Occasional Demons Read online

  “I have an idea. Let’s take a walk on the beach,“ Mary said after they had paid their bill and were heading out of the restaurant.

  Bill was still struggling to bring his attention back to the present moment, and he agreed without really thinking about it. He was still pretty tired from his afternoon jog, but he decided that, even if he couldn’t express to Mary the depth of what he was thinking and feeling, maybe an evening walk on the beach would help him focus on what was eating away at him. He couldn’t believe that a simple wrong number, something that happened to hundreds or thousands of people every day could cause such discomfort, but he couldn’t think of anything else that might account for his mood.

  The salty tang of the ocean and the steady rumble of waves breaking over the sand soothed him. Once the sun was down, the air started to cool with the breeze off the ocean. Thin strands of mist, looking like drifting figures, rose from the sun-heated sand. Far off in the distance, Bill heard the faint cry of a seagull. The sound was mournful and lonely, and it made him sink all the deeper into himself.

  He was holding Mary’s hand, but for some reason the grip they had seemed tentative and distant. Bill tried not to think about how there might be some kind of distance growing between them...a distance that, at least tonight, felt much too wide and unfathomable to cross.

  As they walked along, listening to the soft rush of waves on the sand, Bill couldn’t help but remember other summer evenings, long ago, when he had walked this very same beach. Only back then, his walks, as he recalled, had always been alone while his parents went out to eat or dance or shop. He had spent most of his vacation time alone.

  Alone.

  Walking the beach, day and night.

  Alone and thinking …

  He tried to bring back some of the things he had thought about back then, but his memories of that time had slipped through his fingers like fine beach sand. The predominant impression he had was of utter loneliness.

  It had been a mistake, he finally decided, for him and Mary and their friends to come to OldOrchardBeach to vacation this week. If he had taken even a few minutes to think about it when Mary and Nancy had first suggested it way back in February, he would have known that it might not turn out to be such a good idea.

  He should have known because there definitely was something about this place that was getting to him.

  It might be simply because he was thinking about his parents, both of whom were dead now. His mother had died of lung cancer more than ten years ago, and his father had succumbed to a heart attack a little less than three years after that.

  But Bill was quite sure it wasn’t as simple as that he missed his parents or was feeling sadness and lingering regrets for anything he’d left unsaid or undone with them.

  No, what was bothering him now was something else...something deeper...something more...elusive.

  He and Mary spoke little as they walked along the strand, watching the heavy surge of the tide glistening in the bright moonlight. They had taken off their sandals and were wading ankle-deep in the water, which was cold enough to numb the backs of their legs. Thin fingers of nighttime mist, illuminated by the lights of town beyond, drifted like gossamer rivers between the rounded sand dunes.

  Bill inhaled deeply, letting his gaze shift out across the ocean. A chilly night breeze was blowing in off the ocean, and he couldn’t help but shiver as he stared out over the dark, heaving water and the thin, white lines of waves that rolled incessantly toward the shore.

  But this particular view of the ocean stirred something deep inside him...a memory that remained vague until Bill noticed, up ahead, a dark, irregular line of rocks that stood out sharply against the night sky. For a dizzying instant, he wasn’t able to judge distances, and the shapes looked vaguely like a person lying on the beach, not far in front of them. After another few steps, though, he realized that the outcropping of rocks was much further away. He jerked to a stop so fast he wrenched Mary’s hand, hard enough to make her say something.

  “What the hell are you doing?“ she asked, turning and looking at him as surprise and anger flashed in her eyes.

  Bill tried to reply, but all he could do was stand there amazed and shake his head. The memory that had been shifting just below the surface of his conscious mind all afternoon and evening had snapped into focus the instant he saw those rocks. The shock of it left him speechless.

  He remembered those rocks...from years ago, when he was a teenager, and he and his family used to vacation here.

