Read Demons for Free Online Page B

did that
smile again. But not you, as you see. So. O’Breen pushed off with his chair and sort
of pedalled his way back around behind his desk and in one smooth movement pulled
the box in front of him, slid the rubber band from it onto his wrist and took off
the lid. Let me see your other arm, he said.
    On Elena’s left forearm this time O’Breen scratched a drop each of Formaldehyde,
Isocyanate, Sulphur Dioxide and Epoxy Resin and sent her out into the waiting room
again. This time while waiting she started to think about what O’Breen had said,
how he seemed to be making a distinction for her between a natural and an artificial
thing and how, yes, especially over the last couple of years, she had become impatient
with the artificial in a general sense, be it the cheap Asian-made but fashionable
clothes her schoolmates wore or the stupid, superficial things they said. Elena had
just started to go a little further with this thought when she realised that fifteen
minutes had passed and O’Breen was calling her back.
    The diagnosis this time was also straightforward. On each scratch on her other arm
the welts were up, an angry red already spreading out beyond the wound itself. O’Breen
examined each of these marks, pushing back the skin on either side with his thumbs
and leaning down with his magnifying thing. He said nothing, a specialist utterly
absorbed in his work; it was only as he drew back and pulled a plastic bottle of
cortisone cream across the desk towards him, flicking the cap and offering it to
Elena, that he finally said: Yes.
    Elena was allergic to everything we might call ‘modern’. O’Breen explained how there
are, on the one hand, substances we find naturally, in nature, and, on the other,
manufactured or artificial substances that we have created molecularly from the
ground up. It was the second category, exclusively, that Elena was allergic to and
sadly these substances were everywhere.
    After that first assessment Elena regularly went back during the following weeks
to the house behind the low brick fence with the sign in the yard to be tested for
yet another suite of substances. She was allergic to them all. One day O’Breen stood
her in her underwear in the centre of the room and ran a wand emitting electromagnetic
waves over her body: this too brought her out in a rash and left her with a headache
and a queasy feeling that lasted for days. O’Breen prescribed various drugs and creams
and started to make up with her what he called an ‘action plan’, so that she might
eliminate these allergens from her life. After the fourth visit the receptionist
gave Elena an envelope to take home and on the bus she carefully prised it open.
Addressed to her mother, it was the bill so far. Elena hid it in her underwear drawer
and never mentioned it again.
    She became increasingly withdrawn and strange. She stopped going to school, or went
for a few hours only when it suited her. The principal contacted her mother who said
Elena was sick, then as she always did her mother went straight to her room and yelled
at her to get better.
    Elena lived in her bedroom, a spartan space now bereft of the usual teenage clutter.
She took her tablets and rubbed the creams into her skin and bought her own organic
food which she ate in there, mostly raw. Without any modern gadgetry to rely on she
quickly lost contact with the few friends she’d had—including me, said Hannah.
    Then one day, after the usual visit to O’Breen, outside the shopping centre where
she habitually changed buses, she let her usual bus go, waited at the stop for a
while, and caught the bus to the city instead. She got off at the depot near the
station, bought a ticket and boarded another bus that would drop her seven hours
later in the tiny coastal town where her uncle owned a small timber cottage where,
when they were young, she and Ty would spend the holidays, collecting shells on the
beach and fishing in their uncle’s boat at dawn on the vast,