The Devil's Secret

by Joshua Ingle

  “Come on,” Heather said to the other two. Reluctantly, they entered the vehicle.

  Minutes later, the four of them were speeding through the darkness over grassy, bumpy hilltops. Karen drove, with Thorn seated next to her. Heather sat next to Brandon in the back, clutching the metal beam that supported the roof. The golf cart traveled faster than Thorn had thought possible for such a small vehicle—it must have been going upward of thirty miles per hour—but it was not a smooth ride. At one point, the incessant bumps nearly threw Virgil from the cart, which carried no seat belts. Karen left the headlights off to keep them inconspicuous, and the hill had no streetlights to guide them; their way was lit only by the moon and the stars as they journeyed through the night, fleeing the chaos behind them.

  Thorn heard Brandon sobbing in the darkness.

  “Tim’s not really gone,” Thorn said. “You’ll probably see him again someday.” In another Sanctuary, or elsewhere.

  “That’s right,” Karen said. “We’ll see Tim again in Heaven.”

  A few moments of silence followed, perhaps in mourning for the departed, or perhaps because no one knew what else to say.

  “Let’s get to the plane,” Brandon said in a shaky voice. “I can fly us out of here.”

  “You fly?” asked Thorn.

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” said Karen. “I’m taking us to the church.”

  “What?” Heather said. “Why?”

  “One, it’s safe there. You wouldn’t believe it, but I reckon a church is the safest place to be right now. Two, we have internet, and an old ham radio in the basement. With the cells not working and the phone lines down, those are our best shots at calling for help.”

  “I think we should go to the plane,” said Thorn, who had something else in mind for the aircraft. “We need to get out of here, not call for help.”

  “No, it’s our responsibility to get help. What if those monsters are still alive and decide to go kill somebody else? What if they decide to flee the country? No, I’m calling the authorities and bringing justice down on these crazy people. If people is what they really are.”

  “What do you mean by that?” said Heather.

  “Ask Virgil,” Karen said. “Or the thing claiming to be Virgil.”

  “What are you talking about? Virgil, what’s she talking about?”

  “Go ahead,” Karen said to Thorn. “Tell them. I heard what he called you back there.”

  “Demons as proud as you never go quietly,” Marcus had said to Thorn.

  After the hassle with Crystal in the previous Sanctuary, Thorn was hesitant to tell these humans the truth about his identity and their current circumstances. His previous candidness had only caused unnecessary delays with Crystal and Cole. If he hid the truth from these humans now, they’d be easier to manipulate, and his job of saving them would become simpler.

  Is that still my first instinct? To manipulate? Have I really not grown past my base demonic nature, even after all this? Perhaps this was how any controlling relationship began: by one party thinking they knew what was best for the other, then forcing it upon them. Am I no better than God?

  And would these humans trust that “Virgil” had their best interests in mind, after his actions had led to Tim’s death? Might Karen try to somehow force Thorn to admit that he was a demon? Thorn resented her silly paranoia, even though in this case it happened to be correct.

  “I’m me,” Thorn said through Virgil. “Same as I’ve always been. I’d rather not talk about what happened back there, though. I’m grieving for Tim, too. Just know that I made a bad call, and I’m deeply sorry, and it won’t happen again. I’m very much on your side.”

  No one said anything else, perhaps because each of the golf cart’s occupants was too haunted by their own thoughts to bother any more with Thorn.

  The cart swung through a small forest, then back into clear space, where it continued bouncing over hilltop after hilltop. Had more forest been present, Thorn might have advised staying hidden beneath the trees, but much of the landscape here was bare save for the grass.

  As they drove, Thorn’s thoughts wandered to Marcus, and the malicious words Thorn had said to him upstairs in the country club. Thorn regretted those words already. In spite of everything, he didn’t hate Marcus—at least not anymore—and he didn’t wish for Marcus’s death. He only wished that Marcus would open his eyes. Yet in the heat of argument, Thorn had let his frustration get the better of him, and now Marcus might be lost forever.

