the demonmongers` ball

THE DEMONMONGERS’ BALL
A Novel by David Farren
All rights reserved
Copies of this document may be made for personal use only
1. CHOSEN BY THE GODS
It was eleven at night, and I did not feel like watching the news while I waited for
Letterman or Leno. The latest celebrity molestation trial was coming to an end with the jury trying to decide
whether to believe the kid or the pop star, and the stations were getting too desperate for new angles.
Instead I set up my laptop out on the terrace of my rented Topanga Canyon pad, which
was somewhat like a glorified tree house with all the high-tech wizardry that let me stay
connected with the world 24/7. I was going to work on the script I had promised Jack Hanson,
who was trying to develop a series for a child actress who had outgrown the sitcoms. Since
mediums were the hot new thing that year in TV, his character was to be a darling little psychic
who had to balance the dangers of crime-fighting with a problematic love life. No, we couldn’t
have her actually go to bed with anyone—well, maybe late in the second year of the series if the
ratings began to slip—but Jack’s suggestion was to always make it seem like Mr. Right was out
there somewhere making her antennae quiver.
I always check my email first. Maybe there’d be a note from the family. Or from Eleanor.
I knew neither was likely. Mom kept in touch with my two sisters to gossip about family stuff, but
as a good Christian lady she was ambivalent about my being in the Hollywood scene and did not
want to encourage me. Eleanor, my ex and still the only woman I had ever been in love with,
shared the ambivalence but for different reasons. She wanted me to make it in order to keep up
the child support, but she still blamed my writing ambitions for breaking up the marriage.
There was the usual excessive amount of spam. I had a totally free vacation waiting for
me in South America. A Nigerian official needed my help in transferring millions of dollars out of
Africa. My penis could be lengthened with a special ointment, or, if I so chose, I could order a
Viagra substitute guaranteed to keep me hard all night. And, inevitably, there was a clutch of
young lovelies willing to put on an Internet show just for me. Greed and sex. Just like most of the
shows on the tube. Just like the stuff I wrote when Jack needed a hot script in a hurry.
1
Some had my name right in the heading. “Thorne Webster, tired of working for peanuts?”
“Thorne Webster, important information about your account 23456.” “Thorne Webster, you have
been chosen by the gods.”
I did the usual. I opened none of them, checked the right box and ordered all of them
deleted. Normally this then led to my service telling me I had no messages in my inbox. Only
this time there was still one message left. “Thorne Webster, you have been chosen by the gods.”
Okay, one message to be deleted. And one message left afterward. “Thorne Webster,
you have been chosen by the gods.”
All right, either there was some gimmick that kept the message from being deleted or the
sender was anticipating me and having a replacement ready. I tried again with the same result.
There was one way to check. I went to the trash folder and saw that, yes, there were
three messages with the same information that I had been chosen by the gods. Now I was
curious. I opened the first. It read, “Webster, now go look at the message still left in your inbox.”
The only time I had ever felt such an emotional shock at the computer was when Eleanor
had sent me that fateful email about taking off for a romantic week with the woman we had hired
as a nanny and would I look after the kids.
I opened the second message and began feeling dizzy. It read, “Webster, I’ve already
said what to do, so don’t try my patience.”
I was not going back to my inbox. This was too crazy. Someone had to be playing an
elaborate joke, although how the email could be rigged this way was beyond me. But I was not
going to play along.
I went inside and turned on the television. The late-night talk shows were already
starting. Jay Leno was delivering his monologue. He got just one line off before I hit the remote
in what now was starting to be a full-blown panic attack. “Thorne Webster,” he was saying while
trying not to give in to the giggles, “you’ve really got to open your email.”
Relax. Breathe deep. Yoga stuff. Okay, this was a weird hallucinatory experience. The
kind of thing Jack said he used to have happen when he was my age back in the sixties and was
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heavy into acid. I had the thought that maybe I should call him, even if a cardinal rule had been
to leave him alone between ten at night and five in the morning.
And then the printer over by my desktop computer started clicking away.
I felt a sudden calm. So maybe the relaxation exercises were taking hold. I could handle
this. Sure, the gods, whatever they might be, were really trying to reach me and they had chosen
cyberspace as the means.
I picked up the sheet of paper that had come through.
It was the printout of an email message with the same heading. Up to now I had paid no
attention to the sender. There was just one name: Malarkey.
I started to laugh. Usually in my profession I heard more Yiddish than Irish slang, but the
word “malarkey” did come up every so often to describe something that was complete nonsense.
And that fit what was happening now.
The same heading, of course.
The body of the message is what threw me. It just said, “Lox and eggs tomorrow at
Jerry’s.”
Jerry’s was a very nice deli down by Topanga and Ventura. No time was specified, but
already I had the feeling that was entirely up to me. I just better be there.
I turned on the television. Jay Leno was doing an interview with some rising celebrity. No
messages for me. On a hunch I turned on my desktop computer and called up my email. No
message from Malarkey. I went to the trash folder. The three messages from before had
disappeared. Quickly I went back to the printout. It was blank.
3
4
2. I TAKE A MEETING WITH MALARKEY
I went to sleep before midnight and got up about seven. No dreams, although when I lay
down I had the thought that maybe I’d get more information about what it meant for me to be
chosen by the gods. In the morning I began to think that possibly dreams were the old tech way
for supernatural contacts. Now the gods used computers.
Gods? One wasn’t enough?
I had been raised a good Catholic, but all that seemed as remote now as my days playing
third base on the Saint Thomas Aquinas High team that came ever so close to winning the state
championship. Eleanor had been a recovering Jehovah’s Witness when we met, and we agreed
that neither of us would broach the subject of religion unless we were both drunk. And she was
still enough of a Witness at heart not to drink, even if she did agree to celebrate birthdays and
otherwise seemed normal enough. So God no longer had a role in our thought processes, except
when we watched Amber Tamblyn play a teenager talking to a God who kept showing up in
varied human forms. Ironically, the show had been canceled at the end of its second season,
which was shortly after Eleanor and the nanny came back for the kids and took off for Texas.
And what did it mean to be chosen by the gods? In her series Amber was chosen, but it only
seemed to get her in trouble. The series was called Joan of Arcadia, and, had it gone on long
enough maybe Amber would have been put on trial for witchcraft, just as Joan of Arc had been. I
had even written a script on spec for that episode, and I had planned to send it over during the
summer.
A little before nine I was at Jerry’s. I asked for a table for two and ordered some coffee.
Perhaps Malarkey wouldn’t show. Perhaps Malarkey didn’t exist and I was slipping into some
psychotic state that would not be covered by the pathetic health insurance that was the best I
could afford.
The figure that slipped into the booth next to me could have been out of central casting for a
New York bookie. For his appearance try to think of Joe E. Ross, the comic teamed with Fred
Gwynne in the Car 54, Where Are You? series that my mother had watched while she was
5
pregnant with me. Imagine that he’s balding with a bad comb-over and that he needs a shave,
then put him in a checkered yellow jacket that seems just a little too short and tight and clearly
needs a trip to the dry cleaner.
The waitress is there immediately and he is ordering lox and eggs with a bagel and a side of
tomatoes, and I realize that while he looks like Joe E. Ross he sounds like Joe E. Brown, another
comic perhaps best known for his role as Jack Lemmon’s millionaire suitor in Some Like It Hot.
“Webster, you must want to know why the gods picked you,” he says, barely taking a breath
after adding decaf coffee to his order.
“You’re Malarkey?” I ask.
“No, I’m Jack Lemmon,” he answers, and I feel that woozy sensation again as I wonder
whether he’s reading my mind.
“What’s to read?” he says, grinning. “Didn’t Thomas Aquinas say even angels couldn’t know
what we were thinking unless we said something, and, hell, I’m no angel.”
“You know where I went to school.”
“You batted .325 in your senior year, and I know about your lesbo wife and the kiddies and
that little duplex in Dallas. But I’m not here to bring you up to date on your own bio, my friend.
Hey, how come you didn’t order? Not hungry?”
I realized that the waitress had taken absolutely no interest in me, just in him. He is waving
her back and ordering what I had been thinking about before he came, a Belgian waffle with
bacon. She even looks over once as though maybe I would dispute the order, but I just nod.
“If you had said eggs she would have dropped the notepad. I’ve got that kind of power, and
that’s what you’re being offered, my friend.”
“To hypnotize a waitress?”
Malarkey laughs, but it has that forced quality I’ve heard from Jack Hanson’s flunkies when
he tells another of his really pitiful jokes.
“You mean you wouldn’t want to be the only one in the room when you want someone else’s
attention? It’s what you didn’t have with the wife, and it used to get to you. I call it star power,
and you know why you don’t have it?”
6
I did, but I was not going to say it. I knew also that I didn’t have to. I was going to hear it, no
matter how painful.
“You prefer to disappear, Thorne, like being noticed means something is expected of you that
you’ll never be able to deliver. But it’s what makes you a pretty good screenwriter. You watch,
and then you make up characters who do what you never would yourself even though you really
want to.”
“I’ve written about murderers, Malarkey. You’re saying I just come up with surrogates for my
own hostility?”
“You said it, kid, not me. But if the shoe fits…”
I knew it did. My best script for a crime show had come a year before, when Eleanor and I
had the fight that led to my taking my own place in Topanga Canyon. There had been lots of
angry letters about how the show portrayed the victim as a woman asking to be killed just for
standing up for herself, and someone in the Midwest sent me a clipping about an attempted
homicide that seemed to match the circumstances in the show in a rather uncomfortable way.
“But you’ll make that unnecessary, right? I’ll have ‘star power,’ and I’ll just get my way all the
time. No need to get angry.”
“Or get even? Thorne, you are someone who wants to get even in the worst way. It’s what
got their attention.”
“Whose attention?”
He put a finger to his lips. “Not here, my friend. That comes later, when we’ve got our deal.”
“And I’m Faust?”
Malarkey shook his head. “Never liked that play. I told him so at the time, but would he
listen?”
”Told who?”
“The German. Goethe. Said he was only adapting some old material, which is true enough,
but it gives my guys a bad rap. Mephistopheles still gets ticked off when I talk about it.”
I tried to absorb this. Malarkey, who could cite Aquinas on a recondite piece of theology and
seemingly disprove him at the same time, now wanted me to think that he once carried on a
7
conversation with the real Goethe and still chatted with the otherwise fictional Mephistopheles.
Okay, maybe not so fictional, given what was happening at the moment.
“See, you’re coming around,” he said. The orders had come and Malarkey was digging into
his eggs. “I like writers. I’m good at spotting talent that needs the right encouragement.”
“And you encouraged someone who wrote two centuries ago. Why just talk about Goethe?
Weren’t you around when Chrisopher Marlowe wrote his own play about Faust?”
“Well, I was, but Winkie had that concession. He’ll tell you about it someday.”
“Who’s Winkie?”
“Another one of our elite and everlasting fraternity, Thorne. Another demonmonger.”
I tried to nibble at the waffle. Malarkey picked up his bagel and spread on some cream
cheese.
“It’s not a term in general use anymore. Back a few hundred years ago, when people still
took magic seriously, we could talk about demonmongers the same way we talk about
fishmongers or ironmongers. You want a certain job done you put in a request to your favorite
demonmonger and, presto hocus pocus, you’d have your pick of invisible allies. For a price, of
course.”
“Someone’s soul.”
“Oh, get off that theology nonsense. That’s why I hated the Faust story. It’s so unreal, so far
away from the way things are. Well, I did like “Damn Yankees,” though. Even Mephistopheles
did. He could do a great Ray Walston imitation, too. But I tell him to shut up when he starts
singing the Gwen Verdon song about what Lola wants. You’d think a top-drawer, first-class
demon could carry a tune, but he can’t.”
“But there is a price.”
“Sure, but none of this soul stuff. What would any self-respecting demonmonger do with
someone’s soul? You’re still thinking what the Redemptorists tried to teach you about heaven
and hell and old Lucifer scarfing up the souls of the boys who whacked off at night.”
True enough. It had scared me during those annual retreats, but this only meant I limited my
masturbation to Friday nights so I could go confess on Saturday afternoon. Sometimes, though, I
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had been afraid to go to sleep. The Redemptorists were big on stories about young sinners dying
unexpectedly. Carbon monoxide asphyxiation was up there with car accidents as a way of being
dispatched into the next world with the chance of salvation lost through the willing acceptance of
unauthorized venereal pleasure. Wet dreams were different, of course. But just don’t wake up
to finish off.
“So what is the price? And when am I supposed to realize it’s too high?”
Malarkey had finished his breakfast and was already signaling the waitress to hand me the
bill. I reached for my credit card.
“You know, that reminds me of something that happened long before you got on the scene
out here. It’s back when Jimmy Carter was in the White House and not out building homes for
poor people. Seems the gods got interested in credit cards. That’s when they were first catching
on and most ordinary folks didn’t have one, much less a couple of dozen. But let’s go out to your
car. This is a story that I would not want to be overheard.”
9
3. THE MAN FROM RENT-A-GOD
Jeremy Delesco knew he was ready for his big move, the one that would turn him into a world
celebrity, but the uncertainty of how to make it was killing him.
Mostly it got him in the stomach. Four doctors, one the best G.I. man in Southern California,
agreed his problem was nerves. They prescribed a batch of tranquilizers and asked for a tip on
the market. He had handed his prescriptions over to one of his three girl friends of the moment
and stocked his desk with every antacid sold in the U.S. and half of those sold in Europe.
They had to be jealous, he told himself. They knew that without a fancy college education he
made more money in a month than the four of them made in a year, even with padding their
Medicare bills. They didn’t want to cure him, just get him out of the way. It would serve them
right if Ukiah Solar Power, the hot tip he had given them in all good faith, nosedived from its
present 68.
Nerves? Hell, he had built Delesco Financial Services into a giant by playing the stock
market like a high-stakes poker game, and you didn’t win big like he did unless you had ice water
in your veins. It had to be an ulcer, maybe a tumor, but those goddamn pill-pushers were so
scared of being sued for malpractice that they’d rather let his belly rot away than go on in and
clean it out.
At thirty-two Jeremy was a man to be reckoned with in the world of big money. In his midtwenties he had been just another good-looking kid of vaguely Mediterranean ancestry who was
going nowhere and trying to make ends meet by pumping gas at night while he sold men’s
clothes in the daytime. Then the Arabs jacked up the prices for America’s gas, which led to
severe shortages. Jeremy was told how he could get an unlimited supply if he paid a small
premium and kept his mouth shut. The guy who owned the station never knew, and since
Jeremy had already mastered the fine art of juggling figures he got to keep a good part of the
price of the gas, including the state tax. With his profit he bought his way into the franchised
clothing store where he worked, picked up some truckloads of hijacked suits, and made another
killing.
10
At thirty Jeremy was rich but still not going anywhere. His dark brown hair was thinning, he
weighed forty pounds more than when he had been a touted high school halfback, and he had to
start wearing glasses. Girls still surrendered willingly, but sex had become a boring ritual relieved
only by the occasional excitement of outwitting an eager mother or a jealous rival. Jealousy. It all
came back to that. Drivers would sideswipe his Mercedes because of it, waiters would spill
expensive sauces on his imported suits because of it, even his doctors would ignore his real
condition because of it.
Then he decided to get into the financial services game. For the last two years he had hoped
that becoming a high-priced financial manager for a string of Hollywood clients would give him a
sense of direction, a cue to his true destiny. It had only made him wealthier. His stomach hurt
even more as though the rest of his body was jealous of the success his brains had brought him.
Jeremy was becoming obsessed with the thought that if he did not soon find out where he was
going his once magnificent physique would bloat still further, his hair would be gone completely,
and the insurrection in his gut would become a full-out civil war.
Still the doctors called it nerves. He had tried telling the last one, the great G.I. man, about
his theory of somatic jealousy only to get the biggest prescription of all. You’d think a man with
his reputation would be above jealousy, yet obviously he wasn’t. Look, Jeremy had told him, if it
were nerves his hands would be shaking, wouldn’t they? But no, those long tapered fingers that
had caught footballs and still delighted cute little secretaries and stewardesses were as steady as
ever. And nerves would mean headaches, but all that he ever had was a little eye strain now and
then. Probably it was cancer and he’d be dead before he was thirty-five, still young if not quite so
handsome but unfulfilled because he had not yet made the one big move that mattered.
*
The letter came on an unseasonably warm April morning, the beginning of a new week of
financial wizardry. His secretary, a nice little trick he had hired just a week earlier, brought it in
with a baffled look on her face.
“It seems to be an ad of some sort, but there was a credit card with it.”
11
“Okay, it’s a gimmick, probably a tire discount or something. You know what to do with
gimmicks.”
“It doesn’t look like a gimmick.”
Shit, this was not the brightest kid in the world. Great legs, nice boobs, but not much behind
the eyebrows. He took the letter and the plastic card impatiently. The card was the right size,
made of a stiff red plastic, and embossed with his name and an expiration date of October 31 of
that year. At the top in slanted black letters was ACME RENT-A-GOD.
It had to be a joke. He flipped the card over. Black magnetic tape, a white strip for his
signature, and small type that said simply, “User agrees to abide by all conditions of use stated in
the original contract.”
He took the accompanying letter. It was a standard printed thing with his name typed in at
the top.
Dear Mr. Delesco:
According to industry reports you are widely recognized as a young man on his way up.
Accordingly, our company has selected you as one of those privileged to receive our RENTA-GOD card. In order to activate it simply dial our toll-free number 800-666-0000, answer a
few simple questions, and then all the benefits of divinity will be yours.
If you should decide not to accept our offer, please destroy the enclosed card by cutting it
in half. We do hope, however, that you will allow us the opportunity to serve you as we have
served so many others.
Sincerely,
A.N. Mephisto
Vice-President
Acme Rent-A-God, Inc.
It had to be a joke. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to fake this card just to get a cheap
laugh.
But who would even know what he did with this card? He could dial the number, of course,
but maybe that was when the fun began.
12
Jeremy Delesco did not like to be made fun of. He had quit football in his senior year of high
school because of what had been meant as a good-natured prank by some of his buddies. It had
cost him a college scholarship but his pride was worth it. Nobody made jokes at his expense.
Nobody.
He waved his secretary out of the office, flipped the card over and over as though through the
gesture something would show up on the plastic that had not been there before, then reached for
his phone and punched out the digits for the toll-free number.
“Good morning, Mr. Delesco.”
That proved it. Nobody picks up a phone and greet who’s calling by name unless it’s a setup, and nobody could have a receptionist with such a soft feminine voice with just a hint of a
drawl unless he knew it was Jeremy’s weakness.
“Listen,” he said, much less gruffly than he would have had he not liked the girl’s voice. “I
know this is a gag and I just want to tell you that I don’t appreciate practical jokes. I’m a very
busy man and I don’t want my time taken up with any more of this.”
“Mr. Delesco, this is not a practical joke. We understand how you feel, and we would never
think to interrupt either your workday or ours unless we felt we had something of value to offer
you.”
“Your Rent-a-God service?”
“Yes, sir. It is the finest of its kind available, and we are confident that you would benefit
greatly from taking advantage of it.”
She said all this so seriously. Jeremy wondered who was listening in. Maybe he was being
recorded. Candid Camera did stunts like this. Well, he thought, if it was for some network show
he didn’t want to make a fool of himself by blowing up on the air. He’d play along for a minute or
two more.
“Can you prove you’re genuine?”
“Of course, sir. What would you like?”
“A quick demonstration.”
“Certainly, Mr. Delesco. What if your stomach were to stop hurting?”
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Hey, that was getting personal. Maybe it was one of those fancy doctors and he got his
kicks this way. He’d sue the bastard for every cent he had.
“So make it stop.”
Jeremy sat rigid. The churning, roiling fluids that all the antacids in the world did not seem to
quiet had suddenly stopped their fiery movement.
“It doesn’t hurt,” he whispered.
“Yes, sir. Is that a sufficient demonstration?”
“I don’t believe it. What the hell did you do?”
“We provided you a bonus desire as a token of our good faith. Ordinarily you must charge
four requests before you receive a bonus, but as a part of this special introductory offer you
received one bonus immediately.”
“Introductory offer?” Jeremy was beginning to feel weak.
“You have received a card good for six months. It will provide you a considerable number of
requests but only for that period.”
“How much does a request cost?” he asked slowly.
“It is the standard fee: one year of your life.”
Only once before had Jeremy known real terror. That had been after a game in which he had
caught the touchdown pass that denied another school its shot at the conference championship.
He had been one of the last to leave the field house and a half-dozen blacks, who all looked just
under seven feet tall, were waiting for him. He recognized one as the tackle he had elbowed
while going for the ball, decided they weren’t there out of good sportsmanship, and ran like a
gazelle that had wandered into a pride of lions.
He slammed down the receiver, threw the letter and the card in his wastebasket, and began
pacing the office.
What if this wasn’t a joke? His stomach wasn’t hurting but he found that he was shaking
uncontrollably. He tried to think of a rational explanation for what had just happened. Maybe the
doctors had attempted to prove he was suffering from nerves after all. When he called they made
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the symptoms change to a form he could recognize more easily. It was all a little bit of theatrics
for the sake of convincing him the pain was psychosomatic. He ought to be grateful.
One year of his life per request? How long would he live anyway? If his life span was
supposed to be seventy or eighty years then five or ten requests wouldn’t matter that much.
This was crazy. Maybe that was it. Somebody was trying to drive him insane. Well, he
wouldn’t let it happen. He’d calm down.
Even twenty requests would be worth it. In fact, if he died at fifty but after making his mark on
the world they would be very much worth it.
*
He had lunch at the Playboy Club on Sunset with Harlan X. Graham, an Atlanta-born
theatrical agent who handled many of Jeremy’s own clients. They were not close enough to be
friends, but common interests dictated that they meet at least once a month. Graham—Cracker
to his associates—was a good twenty years older, a hearty man with a perpetually avuncular
outlook. He had long since acquiesced in the fact that he attracted either kids on the way up who
would soon dump him or has-beens trying for one last shot at the big time. Jeremy’s own driving
ambition only seemed to amuse him, as though he took for granted that Dame Fortune always
eluded those who pursued her most avidly. In short, he was a bore, still too important to ignore
but not really worth listening to.
Today for once Jeremy wanted the man to keep talking. A well-fleshed waitress who bodice
seemed hardly equal to its task had just brought their third round, and Jeremy was uncustomarily
ignoring the view made possible when she bent down to place their glasses.
“Jesus, boy, you are not yourself at all.”
Jeremy nodded. “I’ve got a problem, Cracker. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard of, but
some people want to rent me a god and I don’t know whether they’re putting me on.”
Graham stiffened. “You mean one of the rent-a-god companies?”
“One of them? Judas Priest, how many are there?”
“Last I heard there were four but the two smallest are expected to merge.”
15
Jeremy downed his scotch in one quick movement. He had expected Graham to burst out
laughing, perhaps say this was the dumbest thing he had ever been told. It was why he had kept
this date after pacing his office like a trapped animal. Graham, God damn him, could trivialize
anything. It was why he was always just paying the rent on his office. Other guys made the
really big deals that he passed over because his imagination was too limited. But that’s what
Jeremy felt he needed right now, a good old boy who would reassure him that divinity didn’t come
served up with red plastic credit cards.
“Are you in on this, Cracker? It is a joke, isn’t it?”
“Boy, I wouldn’t fun you about something really important. I’m just surprised a wheeler-dealer
like yourself don’t know all about this stuff already.”
Impulsively Jeremy reached over and downed Graham’s bourbon and water. “Well, I’m just a
youngster, like you always tell me. I thought it was a gag when I got a rent-a-god credit card in
the mail this morning, so I call the number that’s in the letter and—no, you’re not going to believe
me.”
“If it’s about any rent-a-god I’d believe anything.”
“They cured my stomach. It was right over the phone. One minute it’s burning away and the
next I don’t feel a thing.”
Graham fingered his empty glass thoughtfully, started to signal their waitress in the ridiculous
bunny costume, then changed his mind and began fiddling with his napkin.
“That weren’t nothing to what those companies can do. I had my chance to get a card about
ten years ago but I was just like you. Only I wouldn’t listen at all. Then I began hearing about the
people who took them up on their offer. Sure, not everyone used the cards, but most of the really
big names in this town did. That was when I wanted one too, but I’d missed my chance. They’re
real picky that way. Turn them down and they don’t waste time on you. I mean, you don’t even
get another company coming to you.”
“How big is Acme?”
Graham whistled appreciatively. “That’s the Hertz of the crowd. They charge a bit more but
they deliver every time. You don’t even get another company coming to you.”
16
“They told me they charge a year of life.”
“Yeah, it’s gone up. Used to be eight months.”
“Do I understand them right? I mean, do they make you die a year earlier than you would
otherwise for each time you use their card?”
“Yeah, you bet they do. Keeps a body from getting too spendthrift. Don’t always work
though. Marilyn Monroe—she was with Acme too—just kept running up her account until there
weren’t no time left. I call that plumb foolish but she wouldn’t have listened to no one, especially
when she got interested in JFK. Just kept spending like there was no tomorrow until there
wasn’t.”
“But why a year of life? That’s a pretty steep price.”
“If you go into the rent-a-god business I guess you gotta charge high. I suppose in their
books it don’t seem like all that much, though. We all die sooner or later anyway. All they get is
some extra time out of us.”
The terror was returning. “Who are ‘they’?”
“You’re joshing me, boy. Nobody can be that ignorant.”
Jeremy, who already had a good idea about who was behind this operation, swallowed hard.
“I don’t believe in all that stuff.”
“That don’t matter none. Where they are, belief ain’t worth nothing anyhow.”
“Those are just old stories. Contracts signed in blood, the smell of sulphur, all that. And I
thought the deal was supposed to be the soul, not just an early death.”
“Hell, if you’ll pardon me saying so, they got your soul. Early delivery is all that’s left.”
Jeremy shuddered involuntarily. He hadn’t thought about things like this since he was a
smart-ass kid in Sunday school.
“Why rent-a-god?” he asked feebly.
“I guess it’s because they got a lot of them old pagan deities just hanging around. They
might as well loan them out, even though it’s not like anyone else can ever see them or anything.
But let’s just say you want a real unattainable woman, like Onassis did, then maybe you rent
17
Venus to sort of make it happen. You don’t even have to be specific, they just supply the best
they got available.”
“Jesus!”
“Not him, boy, much as I hear they wanted him to stay on with them. They do have Osiris,
though. I don’t know about Krishna or Buddha, but then you wouldn’t want no truck with them
shifty Orientals.”
“You talk like you’d take that card if you could still get it.”
“And I’d be right up there managing real stars. But I’d have one thing I’d order first.”
Jeremy had never heard Graham so intent. He bent forward to hear what he had to say.
“I’d have one of them tell me when I was supposed to die just so I could keep me accounts
straight. No sir, I wouldn’t be like Marilyn and go over my limit, that you can bet on.”
*
His hands were still shaking when he picked up the phone. He also found it unusually hard to
control his voice, but the girl on the other end of the line was understanding. Everyone’s a little
nervous at first, she told him. Now if he’d just listen while she read the terms she could okay the
contract right on the phone.
He tried to listen, but the pounding in his chest seemed to override her soft voice. He agreed
to everything without being quite sure that Graham’s summary had covered all that he needed to
know. So what, he thought, at worst they could sue him.
It was done. His card was properly activated. To use it all he had to do was draw a picture of
a charge-plate machine, put the card face up on the picture, and let the company do the rest. It
was the Hieronymus principle, he was told, and it was an Acme exclusive. Other companies still
required the more cumbersome procedure of drawing a circle on the ground, lighting a black
candle, and all that.
Jeremy had already sent his secretary home early. He was alone in his office with his new
toy and the chance to make that one big move.
His first charge was delivered by the god Thoth: a list of all present cardholders for each
company engaged in the rent-a-god business. It was odd, but the sight of a bird-headed man in a
18
kind of sarong standing by his desk seemed entirely natural. He did wonder for an instant
whether he was supposed to tip the god, decided it wasn’t necessary, thought twice about it when
he caught a hint of disappointment in the god’s beady eyes as he faded from view.
One charge, one year. He made a note to follow Graham’s suggestion and ask for the year
he was supposed to die if he weren’t using the card. It seemed morbid but it was practical. He’d
get to it after he made a few phone calls.
It was amazing how many top people weren’t on the lists. Jimmy Carter wasn’t, nor was the
Pope. He didn’t find any of the Russians either, although perhaps that wasn’t so surprising after
all. It meant he could deal quite well. Delesco Financial Services had just gone global. Hell, it
had just gone cosmic. He wondered why nobody had thought of this before: he was going to rent
out his rent-a-god card.
He called Graham first even thought he appreciated that he would quite literally be giving up
a year of life just to be able to rub it in, but after two years of having the man’s platitudes take the
edge off his appetite it seemed worth it.
Old Cracker was stunned with the simplicity of it all, but then short-sightedness had been the
reason the agent had never been more than third-best. They talked a while about the kind of
exchange they’d make and finally hit on the answer. Jeremy would summon up Orpheus to
obtain Elton John and Stevie Wonder as Graham’s clients and in return he’d have a kickback of
three-quarters of Graham’s percentage.
Graham might not like losing that much money, but he could consider it a fit penalty for
passing up his own chance at the card a decade before. And Graham didn’t have to surrender a
year of life, either. Of course, Jeremy was still getting maybe as much for himself as if he had
used the card in the way everyone expected him to. That’s what having brains was all about. It
was how he had got ahead before, only now he saw there was no limit to how far he would go.
Next was the G.I man. The doc was startled by the question but, yes, he knew about Acme
Rent-a-God. Sure, he’d arrange for free medical care in return for the help of Aesculapius in
developing a new procedure that would fix his reputation in the textbooks.
19
He made the two charges right away, then broke off for dinner. He had almost made another
charge for himself—Pan for a weeklong orgy free of the usual discomforts—but decided that
business came before pleasure. He’d save that for his bonus after one more call.
For the first time in a very long while Jeremy thoroughly enjoyed taking his Mercedes along
Wilshire. He smiled at other drivers, gave way graciously to people cutting in front of him, even
waved cheerfully to a woman who nudged his rear bumper. The world was all so different now.
With his rent-a-god card tucked away in his breast pocket he could afford to be generous. He
was a god among mortals, and petty human jealousies could no longer affect him.
At a red light he reached to touch the card.
It was gone. Jeremy let go of the steering wheel and tore frantically into his pockets. He
couldn’t have misplaced it. Perhaps it had dropped out, perhaps—
He didn’t realize that in his panic he had plunged his foot down on the gas. The Mercedes
leaped forward and Jeremy grabbed for the wheel just before a light truck coming through the
intersection hit him broadside. He had time for one last thought: maybe he didn’t have to worry
about human jealousy, but he had not counted on the jealousy of the gods.
*
Graham chucked whenever he told the story, which was often. He knew that nobody any
longer thought him boring, not when he was managing Elton John and Stevie Wonder. “Yeah,”
he said in an exaggerated drawl, “old Jeremy didn’t listen too close to the terms. I knew that as
soon as he called me, but I weren’t about to cut my own throat, not when he was giving me my
second chance.”
One of the models sitting next on the couch next to him at the Playboy mansion realized it
was her turn to look puzzled. “But what was the condition he missed?” she asked sweetly.
Graham winked slyly. “Well, everybody knows you can’t use the card to charge up things you
won’t use yourself. Sure, the order goes through, but the penalty is revocation and, at the
company’s discretion, immediate payment. Jeremy had to give up three years right on the spot,
and there’s no way you can do that without losing everything. But I hear it ain’t so bad for him.
20
He impressed the bosses so much they opened a new agency just for him. He’s still in the
financial services business, so to speak.”
As everyone knew he would, Graham pulled out his wallet with the sky-blue credit card
tucked between his Master Charge and his American Express. The girls bent forward to read the
title printed at the top: ZENITH TEMPORARY GODPOWER.
“Kind of gives employment to a lot of the little guys—gnomes and nymphs and all. They
come in at night and help take the pressure off the budget for human labor. Never had to use it
myself, but I’m told it’s saved a few small companies from going under. It was a real smart idea.
Just small fees too—more like old-time offerings, really, and nobody misses a bit of blood or a
little of his breath now and then. Yep, Jeremy’s really found his place at last.”
21
4. MALARKEY TAKES A POWDER
Malarkey had lit up a cigar as soon as we left the deli. From the aroma I knew it was
something cheap, like the clothes and just about everything else I could see about the man.
Being a demonmonger might not be a particularly lucrative occupation, I figured, although maybe
there were invisible benefits. He had glanced over at me with a hint of disapproval as the idea
came to my mind. Okay, bad joke.
He had begun telling me about Delesco even before we got to my Volvo. He ended it
while we sat on a bench at the park off Topanga by the Hyatt.
“True story?” I asked.
“Gospel, if I can use that word in a pagan context.”
“And the old gods are around to be leased out with a credit card?”
“Webster, I said all this happened a long time ago. Things don’t work that way any
longer, but that’s part of why we’re talking.”
“Why I’m being chosen.”
“If the price is acceptable.”
“The price you seem unwilling to name.”
“I need to know you’re interested.”
“Graham only got the one chance, and he passed it up. How long did he have to think
about it?”
“There wasn’t any rush. But Graham was a cautious man and Delesco was, well,
somewhat impetuous.”
“So is Delesco a demonmonger now?”
Malarkey shook his head impatiently. “I told you already, he’s dead. Demonmongers are
very much alive.”
“Wait a minute. What about Graham’s credit card? You said Delesco had a new
business with it.”
22
“He did, at least for a while. But let’s just say he couldn’t keep things goings. But that’s
another story that I’ll let you hear later on.”
