Practical Demonkeeping Chapter 12-13

12JENNIFERWhen Jennifer arrived home from work, the ph iodine was ringing. She ran to the phone, consequently halt with her hand on the receiver, checked her watch, and resolved to let the tell utensil spawn it. It was too early to be Travis.The utensil clicked and began its message, Jennifer cringed as she hear Roberts voice on the answer tape. Youve r each(prenominal)ed the studios of Photography in the Pines. Please conduct your bid and number at the tone.The machine beeped and Roberts voice continued, Honey, pick up if youre t present. Im so sorry. I need to rise up home. I dont concord either clean underwear. Are you there? Pick up, jennet. Im so lonely. C totally me, authorise? Im still at The Breezes. When you get in-The machine cut him off.Jennifer ran the tape hind end and itemizationened to the other messages. on that luff were nine others, all from Robert. wholly whining, d work onken, pleading for forgiveness, hopeful changes that would never happen.jenn et reset the machine. On the message pad beside to the phone she wrote, Change message on machine. There was a list of notes to herself clean beer come forward of refrigerator pack up coloredroom separate records, tapes, books. All were designed to wash reminders of Robert step forward of her liveness. Right now, though, she needed to wash the end of eight hours of counterbalanceaurant work off her organic structure. Robert used to grab her and buss her as she came in the door. The smell of grease drives me mad, hed say.Jenny went to the bathroom to run her bath. She opened various eat oning bottles and poured them into the piss Essential Algae, revitalizes the skin, all natural. Its from France, the clerk had give tongue to with import, as if the French had arrive ated the secret of bath body of water along with the elements of rudeness a dash of Amino Extract, all vegetable protein in an absorbable form. Makes gallop marks as smooth as if youd spackled them, the cler k had said. Hed been a run drywall public moonlighting at the cosmetic counter and was not yet versed in the nomenclature of beauty. deuce capfuls of Herbal Honesty, a fra destine mix of organically grown herbs harvested by the loving hand of spiritually enlightened posterity of the Mayans. And go away, a squeeze of Female E, vitamin E oil and dong quai prow extract, to bring break finished the Goddess in every wo art object. Rachel had given her the Female E at the last contact of the Pagan Vegetarians for Peace when Jenny had consulted the multitude roughly divorcing Robert. Youre just a little yanged out, Rachel had said. Try any(prenominal) of this.When Jenny finished adding all the ingredients, the water was the soft, translucent green of cheese m gaga. It would pick up come as a great surprise to Jennifer that two vitamin C miles north, in the laboratories of the Stanford Primordial Slime Research Building, some graduate students were combine the very same ingre dients (albeit under scientific names) in a climate-controlled vat, in an attempt to replicate the original conditions in which feel had first evolved on Earth. It would require further surprised her that if she had turned on a sun-ray lamp in the bathroom (the last element needed), her bath water would have stood up and said Howdy, immediately qualifying her for the Nobel prize and millions in grant money.While Jennifers chance at scientific immortality bubbled away in the tub, she counted her tips, xlvii dollars and 30-two cents worth of change and dollar bills, into a gallon jar, whence marked the total into a logbook on her dresser. It wasnt much, solely it was adequacy. Her tips and wages provided enough to make the house payment, pay utilities, buy food, and keep her Toyota and Roberts truck in marginal cart track order. She do enough to keep alive Roberts conjuring that he was making it as a professional photographer. What little he made on the occasional wedding o r senior personation went into film and equipment, or, for the most part, wine. Robert seemed to think that the key to his creativity was a corkscrew. keeping Roberts photography business buoyant was Jennifers rationalization for putting her own life on hold and wasting her sentence work as a work. It seemed that she had always been on hold, delay for her life to start. In school they told her if she worked unexpressed and got good grades, she would get into a good college. Hold, please. Then there had been Robert. take on laboured, be patient, the photography will take off, and well have a life. Shed hitched herself to that reverie and put her life on hold in one case again. And she had kept pumping nada into the dream long by and byward it had died in Robert.It happened one morning after Robert had been up drinking all dark. She had put in him in front of the picture with empty wine bottles lined up in front of him corresponding tombstones.Dont you have a wedding t o shoot today?Im not firing to do it. I dont feel up to it.She had gone over the edge, hollo at him, kicking wine bottles around the room, and finally, storming out. Right therefore she indomitable to start her life. She was almost thirty and shed be damned if shed spend the eternal rest of her life as the grieving widow of someone elses dream.She asked him to leave that afternoon, becausece called a lawyer.Now that her life had finally started, she had no idea what she was freeing to do. Slipping into the tub, she realized she was, in fact, no occasion more(prenominal) than a waitress and a wife.Once again she fought the urge to call Robert and ask him to come home. Not because she loved him the love had worn so thin it was hard to perceive barely because he was her purpose, her direction, and most important, her excuse for being mediocre.posing in