Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  Aloysius came up behind her and gave her a hug. “You need to find yourself a husband. Get out of here.”

  Peggy snorted. “I already got a houseful of men who control my life.”

  Aloysius gave her another hug and walked into the dining room, then around the corner to the living room.

  A demon was sitting in his father’s chair. Gold tags dangled from his ears, glittering in the overhead lights.

  “Cat got your tongue?” the demon asked.

  Aloysius shook his head.

  “Hah. The bull got your tongue, didn’t it? I thought I heard the whole catalogue of your injuries, but apparently they considered that not so much an injury as a benefit. Next time, don’t get Theodore hurt saving your ass.”

  Aloysius rolled his eyes. “I can talk perfectly well, pa.”

  “I hear that. If I ask you whatever possessed you to be up in the barn rafters in the first place, will you answer? Or lose your tongue again?”

  Aloysius shrugged.

  “Thought so. Let’s see how long that lasts. I heard Honey in the kitchen.”

  “Yessir.”

  “She’s too good for you.”

  “Aren’t they all?”

  Liam—the demon—laughed. “That’s the truth. Although sometimes I thought your ma had been sent from Hell as punishment for all the things I’ve done.”

  Aloysius sat on the couch, lowering himself carefully.

  The hell of it was, he liked the demon better than he’d liked his father. There was a storm in his chest, a real twister.

  “Robert coming tonight?” Aloysius asked.

  “I wish he would,” Liam said. “He’s too old for his pa anymore. I wish he’d come by and let his kids wear me out more often. Tell him.”

  “I will,” Aloysius said. “I don’t see him too often, either.”

  “Theodore’s coming. With Maeve.”

  Aloysius leaned back into the couch. He swallowed, and it sounded very loud in his ears. “Good to hear.”

  “He’s late.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine. Any word about Jerome?”

  The demon looked up at him with moist, cowlike eyes. The gold tags on his ears quivered. “No. And not the Blackthorn girl, either.”

  “Where could they have gone?”

  “They’re out on the prairie somewhere, with no food and no water,” Liam said. “We should be out there, looking for them.”

  “Let’s go,” Aloysius said.

  “You’re in no condition. And neither am I, with this leg.” Liam tapped his hoof with the end of his cane. “There are enough men out there already. If they’re going to be found, they’ll be found.”

  The back door opened, and a few seconds later, Peggy exclaimed over Theodore and Maeve, and Theodore’s voice answered, along with a lower, rougher voice.

  Theodore came into the living room from the hallway as the women chattered at each other in the kitchen. He was grinning from ear to ear, but lost his smile for a second as he saw the demon that was sitting in Liam’s chair.

  “Pa,” he said. “Aloysius.”

  The back door slammed open.

  Liam laughed under his breath. “Sebastian, or I’ll cut off my left ear.”

  The door slammed shut.

  “No wager,” Aloysius said.

  “You find anything?” Liam asked Theodore.

  Theodore shook his head.

  Aloysius said, “You know, I just thought of something.” He started to get up from the couch and found that he couldn’t. Theodore held out his hand and pulled him up.

  Aloysius went into the dining room and upstairs, slowly climbing (stairs were worse) until he reached Jerome’s room at the top of the stairs.

  Then he lowered himself to the floor by the bed and looked under the dust ruffle.

  He pushed himself back up, then sat on the bed to rest. After a few breaths, he went back downstairs feeling dizzy, the less said about which, the better.

  “That backpack of his is gone,” he said.

  Liam looked puzzled, but Theodore nodded: the backpack that Jerome took everywhere with him, to go exploring in the fields while the men plowed or mowed. He had a canteen that he filled with water, a knife, and who knows what odds and ends in there.

  Aloysius said, “And I’ll wager your right ear that his bb gun is gone, too. Whatever it was that he was doing, he intended to do it.” But he and Theodore already knew that, even if no one else did. He settled back onto the couch, next to Theodore.

