Practical Demonkeeping pc-1 Page 15

  The Toyota turned over twice and died. A cloud of blue smoke coughed out of the exhaust pipe. The engine cranked, caught again, sputtered, and died; blue smoke.

  “If she goes back to the house, we have to stop her,” Brine said.

  “You will give yourself away. The trap will not work.”

  “I can’t let her go back in that house.”

  “She is only one woman, Augustus Brine. The demon Catch will kill thousands if he is not stopped.”

  “She’s a friend of mine.”

  The Toyota cranked again weakly, whining like an injured animal, then fired up. Jenny revved the engine and pulled away leaving a trail of oily smoke.

  “That’s it,” Brine said. “Let’s go.” Brine started the truck, pulled forward, and stopped.

  “Turn off the engine,” the Djinn said.

  “You’re out of your mind. We leave it running.”

  “How will you hear the demon if he comes before you are ready?”

  Begrudgingly, Brine turned off the key. “Go!” he said.

  Brine and the Djinn jumped out of the truck and ran around to the bed. Brine dropped the tailgate. There were twenty ten-pound bags of flour, each with a wire sticking out of the top. Brine grabbed a bag in each hand, ran to the middle of the yard, paying out wire behind him as he went. The Djinn wrestled one bag out of the truck and carried it like a babe in his arms to the far corner of the yard.

  With each trip to the truck Brine could feel panic growing inside him. The demon could be anywhere. Behind him the Djinn stepped on a twig and Brine swung around clutching his chest.

  “It is only me,” the Djinn said. “If the demon is here, he will come after me first. You may have time to escape.”

  “Just get these unloaded,” Brine said.

  Ninety seconds after they had started, the front yard was dotted with flour bags, and a spider web of wires led back to the truck. Brine hoisted the Djinn into the bed of the truck and handed him two lead wires. The Djinn took the wires and crouched over a car battery that Brine had secured to the bed of the truck with duct tape.

  “Count ten, then touch the wires to the battery,” Brine said. “After they go off, start the truck.”

  Brine turned and ran across the yard to the front steps. The small porch was too close to the ground for Brine to crawl under, so he crouched beside it, covering his face with his arms, counting to himself, “seven, eight, nine, ten.” Brine braced himself for the explosion. The seal bombs were not powerful enough to cause injury when detonated one at a time, but twenty at once might produce a considerable shock wave. “Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, shit!” Brine stood up and tried to see into the bed of the truck.

  “The wires, Gian Hen Gian!”

  “It is done!” Came the answer.

  Before Brine could say anything else the explosions began — not a single blast, but a series of blasts like a huge string of firecrackers. For a moment the world turned white with flour. Then storms of flame swirled around the front of the house and mushroomed into the sky as the airborne flour was ignited by successive explosions. The lower branches of the pines were seared and pine needles crackled as they burned.

  At the sight of the fire storms, Brine dove to the ground and covered his head. When the explosion subsided, he stood and tried to see through the fog of flour, smoke, and soot that hung in the air. Behind him he heard the front door open. He turned and reached up into the doorway, felt his hand close around the front of a man’s shirt, and yanked back, hoping he was not pulling a demon down off the steps.

  “Catch!” the man screamed. “Catch!”

  Unable to see though the gritty air, Brine punched blindly at the squirming man. His meaty fist connected with something hard and the man went limp in his arms. Brine heard the truck start. He dragged the unconscious man across the yard toward the sound of the running engine. In the distance a siren began to wail.

  He bumped into the truck before he saw it. He opened the door and threw the man onto the front seat, knocking Gian Hen Gian against the opposite door. Brine jumped into the truck, put it into gear, and sped out of the doughy conflagration into the light of morning.

  “You did not tell me there would be fire,” the Djinn said.

  “I didn’t know.” Brine coughed and wiped flour out of his eyes. “I thought all the charges would go off at once. I forgot that the fuses would burn at different rates. I didn’t know that flour would catch fire — it was just supposed to cover everything so we could see the demon coming.”

  “The demon Catch was not there.”

