“Baby. . .”
He laid a hand on the doorknob. “Don’t follow me. You follow me, I
ain’t responsible for what I do.”
The door slammed shut behind him.
Billie remained in the living room, supported by a pair of knees that wobbled and shook, her unblinking eyes staring at the space Otis’s body had occupied only seconds before. Her stomach spasmed, pummeled by the fist of an enemy she couldn’t touch or fight. She stayed there in the dead silence for quite some time as the shadows on the carpet grew longer and the lake of lemonade and shards from a glass she didn’t remember smashing dried to a sticky mess on the kitchen floor.
He’d left. For real. She could smell this reality, this finality, as clearly as her own perfume. Her teeth clenched. So the bitch wanted to talk about demons? Fine. Billie had a demon for that skinny ass, yes she did.
She grabbed her keys and got in the car.
OTIS GOT NELL’S ANSWERING MACHINE. “Nell, this Otis. We got to talk, I’ve had enough of this mess. I’ll see you in a little bit.” He flipped the phone shut and threw it on the seat.
The Dodge pickup fishtailed at the end of Jones Chapel Road and he almost lost it before swinging out onto North Carolina Route 26 and heading north. The sun, lower in the sky than it needed to be this time of day in September, made the houses and barns either too bright or too dark, nothing in between. Long shadows crossed the fields and reached for the west side of 26 like bony fingers fixing to snatch his truck from the road. Otis saw these fingers, and disturbed as he was, he stayed right of center.
Lord, he had tried to avoid this. Nell said cleanse his house of any objects that might attract demons, and he did that. Nell said anoint and claim his property for the Lord, and he did that, too. Bought the anointing oil from her directly, smeared it all over every window in the house, every doorframe. When that didn’t work, he grabbed a hold of Billie and anointed her, all over her face and body, and holy mackerel, how that demon had howled! It didn’t like the oil. It screeched as he applied it, cursed him and scratched him, drew his blood. When he got Billie’s body good and anointed the oil made her too slippery to hold and she got loose. When he finally got her again, he had to lock her in the hall closet until the demon went back to sleep, which took the better part of a day. And in the end, that demon didn’t go anywhere. Otis had had enough.
The long stretch of country broke into a familiar set of buildings up ahead on the right. Otis passed his church and the little convenience store next door where he liked to buy his cigarettes. It occurred to him then that he’d left them back at the house, and that right now he needed to smoke. He pulled to a stop a few feet short of the solitary gas pump standing like a statue in the middle of the lot. He killed the ignition and put his hand on the door handle, but a sign in the convenience store window stopped him cold: CLOSED. Which was funny, because he’d been coming here for years, and he knew this place wasn’t open this time of day. Knew it like the back of his own hand, yes he did. So why had he stopped?
Suddenly, he didn’t need to smoke anymore.
And right then he understood: he hadn’t stopped at the convenience store, he’d stopped at the church, because right now God wanted him to pray. Yes he did.
Nell could wait.
His hand shook as he opened the driver’s door and got out, propelled now by a thirst so powerful he couldn’t even stop to flip the lock. A breeze drifting down 26 raised a puff of dust and dead leaves as it reached through every little hole in his shirt and caressed his chest with its cool fingertips as he marched across the parking lot on legs that had gone rubbery in the presence of a force beyond his comprehension. He remembered then that he’d neglected to pack a jacket, but that didn’t matter. The Holy Spirit would warm him. Yes it would.
The church was deserted, but unlocked. Dying sunlight cast shadows on the aisle that ran between two rows of unfinished wood pews as he pushed through the solid pine door. The solid thump of the door closing behind him echoed off the cinderblock walls and vanished into the rafters, leaving him alone with the remains of Saturday evening decaying in the window glass. He shuffled over to his customary seat in the front and sat down.
