Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  Or he hadn’t. Either way, it was still here.

  Aloysius parked behind the trees so his truck couldn’t be seen from the house and walked in with the cooler full of sandwiches.

  Sebastian met him halfway.

  “Tea in the truck,” Aloysius said. Hell if he was going to carry it in; it was heavy.

  He carried the cooler to the door and backed inside. The place was coated with dust. Dust piled up in the corners and smothered the spider webs. A thin breeze came in through a crack in the north window, and the spider webs swayed.

  It smelled like rotten wood in here. A hell of a place to spend the night.

  Aloysius put down the cooler and looked around for a few minutes, remembering. Sebastian slammed the jug on the front step, grunted, then dragged it inside.

  “Followed?” he said.

  “Nah, Don left a guy at the trap on 34, but he fell asleep. I watched him for about half a mile after I passed him. Nothing. But I wouldn’t count on that happening again.”

  “Help me lift this stuff up.”

  “To the attic?”

  “Can’t leave it down here.”

  Aloysius sighed. Sebastian climbed up into the miniscule attic, and Aloysius handed him the cooler.

  “Ready?”

  And then the jug, which was too damned heavy. He almost dropped it on his head when Sebastian lost hold of the handle, but they got it up all right eventually.

  “What are you going to do?” Aloysius asked. Sebastian sat on the side of the attic access, swinging his legs and getting ready to jump.

  “What do you mean, what am I going to do?”

  “It’s your damned fault we’re in this mess.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Which was as good as a confession, in Aloysius’s eyes.

  “You brought them here, didn’t you? The demons. It’s your own damned fault that you’re not a priest anymore.”

  “I was never a priest.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Sebastian lowered himself out of the attic onto a saw horse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Aloysius. I suppose it’s my fault I’m on the run from the goddamned priest, but that’s about enough crazy talk.”

  “So what did you do to him, anyway?”

  “I took a swing at him.”

  “What for?”

  “None of your business.”

  Aloysius backed out of the shack. The boards crackled under his feet, the linoleum all broke up and the wood starting to split. “Well, good luck,” he said.

  “When’ll you be back? Tonight?”

  “I ain’t coming back,” Aloysius said. “You dug yourself this hole. You decide you want to tell me the truth, I’ll help you dig yourself out. I’ll be at my farm, trying to get caught up.”

  Sebastian started to protest, but Aloysius had been his big brother his whole life already. “Just think about Jerome before you open your mouth to lie to me.”

  On the way back, he cursed himself for wiring the gates so tight. He had to use a pair of wire cutters on one gate, then twist the wire back together afterwards.

  Chapter 29

  Saturday he was out in the middle of a pasture, trying to fix a windmill. Liam (the real Liam) had tried to talk him out of digging wells, but he didn’t listen, and now he was trying to figure out what to do about a stripped gear. Why he hadn’t gone with a stock pond, he couldn’t remember anymore. It was probably somewhere between the desire to fart around with a new machine and the desire to prove Liam wrong. About anything.

  After a tense few days of going over the books, he’d decided to ask the demon Liam for a loan, so he could buy a trailer to live in with Honey. He didn’t think it’d take him too long to pay it back; he had brought in a good stallion last year and would have some good two-year-olds to sell soon enough.

  An airplane he didn’t recognize, like a Kaydet but bigger, flew overhead, circled a couple of times, and landed on top of one of his hills, on a dirt road. Aloysius straightened up and put his tools away, packed them in the truck. He was getting antsy, always worried that something was going to change under his feet.

  A demon got out of the plane and walked across the pasture toward him. Aloysius shivered, even though the morning was warm enough. He stood and watched and wondered if Sebastian had been turned over to the demon priest.

  It took a long damned time to the demon to reach him. He disappeared under the curve of the hill for a while, then reappeared one step at a time. His horns were chased with gold, but he didn’t have any tags. In fact, the lower edges of his ears were ragged, as if his tags had been ripped out years ago.

  He didn’t bother wearing clothes, but he wore a belt with a pair of gold-chased axes.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Who are you supposed to be, Connor?” Aloysius asked.

  The demon nodded.

  “He’s dead.”

  “I know. But the dead are easier to replace than the living.”

  Aloysius wasn’t sure what to say. He found his hands creeping toward his belt and his holster. He dropped them deliberately. “Why are you here? Is Sebastian—did you turn Sebastian over to that priest?”

  The demon shook his head. “He’s safe, for now. I came here to explain what’s happening to you.”

  With a choice between the questions, “Why bother” and “What’s happening, then,” Aloysius knew his curiosity would be both satisfied and frustrated, no matter which of them he asked. “Well?” he said, letting the demon decide.

  “We’re taking over your world.”

  “What for?”

  The demon shrugged. “What do you care? It’s a bunch of politics, and it doesn’t matter as far as you’re concerned. A group of us can’t stay in—our dimension, so we’re taking yours.”

  “What are you telling me this for?”

  “I told your brother, but he’s useless. He said you still remember the way things used to be, though.”

  Aloysius snorted. “What am I supposed to do about it?”

  The demon tilted its head to the side. “Keep killing us. We’ll keep coming, but there’s only a couple of thousand of us.”

