24

She had changed. She was there before me, a figure of white, her hair and her gown floating in a wind that was silent, that stirred nothing else.

But she was different, taller, perhaps, or younger. She touched me as she stepped across the threshold. Her fingers were icy as they brushed my lips.

The door closed silently, as though moving with its own will. For a moment I was relieved to see her, grateful, nearly, that it was only her, this charming creature who both disturbed and delighted.

Then I understood. This was not just another visit. This was different. I sensed the hush of a crowd around us, through the walls, like the silent and yet audible weight in an opera house, a thousand lives weighing on the air.

But these were not lives. We were being watched by others, other creatures, other beings, invisible beyond the walls.

Trapped. Of course, I could run. There was the door. But why should I flee my own house?

Her eyes met mine. “It’s time,” she said.

It was hard to breathe. She turned at the entrance to the studio. She was, indeed, taller than I had recalled, and at once more slender and youthful and beyond age.

Tell her to get out. Flames snapped and spat in the fireplace. The color of the fire deepened, and the fire leaped higher, blue, and scarlet.

Despite the silence I felt rising within me, and the growing need I felt to take flight, I kept my voice firm. “I think it’s foolish,” I said, “to put me through this theater.”

She did not respond.

I could only whisper. “It was brutal. That—that thing—was not my father.”

The plastic canopies had been stripped from my furniture, and the chairs themselves were huddled together, like living things, mastiffs, drawn in closer together for protection. The furniture was unfamiliar to me, transformed.

The touch of this furniture, this brass-tacked leather, was enough to make me queasy. The leather had glazed itself with something like hair, the fine, sharp coat of a horse. The room around me was peeled of all familiarity. I was aware in a vague way of the unplastered walls, the gleam of nailheads, but what I saw were the glints and shiver of an armored host. Eyes, I thought, or spear points. I did not let myself look after a glance or two.

It was a fever, I told myself, a sick dream.

She gestured, inviting me to sit. The chair absorbed my weight, welcomed it, seemed to pleasure in it with a quiet groan. The leather breathed under me, around me. Some being held me lightly, taking its pleasure.

I stared into the fire. Don’t look to the left, I told myself, or to the right. I should have been furious. An assault had been made against my emotions. And yet, there was something about her, that sense that I knew her from long ago, that stilled me from being completely angry. I was mystified, but I could feel no hatred toward her.

She spoke. “You’re ready.”

I took a deep breath. I experimented with an incredulous laugh, something to buy time. Use your wits, I reminded myself. Stay steady. She had chosen a conversational tone, like a woman who had stopped by for a cup or two of Earl Grey. I kept my tone equally light. “Perhaps I should be grateful.”

She did not answer. I knew how a grandmaster must feel, considering openings in an international tournament, the eyes of a crowd upon his hand.

“But I’m not.” I turned to gaze at her. “What are you?”

She looked me up and down, mocking, seductive. “Surely you know.”

The words thrilled me.

I had always known the truth was like this. I had always, in the back of my mind, understood that behind all good fortune was some ultimate power. I felt used, battered, and yet all I wanted for the moment was to stop having to experience the wash of such strong emotions. But that is how they—whatever They were—would want me to feel.

“Names are essential in such matters,” I said. Names, I did not add, were the key element in conjuring. The ancient scribes of Judah would stop copying and undergo ritual cleansing every time the name of the Lord appeared in the sacred text.

She spoke after awhile, as though my speech had to be translated for her. “Names are important to human beings. We are not so interested in them.”

I leaned toward her. “Where do you come from?”

“I am not here for conversation,” she said.

“Where?” I repeated.

There was another silence. I began to understand. Speech was crude, a debased communication. “What do I seem to you?” she said.

On the surface this was mere conversation. This was a late-night visit, two people sharing thoughts. I felt, however, the formal quality of the transaction as an undercurrent. This was not chat—this was a deposition, a gentle but inexorable form of interrogation. Something like a system of law had been engaged. I did not know what judges with what sensibilities might weigh my words.

