by Ninie Hammon
“Second dibs,” Bishop said. “Chesterton done asked.”
Watson swore creatively and headed off toward the group of soldiers by the fire, hoping Carter had saved a lone cigarette they could barter over. Several of the soldiers were throwing the tins of peanut butter out of their K-Rations into the blaze, where they’d heat up and then explode, creating “peanut butter ambushes.”
Even from here, Bishop could see Pearson’s demon flexing the pincers on its multiple legs. Bishop dropped his gaze before it saw him looking, but it knew Bishop could see. Demons could always pick out those who had the knowing—Grampa Rufus had told him that. The scraps of a smile lit Bishop’s face at the thought of the old man.
As soon as his grandfather realized Bishop knew, he’d taught the boy everything he could about the battle of good versus evil going on in the world—and how his little corner of it, Caverna County, Kentucky, was a dangerous place for those “with the sight.” Because the veil between the spiritual world and the world of humans was thin there, Bishop had to grow up special strong, his grandfather’d told him, to stand up under it.
The old man’s voice spoke in Bishop’s head now, the way it had done just about every day since they put him in the ground when Bishop was twelve years old.
“Don’t you never get up in the morning ’thout bein’ grateful with your first breath that God give you life, and don’t you never go to bed at night ’thout thanking God he let you live another day. And every minute between them two thankfuls, you let God love you. Ain’t near as hard to love God as it is to let God love you.”
Bishop had grown up strong, but his strength only helped him stand up under the terror of the knowing—not escape the evil it revealed to him. And here, in war, the evil was all around him. A limitless capacity for malice, cruelty and hatred made the possessed soldiers more dangerous than Charlie out there in the trees. The demons saw Bishop, too, of course—ridiculed and taunted him. It took all his strength sometimes not to turn tail and run from them.
Today was Christmas Day, at least it was out there in the wide world where normal people lead lives of blissful ignorance, celebrating an event they only dimly understood. Here in the jungle, the only reminder of the holiday was turkey in their K-Rations instead of Spam. Well, that and the Jingle Bell Boy.
They were camped next to a village called Ho Sung—a ratty village even by Vietnamese standards with only about a dozen villagers living in ramshackle huts, quietly starving to death. Seated by the doorway of the hut nearest their camp was a retarded boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen, who had a cleft palate and one deformed hand. The boy rocked back and forth there all day, quietly singing melody-less songs in Vietnamese. But at first light on Christmas Eve, he began to sing Jingle Bells. Not quietly, but at the top of his lungs. He must have heard it from one of the soldiers in the camp—that was all they could figure. The melody, such as it was, drifted in and out—sometimes it was merely a chant. But the words—even with the boy’s harelip—were easily understandable.
The first couple of times the boy sang it, the soldiers grinned at him. But after hearing the song over and over, non-stop, all day long, the Americans were ready to throttle him. The soldiers tried everything to get him to stop singing—threatened, begged, bribed him with food. Nothing worked.
The next morning, when the unit was ordered to move out, he was still singing and the soldiers couldn’t get their gear packed fast enough.
The sergeant sent a three-man team out in front as scouts and designated another three-man team as a rear guard, to hang back behind the rest of the unit and keep their flank secure. Those three soldiers were Bishop, Pearson and a mean little Texan named Cassidy.
Later, when Bishop tried to remember what happened only minutes after the departure of the main unit, he couldn’t seem to piece the exact sequence together. Maybe that was because of his head injury. It might also have been the Good Lord sparing him the details.
What he could recall was bad enough.
The three soldiers were on the edge of the village, preparing to move out. Bishop was scanning the tree line, his eyes darting back and forth in the search pattern of a combat veteran. The demon on Pearson’s shoulders was chattering and taunting, and the lights of invisible demons surrounding Cassidy were blinking on and off as they whispered lies into his ears.