He prayed and waited for the Holy Spirit to fill him with divine comfort. He prayed for Billie, for Nell, and for himself. He prayed as the sun fled from the evening sky to be replaced by a night so profound that the windows of his church had gone completely black. And long after logic told him the Holy Spirit wasn’t going to come, he continued praying, his hands folded and his eyes shuttered against the darkness and the creeping idea that maybe it wasn’t God who had stopped him here tonight.
He prayed, and he waited.
“HOW MUCH I OWE YOU?” Timothy asked.
Nell, cleaning herself off, frowned but didn’t turn around. “Don’t owe me nothing,” she said. “I ain’t a prostitute.”
“I know, I was just asking . . .”
“Whatever you want to donate, then. Let’s leave it at that.” She pitched the wad of tissues in the trash can and hunted around in the twisted bedclothes for her drawers. She found them and slipped them back on. “Think you gonna be okay now?”
“Don’t know. Think so.” The drawn blinds let in just enough light to make his naked body glimmer under the layer of sweat covering his skin. He was younger than the other men Nell helped out, and his shoulders were wide and free of the pinched look that eventually overcame his kind. “Why, you got to be somewhere or something?”
“Got things to do.” She swung her legs off the bed. Her dress was around here someplace, and she’d put it on if she could find it. At forty-two, she didn’t defy gravity like twenty years ago, but parading around half naked would only make Timothy want an encore. “And so do you. Just remember what I told you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t care how nice she is, you keep your hands off her till that demon gone. You feel the weakness coming over you, you come see me. Devil gets men through they pants. You remember that when you get home. I don’t care what color nightie she put on.”
“Uh-huh,” he repeated.
“You anoint her with oil, and you claim your house for the Lord. Get rid of the drink, if you got any. Got any holy oil?”
“Naw.”
She tracked down her dress and wiggled back into it. “I got some made up, you need any. Twenty-five a gallon.”
“How much you reckon I need?”
“If I was you, I’d get at least four. You gonna spill some when you try to anoint her, or if she attacks you while you’re claiming your house. Don’t want to run out.” She fixed her zipper and turned around to face him. An uncomfortable shadow had settled over his face, and she could see him doing the math in his head. She wouldn’t be getting much of a donation from this one. “Now ain’t the time to be tight,” she said.
“I know that.” He rose and began dressing. “But I don’t get paid till
Friday. Can I put something on it now, maybe get you the rest later?”
Nell turned and padded into the kitchen so he wouldn’t see her rolling her eyes. His immortal soul was in danger, and he wanted to put it on layaway. Lord, have mercy. “I’ll give you a pint now, can’t spare no more than that. Give you the rest Friday, when you bring me a hundred dollars.”
She could hear him muttering something back there in the bedroom, but she let it go. She opened her cupboard and pulled out a small plastic bottle full of vegetable oil and said a quick prayer over it. Now it was holy. She handed it to him when he came out. “Don’t go slinging it all over, now.”
He studied the bottle carefully, as if trying to see God’s healing power floating somewhere inside, then shrugged and pulled a ten out of his wallet. “Donation for this evening,” he said. “I come see you again Friday night.” He made his way through to the front door. The second it closed behind him, Nell muttered a curse and threw the crumpled bill on the counter next to her sugar bowl. Then she checked her answering machine.
And then there was Otis. Nell replayed his message several times, her stomach turning at the stress in his voice and the mindless panic sharpening the edges of his words. She tried calling him back, but his phone wouldn’t pick up. After seven tries, she hung up and stared at the telephone in the silence of her kitchen, biting her lower lip and doing her best to keep her breathing deep and even. She never should have sent him back last time. Never. Otis had no more business playing this game than a five-year-old had playing in the Super Bowl.
