The Descent

FIFTEEN

The door rose up in front of me. Salvation. With the three demons galloping down the narrow passage after me, fast on my heels, I barreled through the door praying, Please let there be a bolt on the other side. Please let there be a way to keep them out.

As soon as I slipped through, however, I plunged into an entirely different world. What had been a rough, rustic wooden door on one side was smooth laminated wood on the other. There was a brushed metal lever for a handle, very modern. There was no bolt but there was no sign of the demons, either: no noise on the far side of the door, no jiggling of the doorknob, nothing. I immediately knew by the astringent smell that I was in a hospital.

It was Luke’s hospital room. Every detail was as I remembered it, down to the sour stench of vomit and the odor of weak cleaning fluid hanging in the air, and the white blanket on Luke’s bed, its surface pilling from many washings. Why had I been brought back to this most painful moment? Hadn’t it been wretched enough the first time, watching helplessly as he declined? What more could I learn from his suffering—if, indeed, I’d been driven into this room to learn something. If I hadn’t been sent here only for a dose of punishment.

I’d never cheated on Luke, but I had been in a continual state of indecision the entire time we’d lived together, unsure if I had done the right thing by returning to him after I’d been completely erased from his memory. While I’d been plagued by nightmares of Jonathan’s unrest in the hereafter, it was only now that I’d seen Adair again—and seen him so changed—that I could admit, even to myself, that it was him I daydreamed of, who I longed for, who I ached for, physically. That was how I’d betrayed Luke—in my desire for Adair. It wasn’t so uncommon, was it? Living with one man while your mind is on another? Being unable to stop thinking of this other man who, for one reason or another, was not the one sitting beside you. Thinking of the way his eyes lit up when he saw you, of his wicked smile and what it was like when he held you, how you responded to the touch of his hands. In solitary moments, you remembered the little intimacies, the feel of his skin against yours, the way he liked to be touched, the velvet nap of his member, the way he tasted. You thought of him even though you could never be with him. His absence nagged like an itch you could never scratch.

Some would say I should never have returned to Luke if this was how I felt about Adair, that it was wrong of me to go back to him if I had any doubts. But complete fidelity of the heart in a relationship is something that has always eluded me. I have often wondered how these people manage to live such straightforward lives, to keep their emotions so simple and tidy. Do they weed out life’s complications as ruthlessly as they would weed a garden? Sometimes a weed turns into a beautiful flower or a helpful herb but you’ll never know if you pull it too soon. Do they ever allow themselves regret for the things they’ve thrown away? I would ask these self-assured people which of us has the luxury of an iron-clad guarantee? Who can be 100 percent sure of one’s choices in life? How do you know that your beloved will always remain the same, or that you’ll never change your mind? Growth and change are two of the great gifts we get from time. It would be shortsighted to spurn them.

Besides, I did love Luke—I did. But he wasn’t the only one I wanted, and wanting isn’t the same as loving. Just as I knew I loved Luke, I wasn’t sure whether I loved Adair. I couldn’t rule out that my attraction to him wasn’t an advanced case of lust, though that’s not to say it was inconsequential. Only a fool would underestimate the power of lust. Kingdoms have been won and lost, men and beasts have battled to the death over it.

Now, if I had been the same girl I’d been at the start of my adventures—the same girl who had loved Jonathan so blindly—I know what choice I would’ve made. I would’ve tossed aside a good man like Luke to take my chances with Adair. And I would’ve been miserable before long, held hostage by Adair’s precipitous temper and erratic behavior, which in my inexperience I would’ve accepted without so much as a whimper. I hadn’t yet learned that it was okay to make demands of the people we love, that we didn’t have to accept others exactly as they came to us. No one is perfect, after all.

As soon as I quieted these voices chasing each other in my head, I crept toward Luke, lying in bed. I felt queasy and anxious. God help me, I didn’t want to be back in that room. I was glad to have comforted Luke when he was dying, but I didn’t want to relive the experience, not so soon after it had happened. I should’ve been happy for this chance to see Luke again, but I wasn’t.