  Brine was on the verge of losing control. Covered in flour and soot, he looked like an enraged abominable snowman. “How do you know that? If we didn’t have the cover of the flour, I might be dead now. You didn’t know where he was before. How can you know he wasn’t there? Huh? How do you know?”

  “The demonkeeper has lost control of Catch. Otherwise you would not have been able to harm him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that before? Why don’t you tell me these things in advance?”

  “I forgot.”

  “I might have been killed.”

  “To die in the service of the great Gian Hen Gian — what an honor. I envy you, Augustus Brine.” The Djinn removed his stocking cap, shook off the flour, and held it to his chest in salute. His bald head was the only part of him that was not covered in flour.

  Augustus Brine began to laugh.

  “What is funny?” The Djinn asked.

  “You look like a worn brown crayon.” Brine was snorting with laughter. “King of the Djinn. Give me a break.”

  “What’s so funny?” Travis said, groggily.

  Keeping his left hand on the wheel, Augustus Brine snapped out his right fist and coldcocked the demonkeeper.

  25

  AMANDA

  Amanda Elliot told her daughter that she wanted to leave early to beat the Monterey traffic, but the truth was that she didn’t sleep well away from home. The idea of spending another morning in Estelle’s guest room trying to be quiet while waiting for the house to awaken was more than she could stand. She was up at five, dressed and on the road before five-thirty. Estelle stood in the driveway in her nightgown waving as her mother drove away.

  Over the last few years Amanda’s visits had been tearful and miserable. Estelle could not resist pointing out that each moment she spent with her mother might be the last. Amanda responded, at first, by comforting her daughter and assuring her that she would be around for many more years to come. But as time passed, Estelle refused to let the subject lie, and Amanda answered her concern with pointed comparisons between her own energy level and that of Estelle’s layabout husband, Herb. “If it weren’t for his finger moving on the remote control you’d never know he was alive at all.”

  As much as Amanda was irritated by Effrom marauding around the house like an old tomcat, she needed only to think of Herb, permanently affixed to Estelle’s couch, to put her own husband in a favorable light. Compared to Herb, Effrom was Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks rolled into one: a connubial hero. Amanda missed him.

  She drove five miles per hour over the speed limit, changing lanes aggressively, and checking her mirrors for highway patrol cars. She was an old woman, but she refused to drive like one.

  She made the hundred miles to Pine Cove in just over an hour and a half. Effrom would be in his workshop now, working on his wood carvings and smoking cigarettes. She wasn’t supposed to know about the cigarettes any more than she was supposed to know that Effrom spent every morning watching the women’s exercise show. Men have to have their secret lives and forbidden pleasures, real or perceived. Cookies snitched from the jar are always sweeter than those served on a plate, and nothing evokes the prurient like puritanism. Amanda played her role for Effrom, staying on his tail, keeping him alert to the possibility of discovery, but never quite catching him in the act.

  Today she would pull in the driveway and rev the engine, take a long time ge
tting into the house to make sure that Effrom heard her coming so he could take a shot of breath spray to cover the smell of tobacco on his breath. Didn’t it occur to the old fart that she was the one who bought the breath spray and brought it home with the groceries each week? Silly old man.

  When Amanda entered the house, she noticed an acrid, burnt smell in the air. She had never smelled cordite, so she assumed that Effrom had been cooking. She went to the kitchen expecting to see the ruined remains of one of her frying pans, but the kitchen, except for a few cracker crumbs on the counter, was clean. Maybe the smell was coming from the workshop.

  Amanda usually avoided going near Effrom’s workshop when he was working, mainly to avoid the sound of the high-speed drills he used for carving, which reminded her of the unpleasantness of the dentist’s office. Today there was no sound coming from the workshop.

  She knocked on the door, gently, so as not to startle him. “Effrom, I’m home.” He had to be able to hear her. A chill ran through her. She had imagined finding Effrom cold and stiff a thousand times, but always she was able to push the thought out of her mind.

  “Effrom, open this door!” She had never entered the workshop. Except for a few toys that Effrom dragged out at Christmastime to donate to local charities, Amanda never even saw any of the carvings he produced. The workshop was Effrom’s sacred domain.