I wondered how many stories I would have to listen to.
“Webster, you don’t seem to appreciate the opportunity we’re giving you just to hear
about the two worlds, especially with you writing for TV and all.”
“Two?”
“The one you thought you knew and the one that’s been there all along.”
“Reality and fantasy, you mean.”
“If you want, but we’re going to disagree on which is the fantasy. Just think about it.
What’s the most real thing happening now?”
I looked around. I remembered an exercise we had done once in a creative writing class
in college. We were to describe all that was around us, suppressing as much as possible any
attitudes we had about what we saw or heard. I went for the obvious. The sun was out, the
grass was freshly mown, there was the noise of the cars going along the street.
“And all of that is real to you because you are conscious of it,” Malarkey said, not waiting
for me to present my list out loud. “But your writing prof missed the point. You’re always reacting
to what’s out there. You’re making choices about what you let grab your attention. So what’s out
there is real to you just because of what’s inside yourself.”
“No,” I responded, “the sun is bright even if I were blind. I might not see it, but someone
else could. The grass still has its smell even if I were all stuffed up. And the damn cars make
just as much noise even if I had ear plugs in. These things might not be real to me any longer,
but they’d still be real in themselves. I wouldn’t be making them up.”
“Ever hear the old puzzle about what happens when a tree falls in the forest and
nobody’s around to hear it?”
“Sure, in Philosophy 101. But we had that licked. There is still the vibration in the air,
and that’s potential sound to anything that can react to it. It’s just a matter of definition
otherwise.”
“And what about the things that you don’t see or hear or smell but I can?”
23
“Give me a for instance.”
“Angel wings. And halos. And the odor of sanctity, which is something like a whiff of
frankincense with just a hint of cinnamon. I think it’s coming from the old lady crossing the
street.”
I laughed. “I thought you’d come up with something less Catholic.”
“It’s my Irish background,” Malarkey said. “Sometimes I go up to a priest and tell him I
used to be an altar boy, so could he spare some change.”
“You were an altar boy?”
“Well, not exactly, but I was around the hedge rows a lot when priests on the run said
Mass. That was in Queen Lizzie’s time, you know. You couldn’t be a Catholic and a good
Englishman at the same time. Given my background, I never much cared for good Englishmen
anyway, so I’d do what I could to make a soldier’s job harder. Lots of young lads went home with
unbelievable stories to tell their mums or their girl friends. They’d have seen things in the fog, or
they’d have heard a banshee’s scream. Sometimes they’d see me as well, and that was the
worst for them.”
“They saw you as I see you now?”
Now Malarkey laughed. “I can be quite a shapechanger when it suits me. It’s a
prerogative of demonmongers, although not used as much today as in centuries gone by. Wait,
let’s ask the old lady with the odor of sanctity.”
I glanced away to see the woman who had been crossing the street. She had stopped in
front of the park bench and was staring at me intently.
“Young man,” she said, “have you been drinking?”
I was puzzled. “No, ma’am. Why do you ask that?”
”Because you are sitting here carrying on an animated conversation with a squirrel.”
“I’m what,” I said indignantly, looking back to Malarkey. Only Malarkey wasn’t there.
Instead a small gray squirrel was scampering across the grass. A smoldering cigar remained on
the bench.
“Oh my God,” I said. “He meant it. This is what you saw.”
24
The woman was already striding away, obviously convinced I was raving. The squirrel
was gone as well. I waited a minute, then got up unsteadily.
I waited a minute for Malarkey to rejoin me in a more human form, but he did not.
This was crazy.
I went back to the car, then on an impulse returned to the deli. I spotted our waitress.
”Excuse me,” I said, “but do you remember waiting on me just a while ago?”
She smiled. “Of course, sir. Was everything all right?”
“It was great, but do you remember my companion?”
She looked back at me with the smile fading. “Sir, you were alone. I though it odd you ordered
two entrées, but you must have been very hungry, since you did eat them both.”
25
5. BILL AND MAYA
It’s two in the afternoon. So far I’ve had two breakfasts at once, if I’m to believe the
waitress at Jerry’s, and afterward I ended up in the park talking to a squirrel, if I’m to believe a
passerby who accused me of being drunk. In the process I’ve been given a story that already
I want to pitch to Jack Hanson as the basis for a new series. Television was always busy
reviving the past, usually with the remakes suffering by comparison, but maybe we could do a
take-off on the old Twilight Zone. The fall season already was doing a remake of The Night
Stalker, although I remained convinced no one could match Darrin McGavin as the intrepid
reporter off on a chase of vampires or werewolves or whatever.
Then the nerves take over. Just what did I mean by saying I had been given the story?
Was I supposed to have an invisible collaborator who didn’t need the credits or a share of the
sale, and I just had to put in the dialogue and camera directions? And how was I to explain
the script to Hanson, who would pointedly remind me that our ideal demographic was an
audience of young adults with lots of money but short attention spans and virtually no
knowledge of history or literature. Their generation had grown up with credit cards and they
knew about finance charges and late fees, but they might not understand the point of what
happened to Delesco. And this business about Thoth—and I was debating whether I would
describe the messenger of the gods as wearing an Egyptian sarong or UPS brown—might
just be a distraction on screen.
Often enough, when I’m working through a possible script, I’ll invite myself for a glass of
wine and a plate of spaghetti with Bill and Maya Hendriks, the kind folks who rented me my
tree house in the canyon. They lived next door in a roomy old house that served as a crash
pad of sorts for starving geniuses, typically painters or musicians who needed to get away
from civilization without being too far away from what might be the next show or the next gig.
Maya had been an army nurse in Vietnam, and Bill was an ex-marine she had first met at
a base hospital near Saigon. They had kept up correspondence through the war, then met
again in civilian life when Maya, now working in a private psychiatric facility in West Los
Angeles, had helped treat him for a breakdown he had experienced while on the road with a
26
long forgotten rock group. No, Bill wasn’t a musician, just a roadie, but he knew how to work
with lights and later on, after getting out of the hospital, he built a small company
manufacturing some of the more exotic components used for special effects. They began
living together, but it was more a brother and sister relationship than anything sexual. For a
while they had a large house near LaCienega, and it was there that they began taking in their
stray humans in the same way other folks took in stray cats or dogs.
I had met Bill at one of the studios, and we had developed a friendship that made it
completely normal for me to ask to live on their property after Eleanor took off. They were an
interesting couple to look at. Bill was tall and gaunt and almost completely bald except for a
thin pigtail, while Maya was short and plump with thick gray hair that came down to her waist.
Both dressed as though they were extras for Peter Jackson’s Tolkien trilogy who failed to
realize that shooting was over, but in Topanga Canyon this was nothing remarkable.
About two in the afternoon I went over and knocked on the door. Maya welcomed me in
and had me sit out on the covered porch where she tended a collection of exotic plants. Bill
came out and joined me with a bottle of homemade wine.
“I’m glad you could come and sit a while,” he said. “I miss adult company sometimes.
Not that the three kids we have with us now aren’t smart enough, but they haven’t lived long
enough to see anything much in perspective. Don’t ask them about history.”
“Funny you should say that, Bill. I was just thinking about folks their age. That’s our ideal
audience for TV, you know, and it’s a lot of work to dumb things down for them.”
“That’s why we don’t own a television,” Maya said. “Someone said the other day that
young Americans could identify Paris Hilton but not anyone on the Supreme Court. Do you
think that’s true?”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “And television is to blame. A show about celebrities gets
ratings.”
“But without the shows would some of these people even be celebrities?” Maya asked.
“It’s enough to make a demon jealous.”
27
I almost dropped my glass. Any mention of demons after my morning’s encounter was
going to be a shock, and I suppose it showed.
Bill and Maya both stared hard at me as I set the glass on the table. “I’m sorry,” I said,
but what you said is one hell of a coincidence.”
I had come over to share Malarkey’s story without saying anything about Malarkey
himself. Now, I realized, maybe more was at stake here than I would have imagined.
“Do you believe in demons, Maya, or was that just an expression?”
Maya laughed gently. “That all depends on what you mean by that word. Centuries of
Christian folklore have seen demons as unpleasant little critters with pitchforks out to lure us
into temptation while cute little guardian angels try to keep us on the straight and narrow. I
think of a demon in more pagan terms, really the way Socrates did when he talked about a
presence that spoke to him and guided his actions. And, yes, I think demons in that sense
are very real.”
Bill placed a hand on her arm. “Maya, I don’t think Thorne came here for some
revisionist theology. If I’m not mistaken, he had something happen that’s shaken him up, and
we have no business trying to interpret it for him.”
“Oh, quite the opposite,” I said. “I did have something happen, and since I do not much
care for the interpretation I’ve already got, which is that I’m probably losing my marbles, I’m
really open for anything you care to suggest.”
And so the whole story came tumbling out, beginning with the peculiar email the night
before and ending with my sitting by myself on a park bench while a squirrel that may a
moment before have been a man smoking a cheap cigar was now running away on the
grass.
Bill and Maya were quiet for a while, maybe thinking how best to tell me that I should find
another place to live. A place where I could be properly looked after. Given my meds
regularly.
“Chosen by the gods?” Bill said finally. “At least you were given a warning.”
“That’s right,” Maya added. “We never were.”
28
“What do you mean?
“Just that,” Bill said. “We’ve had our own close encounters, if that’s what they should be
called. It’s why we’re both they way we are now.”
“But we didn’t have them together,” Maya explained.
“No,” Bill said. “Maya’s came first. Then I had what in the old days would have been
called a nervous breakdown. I ended up with her caring for me, and she helped me make
some sense of things because of what she had been through on her own.”
“Even though it was not quite the same sort of thing,” Maya said. “But suppose we tell
you our stories, and then we can see where yours fits in. I’ll go first.”
29
THE MOTHER WAGON
When the Haight-Ashbury scene came apart Judith left San Francisco and headed north.
That was all I had heard. I tried locating her for about a year, but there were just too many
women like her in the shops and the communes. Also, I couldn’t be sure that she was keeping
this name any longer than she had kept the others. She was a Virgo, five and a half feet tall,
brown hair and eyes, somewhat freckled, fond of peasant blouses and colorful full skirts that
made her look like a Gypsy. An earth-mother type if ever there was one. We had worked
together in a free clinic just off the Panhandle, and I was wondering whether I loved her. I was
still very much in the closet, and I had no idea how to approach the subject of sex with another
woman.
I thought I would forget her after I returned to Los Angeles and the staff of a small private
hospital in West Los Angeles. I wasn’t a hippie like Judith, only a disillusioned nurse who had
seen too many shot-up Americans and Vietnamese to believe strongly in abstractions like peace
and love. There were only bodies, I thought. Governments destroyed them most efficiently for
the sake of other abstractions, specifically liberation and national honor. The summer after my
discharge I ended up in the Bay Area and decided to volunteer my time to a group that wanted to
get kids off drugs, only I found myself experiencing the same symptoms of depression that had
been so overwhelming in Asia.
Judith tried to help. We went for walks the length of Golden Gate Park to the beach, and she
let me talk about the futility of restoring a semblance of health when a week later I’d have the
same kids back. In Vietnam, at least, I could blame the war, but in San Francisco? Judith said it
was the war there too. I found the comparison absurd, we’d argue, and each time this happened
I’d find it harder to go back to the clinic. Finally I didn’t. Months later I wanted to let her know that
my leaving wasn’t her fault, but she had already taken off.
It had been six years. I had made a good salary and managed to put a lot of it away, so
finally I decided I would take a few months off to rethink what I was doing with my life. A doctor
on the staff of the hospital had a summer place off the American River near Sacramento, and I
30
was ready to take up his standing offer to make it a temporary retreat. I’d swim and read and
maybe do some sightseeing in the Mother Lode country.
*
The wagon had just come to Auburn. I saw it the first day I went to pick up supplies. Actually
it was an old delivery van, one of those high, box-like vehicles used by the parcel services, but it
was painted over with pictures of orchards and fields of grain and blue lakes open to the bright
crimson sky of twilight. Judith was driving it.
“Still running, Maya?”
“I could ask the same about you. I tried to find you, you know. It always seemed to happen
that I got to the place you—or someone just like you—had been a couple of months before. No
one ever knew where you had run off to next.”
“I wasn’t running. I was searching.”
“What’s the difference? I still couldn’t locate you.”
Her brown eyes fixed on me and I found that I had to look away. “You weren’t ready yet,” she
said.
“Ready for what?”
“For life, I suppose. You never laughed and you never cried. All you’d do was talk and feel
sorry for yourself.”
“I don’t know if I’m any different today. It’s one reason I’m up here. I’m trying to find out.”
“So now you’re searching too.”
“Perhaps. But what’s with the truck?”
She laughed merrily. It’s the Nerthus Wagon. This is my year to drive it.”
I shook my head.
“Oh, I have to remember that you’re not from around here. It’s a custom. Every summer
Nerthus is brought to the towns, and the people who have waited for her have a celebration.”
“Nerthus?”
“The Great Mother, goddess of the earth. Her statue is in the back of the van.”
I still did not understand.
31
“Just like ancient times,” she explained. “Every summer the statue of the goddess would be
brought to the different villages to bless the fields—and the people—with fertility.
“That,” I said somewhat bitterly, “was obviously before the population explosion.” I wasn’t
going to say anything about my two abortions, one after I was raped and the other after I tried to
convince myself I wasn’t a lesbian by having an affair with a horny young intern from UCLA.
“It’s the celebration of life in all its forms.”
“So you’re still a hippie.”
“I hope I’m something more. Look, I’ll let you ride with me if you want.”
All the uncertain feelings from the past were back. She was older now, but the sensuality I
had always seen in her had not diminished. If anything, it had ripened. For years I had regretted
not wanting a romantic involvement with her when we had been working together.
“I’m a priestess of sorts,” she said, as though also remembering what could have been. “I’ve
always preferred women, as I think you guessed when I tried to get close to you, but you have to
understand that now, driving the wagon and all, I can’t have sex with you.”
I nodded. “I probably couldn’t handle it anyway. You’re safe.”
“You’ll come with me?”
“I’m not doing anything else.”
That evening I had my first experience of a Nerthus festival. We camped on the outskirts of
one of the towns nearby. About twenty or thirty people came at dusk, most of them young
marrieds. They brought fresh fruit and home-baked bread and cheese they had made
themselves. We ate by candlelight, and Judith led the people in chants and songs in a language
that sounded a bit like German. I had expected her to open the back of the van, but she didn’t.
Afterwards, as we lay underneath a tree in sleeping bags, she explained that inside was the
statue of the goddess. But it was never put on display.
“You’ve never seen it yourself?”
“I will, when summer’s over. That’s when the statue is bathed and laid to rest for the winter.”
“Are you so sure there’s anything in there?”
32
“I’m sure, and these people are sure. It’s the mystery of Nerthus that she can’t be seen
except by those who have served her faithfully.”
I laughed. “’It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature.’ Or haven’t you seen that commercial on
TV?”
“I haven’t watched TV in years. But I guess that’s the idea all right. For most of us it’s
enough to see the goddess in the workings of nature. If we do that, she is honored. If we don’t,
what difference would a statue make?”
“Yet you will see it?”
“I will see her,” she corrected me. “Then my own search will be over.”
I decided not to push the subject. Of course I was curious, but somehow I knew that to open
the van now would be sacrilege.
The next day we drove on a few miles further. Again, at twilight, the same festival was
repeated. We didn’t have to announce our presence. The worshippers just came.
“How long has this been going on?” I asked when again we were left alone.
“For centuries,” Judith answered dreamily.
“In California?”
“I suppose for as long as there have been people who were taught the old ways.”
“And who taught you?”
“A friend. I rode with her last year.”
“Like I’m riding with you?”
“Yes.”
“And do you expect me to convert to all this pagan nonsense?”
“If it’s what you have been looking for.”
“I didn’t know I was looking for anything.”
“Then why did you leave Los Angeles?”
I didn’t answer her. Years before, we had talked about what I desired out of life and I said
something about just being left alone. That had been the final argument, and I didn’t want to
repeat it. This time I was finding it enough just to be with her.
33
We repeated the rite every evening. Gradually I was learning the words and music to the old
songs. I was even beginning to get a feeling for what they meant.
A month went by and I called the hospital to say that I wasn’t coming back.
Finally it was late August. We had stopped by a small lake near Tahoe, and Judith seemed
unusually preoccupied.
“Is this where we have the festival tonight?” I asked.
“The summer’s over now,” she told me. “You can go home”
“I love you, Judith. I’m not going to run away again.”
“I wish that you could have said that in San Francisco.”
“I had to learn something first. You’re a good teacher.”
She turned away. I saw that she was crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You never wanted me to
be too emotional.”
“I think I can live with it. You can stop being a priestess now and we can work on just being a
couple. If you’ll have me.”
She touched my face softly with one finger. “I have to bathe the statue now. Look, I must be
alone for this. Why don’t you go into town for a while?”
*
The town was close enough for me to make the walk in less than half an hour. I got a bite to
eat, then decided to kill time in the public library.
There were a few volumes on mythology. Nerthus was mentioned only once. The Roman
historian Tacitus had written about the Germanic custom of having the wagon with the concealed
image of the goddess attended by slaves. At the end of the season of the celebration the slaves
bathed the status. There was something more.
I made the local sheriff drive me back to the lake.
The van was standing where I had left it. The area at the back was still damp as though
someone dripping wet had stood there. Judith was nowhere to be seen.
“She’s out there,” I shouted, pointing to the lake. “We’ve got to get her.”
34
The sheriff shook his head. He had never heard of Tacitus, much less of his story that the
slaves of Nerthus were drowned so that they could never reveal what they had seen when they
bathed the goddess.
“She probably just went for a walk,” he said.
I already knew better. The pink slip to the van, now made out in my name, was sitting on the
dashboard. There was also a note in Judith’s handwriting. “I love you too,” it said. “We can be
together next year, and it will be forever.”
I drove the van back to Los Angeles and put it in storage. I did get my old job back, and then
I met Allie. I kept thinking that the next summer I’d take the van north, and Allie could come with
me and I could teach her everything Judith had taught me. Obviously that didn’t happen. Maybe
Judith just expected too much. Or maybe Nerthus knew I would fail as a priestess. Whatever,
there was a fire at the storage building. No one could find the van afterward.
35
34
LIGHT SHOW
At the time I was in my early twenties, not too long out of the service and unsure whether to
stay in college as a major in electronics. Over the summer I had taken a job with a less than
excellent rock group calling itself The Rubber Package, a title permitting both clean and dirty
readings. My boss was a big, slightly balding ex-fighter named Larry Masters, the group’s
manager, bouncer, and general expert in what is sometimes referred to as “crowd control.”
Loosely translated, this is the delicate art of getting the kids to pay their way in and stay out of
trouble after they do. I was Larry’s assistant in setting up the production, and I ran the light show
that was often all that kept a place from being torn up when the group was having one its frequent
bad nights.
We were due to play a one-nighter in a northwest town that was named Whistling Plain—a
tribute, I suppose, to its location at the junction of two canyons that often had strong winds
whipping through them. It seemed an unlikely place for a gig, and I could not quite decide
whether we were to be the consolation prize for the few longhairs in the area after a summer of
rodeos and county fairs or simply a taste of the world, the flesh, and the devil before the tent
revival that was to hit town in late August. Whichever it was, Larry and I had to be there a day
early to set up the stage and fence in the open field that would have to take the place of a regular
auditorium.
You should understand that traveling with a rock group, even one as poor as The Rubber
Package, did have its good side. Larry paid well, the group had access to some very good grass,
and I got my pick of the surplus groupies. All I had to do, besides stay stoned to counteract the
boredom of towns like Whistling Plain, was straw-boss the kids who would get a place ready for
us, then run my equipment during the show.
The one thing I did not like was the adulation of nutty little teenagers who thought that my
lights and projectors meant that I could mount a Hollywood spectacular. Usually I shooed them
off while I made a test run of the gadgets, some of which I had designed myself, but in Whistling
Plain even their company was better than listening to the flies that grew fat on the cow pies and
36
buzzed incessantly around my lights. This, of course, was my undoing, since one of the
teenagers was a dark-haired, limber girl who sat by quietly even after most of the other
youngsters had to run home for dinner.
It was not quite dark when we had slipped away to a grove of trees to one side of the field.
She seemed knowledgeable, and I had let myself relax my guard about offering a joint to a lady
when the lady was below the age of consent for what else I had in mind. It was then that I met
the sheriff, a tall and lean rancher-type who seemed no more surprised than the girl that I should
have compromised myself so easily.
“Well, son,” he had said as he led me away, “we can’t have your type of people getting our
girls pregnant, can we? And using narcotics, too. Guess I’ll have to lock you up.”
*
I was processed, offered a phone call, and put away for the night. I had taken advantage of
the phone call to tell Larry where I was. We had a standing rule: don’t call for help if you get
busted, but let the group know that you might be gone for a while.
The cell was clean, better than most I had been in. The sheriff even brought me dinner
himself, a substantial home-cooked meal that was my first regular eating in a week. There was, I
reflected, some advantage to being a criminal in a low-crime town.
“Call me Dean,” the sheriff said amiably when I thanked him for the food. I had learned that
being polite was sometimes worth more than all the fast-talking ambulance chasers that Larry
called on to spring us if he really felt he had to.
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“Son, are you interested in getting out of here?”
“Well, sir—I mean, Dean--I would like to get back to my job and then go home.”
“Got anyone waiting for you?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s a shame.” Dean lit his pipe and a rich smoke filled the cell. “A young man like you
should be settled down, raising a family of his own.”
“Maybe someday, but I want to travel first, see a bit more of the world before I do.”
37
“You already have traveled, son. Been to the war even. That didn’t seem to be enough for
you.”
There was a prickling sensation along my spine. I stopped eating and stared at the sheriff.
He had piercing gray eyes that caught the glow in the bowl of his pipe.
“You thought I didn’t know about your being a grunt who took shrapnel in his ass and got a
hard-on every time you saw the little nurse who fixed you up?”
“That’s right. I didn’t tell you, and I haven’t even told my boss.”
“Didn’t have to.” Dean leaned back on my cot and crossed his legs. Casually he set the spur
on one boot spinning with a flick of his thumbnail. The metal clinked cheerfully, and I began
watching its revolution and waiting mechanically for it to slow down. It didn’t. Rather, it seemed
to pick up speed. The pitch of the clinking increased as well until it seemed to shoot past the
range of my hearing. Outside, several dogs began howling, and Dean stopped the spur with a
quick gesture.
“Didn’t have to tell me about your being pretty much alone, either. Just you and your
machines.”
I set down my fork. Whatever hunger I had felt was gone. Now my stomach had tightened
and I was feeling a little dizzy.
“Eat up, son. A man needs his nourishment.” Dean puffed contentedly and I obeyed, not
really tasting the food but knowing that I was going to consume it regardless.
“Made a lot of the stuff yourself, didn’t you?”
“Yes, sir. It’s not that complicated really. Basically just one remote-controlled cartridge film
projector, a slide projector that I run myself, and colored lights with variable apertures for special
effects.”
Dean nodded. “So that you can have film and slides superimposing images on that big
screen.”
I swallowed with difficulty. For a sheriff he knew more about me and my work than he had
any right to.
“You have some pretty interesting slides too, don’t you, son?”
38
I looked back intently. I had assembled a good collection of shots that let me put on some
effective montages on the slightly curved screen above and behind the group. Anti-war things
mostly, but a fair amount of nudity that I blurred if we were playing in a more uptight setting.
Whistling Plain seemed very uptight, but then I might not be worrying about my slides at all.
“That’s good. You’ll do just fine.”
“Do for what?”
“And sharp too. I bet you can even guess what I am.”
“You’re the sheriff.”
Dean picked up the slight edge of panic that had come into my voice. He laughed in a deep
baritone. A man’s man, probably hunted a lot. I tried to calm myself.
“That was a good trick with the spurs,” I said.
“Yep, but it does disturb the dogs.” He set down his pipe on the floor beside the cot.
“Son, I’ve got a proposition.”
“Okay.”
“You see,” he said with a smile, “it was sort of natural for me to take on a sheriff’s job since
I’ve always been a keeper. Actually I’m a dean. That’s why I said to call me that. I wasn’t really
being so informal as you might have thought. I’m up here to take care of the young ones who
have trouble changing back. You hear some of them howling up in the hills every so often. I go
up and try and give them lessons. That thing with the spur sort of gets their attention. Same
family as dogs, but you know that.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied dishonestly.
“Werewolves,son. Don’t agree just out of politeness when you don’t know something. How
else are you gonna learn? That’s the trouble with you youngsters. Think you know all the
answers too soon. It’s a shame sometimes.”
“Hey, look,” I said, “I appreciate the food and all, but I think your idea of a joke is too much.”
Dean fixed me with a gaze that seemed to flip switches inside my brain so that for a moment I
felt that I was back in Nam and there were mortar rounds coming in and I was scared shitless.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s not a joke.”
39
“That’s better. Now, you see, I’ve got this problem you could help me with. You know what’s
in it for you?”
“I get out of here?”
“Yep. And that’s a promise, son. You get out, and you can go anywhere you want.”
“No strings?”
“That’s only in stories. Why, son, we’ve got enough to do already besides trying to teach you
newcomers. Gets so that sometimes you’ve just got to get away for a little vacation in the woods.
Been here a century and a half. Done a pretty good job of teaching, if I do say so myself. State
treasurer’s one of my pupils. Want to be governor someday, even if he has to revert and rip out
an opponent’s jugular to do it. Boy helped me get set up here when it got time to move on from
my last form.”
“Which was what, sir?”
“Warden on the state farm. Gave me a good supply of material, but it got to be a bit of a
scandal when some young reporter found out how convicts were disappearing into the woods.”
“You mean, I could disappear if I don’t cooperate?”
Dean laughed again and relit his pipe, this time just using the tip of his forefinger. “Don’t get
ahead of yourself, son. But you should have seen what I did to the reporter. Showed myself
between forms, I did. Melted every stick of type at that paper with my breath. The place burned
down with him inside. Don’t pay to stick your nose in where you smell the sulphur, if you know
what I mean.”
“So what have I got to do?”
“Sex.”
“Sex?”
“Wouldn’t be a difficult thing for you, son, would it?” Dean chuckled conspiratorily. “You see,
I’ve got some other projects besides the wolves. There’s this young thing who has some trouble
adjusting to her new state, and being that you’re with this light show and all….”
“What kind of young thing?” I asked warily.
40
“Well, son, it wouldn’t do to get too technical with you. I mean, most people can’t even keep
the different orders of demons straight. Let’s just say that you’ll know her as a fireball.” Dean
laughed heartily at his own joke. “A real fireball. Named after Saint Elmo, which I think is a bit
too, well, heavenly for my own tastes.”
“You want me to make it with a piece of light?”
“Well, she’ll see that she gets the action she wants once she’s turned on. Son, the trouble is
the foreplay.”
“Foreplay?”
“Yep, and that’s where you come in with those lights of yours. She likes red, if you can
remember that, preferably a little oblong. When she’s ready she’ll take over. You’ll get a real
charge out of her.”
I felt weak but I knew I had to maintain.
“She won’t hurt you, son. That’s a promise.”
“I haven’t got much of a choice, have I?”
“Well, son, after going to all the trouble to get your act booked in this town and after getting
one of my little succubi to lead you on so that I could arrest you, it would be a shame to have you
get yourself lost with my boys up in the woods, much as they could use the practice. Been a poor
season for camping, you know.”
“So what do I do,” I asked feebly.
“Just put on a real special show tomorrow night. Real special. Remember she likes red.”
Dean stood up and stretched. “Got a big day tomorrow, what with making sure none of the
young people get out of line in town. Get a good night’s sleep, so, and I’ll let you go in the
morning.”
He left, and I went over and threw up into the toilet. I was racked with chills, but I managed to
get some sleep. In the morning it all seemed a bad dream, particularly when the sheriff didn’t
recall bringing me my dinner, much less carrying on a weird conversation about werewolves and
fireballs. There was just one thing. He told me not to take any more chances, and I saw
something in his eyes that made me realize I had not been dreaming.
41
*
Larry was not happy about my having been arrested. I told him that it was just a
misunderstanding.
“Keep your nose clean or I’ll bust it in for you,” he growled.
It was a cool evening and there was the threat of an electrical storm that could wash out the
entire gig—and Larry’s investment. The last thing he needed was me making more trouble for
him.
I was at work getting everything ready for the performance when the girl showed up again, all
dark and slim and beautiful. She just stood there until I found it impossible to ignore her.
“Thanks a lot for yesterday, kid, “ I snapped. “What do you do for an encore, cut my hair?”
“That was my mother,” she said softly, “a very long time ago.”
I had the same prickling sensation as the night before. I had almost forgotten that the chick
was part of the set-up and that whatever world Dean was from was her home also.
“I have something for you,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s film. For the projector in back of you. I’ll put it in if you show me how.”
“Hey, wait a minute. I’ve got my own film, and nobody plays with our act.”
“Dean told me to.”
I knew better than to argue, so I helped her slip in the film cartridge. Then she disappeared
into the growing crowd.
The weather was holding and by now the field was pretty well filled. A few adolescent
cowboys started a brawl, then I saw the sheriff come almost from nowhere and cool them down in
a minute. Usually we didn’t get that kind of cooperation, not even in the big city. Most of the time
the man seemed more interested in letting something happen so that there’d be an excuse to run
us in.
Larry and I were keeping in touch with a walkie-talkie. During the performance he would stay
at the back of the field and watch for trouble, although with the sheriff there it did not seem that
42
too much could go wrong. I still did not understand what was expected of me, but the service had
been very good in teaching me to obey orders when people like Dean gave them.
We started on schedule and, with the group as bad as it was tonight, I was glad we were
playing to kids who could not tell the difference between being loud and being good. If the locals
got restless I could use a strobe effect to jazz up an otherwise dull number and then go into the
film and slides. There were a lot of tricks I could use, although an hour and a half was a long time
to make up with my lights for lost beats and wrong chords.
The girl reappeared at my side about halfway through. I had not yet activated the movie
projector and I was wondering if we would make it through the set without the storm breaking.
There were flashes of lightning against the hills, and the howling of the wind confirmed why the
town had its name. At least, I wanted it to be just wind that I heard coming through those
canyons.
“Now,” the girl whispered.
“Look, I’m in charge here—or am I?”
Now,” she repeated.
“Okay.” I switched on the projector. I knew the slides that I had in front of me and I was
hoping that they would make some kind of sense against whatever else Dean had decided I was
to show.
As it turned out, Dean’s shots seemed completely meaningless. They were oddly shaped
squiggles, black and red lines that ran into each other at strange angles to create a weird sense
of flow. It looked as if I had nothing but the leader, the stuff tacked on to the beginning and end of
a film that an audience doesn’t see unless the projectionist gets sloppy.
“Pretty bad,” I ventured. I was having trouble focusing my nudes. Feminine bodies were
being cut up by the shifting network of Dean’s lines to create a chillingly sadistic effect.
“They’re called sigils,” the girl said helpfully. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
Larry’s voice was cracking from my walkie-talkie. He could see the lines and he wasn’t
happy.
43
“They’re called sigils,” I shouted into my transmitter. Then I just switched off the walkie-talkie
to spare the transistors the force of Larry’s reply.
Strangely, the group seemed to be getting better. Their music, usually no more erotic than
the howling of an underfed tomcat, became richly sensuous. Or was this only my imagination? I
knew that I wanted the dark girl next to me, and the only way I could ease this sudden sexual
urge was to concentrate all my skill into blending the lights and the pictures on the screen. I had
turned on the red spot and I was playing with it, moving it from one musician to another and then
up to the screen to form a dull background against which Dean’s sigils could writhe obscenely.
Then she came. The beginning was static that turned the music into one horrible screech. I
sensed the sudden restlessness of the crowd and then I saw the sheriff up front. The kids stayed
quiet.
A faint blue haze seemed to drift around the stage. From my right I could see Larry running
across the field, tripping over the sitting audience and hissing curses instead of apologies.
The haze concentrated itself into an electric blue ball that first spun across the stage and then
leaped to the screen.
“Kill that blue light,” Larry shouted at me from about twenty feet away.
“Can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t? Let me at those switches.”
I hated to do it, but as Larry stumbled forward toward my controls I slammed the back of his
thick neck with a small board that had been loose on the ground. He went down heavily, and I
kept the red spot licking at the ball, caressing it in a way that sent off a shivering ultraviolet. The
smell of ozone was heady, and I felt an excitement like nothing that I had ever experienced
before. I was into it, and I made my light do everything but split the ball in two. Whatever I was
doing must have been right because I could see Dean smiling as he kept the crowd under control
with the simple force of his presence.
Then the ball leaped from the stage. It was like a million volts charging through my body and
draining me in an orgiastic flash that went through me again and again until I passed out with the
ecstasy of it.
44
*
I have no memory of how I got back to Los Angeles. Apparently I was brought to the
psychiatric ward at the VA hospital and then turned loose with some meds. I wasn’t sure that any
of this had really happened. Apparently I had assaulted my boss after a freak lightning storm
shorted out my equipment, but the sheriff persuaded him not to bring charges and somehow
arranged to get me home.
I knew Maya was working at a hospital in West Los Angeles, not too far from the VA, and I
looked her up. She helped me make sense of things as best I could.
45
8. MAKING SENSE OF THINGS
Bill had lit up a joint while telling me his story. I normally did not use any more, but this
time I felt I needed that familiar buzz.
“So what happened, really?” I asked him. “Do you think you met the lawman from hell?”
