How to Find a Demon-Eater

“Just order already,” grunted the Demon. He always hated it when I took too long picking a flavor. 

I stood in front of the ice cream counter, wooden spoon in my mouth, frozen strawberry bits melting on my tongue, wondering if we needed another taste of the peppermint swirl I’d rejected two spoons back, or if we should try the bubblegum for a change. 

The Demon didn’t really care about the flavors; he simply wanted an ice cream sundae with an extra shot of hot fudge, no nuts. Not that he was allergic to nuts—that would have been too easy. He was a lesser demon, but he wasn’t completely helpless. And I didn’t know about Demon Eaters yet. I thought I just had to keep looking for the right antidote.

“Sorry,” I said to the teenager in the Holstein-print apron. “I need a minute.” I stepped back from the counter to let the next person in line place their order.

“What are you doing?” the Demon asked with a huff. And, I guess I should clarify here, only I could hear him—which maybe I don’t need to specify, but since being possessed I’ve learned there is nothing obvious in life.

“You sure you want ice cream again?” I asked. “Can’t we do something different, like ribs?” As soon as I said that, I regretted it, because he probably wasn’t allergic to meat, seeing as how demons ate people. At least Satan did, according to all those freaky paintings of him cramming sinners into his mouth in Hell.

I tried to think of all the things a demon might be allergic to. “Maybe we could have some sage instead. Or avocados? Mango skins? Holy Water? Gluten?”

Sadly, he was smarter than this. “Nice try. We’re having ice cream.”

He moved my legs first, then my torso, and I was sure I looked like one of those George Romero zombies in search of frozen treats. Despite being inside me for the past two months, he still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of moving me, which is why he preferred persuasion.

I took over my body and got back in line at the counter. “You know I’m lactose intolerant.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know. That’s part of the fun.”

# # #

I had multiple reasons for not liking this Demon. As soon as I understood what had plunged into me, I began researching ways to expel him. I only had a few minutes at a time before he’d catch on and shut down those lines of inquiry, and so I was dealing with scraps of information stolen from the internet, which mostly wound up being an enlightening but ultimately unhelpful glimpse into the less brotherly denominations of the Baptist church. And forget even going near an actual house of worship. The Demon wasn’t having that, not even the neighborhood church, which used to be a 7-11 and still looks like one. I tried to go in there once, whistling like I was just going to grab a candy bar and a magazine, but he turned my ass right back around. Like I said, he was smart.

All the movies pretend that possession is a gradual process, a string of aberrant thoughts and behaviors that steadily increase over a certain course of time. It’s all about the narrative arc, right? Nobody tells it like it is: a sudden implosion of body and mind, obliterating all your senses for—I don’t really remember how long, but when you come back to yourself, it doesn’t take long to realize you’re not alone.

But even though I wasn’t alone, I was lonely. I missed my friends and my family, but I just couldn’t handle that extra voice running through my head when I went out for happy hours, or the disbelief on my parents’ faces when I scarfed down the whole Baked Alaska we were supposed to share after my birthday dinner at Chez Caprice. That’s when I knew I had to figure it out on my own, before I ruined things with everyone else.

# # #

“Let’s at least try lavender,” I said, pointing at a tub of vaguely purple ice cream. “We haven’t had that one yet.”

The girl behind the counter looked at me a little warily, but started scooping.

“And extra hot fudge,” I added, meaning for both her and the Demon to hear me that time. 

Again, I should explain: this was at a point when I still had a little thought privacy. If The Demon could see or hear what I was up to, I was hosed. But at that time, my thoughts were my own.

If I had to speak with him privately, I found I could direct thoughts at him. It was a little like programming, I had to think a code like “<toDemon>” and then only he could hear me. I got the idea from the programming class I’d been working through online around the time the Demon decided to take up residence inside me. That was after the class to brush up on my French at Alliance Française, when I considered applying for the Foreign Service; which was after the economics class I took when I thought maybe I should get an MBA. Clearly I had no idea what I wanted—aside from getting off the paralegal track I’d stalled out on at Wilson, Wilson, Nickerson & Smith, LLP.

