The Lovers

“Look at me when I’m talking to you,” said Ro

Killing Melody McReady in a pond in Idaho, holding her head beneath the water as her back bucked and the last bubbles of air broke the surface…

Telling Wade Pearce to close his eyes and open his mouth, promising him something nice, a big surprise, and then jamming the gun between his teeth and pulling the trigger, because she had been wrong about him. She thought he might have been the one-what one?-but he was not, and he had begun asking questions about Melody, his girlfriend, and she had smelled the suspicion upon him…

Bobby Faraday, kneeling in the dirt before her, weeping, pleading with her to come back to him, as she walked behind him, took the rope from his saddlebag, and slipped the cord lightly around his neck. Bobby wouldn’t leave her alone. He wouldn’t stop talking. He was weak. He had already tried to kiss her, to hold her, but his touch repelled her now because she knew that he wasn’t the one for her. She had to stop him from talking, from trying to act upon his desires. So the rope tightened and Bobby-strong, lean Bobby-struggled against her, but she was strong, so strong, stronger than anyone could have imagined…

A hand on a stove, and the soft hiss as the gas began to seep out, just as it had seeped out decades before in a house owned by a woman named Jackie Carr; the girl waiting for the Faradays to die, one window op Z ane windowen just enough so that she could take breaths of night air. And then noise from the bedroom, a body tumbling to the floor: Kathy Faraday, almost overcome by fumes, trying to crawl to the kitchen to turn off the gas, her husband already dead beside her. The girl had been forced to sit on Kathy’s back, her mouth covered to protect her from the fumes, until she was sure that the woman was no more…

Leaving signs; carving a name-her name, her real name-in places where others might find it. No, not others: the Other, the One she loved, and who loved her in return.

And dying: dying as the bullets ripped into her and she tumbled into cold water; dying while the Other bled upon her, as she slumped forward in the car seat and her head came to rest upon his lap. Dying, over and over again, yet always returning…

A hand tugged on her arm. “You fucking bitch, I said-”

But Emily wasn’t listening. These were not her memories. They belonged to another, one who was not her yet was in her, and at last she understood that the threat from which she had been fleeing for so long, the shadow that had haunted her life, had not been an external force, an outside agency. It had been inside her all along, waiting for its moment to emerge.

Emily raised her hands to her head, pressing her fists into the sides of her skull. She closed her eyes tightly and ground her teeth as she struggled against the gathering clouds, trying in vain to save herself, to hold on to her identity, but it was too late. The transformation was occurring. She was no longer the girl she had once believed herself to be, and soon she would cease to be forever. She had a vision of a young woman drowning, just as Melody McReady had drowned, fighting against the coming oblivion, and she was both that woman and the one who was holding her down, forcing her beneath the water. The dying girl broke the water for the last time and looked up, and in her eyes was reflected a being both old and terrible, a black, sexless thing with dark wings that unfurled from its back, blocking out all light, a creature that was so ugly it was almost beautiful, or so beautiful that it had no place in this world.

It.

And Emily died beneath its hand, drowning in black water, lost forever. She had always been lost, right from the moment of her birth when this strange, wandering spirit had chosen her body for its abode, hiding in the shadows of her consciousness, waiting for the truth of itself to be revealed.

Now the thing that she had become looked down at the little man who was holding on to her arm. She could no longer understand what he was saying. His words were merely a buzzing in her ear. It didn’t matter. Nothing that he said mattered. She smelled him, and sensed the foulness inside him that had forced the stench from his pores. A serial abuser of women. A man filled with hatred and strange, violent appetites.

Yet she did not judge him, just as she would no more have judged a spider for consuming a fly, or a dog for gnawing on its bone. It was in his nature, and she found its echo in her own.

His grip tightened. Spittle flew from his mouth, but she saw only the movements of his lips. He started to rise, then paused. He seemed to realize that something had changed, that what he thought was familiar had suddenly become desperately alien. She freed her arm and moved in closer to him. She placed the palms of her hands on his face, then leaned in to kiss Z ad in to k him, her open mouth closing on his, ignoring the bitterness of him, the stink of his breath, his decaying teeth and yellowed gums. He struggled against her for a moment, but she was too strong for him. She breathed into him, her eyes fixed on his, and she showed him what would become of him when he died.

Shelley did not see her go, nor Harbaruk, nor any of the others who had worked alongside her. Had their memories of that night been played back for them, displayed on a screen so that they could see all that had passed before their eyes, the girl’s departure would have appeared as a grayish mass moving through the bar, an excised form loosely resembling a human being.

The big man in the arrow T-shirt returned from the men’s room. His friend was sitting where he had left him, staring vacantly at the wall, his back to the bar.

“Time to go, Ro

“Hey, Ro

Ro

“I’m sorry,” said Ro

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

THE WOMAN, AT A signal from Epstein, had brought more coffee, once again black for him, and a little milk for mine. Between us lay the two symbols.

“What do they mean?” I asked.

“They are letters of the Enochian, or Adamical, alphabet, supposedly communicated to the English magician John Dee and his associate over a period of decades during the sixteenth century.”

“Communicated?”

“Through occult workings, although it may be a constructed language. Whatever its origins, this first is the Enochian letter ‘Und,’ the equivalent of our letter ‘A.’ In this case, it represents a name: Anmael.”

Jimmy Gallagher, struggling to remember: “Animal-no, that’s not it…”

“And what is Anmael?”

“Anmael is a demon, one of the Grigori, or the ‘Sons of God,’” said Epstein. “The Grigori are also known as ‘Watchers,’ or ‘the ones who never sleep.’ According to elements of the apocrypha, and the Book of Enoch in particular, they are gigantic beings who, in one version, precipitated the great Fall of the angels through the sin of lust.”

He held up two hands before him, but kept the thumb of his right hand tucked into the palm.

“Nine orders of angels,” he said. “All sexless, and above reproach.” He moved his thumb, adding it to the rest. “The tenth is the Grigori, of a different essence from the rest, in form and sexual appetite similar to man, and it is this order that fell. In Genesis, it is the Grigori who lusted after flesh and ‘took themselves wives’ from among the children of men. Such theories have always been a matter of some dispute. The great rabbi Simeon ben Yohai, blessed be his name, forbade his disciples to speak of such matters, but I, as you can see, have no such qualms.