There were delicate lines etched around the corners of Jay’s almond eyes, testament to the brutal 9-9-6 hours that he put in at the law firm – put in for us, to better our prospects, to secure our future. I had absolutely no idea how to tell him how stupendously foolish I had been; how, seeking a shortcut, I had contracted with an ancient evil and jeopardized everything that we had carefully built, imperiled our very souls.
“Jay, it’s much worse than you could–”
As I blurted out my confession, Jay’s face began to metamorphose: His rich brown eyes were transformed into cobalt plasma balls, shooting out tentacles of electric blue and purple that forked like lightning as they invaded his corneas. Blood vessels burst along their paths, so that each line was surrounded by two strips of crimson; a single tear of blood dripped from the corner of Jay’s right eye as his mouth gaped in horror. His skin dried and wrinkled, taking on the ashen hue and tortured texture of birch bark; his mouth opened even wider, the skin at the corner of his lips beginning to tear as It possessed him, jerking open his jaws so that he was left with the same agonized, frozen expression as the cadavers in the Anatomy Lab.
You have broken the covenant. Pay the price or prepare for annihilation.
The voice emanating from Jay resounded with power; its atavistic hunger sent currents of fear up and down my spine. During the next few moments, as blood began spurting from Jay’s ears and nose and he crumpled to the pavement, I dissociated fully: I had no memory of begging a passerby to call an ambulance; of telling the doctors in the Emergency Department that no, Jay wasn’t on any medication, and no, he didn’t do drugs; of taking up my vigil by the side of his bed in the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit, where the Chief of the Neurosurgery Department informed me that there was a 50-50 chance that he would recover.
***
It started with a weekend hike. Just a short, innocent hill climb, our destination one of the many ancient pagodas tucked into the mountains that surround Beijing. It was an October day of azure sky, and the air was crisp and amicable, leaving a subtle, sweet note on our tongues as we climbed the hundreds of stairs to the temple. It was called 天道, the Way to Heaven, but as we hiked, Jay grumbled that it was more like the Way to Hell.
“Ah, teaching, noblest of professions,” the withered crone whispered from behind a plume of incense. She sat atop an overturned plastic bucket in the bottom level of the pagoda.
“But something tells me that you’re not content to teach… There is an unmet hunger in you.”
The air around this gargoyle of a woman seemed to flicker with static-y sparks; for a moment, she looked young and elegant, her long, raven-black hair cascading halfway down her back. In the next second, I saw a crown of pitch-black feathers set atop her head; her lush hair transformed into giant feathers as her onyx pupils swelled to occupy her entire eyes. Then I blinked, and reality reasserted itself.
“Tell me what you want, and it is yours,” she croaked. “So long as you are willing to pay the price.”
Jay glanced at me uncertainly. Relax, babe, what’s the worst that could happen? I said with my smile.
“I want fame,” I confessed. Might as well go for it, right? “I have a YouTube channel, and it only has a few hundred subs right now. I want to go viral.”
“And you’re sure that you’re ready to pay the price, teacher?” She spat out laoshi, teacher, as though it were the worst invective she knew.
“I’m ready,” I answered as I turned to Jay with a wink. “How much will it cost us?”
The witch demanded 50 RMB, just a few bucks (“Seems like a fair price,” I remarked to Jay with a smirk). The hag had Jay and I light some incense before we left.
“Heed your dreams,” were her last words to me before we departed.
That night, I dreamt of Isabella, one of my most promising students, getting a 92 on the end-of-semester exam that my AP Bio students were taking the following day. The next night, as I graded the exams, I came across Bella’s; I scored it, noting that she had achieved the 96 that she needed for an A. Almost without consciously considering what I was doing, I flipped to the second section of the exam booklet and erased two correct answers, substituting incorrect ones before changing the grade on the front page to a 92, an A-. I couldn’t explain how, but I knew intuitively that this was what I was supposed to do.
A single A- wasn’t gonna kill anyone, right? Besides, Bella had gotten a little obsessive about her grades, I rationalized; it might even do her some good to have to come to terms with less-than-perfect performance. At the same time, I scoffed at myself for succumbing to this temple balderdash, for falling victim to such rank superstition. I resolved to put the deal with the crone out of my mind from then on.