I would have to choose my words with care. “My father—my real father—would not want me to trade my soul for power.”

She laughed, gently.

I continued, uttering words I could not have anticipated. “I won’t do it.”

She laughed again. She soothed the cloth over her breast, a voluptuous gesture that aroused me.

“Did you kill DeVere?”

She waited before answering, as though remembering her response from long ago. “We watched you from birth, and marked you as a friend.”

“I don’t believe it.” But I sounded stolid, sullen, even petulant, staring ahead into the fire, able only to overshadow my thoughts with a fistlike skepticism. “And I don’t want to enter into any contract.”

She was silent.

“You will find me stubborn. Not so easy to deceive.”

She watched me.

“I want to end it,” I said. “Whatever we’ve begun. Tonight. Now.”

Her eyes glittered, as though in me she saw a great prize, a pearl of price.

Then I spoke from a deep sense of what was happening, one of those bursts of truthfulness that are more than Freudian slips, a whole paragraph of honesty, like the blank frankness of a drunk or the chattering of a patient anesthetized with sodium pentothal.

I was not trying to thwart her, and I was not playing for time. “There aren’t any angels. They’re mythical, things we wish could exist but can’t. There’s no Heaven, and no Hell.”

The only answer was the snapping of the fire.

I thought for a moment, and then turned aside in my chair. The leather eased around me, ecstatic with the movement of my body. I was sickened at this sensation, and I tried to tear myself away from the chair. The leather crooned after me as I escaped, and yet when I leaned against the mantelpiece I felt the solid, glossy timber shiver at my touch.

She was waiting for me to speak. I loathed the touch of the mantelpiece, the way the floor itself stretched beneath my feet, trembling nearly imperceptibly, wanting the impress of my footsteps.

A thought snagged me. I turned away. I forced out the words. “Are you,” I said, “Lucifer Himself?”

Her laughter was lovely. “Stratton,” she laughed, “you are the most delightful human being.”

I waited. “I’m relieved,” I said, with at least a little truthfulness.

The room changed. The fire did not flicker. Each flame went up straight. She gazed at me without a smile.

“You will decide tonight,” she said, her voice throaty and low, still lovely but no longer touched with laughter.

“Please leave me.”

She did not move.

“I’ve made myself clear,” I continued. “I was told to be ready to transact some business with you. I must tell you that I am not interested.”

The house had been silent. Now it became more than silent. The stillness touched me, shrank my heart. I continued, “If this is the way the powers you represent extort the human soul, then you have lost mine. You have played for me, and failed. My father is asleep with the dead, or with God, wherever humans go when they die.”

Before I could shrink back, she had reached me and was touching me.

I could not deny my own delight. My own sense that at last I was ascending to life. Show me, I thought to her. Show me what you can do.

She touched me as my father had, on my cheek. “So lovely,” she breathed, her breath the scent of gardenias.

“So lovely,” she repeated.

Show me.

I could not think. I was experiencing a lust beyond sensation, something like agony.

“Ours,” she said, her breath in the gentle mechanism of my hearing, entering the organs of my fancy, my faith in life, my dreams.

Don’t do it, I warned myself. Keep your mind a blank.

She was a woman, and beautiful. And yet I knew that she was not female, not human. It was the fluid nature of her body that captured me, and drew me in, the sight of her nakedness arousing me, the sweep of her gown at our feet poured about, beneath us, like milk, like quicksilver.

She wasn’t real, I knew. She was a hallucination. Surely that was it. I was simply losing my mind.

The sexual arousal I experienced was painful. My mind, my consciousness was gone, pricked like a bubble.

I was falling.

There was the nonsensation of oblivion, that empty bliss. But my lust was hard, and what swept me was a wet passion, an orgasm like something an innocent would experience, a child unable to emit seed but able to discover for the first time the hook nature had given him, the pleasure that commands.