by Del Howison
At last, she removed the towel and shook out her hair, then took off the robe and put on a nightdress. She got into bed, turned out the light, and rested her head upon the pillow. He was alone with her; her face was almost luminescent in the dark, pale and indistinct. He felt sleep approach, but he was afraid to close his eyes, for he knew in his heart that she would be gone when he awoke, and he wanted this night to last. He did not want to be separated from her again.
But the itch was still there, the sense that there was an important, salient matter that he could not quite recall, something linked to a long-forgotten conversation that had occurred when he had finally found his way to this room and they had made love. It was coming back to him: slowly, admittedly, but he was finding pieces of that weekend in the cluttered, dusty attic of his memory. There had been lovemaking, yes, and afterward she had been very quiet. When at last he had looked down at her, he saw that she was crying silently.
“What is it?” he had asked.
“Nothing.”
“It can’t be nothing. You’re crying.”
“You’ll think I’m being silly.”
“Tell me.”
“I had a dream about you,” she had replied.
Then it was gone again. He tried to remember what that dream had been. It was relevant, somehow. Everything about that night was now relevant. Beside him, his young wife’s breathing altered as she descended into sleep. He bit his lip in frustration. What was it? What couldn’t he remember?
His left arm felt numb. He supposed that it was the position in which he rested. He tried to move it, and numbness became pain. It extended quickly through his system, like acid injected into his bloodstream. He opened his mouth and a rush of air and spittle emerged. He groaned. There was a tightness in his chest, as though something were now sitting astride him, coiling around him, constricting his breathing, compressing his heart so that he saw it as a red mass grasped in a fist, the blood slowly being squeezed from it.
“I dreamt that you were beside me, but you were in distress, and I couldn’t reach you. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get to you.”
He heard her voice from afar, recalling now the words, remembering how he had held her and stroked her back, touched by the strength of her feelings yet knowing in his heart that he thought her foolish for responding to a dream in this way.
She moved in her sleep, and now he was crying, the pain forcing tears from the corners of his eyes.
“I dreamt that you were dying, and there was nothing I could do to save you.”
I am dying, he thought to himself. At last, it has come.
“Hush,” said his wife. He looked at her, and although her eyes were still closed, her lips moved, and she whispered to him: “Hush, hush. I am here, and you are here.”
She shifted in the bed, and her arms reached out and enfolded him in their embrace, and his face was buried in her hair, and he smelled her and touched her as the agony grew, his heart exploding deep within him, all things coming to an end in a failure of blood and vein, of artery and muscle. She clasped him tightly to herself as the last words he would ever utter emerged in a senseless tangle, and then the darkness took him, and all was stillness and silence for a time.
“Hush,” she said, as he died. “I am here….”
And now you are here.
Hush. Hush.
And he opened his eyes.
CHURCH SERVICES
KEVIN J. ANDERSON
As SOON AS his shouted prayer reached a crescendo in tandem with his silent internal plea, Jerome Tucker opened his eyes and watched the demon leave the young man.
Inside the canvas revival tent, the blasphemous thing emerged from the teenage boy’s nostrils and throat like poisonous smoke mixed with a swarm of bees, crackling, buzzing, and writhing. Demonic whispers built to a scream. A trickle of blood followed the thing as it slid and tore its way out of the possessed young man.
The demon had no choice but to obey. Jerome had commanded it with the compulsion of God Himself.
He had lost count over the weeks, but he had summoned and trapped at least a hundred demons on the long and slow wagon trek across the farmlands of Illinois, across muddy and rutted roads to the wild lands and new homesteads of Wisconsin Territory. In this new and barely settled land, there were many secrets, many buried shadows of times past. So many demons had been cast out in Biblical times, and the evil had to have gone somewhere. What better place to seek refuge than among the heathen in the New World? It made perfect sense.