Bill laughed. “I tried a few times to find out more about Whistling Plain, but it was as
though the town had never existed. I even asked Larry, but he denied we were ever booked
for a place like that. In fact, he says I don’t know what I’m talking about when I say I knocked
him out with a board during a concert.”
“The same thing happened with me,” Maya said. “There had been all the small towns
where Judith and I took the wagon, but they’re not on any map.”
“Like my breakfast with Malarkey. No one saw me with him.”
“But none of us were hallucinating these things,” Bill said. “I’m convinced of that. I was
at a gig at a place called Whistling Plain, and Maya did set up camp in towns where the local
folks practiced a religion that supposedly died out almost two thousand years ago.”
Maya leaned forward. “Remember the Gene Kelly musical, Brigadoon? I loved that
movie, and I wanted to believe that it was not just a fantasy. I even thought about it when I
was traveling with Judith, but there was just no reason to think the places we went were not
as real as anywhere else. They had the same gas stations and fast food outlets, and I even
picked up all the brochures for local attractions. I came back with quite a collection, but you
can guess what happened to them.”
“They disappeared,” I said.
“It’s how the demonmongers work,” Bill explained. “They let us get into their world, then
we have just our personal memories with no way of validating them.”
“It’s as though they wipe the slate clean for everyone else who might have shared our
experiences,” Maya added. “Like the waitress who thinks you ordered two breakfasts. She
did take Malarkey’s order and she watched him eat, but afterward she only remembers what
fits the notion that he never existed.”
46
“But why?”
“It’s part of their dance,” Bill said. “Think of all the demonmongers getting together in
some kind of cosmic ballroom. A few of us are lucky enough, if that’s the right way to say it,
to be invited to do a twirl or two on the floor with them. Afterwards we can try talking about it
only to have our nearest and dearest think we’ve flipped out.”
“That doesn’t answer my question. Why should there be this demonmongers’ ball?”
“Why any dance?” Maya responded. “It’s how we play, Thorne. Maybe it’s playing so
that things happen, like natives do in a rain dance, or it’s playing so that we attract a mate, or
it’s playing just because we like the feeling of moving with the music.”
“I like the Hindu idea,” Bill said. “Everything around us is an illusion—maya, just like the
name of the lady here—but it is because God is engaged in play, what’s called lila.
Enlightenment comes when you can accept that you are not at all the independent reality we
all make ourselves out to be, but this doesn’t take us off the ballroom floor. We still go
through the moves in the dance as we should.”
“And try to have some fun doing it,” Maya said. “And that goes for them—the
demonmongers, that is—as well as for us.”
*
I did feel better. Bill and Maya had each had experiences a great deal stranger than what
had happened with me, and they seemed comfortable with the bifurcated world that they
implied. But I was still bothered by the thought that whatever I took as reality could be
manipulated by some otherworldly beings who traded in access to still more otherworldly
beings. So maybe the gods—or whatever they were--really were sitting around laughing their
heads off. Just a fun-loving bunch of guys into practical jokes. Just don’t take them too
seriously.
Right.
There were no more surprise emails when I got back to my treehouse. Just a voicemail
from Jack Hanson reminding me of a meeting we were to have the next morning with
someone from UCLA. He called himself a parapsychologist—someone who studied psychic
47
phenomena, like the stuff I was write about in the script Jack was expecting—and he was to
help us get a handle on how to make our little star believable. I did not think we could ever
make her believable, either as a psychic or as a detective, but Jack was betting he could
make the series a hit. My own suspicion was that he was hoping to see whether he could get
into the girl’s pants.
I played around with the word processor but nothing much was happening. Okay, a good
night’s sleep might help.
Maybe it was because of Bill’s story but I started dreaming about a luscious dark lady
who wanted sex with me. There was a price, though. I asked what it was and she said it was
my kids. In the dream I say why not, and we get it on.
I wake up drenched in sweat with my heart pounding away. I have the most horrible
feeling that I had indeed bargained away my children. My children. With a sudden
wrenching I realize I cannot remember their names or their ages.
I must not yet have been completely awake. I was in a dream state again, and now I was
in a nightclub of sorts. Noise and neon. And two young women who come up to me and ask
if I want sex with them.
“I’m Kylie,” one says.
“And I’m Kim,” says the other.
Now I am completely awake and I’m screaming.
Kylie and Kim are my kids. They are three and five, and they live in Texas with their
mom and her lesbian lover.
I cannot get back to sleep.
48
9. A DEMOCRACY OF LUNATICS
Jack Hanson has his office in an old building on Maple Drive, just on the outskirts of Beverly
Hills. He’s been there for years, from the time he struck out on his own as a producer and right
away got two hit dramas on the air. Only one lasted long enough to go into syndication—where
the real money is, Jack kept saying—and since then he has made do with the fillers, the shows
that come on when a prospective hit fails to connect or when a network is ready to admit defeat
with a particular time slot. You would have seen his best efforts during the summers, when the
reruns are not getting the viewers and there’s still hope that something appearing now might
catch on and be picked up for the spring.
What surprises me is that in addition to Kevin Stager, the parapsychologist, we have the star
of our intended show. Some years before she had been Sunshine Barkley, and she had played a
perky teenager who was called on show after show to rescue the members of her clearly
dysfunctional family from one or another comedic disaster. Then, after the show did its
mandatory five years to make syndication pay off, it was canceled, in part because its star had a
serious problem with booze and pills. She had been in rehab and the trades were ready to write
her off. Jack was the optimist.
“The next Drew Barrymore, and I’ll put money on it.”
Now she was renamed Sunny Barkley, and I was supposed to see her as an adult with
psychic talents that would allow a slick resolution of whatever crime writers like me could come
up with. I was working on the first of six shows that for practical purposes would be a pilot. With
a lot of luck we’d be on in the spring, and with more luck than I thought possible we’d be
scheduled for the following fall.
I didn’t expect a hit, just a paycheck. And I found it hard to imagine Sunny Barkley as a
private investigator. It would be like having a dumb teenage heartthrob play Sam Spade.
Jack introduced me to Kevin Stager. The man hardly fit my image of a UCLA prof since with
his long hair and wispy goatee I’d expect to see him behind the counter of a local head shop
reading a graphics novel, the modern-day version of the comic books I knew as a kid.
49
Kevin explained quickly enough that he was not really on the faculty. “I was instrumental in
setting up a parapsychology lab while I was a grad student, back when there was a lot of CIA
money available for psychic research since we wanted to keep up with the Russians. Later, after
I got my degree, I was able to find some private foundations to keep us going. The university lets
me use their facilties, but I don’t get much of a salary. Being a consultant for shows like this
helps out.”
Blond, blue-eyed Sunny was something of a surprise. I had expected a spoiled, possibly
hung-over child star whose main concern was that she was the center of attention. Instead I saw
a young woman who was clear-eyed and a lot more sharp than I expected.
“Mr. Webster, I’m so happy that I get to meet you. Mr. Hanson has said so much about you.”
Jack grunted.
“I’m happy to meet you, too,” I said. “And I hope Dr. Stager can help us get the psychic stuff
right.”
“Well,” Kevin said, “let’s get something straight up front. As I understand the premise of the
show, Sunny is supposed to have the kind of ESP that lets her solve a mystery a week. It really
doesn’t work like that. Even the best psychics I’ve ever studied can beat the odds one day and
strike out completely the next.”
Jack was not happy with this comment. “Kevin, this is television. In real life even the best
detectives can’t close every case, much less do it in a couple of days. But it’s what we get an
audience to expect.”
“I know that,” Kevin said. “But I just want to make you understand that I do not want to
misrepresent the genuine phenomena that we study. There’s the possible and then there’s the
impossible.”
“How do you tell the difference?” Sunny asked.
“I’ll tell you. I go to conferences, a lot of them. We have serious researchers, guys like my
friends Charles Tart and Stanley Krippner, and then we have the New Age crazies who ask us to
take seriously their claims to have been abducted by aliens or to have chatted away with Moses
and Jesus inside Mount Shasta. That’s the kind of thing I know is impossible. Sometimes I feel
50
I’ve been set loose in a democracy of lunatics where we’re supposed to honor each and every
report we’re presented.”
“You mean that I can’t be Sabrina or Samantha?” Sunny asked with a mock seriousness that
was completely lost on our UCLA expert.
“No, no,” he said, “put stuff like that in the script and I won’t work with you, no matter what
you want to pay me.”
Jack and I exchanged glances. One thing we both knew was that guys like Stager had all the
integrity of a chameleon set loose on a plaid. If we wanted Sunny to levitate in an episode, the
good doctor would be more than willing to allow it.
Sunny was smiling. I’d like to say she was smiling delightedly, but I appreciate the need for
restraint. Regardless, I found I Iiked her a lot more in person, and somehow I no longer saw Jack
as proposing the series just as a way of getting her into bed. This was a young lady who had a
lot more going for her than the hit series she had made as an adolescent.
Kevin wasn’t through. “Look,” he said, “let me repeat a story that was presented me to me as
the God’s honest truth. You’ll get a better idea of what I’m talking about.”
51
WELCOME TO OUR COVEN
The shop was sandwiched between two brick buildings on Montgomery Street. It was high
and narrow, an alleyway that had been built over and so converted to more commercial purposes.
The light of the late afternoon sun poured through the grilled window and set up elaborate
shadow plays with the objects arranged haphazardly on a dusty piece of purple velvet. There
were candlesticks and incense burners, carved ebony fetishes and brass statues of Hindu
divinities, imported leaflets describing new techniques for spiritual fulfillment and glossy book
jackets offering revelations about witchcraft and voodoo, Atlantis and UFOs, the hitherto unsolved
mysteries of the past and the splendid promises of the future.
The woman outside the shop studied the display quietly. She was perhaps thirty, somewhat
taller than average with her height emphasized by a chic pantsuit, and seemingly as much out of
place in a store dealing with occult supplies as a San Francisco policeman at a graveyard orgy.
Finally she opened the door and stepped inside.
To her left a set of mismatched glass cases, several of them cracked and patched with
ordinary adhesive tape, stretched the length of the shop. Behind the cases were shelves piled
with duplicates of the items found in the window. The walkway alongside the cases was lined
with fading replicas of the movie bills depicting Lon Chaney and Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in
their most terrifying roles.
The counter with its ancient cash register was at the rear of the store. The man behind it was
short and puckish, garbed in a long black robe that looked rather like a nightshirt, and he peered
uneasily at his stylish customer through thick wire-rim glasses. Tufts of pale blond hair shot out
unmanageably beneath a soiled blue skullcap to complete the illusion of a demented rabbi.
With cultivated insouciance the woman examined the contents of the cases. Her kind was in
often enough, the man reflected, always browsing and never buying. Then they went on to dinner
at the Wharf or up on Nob Hill to chat about the quaint little store they had found just down from
Chinatown. The one thing to be said for them was that, unlike the Midwestern tourists who were
the bane of his existence, they seldom disturbed his reading.
52
“You have an interesting collection of daggers.” Her voice, echoing like a shot down the
length of the store, startled the man, and he dropped a paperback mystery to the floor in front of
the counter.
“We call them letter openers,” he said nervously as he rounded the counter to retrieve his
book.
The woman laughed easily. “What a way to talk of athamés. I suppose the pentacles are
really key chains and the packets of dried spiders are just a curious new fish food.”
It would have been simple enough to join in her laughter, but the man found himself suddenly
uneasy. There were a few steady customers for the implements and jewelry, the candles and
incense and oils, but they tended to dress exotically and smell of patchouli and cannabis. He
wondered if once again some bureaucratic office was checking to see that he was not in violation
of one or another statute regulating the degree to which the occult could be openly promoted.
She looked the type, he thought, a sophisticated plainclothes officer ready to issue a summons.
She watched the man bend to get his book and then, with a quick gesture, lifted a thin gold
chain around her neck so that the emblem it held fell outside her blouse. When he stood he saw
the light glinting off a five-pointed star made of slender interlaced gold rods.
“Oh, I didn’t know,” he said. “Please forgive me. We can’t be too careful, you know. Only
last year we had to stop carrying herbs when some kids went into coma after sampling our
wolfbane. That was before I took over, you understand.”
He tried to restrain himself. The real ones—the people who took the occult as seriously as
he did—came in so infrequently that he chattered like a magpie when he met a true priest or
priestess.
The woman smiled knowingly. “I don’t often go to the stores. Usually I depend on mail order
for what I need, but every so often I want something quite special.”
“We have an excellent supply—except for herbs, that is. I hope that we are able to meet your
needs.”
“I hope so, too. How long have you been the proprietor here, did you say?”
53
The man had begun to relax. “I’m not the owner. That would be Mr. Fastung, but he is fairly
well retired now. I feel very honored that he allowed me to take over for him. That was four
months ago.”
“Mr. Fastung. Why, yes, members of my coven have talked about him very affectionately.
But I never associated him with this shop. Isn’t that a coincidence?”
The man’s head bobbed up and down, and the skullcap edged slightly over to one side.
“Yes, yes, but I don’t believe in coincidences. Everything’s for a purpose, don’t you agree?” He
was already planning how he would bring in references to don Juan and the Master Therion and
half a dozen other authorities he had been reading over the years.
“I do agree. Perhaps it was very providential that I came here this afternoon. Now if you only
have what I need….”
“Oh, I hope so, I hope so.”
Carefully the woman continued her inspection of the contents of the shop. The man followed
docilely, ready to cite prices and take orders. “If you would just let me know what you’re looking
for, I’ll see if it’s in stock.” His remark earned a raised hand and he wisely decided to allow this
unusual woman to take her time.
Finally she turned and smiled warmly. “No, there’s nothing here after all. I take it that you
know the occult only at secondhand.”
“What do you mean?” he asked apprehensively.
“”You’ve never been to an actual coven, have you?”
The man looked at the floor sheepishly. He no longer felt like citing Crowley and Castaneda.
In fact, he wanted only to retreat back to his corner and bury himself in his pile of paperbacks.
“Please,” she continued, “I can appreciate the difficulties you must have experienced. So
many people claim to be witches these days, and you never know who is to be trusted.”
“That is so true,” he responded quickly. “I’ve had invitations—many, many invitations—but I
always sensed that something was wrong. People want to take advantage of me, of my
familiarity with occult subjects, but I won’t let that happen.”
54
“That is very wise. I trust that you will not be offended if I extend still another invitation to you.
My coven will be meeting for an esbat tomorrow evening, and I’m sure you would be a most
welcome guest.”
The man turned to conceal his embarrassment. “I don’t know,” he said. “Of course I’m
grateful, but—“
“We work robed, and I’m sure there is a ceremonial gown that would fit you perfectly. As for
the ritual itself, it is quite standard and you will fit in very well.”
“If you’re sure that I would not be intruding.”
“By no means,” the woman said calmly. “We’ll be expecting you.”
*
The man had closed the shop early in order to ready himself for the ritual. Back at the
Mission Street hotel where he resided he bathed in the ancient tub available on his floor, changed
into a faded brown suit and his least scuffed pair of shoes, and meticulously slicked down his
hair. He was pleased with his own appearance—neat but not materialistic, radiant with the
beauty of the spirit, a signal to the one able to see with the eyes of the soul. Then he went out to
catch his bus.
The woman’s apartment building was perched high enough to afford a view of the marina.
There were lights on some of the yachts, and a ribbon of headlights led from the Golden Gate
Bridge along the edge of the bay. After his walk up the hill the man found that the lights blurred,
and he blinked furiously to restore his focus. A uniformed doorman had watched his climb
impassively. For a moment the man thought his way would be barred, but as he approached the
door it was opened for him without comment and he entered the lobby.
The elevator took him to the fifth floor, and the man walked down a narrow hallway squinting
at the numbers on the doors. At last he found the one he was looking for. He rang and waited
nervously.
“Come in. Everyone else is here. There’s a robe for you on the couch. Why not take off
your coat and just slip it on over your clothes?”
55
Obediently he donned what seemed to be a wine-colored dressing gown and followed the
woman, who was exquisitely robed in a flowing Grecian costume, to what he thought must be her
library.
Softly she closed the door behind him. The man, who found it difficult to adjust to the dim
light, stumbled against a table and began murmuring furtive apologies. Then, as his vision
improved, he was able to distinguish a low altar set against the far wall. Two ordinary household
candles were burning on it, and wisps of smoke were rising from a brazier set to one side.
He glanced about to see the other members of the coven and his heart sank.
Ten tiny figures sat in a row along a shelf by the door. Each was outfitted in a robe much like
his own but on a miniature scale. Blank eyes reflected the light of the candles.
Dolls. This woman was high priestess to a coven of children’s dolls.
He felt a moment of anger. No wonder she had been so eager for him to come. She too was
only pretending, and once more he had been cheated out of the recognition he had earned for his
years of untiring study.
The woman touched his arm lightly. “Come, you can be my high priest this evening.”
He did what he was told. Together they arranged the dolls in a semicircle in front of the altar.
Then the woman went through a pastiche of all the rituals described in the books: there were
anointings and benedictions, exorcisms and incantations, spells and chants, all accompanied with
clouds of incense that choked the man and made his eyes water.
They had come to the blessing of the cakes and wine. The man was now past caring that he
had been deceived. As the ritual progressed he had found himself losing the sense of hurt
disappointment. The woman, at least, was real, and his first participation in these ancient
ceremonies was not just as a spectator but as the priestess’s own lieutenant.
He drank eagerly from the chalice. The wine burned his throat but he forced himself not to
cough. Again his eyes were tearing and he wished he could take off his glasses to wipe them,
yet he did not want to interrupt the flow of the ritual.
“I’m sorry, but I guess it’s the wine. I don’t usually drink, and—well, I’m sorry.”
56
The woman loomed over him. She seemed taller now, almost a giantess. He glanced
around. The dolls too had grown. He was looking at them at eye level, but oddly the distance
between himself and them had expanded.
He wanted to rise, get on with the ritual, but his limbs were rigid as though locked in place.
He realized that he could no longer even move his head.
The woman went on without him. There were final invocations and dismissals, and mercifully
it was over. She strode over to flick on the light.
“You did very well,” she said in a voice that was like thunder.
He wanted to answer her but found now that he could not speak, either.
She patted his head affectionately. “We are all so glad you came to join our coven.”
*
The woman entered the shop briskly. Fastung nodded to her from behind the counter.
“Is he satisfactory?” he asked.
“Oh, I find him absolutely charming. I’ve already had compliments on how imaginatively he’s
devised. One of my friends even took off his glasses and was amazed to see they were genuine
prescription lenses.”
“That makes how many?”
“Eleven. I need just one more. It should be a female to balance out the last one.”
Fastung grunted. “Shouldn’t be too hard to come by these days. You’ll be back in a few
months, I presume.”
The woman smiled. “I do hate to wait that long even when I know it’s necessary.” She
reached in her purse for her checkbook. “Same price?”
“Same price. You know, of course, that I’m still willing to buy back the entire collection
whenever you’re tired of it.”
She studied the owner reprovingly. “Mr. Fastung, I could never do that. After all, I am their
high priestess.”
57
11. KEVIN SETS SOME LIMITS
“Now,” Kevin continued, “I still have no idea why this woman even wanted me to hear
such a story.”
“Was she the priestess?” Sunny asked.
“No, she said that she wasn’t. Supposedly the doll coven belonged to a friend of hers,
but she went on that she believed that in fact a grown man had done a reverse Pinocchio in
that apartment. But you get my point. No matter what she believed, this is the kind of thing
that cannot happen. It’s a nice little fantasy but it’s on the same level as having someone
jump out of a movie screen to join the audience.”
“The Purple Rose of Cairo,” Sunny said happily. “That’s one of my favorite movies.”
“And not something you can take seriously as even a possible psychic phenomenon.”
“Not like ghosts,” I said. “Or demons.”
“No, I don’t believe that ghosts or demons are real entities, but somehow there are
experiences that we find easiest to interpret this way. Various instances of the poltergeist
phenomenon, for example. Or the classic experiment in Toronto some time back when a
group held a series of séances in order to conjure up an admittedly imaginary entity.”
“So if they are not real, just what is going on?” Sunny asked.
“That’s what parapsychology is all about. I’m partial to the theory that there is something
about consciousness as some kind of energy that can affect the things around us.”
“Like real vibrations,” Sunny said.
“And in the same way some individuals are able to be affected by things outside them
that have been previously imprinted in a way we cannot yet explain.”
“Like real vibrations,” Sunny repeated.
“Maybe. I used to think that maybe quantum mechanics held an answer, but I changed
my mind. Thoughts, for instance, do not obey the laws of thermodynamics. But I’m not ready
to go with the Cartesian stuff that this proves whatever we mean by the mind is an
independent reality that science may as well leave alone.”
58
“Maybe,” I suggested, “we have this backwards. What if our picture of nature is just one
set of possibilities, and there are entities that can play with how we see things so that a lot
more is possible than you are willing to admit?”
“Entities at a level above our own, you mean.”
“What we might call gods.”
Kevin laughed. “If I for a moment believed this I’d have to close down my lab. We’re the
top of the food chain, and we play with the gods, not the other way around.”
“You’re not at all religious?” Sunny asked.
“Not at all.”
“Okay,” she said, “I want to tell a story, too. I heard it from a priest who is a friend of my
folks. He was trying to discourage me from getting involved with a show that had anything to
do with the supernatural. He figured I had no way of knowing the trouble I could get into.”
59
THEY DON”T SERVE SPAGHETTI IN HELL
The house would have brought three hundred thousand if they had sold it a few years before.
Now, with the unbelievable inflation of California property values, it was worth more than a million.
Easily. It stood proud and lordly among the other Victorian homes lying to the south of the Santa
Monica Freeway, the kind of place that caught your eye if you could look past the graffiti on the
bus benches and billboards.
No one lived there now. After Jack Castagna had been assassinated in the basement that he
had converted into a game room, the local police and the Feds alike had gone through it like
vultures. Rosie and the kids had moved out rather than be reminded any further that Jack had
been a very violent man who had made his living by very violent means. They had thought about
putting the place on the market but finally decided against it. Instead they rented it out to a
succession of families only to find that Jack Castagna had never really quitted his property. Sure,
his bullet-riddled body was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery, but his soul remained behind. Now
they had to leave it vacant and hope that the local gangbangers did not trash it. Not that they
needed to worry, since even the most hardened Crip kept a safe distance.
Father Lou Donato—young Luigi to the old families at the parish to distinguish him from old
Luigi, who still ran the best Italian restaurant west of Chicago—had been called in twice before by
the Castagna family. He had gone to the house and left with nothing more concrete than a
feeling that the man who had so often eaten his father’s lasagna was still somewhere around, still
watching sharp-eyed for a glint of metal beneath a flapping coat.
“He was retired,” Rosie Castagna had protested in the rectory the first time she had been to
see him. “There wasn’t any reason for them to do it. He wasn’t going to testify, no matter what
the papers said.”
Father Lou knew better than to quote the Bible about those who lived by the sword. Right
after the shooting Rosie had denied that her husband was anything but what he seemed, an
aging Chicago tavern owner who had come west for his health. She was like his own mother that
way. But then old Luigi had made the transition to respectability far more easily than Jack
60
Castagna. After all, with a son studying for the priesthood it wasn’t seemly to make too much of
the old days.
“He’ll say a Mass for my soul and I’ll go right to heaven.” Jack had joked that way the night
before he died, but at the time Lou Donato was still a year away from ordination. He had not
even attended the funeral, much less been able to conduct it.
“So say some prayers in that room, maybe bring some holy water or whatever.”
“Mrs. Castagna, you’re asking me to exorcise the house, aren’t you?”
“Is that so bad? Jack would want us to get the income, but the way things are no one can
stay there.”
“You know, an official exorcism would require the Cardinal’s permission, and even then only
a very experienced priest would be assigned to do it.”
“Luigi, that’s just if the devil’s there. It’s only my unhappy Jack, but he makes it so difficult for
us because he’s not at peace. It doesn’t have to be an exorcism with the cross and everything,
just maybe a little conversation. Jack always liked you. He’d listen if you tell him that he has to
find somewhere else.”
“You could tell him that yourself.”
“Me?” Rosie shuddered. “I wouldn’t go to no haunted house, not even if it’s just my Jack.
You’re a priest. That’s your job.”
It was futile to argue either theology or ecclesiastical regulations with the widow Castagna.
Father Lou had promised that he would see what he could do.
He made this third trip on a Thursday, his night off. The housekeeper had puzzled over
Father Lou’s requests for a box filled with kitchen utensils.
“I’m cooking for a poor family,” he had said. It was the kind of statement that in the seminary
fell halfway between a lie and the truth, but, according to considered opinion, would be
permissible as an instance of mental reservation.
He stopped off at a supermarket on the way. “Father, forgive them,” he whispered after
looking at the outrageous prices. By all rights he should have gone over to a little Italian market
near his folks’ home, but then the gossipy owners would have announced his purchases and he
61
would have had to account for them. “You bought food to cook yourself when I could have fed
you,” his pop would say. “What’s wrong—my place ain’t good enough for you now that you’re a
holy priest?”
“Pop, you know I get over as often as I can.”
That was mental reservation also. Pop had succeeded in keeping his priest close to his
family physically, but Luigi would never know that much of the attraction of holy orders for his son
had been the hope of being sent far away from the viscous hold of Jack Castagna’s old circle.
That and the pious thought that somehow he might atone for his father’s sins. But the Cardinal
had sent him back to the old parish, back to the familiar setting in which the Church was
somehow to ignore the fact that good family men like his own father owed their first allegiance not
to God but to the devil as manifested in the Mafia.
He pulled into the driveway just as it was getting dark. Previously he had come only in broad
daylight, but those other visits had been intended more to familiarize himself with the house than
to have the kind of conversation that Rosie Castagna had in mind.
The priest was wearing his Roman collar. That too had surprised the housekeeper even as it
reassured her that his night out was to be spent honorably. Somehow he felt it would be more
appropriate than a sports shirt. “Some exorcism,” he thought. “Chianti instead of holy water, but
at least I’ll be dressed right.”
Once inside, father Lou blessed himself, slipped on a stole over his black clerical shirt, and
made his way down to the game room. There were two blessed candles in his box of utensils.
He found holders in a cupboard and set out the candles in the center of the inlaid game table
near the door.
He shuddered involuntarily. Jack had been shot at close range right at that table. As the
police reconstructed it, the killer had pumped the first shots into Jack’s upper arms, then put more
slugs into his legs, probably to get the ex-mobster to talk about his recent conversations with the
law. He would have had to reload, then finally he ended his victim’s agony with a bullet to the
brain.
62
No one would have heard Jack’s screams. The family was out to the movies, and the game
room was sufficiently soundproof that a bomb could have gone off in there without alerting the
neightbors.
Upstairs he began cooking spaghetti. He was shaking now, and the urge to pack up and get
out of here was growing stronger by the minute. If it hadn’t been for his promise to Rosie
Castagna he would have done just that, but one thing he had learned as a child was the
importance of living up to his word. He might regret his vow to settle Jack’s troubled ghost, but
he would not go back on it. Priest or not, he was still a Donato.
When he returned to the game room he saw that one of the candles had guttered and gone
out. He kneaded the beeswax up around the wick and reached for a match.
A cold blast of air extinguished the other candle, and for a moment the priest was left in
darkness. Breathing deeply to steady himself, he struck the match and relit both candles.
“No more tricks, okay?” He forced a note of levity. “I mean, this isn’t like a routine with bell,
book, and candle. I just want to talk.”
The candles stayed lit. Father Lou returned to the kitchen to prepare a steaming plate of
spaghetti with garlic and olive oil, just as his pop would have made it. He poured a glass of red
wine and took both the plate and the glass back downstairs.
“You went to a lot of trouble, kid. I appreciate that.”
Jack Castagna was sitting expectantly at the table. The priest inhaled sharply. He realized
that somehow he had managed to set down the dinner, but otherwise he was not sure how close
he had come to the hulking figure illuminated in the glow of the candles. Already he had
retreated to the safety of the doorway.
“You’ve got to stay, Luigi.”
He was a small boy again. His father and Jack Castagna were sitting at a table covered with
strange-looking papers.
“He’s only a kid, Jack. He just got curious and came on in.”
“Kids talk. He’s got to swear.”
“Okay, Jack, maybe you’re right.
63
“Sit down, Luigi.”
Obediently the priest took the chair across from Jack Castagna.
“You said you wanted to talk, Luigi. Okay, what’s it about?”
Father Lou tried to speak but found his throat constricting with the terror of the situation.
Finally he gasped out the words he needed.
“Rosie asked me to come.”
“So?”
“She can’t rent the house while you’re here.”
“It’s my house, ain’t it?”
The priest was beginning to recover his courage. The ghost wasn’t anything of what he had
expected. It was only Jack Castagna sitting across from him as he had so many times before.
There was nothing filmy or transparent about him. The man was as solid as he had been then—
and as menacing.
“Jack, you’re dead now.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“You’ve got to go on to where you belong.”
Castagna laughed raucously. “Where I belong? Kid, why should I do that? Here, I even get
to see a good old-fashioned plate of spaghetti. They don’t serve stuff like that where I’m
supposed to be.”
“It’s the way things are supposed to be,” the priest said, hoping he had put some conviction
into his tone.
“Sure, kid, but there’s something I got to do first. Rosie’s a little put out maybe, but all this is
for her good, too. Just like always. You can tell her that for me.”
“This isn’t your place anymore.”
“Look, Luigi, when I go to hell I want to take my Judas with me.”
“The man who killed you?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe that’s not possible. Maybe he’s repented.”
64
“You spent so long in the seminary and you want to tell me what’s not possible. This guy, he
doesn’t repent while he’s still got everything going for him. He has to die like I did, surprised. I
want him in the state of sin. It’s only fair.”
“I don’t understand. What makes you think you can make that happen?”
“You and I made a deal once, kid, and part of the deal was this.”
Father Lou again was the child who scribbled his name with the blood spurting from the tip of
his forefinger. He was making a deal because that was what he was supposed to do as a man in
his family. Jack and his father were examining the paper, then Jack folded it and held it to the
flame of the match.
The young Luigi heard himself reciting the oath. “May I burn as this paper if I break my
word.”
“A deal’s a deal, ain’t it, kid?”
The priest nodded. He had never forgotten that moment when he had first pledged himself to
honor the code of his father and his father’s closest friend.
Now he was as though he was a child all over again, and Jack Castagna’s eyes like flashing
bits of amber were burning deep into his soul.
He remembered nothing more until the morning.
*
Luigi Donato looked at the figure in the doorway of his restaurant.
“Hey, Lou, it’s your big night out and you’re coming to see your old man after all. You’re a
good kid.”
“Hi, Pop.”
It was only then that old Luigi noticed the eyes like flashing bits of amber in his son’s face.
He didn’t see the gun until it was too late.
65
13. TIME FOR A DRINK WITH CRACKER
“That’s a horrible story,” I said. “Why would a priest ever come up with it?”
“As I said,” Sunny replied, “he wanted me to steer clear of the occult, even if it was just
playing a psychic private eye on television. Maybe he made it all up, I don’t know.”
“Well, somebody made it up,” Kevin said. “Just think about it. We have plenty of cases
in which people report having normal conversations with individuals who they think are alive when
it turns out they’re not, but there’s nothing in the literature in which we have a supposed ghost
engage in a case of possession. No, thank you. It doesn’t happen, can’t happen.”
I already was fairly sure that the story was not straight fiction. Maybe it came from the
confessional. Maybe Lou Donato was still a priest somewhere in the Los Angeles archdiocese,
but so far it seemed that whenever someone had an invite to the demonmongers’ ball it became
impossible to tie things down in the everyday world.
That’s why Sunny’s next comment sent new chills through me.
“Cracker told me not to worry about our priest.”
“Cracker?”
“Well, that’s what everyone calls him. His name is Harlan Graham, and, well, you know
about graham crackers.”
“Yeah, I got it. I’ve heard his name, but I didn’t know he was a real person.”
“Well, I guess he is so much a legend. He used to manage Stevie Wonder. He’s slowed
down a lot now, and I guess I’m lucky to have him as my agent.”
Carl Jung called it synchronicity, and that was a big term for some of the New Age
writers. Things happen together that seem more than mere coincidence because of the level of
meaning we can attach to them. Like having someone talk about a sudden windfall and then
picking up the sports page and seeing that a horse named Windfall is running at the local track
that afternoon. I know I’d be out there to put my money down because this would almost seem
like a message from beyond. If I won, I’d be convinced that this was indeed a psychic signal. If I
lost, well, at least I had a good story to tell.
66
Malarkey had talked about Graham, but I was now fairly sure that Malarkey himself was
nothing more than a peculiar blip in my sanity. And after listening to Bill and Maya I had given up
any expectation that, even if my possible breakfast partner was not just an hallucination, anyone
from his cast of characters would show up in my so-called real world.
Now, a day later, I find that Graham is not only a real person but also someone
connected with my work as a TV writer. Sunny must have been alarmed by my expression
because she reached over again, this time not just patting my arm but holding on and gently
shaking it.
“Mr. Webster, are you OK?”
“Yeah, Thorne,” Jack added, “you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I steadied myself and forced a smile. “You know, it’s almost something like that. Look,
this is going to sound crazy, but I’ve got to talk to Graham as soon as it can be arranged. He
knows something that can answer a lot of the questions I have right now.”
“What kind of questions?” Jack asked.
I looked over at Kevin Stager, who was staring at me with obvious discomfort.
“Questions about what doesn’t happen and can’t happen.”