  “Dinner’s ready!” Peggy called.

  Aloysius groaned. “I have to get up again, don’t I?”

  Theodore pulled him up as Sebastian came into the room, an ugly snarl on his face.

  Chapter 24

  The demons yelled behind him, whooping and hollering. Jerome ran headlong down the tunnel for as long and as far as his legs would carry him, and then he kept running.

  Suddenly his boots weren’t trodding on packed dirt, but on something harder. He kept running. It was still pitch black—which is to say, just a little bit less black than true darkness. His father had taken him to a cave in the Black Hills once, and it hadn’t looked dark or like anything when they’d turned the lights out. He could tell when his eyes were open: so the demons were still behind him with their light.

  His footsteps echoed back at him, telling him that the tunnel had come into a wide room. He put up his hands just in time and bounced off a wall. His wrists hurt, but he kept to his feet.

  He ran to the left, trailing his right hand against the wall—it curved a little and felt like it was made out of clay—and holding his left in front of him.

  The demons came closer, and Jerome saw an even darker area in front of him. He ran toward it: a doorway. He entered.

  He kept his left hand on the wall and kept running. He couldn’t afford to run headlong anymore; he was too tired. He took the next left. He had to find somewhere to catch his breath.

  Jerome kept taking lefts until he was in a small, round room with a broken door, the sounds of the demons chasing him long gone. He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not; they might be going for help.

  It smelled like soap; he reached out and felt soft, folded fur. The demons he’d seen didn’t seem to use any clothes. Maybe they only fought naked.

  Jerome squatted on the ground and felt around until he found a space between two stacks of fur. He wormed his way into the crack, then twisted until he was all the way behind the fur. Stuck in a tiny crack with no air to breathe again, he thought.

  He took a deep breath. The air was dusty, and he coughed. Good. Dusty was good, meant nobody came in the place too often. He let go of the knot in his stomach: he’d escaped the demons so far. His head lolled. He hadn’t been awake long enough to be tired! He had to stay awake, had to—a thousand things he’d have to do, in order to find Celeste Marie and get her back to the surface, not the least of which was finding a way to keep the demons from coming back and kidnapping her again.

  It was too much for him. Like a baby, he took a nap.

  When he woke, he felt a little sick to his stomach, which meant he hadn’t gotten enough sleep. Good. He pushed out from behind the furs and put them back as well as he could, knowing that everything he touched was likely smudged with dirt.

  Jerome pressed his hands along the doorway where, in a human house, the light switch would be. Nothing. He waved his hands over his head, then jumped up and waved his hands again. Nothing. He felt along the floor and felt a groove with a button of some kind at the bottom, but he wasn’t strong enough to push it all the way in. Or it was broken.

  Just as well.

  He left the room, taking a left. Sebastian had taught him the trick of working his way out of a paper maze by taking turns of all the same direction. Jerome hadn’t liked it as a solution—sloppy—but had had to acknowledge that it was effective, unless the maze builder had planned for it. Sebastian had said that he’d had to study mazes in seminary, as a spiritual exercise; howe
ver, most of the mazes he had studied had only had one path to them. This had struck Jerome as being stupid until Sebastian had explained that the general idea was that all pathways led to God, after which it sounded like blasphemy.

  Because not all pathways led to God. Or else there would be no such thing as damnation.

  As Jerome walked the clay corridors, some with rough, cracked, broken walls with dirt behind them; some with polished, smooth walls; he found himself saying the phrase not all pathways lead to God over and over, angrily. Sebastian hadn’t disagreed with him, but he hadn’t agreed either. Sebastian had only said that he liked the challenge of a maze whose outcome wasn’t predictable—but all mazes were predictable. You could see how many exits there were, how many entrances; you drew your path in the maze until you found your way out. That was the point of it. It either took you a long time, or it didn’t.

  Mazes were a stupid metaphor.

