Creatures of Want and Ruin

by Molly Tanzer

  “Fin, you’re talking a million miles a minute.”

  “That’s because there’s no time! We have to figure out what’s going on. The demon said we can still save the island, but we have to act quickly.” Ellie didn’t look convinced, so Fin thought fast. She couldn’t compel Ellie to tell her the truth, but the demon had said that she would have an easier time seeing through lies. “Tell me something. Tell me something and don’t tell me if it’s the truth or a lie; just tell me something I wouldn’t know and let me show you what I mean.”

  Ellie looked confounded by this demand, so Fin latched on to something she’d earlier noticed.

  “Tell me how you feel about that cop—Jones.”

  Ellie went red as a boiled lobster, which Fin could have seen through without any help at all. “Never mind. Please just believe me, Ellie! I mean, why would I be bleeding from the eyes and the nose if something hadn’t happened—if something hadn’t changed?”

  Ellie looked skeptical. “But what if we go and he’s not there? What if we go and everyone’s there? We can’t take them all on, and what if they capture us, or . . .”

  “Have they traditionally gathered at your house?”

  “No, but . . .”

  Fin’s mind whirled like a pinwheel. “Why would they all be there, Ellie? There’s no reason for them to be. Plus, didn’t you say you thought your father was shot with a crossbow bolt? If that’s true, and I believe it is, likely he’s just recovering, sleeping off his long night. And if he’s not there, your mother will be, and we can get her to tell us where he is. We need more information about what’s happening, and it seems to me that the most reliable way of obtaining it is to go to your house.” She peered at Ellie. “You’re afraid,” she said, seeing it clearly.

  Ellie’s expression became mutinous. “I am not!”

  “You are.” Fin could see it as clearly as she could see the sand, the skies, the trees. “It’s all right. I’m proposing we find out if it really was your father who killed your brother. That’s terrifying.”

  She had made Ellie angry, but she was also now seeing the truth so clearly she couldn’t help but speak it. The odd thing was, she had no idea if the demon was helping her or not. She still felt strange, but the thoughts seemed to be occurring naturally from within her own mind. Then again, the demon was inside her mind, after a fashion . . .

  She couldn’t do this, not right now. She had to go with her gut.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “No, I’m sorry,” said Ellie, with a shake of her head. “You’re right. I mean, of course you’re right. I am afraid. But I also think you’re right. We have to go talk to him.” She sighed. “I just wish I knew for sure if this was going to work.”

  “It will work,” said Fin. “Trust me.”

  It wasn’t until they’d swum back to the boat and were under way that Ellie asked the exact question that Fin had been dreading answering.

  “Rocky said that when you deal with demons, you have to give something up,” she said. “There’s a cost.”

  “Sure,” Fin replied, as casually as she could.

  “I wonder what Hunter gave up,” said Ellie, and Fin relaxed for a moment, until she continued. “What did you give it?”

  “Nothing of value,” she replied. As far as she was concerned, that was the truth.

  3

  It was still early as Ellie tied up at the boatyard at the end of Ketcham Avenue, but a few of the usual suspects were already there, huddled together, no doubt grumbling about the weather, the look of the bay, the day’s tasks. She knew it was impossible she and Fin would get by them without being hassled; she did not usually arrive with anyone, much less a bedraggled but proper-looking lady with salt-crusted hair and bloodshot eyes. So she came prepared to answer their questions as blithely as possible.

  She needn’t have. They scarcely looked up as Ellie and Fin passed them by, so intent were they on their discussion, until Fred spied her and said, “It’s Ellie. Hey, Ellie! You were up on stage with him! With Hunter!”

  “So what if I was?”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About this?” He handed her a little flyer. It said:

  Tonight, Amityville Prays!

  Friend, tonight is the night we’ve been waiting for.

  We have done our work.

  If the faithful act as one, it will be in strength that we call for the change we need.

  Tonight, I entreat you: add Long Island to your prayers.

