My Demon (14 page)

Alex swung her legs out of bed, the air blasting an icy breath over her exposed skin, and she shivered. Funny, her mother always kept the house so warm. Alex made her way to the bathroom, dragging her towel on the carpet behind her. Her head felt dumb, and as she locked the door, Alex hoped the shower would wash the fog out of her mind.

Hot water dowsed her, pinking her cheeks, but still her brain refused to kick in. She stepped out of the shower and grabbed her towel, scrubbing frantically at her skin in an effort to encourage something, thought functions, anything. Alex opened the moisturizing cream, rubbing the lotion in using her fingers tips. Lost in the sensation as she massaged in the Nivea, thoughts of the night before returned with the force of a bulldozer.

“Oh Shit.” She remembered the ugly impostor posing as her demon. Jeremy snatching him off her, how he’d seen. Despite the warm muggy atmosphere in the small room, her body gave a nipple-raising shiver. Alex wrapped up in her towel. She needed to get out, get some fresh air. Think.

Leaves swirled around her as she walked out into the autumn morning. The bitter wind blustered Alex into walking in a stagger, head down, her coat zipped to the top.

Crumpled leaves congregated in piles along the curbs and against walls and fences. Alex stepped into them, but with no real urge to crunch them underfoot. She snuggled further into her coat and continued her walk down her street.

Mr. Duggan approached from the opposite direction. He sent an apologetic look her way before returning his gaze to the pavement. Momentarily baffled at the old man’s guilty expression, Alex remembered he’d ratted on her to her mother. She looked up from leaf watching, in an attempt to catch his eye as he got closer.

“Hello Mr. Duggan,” she said.

The old man stopped and leaned heavily on his wooden cane. “Good morning, lass.” A caring smile graced his lips. “How are you today?”

Alex opened her mouth to apologize for her behavior. Should she say sorry for the unpredictable actions of a demon? It was up to her to control herself in Clive’s presence. And seek help … to go visit the doctor.

Then, without any warning, a thick blue smoke wafted out of Mr. Duggan’s eyes. The old man reached out with a gnarled and liver spotted claw hand, and patted Alex on the arm. She shrank from his touch as the smoke drifted through the air towards her. The wind whipped up around them, fluffing Mr. Duggan’s short white hair. But the blue smoke floated on regardless.

“Are you okay, dear?”

Alex snapped her mouth shut, and took a step down the path. “I’m fine, um, I got to go.”

She searched around for other passers-by. Would they notice it, the smoke? The street was empty.

“Good-bye, Mr. Duggan.” Alex backed away another pace as the smoke seemed to reach out for her. The tendrils curled and grew, fed by the old man’s rheumy eyes.

“Good-bye, Alexandra,” he said and lifted his cane.

He turned from her, taking the source of the blue wisps. The smoke thinned, then disappeared altogether as Mr. Duggan’s cane resumed clacking on the pavement.

“Holy shit,” Alex whispered.

There was an entrance to the park almost opposite where she stood. Alex forced her eyes off the old man and bolted for the gate. Not far in, she found a bench, and shrank up against the wood, as if she could hide away from view.

“What the bloody hell was that?” Alex asked herself. They’d had a conversation in the middle of the night. Clive had talked about giving her some kind of ‘sight’.

What had he done to her?

She curled up, holding her head tightly for a few seconds. Was her neighbor a body snatcher? Was this the thing Clive needed her to see?

Alex took deep breaths and released her head. A couple of young lads whizzed by on bikes. A brown haired boy turned to stare as he flashed past. The image of his face burned into her brain.

She blinked and the boys were gone, but a picture of the brown haired lad, his eyes leaking as he rode by, stuck in her vision. Tendrils of blue smoke wafted about in the place he had been.

Another. Not just the old man.

Frozen against the hard bench, she searched around the park. A young couple cuddled up under a tree, holding each other tight in the autumnal breeze. The man turned to Alex as if she’d called out. He stared back, blue fumes clouding his face from Alex.

A woman in a cheap tracksuit walked up the path towards Alex, her dog pulling hard on the lead. Alex searched the woman’s face for signs of smoke. Brown eyes glanced back, and the woman nodded as she passed by. Then Alex noticed the dog, a muscle bound Rottweiler mix. The dog twisted towards her as it trotted past, curling its lips and snarling in a barely heard growl. Alex pulled her legs away from the path, and almost missed the blue tinged air that remained where the dog had been.

“Scary isn’t it.” Clive appeared behind her.

Alex leapt up out of her seat and spun around. “I thought you were supposed to be ringing a bell!” she screamed at him. She took a deep breath and regained control, not wanting to draw any more attention to herself than necessary, here in the park, surrounded by strange semi-human creatures.

Clive rounded the bench and approached Alex with slow tentative steps. Carefully, he slid his hand around hers and sat down, pulling her with him.

“I’m sorry I had to show you that.”

Alex looked over. “It is you?” She frowned at him and squinted her eyes, focusing and refocusing on him. “Say your name.”

“Clive. I’m Clive, your friendly neighborhood demon,” he replied, his beaming smile absent.

“Oh God, Clive. What have you done to me?” She stared wide-eyed at him. “What do I do?”

For a moment, she remembered the demon’s invisibility as a jogger passed by. He glanced at her, just as she leaned into Clive’s side, and lent her head on his shoulder. She pulled reluctantly away from the demon.

