His cryptic diffidence did not diminish his energy one bit. He sustained his high volume rant, advancing on Aaron, coming within an arm’s length. His face flushed. Sweat dribbled down his brow. He held a sheath of papers tucked into a Bible high over his head with both hands.
“Satanists! Witches! In the name of Jesus, I bind you. In the name of Jesus, I command you to go, under the feet of Jesus I expel you. In the name of Jesus I command you never to return!”
Aaron’s face hardened. “Okay. I’ve had enough. Get off my property!”
The preacher continued to work himself into a frenzy, his words accelerating almost beyond comprehension.
“By-the-blood-of-Jesus-I-bind-you-demons-inhabiting-this-house-with-cords-that-can’t-be-broken. The-Lord-shall-cast-you-into-the-prison-for-demons-deep-beneath-the-earth.”
“Bloody hell,” said Aaron. “I said, get away from me, and get the fuck away from my house.” Aaron shoved him. “Get away from my door!”
The man chanted on, rapid fire. “Foul-serpents-you-squirm-and-grovel-under-my-feet. If-you-bite-my-heel-by-the-grace-of-God-I-shall-trample-your-head.”
“Not if I trample your fucking head first. Now, out of my yard before I call the cops.”
A woman lurched forward and thrust her candle at Aaron, rattling off another rapid-fire prayer at him.
“Oh-Saint-Michael-the-Archangel-defend-us-in-the-hour-of-battle-be-our-safeguard-against- the-wickedness-and-snares-of-the-devil-may-God-restrain-him-we-humbly-pray-and-do-thou-oh-Prince-of-the-Heavenly-Host-by-the-power-of-God-cast-into-hell-satan-and-all-the-evil- spirits-that-roam-through-the-world-seeking-the-ruin-of ….”
Aaron slapped away the woman’s candle. Those behind her rushed forward, slipping another candle into her palm, wielding their candles like sabers to nudge Aaron back.
A man wearing a bulging photographer’s vest pushed his way through the crowd. Something long and dark dangled loosely in his grip.
“Aaron, watch out! There’s a guy coming with a gun.”
“A gun?” said Eleni.
Sari stopped singing. Ron stopped strumming. Mal put down his horn. But through all the commotion, Paolo kept up a ferocious beat on Aaron’s collection of drums.
“Did someone say gun?” said Sari.
Aaron retreated into the house and slammed the door.
“Jesus, this is getting out of hand,” he said.
People pressed against the windows. Their chanting permeated the music room.
“Shola baratoli molan. Atara bahoon etia. Tanash abiha. Mera tera neran. Taribantaia aba halam burem.”
“What the fuck kinda language is that?” said Ron.
“I know that shit,” said Hollis. “That’s tongue speak. They speaking in tongues. They must be Pentecostals.”
“Christ, next they’re gonna haul out the snakes,” said Mal.
“Charismatics,” said Aaron, nodding. “Fucking lunatics, all of them.”
“Can’t blame ‘em,” said Hollis. “You gotta admit. This shit sound like jazz from hell. They’re just good Christians, doing what they think is best. Folks who find Jesus, they do what they can to make this world pure.”
“Who are you kidding Hollis?” said Aerie. “Since when do you go to church?”
“Since I started playing this ungodly music is when,” he said, disassembling his sax. “I’m out of here. Come Sunday, I’m finding myself a pew. I don’t care whose. Unitarian. Catholic. I’ll go Mormon if they’ll take me.”
“Hollis, get back on that horn. Come on everybody. Play. We’re not gonna let these assholes tell us what to do.” Aaron picked up his fiddle. “Come on, Hollis. Just give us ten more minutes. We got this far, we can’t have far to go. Come you guys, step it up. Let’s get that birdie singing.”
Aerie’s fingertips throbbed, on the verge of blistering. A week away from a bass had eroded her calluses and turned her muscles to mush. But she dug in and locked into a bucking groove that alternately clashed and linked with Paolo’s rhythms.
The interruption and altercation seemed to catalyze their collective process of creation. The level of verve and daring in the room surged noticeably. Ron approached full flail on guitar. Sari arched her back and emptied her lungs.
