“I brought them,” she said when she came where people were again. “See, here they are. All of them.”
“You’ll need them,” they told her. “If you live, they will be your dowry.”
She heard a man’s heavy voice, full of baffled fury. “Put her in that little back room and lock her in.”
Chernon objecting to this. “She’s dying. She can’t move. There must be someone else with some healing skill….”
“Susannah was the only one here. Not goin’ to waste time an’ trouble goin’ over the mountain for anybody else. Let her die if she dies. It’s All Father’s will, either way.”
Chernon’s voice again, and the sound of a blow, and then nothing but quiet and jostling dark with the cows all around her, their rank, animal smelling filling her nostrils.
“If you live,” the cows told her, “you’ll need us.” They stayed with her, leading her through the dank darkness which went on and on until she supposed it would simply go on forever.
DILIGENCE, the twenty-eight-year-old son of Rejoice Brome, had been rounding up a recalcitrant sheep that had seemed possessed of a demon. It was one of the ram lambs lately captured from the devil women, which probably explained the animal’s orneriness, but it also made the animal valuable, which meant Diligence couldn’t just consign it to the netherworld and leave it to be eaten by coyotes—though he fervently hoped that’s what would happen someday, when he wasn’t the one responsible. He didn’t dare cross Papa at the moment. Nobody dared cross Papa right now, not even a little. It was only yesterday Susannah had hung herself up on that old rope, only yesterday that the demon woman got shut up in the back room of Papa’s house to live or die. Not even a day yet since that fella from outside had that set-to with Papa and got hisself knocked down. No time to be causin’ trouble was the way Diligence had it figured out, so he’d kept after that ram lamb until he found it even though it had taken all day.
He had just shut the sheep in the fold in the falling dark, fighting it every step of the way, and was about to go up the path to the bachelor house when something stepped out of the trees in his path.
It had teeth, and the teeth glowed. He saw that much. It had a face that was way too big for anything he knew of. His mind shut down in panic and he tried to dodge it by jumping into the trees along the path, but something invisible caught hold of him and the next thing he knew he was lying on his belly with his head pulled up by the hair by the invisible thing sitting on him while the glowing teeth and the glowing eyes moved around like there was maybe one and maybe three or four things coming at him in the night.
“Chernon?” asked a horrible, echoing voice. “Where is our friend Chernon?”
Diligence couldn’t think. He didn’t know what a Chernon was. He gargled, spit filling up his throat as the thing on his back did something cruel to one of his hands. “Arghhah,” he gurgled around a half scream. “Don’t know. What is it?”
The thing let up on him a little. “You people brought a man and a woman from out there. The man’s name is Chernon. He’s not really a man. He’s a demon. He’s a friend of ours, and we want to know where he is.”
“Up t’Papa’s house,” Diligence howled. “He was up t’Papa’s house with the woman. Cappy hit her with the shovel and she ain’t been able to talk since then….”
“Ahh,” said the deep voice, who had already known that Stavia had been badly hurt. “There’s an angel coming to get that woman. You shouldn’t have hurt her. That’s something you shouldn’t have done!” Later on, remembering, Diligence had the strange idea that the voice had had pain in it, but at the moment he didn’t think anything because something hit him behind the ear with a kind of lightning flash and he didn’t know anything else.
“Cappy,” said one of the invisible creatures. “That would be one of the young ones up at their barracks. I’ll take care of that one.”
“We’ll take the masks and go create a little more demonology,” the deep voice said. “Papa’s house would be the one up the hill there?”
“Take you about an hour?”
“About that.”
“Who’s got the feathers?”
“I have. I’ll bring them.”
As luck would have it, Cappy Brome was leaving the bachelor house for the privy when the invisible thing caught him, threw him down with his face in the dirt, and then pounced on him.
“Cappy?” a voice whispered to him. “You’re Cappy?”
Though almost paralyzed with fright, Cappy managed to nod. The thing that was sitting on him seemed satisfied with this. “That woman you hit with the shovel, that was a holy woman,” the voice said. “She’s a healer.”
Cappy convulsed as he tried to throw off his attacker. “She ’uz a whore,” he cried. “Walkin’ around with her hair hangin’ and her body showin’. She ’uz no better’n a whore of Babylon. She ’uz tryin’ to get away….”
“Umm,” said the voice. “Well, it’s obvious that disputation is not going to change your mind. I will, therefore, simply make my point in blood.” And with that Cappy felt his shirt ripped away and a knife moving on his back. “An angel is coming to rescue her,” the voice said, punctuating the remark with a whole series of jabs and slices of the blade. “Remember that!” Then something hit Cappy on the head and the thing went away.
From up the valley came confused sounds of people yelling. Fire bloomed from the location of Elder Jepson’s barn.
“Good idea,” said the invisible thing, moving
