Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  “What’s this?” Sebastian asked.

  “I just thought of it. Just something to get the kid to get out without raising a ruckus.”

  “I like it.”

  Aloysius groaned. If Sebastian thought it was a good idea, it was bound to be a damn fool mess.

  There was another tap at the door.

  “Go back to bed, Jerome,” Aloysius hissed.

  The door opened. It was Theodore.

  Sebastian said, “We’ve got to set a trap for those things. At Duncan church. Next week. It might be our only chance.”

  Theodore nodded. “Bear traps.”

  Aloysius shook his head again. A big damn fool mess.

  Chapter 11

  Jerome was angry. Talk, talk, talk. He couldn’t sleep. He went back to his room and pulled on his clothes, balancing carefully on the floorboards to keep them from creaking. He went down the stairs, slipped out the door at the bottom, and tiptoed through the kitchen, which was full of shadows from the green light outside.

  He grabbed his bb gun, his boots, and his stick. Useless. He was angry and useless.

  He sat on the back steps and put his boots on. All he could do was check the farm one more time. He wasn’t going to sleep. The crickets creaked at each other and the air was hot and still and mean, like a kid throwing a silent temper tantrum in the corner of the schoolhouse. He picked up a rock and threw it into the grass as hard as he could. The grass bent, the rock disappeared, nothing changed.

  He ran down the steps and off toward the cow barn. He climbed the wood gate and dropped into the front pen. The dirt was dry, and hoof marks crumbled under his feet. He grabbed for his gun and stick through the slats, then stopped at the feed shed. He’d only checked the barn during the day, not the shed.

  He lifted the latch on the door and went in. A couple of empty five-gallon buckets had been stacked next to the grain. Boards lay across the doorway lengthwise, holding back the grain, sitting in a grooved slot; as the level of grain dropped, another board would be pulled out; the boards would be replaced in the fall, when the bin was filled again.

  Jerome listened. He thought he heard something small, like a mouse, running across the oats on the right-hand side of the shed, but that was it.

  He put his BB gun and stick down and climbed over the wood slats.

  The shed was held together with thick steel cables, twisted and smooth, with tiny pinpricks where wires had busted loose, here and there. Jerome had sliced up a hand hanging off the cables before and now only attempted his glorious acrobatic stunts when he was wearing leather gloves. He walked along the cables to the other side of the shed, to the part where the oats were deepest, and jumped in.

  The oats were cool against his skin, hissing against each other. Jerome sank, scooting himself deeper, and the oats poured in on top of him. The dust got in his nose, and he sneezed, holding his breath so only a tiny pew escaped.

  It was hard for Jerome to stay angry when he was surrounded by so many seeds that you couldn’t count them, not even if you counted one a second for the next hundred years, even before you accounted for the fact that people were removing them every day but adding to them in every fall.

  The thing about counting things was that there was always more than you could count. And that made him happy.

  Jerome swished his arms and legs back and forth for a minute or two, making grain angels. He was a man now (he had been since the moment he’d decided he would die to protect Celeste Marie, if need be, while arguing with Sebastian), and even if the best he could do was useless, he was going to do it.

  On the way out, he pounded his stick on the floor. He couldn’t decide whether it sounded hollower than usual. After a few more knocks with the stick, he decided that if he couldn’t tell whether it sounded hollower or not, it probably wasn’t.

  He left, latched the door behind him, and checked the barn.

  He left the demon’s shed until last.

  Something Peggy had told him at their mother’s funeral kept running through his head. They’d been outside in the cold and the wind, and the green tent next to the grave was flapping and flapping. Jerome was holding the edge of the tent and trying to keep it still, but he couldn’t. He was so ashamed of it that he had to stand with his face turned away from his mother’s coffin, as his brothers lowered it onto the frame in the grave.

  Peggy stood next to him. He knew without looking that her face was covered with tears and snot, and for once, she didn’t care what she looked like. He had overheard his father telling her that she was going to be his mother now, but she hadn’t told Jerome. He wasn’t supposed to know.

