by Harvey Click
“And you made me swear an oath to defeat the Lost Society,” Amy said. “Give me a fucking break. You want me to find the Holy Grail while I’m at it?”
“They probably killed your brother. Maybe that doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“I don’t know if he’s dead or not, I just know he doesn’t answer his phone. And now I don’t even know that, since you stole my phone. I just want to go back home, but you stole my car too, not to mention my fucking money.”
“You wouldn’t last a week if you went home,” Neoma said. “By now the crying man has told Sandoval that you witnessed a sacrifice. Do you really think he’d let you live?”
“What about Shane? Why doesn’t he have to hide somewhere? The crying man probably saw him too, though I guess he sneaked up from behind.”
“Shane was wearing a mask, remember? We’ve trained Shane, so he knows how to be careful. That’s why you need to be training right now, instead of sitting here flapping your jaws.”
“I’d rather go home and take my chances.”
“They have your hair, Mary, so without my protection they’d be able to find you in Columbus or Istanbul. What are you going to do, wear incense ointment twenty-four seven? You might be okay for a day or two, then one night you’d come home and find them waiting for you in your bedroom. They probably wouldn’t kill you right away, they’d probably take you to one of their headquarters to torture you and see what you know about us. They wouldn’t have to take you very far—I happen to know they have a headquarters in Cincinnati, and by now they may even have one in Columbus.”
“Now wait a damn minute. You said you stole my car so Sandoval would think I was carjacked and stop looking for me. I mean, if your scheme’s not going to do that, then just give me my fucking car back!”
“Yes, that’s why I ‘stole’ your car, as you put it, but then what happens to the news story if you suddenly show up in Columbus? You’d be really big news then.”
“Okay, I get it. So your carjacking scheme was intended to trap me here.”
“Yeah, right, like I really want you here. A crybaby is the last thing I need right now. Anyway, let’s can this shit before we end up taking it outside again.”
“If Sandoval’s so damn clever, he’s not going to buy your stupid carjacking stunt anyway.”
“Maybe not, but I think he will because he wants to believe it. If he believes you’re still at large he’ll have no option but to inform his superiors that you witnessed his sacrifice, and they’ll see it as a major blunder on his part. But if he believes you’re safely out of the equation, he can keep his mouth shut and no one will be the wiser.”
“Why do you hate them so much anyway?” Amy asked.
“They murdered my wife. You’re wasting our time with all this chatter. It’s almost 9:30, and that’s when I told Leo to meet you for a fencing lesson. You’ll find him where you found him yesterday, and if you keep chattering like this while you’re fencing he’ll probably shove his foil right down your throat.”
This time Amy looked at her watch before they started fencing and again when they stopped: they fought ferociously without pause for exactly twenty-nine minutes. Again she was panting hard and drenched with sweat as she stripped off her gear, and again Leo appeared to be breathing normally.
“Tomorrow Milady wants me to introduce you to sabers,” he said. “They can be dangerous, my dear, but I’ll go easy with you.”
“I don’t think you know how to go easy,” she said.
Leo smiled and gave her a slight bow that made him look as if he belonged in the eighteenth century instead of the twenty-first. “With foils, there’s no need to go easy with you,” he said. “Your skill is quite remarkable.”
The compliment left her wordless for a moment, but at last she murmured, “Thank you.”
“The practice sabers will be blunted, but they’re made of steel and can easily break bones,” he said.
“What’s the point of all this swordplay?” Amy asked. “Everybody here seems to have a gun.”
“Guns, yes, they can kill people quickly and from an impressive distance too,” Leo said with a look of disdain. “But guns cannot kill demons. For killing demons one needs a sword, and a special sword at that, a sword that has been properly sanctified over sacred incense. And let’s not forget that at close quarters a sword can dispatch a person quite neatly as well.”
“Is anyone thirsty?” someone called quietly.
Amy turned to see John standing in the shade of a tree, and she wondered if he had been standing there watching the entire bout. He had an ice chest beside him and was holding out two cans of Coke.
“Yes, very,” Amy said.
“I brung you a glass of ice too,” John said, and he awkwardly retrieved it from his ice chest while trying to clutch the two cans in his left hand. Then there was some more awkward business while he tried to figure out what to do with the second can so he could pour the other into the glass. By the time he solved the problem, Amy saw that Leo was halfway to his cabin, and she hoped he wasn’t leaving in order to give the two lovebirds some private space.
“Thanks,” she said when John handed her the glass, foam dripping down its side and off his hand.
“We got class in a little while,” he said, “and I reckon you might want to sit here in the shade and cool off first.”
“Class?”
“Novice classes are held in the barn, and it gets plenty hot in there, so I reckon you might want to sit in the shade and cool off first with a nice cold drink.”
It seemed to be a speech that he had rehearsed for a while, and he gave her a nervous smile before launching into the second line of it: “The grass is nice and cool beneath this tree if you want to sit down and enjoy your drink.”