Inside the large tent crowded with farmers, their wives, their children, and a few shopkeepers from Bartonville (the closest thing that could have been called a town), he raised his hands. His full, rusty red beard stood out like flames on his chin.
“Leave this boy, I command you!”
Even after the demon had fully emerged, the teenager continued to spasm and moan, his jaws clenched, lips drawn back. The audience gasped; several women fainted, while others uttered their own prayers. Two lanky farmers swore with coarse language that would not have pleased an eavesdropping God.
“As Jesus Christ trapped the demon Legion in a group of pigs, so I contain you here, where you can do no further harm.” With an imperative gesture, Jerome stuck out his hand, touched the ornate potbellied clay jar covered with runes and designs, symbols now rusty with dried blood.
The demon struggled and wailed, shifting and convulsing like a tornado of flies, and, inexorably, the crackling black mist was sucked into the containment jar—the holy relic from ancient Egypt, or Babylon, or Assyria (Jerome wasn’t exactly sure which). Like smoke swirling up a chimney in a harsh draft, the indefinable thing vanished into the clay vessel with a last alien howl, and when it was trapped completely in its new prison, the maddening sound stopped with the abruptness of a slammed door.
“Glory to God on high!” called out Jerome’s wife, Mollie. She dutifully stood beside him at the pulpit, holding open the tattered Bible, knowing exactly which verses Jerome would need for the next step of the process.
The teenager’s weeping mother rushed forward, knocking over one of the thin wooden benches as she came up to throw her arms around her limp son. “Oh, he’s saved, he’s saved!”
Blood dribbled from the boy’s mouth as he groaned, then opened his eyes. He stared around with a sparkling awareness, as though he’d been asleep for months. The audience applauded wildly, called out choruses of “Amen!”
Mollie read aloud from the Twenty-third Psalm, not because it was especially appropriate but because it was her favorite passage. Her high and musical voice gained strength as she read verse after verse.
Jerome was the more forceful personality with a passion for his calling, but he couldn’t have done this without Mollie’s help, without her faith. She had followed him from their home, leaving everything behind to journey across untamed country, staking her future on him.
Jerome Tucker had always wanted to be a preacher, but he’d needed a flock. And with so many homesteaders moving west to stake their claims in uncharted lands, those people needed to hear the Gospel. So Jerome had gathered up his savings, took the last of the money he needed from his parents, and bought a wagon and horses, a large tent, and Bibles—everything he needed.
He went to the land surveyor’s office to study maps of Illinois and Wisconsin all the way to the Mississippi River. The owlish-faced clerk had shown him available plots and already claimed areas where farmland was being cleared by hardworking pioneers. Jerome did not want acreage for himself; he just needed to find a large enough group of people who required his services.
He knew he would find the right place. He’d been so eager to grab the plat books that he’d cut his finger on the countertop’s ragged wooden edge. Sucking on the wound absentmindedly, he had turned pages, following the geography up into south-central Wisconsin. By smeary light that passed through flyspecked windows, he stopped to study farmland, roads, and neighboring towns.
A droplet of blood fell
and splashed on one particular area, a bold crimson mark on the map. Jerome considered it a sign, a position chosen by his blood. That was where he would go.
As they made their way westward, he and Mollie had preached to crowds, and Jerome did God’s work, casting out and capturing many demons to purify the population along the way. The cross-country journey had taken months, through falling snow and over slushy roads, through heavy rainstorms and a miasma of humidity and mosquitoes. He felt as if he and his wife were required to pass through the very plagues of Egypt to reach this particular Promised Land.
Finally, on a low hill that overlooked recently claimed farmlands, sprawling fields of corn, and uncleared trees that marked land boundaries, Jerome and Mollie had erected their big tent for the last time. There, he held nightly services. When the people began to understand that Jerome could truly cast out demons, that he could take away their sins and purify their thoughts, his flock began to grow….
