The Devil Dances (10 page)

As if sensing my mood, she looked up and said, “You, too, are alone, yah?”

I had to take a moment to think about that. “I have friends.” Then I laughed. “Friends in low places, mostly.”

“But no family.”

“My father is still alive, but we don’t speak much. My mother… she went away when I was pretty young.” To change the subject, I said, “Do you have any cause to believe anyone would want to hurt Caleb? Maybe someone here? Someone with a grudge against him?”

“You would need to speak to Isaac about that. Isaac Schroder. They were friends, and he knew Caleb best. All his secrets.”

“Big kid, about twenty? Glasses?”

“That be Isaac…”

There was a crash from upstairs like a chair had been kicked over, then some running of feet and voices as several people began shouting in distress at each other. Mrs. Knapp flinched, then looked toward the ceiling with such a look of despair, I felt my heart skip a beat. “I hope this information is useful to you, Nicholas. Now, I have a favor to ask.” She turned to me and fixed me with her wise, grim eyes. “You said the demonic hosts are under your dominion. Did you lie?”

“I may not be worth much to most folks, but I guarantee I’m the best damned exorcist in Pennsylvania, ma’am.”

“Yah, good.” Mrs. Knapp nodded. “You must cast the demons out of my granddaughter, Sarah.”

I followed Mrs. Knapp upstairs. At the end of a long hall we came to her granddaughter’s bedroom. It was decorated simply and tastefully, with muted colors. Handmade stuffed toys were clustered on a window seat, and there were books on a shelf along one whole wall—Bibles and classic literature, of course, but also the type of modern teen romances you see everywhere. The windows were all open, but the room was damp and summer-muggy, and the vague stink of urine and vomit—sick smells—hung over the place like a noxious cloud.

A Shaker bed dominated the room, and a handmade quilt covered Elsie Knapp’s nine-year-old granddaughter, Sarah, who was shivering like a little girl with a fever. Her family hovered on both sides of the bed like mourners at a funeral. I saw the woman with the Sight from the side of the road, Sarah’s mother—Mrs. Knapp’s daughter-in-law. She turned her back on me as I followed Mrs. Knapp to the foot of the bed. The men stayed stoic, sitting in chairs arranged around the perimeter of the room, or hovered, standing, in corners as they looked on helplessly at the suffering child.

Mrs. Knapp introduced me to them all, each in turn. They were her sons, or her grown grandsons. The men nodded at me, but didn’t stand or offer their hands to shake, not that I expected them to. Actually, I was rather impressed with their resolve in tolerating my presence, but maybe they were only doing so because they were so desperate. “This is John, Sarah’s father, and my second eldest son,” Mrs. Knapp said. He was the only man with the courage to step forward.

He was lanky, like so many of the men here, sinewy and work-hardened, but small. He had a severely pinched face and hard eyes that said he’d been around the block a few times. Otherwise, he was remarkable in his sheer, unremarkable plainness. Brown hair, medium-brown eyes, nearly trimmed beard. If he hadn’t been born Amish, he would have made a great cop or FBI agent. “I’ve no grievance with you, Daemon, but if you can heal my Sarah, I will be very grateful to you.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Knapp,” I told him and went to sit on the edge of Sarah’s bed. The others muttered in Pennsylvania Dutch, probably talking about me. I ignored them and set my hand on the forehead of the young girl squirming under the quilt. She was thin and blond and damp with sweat, but she felt cool to the touch, like her skin was made of lifeless porcelain. The stink of the other-creatures clung to her like a psychic funk.

She immediately stopped writhing and opened her eyes. They were not the eyes of a nine-year-old girl. They were too sly and worldly for that. They were a deep set, cornflower blue, with unhealthy dark rings lurking beneath them. “Prince Nicky,” she said. Her voice was raspy and dry like she’d been screaming for hours. “How nice to finally meet you, my liege.”

I knew I was speaking to no girl. “I wish I could say the same.”

“Do they know?” Her eyes moved to the concerned faces of her family.

