Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  Celeste Marie took her hand off Jerome’s arm, and the hiccups came back so suddenly that he made a hork! sound as the first one caught him. Celeste Marie grabbed his arm again, but it was too late: Granata had crashed into the clearing from the middle of another lilac bush and headed straight toward Jerome and Celeste Marie.

  Without letting go of his arm, Celeste Marie picked up a chunk of cat poop and flung it in the opposite direction. Then she started backing further into the bushes.

  Neither one of them breathed.

  Granata ran toward the cat poop, picked it up, and smelled it. He whirled in a circle, bugling, and the other demons ran back into the clearing. There was so much noise that the demons couldn’t possibly have heard Celeste Marie and Jerome backing out of the bushes and into an old granny’s backyard.

  The two of them stood. Celeste Marie brushed off her dress, and they ran through the damp sheets on the line, around the house, and down the dirt road.

  They still weren’t breathing.

  Jerome jerked on Celeste Marie’s arm, just a twitch to show her he wanted to go down by the river, where the brush was thick and tangled, and they could hide for hours without being found.

  Celeste Marie shook her head and stopped in the middle of the road. With the tip of her finger, she counted down the houses until she reached the abandoned house at the end of the road. She pointed at it twice and looked at Jerome with her eyebrows up.

  Jerome shivered.

  The old man who had owned the place, Robert Mean Claw, had accidentally set the place on fire and burnt up everyone inside one cold night last winter. The only reason the place was still standing was that nobody cared enough to knock it down.

  Celeste Marie tugged on his arm, and Jerome nodded.

  Now it was Celeste Marie pulling him along the road. Jerome wanted to run faster, but he couldn’t. Eventually the house was upon them, and Jerome ducked under a black and fallen beam. He lost contact with Celeste Marie for a split second and almost fainted from lack of air. She grabbed him again and pulled him toward the back of the tiny shack.

  The ruined hovel was light enough inside, because the aluminum siding had curled up and pulled away, and the roof had half-fallen in. Celeste Marie knelt in the middle of a pile of black soot and reached down.

  As soon as her fingers touched the floor, Jerome felt it: she pulled a black wave of darkness over them, bitterly cold and dark and stuffy at the same time. He could hear a half-dozen voices breathing, some peacefully, another crying quietly, one snoring.

  Jerome opened his mouth and breathed. It smelled bad, sour sweat and vomit, and he knew the demons would never find them where they had gone.

  Chapter 7

  Then Aloysius noticed that the clearing behind the church was full of demons, staring at him in gap-mouthed disbelief. One of them, he noticed, had gold punch-cards or cattle tags in his ears.

  “Shit!” he yelled, more to remind himself to stop gawping than anything else. He launched out of a runner’s crouch and sped back around the side of the church before he remembered the rest of the congregation would be pouring out the front of the church, trying to get away from the supposed earthquake.

  Perversely, he wanted to run straight through the middle of them, grab his father by the lapels of his corduroy jacket and yell at him that it wasn’t damned bison running around and trampling people, if only he’d look.

  The S.O.B. probably wouldn’t believe him, even after he’d been stampeded.

  So when Aloysius hit the front of the church, he kept running and turned onto a gravel road, heading north, hoping that the demons would follow him.

  Fat chance. A woman screamed, and he turned around to see the demons running straight into the parishioners. The demons howled. Aloysius could see his father coming down the steps, cane in hand, swinging.

  Then the first shot echoed across the street, and one of the demons fell. Theodore fired again. Some of the other men were running toward their trucks to get their shotguns.

  The ground shook underneath their feet, and Liam stumbled.

  Aloysius cursed his own stupidity and pulled his revolvers out from under his jacket. Several of the demons were charging up the steps toward Liam—probably trying to get inside the church. Aloysius sighted at them but couldn’t get a clear shot: Liam kept getting in the way, swinging his cane and yelling for a shotgun.

  The first demons shoved Liam aside, knocking him down the wooden steps, and rushed inside.

  The demon with the gold ear tags was close behind him, bugling something unintelligible.

  Then Sebastian stepped out of the front door of the church, Bible in hand. He raised it over his head and chanted something that Aloysius couldn’t catch. He took a cruet of holy water and sprinkled it over the face of the first demon.

  The demon winced, shook its head, and wiped its eyes. Otherwise, nothing happened.

  Aloysius tried to sight the demon again.

  Theodore howled, and Aloysius switched to the mess in front of the church doors. Dozens of demons were among the humans. He couldn’t be sure, but he didn’t think the demons had planned on what was happening. They didn’t have any weapons or tools. They weren’t killing people indiscriminately; it was more like they were sniffing them, trying to smell something out.

  Sebastian’s chanting turned into an outraged howling, and Aloysius looked back up at him.

  The demon with the gold tags was standing face to face with Sebastian, coughing into Sebastian’s face so hard that spittle dripped from his cheeks. The damned thing was laughing at him.

  One of the demons screamed and went down as Theodore shot him. The gold-tag demon grabbed the Bible out of Sebastian’s hands and ripped it right down the middle.

  Sebastian shrieked and jumped on top of the demon.

