The Mammoth Book of Angels & Demons (30 page)

“Who told you that?” Dancy asks, and she kicks at a loose bit of concrete, pretending that she isn’t afraid. “I was just looking for the panther, that’s all.”

“We don’t have
time
for this shit,” the woman growls and seizes the iron bars in both hands, and now Dancy can see the long black claws where her fingernails used to be. The naked woman, who isn’t really a woman at all, slams herself against the bars so hard that the whole cage shakes and the padlock rattles loudly.

“Now open this fucking cage!”

“Don’t you talk to me like that,” Dancy says; her face feels hot and flushed, and her heart’s beating so fast she thinks maybe it means to explode. “I don’t care what you are, I don’t like to be talked to that way.”

The thing in the cage presses its face to the bars, and its thick lips curl back to show Dancy eyeteeth that have grown long and sharp, the teeth of something that hunts for its supper, something that might even send a panther packing. Its amber eyes blaze and spark, and Dancy tries not to imagine the soul burning beneath its skin, inside that skull, a soul so hot it will wither her own if she doesn’t look away.

“What? You think you’re some kind of holy fucking
saint
,” it snarls and then makes a sound that isn’t precisely laughter. “Is that it? You think you’re something so goddamn pure that strong language is gonna make your ears bleed?”

“I think maybe it’s a good thing, you being in that cage,” Dancy replies, almost whispering now.

And the thing locked in the iron cage roars, half the cheated, bottomless fury in the whole world bound up in that roar, and then it slams itself against the bars again. Its bones have begun to twist and pop, rearranging themselves inside its shifting skin. Its hands have become a big cat’s paws, sickle talons sheathed in velvet, and its spine buckles and stretches and grows a long tail that ends in a tuft of black fur.

And Dancy turns to run, because she doesn’t have her knife, because somehow she wasn’t ready for this, no matter what she saw in Bainbridge or Shrove Wood, no matter if maybe those things were more terrible; maybe the angel was wrong about this one. She turns to run, running for the first time, and she’ll worry about the angel later, but the old man is right there to stop her. He holds her firmly by the shoulders and grins down at her with his tobacco-stained teeth.

“Where you goin’, sport? I thought you
wanted
to see my panther?”

“Let go of me. I told you I ain’t got three dollars.”

“Hey, that’s right. You did say that. So that makes this sort of like stealin’, don’t it? That means you
owe
me somethin’,” and he spins her roughly around so she’s facing the cage again. The thing inside has changed so much that there’s hardly any trace of the cowering, filthy woman left; it paces restlessly, expectantly, from one side of the cage to the other, its burning, ravenous eyes never leaving Dancy for very long. And she can still hear its animal voice inside her head.

You were supposed to save me,
it lies.
You were supposed to set me free.

“Big ol’ cat like that one there,” the old man says and spits a stream of Beech-Nut onto the concrete, “she’ll just about eat a fella out of house and home. And seein’ as how you owe me that three bucks—”

“Do you even know what you’ve got in that cage, old man? You got any idea?”

“Near enough to know she ain’t none too picky in her eatin’ habits.”

“You don’t hold a thing like that with steel and locks,” Dancy says, matching the monster’s gaze because she knows this has gone so far that it’ll be worse for her if she looks away.

“Oh, don’t you fret about locks. I might not be old Mr Merlin at the goddamn Round Table, but I can cast a binding good enough. Now, tell me somethin’, Dancy,” the old man says and shoves her nearer the cage. “How far d’you think you’d get after that mess you made down in Bainbridge? You think they were gonna just let you stroll away, pretty as you please?”

And she reaches for her grandfather’s straight razor, tucked into the back pocket of her jeans, not her knife but it’s plenty enough to deal with this old wizard.

“You think there’s not gonna be a price to pay?” he asks, watching the thing in the cage, and he doesn’t even notice until it’s too late and she’s folded the razor open. The blade catches the dull, cloud-filtered sun and shines it back at her.

“Whole lot of good folks out there want you dead, sport. Lots of folks, they want you fuckin’
crucified
. It’s only a matter of time before some ol’ boy puts you down for what you done.”