I succeeded in doing so until the following evening, when my phone began exploding with so many notifications that it powered off, drained of juice after 45 minutes of nonstop stimulation. I signed into my YouTube account and saw that my most recent video, “The Legend of Heaven’s Way Temple,” had gotten 950,000 views in 24 hours. Holy shit. I had gone viral! Other creators were contacting me about interviews and collaborations; brands were getting in touch to see if I’d be interested in shilling camping gear or hippie crystals; even Jay raised his eyebrows appreciatively when he saw the green number representing my AdSense revenue total. Amidst all of this excitement, it was easy enough to set aside thoughts of Bella – after all, I was considering quitting my day job, now, anyway.
***
“Are you sure that you wish to play again, John?” The hag questioned me when I returned solo (I was too embarrassed to tell Jay how much I had bought into this whole scam).
At this point, it had been six weeks since my first visit. It was probably all bullshit anyway, I knew, but – on the off chance that it was real, that something magical was going on – I wanted to leverage it to my advantage. I needed the mojo for one more viral video, this one with over two million views, to lock my newfound success into place. Then I could leave this unsettling crone, this sketchy temple behind for good. Besides, all I’d had to do the first time around was change an A to an A-; it wasn’t exactly a steep price to pay, right?
“I’m sure,” I affirmed. I gave the crone the 50 RMB, lit the stinking incense, and chugged coffee to delay falling asleep for as long as possible. When I finally passed out, I dreamt of Jay’s crestfallen face as he pretended not to notice that I had forgotten our five-year anniversary, which was coming up this Wednesday. Not that, I thought. Please not that. It’ll break his heart.
On the day of our anniversary, I balked. It was the first day that Jay had taken off in the five years that we had been together, and I woke up with his arms around me, his eyes locked on mine – filled with the boyish exuberance that never left him, his mouth set in that determined look of his. So, I had ignored my promise to the keeper of the temple, and 24 hours later – as my most recent YouTube video garnered three million views – Jay suffered the brain hemorrhage that nearly killed him. A one-in-a-million oddity, the doctors assured me; a defect in the arterial wall that had been present since birth, a grenade that could’ve detonated at any time. That is what they wanted me to believe, at least, but I knew better.
***
“Tell me how to save my fiancé,” I growled at the hag, my eyes watering from the acrid fumes of the incense as I throttled her.
“Back, fool,” she spat, throwing me against the far wall of the pagoda with preternatural strength. She drew herself up to her full height: Twelve, fourteen feet, a cape of black feathers cloaking her skeletal frame. I realized then that she was wearing a human pelvis atop her head: The smoldering coals of her eyes burned through the pear-shaped obturator foramina, while the twin wings of the iliac crests flared outward and upward, providing a baroque embellishment to this infernal headgear. The pyramidal heft of the sacrum slid down her forehead and over her nose, covering her like armor as she fumed and bellowed.
You have broken the covenant. Pay the price or prepare for annihilation.
“I don’t understand! I don’t know what price to pay!” I sputtered, despairing. I collapsed into a heap, lowering my forehead to the floor as I sobbed.
“The language of the spirits is smoke and symbol,” the demon responded as the hag glitched and strobed back to her usual proportions, casting psychotic shadows against the walls of the temple as she vacillated between human and beast.
“So, I need to do something to ruin my relationship with Jay?” I wailed.
“The time for simple action is past, child,” the hag responded, and in her wretched tones I thought I detected a hint of sympathy. “Only flesh and blood will satisfy the spirit now.”
“So, I make myself bleed,” I repeated hollowly. I was ready to die, if it meant that Jay could live. “Here, now?”
“The place where you render the sacrifice isn’t important. But a mistake of this magnitude demands a very specific form of propitiation,” she cautioned.
My resolve was already draining; dread began to dilute the iron in my blood.
“So, I have to cut myself…”
“Either the chicken or the eggs should suffice; it is not necessary to forfeit them both,” the crone elucidated, brightening with Faustian glee. Her eyes drifted down to my stomach, then to my belt, then below that, coming to rest on my crotch with an expression of lewd mirth.
“Oh my God, no –”
“It is fitting, yes? To sacrifice the instrument of your love for each other?”
***
“Hello?” My phone rang as I stepped off the metro near my apartment six hours later.
“I’ve got some terrible news, John.” It was Alice, the high school’s head administrator.
“Yes?” My stomach had already been shredded; I didn’t think that a single day could accommodate any more misfortune.
“Bella committed suicide today. Jumped off the 18th floor of her family’s apartment building. Yale turned her down, and she just couldn’t cope…”
I begged off the phone, feigning shock. I had one more stop to make on the way back to my apartment, and I didn’t want to delay things any longer.
“I’m going to need a sharp knife and two bags of ice, please,” I told the wizened old man behind the counter.