by Ninie Hammon
Jack sat out the practice. Mikey had found some ice somewhere and wrapped it in an unused team T-shirt so Jack could hold it on the wound on his leg. Jack and Daniel were the last to leave, had waited behind to talk to Bishop.
“What did you mean by that, when you said somebody sent them, that they were just the hired help?” Daniel asked.
Bishop suddenly felt very old and tired. And this battle hadn’t even really begun yet. At least he knew now. Last night, going through them ancient texts in his study, he’d realized that the answer he was lookin' for wasn't in them books. He knew now what he was up against. And these children had to know about that, ’cause if he was interpreting everything right, they was gone be part of it.
“I’ll lay everything out for you to see at Bible study Thursday night,” he said.
******
Sheriff Bill Cunningham took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then put them back on and studied the time sheets on his desk. It was done, over. He had used up the whole year’s overtime budget in the past week. There had not been a single act of vandalism since what he had come to call Black Tuesday. No dead dogs. No snakes. Nothing.
Of course, it was clear to Sheriff Cunningham that anybody smart enough to do what they’d done and not leave a trace was also smart enough to figure out that no small town could keep up that kind of vigilant surveillance for long. Sooner or later, it would have to end, and life would return to normal.
And deep in his gut, Sheriff Cunningham believed that as soon as the patrols stopped, the horror would start all over again.
The sheriff got up from his desk and wandered over to the window, pulled back the flowered curtains his wife had insisted on hanging there and stared out at the town square. The late-afternoon sunlight was shades of burnt-orange and pink, and the shop windows smoldered with reflections of that fading fire. It looked totally unremarkable. People going about their lives. Mammas pushing strollers, stores selling shoes and cosmetics and spark plugs, Pete at the Gulf station changing the gas price sign to $1.09 a gallon, two little boys in white Karate uniforms practicing their "wax on/wax off" moves. Normal. But now it seemed like airbrushed reality. Ever since he got the first look at the mutilated corpse of Ella Fletcher’s Jelly Belly, it had seemed to the sheriff that he’d been granted a peek behind the curtain, a view of —not the Great Oz pulling cranks and pushing buttons—but of something sinister, dark and ugly. And frightening.
He shivered. Ok, admit it. He was scared. He didn’t know what he was afraid of, but he was terrified. He knew, without any idea how he knew it, that what had happened last week in Bradford’s Ridge was going to pale in comparison to what was going to happen as soon as he called his officers off the street.
His grandmother had lived through the Battle of Britain, had been in London when Hitler’s buzz bombs terrorized the city. She’d told him that the hardest part, the scariest part, was when you heard the buzzing engine of the rocket cut off. The silence that followed meant the bomb was falling. You didn’t know when or where it would hit and explode, destroying everything and everybody anywhere near it.
The horror last week was a buzz bomb. It was silent now. The engine had cut off, and an explosion was coming.
******
2011
Becca wished the water were clear, like the pictures you see of coral reefs with colorful fish flitting here and there and the bubbles from your scuba tank, little round sprinters, racing each other to the surface.
She would lie back in the clear water, her hair floating like a halo around her head, and watch the bubbles of her last breath rush up to burst into the bright sunlight that filtered down through the water’s depths in rays like sparklers.
But the Ohio River was muddy, not clear. It flowed lazily beneath the L&N Pedestrian Bridge, ugly brown water that would swallow her up with no bubbles or pretty fish or sunlight rays. Just cold, wet and dead.
Becca walked slowly up the Cincinnati approach to the Purple People Bridge, an old train trestle converted into a scenic walkway between Ohio and Kentucky. The bridge, the beams and guiders painted purple, called out to her with an air of silliness. Silly was a good last place to be in life.
She pretended to look down at the water as she studied the girders and posts and wires that fit around the bridge, a spider’s silver steel web that held it in place. As soon as there was a break in the foot traffic, she would hoist herself to the top of the railing, holding on to a support post to balance on the narrow metal beam. She’d have to move quickly because if anyone spotted her and figured out what she was doing, they would undoubtedly try to stop her.
