by Remy Wilkins
To My Sons
Stephen Archer
Jaiken Montaigne
Oz Maethelvin Anderson
Tallis Jove
and
Regis Augustine
My Reason for Writing
Contents
1 A MIGHTY FORTRESS
2 OUR ANCIENT FOE
3 THIS MORTAL LIFE
4 ONE LITTLE WORD
5 STRIVING
6 MORTAL ILLS
7 THIS WORLD WITH DEVILS FILLED
8 DOOM IS SURE
9 THE PRINCE OF DARKNESS GRIM
10 ALL EARTHLY POWERS
11 LET GOODS AND KINDRED GO
12 RAGE
13 CRAFT AND POWER
14 A BULWARK
15 TREMBLE NOT
16 ARMED WITH CRUEL HATE
17 AMID THE FLOOD
18 THE BATTLE
19 ON EARTH IS NOT HIS EQUAL
20 THE BODY THEY MAY KILL
21 FROM AGE TO AGE
AFTERWORD: CAN DEMONS BE SAVED?
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
A MIGHTY FORTRESS
Out of the hills in the early evening, where finally the Appalachians rolled to a rest in northern Alabama, descended a gray van, a trail of dust signaling its arrival. The nearby mountain had many names, including Gategwa or Oostanaula, though most of the locals called it Skeleton Mount due to the stone snake effigy built like a spine atop its peak. For the passengers in the gray van, the mountain was the tombstone to their journey.
Inside the van was the Niemand family—or two-thirds of the Niemand family, for Mr. Niemand had left Virginia, his wife of thirteen years, and his son Rodney in early spring to make a name for himself in the City of Angels. Rodney thought his dad was already off to a bad start if he wanted to make his name in a town called that.
Their destination was at the foot of Skeleton Mount, a little town once called Etowah but now known as Twin Rivers, where Rodney was to spend the summer with his weird Uncle Ray.
The first of these “twins,” the Snake River, flowed alongside the mountain before curling off and corkscrewing through the farmland outside the town. The second was simply named the Second River, and it flowed down Skeleton Mount in buoyant leaps and waterfalls. These two rivers gradually drew nearer until they united as they left the county. The van outlined the Snake River before crossing over a bridge to town.
Rodney brushed back his thick brown hair and settled his red ball cap back to its usual place. They drove down Main Street, where most of the businesses had already closed. Here and there the bright signs of a diner or coffee shop or cinema would add their light to the late afternoon sun. Rodney plucked out his earbuds. “For real, he doesn’t have a TV?”
“For real,” she said, moving her hand to flip her hair over her shoulder, but finding only a shorn wisp of sandy brown.
“I thought he hid one in his bedroom.”
“Nope. Sorry, kiddo.”
“How far outside the city does he live?”
His mother laughed. “I bet you could walk from his front door to this gas station up ahead in an hour. Less if you use your bike.”
“I’m going to need more video games,” he muttered to himself as they left the town and followed the curve of the mount westward. On the right were rows of cotton plants, about a month or so into their growth, green and hardly knee-high. On the left side of the road, a wall of trees grew thick up the toe of Skeleton Mount.
Rodney’s mother slowed as they arrived at a gravel road that led into the woods. The road was marked by a wood barrel mailbox. The final stretch to Ray’s house was a long driveway that looped around a steep hill. The gray, moss-covered trees slumped, and the roof screeched as their low branches scraped the top of the van.
“I think it will be good for you,” said his mother, picking up the discussion they’d had the last two weeks. “He used to play baseball. He could probably help you.”
“I hate baseball.” He kicked the bat lying at his feet, still looking new despite a full year of use.
“You’re still learning. It’ll be more fun when you get better at it.”
“Dad made me play. I didn’t want to.”
“It’s good to get some sunshine.”
“Ugh, I hate sunshine.”
“Rodney Abner Niemand.” Her voice was a crisp even tone, not angry, but as if she were invoking an historical figure. She shot him a mirthful look from the rearview mirror. (He’d chosen to sit in the back.) “You don’t get to talk like that. Tell me you love sunshine.”
Rodney pulled his hat low. “I love sunshine.”
“What was that?”
“I love sunshine.”
“You need to keep practicing. It sounds like you don’t mean it.” She playfully stuck her tongue out at him. He tried to smother his smile with a shrug.
She flipped on the headlights to see through the shadows and slowed the van to creep over a washed-out section of the road. Potholes made the whole van shiver.
“Ray’s got rabbits. He’ll let you play with those. And you’ve got the woods to explore.”
“Uncle Ray’s always so busy, Mom. He’s not going to play with me. Besides, he talks to himself.”
“Oh, he’s just joking around,” she said, catching his eyes in the mirror to gauge his reaction. He drew his lips into a straight line, noncommittal, like his dad. Balanced between smart remarks and sincerity. “He’s doing us a big favor.”
“Doing you a favor.”
She slowed the car down to a crawl. “Rodney,” she said more sternly.
His voice leaped a measure, to the tone of pleading, but short of whining. “I want to go with you. Why can’t I go with you?”