Now, seeing the teenage boy get shakily to his feet and collapse in his mother’s arms, both of them crying, Jerome felt tears roll down his own cheeks. He had saved at least thirty people in this area already, and they all owed him a great deal. He would forge them into a community, a town, a new place.
Smiling, he lifted his hands and called out once more. The canvas tent had been old when he’d purchased it secondhand; now it was patched and stained—by no means was it an adequate palace for worship. Now that he knew with all his soul that this was the place, now that all the people in the revival tent listened raptly to whatever he had to say, he called them together and he made his request.
“I must ask something of you, my friends. This ground has been consecrated enough with all our prayers. Now, I require your help, your wood, your tools, your labor, and your love. We will build a church here, and then we will establish a town.”
* * *
During their journey west and north through Wisconsin, at the edge of a river that drained into the Mississippi, Jerome had found the ancient symbol-bedecked urn that had changed his life.
He and Mollie had stopped for the night in a small town where flatboats delivered cargo downriver and brought new supplies back upstream. There, they had met a man with clumpy brown hair and three fingers missing on the left hand. His face was weathered and more deeply tanned than could be explained by any Midwestern summer, and his eyes had a distant stare, focused on memories rather than the landscape, as if he had already seen more than his share of wonders and nightmares.
The man struck up a conversation with Jerome but did not introduce himself. He explained how he had traveled the Ancient World looking for oddities and treasures.
“Pharaoh held the Israelites in Egypt,” Jerome said. “In ancient times.”
“Egypt is an ancient place full of dead things. I’d heard rumors that there were so many treasure-filled tombs scattered across the desert that a man could simply walk along and pick up gold and jewels. There are tombs, all right. The entire land is like a skeleton.”
Jerome knew about wealthy Europeans, gentleman archaeologists who explored Egypt and returned with mummies and artifacts, telling ludicrous tales of curses and the revenge of ancient gods. Jerome knew all such stories to be false, of course, because he had read the Bible—carefully—several times.
The man held up his left hand, showing the three stumps of his fingers. “A jackal did this. Bit them clean off when I tried to retrieve a demon jar from a tomb.”
“What’s a demon jar?” Mollie asked. The man looked at her, surprised that she had spoken.
Jerome had no patience for those who didn’t respect his wife. “What’s a demon jar?” he repeated.
The man opened the large trunk that held his belongings and moved a rolled rug and some cloth aside to extract an ivory-pale urn made of ancient clay; it looked as if it had been cast from liquefied bone. Its surface was stippled with indecipherable writing, odd designs, one of which Jerome recognized as the Star of David; another, prominent in the center, was unmistakably the Cross.
“Moses wasn’t God’s only prophet in Egypt,” the man said soberly. “This jar was created by one such holy man as a vessel to capture and hold the demons that filled the land.” He lifted the lid of the urn and gazed into its dark interior. “It’s empty now—either the demons have escaped over the years, or it was never used. But you can tell by the symbols that it must be a sacred relic.”
Mollie was more skeptical. “If this was created in ancient Egypt or Sumeria, that was many years before Christ died for our sins. How could it carry the symbol of the Cross?”
The man regarded Mollie with no small amount of annoyance. “And what is it, ma’am, that a prophet does? Why, he prophesies! He knows the future. Wouldn’t God’s chosen know about the impending arrival of God’s son?” He turned back to Jerome. “If you are a preacher, and if you are truly guided by the Holy Spirit, then you must know already how to cast out demons.”
In fact, Jerome didn’t, though he’d always thought about it.
“But any preacher can cast out demons,” the man continued. “And then what? They are freed from one host and sent to wander the world, where they continue to wreak havoc. With this urn, however”—the man patted the rough clay surface—“you not only withdraw demons from the possessed, you also imprison them, seal them in this jar, where they will cause no further harm.”
The man sounded tired and disappointed. “To be honest, I have no use for this relic. I am not a holy man.” With a smile, he extended it toward Jerome. “Take this as my gift. It is better off in your hands, since you can do God’s work with it.”