  If it was there already, pray twice.

  This community has been reeling. Pray that it shall be steadied!

  This community has suffered. Pray for peace!

  The time is now, if we all act! Our voices WILL be heard!

  Yours in fellowship,

  Rev. Joseph Hunter

  Ellie looked to Fin. The circumstantial evidence against Hunter, as Jones might say, was becoming overwhelming.

  “So?” asked Fred.

  Ellie had not prepared for this sort of inquiry—only to answer who Fin was and why she looked so disheveled. She opened and closed her mouth, unsure what to say—she believed that something would happen tonight if Hunter willed it, though of course not the direct touch of the hand of God. And yet she could not foresee it going well if she were to tell these men a tale about demons, magic, and the end of the world.

  “Where did you get this?” asked Fin.

  Eyes slid to Matthew, who stuck his chin out defiantly. “It was in my mailbox this morning. Don’t know who put it there.”

  “Tell me the truth,” said Fin.

  Ellie didn’t feel a tightening in the air, as she did whenever Hunter did what he did, but she did shiver. Fin’s voice was strangely compelling as she spoke, and Ellie wasn’t the only one who noticed. The men all stood a little straighter, most of all Matthew.

  “I went to Hunter’s revival, and put my name and address down on his list of sons of the island,” he said. “I told him myself he could count on me.”

  Ellie’s doubts about Fin’s experiment with the demon left her, replaced by a strange terror. It was obvious from Matthew’s expression that he hadn’t wanted to confess this, but had felt compelled to do so.

  “You said you hadn’t gone!” said Fred. “You said you’d changed your mind!”

  “Why would you lie about that?” asked Fin, in that same strange way.

  “Because I knew what you’d all say—what you’d all think of me, just for the crime of wanting to protect our society,” answered Matthew. “Because your wife’s mother is Irish,” he said, looking at Fred, “and you’re marrying a Polack,” he said to Ellie, “and the rest of you were so unpleasant about my interest in Hunter’s philosophy. Anyway, he said after the meeting that we must feel emboldened by our success, but still not be too eager to tell the world who we are. He said our message will inspire fear in the weak as it inspires courage in the strong.”

  “So you think I’m weak?” Fred said, understandably pretty annoyed by this. “Weak because I married my Clara?”

  “Because you do not see how corrupt our society has become,” said Matthew, his bold words—or rather, Hunter’s words—at odds with the terrified look on his face. “Because you have not just allowed—you’ve encouraged worms to gnaw at our community’s roots. You have welcomed the stranger at the expense of your neighbor.”

  “I went to elementary school with Clara,” said Fred. “You didn’t move to Amityville until you were twenty-three.”

  “It’s not just about Amityville,” said Matthew. “It’s about all Long Island! Too long have we tolerated what we ought to cut out. But no longer.”

  “Yeah? What are you gonna do about it?” asked Ephraim.

  “Pray,” said Matthew. “We’re going to pray for God’s intervention, just like it says in the pamphlet. The time has come to get everyone on our side, so that we may come together after God has answered us. Thr
ough our faith, our society will finally become free.”

  “Thank you for your honesty,” said Fin, and gave him a brilliant smile. “But we must go now—we have an appointment elsewhere. Enjoy your morning.”

  Ellie did not think that was likely.

  “Why didn’t you ask him more questions?” asked Ellie as she and Fin trotted up Ketcham Avenue.

  “If he’d known about anything more than the prayers he would have said so.” Fin glanced at her. “Still skeptical?”

  “Not after that display.” Ellie sighed. “A month ago I wouldn’t have believed in any of this.”

  “I know. But you and I both know that if he’d had a choice, that man wouldn’t have shared any of that with his friends this morning.”

  “Yeah, something tells me he’s not happy right now,” said Ellie.

  “That’s his problem,” said Fin coolly. “Nobody forced him to go to that meeting.”