“Rodney, I’ve told you. We’re starting a new life. A new everything, new city, house, job, friends, everything. I need to get some things settled first, and then you can come.”
Rodney crossed his arms and muttered, “Abandoning me.”
She paused to let the argument die. They’d spoken these same words again and again. She increased the van’s speed and the gravel took up the complaint.
“What am I going to do with rabbits?”
“Hey, maybe you could help make a rocking chair. That’d be good for you to learn.”
Rodney picked at the loose threads of his shirt. “Yeah, I guess. If I get to use knives and other things.” He chopped at the stray threads with his hand. They rumbled across the wood bridge that spanned Second River.
“Rodney, Rodney, Rodney,” she said, “ . . . you’ll be happy.”
Uncle Ray only invited them the week after Christmas and on Easter Sunday. Rodney had never stayed there longer than a couple of nights. He usually spent the whole time on the couch playing his video games or reading. When he was younger he’d lie on the rug and push cars across it.
They lived an hour and a half away in Rome, Georgia, but Ray never visited. His mom would always invite him, and his dad would always give her a look, but Ray stayed home tending his garden and making the rocking chairs he sold online. Both the governors of Alabama and Georgia had bought one. Another was in a museum somewhere. It made the newspapers. “Recluse woodworker,” they called Ray. He’d had to look up that word—recluse meant a person that had withdrawn from the world to live alone.
“Mom?” he looked up to find her eyes in the mirror. “Did Ray go crazy?”
She kept her eyes on the road as she answered. “No, of course not.”
“Dad said he did.”
“Your dad . . . ” she slowed the car till they were almost stopped. “Ray is just a little
lonely.”
They rounded the last bend and descended into a clearing where the house was. Though the sun was at a low angle in the sky, the two light poles out front were already on, emitting a soft yellow light.
His uncle had built his house as a series of interlocking honeycombs, each room a hexagonal cell. Ray had named his home Corleonis, Heart of the Lion, but the locals simply called it the Honeycomb House. The first floor was in a flower pattern with six petals around a central stair room that held a grand spiral staircase. The second floor held three bedrooms—Ray’s and two guest bedrooms—plus two bathrooms. A more modest spiral staircase climbed to the third floor, which was an observatory. Last Christmas Ray had tried to get Rodney interested in looking at stars, but after staring at far away white dots for ten minutes he’d had enough of that for a lifetime.
Next to the towering Corleonis was Ray’s workshop. It was a great wooden hall with a concrete floor and a high ceiling, crossbeamed throughout. It held whispers like regular speech and speech like shouts. Rodney could hear the whine of the circular saw reverberate through the walls. Inside you could feel it with your teeth.
Between the house and the workshop was Ray’s car. It was a beat-up yellow Honda Civic Wagon, an “old hoopty,” Ray called it. It had long ago lost the “da” at the end of “Honda” and his mom had pried off the c-v-c from “Civic” so that it would read “Hon i i” and henceforth called it the Honey Pot.
Rodney’s mom parked the car, and he began gathering his belongings: a stack of comic books, his baseball glove and bat, and a slingshot his mother rarely let him use back home. Rodney waited until the whine of the car died before he opened his door.
Ray was standing on the porch to greet them. His beard, salted with grays, hid his neck. His nearly shoulder-length hair was without the ponytail today, but he wore one of his signature tie-dye shirts. His tie-dye shirts weren’t spirals; they were vertical pillars of color with purple in the middle and reds, greens, yellows, and blues flowing out of it.
He gave the black suspenders spanning the length of his stomach a snap and smiled as Rodney trudged around the van. Then Ray rumbled down the steps swatting the air in front of him and saying, “Out of the way scalawag—let me greet my nephew.” He put a hand on Rodney’s head and gave him a rough hair tousling, knocking off his cap. “Rodney, my man.”
“Hi, Ray.” Rodney straightened his hair and picked up his cap, settling it more tightly.
Ray took the suitcase his sister pulled out of the trunk. “Need some supper, Ginny?”
Ray called her Gin or Ginny, short for Virginia (only her coworkers called her that). Sometimes Ray called her Spica. Rodney was in the dark as to why, but his mother would brush it off as from some forgotten story. His father assumed it was racist.
“No, we got something on the way.” Rodney’s mom pulled out his bike from the back and wheeled it to the house. She leaned it against the wall beside the front stairs.
“Aw, at least have some winter apples. They’re just starting to peak. I put ’em up as soon as I harvested them, and they’ve got this perfect sweetness to them now.”
“Are they from Daddy’s trees?” she asked.
“Yup, and I got this great apple peeler too.” He led them up the front steps. “Mind the hooligans,” he said gesturing to nothing as they entered.
They dropped Rodney’s stuff on the floor of the foyer. Carved on the floor was a sign like two crescent moons back to back with a bar connecting them, like an H. This is partly why most called it the Honeycomb House, yet the walls were decorated with little fish.
The wood floor creaked as they walked into the dining room. There, carved on the wall between the windows, was a charging ram. Its head was down like it wanted to burst through the wall into the kitchen. Rodney couldn’t help but touch the intricately carved chairs and table as he passed. His uncle had spent years “doodling,” as he called it, etching symbols, scrolls, and pictures into the wood surfaces. They entered the kitchen. The panel over the back door was of a woman holding two wheat stalks in her outstretched hand.