But at least the programming was coming in handy. I simply had to remember to think “</toDemon>” at the end of what I wanted him to hear. I lost the chance to test a potential antidote once by forgetting to close the code, and had to give away a whole batch of cookies that looked like chocolate chip but were actually raisin. He wouldn’t touch a cookie after that, which meant I couldn’t touch a cookie as long as he was inside me.

The clerks and the other paralegals were jealous, watching me eat ice cream at my desk all the time. They weren’t that sympathetic when I squirmed on my chair, gut gurgling and churning; and I got little pity when I had to stay late to finish up after running back and forth to the bathroom all day. Eventually the Demon caught on that letting me take my Lactaid pills meant we spent less time on the toilet and more time eating ice cream. But he still liked a little gurgle once in a while. More than that, he liked the power of knowing he could make me even more miserable at any moment.

As things progressed, I stopped participating in the weekly lunch outings, where my coworkers would stare at me over their salads and chicken fingers while I went straight for dessert. To be honest, skipping the lunches was a bit of a relief. The partners encouraged us to form “community,” but like true legal professionals, we only wound up sizing each other up like rats in a lab—if rats could spring out of their cages and go for drinks together after a day of experiments.

My coworkers kept asking me how I did it without gaining weight. The Demon purposely burned off all the extra calories to keep me the same size because he hated clothes shopping even more than I did—it took just that one time at Macy’s after my pants had gotten tight, and that was enough for him. But how was I supposed to explain all that to my coworkers?

“But aren’t you lactose intolerant?” they would ask.

“Yes,” I’d say.

“Huh,” they’d say, giving me the same look I used to give people who ordered Diet Coke with their bacon burger, fries, and apple pie.

They sure enjoyed those raisin cookies, though.

# # #

“Lavender?” asked the Demon. “Is this another one of your schemes?”

I didn’t answer, keeping my thoughts as blank as possible. I tried not to hope too hard that lavender was the demon-expectorant I’d been looking for all along.

His curiosity was too much for him—he didn’t stop me from handing over the money and taking the sundae. He wanted me to lick it before I even sat down, but I managed to get us into the chair before I dug in.

I opened my Lactaid bottle, pausing briefly to make sure he wasn’t going to make my hand jump and scatter them all over the floor. After popping a pill, I leaned over the sundae just long enough to swoon over a warm whiff of chocolate and lavender. I spooned the first bit of luxury into my mouth, and for a moment, abandoned all thought, surrendering to the sensation of hot fudge rolling over chilled cream on my tongue, warm sweetness mixing with aromatic cool. In that instant, I could forget all about my Demon, and give myself over to the pure, sweet joy of ice cream.

How was I supposed to know lavender made him stronger?

“What kind of spell is ‘<toDemon>’?” he asked. 

Then he said, “Oh.”

Then he said, “OH!!!!” 

And then, through me, he laughed and laughed, and it took all my strength to walk us out of the ice cream shop before they called the police.

I no longer had the privacy of my own thoughts.

There was only enough lavender in that ice cream for a little kick of power, so he couldn’t stop me from going back to work. With my luck, though, someone wearing lavender perfume stepped into the elevator on my way up to my office. She got out on the next floor, moments before he summoned enough power from her scent to make me run my tongue along her neck.

The rest of that day was—I’ll call it “erratic.” I wound up going home sick—not that I actually went home. Instead, the Demon had me all over town charging ruinous amounts on my credit card for lavender soap, shampoo, chocolate, deodorant, sachets, perfume—lavender everything. No sooner would I leave a store, then he’d set me walking down the street, bags swinging from my arms, sniffing a bar of lavender soap and searching for lavender boutiques on my phone.

“Lavender House!” we crowed. Lo and behold, it was a mere five-minute walk away. But even that wasn’t soon enough—the whole time there he had me glutting myself on lavender chocolate and spritzing lavender perfume straight into my face. When he made me unscrew the bottle, I knew he was going to make me drink it straight, so I fought him, so hard I walked into traffic and almost got hit by an Uber, which made me drop the bottle and spill everything.

“See,” I told him, “that’s what you get. Now simmer down or we’re not going to make it to Lavender House.” That’s the only way to get a demon inside you to calm down, by showing him what you could do for him if he just got out of the way and let you. Thing is, that’s the best way to destroy yourself, too.