  Amanda paused, her hand on the doorknob. Maybe she should call someone. Maybe she should call her granddaughter, Jennifer, and have her come over. If Effrom were dead she didn’t want to face it alone. But what if he was just hurt, lying there on the floor waiting for help. She opened the door. Effrom was not there. She breathed a sigh of relief, then her anxiety returned. Where was he?

  The workshop’s shelves were filled with carved wooden figures, some only a few inches high, some several feet long. Every one of them was a figure of a nude woman. Hundreds of nude women. She studied each figure, fascinated with this new aspect of her husband’s secret life. The figures were running, reclining, crouching, and dancing. Except for a few figures on the workbench that were still in the rough stage, each of the carvings was polished and oiled and incredibly detailed. And they all had something in common: they were studies of Amanda.

  Most were of her when she was younger, but they were unmistakably her. Amanda standing, Amanda reclining, Amanda dancing, as if Effrom were trying to preserve her. She felt a scream rising in her chest and tears filling her eyes. She turned away from the carvings and left the workshop. “Effrom! Where are you, you old fart?”

  She went from room to room, looking in every corner and closet; no Effrom. Effrom didn’t go for walks. And even if he’d had a car, he didn’t drive anymore. If he had gone somewhere with a friend, he would have left a note. Besides, all his friends were dead: the Pine Cove Poker Club had lost its members, one by one, until solitaire was the only game in town.

  She went to the kitchen and stood by the phone. Call who? The police? The hospital? What would they say when she told them she had been home almost five minutes and couldn’t find her husband? They would tell her to wait. They wouldn’t understand that Effrom had to be here. He couldn’t be anywhere else.

  She would call her granddaughter. Jenny would know what to do. She would understand.

  Amanda took a deep breath and dialed the number. A machine answered the phone. She stood there waiting for the beep. When it came, she tried to keep her voice controlled, “Jenny, honey, this is Grandma, call me. I can’t find your grandfather.” Then she hung up and began sobbing.

  The phone rang and Amanda jumped back. She picked it up before the second ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh, good, you’re home.” It was a woman’s voice. “Mrs. Elliot, you’ve probably seen the bullet hole in your bedroom door. Don’t be frightened. If you listen carefully and follow my instructions, everything will be fine.”

  26

  TRAVIS’S STORY

  Augustus Brine sat in one of the big leather chairs in front of his fireplace, drinking red wine from a balloon goblet and puffing away on his meerschaum. He had promised himself that he would have only one glass of wine, just to take the edge off the adrenaline and caffeine jangle he had worked himself into during the kidnapping. Now he was on his third glass and the wine had infused him with a warm, oozy feeling; he let his mind drift in a dreamy vertigo before attacking the task at hand: interrogating the demonkeeper.

  The fellow looked harmless enough, propped up and tied to the other wing chair. But if Gian Hen Gian was to be believed, this dark young man was the most dangerous human on Earth.

  Brine considered washing up before waking the demonkeeper. He had caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror — his beard and clothing covered with flour and soot, his skin caked with sweat-streaked goo — and decided that he would make a more intimidating impression in his current condition. He had found the smelling salts in the medicine cabinet and sent Gian Hen Gian to the bathroom to bathe while he rested. Actually he wanted the Djinn out of the room while he questioned the demonkeeper. The Djinn’s curses and ravings would only complicate an already difficult task.

  Brine set his wineglass and his pipe on the end table and picked up a cotton-wrapped smelling-salt capsule. He leaned over to the demonkeeper and snapped the capsule under his nose. For a moment nothing happened, and Brine feared that he had hit him too hard, then the demonkeeper started coughing, looked at Brine, and screamed.

  “Calm down — you’re all right,” Brine said.

  “Catch, help me!” The demonkeeper struggled against his bonds. Brine picked up his pipe and lit it, affecting a bored nonchalance. After a moment the demonkeeper settled down.

  Brine blew a thin stream of smoke into the air between them. “Catch isn’t here. You’re on your own.”

