DEMON
Demon-child. Kicked in the womb so his mother doubled over in pain. Nursing tugged and tore at her young breasts. Wailed through the night. Puked, shat. Refused to eat. No he was loving, mad with love. Of Mama. (Though fearful of Da.) Curling burrowing pushing his head into Mama’s arms, against Mama’s warm fleshy body. Starving for love, food. Starving for what he could not know yet to name: God’s grace, salvation.
Sign of Satan: flamey-red ugly-pimply birthmark snake-shaped. On his underjaw, coiled below his ear. Almost you can’t see it. A little boy he’s teased by neighbor girls, hulking, big girls with titties and laughing-wet eyes. Demon! demon! Lookit, sign of the demon!
Those years passing in a fever-dream. Or maybe never passed. Mama prayed over him, hugged and slapped. Shook his skinny shoulders so his head flew. The minister prayed over him Deliver us from evil and he was good, he was delivered from evil. Except at school his eyes misting over, couldn’t see the blackboard. Sullen and nasty-mouthed the teacher called him. Not like the other children.
If not like the other children, then like who? what?
Those years. As in a stalled city bus, exhaust pouring out the rear. The stink of it everywhere. Your hair, eyes. Clothes. Same view through the same fly-specked windows. Year after year the battered-tin diner, the vacant lot high with weeds and rubble and the path worn through it slantwise where children ran shouting above the river. Broken pavement littered like confetti from a parade long past.
Or maybe it was the edge of something vast, infinite. You could never come to the end of. Wavering and blinding in blasts of light. Desert, maybe. Red Desert where demons dance, swirl in the hot winds. Never seen a desert except pictures, a name on a map. And in his head.
Demon-child they whispered of him. But no, he was loving, mad with love. Too small, too short. Stunted legs. His head too big for his spindly shoulders. His strange waxy-pale moon-shaped face, almond eyes beautiful in shadowed sockets, small wet mouth perpetually sucking inward. As if to keep the bad words, words of filth and damnation, safely inside.
The sign of Satan coiled on his underjaw began to fade. Like his adolescent skin eruptions. Blood drawn gradually back into tissue, capillaries.
Not a demon-child but a pure good anxious loving child someone betrayed by squeezing him from her womb before he was ready.
Not a demon-child but for years he rode wild thunderous razor-hooved black stallions by night and by day. Furious galloping on sidewalks, in asphalt playgrounds. Through the school corridors trampling all in his way. Furious tearing hooves, froth-flecked nostrils, bared teeth. God’s wrath, the black stallion rearing, whinnying. I destroy all in my path. Beware!
Not a demon-child but he’d torched the school, rows of stores, woodframe houses in the neighborhood. How many times the smelly bed where Mama and Da hid from him. And no one knew.
This January morning bright and windy and he’s staring at the face floating in a mirror. Dirty mirror in a public lavatory, Trailways Bus Station. Where at last the demon has been released. For it is the New Year. The shifting of the earth’s axis. For to be away from what is familiar, like walking on a sharp-slanted floor, allows something other in. Or the something other has been inside you all along and until now you do not know.
In his right eyeball a speck of dirt? dust? blood?
Scared, he knows right away. Knows even before he sees: sign of Satan. In the yellowish-white of his eyeball. Not the coiled little snake but the five-sided star: pentagram.
He knows, he’s been warned. Five-sided star: pentagram.
It’s there, in his eye. Tries to rub it out with his fist.
Backs away terrified and gagging and he’s running out of the fluorescent-bright lavatory and through the bus station where eyes trail after him curious, bemused, pitying, annoyed. He’s a familiar sight here though no one knows his name. Runs home, about three miles. His mother knows there’s trouble, has he lied about taking his medicine? hiding the pill under his tongue? Yes but God knows you can’t oversee every minute with one like him. Yes but your love wears thin like the lead backing of a cheap mirror corroding the glass. Yes but you have prayed, you have prayed and prayed and cursed the words echoing not upward to God but downward as in an empty well.
Twenty-six years old, shaved head glinting blue. Luminous shining eyes women in the street call beautiful. In the neighborhood he’s known by his first name. Sweet guy but strange, excitable. A habit of twitching his shoulders like he’s shrugging free of somebody’s grip.
Fast as you run somebody runs faster!