I turned the corner and there it was, tall and skinny, crammed between a dry cleaner and a pharmacy: Lavender House. It was purple, of course; two stories, and the windows were tall and skinny too, with lacy curtains and bundles of lavender in glass bottles on the windowsills inside.

My heart was pounding—his anticipation plus my anxiety—as we stepped over the threshold to the tinkle of a bell above the door. It was like stepping onto a planet with lavender atmosphere, like L2O, and I knew I was in trouble, because I could barely even form a thought. I could only think lavender, lavender, lavender, and I wasn’t anywhere close to the driver’s seat anymore, not even in the front of the car. I was the kid stuck in the back with the hairy old dog blankets.

The Demon had no cool left at this point, just started grabbing dried lavender bundles off the shelves and rubbing them all over me, and was about to stuff one right into my mouth when I heard a woman say, “Welcome to Lavender House.”

Her voice was light and delicate. Heady. Not loud, but it grabbed the Demon’s attention long enough for me to close my mouth and drop what had nearly been my lavender pacifier.

“I see you’ve been looking at our aromatherapy bundles,” she said. She wore a high-necked, purple, Victorian-looking dress with sleeves down to her wrists. Her hair was swept up into a snowy bun, which I could have sworn had a tinge of purple to it as well.

The Demon moved us toward her, my steps supple and fluid now that he had complete control over me.

“Lavender can help with a variety of issues,” she said, looking us up and down with one raised eyebrow. “Anxiety, depression, headaches, digestion.”

She turned toward the shelf behind her and selected a small glass bottle with a dropper in the cap.

“This is lavender essential oil,” she said, facing us again. She unscrewed the cap and squeezed the bulb to draw oil into the dropper, then held it out to us. The Demon leaned my body forward, and we breathed in the flowery concentrate. The intensity with which we experienced that pleasure—whole body, whole mind—almost let me forget he was there.

“It’s edible,” she said. “Want to try?”

Without hesitation, the Demon opened our mouth. But then the woman pulled her hand away, tilted her head back, and placed a glistening drop of the oil on her own tongue.

Before the drop even landed, a whirl of emotions dizzied me: desire, disappointment, confusion, outrage. Something shifted in my body, my limbs getting lighter, my belly heavier. I felt the Demon gather himself in from my extremities and concentrate himself into a mass in my belly. He was fighting something, raging in circles inside me like a cyclone. But his power was no match for hers, and the wriggling, bulging rage of him wrenched itself up my throat into my mouth. A blinding bolus of light flew past my lips and over the counter into hers. She clamped her mouth shut, and with a satisfied smile, swallowed him down.

# # #

I woke up on a futon in a back room, with the white-haired woman reading in a chair beside me.

“I’ll get you some water,” she said, setting down her book. “I assume you don’t want any lavender in it.”

I drank glass after glass, which she poured from a purple pitcher while she explained the work of a Demon Eater: how to track unrest, how to tell the difference between a sweet tooth and possession, how to know when and where to appear.

“So, you see,” she concluded, “the Lavender House isn’t really here. It comes and goes as needed, and the next time it might be—I don’t know, Licorice Heights, or Cinnamon Castle, or the Honey Hive, whatever a demon’s weakness is. But unless someone has a demon, they’ll never find it.”

I nodded and asked for another glass, but the pitcher was empty.

“Seems our time is up,” she said, placing it on the ground.

“But—”

“Ah, ah, ah, let’s not be greedy.” She lifted a finger like a schoolmarm. “I’ve spent a lot of time with you. Most people dash right out of here as soon as they wake up.” 

“But how did I—”

“Shh.” She put a finger to my lips, and I heard bells. “That’s the door.” She stood and smiled as I grabbed her hand. 

“But, where did the Demon come from?” I asked. “Why’d he pick me? And how did you know?”

She looked down at me appraisingly, arching her eyebrow again. “Persistent. Good. But I need to help this customer. And you need to lie down and gather your strength.”