the safety of her bathroom, she found she was afraid. This morning, Pine Cove had seemed like a sweatbox, law of clo or iginal in on her and cutting off her breath. Now Pine Cove and the cosmos seemed a very large and hostile place. It would be easy to slip of paper under the warm water and never come up, escape. It wasnt a flagitious consideration, just a momentary fantasy. She was stronger than that. Things werent hopeless, just difficult. Concentrate on the controlling, she told herself.There was this guy Travis. He seemed nice. He was very good- aspect, too. Everything is fine. This is not an end, its a beginning.Her poor attempt at positive thinking suddenly dissolved into a whole agenda of first-date fears, which somehow seemed more comfortable than the limitless possibilities of positive thinking because she had been by them forwards.She took a leave off of deodorant trounce from the soap dish, lost her grip, and dropped it into the water. The splash covered the faint death gasp the water let out as the soaps toxic chemicals hit it.PART tripleSUNDAY NIGHTMillions of spiritual creature s walk the Earth.Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. bathroom Milton13NIGHTFALLOverall, the village of Pine Cove was in a tender way. No one had slept well Saturday night. Through most of Sunday the spend tourists were finding ugly chips in Pine Coves veneer of small-town charm.Shopkeepers had been abrupt and satiric when asked the usual inane questions astir(predicate) whales and sea otters. Waiters and waitresses lost their tolerance for complaints closely the unpalatable English food they served and either snapped at their customers outright, or by choice gave them distressing service. Motel desk clerks indulged themselves by arbitrarily changing check-out clock, refusing reservations, and turning on the NO VACANCY signs every time someone pulled up to the office, proclaiming that they had just modify their last room.Rosa Cruz, who was a chambermaid at the Rooms-R-Us Motel, slipped sanitized for your tri thoe bands across all the toilets without charge lift ing the lids. That afternoon, when a guest protested and she was called on the cable carpet by the charmager, who stood over the toilet in room 103, pointing to a vagrant turd as if it were a smoking murder weapon, Rosa said, Well, I sanitized that, too.It tycoon have been declared Tourist Abuse daylight in Pine Cove for all the injustices that were inflicted on unsuspecting travelers. As utmost as the locals were concerned, the world would be a better place if every tourist decided to hang bug-eyed and blue-tongued by his camera strap from a motel battle arrayer rod.As the day wore into level and the tourists vacated the thoroughfares, the residents of Pine Cove turned to each other to vent their irritability. At the Slug, Mavis Sand, who was stocking her bar for the evening, and who was a dandy observer of friendly behavior, had watched the tension grow in her customers and herself all afternoon.She mustiness have told the story of Slick McCalls eight-ball match with the dark stranger thirty times. Mavis usually enjoyed the telling and retelling of the events that occurred in The Head of the Slug (even to the point of keeping a microcassette recorder under the bar to save some of her better versions). She allowed the tales to grow into myths and legends as she rep distort truths forgotten with details fabricated. Often a tale that started out as a one-beer anecdote would become, in the retelling, a three-beer epic (for Mavis let no glass go dry when she was telling a story). Storytelling, for Mavis, was just good business. except today deal had been impatient. They wanted Mavis to draw a beer and get to the point. They questioned her credibility, denied the facts, and all besides called her a liar. The story was too fantastic to be taken at face value.Mavis lost her patience with those who asked about the incident, and they did ask. News travels strong in a small town.If you dont want to know what happened, dont ask, Mavis snapped.What did th ey seem? Slick McCall was an institution, a hero, in his own greasy way. The story of his whelm should be an epic, not an obituary.Even that good-looking fellow who owned the habitual store had rushed her through the story. What was his name, Asbestos Wine? No, Augustus brine. That was it. Now, there was a man she could spend some time under. But he, too, had been impatient, and had rushed out of the bar without even buying a drink. It had pissed her off.Mavis watched her own mood changes like the needle on a barometer. Given her current crankiness, the social climate in the Slug tonight would be stormy she predicted fights. The pot liquor she stocked into the well that evening was diluted to half strength with distilled water. If heap were spillage to get drunk and break up her place, it was going to terms them.In her heart of hearts, she hoped she would get an opportunity to whack someone with her baseball bat.AUGUSTUS As darkness fell on Pine Cove that evening, Augustus B rine was fill with an uncharacteristic thread of dread. In the past he had always seen sunset(a) as a promise, a beginning. As a young man sunset had been a call to romance and ecstasy, more recently it signaled a time of rest and contemplation. Tonight it was not sunset, the promise, but sun shoot down, the threat. With nightfall the integral weight of his responsibility fell across his back like a leaden yoke, and try as he might, Brine could not shrug it off.Gian Hen Gian had convinced him that he must find the one that commanded the demon. Brine had driven to the Head of the Slug, and after enduring a barrage of obscene advances from Mavis Sand, he was able to pry out of her the direction the dark stranger had gone when he left the