Before the Devil Fell

by Neil Olson

  She looked up quickly.

  “You got all that while I was in the kitchen?”

  “No, my Latin isn’t that good,” he said. “I recognize his mark. I run across a lot of demons in my reading. Of course, there are inconsistencies from source to source.”

  She started turning pages again. Faster and faster, as if some answer was going to leap out at her on the next yellowed page of impenetrable text.

  “Can I make a suggestion?” he asked. She stopped and looked up at him again, a weary desperation on her face. “Why don’t we ask her what she meant?”

  “I’ve called her three times,” Sam replied. “She won’t answer.”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s drive over and knock on her door.”

  She became very still. Looking at him, but her mind elsewhere. He would swear that she was frightened by the idea. And yet, after several long moments, she nodded her head.

  “Okay,” Samantha said. “Fine. We’ll do it.”

  * * *

  The town’s contact with the sea was primarily via a large inlet, surrounded by streams, marshes and dunes. All low ground north to Plum Island, except for the dark green hump of Hog Island. Heading south there was higher ground. Rocky bluffs right on the water, and forested hills behind them. The roads were poor, so it was sparsely populated. Will was surprised to find that Evelyn Price lived in a brown-shingled shack in this part of town, but perhaps she coveted privacy. He was getting out of the car when Samantha grabbed his arm.

  “Don’t touch the doorknob,” she said firmly.

  “You’re right. Those things are filthy.”

  “Listen to me. Don’t touch anything you don’t need to. Don’t step into the house unless she invites you.”

  “Sam, the woman is ninety years old.”

  “She’s a powerful witch.”

  “You don’t use that word,” he objected.

  “I’m using it for your convenience.”

  “Ah, thanks. I thought she liked you.”

  “I haven’t spoken to her in a while,” Sam replied, gazing at the little house in trepidation. “Anyway, I’m not saying she’s hostile. I’m just saying be careful.”

  The sun was waning, but the day remained bright. There was a salty breeze off the ocean and drying clothes snapped and shuddered on lines staked up in the yard. Sam rang the doorbell once, then again a minute later. They were crowded together on the small stoop, waiting.

  “I guess she’s not home.”

  “No, she’s here,” said Sam, turning in place with her face up. Like a dog on a scent.

  She stepped down and headed straight for the laundry, vanishing behind a billowing white sheet. Will wondered why she didn’t go around. Maybe her homing device didn’t work like that. He followed, fresh-smelling pillowcases and blouses slapping his face as he ducked and bobbed through waves of material. Sam appeared and disappeared ahead. Until he cleared the last flapping sock to stand on a green shelf of land, falling abruptly to the sea. It was windy, and white crests tipped the waves to the horizon. In a weather-beaten Adirondack chair sat the old woman from the Cask & Flagon, her back to the stirring view. She smoked a cigarette and drank what looked like a generous glass of whiskey. Watching her clothes dry.

  “Hello dear,” Evelyn Price croaked at Samantha. That damp voice. Spotted, deeply lined flesh and the palest of blue eyes. She gave Will the full up-and-down before speaking again. “I guess you were bound to show up sooner or later.”

  There was no kindness in her tone, but no malice either. She was past caring what anyone thought.

  “I think your laundry is dry,” he said.

  “Yeah.” She gazed at it. “Problem is, once I get into this damn chair, it’s impossible to get out again.”

  “My grandma used to dry it on the line like that,” Sam said. “I love that smell.”

  “Salt and mildew?” the old woman snorted. “It’s only there because the dryer is broken. Haven’t gotten around to fixing it.”

  “How long has it been broken?” Will asked.

  She took a long squinting drag on the cigarette, considering.

  “Six years?”

  “I hope this isn’t a bad time,” Sam said.

  “Hah,” the woman laughed, or perhaps it was a cough. “Look at me. I’m ninety-two—all I have is bad times.”

