Come Closer (14 page)
The man left the station without a word, and the train took me home safe and sound.
I
N OCTOBER ED INSISTED on having Alex and Sophia over for dinner—a thank you for the wonderful weekend at the beach. To tell you something about Sophia, I had never, in the six years that I knew her, not on one occasion, seen the soles of her feet. We had spent a week at the beach with them once, and first thing in the morning she slipped into satin wedge-heeled slippers. On the boardwalk she wore high-heel clogs; even in the water she wore cheap plastic thongs. She always wore a black suit, during the week, and always black high heels—strappy sandals in the summer, pumps in the spring and fall, tight curvy boots in the winter. Another thing about Sophia: she colored her hair (I could tell from the unchanging shade of baby blonde), but I never once saw her natural color, not even at the roots, not at her part, not even at the nape of neck. I also never saw Sophia gain or loose a pound, never saw a wrinkle or a pimple or a pore on her skin, and never saw her sneeze, hiccup, burp, or fart—although she did occasionally release a dry cough from her throat. I couldn’t stand her.
N OCTOBER ED INSISTED on having Alex and Sophia over for dinner—a thank you for the wonderful weekend at the beach. To tell you something about Sophia, I had never, in the six years that I knew her, not on one occasion, seen the soles of her feet. We had spent a week at the beach with them once, and first thing in the morning she slipped into satin wedge-heeled slippers. On the boardwalk she wore high-heel clogs; even in the water she wore cheap plastic thongs. She always wore a black suit, during the week, and always black high heels—strappy sandals in the summer, pumps in the spring and fall, tight curvy boots in the winter. Another thing about Sophia: she colored her hair (I could tell from the unchanging shade of baby blonde), but I never once saw her natural color, not even at the roots, not at her part, not even at the nape of neck. I also never saw Sophia gain or loose a pound, never saw a wrinkle or a pimple or a pore on her skin, and never saw her sneeze, hiccup, burp, or fart—although she did occasionally release a dry cough from her throat. I couldn’t stand her.
To tell you something about Alex, after six years I still knew nothing about him that didn’t pertain to either his career or the fruits of that career—beach house, cars, Claire’s private schools. I didn’t know where he’d gone to high school, his favorite color, what books or movies or music he loved or hated. I was acutely aware, however, that he was a VP before he was forty and had 30 percent of his retirement income in stocks and the remainder in long-term bonds and real estate.
Ed and I had silently decided to put on a pleasant face for his friends and tell them nothing of our problems. Except that somehow Ed had gotten the idea that I would be cooking dinner, and was shocked, when he got home at six, to find out I had nothing prepared.
“I don’t understand,” he yelled. “You didn’t make ANYTHING? We have people coming over in one hour and you don’t even have a box of fucking rice in the house? What the hell am I supposed to serve, cereal and ice cream?”
“No, Ed,” I told him. “You mean you didn’t make anything, you don’t even have a box of rice, and you have people coming over in one hour. And no, they can’t have my ice cream.”
For the first time I couldn’t tell who was speaking, me or Naamah.
An hour would have been plenty of time to get something together but we easily killed it fighting and when they got to our place—complaining, as they did with every visit, of how hard our place was to find—we had nothing to serve. Ed confessed that there had been a little mix-up over dinner (he followed this with a revoltingly sycophantic little laugh), and that he’d have to run out and get something. I was beyond even pretending to be amused, and sat sullenly at the kitchen table while Ed babbled. Alex, good sport that he was, went along with Ed for the ride.
Sophia and I were left sitting around the dining table with a bottle of white wine. We both lit cigarettes, the first line of defense against silence and boredom.
“So,” I asked her, “what’s new?”
“Not much,” she said. “We’re moving the firm.”
“Where are you moving?”
“Just across town. It’s just a hassle, that’s all. Missing files and everything.”
“Moving’s a drag.”
“Yep.”
We smoked and drank our wine. I looked at Sophia, and she was looking at me in an odd way.
“What’s different?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You look different. Did you gain a few pounds? It looks good on you. You look healthier.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Of course I knew perfectly well what she was talking about.
