Demon's Door Read online

  Jim swung his legs out of bed and found that he could do it easily. ‘Was I screaming anything comprehensible?’

  ‘Unh-hunh. You weren’t cursing or nothing like that.’

  ‘I mean, could you understand what I was saying?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something like “get off me!”, and “go away!” But you were really going crazy. That’s why I stayed here, to calm you down.’

  ‘You’ve been here all night?’

  ‘Pretty much. I didn’t want anything to happen to you, you know, like swallowing your tongue or something.’

  Jim felt as if he had the mother and father of all hangovers, although he couldn’t remember drinking more than three beers last night – two at the Cat’n’Fiddle and one here at home. He looked around the bedroom. It looked just like normal. Its off-white carpet was reasonably clean, with only one red-wine stain on it, in the shape of the Baja peninsula; and it was reasonably tidy, except for a stack of books beside the bed – the books he always picked up before he went to sleep, but never managed to finish. Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust; A Fire on the Moon, by Norman Mailer; and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

  Summer climbed off the bed and stood up and stretched. Jim said, ‘I don’t know what the hell could have been wrong with me. I wasn’t drunk. I don’t remember getting drunk, anyhow. I only had one beer in the house.’

  Summer came up to him and ruffled his hair, as if he were a kid. ‘Who knows? Maybe you’re worried about going back to college. I get nightmares sometimes before I start a new job. Did I tell you I got a job at Le Pothole? I didn’t, did I? Isn’t that great?’

  Jim looked up at her. ‘Le Poteau? That new pole-dancing club on Cahuenga? Yes, you did. Congratulations. You start tonight, don’t you?’

  ‘No, tomorrow night. Today I have to have my nails polished, and my Brazilian Brazilled. Mr Subinski said I have to look one hundred per cent perfect. He’s the owner, Mr Subinski. He’s like such a perfectionist.’

  ‘You didn’t have your nails done yet?’

  ‘No. I’m going this morning. Why?’

  Jim stood up. For a moment he felt giddy, and he swayed.

  ‘Hey, are you OK?’ Summer asked him, laying her hand on his shoulder. ‘You look like death warmed over.’

  ‘No, I’m fine. Just a little disoriented, that’s all. What day is it?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘Tuesday? It can’t be Tuesday.’

  ‘Jimmy, it’s Tuesday. Why would I lie to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Of course you wouldn’t. Why would you? But how can it be Tuesday? Yesterday was Tuesday. I ran over Tibbles yesterday when I was backing out of the driveway, and squashed him.’

  ‘Oh, yuck! You ran him over and you squashed him? You didn’t tell me that!’

  ‘I ran him over and squashed him but then I went to college and this Korean kid came in and he was carrying Tibbles in a cat basket and Tibbles was OK.’

  Summer was staring at him with her little nose wrinkled up, as if he were talking to her in a foreign language. ‘Jimmy, listen to me. You didn’t go to college yesterday. Yesterday you went to the market. You went to Ralph’s. I saw you coming back with all of your shopping. College doesn’t start back until today. You told me that yourself. You said you were dreading it. Those were your actual words. Another fifteen sickos, that’s what you said.’

  ‘Sickos? Oh – you mean illiterates.’

  ‘Ill, sick, what’s the difference? You said you wouldn’t mind changing jobs.’

  ‘I remember. At least I think I do. But I thought I said that this morning, just before I left for college and ran over Tibbles.’

  ‘But you didn’t run over Tibbles. Look.’

  Jim turned toward the half-open bedroom door, and there, watching him, was Tibbles. He didn’t usually wake up this early, but he had obviously heard voices and his curiosity had gotten the better of him.

  ‘You were right,’ he told Summer. ‘I think I was having a nightmare. Thanks for taking care of me. You didn’t have to.’

  Summer kissed his cheek. ‘I know I didn’t. But I like you, as it happens, and even if you’re crazy you always smell nice.’

  Jim looked at her, standing against the sunlit blind. She made him feel old. Not as old as he had felt in his nightmare, but she was at least ten years younger than he was.

  ‘You want some coffee?’ he asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘So long as you’re OK now, I’d better get back downstairs.’

  ‘Well . . . thanks again for everything. I really appreciate it. And good luck with the job.’