  “We came to ask about the book,” said Sam. Evelyn looked accusingly at Will.

  “They don’t teach you boys Latin in school anymore?”

  “I can make it out,” he replied, crouching down so that their faces were on the same level. “We just wonder why you wanted me to have it.”

  “You don’t know?” Her gnarled face was incredulous. “Shit, it’s worse than I thought.”

  “Your daughter,” said Sam, “Margaret—”

  “I know my daughter’s name.”

  “She told us about the curse. The curse on the families.”

  Evelyn considered them both at length, her expression growing amused.

  “I’m sure she told you something. You can sit if you like. Don’t ask me to get chairs.”

  Samantha sat down in the long grass and began speaking. Of Wales. The demon. The seven heroes who caught and bound it. The promise of riches refused. The casting out and the curse. Will felt certain that she was repeating Margaret’s version word for word. Just ask me. I remember every damn thing I’ve ever heard. To his surprise, Evelyn did not interrupt. Just sipped and smoked and listened while waves thudded and hissed on the rocks below, out of sight. They were all quiet for some time after Sam finished.

  “Yup,” said Evelyn at last, nodding to herself. “That’s one way to tell it. What you might call the sanitized version.”

  “What’s the true one?” Sam asked.

  “No true one. It’s a legend. You shouldn’t go believing such things, no sir.”

  Shoont. Nossah. Will had not heard an Old Yankee accent so thick since his great-aunt died.

  “Never mind true,” said Will, settling himself in the grass near Sam, six feet from where the old witch’s sandaled foot dangled. He was determined to learn what he could this time, without suspicion or quarrel. “Tell us a different version.”

  “Different,” Evelyn rumbled, consulting her whiskey glass. If it was whiskey. “Okay, here’s another way to tell it. Those seven fellas who went hunting that so-called demon weren’t any heroes. They were doing what they had to do. What their women made them do. Cleaning up the mess they created.”

  “Because they had called the demon in the first place,” said Will. Having suspected it since Margaret Price first told them the tale days ago. Evelyn nodded.

  “Why?” asked Sam.

  “Who knows?” the old woman replied. “They wanted knowledge, or a favor. Those are the usual reasons. But they misjudged its strength. Lost control of it. Had to go hunt it down once it cast its shadow over the countryside. Still, they weren’t so swift to ignore its offerings. They wanted to get something out of the whole bad business. Some of them, anyway. They went ahead and made the deal. Knowledge for freedom. Once they had what they wanted, they went back on their promise and banished the old one.”

  “That’s why it cursed them,” Will said.

  “Well, sure,” she agreed, turning a mirthless smile on him. “Wouldn’t you have?”

  “What was the knowledge they gained?” he asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” She looked back and forth between the two of them. “You know, I always forget how young people resist answers that are right in front of them. Even the smart ones. Can’t say I envy either of you. What they gained is everything that makes our families what they are. The lore. The sight. The healing.”

  “No,” said Sam sharply. She shook her head quickly once, again
. Will reached out and touched her knee but she flinched away. “I don’t believe it. The healing isn’t evil.”

  “You silly girl,” said Evelyn Price. “Who said it was?”

  Will recalled Sam’s own words to him, which she seemed to have forgotten. There were things not from here. Things that crossed over. Whose true nature staggered our minds, defied comprehension. We gave them names. Angel. Demon. Old one. But they were just names. Such power was neither good nor evil; it simply was.

  “And what about after?” he asked. “They were driven out by their community?”

  “Maybe. Maybe they just felt they had to leave.”

  “But they were pursued by the curse. Of restlessness.”

  “More like the curse of stupidity,” cackled Evelyn.

  “What does that mean?” Sam snapped. Her bluntness restored by the old woman’s incivility.

  “It means we don’t change,” Evelyn replied, a weary remorse in her tone. “Going someplace different didn’t make them different people. They got up to the same old mischief.”