Hollis looked lost. He kept glancing towards the door. He sighed, put down his case and picked up one of Aaron’s clarinets. His eyes drifted up to the loft. “Oh man, I wish I never took this gig.” He licked the reed, took a breath and noodled his way back into middle of the jam.
“Yeah, buddy. That’s the ticket!” said Aaron. Like a spider enhancing a web, he spun manic flourishes from his central drone.
No longer was their music a loose assemblage of whims. Disparate threads twined with startling serendipity, embroidering a tapestry of sound.
The bell jar began to hum.
“Oh yeah!” said Aaron. “Now, we’re getting somewhere.”
***
John circled back around the house to see what was going on at the front door. He brushed past one of Mac’s guys. The two made eye contact and the man smiled and nodded. John glared back. The man responded with a grimace of his own.
Before he could reach the driveway, the front door slammed, dashing his hopes for a safe and amicable safe resolution to this encounter. The music started up again and rose in intensity and volume, reaching heights of bedlam surpassing all that came before. The ground seemed to tremble from the clash and mingle of strange harmonics.
This was clearly no ordinary music. Why did it terrify the others, but not him? Was he immune? Conditioned from prior exposure? Or had his soul been overtaken by the forces they were fighting?
Funny. John didn’t feel possessed. He wasn’t even sure he believed in demons or the devil. Not anymore.
Many of the others, the believers, backed away, out of the yard, onto the road. Donnie remained planted in the driveway like a statue, keeping a wide stance, his palms opened upward and his head thrown back to the evening’s first stars.
A few brave souls kept several paces behind him, Cindy and Mac among them, holding hands now unabashed, torches raised high as the twilight plunged into nightfall. John wanted to feel jealous or aggrieved, but he felt nothing of the sort. His heart held only worry for Aerie.
Tammie caught John’s eye. She walked over with Rand in tow. Jerry stayed put, watching Donnie’s back, leaning on his shotgun.
“Look at him go,” said Tammie. “Isn’t he awesome?”
“These deliverances, are they all this intense?”
“Not at all,” said Tammie, her torch sputtering from a faulty wick. “They’re usually just prayer meetings, counseling sessions, that sort of thing.”
“Boring,” said Rand. “This one’s an actual, freaking war! Spiritual warfare. Now, this is what I’m talking about. This is why I took this internship.”
Donnie spoke entirely in tongues now, channeling every ounce of Holy Spirit he could muster. He trembled and jerked like an epileptic.
John sidled over to Jerry. “Is Donnie okay? Should we do something?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Break him out of his trance?”
“Nah. He’s fine,” said Jerry. “He’s just doing his thing. I mean, this is what he does.”
“How long is he going to take?”
“As long as it takes. Something tells me, he’s just getting started.”
John stared at the house, transfixed by the sight of the shadows dancing in time with the music, the way Donnie’s chanting seemed to mesh with the overall composition, as if Donnie were in cahoots with the alleged Satan lovers inside.
“Pardon me, if this sounds stupid,” said John. “But … how will we know when the deliverance is … Delivered?”
“Oh, there’ll be signs,” said Jerry. “Might not be obvious to us, but Donnie will know ‘em when he sees ‘em.” He reached up and scratched his beard. “One good sign would be getting this dang music to stop. And another….” He turned tow
ards the hillside behind them. “Another might be coming down out of those woods. There’s been quite a lot of action up there, and I’m pretty damn sure it’s not raccoons or deer. I got a feeling them whirligig things are getting riled. Just like I thought, it’s this music that’s attracting them.”
“Oh man, that’s all we need,” said John. “As if these folks aren’t spooked enough.”
“Yeah, well, that ain’t all. I’ve been keeping an eye on Mac’s idiot goon squad here. If you ask me, these men are acting a little too jittery to be handling those kinds of weapons. They’re way out of their element.”
“Oh, don’t say that.”
“I’m just saying. Things might get hairy.”
“You’re not implying—” John exhaled deeply. “Anything we can do about it?”
