10Welcome to my brain.
TW: rape, suicide ideation.
Prelude:
"There's a feeling I get when I look to the west, and my spirit is crying for leaving… And it's whispered that soon, if we all call the tune then the piper will lead us to reason… And if you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last, when all are one and one is all." –"Stairway to Heaven"
When I was seven, the devil was my imaginary friend.
He didn't look the way you'd expect, with rubbery red skin, curly horns, and a pointy tail. I wouldn't have known he was the devil, except that at one point I think he introduced himself as "the Prince of Darkness" or some other such nonsense. I was a kid, though. Lonely. I didn't care. He had a dad body with a little bit of paunch, five days' worth of stubble, soft brown eyes and a kind smile. I remember he wore one of those goofy Christmas sweaters—the kind with the dangly bells and pom-poms all over the front.
He made me feel safe, kept me company when my mom had to run down to the corner market for an early shift and the babysitter was still on the way. But he never stayed for very long; he was always on his way to somewhere else. Every time he said he had to go, I'd ask, "Where to?" and he'd just smile and wink.
"Someday you'll see." And then he'd whisk away in a whirl of jingle-bells.
You know, my dad left on Christmas morning when I was six years old, so you can see why it wouldn't take an in-depth psychoanalysis to figure out the origin of my imaginary friend. Sure, my mom worried when I came home from Sunday school with a drawing of the devil in black crayon only, but the teacher said I'd grow out of it.
I did.
Then, when I was fourteen, the devil came back. He wasn't wearing the Christmas sweater anymore, and it looked like he'd gone on one of those ridiculous celebrity diets. With long bushy hair, tight black trousers, and an open blazer baring his naked chest and several cords of beads and baubles—hell, if I'd put a guitar in his hands, you'd've sworn he was Jimmy Page. He smiled at me, brown eyes kind as ever, leaned close and whispered, "Did you think I wasn't real?"
"The hell are you doing in my room?" I demanded in response, hoisting my heavy blanket up to my chin.
He only laughed with unruly amusement. "It's been a minute," he replied. "Just checking in on you."
"Well I'm fine," I said, trying to avoid staring at his chest. It was pleasantly hairy: enough to prove he didn't have some sort of hormone deficiency, but not enough to give the impression that a small creature was trying to escape from within his blazer. Look, I wasn't trying to perv on this ambiguously-in-the-realm-of-middle-age man. I was fourteen years old. It was a time of stress and sexual awakening (the two are distinctly correlated in my mind). And here came this big-hair band Adonis in tight jeans and a blazer—not to mention the whole childhood father-figure thing added in for good measure. Part of me thought I was just having another one of those sexy dreams that always left me half-aroused, half-mortified when I woke up. I mean, after all, men don't just show up in your bedroom at two in the morning dressed like rock stars.
It must have only been a few seconds before he turned away, but it felt like a mile—the kind of mile they make you run in PE at the beginning of the school year, just to see how slow you are, and you're really slow because halfway through the second lap you get a cramp in your side, so you limp another lap or two before finally giving up and walking the rest of the way. And when he did turn away, it felt like collapsing on the bleachers and dumping the contents of your water bottle over your face instead of drinking it because you're still gulping air.
"Wait!" I called to him just as he reached for the door.
He turned slightly, face obscured by a tangle of long curls and a feather. Yes, a fucking feather in his hair. Beads clinked together, obscenely loud in the silence.
"Where are you going? You just got here."
"Places to be," he said softly with a shrug, like that explained anything.
I recalled several other similar conversations from years ago. Knowing if I asked where, he'd sidestep a real answer, and remembering his promise to show me someday, I said instead, "Will you take me?"
This turned him to face me again. "Are you unhappy?" he asked, and for a moment I thought I saw a flicker in his eyes, like a dying ember flaring as it slips through the grate and falls onto the floor of the fireplace.
"No?" It didn't really feel like an answer, but he took it with a solemn nod anyway.
"Not yet," he murmured thoughtfully, almost more to himself than to me. Glancing back up at me, he forced a small smile and added, "Soon."
"You said that seven years ago," I pointed out irritably.
His smile broadened briefly. "Time works differently for me," he explained, adding with calm reassurance, "But I always keep my promises. Do you believe me?"
I responded with a question of my own. "Are you really the devil?"
A snort escaped him. "I suppose you could say that. Others have. Are you afraid?"
"Aren't you busy?" I retorted, repeating my first question: "What the hell are you doing here?"
He did not laugh. His face grew very serious, and he crossed the room in a few long strides. Leaning over me, his eyes close to mine, he whispered, "You're special."
God, isn't that what every teenage girl wants to hear?
It left me breathless. He touched my forehead, his fingertips cool, and my eyelids grew heavy. I barely saw him slip through the doorway before I was asleep.
I woke up in the morning and glanced at the corner of my room where I thought he'd been standing, but all I saw was a pile of wrinkled clothes haphazardly balanced on the desk. Could I have simply been talking to my dirty laundry last night? Well, it wasn't the most embarrassing thing I'd done. I didn't tell a soul about my nighttime vision, and he didn't come back.
Eventually I forgot.