An oxygen line ran under his nose. His wrists were so bony that his identification bracelets hung from them like paper manacles. His bed was set at a forty-five degree slant to help with nausea, but it made his head hang forward at a frightening angle, as though his neck had been snapped. On second thought, he didn’t look as terrible as he could’ve; whatever power had brought Luke and me together at this moment, it had been kind enough to make Luke look healthy, not as wasted by illness and exhaustion as he’d been the last time I saw him. He even had his hair, those unruly sandy brown curls. I was thinking how much I’d like to smooth his hair back from his face—just for the excuse of touching him—when his eyes suddenly opened.

“Lanny,” he said, recognition in his gaze. So he could see me, too, as Sophia had. “Is that you?”

“Of course it’s me.” I smiled and reached for his cheek, brushing it gently. It felt solid enough.

“Am I dreaming? Your voice . . . it sounds like you’re right next to me.”

“That’s because I am here, Luke. This isn’t a dream. You can trust your eyes.”

We hugged. I couldn’t bring myself to kiss him, however, and we hung in an awkward embrace. We still had tenderness, but the passion between us was gone . . . unsurprising at the end of a long and intense illness. Worn out by exhaustion and fear, we naturally became numb to physical passion. After seeing Luke ravaged by drugs and madness, I could no more bring myself to feel attraction than he could have mustered the energy to respond.

Lying in his hospital bed now, he didn’t look all that relieved to see me; he seemed preoccupied and not entirely himself. “Where am I? What are we doing back in the hospital?” he asked, alarmed, looking at the tangle of tubes and wires hanging from his arms. “And what are you doing here?” His face drained. “You haven’t died, have you, Lanny? How is that possible?”

“No,” I rushed to assure him.

“Thank God.” That calmed him a bit, though he was still on edge, his gaze darting around the hospital room. “I don’t understand, though, why I’m back here. . . . Why are you back here? What’s going on?”

“I think maybe you and I have been brought together in order to talk,” I said slowly, trying to make sense of our circumstances. “Was there something you wanted to say to me? Something you didn’t tell me when we were together? Maybe it will come to you if you relax,” I said, taking his hand. “How are you?”

He gave me a sideways look. “You mean how am I since I died? How do you think I’ve been? Dying wasn’t at all how I expected it to be. Not that I was looking for a scene from the Bible, pearly gates and Saint Peter, any of that nonsense. But it was a little underwhelming. I had to figure everything out for myself when I got here—I don’t know, I guess I expected it to be better organized. . . . It’s not like the first day on a new job, there’s no woman with a clipboard from human resources welcoming you on board, no printed checklist to help you get settled in. No one tells you what to do or where to go. It just happens, whether you want it to or not.”

“What do you mean, ‘it just happens’?” I asked, not quite following him. “What just happens?”

“The next part. The hereafter. Eternity.” Oddly, he was still wearing eyeglasses, and he pushed them up the bridge of his nose as I’d seen him do a thousand times in life. He shook his shaggy head. “Whatever comes next, it’s already happening. I’m losing a bit of myself every day. My memories are fading. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s like I’m breaking up and parts of me are drifting away or falling off.”

He sounded so sad and desperate that, even though the prospect was terrifying, I tried to remain upbeat and cheer him up. “Well, that doesn’t seem so bad. Maybe it’s all part of becoming a new person, clearing out the old, making room for the new.”

Luke looked at me as though I’d gone crazy. “What do you mean, it doesn’t sound bad? It’s the worst thing that could happen. I’m breaking apart. I’m ceasing to be. I suppose it means the very last bits of my consciousness are finally coming apart and all that was left of me—residual energy—is returning to wherever we come from.”

He was a doctor, a man of science, so I tried to appeal to his analytical side. “If your energy is returning to the cosmos, maybe that means your consciousness is going there, too. Maybe you’re about to experience the wonders of space.”

The prospect seemed to depress him further. “I don’t think so. I think it’s all just coming undone, like a tape being demagnetized. As time goes on, I remember less and less. I feel less and less. Sure, it all sounds interesting in the abstract, but now that it’s here, I’m frightened, Lanny,” he said. I’d never heard him sound as scared, not even when he confronted Adair four years earlier. “This isn’t what I expected. All those times I’d wondered what it would really be like, to be dead . . . especially after having patients die on you, being right there with them when it happened. I wasn’t prepared for this. It’s really going to be over. This is what it means to die. I’ve come to the end. I can’t believe it. It’s really going to be over.”