  There was a volley of shotguns and Aloysius cursed again. The damned farmers had gone for their guns and were firing into the middle of the mess of people and demons, hitting everyone. Aloysius threw down his revolvers and ran straight into the middle of it, trying to make it through and across to the other side before the men could do too much more damage.

  He grabbed an old Indian lady and dragged her out from under the hooves of one of the demons, then tossed her onto the gravel. She panted for a second, then rolled away. Another one of the demons thumped him in the shoulder, headed toward the church, and knocked him sprawling, but luckily in the right direction.

  Aloysius got to his feet and behind the men with the shotguns. He pulled the gun away from the first man and dropped it. The second gave him a little bit of trouble, and he didn’t manage to get to the third man before he fired again, hitting a woman trying to protect a small baby.

  Aloysius punched the third man in the nose, took his gun, and butted the fourth man in the back of the head with it.

  “Drop your guns!” he shouted, too late to do any good. “Hold fire! Hold fire!”

  The last man fired again but hit one of the demons in the arm. It bellowed and charged up the stairs regardless.

  They’d been looking for something and hadn’t found it.

  Theodore was taking demons down, shooting them in the back of the head, one at a time, as they ran up the stairs and into the church. Sebastian was lying on the steps with the tatters of his Bible around him, across his chest. He looked dead for a second, then started yelling.

  His father had landed off the steps and was sprawled on the ground beside them, having as much trouble righting himself as an upended turtle.

  A loud bugling came from inside the church, and the demons outside started running faster, pushing each other in their hurry to get inside.

  Aloysius couldn’t blame them. Theodore had run out of bullets and was back to using the knife. Aloysius limped—when he’d hurt his leg, he wasn’t sure—up to Theodore and pulled his arm back. He knew it was dangerous, but he was too curious to stop himself.

  Theodore turned and gouged with the knife. Aloysius stepped back, stumbled, and fell.
It was probably only falling that saved him; the knife swept over his head where his guts would have been.

  Theodore gasped and dropped the knife, then reached down to help Aloysius up. Aloysius hooked the last demon in line in the back of the knee—its joints were reversed, like a cow’s. When it stumbled, lowering its head to a convenient height, he swung the shotgun stock around and knocked it in the back of the skull.

  It fell. Aloysius reached across, stopped his brother from beating the crap out of the beast, and said, “Gimme your rope, Theodore.”

  The beast twitched, and Aloysius hit it again.

  Within a few minutes, the two of them had the thing roped with its hands and hooves behind its back, unconscious.

  Now, if only he could do that to his father.

  Chapter 8

  Aloysius thought it best to stay out of Liam’s way, so after they had the demon tied up, they dragged it to the back of Theodore’s pickup truck—it took a good six men to do it; they carried the demon like they would a coffin—and tied it down again and covered it with a tarp so it wouldn’t get heat stroke, all that black fur already glistening in the sun.

  They’d lost six, including the young Sioux woman and her baby. It was a miracle they hadn’t lost more.

  Aloysius barked orders to the men who’d been shooting in the crowd and lined them up in front of the church so they could see the bodies laid out in the dirt. The demons had been laid in a pile; the people had been laid out straight in a row.

  “I want you to take a good look at this,” Aloysius said. “There’s only one of these dead that wasn’t hit with a shell, and that was the babe, crushed under her mother when she fell. Not a one of these demons had a gun. Do you know what that means?”

  With a thump of his cane across Aloysius’s back, Liam appeared beside Aloysius and said, “Good job, boys.”

  Aloysius clicked his teeth shut and walked up the steps into the church as one of the men cheered. He didn’t trust himself to look back and see who it was. His boots almost skidded in the black blood covering the steps, and he grabbed the splintered rail, nicked his hand. He shoved it in his mouth and went inside.

  The demons hadn’t set the church on fire; they hadn’t even cracked the floor down the middle this time. In a way, it was reassuring. Nice to still have the church, anyway. In another way, it was terrifying: they hadn’t got what they’d come for, obviously.

  He wondered where Jerome had gone with Celeste Marie.

  Apparently, so did her father. Blackthorn stopped him at the door. “Have you seen them?”

  Aloysius shook his head. No point in starting a fight now. Blackthorn rushed out, leaving behind the church floor—thin green carpet covered the floor—torn up and the pews knocked out of order. Black blood splattered everything from font to candlesticks.

  The smell was pretty bad, too.

  Only one of the demons had fallen inside the church, bled out from one of Theodore’s knife gouges. The trail of blood led out the front and onto the pile of bodies.

  They’d be back. He knew it.

  Aloysius followed the trail of hoof prints and splatters down to the basement. The tables and chairs, all set up for the reception after service, had been scattered. A big, dark hole had been torn through the middle of the floor, about ten feet across. He reckoned it had been done by the same type of machine, from what he remembered of it. Cement and linoleum had been thrown across the room, breaking glass in the picture frames and embedding itself in the ceiling tiles.

  But the hole had been backfilled with black clay. When he stuck his pen knife into the dirt, it was packed solid.

  He stood up and stretched with his hands in the small of his back. It had been a rough week, and he really should get back upstairs to Theodore’s truck and make sure that nobody cut the thing’s throat.