  Why am I still so attached to this vile creature? Thorn wondered. Why do I want to save him? Perhaps because I know that convincing him of the truth means that there’s hope for anyone. Even for me. This answer felt weak, but it was the best he could formulate.

  Thorn half-wished that God could wave a hand and smite the other demons, though, to save him some trouble—not that God would kill them, since He claimed to want reconciliation with all demons. But Thorn was grateful that God couldn’t wave a hand and smite him.

  A limited God. How strange to consider. The thought had never crossed Thorn’s mind before today. A God incapable of knowing our hearts, so He has to test us. Yet this wretched place was certainly not a test for the humans, and that relieved Thorn. How freeing it is to be able to plan without worrying about the Big Choices that God wants us all to make. What a fool’s errand that was. And how freeing it is to be able to do good without having to worry about pleasing God and getting into Heaven. Indeed, even after all that effort—after every leap of reason and every selfless act—Thorn had still nearly been sent to Hell. What brazen arrogance God possessed to even create such a place, much less send good people there—solely because their beliefs varied just slightly from His. And Thorn might still be sent there too, for merely desiring a choice other than God or evil.

  Thorn wondered: if God was so unwilling to bend His rules and let Thorn live his own life on Earth, why had God admitted so much information to him? Why had God revealed so much potentially sensitive knowledge to someone who was clearly an independent thinker, who was clearly hesitant about accepting God’s offer of angelhood? Had God’s emotional episode just been a show to manipulate Thorn? If so, it was strange behavior for someone who supposedly wanted to grant Thorn—and all demons—forgiveness. For such a powerful and prideful being, God certainly had trouble expressing Himself.

  Or perhaps God’s demeanor had been so odd because He didn’t want to grant forgiveness after all.

  Perhaps He wanted to ask for it.

  6

  Tim.

  Good Shepherd Family Church had been renamed and remodeled many times over the years. As far as Brandon knew, the quaint chapel had been built in the ’30s, served as some type of Red Cross center during World War II, then transferred between different denominations for some time during the ’50s. The Lutherans built the school structures, the Presbyterians built the ministers’ housing, then the Baptists had built the community center. The church had ended up with the Baptists, then suffered another series of denomination changes as congregation after congregation had disagreed with itself and split over its differences. Even as a punk teenager, Brandon had been fascinated by the chapel’s old stones and dank, mysterious basement. He’d been told the whole history of the place when he’d asked—

  Tim.

  This late at night, with moonlight coating the old graveyard next to the church, and all the interior lights off, the place looked ominous. If not for the friendly road sign and the lights in the empty parking lot, a passerby might mistake the church for the haunted setting of a ghost story, rather than the place of refuge Karen wanted it to be. Even now, though, Brandon missed all the good times he’d once had here. He missed the sense of home that these buildings had once stirred in him. He missed—

  Tim.

  When Brandon looked at the youth center, he saw Tim shingling the roof with him six summers ago. When he looked at the parking lot, he saw Tim nursing little Liam Tanner after he’d been hit by a
car, waiting with the wailing child until paramedics arrived. When he looked at the dark chapel, he saw Tim accompanying a fourteen-year-old Brandon down the center aisle after one of Karen’s best sermons, then kneeling with Brandon at the altar, guiding him while he accepted Jesus into his heart. Tim was the man who’d saved Brandon from spending his teenage years in the foster care system, and likely from a life of poverty. Tim had been an intelligent, compassionate, moral man; other than his faith, he’d been everything Brandon had ever wanted to become.

  And after one senseless act of violence, Tim was dead.

  Brandon could ignore his grief no longer. The weight of it bore down on him, its intensity staggering. His knees gave way. Dull pain shocked his hands as they hit the grass and dirt in front of the chapel, catching his fall. He was only half aware of his body twisting around to sit on the curb. Teardrops sprinkled the cracked asphalt below him, spattering the rice thrown earlier by friends and family.