“Thanks,” she said.
After they sat down John didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, so he groped in his ice chest for another glass and poured a Coke for himself. Foam ran down his hand onto the crotch of his blue jeans, and he started to brush it away but then thought better of it.
“You sure are right handy with that fencing foil,” he said. “Leo says I’ll never be no good at it, but I am pretty handy with a gun. You throw a nickel in the sky, and I can shoot a hole clean through it.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she stared at the sky and drank her Coke.
“How long have you been here?” she asked after a few minutes.
“This is my fourth day. They recruited us down in—well I ain’t supposed to say from where. None of us are supposed to tell our last names or say where we’re from.”
“You said they recruited us. Who’s us?”
“Me and my pa.”
“Is Jake your father?”
“He is. He come here one day before me to make sure these people wasn’t crazy.”
“And he decided they weren’t?”
This earned a grin from John. Despite his shyness, he was a handsome young man with an open and innocent face.
“So why did you and your father join?” Amy asked.
“Them skunks killed my mother,” he said. “They run the town where I’m from, just like they do here. So me and Pa joined up to fix the score.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
They finished their Cokes, and he said, “Well, we best be getting to class.”
John was right about the barn being hot, even though the wide sliding doors were open as well as the windows. There were folding chairs set up on the threshing floor for Amy, John, and Jake and another chair for Manda, who was teaching the first lesson today. It was about demons.
“In some parts of the country you don’t need magi to conjure them up because they’re already there,” she said. “They hide in caves and swamps and hollers where not many people see them, but some do, and according to stories and accounts some places have been haunted by them for centuries. Lots of people have seen them in the swamps where I’m from, and their grandparents have seen them
and their great-grandparents too.”
She had a soft Southern accent, and Amy wondered if “the swamps where I’m from” were in Louisiana.
“So how did they get there?” Manda said. “Probably they were conjured up long ago by witches or warlocks and were never properly dismissed. They’re immortal of course, so they’ll infest the earth until someone dismisses them. When a sorcerer evokes a major demon he must stay inside his circle of protection while the demon is present or it will tear him to pieces, and he needs to properly dismiss it before he leaves that circle. But minor demons are different. They’re stupid and sometimes can be controlled by the sorcerer even when he’s out of his circle. That’s the story with all the listeners and jabber-suckers and herky-jerkies we’ve got prowling around these parts—Sandoval knows how to control them, so he summons up all of them he wants and lets them roam around according to his will. They’re his servants.”
Manda was an attractive woman maybe forty years old with smooth skin the color of mahogany. She was tall and muscular, and while she talked about how to spot demons in the dark by the faint green glow they gave off, Amy imagined her beating Neoma to a pulp in the front yard.
“Now it’s time for your Easter egg hunt,” Manda said. “This morning Brook hid some presents for you somewhere here in the barn. One is a dead mouse, one is a little dab of rotten Limburger cheese, and one is a tablespoon of seriously rotten egg. So there’s a present for each one of you, and whoever doesn’t find one is a rotten egg. Just follow your noses.”
Amy and the two men went off in different directions, sniffing like bloodhounds in different corners of different stalls filled with barrels and rakes and buckets, and in the large stall at the north end she found an old Massey Ferguson tractor with a mower hitched on back. The old barn was filled with a medley of odors, some of them not pleasant, dust and straw and in one stall old horse manure, and occasionally she caught a whiff of something dead but she couldn’t pinpoint where it was coming from.
“I found the spoiled egg,” Jake called out. “But I reckon somebody else can have it. I ain’t real hungry just now.”
Amy climbed to the hayloft and felt a sudden jab of fear as soon as she was up there. Somewhere behind the bales of straw she thought there was a listener hiding. But then she found what had made her think of a listener. It was a tin can with some Limburger cheese at the bottom, and she realized it was the same smell she had noticed in Billy’s closet.
“Demons are good at hiding, but they can’t hide their smell,” Manda said. “Harpies, jabber-suckers, and babbleboons smell like rotten eggs. They’re a fairly low class of demon and have limited intelligence. They can communicate rudimentary information to the sorcerer and tell him what they’ve seen, though they aren’t especially good at processing that information themselves. Like all demons, they have sharp teeth and deadly venomous bites with no known antidote.
“Even lower on the demon scale are centicreepers, toadfaces, pukers, and the like. They’re probably no smarter than untrained dogs, but they’re plenty dangerous. They smell like dead mice or rats, which makes things a little tricky since dead animals aren’t exactly rarities out here in the woods, but once you get used to smelling dead animals you learn that dead rats and mice don’t smell like dead raccoons or possums.
“Listeners, herky-jerkies, and snakewalkers are some of the smartest of the minor demons, and they can be very crafty, so if you smell something like spoiled Limburger you need to watch out. As for shitskins, well I guess you probably have some idea what they smell like.”
Everybody chuckled, but not very happily.
