Body Surfing

seemed reversed: he felt the water, then heard the bucket fill. Felt the skull-splitting pain in his forehead, then realized his face was wet. A kaleidoscope of colors danced through his vision. He heard the demon speak, and then saw him standing in front of him.
    “Oh, stop moaning, Q., and open your eyes.”
    Q. frowned. He knew he frowned because it made his face hurt like hell.
    “I thought they were open.”
    The demon laughed as Q. concentrated, found his eyes, his eyelids, willed them open. It was hard. It felt as though weights had been anchored to them with fishhooks, and even after he got them open it was a moment before the kaleidoscope faded. But that didn’t make things better, because then he had to look at Leo.
    The demon sat on a barrel. Q. found it hard to focus to read the faint letters that disappeared around its curved side.
     
    Van Ars—e
     
    Q. looked around, his head throbbing painfully with each muscle contraction. He saw more barrels, a table strewn with uniformly rusty tools, a few hay bales, and a pile of machinery that looked like—and in fact was—a tractor that had been dissembled piece by piece. It was this last detail that brought him back. He and Jasper had taken the tractor apart four years ago for the simple reason that they wanted to see how many pieces there were. They had reached 1,276 before losing interest in the project.
    He glanced back at the demon.
     
    Van Ars—e
     
    Only now did he notice that Leo held Ileana’s watch in his hands, twisting the crystal round and round, listening to the faint clicks as the darts rotated beneath the dial.
    “Neat, huh? If you could improve the range on it, it’d make a good weapon.”
    The demon placed the watch on the barrel beside him—right next to Q.’s phone—his real phone—which he picked up. “Heads up,” he said, and tossed it to Q.
    The demon aimed to Q.’s left, and the boy had to jerk his hand out to catch the phone. He thought his head would explode at the movement, but he was distracted from the pain by a light tap on his chest. He looked down and saw his other phone—the one he’d turned into a Solomon jar—dangling from a wire. He followed the wire up and found the metal band of the tiara circling his throbbing head.
    “Ah ah ah,” Leo said, waggling one of his host’s fingers. “No touching, or I’m going to have to get rough. It looks good on you,” he continued. “Who knows, maybe you can bring tiaras back into fashion for men. But that’ll have to wait till another day. We’ve got work to do. Turn around, would you?”
    “Look,” Q. said, “would you just cut the theatrics and tell me what’s going on?”
    “But I like being theatrical. It makes things take up more time. And time is all I have.”
    “I really don’t—”
    “Turn, fucker.”
    Q. turned—and promptly jumped off the barrel, because his cheek had brushed against a man’s leg. He followed the leg up, then staggered backwards until he tripped over a tractor tire and fell to the ground.
    John Van Arsdale and his girlfriend Cakes hung from a pair of hooks screwed into the wall of the barn. At least Q. assumed it was them—their faces looked like they’d been chewed up, and what flesh remained was completely covered in blood. Cakes’s throat had been ripped open, but Jasper’s dad had gotten the worst of it. His right ear and cheek and most of his lips were missing, and his teeth leered out of his skull in a gaping, grisly smile.
    “I have to be completely honest,” the demon said in a nonchalant voice. “The dog did the best work. Apparently possession doesn’t agree with canines.”
    Q. began pushing away from the corpses, but his hands and legs got tangled in tractor parts.
    The demon was shaking his head.
    “You really don’t have the stomach for this, do you? Well, look, I’m not completely heartless. I mean, if you want to get technical about it, I am completely heartless, and armless and legless and tongueless, blah blah blah, but I was speaking metaphorically.”
    Q.’s eyes flitted back and forth between the demon and his two sacrifices. He saw that Leo had posed them hand in hand, the two appendages stuck together with their own drying blood.
    “However, building a Solomon jar a week after you first learned of the existence of the Mogran is a pretty remarkable feat, although I have a hunch Dr. T. might’ve steered you in the right direction. Interesting theory, the Solomon jar. There were stories,