  He had come down here, especially late at night, and in a strange way, he had considered this outcropping of rocks to be his personal domain. He would sit alone for hours on those rocks, watching the moonlight shift and shatter like a fireworks display across the seething, dark ocean. In an odd way, it seemed as though it had been no more than a year or two ago, but it also felt like it could have been another entire lifetime ago...It was all so vague except for a memory that arose in his mind of one particular night...

  It must have been at least twenty years ago, he thought, when he had not come down here alone at night...and he had met someone.

  A young woman.

  The memory grew stronger, and he recalled that they had strolled along the beach, holding hands just as he and his wife of twelve years were doing now. And that night, so long ago, he and this girl had wandered over to this outcropping of rock—his rocks!—and they had sat down to talk.

  Maybe it was because it had been a hot summer night, and they were young and their blood was running hot. Maybe it was the magic of the moonlight on the ocean. Whatever it was, it had put them both into a romantic mood, and before long, Bill and the girl found themselves holding each other close and kissing. Not long after that, they had slid down onto the sand, and in the dense shadow of the rock outcropping, they had removed each other’s clothes and made love. All the while, the ocean waves hissed and boiled around them, moving closer and closer.

  Her name had been—

  Lost in thought, Bill grunted as he shook his head, trying to recall her name, but he couldn’t remember it. No matter how hard he tried, it eluded him, just as a clear memory of her face eluded him. He recalled her features only vaguely, and they drifted in and out of focus like the sea-mist on the dune.

  Maybe she had never told him her name. What would it matter? He hadn’t thought of her in years, and in so many ways, his memory of her and what they had done that night was more like a half-remembered dream than a real experience. Back then, he had been relatively inexperienced with women, having only made a few fumbling attempts to make love to his high school girlfriends, and he had never really been sure he’d been doing it right.

  But that night...that night had been magical, and he had no doubts that he had done it right.

  He smiled and chuckled softly to himself as he recalled how it had felt to thrust deeper and deeper into her as he supported himself in the sand on his hands and knees. They had ground their hips together, marking time with the steady, rhythmic surge of the tide. The sights and sounds and scents of the ocean that night had filled his blood like a powerful drug that swept him away.

  And when they were done... When they were done, he wasn’t sure what had happened after that. He had no memory of saying or doing anything with her afterwards. Had she just left him there, or had he walked the beach with her afterwards? Did he walk her back to where she was staying, or did she simply walk away alone? The night seemed, in memory, to be so magical, he almost remembered that she had walked away from him and gone out into the ocean, to be submerged by the waves. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he never saw her again.

  Bill now found it remarkably odd that, at least up until tonight, he had never even thought about her or remembered that long-ago summer night of pleasure. He was suddenly aware that he and his wife had stopped walking, and Mary was standing there ankle-deep in the water, staring at him. Her eyes were glowing silver in the moonlight. Bill was distantly aware that they were s
till holding hands, but he couldn’t help but feel oddly dissociated from their touch. His thoughts and emotions rushed with an almost audible sound inside his head as his memory of that night so long ago sharpened...

  He remembered how the young, nameless woman had moved beneath him.

  He remembered how salty her breasts had tasted as he bent to kiss them and fill his hands with them.

  He remembered the velvet-smooth flatness of her stomach, and the soft, yielding pressure of her wet lips as they brushed lightly against his mouth and neck and chest and stomach.

  He remembered how her body had surged and swelled like the moving ocean beneath him...how it had shifted like smooth, wet sand...dancing like strands of seaweed, drifting in the pull of the tide.

  “Honey...? Are you all right?“ Dazed with his memories, Bill shook his head and looked at her, trying to bridge the chasm that suddenly seemed to have opened up between them.

  Mary’s voice was coming to him from far away. He looked at her with a deep sadness, and was almost carried away by the wave of dizziness that swept over him. He realized that they were no longer holding hands, and Mary appeared to be sliding away from him, shifting backwards at a frightening speed. His heart gave a quick, heavy thump inside his chest. He felt a spinning vertigo when he looked ahead at the dark line of jagged, seaweed-crusted rocks and saw...

