Costume Not Included

by Matthew Hughes

  The demon shook its head in grim recollection and clamped the cigar behind one of its fangs. "So then we gotta lie there in the bottom mud till the fish and the crabs eat the carcasses, before we can get unstuck from the flesh. And, that ain't the worst of it – then we gotta go back and report to the division chief, except it's worse than the worst, 'cause the boss himself has heard all about it, and he's more than a little hot under the collar, I'm tellin' ya!"

  The demon blew smoke, and only some of it was from the Havana. "So, yeah, I guess I oughta remember that mug!"

  Melda said, "You can't blame him for casting you out when you were turning some guy's head right around his shoulders. I mean, he was a prophet. It was his job!"

  "And possessing was mine! Besides, what about the poor schmoe who owned the pigs? Some Greek farmer, that herd was all he had. He couldn't pay his debts and ended up in slavery!"

  Chesney tsked. "Like you care!" he said. "Now, where is he and who's got him?"

  "He's on a jet that's just landed about four hundred miles from here. He's with some TV people who are takin' him to meet with a guy name of Bruster. Bruster's thinkin' of puttin' your guy on the air."

  "Hall Bruster?" Chesney said. He frowned.

  "That's the bird."

  "Is that bad?" said Melda.

  The young man told her about his mother's letter and the red hot poker reference. "He'll want to embarrass Hardacre."

  "Do we care about that?" Melda said.

  "Josh might get in trouble."

  "So we'll get him out of it." She looked at the demon. "Right?"

  Xaphan snorted, blowing rings from both nostrils. "Your guy might not be the one gets in trouble," it said.

  "What does that mean?" Chesney said.

  But the demon waved its pint-sized hands, the smoke from the cigar making zigzag bands in front of its face. "I already said too much."

  TWELVE

  Hall Bruster's Sunday afternoon program went live to air so that he could take calls from viewers. His scheduled guest was Maylene Ho, a newly elected member of the House of Representatives who was a strict constitutional originalist: she had campaigned on a platform of reverting the republic's seminal document back to its original form, before all these footling amendments had watered down its historic purity. Bruster wanted her on board because she was foursquare for the abolition of the income tax, a change he favored because it meant he would not have to employ a firm of accountants to mystify the IRS as to exactly what he took in, and where it all went. But his screeners would have to vet callers carefully to keep any of them from pointing out that one of the amendments Ho would like to repeal was the one that had given her sex the right to vote. Bruster wasn't entirely sure that she had actually read the Constitution; she might be relying solely on posts from blogs she had googled.

  But when Janet Morrissey told him that she had Hardacre's prophet on the jet, he immediately told his in-studio staff that the Congresswoman would get no more than the first half-hour and that he wanted her out of guest's seat the moment Joshua set foot across the threshold. He then sat down and, suppressing the occasional giggle, jotted down a series of questions for the alleged Jesus of Nazareth redux.

  Now he was listening with only half an ear as the Congresswoman provided her exegesis as to what the Constitution really meant: mostly plenty of church and a minimum of state, with a citizenry whose pockets remained full of their own cash while their hands never strayed too far from a loaded gun. Twenty-two minutes into her segment, the earpiece he was really listening to informed him that the helicopter bringing the new guest from the airport was landing on the roof and did he want them to take the man to make-up or bring him straight down to the studio.

  "Tap your pencil on the desk if you want him right away," said the producer in the control booth, and the lead from the pundit's HB 2 snapped off and struck the representative in the left eye.

  "Ow!" she said, reaching up to dislodge the greasy fragment, giving Bruster the perfect opportunity to say, "Let's take a break."

  "Here's the way we'll play it," Chesney said to his assistant. The television in the living room was on and Bruster had just gone to a commercial that featured the pundit himself pitching medallions that illustrated great moments in American history. The day when Ronald Reagan single-handedly tore down the Berlin Wall was "commemorated in genuine gold plate," Bruster's taped voice was saying, "a moment all patriots will treasure. And speaking of treasure–"

  Chesney muted the sound as the screen showed a medallion showing the multitudes that had gathered for Bruster's celebration of his own exemplary rectitude on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in which the pundit appeared larger than the assassinated president's statue. "Here's the way we'll play it," the young man said again. "If it goes okay, we'll let it roll. If he's getting pushed around, we'll go and get him out of there. Go in invisible, cloud of smoke, grab him and gone. Got it?"

  "If he gets pushed around?" Xaphan said, followed by a wordless sound that expressed skepticism.

  "What?" said Chesney.

  "I'm not sayin' nothin'. You got any more rum?"

  "You drank it all."

  "You mind if I…?"

  "Be my guest."

  The fiend put its cigar in its mouth. A bottle of liquor, still trailing seaweed from the sunken freighter whose cargo the demon was gradually pilfering, appeared in the hand it had just emptied. Xaphan looked at the cork, which shot out and hit the ceiling, then filled the tumbler and drank half of it. A rumbling belch followed, then the television screen showed Hall Bruster back at his desk in the studio.