Suddenly, Pearson picked up a discarded gasoline can, emptied the last of its contents over the head of the Jingle Bell Boy and tossed it aside. Bishop saw what was coming and rushed at Pearson to knock the cigarette lighter out of his hand. But Cassidy turned and jammed his rifle butt into Bishop’s belly two steps before he reached Pearson and Bishop collapsed airless on the ground.
The shrieking was a sound unlike any Bishop had ever heard. Not just the cries of the boy, but the delighted squalling of the demon, yipping and screeching like an excited baboon. The boy lurched to his feet, the whole top portion of his body in flames. He cavorted in a horror dance of agony, then fell to the ground wailing. His cries only lasted a few moments, then he was silent.
The stink of burning flesh rose up in noxious fumes that blurred Bishop’s vision. He sucked in a great lungful of the stink when he gasped in the air that had been knocked out of him. Not yet able to stand, he tried to crawl to the burning figure, now lying still in the dirt with a handful of other villagers standing in silent horror around him.
Pearson stepped in front of Bishop and blocked his path.
“Too late now,” he said. “Our little songbird’s a cooked goose.”
A villager appeared with a blanket and began to beat out the flames. Bishop staggered to his feet, shock and outrage dark on his face, but Pearson spoke before Bishop had a chance to say anything.
“Your word against ours, Washington. Two of us, one of you.” He gestured toward the villagers. “What the maggots say don’t count.”
The demon on his shoulder was squealing in raucous delight, laughing in a high-pitched maniacal voice, hopping up and down. Pearson turned as if to leave. Instead, he reached out with the speed of a striking cobra and grabbed the arm of a white-haired old woman with no teeth.
“It’s Christmas morning and I got me one more present to open,” he cried. “Gonna fry me another maggot.”
When he began to drag her toward the discarded gasoline can, the woman figured out what he intended to do and tried frantically to escape, cried and begged, dug her heels into the dirt and struggled desperately to break free. But Pearson’s grip was like iron. The other villagers remained as motionless as statues.
“Let her go,” Bishop said, finally able to speak, but neither soldier even looked at him. Cassidy reached down for the gasoline can.
“Got any hotdogs, Preach?” he said over his shoulder. “We could pretend it’s the Forth of July instead of Christmas.”
“Stop!”
Bishop’s voice boomed like a clap of thunder. There was so much power in the word it sounded like the voice of God himself and both soldiers turned to look.
“Let. Her. Go.” Bishop said each word slowly, separately.
Pearson sneered. “You ain’t gonna shoot me.” He reached out and took the can of gasoline Cassidy’d picked up off the ground.
“You need to believe what I’m sayin’ now.” Bishop spoke with quiet, deliberate authority. “You try to pour gas on that old woman, I will shoot you soon as I would a gook.”
Pearson paused for a moment, uncertain. Then he lifted the can. Bishop fired. The round slammed into Pearson’s shoulder, knocking him sideways. He dropped the can and his hold on the woman and collapsed in a screaming heap on the ground. The woman lurched out of grabbing range and scurried away. She and the other villagers vanished in an instant into the nearby jungle.
Pearson rolled over on his back, blood streaming down his shirt, and yelled at Cassidy.
“Kill him! Kill that nigger.”
In something like slow motion, Bishop watched Cassidy turn toward him, lifting his rifle, saw the lights aroun
d him flickering so violently they lit up a shape, the form of a snake wrapped around his neck, its forked tongue flicking in and out of its mouth as it whispered in Cassidy’s ear. Bishop swung his own rifle toward Cassidy, saw the demon lights surge so bright the brilliance almost blinded him.
Bishop squeezed the trigger. The round hit Cassidy square in the chest and ripped out his heart a fraction of a second before he could fire. He died instantly. But he fired, anyway. A death reflex—or some other force—pulled the trigger on Cassidy’s rifle and Bishop’s world went instantly black.
*****
Theresa Washington paused to take a sip from her cup of coffee and wrinkled her nose. It had grown cold in her hand as she’d recounted Bishop’s story to Daniel, Jack and Crock, who sat spellbound around her kitchen table, their own coffee cold in their cups.
