“Only questions about you, John,” Venn replied.
“Why did you come back here, Venn?”
“I told you—I am the one with questions to be answered. Such as how you have learned these secrets you possess. These…spells…conjurations…what-ever one might call them.”
For several moments, Trendle hesitated. The dog snarled in the interim, its upper lip curling back to bare its slick teeth. Then, the reverend said, “My father built our cottage on a crossroads of two fairy paths, Venn. My two sisters and a brother died before the age of six. I’m sure it was the forces flowing through there that killed them. My father went mad, drank himself into the grave. My mother died not long after. But I, Venn…I survived.
Where my family were poisoned, were leeched, I was made strong. I was a lightning rod.”
“And you used this force to raise demons? In the service of the Lord?”
“I do what I must!” Trendle spat.
“Even murder priests?”
“One man’s priest is another man’s infidel.”
“You quote a chapter of the Bible that doesn’t exist in my own, John. But then you seem to have a personal acquaintance with our Master.”
“I know Him better than you, Venn.”
“There, you may be right. I don’t understand God. But these days, I’m not so certain that He even understands Himself.”
“Blasphemer!” Trendle shouted hoarsely. In his fury, he almost staggered.
“Tonight, you’ll die like the other two of your poisonous order!”
“That,” Venn told him, “is quite impossible.”
From one pocket of his coat, the old vicar produced a mallet. From the other, a chisel. Before the priest could even utter a sound of protest, the vicar bent over his massive dog, centered the point of the chisel between its eyes, and with one great blow hammered the spike deep into the animal’s brain.
With a terrible yelp, its legs went out from beneath it, and it thumped onto its chest, its tongue lolling out only to be bitten in its snapping jaws. Its hind legs dug into the ground, but more in a nervous reflex than in an effort to rise.
With a final convulsion that shook its entire frame, the animal died.
Through his lenses, Venn saw the red eyes wink out. But at that same moment, a puff of black smoke like the dog’s final exhalation curled out of its half open mouth. This mist rose, and deepened, and broadened. It began to turn in on itself, to billow in reverse, to twist itself into something more tangible.
Something with wings. And in its uppermost part, two red eyes with silvery pupils snapped open.
The Hebrew letters fitted together like bricks. The cells were joined into a body. The demon took on its finished form.
Though the creature’s skin was like obsidian, and it was naked and its flapping wings were like those of a raven, the red-eyed demon had the wrinkled, feral features of the Reverend Trendle. On legs bent crooked like those of a dog, and with fingers hooked into talons, the hovering being alighted on the ground and started toward the priest. Grinning wickedly.
There was a screech like that of a hawk, a sound that seemed to rip the flesh down the length of Venn’s back. Then, from the night sky, another ebon figure alighted. A second pair of fiery eyes glared. Though this second demon had his own face—or because it had his own face—Venn was just as horrified by it as he was by the first. And yet it had answered his unspoken call. It followed his unuttered instruction. His genie freed from the lamp.
The two demons flung themselves at each other, and Trendle cried out in rage and fear.
Later, one of the farm laborers who had remained behind to futilely battle the fire would relate that in the glow of the blaze and the flashes of lightning, he distantly saw the two clerics standing apart from each other. And they seemed to be bellowing, shrieking at each other. Or perhaps it was the wind, the thunder. He even thought he saw a whirlwind sweep up a funnel of dust between the two men. But he did not see—and even Trendle did not see—what Venn did through his stained glass lenses.
The two demons tore at each other with their claws, gouging each other’s naked flesh, tearing fistfuls of glossy feathers from the other’s wings. Trendle’s pet, his double, used one of its hind legs to open the belly of Venn’s. Instead of blood, black smoke gushed out. With a roar, as if in pain and outrage, Venn’s creature spread wide its jaws and clamped its mouth onto the throat of its oppo-nent. Shook its head in a frenzy like a dog with a hold on a cat.