  ‘You have to come see me. I could wangle you a pass. I’m really good. When I was dancing at the VIP Club at Xes, Kiefer Sutherland said I was fourble-jointed. Well – he looked like Kiefer Sutherland. It could have been his double.’

  Jim opened the front door for her. Outside, the air was filled with a gilded mist, and it was already warm. Summer gave him another kiss and then she tippy-toed barefoot along the landing.

  ‘Summer!’ he called after her.

  She turned around at the top of the steps. Her hair was shining and her eyes were bright.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just – you know – thanks.’

  He made himself a mug of espresso and switched on the TV news. There was no question about it, this was September 7, the first day of the fall semester. In other words, it was yesterday. The news was the same as it had been yesterday – an unexpected drop in share prices, an airplane crash outside of Juneau, Alaska, four people dead – but there were so many inconsistencies that Jim felt as if his life had been disassembled and put back together in a totally different order.

  For instance, Mrs LaFarge’s Tupperware box of chicken livers was still in the fridge, and there were no cans of Instinctive Choice shrimp left in the larder, because Tibbles had eaten the last one yesterday. Or today, or whenever it was. There were no more bottles of Fat Tire in the fridge, either. So even if this were yesterday, it wasn’t an identical yesterday. It was more like an alternative yesterday.

  Jim took a long shower, and then sat naked on the end of his unmade bed, his head bowed, cooling off and thinking. He couldn’t believe that the demon who had visited him last night had been nothing but a nightmare. It had been far too real, far too frightening. Even his worst nightmares had never been as frightening as that woman who had turned into a fox-creature. He could still feel its bristles.

  The creature had left no traces behind. Jim’s T-shirt wasn’t torn, and he had no claw marks on his shoulders and arms. But then the demon hadn’t attacked him as he was now. It had attacked him as he was going to be, when he was over eighty years old. Maybe it was lying in wait for him, sometime in his future. Maybe he had been given a premonition, or a warning.

  But why? And what about Maria Lopez? Had she been attacked in the future, too? But if she had, how had she managed to come back to the past, or the present, or whatever yesterday had been? And if she wasn’t in the ER at Cedars-Sinai, where was she?

  Woody Allen once said that mankind has reached a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other path leads to total extinction. Jim was beginning to agree with him.

  When he went to the front door, Tibbles immediately ran toward him, and stood waiting for him to open it.

  ‘If you think I’m going to let you get out this time, you have another thing coming,’ Jim told him. ‘Now stay, you got it? Stay!’

  Tibbles looked away, as if ‘stay!’ was an order that applied only to dogs, and certainly not to him.

  Jim opened the door. Tibbles made a rush for it, but Jim snatched his collar and swung him back inside.

  ‘I don’t know how many lives you have left, but you’re not wasting another one, OK?’

  Tibbles gave him a venomous look and stalked back into the kitchen, his tail erect.

  ‘I’ll see you this evening,’ Jim called after him. ‘Don’t worry if I’m late. I may stop off at th
e Cat’n’Fiddle for a drink on my way home. Or maybe I’ll go to The Happy Ending instead.’

  He went down the steps. As he was walking past Summer’s apartment, her door opened and she came bouncing out.

  ‘Hi, Jimmy! How are you feeling? Gotten over the screaming meemies?’

  ‘I hope so. Maybe I was just suffering from pre-semester stress. Anyhow, thanks for taking care of me.’

  ‘Tibbles safely locked up? You don’t want to squash him a second time even if you didn’t squash him a first time.’

  ‘No, he’s safe inside. Have a good day, won’t you?’

  ‘You too. And listen, don’t worry too much about those ill people. You’ll be OK. You’ve been teaching for how long?’

  ‘Now you are making me feel old.’

  Summer kissed him on the cheek. ‘You’re not old, Jimmy. You’re not old at all.’

  ‘Well, thanks. That’s made me feel better.’

  ‘You’re just, like, mature.’

  He waited until Summer had driven off in her yellow Beetle before he climbed into his car. He switched on the engine and the air-conditioning, and while the interior gradually cooled down, he climbed out again and went down on his hands and knees to check underneath. He knew for sure that he hadn’t allowed Tibbles to escape, but after what had happened yesterday, or today, or whenever it was, he didn’t trust his own perception.