  "My next guest is someone you've been hearing about," he said, "if you happen to tune in Sunday mornings to a little medicine show put on by a self-proclaimed TV preacher named Billy Lee Hardacre. The Reverend Hardacre, as he likes people to call him, flunked out of a seminary after blowing a career as a slick labor lawyer and writing a few potboilers that the New York Times thought were just the kind of thing you and I should be reading."

  He paused there to quirk an eyebrow in his trademark and you and I know what we think of that expression. The thirty or so people in his studio audience, all of whom had signed loyalty oaths, reacted with raucous hoots and sundry noises of derision.

  "Well, lately, Billy Lee has been telling his dwindling following – I mean, folks, you really can't fool all of the people, all of the time – he's been telling them that a genuine," he pronounced each of the three syllables separately, "end-of-days prophet was about to appear."

  Bruster paused to let that one sink in, while the studio audience registered their lack of esteem for the preacher in question. "And, amazingly, this latter-day wonderworker would make his appearance – where else? – on Billy Lee's little one-man stage."

  The audience laughed, though not sympathetically to Hardacre's claims, and Bruster waited until the sound died before he said, "But you won't believe this, folks. Guess who this TV huckster, this hack novelist, this sleazy lawyer said his so-called prophet would be?"

  One of the audience, apparently not accustomed to rhetorical questions, could be heard saying, "Who?"

  Then Bruster lowered his chin so that he could look into the camera over his glasses and said, "Well, he said it would be a guy we all remember as Jesus of Nazareth…"

  Shouts went up from the audience, not mocking now but angry; the pundit's audience skewed markedly to the portion of the American population that believe that their Savior was as American as they were, and no more to be trifled with than any other patriotic son of liberty.

  Bruster raised his voice over the commotion. "…that's right! Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, our Lord and Savior!"

  The shouts were louder, and there was a sound of motion and moving furniture. Bruster showed the outraged studio audience a palm, then another, patting the air gently.

  "Well, folks," he said, dropping back into the purr he favored when setting up an on-air lynching, "you'll be glad to know that Billy Lee's messiah turned up
today, right on time." More angry growls from off-stage, including one clear recommendation – Shoot him! – then Bruster swept one arm toward the place where guests usually entered the set, "and here he is now!"

  Chesney said, "We need to go there right now!"

  Xaphan said, "Give it a minute."

  "They'll tear him apart!"

  "Costume!" Instantly, he was clad in his blue and gray garment. "Go! Now!"

  "I'm tellin' ya," said the demon, "he don't want rescuin'."

  Melda said, "What's going on, Xaphan?"

  "Why'ncha watch and see? We can be there anytime you want, puff o' smoke, you name it."

  The screen showed Joshua stepping hesitantly into shot from the left, his eyes squinting and blinking against the lights. Bruster had stood up behind the desk and was reaching out a hand to the prophet. But Joshua had not been introduced to the handshake, and seemingly thinking that he was being offered a helping hand, waved away the assistance.

  The audience rumbled at the show of discourtesy to their idol, and someone shouted, "Shame!"

  The pundit gestured to the guest's seat and the prophet sat down, crossing his legs and showing his sockless, sandaled feet. The wide shot of the two men was replaced by a close-up of the prophet's hairy appendage, the toenails in need of the kind of services Melda supplied to women at Sugar 'n' Spice.

  Then the two-shot was restored as Bruster leaned back in his chair, studied the other man for a long moment, and said, "So you're Jesus of Nazareth?"

  Joshua was distracted by the growls from beyond the lights, but then he held up a hand in a wait a minute gesture and said, "Joshua. Jesus was the name the Greeks gave me, after I was dead."

  Harsh laughter from the audience, but Bruster patted it down again and said, "Ohhh-kay, Joshua. But you were around, back in the time of Pontius Pilate, did some miracles, got crucified, rose from the dead."

  "Uh huh," said the prophet in a tone that indicated that his mind was on something other than the question he'd just been asked. He had put both feet on the floor, his forearms on his knees, and was leaning forward to peer intently at the host.

  The audience was reacting with loud cries, and this time Bruster was making no effort to pacify them. Indeed, he was making can you believe it? faces at the crowd while his hand gestured in Joshua's direction.

  At that moment, the prophet stood, reached over, and seized the other man's hand in a strong grip. Bruster reacted as if he had received a jolt of electricity. He rose from his chair and tried to pull his hand free, but Joshua only shook his head and tightened his grip. Chesney could see the cords standing out in the bearded man's wrist.

  "Come out of him!" Joshua commanded, in a voice that brooked no defiance. "Both of you! Right now!"

  Hall Bruster began to shake. A white froth appeared at the corners of his mouth, his eyes rolled back, and his knees bent as he began to run in place behind the desk. Then his neck bent backwards to an impossible extent. Chesney could hear the bones crack as the back of the pundit's skull almost touched the space between his shoulder blades. His mouth opened wider than it should have been able to, and a roaring voice emerged, making harsh sounds that might have been words, but in a deep timbre that no human vocal apparatus could have produced. It sounded to Chesney like a whale cursing.