The blurred frenzy of limbs and wings collapsed to the ground. Venn’s demon did not let go, despite the claws that slashed its arms and shoulders.
But it was streaming more and more smoke like squid’s ink from its opened belly. The bleeding smoke that rose up from both of the beings’ many wounds began to obscure them, so that they appeared shadowy as they had before they’d fully formed. Still, through the fog the crimson eyes glowed.
But one of the pairs of eyes faded, and blinked out. Embers turned to ash.
Where two demons had fallen, only one rose. What was left of the other dispersed around the vague legs of its murderer. In the blended mist of their blood, however, neither Venn nor Trendle could tell which of the creatures had survived.
Trendle cried out inarticulately, and backed away several steps, as the foggy, wounded demon turned in his direction and staggered toward him. It stretched wide its arms in a gesture more like a yearning for help than a motion to attack. Like a child begging its parent to ease its suffering.
Trendle caught his heel. Began to fall back. Where at first it seemed the demon had needed his embrace to support itself, now it supported him. Its arms went around him. The great wings, from Venn’s position, nearly blotted the vicar from view. But for one moment, Venn saw a perversion of his own profile, leaning in as if to kiss the reverend.
Venn heard the man wail, briefly, before the demon burst into a fire ball—and was gone. And when the flash of fire had quickly diminished, the Reverend Trendle had vanished as well, except for a small mound of steaming gray ash.
Hit by a bolt of lightning, the laborer who witnessed the event from a distance would suggest. Or maybe, a victim of Old Shock himself
VII: The Cross
Father Venn walked the straight path, the inferno that had been the Brooks’ cottage becoming small behind him, until he could no longer smell it, feel its heat on him.
He entered the thick of Candleton. There, he lingered briefly, wondering where the workers had brought Sue Brook. He wanted to go to her. They had held onto each other in their fear, back at the farm. She could touch him, and he her. He could bleed, whatever that blood might really consist of.
He stood there in the central road, looking from one yellow window to another. Like a lost child, wondering which home belonged to him. He numbly stepped back to let wagons rattle past him, headed toward the farm to engage the fire.
Ultimately, Father Venn turned away from the yellow windows and continued along the straight path. Leaving the center of his old town, and leaving his flock now without any shepherd whatsoever. But maybe that was better for them.
««—»»
It was becoming light on the horizon by the time he finally, slowly made his way to the crossroads that the villagers called the Cross. A delicate patina of light lay over the earth like a thin foil of hammered gold, and shadows were tinted a pale violet. It was the most fragile, the most ephemeral phase of the day.
Where the two roads met, intersected, Father Venn stopped. A man was waiting for him there. Father Lodge came forward several steps to meet him, smiling subtly. Father Lodge, no longer rooted to his own spot.
Before he spoke, Venn looked off down the right side of the crosswise road. It dipped somewhat into a hollow, and that hollow was filled with a thick morning fog rolling in, it would seem, from some nearby pond or water-mead.
The light of dawn glowed on the thick mist, tinging it gold as well. But as Venn had been raised in this area, he knew there was no body
of water down that way. He had never seen such a dense fog along that path. And when he raised his spectacles a bit to look out from beneath them, he saw that the fog was no longer there. The path clear, its borders glittering with dew.
Lowering his specs in place again, he looked back to Lodge, to see that the older priest was extending his hand.
“I’ll be needing those, now, Alec,” he said.
It took Venn a moment to understand what Lodge meant. Then he realized he was referring to the spectacles. He realized that now Lodge could touch them where he couldn’t before.
But before he removed the spectacles, before Lodge was no longer visible to him, he asked, “What about Father Dewy?”
“He’s gone on ahead of you.” Lodge tipped his chin toward the crosswise path. Toward the gold-lit roiling mist. “The old woman, Baptista, too.”
Venn nodded, and smiled faintly. “And what about you, Edmond?”
“I’ll be staying for a while. It comes to me that I have some things to do.”
