Demonology

Christopher DeWan

The Hahamongna Watershed above Devil’s Gate Dam was once considered sacred land by the Tongva Indians, but we go there to play frisbee golf and get high. Tim and Aaron first showed me the park a few months ago. I don’t like frisbee golf and I’m not even sure I like Tim and Aaron, but I like drugs and I like getting out of my parents' house, so I became what I guess you can call their friend.

We’re stoned at Hahamongna with Aaron’s girlfriend Mira, who used to live nearby until her mom moved them to Reseda. Mira doesn’t like frisbee golf either, and that’s the reason that, while Tim and Aaron hurl discs down in the flats, Mira and I are sprawled on top of two picnic tables, staring at the afternoon sky.

I’ve never met Mira in real life until today, and she’s so attractive I have trouble looking at her. I’m doing what I always do when I’m nervous, which is, talk: I spew facts in the idiotic hope they’ll accidentally add up to something interesting. They generally don’t. Today I’m blathering about NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just up the road. I took a tour there once and posed for a photo with a Mars rover, but I’m pretty sure Mira’s not interested in Mars, so instead I tell her about Devil’s Gate.

“This place is a hellmouth,” I say.

She looks at the trees and the families at their barbecues. “You think this place is bad, you should see Reseda.”

But I can tell I have her attention, because she sits up. She’s looking at me with her eyes which might or might not be amber and which look familiar and not familiar, and I keep talking.

“The guy who created Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jack Parsons, was really into the occult, and around the time he opened JPL, he also opened a hellmouth down by the dam. That’s why they call it Devil’s Gate.”

“Is that true?”

“I don’t know what’s true,” I say, and she laughs, which surprises me, and I laugh too, and then we’re both laughing, easy laughing, and I think, this is why people do drugs, so we can laugh with people and feel like we know them from scratch.

And I guess that’s why I say what I say next. “Jack Parsons was also really into sex. Wife- swapping, S&M, dress-up. He had a whole sex cult thing.”

She stops laughing.
I can’t believe I just said that, here, to her.
At the bottom of the hill, there’s the clang of a chain and some cheering because one of the frisbee golfers has successfully frisbee-golfed. Up here, it’s silent.
Then she says, “Show it to me,” and I panic because, for a second, I’m sure she’s talking about the video.
But she doesn’t know I know about the video.
So I ask, “Show you what?” and she says, “I want to see the Devil’s Gate.”

#

The dam is a half-mile from the picnic area and we walk there in our shitty shoes through yellow dust. Hahamongna is called a watershed, but I’ve never seen water in it, just a hundred acres of dirt and dried sagebrush, the kindling of some future wildfire.

Mira is a fast walker and I have trouble keeping up. “You don’t get tired, do you?” I ask, and she explains she’s a runner, she runs every day with her husky dog who they call Pericles even though his name is just plain Perro. “Word of advice?” she offers. “Never let your baby brother name the family dog.”

“I didn’t know you had a brother,” I say.
“How could you? We just met today.”
But there’s a lot I know about Mira. I know she has a tattoo of a butterfly on her hipbone and she wears a ring around one of her toes. I know she has a scar below her ribs from a burst appendix. I know she keeps stuffed animals in her bedroom even though she’s seventeen.

The trail turns from dirt to paved on what looks like a bridge, but we peer over the railing and see we’re walking along the top of the dam. It’s breathtaking. It bends gravity—a manmade cliff, an ocean of concrete crashing onto the rocks at a distant vertical horizon. It makes me feel small.

Mira spits and watches it spindle down to the bottom. Then she turns to me. “So where’s this hellmouth?”

#

She knew, she must have known, that Aaron was recording the video.

What kind of person does that?
What kind of person lets a person do that?
I want to ask her, What did you expect would happen?

I want to ask, Didn’t you know he would show it people? That they would keep it on their phones and play it over and over, and pause and rewind and jerk off over and over, until they felt like they knew you, like they owned you, like they were better than you?

I want to ask, What were you thinking?

For once, I keep my mouth shut.

#

Time has passed the way time passes when you’re on drugs, not at all but suddenly, too. I see the sun is going down or already has: the only light is the pink glow on the clouds quickly turning purple.

“We should turn back," I say.
“You scared?” she asks, and walks down the trail into the shadows.
I am scared. I don’t believe in that devil stuff, or I don’t think I do. I don’t know what I believe. I know maybe there’s God, and that God is order. I know that wherever there is not order, there is chaos, and maybe this means that chaos is the Devil.

But chaos is everywhere.

Isn’t there a law in physics that chaos wins, that everything falls into disorder? Hahamongna was a natural lake once, until one day something shifted and broke, and the lake poured down the canyon and flooded the valley, and all the rushing water carved the cliff into the shape of a face that looks exactly like a giant jeering demon.

This is where Jack Parsons cast his spell to open the Devil's Gate.

For the first time, it occurs to me that going to look for a hellmouth in the dark while stoned might be a bad idea.

There is, in fact, a literal gate at Devil’s Gate, a metal fence over a service tunnel that burrows into the dam. It's meant, of course, to keep people like us from sneaking in. But it’s impossible to shake the idea that the gate was put here for the other reason: to keep something from getting out.

The surrounding stone is covered in graffiti, illegible shapes and names, and I wonder if it isn’t graffiti at all but an elaborate collection of arcane wards, spells to lock things in place, to seal the gate shut, to hold back the chaos.

Over my shoulder, the devil jeers.

Mira yanks at the fence and its rattle echoes through the canyon. “How do we get in?” she asks, and it’s only now I realize how much she wants this, how eager she is to get inside, and what a poor guide I am for her today: I who have never set foot in the tunnel, I who have never held a girl’s hand, I who have a video on my phone right now, in my pocket, and all day have been trying to decide if I should tell her or not, and this wasn’t even the right question.

Of course I should tell her.

The right question has been, would I be brave enough to do it?
Of course I won't.
Mira has spotted a ladder that goes up the cliff, a steep caged ladder I hadn't seen. At the top, there’s more graffiti and another cave mouth. She’s halfway up and climbing fast, and I don’t know if I can catch her.

When you decide to open a hellmouth, what do you expect will happen? Are you hoping to steal some secret knowledge from that place where other, lesser people are afraid to go? What do you find there, on the other side?

In the video, Mira is lying on her back and Aaron is standing over her, holding his phone. He uses a filter that gives her kitten ears and whiskers, and changes her voice so it burbles out like a baby. She’s naked, holding one knee close to her chest and using her other hand to clutch the bedpost, and she’s looking straight into the camera, not at Aaron but at all of us, and she’s laughing, laughing and completely unashamed, laughing with joy, brave and burbling, happy, laughing. Free.