Demonology by Rick Moody Read Free Book Online

sure that you were thinking creatively
     along the same lines we are. We want to make sure you’re comfortable with our plans. As married people, as committed people,
     we want this ceremony to make others feel good about themselves, as we’re feeling good about ourselves. We want to have an
     ecstatic celebration here, a healing celebration that will bind up the hurtany marriages in the room might be suffering. I know you know how the ecstasy of marriage occasions a grieving process for
     many persons, Mrs. Manzini. Sarah and I both feel this in our hearts, that celebrations often have grief as a part of their
     wonder, and we want to enact all these things, all these feelings, to bring them out where we can look at them, and then we
     want to purge them triumphantly. We want people to come out of this wedding feeling good about themselves, as well be feeling
     good about ourselves. We want to give our families a big collective hug, because we’re all human and we all have feelings
     and we all have to grieve and yearn and we need rituals for this.
    There was a long silence from Glenda Manzini.
    Then she said:
    —Can we cut to the chase?
    One thing I always loved about the Mansion on the Hill was its emptiness, its vacancy. Sure, the Niagara Room, when filled
     with five-thousand-dollar gowns and heirloom tuxedos, when serenaded by Toots Wilcox’s big band, was a great place, a sort
     of gold standard of reception halls, but as much as I always loved both the celebrations and the network of relationships
     and associations that went with our business at the Mansion, I always felt best in the
empty
halls of the Mansion on the Hill, cleansed of their accumulation of sentiment, utterly silent, patiently awaiting the possibility
     of matrimony. It was onto this clean slate that I had routinely projected my foolish hopes. But after Brice strutted through
     my place of employment, after his marriage began to overshadow every other, I found instead a different message inscribed
     on these walls:
Every death implies a guilty party.
    Or to put it another way, there was a network of sub-basements in the Mansion on the Hill through which each suite was connected
     to another. These tunnels were well-traveled by certain alcoholic janitorial guys whom I knew well enough. I’d had my reasons
     to adventure there before, but now I used every opportunity to pace these corridors. I still performed the parts of my job
     that would assure that I got paid and that I invested regularly in my 401K plan, but I felt more comfortable in the emptiness
     of the Mansions suites and basements, thinking about how I was going to extract my recompense, while Brice and Sarah dithered
     over the cost of their justice of the peace and their photographer and their
Champlain Pentecostal Singers.
    I had told Linda Pietrzsyk about Brice’s reappearance. I had told her about you, Sis. I had remarked about your fractures
     and your loss of blood and your hypothermia and the results of your postmortem blood-alcohol test; I suppose that I’d begun
     to tell her all kinds of things, in outbursts of candor that were followed by equal and opposite remoteness. Linda saw me,
     over the course of those weeks, lurking, going from Ticonderoga to Rip Van Winkle to Chestnut, slipping in and out of infernal
     sub-basements of conjecture that other people find grimy and uncomfortable, when I should have been overseeing the unloading
     of floral arrangements at the loading dock or arranging for Glenda’s chiropractic appointments. Linda saw me lurking around,
asked what was wrong and told me that it would be better after the anniversary, after that day had come and gone,
and I felt the discourses of apology and subsequent gratitude forming epiglottally in me, but instead I told her to get lost,
     to leave the dead to bury the dead.
    After a long excruciating interval, the day of Sarah Dan-forth Wiltons marriage to Brice Paul McCann arrived. It was a day
     of chill mists,