Fire Devil

by J L Bryan

  I turned to see Tucker Nealon.

  He wore a cowboy hat, boots, and a leather duster, which looked like a smart thing to wear for protection when poking around a house haunted with violent ghosts. He wore a leather vest, too, but it was barely visible under the disjointed mass of emblems and sacred symbols that hung from his neck. I noticed, among other things, an Egyptian ankh, a Celtic Cross, Norse runes, and some writing that might have been Hindi. He looked like he belonged in some kind of occult biker bar.

  His long hair and thick beard were brownish, with some gray spattered in. His face was weathered, like it had spent a lot of time in the sun. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties, though that weathered-skin thing might have been making him look a little older.

  “Uh, sorry,” Stacey said, blushing hard. “I didn't mean to make fun of your, uh, meditation techniques.”

  “Then I must have completely misheard you.” Tucker turned toward me and extended a hand. “You must be Ellie Jordan.”

  “That's me.” I shook his hand. It was rough and callused, and he had a firm grip. “You come highly recommended.”

  “Shoot, you must have been talking to the wrong people.” He flashed a bright smile, an expression that was kind of disarming given that he looked like a bit of a wandering-vagabond type.

  “Well, I hope you like soul food,” I said.

  “It's just the thing for this kind of work.”

  We squeezed in around a small square table, five of us at a spot meant for four, with an extra chair dragged over from another table where an elderly couple were eating oxtail and collards.

  “So, Tucker,” I said, once sweet tea had been poured and food arrayed in front of us. “Calvin mentioned that you're a deliverance minister, is that right?”

  “That's how I started,” he said, soaking up gravy with cornbread. “When I was a kid, my brothers and me kept seeing something out in my granddaddy's old barn, the one he'd boarded up years past when he built the new one. It'd make the strangest sounds at night—yowlin' and hissin' like a wounded bobcat one night, snarling like a rabid dog the next. Granddaddy just got angry and told us to stop telling stories, and leave the old barn for the birds and mice.

  “Well, we knew that wasn't true. So we went out there one night. Luke was the oldest of us, at fourteen, and Billy was thirteen, and I was twelve—we were all just about a year apart, all of us born around late summer. Anyway, it was a hot summer night when we went out there, but the space around the barn was cold, like there was a big heap of ice inside.

  “So we went out there, thinking it was some kind of wild animal or crazy man. We were ready for a fight—I had my Louisville Slugger, Billy had an ax, and Luke had managed to get hold of Granddaddy's shotgun.

  “The door was nailed shut, but the wood was old, and the ax opened her up pretty good. We went on in there, and I could swear it was bigger on the inside than it looked on the outside.

  “The smell was awful. That was from the dead animals. Mice, birds, spiders, all over the dirt floor in there, all dead. Not injured, not like they'd been hunted and half-eaten by the farm cats. Just lying there, eyes wide open, like they'd sucked in poison gas. Some of them weren't much more than bones; others looked like they'd died there that morning.

  “We'd gone in without much fear—we were teenage boys, you know, gonna live forever—but once we were actually in there, that's when the fear set in. We felt the thing watching us from the dark for a long while before we really saw it. Even then, it was still just in the shadows, keeping back from the moonlight shining in behind us.

  “It had the shape of a person, almost, but it wasn't quite right. The legs and arms were too long, and the body was too short. It kind of looked like when a kid tries to draw a person, and you got a head and arms and legs in there but not much body. Only somehow a picture like that had come to life, and it was awful to look at. Like it was trying to look human but doing a really bad impersonation. It was tall, too, seven or eight feet.

  “The worst thing was its head. At first we only saw it from the back. Its hair was in clumps, and didn't look all that human. More like blobs of dead weeds glued into place. Where there wasn't any straw hair, we could see its scalp—pale like a dead fish, mottled like it was diseased.

  “When it turned to look at us, though, that's when the fish really hit the fan.”

  “The fish?” Michael asked.