But then she slips free of his big, callused hands, and before the old man can say another word, she’s slashed him twice across the face, laying open his wrinkled forehead all the way to the bone and slicing a three-inch gash beneath his chin that just misses his carotid artery. The old man yelps in pain and surprise and grabs for her, but Dancy steps quickly to one side and shoves him stumbling towards the cage. He trips and goes down hard on his knees; the wet crunch of shattered bone is loud, and the thing that isn’t a woman or a panther stops pacing and lunges towards the bars and the old man.

“Yeah, that may be so,” Dancy says, breathless, blood spattered across her face and T-shirt and dripping from the razor to the cracked gray concrete. “But
you
won’t be the one to do it.”

And then the thing is on him, dragging the old man up against side of the cage, its sickle claws to part his clothes and flesh like a warm fork passing through butter, but he only screams until it wriggles its short muzzle between the bars and bites through the top of his skull. The old man’s body shudders once and is still. And then the thing looks up at her, more blood spilling from its jaws, flecks of brain and gore caught in its long whiskers.

“Well?” it growls at her. “You gonna do what they sent you here to do, or you just gonna stand there all damn day with your mouth hanging open?”

Dancy nods her head once, wanting to tell it that there’s no way she could have ever opened the cage door, even if she had the key, even if the angel hadn’t told her to kill them both.

“Then you best stop gawking and get to work.”

And Dancy wipes the bloody razor on her jeans, then folds it shut, and she runs back up the steps to the cluttered porch and the noisy screen door and the shadows waiting for her inside the little store.

It doesn’t take her very long to find what she’s looking for among the dusty shelves and pegboard wall displays – a cardboard box of Diamond kitchen matches and a one-gallon gasoline can. She takes out a handful of the wooden matches and puts them in her pocket, tears away the strip of sandpaper on the side of the box, and puts that in her pocket as well. Then Dancy gets a paper bag from behind the cash register and also takes some of the Campbell’s chicken and stars soup and a handful of Zero bars, some Slim Jims and a cold bottle of Coca-Cola. While she’s bagging the food, she hears thunder, and at first she thinks that it’s the angel, the angel come back around to check up on her, to be sure she’s doing it right. But then there’s lightning and the
tat-tat-tat
of rain starting to fall on the tin roof, so she knows it’s only another thunderstorm. She rolls the top of the paper bag down tight and tells herself it’s not stealing, not really, that she’s not taking much and nothing that she doesn’t need, so whatever it is, it isn’t stealing.

Over the staccato patter of the rain against the roof, she can hear the noises the cat thing in its cage is making as it tears the old man apart. She thinks about looking for a key to the cage, no matter what the angel has said. The old man might have it hidden in the register, or somewhere in the clutter behind the counter, or in an old snuff tin somewhere. She might get lucky and find it, if it’s even there to be found, if she spends the rest of the afternoon searching the Texaco station. Or she might not. And anyway, there would still be the binding spell, and she wouldn’t know where to begin with that.

“It’s just another monster,” Dancy says, as though saying the words aloud might make it easier for her to believe them. And she remembers her mother reading to her from the Bible about King Darius and Daniel and the angel God sent down to shut the mouths of the lions in the pit. Would it even be grateful, the thing in the cage, or would it try to kill her for setting it free? And would her angel shut its mouth, or would it let the thing eat her the way it’s eating the old man? Would that be her punishment for disobeying the angel’s instructions?

Then there’s another thunderclap, louder than the first, loud enough to rattle the windows, and this time the lightning follows almost right on top of it, no seconds in between to be counted, no distance to calculate, and Dancy takes her brown paper bag and the matches and the gas can and goes out to the pumps. The screen door slams shut behind her, and she finds her duffel bag right where she left it with the old man, beneath the corrugated tin awning. The rain’s not coming down so hard as she thought, but she has a feeling it’s just getting started. She opens the duffel and tucks the paper bag inside with her clothes and the carving knife, then Dancy shoulders the heavy duffel again and steps out from beneath the cover of the awning.