Suddenly embarrassed or shy, he added, “However, if you could spare some coins, I need to buy passage back home. Thieves in Constantinople took my last money, and I have had to beg my way, working for passage across the sea, then on riverboats down the Ohio, then across country, finally to here. My mother has consumption, you see. I am trying to get home so I can be with her before she dies.”
Jerome felt the earnestness in the man’s voice, and he knew how much good work he could do with this demon jar.
“Whatever you think the jar is worth …” The man left the idea hanging. Mollie shot her husband a sharp glare as Jerome enthusiastically opened his money pouch and withdrew far more coins than they could spare. Jerome was sure, though, that once he began casting out demons, grateful parishioners would quickly contribute to the offering plate.
“How do I use it?” Jerome asked.
The man regarded him earnestly. “You’ll know. God will show you.”
* * *
Late at night, under a buttery-yellow moon, Mollie found Jerome within the framework structure of the nearly completed church. The glass windowpanes had not yet been installed, but the walls were finished and the roof partially covered. The smell of sawdust mingled with sweat hung in the air: aromas of sweet pine and devoted labor. People volunteered their time, several days a week, to finish the great work.
In the large window opening that would soon be filled with beautiful stained-glass panels shipped all the way from Chicago, Mollie could look down the hillside to the silver-lit fields and small cluster of new buildings, the embryo of the town that her husband had coaxed into existence.
The altar had been completed first, covered with an embroidered, lace-edged cloth: a gift from three farmers’ wives who had worked their fingers sore to finish it. In the center of the altar lay the large old Bible next to the pale demon jar. Jerome had held regular services here as soon as the framework was erected, and he had packed away his tattered old revival tent for good. He expected his brother Clancy to bring their parents anytime now.
Now he knelt before the altar in the dark. Unlit candles stood in freshly lathed wooden stands. As Mollie entered the skeletal church behind him, her step softly creaked the new-laid pine floorboards, but he did not stop his muttered prayer. Eyes half shut, he pulled out his knife, touched the razor-edged tip to his thumb, then sliced. The blood looked like bl
ack molasses as it welled up.
Mollie stood behind him, bowing her head, not interrupting the sacred ceremony. Jerome extended his thumb and pressed the warm wetness to the Cross that stood out in sharp relief among the other designs. The ancient jar seemed to draw the blood, drink and absorb it greedily.
“God will protect us from demons,” Jerome muttered. “God will contain them inside here.”
It wasn’t exactly a recitation from the Scriptures, but the demons could hear him. Trapped in their jar, they would be afraid.
The Scripture had a long tradition of blood sacrifice: just as Abraham had been willing to make a blood sacrifice of his son Daniel, just as Moses marked the lintels of the Jews with lambs’ blood so that the Angel of Death would pass over their homes, just as God had demanded the blood of his own son Jesus to save humanity, so Jerome was willing to give up a small amount of his blood to strengthen the demon jar, to keep the evil things inside.
He slowly regained his feet, turned to his wife. “Every demon I’ve removed and imprisoned is one less soldier Satan has for the Final Battle. Not only am I making my new town a pure and holy place, I am aiding the whole world.”
Mollie, though, was concerned. “All the times in the Bible where a godly man casts out demons, he never tries to collect them. He never keeps them like old coins in a purse. And what happens when the vessel is full? Do you know how much evil it can contain? I’m worried about what that jar really does.”
“Why, it imprisons demons, Mollie.” Jerome leaned closer in the deep shadows of the unfinished church. “And when we bless this new house of worship, when all of the congregation comes from miles around, they will join together and make a similar sacrifice. We’ll purge this area of all sins and evil thoughts. This land, this town of Tucker’s Grove, will become a new Eden.” His eyes were shining in the moonlight. “Yes, I’m sure, Mollie. I’m sure of our future, I’m sure of this place, and I’m sure of my mission. Not a shred of doubt.”