  He was still on his hands and knees when Mrs LaFarge came down the steps.

  ‘Jee-yum!’ she exclaimed. ‘Did you lose something? Or are you praying to Mecca?’

  He stood up, smacking the knees of his navy blue chinos to get the dust off. ‘Hi, Violette. No – I was just making sure that I wasn’t leaking oil.’

  ‘You are feeling better now? After last night? It is many years since I heard anybody scream like that – a fellow who cut his own hand off with a chainsaw. I was going to call for an ambulance.’

  ‘I’m fine now, Violette. I think it was something I ate.’

  ‘Pff! To me, it sounded much more as if you were having un cauchemar terrifiant – a really scary nightmare. I am an old lady, Jim. I can tell the difference between terror and indigestion.’

  ‘Thanks for your concern, but I’m fine now. Really. I have to get to college.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The empty flagons will be waiting for you to fill them with knowledge.’

  Before he got back into his car, Jim looked across at Mrs LaFarge and he had the distinct feeling that she knew what had happened to him – that she knew about him running over Tibbles and bringing him back alive. But behind her black insect-like sunglasses her expression gave nothing away. All she said was, ‘Bonne chance, Jim. Maybe I will see you this evening, and you can describe to me what a great struggle your day was.’

  He backed out of the sloping drive into Briarcliff Road. As he drove along Hollywood Boulevard he played Robbie Robertson singing ‘Somewhere Down the Crazy River’ on his stereo. ‘Yeah . . . that’s when time stood still . . . you know, I think I’m going to go down to Madam X and let her read my mind . . . but she said . . . “That voodoo stuff don’t do nothing for me.”’

  He turned into the gates of West Grove College and drove straight into the space reserved for Royston Denman, the head of mathematics, because his Mercury was eighteen feet long and six feet wide and he could park in Royston Denman’s space without a whole lot of complicated manoeuvreing. He collected his brown canvas bag and joined the motley tide of students who were pouring in through the main entrance. They reminded him of extras in a movie about teenagers who had been taken over by aliens. Or maybe he was getting old.

  Yesterday (or today, or whenever it was) he had thought about turning around and walking out of the college and never coming back, but today (or tomorrow, or whenever it was) he knew that he couldn’t do that. He had to find out what had happened to Maria Lopez. And it was equally urgent to find out what was happening to him.

  As he walked along the corridor toward Special Class Two, he could hear his new students up ahead of him, laughing and shouting and whistling, and the strutting sound of gangsta rap music.

  Sheila Colefax came out of her classroom, very flustered, and called out, ‘Jim!’

  ‘Yes, Sheila, I’m real sorry about the noise. Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll shut them up.’

  ‘Oh . . . well, thank you,’ she said. ‘It is very distracting.’ He had obviously caught her on the back foot by being so obliging.

  She was turning away when he popped his fingers and said, ‘By the way, Sheila . . . didn’t I hear something about a poetry recital at the Brentwood Theater?’

  She frowned at him. ‘Yes . . . there is. But it’s the Santa Barbara School, and the Santa Barbara School is abused women, mainly. I wouldn’t have thought that it was quite your thing.’

  ‘I don’t know. I hear they have some pretty strong poetic voices. Are you going?’

  ‘Well, yes. I have tickets, but I’m going with an old friend of mine from UCLA.’

  ‘OK, that’s fine, I just thought I’d mention it.’

  He continued walking along the corridor toward Special Class Two, leaving her standing in the doorway to her classroom, completely perplexed. About twenty yards away, he turned, and gave her a smile, and lifted his hand in salute. They might be frightening, these inexplicable shifts in time, but they had their advantages, too. They gave you an edge.

  He entered the classroom and it was just the same as it had been yesterday (or today). T.D. had his back to him and his boom box on his shoulder, and was bobbing up and down to ‘Chase Da Cat’, while Grant and Arthur and Billy were throwing a basketball around, and Elvira Thomas was perched on top of her desk polishing her nails in sparkly purple. Today he noticed that Leon was texting, and laughing sarcastically to himself as he did so, while Georgia was plucking her eyebrows, and behind the upraised lid of her desk, Patsy-Jean Waller’s cheeks were bulging, as she guiltily stuffed down a BabyRuth bar, one pudgy hand half-covering her mouth.

