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“You become rude over beer,” Mort observed. “You treat a friend like an enemy.”
“I guess. Sorry. Mama used to hide the beer, or worse, pour it out. She said I drank too much.”
“You do drink too much.”
“I know. But that’s not anybody else’s problem.”
Mort cocked his head to the side slightly. “Do you believe that when you say it? Or does the lie curdle on your tongue even as you speak it?”
Tristan swallowed, already feeling better. He was used to defending his drinking. He defended it every day to himself. He’d tell himself that it wasn’t that bad, because it was only beer. Real alcoholics drank whiskey. And who cared if he was an alcoholic? Plenty of people were.
He didn’t reply to Mort, because he already knew those excuses, flimsy as they were, would not fly with Mort. He would dismiss them instantly and then they would be useless to himself as well.
“I don’t ever see you eat,” Tristan said.
Mort gave a slight shrug. In morning light, the very tips of his dark hair seemed slightly blond. Or maybe red. “I don’t eat much.”
“Don’t each much, or can’t eat at all?”
The mutual insight rendered them both silent, neither one of them wanting to admit their perceived shortcomings.
Tristan drank his beer. Mort ate nothing. The cereal went untouched.
Now that Mort knew the reason for Tristan’s gift, or at least the reason Balthazar had given him, he wondered if the mystery might evaporate, and along with it, his interest.
Just a broken boy, hurt so deeply he saw demons.
The explanation was so reductive. It made something exciting and mysterious banal and sad.
He could leave now. Should leave now.
But the noose still hung on the porch, and he knew what would likely become of Tristan if he was to leave now. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been fixed.
“You thinking about moving on?” Tristan asked him the question, showing surprising perceptiveness for a drunk. “I’ve seen that expression before. People always leave.”
“I don’t want to leave,” Mort said, surprised that it was true.
“You like shitty, broken-down houses, and assholes who day-drink? You said you were going to stay until you found out how I could see demons. Does this mean you’ve figured me out?”
“I think there is a simple and reductive explanation, that you were hurt very badly, and that hurt broke the pieces of you that stop most people from perceiving the whole world.”
“There are a lot of fucked up people on this planet. Most of them don’t know when there’s a demon in the room.”
“That’s true,” Mort agreed. “Maybe that’s why that explanation feels unsatisfying. Because it was wrong. But the one who gave it was very wise…”
“Wisdom is overrated,” Tristan said. “Maybe there’s no reason for it. Maybe it just is.”’
“You could be right,” Mort agreed. “I think you are.”
They spent three days following the revelation doing nothing. Tristan drank and Mort sat on the porch. The noose was taken down and life seemed to settle into what Tristan hoped would be a routine. He liked having Mort around. It wasn’t just the money, either. He felt much less lonely with someone else in the house. He barely noticed it anymore when the sun hit Mort’s face a certain way and illuminated the skull.
Mort was so fascinated by what made Tristan able to see demons, but Tristan absolutely did not want to know what made Mort’s bones seem to flash through his skin from time to time. He wasn’t a demon. He was something else. Tristan didn’t know what, and didn’t care to know what.
He felt a yearning when he looked at Mort, a pull. A connection, maybe, though even thinking that felt like arrogance.
On the night of the third day, close to midnight, the men received another visitor. The demon appeared on the porch as a cloud slid over the moon.
Mort did not sleep. He was sitting on the couch watching wrestling on the television. It was an ancient game of good and evil he found he could relate to.
“MORT!”
Tristan startled awake when the demon shouted Mort’s name.
“Keep it down,” Mort hissed, banging out the screen door. He sensed Tristan’s movement behind him, but wanted to deal with this uninvited visitor before Tristan fully woke up. Better to have had a bad dream than to be harassed by demons.
“Come with me.”
This demon was not a lowly peon like the first messenger who had come, nor was it an ally like Balthazar. This was one of his father’s enforcers, a creature who did not feel any need to be polite.
“Time to come home, boy.”
The demon had thick leather bracers on his arms, and the air of a gladiator. There was no pity in his demeanor and no politeness in his tone. He was handsome in the way evil often is, brashly and boldly appealing. He had dark hair twisted into braids and tied up behind his head, dark eyes, and a prominent nose. He looked a lot like Balthazar, but without the temperance of wisdom. His dress was ancient, and standing on the porch of a modern man, he was both imposing and anachronistic.