No one was going to stop her this time. She’d tried before to escape the black monsters that slithered around on human hosts and crawled around in her head. She’d had her stomach pumped twice when she was in the mental hospital. After that, she’d tried to tough it out. She really had. She had lived with horror inside and outside, took every breath with her whole chest constricted, a guitar string pulled so tight you couldn’t tell anymore if the sound it made was music or crying.
Last night, he came to her. He was inside Chapman Whitworth, and he saw her, glided into her through the black spots in her eyeballs. Rumbling a mighty roar of rage inside her head, he had ripped her apart in a frenzy of destruction, shredding all she was, who she was.
Now, she was only the tatters of a person flapping in the wind. Ripped pieces with no substance and only the one thin cord of life holding them together. When that was severed, the pieces would float away free into oblivion. And whatever or whoever it was who had been Becca Hawkins would be no more.
She saw her chance, glanced both ways and then climbed up onto the railing. She felt the sun on her face and a breeze lift her hair off her neck. Down below was brown death, waiting for her, and Becca Jean Hawkins lifted her foot to step off into nothing.
That’s when she spotted the hat. Floating in the water below her was a tall, floppy hat with red-and-white stripes. She gasped.
The Cat in the Hat’s hat.
Becca looked at it in wonder, realizing as she did that it wasn’t moving. Sticks and other pieces of debris floated along with the current under the bridge past the hat, but it remained steadfastly where it was.
That kind of hat wouldn’t even float—would it? It would turn into a shapeless red-and-white striped lump. This hat didn’t even look wet. The muddy brown water hadn’t stained the pure white of the stripes, either. And it was bobbing up and down…as if somebody wearing it were dancing.
“Hey, lady!”
Becca turned to see a man only fifteen or twenty feet away. He was big, with a huge chest and brawny arms, wearing a gray jumpsuit with his name and a logo—Harrison County Electric and Gas—stitched on the pocket.
The man started toward her.
“What do you think you’re doing up there?” he said.
“I…I dropped my hat,” Becca heard herself say. She looked back down at the river flowing in an endless brown expanse and saw the hat still bobbing in place where it’d been before.
“Well, it’s gone now, and you’re going to go with it if you don’t get down from there.”
“No, it’s not gone. See,”—she pointed to the hat in the river—"it’s right there.”
The man glanced where she pointed. “Like I said, the hat’s gone. Now come down off that railing.”
The man didn’t see the hat. Couldn’t see it.
Becca never took her eyes off the hat as she climbed back down. When her feet touched the bridge floor, the hat floated slowly away.
CHAPTER 30
1985
Theresa had made chocolate-chip cookies, and Bishop was glad. The smell was wholesome, and these children was gone need wholesomeness around them tonight. He was about to open up the back door to Hell and give them a peek inside. He glanced at the tattoo on the top of his left hand—1John 4:4. He’d gotten the tattoo after he came home shattered by his experience in Vietnam, so he’d never forget: He who is i
n me is greater than he who is in the world.
He tried to gather his wits about him, what few he had left. Since the day two weeks ago when them six demons come tearin’ out of the woods, he’d hardly been able to sleep a’tall, kept wakening up in a cold sweat. His dreams was stalked by monsters too terrible to think about, demons crawling over each other like maggots on roadkill…and beyond it all, in the background of every nightmare, was an awful red glow and a pillar of black smoke. Hidin’ inside that smoke was pure evil.
And now he had to tell these children 'bout it.
Jack and Daniel—he sometimes thought of them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but he didn’t tell them that—sat side by side on the couch in his living room, and he faced them in his big recliner. Becca sat on the floor cross-legged at his feet, watching the silver ballerina go around and around on Theresa’s old music box to the hinky-tinky tune of The Blue Danube Waltz.