“Huh. Well there’s something different.” Sophia was slouching a little in her chair in a typical businessman’s posture, legs spread wide. In her right hand was a cigarette and in the other, a glass of wine. Now she put her cigarette out and straightened up in her chair into a stiff, nunlike position, and turned around so she was looking directly at me. I thought she was angry at me. In the corner of my eye I saw something scurry from behind the bedroom door to the bathroom. I was oddly comforted by knowing Naamah was in the room.
“I think,” she said from this odd position, “I know what it is.”
“What do you mean?”
Out of boredom I had been picking the label off the bottle of wine. Now I looked up at Sophia—and oh, what I saw. Her cheeks bulged out as if she had filled them with air. Her eyes opened wider, and then wider, until they popped almost out of the sockets. Her lips, now thick and engorged with blood, dropped apart to reveal black teeth that shrunk before my eyes into stubby little points.
I drew in a sharp breath with a tiny squeal and jumped out of my chair. In doing so I knocked over the bottle of wine. My eyes darted to the table at the sound of glass hitting wood, and then I blinked, and when I looked back up, Sophia was Sophia again. And she was laughing
“All I meant,” she said, “was that you’re looking very good.”
I stared at her, speechless.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “You’re scared. Relax. Soon you’ll have the world at your feet.”
I said nothing, still frozen. I was just starting to see black, starting to feel myself fade away and the demon rise, when I heard keys rattling by the door. Ed and Alex were back with two shopping bags of take-out Japanese and the laughter of old friends. Naamah slinked back into the shadows, and the rest of the night went on without incident.
THE horrible thing with Sophia had been so quick that the next day I thought I might have imagined it. Nothing could be taken for granted anymore. Nothing could be assumed.
So I didn’t draw any conclusions from what had happened. But a week later another horrible thing happened: I was about to get into a taxi when a woman, a young redhead, appeared in front of me out of nowhere. She stepped right through the door I held open for myself and slammed it behind her. I stared at her through the window, streaked with rain and bright reflections of the streetlights around us. She looked back up at me, laughing, and rolled her eyes up and around in their sockets, revealing a black glistening hole between her eyelids.
Soon after that, during a meeting with a new client at Fields & Carmine, I bent under the table to get a pen that had somehow jumped out of my hand. There under the table, two seats to my right, was the upside-down face of the new client, also bent over, seemingly in search of his errant pen. He caught my eye. I smiled briefly and intended to straighten up again but the demon held me down as strongly as the client’s eyes held mine. The client grinned widely, and then wider, stretching his lips across his entire face. He raised his eyebrows up into high pointy peaks until he resembled nothing so much as a clown. “I know you,” he mouthed. His throat didn’t make a sound but I heard his words clearly in a deep echoing baritone inside my head.
There were more incidents—an odd glance on line at the bank, a quick contorted face across the street—but none as direct as Sophia had been, and I learned nothing from these odd encounters except that there were others, and that I now had the misfortune of being able to see them. Naamah wasn’t particularly interested in them, and I wasn’t either. By now the most shocking truth wasn’t that there were more like her and me, or that her ability to manipulate me was growing so rapidly—it was that, previously, I had been so stupid as to think I had any understanding of the universe at all.
I
WENT BACK TO SISTER Maria’s. But Maria wouldn’t let me in the door. When she saw me through the glass she ran out to the street and stopped me.
WENT BACK TO SISTER Maria’s. But Maria wouldn’t let me in the door. When she saw me through the glass she ran out to the street and stopped me.
“Oh no,” she said. “I have children here, my family lives in back. I can’t let you in, not like this.”
“Like what? What did I do?”
“Amanda, I can see her. She’s stronger than ever. Go, get away from here. I tried to help you once already.”
I started to cry. “But what am I going to do?” I pleaded.
“Wait here.” Maria went back inside, locking the door behind her. She came back with another large glass bottle like the one she had given me before. This one was labeled #17: DEMON BURNING EXTRA STRENGTH.
“And use it this time,” she said, slipping it into a brown paper bag. “And there’s a book that you need. Possession, by K. L. Walker. Now go!”
1 STUMBLED away from the store. When I reached a particularly desolate street, lined on either side with weedy lots of burnt cars and old mattresses, I stopped and opened the bag Maria had given me. I opened the bottle and lifted it above my head. I tipped it just a little so that a thin stream trickled onto the crown of my head.