She left the answering machine and stepped out on the porch to see if some fresh air would clear the tightness in her throat that swallowing didn’t seem to help. Wrapping her arms around her thin shoulders against a chill she hadn’t expected, she stared down the dirt road that led through the woods from her property as the wind blew. It was getting dark. Nell, shaking like the partially denuded trees, held herself even tighter. It was getting cold, too, powerful cold. The temperature had dropped with the coming evening, but it still shouldn’t have been like this yet, not in September with summer still back there at the bar finishing its last drink. Things were changing. People talked about global warming and record highs and lows, but she knew better. She couldn’t have gone on the news with it, but she knew better.
Dead leaves whispered at her to get in her car and go, but she remained on her porch. She couldn’t go anywhere. Not until Otis got here and they had a chance to decide what to do about Billie and that thing inside her. But as she stood watching the day flicker and die, Nell reflected with a shiver that the time for real action may have already passed. Anointing and praying didn’t seem to work. Not with this one.
She turned and went back inside.
BILLIE HAD NEVER BEEN up around Nell’s house, but once upon a time, before Otis’s sanity deteriorated, someone must have told her where it was. Oh, yeah, that whore lives up off 26 on a dir t road about a mile past the old Shell station on the right. She couldn’t remember who or when, but someone must have told her where to go.
The sun had nearly finished its descent by the time Billie’s old Monte Carlo carried her up a short dirt road and deposited her in front of a pre-World War Two frame house nestled back from the highway. She cut the ignition and stared at the single light burning in one of the front windows. How many times had her own husband pulled his truck into this very spot? How many times had he left another piece of himself in that filthy little house where the whore turned her tricks day after day?
Billie gripped the steering wheel tightly enough to crush stone. Another question: what was she going to do now that she was here?
Easy, Billie thought, we’re gonna talk. That was all, just a little talk. Shame the whore, give her a piece of the truth. The truth that she was a nasty old whore as hated in the community as a rattlesnake under the porch, common vermin, a rat, a cockroach.
A worm.
Billie breathed in through her nose. Yes, a worm. There you go. Hateful little thing that went and dug itself into a perfectly good apple and made it all rotten. In her mind’s eye, Billie saw the worm wriggling and feeding on the flesh of the apple as if it were something she had witnessed personally; for a moment, the image was so clear that she had to shake her head to get rid of it. Her eyes homed in again on the light in Nell’s front window.
Time to have a little talk with the worm. Billie opened her door and got out.
OTIS WAS HERE.
Hearing the tires grinding their way across her leaf blown yard, Nell finished up on the toilet and hurried to the front door. She threw it open and stopped cold.
“There you are, you dirty bitch! I got a bone to pick with you!”
Lord, that was Billie herself out on Nell’s porch. Fatter than a prizewinning pumpkin, she stood barely three feet away with her fists holstered on her broad hips and her eyes burning with anger as black as her skin. She breathed through her nose, like a bull. For a moment, Nell’s heart quit beating.
“Billie. How you doing tonight?”
“Don’t how-you-doing me, you filthy slut!” Billie’s eyes were wicked slits. “Open the door! You and me gonna talk!”
Nell swallowed. The bottom disappeared from her stomach and her insides plummeted into a black hole in the center of her body. Billie didn’t see the demon, probably didn’t feel it either, but Nell sure did. Billie had the demon all curled up inside of her like. . .
Like a worm in an apple.
A worm in an apple. Asleep for the moment but still there, like a bull rattler coiled under the Christmas decorations in the attic, waiting for a hand to reach for the holly wreath above its diamond-shaped head.
“What’s the matter, bitch?”
Nell blinked. Get her inside, she thought. Anoint her with oil and cast out the demon. Take it by surprise.
Nell bit her lip. Billie wouldn’t sit still for anointing, but still, she had to try. If God had placed this victim on her porch, she had to believe He had a reason. She breathed in deeply and reached for the screen door handle. “Come on in.”
Billie wasn’t quite fat enough to have to turn sideways, but she did anyway, as if unsure of her own width. Her eyes cut hot trails over Nell’s face as they swung across her living room with a look of disgusted appraisal. Nell sent up a silent prayer.
“Billie.”
Billie turned around. “What business you got telling my man I got a demon in me?”