  “How are you supposed to take over the world with only a few thousand of you?”

  “Once we have a big enough foothold, Granata will pull over more of my people, whether they want to come or not. It might take a few centuries, but he’ll do it.”

  “What if I’m tired of killing? Can’t we bargain with Granata?”

  “You’ve met him. You tell me.”

  Granata must be the demon priest, then. Aloysius nodded. “I see.”

  The demon turned around and started to walk away. “How did you get here?” Aloysius asked. He realized he’d probably end up asking so many questions the demon turned around and cut him down where he stood, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  The demon turned back toward him. “Granata made an offer of power a long time ago, in your world. The longer it went on, the more of a hold he had here. And then he found the galuk. He’s been twisting her dreams ever since he captured her.”

  “The galuk?”

  “If there were a word for her in your language, I would have used it. The girl. Whatever you convince her of, it’s bound to be.”

  “Bound,” Aloysius said.

  The demon said, “That’s the best I can do.”

  “Celeste Marie.”

  “Is that a name?”

  “That’s the name of the girl.”

  “Ah.” The demon turned around again; he obviously couldn’t have cared less.

  “What happens if we get her back?”

  The demon didn’t say anything, started walking.

  “Wait,” Aloysius called, as all but the top of the demon’s head had disappeared down the hill. “I’ll give you a ride back to your plane.”

  The demon sighed and walked back up the hill. “All right.”

  Aloysius waited until the demon had passed
him, then followed him to the truck. The demon opened the passenger door and slid in. Aloysius climbed up (he’d installed an extra step on the driver’s side) and started the truck.

  “Sorry about the leg room,” he said.

  “I’ll be out soon enough.”

  “How’s Sebastian?”

  “He’s fine. I’m not about to turn him over to Granata, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “Why?”

  “He’ll kill him. In a heartbeat.”

  “Why?”

  The demon didn’t answer. Aloysius drove back up to the gate, let himself out, shut the gate, and drove down the dirt road toward the plane.

  “Why are you doing this?” Aloysius asked.

  The demon glared at him, and Aloysius commended himself to his Father in Heaven. Liam had always said his incessant questions would be the death of him. He was about to ask whether the tunnels were still there or if they were gone now when the alien coughed.

  “Have you ever had a brother who made mistakes?” he said.

  Aloysius just looked at him. “Have I.”

  “Then that’s all you need to know.”

  Aloysius nodded. He pulled up in front of the plane and parked the truck. “What’s your name?” he said.

  “Connor.”

  “No it ain’t. You got a name that doesn’t belong to my dead brother.”

  “Granossa.”

  Aloysius said, “I appreciate it. Let me know if you need anything.”

  The demon held out his hand, and Aloysius shook it.

  “I’ll kill you if you touch him,” Granossa said.

  “Don’t I know it,” Aloysius said. “Same for you.”

  “Coming to dinner tomorrow? After church?”

  Aloysius nodded. “You should wear some clothes.”

  The demon said something in another language that Aloysius assumed was swearing, then slid out of the seat. “Don’t say anything in front of Liam,” Granossa said. “He’s a softie, and he likes humans. But he won’t think twice about cutting you down. You’re like pets to him.”

  “And nobody wants a dog that’ll bite its master,” Aloysius said. “All right.”

  The demon slammed the truck door and got into the plane. Aloysius turned around and drove off. A few minutes later, the plane flew low over the top of the truck, rocking it on its shock absorbers. He grinned. The demon couldn’t have known how like Connor he was.

  He thought about Celeste Marie and Jerome for a while, driving back to the windmill. Poor kids. Jerome had been right all along, and it was too late anyway.

  Chapter 30

  His father was dead. Liam was dead. It was the beginning of the end of the beginning. It was a blow. It was sickening, a feeling that he was going to make himself feel as bad as he ought to feel, if he were a decent human being. He had had no idea that he wasn’t a decent human being until that moment; he’d never questioned himself, he’d never thought such a thing. His father was his father.

  Jerome found himself going around and around with that statement, walking back into the dark. My father is my father. My father is my father. He would think—in the flashes between the moment when he had forgotten what he was supposed to be saying and he felt compelled to start saying it again—that it was a very important thing to say, in a way that saying my mother is my mother or my sister is my sister or even I am myself was not important. He knew those things. He must not know that—

  “My father is my father,” he whispered. He knew he could yell it if he felt like it, and he did feel like yelling it, but he knew the more frenzied he allowed himself to become, the more false it would sound. In fact, he shouldn’t be saying it out loud at all. If he was going to have to think it, the least he could do, in honor of his father, was not to feel so threatened by not—

  “My father is my father,” he whispered. He couldn’t seem to help himself.

  The dark pushed down on him in a way that it hadn’t before, but it wasn’t the dark that concerned him. He followed the tunnel back to the stone-walled corridors, then consulted the map in his head again. He certainly hadn’t explored the extent of the corridors; what was surprising was that they were all more or less on the same level.

  Doubt. He doubted his father.