“Watch your ass … and hope that music stops real soon.”
John knew things would get worse before they got better. He knew where this music led, and how it would not end until it reached a climax guaranteed to blow these people’s minds. He had only heard it happen twice before and both times it came after unbound and rollicking sessions like the one they were presently witnessing. He felt like a man watching a bomb about to go off and powerless to tell anyone.
Already, people moaned and sobbed. This was obviously much more than people expected, much more than they could handle. More folks peeled off and skulked away.
The music began to mess with his vision. The house seemed to ripple like a heat mirage. He grew dizzy, and his visual field closed in at the fringes. His knees began to wobble.
Mac passed in front, making his way among his congregation, trying to rally those who had departed and gird the will of those who remained. Cindy remained with the hard-core throng behind Donnie as he sustained his assault from the driveway. Tammie ran up and handed him a bottle of water, and wiped his brow with a hankie.
“Hold strong, people,” said Mac. “We are winning this battle. We are winning. Keep it up. Hold strong. Send all your strength, all your prayers to Donnie. God bless him, he’s doing heroic work. He’s our hero.”
Mac’s confident visage eroded a bit when he came around to where Jerry and John stood. He bumped his fist against Jerry’s shoulder. His eyes fluttered when he tried to look at John.
The scream first manifested as a ripple in the reservoir of John’s torch. It blasted out of the house like a jet engine, delivering a screech like a thousand cats boiling in oil, a million fingernails scraping against blackboards. It was as primal a shriek as ever generated by a beast in any eon. John could imagine the lungs of dinosaurs making such sounds, if earthly creatures had ever made such sounds. He had heard this before, but never so brain curdling, never so sustained.
“Make it stop!” someone shouted, their face teary and dripping. One man fainted. Others dropped to their knees and begged to Jesus to make it stop. Donnie wobbled in the driveway, stunned speechless. He staggered back.
The crowd broke. One man fainted and had to be pulled along the road, heels dragging. Another clutched his shoulder and stumbled and collapsed into some bushes. Candles blinked out. Few bothered to relight them.
The scream echoed against the hills. Before the echoes could fade completely, the music finally stopped.
Something gurgled and scraped in the forest behind them. It moved along the hillside. Those who had taken shelter among the trees scampered onto the road like roaches flushed from a kitchen cabinet.
John looked around for Cindy, but it was getting very dark and fewer torches remained alight, hers not among them.
Mac cowered on the pavement by John’s feet, having hit the deck with the first onslaught of screaming. He scrambled to his feet, panting with fear, his face stricken with panic. He retrieved his still burning torch from the blacktop and advanced on the house in a crouch. He approached with caution, as it were a sleeping dragon that might wake up and devour him. He swept his torch against the mulch beneath a patch of holly.
John, appalled, rushed forward. “Mac! What the heck are you doing? There are people inside.”
“They can’t be people,” said Mac. “These are demons.” He ran around the back of the house, swiping his torch against anything that would burn.
Frantic, John looked for help among the watching throng. People looked on, stunned, but no one made a move to interfere with Mac.
“Donnie! Jerry!”
Jerry had slipped away into the darkness. Donnie sat slumped on a boulder at the end of the driveway, transfixed by the flames spreading across the dry mulch, as disinterested and unresponsive as the stone on which he sat.
John ran over to the holly and tried stamping out the flames but they had spread too quickly through the clumps of dried leaves that had collected in the flower bed. Fire lapped at the lowermost shingles.
He rushed to the front door and pounded on it with his fist as Mac rounded the other side of the house with two of his security goons in tow, his face still manic and distorted with rage. He pulled a machine pistol from the pocket of his jacket.
“Get away from that door or I’ll take you down!” he shouted. “Let the Holy Fire sort the good from the bad. Right Donnie?”
John backed away, his arms outstretched, beseeching Donnie to intervene, but the Reverend just sat there like a tired dog and blinked.
***
Donnie felt that thing in his stomach again, roiling his insides. It was just like last time. He could feel the demons poking, probing, encircling his viscera with their coils, stabbing him with their claws.