  Xaphan silently toasted the screen, then said, "And here we go."

  Something shadowy yet thick, like dense, roiling smoke, erupted from Bruster's far-too-open mouth. It twisted in the air, then tumbled to the desk, and the shapes of knobbed limbs and joints, a narrow, hairless skull, wart-speckled shoulders, and some even less attractive parts, seemed to take solid form only to dissipate from one moment to the next. And now something else was appearing from the pundit's lips. It looked to Chesney like a pair of giant crab's legs, sickly yellow and tipped with jagged claws, reaching out from within to spread the orifice even wider. Instead of a deep-throated roar, the man's body was now issuing a hissing, gasping voice, the words it was forming full of harsh gutturals and throatclearing k-sounds.

  Someone screamed amid a clatter of chairs and shouts, and a rising din of struggle as the unseen audience fought to put distance between themselves and the glistening, segmented body that was dragging itself out of Bruster's throat and joining the writhing smoke-creature on the desk. The monster lifted its tail to elevate the stinging tip, a drop of pale ichor hanging from the needle point.

  But Joshua, still clutching Bruster's hand, pointed a finger at the two horrors on the desktop and said, in a voice that shook the studio walls, "Begone, foul demons! Back to the pit and trouble this soul no more!"

  And in a moment, gone they were. The desk was empty, Bruster ceased his high-stepping contortions, and fell back in his chair like a plump puppet whose strings have been cut. He bounced off the back of the seat, his glasses flew off, and his arms barely caught him as he toppled forward to sprawl across the desk. He lay inert for several seconds as the last sounds of the fleeing audience registered on the overhead microphone. Then he slowly lifted his head, his eyes glazed and blinking, a dribble of drool hanging from one corner of his mouth. "Where… what…?" he said.

  Joshua was looking down on him, a kindly expression on the unbearded portion of his face, his eyes pools of compassion. "There," he said, "I'll bet you're glad to have those two out of you."

  Bruster looked up, stunned. Then his face took on an expression of pure delight, even as tears sprang from his eyes. He said, "You are my Lord and savior."

  "Now, now," said the prophet. "They were just a couple of demons."

  But Bruster slid from his chair to his knees and embraced Joshua's ankles. "Lord, Lord," he cried. Then he just cried.

  "See?" Xaphan said, gesturing to the screen with the Havana. "Told ya."

  The shot of a drooling Hall Bruster, his back being comfortingly patted by the prophet, abruptly disappeared, and was replaced by a notice that technical difficulties had temporarily disrupted the broadcast.

  "We should get him out of there," said Chesney. "Some of those people wanted to attack him even before…" He made an expansive gesture, both hands vibrating in mid-air, that connoted a situation that was rapidly going out of control.

  "Bring him back here," Melda said. "The media will be looking for him at Hardacre's." She thought for a moment. "And the rev is probably not going to be the most genial of hosts just now."

  "Not to mention the old battle-ax," said the demon.

  Chesney thought he might have commented at that point, but Joshua had to be his primary concern. "Let's go," he said.

  They passed through his room in Hell, the fiend pausing to refill its glass, then relocated to Hall Bruster's television studio, where chaos was apparently settling in for an extended stay. Two men in shirtsleeves, one fat and the other even fatter, had the host by his ankles and armpits and were endeavoring to remove him from the vicinity. A tall, thin man with an earpiece-and-microphone set dangling from a cord around his neck was shouting, "Get back! Get back!" at the prophet, while a short young woman with her hair severely braided was poking at the bearded man with the pointed end of a flagstaff that usually stood in the background of Bruster's set.

  Joshua was backing away, palms extended in a placating mode, saying, "He'll be fine. A little wine mixed with honey works wonders."

  Chesney said privately to Xaphan, invisible behind him, "Voice of authority," and stepped into the melée. "I'll handle this," he said, in a tone that made Gregory Peck sound like a tenderfoot Boy Scout. The director and the spear-maiden fell back, giving the young man space to step up to the prophet and take him by the arm.

  "It's all right," Joshua said.

  "No, it's not," Chesney said. He could see past the prophet and across the studio to a side door that led out into a sunlit parking lot. Some members of the audience who had fled the unexpected exorcism were now peeking back into the room. Seeing a welcome absence of demons and an outnumbered false prophet already under attack, their courage was reasserting i
tself. One fiftyish man with a face lined by a lifetime of delivering stern judgments was already withdrawing a square-barreled, black pistol from under his armpit.

  "Xaphan!" the young man said. "Now!" An instant later they were in transit through Chesney's infernal stage point, then before the young man could blink they popped into his apartment's living room.

  Joshua looked around and noticed the view from the window. He went over to survey the panorama of river and city. "We're very high up, aren't we?" he said. "Reminds me of the time when the Adversary wanted a chat with me."

  "That reminds me," said the demon, "he wants another one."

  "What about?" said the prophet.

  "He don't tell me that. You gotta ask him yourself."

  The bearded man shrugged. "What's the point? We never had much to say to each other."