Her Favorite Demon
by Bill Prindle
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 2
In her sixth-grade Maine history class, she’d learned that when the British expelled the Acadian French from Canada around 1750, many of the dispossessed wound up in New Orleans and became the Cajuns, but some had found refuge along the Maine coast. Maybe Augustine was one of those exiles.
The first few pages dealt with the nature of magic, charms, and curses in general, the influence of the time of year on such spells, and included short descriptions of the two grimoires from which they were copied, the Ars Goetia and the Monarchia Daemonum.
A list of problems and the appropriate remedy to solve or prevent them mentioned names of a demons or spirits to summon. Some dealt with childbirth, crops, and warding off curses. They were complicated and had ingredients unknown to Lili.
Well, Augustine, I hope you had lots of children and grew plenty of turnips, Lili thought.
The last spell she translated was more promising and surprisingly simple. To acquire powerful, hidden knowledge from a demon named Barbatos, she must draw a large triangle on the ground with one corner pointing south, put a candle on the southern-most point, and summon the demon with the provided Latin incantation.
Barbatos had to reply to requests truthfully as long as he was summoned into the triangle. To send the demon away, she had to blow out the candle. In a passage that had been smudged and partly eaten away, she could make out the word minuit, which she knew meant “midnight.” The instructions on how to make the best use of Barbatos’s powers had faded to the point of illegibility.
Lili jumped when two hands plopped down on her shoulders.
“I knew you’d be in the library!” Kat said. “You are such a drudge, Lilikins!”
As Lili turned around, she slipped the little book into her knapsack.
“Please don’t call me that,” she said. “Kat, is that one of my tops?”
“You weren’t home so I looked through at all those clothes you hate and found this sexy little number.”
It was a pink halter top with the word “WET” in silver sequins across the front. “Nice, huh? Think Lon will like it?”
She spun around so that her dark brown hair swirled across her face and struck a pose showing off her figure. Kat had developed early.
“It would be nice if you’d asked me first,” said Lili. “Anyway, you can keep it.”
“Has someone lost track of the time?” Kat said.
Lili looked over her shoulder at the grandfather clock. “Eleven o’clock! The mail’s in!”
She grabbed her knapsack, and they dashed down the street to the post office.
Both Lili and Kat had received letters from Benson. They ran outside, hugged each other, tore open the letters, and read.
“Omigawd,” said Kat. “Omigawd, omigawd, omigawd!” she screeched as she jumped up and down.
Lili read her letter. It said she had been a worthy applicant, but the scholarship had been awarded to Katherine Bowden.
Lili felt enveloped in a fog of unreality, as though she were watching some terrible event happening to someone else. She was aware that Kat was hugging her and saying she hoped they’d always be friends.
Later Lili remembered congratulating Kat and telling her she needed to be alone for a while. She barely remembered walking home. She curled up on her bed and cried until she could barely breathe, her heart shattered.
At one o’clock, she pulled herself together and trudged down Main Street to her job as the ice cream girl at the variety store take-out window. She deflected all questions about her red, swollen eyes, and when her shift ended at six, she returned to her room and sobbed herself to sleep.
She awoke with a start when she heard Edith’s car door slam. Lili rushed around the house turning the lights on — Edith hated coming home to a dark house — and opened the can of beef stew, dumped it into a pot, and put it on a burner.
“Jesus H. Christ! The goddammed house is dark, and dinner is not on the friggin’ table. Too busy reading to make dinner?”
Leaning unsteadily against the kitchen counter, Edith took a bottle of vodka from her tote bag, poured herself half a glass, and lit a cigarette. Edith drank on the job and stole liquor from the houses she cleaned.
“Supper’ll be ready in a few minutes,” Lili said, her voice shaking as she put some rolls in the oven. Although she’d grown used to Edith’s bad moods, she was afraid of Edith when she was this drunk.
“Look at you. Just look at you. You can’t do anything,” Edith said. “You’re useless, just useless — aren’t you? Well, answer me! Are you useless?”
“No, I’m not useless,” Lili mumbled.
“I say you are, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.” Edith tossed her cigarette in the sink and took a few steps toward Lili.
“Oh, I heard all about it, I did. That tramp friend of yours walked off with the scholarship, didn’t she? You think you’re so damned smart, but you ain’t so smart now, are you, missy? You’re no better than the rest of us, and you’d best get used to it.”
“Please stop, Edith,” Lili said. She stirred the pot.
“’Please, Edith, poor little orphan me, Edith.’ What about me? I take care of you like I was your servant or something, I buy you stuff, I work my hands to the bone, and what do I get for it?”
“You steal liquor and get drunk,” Lili whispered.