She stood a few feet away, just inside the doorway, blocking Nell’s only pathway to the kitchen and the powerful weapons stored there. Nell cleared her throat. “Oh, I don’t know where he got that idea. I just kind of went along with it, you know. Look, why don’t you have a seat on the sofa and let me get you a glass of water?”
For a moment, Nell thought Billie wasn’t going to go for it, that she could read Nell’s mind, but finally she shrugged. “Just hurry it up. I ain’t got all night.”
Billie waddled towards the sofa. Quelling the urge to run to the cupboard as fast as her legs would carry her, Nell walked calmly into the kitchen with her heart fit to jump out and do the Funky Chicken. She reached for the door to the cupboard out of which she had taken Timothy’s blessed oil a bare half hour before. Then she saw an empty glass in the sink and stopped.
If she was trying to cast out a demon, wouldn’t it be a good idea to use some blessed water, too? And wouldn’t it be better if Billie actually ingested the water rather than having it dumped on her head, burn that nasty thing from the inside out? Yes it would. Of course, if Nell came out with a glass of water in one hand and a bottle of holy oil in the other, Billie would want to know about the bottle. This would have to be a two-part attack.
Nell added some ice cubes to the glass and ran the faucet until the water covered them all just a half inch below the rim.
“Don’t take your sweet time, now,” Billie called from the living room.
Nell, her back to the living room, set the glass beside the sink and prayed. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, bless this water with Your everlasting might. Fill this water with Your healing power. I ask You this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
She opened her eyes and looked down at the water. With the exception of condensation forming on the glass, it looked the same as it had seconds before. But it wasn’t. Now all she had to do was get Billie to drink it.
Nell padded out into the living room. She set the glass in front of Billie, slipping a coaster under it with her left hand out of habit. “There you go.” She turned and darted back towards the kitchen.
/> “Where you going now?”
“It’s time for my cranberry juice. Keep my kidney stones from coming back.”.
“Hurry your ass up, girl! Damn!”
Drink it! Nell’s mind screamed. She was in the kitchen now, on her way across the linoleum, the cupboard and its store of weapons locked in her vision. Her ears pricked for the shriek of a burning demon, but she didn’t wait around for it. She threw open the cupboard door and grabbed the biggest bottle of oil she had, fresh oil, blessed just this morning. She whirled around.
Billie was standing right behind her.
Nell let out a squeak and dropped the plastic bottle. It bounced off the floor at her feet and skittered across the tiles, coming to rest beneath the sink cabinets. She looked up at Billie, eyes wide and panicked.
Billie’s brow furrowed. “What you need that for?”
Nell tried to chuckle. “Oh, I was going to start heating it up for dinner, you know, for when you leave. Gonna fry me some potatoes.”
“I thought you was getting cranberry juice.” Billie’s frown deepened. “What you got going on in here?”
Oh, shit.
Nell saw it before Billie did, but of course, Billie probably never saw it. The demon inside her uncoiled from its sleep and rose up in the infected space behind her face while her body became a sponge that drained the light from air itself. Her pupils dilated to an impossible width, making the whites of her eyes disappear.
Nell stared into pools of obsidian and found herself alone with the demon. It stared at Nell with no expression at all, like the inmates in the reptile
cages at the Asheboro zoo. Nell’s jaw trembled. “Billie? That you?” The mouth opened and the tongue wiggled. It didn’t answer.
Nell’s legs threatened to buckle beneath the crushing load of fear that had suddenly settled upon her body. For all her good work, she had never actually seen a demon in the flesh, much like a doctor had never seen with his bare eyes the little creepy-crawlies that caused the influenza. But that didn’t matter now, because God was with her. He had chosen Nell to do His work, as He had chosen her in the past. He had sent this demon her way because He knew Nell loved Jesus and Nell could beat this thing. Yes she could.
MIdnight Diner 1: Jesus vs. Cthulhu Page 6