  “My granddaddy didn't like us to swear,” Tucker told him, “Anyway, this thing's face...it wasn't really a face at all. It was like a puddle of spilled motor oil, but it was just sticking there on the front of its head, not dripping or running off like oil would have. It just kind of rippled, mostly dark but with little weird colors here and there.

  “It wasn't anything natural, I can tell you that. My brother let off that shotgun at the sight of it, and for a second night turned to day, and we just about went deaf from the blast.

  “And what I saw in that second changed my life for good. Neither of my brothers saw what I did. Maybe Luke was blinded by the muzzle flash. Maybe Billy was looking down at his ax, or back at the open door, thinking about running. I saw it, though. Those big stalk legs, hairy and too thin, more like a spider's than a human. The arms, just about the same—what I saw was like a spider, only with those four limbs instead of eight. Its body was pale with patches of that rotten-straw hair. Its face looked like it was made of pieces of different people's faces, glued together, but they didn't fit perfectly, you know? Like parts from different puzzles. It was kinda Cubist.”

  “Cubist?” Michael asked.

  “You know, like Picasso, but I'm not talking about his Blue or Rose Periods here.” Tucker shrugged. “I figured everyone had heard of Picasso.”

  “Yeah, of course,” Michael said. “I was just making sure you weren't talking about his, uh, Blue Period.”

  “Uh-huh.” Tucker bit into the fried slab of catfish he'd been ignoring. “So after the shotgun blast faded, we hightailed it out of there, as you can guess. I could hear the thing screeching and howling behind us.

  “Granddaddy came out, woken up by the shotgun. I don't believe I'd ever heard him swear before, but when we told him we'd opened up the old barn, he let out a string of profanities that would make the devil blush.

  “He didn't bother with the shotgun. He told us to get in the house. Then he carried two things out there with him—his old family Bible, and an old medicine wheel. This one.” Tucker touched one of his amulets, a small woven wheel with crossed strands, which I knew represented the cardinal directions. “The three of us huddled on the back porch of the house, watching Granddaddy go into the barn where we couldn't see him, then listening to him yell. We all had cut marks on us, we saw, like we'd been slashed up by something with claws, but we didn't remember it coming close; the thing had cut us from a distance somehow.

  “After a while, the barn went quiet.

  “When Granddaddy finally came out of there, he was limping, bleeding from the scalp. The spine of the family Bible was broken, and it was leaking pages as he went, the wind scattering them across the yard.

  “He wouldn't let us call a doctor, wouldn't tell us what happened. He whipped us the next day for going in the barn.

  “I kept asking him what happened, day after day. My brothers didn't want to know. They wanted to forget and pretend it didn't happen.

  “Granddaddy wouldn't tell me for a few months. He was sick, though, and closer to dying than we realized. He finally told me, just a few days before he passed on. He said it was an old spirit of the desert, and he'd only just managed to contain it in the barn. But it had just about killed him. Did kill him, I think, because he only got weak after that night we opened up the barn.

  “The night Granddaddy died, I went out to that barn—he'd nailed it all back up, of course, twice as tight as before—and I heard the thing growling in there again.

  “That's when I started calling every church in the book, looking for help. Nobody took me ser
iously. Not until I got to the Reverend Bo Jenkins of the Primitive Church of the Deliverance, out in Van Horn, five hours from the farm.

  “Turns out he'd dealt with this kind of thing before. Reverend Jenkins came out and went to work. I was the only witness. The Rev prayed and hollered himself hoarse. I was just outside the open door, watching a wind whip around him like he was in a tornado, kicking up dust, watching cuts appear all over him.

  “But he held firm, and by the end of the night, he'd cast that demon out. And I decided I would learn all I could from the Rev. He was pretty old, and it turned out his church wasn't a heck of a lot more than a shed with a handful of congregants, but the man knew how to take on spirits. I wanted to know how to fight them. And when I was nineteen, I became ordained by Reverend Jenkins as his assistant minister. I've spent the last twenty years casting out spirits whenever I hear about them, sometimes from a place, sometimes from a person. You could say it's my calling. I also work as a welder, but that's just to keep the bills paid. Taking on dangerous ghosts doesn't pay all that well by itself.”