  It was useless. Peggy was just a dumb girl who didn’t know how to fall in love and get married, standing there with her face covered with snot.

  He pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and regretted it: he’d stuck his red handkerchief in without thinking about it, and now he was waving around a bright red square in the middle of a funeral. It was like asking a bull to charge you at the rodeo.

  “Here.” He shoved it into Peggy’s hand, so she’d be the one caught with it, not him.

  Peggy clutched his hand and refused to let go. He jerked her arm, but she hung on like someone had tied their hands together.

  Without warning, she picked him up. He squirmed to get loose—he was ten years old, damn it—but she was as strong as an ox compared to him, and his legs dangled.

  “You’re so brave,” she whispered.

  “Leggo!” he hissed.

  She gave him a soppy, snotty kiss on his cheek. “When you’re the most scared, you’re also the most brave.”

  “Ugh!” He said it louder than he’d meant to, and other people turned to look. Peggy finally let him slide back down to the ground, and he wiped his face, which stank of tears and boogers.

  She’d already gone back to weeping, still clutching the handkerchief in her hand. She didn’t even use it.

  Jerome couldn’t see that either of them had been brave that day, but he found himself saying it whenever he was scared. Sometimes it helped; sometimes it didn’t.

  He heard talking from the shed and dropped back into the shadows. The door was closed, but the lock was off and he could see a stain of light on the ground in front of the shed.

  Jerome heard a thump, unmistakably the sound of his father’s cane on cement. He crept around the shed to the back. The entire back wall of the shed was a sliding panel that swung aside so they could store the big grain mower inside, with all its sickles and bars greased and stacked to the side. He put down his BB gun and stick, then lowered himself onto the grass.

  The door was barred from the inside, but the bottom of the door leaned slightly outward. Jerome eeled up to the gap as close as he could without being seen. If he’d yanked on the bottom of the door, he could have gone inside, but the movement would have given him away.

  Inside, Liam was aiming a shotgun in the demon’s face. Robert was standing next to him, holding Liam’s cane. Liam fired.

  The shotgun blasted the demon in the face and woke up all the chickens in the coop only a few yards away. The hens squawked first, then the rooster crowed.

  The demon spasmed and flopped around, still wrapped up with so much rope that Jerome couldn’t see where its arms or legs met its body. Liam cursed and loaded another shell. He pulled back the hammer, aimed, and fired again. The demon flopped again and went still.

  Liam handed the shotgun to Robert, who handed him his cane. Liam prodded the demon with his cane, then nodded at Robert.

  Robert let Liam go out of the shed first, then reached up to the spare light hanging off a roof beam and switched it off.

  Jerome waited until Robert had locked the door.

  By then, his brothers were running out of the house to find out what was going on.

  Aloysius yelled, “What did you do?”

  Liam said, “I took care of it. Like I told you boys to do earlier, and you didn’t.”

  Aloysius wasn’t thinking
. “What did you kill it for?” He probably wanted to talk to it some more, out of curiosity.

  Sebastian said, “I’d like to see it, please.”

  “No,” Liam said. “I won’t have the two of you fussing around with it. It’s dead, as it should have been hours again. You shouldn’t have brought it back with you.”

  “You’re the one—” Aloysius cut off.

  Suddenly, Jerome was dangling in midair. He twisted around and saw that Theodore was carrying him by his belt and the back of his shirt, toward the front of the shed.

  Liam scowled when he saw Jerome, but he could tell Liam wasn’t mad, was in fact proud of him.

  “Found him,” Theodore said. “You stop worrying Peggy now.”

  Jerome burst into tears. “Put me down!” When Theodore dropped him, he raced back around the shed, grabbed his bb gun, and ran back into the house. Within seconds, he was under his covers (still in his clothes) and pretending to be asleep when Peggy opened the door.

  Chapter 12

  When Aloysius woke the next morning, Sebastian was gone. The old Buick that the parish had provided for him was gone, too.