  “Hello? Can we come out now?” a querulous voice demanded.

  He looked over into the kitchen. The serving window was shaking. He walked over and lifted it up; two of old ladies were standing there. Katherine had tears pouring down her face, and her friend Tekawitha had her arms wrapped around her middle in a hug.

  Tekawitha said, “I’m tired of hiding back here.”

  “You can come out now,” Aloysius said.

  The two of them shuffled toward the kitchen door, not letting go of each other. Aloysius stifled a laugh as they stumbled on something on the floor.

  “We still having the sandwiches?” Tekawitha asked.

  “Yes ma’am,” Aloysius said. “We have some more to bury, too. They’re laid out in the front, if—”

  The two ladies gasped in horror and rushed up the stairs faster than Aloysius could have expected, almost pushing each other up the stairs in their hurry.

  Aloysius followed them. He looked back at the hole in the floor. They should all leave the church and not come back until they knew for certain the demons were gone; of course they wouldn’t.

  Liam insisted that the demon be brought back to the farm. Peggy wouldn’t have the thing in the house, though, which was just as well. So the demon ended up locked in a shed. It was tied up so securely that there was no hope that it would get out; the lock on the shed was more to keep the hands out than anything else.

  Their eldest brother, Robert, had come in from the next county to see the beast. After supper, Liam led them all to the shed, pulled out the key, and unlocked the door.

  The beast lay on its belly. It was awake; it twisted and flopped onto its back. It was bigger than a man, wide through the chest like a bull and thick with fur. Aloysius would have sworn the devil had taken a bison and squeezed it in his hands until it could stand on two legs; the only difference was in the forelegs, which had hands instead of paws. And the extra, twisting horns.

  “What are you?” Aloysius murmured.

  “A demon from Hell,” Sebastian said, just as low, which struck Aloysius as odd. Normally, Sebastian liked to be able to make grand pronouncements like that at the top of his voice.

  Aloysius squatted down beside the thing to get a closer look.

  Liam said, “Watch out it doesn’t knock your legs right out from under you.”

  Aloysius touched the thing’s closest ear, tipping it back and forth with a fingertip to see if it had any tags or markings. The thing snorted and jerked its head away.

  “What are you?” Aloysius asked, louder. “Can you understand me?”

  Robert said, “Quit playing with it, Al.”

  “I just want to know.”

  Sebastian said, “There’s something I’d like to try.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Liam said. He was standing next to the door with his head turned toward a gap in the doorframe that was letting in fresh air.

  “There were a lot of stories going around at seminary about…demons,” Sebastian said. “I happened to hear quite a bit, actually.”

  “Spit it out,” Liam said.

  “I might have a prayer—a reading, really—that might bring the gift of tongues down upon this demon.”

  That stopped them all right.

  “Not sorcery,” Liam said.

  “No,” Sebastian said. “It was a silly idea. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  Liam said, predictably, “I want to hear it.”

  It was a scene from a decade and a half ago, with one of the Jennings boys come up with some idea, like a better way to round up cattle or something. A trip to the circus. Their father would get this calm, low tone of voice, asking to hear them explain the idea, and he wouldn’t let them go until they did and he’d mocked them to tears.

  Aloysius had thought Sebastian had learned better, but apparently not. Sebastian coughed into his fist and opened the taped-together Bible he’d been carrying behind his back.

  He opened it—maybe Mark or Luke—and read, “The seventy-two returned rejoicing, and said, ‘Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name. Jesus replied, ‘I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky. Behold, I have given you the
power to tread upon serpents and scorpions and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.’”

  Robert said, “Luke 10.”

  Liam said, “Seventeen to twenty.”

  Sebastian continued, “At that very moment he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, ‘I give you praise, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.’ Lord our Father, reveal unto us this mystery. Demon, I command you in Jesus’s name, speak!” Then he said something halfway between a grunt and a foreign-sounding cuss word.

  The demon groaned and said in a voice so low it almost couldn’t be made out, “Let me go.”

  It was a good thing none of the women were there, or they would have seen Aloysius jump up and shriek like a little girl.

  “Sebastian!” he yelled. “What the Hell did you do?”

  Sebastian looked at him, black circles under his eyes. “It was the Lord, Aloysius.”

  “It’s a miracle!”

  “Many things are miracles,” Sebastian said. “They just aren’t appreciated as such.”

  Sebastian seemed to have given up somewhere along the last few days with ever convincing Aloysius to call him by his priest name, but if there ever were a time that Aloysius would have used it, it was right then and there. Aloysius could understand a demon shaped halfway between manhood and a buffalo. It was just the kind of thing that Satan would do.

  But that a man, a mortal man, even a priest, could call down on the power of God, that he just could not believe. It put shakes in his bones and ice in his water.

  But that didn’t stop him in the least from being so curious that he would have traded his left ear to ask it a half-dozen questions.

  “What are you?” Aloysius asked.

  “I am Barlor of the Makkur, servant of Granata.”

  “Who is Granata? The one with the gold tags?” He got back down on hands and knees next to the thing.