  Travis seemed to forget that he had been beaten, kidnapped, and tied up. His concentration was focused on Brine’s last statement. “What do you mean, Catch isn’t here? You know about Catch?”

  Brine considered giving him the I’m-asking-the-questions-here line that he had heard so many times in detective movies, but upon reflection, it seemed silly. He wasn’t a hardass; why play the role? “Yes, I know about the demon. I know that he eats people, and I know you are his master.”

  “How do you know all that?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Brine said. “I also know that you’ve lost control of Catch.”

  “I have?” Travis seemed genuinely shaken by this. “Look, I don’t know who you are, but you can’t keep me here. If Catch is out of control again, I’m the only one that can stop him. I’m really close to ending all this; you can’t stop me now.”

  “Why should you care?”

  “What do you mean, why should I care? You might know about Catch, but you can’t imagine what he’s like when he’s out of control.”

  “What I mean,” Brine said, “is why should you care about the damage he causes? You called him up, didn’t you? You send him out to kill, don’t you?”

  Travis shook his head violently. “You don’t understand. I’m not what you think. I never wanted this, and now I have a chance to stop it. Let me go. I can end it.”

  “Why should I trust you? You’re a murderer.”

  “No. Catch is.”

  “What’s the difference? If I do let you go, it will be because you will have told me what I want to know, and how I can use that information. Now I’ll listen and you’ll talk.”

  “I can’t tell you anything. And you don’t want to know anyway, I promise you.”

  “I want to know where the Seal of Solomon is. And I want to know the incantation that sends Catch back. Until I know, you’re not going anywhere.”

  “Seal of Solomon? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Look — what is your name, anyway?”

  “Travis.”

  “Look, Travis,” Brine said, “my associate wants to use torture. I don’t like the idea, but if you jerk me around, torture might
be the only way to go.”

  “Don’t you have to have two guys to play good cop, bad cop?”

  “My associate is taking a bath. I wanted to see if I could reason with you before I let him near you. I really don’t know what he’s capable of… I’m not even sure what he is. So if we could get on with this, it would be better for the both of us.”

  “Where’s Jenny?” Travis asked.

  “She’s fine. She’s at work.”

  “You won’t hurt her?”

  “I’m not some kind of terrorist, Travis. I didn’t ask to be involved in this, but I am. I don’t want to hurt you, and I would never hurt Jenny. She’s a friend of mine.”

  “So if I tell you what I know, you’ll let me go?”

  “That’s the deal. But I’ll have to make sure that what you tell me is true.” Brine relaxed. This young man didn’t seem to have any of the qualities of a mass murderer. If anything, he seemed a little naive.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you everything I know about Catch and the incantations, but I swear to you, I don’t know anything about any Seal of Solomon. It’s a pretty strange story.”

  “I guessed that,” Brine said. “Shoot.” He poured himself a glass of wine, relit his pipe, and sat back, propping his feet up on the hearth.

  “Like I said, it’s a pretty strange story.”

  “Strange is my middle name,” Brine said.

  “That must have been difficult for you as a child,” Travis said.

  “Would you get on with it.”

  “You asked for it.” Travis took a deep breath. “I was born in Clarion, Pennsylvania, in the year nineteen hundred.”

  “Bullshit,” Brine interrupted. “You’re not a day over twenty-five.”

  “This is going to take a lot more time if I have to keep stopping. Just listen — it’ll all fall into place.”

  Brine grumbled and nodded for Travis to continue.

  “I was born on a farm. My parents were Irish immigrants, black Irish. I was the oldest of six children, two boys and four girls. My parents were staunch Catholics. My mother wanted me to be a priest. She pushed me to study so I could get into seminary. She was working on the local diocese to recommend me while I was still in the womb. When World War I broke out, she begged the bishop to get me into seminary early. Everybody knew it was just a matter of time before America entered the war. My mother wanted me in seminary before the Army could draft me. Boys from secular colleges were already in Europe, driving ambulances, and some of them had been killed. My mother wasn’t going to lose her chance to have a son become a priest to something as insignificant as a world war. You see, my little brother was a bit slow — mentally, I mean. I was my mother’s only chance.”