He was right: this was frightening, much more frightening than the many deathbed vigils over which I’d presided. I was scared for him, and what’s more, I could do nothing about it. I couldn’t stop what was happening to him, I couldn’t save him. As I contemplated all this, holding back tears, he snapped his head up as though he was seeing me for the first time since we’d materialized in the hospital room.

“You never did tell me . . . if you’re not dead, what are you doing here?” he asked. I suppose he was suspicious, and why shouldn’t he be? I was alive in the land of the dead.

I squirmed, suddenly realizing that he might be thinking that I’d come for him, that my presence here was all about him. That maybe I’d had second thoughts about his delirious request—you could ask Adair to make me immortal. I answered him truthfully. “I asked Adair to send me. I came to look for Jonathan,” I confessed, trying to look as contrite as possible.

An exasperated sigh escaped from Luke and he folded his arms, awkwardly for all the wires and needles. “I should’ve known. I should’ve guessed that. It’s always been that way with you, always Jonathan or Adair. Never Luke. Never any room for me.”

It was unlike Luke to be so candid. Staring oblivion in the face probably had something to do with it; no reason to pretend anymore. Still, I was hurt and not above rebuking him. “How can you say that? I was good to you, Luke. Especially at the end. I promised I would take care of you and I did.” We’d had a bargain. Four years ago, Luke had helped me escape from the police after I’d released Jonathan from his immortal bond, and in exchange I promised that he would never be alone. I would be his companion for life. I didn’t realize until later that I must’ve made this offer to Luke because being alone was what I feared most. He’d taken me up on my offer, nonetheless. Maybe we’re all afraid to be alone.

Here I was making good on my end of the bargain, but in a way I could never have imagined.

He seemed somewhat mollified. He looked up at me, over the rims of his eyeglasses. “I’ll give you that. But—we can be honest with each other now, can’t we, Lanny? Now that the end is near? Because I do have something I want to tell you.” He paused and looked at me tentatively before proceeding cautiously: “If you want to know how I really feel about us . . . I feel like we never should have gotten involved. I always felt as though you never really loved me.”

A sharp pain cut into my heart like a knife. “Luke, you must know I love you. I wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t. I know I have no right to say this to you, but it hurts me to hear you say these things. To say ‘it was always Jonathan or Adair, and never any room for me.’ I loved you, Luke, of course I did. If I didn’t love you, I could’ve just walked away. It would’ve been a damn sight easier.”

He was quiet, thinking. The monitors beeped in the background. “I suppose,” he said.

“We were happy together,” I insisted.

“But you never loved me the way you loved those two. You can admit it to me now. I won’t hold it against you, but I’d rather die knowing the truth. Jonathan and Adair—they were always on your mind. I could tell.”

My cheeks flamed. I couldn’t deny it.

“I don’t hold it against you, really,” he continued. “I mean, I saw Jonathan with my own eyes. He was a god. One in a billion. Even in death I could see why no woman was able to resist him.”

My stomach twisted, remembering the purpose of my visit to the underworld. “Luke, Jonathan’s in trouble. That’s why I’ve come here,” I blurted out. “He is being held by a queen, the queen of the underworld. Have you heard of her?”

He shook his head. “It sounds like something from an old myth, doesn’t it? Hades and Persephone and all that. Sorry, I can’t help you, Lanny. Like I said, nothing’s been explained to me. The queen of England could be here for all I know. I’m not like Jonathan or you or Adair. I’m just an ordinary guy, a speck of dust in the cosmos, and I’m going to die an ordinary death.” He had the same expression I’d seen many times, a quizzical look he’d worn during the odd quiet moment. “I have a question for you, Lanny, and I want you to tell me the truth. Did you ever love me, or was I just a convenience that night when you were brought into the hospital? What was I to you? Just a gullible man who could help you escape from the police . . .”

I threw up my hands in exasperation. “Luke, I just told you five minutes ago that I love you. Wasn’t I with you for the past four years?”

“You stayed out of obligation, because of your promise, not love.”

“Isn’t obligation a part of love?” I felt my blood rising. “I made a commitment to you, and I honored it because I love you.” I squeezed his hand.

He made a sour face. “Do you know what it was like knowing that you didn’t love me the way you loved the other two? That you loved them more,” he said, unable to say their names at that moment.