Edith grabbed Lili’s arm and spun her around. “What did you say? Did you say something?” she shrieked. “I’ll tell you what I get. I get a dark house and no dinner and a little bitch who sasses me!”
She drew back her hand and cracked Lili hard across the face. Lili fell back against the stove. Her nose was bleeding.
Edith stood over her and snarled, “Get out of my sight!”
Lili ran upstairs, locked her bedroom door, threw herself on the bed, and turned out the light. She felt as though she had no tears left and shivered uncontrollably. Her life had reached a dead end.
The vocabulary word “destitute” occurred to her. Closing her eyes, she wondered if it were possible to feel any worse, so she willed herself to feel nothing and drifted off into a fitful sleep.
When she opened her eyes, there was a band of moonlight across her worn chenille bedspread. She propped her head on her elbow and, as she had done many times before, tried to imagine Séraphine sitting across the room, shrouded in darkness. The sophisticated adventurer crossed her long legs and combed her lustrous black hair away from her eyes with her fingers; Séraphine never used a comb or brush.
“Séraphine,” Lili whispered, “what will I do? Everything is ruined.”
“Ah, ma pauvre petite,” replied Séraphine in that husky voice of hers, “in times of danger, you must always move forward; no retreat is permitted. Do something bold, even dangerous. Confront your enemies and show them no mercy. You must act! Il faut agir !”
Lili recognized that the words were from the third book in the Flambeau series, Fatal Conquest, in which Séraphine cradled her dying mentor Achille, who urged her to seek out his killers and revenge herself. Séraphine excelled at revenge.
Lili turned on the bedside light and took the old book out of her knapsack. She again read over the spell about obtaining secret knowledge from a demon. Her alarm clock read eleven o’clock.
“I will do something dangerous,” she said, “tonight.”
At 11:45, dressed in her thin cotton nightgown, she took her knapsack and tiptoed down the back stairs to the kitchen. After collecting a candle, her Girl Scout compass, and a box of matches, she slipped out the back door and walked across the cool wet grass to the barn behind the house. Once there, she lit the candle, determined which way was south, drew a large triangle on the dirt floor, and fixed the candle on its southern point. She read the words to summon Barbatos.
She stared intently at the flame. Nothing happened. She waited and then the flame fluttered.
She lifted her gaze and saw a thirty-something man dressed in boating sneakers, khaki pants, and a button-down tattersall cotton shirt standing in the middle of the triangle. His streaky blonde hair was combed to leave a lock artfully hanging across his forehead. He looked as though he’d stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalogue.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I believe you called me.”
“You’re Barbatos?”
“In person.”
“You’re not what I was expecting at all,” she said. “You look like a model.”
“Do I really?” he said, his face lighting up. “That’s precisely what I was trying for. In the old days, we used to show up looking like something out of a Godzilla movie but, back then, people were used to such spectacles. If I did that now, you’d probably drop dead of fright.
“These days. when a message comes into the call center, we check the coordinates, do a little research, and show up in a style appropriate to the century and location. So here I am in Maine, the land of lobsters, khaki pants, and Weejuns. By the way, what is a Weejun?”
“It’s a shoe,” she said. “I was kind of hoping you’d be a little scary.”
“There are different kinds of scary.”
For a while, neither of them said anything.
“So are you going to tell me why I’m here?” he asked.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.”
“You didn’t read the whole spell, did you?”
“The last part of it was sort of messed up.”
“Would you like me to tell you what you missed?”
“Yes, please.”
“You have to phrase it as a request.’
“Like Jeopardy?” He smiled weakly. “Okay, Mr. Barbatos, please tell me the part of the spell that I wasn’t able to read.”
“First of all, it’s nice you’re polite, but just call me Barbatos,” he said. “Here’s what you neglected to read:
Once summoned, the demon can provide hidden knowledge for exactly seven days from its first appearance. After that, it may be summoned and dismissed by saying its name three times. As long as it is inside a triangle, it must speak the truth. If summoned in the absence of a triangle, it might speak the truth or it might lie. At the end of the seven days, the spell ends and the demon cannot be summoned until thirteen years have passed. Nota bene: Even though it must speak the truth, it will not necessarily reveal the complete truth unless compelled to do so.
“What if I blow out this candle and never summon you again?”
“Your loss.”
“The spell says you provide powerful hidden knowledge. Please tell me what that means.”
“It’s far more complicated than you could ever understand, but here’s the Quick Start version. If the knowledge already exists or if the circumstances have been set in motion that will inevitably produce said knowledge, then I have the power to reveal it to you. So think of something important you want to know more about.”