  Her!

  The young woman’s form emerged from out of the night like a slowly developing photograph. Her pale, oval face was framed by a wild, tangled shock of dark, twining hair. Her skin glowed with an eerie white translucence that gradually blended into the lighter color of the beach sand behind her. Her hair rose and coiled like storm clouds, shifting fast across the night sky and obscuring the rising moon. Moonlight trimmed the full, rounded edges of her figure with cold, blue glow.

  Bill turned and, raising his arms, looked helplessly over his shoulder at his wife. She seemed to be moving toward him but in agonizing slow motion. By the way she was moving, by the way her hands were clenched and her arms were pumping at her sides, she seemed to be running toward him, but after staring at her for a heart-stopping instant, he realized that she wasn’t getting any closer. Like the irresistible pull of a magnet, Bill felt his gaze pulled around and drawn to the eerie figure that was perched on the dark rocks at the water’s edge.

  This can’t be real. I have to be imagining this. Bill told himself as he fought desperately against the waves of chills that gripped his body.

  This can’t be happening!

  From out of the darkness, the woman’s face loomed at him. Her eyes were glowing with a rich, lambent light, like candles seen though a dense fog. Moving with the silky motion of seaweed drifting beneath the water, she reached out to Bill with both hands and beckoned to him with a subtle, teasing wave of her fingers. With a slow, liquid glide, she rose to her feet and started toward the water. The waves surged in time with the throbbing of Bill’s pulse as they washed up first over her legs, then her hips.

  Once she was waist-deep in the water, the woman hesitated before turning back to look at Bill. When she spoke, her voice carried on the sea breeze so softly that Bill could barely hear her above the rolling hiss of the waves. As faint as her voice was, though, it seemed to encompass every sound of the ocean and the surrounding night. In her voice were all the forgotten memories and thoughts and desires that Bill had ever experienced.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,“ she said, her voice sounding so familiar it was like the voice of his thoughts.

  As he started moving toward her, forcing his way into the surge of the surf, his arms outstretched, Bill heard a single, shrill scream from behind him. It sounded impossibly far away, and he ignored it as he followed the woman deeper into the ocean, wading until the chilly water was up to his chest. At first he struggled against the steady back and forth pull of the tide, but before long he yielded to it. As much as he tried to deny it, he couldn’t help but acknowledge that, all his life, he had been thinking about her, too. And as the water rose over his shoulders and entered his mouth and nose, he saw her coming toward him with her arms outstretched.

  The Man Who Looked Like Murphy

  1

  “You really don’t ’spect me to believe that crap, I hope,“ Rice said with a shake of his head as he took a long pull on his cigarette.

  Sitting across the table from Rice, his elbows resting on the soiled oilcloth tablecloth, the man cocked an eyebrow and then nodded. A smile lingered on the corners of his mouth, but it was a cold smile, absolutely devoid of humor and almost cruel.

  “I realize that you may find it somewhat difficult to understand,“ the man said. His voice had a faint metallic ring to it that Rice found disconcerting, and he spoke with a slight hesitation as though carefully choosing each word.

  “It ain’t difficult to understand,“ Rice said as smoke poured like liquid from his nostrils. “I find it difficult to believe. What kinda moron you take me for, huh?“

  A single, forty-watt light bulb, made all the dimmer by the greasy brown film that covered it, cast a warm glow over the man’s face. Rice squinted through the haze of smoke around him, leaning closer to study his guest. The apartment was so cold Rice wasn’t comfortable without his heavy coat on, but his visitor was wearing a simple, lightweight tunic and loose-fitting trousers. His clothing shimmered with an emerald light that shifted whenever he moved or Rice shifted his gaze.

  After studying his guest in silence for several seconds, Rice realized why the color of his guest’s clothes bothered him so. That particular shade of green reminded him of the frozen bottom of the algae-filled pond where he had ice-skated when he was a kid. Rice would never forget the terror that had gripped him when he was twelve years old, and he had fallen through the ice. He had sunk to the bottom and almost drowned, and he would never forget the rush of dark green water below the ice that had enveloped him. He was lucky that his father had been nearby and had pulled him out.