“Does love have to be a contest? I’ve had a long life and it’s always been that way for me: you lose one love and, if you are lucky, you find another.” I tugged him closer to me, though he tried to resist. “Listen to me: I was alone for a long time, Luke. For many years, before we met, I had no one in my life. I didn’t want to go through it again, you know: growing close to someone, tangling my life up in someone else’s, only to lose them. I just couldn’t do it—but then I met you. I couldn’t remember when I’d known such a good man. I knew I was lucky. Don’t tell me that I squandered the last years of your life. It would make me very sad to think that you had been unhappy.”

He bumped against me. “You know that’s not true. I wasn’t unhappy. But I know what you wanted, Lanny. You wanted Jonathan to love you the way you loved him, to love you above all others, to be his one great love. I suppose that was all I wanted: to be your great love. That was foolish of me, since there would always be Jonathan, but . . . none of us is immune to our heart’s desire.”

I sensed his time was short. I was conflicted—unsure what to say, for it was clear that he wanted to be refuted. He wanted me to tell him that he was the great love of my life, and what difference would it make if I lied to him as he teetered on the brink of annihilation? Yet I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that it was Adair, not Jonathan, I loved more than anyone. After years of chasing after Jonathan, I’d come to love him like a brother; he was the one connection I had to my past, to my family, to my home. He was the only one to whom I felt any sort of obligation, not Luke. I was the one who’d brought Jonathan into this mess; I had to do everything in my power to get him out. I took a deep breath, decided which course to take—and spoke.

“Isn’t it enough to be one of my great loves? I’ll never forget you, Luke. You were the best man I ever had in my life. A much better man than Jonathan.”

He snorted. “A better man than Jonathan? That’s not much of an accomplishment, is it? From everything you told me, he was—a jerk, to be blunt. I don’t know why you’ve come here after him, Lanny.”

“I have my reasons. He needs me—let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to talk about it right now.” Meaning I didn’t want to use up the last minutes of his life talking about Jonathan.

He blinked at me, as though fighting to see through a film. “You know, I’m about to be sent into the great unknown and I still don’t know what I was supposed to do with my life, what it was supposed to mean. I want resolution. There must be a reason you’ve been sent to me, Lanny. You’re the immortal one. You must know something that isn’t revealed to us ordinary people. I want answers.”

“I don’t have an answer for you, Luke, other than to say you were a wonderful father and partner. Your daughters love you. You made me happy every day we were together. Maybe that’s what your life was about. Isn’t that enough?” I kissed his forehead. His last moments were upon us. He was dissolving, blurred in some spots, thinned in others. He looked like a ghost.

He’d closed his eyes, leaned against my cheek. “Now that we’re at the point of sharing secrets, I have something to tell you. I always thought it a shame you couldn’t have children. You’d have made a wonderful mother.”

“Me?” I blurted out a laugh.

“You were great with the girls,” he said softly, as though he were falling asleep. “Always so patient. They loved you right from the start. It made Tricia a little jealous, you know.”

“Shhh,” I said. His hand was getting colder in mine. The air in the room seemed thin all of a sudden, as though we were on a high mountaintop. I’d woven our fingers together tightly now, feeling the stretch as I accommodated his larger hand in mine. However, his grip was weakening by degrees and the bulk of his hand felt lighter with every second. He was fading before my eyes, drifting away piece by piece—his end was truly here.

I ran my fingers through his hair, but it was as though I were raking frigid air. He was almost gone; the hospital room was almost gone, too. It was freezing, as though a window had been thrown open on the coldest Maine night—no, surely colder than that—and the blinks and hisses and chirrups of the hospital room ceded to the rasp of empty, endless space. Infinity was calling. Eternity comes for us all in one form or another, and it had found Luke. We teetered at the edge of a huge abyss and I sensed that if I wasn’t careful, I’d be pulled into it. This was the abyss Adair had told me about, and now that I faced it, I understood his horror. It was impossible to believe that our consciousnesses could live on in that absolute emptiness. If they did, how lonely they must be; how bereft an existence they must have in the flat black void. This was what Adair had saved me from for a great long while by making me immortal. I could not save Luke from it. This was the inescapable end.

“Good-bye,” I said to Luke in a last gesture of tenderness, but he was already gone.