The scream had knocked him for a loop, in that moment of weakness, they had pounced and he could feel their possession taking hold. He didn’t care anymore about continuing any prayers. His deliverance had failed. He, again, had failed.
Jerry came up behind him.
“You alright, boss?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Get everybody out of here, Jerry. They’re too strong. They’re just too strong. All hope is lost.”
“Calm down, Donnie. It’s okay. The music stopped. Maybe what you did, worked.”
“Wasn’t me. I had no control. It just happened. It was their volition.”
“The thing is, Donnie, up in those woods—”
“You don’t feel them?”
“Feel what?”
“Inside. Your inner core. Are they not coming after you, too?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about Donnie. Nothing’s coming after me. But—”
“Of course! They’ve targeted me. I’m the object of their defense.”
“Boss. I’m trying to tell you. There’s something scrambling around in those woods behind us.”
Donnie nearly slid off the boulder in despair.
“We’re … surrounded. They’ve got us inside and out.”
Jerry stared up into the blackness of the forest. “Hear that scraping? That’s them. They’re coming on down.”
Donnie tried to rise, but a pain like a javelin point seized his middle and doubled him over. Several of Mac’s parishioners came over to console him.
“There, there, Reverend,” said a young woman. “You did it. You made them stop.”
“I did nothing.”
“Such a godly man. So humble!” said her older companion.
Jerry looked up, a new glow glistening off the plane of his forehead. “Oh my God! Pastor Mac. He’s burning down the house.”
“Maybe … maybe it’s for the best,” said Donnie.
***
“Ooh Rah!” said Ron. “Listen to that birdie sang!”
“Gotta admit,” said Mal. “That was a good one. For being all acoustic.”
Sari slouched on her stool, breathless and panting. “Yeah. It was good for me, too.”
Aaron, grinning broadly rushed over to the bell jar and ripped the cover off. The birdie had expanded several times in size to nearly fill the jar.
“Gol dang!” said Hollis, lurching back, holding the cla
rinet like a baseball bat. “What the heck is that thing?”
“Don’t worry about it, Hollis. You did your part. You get paid.”
A fist pounded against the front door.
“Someone’s knocking,” said Aerie, laying the bass down gently. “Should we answer?” Something acrid bit her nostrils. “Do you guys … smell smoke?” She rushed to a window. The chanting outside had stopped and the crowd had mostly dispersed. Those who remained looked on in silent awe as flames lapped against the cedar shingles from the border of hemlock mulch encircling the house. Several onlookers put out their candles as if embarrassed by what they had wrought.
“Holy shit! The house! It’s on fire!”
“No way,” said Ron.
“Those bastards!” said Aaron.
“Do you have an extinguisher?” said Aerie.
A blank look came over Aaron and he bolted into the hall, Aerie close on his heels. He ripped open the overstuffed pantry and fumbled through a pile of pasta boxes and cans of tomato sauce. “I can’t find it.” He ran over to the basement door and kicked a laundry basket down the steps. “It’s … not here.”
“Someone call 911!” said Aerie.
“No!” said Aaron. “Let me handle this. I don’t want any firemen here. This house isn’t built to code.”
Paolo already had taken out his phone. “Yes, ma’am. I would like very much to report a fire please at 839 Summerton Hill Road.”
“Paolo, no!”
An orange glow flickered through the kitchen window.
“Oh my God! It’s in the back, too.”
Aerie grabbed a large pot and filled it with water from the kitchen sink.
Mal rushed in. “What the heck are you doing? Making pasta?”
“Get out of my way!” She yanked open the window, lifted the pot, and heaved its sloshing contents down the side of the house. Some of the flames quenched, sending up puffs of pale smoke. She pushed out the screen and stuck her head out. Small fires burned every few feet, spreading through patches of unraked, wind-gathered leaves. In places, the cedar shakes were catching.
“Someone get the hose! We’re surrounded by little fires.”
Aerie refilled the pot.
“Here, try this,” said Mal. He pulled out the extensible faucet out the window.
“That’s no good,” said Aerie, pushing it aside. “It’s not long enough. We need the garden hose.”