“Several months ago when I visited here I saw you in town, at a distance. In the company of Mrs. Fawley. And then when the good Father Clare told me of Mrs. Fawley’s party…”
“You came to destroy me. Thinking I destroyed your church.”
“What are you, if not a fallen angel? Why are you walking the earth?”
“Why are you walking the earth, Father?”
“I have a mission. To do good. To right wrongs.”
“As do I. Father Venn…though tonight I wear this lovely dress, and mingle with this lovely group of people, in my mortal life I was not so fortunate. My husband and I both lie in that potter’s field. Pinned to that unconsecrated ground as though we were both staked through the heart. All because we didn’t have a few words said over us by some man in black. And there are babies there, Father. All cursed to a limbo of endless waiting, all for want of a few drops on their brows. It’s cruel, Father Venn. The rules aren’t fair. Men make the rules. God is more compassionate than that, I think. But men’s rules are men’s rules and that’s how the game is played.”
“So what you want is to be released…”
“To be exorcized, Father. To have the demons of our unworthiness cast out. To be allowed the peace we have so long been denied. I’m not a fallen angel, Father. I was never permitted to rise.”
Laughter came distantly from the house, like the chatter of night insects, tiny and ephemeral. Though the woman’s anger was strong, Venn no longer feared her.
“Why did it take you so many years to arrange this blessing?”
“I was just released from my grave this year. I don’t understand the lapse. Perhaps God was busy and I had to wait my turn on His list. Perhaps He’d forgotten us, in our unhallowed corner. Perhaps it was a penance I had to pay for the sins of my life.”
Venn shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. But let me help you. I’ll be here with Clare on that day. I’ll set you free. You and your husband, and all the others.” He gazed off into the murk of the garden. “Perhaps it was this I was meant to do all along, and not hunt for the demon that burned my cathedral, as I believed.”
“Maybe it was God Who burned your cathedral,” said Emma Garland. “You don’t seem to know Him any better than I.”
“I suppose not,” he murmured. After a moment he began to move away from the woman. “I’ll go now, Mrs. Garland. But I will be back—I promise you.”
“Father?”
“Yes?”
“When you put me to rest, will you then be able to rest, yourself?”
He smiled. “I do hope so.”
“I can see your eyes, Father. You know you died in that fire, also, don’t you?”
“Yes. I know that.”
“I just wanted to be sure you understood. So many ghosts don’t realize it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Garland. It was a pleasure meeting you.”
“Thank you, Father Venn.”
“Forgive me for…not understanding you,” he said.
“Forgive me for my bitterness.”
“You are forgiven.”
The priest reached up to his face and removed his spectacles at last, folding them away. For the first time, he saw the lovely woman without her tapered black wings. He had wanted to see her this way. As if they both might pretend they were mortal again.
“Good night, Mrs. Garland,” he told her.
“Good night, Father,” she replied.
Gun Metal Blue
Every gun has a demon.
They might be thought of in that sense, or they might be considered elemental spirits, bred from the mating of ore harvested from the earth and the fire of forging. And some essence of their being might even come from the manufacturers of these machines; an errant shred of human mind or soul, entering into the alloy.
They are as diverse in form as are the guns themselves. The demons that are linked to single-barrel, break- open shotguns, for instance, are Cyclops-eyed and slack-mouthed. When they kill a human, these beings barely notice the difference from their usual diet of fowl and squirrel.
But there are demons with sharp minds and a ravenous hunger for the rending of human flesh. They are the demons of the genus Glock or Beretta. They are often far more intelligent than their owners, who feel that winning a rock of crack or settling a driving dispute is a worthy enough wish for the summoning of the genies from these polished lamps. Those humans who feel that an absence or an abundance of melanin in the skin cells is reason enough to kill the other. The demons know no such racism, though they often kill each other’s owners, orphan each other until the next masters comes along to adopt them. The demons know no competition with one another, although the makers of their earthly metal vehicles compete to out-do each other’s product. The demons welcome the competition. The better the gun, the sharper their minds.
It does seem that the complexity or sophistication of the gun dictates the intelligence of the resident spirit, as if the minds of the human designers and engineers have imparted their force to the demon’s mind. And it seems that the intended use of each gun dictates the disposition of the attending demon, in regard to its thirst for human blood.
For there are many breeds of these demons which crave human blood; not content with rabbits and deer, demons that are vampires waiting in the metal coffin of an ammunition clip, that fly free—embodied in part in each bullet—to taste that blood. The demon of a gun is both a god demanding sacrifice, and the sacrificial knife itself.
* * *
His name, for all intents, was J611821. This was the serial number stamped in the butt of the Smith and Wesson .38 Chief’s Special Revolver, Model No. 36. It was a snub-nose with a five shot cylinder and checked walnut grips. His first owner had ordered pearl grips and left a deposit for them but had never picked them up. The metal of J611821’s earthly form had a chrome-bright nickel finish, though his demon’s flesh, could it be seen by the limited vision of humans, would have appeared as dark as the metal beneath that mirrored nickel epidermis. All humans were red on the inside, J611821 liked to joke to himself, and all demons were a deep gun metal blue.
J611821 joked only with himself because there was no interaction between demons, not even on a telepathic level. The most they had was an awareness of their brothers, a sort of collective unconscious, a vague feeling of their connectedness and shadowy memories of their origins in wombs of fire.
But J611821 was not alone in his world. Sometimes he’d had guests, over the years…
He had first been owned by a man who only dreamed of violence, of brutal revenge for wrongs imagined or real, but who had never actually set J611821 free against anything more living than a tree. J611821 had been born in the late 70’s following a pure lineage of revolvers before him; he was young and old at the same time. But times had changed. After decades of sameness, a race of radical new guns had been born; semi-automatics were revered in the arts and favored in the streets by cop and criminal alike. He accepted the change; he felt no competition, envy or resentment. What he lacked in modern looks and ammo capacity he made up for in the sheer dependability of his durable, simple design. And he welcomed the passing of time, because it finally brought him his first taste of blood.
His first owner’s home was broken into and J611821 was stolen. He missed being carried from room to room by his first master, because the man’s adrenalin had tasted good to him in place of blood. He missed his master pointing him into the mirror and silently snarling hatred. But his second master ended his virginity in a sense, when this man killed another behind the counter of a convenience store. The store proprietor fired some shots of his own before he was killed, and J611821 remembered nearly brushing a bullet from that man’s gun as they crossed in flight, but even then the two demons had not been able to communicate with each other.
Since that glorious first night’s feeding there had been only two others over the last decade. But J611821 was not impatient. He knew his sturdy design would endure, perhaps for centuries…and he would feed again.
But it was not blood that he fed on in the literal sense. He thirsted for blood more for the sheer symbolism of