  As he laid down his bag and his papers, however, and looked along the front row of desks, he saw that Maria’s chair was empty. But he also saw that Kim Dong Wook was sitting in his place, calmly reading a book. Kim was wearing the same snow-white shirt as yesterday, when he had carried Tibbles into the classroom in that cat-basket.

  The rest of the students noticed that Jim had walked into the room, with the exception of T.D., who continued to bob and sway, and Elvira, with her gold cornrow hair, who was applying the final polish to her left pinkie. Arthur caught the basketball and held on to it, and sat down, while Leon stopped texting long enough to peer at Jim and shake his head dismissively, as if to say, ‘Here he is . . . just another down-at-heel remedial teacher in a cheap linen coat and crumpled chinos and five-year-old Timberland deck shoes.’

  But Jim walked directly over to Kim, and stood in front of his desk, and said, ‘How is Maria?’

  Kim Dong Wook pushed back his chair, stood up, and bowed his head. ‘I am Kim Dong Wook. I am honored to meet you, Mr Rook.’

  ‘You’ve met me already, sunshine. Don’t try to pretend that you haven’t. I killed my cat and you brought him back to me. But that was yesterday, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Rook. I am sorry for what happen to your cat. But each day is every day. Today is today. Today is first day of new semester, yes?’

  Jim said, ‘How is Maria? More to the point, where is Maria? She’s not in the ER at Cedars-Sinai, I know that for a fact. The West Hollywood police have never heard of her. So where the hell is she, Kim?’

  Suddenly, the tension between them was so electric that all of the students in Special Class Two fell silent. Arthur smacked T.D. on the shoulder, so that T.D. turned around and realized that Jim had arrived, and that something very heavy was going down. He switched off ‘Chase Da Cat’ and put down his boom box and said, loudly, ‘Wass happenin’ man? Wass occurin’ here? Somebody goin’ to fill me in?’

  Jim ignored him, and kept his eyes leveled o
n Kim Dong Wook. ‘I may be many things, Kim, but I’m not green.’

  ‘I did not suggest such a thing, Mr Rook. I know that you have much deepness.’

  ‘Well, you’re right, I do have much deepness. In fact I have more deepness than you will ever know. So you had better be careful what you say and do, because otherwise you’ll be in deepness, too, and that deepness will be deep doo-doo.’

  Kim’s face remained impassive, so Jim leaned forward until their noses were almost touching, and said to him under his breath, ‘I don’t exactly know what it is that you’re involved in, Kim. I’ll admit that much. But I do know that it’s concerned with time, and spirits, and maybe one spirit in particular. And so let me just tell you this: Special Class Two are under my pastoral care, and if anybody so much as touches one hair on their heads, they’ll have me to answer to. You got it?’

  Kim bowed his head again. ‘Whatever you say, Mr Rook. But in Korea there is a proverb, if you speak of the fox, it will come. English translation – talk of the devil.’

  Jim looked at him for a long moment, saying nothing. Kim looked back at him, and Jim was sure that he was giving him the faintest of smiles. But then Jim turned around to the rest of the class. ‘Good morning, Special Class Two! My name is Mr Rook – rook like in the bird, and I want to welcome you to another inspiring year of remedial English!

  He went over to the chalk board and scrawled the word phonetic. Then he pointed at Tamara and said, ‘You want to read the TV news, don’t you, Tamara? Why don’t you read this word for me?’

  Tamara’s cheeks flushed pink. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Oh . . . I’m like The Mentalist. Or Sherlock Holmes. I can see that you’re all dressed up and your make-up is absolutely perfect. Who comes to college looking as nifty as you? Only a girl who has dreams of being a TV news anchor.’

  Tamara stared at the word on the chalk board for almost half a minute. Then she said, very slowly, ‘Pah-hon-tic.’

  ‘OK,’ said Jim. ‘Good try! How about you, Arthur?’

  ‘That’s easy,’ said Arthur. ‘It’s “phone” like in “phone” and “tick” like in “tock.” Phone-tick.’