*
We agreed to adjourn the session. Kevin would be back because he got a good fee as a
consultant, even if he might suspect I was going overboard on the psychic stuff. Jack did not
have any other show anywhere close to being more than a concept, and he joked that if we could
not get Sunny back on the tube with my script he’d go for a reality show instead. “We’ll set her up
as a tarot reader and film the results. Follow people back and see what happens when they do
what she tells them. Of course, we’ll fake the readings and do some stuff to make the clients
think she was right on the money. Lots of laughs.”
Jack, I should explain, hated reality shows. He had not even liked Candid Camera. He
wanted an audience to be entertained the old-fashioned way, with a good story. The type of
exploitation that had become prevalent—“eating worms and smooching with bimbos,” as he
described it—bothered him as it did me, although in my case it was the fear of professional
67
oblivion. The trouble was, he could come up jokingly with an outrageous premise—an example
was using a prostitute to set up an adulterous encounter with one or another honest citizen and
then bringing in the offended spouse to find them in flagrante delicto—only to discover that a
network head was ready to take him seriously. That really happened, by the way. Jack had to
beg the man not to ask someone else to run with it.
“I don’t want to keep calling you Mr. Webster,” Sunny said when we were outside the
office. “It’s Mr. Graham’s idea. Anyone older than me should get a title.”
“I’d rather you just called me Thorne anyway, but I’ve got to tell you I don’t much like my
name. I keep it for good luck.”
She looked puzzled.
“I was named for Thorne Smith. He wrote books that my grandfather loved, comic things
with ghosts and witches that were very popular before the Second World War. Topper and I
Married a Witch were particular favorites. So my mother in a sense grew up with Thorne Smith,
and when I came along, right after her dad’s death, she gave me his name.”
“Topper,” Sunny said. “Cary Grant played him in the movie. And Veronica Lake was the
star in I Married the Witch. I love those old movies, but I didn’t know they were books first.”
It figured, but I did not want to remark on the obvious generation gap. Sunny was
probably like some of my young friends who had shelves filled with videos and DVD and not a
book in sight. The term “bookcase” would probably disappear soon from the furniture ads.
“You like both, don’t you?”
I startled, then realized that Sunny did not have to be reading my mind the way Malarkey
did.
“I think I like books better. I can always imagine seeing the scenes in a number of ways.
Once the story’s committed to the screen that’s gone.”
“That’s neat. I’ve had acting coaches tell me not to read the book a script might be based
on. Just go with the lines that are there and let the director worry about the rest. Maybe that
makes my job easier than yours.”
Maybe it did.
68
A short time with her cell phone and Sunny arranged for the two of us to have lunch with
the fabled Harlan Graham. It was to be at Musso and Franks, a traditional chop house in
Hollywood that had outlasted the Brown Derby and Perrino’s and, of course, the Playboy Club.
*
Malarkey’s description had led me to expect a man much heavier and certainly more
outgoing. But then Sunny’s agent had to be well into his seventies, and his pallor and the rasping
I heard in his voice suggested that it might now be an effort just to be civil.
“Is it a bad day, Mr. Graham?” Sunny asked.
“I’ve had worse, darling. But I did want to meet the hotshot who’s going to write you the
perfect part.”
I cringed and mumbled something about hoping to do a good job.
“That’s all right, son. I know this business. You can write literature but it’s crap that gets
on the screen. So enough of the pleasantries. Sunny says that you were eager to meet me, and
she seems to think it’s not about business.”
“No, sir, it’s a bit strange. You see, yesterday I had someone tell me a very weird story
and you were in it.”
A waiter, one of the old school with little patience for indecision, came up for our orders.
Without hesitation Graham ordered a martini and a lamp chop, Sunny said she’d have iced tea
and a Cobb salad, and I went for a club sandwich and coffee.
“A weird story. Isn’t that your stock in trade?”
“Yes, but usually the people and the incidents are entirely fictitious. What I wanted to ask
you was whether this one might in any way be based on fact. Does the name Jeremy Delesco
mean anything to you?”
“Delesco. Used to have lunch once in a while with a young fellow by that name. You
were probably in kindergarten at the time.”
“Mr. Graham, how did he die?”
“It was a car accident. Sad, really. He had his whole future ahead of him.”
69
“The weird part is that he was supposed to have offered you a chance to rent a god,
which went against the rules for some kind of supernatural pact he had made, and that’s how you
got a couple of your most famous clients.”
Graham was smiling. “Rent a god? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It was sort of a credit card.”
He shook his head. “Well, I can see how someone was having fun with you. No, I never
heard him talk about anything crazy like that, and I like to think I got my clients because of my
ability to put together the right kind of deal. So that’s the story?”
Maybe Graham was just putting me on, but now, with drinks just arriving, I realized that I
would not get anywhere by repeating more of Malarkey’s story. Still, the fact that both Graham
and Delesco were real people whom I had never heard of before yesterday was something of an
answer in itself. I could not have been completely hallucinating.
“Webster, if you like to sit around and listen to weird stories I may as well provide some
entertainment. Sunny, you won’t mind if an old man reminisces, will you?”
Sunny, who obviously doted on him, did her arm-patting thing and smiled brightly.
I sipped at my coffee and Graham began.
70
THE PICTURE MAN
The man with the sunburnt face, watery blue eyes, and thinning blond hair slicked back from
his forehead could have been any age from twenty to forty. He wore a brown pinstripe suit two
sizes too small, and he carried a worn leather briefcase that he set down carefully before he rang
the bell to the right of the screen door.
I had watched him make his way down the opposite side of Budlong, beginning with the old
white frame house at the corner. Each time he had set down the briefcase, said a few words,
then picked up the briefcase and retreated, bowing like a Chinese courtier. When he crossed the
street and started down my side I decided maliciously to place an order for whatever he was
selling—the biggest order I could.
I was twelve and I had to stay inside on this bright summer afternoon as a punishment for my
misbehavior the day before. Not that I had done anything that terrible, but with my dad overseas
fighting the Japs my mom expected me to be the man of the house, and somehow I had let her
down by being an hour late for dinner. I had been over at Exposition Park, right by the University
of Southern California, and I had spent more time than I thought wandering through the museum
that housed the dinosaurs.
I felt horribly wronged, and the petty vengeance of putting in a fake order that my mother
would have to refuse appealed to me. Besides, the salesman was a tramp. Otherwise, he too
would either be in uniform or he’d be at a war plant making the planes that guys like my dad
would fly against Tojo. The point was that I felt like getting back at everyone.
Then he was at the door, his briefcase on the ground, and he pushing at the doorbell that no
longer worked. After a moment he opened the unlatched screen and knocked forcefully at the
door. I opened the door but lost my nerve when I saw him looming in front of me.
“My mom isn’t at home, mister, and we can’t buy anything anyway.”
The man smiled so that I could see the uneven tobacco-stained teeth. “Well, son, I ain’t
exactly selling things.”
“Then why are you here?”
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“I’m taking orders for a service that your mom might sure appreciate.”
“Your mom might feel different. You see, I represent folks that take pictures—real good
pictures. Ain’t your daddy in the service?”
I knew he had seen the blue star hanging in the front window, next to where we put the sign
when we wanted the Helm’s truck to stop and sell us bread or pastries. “He’s in the Army Air
Corps.”
“Well, wouldn’t it be something nice to send him a picture of you and your mom to keep with
him in his air plane?”
“My dad’s got plenty of pictures. Mom sends him snapshots all the time.”
“I bet she does, son, but that ain’t the same as a family portrait, especially the kind of portrait
my company makes. And tell you what.” He bent down and I could smell the cheap wine on his
breath. “You don’t even have to pay me.”
“What do you mean?”
“We got an approval service. You get one professional picture absolutely free, then you look
at the proofs and decide if you want any more pictures at some real special prices. If you’re
smart, see, you keep the one picture and there’s no more obligation.”
“That doesn’t seem smart for your company.”
“Oh, but it is. Almost everybody likes the one picture so well that they order from the proofs
we got for the rest. That’s how we get our profits. But sometimes poor folks just take the one,
and we kind of figure it’s like we’re helping people out.”
I took for granted there was a catch in it. Nobody gave us something for nothing even if my
mother persisted in her belief that one day we’d get lucky and hit the jackpot. It was why we went
to the movies on Wednesday night when they played bingo at intermission, and it was why she
always bought a whole book of raffle tickets from one of the kids at the Catholic school, and it
was why I had to help her with all the jingle contests from the magazines. But these sales offers
were different: the only way you got lucky was when the stuff that came was worth the money you
paid for it, and that didn’t happen too often.
“I don’t think my mom would be interested.”
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“Well, son, let me show you some of our pictures and maybe you’ll change your mind. Of
course, you’re going to have to let me come in.”
One rule we had was not to let strangers through the door. Well, I had backed down on my
first plan for getting even, so I decided I might as well let the man come on in. Besides, no one
might ever know the difference. I stepped back from the door and let the man find his way to the
couch.
“I thank you, son. It’s been mighty hard just tramping those sidewalks. You wouldn’t happen
to have a glass of lemonade or something?”
I fetched a bottle of orange soda from the straining refrigerator.
The man sipped at the soft drink appreciatively. “You’re a good boy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now let me show you those pictures.” Quickly he reached inside the briefcase and pulled
out a thin album.
“See this one—that’s the fellow who runs the grocery down the block.”
Mr. Miller was smiling back at me from a hand-tinted photograph. It was a good picture, I had
to admit. It looked just like him except that I had not noticed before how bald he was getting.
“And, here, that’s the Wright family. Maybe you know them.”
Carl Wright was in my grade at school. He was a tall kid who talked a lot about sports. Again
the picture was a good one, but somehow it made Carl look three or four years older. Also, he
was wearing what seemed to be a high school letterman’s sweater.
“Those are very nice,” I said.
“They’re more than nice,” the man corrected me. “I told you my company takes very special
pictures. Now look at this.”
There was one more photograph he showed me. Again it was of neighbors. I didn’t know the
family by name, but the father was also overseas. His wife and my mom exchanged pleasantries
sometimes, but both women seemed afraid to talk very much lest they come at last to their
common fear of widowhood.
73
The photograph showed a lovely family. There was a handsome man in uniform, the woman
we always met, and the child that I knew was still in a stroller. Yet again there was the slight
difference: in the photograph the child was perhaps three or four.
“When did your company take this picture?”
“We were by the house just last week. Why do you ask, son?”
“I don’t know, mister, but there’s something funny.”
The man grinned and finished the last of his soda. “It’s what makes our pictures so special.
They don’t show what’s now but what’s going to be. Think what this picture will mean to the lady
who’s in it. Why, she knows now her man is coming home and everything is going to be OK.
She gets this picture free, you understand. Now if she wants, she can ask to see the proofs for
some other pictures. Let me show you what I mean.”
He pulled out a long thin envelope. Inside were two strips of sepia photographs. I studied
them carefully with increasing bewilderment. The time in the pictures on each strip seemed to
reach from five to twenty years. On one row, however, the man in uniform was missing.
“You select the pictures you want, see, and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“But they’re different, like different stories.”
“You are a smart boy. Now let’s just say your neighbor here wants her husband to live a
good long time after he first gets home. Well, naturally, she’ll buy the pictures that show him
present with his family. Now if she didn’t like him very much, then maybe she’d take the other
strip.”
“You mean we could see the future?”
“Even better, you can select the future. What other company can make that offer?”
“Do those pictures cost very much?”
“I think the price is real reasonable. But that would be up to your mom now, wouldn’t it?”
I thought about my mother waiting for Lady Luck to smile at last. What, I wondered, would it
mean for her to see pictures of the future. Despite the heat of the day I was shivering. The man
had no business being in the house. Mom would probably tell me she didn’t believe in any such
nonsense as photographs of what was still to happen, and I’d get punished for letting someone
74
who was either a criminal or an obvious lunatic sit in our living room. But what if she wanted to
take a chance on him? And what if, once more, she didn’t win? That, I thought, would be even
worse than being punished for a second afternoon’s disobedience.
“Gee, I’m sorry, but I don’t think she’d be interested.
The man smiled. “Well now, I still got to thank you for your hospitality. And I guess my
company’s pictures ain’t for everyone.”
He put his stuff back into the briefcase, handed back my empty bottle, and got up from the
couch.
“Sure is a hot day outside. How come you ain’t out there playing?”
“It’s too hot. I’d rather be inside.”
“Well, son, maybe you’re making a wise choice.”
I watched him retreat down the front walk. The pictures had to be fakes, I told myself.
Otherwise the salesman wouldn’t have such a poor-fitting suit and scuffed shoes. Why, he’d
probably be a millionaire and never have to walk at all.
*
Fast forward. I’m in my early forties. That’s supposed to be a crucial period—the male
climacteric, some call it. It’s the time when you think about the choices that have defined your
life. Men get divorced or at least they have affairs, and they change jobs and act a bit crazy, all
because the awareness of mortality has hit home in a way that it never did before. The trouble
with me is that I went through all of that ten years early. Now I was divorced, barely making it as
a Hollywood agent trying to get jobs for has-beens and never-will-be’s, and more than suitably
neurotic. I sat home a lot and just stared out the window. That’s how I was able to see the
salesman coming.
He went down the side of the street across from me, then he came up the walk. I lived in a
dilapidated house closer to Washington Boulevard. It’s not too unlike the one in which I grew up,
but if I stay inside not it’s clearly by my own choice. Mom died twenty years ago. She had never
recovered from the ordeal of waiting through the months after we received word that my dad’s
plane had been downed over Okinawa. And I never forgave myself for not allowing her the
75
chance to avoid that agony. I suppose that guilt had haunted my marriage and made the breakup inevitable.
He rang the doorbell. I walked slowly across the living room and let him in. His cracked lips
forced a smile, and I could see from the look in his rheumy eyes that he remembered me.
“Got another bottle of pop for me, son?”
Obediently I obtained him a can of diet soda. He pulled at the aluminum pop-top and lifted
the can to his lips.
“You haven’t aged a bit,” I told him.
“I never do,” he answered slyly. “Just dress different, that’s all. Go in more for sport shirts
now. They got them at the Goodwill place, too.”
There was much I wanted to ask him—who he had been before he began going door to door
like this, where did he live when he wasn’t on the street, had he chosen to look and act like this
by himself or was it some cosmic punishment—yet the confusion of thoughts going through my
brain kept me from doing anything more than watch him guzzle his drink. Finally he wiped his
mouth with the back of his wrist and grinned at me.
“Ever see any of those old neighbors?”
I shook my head. After the war Mr. Miller had sold out his grocery and moved away. Carl
Wright had gone on to college at U.C.L.A. and then become a football coach in another state.
The woman my mother and I used to meet had stayed in the same place, but after we got word
that Dad was missing in action she avoided us as though somehow it was her fault that we were
the ones left to grieve.
“I don’t have much of a future, I’m afraid.”
“You sure are a sulky one, ain’t you? Thing is, the camera sees you the way you make
yourself be at the time. Make yourself someone different and all bets are off. Well, if you’re still
not interested….”
He got up to go but impulsively I grabbed his shoulder. “Do you really mean I can still get my
picture taken?”
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“If you want, the fellow with the camera can come this evening. Then I’ll drop by in maybe a
week with your free picture and your proofs. That’s when we talk about terms.”
“I still get one free picture, no obligation whatsoever?
“Yep.”
“And it’s a portrait of how I’m going to look just a few years in the future?”
“That’s how we do it. Keep in mind it’s a picture based on what you’ve made yourself into
right now.”
“OK,” I said, “so what have we got to lose?”
*
The kid who took the picture explained that he was still in college. He didn’t know anything
more about the company he worked for than that some guy who looked like a bum had recruited
him. He used his own camera, an expensive reflect mounted on a tripod, but the company
supplied the film and processed the prints. “They pay good money. I just take my pictures and
don’t ask questions.”
I took the hint and stopped trying to find out more about how this mysterious company did its
business. The kid took half a dozen poses, then left.
A week later the salesman returned. He pulled my picture out of a battered leather briefcase
that could have been the twin of the one I remembered from my childhood.
“Well, son, this is it, your second chance.”
It was the photograph of an infant. I didn’t ask to see the proofs.
“But I could be different?”
“Up to you, son. It’s all up to you.”
*
I’m a success today, with A-list clients who tell me I’m the best in the business. What always
gets to them, though, is the huge portrait of an infant that I have hanging in my office. I had it
made from the one picture that I was given a long time back. I ask potential new clients what
they see in it, then I keep those who give me the right answer.
77
And what’s that, you ask. Well, think of any time you see the picture of an infant. Maybe
you’ll think of the future that lies ahead for that child, how with any luck it will become a happy
adult. But if you look at the picture I’ve got and you have any real sensitivity, you’ll think of
something else. You’ll think of a wasted past and a rebirth with still fewer possibilities because of
it. And maybe you’ll decide not to throw away the present quite so easily.
78
15. I MEET JENNIFER
Graham leaned back. He had finished his chop and his drink, and Sunny was done with her
salad.
I had eaten very little of my sandwich.
“It was still a free picture, understand. But it made me realize the show didn’t have to be
over. It’s what I tell young Miss Barkley here. We can always remake ourselves. I decided to do
an impersonation of Colonel Parker, Elvis’s manager. I even affected a Southern accent. Damn
if that didn’t get me more clients.”
“Including Elton John and Stevie Wonder,” I said.
“Briefly, in both cases. And I’m still around a generation later. Now I know the time is getting
shorter, but that doesn’t scare me. That’s the irony, isn’t it? When I was young I was ready to
say I didn’t have a future. Now that I’m so damn old with whatever is wrong in my chest I do say I
have a future, and I’ll wrestle the devil for every extra minute I can get.”
It made sense to me. I was now feeling very ashamed of the way I had been feeling just a
couple of days earlier. Sure, my future was ahead of me. I’d just have to make of it what I could.
*
I picked up the check. In the parking lot Sunny seemed reluctant to let me go.
“You’ve had things happen to you,” she said. “And you don’t know what to make of them.”
“Are you trying to prove you’re psychic?” I asked.
“Thorne, don’t make fun of me. Just because I’m still a kid in your eyes doesn’t mean I can’t
get a feeling for what’s going on with you.”
“Sunny, I don’t mean to put you down. But I have had something happen and it made me
think I’d really lost it until I listened to Harlan back there. Does the word “demonmonger” mean
anything to you?”
“I’ve never heard it before now. What does it mean?”
I tried to explain. “A demonmonger is someone who seems just like you or me, only maybe
the kind of individual we’d be inclined to dismiss. Like the picture salesman Harlan was talking
79
about. I have a friend who met someone who was a sheriff in the sticks. And I met someone
who came off like a sharpie from the sidewalks of New York. They appear immortal and talk
about having different forms. And they come along to offer us something marvelous.”
“Wow,” Sunny said. “I’ve never had an experience like that.”
“Don’t wish for it, either. I’m still trying to reason out whether I’m sane.”
“Are you married?” Sunny asked suddenly. “Or living with someone?”
I was startled by the question.
“I’m not asking for myself, silly. I’m way too young for you. But it hit me that you must be all
alone right now.”
“I am.” Impulsively I gave Sunny the skinny on what had happened with my marriage.
“So you’re free,” she said.
“I still want her back. And I want our kids.”
“Maybe you’re supposed to let go of her. You can still share the kids.”
“They’re in Texas and I’m here in la-la land.”
“I want you to meet someone. Don’t say no right away. She’s my therapist. A nice lady,
about your age, and she’s maybe able to relate to what you’re talking about. She told me once
that as a child she had been possessed. I forget how that came up, unless maybe I was saying
that it must be a devil that was keeping me from being sober.”
*
Sunny arranged it. I’d show up at a particular watering hole along Santa Monica Boulevard
around seven. We could have a drink, but whether we’d have dinner was up to how we got along
in the first fifteen minutes. Her name was Jennifer McCleary.
Traffic from the valley was more miserable than usual. Somewhere I had read that the 101
and the 405 were the most heavily used freeways in the country, and this evening it seemed that
even without the all too frequent sigalert they both were only marginally better than parking lots. I
was a half hour late, and I was ready to accept that the woman had given up on me. At least
there was no one matching Sunny’s description who was not already deep in conversation with
another male.
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“Thorne Webster?”
I spun around. The woman who had touched my shoulder was strikingly attractive. She was
dressed in a dark blouse and skirt with no jewelry, and her makeup was understated, barely
concealing the freckles on her fair skin. There were streaks of gray in her dark brown hair, which
she wore back in a ponytail.
“The traffic was miserable tonight, and I was so afraid you would think I stood you up.”
“Miss McCleary?”
“Call me Jennifer. Sunny described you very well. And she was very definite about how I
should greet you. ‘Firm handshake, look him in the eyes, smile, and realize he’s probably scared
to death, so don’t make any sudden moves.’ Well, you don’t look scared to death.”
“Uh, how much has she told you?”
“Enough to know something spooky has been happening. She said you’d tell me more when
you were ready.”
I had to laugh. “I might never be ready. You’re really a psychiatrist?”
“I really am. I got my MD, then decided to specialize with kids who had problems. Since you
might be outside the age range of my clientele I think you’re safe to see me just as a woman who
likes to listen to stories. I promise not to get out my Thorazine.”
“Do you want a drink? We’re supposed to have fifteen minutes before making the dread
decision about dinner.”
“Look, I’d rather have plum wine with a nice Chinese dinner as soon as possible, and there’s
a place in Santa Monica that I always go to. We can take my car. I promise, no sudden moves.”
*
Going across Santa Monica Boulevard out towards the beach, Jennifer gave me the short
version of her biography. Until she was fifteen her father had taught English at a community
college just north of the city, then he took a sabbatical to do more research for a book that would
follow up on one he had already published about Shakespeare’s use of the occult in his plays.
One year stretched into three, and Jennifer had returned to California on a full scholarship to
Stanford.
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“Dad didn’t really want to come home. My mother had been institutionalized when I was ten,
right after I went through what Sunny probably told you was my being possessed, and until her
death five years ago she was in a state of encephalitic lethargica. If you ever saw the Robin
Williams’ film Awakenings you’ll know what that is. There was nothing he could do for her, and
she never acknowledged either of us, although there is always the question of whether
somewhere deep inside she knew we were there when we visited. It was because of my mother
that I went into medicine, although I realized after I began my work in psychiatry that I was meant
to work with kids rather than adults.”
“Is your father still in England?”
“Yes, he is. He teaches over there and still plans to come out with that second book. In the
first he argued that Shakespeare himself had been part of a coven of witches—the legend is that
they raised the storm that sunk the Spanish Armada--and he what he wants to do now is
establish the continuity between the group then and the modern-day Wiccans. Every so often
there seems to be a breakthrough, like a trove of old letters, but it’s never enough. He’s
stubborn, though. I think you’ll like him.”
“There’s a chance I’ll meet him?”
“Thorne, if we get married you have to do the old-fashioned thing and ask for my hand.”
I started coughing.
“Oh, I just did what Sunny told me not to. I made a sudden move.”
“That,” I said, “is a definite understatement. And you promised.”
She began laughing. “I just wanted to get that out of the way. Maybe we’ll hit it off, maybe
we won’t. I don’t mind being single, and you’re on the rebound and probably better off not getting
too involved with anyone.”
“Are you always this direct?”
“No, actually I’m fairly reserved. I suppose it’s just the excitement of meeting someone else
who has had an encounter with a demonmonger.”
“Like some of your patients?”
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”Like myself. Hope you don’t mind my showing you mine before you show me yours.
Psychologically speaking, of course.”
I joined in the laughter. “Of course.” I liked her a lot already.
83
THE CHANGELING
I had just started in private practice in pediatric psychiatry, but already I had more referrals
than I could handle in good conscience. I decided early on to avoid the cases that seemed most
likely a matter of malfunctioning brain chemistry. Any doctor could prescribe lithium and the other
chemicals, but I wanted to use my training to deal with kids who might too easily be seen as just
delusional and so not be taken seriously.
I had been a child like that. When I was ten a girl friend and I had found an old amulet at the
site of one of the early California ranchos now being developed for a shopping center. Afterward
I went through a severe personality change. Things started happening around me that friends of
my father, individuals very much into modern-day witchcraft, interpreted as the manifestation of
some entity linked to the amulet. I was able to give him a name—Mendaga—and I invented a
few stories about how he had taken on human form and been in love with various women ahead
of me, especially a Spanish princess at the time of the Armada and the daughter of whoever once
owned the property where we had found the amulet. Good bodice-ripper stuff. Of course, I had
been aware of my dad’s theory that Shakespeare was part of a coven that had invoked demonic
powers to stop the Armada, so it could be said I was just building on this.
Anyway, my dad’s friends held some kind of ceremony that was meant to be an exorcism. It
seemed to have worked. Mendaga was gone and I was just a normal kid again. I had only vague
memories of what had been going on inside my head—the delusions, if you want to call them
that—and the spooky stuff that my friends in the field of parapsychology call PK—
psychokinesis—was over.
I wish I could say everything was back to normal with my family, but it wasn’t. The strain had
been particularly hard on my mother, and she had her breakdown almost immediately. Then she
slipped into a cataleptic state and we lost her forever. I felt a lot of guilt, as though possibly my
mother had chosen to have this force take over her awareness in order to spare me. That’s when
I decided I had to become a doctor and a shrink. I’d get my degree and I’d be able to do
something to bring her back. She died while I was still in residency, and I switched my focus to
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working with children, especially those who seemed to be going through anything similar to what
had happened with me.
Now you need to understand that all along I had remained convinced that there were no
supernatural entities out to haunt our own cozy little world. The Gospel stuff about Jesus
negotiating with a pack of demons to leave the humans they afflicted and instead take up
residence in a herd of pigs that promptly rushes off a cliff was and could be no more real than
having Lot’s wife turn into a pillar of salt after angels show up and tell the family that it’s time to
move. That did not rule out there being real psychic phenomena, but I was convinced that the
key to anything here was inside the human brain, not out in some supernatural realm. I was a
scientist determined to help children recognize that they were more in charge of things than they
or certainly their parents imagined. As often as not I would set up something that was a little like
the exorcism I had gone through, although with none of the more scary elements.
And I had a lot of success. Perhaps most kids have imaginary friends, and with some the
boundary between what they make up and what seems real does get blurred. I worked on getting
my clients to get over their fears, as when they would think their invisible playmates were out to
hurt them or the ones they loved. I was so good, in fact, that a local columnist did a story on me
as the expert on running off the bogeyman and scaring away the monster that lived under the
bed. That was publicity I did not need and certainly did not want. But it was also what led to what
might be called my conversion.
I had a message a few days after the column ran in the Los Angeles Times. By now I was
instructing my receptionist just to explain that I was not taking any new clients, but when I heard
that this was Magdalena Ramirez, the wife of the rising Chicano artist Paco Ramirez, I made an
exception. I had seen Paco’s work at several local galleries, and I had kept thinking I should buy
a few of his pieces before they moved completely out of my price range.
What was most extraordinary about his style was that it reminded me of some of the Goya
paintings I had seen in Madrid although otherwise the use of color and imagery was like that of
Frida Kahlo. They were powerful, especially one that was titled “Blue Mirrors” depicting a
somewhat ghostly older woman dancing in front of a panel of mirrors that reflected vibrant images
85
of what might have been herself in earlier years. Like Frida, he had inserted a balloon and it read
yo amo sus vidas locas—“I love her crazy lives.” I found it marvelous that a male could sense
something so profound about a woman’s needs.
I could not even begin to imagine what really lay behind this and all the other paintings. And
then I met Magdalena and her son.
Diego was ten and he appeared severely autistic. He was a beautiful child with black curly
hair and a seraphic smile. But he did not look at you, and he did not seem to hear anything you
said. Although he walked normally into my office and sat where his mother placed him, it was as
though he was so wrapped up in a world of his own that anything else was impossible.
Magdalena herself was a strikingly handsome woman. She radiated warmth, and unlike
many of the parents of the kids I treated she did not come across as overly anxious.
She filled me in on what had happened. Diego had been an absolutely normal infant and
toddler, bright and somewhat mischievous. He had been named for the great Mexican artist
Diego Rivera, Frida’s husband, at a time when Paco was just getting started as an artist. His day
job was as a truck driver, and Magdalena was a secretary at a local school. Her mother looked
after Diego until what Magdalena called his change.
“No symptoms of anything before that?” I asked.
“Nothing. What made my day coming home was having him rush up to me and grab me
around the waist. Then, one afternoon, I had this call at school. Mama was hysterical. Diego
was four at the time, and usually he was out playing in the yard all day. She had looked out and
something seemed wrong. For one thing, the gate, which she was sure she had latched, was
swinging open, and Diego was standing there waving to someone or something out on the street.
She ran out and it was as though Diego was in a trance of sorts. He kept waving until she
dragged him back into the house. And then he just started smiling but said nothing and did not
seem even to hear anything she said.”
“And that’s how he’s been for the past six years?”
“Yes. He lets himself be dressed and fed, but there’s no recognition of anything else. He’ll
sit in one place all day if we let him. We tried taking him to a school for the disabled, and he sat
86
in class the same way. Since he didn’t bother anyone the teachers learned just to leave him
alone. Eventually we signed a form that he was being home-schooled. Quite a joke.”
“And you’ve been to other doctors.”
“Many. After Paco’s career began taking off we were able to afford the best. We even had a
succession of nannies, but they’d be with us just a few weeks before they quit, saying that there
was something too spooky about him. Luckily I no longer had to work, so I stayed home with
him.”
“Spooky?”
“That’s maybe the best word. Usually autistic children are anything but quiet. Diego doesn’t
move. He just sits and smiles.”
“And you’ve had all the regular scans?”
“Absolutely normal. There’s activity in the brain that’s just what you would expect with
someone fully awake and functioning. But it’s as though he’s in a totally different world with his
thoughts.”
I did not feel especially optimistic at that point. I needed to be able to communicate with a
patient, and that’s what seemed impossible.
“I haven’t told you everything,” Magdalena said. “And this is something I’m not supposed to
tell anyone.”
I leaned back. Here it comes, I thought. As often as not I would finally get parents to admit
that there had been an episode of sexual abuse that triggered substantial psychic damage, and
we would talk about a process of therapy that had to include them as well as the child. But I was
not ready for what I heard now.
“Paco doesn’t do those paintings that have made him so famous. They’re Diego’s.”
I glanced at the smiling child. “Come again, please.”
“I said, Diego does those paintings. Either that, or someone is there with him.”
She explained. It was only weeks after Diego had gone into this trance state that they went
into his room in the morning and found a pencil sketch. It was the picture of a young man holding
a bouquet of flowers and staring wistfully at a window.
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“It was incredible. We used to encourage Diego to draw, but he never seemed to like it too
much, and he never got much past stick figures. This was something different, and I thought at
first that maybe Paco had left it there. He was as amazed as I was, especially since the feeling in
it was so intense. Artistically it was way beyond what he was doing at the time.”
“And Paco passed it off as his own,” I said.
“We needed money, and Paco took it to a gallery that handled new artists on a commission
basis. It blew the owner away, and a few days later we had a call that it had sold for three
hundred dollars.”
“And Diego did more drawings.”
“Paco set up an easel in his room. He left charcoal and paints. In the next few weeks there
were a few more sketches, then oils.”
“Did you see how Diego did all this?” Already I was thinking about the autistic savants I had
researched while in residency. It seemed as though having something shut down in the brain,
like the ability to interact socially that characterized autism, occasionally allowed extraordinary
talents to emerge.
“That’s the point,” she said. “If you ever watched Diego he would not move. If someone
stayed in the room with him at night he never left his bed. We even tried to install a video
monitor, but if it was on then it was as though he knew this and nothing would happen.”
“But Paco kept selling these works.”
“He did. After the first showing and the glowing reviews we realized that there was no way
we could go back and tell the truth. First off, it would seem unbelievable that a child could do this
kind of work, even though there have been a few kids—like Alexandra Nechita and Akiane
Kramarik--who established their artistic reputations before they left grade school. But the real
problem is that Paco would have to admit that he is a fraud. He could not live with that.”
“So isn’t there a risk that if anyone could snap Diego out of his present state then the truth
would come out?”
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Madgalena agreed. The other side of the coin was that Diego was being denied the
recognition that really belonged to him. As a mother she found herself developing an increasing
amount of resentment toward her husband for doing this.
“We needed the money at the beginning, and then the fame started going to Paco’s head.
The fame and the women. He’s had several affairs, but he tells me I should mind my own
business and just take care of our meal ticket. God, I hate this machismo thing.”
So there was resentment for several reasons. No, Paco did not know that she had brought
Diego to see me. And if there were even the suspicion that she had told the family secret he was
likely to do more than just break a rib, as he had done when she confronted him about his most
recent fling.
I had the fleeting thought that I might not be particularly safe, either.
*
I arranged to see Diego on a weekly basis. For the first two weeks, while Magdalena sat by, I
tried all my usual tricks with no success. The third time I had the bright idea to ask Magdalena
just to wait outside. And that’s when it happened.
I had my back to Diego when I heard him speak.
“Mendaga still loves you, Jennifer. You should never have sent him away.”
I almost fainted. Spinning around I saw no change on the child’s face.
“Diego, you talked to me.”
Nothing.
I knew then that somehow, as with his painting, Diego could not be subject to direct
observation. I went over to the window and looked out.
“Diego, can you talk to me now?”
“Yes, Jennifer, I can.”
This was not really a child’s voice even though the timbre was what I’d expect to hear from a
little boy his age.
I gripped the ledge. “Why did you say anything about Mendaga? How could you know about
him?”
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“That’s not important. You just needed to know. He didn’t understand what he had done
wrong. They never do.”
“You’re not a child, are you?”
“I’m in a child’s form.”
“Are you a demon?”
“No, Jennifer, I’m something else. I deal in demons, kind of an intermediary. You know, buy
and sell. I’m more human than not, and that means I have a biography. Really a succession of
biographies.”
