He blessed them. Never before had I heard such things spoken, even to Lucifer, and he had been the anointed one. Coveted words! And then, to these creatures, these base and strange new things, he gave license to create more of their own for as long and often as they dared. Imagine!”
In the rearview mirror I saw fever in his eyes.
“These were no gods—no spiritual beings even—these creatures. But they had been given the power to create.”
I had never seen him this emotional.
“We had no such power! They had been blessed. We had no such blessing. Can you understand?”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking how a firstborn must feel at the birth of a younger sibling—how I had felt at the birth of my sister when I was six years old.
“That day,” he said, at a stoplight now, his hand a fist on his chest, “another new thing sprouted, this time inside me, its roots embedded in the soil of my changed heart. By nightfall, jealousy had wound its tendrils through my innards, choking me from the inside. From Lucifer’s face I knew I was not the only one.
“And now, with the passing of another day, there came new creations more exotic than before, walking on legs, many of them without wings, roaming over the land. By any logic they should have been miserable—censored, condemned to swim, to roam on land without flying, to fly and not swim. I wanted them to be miserable. But they fascinated us with their strangeness and variety. And they ate things.”
He chuckled, but the sound was hollow. “Never before had we seen such a phenomenon. Terrible, fascinating—the devouring of green, living things for the sake of a too-mortal body. Mesmerizing. Horrifying. We watched them do it for hours, transfixed—mouthfuls of green, leaf and branch, fruit and seed, even the tiny plankton of the sea—all devoured by bodies with appetites we did not understand. So strange, so novel. We couldn’t get enough of it.”
I thought back to the coffee in the café, the scone at the bookstore, and the demon watching me. Even in the tea shop, he hadn’t drunk from his cup but watched me lift it to my lips so intently I had wondered if he had poisoned it.
“Yes!” He laughed. “So now you know why I will never tire of watching you consume things.”
This struck me as deviant as a foot fetish. “Then why don’t you ever eat?”
His expression slowly twisted. In the rearview mirror, I saw acid leak into his eyes. “Because it all tastes like the dirt you come from!”
I fell back against the seat, startled into silence as he drove on, eyes boring into the road before us.
We entered a residential area of large, rolling yards. Iron fences enclosed wooded drives, old elms screened houses buttoned tight by latched iron gates. I recognized this Belmont neighborhood; in college I had attended a party here at the family home of a friend-of-a-friend. I had been struck by the sheer size of the house, awed by the French table clocks, chinoiserie secretaries, and mahogany sideboards that whispered “heirloom” and “old money,” each of them at anachronistic odds with the modern security system panels and television sets. Someone had set a sweating beer bottle on top of a Queen Anne table and I had discretely removed it, trying to save the old oak the indignity of a ring.
For years I returned whenever I found myself in the area, to admire the gabled roofs and columned porticoes, the dark shutters and diamond-paned windows, to tell myself that when I got caught up at work, I would pull out one of my own manuscripts and finish it. And when that day came—the one with the six-figure advance and movie deal—I would buy a place here where my kids could play on the lawn or ride their Big Wheels in front of the garage, where our two family cars—one of them an SUV and the other an Audi sedan—were parked inside. When the kids were old enough, they could go off to the local private school, complete with its own ice-hockey rink.
I indeed finished the manuscript and sold it in a three-book deal as the Coming Home series. But I never bought the house. The first book sold fewer than 3,500 copies, and the series was cancelled after the release of the second. Had it stayed in print long enough, I was sure it would have done better, but the unsold copies returned too quickly, their shelf space surrendered to higher volume tenants.
Lucian pulled over in front of a stately brick Tudor covered with ivy. I was not surprised to recognize the curved front entry, the door like an upside-down U, the turret to the side of it running up the front of the house, complete with a spire, the steeply pitched roof. It was the same house I had visited nearly two decades ago, the same one that had informed my every image of success, of a life worthy of Aubrey’s expectations. A mark I had fallen short of.
The demon squinted at it through the passenger window, his forearm resting on the steering wheel. I expected him to crow his knowledge of my having come here, to regale me with the story of how I made out with Deanna Blair in an upstairs bedroom, then drop the bomb that she was dead or paralyzed or kidnapped in Colombia. But he was silent. I found it unnerving.
“Why are we here?”
He turned in the seat and regarded me. “I’ve thought a long time about telling you this, gone back and forth on it. I’m not sure about it, even now, but look—we’re here, and I promised to tell you everything.”
He seemed to wait for some indication of my understanding.
“The world is not as you see it,” he said finally. “Look at that house. So grand, so very upper-crust.”
“That it is,” I said warily.
“But here’s the thing: That house, the cars, the old furniture and interior decorating, even the landscaping—this physical world—is nothing but window dressing. Beneath all of that lies another realm altogether.
“The distinction between our two worlds is important for you to understand. It’s important for you to know that beneath the aesthetics of every temporal veneer lies a stratum of infallible truth: a spiritual realm, the world wiped clean of cosmetics.”
Now, as I looked again at that house, the heavy brick began to fall away, translucent as a frame in a ghost movie. And then the two upper levels silently collapsed, caving in the middle so that the stately old furniture, tables, and consoles with their curving legs and claw feet slid and then toppled through the crumbling floors. I had experienced Lucian’s tampering with my brain before in visions and dreams, but this—here, with my eyes bearing open witness to the very thing before me—was disconcerting. I jerked in my seat, but it, too, had become transparent. And then we were no longer seated in a cab but standing on a street that was no longer paved, in front of a yard that was nothing but earth and rock.