  The memory of his garden conversation with Tim crisp in his mind, Brandon realized that all of his existential fears had been confirmed. Life truly was just a brief blip in the infinity of time, pitifully fragile and fundamentally meaningless. Half of the people Brandon had ever known had been killed in a matter of minutes. What kind of broken person would Brandon be without them? Who would Brandon be without his father? I’ll never argue with you again, Dad. I’ll become a Christian again, if that’s what it takes. I’ll do anything—believe anything—if you’ll just come back.

  And now Karen was pacing toward him from the side door of the chapel, determination in her step and contempt on her face. Had she come to lecture him on nihilism again? Would she mock him for it? Should you ignore the emotions welling up inside you now? she might say, taunting him. Those emotions are just arbitrary perceptions that your evolutionary past is projecting, after all. Human life has no objective purpose to you, so your father’s death should mean nothing. Brandon braced himself for her ridicule.

  Karen crouched next to him and glided a hand over his face, wiping away his tears. Her other hand rested on his shoulder in a gesture of reassurance. “Hey, hey, Brandon,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Then she hugged him, and the hug felt strange and soothing. “Tim was a wonderful man. One of the best I ever knew. I want you to know that I’ll be here for you just like he was. I love you, and God loves you, and you just ask for anything you need, okay?”

  She broke off the hug, and now Brandon could see dry tears on her face, too. He sniffled. Another sob escaped him. “You lost a lot of people tonight too,” he said. “This is so—How can this be happening? This doesn’t make any sense.”

  Karen ran her hand through his matted hair, fixing it the way a mother would. “We’re under attack, sweetie. I don’t know if this is end times or just some bad ideas being spread around, making people do evil things. But everyone I lost is in a safe place now. Tim is too. It’s sad that we won’t see them for a while, but we have to focus. There’s more to be done to make sure we’re safe, and that the rest of the folks around town are safe, too.”

  Tim would have liked to hear Karen reassuring Brandon that he’d gone to Heaven. Which made it even more painful to Brandon that Tim had been wrong—that there was no Heaven, and that all Tim’s hope for such a place had been false hope. Confident that death was not the end, Tim had lived more for the wished-for life beyond than for the real life right in front of his eyes.

  “None of it matters,” Brandon said. “Can’t you see that now, Pastor Noyce? It’s all pointless. Life. Everything.”

  “I’ve read the Bible, sweetie. I know what the point of it all is. That’s where I find strength now. You don’t have to take strength from God, but I’ll take it from Him, and you can take some from me.”

  Brandon shook his head and tried to hold back more tears. “I would have believed you a few years ago. But there’s no such thing as strength, or weakness. Just… emptiness. If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.”

  Karen muttered something nasty that Brandon couldn’t hear, then said, “Nietzsche, right?”

  But tragedy weighed too strongly on Brandon for him to be surprised that Karen had recognized a Nietzsche quote. “It’s just too much,” he said. “Too much, knowing that there’s nothing after death. The strong, the weak… we all enter the void together. And being this close to the void, seeing so much pointless death. How can you not leave Christianity? How can you not see reality as nihilistic?”

  Karen shook her head, but her gaze looked more pitying than condescending. She sniffled a little herself. “Brandon…”

  “What are you waiting for?” Virgil said, walking up beside them. Though he spoke to Brandon and Karen, his eyes swept the gloomy forest on the far side of the parking lot. “We need to get indoors, out of sight. Heather found a flashlight. Let’s go.”

  Karen offered Brandon a hand. He took it, and she helped him up.

  •

  The land line in the church was already out, and Thorn sabotaged the church’s internet router when the humans weren’t looking. They spent ten minutes fiddling with it, and with the computers’ settings, before Karen labeled the failed internet connection “the work of the Devil” and decided to lead them to the basement to find the radio instead.