“Why Diego?”
“I came to the gate and saw him playing. He wasn’t afraid of me, and I so wanted to have
more time on this earth. Above all, there were things I wanted to draw. I saw how this could be
arranged.”
“So you’re the artist, not Diego.”
“Aren’t my paintings beautiful?”
I had to admit they were. “I knew you had the soul to appreciate them. I’ll have one just for
you. Magdalena can bring it to you.”
“Look, do you have a name of your own?”
“You know the old stories. If I told you you’d have power over me.”
“So you’re going to keep this little boy away from his mother?”
“No, I’m not. I accept that it’s time to go on. But it won’t be today. I have to do your
painting.”
*
Late the following morning my receptionist told me that Magdalena was calling in a state of
excitement.
I picked up the phone.
“Dr. McCleary, I don’t know what you did but he’s back. This morning I went into his room
and he leaped out of bed and just grabbed me around the waist the way he did before all this
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happened. And then he asked whether he could have bacon and eggs for breakfast. Oh, God, I
can’t believe it.”
The painting came a few days later. It showed a young woman holding an amulet in front of
an adobe building surrounded by cactus. I recognized myself, and I remembered the amulet.
The balloon said ya me ama—“he loves me still.”
I heard on the news almost a year later that the noted artist Paco Ramirez was shot and
killed by the police after defying a court order to stay away from his estranged wife. He had been
waving a gun and screaming obscenities. His last words had been that he would kill everyone
who had stolen his genius from him. Magdalena and I were the only ones who could know what
he meant, and I was happy that we both were still alive.
I did see Diego again to help him get through his father’s death. He was just a normal kid. I
tried to get him to draw but he showed no special ability. His last painting was on the wall in my
office. He looked at it with no recognition.
“That’s a creepy painting. The girl looks like you. Is that why you have it?”
“Something like that,” I said. “And it’s a reminder that someone still loves me.”
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17. JENNIFER ATTEMPTS AN EXPLANATION
“Now you know my demonmonger story. It’s time for you to tell me yours.”
She had pulled along the curb by her restaurant. A young Asian in a red jacket hurried over
to open the doors. She took the ticket for valet parking and had me follow her up to the door. I
saw that there were several groups waiting for tables, but as soon as we stepped inside we were
immediately greeted by the hostess and directed to climb the stairs to a dining area on the
second floor.
“Dr. McCleary, we have your favorite table. We are so honored that you were able to come
this evening.”
The booth was secluded with a view of the street below. We had barely sat down when a
waiter arrived with menus, bowed, and stepped away.
“Thanks, Phil,” Jennifer said. “A wonderful kid, just graduated UCLA and going on to med
school back east.”
“Everyone seems to know you here.”
She smiled. “I do come here often. Mrs. Lee is the owner, and we’ve become good friends.
Phil is her nephew. But we have time before we order. I want to hear your story. Phil’s bringing
you a scotch and water, compliments of the house.”
The waiter was back with my drink. “How did you know I like scotch and water? And how did
you order it?
“It’s a ritual. Whenever I come here with a man Phil always brings the same thing. I think
Mrs. Lee told him to do it as a test.”
I felt a sudden twinge of jealousy thinking of Jennifer’s other dinner partners. The drink itself
was strong and very good, not a cheap house blend. I sipped it appreciatively.
“Johnny Walker Blue Label. My theory is that the test is how well you react. If you just
guzzled it down I’m supposed to hurry though the meal and get rid of you. If you didn’t seem to
like it at all I suspect Mrs. Lee might not even let you order because it would mean you could
never appreciate anything she would have prepared. Let’s just say you’ve passed just fine.”
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“So far anyway. Are there other rituals I should expect?”
“Once we’re through the dinner Mrs. Lee will probably want to join us. She always has a
story for me from her life in China. She’s from the north, near Xian. Most Chinese restaurants
serve Cantonese dishes, but she insists on the kind of food she grew up with. She’ll serve rice
but wonders why anyone would prefer it to her noodles and dumplings. You should probably let
me order so that you can have some of her specialties. But that’s later. Right now I’m expecting
to hear about your demonmonger.”
I took a deep breath and began telling her about the events starting two nights before with my
strange email. I described my meeting with Malarkey and summed up his story about Jeremy
Delesco, now adding how I had met earlier in the day with Harlan Graham, who had figured in the
story.
She listened quietly, then paused before commenting as though she needed to choose her
words very carefully.
“So how crazy is this?” I asked.
She shook her head. “It’s not crazy at all. Ever since I treated Diego Ramirez I’ve been on
the lookout for reports that in any way matched up. Bit by bit I’ve accumulated enough evidence
about what you call demonmongers to convince me that they are a special fraternity, just the way
Malarkey described them to you.”
“So you really are a convert.”
“I think there are personalities out there that are not linked to whatever we usually call reality
but seem to transcend it. So to that extent I’m no longer the pure skeptic. How things got to be
this way is something else, and I think it is wiser not to speculate. About every culture has its
folklore with various groupings of supernatural entities--things that go bump in the night, or worse.
And ghosts are always part of the story, of course. What is new, I think, is this business of having
individuals who mediate worlds, like peddlers traveling from one country to another. And
peddlers, you know, are not exactly classy businessmen.”
I thought of Malarkey in his thrift-shop outfit. And there was Graham’s seedy picture man.
“Like agents for demons,” I said.
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“To some extent. The thing that stood out was how, like peddlers, they try to adapt to the
cultural expectations of the places where they find themselves but are never completely
successful in doing so.”
“So are they human beings, like you and me.”
“I think they were, once. Then somehow they become like what they’re selling. They
become more, well, supernatural. What distinguishes them is that they still have some of the
same expectations they did before. Like that entity that possessed Diego. He had been an artist,
and he wanted another chance to express himself.”
“What was Mendaga, then?”
“Not at all the same thing. And I was not possessed, at least not in the same way. Our
contact had been through the amulet, and maybe my dad is right about there having been a
coven in Queen Elizabeth’s time. What I think, though, is that those people did not just summon
a supernatural force but actually created it.”
“So witches are demonmongers?”
“Oh, no, not at all. I think of there always having been some kind of trade in the supernatural.
What we’re calling demonmongers fit into a completely different category of dealer. And my bet
is that they come to exist precisely when an old belief system is disappearing. It’s as though the
old gods and all their accompanying courts are in danger of fading away into oblivion unless they
can find new employment. So they choose new intermediaries and in some ways make those
individuals more like themselves.”
The gods have chosen you. I remembered the email from two nights before, and I
remembered the theme of Malarkey’s story. So was I being called to be a demonmonger myself?
No, this was preposterous. It had to be.
Paul was back for our order. Jennifer decided we’d have yangrou paomo, which was some
kind of soup with noodles, and a selection of Mrs. Lee’s dumplings. And plum wine, of course.
The food came quicky, and it was delicious.
We had barely finished when, as Jennifer said she would, Mrs. Lee came to join us. I took for
granted that I must have passed her test with the scotch.
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Jennifer explained that I was a screenwriter. This seemed to intrigue her, and I thought for a
moment I would be subjected to the usual barrage of questions about the programs I might have
written for and the stars who might have been in them. Instead, she glanced around nervously as
though it might not be safe to tell me her thoughts.
“I like story-tellers,” she said very softly. “The gods speak through them.”
“Mrs. Lee, you tell stories all the time,” Jennifer said. “Do you mean the gods speak through
you?”
“Oh, I think so sometimes. And I know they want to speak through this young man, even if he
has not always been willing to let them.”
I hardly minded being called young, but, given the conversation Jennifer and I had been
having, the rest was more than a little disturbing. Mrs. Lee must have seen the stricken look on
my face. “Oh, I do not mean to offend you. Please, accept my apologies.”
She signaled Paul, who quickly was at my side with a glass of brandy. “Here,” she said, “you
drink this while I tell a story. It is about someone from my village in China, and it is all true.”
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96
THE FOX BRIDE
Hu Guanhua knew that China would change, but he had no idea how fast. Just two
years before they heard that Chairman Mao had died, his village near the old city of Xian learned
of the good fortune of their neighbors some miles to the east. Peasants digging a well had come
across an almost unbelievable wonder, the tomb of the emperor Qin Shi Huang with his terra
cotta army of life-size warriors and horses. The government, fully aware of the extraordinary
significance of this find, began further excavations and prepared the plans for a museum on the
site. Some people with the right connections were going to get very rich.
Rumors flew that there were other sites still awaiting discovery. One story that swept
through the village was that while their neighbors had only uncovered statues, below their own
communal farms was the site where Emperor Xin had established a treasury for the gold and
silver he would need for his expenses in the afterlife.
Hu thought this was ridiculous. He was close to thirty at the time, and as one of the first
from the area allowed to study out of the country he felt a certain superiority, especially over the
men and women of his parents’ generation who had lived through the Cultural Revolution when
education appeared to begin and end with memorizing the sayings of China’s glorious leader. He
had his degree in agriculture from California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, and his job
was to assist the local farmers in improving their harvests. Their early reluctance to accept
change had given way to a greater willingness to adopt new technologies if it meant more cash.
The last thing he needed was to have freelance excavations in the fields. Traveling
around the region he still found many of the so-called farmer paintings from Mao’s time that
depicted impossible results such as corn stalks tall enough to interfere with airplane flight paths or
swine as large as elephants. It was as though, imbued with the right outlook, the farmers could
magically induce nature to exceed her limits to the glory of the People’s Republic. Hu shuddered
at the thought that this same outlook would persist if these same people became devoutly
Communist amateur archaeologists. The landscape would be hopelessly pitted and the healthy
topsoil lost under the rocks that would be dug up.
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Old Hao was one of the men he tried to convince to help him dispel this fantasy. The
village elder had been in the army when Mao finally wrestled control of the mainland from Chiang
Kai Shek and his American supporters, and so he had the respect of all good members of the
Party. Hu also thought of him as sufficiently used to the ways of the world to appreciate his
concerns.
Hao in turn saw Hu as one of a new generation that he did not understand. Because he
had an uncle who was important in the Party the young man had been permitted to travel to the
heart of the capitalist world. He had gone to school in a place that Hao learned was near
Hollywood, which meant that Hu most likely had partied with movie stars and other corrupt
individuals. On his return he had been sent to enlighten honest peasants on new ways to work
the same soil that had been worked by the grandparents of their grandparents back through
uncountable generations. However, Hao was shrewd enough never to voice his misgivings,
which he was sure led Hu to think that he might be an ally.
Not that Hao was any more patient with those in the village who hoped to find buried
treasure. It could be true, he thought, but any such discovery was bound to disrupt their familiar
ways still further.
Hu felt the weight of his first assignment. His bosses in the Party expected him to
increase production. His own parents, living in another village close to Xian, awaited his weekly
visits in order to show off still another young woman from the region. They respected the new
ways enough to allow Hu to make his own choice of a bride, but they were already older than
most other men and women with grandchildren and secretly they were concerned that Hu’s time
overseas and his promising future in the Party had made him less willing to take a wife from a
peasant family.
The secret that Hu could never share with anyone on this side of the Pacific was that he
had no interest at all in finding a wife. He had discovered in California that he was a homosexual,
and there was a willing partner waiting for him if he ever returned. The guy’s nickname was
Charlie Chan. Hu had met him at a bar after one of his classes, when again he had been
subjected to the now tired routine of someone imitating the American comedians Bud Abbot and
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Lou Costello. “Who’s on first?” was not funny to him the first time he heard it, and he thought the
repeated play on his name simply a mean-spirited display of racism.
“Get a doctorate and I’ll call you Dr. Who,” Charlie had said before buying him another
beer. Charlie, it turned out, had studied in England and become addicted to the British television
series about a time-traveling adventurer. Now Hu had laughed. What followed was a subdued
courtship followed by a passionate week in Charlie’s apartment just prior to Hu’s return to China.
Now they exchanged monthly letters carefully edited to avoid anything of a more personal nature.
The trick, Hu recognized, was to take his job a day at a time, hoping against hope that his
service to the Party would be rewarded with a chance to return to California.
*
On a blustery afternoon Hu had shared a meager midday meal in the fields with Hao and
a few of his cronies. Discussion centered on the effort some of the treasure-hunting villagers had
made to dig around a now unused well. All that had happened was that they had dislodged a den
of red foxes. Some saw this as a very bad omen.
“What if these are hu li jing?” One man had asked, referring to the local superstition that
there were demonic entities that could change their form from that of a fox to that of a seductive
woman.
“Perhaps we should inform Mr. Hu that his relatives are now homeless,” another had
joked. The play on words was that in the nationally established dialect, elsewhere called
Mandarin, hu was a fox. It also was the word for a barbarian, and the fact that he had recently
come from the great land of barbarians to the east meant that their agricultural expert seemed
well-named.
Hu was as impatient with these quips as he had been with the jokes in California.
Courtesy demanded that he not show this, however. He forced a polite smile and steered the
conversation back to the tasks set for the week.
Hao assured him that all would be done properly. Hu returned to his jeep and began
driving out of the fields.
The woman seemed to come out of nowhere ahead of him. Hu jammed on his brakes.
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“Please watch out,” he shouted. “Get out of the road.”
“Mr. Hu,” she called back. “You must allow me to come with you.”
Hu was surprised. He did not recognize this woman. She was strikingly beautiful, with
unsually sharp features that suggested an ethnic background other than Han.
“How do you know my name?” he asked. “And what are you doing out here so far from
home.”
“Mr. Hu, I do not have a home, thanks to your friends from the village.”
“What do you mean?”
“We used to live out there,” she said, pointing out to a spot on the horizon. “Greedy men
have razed it.”
Now Hu thought he understood the joke. First he would be told about the hu li jing at his
meal and then this woman, whoever she was, would appear before him.
He was not amused and he now felt no need to be courteous.
“Very funny,” he said. “Was it Hao who put you up to this?”
“No one has put me up to anything,” she said. “And old Hao is a fool. He always was,
just as was his worthless father. His uncle, however, was very different. My mother had told me
how much she enjoyed her time with him.”
Hu was puzzled. He tried to recall what he could of Hao’s family. Yes, there was a story
about his father’s brother, who left his family and disappeared into the fields, eventually to be
found emaciated and raving. He had died not long after, and the gossip was that he had been
seduced by a hu li jing, his vital forces drawn out from him by the demon’s insatiable demands on
his body.
“No,” he said, “you are trying to frighten me with superstitions. That will not work, young
woman. I am a good Communist and that means I do not believe in supernatural nonsense.”
The woman laughed. “I have not asked you to believe in anything. I am here and so are
you, and I have a solution to the problem that is most vexing for you.”
“What problem?” Hu asked. “How to make crops grow faster?”
“How you will be reunited with Charlie Chan.”
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Hu forced himself to remain calm. This was impossible, he told himself. He had been so
discreet. No, unless the Party had its spies even in a California bar, Charlie was his secret, his
real name never disclosed.
“The man you call Charlie Chan is one of us. He too is a hu li jing.”
Hu remembered the sex that had been out of this world. Charlie had joked that he was
just a gay young fox, and his traditional Chinese parents would be very disapproving.
“I am going to offer you an arrangement,” she said. “You may accept it or not. If you do,
then I promise you will return to California. If not, well, I will do nothing to harm you, but you will
always regret passing up this opportunity.”
*
Hu hesitated only a short while. What did he have to lose, he thought.
That evening Hu appeared at his father’s house with a beautiful young woman. He
explained that she was from a distant village, but her parents had died in a tragic accident.
Perhaps his own family would be willing to take her in.
Struck by her beauty, his parents agreed. Immediately they thought of the grandchildren
that might be theirs if the young woman showed enough interest in their son, the bookworm.
Out in the fields all talk about digging for treasure soon ended. The weather was proving
extraordinarily beneficent, and already there was talk that the crop yield this year would surpass
even the most extravagant projections. Corn had never grown higher, and the pigs seemed to
swell in size. Hao and the others joked that they should credit Hu Guanhua and the marvelous
education he had received in California. They would even recommend that he should return so
that he could learn still more.
Hu and the beautiful young woman were married in a ceremony that was only partly
traditional, since she had no parents from whom she could be stolen.
“Ah, is it not wonderful how things have turned out?” his mother asked her husband.
“They will be gone only a few years in California, and when they return we will see our
grandchildren.”
Her husband agreed. It would be only a few years.
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*
Hu did not return for a number of years. He had been invited to teach at Cal Poly
Pomona, and he directed a number of research projects that brought together both Chinese and
American students. He was still very private, although a number of his grad students commented
that he seemed to be closer in some way to his brother-in-law Charlie than he was to his
remarkably beautiful wife.
There were no children. Hu’s parents finally reconciled themselves to this. At least their
son was a credit to his family and his village.
Only old Hao seemed to suspect the truth. He had become very wealthy as China left
behind the old system and allowed more room for the true entrepreneur. He devoted some of his
resources to establishing a wilderness area where the foxes could run undisturbed.
Writing to
Hu, Hao told him that Mrs. Hu would have a special place to stay whenever they chose to return.
Her family probably still missed her.
Hu did come back to the Xian area nearly twenty years after he had left it. No one
recalled seeing his wife from the time they arrived until it was time for them to return to the United
States. At the airport she had a parting gift for old Hao, who had accompanied them.
It was a couple of gold coins dating from the time of Qin Shi Huang. “From my mother,
who loved your uncle,” she said. “We found them in our old home, which is now in the sanctuary
you have set up for us. Do not go back on your word.”
Hao nodded. He knew better than to anger a hu li jing.
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103
19. JACK HAS MISGIVINGS
Jennifer drove us back to where I had left my car.
“So do we do this again?” I asked.
“I’m willing,” she said. “But you did surprise me tonight.”
“How was that?”
“You didn’t say anything about wanting to meet Mrs. Hu.”
I nodded. After getting together with Harlan Graham I was no longer quite so sure what I
would learn if I actually met another of the people from the stories I was hearing.
“I’d probably meet a nice Chinese matron who would act like I’m crazy if I asked her
about foxes. And if she is what Mrs. Lee has said, then it might be dangerous.”
“After hanging out with a demonmonger you’re scared of a Chinese lady vampire who is
just trying to live a respectable life in a new country?”
“Don’t make fun. You’ve had a lot longer to get used to all this than I have. And,
anyway, you’re not the one who’s being asked to join a club I’m not sure I would want to be
in.”
“Paraphrasing Groucho Marx, if they let someone like you in you’re not sure you’d want
to belong? And, regardless, we still don’t know what being chosen by the gods is supposed
to mean. In some way we’re all chosen, although I don’t think any of us quite understands by
whom or for what.”
“And I don’t know the price. It’s like being invited to the country club but no one tells you
the initiation fee or the dues.”
“Like the old saying about being in a Rolls Royce display room, if you have to ask the
price…”
“It means you can’t afford it. I know, and I think that’s my point.”
We were back at the parking lot in West Hollywood. “Call me,” she said.
*
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When I got home the answer machine was blinking away. I listened to Jack Hanson
grumble at me about never getting a cell phone so that I could be reached. I was to call him,
regardless of the time.
I tried to be casual, but the only time Jack called was when he had bad news. Good
news he seemed to feel could always wait on my calling him.
“Thorne, I know you’ve been working hard on the project, but, well….”
“Jack, you can tell me. Does Sunny want out?”
“No, nothing like that. I’ve been thinking ever since you guys finished up this morning.
Maybe we’re getting into something that they don’t want us to be involved in.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Thorne, I don’t know what I’d call them. Powers. Supernatural forces.”
“Gods? Demons? Aliens?”
“Whatever. I had to leave my office because I was getting spooked being alone. I know,
I’m talking like a kid who gets scared by ghost stories around the old campfire. But I have my
reasons to be uneasy. It’s bringing back something that happened a long time ago, back
when I was representing people like Sunny before I got into the production biz.”
“Jack, you have a story, too?”
“Yeah, just hear me out.”
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UXOGUÉ, MY FRIEND
The woman who came to my office looked to be in her early forties. She also looked like
someone who could have stepped out of the early forties—at least the way they were in the films.
She wore a dark red outfit with old-fashioned nylons, the kind with the seams, a pillbox hat with a
netted veil, and elegant white gloves that matched her purse. I think my secretary Sharon was so
stunned to see her that she forgot her most basic duty was to man the gates and protect my
office. Being an agent had its risks, which I tried to manage as reasonably as I could by avoiding
anything that could become a confrontation. The drill with someone I did not know was to say I
was at the studio with the time of my return uncertain.
“Mrs. Javitts is here to see you, sir.”
“Mrs. Javitts?”
“Tell him the name is Helen Javitts, and now that I know he’s in there I want to see him
now. Not an hour from now, not five minutes from now, but now.” My D.I. from Marine boot camp
during the Korean War could not have spoken with any greater expectation of being obeyed
instantly and completely.
“OK, send her in,” I said. “But tell her I have to leave for Paramount in just a few
minutes.”
That was our agreed-upon code to have Tucker Williams leave his office down the hall
and stand ready to usher out someone who might be there to make trouble. Tucker used to play
ball for the Rams before he injured his knee, but he had stayed in shape so that the 300 pounds
on his six-four frame seemed to be all muscle. He was driver, bodyguard, and, interestingly
enough, a good advisor on real estate deals.
“Mr. Hanson, I am Helen Javitts. My son’s name was Roger Javitts. That should mean
something to you.”
No handshake, and she declined my offer to sit. I deliberately left my door open.
“I’m sorry, but it doesn’t. And I do know my clients.”
“Roger knew just one of them, that fraud Ignacio Reyes.”
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Javitts. Now it registered. This was the kid who had fallen to his death while stalking
Reyes at his Malibu house. I hoped Williams was on his way.
“Mrs. Javitts, I did read about your son’s death—“
“His murder, you mean. Reyes killed him.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s been established that Mr. Reyes was not at home that night. Your son
was trespassing and there was a terrible accident.”
“No,” she said firmly. “Where they found his body proves this was no an accident. He
landed thirty feet away from the base of the cliff. Someone had to have thrown him out with
tremendous force. He didn’t just fall, and he couldn’t have jumped. At least two strong men had
to have swung him outwards.”
“Mrs. Javitts—“
“I have just one thing to have you tell that man. I mean to have him pay for what he did.
And he will pay, one way or another.”
“Mrs. Javitts—“
She had already turned and was striding away toward the reception area. Tucker had
arrived, and I saw him open the door to the hall. The woman said nothing more as she left.
“Mr. Hanson, I’m so sorry,” Sharon said. “But when I saw her there I just froze. She
hasn’t aged at all.”
“What do you mean she hasn’t aged?”
“You don’t know who she is, or, rather, who she used to be?”
“No, just that she seems to dress somewhat behind the times.”
“That was Helen Stiller. She was big when I was a kid, usually played the woman who
would get Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe to check up on a missing husband and then you find out
she’s a cold-blooded killer. I thought maybe she was dressing the part for a remake.”
“Helen Stiller, yeah,” Tucker said. “My heart belonged to Gale Sondergaard, but she was
a close second.”
107
It meant nothing to me. I had never been much a film buff, but these two both went to all
the art theaters whenever they brought back the old black and white murder mysteries. Sharon
said she had seen The Thin Man at least twelve times.
What troubled me was that this woman was threatening my client. What’s more, maybe
dressing like one of the characters she used to play could be a signal that she was completely
unhinged and had moved from being a grieving parent of a stalker to being a stalker herself.
Tucker said to call Ignacio first, then alert the sheriffs out in Malibu.
*
Ignacio Reyes was from Arizona. When Carlos Castaneda hit the publishing scene
claiming that as a UCLA grad student he had taken up with an old Yaqui sorceror named don
Juan Matus, Ignacio tried to follow in his footsteps with stories about a tradition of Aztec magic
handed down in his family. Carlos hit the big time with an agent named Ned Brown, whom I knew
well enough, and in a few years he was a national phenomenon. Ignacio could not get Ned
interested in him, so he showed up at my office with a proposal for a television documentary.
With a camera crew trailing behind, Ignacio visited his grandfather, whom he described with the
term brujo—the same word used by Castaneda for his elusive Yaqui master. Enrique Reyes
knew how to tell a good story, and we managed to get the show on the air.
Ignacio took it from there. I got him a show of his own on one of the local stations, and
soon enough he was a star in his own right.
Unlike Castaneda, who kept to himself and let Ned Brown fend off all the folks who
wanted to make money from the don Juan story, Ignacio was more than willing to let himself be
merchandized. He had tapes and seminars, and I got my fifteen percent. Ned did better with
Castaneda, of course, but I was paying the rent and then some.
The key thing was Aztec meditation, which seemed to consist in the repetition of the word
uxogué—pronounced “ooh show gay”—to the beat of a handheld drum. If you did it right you
were supposed to feel your heart adjusting to the rhythm established by whoever led the session.
Then, with your eyes closed, you were supposed to feel different colors. That’s right, you were
supposed to feel them. Red was hot, of course, and blue cold, but with the suggestions
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presented by the leader you could work through an entire palette and discover very distinct
differences so that, for instance, a certain shade of green was supposed to feel smooth and
yielding while a certain shade of gray was hard and rough. The idea was that you should either
direct these feelings to parts of your body that needed healing or focus them on mental
representations of your emotional states.
I have no idea what any of this felt like since I had no more interest in meditating than I
did in mountain climbing. Regardless, I had to start dealing with hip types who thought they’d get
my attention by saying uxogué in a suitably rhythmic manner. Often enough I’d just tell them to
cut the crap and let me know the deal they had in mind. If it might make money I’d run it by
Ignacio.
We were doing well the first year, then Ignacio began dressing up his presentations.
Uxogué, he now said, was more than just a sound. It was some mystical state of being. The one
who achieved the proper uxogué could alter any normal response to the laws of nature. In
particular, and here I was sure he was borrowing a page from Castaneda, he might even leap off
a cliff and not fall. How this was to happen came with the special seminars, the ones that I
learned soon enough were off the books so that I got nothing from them.
About this time the complaints started coming in. Uxogué failed to heal someone’s
cancer, although Ignacio appeared to have said that it would. For a few women uxogué seemed
to require undressing and having Ignacio feel them up. And then a kid named Roger Javitts fell to
his death.
*
What the deputies out at the Malibu sheriff’s substation did determine was that Roger had
attended several of the low-level seminars and somehow became convinced that he was being
denied access to the deeper secrets of Aztec meditation, the ones available through invitationonly sessions, because Ignacio Reyes perceived him as a threat. Ignacio denied this, and in an
unusually candid interview after Roger’s death told one of the detectives that he screened
candidates on just two things: they could pay the stiff fees and he found them physically
attractive. Roger admitted that he lived on a meager paycheck from the records store where he
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worked, and he was a gawky youngster barely past his adolescence. There were no nerd
scholarships, as Ignacio put it.
Undeterred, Roger somehow learned where Ignacio lived and began showing up near his
property. He had been intercepted several times by private security and sent on his way. One of
the reports described him as somewhat spooky, sitting cross-legged and reciting uxogué with his
eyes closed and drool coming down his chin.
Then he was found on the rocks below Ignacio’s beachfront property. The best guess
was that he had tried to get to the house by walking along the edge of the cliff and somehow lost
his footing.
Afterward, at my suggestion, Ignacio took some time off. He agreed that he might have
been too upfront with the detectives, one of whom got quoted as an unnamed source in a seamy
tabloid story. This was about the time the press was having a heyday with a guru from India who
had set up a free-love commune in Oregon. “Aztec sex cult” was one of the labels he’d have to
live down for a while. Castaneda might get some negative publicity with dumb kids who tried out
peyote to be like don Juan, but at least Ned Brown had managed to keep him from going
Hollywood.
Ned had it easier, though. Castaneda, who had learned his English as an adult, was an
extraordinary writer and a perfectionist who, as Ned once told me, would not allow his editors to
change even a comma. Ignacio was good with words, but he found writing difficult. He said it
was boring, and he needed a live audience. His hero wasn’t Castaneda, with whom I would have
expected a greater affinity, but Werner Erhard, whose est seminars were racking in the big bucks.
After Helen Javitts left my office I reached Ignacio in Arizona. I suggested that maybe he should
not be in too much of a hurry to get back to Malibu. When he did get back I’d have Tucker
babysit him for a while.
“Jack, you’re trying to scare me. Why should I worry about this woman? Did she say she
would go to the papers?”
110
“Ignacio, she was the guy’s mother, but she also used to be big in Hollywood playing
murderous broads. Maybe she’s lost a few of her marbles—you know, Gloria Swanson in Sunset
Boulevard--and she’s planning to take you out like this is all a B-movie.”
“I have never heard of this Gloria Swanson.”
“I’ll have Tucker tell you all about her. But make sure you tell me when you’re coming
back. And don’t be in a hurry.”
*
Indications that things might get a little strange came when Lieutenant Parker from the
Malibu substation returned my call.
“Mr. Hanson, we did some checking on Helen Javitts. You’re right that she used to be an
actress known as Helen Stiller, but I don’t think she’s up to any kind of revenge killing.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“She’d have to get in and out of her crypt in Forest Lawn. The woman in your office
might be trying to spook you, but she can’t be Roger Javitts’ angry mommy. If she makes any
more contact, be sure you let me know pronto.”
I had Sharon do some digging for me. Yes, she learned, Helen Stiller had spent a few
months in a locked ward and died about six years ago. “That might explain why Roger was so
messed up himself,” she said. “His mother was a severe alcoholic. Her mind gave out, and she
was institutionalized. They didn’t diagnose the cirrhosis properly, and her body gave out as well.”
“Well, it wasn’t a ghost in the office, just someone who looked enough like the late Mrs.
Javitts in her better days to do a good impersonation.”
“Too bad she wore gloves,” Sharon said. “We could have had some fingerprints.”
“You’ve been watching too many detective movies, kid. But if the crazy lady comes back
you don’t wait to have Tucker detain her.
”Citizen’s arrest?”
“She has to be breaking some kind of law.”
*
111
If you think this is going to be a ghost story after all, well, you’re wrong. The real Helen
Stiller still rests in peace. She may have died unhappy, but she never knew that her only son
would go flying off a cliff in Malibu.
I do mean flying. I had Tucker, who likes cops, go over to the Malibu substation and
check out where the body had been found. Yes, there was a loose end, and it was what the
woman in my office had indicated. To land where he did, Roger Javitts, if he not been tossed
outward, had to have done a good impression of Wily B. Coyote walking on air. Since the only
footprints were his, and his last steps had been at the edge of the cliff looking outward, he must
have jumped. How he got that far out was a total mystery.
Now, the odd thing was that there had been nothing in the papers about this. The
woman who posed as his mother had some very secret information, and this raised the possibility
that she was herself linked to the substation. Tucker, with Sharon at his side, would try to follow
this up.
I got back to Ignacio. He sounded somewhat disturbed when I told him that his stalker
had in fact jumped to his death.
“Maybe it is my fault, Jack. The boy wanted to prove he had enough uxogué, and I would
notice him and take him as my apprentice. He would fly in front of my window.”
“Maybe you should explain, Ignacio. Did you ever tell your audience you could fly?”
“So I got carried away and borrowed something from Castaneda. It didn’t seem like a big
deal at the time. You know, I had been quoting Jesus about faith that could move mountains, and
I just threw this in because everyone knew the don Juan stories.”
“And you did this when Roger was in the audience.”
“Yes, and he came up afterward and asked me if someone who was uxogué could fly. I
said that was so, but only a very advanced student should ever attempt this. That was when he
said he wanted to take my special course. I told him that he was not ready.”
“Meaning that he was broke and not too good-looking.”
“Jack, I was getting movie stars. They were the big money, and I couldn’t let them think
someone who had uxogué could ever be a loser.”
112
Real Hollywood, I thought. “Maybe you’re losing me. Sometimes you say uxogué is
something you have and then you say it’s something you are. I used to think it was just a kind of
mantra, then I heard everyone using it as a greeting.”
“It’s all of this. You don’t listen to my tapes, do you?”
I had to admit I found them hard to take.
“Jack, I know we have just a business relationship. I don’t ask you to like me. I don’t
always like myself. But I do make money for us both, right?”
I agreed that he did.
“Then I must tell you something,” he went on. “I have persuaded my grandfather that I
am ready to follow in the family tradition. Up to now I have told his stories, although I add my own
touches. But I want to know more. I want to be more.”
“Uxogué.”
“Yes, Jack, I want to be real uxogué. I want to be bigger than don Juan, who probably is
just a story Castaneda makes up. But I don’t want to hide away in the desert someplace. I want
recognition. I want more than you can get for me.”
Here it came. I had seen it before with the one-hit wonders who decided they could take
on the world. Tell them to slow down, get more realistic, don’t spend so much—all of this was
wasted breath. If I couldn’t take them to the top, they needed someone who would. And usually
they ended up in the “whatever happened to” articles that should serve as cautionary tales for the
new one-hit wonders and yet never do.
“I’m grateful, Jack. But I have to go my own way. Uxogué, my friend.”
“Uxogué, Ignacio. Good luck.”
*
Maybe there is something to this business of good and bad karma. People who get
ahead by screwing everyone else do find themselves getting screwed sooner or later. Not that
good guys don’t often enough finish last, after all. But I was learning to prefer the good guys,
even if I might not always make as much money with them. Ignacio Reyes had left a bad taste in
my mouth.
113
About six months after our conversation I began to hear something more about Ignacio’s
new teaching. There were no public seminars, only the private training. Uxogué, I learned, was
now something that could be transmitted, like a kind of psychic energy. It was not something you
could buy, exactly. But the apprentice was expected to share the characteristics of his own
lifestyle with his master. This meant the master got comped for everything, and the apprentice
could begin to share in that which made the master what he was. Uxogué, my friend. This was
what it was all about.