  “Tell me about it,” I muttered. I hurried to change the subject before the long-winded Texan could launch into another tale. “Getting to our current situation—”

  “Your friends tell me we're dealing with a possession by a pyrokinetic ghost with a long list of murders behind him.”

  “We had a lot of time to chat on the way up,” Stacey said.

  “And to listen to Tucker's stories,” Jacob said. “So many stories.”

  “One more wrinkle,” I said, “This ghost now possesses a ring that gives him control of another, more dangerous ghost.” I began to tell him about Amil, the innocent boy trapped and changed into the slave-assassin Snake Man entity, but he cut me off.

  “I've heard this part, too.”

  “It's definitely been a long time in the car,” Jacob said.

  “So, we think Clay could be using the ring to collect other dead souls,” I said. “Because that's what he's doing. He picked up the strongest ghost from an old fire in Oklahoma, and he seems to be growing stronger already. He totally Freddy Kruegered me in my dreams, including slash wounds. And if he reaches Peshtigo and rounds up a whole herd of high-energy ghosts from the deadliest wildfire in American history...well, I don't know what comes after that, but he'll be unimaginably powerful. So, Pastor Nealon, what's your advice for approaching a possession like that?”

  Nealon steepled his fingers, as if to make a tiny church with his hands, and blew into it, like a wind deity, I guess.

  “It sounds like he's on the fast track toward demonic evolution,” Nealon said. “We've all met the ghosts of murderers and other personalities who've become dominant over spirits, like their victims from life, right? Sometimes a soul begins to catch on to this, and learns to feed on the living, and even on the dead. Over hundreds or thousands of years, you've got an entity that's so twisted, evil, and powerful, there ain't many pennies of difference between it and a full-on Hell-spawned demon.”

  “So the idea is to stop Clay from doing that,” I said.

  “I have one question,” Nealon said. “What did this fella Clay hold sacred? Do we know that about him?”

  “Sacred?” I shrugged. “I know what he obsessed over. Elizabeth Sutton. And since then, mothers.”

  “His relationship with his own mother must have been troubled.”

  “She died when he was a boy,” I said. “His father was harsh and hard-drinking, and whipped him when he got out of line.”

  “So, typical nineteenth-century dad,” Stacey said, and I nodded.

  “I don't see how we can use that against him, though,” I said.

  “A symbol of feminine power ought to help,” Nealon said. He reached inside his vest and plucked out, from some hidden pocket, a tiny ivory statue of a voluptuous woman, her hairstyle braided and elaborate, her face blank. “This is a Paleolithic goddess figurine. It's carved from mammoth tusk.”

  “How could you have something like that?” Jacob asked. “Shouldn't that be in a museum?”

  “Keep your bullwhip on, Indiana Jones,” Nealon told him. “This happens to be a very powerful totem against some very prehistoric bad guys that are out there. It's not going to do any good on display behind glass somewhere.”

  “It's either fake or stolen,” Jacob said. He reached out and touched the figurine, then shuddered. “Stolen. And it knows it.”

  “Let's not get sidelined over the little evils when we're up against the big ones, okay?” Nealon tucked the figurine out of sight again. “So there's a powerful archetypal feminine going for us, but I'd say some water elementals ought to help us out, too. This here is a crab claw sacred to a certain tribe in the South Pacific.” He gestured to a claw engraved with symbols. “On top of that, I've got a flask of red water from the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, sacred to ancient pagans and rumored to be the resting site of the Holy Grail. I've had the water blessed by, well, a few different religious authorities. And others.”

  “Others?” I asked.

  “Well, let me go order some of that sweet potato pie, and then I'll explain to you about the principles of chaos magic and how I came to them after my mentor faced a being he couldn't stop—”

  “Make the pie to go,” I said. “You can tell me the rest in the car. ”

  “Wait a sec,” Stacey said. “You two just drove nonstop for like twenty-four hours to get here.”