“The good Lord was lookin’ after my Bishop that day,” she said. “The bullet that bad man shot only clipped the side of Bishop’s helmet. Knocked him senseless for a bit, but if it’d been a quarter inch lower …” She paused. “By the time Bishop come to in the field hospital, Pearson’d done told the tale, some elaborate story about the Cong torturing that poor boy and how Cassidy got killed by ‘friendly fire’ when they tried to save the boy.”
“But didn’t the villagers say—?” Daniel began.
“I ’spect didn’t nobody ever ask the villagers nothin'. ’Sides, they’d done run off before the shootin’ part started. You got to remember—they was a war goin’ on and folks get killed in wars. That’s just the way of it. Wasn’t no point in Bishop trying to set it straight, neither. He didn’t have no proof.”
Pearson and his demon caught a freedom bird home to a stateside hospital, she said, but Bishop hadn't been injured severely enough to be sent home. Instead, he returned to his unit to complete his tour of duty.
“He told me he wasn’t the same after that, though. It started then, the change I seen in him when he come home. He said he kept smellin’ that stench, day and night for weeks. No matter what he done, he couldn’t get the stink of the Jingle Bell Boy’s burning flesh out of his nostrils.” Theresa paused and for a moment was lost in thought, her eyes fixed on nothing at all in a thousand-yard stare. Then her focus shifted back to the men seated at her table.
“I don’t know…maybe…” she began, “maybe if he hadn’t gone to Saigon right before they shipped him home, he mighta been alright eventually, might have been able to put it all behind him. After that time, though—just a single afternoon—Bishop wasn’t never gonna be alright again. ’Stead of ‘puttin’ it all behind him,’ he got hisself a tattoo so he wouldn’t never forget it.
“1John 1:6,” Daniel said, as if he’d only remembered it as he spoke the words.
Theresa nodded. “He put it on the top of his hand right in the center where he’d see it, where he’d have to look at it every day.”
“I looked at that same spot on the top of my hand every day, too,” Crock said, “but all I ever saw there were bruises. That was where the nuns at St. Dominic Elementary whacked us with a ruler for various crimes against humanity, including, but not limited to, failure to memorize our scripture verses. I probably got knuckle-whacked over that one—1John 1:6. What does it say?”
“He who is in me is greater than he who is in the world,” she said.
No one spoke after that. The three men looked at Theresa but waited in silence until she was ready to continue the story. When she began speaking again, the words she dropped into the puddle of stillness sent ripples out to lap at the feet of everyone seated at the table.
“The one that killed the Jingle Bell Boy—that wasn’t the worst demon Bishop seen when he was in that war. Right before he shipped out, he went into Saigon to see could he find some pretty jade earrings to bring home to me. He was standing on a curb about to cross the street when the awfulest voice he ever heard called his name. ”
Theresa mindlessly rubbed her upper arms with both hands, like she’d suddenly grown deathly cold.
“The voice come from the backseat of the car that was right next to him waiting for the light to change. Bishop leaned down and looked in the open window of that car and…”
She stopped again.
“You got to understand, Bishop come home different. He wasn’t never again the laughing boy I fell in love with. He was serious after that, had a haunted look that never left him night or day, and he started studyin’ demons, tryin’ to understand ’em. It was that meeting there on the street—in half a minute—that done it. The filth and degradation of pure evil reached out and touched Bishop Washington that day, and wasn’t nothing the same in his life ever again.”
An Asian man was seated in the back of the car, an expensive black sedan shined up bright as a new penny, she said. Only Bishop didn’t see the shine. What he saw was green slime, stinking, foul goo completely covering the vehicle and oozing in rotting clumps off the bumpers onto the street. The slime come from the back seat of the car—from what was in the back seat.