His smile broadened. He wiggled his fingers for the spectacles that Venn had had made for himself, a year ago now.
“Don’t be long,” Venn told his friend, then removing his red spectacles.
The older priest did not vanish, after all. He stood there as solid as a man in the flesh, as solid as Venn himself appeared, accepting the specs and fitting them on his nose.
“Some sort of justice has been achieved, Edmond. But I’m not certain that I’ve learned anything.”
“Perhaps the learning is about to begin.” Father Lodge rested his hand on Venn’s shoulder for a moment. “Go home, Father Venn.”
Venn turned toward the right-hand path, and though he could no longer see the golden fog he knew it was still there. He walked toward it. Savoring the feel of his last steps on this hard path. Relishing his last breaths of crisp autumnal air. Admiring the gilded coronas of the rough hedges. He walked slowly. Unhurried. Though there was a tinge of melancholy, a nostalgia in advance, it was not reluctance he felt. Or fear.
It was simply that it was a time for him to be at ease. His time—at last—to rest.
Channel 2:
The hosts
The first time Clare saw one of the creatures for herself was on the flight home from Hong Kong, when a thin length of segmented tail (or head?) extended from the ear of another couple’s adopted baby. That explained why the poor little girl had been crying so much; and here Clare had just thought the changes in air pressure might be hurting her ears.
There had been four couples going together as a group—three straight couples and a pair of lesbians—to bring home their babies at last. Clare had known that the babies would fuss with discomfort, and this would make the other passengers uncomfortable as well, but they would all just have to endure it together. And so she had reclined her seat against the knees of the man behind her, trying to make a cushy bed of her body for the boy they had named Dylan.
Despite all her zealous dieting programs, she had a large body presumably made for birthing children, though she had not been successful in that endeavor, either. Her husband, Gary, had an even larger body, imposingly tall and broad but more successfully toned from racquetball and bike riding. He took turns cradling their tiny new son, so unlike them with his dark hair standing up in wispy spikes and his glistening black eyes. The four babies looked more like siblings than they did relations to their new mothers, who were uniformly blond—though in Clare’s case, anyway, not in the natural sense. But Dylan’s differences didn’t cause his new parents concern. Rather, it would announce to others the generousness of their hearts, in that they had obviously gone so far in their efforts to give a child from a less privileged country the opportunity for a better life. They expected most people to be charmed and admiring, rather than confounded. Celebrities did this all the time.
“My favorite souvenir,” Gary joked, kissing his squirming son on the top of his head. Whenever he moved his big body, he accidentally dropped a burping towel or teething ring or cover to a baby bottle behind him, so that the passenger crushed back there would have to dig down at his feet to retrieve it.
Oh well. He’d just have to understand how important this all was.
The couple ahead, at least, understood. With a little girl of their own, they had been excitedly babbling to Clare and Gary over their seat like neighbors over a fence between neatly groomed yards. It was during one of these moments, when the other couple were holding their baby up to see Dylan, distracting their infant long enough for her bawling to subside into mere sniffles, that the animal inside her skull snaked about six inches of its body out of her ear to test the air lazily, before sliding moistly back inside.
Clare had been shocked silent. The father holding his new child up like a hard-won trophy had cried out in horror and held her up higher, as if to throw her away from himself in an impulsive act of revulsion, as if a porcelain doll had broken open in his hands to reveal itself filled with excrement. Only after he and his wife began blurting loudly and miserably, and Gary said, “What? What?”
did Clare begin to tremble hard and mumble over and over, “Oh my God.”
And then she remembered that her own adopted child had been crying a lot during the long, long flight, too.
««—»»
“Hi, honey; do you need a ride to the –”
That was all that Clare’s friend Patricia got out before her fourteen-year-old daughter Brice slapped her across the face with cracking force, and strode off to her room upstairs. They heard her door slam, and urban music come thumping to life like the dramatic beat of her teenage heart.