In the house that’s a semi-detached rowhouse on Mill Street he’s not listening to his angry mother asking why is he home so early, has a job in a building supply yard so why isn’t he there? Pushes past the old woman and into the bathroom, shuts the door and there in the mirror oh God it’s there: the five-sided star, pentagram. Sign of Satan. Embedded deep in his right eyeball, just below the dilated iris.
No! no! God help!
Goes wild rubs with both fists, pokes with fingers. He’s weeping, shouting. Beats at himself, fists and nails. His sister now pounding on the door what is it? what’s wrong? and Mama’s voice loud and frightened. It’s happened, he thinks. His first clear thought. Happened. Like a stone sinking so calm. Because hasn’t he always known the prayers did no good, on your knees bowing your head inviting Jesus into your heart does no good. The sign of the demon would return, absorbed into his blood but must one day re-emerge.
Pushes past the women and in the kitchen paws through the drawer scattering cutlery that falls to the floor, bounces and clatters and there’s the big carving knife in his hand, his hand shuts about it like fate. Pushes past the women now in reverse where they’ve followed him into the kitchen knocks his one-hundred-eighty-pound older sister aside with his elbow as lightly as he lifts bags of gravel, armloads of bricks. Hasn’t he prayed Our Father to be a machine many times. A machine does not feel, a machine does not think. A machine does not hurt. A machine does not starve for love. A machine does not starve for what it does not know to name: salvation.
Back then inside the bathroom, slamming the door against the screaming women, and locking it. Gibbering to himself, Away Satan! Away Satan! God help! With a hand strangely steely as if practiced wielding the point of the knife, boldly inserting and twisting into the accursed eyeball. And no pain—only a burning cleansing roaring sensation as of a blast of fire. Out pops the eyeball, and out the sign of Satan. But connected by tissue, nerves. It’s elastic so he’s pulling, fingers now slippery-excited with blood. He’s sawing with the sharp blade of the steak knife. Cuts the eyeball free, like Mama squeezing baby out of her belly into this pig trough of sin and filth, and no turning back till Jesus calls you home.
He drops the eyeball into the toilet, flushes the toilet fast.
Before Satan can intervene.
One of those antiquated toilets where water swirls about the stained bowl, wheezes and yammers to itself, sighs, grumbles, finally swallows like it’s doing you a favor. And the sign of the demon is gone.
One eyesocket empty and fresh-bleeding he’s on his knees praying Thank you God! thank you God! weeping as angels in radiant garments with faces of blinding brightness reach down to embrace him not minding his red-slippery mask of a face. Now he’s one of them himself, now he will float into the sky where, some wind-blustery January morning, you’ll see him, or a face like his, in a furious cloud.
CAITLIN R. KIERNAN
Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan was born in 1964 in Skerries, Ireland, but came to the United States as a child, shortly after the death of her father. Her family lived in several locales in the South before settling in Birmingham, Alabama; in spite of her birth in Ireland, Kiernan now identifies herself as a Southern author and draws upon the heritage of Southern culture in much of her work. After receiving a degree in vertebrate paleontology from the University of Colorado, Kiernan returned to Birmingham to work at the Red Mountain Museum. She has published several scientific papers in such journals as the Journal of Paleontology and the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and her scientific background is an essential component in several of her novels and tales.
Kiernan began publishing short stories in the 1990s, and they have now been gathered into five volumes: Candles for Elizabeth (1998), Tales of Pain and Wonder (2000), Wrong Things (2001; with Poppy Z. Brite), From Weird and Distant Shores (2002), and To Charles Fort, with Love (2005). Her work came to the attention of Neil Gaiman, who commissioned her to do much of the writing for The Dreaming, a successor to Gaiman’s successful graphic novel The Sandman; Kiernan scripted The Dreaming from 1997 to 2001. Her first novel, Silk (1998), fuses supernatural and psychological horror in its account of the demons that emerge from a young woman’s memories of her father’s abusive treatment of her; it won the International Horror Guild award for best first novel. Threshold (2001), a cosmic novel that draws upon Beowulf, Algernon Blackwood, and others, won the IHG award for best novel. Low Red Moon (2003) is another cosmic novel; The Five of Cups (2003) is a vampire novel; Murder of Angels (2004) is a sequel to Silk, while The Dry Salvages (2004) is a dark science fiction novel. Alabaster (2006) is her latest story collection.
“In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888),” first published in Tales of Pain and Wonder, effectively utilizes both Kiernan’s knowledge of science and her sense of place in its evocative account of an ambiguous monster lurking in a tunnel in Birmingham.