  But there were other things about his guest that disturbed Rice. His hair, for instance. It wasn’t just gray; it was streaked with silver and combed straight back from his forehead. Rice thought it just didn’t look right.

  Worse, though, were his guest’s eyes. They were a deep shade of green that, like his clothing, shimmered in the weak light. Rice shifted uncomfortably whenever they made eye contact. Just to keep busy, he flicker the lengthening ash from his cigarette and rolled the glowing tip around inside the ashtray.

  “Oh, I don’t take you for any kind of...moron, Mr. Ricci,“ the visitor said smoothly.

  Rice suddenly jerked forward and jabbed his forefinger hard into the man’s bony chest. “The name’s Rice. Rice! Unnerstand?“ What really got on his nerves was the way the man pronounced every word so precisely. It seemed to Rice almost like the guy was trying to make fun of him.

  “I—“ the man said, but Rice cut him off with a heavy-fisted blow to the table.

  “Nobody but nobody calls me Ricci! Everyone call me Rice.“

  The corners of the man’s pale mouth twitched into a wider smile that exposed perfectly straight, white teeth that looked like they might be all the same size. He couldn’t tell for sure, but they certainly looked odd.

  “At last count, Mr... Rice, you didn’t seem to have all that many friends.

  There it was—that cool, precise diction again. Rice was filled with rage, but he knew that he couldn’t let this guy see how much he was getting to him, so he leaned back in his chair and hooked his thumb through his belt loop as he smoked.

  “Yeah...well...you know, it was sorta unfortunate about what happened to Ranieri.“

  “Unfortunate?“ the man said. The color of his eyes shifted again, taking on a deeper, colder shade that drew Rice’s attention. Rice grunted and tipped his chair back until his back rested against the wall.

  “The way I see it,“ Rice said, “it was just a bad business transaction. That’s all.“

  Just to keep this guy off balance, Rice suddenly s
hifted his weight forward. The chair came down with a loud bang, and he poked the man in the chest again. His guest seemed not to react at all, and that made Rice wonder if the guy had any freaking nerves.

  “An’ none of this mista crap, either. Got it? The name’s Rice...just plain Rice.“

  “As you wish, Rice,“ the man replied, smiling thinly as he nodded.

  The cold tone of the man’s voice was really starting to bug Rice. He didn’t like the way he sounded so cool and collected, like absolutely nothing could faze him. Anyone who knew Rice was supposed to be afraid of him or at least a little bit nervous around him. If this guy was telling the truth, and he knew all about Rice and his reputation, then how could he stay so calm?

  “Wanna smoke?“ Rice asked as he shook another cigarette from the crumpled pack he had on the table. When the man shook his head, Rice put the cigarette into his own mouth and lit it with the one he’d been smoking.

  The man sitting on the opposite side of the table waved his hand in front of his face like he was shooing away a fly. Rice took a deep inhalation and watched, fascinated by the way the man’s pencil-thin tendons slid beneath his waxy-pale skin.

  “By the way,“ Rice said, exhaling a gray plume of cigarette smoke into the man’s face. “I never did catch the name.“

  The man looked up at the ceiling for a moment as though considering something and then said, “I suppose the closest pronunciation would... Murphy.“

  “Murphy,“ Rice said. He couldn’t help but laugh out loud. “Murphy. Hell, that don’t sound to me like no name for any man from the future.“

  “It’s a close approximation,“ the man said tonelessly.

  Rice doubled up, his body shaking with laughter, but not for an instant did he take his gaze away from his guest as he secretly tried to gauge the man’s reaction to him.

  “Now you gotta come clean with me,“ Rice said, his shoulders still shaking with laughter. “You ain’t no man from the future. I know that. So what’s your scam? Really? Whadda yah think you got on me?“