Body Surfing

in the fireplace. From the verandah of the thousand-year-old farmhouse, you could see the glittering Mediterranean, and the sky was a delicate, cloudless blue. There was even a solemn little boy—a deaf-mute named Faroukh—who magically appeared with glasses of lemonade or kefir, bowls of hariri or tabouleh. The atmosphere was so idyllic that Ileana wondered if she’d passed from one kind of madness into another. Only the vultures wheeling lazily over the corpses in the occupied zone let her know she hadn’t entered paradise. That and the fresh wound on her wrist.
     
    She didn’t want to believe him at first. She’d watched her family killed before her eyes. Had been raped by a pack of Serbian wolves. Her world had gone insane. Why shouldn’t she go insane as well? Why shouldn’t she take her revenge?
    Alec smiled patiently. “You asked me that question in English.”
    English.
    A language she hadn’t spoken, before that night.
    So she listened. Sipped lemonade, rubbed the rapidly healing wound on her wrist, and listened.
     
    Alec told her that the being that had taken control of her was called a Mogran. It was older than the house they sheltered in, had stolen thousands of lives before hers, was responsible for innumerable murders besides those it had forced her to commit. Once upon a time, though, it had been a person, just like her. A mortal. But through a process lost both to history and to the demons themselves, it had shed its skin and become a being of pure spirit, capable of moving from one body to another—indeed, incapable of living outside a body, like a cosmic parasite, a metaphysical virus. Whether this transformation was accidental or intentional, accomplished individually or with the help of one or more preexisting demons, was unknown. Only two things were certain: first, that it had been a virgin when it died—a “bound soul,” to use the demons’ own term, still tied to its birth body like every other human being—and second, that it could only leave the body of a given host by having sex: “unbinding,” at which point the entire universe was open to it, excluding only those bodies the demon had possessed previously. The rules were specific and incontrovertible: sex, to orgasm, with another person. There was no other way.
    Within those parameters, however, a demon’s power was prodigious. It began the moment it took possession, when it absorbed the memory of its host. Not just the conscious memories, but the unconscious ones, the incomprehensibly vast amount of data that had flickered past a host’s senses during the course of even the most routine existence. Most of us learn to filter out the white noise of modern life, the TVs and radios playing in the background, the billboards passed in the city center, the conversations overheard on sidewalks, buses, trains, airplanes. To a demon, such information was equally as present as the names of its host’s parents or children, equally as important.
    How it used this knowledge, however, varied from demon todemon, possession to possession. A Mogran was perfectly capable of assuming control of its host, replacing the native mind with its own. But doing so made an indelible mark on the host’s psyche after the demon departed. Left it by turns paranoid, schizophrenic, fractured into warring personalities, sometimes catatonic, sometimes suicidal. It was almost impossible to recover from such an inhabitation, and the Mogran tended to shy away from it, not because of any charitable impulse toward their hosts, but because such behavior led to unwanted attention. In fact, Alec told her, few people were ever aware they’d been possessed, that their bodies had been borrowed, their memories stolen. The demon would hide in the unconscious, poke around in the shadows and use what it found to manipulate its host in subtle, often unnoticeable ways. Lowered inhibitions, nudges to act on urges that normally wouldn’t have seen the light of day. The Mogran lacked bodies, yet could not live without one; as such they were dependent upon the human race even as they were complete masters of whichever individual they happened to be housed in. Such a dynamic made the Mogran bitter, malicious even. Their only pleasure was playing with their hosts, messing with their heads, their lives, the lives of the people around them. It was the closest thing to vengeance they could take.
    The information it absorbed wasn’t merely mental either: it extended to the