Demon: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page A

lie. But I tell you, lying to you now will not serve my purpose.”
    “What purpose is that? And why should I care or listen to anything you say?”
    “ Finally an interesting question!” the demon said with what nearly sounded like relief. “The first answer is that I want to set the record straight. To shatter a few myths about my kind. The second answer is this: because it is a story unlike any other. I believe you’ll find it to be of personal interest.”
    “Why, because I’m a seeker?” I didn’t hold back the bitterness.
    “Because my story is ultimately about you.”
    Something in me recoiled. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
    She folded her arms on the edge of the table. “When you were growing up, you honestly believed in the morals of stories, in the integrity of comic-book heroes, of Batman on television, didn’t you? And it had a greater impact on you than having morality drummed into your psyche by a church telling you to please an angry and distant god. You were good on principle. And yet here you are, without a wife or kids, or the success that being good was supposed to win you. Am I right? I know I am. And so you’re on a quest for new meaning because the alternative is only this: that goodness has won you nothing but pain. And you’re not willing to accept that.”
    “No.”
    “You need a sense of context, that larger picture. As I said before, I can give you that. But you have to hear me out.”
    As she said all of this, I found myself drawn to her in a wholly different way than I had before, against judgment, against instinct. And perhaps this was the grandest seduction of it all: that she was right.
    “Don’t worry about anything else. Simply write down what I tell you. Each word. Everything. And then you’ll know it is real and you are sane.”
    “I can’t remember each word. My mind is shattered, can’t you tell?” But even as I said this, I knew I could recite that first conversation verbatim if I wanted to. Even now the full flow of that conversation came over me, as though summoned by the mere act of thinking of it, our exchanges of that night and this one intertwining and overlapping like competing melodies in my mind.
    “You’ll remember.”
    She glanced at her watch and frowned. The ankh swung in the window of her neckline as she gathered her coat. I had been transfixed by that view before, but found I could hardly look at it now.
    She . . . he . . . it left, as it had before, without preamble. I come to you at great risk, Lucian said the first night. What, exactly, had the demon meant by that?

    I SPENT THE NEXT two weeks going through the motions of a job that seemed suddenly meaningless. I checked the time, the date, my calendar, with a regularity that bordered on obsession. I wrote down and read—and then reread—my accounts of both encounters, though I didn’t need to. As promised, I hadn’t forgotten one word of either. I began to think that this was the real demonic trick: to trap me in this limbo—less dead than before, not quite alive.
    And then the mysterious L appeared again.

3

    Trying to get away from my home before the appointed time, I noticed the church down the street with new eyes, saw it for perhaps the first time as more than scenery on the way elsewhere. A moment later I was checking the doors—it was Saturday, after all. But they admitted me easily, and I found myself loitering in the narthex until, with great hesitation, I entered the sanctuary.
    I chose a creaky pew toward the back.
    I immediately felt out of place. I hadn’t been to church in years, and then only for holidays or weddings. I was conscious of every sound, of the still postures of those few sitting or kneeling in the pews ahead of me. I wondered if, having been in the presence of a demon, I would conversely better notice the presence of God.
    But I felt nothing.
    In the last week I’d been tempted to search through the boxes remaining in my spare room for my old