  He had enough to do that day without having to worry about Sebastian and whatever it was that he was doing, but he went looking for him anyway. He knew something was up with that kid, and he wanted to know what it was before it got any worse.

  Even Jerome had more sense, and he was ten.

  As he got into his truck and drove toward the Duncan church—it was all he could think of to do—he wondered what had happened to Sebastian. When he’d been Jerome’s age, he’d been the funniest little kid, full of tricks and games and laughter. Then he’d gone off to seminary, looking as serious and determined as he ever had, and things had changed. Aloysius never got the sense that Sebastian, in disguise, was still underneath it all. Sebastian was arrogant, stuck up, rude to regular people. People that had known him his entire life didn’t know him anymore. Someday, maybe today, he’d have to find out what had happened to make Sebastian think he was better than everyone else.

  The drive to Duncan went by quickly. He passed his own new ranch and gave it a brief two-fingered wave. He’d just put up the sign with his brand on it a couple of months ago. He was lucky to have the help he did, a couple of good men from the reservation who were taking care of things while he chased demons, but he needed to get back.

  He pulled into the gravel lot beside the Duncan church. It was one of the old-fashioned churches, a tiny, brilliant white block of a building with a tiny bell in a tiny cupola. It was just as well that they’d cancelled services; the church members from the three parishes wouldn’t fit in the tiny church, not even standing cheek to jowl.

  The building stood by itself in the middle of the prairie, about a half-mile from the nearest farm, which was Blackthorn’s. He didn’t have much, just twenty acres of alfalfa and pasture for a herd of sheep that were always getting loose and making a mess of someone else’s property. The man couldn’t even bale his own alfalfa. Even though he despised the man, Liam had one of the brothers bale it for him throughout the summer, on account of his duties as deacon.

  There weren’t many sheep in the area; the countryside was mostly filled up with cattle, Herefords and Angus. And sheep. But Peggy liked lamb, so they had one every Easter that hardly anybody else ever touched. Peggy didn’t mind; she froze the leftovers and ate them for the rest of the year.

  The church door was standing ajar, and the Buick was parked out front.

  Aloysius parked his truck and sat outside for a few minutes. He didn’t know what to expect inside that church, but he was prepared for it to be bad.

  He walked up the front steps and through the door.

  The Duncan church was so small that it didn’t have an entryway; the front doors opened onto the pews directly, and that was it. The inside was pretty, though, with big white columns on either side of the altar, running up to the roof, and plaster statues of Mary and Jesus on either side of the columns. The ceiling over the tabernacle was covered in gold-leaf curlicues and patterns.

  It was a wonder the place had never been busted into, all these years. But it was pretty far away from any town, and Jim Blackthorn was known to fire a shotgun at any stranger who came close to his house, even on Halloween when folks were driving their kids around.

  Sebastian was kneeling at the altar with his hands on the bare wood and his head hanging down. He was facing the cross and didn’t act like he’d heard Aloysius clomping up the stairs.

  “Sebastian?” Aloysius called.

  His brother didn’t move, other than to keep chanting in Latin. Now, Aloysius had been to Catechism as much as any good kid, but it had been a long time ago, and he’d had his curiosity satisfied as to what the words said during Mass meant, but he couldn’t remember what he was saying most of the time as he chanted the responses in Latin. He didn’t know what Sebastian was saying, but it wasn’t anything he recognized.

  He listened for a moment. “Sebastian?”

  He walked up the aisle, knelt at the riser for the altar, and touched Sebastian on the back of his shoulder.

  Sebastian shook his head and chanted louder. Aloysius backed away and went outside again.

  The door to the basement was outside near the front of the church, and it was still locked. Aloysius went back inside the church, walked around Sebastian to the sacristy, and found his keys. The man was still in agony over something, but Aloysius didn’t know what.