  “But didn’t you say Hunter could manipulate people’s minds, as you can make people tell the truth?”

  “He can, but the demon said it was easier if people were already sympathetic,” said Fin. “Didn’t you say Jones went with you to that meeting? Is he going to be praying along with everyone tonight?”

  Ellie conceded the point. “I didn’t think about it at the time because I didn’t understand what was happening, but yes . . . Hunter mesmerized him along with the rest of the crowd. To no lasting effect, though, it seems.”

  “Exactly,” said Fin grimly. “I think you have to want to believe what he’s saying for it to last.”

  Thinking over what Fin said, Ellie felt a flutter of nervousness as she turned down the familiar street to her house. It looked as it always did, small but well cared-for. It was hard for Ellie to accept that inside, her father might be recovering from a crossbow bolt to the shoulder, but she acknowledged that her unwillingness to believe in that possibility was, in part, how things had gotten to this point in her hometown.

  Of course Ellie had known the Klan had a presence on Long Island, but it always seemed like something other families had to deal with. Perhaps if she’d responded more aggressively to the occasional eyebrow-raising things her father had said over the years she could have prevented all this—stopped him before he’d gotten to this point. But with everything else she’d had to deal with, and her desire to preserve peace in her home where she could find it, it had been easier to let it slide.

  “You okay, Ellie?” said Fin.

  Ellie had paused, weighing whether they ought to knock, or just barge right in the back door as she’d done all her life. She decided on the back—she wasn’t interested in standing on the step, waiting to see if someone would answer the door.

  “I’m all right,” she said, but when she heard how crisp she sounded she walked back her statement. “Actually I’m a wreck. This isn’t going to be pleasant. Even if he’s fine, and wasn’t part of that attack last night, he’s still a part of Hunter’s entourage, and he won’t have any kind words for me.”

  “You were on my side when I hashed that all out with Jimmy and the rest,” said Fin. “Of course I’ll be on yours now.”

  “Given everything you’re able to do, you’ll be a lot more helpful than I was,” said Ellie.

  “I really can’t explain how much it meant to me to have you there,” said Fin.

  “Well, all right,” said Ellie, her mind alighting on Gabriel in that moment. She’d given up many a chance to have him do just that . . . How different would things be between them right now if she’d afforded him the same chance she was giving Fin?

  “Are you ready?” said Ellie, unsure if she was prepared to see what she might see . . . But then again, she would never truly be ready.

  “I am,” said Fin.

  Ellie’s house was cool and dark inside, and very, very quiet. A look around the corner revealed no one in the parlor. Her stomach clenched. If her father was in bed at this hour, he was either deathly ill or grievously wounded. Even when he hadn’t been fully healed from his training injury he’d still gotten up every morning, gotten dressed, and come downstairs, if only to sit in his chair.

  She motioned to Fin to follow her, pointing upstairs. Fin nodded. She looked as uncomfortable as Ellie felt.

  They heard low voices as they approached Ellie’s parents’ bedroom.

  “You ought to let me call a doctor,” said Ellie’s mother. “You’re still bleeding.”

  “I’m fine. And I don’t want to explain how I got this.”

  “You don’t have to explain.” Ellie’s mother sighed. “At least let me go to Ellie and Gabriel’s and bring Lester back.”

  “I’ll see you in hell before I ask him for help!”

  Ellie exchanged a look with Fin, who nodded. They didn’t need a demon’s power to draw the obvious conclusion. It had indeed been him last night—what else could they be talking about? And more than that, he hadn’t told Ellie’s mother what had happened.

  Ellie stepped into the room. “That’s not the real reason you won’t let her go to Lester, now is it?”

  “Ellie!”

  They said it in unison, like people in a play. Harriet West stood up; her husband did not.

  “You didn’t tell her.” Some part of Ellie knew that this was not the most important part of the conversation they needed to have, but at the same time it was so outrageous she couldn’t let it slide even for a moment. “She doesn’t know, does she?”