Within seconds, furniture and hospital equipment started disappearing all around me. Afraid of what might happen to me when the last piece vanished, I hurried to the door, cracked it open, and peered out. The passage was empty, so I crept out. It seemed positively quiet and serene here, now. I proceeded to retrace my steps, thinking that I might come across the door from my nightmares and, behind that door, Jonathan. But as I turned a corner, I came face-to-face with a demon.

My blood froze in my veins. Maybe two feet separated us. He could’ve reached out and snatched my arm.

But he didn’t. Instead, he lowered his huge head and brought one topaz eye close, looking me over. He snorted and his brimstone breath washed over my face. He was one of those demonic creatures, yet there was something familiar about this one, something in his expression, a haughty yet wistful look I’d seen before.

The demon pulled himself up as tall as he could, given the low ceiling. He swished his tail elegantly. Again, he fixed me with his golden eye.

“Lanny.”

I recognized the voice, even though it was one I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Dona? Is that you?”

The demon snorted again and turned his massive head away from my curious stare, embarrassed. “It is I.”

I hadn’t seen Dona since we’d lived under Adair’s roof in Boston, in the early 1800s. He’d been one of Adair’s companions, too, a foul-tempered aristocratic Italian who’d had little use for me then. I couldn’t help but think how the mighty had fallen; the always fastidious Dona couldn’t be happy to have been turned into a beast. He had been a beautiful man in life. It must’ve galled him to be transformed into this creature.

“Dear God! Dona! I thought I’d never see you again! How long have you been here?”

“Not so long, I suppose, and yet it feels an eternity. An eternity as this monster that you see, with a tail and horns, more beast than man. . . .” His eyes were large, their expression soft and quite touching, even if they were an eerie golden color. He reached up and ran a hand distractedly down the length of one silky, long ear, perhaps a nervous habit, perhaps to confirm that he was still in this unfortunate form. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized what it meant to find Dona here. As had been the case with Savva—who, it occurred to me now, would surely transform into a beast as vile as this before long—Dona could be in the underworld only if Adair had taken his life.

As if reading my thoughts through my expression, the demon flashed a look of anger. “I didn’t ask to be released, you know. I was perfectly happy when Adair found me. I was at peace. I wasn’t harming anyone. But Adair insisted that my time was over. It didn’t matter that I begged him to spare me; he took my life and sent me here.”

Shocked, I couldn’t speak for a moment, and when I could, the best I could say was, “I’m sure he didn’t mean it. He didn’t know where he was sending you or what would happen to you.”

Dona seemed unconvinced. His tail switched. “Adair always was like that, you know,” Dona whispered. “A bastard. Never thinking of us as having wishes and desires of our own. Never thinking of us as anything but servants to him.” The demon made a sound halfway between a bellow and a moan. “I wish for God to damn him, as we have been damned. Damn him to hell.”

It didn’t seem a good idea to let Dona get carried away by bitterness at that moment; I needed his help. I laid a hand on his blackened arm. “Dona, I may be crossing a line . . . I know we were never close in life, but I need your help. I am throwing myself on your mercy.”

He cocked his large head, waiting.

I drew in a deep breath, preparing to be rebuffed. “You see, I came here looking for Jonathan. You remember Jonathan, don’t you?”

He snorted derisively at this and rolled his eyes. “Of course I remember him. Anyone would remember Jonathan. He is impossible to forget.”

“Have you seen him here, Dona? I heard he was being kept by the queen of the underworld.”

At this, Dona shied back, like an animal that had been bitten and startled by some ghastly insect, his ears twitching in irritation. “Oh, why do you ask me this? There’s nothing you can do for him. He is here with the queen and she will not give him up to you. Trust me on this—I am part of her retinue, you know. We demons serve the queen of the underworld. That appears to be our reward, for putting up with Adair in life. I suppose he would say that it is the price we must pay for having lived so long.” He snorted again, in disgust this time.

I looked into his golden eyes. “I’m not afraid of her,” I lied.

“You should be.”

“Dona, can you take me to him?”

“It is hopeless.”

“I just want to see him and speak with him. Please, Dona. I’ve come this far—don’t make me go away empty-handed.”

He looked from my hand, still on his arm, to my face. “All right, I will show you where he’s being kept. After that, you’re on your own, do you understand me? You can expect no more help from me.” And with that, he turned—hooves thumping heavily on the hard-packed ground—and began to lumber down the passage, leading the way.