The scholarship! Immediately Lili’s eyes brimmed with hot tears.
“I can’t believe that I didn’t get the scholarship to the Benson School. I was the most deserving student. My teacher Miss Preble even said so,” she snuffled. “Please tell me why I didn’t get the scholarship.”
“You didn’t get it because during your interview Headmaster Worley decided you were an inferior candidate.” Barbatos shrugged.
“What!” she cried. She looked at Barbatos imploringly, tears running down her cheeks. “Tell me if Kat was really the best candidate.”
“Not at all. You were the best candidate in every conceivable way. As you well know, Kat is smart but lazy, and she cheats every chance she gets. But your so-called friend was the more cunning candidate.”
As he regarded the bereft figure before him, shaking with grief in her shabby nightgown, Barbatos almost felt a twinge of sympathy where his heart would have been.
“What do you mean ‘so-called?’ Tell me how she was more cunning. I don’t even know what that means.”
“During his interview with Kat, Worley said that he knew that you two were close friends and that it must be hard to compete against each other. Kat said it didn’t matter to her who won the scholarship.
“‘As her friend’,” he said, mimicking Kat’s chirpy voice, “‘I helped Lili with her assignments and gave her ideas for her compositions. But if taking time away from my studies meant that Lili became a better student, it was worth it. I even convinced her to stop cheating.’
“Kat finished up saying she was happy to provide some emotional stability to your life, what with you being an orphan and living with an alcoholic thief. She said if that’s the price of friendship, well, she was glad to pay it.
“Put another way, Kat stabbed you in the back, twisted the knife, and left it there.”
Lili felt as though the floor had fallen away. She swayed as though she might faint. Barbatos took out a fingernail clipper and trimmed a cuticle.
“Oh yes, the other reason she got the scholarship is that with her artful application of makeup, your little friend appeared to be a much more mature high-school student than you did with your freckles and braid and Little Bo Peep dress.
“Worley has a weakness for pretty girls. A few years ago, he had a tumble with one of the servers at the Dairy Queen in Prescott. Lately he’s been playing patty-cake with the comely Québécoise Miss Poitrine, the French teacher at the Benson School. I assure you that Worley’s wife would be none too pleased should she find out. You humans are such frail creatures, so easily tempted,” he mused.
Lili’s sobbing had subsided to hiccups. In a hoarse voice she said, “Barbatos, tell me what Kat thinks of me.”
“You really are a glutton for punishment, dearie. You want to know what she says about you when you’re not around?”
“Yes.”
“She says she feels sorry for you because you’re so geeky and plain. She also hints to her friends that you’re illegitimate.”
“I am not. Grandpa told me my parents were killed in a car crash right after I was born.”
“Were they?”
“What do you mean? Tell me what you know about my parents.”
“I know everything about your parents,” he said. “When your mother was working as a waitress in Portland, she ran away with the charming scoundrel who fathered you, a man with so many aliases I’m still not sure what his real name was.
“He was gifted with good looks and was devilishly smart, a protégé so to speak. He could fleece a mark as easily as you can hum a tune, and whatever he wanted, his marks gladly gave it to him. He seduced your mother just to get his hands on her little nest egg, never married her as he’d promised, and dumped her, penniless and pregnant.
“A few years later he fetched up in New York and swindled the wrong guy — a vory v zakone in the Russian Mafia, who dismembered your father and dumped him in the East River. Your spirit, ambition, and brains are your father’s.
“You have your mother’s looks, but I hope they do more for you than they did for her. She was a sweet, hapless victim, with a surpassing beauty that only attracted losers and scoundrels. Not long after she gave birth to you, she overdosed on meth. Your grandfather collected you, and here we are.
“Lili, for a kid as smart and beautiful as you are, you can’t seem to catch a break. Maybe it’s time for the breaks to go your way.”
Lili felt numb. Her father was a criminal and her mother killed herself? Who am I? she thought. What am I?
“I have an idea,” he said gently, “a sort of let’s-get-acquainted offer. We’re off to kind of a rough start, what with me dumping a load of bricks on you. You might be thinking, ‘Can I really trust this guy? Is he really telling me the truth?’ So let’s try something that’ll be fun. What do you say?”
“Like what?”
“Kat took something from you. Why don’t you take something from her? Just for fun.”
“I don’t want anything of Kat’s,” Lili said.
“Oh, come on, think of something and let’s see what happens.”
“I don’t understand.”
“What about Alonzo?”
“Take Lon away from Kat? How would I do that?”
Barbatos crossed his arms and regarded her thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s enough for one night. Why don’t you sleep on my offer?”
“Okay,” she said and blew out the candle. He disappeared.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Bill Prindle