Somehow, I had the feeling she wouldn’t be back any time soon. And yet I lay there, waiting, idly counting the boxes of scented soap and flowery perfume stacked on the shelves around me. Curious, I sat up and picked up the book she’d been reading by my bedside—it was page after page of screenshots from the programming class I’d taken. Underneath it was a book of French exercises, the same as mine, and under that, the same econ textbook I’d limped my way through in that benighted class. I leafed through the books, puzzling over this impossible coincidence, as sounds from the store drifted into the back room: the front door opening and closing to the tinkling of bells, the cash register beeping. 

My ears pricked up when a low, masculine voice said something about blood pressure medication. I looked around. The boxes of lavender products had turned into cartons of Lipitor, Celebrex, Vicodin, and other prescriptions. My pulse spiked when I heard another unfamiliar voice say something about “looking for it in the back.” As if those were the magic words for my legs, I jumped up and ran out the back door into an alley. When I turned around, sure enough, it was the rear entrance to the pharmacy, right next to the dry cleaners.

The Lavender House was no more.

# # #

I went back a few times after that—I couldn’t let it go, I had to know why I’d been targeted, if for no other reason than to make sure it never happened again. Now that I was free to research demons, I looked and looked for information about demons with food fetishes, but I never found anything that sounded like what happened to me. And I wasn’t about to tempt other kinds of demons by nosing around in churches asking after them.

Winter set in, and my enthusiasm for standing around in the cold looking for an imaginary building to reappear decreased along with the temperature. I’d also started taking guitar lessons, which was occupying more of my time. I mean, I couldn’t prove the programming course had anything to do with my possession, but I also couldn’t say it didn’t, so I figured it was best to try something else.

I’d almost gone a week without thinking about my Demon when one of my coworkers started acting a little…off. “Ivy League” Jeremy had been a regular at the weekly lunches—until suddenly he wasn’t. He also stopped going out for happy hours after work. But it was the KFC that clinched it: he began going there every day for lunch, to the point that the poor guy smelled like a walking chicken tender all afternoon. Normally I would have enjoyed seeing the little snob knocked down a peg, but this time I knew what he was dealing with.

I tried to talk to him about it as indirectly as possible, even splurging on Krispy Kreme one morning and “spontaneously” inviting him to the staff room for a coffee break. I suspected a new kind of grease would tempt his demon, and I was right. I tried to make small talk as he shoveled maple bars and Boston cremes into his face, and the fact that he didn’t find a way to mention his time at Harvard even once in that fifteen minutes confirmed it: he was in trouble. Though the demon inside prevented him from revealing the truth, I saw enough pleading in his eyes to cement my resolve to help him—I just had to figure out how.

Then one day he made the leap to the other side of the menu, coming back from lunch with a bulging Taco Bell bag and pockets stuffed full of hot sauce packets. From the doorway of the break room I watched him plow through chalupas and burritos until he balled up the last empty wrapper and missed the garbage can. When he ripped open a fresh packet of hot sauce and squirted it straight into his mouth, I knew the chase was afoot.

Sure enough, he left work early that day. Déjà vu had my head spinning as I followed him through town, watching him stumble in and out of specialty shops with bottles of hot sauce clinking in his pockets, and strings of hot peppers crisscrossing his chest like bandoliers. It made me sick, thinking of how his gut must be burning, but I knew he was going in the right direction for help—we were entering a neighborhood I knew quite well.

That day, though, it wasn’t the Lavender House: it was Jalapeño Heaven. And when I peered through the front window, I saw a woman in a high-necked, long-sleeved red dress, with a rosy tinge to her snowy, upswept hair, affixing a string of dried peppers to the window frame like Christmas lights.

Jeremy stormed into the building, and I followed calmly in his wake. The woman bade him good afternoon, then turned her attention to me. 

“It’s nice to see you again,” she said. “I’ll just help this gentleman first. Then we’ll sit down and have a nice, long chat.” As she said this, she tapped a sign hanging from the counter: 

HELP WANTED

My heart jumped around in my chest like a student waving to be picked for the one question she finally knows. I clasped my hands in front of me and waited, lip pinched between my teeth, watching a single flake of hot pepper flutter down toward the Demon Eater’s tongue.