Just then the gray sky split open and fat drops of rain started to fall. I closed my eyes and continued to drip the liquid onto my head. It smelled like anise and musk and ginseng. Through my closed eyes I saw white lightning crack open the sky. My skin stung like a sunburn where the fluid had dripped on it. I opened my eyes to the filthy city street and then I heard laughter. Then I was laughing too, or rather, she was laughing through me. I laughed until I was lying on the filthy concrete, rolling around in yesterday’s newspapers and used condoms. I dropped the bottle and it shattered, spilling the potion across the concrete. I rolled in the gutter, wet from rain and bloody from where my skin scraped the concrete and the broken glass. The corners of my mouth started to burn and then crack and bleed, but I kept laughing.
“Amanda,” she said through her laughter, our laughter, “did you really think this would work?”
I
KEPT SEARCHING FOR
Possession
by K. L. Walker, the book Maria had told me to read. Missing in every library, sold out in every bookstore. One afternoon I woke up from a blackout to find myself sitting on the floor in front of the mantel. I sat with my legs curled to the side and my face tilted towards the fireplace, as pristine as a girl in a Currier and Ives print. A fire was burning inside it; when my eyes focused and I looked closely I saw a little mountain of books, slowly burning away. As soon as I could, I ran into the kitchen for some water to put out the fire.
KEPT SEARCHING FOR
Possession
by K. L. Walker, the book Maria had told me to read. Missing in every library, sold out in every bookstore. One afternoon I woke up from a blackout to find myself sitting on the floor in front of the mantel. I sat with my legs curled to the side and my face tilted towards the fireplace, as pristine as a girl in a Currier and Ives print. A fire was burning inside it; when my eyes focused and I looked closely I saw a little mountain of books, slowly burning away. As soon as I could, I ran into the kitchen for some water to put out the fire.
Five copies of
Possession,
all burned beyond restoration, the letters of the title just barely visible on the spines.
Possession,
all burned beyond restoration, the letters of the title just barely visible on the spines.
I gave up on
Possession
and found another book that looked promising—
Demon Warfare Today
—but she knocked it from my hands again. I bought
Protecting Yourself from Evil
but it vanished between the bookstore and the loft. I had put it in my purse, but when I got home it just wasn’t there. Soon I found myself unable to even set foot in a bookstore; I would start out with the best intentions and at the door I would find myself turning away, never able to open the door. I would end up getting an ice cream from a street vendor or stealing another lipstick from a drugstore. The same thing happened if I tried to enter a church, or a synagogue, or even the Society for Ethical Culture, as I tried one bright fall afternoon. Even if I had had the capacity to schedule and keep an appointment with a therapist, I wouldn’t have gone. I was sure that there was no one I could trust.
Possession
and found another book that looked promising—
Demon Warfare Today
—but she knocked it from my hands again. I bought
Protecting Yourself from Evil
but it vanished between the bookstore and the loft. I had put it in my purse, but when I got home it just wasn’t there. Soon I found myself unable to even set foot in a bookstore; I would start out with the best intentions and at the door I would find myself turning away, never able to open the door. I would end up getting an ice cream from a street vendor or stealing another lipstick from a drugstore. The same thing happened if I tried to enter a church, or a synagogue, or even the Society for Ethical Culture, as I tried one bright fall afternoon. Even if I had had the capacity to schedule and keep an appointment with a therapist, I wouldn’t have gone. I was sure that there was no one I could trust.
The battle was all mine, and I was quickly, obviously, losing.
S
OON I DIDN’T HAVE A moment alone. When she wasn’t inside me, I could see her scurrying around, looking over my shoulder, ready to jump in if necessary. In the apartment I would see a lock of dirty black hair or a small white foot hiding in the shadows out of the corner of my eye. At the office I would catch sight of her hand, with its long unpolished nails, scribbling alterations over my designs.
OON I DIDN’T HAVE A moment alone. When she wasn’t inside me, I could see her scurrying around, looking over my shoulder, ready to jump in if necessary. In the apartment I would see a lock of dirty black hair or a small white foot hiding in the shadows out of the corner of my eye. At the office I would catch sight of her hand, with its long unpolished nails, scribbling alterations over my designs.
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