  He had to find some way to go down a level. Up, down, there was another level below this one. Logically, there should be many ways up and down, stairs, ramps, ladders, elevators. He’d never been in an elevator, had never seen one, but he knew about them, the way he knew about elephants. Elevators were a logical—

  In his entire life, he realized, he had never doubted anything. He had not known things; he had suspected things that his brothers—especially Aloysius—had told him were lies; he had tried his weight on a board he was using as a bridge between two corners of the hayloft in the cow barn and had had it break under him, that is, he had been unsure of whether it was hold him or not and it hadn’t; but he had never doubted anything.

  “My father is my father,” he whispered. He doubted that Peggy had thought his father was a good man. It had never occurred to him.

  Aloysius, clearly, didn’t think that Liam had been a good father, but Aloysius was made to doubt. He was made to stick his fingers into misunderstood and moving machinery and somehow come out unscathed but even more puzzled than before. He was made to ask question after question, ones that would yield to only the remotest bit of consideration. He was made to be able to live without answers. Sometimes he would get the answers and not believe them.

  The rest of them knew their father in a way that Aloysius could never know him, but then again, it didn’t seem to bother Aloysius much, to doubt that Liam had been a good father. He was in such a state of perpetual doubt that Jerome could easily imagine that Aloysius doubted the existence of God, or whether his feet would touch the ground when he next took a step forward, or plunge down to Hell, if the thought ever crossed his mind.

  Jerome was walking blindly, and he knew it, but he couldn’t stop walking and thinking, in a roundabout way, about his father.

  Robert didn’t doubt that Liam was a good father. But there was something wrong with Robert.

  Theodore didn’t—ah. Jerome realized that Theodore didn’t doubt that Liam was a good father; he knew he wasn’t. But then Theodore knew everyone’s flaws, especially his own. He refused to change; thus, he didn’t consider that he had the right to complain about anyone else. Theodore went around, or he went through, that was true. He didn’t doubt.

  Sebastian…that was a complicated notion. Had Sebastian doubted that Liam was a good father?

  Jerome was surprised to find that he didn’t know. It made him uncomfortable. He had assumed that Sebastian, with whom he agreed on many things, even though he thought Sebastian was a bit of a silly, had thought that Liam was a good father, but now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure.

  He didn’t know, couldn’t guess. Maybe, to Sebastian, it didn’t matter whether Liam was a good father or not, he simply loved him—no. Sebastian didn’t love Liam.

  Jerome found himself crying out loud. “My father is my father,” he said. Up and down, up and down. Well, down at least. This might be the top level, there might be no more up.

  Were the demons supposed to live in darkness? Had they been driven down from the darkness, or had they been pushed out of their depths, toward the light? Logic said the latter; Hell was always depicted as downward. But he thought the demons had seemed comfortable in the light above; even though they had come out of the corridors (apparently), they hadn’t been blinded. They did not walk in the dark as he was walking, had carried light with them.

  Any creature that came from the earth—a rabbit, a mole, a mouse—did not need light to see underground.

  Jerome laughed and wiped his face. Maybe he was some kind of demon himself, a different kind than these. A rat demon, comfortable moving around sightlessly through the maze of dark corridors, looking for his cheese. (He also had never seen a white rat or, in fac
t, a psychologist, but he had been brought up to believe in their wondrous existences, like giraffes or elephants or the Milky Way.)

  Cheese Marie, he was searching for Cheese Marie.

  He was being foolish. Doubt led to foolishness, which inevitably reminded him of Aloysius and his teasing.

  Sebastian moved people around. It wasn’t a matter of thinking Liam had been a good father or not, or of doubting him. Sebastian had calculated Liam’s actions and reactions, and had moved his father around with more or less success. He had, for instance, got Liam to send him to seminary, despite the fact that he was a lazy good-for-nothing most of the time. In fact Sebastian had played the lazy good-for-nothing to encourage such a thing. However, he hadn’t calculated that Liam would be so proud of him—and so fond of him—Sebastian had spent years wrapping Liam around his finger—that Liam would manipulate him as well, tying him to the very place that he hated, just when he thought he’d escaped.

  Jerome ran his fingers over the door to one of the living areas. His chest felt like it had been bathed in black oil, a stifling, choking blackness that would not come off, not with any amount of tears, as he realized Sebastian hated the farm.

  Jerome looked down at his hands. He couldn’t see them, but he knew where they were. He and Sebastian, he knew, would jointly inherit Liam’s farm. The other boys, Robert and Theodore and Aloysius, they had their own land now, that Liam had helped them buy and tame.

  Jerome loved the farm, but he doubted he was strong enough to hold it.

  He put his back on the door and slid down to the floor, slipping out of his backpack in the process. It wasn’t that he wasn’t old enough. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to. And, in fact, it wasn’t that he wasn’t going to try until it killed him. It was that he, he could only be what he was. He couldn’t change. He couldn’t reach beyond himself and create wonders, and he couldn’t hold back all the time that would affect the farm.

  His hands fell, and he brushed against something at the bottom of the door frame, another notch, this one with a heavy lever inside. He felt around it, then stood up, put his backpack on, and jumped on the lever until it shifted. There was a grinding sound on the other side of the door. He opened the door.