“I’m sorry,” Patricia said to Clare, turning to her with a mix of stunned pain and embarrassment. She smoothed her hair back over her reddened ear.
“She’s going through a tough time right now. I guess her boyfriend has stopped talking to her, and kids tease her sometimes about Chad—you know.”
Clare knew, despite having no other children. According to the experts on talk shows and in counseling classes, older siblings of those carrying the parasite often exhibited resentment arising from feelings that, in attending to their more physically afflicted younger brothers or sisters, their parents weren’t giving them sufficient attention. Thus, there were really two kinds of affliction sweeping the country’s children.
Like most flu strains, apparently, the parasite was thought to have originated in Asia. Of course Clare had heard of it before witnessing a case for herself on the plane; it had been hard to miss on the news. But it had all seemed so far away, as removed from her world as conditions like elephantiasis, brought about by nematodes and other parasites, better known but still incon-ceivable to Clare in this day and age. In her subsequent research (and she prided herself on how much research she had done, comparing notes with her friends in support class), Clare had read about other parasites that had harassed human beings through the millennia. Tapeworms thirty feet in length, sometimes expelled from the mouth. Round-worms and their like vomited up, or inching their way out through the penis, or burrowing out the navel.
Lumbricoid worms inside the ears, the nose. Worms inside the human heart.
It all seemed so—Third World. So Dark Ages. And yet here they were, almost seven years later, and the parasite that afflicted Dylan had spread around the globe like a communicable virus. Seven years later, and it was all just a sad fact of life in even the most privileged of countries.
“You handle it well,” Clare said to Patricia. It was the kind of thing they all said to each other, all the time, in and out of the classes. “I know it’s hard with a teenager, even without a host-kid.” It was what they called them.
“Well, how about you? Sometimes I don’t know how you do it alone, Clare.”
“Oh, Gary sees Dylan every other weekend, and usually at least one evening during the week. He’s still a good father, I have to give him that.”
Clare had straightened up her body in her chair in order to pay her ex-husband th
ese compliments. She had to show her grace, her strength, even as it ate at her that after almost ten years of marriage her husband had left her for another woman. Blonder, much more slender. And now, pregnant. She hoped it wouldn’t be a host-kid, she really did. After all, what kind of self-respecting, mature, well-balanced adult would hope otherwise?
“Here’s our little guys now,” Patricia said, smiling fondly, as her son Chad and Dylan came into her livingroom.
They came like two frat boys who’d been drinking too hard, stumbling and bumping into each other and half leaning on each other. Chad was crying.
He looked beat up and feverish and ill-rested all at once. Mucus glistened thickly over his upper lip, and he licked at it. Patricia sped over to him to wipe it away. “Don’t lap it, honey, how many times have I told you?” She also dabbed away a trickle of the stuff that had run down his neck out of his ear.
She rubbed vigorously at the collar of his expensive sweater. Next she dabbed his eyes; the wetness leaking from them might not consist solely of tears.
Dylan wasn’t crying, but he looked drugged, his gaze meandering around the room as if he couldn’t distinguish his mother from the furnishings. Actually he was drugged, for pain and to keep the parasites’ growth, activity and reproduction in check, though there was no way yet that could be found to poison the parasites entirely or root them out fully without involving delicate brain surgery. Clare went to him and took his hand and his befuddled eyes found her at last. It seemed like the last time they had looked bright and alive had been on that flight home from Hong Kong, so many miles and years before.
Well, she still prized those dark slanted eyes. But though she had studied Chinese culture extensively, and admired it to the degree that she felt would be expected of her, she couldn’t help but congratulate herself that here she was taking such very good care of a little boy from a country where murdering healthy infants simply for being female had once been so widespread. It was her responsibility, as an educated and sophisticated human being, to represent her species in a much more civilized and enlightened fashion. It was all about courage, tenacity, personal grit. Patience, balance, and endurance. Endurance above all else. These qualities had served her well in college, and in the work-place. She had never known they would also become such valuable resources in this way.
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