In some ways Ignacio had found a solution to several of his problems. He no longer had
to own anything under his own name, which meant anyone who still thought about suing him
would be out of luck. And with no income of his own the IRS could not come calling. The really
rich know that the trick to enjoying life is not to become celebrities. Ignacio, who had said he
wanted to be more famous than Castaneda’s don Juan, seemed to have learned at least that he
should not try to be a celebrity in the same way as he had in the past.
There was the rumor, though, that Ignacio might not be enjoying life as much as he
expected. People who knew still other people said that he was considerably more moody, harder
to please. And then there was a small article in a magazine dedicated to the emerging field of
Chicano studies. A grad student had debunked Ignacio’s claim to have inherited some secret
Aztec teaching. Meditation of any kind, he claimed, had never been part of the Aztec world.
Human sacrifice had been, but anyone who tried to bring back slaughtering virgins on stone altars
was in big trouble, First Amendment or not. And uxogué was definitely not a Nahuatl word.
Still later someone who knew I used to manage him remarked that the most troubling
aspect of Ignacio’s new persona was that he really seemed to believe what he was saying. Like
the ability to fly, as though the true sorcerer was no longer bound by the laws of physics.
Castaneda, of course, had said the same thing. His concept was that our ordinary reality
was based on a set of expectations which we all learned from our culture. The sorcerer had
techniques that allowed him to expect things differently. Or something to that effect. The thing
everyone remembered from the first book, presented as a serious piece of anthropological
114
research by the quite respectable University of California Press, was Castaneda’s story of an
experience in which, after ingesting peyote, supposedly he had flown like a crow.
The Ignacio I had known had been something of a con artist, but at least he had not been
caught up in a fantasy that called on him to prove himself by doing something stupid. I was
beginning to get a very bad feeling about where this was going.
*
For a long while I heard nothing more.
By then I had given up being a talent agent and moved into production. Sharon stayed
with me until she met and married an actor who loved old mysteries as much as she did. Tucker
followed his own ambition of becoming a real estate mogul.
The script was one of those over-the-transom things. My new secretary would have put it
in a slush pile that we handed over to someone who read scripts and prepared coverage for
about seventy-five dollars a pop except I saw it first. “The Case of Roger Javitts.”
The writer was someone named Ellie Ann Showalter. The return envelope indicated a
post office box in Malibu.
I began reading scene by scene. Whoever she was, Ms. Showalter definitely showed
some talent. I was able to imagine easily enough the story as she wanted an audience to see it
on screen.
Roger Javitts narrates. We see him first as a young man who feels he can never fit in.
He attends a lecture by a pop guru, who encourages him to imagine a completely different future
for himself. He takes this to heart, and we see him turn into someone quite different. In an early
scene we see him as a clerk in a record shop who gets no attention from the pretty girls who
come in. In a later scene the girls are falling all over him, and one of these girls is a promising
young singer named Helen. He quits his job because now he sees that his true potential is as a
record producer. Of course, he and Helen have a passionate romance, and then he brings out
her songs and they’re a hit.
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Now there’s a meeting with the pop guru, who wants to record some songs of his own.
Roger has to tell him that he has no talent. The guru is angry. He had followed Roger’s career
and insists that it is because of his own magical energy that the young man had become the
success that he was now. They argue, and the guru says that whatever he gave he can also take
back.
Now we’re into act three. Roger is in trouble financially. Helen has left him for the guru.
Roger comes to realize that he must prove himself the guru’s equal. He confronts him at the
man’s beachfront residence high above the pounding surf. As Helen stands by awaiting the
outcome of a sorcerer’s duel Roger leaps off the cliff. The startled guru gets too close to the
edge and slips. We see him fall to his doom. Roger appears to float back to the cliff, and Helen
runs screaming into the house to call the police. Roger is arrested for murder and Helen testifies
against him.
“I know now,” Roger says at the end, “that he had bewitched her so completely that she
could not see what I had become. But it doesn’t matter. I know that I can fly, and I will fly out of
prison.”
The author never used the word uxogué, and the pop guru is not Latin, but this was a
definite reworking of the encounter between Ignacio Reyes and the real Roger Javitts. I needed
to know more about Ellie Ann Showalter.
We sent a letter to the return address. I said I was very interested in the script, and we
needed to meet. My letter came back. The lady had closed her box and left no forwarding
address.
*
About a month after this I read that Ignacio Reyes had been killed in an accident back in
Arizona. He had run off the road to avoid hitting a deer. A woman had been with him, but she
had survived the crash unhurt. Her name was Ellie Ann Showalter.
I called Parker in Malibu and explained my interest. A woman who writes a script about a
pop guru and kills him off on the printed page might have decided to do the same in real life. He
agreed to contact Arizona authorities. I got his call back in a few hours.
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“The Showalter woman’s disappeared. I found out that apparently she had been trying
to get to Reyes through his family, and he agreed to meet her. They went driving in the desert,
and that was that.”
“Maybe you can find out something more. I know she rented a post office box in Malibu,
because she sent me the script from there. She had to provide some kind of ID at the time.”
“I’ll follow it through. The story she gave the locals has a few flaws. An obvious one is
that there are no deer in that area. With what you’re telling me I think they may want to get her
back.”
Nothing for a day or so, then Parker called again. “How much did you know about Roger
Javitts?”
“Just that his mother was the actress Helen Stiller.”
“And did you learn anything more about her?”
“No, I didn’t. What should I know?”
“Briefly, long before Hank Javitts, she was married to an actor named Guy Showalter.
They had a daughter, and after the divorce she was raised by her father’s family. You can guess
her name. Apparently she was the spitting image of her mom. She got to meet her half-brother
only once, and that was a week or so before his death when he had contacted her. He was pretty
out of it, raving on about Reyes stealing his soul or some such nonsense. I guess you can patch
together the rest.”
That was not the end of the story. I finally did get a call from Ellie Ann Showalter. As
before in my office when she had pretended to be her mother, she skipped the pleasantries.
“I do not expect you to do anything with my script. But I want you to know how much of
the story was real. I went with Roger that night. He said he would prove something to me as well
as to Ignacio Reyes. Then he jumped. For one triumphant moment he hovered out there, and I
believed, just as he did. But then he must have doubted, and he fell. Maybe it seems wrong to
you, but I blamed Reyes for his death and determined to avenge him. Had he only encouraged
Roger more, his spirit would have been stronger and he would never have fallen.
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“I resolved never to waver in my own belief. I stalked Reyes just as Roger did. When he
agreed to meet me I told him that I would conjure up a magical deer to prove the strength of my
own uxogué and he would have to take me as his student. I did do that, and I willed myself out of
the jeep when he ran off the road to avoid hitting it.”
I could have told her that I thought she was crazy, but somehow I realized that there were
things about her story of Roger’s death that had to be true. He did fly, even if only for a few
seconds. I don’t think I wanted to know more than that.
“So what do you have to say?” she asked.
“Uxogué,” I answered. Then I hung up. She never called back.
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119
21. I FIRST LEARN OF THE BRENDANITES
I was not sure just what Jack was trying to tell me with his story. I started to ask him, but
he said he was feeling very tired and wanted to call it a night. “But get yourself a cell phone,” he
said.
Before hanging up I jokingly said, “I wish I may, I wish I might, have a cell phone be mine
tonight.”
“It’s too late for that this evening. You’re supposed to say it with the first star you can see
in the sky.”
“Right. Good night, Jack.”
OK, it had been a full day. For a while I toyed with the idea of noting down something
about the other stories I had heard that day, from Kevin Stager’s lonely occult shop manager and
Sunny’s exorcism gone wrong to Harlan Graham’s wandering photographer, Jennifer’s
experience with the child who had created the art of Paco Ramirez, and Mrs. Lee’s immigrant fox
woman. Then I thought about how strange it was that all at once I had people volunteering these
very different glimpses of the supernatural. Coincidences? Or some cosmic plan unfolding?
Part of me resisted this idea. Maybe some of the screws were loosening a bit, but I still
wanted to think of myself as a hard-headed rationalist. I remembered once listening to a talk by
Rod Serling, who created The Twilight Zone. Somone asked him whether he had ever had any
spooky experiences of his own. Serling denied it, commenting that he would probably have a
heart attack if he did. Much later, when I heard that Serling had died of a heart attack, I found
myself wondering whether at last he had stepped into the twilight zone himself.
Another part of me was drawn to it. Perhaps this was what Jack Hanson had picked up
on, and his story about Roger Javitts was a cautionary tale about taking the supernatural too
seriously. Bill and Maya, I knew, had been profoundly affected by experiences that apparently
were never repeated. What if, apart from having breakfast the day yesterday with an imaginary
companion, I was to have something happen that I could not write off to having been in a
delusional state? Jennifer McCleary, who had gone through some strange experiences as a child
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and then somehow been brought back into that world when she treated little Diego Ramirez, was
clearly able to function well in the reality the rest of us shared. Or was she functioning that well?
Why had she never married? Had she ever had serious relationships? Was she still saving
herself for a lover that would be Mendaga back in another human form?
I told myself not to go there in my thoughts. She was an interesting lady, and she had
signaled availability. Well, maybe it was conditional availability. She had wanted to know about
my experience with demonmongers, and maybe I would be a possibility for her only if I was linked
to the supernatural myself.
I dropped off to sleep quickly.
*
I woke up in the middle of the night to a cell phone ring tone. It was familiar but I could
not place it. Anyway, I did not have a cell phone, so it did not matter.
The phone that I didn’t have was still ringing. Suddenly I remembered my late-night
conversation with Jack Hanson and my wish for a cell phone.
It was next to the bed by the clock radio.
I did have to be dreaming, but I felt completely awake. I picked up the phone and flipped
its cover.
“Yes?” I said.
“Good morning, Mr. Webster.” It was a woman’s voice with a hint of a drawl. A sense of
panic gripped me as I recalled Malarkey’s story about the woman who signed up Jeremy Delesco
for his supernatural credit card. This was not a good dream, I thought.
“Yes,” I repeated weakly. “What is it?”
“We just wish to confirm that your phone is operating properly. You will have
complimentary service with unlimited minutes and no roaming charges for exactly one week.
After that, you will need to negotiate with your carrier.”
I did not want to ask who was the carrier. I just wanted to get back under the covers.
Then the dream would end, and when I woke up there would be no cell phone.
“If you have any questions, just dial star-33. Good-bye.”
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The call had ended. I closed the cell phone and placed it back on the table. Then I
pulled the covers over my head and willed myself to sleep.
I the morning I awoke and glanced immediately at my night table. The phone was still
there. I picked it up, almost expecting that it would not be anything normal. It seemed perfectly
ordinary, a nice little Nokia model. There was a charger for the battery and a belt clip next to it.
No instruction book, however.
I had a cell phone before Eleanor left me. I’d call home to talk to Kyle and Kim, who like
all little kids seemed to enjoy hear their daddy’s voice but could not quite decide how to carry on a
conversation with someone they couldn’t see. I had stopped my service and thrown the thing
away when I found that Eleanor was unwilling to have me call her in Texas. She wanted the kids
to adjust to their new surroundings without my negative input. Later, she’d have them call me.
That had not yet happened. Eleanor and her partner also had made sure to have an unlisted
number. In an emergency someone could contact her father, who lived in Las Vegas, and he
would relay the message. I suppose this meant her definition of an emergency was my being hit
by a car or something else that might change the dynamics of our relationship while the divorce
was still in process.
I dialed star-33. Just a busy signal.
Impulsively I called Jennifer and told her what had happened.
She laughed. “That’s marvelous. Does it have a camera?”
I said that it did. “Maybe it takes pictures of the future,” I said, thinking of the story
Graham had told me.
“All right, I’m joking. I don’t know if this is anything more than an ordinary piece of
twenty-first century technology.”
“Well, yes, but it’s not everyone who has a gift from the gods like this. Will I see you
tonight so you can show it to me? Take my picture and we’ll find out how enchanted it is.”
“Am I supposed to just take this for granted? The phone, I mean.”
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“Why not? I think it is part of the test for you--that you can just accept that things like this
do happen.”
“And what am I being tested for?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Tonight, instead of just setting up a rendezvous, Jennifer would drive over to the canyon
and pick me up. I said this would give her a chance to meet Bill and Maya, who seemingly had
had their own experiences of being chosen by the gods.
Afterward I called Jack Roberts, Eleanor’s father in Las Vegas. On his answer machine I
left the number for my new cell phone. “For emergencies,” I said.
*
The rest of the day was not that productive. I kept trying to work out a decent plot for the
show that would introduce Sunny as a psychic private detective. Over the last few weeks I had
thought of dozens of possibilities, none of them altogether original and none of them particularly
engrossing.
Jack had argued that in the first show we should see Sunny already established in her
career. What bothered me with this approach was that it was too easy to disappoint a viewer if
we had a script in which we have a case that looks like it can’t be solved and then, wow, a
psychic flash and it’s all taken care of. Deus ex machina, the last resort of a desperate writer. At
the same time, I had not been sure how much we could rely on Sunny to carry off anything more
challenging.
Now that I knew Sunny a little better I felt a little more confident in having her be in almost
every scene, and I was spending more time thinking of the backstory for her character. How did
she recognize that she was psychic, for instance, and what would impel her to become a
detective? I had originally thought about having her be a psychic who gets into the private eye
business almost as a lark. Then I had made her a detective who, perhaps from getting bumped
on the head, finds she is psychic. Either would allow a lighter tone to the show, important if we
were to attract viewers who remembered Sunny from her sitcom years.
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I kept getting distracted by my replay of the evening before. I found myself going over
every comment I had made in talking to Jennifer. What had I sounded like? How had she
expected me to relate to her experiences? The worst thought was that she might see me as a
charity case, a lonely guy whose wife had dumped him. She’d go to bed with me, perhaps, but
there would not be a serious romance.
That was assuming I would want a serious romance when my rival might be a
supernatural entity of some sort. How was I to compete with Mendaga, whatever he was?
*
I went over to Bill and Maya’s house a half hour before Jennifer was due to arrive. I
explained that she was a psychiatrist who worked with kids, and that I had met her through Sunny
Barkley. Yes, she was very pretty. No, we didn’t have anything going, at least not yet.
“Be open, Thorne,” Maya said.
They already had company. I went into the kitchen and navigated through Maya’s plants
to greet a man who looked the same age as Bill. He was wearing a denim shirt and pants with a
broad leather belt and a large silver buckle set with turquoise.
“I’m Dan Fallon. Bill tells me we’re in the same business, sort of. I don’t write for the
screen, though, the way you do, and it would be a wonder if you ever read any of my books.”
We shook hands and settled at the table, where Dan was nursing a mug of tea.
“I might say the same for the shows I did. I sometimes wonder if anyone ever watched
them. What kind of books do you do?”
Dan smiled. “I’m into researching the esoteric stuff. My specialty, if you can call it that,
would be the cults that have sprung up time and again in Southern California.”
“The land of fruits and nuts,” Bill said, “and plenty of flakes.”
“Are you working on anything now?” I asked.
“I’ve been trying to do something about the Brendanite Order, which used to run a ritzy
private school in West Los Angeles.”
“A Catholic group?”
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“Hardly. They claimed to be descendants of the old Cathars, heretics in southern France
supposedly wiped out centuries ago. Their legend was that members escaped to an island off
Scotland and gradually evolved into a type of religious order with a number of prominent laymen
allowed special status as associates of a sort. John Dee was supposedly linked with them, as
were other Elizabethan occultists.”
“I’ve never heard of them.”
“Few people have, unless you were among the really rich and famous who wanted a
particular kind of schooling for their kids. The stories used to circulate that they were devilworshippers or, worse, demonmongers.”
Now he had my complete attention. “Demonmongers? That’s an odd term.”
Dan laughed. “I agree. I don’t know when it first appeared, but it seems to refer to
individuals who are like us, kind of, but can command otherworldly entities. Things that go bump
in the night, and all that. I think it’s all nonsense.”
I glanced over at Bill, who shook his head slightly to indicate that, no, he had not said
anything about my encounter with Malarkey.
I tried not to seem too eager. “Did you ever find out why the term was applied to them?”
“It’s what I’m still working on. Unfortunately, the folks that ran the school are now long
gone. But I did meet a remarkable woman who was affiliated with them for a while. I don’t know
how her story fits into their overall set of beliefs, but I think it’s fascinating in its own right. Do you
want to hear it?”
He didn’t have to ask me twice.
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126
A NIGHT AT BLUE LAKE
About thirty years ago, while I was researching the history of the odd religious group
known as the Brendanites, I ran across the name of an Agnes Deschamps who had taught dance
at MacLeod Hall, their old school in Brentwood. It sounded vaguely familiar, so I began a search
and found that Miss Deschamps—she was always “Miss” and apparently a stickler for polite
address despite a general irreverence otherwise—had a number of connections in the studio
scene of the late 1930s. I made a few phone calls to some old friends who knew how to reach
just about anybody who had ever been in the business and was still alive. I found out that Miss
Deschamps was living with a woman named Celeste Leon, her granddaughter and caregiver, in a
little cottage over in Studio City. Then began the thing with finding an old acquaintance willing to
make contact and persuade her to let me talk with her about her time at MacLeod Hall.
I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say that eventually we did meet despite
Celeste’s objections, and Miss Deschamps agreed to a series of interviews. What I learned was
that she was one of those people in and out of a succession of fringe groups long before Carlos
Castaneda and Shirley MacLaine made the bestseller lists. She had been a Spiritualist, a
Theosophist, and a follower of Gurdjieff, to cite just a few.
Gradually she filled me in on her background, although because of various
inconsistencies I was never sure how much was pure invention. Her most consistent story was
that she had left her native New York while in her teens, just after the First World War. After a
brief marriage to a traveling salesman in New Orleans she had decided to try out show business.
Because of her diminutive size and pixie-like personality—“I wanted to be a gentile Molly Picon,”
she said--she found that she fit in comfortably with the people who made a living off the carnival
circuit. At first she was a dancer, then, after injuring the muscles in one leg, she became a
fortune-teller.
“That was never hard to pull off,” she said. “Get out the cards and tell a story that is close
enough to what someone wants to hear. Of course, I sometimes came up with things that the
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client swore I could not have known unless I was a true psychic. Maybe that’s what got me
wondering about what was really possible.”
She remarried and attempted a more settled life only to have her husband, a construction
engineer who had survived the rigors of building the Panama Canal, die in a freak accident while
working on the roof of their house, which at one time she said was in Chicago but at another she
located in St. Louis.
Now a widow with a comfortable estate, she had been drawn to New Mexico. For a
number of years she had lived in the Taos area north of Santa Fe, where she had become a
friend of Mabel Luhan, the socialite who had brought D.H. Lawrence out to New Mexico. That
was, she said, the period of her strongest spiritual searching.
“I was a dilettante,” she said. “I read everything and tried everything. Mabel Luhan’s
Indian husband Tony is the one who said I should just accept that I was meant to have a foot in
the spirit world. I didn’t need a teacher, since the answers were already there inside myself. He
even called me a witch, although at the time I found the word rather unpleasant. Not as bad as
‘demonmonger,’ understand, but still it made me think of dark forests and old hags conjuring up
evil forces in Macbeth.”
“What did he mean by the word?” I asked.
“What it meant to the Indians. I could be in touch with the supernatural and I could use it
outside the rules that exist for the priests or medicine men of the tribe. He used to joke that I was
a diablera. That’s not really a nice word, but he didn’t mean any harm by it.”
“But you did feel offended by it.”
“Well, later on I read some books by a British scholar named Margaret Murray, who said
that what we called devil-worship had been an older religion, essentially a worship of the moon
goddess that had survived through the Middle Ages in spite of intense persecutions. Then I read
Robert Graves. You know, his book The White Goddess about the old Druids. Oh, I loved that
book. It came out when I was already here in California, but I wished I had it to read twenty years
earlier when I was up at Blue Lake.”
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Blue Lake, as I was to find out, was a lake sacred to the Taos Indians. It had long been
the basis of a raging controversy with the Federal government that was not resolved until 1970,
when a vast amount of acreage including Blue Lake was removed from the national Forest
system and returned to Native American ownership. The people of Taos pueblo had always
made an annual pilgrimage there, but whites were never permitted to be present.
“Tony knew I wanted to go up there, so he found someone who would take me when no
one else was going to be around. What I didn’t know at the time was that Felipe, the man he
found, was a peyotero. Tony said that I wanted to have a religious experience at Blue Lake.
Felipe thought that meant I wanted to use peyote.
“Well, we camped up there and he made me eat some of these buttons he had brought. I
didn’t know any better, and I was very good at pretending that I knew all about everything the
Indians did. Now I had heard about peyote all right, but I did not think it was much different from
any of the other drugs we used sometimes. You know Cole Porter’s line about getting a kick from
cocaine—that’s all I thought it would be like.”
“So did you have hallucinations?”
“I still don’t know.”
Miss Deschamps was trembling slightly as she recalled something that had taken place
half a century before. She pulled her sweater more tightly about her shoulders and glanced
around to make sure Celeste was not close enough to hear.
“I started to get sick, then things became very quiet. I think I fell asleep. When it was
almost dawn I felt Felipe shaking me. He said we had been discovered and should get out as
fast as we could. I told him I was in no hurry, but if he was afraid he could run for it on his own.
And that’s just what he did, like a scared bunny with a wolf on his tail.
“I did not think the Indians would hurt me, so I just sat there and waited. A few minutes
later a few young fellows wearing blankets came up to where I was sitting in my bed roll. Then I
did get afraid, because I was not sure I wouldn’t be raped and then just left there. Their leader
seemed to see that I was anxious, so he signaled for the others to draw back.
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“I tried to say something, but the words would not come. I didn’t know whether the man
would understand English anyway. He gestured for me to get up and put on my coat. The other
young men picked up the bed roll and the rest of my camping stuff, and we went down to the
water in single file. Now this is where it gets crazy.”
Miss Deschamps had paused and was rocking her body slowly back and forth. I thought
for a while she would not go on with her story, and I turned off the tape recorder that I
occasionally used when our conversations became more of a straight interview. She gestured
that it was all right to leave it on.
“We went in to the water. All of us. I was just behind the leader, and the others were
behind me. I thought perhaps we were to start swimming, and that frightened me because I was
fully dressed and I had never been much of a swimmer anyway. The man ahead of me just kept
walking until he was completely submerged. I panicked and ran backwards. I almost knocked
over the others, but I didn’t care. They kept walking until they were under the water as well.
“I got back to the shore and lay there sobbing. I was wet and miserable and extremely
frightened.”
“What happened to the Indians?”
“They never came back up. That’s when I realized who they were. Mister Fallon, how
much do you know about the kachinas?”
“Not very much. Aren’t they dolls of some sort?”
“There are dolls that represent the kachinas, but the kachinas themselves are the spirits.
In the Indian dances the men put on masks to represent the different spirits. Well, the kachinas
were doing some kind of ritual of their own in which they put on the masks of people. There,
does that sound crazy enough to you?”
“It sounds like you were getting a good buzz off the peyote.”
“That’s what I will never know. The Indians believe their kachinas live in Blue Lake.
Maybe I missed my chance to enter the kachina world.”
“Maybe you would have drowned.”
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“I almost caught myself a death of a cold. It warmed up just a bit as I came out to the
road. I was able to get a ride back to Taos. I gave Mabel and Tony Luhan quite a start when I
showed up. I didn’t tell them everything, just that I had become separated from Felipe and
slipped into the water. Perhaps that’s all that did happen anyway.”
“And what about Felipe? “
“Oh, that poor man must have been absolutely terrified. He simply disappeared, and no
one ever did find out what happened to him.”
She was right, the story did get crazy. To make matters worse, Miss Deschamps had
prepared me to expect her to be untruthful.
“We’re all frauds,” she had told me once. “But it’s the fraud of the minstrel, not the fraud
of the prince. Those in power in this world deceive themselves that they are entitled to their
position, and others are destroyed that this deception may go unchallenged. Those who come to
sing for their supper are honest liars. They know there’s a piss-pot under the royal bed, and the
fact that it’s enameled doesn’t keep it from stinking. So they weave dream words into rich fabric
that the prince will buy, and then they go out and get drunk and piss on the ground.”
“So is a poet better than a prince?” I had asked.
“Whose lies do you remember better? Homer’s—or those of the Greek rulers for whom
he sang? Shakespeare’s—or those of the king of England at his time?”
“What if I just want the truth?” I demanded.
“Go sit on the toilet then. That’s the truth about us: we all do it.”
Now, after hearing about her night at Blue Lake, I reminded her about her comparison of
the prince and the minstrel.
She smiled. “So you have to decide for yourself whether I am to be believed or not.
Some day maybe you will have an experience like this for yourself, and it will change everything
for you.”
“Including what I think I can mean when I say something is true?”
“Oh, yes, and this may terrify you the most.”
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23. LISTENING TO SHADOWS
It was perhaps midway through Dan’s story when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up
and Jennifer, whom I had not heard come in, bent down to kiss me. It wasn’t anything
passionate, yet it did not seem like an otherwise disconnected expression of affection. I glanced
over at Maya, who smiled knowingly.
When Dan ended she whispered, “Please listen to what he’s saying, Thorne. I’ve been there.
I know what he’s talking about.”
It was time for more introductions. Besides Jennifer, two others of Bill and Maya’s current
lodgers had come in to join us. They were Rick Matthews, a black musician just a few years
younger than myself, and Alice Haynes, an artist who looked barely out of her teens.
Rick seemed particularly impressed with Dan’s description of Miss Deschamps and had been
pressing him for more details about the woman. Dan explained that she had died not too long
after the meeting when she had told him about her experiences at Blue Lake.
“She did tell me several times over,” Dan said, “that anything she could leave as a legacy—
her Blue Lake doctrine, she called it—could be summed up in this instruction: look at the silence
and listen to the shadows. The first time she said this I thought I had misunderstood her. How
could someone look at silence or listen to shadows? Shouldn’t these be switched? She was
adamant that she meant what she said.”
“I think I know what she meant,” Rick said. “Most people never think about seeing music
when they hear it. Alice, you ever hear a painting that you’ve done?”
Alice nodded and Rick went on. “So what I take from Miss Deschamps is that we go that
extra step and go for what’s not so obvious. Think I’m right, Dan?”
Dan shook his head. “I think she was talking about a way of meditating in which the senses
act differently. You really see a sound, for instance. The Brendanites used it with their students.
Miss Deschamps told me one time that in teaching dance she had a color scheme to match the
moves and the music. Now my guess is that if you really got further into this you’d know what it
would mean to have something visual when there is no music at all. Now I’m good with words,
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but that’s as far as my artistic talents take me. You and Alice are a lot more likely to get what she
meant than I am.”
Bill and Maya said they agreed. I waited for Jennifer to say something but she seemed very
hesitant to speak up. I whispered that she could join in because I really wanted to get her
impressions.
“I’ll tell you later,” she whispered back.
Bill asked the question that had been on my mind all along. “Dan, apparently Miss
Deschamps was familiar with this word ‘demonmonger.’ Did she ever say anything more?”
“No,” Dan replied. “It’s only tonight that I even thought about it again as a term.”
“Maybe I can help you guys out,” Rick said. “I’ve got my own story to tell. Ordinarily I’d be
afraid even to bring it up because it makes me seem like a damn fool if I say I believe it, but I’ve
never been able to put it out of my mind. I met a demonmonger not too long back. At least I met
someone who said he was one. Now he had to be crazy or lying or something, right? But let’s
just say Dan has set a kind of mood for this. Want to hear it?”
Again there was no question about it. Rick had to tell his story.
Jennifer now had brought a chair close and sat with her arm over my shoulder. I was starting
to feel very scared, not because this was a night for spooky tales but because I realized I could
very easily have already fallen in love with this woman that I barely knew. And being in love with
her, I somehow understood, meant allowing the sum total of her experiences to flow over my
own.
Rick began.
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134
JOHNNY REB
“You want to know how it happened? You want to know how I became a
demonmonger?”
The old man with skin weathered like leather left too long to the mercy of the elements
grinned at me. What surprised me was that he had such good teeth. Most of the skid row
residents I worked with were either toothless or well on their way to that sorry condition.
“Partner, I don’t know what that means.”
“I make deals for young folks like you. You want something supernatural, I kind of
arrange to get it. Low cost.”
I thought of my great-aunt back in New Orleans. When I was small she had taken me out
to the old St. Louis cemetery to visit the tomb of Marie Laveaux, the nineteenth-century Voodoo
queen. It was pretty well marked up, and there were fresh flowers and some cheap beads, like
those tossed out from the floats during Mardi Gras. Auntie Bess had made me touch the
inscription and say a prayer for the lady’s soul.
“You pray for her to rest in peace and she’ll remember you kindly,” she had said. “Just
pass her by and you never know what can happen.”
I had not understood how someone dead could have any effect on the living. Even then
I was the skeptic. Never afraid of the dark, not scared of black cats crossing my path. The
threats to my well-being were definitely those from this side of the grave, like the gang of white
teenagers that had beaten my older brother so badly that he would never be quite right in the
head afterward. They had broken both his hands, too, and said that a nigger had no business
playing an organ in our parish church. The nuns that taught all of us never knew, and I wonder if
the old priest, already afflicted with the cirrhosis that came from years of solitary drinking, would
really have cared.
“What kind of deal would you make for me?” I asked, humoring him.
“Maybe get you to Carnegie Hall. You play classical piano, don’t you?”
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Most of the regulars at the soup kitchen knew I was a musician. I wasn’t a celebrity, like
the movie stars that came downtown on Thanksgiving to serve turkey and trimmings to the
homeless, but I had steady work with a CD still selling well. And once I had started coming down
to help Reverend Al it became something I’d do once or twice a week. I’d even pray with the men
before a meal, although now, if asked, I would have said that I had had better luck with Santa
Claus as a kid than I did with the Almighty now that I was an adult.
“So how would you do that?”
“That’s my secret. You just have to keep up your part of the bargain so that I get my
commission.”
Somehow I knew that a commission wasn’t reckoned in dollars and cents, but it did not
seem a good idea to go into details.
The old man winked. “But I can tell you ain’t really interested, that right?”
“No,” I said, “it’s something I’ll pass on. But you can go right ahead and talk about how
you got to be a whatever you called yourself.”
“I’m a demonmonger and proud of it. Maybe it don’t look like it to you, but I’ve done real
well. Lots of big sales.”
“Any I’d have heard about?”
“Now don’t go laugh at me, son,” he said firmly. “And I always ask for my customers to
sign something that says they won’t go blabbing.”
“A confidentiality agreement? I would think that you’d want more people to know about
you. More sales, and all that.”
“You don’t know nothing about it. It’s not how many deals I make but how good they are.
A couple of guys in the business lost their franchises a while back because they took on bad
accounts.”
To be honest, I couldn’t be sure how much of this was an old man’s rambling, mixing in a
salesman’s talk with something entirely delusional. I had heard plenty about demons with some
of our clients, but the only individuals that much concerned me were those who talked about the
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voices urging them to kill. Even then, I worried less about those who said they had the devil in
them than I did the Bible-thumpers who said God was commanding them to human sacrifice.
“So how did you get into this line of work?” I persisted. “Did somebody advertise?”
For a moment I was afraid that I had really offended the old man with the way he bent his
head and wiped a paper napkin over his brow, but then he looked up and I could swear his eyes
were sparkling. Then he laughed. It was a raucous, almost braying laugh that had everyone in
the room staring at us, and I found myself unaccountably shivering as I listened to it. I glanced
over at Reverend Al, who just shook his head slightly to let me know I was on my own.
“Son, you got no idea of how they get their men. Advertise? Like one of those ‘help
wanted’ signs in a five-and-dime window? Oh, that do make me laugh. Why, truth is we all
working for them already, just never know it until it come promotion time. Then they pick the best
of us for some extra training.”
Already I didn’t like the sound of this. It was like someone telling you what you were
afraid was true but never wanted to accept. You know, your doctor saying he had wanted to
spare you the bad news as long as he could, but, yes, that lump in your throat was a tumor that
was going to kill you. Or your girl friend saying it wasn’t you who got her pregnant with that kid
you loved so much, but now the real father was back in town.
“You’re telling me I work for them, too?”
“It’s what you always believed, ain’t that right?”
Now as a musician I had played all types of gigs. There had been audiences that sat in
tuxes and ball gowns and applauded politely when I played some Mozart, and there had been the
cats in ragged work clothes who whooped it up when I gave them some Jelly Roll Morton. As
long as I got paid I didn’t care. Deep down I had always thought it didn’t matter who listened to
me as long as my bosses were happy.
But you don’t yet understand what I meant by this, and what scared me was that this
derelict did understand. You’re probably thinking my bosses were the guys handing over the
dollars. No, each boss was an invisible presence dictating how one thing in my life was to lead to
another in some kind of plan that wasn’t meant to make any sense to me. Only there were
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breaks in the plan, or, better, there were multiple plans as though I was being handed off from
one boss to another.
“Yep,” he said, “some of us are very good workers. In fact, we almost see what the
bosses want before they tell us, and they appreciate that. Now, you’re a good worker all right, but
you’re nothing like me. And that’s how I got my promotion.”
“And you’re going to tell me how that happened.”
“It’s why you came down here tonight, son. You might think it was to be the do-gooder,
but that’s not what the plan was.”
“You’re not telling me I’m supposed to become a demonmonger.”
“Hell, no. But you’re supposed to know how I became one so that you can tell the story
some time when it counts.”
“As though I’ll know when that is.”
“You’ll know. But right now you just listen.”