  At Thorn’s suggestion, they kept the lights off in the old church, so as not to make the place conspicuous to any demons—or angels—flying overhead. Even the basement had high windows where a light could be visible from outside. So Thorn had convinced the humans that the flashlight should be their only source of illumination. He was regretting that choice now, though, because the basement was eerie even to his hardened demonic heart. So much stuff had accumulated here over the years that the basement was less of a room and more of a labyrinth, comprised of pianos and organs, stacks of chairs, piles of books, ancient pews crawling with cobwebs, a gigantic plastic Christmas tree laid lengthwise, and countless other old things stretching outward into darkness. Just ten feet from the stairs, Thorn was already glancing over his shoulder past Heather and Brandon, worried that whoever had been watching him from the blackness beyond the daycare doorway might be lurking here somewhere, waiting for him still.

  “Where’s the radio?” Thorn asked through Virgil.

  “Near the back, sad to say,” Karen said. “Just keep left and we’ll get there sooner than later.”

  The humans’ feet pattered against the sandy floor as Thorn led the way, holding the flashlight steady in Virgil’s hands. The basement’s darkness seemed to swallow the dim beam. Was it running out of batteries?

  Thorn tried to ignore his growing dread. He needed to play the part of the fearless leader, especially for Brandon, who was falling apart. From what Thorn had gathered from Brandon’s conversation with Karen, Brandon had recently abandoned his faith. But the poor boy had had no worldview with which to replace his belief, so skepticism had given way to cynicism, and ultimately to nihilism. Thorn had seen the process a few times on Earth, and he knew that such thinking led to despair, to apathy, and possibly to the psychopathic Brandon from the Miami Sanctuary. Even if not, though, Thorn couldn’t have Brandon bogged down in dreariness. Not tonight.

  “You know,” Thorn said as he swept his flashlight beam over a dusty stack of old offering plates, “Nietzsche himself viewed nihilism not as something to wallow in, but as something to overcome. He saw nihilism as a natural result of millennia of religious thinking—as the despair that comes when people realize that the myths they believed are untrue. But he also thought that humans were stronger than that despair. That we wouldn’t just resign ourselves to it. That we’d forge our own path and create—”

  “Stop talking about that,” Karen said. “I don’t wanna hear talk like that now.”

  Thorn glanced at her, but her eyes were focused on the murky crevices that seemed to push in against them, waiting for a chance to swallow them up. I’ll have to keep an eye on this one, too. She’s even more spooked than I am.


  “You’ve read Nietzsche?” Brandon asked.

  Thorn shrugged. “I heard him speak once.” Karen raised an eyebrow at that, but Thorn continued. “I would urge you, Brandon, not to jump to the conclusion that we’ll never discover structure or purpose to the universe around us. The universe is a big place, and we know next to nothing about it. Don’t assume that there is no meaning just because we haven’t found it yet.” Thorn spoke this to himself as much as to Brandon. If I succeed in exposing God’s plans to demonkind, will I have a purpose in the resulting world? A world in which neither God’s despotism nor demons’ dogma hold authority over me? Will I have a reason to exist?

  “There it is,” Karen said, pointing to a corner. Thorn shifted his flashlight beam and uncovered a gray metal box about the size of an office printer. Various knobs and gauges adorned its surface. A twirling black cord connected the box to a microphone on a small metal stand.

  Karen swiped her hand over the top of the box, stirring up a flurry of dust, then turned a few of the knobs.

  “Do you know how to use it?” Heather asked.

  “I saw the pastor before me use it, years ago. I might be able to figure it out.”

  “Can we just plug it in?”

  “Not down here. Let’s take it into the chapel. Brandon?”

  Brandon approached the radio, knelt, then lifted with his legs. Heather grabbed the microphone. “You sure your wound is okay?” she asked Virgil.

  “I think so,” said Thorn. “I’ll be all right.” Though the radio might cause me more injury than the bullet wound will. Thorn would have to supervise their use of this old contraption, sabotage it if it started working. The humans might not trust him enough to go to the plane like he’d suggested, but he couldn’t let more victims become ensnared in this mess by allowing Karen to contact the authorities.

  Thorn was about to follow the newlyweds back upstairs when Karen waved him over to a rickety wooden shelf. “Virgil. Look at this.”