Bishop leaned over and put his elbows on his knees and looked earnestly into Jack’s and Daniel’s faces.
“What you children needs to understand is that all them old stories—they’s mostly true. Some of them creatures we laugh about now, they’re real.”
Becca spoke softly to Jack and Daniel. “Cole’s demon has the ugly face of a dragon.”
They musta talked about it! After he told Jack and Daniel that Becca could see demons, they must have discussed it, the three of 'em. Good! Meant they was close, didn’t have no secrets separating ’em. They was gone need that close bond if they was gone do what they was gone have to do.
“Them demons that’s doin’ they mischief right now in Bradford’s Ridge—six of them don’t show up in one place for no reason, workin' together like they was out selling Girl Scout cookies. They ain’t powerful enough to have got here by theirselves. They had to a’been sent.”
“That’s what you meant when you said they were just the hired help,” Daniel said. “But if they are the servants, who do they serve?”
They musta talked about that part, too.
Bishop squared his shoulders then and spoke words out into the air that had until this moment only haunted the darkest, blackest caverns of his own mind. He was ’bout to share the horror he carried…with three little kids.
“Ain’t a who, it’s a what,” Bishop kept his voice quiet, but it seemed loud in the small room. “From what I’ve seen and heard—only explanation that makes any sense to me is that there’s an efreet hereabouts somewhere, here in our world.”
When Bishop went lookin’ for answers in his demonology texts—he’d stayed up all night after he’d snatched Becca back from them demons—he’d shied away from jumpin’ to conclusions. Lookin’ back, he could see now that he’d known all along, somewhere deep in his guts, what monster from Hell they was dealin’ with. But in the beginning, it’d seemed too obvious.
Bishop had first started studyin’ demons after the horror he’d seen in Vietnam. And he’d become fascinated by efreets. He’d been like a mouse starin’ into the eyes of a cobra—utterly horrified but powerless to look away. Bishop had dug into Middle Eastern and Iranian literature for years, pullin’ out a little bitty piece of information here, a single line of reference there. The Caverna County librarians knew when they seen Bishop comin’, he was gone ask for some obscure text they’d have to send off for; the mailman finally give up askin’ what he was doin’ with all them strange books. In fact, there had been some small part of Bishop way down in his soul that was scared his interest would draw the beast, that it would feel his fascination, feed on it, somehow follow it here. Maybe it had. All Bishop knew for sure was that what they was facing was an efreet. He hadn’t figured that out by reading demonology texts, though. He just knew.
“What’s an efreet?” Daniel asked.
“It’s an enormous winged creature made out of fire.”
Bishop got up and went to his study. Years ago, he’d happened across the picture of a painting in one of them old books, had spent six months trackin’ it down and had to pay almost a hundred dollars to get a reproduction. But he’d a’paid ten times that if he’d had to. He’d felt a compulsion he couldn’t control any better than he could understand it. He had to have that image. And that should have warned him there was some power tuggin’ on him. But it hadn’t. Now, he lifted the reproduction down off the wall where it’d hung all these years and took it into the living room.
The children stared at the image. Hidden by smoke rising out of a lake of fire was a pillar of darkness, a black hole in the world, a shape with wings.
“Efreet ain’t no ordinary demon,” Bishop said. “Bible says that ‘‘our battle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, the powers, the authorities of this dark world.’ An efreet is a ruler, an authority. A powerful, powerful evil.”
“This efreet…where is it?” Jack asked.
“Here in our world—somewhere close by.”
Then Bishop told Jack, Daniel and Becca what Grampa Rufus had told him all those years ago. Their eyes grew wide with wonder—and fear.
“What I can’t figure is how anybody could have summoned an efreet ’cause what you have to use for the ceremony—the implements don’t exist no more. I’ve read about ancient scrolls that tell how folks called forth demons from Hell, but them scrolls have been lost for centuries, and even if you could lay hands on one, they was in languages ain’t nobody spoke for a thousand years.”