*
“Some of us can remember a long time back, to when we were more ordinary folks. But
that’s not too common, and when we get together the talk usually is about our more recent turns.
These ain’t rebirths, at least in no way you would think of them. We’re just back, kind of updated
like new mail-order catalogs. Then we can go a long while before it’s time to get put aside. A few
special demonmongers can even remember what happens in between, but I’ve never had that
talent.
“Now maybe I’m lucky or maybe not, but I remember being just a man like you. No
claims on me, or so I thought, and no expectations of anything more than the sun coming up and
offering me a chance to see something really new.
“That’s the way it was when Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Davis each had his mind set on what the
south should be like. Now I hear that everyone says it was all about slavery, but I was too poor to
own any slaves myself. I was a young man from Virginia, and all I knew was that the Yankees
wanted to tell us all how to live, and we had to fight defend the rights of our southern states to
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secede and form a new confederacy. And, besides, I had once met General Lee, well before the
war began, and he seemed a decent man who would do the right thing and nothing else.
“Now the big mistake everyone made was to think this was something that would be over
in a couple of months, maybe even a couple of weeks. One side would charge and the other
would run, and we all thought it would be the other boys who would run. Maybe that was
particularly true in Virginia, because we had young men who were mighty proud of their
horsemanship and thought they would all make fine, brave officers. We thought of the Yankees
as mostly farmhands who had no reason to fight about things they didn’t understand. Oh, Mr.
Lincoln made it all seem to be about slavery, which was meant to inspire folks who never were
around the colored to see that it was not all the bad stuff some wrote about, but we knew it was
really about having our states mean something.
“Now I imagine you know enough about your history, especially with you being colored
yourself, to see how wrong we were. Once men died all the first reasons we went to war went
right out of our minds, and it came down to not letting them have gone to their graves for nothing.
We had to win, and that was it.
“Of course, the generals figured the only way to fight a war was to throw as many men as
they could muster right against the enemy, even with cannon blasting right into the lines. We
fought like that in Gettysburg, and on both sides only two out of three soldiers were left to fight
again. Each of those two counted himself lucky to be alive and not seriously wounded, and their
officers would tell them how they had been spared by God so that they could do things over. The
worst that could happen was they’d die like heroes and join the regiments already there in
heaven.
“Now I was beginning to get my doubts about the plan the bosses had for me. If I was
such a good worker why was I with the side that was in retreat? I ‘d really think of that when my
bowels would do their own version of Johnny Reb and I’d shit in my uniform. That was how I got
separated from my regiment. I had gone down to a creek to wash myself off, and then with the
cramps I just had to lie down.
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“When I woke up it was dark and I was covered with muck. There was a sound of
someone stomping nearby. On instinct I grabbed for my prized Whitworth rifle and realized to my
horror that it was gone. But that was nothing to the feeling that came over me when I saw that
what had been stomping nearby was the biggest man I had ever seen, and he was holding my
rifle.
“Now I had thought I had some experience of how the Lord could cast men in his own
image and likeness and still make them so different, but this giant was like nothing that had ever
walked the streets of a town or even the trails of a forest. He was white, all white. He was close
to naked with just a bolt of rotting fabric wrapped around his groin, and his skin gleamed in the
moonlight. He had matted white hair that fell in a tangle over his shoulders, but he lacked a
beard. When he opened his mouth, which was big enough that I could have fit a watermelon
inside, I saw he was toothless with just a few rotting stumps. But his eyes were the worst. They
were pink and rheumy and they were staring fixedly at me.
“So we were looking at each other. He had stopped moving and I was too scared to
start. Then he took my rifle and began bending the barrel as easily a child might bend a piece of
tin.
“No,” I shouted, just thinking of that gun and how much it meant to me, “don’t do that.”
“Oddly enough, he stopped and set the rifle, already beyond use, down at my feet. As he
did so I became aware of the rank odor from his body, and I found I had the sudden urge to
vomit. Already I had been on a detail to retrieve the bodies of those who had been slaughtered
on the battlefield, and I thought I could never smell anything as revolting, but this creature had a
foul odor well past that. Imagine, if you can, the smells of the privy together with the stench of
rotting flesh overlaid with the sickening fragrance of decayed vegetation. Now, as I retched, I
thought that perhaps I too was being welcomed into the battalion of the dead and that hell was
not a matter of touch, with fire licking at my flesh, but instead an evil aroma that would force my
very intestines to erupt in protest.
“It ended soon enough, and as I rolled on my back I saw that this man, if that’s what I
could call him, was looking at me in a way that signaled concern. I found that I was now more
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able to tolerate his scent, and I attempted to divine more clearly just what it was that I saw in front
of me. A man? Suddenly I thought that this beardless creature might be a female, and I found
myself looking down to its groin.
“Then it made a sound that might have been a laugh and it lifted the rag to show me its
sex. To my horror I saw that it was both male and female. Now as a soldier I had laid with camp
followers and in my youth I had learned the ways of sex with other young men, so now the
thought struck me that the punishment for all my sins of the flesh might be an assignment to be
this creature’s toy.
“Now, in addition to all the horrors that assailed my sense of smell, I began to imagine all
the things that would offend my sense of touch. All that was slimy, all that prickled and stirred up
a rash, all that might burn without relief. What might it be like to have that monster’s immense
organ tearing at my bottom or being compelled to drive my own into its own pustulent orifice? It
was too late to repent my sins, and this was my welcome to damnation.
“Then everything changed. I had been a good soldier, willing to charge at the enemy
despite the fear that in a moment more I would be gut-shot and lying on the ground screaming for
my momma like so many of the poor boys around me. That discipline began to take hold of me
now, and I willed away the protests of my body.
“I stood, although still rather uncertainly, and I gestured to the creature to move back. It
obeyed. And then it seemed to wait for my next command.
“I said nothing but in my mind I formed a picture of a fire. Quickly the creature began
moving through the brush, ripping at any material that might be dry enough. When he returned I
reached inside my knapsack for the flint and steel that I used to strike sparks and threw these to
him. I had little bits of burned cloth, and these too I tossed to him. Now I formed a play in my
mind in which I made a pile of very dry twigs on top of which I placed a bit of this char, and
carefully I saw myself striking the flint so as to produce the spark that would ignite the burnt cloth
and blowing on the flame until the tinder itself erupted into flame.
“I was now past amazement when the creature reenacted my very thoughts. We soon
had a blazing fire, and I began to wonder now what more was needed. I imagined a spit with a
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rabbit roasting over the flame. The creature hesitated but a moment, then disappeared back into
the woods. Minutes later he returned with a hare still quivering from the blow that had broken its
neck. I took out my bowie knife and quickly gutted and skinned the rabbit, then handed it to the
creature to roast over the fire.
“I ate although the rabbit was barely cooked, and no meal that I would ever have in the
finest restaurants, whether in New York or New Orleans, could match the savor of this crude
dinner. I now understood that I was not to fear this creature that could seemingly read my
thoughts, since its only goal seemed to be to obey them.
“Well sated, I lay down by the fire and drifted off to sleep. I awoke at the dawn, but I was
alone. Perhaps the creature stirred only at night, I thought, and it had taken to its lair when the
sun came up. Now I was at a sorry pass, since now I would be thought a deserter if seen by the
soldiers in gray and an escaping enemy if seen by the soldiers in blue. I recognized that my
calling to be a soldier like them had ended, but I was not sure what it would take for me to
escape. Strangely, though, I no longer felt any fear. I had by my thoughts commanded a
monstrous denizen of this forest to build me a fire and fetch me a meal, so what more might I be
able to achieve?
“And with that I began my trek, now moving west with the intent of passing between the
lines and escaping to a more peaceful area. I soon came to a farm house that looked
abandoned, as though its occupants feared being caught up in the violence as the Confederate
army retreated and the Union army pursued. I was able to find more provisions and, best of all,
civilian clothing. There was also a horse that seemed grateful to again have a rider, and now I
was able to move more rapidly.
“I had attempted to frame a speech that would explain my presence when next I came
across my fellow man, but after a few days of wandering not a soul appeared. I was alone on the
road and alone in the houses that I found. I had food, and I had the company of animals, both
tame and wild. It always seemed as though the men and women who had resided in the country
and in the towns had just left shortly before I arrived. Often enough there were still signs of their
recent presence. It might be a pot of soup yet warm over the dying embers, or bread just baked
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and left upon the table. But where they had gone remained a mystery. It no longer seemed
believable that they had fled an approaching army. It was more as though I was just conjuring
phantom residences, and I myself was but a ghost wandering alone in a place that was neither
heaven nor hell.
“Now this could not go on forever, and finally my journey ended. But when it did I was
now an old man, just as you see me now. I remembered the walking and the riding and then the
walking again when my horse bolted away during a thunderstorm. A winter must have followed a
summer that had followed a winter, but each season was but a day to me. I was traveling for
years, even though I would have thought it had been but weeks.
“The way it ended I was on the battlefield again. I felt I was suffocating, and there were
men pulling me out of a trench.
“These were the first human faces I had seen since I had lost contact with my regiment in
Virginia. I tried to talk, because I wanted to know whether they were Union or Confederate, but I
realized soon enough that they could not understand me. They all spoke a language I had never
heard, and my best efforts to picture my thoughts for them as I had for the creature that had
obeyed me in the woods were of no use. I could not bend their minds.
“They took me to a field hospital very different from what I had seen before. There were
large red crosses everywhere I looked, and there were a number of young women in nurses’
garb. One of them, it turned out, did speak English, and this was how I came to know that I was
now in France and that more than fifty years had gone by since I had fought and almost died at
Gettysburg.
“Her name was Marie. She was not a beautiful woman, and I knew without being told
that had she given herself to the service of others even though what she most desired was the
love of a handsome young man from her village far to the south. The surgeons at the hospital
had marveled first at my escape from a poisonous death that had taken everyone else in my
trench, then marveled more that a man of my age in clothing that looked from another time should
have been there at all. They accepted that I was an American, but why I should be in the British
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lines apparently prepared to do battle against the Germans was a mystery that I could not in any
way explain without being regarded as a madman.
“There were now many things that had changed within me. The first was that I could,
although not always clearly, know what thoughts were going through another’s mind, and this was
how I understood the reason Marie had become a nurse and traveled so far from where she had
been born. But I had another ability as well, and that was to see the ghostly forms that prowled
among the beds. They were, like the creature I had met by the creek at the beginning of my
strange wandering, variations on the human form, some grotesque and some appealing but all
not found within the ordinary world. And, like the creature, I discovered I could have them do my
bidding.
“Later, when I looked through picture books, I saw how painters had conjured the images
of demons afflicting the damned. Now if before I was in this hospital I had every reason to think I
was already one of the damned, my feelings now were very different. I accepted that the things I
saw were demons, but they were frightening only to one who could not command them. They
were like the colored men and women that could be bought and sold in my native country, only
they served willingly as though their true freedom was to be called upon.
“At first I experimented with the most trivial of tasks. I chose one of the demons, who
looked most like a small child but with a wreath of knots about its brow, to fetch me items that I
fancied. It brought me a pipe and tobacco and a flask of whiskey, and in the midnight silence,
while those around me slept, I stepped outside to enjoy these small comforts.
“Marie was also awake, and she came out from the tent where the nurses slept. She saw
me, and I knew that she meant to have me return to my bed with no drink and no smoke. I
raised my hand to silence her, and then she must have seen my demon servant. She did not
scream but she crossed herself and, overcoming her terror, came to where I sat.
“’I knew you were a sorcerer,” she said. ‘I could not tell the doctors, but it was the only
way you could have come here from some other time. And now I see you here with this imp.’
“I was not quite sure what a sorcerer did. I supposed she meant she saw me as some
type of conjure man, like the uncle of mine who could take a forked branch and find water where
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it dipped. It was then I began to think of the possibilities I was being offered. Alone in an
unfamiliar land as ravaged by war as had been my native Virginia, I was unsure how, even with a
demon companion, I would be able to journey on. But Marie could help me, and I knew what kind
of bargain we would strike.
“And so we both escaped. Marie brought me back to her village far from the battlefield,
and with us came my demon, always visible to me and occasionally to her. In return for my
rescue I made the first of what would be many arrangements for the benefit of a client. Marie,
who had been so plain in her appearance, blossomed into a beauty, and the young man she had
fancied fell hopelessly in love with her. Now, of course, she no longer thought him as desirable
as she had before, and so we struck still other bargains that allowed her to find a place in high
society. I left her when she embarked on a loveless marriage to a wealthy man many years her
senior, and I never attempted to learn more of what happened to her.
“Later I would meet others who had become suspended between worlds, like me. We
were called many things by those who sought our services, but I found that among ourselves we
were known just as demonmongers.
“One thing we all seemed to have in common was that we lacked the ambitions of our
clients. Marie had changed and not for the better when she found that she could be a beauty.
Other clients have changed when I arranged for them to be famous or wealthy or suddenly gifted
with a long desired talent.
“I was the reason for these changes, but not in any way that you might first expect.
There was always a price for my services, and it was something that my clients thought they
would never miss. With Marie it had been a child’s sense of wonder, but this was what our
demon most desired. And so it was that Marie, once she had within reach that which she thought
would be her lasting happiness, found that she could not be content with it, while I watched this
creature she called an imp begin to experience delights in the most ordinary of settings. Soon it
seemed to become ever more human, and the day came when I looked and saw but a small boy,
who grinned at me and ran away.
*
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I had listened to the old man’s story very patiently. It could not be true, of course. Here
was a derelict claiming to have fought at Gettysburg, then jumped through time to the First World
War. But I did not laugh, and this was primarily because I had the spooky awareness of
something else nearby, and this something else was not at all of this world.
He smiled, and I wondered if indeed he could read my mind.
“I do not like to do it so much these day,” he said. “The young people now all have so
much and yet they always pine for more. I am meant to be a traveler, what you want to call a
bum living on handouts, but I have everything I could ever want.”
“Can demons really turn into human beings?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, and sometimes human beings take their place,” he answered. “It is not all a fair
trade, though. Those who were always demons are true innocents, and when they become
people, which does not happen all that often, they are a source of joy. The humans that became
demons are quite different, and in that other world they are the outcasts. They are the ones to
beware of, because they have no real place in either world and so they become a source of
misery. Too often it is demonmongers who are blamed, and I have never thought that right.”
“But you’re the source of temptation, the reason someone can lose sight of what’s really
important. Are you telling me Marie would not have been better off if you had never come
along?”
“She would have found another demonmonger sooner or later, and things might have
been even worse for her.”
“And you could really get me to Carnegie Hall?”
“You know already that you are a man happy with what you are now. There are demons
aplenty that would want to take on something of your inner nature, like the spirit I know you can
just barely spy as he lurks near us. You see, if you really want this, I would have to do it for you,
because that is my job, my part in whatever plan the bosses have for you.”
“And if I tell the bosses to go to hell, I’m happy with the way I am?”
The old man reached out and clapped my shoulder. “Son, that’s the joke. They’re
already there.”
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25. ALICE FROM WONDERLAND
“Why do we always have to talk about hell as something evil?” Alice asked as soon as
Rick had finished. “I like what he said about demons being innocent before they take on human
form.”
“Well,” Dan commented, “it’s theological nonsense, of course. I was raised a Catholic, so
I have to think of demons as fallen angels. Hell is their place of punishment, and it lasts forever.
Whatever contact we have with them is going to be something meant to bring about our
damnation.”
“You are wrong,” Alice said. “Maybe not about what Catholics say. But they don’t know
the truth. I do.”
In the time I had known her, Alice Haynes had been pleasant but never talkative, much
less argumentative. But this was a night for surprises, I figured.
Dan was forcing a smile, but I had the clear impression that he was used to being the
authority on the occult and so was distinctly uncomfortable at being challenged by a girl maybe a
third of his age.
“Don’t you really just mean that you have a different belief system?”
“No,” she persisted. “But I’ll have to tell you a story, too. Since you’re a Catholic maybe
you’ll like it. It’s about a priest.”
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FATHER TOM’S SUCCUBUS
Things had changed so much just in a few years. When he was a teenager the Mass had
been in Latin with the priest standing in front of the altar to represent the congregation assembled
behind him. But that was not the way things were when he had been ordained, just a few years
after the end of the Second Vatican Council that had done away with so much that was familiar
and comfortable. Now the priest was expected to stand facing his people. He was to look
across a plain table, like a host preparing his dinner guests to share a meal of bread and wine
that through the lens of faith were seen as the body and blood of Jesus, the Christ. And
everything was in English, or whatever might be the language of the people in an area.
He no longer celebrated Mass at all. He was still a priest, and he always would be. He had
never been laicized, and he was still a Jesuit, even if he hardly ever saw any of the men who
shared his vows. He had his apartment in the Marina, and he could walk a few minutes down to
the yacht harbor and look out to the Golden Gate Bridge. Someone in the provincial’s office
made sure the rent was paid, and he had a monthly deposit in his checking account that covered
his modest expenses. Technically he was on a leave of absence.
There was just this understanding. He was no longer Father Tom to anyone. His neighbors,
who seemed to be mostly young professionals, never even asked his name. He was just this
gray-haired gentleman who walked with a cane and seemed somewhat prone to talking to
himself.
Being certified crazy but still able to look after himself was a blessing in some ways. Nothing
was expected of him. He could get up when he felt like it and spend his day in any way he chose
and go to bed again when he felt like it. Not that he ever much varied his routine. He was awake
at six, and he would sit and try to meditate for at least half an hour, and then he would have a
breakfast of juice and toast and coffee. Afterward he would shower and dress and go out for a
walk and come back and work on his project until the early afternoon. He would have a light
lunch of soup and bread followed by a short nap. Then he would return to his project. Dinner,
some fish or chicken with a few vegetables, would be at six. He would take another walk, work
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on his project, and retire at ten. Not that he slept all that much. Instead he would find himself
rehearsing parts of his project.
He was never much aware of what day of the week it might be. He knew Sundays were
supposed to be important, but it had been years since he had been inside a church. Christmas
and Easter and all the other great feastdays, the times when as a young Jesuit there had been
special dinners and a sense of celebration, now were no different than any other day. He would
rise and meditate and eat and walk and work on his project and then go to bed to prepare for
another day of the same.
It was the project that had put an end to his active ministry. He had tried to explain to the
provincial that it was not possible to teach or hear confessions or say Mass or do any of those
other things once expected of him because he had to work on the project at least ten hours each
day. Anything less and he would be damned.
One thing the Jesuits had always been known for was the care they took of their own. He
had been to the best psychiatrists. He had been in several hospitals. He had taken a number of
drugs intended to make him stop thinking about the project. Finally, he had been allowed to live
as his did now.
At first a few of his old friends had come by. He had attempted to be pleasant and
hospitable, but they needed to understand why he must have his solitude. Certainly, they did not
want to be responsible for his damnation by taking him away from his project. Eventually they
agreed, and now he had this even rhythm to his life. He was happy.
*
The wind had been unusually strong the evening that the priest was first aware of her. It had
howled outside with a special fury. The next morning, when he went for the first of his two daily
walks, he saw that a tree had come down and crushed a parked car. When he came back to his
apartment he thought that definitely she would be gone, but he was wrong.
Everyone had always been asking him whether he saw things or heard voices or otherwise
demonstrated some break with reality. No, he was not paranoid, not a schizophrenic. He would
not even agree that he was suffering from what they called an obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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Yes, he must work at least ten hours a day on his project or he would be damned, but he did not
feel any anxiety about this. It was more a purely intellectual recognition, much like the
acceptance a cancer patient might have when told that his condition is terminal. In fact, when
pressed, he said that hell was most likely a very pleasant place in which to spend eternity, but he
did have a duty to avoid it, and it was most important for his sense of self that he did whatever
was his duty.
The night before, when he first saw her, he was somewhat startled but quickly recovered.
She was perhaps five and a half feet tall, she was very pale with long blond hair that spilled over
her breasts, and she was naked. She was also quite transparent, since he could see through her
to his bookcase. This is what allowed him to recognize that she was not someone from the
neighborhood who had walked into his apartment and disrobed for whatever purpose such a
young woman might have. How he could see both her and what was behind her with complete
clarity was one of those puzzles that at another time might have commanded his curiosity. At the
moment this would be an interference with the concentration he required for his project, so he
completely ignored the question and he did his best to ignore her as well.
She had remained in the apartment all that night. She appeared to be walking around,
examining his books and his pictures but otherwise no longer trying to solicit his attention. He
thought that perhaps, if she were a possible hallucination, she would accompany him on his
morning walk, although the thought did occur to him that if she were visible to anyone else it
might create some problems, even here in very liberal San Francisco. Out on the street, in the
chill air, he became convinced that the only rational explanation was that he had only imagined
her.
He had never had sex. He had never even masturbated, which one of the psychiatrists, who
had seemed especially interested in his sexual history or the lack thereof, commented was a
most unlikely story. He thought about how someone starving might hallucinate a sumptuous
meal. That did not seem likely in his case, though. Without any experience, what could be the
basis for such a lifelike fantasy?
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Back from his walk he saw that she was still there. Now, though, she seemed less
transparent. Also, she was wearing his bathrobe. Well, he could not be concerned, since he
must now dedicate himself to his project.
But there was a problem. He had completely forgotten what the project was.
*
The priest was not sure how long he just stood there. Maybe, he thought, this was the onset
of Alzheimer’s. A senior moment, as his fellow Jesuits used to joke when after dinner and
perhaps a drink or two more one or another of the older men found his memory failing him for a
name. But he could remember everything else. He may not have had a photographic memory
but it had always served him well in his studies, and there seemed to be just this one hole in it at
the moment. But it was somehow far worse than having something on the tip of his tongue.
Finally he said, “I’m Father Tom. Who are you, and what are you doing here in my
apartment?”
He was not sure that this phantom in his bathrobe would speak.
At last she said something. But it was not in any ordinary voice. It was something he heard
inside his head.
“You are an impossible mission,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Do you have any idea of what I am?”
“You mean, what you are if you not an hallucination?”
“I do not like being treated like an hallucination. That is very demeaning.”
“Then you are what theologians called a succubus, a demon who takes on the form of a
seductive female to lead a saint into sin.”
“Bingo. You are no saint, but I am a demon. There, that should scare the pants off you,
metaphorically speaking.”
The priest found himself laughing. “Okay, you have me there. But why don’t you think I’m at
least a saint in the making?”
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“I’ve had my share of saints. Anthony in the desert, for example. He was impossible also,
but not for the same reason. He was truly a saint. You just don’t want to be bothered by
distractions from your precious project.”
The priest found a seat and took a deep breath. “Then you know what my project is.”
“Of course I do, buster, but don’t expect me to remind you about it.”
“So you show up here naked and expect me to be aroused. Then it’s sin, sin, sin and I’m just
as damned as I will be if I cannot complete my project.”
“You oversimplify, Tom. That’s why I have to stay covered up. The point is that I said fuck
the mission. I’ve been too long in the business anyway. It’s time for me to retire.”
“But you’re a demon. You cannot just stop being a succubus.”
“Like I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t know shit about us.”
“I wish you would not use that kind of language.”
“You’re saying I sound like a whore? Oh, I can use every dirty word in any human language.
I always thought some of them were very silly, but it had to be part of the act.”
“And if you really want to stop playing that role you’ll have to talk differently. Also, you have
to have a name, and not some strange Assyrian thing, either.”
“Okay, I’m Alice. You know, through the looking glass and all that? That’s what I feel like.
Your world is not as streamlined as the one I’m used to. Maybe that’s why some of us get this
urge to jump to the other side of the mirror. And some of us do it even if we can’t jump back.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m human now, damn it, if you can handle a last piece of swearing. And it’s all your fault, so
I expect you to take some responsibility for this transition.”
*
And that was how Father Tom found himself with a most unlikely roommate. He was relieved
to find that Alice no longer had any expectation of sharing his bed. He offered her the bedroom
but she insisted on taking the couch in the living room.
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“It’s where you have this TV you never watch,” she said. “I need to get acclimated to your
culture. The old Egyptian desert was a snap, but I’m still bewildered by what goes on now.
Camels I can handle, but you’ll have to walk me through getting on a cable car.”
“I thought you demons know it all.”
“Another of those theological myths. We have some imprints to start with, but after that we’re
clueless. We get the language easily enough, but you humans manage to build layers of
meaning that make it very difficult for beings like me—or beings like I was. Now I have to be one
of you, and it is not easy.”
The priest definitely appreciated the absurdity of the situation. He had no doubt at all that
Alice was just who she said she was, a demon who had decided to become a human being.
What he also found was that he had become somewhat clueless himself about how he was
supposed to spend his day. He still could not remember anything about his project, so the hours
he used to spend on it now had to be given over to this strange entity.
It began with a trip to the large Safeway a few blocks from his apartment. A young woman
should have a proper diet of fruits and vegetables, he felt. Yogurt, maybe. And there were a
variety of TV dinners, some of which might appeal to a demon’s appetite.
There were shops up on Union that had clothing she could wear. He had no sense at all of
feminine fashion, so he suggested that he had a niece staying with him who needed some new
apparel that he wanted to get as a welcome gift. The grinning salesgirl was very helpful.
Alice approved of his choices. “They’re a beginning, Tom. At least now I could go out with
you.”
Tom realized he had not really thought through the ramifications of this.
“That’s all right. You already talked about me as your visiting niece.”
“You know that?
”Tom, the change is a process. I’m still enough of a demon, so my ability to read minds or
know what’s going on has not completely faded yet. In fact, if you’re short of cash I can make
things go into your shopping bag without you having to pay”
155
”That;s all right,” the priest said quickly. “I do have a credit card, and there’s enough
money in the bank.”
“Tom, you are so honest. Maybe that’s why I failed to seduce you.”
What the priest did not want to admit was that, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was
feeling sexual excitement. Fortunately, Alice, so concerned now with adapting to being a
human being, seemed unaware of this.
*
It took a day or so, but now he was aware that he could hear Alice as someone out there,
not just a voice in his head. And the physicality of her transformation seemed to be
progressing. She was obviously still getting used to the physical processes involved in eating
and also in elimination.
“I don’t think I like your bodies,” she said as she left the bathroom. “Eating is okay, but
that other part. It’s not nice.”
“It’s being human.”
“Easy enough for you to say. You started in with diapers and went on to the rest. I have
to get the hang of this all at once. Am I really offensive?”
The priest laughed. “It’s all part of being human, and that’s never anything to be ashamed
of.”
“But what am I going to be like when I start getting a period? Am I going to have
hormones making me go crazy? Will you still want to have me around?”
“Do I really have a choice?”
“Yes, Tom, you do. That’s what scares me the most. And when I was a demon I could
not be scared, you know. I was supposed to be the one doing the scaring.”
Maybe it was because he saw the tears in her eyes, but for the first time the priest
reached over and pulled the woman into a tight embrace. She was real and solid and he
understood he wanted her, and he knew that this was the test for both of them. She no
longer wanted to be a demon, and he could not let her go back.
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“Thank you,” she said finally. “I can still read your thoughts, Tom. I don’t know how
much longer that will be so, but you are really teaching me something. Maybe this is what
love is about. And I love you as well. That’s new for both of us, isn’t it?”
*
The priest did not sleep. Instead he kept thinking back. Why, really, had he ever wanted
to be a priest? His mother had been from a generation in which new parents were instructed
to withhold affection so as to decrease an infant’s sense of dependence. He still
remembered how he had been told that boys were never to cry. With some perverse logic he
reached the conclusion that emotional dependence was unacceptable.
Before the Second Vatican Council there had been an emphasis on vocations that
stressed the idea that it was better to be a priest than one of the laity, and it was better to be
a vowed religious than a diocesan priest. Tom had bought into this, and because he was
attending a Jesuit high school it only seemed reasonable that to be a better Catholic he
should also be a Jesuit. The bonus was that he would be following the Gospel dictate to
leave all family behind. He could escape the world of feelings.
The project had probably begun while he was a Jesuit novice. There was a prayer book,
the Raccolta, that included all the prayers to which a plenary indulgence had been attached.
This meant that for each time he said one of these prayers a soul would be freed from the
flames of purgatory. Tom made a list and once a day he recited each of the prayers.
Eventually he had stopped, but still he had the vague feeling that he needed to find an
acceptable substitute.
That must have been the beginning of the project, whatever it was. Somehow it also
involved repetition, but that was all he could remember.
He heard the television in the front room. He had not watched anything for years.
Occasionally he had glanced at newspaper headlines, and so he knew terrible things had
happened in New York and because of them his country had once again gone to war. He
could not have explained any of the details, since only the project had mattered. Now,
however, he found himself suddenly curious.
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He got up and put on his robe—the new one, since he wanted Alice to keep the one she
had been wearing when she began her transformation. She was curled up on the couch and
gestured for him to sit next to her. The Godfather was on the screen.
“You will want to watch the headlines,” she said. “There is a station that goes on all day
and all night just with these. It may be very confusing at first, but I can help you.”
That seemed most odd. She was the one who had to adapt to being human, yet for
practical purposes he was far less aware of what was happening in the world than she was.
“Some of us always managed to keep up. It was part of the job, you know. How could
we tempt you mortals unless we could use your language and know your customs? Of
course, that’s why some of us decided to jump the gap and become mortals themselves.
Until I was assigned to you I never thought it would happen to me.”
“And what was there about me?”
“Oh, it seemed a routine enough posting. An aging priest who had never strayed from his
promise of chastity. Turn you on, make you sin, then let the boss feed on your guilt.
Standard succubus 101. I’d been doing this for centuries.”
“But not always successfully.”
“I don’t think someone like that old desert saint should be held against me. At least I got
his attention, and he wrote up a storm about me. You, though, were impossible. You could
look right at me at my luscious best and still keep your mind on your project. So I could go
back and tell the boss he’d have to go hungry this time or I could just stay here.”
“So you know all about my project. Why is it I can’t remember a thing?”
“I think that’s the boss’s doing. He’s really ticked off.”
“But you said it was my project that made me resist you.”
“But it’s too late. We could have sex and he gets nothing out of it. There are rules to
this, you know.”
The priest didn’t know.
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“It’s the guilt,” she explained. “I’m not the only one who’s going through a serious
change. What we have in common is that we’re both changing into human beings. You
would not feel guilt the same way any longer.”
“But I’ve always been a human being,” the priest said. “What do you mean I’m
changing?”
“Oh, you weren’t that human. You refused to feel things. Nothing gave you real
enjoyment. You might as well have been a robot. A nice robot, but a robot. That’s why the
Jesuits finally gave up on you. You couldn’t tear yourself away from your project. That was
as bad as if you were possessed, and for a while I thought maybe we had some crossed lines
of communication and some other office had got your file.”
“Some other office?”
“We really are not as well organized as your theologians tell you. You probably learned
about us as though we are an invisible army behaving in a very orderly manner. You know,
Lucifer down there in headquarters playing some ridiculous game with God to see who can
capture the most souls. The legions of hell and all that nonsense.”
“But you are a demon.”
“I had a beginning, Tom. It wasn’t like anything you have ever been taught. None of us
have been around before there was a human world. Not even the boss.”
“Lucifer?”
“Wrong picture. If you met the boss—well, the boss that we have now—you would think
you were talking to a very smooth CEO. Centuries back, when I was created—again, that
may not be the right word but it has to do—the boss might have been more like a
supernatural Attitla or Genghis. You know, the ruthless head of an army, the image your own
Ignatius Loyola had of the devil. Before that, when one of the old Hebrew writers had his own
vision, he was God’s tough-talking consigliere, like the character Robert Duvall plays in the
movie that’s on television right now. Different eras, different images of power.”
The priest felt total bewilderment. There was good and there was evil. There was God
and there was his eternal enemy.
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“No,” Alice said. “I can still read your thoughts, and all I can tell you is that both God and
the devil, as you think of them, are your ways of trying to make sense of things. Now what is
really out there beyond all of us is as much a mystery to me as it is to you. But what happens
is that the things that human beings come to believe in do come to exist. There are gods and
angels and lots of other possibilities. All that is in your human mythologies is real in the world
I came from, even unicorns and dragons. Still, we’re no more organized than you are, and
that is because we are the product of so many different things that happen with
consciousness. That’s why things go wrong for our world just as they do for yours. It did not
seem unlikely another demon had hold of you so that you would be lost in your project.”
The priest shook his head. “You’re trying to tell me that human beings invented demons,
but how is it possible that a demon could become a human being?”
“Consciousness is more than just human thinking, Tom. It is the matrix of all possibilities.
You and I both share in it, and that is why I could become a human being and why some of
your kind become demons.”
*
As the days went on the priest found himself newly immersed in the everyday world. He
no longer went of his walks but instead took the bus to see places that once were familiar to
him but now had changed. He had thought Alice would accompany him, but she attempted
to explain that until her transformation was complete it might be rather difficult.
“Not everyone can see me as you do now. I am solid inside this room, but outside it
would be different. Go on your own, and come back and tell me what you have seen.”
And this is what he did.
But then came the afternoon that he returned to his apartment and she was no longer
there. He found a note on the table.
“Tom, there were things I could not tell you before,” it read. “The choice I made exiled
me from the world I knew, but it meant that I then had to leave all that was connected with it.
You were my assignment once, and once my transformation was complete I had to leave you
as well.”
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The priest stared at the note. It was in his own handwriting. He looked around the room.
There were the clothes he had bought her, but there was something odd about them. They
never seemed to have been worn, and yet he had seen her in them. He looked in the
bathroom. There was the toothbrush he had provided for her, and the few toiletries she had
requested. Nothing had been used.
The tears came along with great gasping sobs. Could she have been an hallucination all
along? Had one type of madness just been replaced by another?