  “Know what?” asked Harriet, looking from her daughter to her husband. She said it again, more urgently this time. “Know what?”

  “Why are you in bed, Pop?” asked Ellie. “What’s wrong?” She strode over and pulled the bedsheet away from his shoulder. His pajamas were open to the navel, and she saw the binding for a compress right where SJ’s bolt had struck the man who’d killed Lester. “Now how on earth did this happen? Did he tell you that, Ma?”

  “He said he was walking home last night from his meeting, and a”—Ellie’s mother used a hateful word that Ellie had never heard spoken in their house before, and had never expected to, certainly not from her mother’s lips—“shot him in the back, right out of the blue. Can you imagine that? What this town is coming to, I just don’t know.”

  “That’s not true.” That was Fin, who had sidled in and was standing with her back to the Wests’ wardrobe. “Tell her the truth, Mr. West. Tell us all.”

  Ellie shivered, and not just because of the tone of Fin’s words.

  Her father’s face was still a mask, but now it was a rictus of fury. He was clearly struggling against Fin’s order, but he could not resist it in the end. “The truth is, I was shot while my associates and I attacked a degenerate—a moonshiner—at her home.”

  “Robert!” cried Harriet, and sat back down on the edge of the bed, her hands pressed to her mouth in horror. “Why?”

  Ellie’s father looked horrified too, though for different reasons.

  “And why won’t you be asking Lester for help?” Ellie knew this was cruel to both of them, but she couldn’t—no, didn’t want to—stop herself. She wanted to hear him say it.

  “Lester is dead,” said her father. “I killed him with my own hands.”

  This time, Ellie’s mother could not even say her husband’s name.

  “It was an accident,” he added. “I meant to kill . . . someone else. I had to, as one of the generals; I was the only one who hadn’t helped in our grand plan to establish the vessel’s nodes all over Amityville . . . But Lester knocked him out of the way.”

  “Nodes? Vessel?” Ellie pressed him as her mother stared on in mute horror. “What do you mean?”

  Her father sat up straighter in bed. “The vessel is the physical manifestation of the god’s holy energy that will cleanse this land. It is like a fungus; its roots reach beneath the earth, bubbling up here and there, but its reach is not infinite. It requires help to put down larger nodes from which the smaller tendrils can emerge and spread—help in the form of blood sacrifi
ce.”

  Ellie wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting to hear, but it wasn’t this. She had no idea what to say.

  “Excuse me,” Fin said as Ellie mulled over all of this. “What god is this exactly?”

  “If the God we were taught about in church exists, he has abandoned us,” said her father. “Just look at what he has allowed to happen to his world!”

  “So,” said Fin, “you and your associates, you think you’re worshiping some sort of god that has commanded you to kill people . . . and it’s supposed to help change this island for the better.” Ellie appreciated her friend’s skepticism; it helped her feel like she wasn’t completely insane.

  “Worship is for the weak,” answered her father. “Men of vision, men of integrity—we act.”

  “So if Lester became a node, how many others have already become . . .” She couldn’t quite say it, thinking of what she’d seen.

  “He was the sixth. There will be a seventh, tonight. Hunter will do it—the final feeding that will make the vessel strong enough to grant us our desires at last.”

  Hunter. It was actually a relief to hear the man’s name mentioned. Ellie realized in that moment how little she’d trusted herself. Her experiences, being unique—at least as far as she knew—had seemed insignificant and untrustworthy. A clearer picture had begun to emerge over the past day and a half, but only now did she feel that she ought to have trusted herself.

  But enough was enough. “So you’re telling us that a god has asked you, Hunter, and some friends of yours to sacrifice human beings to help out some sort of fungus that will cleanse Long Island of undesirable elements.” Her father nodded yes; Fin’s demon had been right. He’d been duped. The big question now was, did Hunter believe what he’d told her father, or did he know the truth? “How will this god do it?”

  “It is not for weak men to know,” he said.