“And then sudden as the slime was there, it was gone. The man in the car was looking up at Bishop and there was this glow around him, like the red around Chapman Whitworth. Only this was green, a cancerous glow that Bishop knowed was that slime he’d seen on the outside of the car being inside the man. Wasn’t no demon perched on his shoulder. It was a demon all through him, the way sugar dissolves in coffee, a perfect possession. That man had invited the demon to take over his life, welcomed it, and the man’s soul was completely gone, nothing left but a black hole where it’d been.”
The creature had let Bishop see its real form for a moment, then spoke to him out the car window in a jagged voice that tore open every ear that heard it.
“You see me, don’t you, little black monkey,” the voice said. “Hear me, monkey. Remember my words and remember this face. Through this pathetic human being, I will do a great and mighty work.”
The man’s eyes were dead, black marbles, holes in the universe that Bishop could look through and see down into the depths of hell itself. Then the man reached out the car window and took hold of Bishop’s hand.
“Fire and ice was how Bishop described it—the frigid grip of death and the scorching flame of evil. I used to catch Bishop a’lookin' at that hand sometimes when I’d come on him sudden, rubbin’ it like maybe he could still feel the heat and cold.”
Theresa’s mind filled with the image of the big man, standing stock still in a tobacco patch or in church, turning his hand over slowly and examining it as if there ought to be some mark, some scar there.
“But that man’s touch didn’t last even a second! He dropped Bishop’s hand and fell back like he’d been shocked. That thing didn’t have no power over the light that was in my man! Then the traffic signal changed and the car drove away.”
“Who was the man?” Jack asked, and she could tell he absolutely, positively did not want to know. She didn’t want to tell him, either.
“It was years and years later ’fore we found out. Bishop come home one day and wasn’t no expression at all on his face when he dropped a Newsweek Magazine on the kitchen table. The picture on the front of it—that was the man in the car in Saigon. Bishop didn’t have to tell me. I knew.”
She drew in a deep, shuddery breath. “The evil that touched Bishop that day and then traveled on, that demon had took over the body and soul of a man named Pol Pot.”
Daniel gasped and the blood drained out of his face so abruptly Theresa thought he might pass out.
“I’ve been there,” Crock said, and there was no laughter or good humor in his voice. “I’ve seen the Killing Fields Memorials. My brother served in the Vietnam war and his unit fought in Cambodia—though nobody ever admitted it. We went there, the two of us, to the monument in Choeung Ek, the site of a Buddhist memorial to the victims.”
“Three million people slaughtered.” Daniel said, his voice tight. “We studied it in seminary. All the Buddhist monks, there’d been sixty thousand of them. A
fter Pol Pot, there were only eight hundred left. The Moslem Cham--there were twenty thousand of them and only four people survived.”
“The memorial’s built around mass graves,” Crock said. “The victims had to dig their own graves and they were weak so the holes were shallow. After heavy rains, things…surface. We were walking on a path and I saw what I thought were little white rocks, but the guide said they were teeth. And a bigger white rock…he said it was a skull, a child’s skull.”
Silence filled the room when the magnitude of it struck them all momentarily mute.
“See, that’s the thing,” Theresa said, her voice urgent. “When a demon gets control of somebody who’s got power, they ain’t no end to the evil it can do. No end a’tall.” She paused to take a deep breath and when she spoke again her voice was barely a whisper. “That’s why we got to stop this ’un…while we still can."
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Author Ninie Hammon
talks briefly about BLACK SUNSHINE
(Click here.)
After two decades of shame that drove him into a whiskey bottle and left him a homeless, under-a-bridge drunk, Will Gribbins has come home to face his past.
He and his best friend were the only two survivors of the 1980 explosion that killed 27 Eastern Kentucky miners in the Harlan #7 Coal Mine and shattered countless other lives in the close-knit little community of Aintree Hollow. But the two young men escaped the mine that day with more than just their lives. Each carried the burden of a terrible secret about another tragedy that occurred in the mine after the explosion, a secret that destroys the next two decades of Will’s life.