Perhaps he was damned now, after all. Hell, some theologians insisted, was nothing but
utter loneliness, an eternal separation from the only true source of love.
No, he told himself, he would not allow that to be true. Alice had come into his life and
changed it. He could not betray her by allowing himself to lose again his sense of being fully
human.
“I do love you, whatever you are, whether from another world or just something I made
up,” he whispered. And then he picked up the phone. He had to call the provincial’s office.
There was no more project, no further reason to be on this prolonged leave of absence. It
was time to return to work.
*
Two years later there was a quiet service at the Jesuits’ cemetery in Santa Clara. The
provincial was there along with some of the men who had worked alongside Father Tom
when he returned to the active ministry.
The provincial introduced everyone to a strikingly
attractive young woman who was carrying a single red rose.
“This is Tom’s niece,” he said. “She called me last night after seeing his obituary in the
Chronicle. I was surprised she had my number, but she said Tom had given it to her when
she stayed with him some time back. Alice, I’m glad you were able to come.”
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162
27. THE CHILDREN ARE MISSING
When Alice finished her story we all sat somewhat stunned. I think we shared the
obvious question. Was this supposed to be about herself?
Dan Fallon broke the silence. “A cute story, Miss Haynes. But I don’t know if I see the
reason you have for telling it. Rick over here had the courtesy not to make us think he was some
kind of supernatural entity himself. But isn’t that just what you have been doing?”
Alice did not seem disturbed. “I’m not crazy, Mr. Fallon, and I’m not mean. I am
reporting something that I think matters a great deal to two of you in particular, Jennifer and
Thorne. You can believe me or not that it is true.”
“But, honey, are you the Alice in the story?” Rick asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Well,” Rick said, “if you are then you can explain what was Father Tom’s project.”
Alice laughed. “Then I’m better off just letting you guess. And it’s time for me to go,
anyway. Bill and Maya, I love you both.”
And then she left. What none of us realized until the next day was that she was not
planning to return. She had moved out, no forwarding address.
*
When Jennifer came up to my tree house we had not yet decided whether to stay in and
take advantage of Bill’s offer to cook up a fresh pot of spaghetti or do down to the valley and find
a restaurant that was still open. There was always Denny’s, I said, and this already made a good
case for Bill’s spaghetti.
“You are going to show me the magic cell phone,” Jennifer said.
“Right, and we’ll try out the camera to see if we get something about tomorrow.”
The cell phone was still as ordinary as it had seemed that morning. I was just a bit
apprehensive trying out the camera, but it did only what anyone might expect of a camera.
And then the phone rang.
I jumped. Maybe this was another service message and Jennifer could listen in and
know I had not been making it up.
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It was my father-in-law in Las Vegas.
“Thorne, I’ll just come out with it. The children are missing.”
“Jack, what do you mean? What happened?”
“I just got off the phone with Eleanor. She and her friend went out for a drink. They had
a neighbor looking after the girls. When they got back the neighbor said you had come by and
got them.”
“Jack, I’ve been in Los Angeles all day.”
“And that’s why I’m calling. I figured something was strange about the story, but Ellie is
hysterical and she’s got the cops looking for you. I mean, the description the neighbor had fits
you to a ‘t,’ and the kids sure acted as though it was you.”
I was feeling sick to my stomach. “Jack, I have to get out there. I probably can’t get a
flight until the morning, but I’m coming out. Tell Eleanor. I’ll call back with my flight number.”
“Okay, son. And I’ll stay by the phone.”
I gave Jennifer the bottom line: I had to go to Texas as quickly as I could because my two
little girls apparently had been kidnapped, and the man who took them was a dead ringer for me.
“I’m coming, too,” she said. “Don’t even think of objecting. Something is happening here,
and it has a lot to do with all the stories you’ve been told, especially what you heard from Alice
tonight. You’re still new at all this, but I had to grow up with it. I can help.”
I knew better than to refuse. She left to pack, and I got on the Internet to see how I could
get two flights to Dallas in the morning.
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28. THE EYES OF TEXAS
Maya insisted on preparing a substantial breakfast of eggs and hash browns even though
I insisted I had no appetite whatsoever. America West flew out from LAX at a quarter to nine.
A little before six I drove down Topanga Canyon to the coast, then took the road up through
Santa Monica and then followed Lincoln Boulevard to the airport.
Jennifer was already at the terminal, and she was not alone.
“Hi,” Sunny Barkley said. “Call it a psychic flash, but I had this sudden urge to call Dr.
McCleary late last night, and she told me what was happening. I’m coming with you. I’ve
already bought my own ticket.”
I let my breath out slowly. Nothing was going to be easy when we got to Dallas, and all I
needed was this actress for whom I was to write a script about being a psychic detective
tagging along as though she is actually living out the part.
Jennifer put a hand on my arm. “Thorne, don’t be angry. I get my own psychic flashes
sometimes, and I have this strong feeling that, whatever is happening, Sunny is meant to be
there to help.”
“It’s not TV, Sunny. I don’t have any lines for you to learn. And I’ve got two kids missing
with the Dallas cops thinking I’m the one who took them, so I may have a real problem
coming up with the right plot line.”
I felt the pressure increase on my arm.
“Don’t take it out on her, Thorne. There was a reason Sunny started coming to me a few
years ago. Remember, I’m the lady shrink who deals with kids who think they see ghosts
and demons.”
“And I was seeing both,” Sunny said. “Or thought I was. Dr. McCleary helped me realize
I wasn’t just going crazy.”
“By saying there are real ghosts and demons?” I muttered.
“No,” Jennifer said, “by teaching her how to cope with experiences that most people don’t
have, at least not on a routine basis.”
165
I remembered back to Sunny’s story when we had been sitting in Jack’s office with the
parapsychologist Kevin Stager. She had talked about an exorcism gone wrong when the
young priest attempting it was presumably possessed by a ghost bent on revenge. She had
made it sound as though she knew the priest in question. Obviously that was not a man who
had coped at all well.
“Mr. Webster,” Sunny said, “I have one thing going for me that you do not. I can identify
with little girls like your daughters. I think I know where they are, but it’s not somewhere in
the ordinary world.”
“Not in the ordinary world,” I echoed. “And how is that supposed to fly with the Dallas
cops?”
“It all depends on whether you get a detective that’s open to the world the three of us
know about.”
Not likely, I thought. Sure, maybe I should just sit down with a cop and talk about with my
encounter with the demonmonger Malarkey. And Jennifer could talk about little Diego
Ramirez channeling another of Malarkey’s strange fraternity. Right.
*
It was my fault. Instead of welcoming Sunny’s efforts to help I had all but bitten her head
off. And I had been rough on Jennifer as well. The result was that the two women opted to
sit together and let me stew on my own for the five hours it took to get to Dallas.
I forced myself to apologize as we got off the plane.
“Apology accepted,” Jennifer said, “but you have to get over taking things out on anyone
who only wants to help you.”
“That’s what Eleanor used to say.”
“And you didn’t listen.”
What saved me was the appearance of a tall blond lawman who introduced himself as
Sgt. Trane Sandridge from the Missing Person Squad of the Dallas Police Department. We
shook hands and I introduced him to Jennifer and Sunny.
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“Well,” he said, “things are a little strange right now. Your ex-wife gave me your picture,
which is how I recognized you after I heard you were coming in, and from everything I can
piece together you were in Los Angeles yesterday. That is correct?”
“There are a lot of people, including Dr. McCleary here, who can swear to that.”
“And I have a neighbor who would swear you were the one who came by to get your
daughters early yesterday evening. You wouldn’t happen to have a twin, would you?”
“Of course not. My father-in-law said the girls seemed to think that it was really me.”
“The neighbor said they were overjoyed to see you, and she had no reason to think it
might not be all right for you to take them out to get some ice cream.”
“But it wasn’t me.”
“And that’s the mystery here. How long has it been since you have seen your
daughters?”
This was the painful part. When Eleanor left me and took the girls, I had seen them only
twice before they went off to Texas. I had not fought for custody, and while there seemed to
be no restrictions on visitation I simply had not brought myself to get on a plane to spend a
few hours competing for their attention. It was now well over a year since they had moved. I
looked over at Jennifer and Sunny as I explained this and immediately sensed their
disapproval.
“Well,” Sandridge said, “the neighbor said this wasn’t the first time you—or your
mysterious twin—had come by. Usually you just talked to the girls for a little bit, then left.”
“You mean, when the neighbor was playing being their nanny.”
“If you want to put it that way. I take it you think your ex-wife should never have left them
to go out with her partner.”
“I don’t give a damn if she and her so-called partner want to hit every hot gay bar in your
city, but I don’t like to think they just left my daughters with whoever they could find to babysit
them.”
“So the girls needed to be rescued.”
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I already sensed where this was going. “Maybe,” I said, “but I wasn’t the one who did it.
And I haven’t a clue about who did.”
*
“I think,” Sandy said quietly after Sandridge left us to check in at the station, “that you are
a real jerk-off as a parent. And I speak from a lot of experience with jerk-off parents. My
folks divorced when I was four. My real dad kind of disappeared until I got famous as the
teenage TV star, then he called and said he wanted to get together with me. We met in a
restaurant, and I found out all he wanted was for me to stake him in some business venture
he had in mind. I said it was up to my mom since she was my business manager, and so he
just left me sitting there after telling me I was just a bitch like my mom. I never heard from
him again.”
“You’re probably right about me,” I said. “Right now I’m not very proud of myself.”
And I was not. When Eleanor left, Kim had been four and Kylie just two. I used to tell
myself that they were absorbed enough in each other that they weren’t missing anything if I
spent very little time with them. And Eleanor had been a great mom, always reading to them
to make up for the fact that they were not allowed the evil television set. When she had
decided to go back to work, Charlene had come on the scene as a nanny. She had been
terrific, and I never thought much about the fact that she stayed overtime to share in the
duties of putting the girls to bed. And if Eleanor and Charlene afterward spent long hours
chatting away over a bottle of wine it just meant I was off the hook to keep my wife company.
And Jack had been keeping me very busy. I kept telling myself things would ease up and
we’d have more time for ourselves as a family. The evil television set, even though it paid
our bills, could still be off. Later, when we were going through the divorce, I tried to convince
Eleanor that everything I had been doing was for her and the kids. She laughed at me and
said that I was so good at coming up with make-believe scripts that I had even written one for
our marriage.
I did not look forward to seeing her now, but it could not be avoided. Sandridge had
Jennifer and Sunny go right to the hotel, but he took me to the station. We were in one of
168
those interrogation rooms where the mirror on the wall will let someone see in. The detective
had me talk about the kids for a few minutes, then went outside.
“Well,” he said when he came back, “your double is apparently not a good enough mimic.
He has your looks down but not your voice and certainly not your mannerisms. The neighbor
said the man reminded her of an old character actor she used to watch on television. Ever
heard of Joe E. Brown?”
I had only felt I was going to faint on two occasions before. One was after getting hit with
a ball during my high school playing days, and the other was after giving blood at the Red
Cross one afternoon when I had neglected to eat either breakfast or lunch. I was glad I was
sitting, because otherwise I probably would have collapsed on the spot.
“Hey, are you all right?” Sandridge asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m definitely not all right. But if I told you what was wrong you’d probably
have me locked up in your local looney bin.”
“Why don’t you try me?” Sandridge said.
“I think I know the man who took my kids. Except he’s not really a man in any ordinary
way.”
“Meaning?”
“He’s a demonmonger.”
“Come again.”
“That’s what he called himself when I met him a few days ago. He wanted something
from me, and now I think he’s taken my daughters to make sure I come around.”
“You have a name for this fellow?”
“He called himself Malarkey.”
Sandridge was quiet for a few minutes. “Well,” he said finally, “maybe that explains
something that came through my email yesterday morning. Someone calling himself
Malarkey said I would find some missing kids at a diner out in the country called Aunt Luisa’s
Cookhouse and Café. We tried to check where the email came from, but no luck. I didn’t
even associate it with your case until you said his name.”
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“So can we get out there?”
“We will,” he said, “but first you’re going to have to tell me everything, no matter how
weird or absurd.”
I agreed, but I insisted that both Jennifer and Sunny had to be there when I did.
*
At the hotel Sandridge made sure we had a quiet booth in the coffee shop. I was to start
from the beginning, but there would be no tape recorder or anything else that might intimidate
me. He also promised that he would not share any of this with Eleanor, at least not until we
had located the girls and it might be necessary.
After I had gone through the events of the last several days, Sandridge just nodded.
“So, do you think I’m crazy?”
“No,” the detective said, “but I have to admit I have not been completely honest with you.
I was surprised to hear you use that term ‘demonmonger,’ since I thought it was just
something in my own family lore. Since it seems part of what is happening is that everyone
has to tell you a story, I’ll have to go along and tell you one of my own.
“First off, does my last name ring a bell with you?
“Sandridge? No, it doesn’t.”
“Well, being a lawman runs in the family. My great-grandfather was a Texas Ranger who
got the job of tracking down a murderous gunslinger who went by the moniker of the Cisco
Kid. O. Henry wrote about him.”
“Sure,” I said, “Cisco and Pancho. Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carrillo.”
“Not really,” Sandridge said. “The character from the movies and TV is supposed to be
the character invented by O. Henry, but go back to the original story and you can see one hell
of a difference. O. Henry wrote a story called ‘The Caballero’s Way’ in which there is young
Anglo gunslinger who is described as liking to shoot Mexicans just to see them kick. He’s
living with a Mexican girl when my great-grandfather is sent to hunt him down. The twist in
the story is that the Kid sends a fake message that says he will send out the girl in his clothes
170
and then follow wearing hers. My great-grandfather, who had by now fallen in love with the
girl, shoots her, thinking it’s the Kid.”
“And O’Henry used real names?”
“He sure did. But don’t expect Hollywood to respect the original. You’re a screenwriter,
so you know better than I do how things can be turned upside down. You have a Spanish
actor who wants to play a hero, so you take the name ‘Cisco Kid’ and make the audience
think there’s a connection with O. Henry. Nice marketing.”
“Okay, that’s quite a story, but I don’t see how it has anything to do with a
demonmonger.”
Sandridge smiled. “You haven’t heard the real story yet. It’s about what happened after
the Cisco Kid got away.”
.
171
172
THE REDEMPTION OF THE CISCO KID
Of course she had it coming to her, the Cisco Kid told himself over and over. He had
truly loved her, or at least had come as close to loving her as might be possible for a
hardened gunslinger whose readiness to take a human life, at least a male life, had made
him so notorious in the south part of Texas as an old century was coming to a close. But
when he had crept close to her shack and seen her with the tall blond Texas Ranger he had
come to realize that she was no different from all the other women who had ever let him
down, beginning with the hard-drinking Bess Goodall who had given birth to him and then run
off.
He had overheard just enough of their plan to set a trap by sending the lawman a
message. Tonia had said she would let him know when he was there. Lieutenant Sandridge
received a message all right, but it said that the Kid, who was a small man, would try to
escape by exchanging clothes with her. The Ranger had fallen for it, and the Kid had ridden
off while the girl stepped outside shortly after, still dressed in her own red skirt and blue waist
and brown mantilla. Goodall had heard Sandridge empty his six-shooter.
Now the Cisco Kid had no way of judging what kind of man Sandridge was. The Texas
Rangers had been after him for a long while without success, mostly because he had so
intimidated the local population that no one wanted to be known as an informant. But a man
bent on revenge and hiding behind a badge no longer operated with the same considerations
either for his own safety or that of others, and he could just as easily be more a source of
concern for the Mexicans and half-breeds who lived near the Rio Grande than the Kid
himself. It was time he rode on.
If Goodall had any regrets about the era in which he had been born, it was that he was a
generation too late to gain the notoriety that would make him a legend. There would be no
dime novels about him as there were about the James brothers, even though he had heard
there was a writer in Austin, a man named Porter, who had wanted to interview him. The era
of the cattle wars, when someone like Billy the Kid could be hired by one rancher to shoot it
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out with a rival’s gunmen, had ended, which meant that being a gunslinger was no longer as
profitable an occupation as it once had been. And what with the Frontier Batallion, as the
Texas Rangers were then known, and the Pinkertons both making it more difficult to make a
living as an outlaw in the traditional manner, all that had been left was to cheat at cards with
well-heeled businessmen who could brag to the folks back east that they had lost at poker to
a young man who had the cold hard eyes of a professional killer but could certainly charm the
ladies.
And so it was that Goodall followed the border from Texas into the harsh Sonora desert
far to the west in the New Mexico Territory. There was slight chance that Sandridge could
follow him here, but the Cisco Kid preferred to play it safe by avoiding major settlements. He
was comfortable enough with the Indians he ran across, Apaches and Navajos, and his skill
with a rifle was appreciated when he helped bring down game that all could share.
His luck ran out as he came close to Tombstone. He was in a wild area at the mouth of a
canyon when his roan horse was startled by a sidewinder, bucked, and threw the Kid to the
ground. He hit his head and lost consciousness. It had been late afternoon when this
happened, and Goodall awoke to find it was night and his horse was gone.
Since his rifle, canteen, and bedroll were all with the horse, the Cisco Kid realized that he
was as good as dead. This was an uncomfortable thought, and Goodall made himself think
more optimistically. The first thing he had to do was find some shelter and get a fire going.
With his pistol he might still take down a bird that would offer some nourishment. Finding
water was going to be far more of a problem, but he thought that if he tried exploring some of
the caves he saw in the canyon he might find where there would be an underground stream.
He got to his feet but became nauseous with a wrenching headache. Reaching up to his
scalp he touched a large bump. This was not at all good. He had seen men hit on the head
who died as sure as if they had been gut-shot because they had bled inside their skulls.
Collapsing again to the ground he vomited, then rolled away and waited to see if in the next
few minutes he would lose consciousness in a far more permanent manner.
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The Cisco Kid, who had killed a fair number of his fellow human beings, had never been
much given to thoughts of what happened to a man’s soul when it was forcibly wrenched
from his body. He had heard preachers say either angels or devils would come to escort the
newly departed to a future station in either heaven or hell, and he had just taken it for granted
that when his own turn came it would be a short ride to hellfire and damnation. Now with the
prospect far more immediate, Goodall found that he had a strong inclination to beg for a less
dreadful alternative. He’d make any deal he could. He’d even read the Bible and go to
church every Sunday. At the same time he knew that it was a bit late for all that. He was
going to die and go to hell, and just being sorry for his sins was not going to save him. Then
he passed out.
*
The Cisco Kid had no idea how long he had been unconscious. He opened his eyes and
tried to move, but found that he was wrapped as securely as an Indian child on its mother’s
back. He was inside a cave, and there was a small fire illuminating a scene stranger than
anything he could have imagined. All around him were animals, both the predators and their
prey. There were wolves and bobcats, deer and rabbits, and they were all sitting together
and sharing a peace pipe like old friends. An eagle crouched nearby, gently tugging at its
feathered head until it lifted off and a man-like figure emerged. At its signal the other animals
likewise pulled at their skins and removed them. Then the figures all rose and began a dance
around where he lay.
Maybe this was hell, the Cisco Kid thought. These creatures would shortly resume their
former appearance and the predators would begin feasting on him while the former prey, the
type of animal he had so often hunted, would celebrate this proper turn of events. He wanted
to scream but no sound would come.
*
He awoke again and smelled a pungent tobacco. He was still wrapped up, but there was
no evidence of a fire, and certainly there were no animals.
“Well, you might live and then again you might not.”
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Goodall realized the voice was coming from behind him.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“You are in my cave, young man. I’ve had to buy you back from the critters that wanted
your soul.”
He felt himself being lifted up by someone with surprising strength. “Might as well get
these wrappings off you.”
Now freed, Goodall was able to turn and see his rescuer. For a moment he thought he
might still be in the middle of whatever weird dream he had been having.
“Wasn’t no dream,” the man said. At least he seemed to be a man, but there was
something about his face that suggested something apart from a strictly human lineage.
Perhaps it was the sharp features or the broad nose or the glistening eyes that peered from
beneath thick brows. He was wearing a tattered brown robe and smoking a clay pipe.
“So we are properly introduced,” he said, “my name is Fray Luis Montenegro. Time
before last I was a Jesuit down in Paraguay, got killed by some angry planters, and then
when I was back I decided to try my luck as a Franciscan. Didn’t work out any better, since I
was murdered when the Pueblo Indians revolted against the Spaniards. Don’t know yet
what’s next. Here, drink down this broth.”
Goodall almost gagged as he swallowed from the cup that Montenegro held out for him.
“Oh, it don’t taste all that good, but those are healing herbs. They heal the soul as well
as the body.”
Goodall did feel better. The one thing he felt he could be sure of at the moment was that
the man who called himself Fray Luis Montegro was probably mad.
Montenegro laughed. “You are a most lucky fellow, Goodall. By all rights you should be
shoveling coals for old Lucifer, but I bargained for you. That was even before I brought you
down to my kiva.”
“I don’t understand. You’re a priest?”
“Was. Twice even. I’m maybe the only demonmonger who’s ever been a member of the
Roman Catholic clergy, but I’m told I have some counterparts over in Asia with the Buddhists.
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We make the best kind of exorcists, you know, and that’s because we are halfway into the
demon world ourselves, so we kind of make our little arrangements. Just like Jesus and
those pigs in the Gospel story.”
Goodall did not know the story and he was not about to ask.
“Why me? I was ready to go to hell.”
“No, you were out there yelping after your fall. Just like any old sinner does. But there
was something special about you. Something interesting. You have a talent that never got a
chance to develop.”
“What kind of talent?”
“You can hear plants.”
The Cisco Kid tried to think what this could possibly mean. He did know that when he
was on his own out in the desert it was as though there was an odd music that would
suddenly come up around him.
“They all sing,” Montenegro said. “And that’s how the first healers learned what to use for
food and for medicine and for taking journeys into the spirit world. I have that talent myself,
and that’s why I felt sorry for you when I saw you wandering around out there. So I asked
Brother Snake to scare off your horse so I could bring you here.”
Yes, Goodall told himself, the man was totally mad. And yet he recognized that
something about what he was saying did ring true.
“So what do you want from me?”
“I want you to be a good listener.”
*
Later the man who had once been the Cisco Kid would try to recall just what was
happening inside himself. Preachers always talked about sinners being redeemed, but this
was supposedly a matter of public confession and some humiliating penance. Listening to
plants had never been mentioned, but as Goodall began his lessons with his demonmonger
teacher he did feel as though the self that he had been was being washed away and a new
person was appearing.
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Montenegro was patient. As often as not he would disappear for days at a time, but now
Goodall found that he was able to hear the plants that agreed to nourish him. Their music
also told him where he would find water, and as the months went by he was more content
with his own existence.
Eventually the time did come that Montenegro said Goodall must return to the world of
ordinary men and women. There was a horse waiting for him, and so the man who had been
feared as the Cisco Kid returned to Texas and a completely different life than the one he had
known as a gunslinger. He found a monastery that needed his unusual skills as a gardener,
and he lived there for almost twenty years.
It was during the dreadful flu epidemic of 1918 that once again he met up with the
lawman who had been his nemesis. The monastery had set up a hospital to help treat those
infected, and Goodall worked side by side with the doctors, only his specialty was herbal
treatments. A woman named Luisa Sandridge was brought in by her anguished father. Near
death, she seemed to recover almost miraculously with Goodall’s strange brew. Later they
talked, and she now learned who he was.
When her father next came, Goodall had disappeared. The former Texas Ranger, who
had vowed to kill the Cisco Kid no matter what, had to examine his own heart. The Cisco Kid
had saved his daughter, so perhaps a debt had been paid. Still, had he confronted him, he
could not be sure that he would not have tried to kill him.
Luisa herself did not have all of Goodall’s ability to listen to plants, but he had taught her
how at least to use her other senses to appreciate their properties. She put all this to good
use, and Aunt Luisa’s Cookhouse and Café became a legend.
Goodall himself was never heard from again.
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30. AUNT LUISA’S COOKHOUSE AND CAFÉ
“So when we do we go get my kids?” I asked.
“We might as well get started now,” Sandridge said. “But I wanted you to hear my story
first so that you’ll know what kind of place you’re going to. I haven’t been there for years,
even though it’s family that still run it.”
“You make it sound very mysterious,” Jennifer remarked.
“It is,” Sandridge replied. “The original Aunt Luisa, my great-aunt, developed some
recipes that were passed down to her daughters. Stuff that was supposed to be good for
what ails you, both mind and body.”
“Stuff learned from the Cisco Kid,” Sunny said. “Did the family ever try to capitalize on
the connection?”
“The story is that Duncan Renaldo ate there once and threw up, like the real Cisco Kid
was angry about what Hollywood did to O. Henry’s story. But, no, the story stayed in the
family.”
“Maybe this is where everything is supposed to come together,” Jennifer said. “And
we’re all supposed to be part of it.”
“Sure,” I said, “if we had any idea what this ‘it’ really is.”
“I think I do,” Sunny said. “We’re all invited to the demonmongers’ ball.”
*
Getting started was taking a while longer than I expected. Sandridge had been calling
ahead, and the cousins who operated the café confirmed that two little girls matching the
description of Kim and Kylie had been playing in the front. At first they thought that they were
with someone else at the café, then realized that the children really seemed to have no idea
of how they had come to be there. They were perfectly fine, though, and one of the
teenagers in the family had been deputized to be their babysitter until we got there.
“What about their mother?” Jennifer asked. “Shouldn’t she be told?”
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“She will be,” Sandridge replied. “But maybe not just yet. They might have my badge for
this, but I’m going to trust the three of you to help me out here. We’re going to go out and get
your kids, Mr. Webster, and we’re going to try and find out anything we can about who took
them, but already I think we all know the answer.”
“So you believe in demonmongers?” Sunny asked.
“That’s maybe too strong a way of putting it. But I have a feeling there’s no way I could
write a report that would make any sense. Someone wanted to make sure we’d all go out to
the café together, and your kids just happened to be the way it was being arranged.”
“And whoever’s doing this doesn’t care about who gets hurt,” I said. “I know Eleanor
must be going through hell, I’ve been pegged as a kidnapping suspect, and God knows
what’s happening with the kids.”
“The kids are all right,” Sandridge said. “My cousins say they seem completely normal.
Teresa—the girl who’s looking after them right now—is showing them how to bake some of
Aunt Luisa’s special cookies, and they’re really getting into it.”
“And they don’t know how they got there?”
“No. They remember being at home, then they know they’re playing outside the café. It’s
like there was no time in between.”
*
I had a little time alone with Jennifer before we set out. She seemed especially calm. I
was still upset at the idea that Malarkey—if that’s who this was—didn’t mind putting some of
us through hell.
“If he’s a demonmonger,” Jennifer explained, “then he thinks more like the demons
themselves than he does like us. Think about the stories you’ve heard. Forget this nonsense
about fallen angels. I’ve come to believe that, far from being super-intelligent and malicious,
demons are more like very small children, completely egocentric. They don’t set out to hurt
anyone, but they have their own agenda and sometimes they do hurt people. We get angry
or fearful or whatever, and if we direct our energies the right way we find that we can scare
them off. And sometimes we find that we can bargain with them, just like we do with willful
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children. Maybe the most striking thing is that demons are so very curious, as though they
are trying to figure out what makes us tick. They really want to be like us, you know.”
I had to laugh at this. Here we were, those of us who made up the human race, all along
trying to plumb the intentions of the gods, and the truth was that a supernatural entity—a god,
an angel, a demon, or whatever else we wanted to nominate for membership in the club—
was echoing our attempts by trying to see some greater design in what we ourselves were
doing. Sometimes this meant they had to play along with the roles we had written for them,
and if we rewrote the scripts, as we did so often, they were bound to feel a bit confused.
“So what’s the grand purpose for bringing us all together, you and me and Sunny and
Trane Sandridge?”
“Thorne, go back to that first email. You’ve been chosen by the gods. I think that in just
a couple of hours you are going to find out what that means.”
*
I was trying to think what would happen when we got to Aunt Luisa’s Cookhouse and
Café. Would we be stepping into place that did not really exist in an ordinary reality? Would
there be a congregation of not-quite-real entities caught up in an old-fashioned hoedown, a
demonmongers’ ball?
What did happen was that we pulled into the parking lot for an otherwise ordinary rural
diner. There were just a few other cars, and only a few tables were occupied. Sandridge led
us into the back, and there I found my daughters industriously decorating cookies. Teresa,
who was guiding their little hands, was a bright-eyed young woman who immediately
recognized Sunny and went into a flurry of teenaged omigoshes. The girls themselves
looked up and said hi as though our being here together was the most unexceptional thing in
the world. I didn’t care, and I swept both of them into my arms and wept unashamedly.
“Why are you crying, daddy?” Kim asked.
“Guys, where have you been? Your mother and I were so worried.”
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My older daughter looked confused. “Daddy, we were playing by the television, and
someone said we could step inside, so we did. And it’s been a lot of fun. Are we supposed
to go back now?”
I didn’t know what to say. I looked at Jennifer helplessly.
“It’s all right,” she said to them. “Your mom and dad just didn’t know that’s what
happened.”
“Who are you?” Kim asked. “Are you daddy’s new girlfriend?”
“I guess you could call me that,” Jennifer said. “Is that all right?”
“Mommy has a new girlfriend, too. Her name is Charlene, and she used to babysit us.
She’s very nice. Are you nice?”
“I try to be.”
“Then I suppose it’s OK. Is it OK with you, Kylie?”
My younger daughter just nodded. She wanted to get back to the cookies.
Sandridge had out his cell phone. “I guess we should let their mother know what’s
happening, but I don’t think she’s going to believe a word of this.”
*
Eleanor came later in a police car. She handled things better than I thought she might.
We didn’t say much to each other. As she took the girls back to the car she just looked at
me. “I’m sorry I doubted you,” she said. “What else am I supposed to say?”
It was enough.
More cars were coming and the diner was filling up. Sandridge and Sunny had found a
quiet booth to themselves. Jennifer pointed to them and smiled. “Maybe you can put off
working on that script for a while. I have the feeling Sunny wants to learn more about
detective work from the pros.”
“And what about us?” I asked.
“I think we’re supposed to have a drink with the gentleman in the corner.”
I looked over. Malarkey, dressed now in Western garb, was waving us over.
“You can really see him?” I asked.
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“He looks pretty solid to me.”
We pulled into the booth next to him. “So, what was this all about?” I demanded.
“We had to get your attention,” Malarkey said. “Remember the story I told you the time
we had breakfast? Did you get the point?”
“What point?”
“The gods have to change with the times. So a while back they tried out credit cards, but
that was not as successful a venture as they hoped. They’re always looking for the next big
thing, and maybe you can help them out.”
“Sure,” I said, “how about setting up a webcam on Mount Olympus or Valhalla or
wherever and have subscriptions.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea,” Malarkey commented. “But they really were thinking
more along the lines of a reality show of some kind. Isn’t that what TV’s all about these
days?”
I hated reality shows, mostly because they had narrowed the possibilities for those of us
who were old-fashioned scriptwriters. And just how could someone have a reality show on
which the characters were not real people but characters from mythology? It was a bad joke.
“So it needs some work, but you’re good at that,” Malarkey said. “You’ll come up with
something.”
“I’ve got a job already, thank you.”
“You did have a job,” Malarkey corrected me.
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“No,” Malarkey said, “nothing’s happened to your boss, but the network has pulled the
plug on his little protégé. I don’t think that’s going to bother her all that much now that she’s
found true love, but it means you’re free to work for us.”
“And get laughed out of town.”
“You underestimate our resources, Webster. Just sign on and you’ll be rich and famous
beyond your wildest dreams.”
“And that’s what I’ve been chosen for?”
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“That’s not good enough?”
I looked over at Jennifer. “No,” I said. “I don’t think it is.”
We were alone. One moment he was there and the next he wasn’t.
Jennifer was laughing. “You’re right,” she said. “He does just vanish.”
*
They definitely were special cookies. The girls had made sure Eleanor had some and
brought more home for Charlene as well as for the neighbor who had been looking after
them. When I had asked what was in them, Teresa said the recipe included blossoms from a
rare plant that grew somewhere out in the desert. It was one of the recipes the original Aunt
Luisa had handed down. Anyone who ate them would stop being concerned about a loss
that had not really happened. Well, the kids had not really been lost, so, as Sandridge let me
know as he saw us off at the airport, Eleanor no longer wanted anything more from him.
Of course, I still wanted something from her. I had told the kids I lived in a tree house
and they begged me to allow them to come and spend some time in it. Sunny, standing arm
in arm with the detective, said that she was going to keep looking after the girls, whom she
described as her little sisters. “I’ll make sure they can come,” she promised. I did not doubt
her.
Jennifer came back with me to Los Angeles. While still in Dallas I had talked with Jack,
who confirmed that the network no longer wanted the pilot I had been trying to create. So
Sunny could spend some more time in Dallas. Maybe she would learn to ride a horse. Or
grow exotic plants and open an organic restaurant. Or just get closer to the great-grandson
of the man who had chased the Cisco Kid.
I had to decide what to do next to earn my living in Hollywood. My thoughts kept coming
back to Malarkey’s suggestion about a reality show. Well, maybe we could make it work.
The audience, of course, would think it was a spoof with actors pretending to be supernatural
beings, but for those of us in the know it would be something else. I’d call it a tribute to
Thorne Smith, who had so much fun with the supernatural in the thirties. Or perhaps it would
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be a nod to Neil Gaiman, who had imagined the old deities back as American gods. Now it
was just up to the gods themselves, but they had started all this.
I got out the cell phone that had appeared by my bed just a few nights before. I checked
the address book. There was an entry I had not seen before. The Delesco Agency. I dialed
and readied my pitch.
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