Then I turned twenty-one. It should've been a good day, a break from the drudgery of a life that should've been more exciting than it had turned out. I clocked out of work an hour early and my friends took me out for drinks at the one bar in our small town, where I spent half the evening making eyes at Evan Hurst a couple of tables down. Everyone knew Evan Hurst; he was clever, athletic, and could make anyone laugh. He'd been a baseball star back in high school, and no one knew why he stuck around town after graduation, but I wasn't going to complain.
He made the first move. A beer appeared at my elbow, and when I glanced up at the server, she nodded in his direction. I met Evan's gaze and he winked at me.
I'm not sure how I shook myself loose from my friends, but Evan and I shared a couple of drinks and then the next thing I remember is my hair catching on the rough brick wall behind me and Evan's tongue down my throat. Then the motel room, dirty yellow wallpaper and pink lampshades casting a soft glow over the rumpled bedding. I don't know if I actually said "no" out loud, but I certainly thought it over and over, staring up at that popcorn ceiling, listening to Evan's labored breathing as he peeled the clothes from my inert body. Shit, it didn't physically hurt, not like I was expecting anyway, but I'd lost interest in the alley behind the bar when the world started spinning, and now everything just felt fumbling and vaguely vile.
He had the consideration to pull out, at least, dribbling onto the dirty sheets instead.
"Thanks," was all he muttered as he zipped up his pants, throwing on his jacket and leaving me there alone and naked.
I rolled over and vomited just before I lost consciousness.
I was shivering when I woke to a pounding on the door. Sunlight eked through the yellowed curtains, like it was afraid to enter the dismal room. I tried to sit up and everything whirled around me.
The pounding continued.
"What?" I demanded, my voice weaker than I intended it to be.
"You were supposed to vacate an hour ago!"
I recognized the manager's gravelly voice, saw his sallow face appear in the window as he peered through it, the sheer curtains doing nothing to hide me. First I noticed him ogling me, then I realized I was still naked.
Everything came back to me. The drinking, Evan's probing tongue, his sticky, sweaty breath in my ear. I retched, but nothing came up except a bit of bile. I'd already expelled the rest last night.
Once I was dressed, I gathered my courage and wrenched the door open, daring the manager to say anything to me. He didn't, and I left.
I thought that would be the end of it, but that's not how small towns work. Rumors spread. People looked at me differently. You know the look, the kind that comes with whispers behind the hands, girls clinging to their men a little tighter when you walk by. A month rolled by, crushing me beneath it. I withdrew, didn't go out with my friends, didn't even go to work near the end, stopped eating and picked up smoking.
I'm still not quite sure how I found myself up on that chair, teetering on the edge with a rope coiled around my neck and a couple of my mom's sleeping pills sitting in my gut, soaked in whiskey. I don't even know if I actually planned to go through with it, but there I was, and in the moment it felt all right, balancing on the edge of life and death. I wobbled a little, and the floor leapt up at me, screaming at me to slip, daring me to jump.
My hands flew to my throat, gripping the rope while I steadied myself, my breath ragged and wild. That's when I saw him, standing in the corner like he'd been there the whole time and I had only just noticed him.
He wasn't the devil I knew before. Not the dad devil, not the big-hair band devil. No, tonight he wore a shadow draped like a robe around him, long curls tamed behind his head with some sort of hair tie. He looked bigger than I remember, towering at eye-level with me, though I was on a chair and not a short person. His face was stone, eyes hard and black like chips of obsidian. They pierced straight through the festering wound inside, and it all spilled out in a flood.
I dangled on my tiptoes, sobbing as the rope bit into my throat, reminding me how close I was to oblivion.
"Don't," I warned him in a thick voice as he approached.
He stopped. "You've been drinking," he noted, his voice low.
"That's what you're choosing to lead with?"
"Are you going through with it?"
I was a little taken aback by the emotionless, almost clinical tone he takes. "Are you going to stop me?"
He didn't respond for a moment, staring fixedly at the floor. Finally, he looked up, regarding me with resignation. "What would it take?"
The question caught me off-guard. I don't know what I expected, but it wasn't that. Still, the answer came almost immediately. "Take me with you."
"It's not time."
"When, if not now?" I insisted.
"You don't belong where I must go. Not yet."
I swayed a little on the chair. He took a step forward. Steadying myself, I stared down at him through tears that still swelled in my eyes. "I don't belong here either. All my life I've slipped in and out of other people's lives, like a shadow, hardly there long enough to be noticed. But you see me."
"I see everything," he replied matter-of-factly.
"Then you know. Get me out of here."
"Do you really think where I'm going is better than this place?"
"Are you taking me or not?" I demanded, warning him, "I'll find my way to hell one way or another."
He let out a soft, sad laugh. "Of that, I have no doubt." Looking up at me, he sighed, and his eyes softened. He held a hand out to me, and that's when I realized—it had been hidden in the shadows until now—his right arm was missing, just gone from the elbow down. Had he always been like that? I couldn't recall, and in the moment, it didn't seem like an important or polite thing to bring up.
With one-and-a-half arms extended to me, he whispered a single word that rang through my bones, calling me to him.
"Come."
I stepped off the chair and fell into the shadow of the devil's embrace.