  Tunnels in the dark, with possibly no way out but the way he’d come in, and unknown dangers, and no light, and no way to know how long the water in your backpack was going to last you, and looking for the person who needed you most. That was a better metaphor.

  Not all pathways led to God, unless you counted death.

  Jerome kicked the wall. He was done looking for Celeste Marie; it was time to find her. When he stopped to think about it, he knew where she was; she was a couple of miles away, and unhappy.

  He turned toward her and started walking. The corridors might lead him astray, but he knew where she was. She probably had made him that way.

  He tried to judge the shape of the room he was in from his footsteps, but it was almost impossible to tell where the doors were, so he had to keep using his hands. What were all these empty rooms doing down here? Just sitting around, waiting for someone to get lost in them?

  There were all kinds of ways you could organize corridors so nobody got lost in them. As he walked and turned, trying to head more or less in Celeste Marie’s direction, Jerome kept the pattern of the corridors in mind, coloring the twisty corridors green and rooms red; the bigger the room had seemed, the more pink it became.

  As far as he could tell, they had just built what they needed, hadn’t planned for anything after that, then built again.

  Irresponsible.

  Jerome had ideas of things he would change, when he was a farmer. Some of the ideas his father had about farming and ranching had built up without organization and would be more efficient after Jerome had set them straight.

  Jerome happily considered this while he walked toward Celeste Marie.

  Of course, he was almost on top of the demon before he heard it, because he wasn’t paying attention.

  Who’s the bigger idiot, the idiot or the idiot who almost gets killed thinking about the idiot’s idiocy?

  He was walking down a hallway that led almost in the same direction as Celeste Marie when a tiny light shone around the corner. Jerome froze, then tiptoed to stand in a doorway.

  The demon walked around the corner. It was holding what looked like a slightly squishy sphere between two fingers. Jerome couldn’t get any further back into the doorway; embarrassingly, he hadn’t figured out how to open the demons’ doors yet, in addition to not being able to turn on their lights. Jerome held his hand so it blocked the light from the sphere.

  The demon blinked as it got closer to him. Jerome waited. His heart was thudding in his chest; he ignored it.

  The demon stopped. “Who’s there?”

  Jerome waited. The demon took a few steps closer, another step—

  Jerome flew out of the doorway, charging the much bigger demon. With a deft squeeze, he pinched the sphere out from between the demon’s fingers and clutched his hand around it.

  “Hey!” the demon yelled.

  Jerome ran toward Celeste Marie, stuffing the light in his pocket. The noise from the demon behind him faded as it stumbled around in the dark.

  When he couldn’t hear the demon anymore, Jerome stopped to inspect the light. He didn’t look at it; he kept his eyes clenched shut and felt it with his fingers, rolling the soft sphere between them. There didn’t seem to be a switch; he was going to have to get rid of it.

  He squinted until he was sure he could open them just the barest crack. He found an open doorway and prepared to chuck the ball inside—then noticed that the ball stopped glowing in his palm as soon as he stopped squashing it.

  He put it in his backpack, took a drink of water, and kept walking.

  Finally, he was almost at the place where Celeste Marie was. Miles of tunnels and corridors, and no more demons had found him, which was ridiculous, both the idea that miles of tunnels could be hidden under the farmland and nobody noticed, and that the tunnels were so unused that only one of the demons had run across him.

  There was only one thing stopping him.

  A door.

  Jerome studied it and wished he’d been able to learn how doors were supposed to be opened from the other demon. Or that he could figure it out himself.

  After a time, he slid with his back down the door and pressed his ear against the door, which seemed like it was made out of clay tiles. He didn’t hear anything through the door. Then he put his head on the floor and had a little better luck listening through the crack between the door and floor.

  Celeste Marie was crying.

  He tried to look under the door, but saw only a faint glow.

  Jerome got up and studied the door again, with his hands.