  “You mean calling on...those powers again?” Will asked, dismayed. “That’s why they kept getting thrown out of places? Christ, is it that easy to summon a demon?”

  “No. Very hard. Even harder to get rid of one.”

  “Then how did they manage to keep doing it?” he pressed.

  “Maybe they got lucky,” Evelyn suggested airily. “All it takes is one arrogant idiot every generation, thinking it’s his birthright. Getting his hands on the right spell and giving it a whirl. Sooner or later someone hits the mark.”

  “Twelve idiots,” Will corrected.

  “Twelve bodies,” she agreed. “Fewer, if necessity requires. But only one needs to know what he’s up to. The others just have to do what they’re told.”

  “Or maybe the first demon never went away,” said Samantha. “Maybe they never really banished it. That’s why they’re...why we’re able to keep recalling it again and again. Maybe that’s the real curse.”

  Evelyn regarded the younger woman with a pleased expression. Then pointed the stub of her cigarette at Sam.

  “I knew there was more to you than good looks.” She turned her gaze on Will once more. “I’m sorry I didn’t pay more attention to what they were up to in your mother’s house. Never occurred to me there was any real danger. I was forgetting that they didn’t have Jane watching them anymore.”

  “Jane was the knowledge-keeper,” he said, again remembering Sam’s words. “She died before she could pass on what she knew.”

  “Jane was a good soul,” said Evelyn, shifting uncomfortably in the deep wooden chair. “An insufferable know-it-all, but a good soul. She died much too young.”

  “You should have stepped in,” Sam scolded. “You should have shown them the right way. Instead of keeping it all for your own family.”

  “I didn’t keep it for anyone,” the old woman shot back. “I didn’t even teach this stuff to Margaret. I wanted it to die with me.”

  “You do think it’s evil,” Samantha accused.

  Evelyn waved a hand at her in annoyance.

  “Stop blathering about things you don’t understand. Honestly. It’s the times, that’s all. Modern medicine. Modern science. Nobody has any use for the old ways. And those who worship them become outsiders. Sad, stuck little creatures, unable to function in the real world. I didn’t want that for anyone’s child, never mind my own.”

  Will had heard the words not spoken. Sad, stuck little creatures like you. He was sure that Sam must have caught it, as well.

  “But you were wrong,” said the younger woman defiantly. “Because we don’t have any choice about being this way. I don’t. So it’s only a question of using your skills well or using them badly. You should have helped and you didn’t.”

  Evelyn fixed her with a cold gaze, but said nothing. Sam gazed back unblinking.

  “In the wine shop,” said Will, breaking up the standoff. “You felt something. Something in me.”

  Evelyn closed her eyes and took a deep breath, coughing wetly on the exhale. He didn’t like to imagine the state of her respiratory system.

  “Wasn’t just me who felt it. Saul felt it too, did you notice?”

  “I just thought he was afraid of you.”

  “Well, that’s true, he is. But he was feeling what I was feeling. The Jews are very sensitive to spirits.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Price,” groaned Sam.

  “What, Saul’s not a Jew?” she demanded, looking at him for some reason.

  “I believe he’s a druid,” Will replied.

  Her laughter terminated in a long fit of coughing that Will worried would finish her off. Great, he thought, as Sam rose to assist her. Here’s another one Jimmy will chalk up to me. Conner the destroyer. But Evelyn waved Sam away and spat what looked like a generous section of lung into the grass. She slumped back in the chair, posture slack. Yet her reddened face showed something else. A sharp line to her mouth, and her eyes half-shut but hard as marbles. As if daring them to see her as vulnerable. She looked dangerous.

  “I felt it,” Evelyn wheezed. “Once before. When I was a girl. We spent summers in Maine then.” She finished the whiskey and, to Will’s horror, lit a fresh cigarette. “Our neighbor was a veteran of the Great War. Shrapnel in his head, some old books he brought from Paris. My parents said stay away, but I was friends with his daughter. Cindy. Summer friends. She got ‘sick,’ they said. Sure, sick. If sick means your eyes turning yellow and climbing around the roof at night. Hypnotizing her sister. Her cousin too. She smelled funny—all the dogs stayed away from her. They finally locked her in the basement, but she got out.”