“I was attacked by something that I call the crying man,” Amy said. “He looked like a skinny old hunchbacked man except he had blood-red eyes and his ears were big and pointy and his skin was way too white with blue veins showing everywhere. Oh, and he had white hairs all over his face and body.”
“What did he smell like?” Manda asked.
“Spoiled cabbage.”
“That sounds like a type of mazzikin,” Manda said. “They look more like humans than any minor demons and they tend to be very old. Did it talk to you?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s definitely a mazzikin. They’re not minor demons, they’re intermediates, what you might call middle-class. They’re not as powerful as djinns or afreets but are probably just as smart. They’re much harder to control than minor demons, and if Sandoval can control intermediates then he’s more powerful than I was thinking. I assume you told Milady about this crying man?”
“Yes, she knows.”
“Then she knows what we’re up against, and it’s worse than what I was hoping.”
When they broke for lunch, Amy showered off her sweat and put on her last clean T-shirt and her last clean pair of shorts. Neoma, Ivan, and Red all seemed to be gone, and she didn’t know if she was allowed to fix her own lunch. She envied the others for having their own cabins, their own bedrooms, their own refrigerators, their own money to buy their own food, and she thought that even though she had sworn the oath she would never be fully accepted by the group so long as she was living under close scrutiny in Neoma’s house.
She found some tuna salad and bread in the refrigerator, fixed herself a sandwich and ate it. There was a small utility room off the kitchen, so she brought down her dirty clothes and put them in the washing machine before returning to the barn for her next lesson.
The Native American named Bloody Joe taught them how to make protection bags. “Don’t let me hear anybody call these medicine bags,” he said. “Medicine bags are sacred spiritual talismans that a warrior earns after he completes a grueling vision quest. These are not medicine bags. These are white man shit. These are not sacred or spiritual, but they protect the camp from demons if you make them properly. You fuck these up and we all die.”
He had three spools of thread with needles, some cans, bottles, and buckets containing various substances, and a pile of little burlap bags, each one maybe big enough to hold a tennis ball. He showed them how to put a scoop of fine campfire ashes in a bag, then a small pebble of frankincense, a splash of myrrh, a sprinkle of cinnamon, a pinch of galbanum, other pinches of other things, another scoop of ashes over all of this, and finally a tablespoon of olive oil to soak the ashes. He showed them how to sew the bag securely shut with a long loop of bailing twine sticking out the top so the bag could be hung from a branch.
Bloody Joe was a muscular, medium-tall man of about fifty with a deep-lined face that looked as if it had never smiled. His black hair was streaked with silver-gray and pulled back in two long braids. He sat and watched them fill bag after bag with a deep frown on his face, never speaking a word except to bark out an occasional complaint: “Get more onycha in there. Cheap watered-down crap from China, doesn’t smell right. Demons are just gonna laugh at this cheap Chinese shit.”
For two long hours they sat in the hot barn filling bags, and Amy thought if this was supposed to be a class she was glad she wasn’t paying tuition. Once John said, “I never could sew worth a hoot,” and another time Jake cursed when he stabbed his finger with his needle, but aside from that none of them spoke.
“Now we hang them,” Bloody Joe said. He gave each of them an eight-foot long two-by-two with a hook at one end, and they followed him out of the barn with their protection bags in a big canvas sack that John toted over his shoulder.
“We hang them in the trees all around the edge of the compound,” Bloody Joe said. “Then we hang some more in a straight line through the property running north-south and another straight line running east-west. Every week that we sit around here on our asses doing nothing means one more week we’re giving the demons to find us, so every week we hang more bags and cross our fingers. After a couple hard rains a bag will lose much of its potency, so during rainy times we have to hang them more often.”
They came to the edge of the property, and Bloody Joe showed them how to attach the loop of a bag to the hook at the end
of the two-by-two and reach up into a high branch of a tree and hang it there. They followed him and took turns hanging bags, and often Bloody Joe would scold them because the bag wasn’t secure enough. “If a hard wind blows, that bag will be gone with the wind,” he said.
This was the first time Amy had seen most of the property. The perimeter was marked with no-trespassing signs, but there were no houses or evidence of human activity on the other side of the signs, just deep hollows or hills too steep for climbing or rocky flats filled with bramble and tall weeds. When Ivan scouted for property to lease, he apparently had found one of the most isolated patches in the state.
They went past the shooting range, which used a steep hill as a backdrop to stop the bullets, but there was nobody shooting now. Nearby was an archery range, where one man was practicing with a bow and another with a crossbow. After that they came to a clearing where Siliang and Brook were practicing martial arts, and their fighting looked fierce and skillful. She saw two people clanging sabers in a small clearing and saw the tattooed woman throwing knives at a dead tree.
She hadn’t given much thought to what the others around here did; maybe she had imagined that they spent most of the day relaxing in their cabins. For the first time it occurred to her that there wasn’t a single fat or out-of-shape person at the compound. Old or young, large or small, they were all in fighting trim.