“I haven’t showed them my pedigree, no.”

“You should tell them.”

“Don’t listen to it,” I told the men and women in the room with me. “The demon lies. The demon will always lie.”

The thing inside Sarah laughed in a coarse, unnatural voice that reverberated around the room. “Really, Prince. That’s rather amusing, coming from the Prince of Lies.” She turned her head to glare at the others and some threw up the medieval sign of exorcism. “Of all the exorcists in the world, you bring
him
to me? Ask him why he uses no Bible. Ask him why he uses no prayers, why he calls on no gods. Ask him why he fears the station of the cross…!”

“Look at me,” I said, and the demon stopped babbling and dutifully turned Sarah’s head in a frighteningly mechanical way to give me its full attention. There was resistance in its eyes, but I knew it could not resist me. “You will address
me
, not them.”

“Fuck you, Prince. Fuck you and fuck your Whore of Babylon…!”

I smiled demurely at its pathetic attempts to psyche me out. “I have dominion over your kind,” I reminded it. “My house has dominion over your house. I could rip you out anytime I want, fallen one, crush your miserable excuse for a soul in the palm of my hand.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I want to ask you something. Why Sarah? What do you want with her?”

“I told you. Fuck you, Prince. Fuck your power. Go home and fuck your bitch. Fuck your bitch’s brother. That’s what you want, don’t you?”

I didn’t say anything to that. The thing about demons is, you don’t get personal. You don’t give them anymore ammunition than you have to. The thing knew about Vivian and Josh? Fine, no big deal. The last thing you wanted to do was feel uncomfortable when dealing with demons. You never showed it fear—fear it could use. It could get a handhold on your soul that way. Lucky for me, I had no soul. Or, if I did, it was made of pretty foreign stuff.

I felt a charge in the air as the thing inside Sarah tried to resist me—so
it
was afraid, as it well should be. It smiled to cover its discomfort. “I know you, Angel-breaker. I know what you desire. I know what you do at night.”

“Don’t make me wash your mouth out with soap.”

But it continued on, unperturbed. “You jerk yourself off, thinking about them. About Vivian and Josh. About them together. You are so weak, Man of Sin. Such a weak, needy Prince…”

Childish tactics, a last ditch effort to unnerve me. I laughed at it.

“You laugh? You burn with lust, Prince. You’d shove your dick down a hole in the ground, if you could…”

“And so would the vast majority of men today. What’s your point?”

The little girl hissed, seemed to rise up a few inches, and then spat in my face before dropping back down to her pillows. I ignored the phlegm racing down my cheek. I raised my hand and covered Sarah’s face. “Time to go.”

I was barely touching her, but she started to scream as I began the process of extracting the offending spirit from her young, tortured body. It screamed in raw, soul-tearing spurts. It screamed like I was pounding nails into Sarah’s head.

Sarah’s mother finally turned around and tried to rush to her daughter’s side, tears in her eyes and a hand clamped over her mouth, but John caught her around the middle, hugging his distraught wife against his body. “No, Mary,” John said. “Let him work.”

“Fuck you, Tempter. Fuck you, Son of the Morning…” the demon babbled before segueing into other languages, Divine among them.

I breathed in and I breathed out my raw power. I raised my hand a few inches and Sarah’s entire body jerked upward like a puppet on short strings.

“Fuck you, Mammon. Fuck you, Devil, Prince of this World…”

“Why Sarah?” I asked as calmly as I could. I knew if the house were wired with electricity every appliance would be overloading about now. Power and rage poured off Sarah like heat off a desert deadpan, more than any single little girl could possibly have. I thought it was possible that there was more than one of the fallen inside her. There might be a legion, for all I knew… or cared, really. One demon or a million, they were all going the way of Elvis. “Why go into Sarah? What do you want from her?”

The thing inside Sarah glared at me like a snake. It smiled with bestial lust. “She welcomed it. She spread her pussy for him like the good little slut she was. She welcomed him into her body!”

