One Silver Coin For a Pound of Demon

Chapter 15

Draft
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Since then, the door between the bedroom and the living room had never been closed.

Lemuel never mentioned this and never came to close the door, so you also don't mention it or close the door. You're a light sleeper, and if the door isn't shut, the sound of his fluttering on the couch would wake you up. From the bedroom, Lemuel's nightmare sounds like the last few kicks of a hung man. You get up as fast as you can every time, you feel that once you're late the sound would disappear forever.

You push Lemuel awake. Sometimes he'll thank you, sometimes he'll apologize, and sometimes he'll attack you and yell at you to get out. Of the three, the least you want to hear is the apology, because an apology always comes with "please," "no," or "God"— only the word "God" could be said by those with demon blood. Because it's not a Holy Word of true efficacy. It's useless for a person without power to call on the name of God.

When Lemuel apologizes, he'd always grit his teeth. Those words are chewed between his lips and teeth, a small part is squeezed out, most of it is swallowed back. He seems to backtrack once he opens his mouth, turning the apology into a curse. He's not really sorry, his voice shakes and changes tone, full of humiliation, hatred, and fear. He's not apologizing, he's begging for mercy, and he's fighting back with the last of his strength.

In this state, Lemuel's extremely tenacious yet extremely fragile, like the sharp edge of broken china, and you don't know if you can fix him.

You too have dreams, it's as if you were infected. That day you dream about eating candy. You see a group of soldiers surrounding a demon. They fuck it, break its horns, and poke into fucked-up hole whatever they could grab. They tug at the demon's hair, and you see Lemuel's face. "I'm sorry..." he says, "Please, don't..."

With sugar in your mouth your older brother puts his arms around your shoulders. You want to go back, but older brother's hands are like iron tongs. He suddenly becomes your father, you can't move at all. You try to turn your head around, and a few meters away, they break Lemuel's neck.

You don't know if you're in Lemuel's nightmare.

You can exorcise and heal, but driving away nightmares aren't your domain. You're limited in what you can do and you don't know if that's a disservice. Sometimes Lemuel seems to want you to stay, and sometimes he can't stand anyone being around him.

You can't tell the difference between the two, so you have to deal with both in the same way: turn on the lights, push him to wake him up, sit on a chair a few meters away from the sofa for ten minutes, say goodnight to him, and leave. At least Lemuel doesn't insist that you leave after waking up, and he doesn't seem to hate you more than he did before, which shouldn't be too bad.

Anyway, you think you like the door being open. Aside from the nightmares, you'd still be able to hear Lemuel moving in the living room. You hear him wander, pour water, and put the glass back on the table, it make a soft bump. It sounds so good that you even loved the mug for it. It's a plain white mug, a giveaway from a supermarket event that happened¹ a few years ago. You scrub it once a day and fill it with water.

When you got home that day, you found that the TV remote control isn't in its original location.

It's supposed to be next to the living room shelf, with the edge aligned with the seventh floor tile², but now it's been moved two centimeters to the right, and the top is tilted a bit, no longer parallel to the wall. Someone picked it up and almost successfully put it back in place, but you remember exactly where things in your home are in- nothing in this room has been touched ever since you moved here ——You notice that this the first time you've entered the door and truly scanned the living room.