“I’ve got you in the bigger bedroom this time, Rod, since it’s just you.”
“That’s okay, I like the little one.” The smaller one had beetles carved into the walls.
Ray pulled out wood bowls from the cabinet and set them on the counter. He reached into the fridge and took out a wood bowl with reddish-yellow apples in it.
“Rodney? Would you like one?”
“Sure.”
He brought out a metal contraption with a wide wood base from one of the cabinets. It had a long screw with a crank at one end and three prongs at the other that passed through a sharp metal hoop cutting out the apple core, while another blade cut the apple meat into a spiral.
“These babies are Stayman-Winesaps,” he said as he pressed the top of an apple into the prongs. “A tad tart when you harvest them, but if you store them right, they take on a bit of sweetness over a few months.” He began turning the crank, which pushed the apple into the skinner. The apple skin was spit from the peeler and spilled to the counter with a wet slicing sound.
When the apple had passed through the hoop, Ray pulled it free, leaving the core impaled on the prongs, and pulled apart a perfect slinky of apple. He handed it to Rodney.
“Eat hearty, me lad.”
“Cool,” he said as he played it like an accordion. “Can I do one?”
“Do two, so I can have one as well.” He pulled off the core, unwound the crank so that the screw returned to its starting point and stuffed another apple on the prongs. He stepped aside so Rodney could turn the shaft.
The crank required more effort than he expected. Not wanting to look weak, he turned his shoulders into it and the apple shot through the bladed ring, sending out a rooster tail of apple peel.
“That was fun,” he said as he finished. He pulled the fruit free and handed it to his mother. She put the head of the spiral into her mouth and bit. The crack of the apple was like fingers snapping.
“Mmmm,” she said. She raised the fruit, letting it dangle from three fingers, closed her eyes and said, “I love apples, I love apples, I love apples.”
Rodney finished an apple for Ray, picked one of his own, and announced, “I’m going to look at the walls.”
“Hey, check out the library,” Ray called as the boy pushed through the swinging door into the stair room. “I just put in some wildlife to go with the hunter.”
With his eyes, Rodney followed the thick central beam way up to the third floor. Ray always joked that if he ran into it too hard the whole house would come crashing down. The pillar was about the only thing that was untouched by his carving knife.
He approached the strange clock that was built into the wall under the stairs. It was a pendulum clock with symbols instead of numbers, gold set in a blond wood so finely grained that it looked like the Aurora Borealis. The little hand was pointing between a symbol that looked like an H with two fish behind it and one that looked like a Y, where the seven and eight would be on most clocks, and the long hand was pointing to squiggly lines over a picture of flowing water, where the six would be. The second hand circled over the other marks, a horseshoe, the letter M, an arrow, and other weird symbols.
Below the clock was the only phone in the house. A little shelf was built into the wall with a piano bench pushed underneath. Years ago, Rodney would tuck himself into this cubbyhole to play with cars or action figures. He could lie curled up and watch the ankles of others as they walked through the house.
He heard the voice of his mother speaking in a secretive tone. Though it was quiet, it sounded like a siren in his ears: Grown-up talk. Pay attention. He moved nearer to the wall to listen.
“Ray, I’m thinking about going back to my maiden name.”
“Did you get papers?”
“Yeah, last week. I’m not going to co
ntest. He doesn’t want anything. It’ll be official in thirty-one days.”
Rodney slouched to the floor, his back against the wall, knees to his chin. Turns out his mother wanted to make a new name for herself, as well. He felt like the last Niemand alive. The thread of his mom’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts.
“But what about Rodney?”
“What about him?”
“What should I do about his name?”
“Have you talked to him about it?”
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t want him to feel like his last name is bad. I also don’t want him to feel abandoned. He’s only twelve.” Rodney only ever heard his mom speak this way when he was out of the room. To him she was as cheerful as ever.
His uncle cleared his throat. “I could ask him about it.” Then Rodney heard the wood bowls clink and the faucet turn on. He stood and tiptoed into the library. The walls were bookshelves stuffed with books, and across from him were two small windows looking out into the backyard. He slid the door shut behind him and noticed an archer carved into it, an arrow strung on his bow. He scanned the walls for what the archer hunted, but could see only rabbits and a single snake carved at the foot of a tree.
His eyes were drawn to a shelf of brightly colored paperbacks. He ran a finger across the cracked spines, silently reading their titles: The Order of Angels, The Flood of Demons, The Cloak of Colors. They were well worn, probably read yearly. Ray was rarely without a book in his hand or a potboiler tucked into his back pocket. He and his mother would quote comedic lines to each other from stories they’d both read. They could go for hours.
The phone rang, its rattle springing into his ears. He returned to the stair room, pulled out the little bench below the telephone and sat. Rodney could never remember a time when the phone rang. He thought the only person that called Ray was his mother. He waited for another ring before answering.
“Hello?” he said and held his breath.
“ . . . Rodney? That you?”