“Can they see you?”

“No, I’m as invisible to them as everyone else.” Clive watched the jogger disappear down the path.

“What are they? Are they aliens?”

“They come from a dimension from beyond my own.” Clive gazed over at the horizon. “They fly in through the early morning sunshine, a journey fraught with danger, I might add.”

“Sounds corny,” Alex said.

“Maybe,” Clive replied. He still stared into the sky, a faraway look in his eye. “The few who do reach the Earth, must take immediate possession of a body. If not, they die.”

“Then why risk the journey?”

“If you somehow travelled to their dimension, you’d understand why they risk coming. And the only way they can get into a human is when the target person is in the deepest of sleeps.”

“Jesus,” Alex whispered, she trained her eyes above the level of the people passing by, and stared at the treetops. She shook images of formless creatures falling through the crisp morning sunshine and into unsuspecting human folk out of her head and wondered if she’d ever sleep through a sunrise again.

“The ones you need to worry about,” Clive sat down beside her, and leaned in conspiratorially, “the ones you
really
need to worry about are the ones that get above their station, begin to think that this dimension is their playground. Those ones are really dangerous.”

“Why, what do they do?” Alex whispered, her voice barely audible, eyes wide with fright.

“They reproduce.” He shook his head. “That’s not quite right, they sort of divide and expand into others.”

Alex sat hunched over, her arms wrapped around herself and gazed into a grouping of trees across the path. The birches appeared to be in a huddle, and Alex had often wondered what they were discussing so privately. “What are they called?”

“Their full name is the Andrapodistai. But we tend to call them the Podis for short.” He turned away from the horizon, and faced Alex.

“There was one in a dog.” Shock numbed her.

“Anything that has a soul will be used by them.”

“So what can I do?” Alex asked. Her face numb, her features slack, she peered into the demon’s eyes.

“You need to kill them.”

Alex’s jaw worked as she tried to speak, to say anything to make the moment not real. He hadn’t said that. Clive had made a silly joke, and life would go back to normal, without blue clouds floating out of people’s eyes. She drew her legs up to her chest, clutched them tight against her.

“You can’t be serious. You can’t possibly expect me to
kill
anyone.”

“You’re the only one who can help, Alex. We don’t have anyone else able to fight the Podis.”

“But there are so many of them. Hundreds of thousands must be infected … is it an infection, can I call it that?” She tried to shrink further away from the path as another Podis-person approached. “They must be close to taking over the country. What am I going to be able to do against such numbers?”

“The portal focuses in on this area, so most of the Andrapodistai are in Reading. It’s their breakthrough zone.”

“What, they can only do it here? You’re kidding.”

“I assure you, I do not kid.”

“Even so, thousands of people are… infected.”

“Actually only a few hundred Podis have come over, and I suppose infection is as good a way as any to describe them.”

Clive put a steadying hand on her knee, and she covered it with her own. Around the park, little tell-tale trails of blue drifted towards the sky.

“It is very important that you don’t tell anyone else, even Becky, about the Podis. You are so special. I don’t want to lose you.”

“What do you mean—lose me?” she interrupted, probing his dark features for understanding, completely floored by this new revelation. “I don’t understand, why me, you could never expect me to actually
kill
a person … hundreds of people.” She hiccupped in her emotions, as the world expanded violently around her, leaving her all alone in the middle. “There must be some other way…”

Alex’s eyes roved restlessly across the park, seeing more and more blue clouds swirling out of people’s heads. A pigeon flew out of the sky to peck at the remains of a crust near her bench. The bird gaped at her with black shiny eyes, a thick blue smoke spiraling towards Alex.

“I want… I need to… some time…” her words faded, unable to articulate her thoughts, Alex got up from the bench. She kept her eyes fixed on the path before her, and jogged. Not wanting to see any more smoke, she broke into a run.

Alex ran from the park, stumbling past a couple of joggers and a gaggle of young mothers and their prams. A little girl skipped up to Alex, her hair a fiery red, her eyes a startling blue. For a second, Alex slowed to return the wide smile the child offered, but then thick smoke poured from the girl’s eyes.

“Get away!” Alex cried out, and pushed past the girl and ran out of the park entrance.

A long wail pierced the air, and one of the mothers called out, “Learn some manners!”

Alex dodged the traffic on the road, and without slowing her pace, tore up her street. A dirt alley just wide enough for a small car led down the side of an end terrace house. She propelled herself off the pavement and down the path to the back entrances of the rear gardens. Fence panels flew past, her breath tight in her chest, her legs getting the wobbly feeling that said she should stop. Three gates along, Alex finally slowed. She stumbled through into her own garden.

Locked in, the rough surface of the fence panels against her back, Alex’s eyes fell on the kitchen window. Someone moved within—her mother. Without a second thought, Alex darted into the shed, and slammed the door behind her.

Inside was damp, the scent of earth thick in the air. A dusty window looked out onto the garden, a sturdy wooden potting bench positioned along the same side. A leftover from her mother’s attempt at growing vegetables.

Alex wiped away the cobwebs and sat on the bench. The shed door moved a little.

“Can I come in?” It was Clive. Her ever faithful Rottweiler, following her wherever she went. Could she tie him to a tree and leave him behind?