  “She was possessed?” Sam asked.

  “Only case I’ve ever seen,” Evelyn replied. Looking at the laundry as she pulled deeply on the cigarette. The sun was dying and blue shadows crept across the yard. “Of course it’s rare enough that most never see it. But at the tender age of thirteen I got to witness an exorcism and a banishment, all in one go. Performed by my own mother, no less. Man, that was some night.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Will. “Did it work?”

  “It did. But it was a struggle. And Cindy was never really the same afterward.”

  “So I’m possessed?” he asked, trying to laugh and failing.

  “No,” Evelyn said, looking hard at him again. “That’s the funny thing. I get the same uncanny feel off you I did from poor little Cindy. But you’re obviously under your own control. It’s with you, but not in you. Damnedest thing.”

  He saw Sam put her face between her knees, but didn’t know what to make of it.

  “Is that better or worse?” he asked.

  “Worse,” she replied in a clinical tone, “in that it gives the demon freer range of action. It’s not limited to your presence. But also better in that we don’t need to perform an exorcism. Those are messy. The host can die. In your case, it’s just a straight banishment.”

  “Could you do it?” he asked, surprising himself.

  She closed her eyes again and exhaled, smoke shooting out her nose like an old dragon.

  “That’s what I figured you came here for. Took your time getting to it.”

  “What’s the answer?” Sam asked. In a small voice, bled of all its former challenge.

  “Do you have the summoning spell that was used?”

  “No,” Sam answered. “We’ve been looking for it.”

  “It would be better to have that spell,” said Evelyn. “In case there’s anything peculiar about the manner in which it was called. But either way, I should be able to do it. I know the ritual. I’ve seen it performed. That puts me way ahead of anyone else you’re likely to find. There’s a catch. Which, to go back to your first question, is why I gave you the book.”

  “What?” asked Will, already knowing the answer. Indeed,
embarrassed at himself for not having figured it out before.

  “In the banishment ceremony you have to say what you’re banishing. You must speak the name of whatever’s gotten ahold of you. So tell me, William. Do you know its name?”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Sam was agitated the whole way home.

  “Its name?” she said, squeezing the steering wheel until her knuckles stood up white. “They aren’t like us, those...those things. Why would they have names like us?”

  “She explained that,” Will replied. Even if they could not know the true name and nature of a demon, a certain word—which we called a name—succeeded in bringing it forth. That sound clearly had significance to and power over the being.

  “So why would some monk from hundreds of years ago know it?”

  “The book is a compendium,” he said. “It’s just somewhere to start.”

  Will didn’t know why he was playing devil’s advocate. So to speak. The whole thing was as absurd to him as it was to her. Despite the strangeness of the last two weeks, he was not prepared to accept a centuries-old superstition as fact. He knew too much. He had studied how and why those superstitions developed, and what damage they had done. Persecution. Stoning. Burning. He had been trying to focus on concrete matters, like what happened on that long-ago night in his house. The harm that the coven members had since suffered. Jimmy’s suspicions. Matters which, however bizarre, might have an earthly explanation. This business with demons was something else entirely.

  “And did you hear her with that ‘some of them’?” Sam barreled on. “‘Some of them’ were tempted by the demon. ‘All it takes is one idiot a generation’?”

  “So what?”

  “The Halls. She’s talking about the Halls.”

  “She never mentioned family names.”

  “Of course she didn’t. You think I don’t know who she meant? The Halls make a mess of things and the Prices clean it up. Poor, martyred Prices.”

  “For God’s sake, Sam. I didn’t get any of that. Everybody was in my mother’s coven. Eddie Price was in it.”