  He explored the basement, which smelled closed-up and abandoned, mildewed, in a way the other church basements hadn’t. He tapped along the floor with the heel of his boot, trying to sound for hollow spots. He didn’t find anything. He wished he’d done the same thing for the Fort Thompson church before the service, so he’d know whether to expect a hollow sound before the demons attacked, or whether they broke through just at that moment. It seemed like a miracle of timing, if so, to coordinate an attack overland from miles away with digging a tunnel and transporting troops, and not carrying any radios or anything.

  Maybe they couldn’t afford to leave anything behind, though. Except bodies.

  Aloysius shook his head and continued stomping around the basement floor until Sebastian came downstairs to find him.

  “You took my keys,” he said.

  “Checking the basement,” Aloysius said. “What were you praying about up there? It looked pretty serious.”

  “None of your business.”

  Aloysius tossed him the keys. They flew through the air jingling, and Sebastian caught them with a clap.

  The gravel upstairs crunched for a second, then stopped. A car door creaked open, then slammed shut.

  Sebastian sighed. “Call me Father Vincent Paul in front of him, okay?”

  Aloysius looked a question at him, but he didn’t answer. He led them upstairs and locked the basement door behind them.

  Another priest was climbing the stairs to the church.

  “Dennis,” Sebastian called. “I’m down here.”

  The man turned, and Aloysius knew where all Sebastian’s sense of humor had gone. The two men didn’t look much alike, but they had the same serious expressions on their face, the same superiority. Aloysius looked up to the pearl-blue sky and thought, Lord in Heaven, have mercy on their souls. He couldn’t imagine a man going to Heaven unless he could laugh at himself.

  Dennis was a short, ugly man with an enormous, bulging, balding forehead. He grinned for a second when he saw Sebastian, then cut it off and buried it under his serious expression again.

  “Vincent Paul,” the man said. “Have you learned humility yet?”

  “More quickly than you thought I would,” Sebastian said. Aloysius turned and was quick enough to see the end of a grin disappearing off his brother’s face, too. “Father Dennis, this is my older brother Aloysius. Aloysius, Father Dennis. He’s a friend of mind from seminary. He works for the Bishop now.”

  Aloysius gave Sebastian a close look before he turned to shake De
nnis’s hand as he came down from the church’s front steps. Sebastian looked rueful for a second, then slipped his face back on again. He looked over Aloysius’s shoulder at Father Dennis and jerked his head no so fast that Aloysius almost missed it.

  “Pleased to meet you.” Father Dennis shook Aloysius’s hand. He had silky-soft skin with overlong fingernails, but the muscle beneath was firm.

  “You, too,” Aloysius said. “I’m the one who locked him in the outhouse, by the way.”

  Father Dennis’s eyes twinkled, and Aloysius wondered what his real name was. What did they want you to change names for, anyway? To be reborn in Christ, or to be hidden away so people who knew you as a kid, the people who knew you before you got turned from a crackup into a priest couldn’t find you anymore?

  “Is that a confession?” Father Dennis asked.

  “Nah, I was hided over that one years ago. I confessed all I got to confess over it. But I’ll tell you my side of the story if you ever want to hear it.”

  “I’d like that,” Father Dennis said.

  Sebastian kept his mouth shut, which was troubling.

  “So, what’re you here for?” Aloysius asked.

  “Father Vincent Paul asked for advice of the Bishop. I’m here to provide it.”

  “What, you brought him a letter?”

  Father Dennis smiled again, but this time his eyes didn’t twinkle. “I have been authorized to make the judgment myself.”

  “Oh, it’s judgment now, it is? Not advice.”

  “When it comes to the church, it’s the same thing,” the man said. This time, the corners of his wide, fishy mouth turned down just a touch.

  “I see, I see,” Aloysius said. “But it’s hard to consider it like that when it’s your little brother doing the advising, so I’m not used to thinking of it like that.”

  Father Dennis shrugged. “I suppose.” He turned toward Sebastian, shutting Aloysius out of the conversation. “You’re going to be reassigned.”

  Sebastian sighed. “Finally.”

  “Did you…?”

  “Not here,” Sebastian said.