  “Twenty-three, it turned out. But we're fine. We traded off sleeping.”

  “Really, Ellie?” Stacey asked. “You slept? At night?”

  “We'll be fine,” I said. “It's only four or five hours to Peshtigo from here. Head north through rural Wisconsin, if you fall into Lake Michigan you've gone too far. We're not spending the night here when we could be spending it there.”

  “That means you could be confronting him tonight,” Stacey said. “Again, without rest, without preparation—”

  “We'll prepare on the way down,” I said.

  “Yeah, I can't say I'm ready to line up behind this plan of attack,” Michael said. “I've been pretty up close and personal with this guy, and I'm not sure he's going to back down if you splash him with some alleged Holy Grail well water.”

  “It does sound a little Monty Python-esque,” Jacob said.

  “I've got a water-elemental weapon, too.” Nealon reached under his long leather and pulled out—I kid you not—the weirdest sword I'd ever seen, its handle and spine longer than a baseball bat, but with a serrated edge. Or so I thought at first, until I realized the blade was actually made of a row of— “Teeth,” he said out loud, nodding as he followed my gaze.

  “Teeth?” Stacey asked, going a bit pale as she looked along the toothy edge.

  The restaurant had gone quiet, too, as a number of people noticed the guy with the crazy primordial weapon. It didn't help that Nealon was slashing it around in the air to demonstrate its use.

  “From tiger sharks,” Nealon said. “It's a traditional Polynesian weapon. Shark teeth mounted in sacred koa wood. Also blessed by a Hindu holy man, Methodist and Pentecostal ministers, and a Wiccan priestess. When my mentor failed against a demonic desert spirit in New Mexico, I was able to cut it down with this. It should help against your fire ghost.”

  The crowd began to mutter around us; apparently the guy swinging a shark-tooth sword while yapping about witchcraft and demons was making them uneasy for some reason.

  “You'd better not be thinking about attacking my sister with that thing,” Michael said.

  “Okay, let's maybe discuss this outside,” I said.

  “After I get that sweet potato pie.” He twirled his shark sword as he started up toward the front again.

  “We'll get the pie for you,” Stacey said, hopping up from her chair. “We'll get a whole pie if you want, just...put that away and meet us outside.”

  “Come on, Tucker,” Michael said, getting up and taking Nealon gently by the elbow of his sword hand.

  “I don't l
ike to be steered.” Nealon pulled his elbow away and walked, slowly, toward the door. Everyone was still looking at him and his sizable bladed weapon; there wasn't much about Nealon's appearance to reassure them that he was of sound mind, rather than someone who might just start chopping up restaurant patrons at random.

  “Maybe put the sword away, too,” Jacob suggested, trailing behind Michael and Nealon as they headed for the exit.

  “We may as well buy a whole pie,” Stacey whispered to me, while we walked through the silent crowd toward the cash register. “To kind of apologize for freaking everyone out. Besides, hey, it's pie.”

  “You won't get any complaints out of me about it.”

  “Also...I'm serious about you and Michael needing rest.”

  “Not this again—”

  “So I propose that Jacob and me, with our well-rested brains, take up driving the rest of the way. Stick the guys in the van, you and me take my way-comfier Escape, and we can plot out the final destruction of Anton Clay as we go. Without Jacob trying to make us listen to They Might Be Giants.”

  “That's...not a bad idea,” I said.

  “I know, like how many times can you listen to the same 90's novelty songs? A hundred billion, apparently.”

  Outside, foil-covered pie in hand, we explained the vehicle switch to the guys.

  “I'll ride with you,” Nealon told me. “If that's where the plans are being made.”

  “We'll cut you in on the plans once they're final,” Stacey said. “Plus, I was really going for a guys in one car, girls in the other kind of situation.”

  Nealon scowled at her. “What is this, elementary school?”

  I sighed. While Nealon did make me a bit uncomfortable, I needed a chance to get to know him and figure out the best way to use him. The drive up was the obvious time to do that.

  “Nealon rides with us,” I said. “Jacob, you and Michael take the van.”