The creature’s answer confused me. I didn’t understand who “he” was. I didn’t understand what it was talking about, but I was sure it was linked to Sarah’s possession somehow. Usually, when you open one door, many things come through. That was the reason the demonic host could not usually affect the young and the innocent. All I could figure was that Sarah was not as innocent as she had first seemed… yet she was not yet old enough for her own Rumspringa…

“Who are you and how did you get into Sarah?” I demanded to know.

A new sound came out of Sarah’s throat, a tiny mewling noise I recognized as belonging to a young girl. Sarah. Finally, Sarah was in distress. A wave seemed to pass over her face, and for a moment all the tension and worldliness left it and I was looking down into the sweating, terrified face of a young girl trapped in her own version of hell.
“Mama…”
she said, and then the wave passed and the demon was back again.

I realized this couldn’t go on. I couldn’t keep interrogating the demon without hurting little Sarah. I squeezed my fist and the demon screamed in agony, over and over like a siren, and thrashed its head back and forth while Sarah’s body bowed like there was a rope tied around her middle, arching her slender frame up at an almost unnatural angle.

Time to end this circus—even if I couldn’t get answers. I took a deep breath. “I, the World’s Inheritor, drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders, all wicked legions, assemblies and sects. In the name of Ha-Satan, and by the power of my father’s house, I command thee to leave this servant of Christ and to dwell in the darkness of the everlasting pit. As I will it, so mote it be.”

I drew the symbol of my father’s house over her face, not the pentacle or pentagram that was so popular in horror fiction and occult movies—that sign was actually pagan, not satanic—but the older symbol, the Morning Star, the real one that only some of the most dedicated scholars and priests on earth knew.

Sarah erupted into new screams and her hands flashed out, catching me at the sides of my face, scratching my cheeks with her fingernails as the unclean spirits were wrenched from her and flung into darkness. The scratches hurt, but I didn’t mind so much if it meant I was freeing little Sarah from her tormentors. I’d had worse done to me, much, much worse. It lasted only a few seconds, then her eyes cleared and she slowly and peacefully fell back onto her pillows as the room filled with the perfume of roses and hyacinth.

She let out a kitten-like cry and covered her face. She had dislodged the handmade quilt in her struggles, and it was only then that I spotted her small, but still very noticeable baby bump. Seconds later, her mother and father were there, comforting her and speaking lowly in Pennsylvania Dutch.

I stood up, stood back, even as Sarah’s mother drew the quilt up over her daughter in modesty. I realized my work here was done. I stepped outside the room, and old Mrs. Knapp escorted me down the stairs. We walked in silence with the unanswered question hanging between us

Eventually, Mrs. Knapp, sensing my unease, said, “She is not the first. There are others like this.”

“Pregnant girls? Pregnant little girls?” I swallowed against the knot in my throat. “How many? How many girls are like this?”

“There were eight. Sarah is the ninth.”

We stopped in the kitchen. I’d found it too warm for my liking when we’d first arrived, but now it was just right to chase away my bone chills. The scratches on my faces were starting to hurt, and Mrs. Knapp instinctively went to retrieve some astringent from the cupboards. I went to the kitchen window over the sink and looked out at the growing darkness and the clouds scuttling across the distant Lehigh Mountains. “Have you considered that someone in the community is responsible?”

“That was our first fear,” Mrs. Knapp said, returning and asking me to sit at the table so she could doctor my wounds. “The men were interviewed. The boys, too. But when the first children were born, we knew it was no one in the colony.”

“How do you mean?”

“They weren’t right, like. Not… correct. Deformed.”

“How?” I was almost too afraid to ask.

She closed her eyes tight. “The little ones had hooves. And other terrible things.” She swallowed hard. “Most died, but some survived…”

“What happened to the survivors?”

“The parents… well, they took care of them.” Mrs. Knapp lowered her head as if she was praying, or as if the burden of her life had become too much. “Nicholas, we don’t believe this is the work of any earthly power.”