Though he couldn’t figure out how it could possibly have happened, he had finally come to accept that it was almost inevitable. The darkness was magnetic, and the veil here in Caverna County was too thin to hold it back.
“Only thing’s still around is the blood.”
The children already knew the significance of blood sacrifices. He’d taught in their Bible studies how the Jews were required once a year to bring a lamb to sacrifice on the altar in Jerusalem.
Becca asked if that meant somebody had sacrificed an animal to summon the efreet, and he shook his head, wishin’ he didn’t have to say it but knowin’ he had to.
“No, sugar. Didn’t nobody sacrifice an animal. To bring forth a demon like this one”—he pointed to the monster in the picture——"out of the spiritual realm and into the world, you got to sacrifice a person.”
“So if someone in Bradford’s Ridge summoned an efreet,” Becca said, her voice so soft it was barely audible, “they had to…murder somebody?”
Bishop nodded. But you couldn’t murder just anyone, he told them, had to be somebody who’d been singled out, somebody evil had put some kinda mark on. Bishop had first read about that part prob'ly ten years ago and had scoured every text since, tryin' to find out what it meant for evil to “put a mark on” somebody. He never found out. But in the past week, a possible answer had begun to form. That awful day he’d stood on the edge of the woods and first seen six demons in one place—that experience changed him. Couldn’t nobody see a demon, experience a demon, and be the same person afterwards. That kind of evil left a scar, a mark. Maybe that’s what “the mark of evil” was talkin’ about.
He cleared his throat and went on, talked about the pentagram, that whoever called forth the efreet had drawn a pentagram and summoned the efreet into it.
“That day in the woods,” Becca said, “the demons were trying to find ‘the summoner.’”
“Why wouldn’t the efreet know who summoned it?” Daniel asked.
Bishop shrugged. He had no idea. He explained that a pentagram was a hole in the barrier between the human and the spiritual world, a place where demons could crawl out. The pentagram outlined the boundaries of where the efreet, and the other demons that had come along with it, could go in the human world. The only way to escape the pentagram was to possess a person.
“So the efreet brought six other demons with it when it was summoned,” Jack said.
“Six that we know of,” Bishop said. “Ain’t no telling how many they is. That pentagram is a hole—a door. And you know what happens when you leave the doo
r open. You come home, and they’s wasps and flies and all kinda creatures you kept out with that door closed. Somebody summoned the efreet—don’t know who or how or where or why, but it musta happened. Somehow them six kids stepped inside the pentagram used to summon it, and six of the demons there escaped the pentagram by possessin’ the kids. But that don’t mean them six was the only demons there.”
“Is the efreet in one of the Bad Kids?” Jack asked.
“No, that demon’s too big and powerful to possess a child. That’d be like putting rocket fuel into a toy truck. It’d burn up. The person who summoned it—that’s who the efreet possessed. It’s called perfect possession when somebody invites a demon in, and then the evil don’t just control the person, it’s a part of ’em—milk in coffee, all stirred up together. They soul is completely gone, nothing left but a black hole where it’d been.”
“So the Bad Kids must have found the summoner,” Becca said.
“Uh-huh,” Bishop said. “And that’s who’s calling the shots now. He’s got them kids out doing awful things for a reason. I can’t imagine what that reason would be, but it’s not just random demon mischief. Whatever the efreet-possessed summoner’s got planned, it’s a powerful, terrible thing.”
He paused then. Now that he had come to it, he wasn’t sure he could do it. But he didn’t have no choice. Wasn’t like he was the one who’d picked out these children to be involved in this. There was a reason for that, too. It made no sense a’tall to him. All he did know was that they all had to play the part they was called on to play—whatever it was. Adult or child.
“And we”—he made a gesture that indicated himself and the three children—“we got to do two things.” He took a breath. “First, we got to find that efreet and—”