  Then he listened. Not hearing anyone moving around, he pulled out the sphere and pinched it in his left hand.

  Near the top of the door was a second button, set inside a groove. Jerome reached it, standing on tiptoe, with his fingers, but was unable to press it in.

  He jumped, trying to get some extra force, and landed on the groove in the floor as he punched the upper button.

  The door clicked. Jerome landed on the ground, frozen. Then he let the light go out and snaked his fingers around the edge of the door.

  The door opened toward him, and he pulled it open. Thankfully, it swung silently on its hinges.

  He went inside the room, which was immense. He was standing on a balcony or mezzanine above a pit; the balcony had several doorways leading off the balcony, but no stairs or ladders leading down into the pit.

  Jerome edged closer to the flat stone wall at the edge of the balcony and looked over. Celeste Marie was being held in a cage almost directly below him. She was lying in a hammock that had been tied onto the bars of the round cage, apparently asleep. She was crying, tossing in the hammock. Her hair was out of its braids, thick and black.

  A demon was standing next to the cage, turning dials. He would turn a dial, Celeste Marie would cry louder or softer, and he would turn another dial.

  He couldn’t jump that far down; he’d break a leg, and then what good would he be?

  Jerome backed out of the room. He’d have to find another door.

  Chapter 25

  “That priest!” Sebastian said. He walked to the far side of the room and returned. He hadn’t bothered to take off his shoes.

  “Who?” Aloysius asked. Was he talking about himself? Aloysius was pretty sure that not a few of Sebastian’s parishioners had said exactly the same thing, in the same tone of voice.

  “Father Dennis.”

  “The priest that came from the Bishop?” The last Aloysius had seen him, he’d been laid out next to Liam, dead.

  “Now what?” Liam asked, as though this were a regular occurrence.

  “He’s—he’s going to have me defrocked!’

  “For what?” Aloysius asked carefully.

  “For drinking!”

  Aloysius laughed. “You? Since when did you start drinking?”

  “He says I’m a bad example. He says he’s going to tell the Bishop that he, personally, has seen me drinking to excessive amounts as well as saying mass while drunk.”

  “So?” Aloysius asked. “Since when has that been enough to get
a priest defrocked? I’ve seen lots of drunk priests come through the reservation.”

  “Aloysius!” Peggy said from the dining room. Aloysius didn’t spare her a glance; she’d been scandalized by any number of things he’d said over the years, and it hadn’t done her any harm yet.

  “It’s true,” Liam said. “I saw Father Walter sneak a tipple before mass many a time.”

  “He says he’ll make it stick.”

  “What did you do to piss—excuse me, ladies. To get him so worked up at you?” Aloysius tried to make his tone sound lighthearted yet concerned, but he kept steely eyes on his little brother.

  “I don’t know!”

  Yep. Sebastian was lying. His face pinched up toward his nose, which wriggled like a rat’s.

  Aloysius shut up, which, for him, might be considered odd. He caught Theodore staring at him, but he couldn’t read the expression on his brother’s face (no surprise there).

  Sebastian paced back and forth until Peggy said, “Time to eat.”

  Aloysius looked into the dining room. Next to Peggy and Honey was standing a demon: Maeve’s replacement. The other men stood up and walked into the dining room without comment. The oven dinged, and Honey ran back to the kitchen.

  Aloysius grunted, and Theodore doubled back to lift him away from the couch. He’d healed fast; most of the bandages were off already, showing scabs and pink skin.

  The wide, open doorway between the dining room and living room was like a picture frame: family supper, with demons. Liam sat at the head of the table, his gold tags flashing as he sat awkwardly, holding his damaged leg as straight as he could while he slid it under the table. He scooted himself forward, even though it must have jostled his leg.

  Aloysius stayed up until Honey returned with a plateful of hot biscuits and a crock of honey balanced underneath it. She put the biscuits down in front of him, then let him seat her, a privilege she never allowed him unless Liam was around.