The rain feels good, the soothing tears of Heaven to wash her clean again, and she goes to the pump marked regular, switches it on, and fills the gasoline can to overflowing. Then she lays the nozzle down on the ground at her feet, and the fuel gushes eagerly out across the gravel and the mud and cement. Dancy takes a few steps back, then stands there in the rain and watches the wide puddle that quickly forms around the pumps. She wrinkles her nose at the fumes, and glances up at the low purple-black clouds sailing past overhead. The rain speckles her upturned face; it’s cold, but not unpleasantly so.

“Is this really what you want from me?” she asks the clouds, whatever might be up there staring down at her. “Is this really what happens next?” There’s no answer, because the angel doesn’t ever repeat itself.

Dancy picks up the gas can, and there’s a moment when she’s afraid that it might be too heavy now, that the weight of the duffel bag and the full can together might be too much for her to manage. But then she shifts the duffel to one side, ignoring the pain as the thick canvas strap cuts into her right shoulder, and the can doesn’t seem so heavy after all. She splashes a stream of gasoline that leads from the pumps, across the highway and then down the road for another hundred yards, before she stops and sets down the almost empty can.

This is what I do, she thinks, taking one of the matches and the rough strip of cardboard from her pocket. Just like our cabin, just like that old church in Bainbridge, this is what I do next.

She strikes the match and drops it onto the blacktop, and the gasoline catches fire immediately, a yellow-orange beast, undaunted by the summer rain, blooming to life to race hungrily back the way she’s come. Dancy gets off the highway as quickly as she can and crouches low in a shallow, bramble- and trash-filled ditch at the side of the road. She squeezes her eyes shut and covers her ears, trying not to think about the thing in the iron cage, or the naked woman it pretended to be, or the old man who would have fed her to the monster, trying not to think of anything but the angel and all the promises it’s made.

That there will someday be an end to this, the horrors and the blood, the doubt and pain, the cleansing fires and the killing.

That she is strong, and one day soon she will be in Paradise with her grandmother and grandfather and her mother, and even though they will know all the terrible things she’s had to do for the angel, they’ll still love her, anyway.

And then she feels the sudden rush of air pushed out before the blast, and Dancy makes herself as small as she can, curling fetal into the grass and prickling blackberries, and the ancient, unfeeling earth, indifferent to the affairs of men and monsters, gods and angels, trembles beneath her.

Sanji’s Demon

Richard Parks

Richard Parks has written a series of stories about Lord Yamada, a minor aristocrat in Heian Japan (794–1185) who makes his living as a “nobleman’s proxy”: basically a private investigator who handles situations, mostly of a paranormal nature, that his social betters either can’t handle or would be too embarrassed to try. Here, he encounters a type of Japanese demon, the
oni.
Although there are different types of
oni,
some far more benign than others – sometimes they are even portrayed as lovable and cuddly – they are primarily thought of as described by Parks: hideous, savage, gigantic supernatural creatures with the ability to shape-shift and a tendency to devour humans. Masks and other portrayals usually depict them with two horns and huge mouths sporting multiple fangs or tusks.
Oni
are often found nowadays in anime, manga and film.

Kenji the reprobate priest was in a strange mood, even by Kenji’s standards. “I’ve traveled a great deal, Yamada-san, but I think Echizen may be one of the most charming places I’ve ever seen.”

It was the middle of the afternoon. Kenji and I traveled on foot along the Hokuriku Road on our way to find a demon-queller near the village of Takefu. I happily conceded that Echizen had its charm. It was early fall and the leaves were starting to turn; the breeze was pleasantly warm still but with a hint of chill. Even so, Echizen’s leaves and mountains and wooded hillsides were not much different than those to the west or north and, like them, after sunset would be stirring with creatures both unpleasant and dangerous. I shrugged. “It’s nice enough.”

Kenji sighed. “Nice? Lady Shikibu herself lived here for a year. The poets Nakatomi no Yakamori and Ōtomo no Yakamochi were exiled here. They were two of the greatest poets of our grandfathers’ time! I can see how this place could inspire them.”

I scratched my chin. “Kenji, a great many courtiers get exiled at one time or another, and every single one of them is a poet, by necessity. It stands to reason that
some
of them would be good at it. As for inspiration, Nakatomi’s love was still in Kyoto while he was trapped
here
, so of course he wrote brilliant poetry full of regret and longing. Honestly, what’s gotten into you?”