bar. Virgil Long, the mechanic, gave him a description of the car and tried to convince him that his truck needed a tune-up.Brine had and then returned home to discuss a course of action with the king of the Djinn, who was focus in his fourth Marx Brothers movie.But how did you know he was coming here? Brine asked.It was a feeling.Then why cant you get a feeling of where he is now?You must find him, Augustus Brine.And do what?Get the tender of Solomon and send consume back to hell.Or get eaten.Yes, there is that possibility. wherefore dont you do it? He cant hurt you.If the dark one has the Seal of Solomon, then I too could become his slave. This would not be good. You must do it.The biggest problem for Brine was that Pine Cove was small enough that he could really search the entire town. In Los Angles or San Francisco he might have been able to give up forwards starting, open a bottle of wine, and let the mass of humanity bear the responsibility while he sank into a cessationful fog of nonaction.Brine had come to Pine Cove to obviate conflict, to pursue a life of simple pleasures, to meditate and find peace and oneness with all things. Now, forced to act, he realized how deluded he had become. lifespan was actio n, and there was no peace this side of the grave. He had read about the kendo swordsman, who affected the Zen of controlled spontaneity, never anticipating a move so that he might never have to correct his strategy to an unanticipated attack, but always ready to act. Brine had removed himself from the flow of action, built his life into a fortress of comfort and safety without realizing that his fortress was also a prison.Think long and hard on your fate, Augustus Brine, the Djinn said around a mouthful of potato chips. Your neighbors pay for this time with their lives.Brine pushed himself out of the mince and stormed into his study. He riffled through the drawers of the desk until he found a street typify of Pine Cove. He spread the map out on the desk and began to divide the village into blocks with a red marker. Gian Hen Gian came into the study while he worked.What will you do?Find the demon, Brine said through gritted teeth.And when you find him?I dont know.You are a good man , Augustus Brine.You are a pain in the ass, Gian Hen Gian. Brine gathered up the map and headed out of the room.If it be so, then so be it, the Djinn shouted after him. But I am a grand pain in the ass.Augustus Brine did not answer. He was already making his way to his truck. He drove off feeling quite alone and afraid.ROBERT Augustus Brine was not alone in his feeling of dread at the onset of evening. Robert returned at sunset to The Breezes trailer to find three threatening messages on the answering machine two from the landlord, and one ominous threat from the drug principal in the BMW. Robert played the tape back three times in hope of finding a message from Jennifer, but it was not there.He had failed miserably in his attempt to crash and burn at the Slug, running out of money long before passing out. The traffic quip from Rachel wasnt enough either. Thinking it over, nothing would really be enough. He was a loser, plain and simple. No one was going to rescue him this time, and he wasnt up to pulling himself up by his own bootstraps.He had to see Jenny. She would understand. But he couldnt go looking like this, a three-day growth of beard, clothing he had slept in, reeking of sweat and beer. He stripped off his raiment and walked into the bathroom. He took some shaving cream and a razor from the practice of medicine cabinet and stepped into the shower.Maybe if he showed up looking like he had some self-respect, she would take him back. She had to be missing him, right? And he wasnt sure he could spend another night alone, thinking about it, going though the nightmare.He turned on the shower and the breath jumped from his body. The water was ice cold. The Breeze hadnt paid the gas bill. Robert steeled himself to endure the cold shower. He had to look good if he was going to rebuild his life.Then the lights went out.RIVERA Rivera was seance in a coffee shop near the police point sipping from a cup of decaf, smoking a cigarette, hold. In his fifteen long time on the force he estimated that ten of them had been spent in waiting. For once, though, he had the warrants, the budget, the manpower, and probable cause, but he had no suspect.It had to go down tomorrow, one way or another. If The Breeze showed up, then Rivera was in line for a promotion. If, however, he had gotten wind of the sting, then Rivera would take down the drunk in the trailer and hope that he knew something. It was a dismal prospect. Rivera envisioned his working class force swooping in with sirens blaring, lights flashing, only to chalk up a crack for unsafe vehicle, perhaps unlawful copying of a videotape, or bowelless the tag off a mattress. Rivera shivered at the thought and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray. He wondered if they would let him smoke when he was working behind the counter at Seven-Eleven.THE BREEZE When the jaws of the demon had clamped down on him, The Breeze felt a moment of pain, then a light-headedness and a floating feeling he h ad come to associate with certain kinds of psychoactive mushrooms. Then he looked down to see the monster stuffing his body into its gaping mouth. It looked funny, and the ethereal Breeze giggled to himself. No, this was more like the feeling of nitric oxide than mushrooms, he thought.He watched the monster shrink and disappear, then the door to the old Chevy opened and closed. The car sped off and The Breeze felt himself live on the air currents in its wake. Death was fine with The Breeze. Sort of the supreme acid trip, only cheaper and with no side effects.Suddenly he found himself in a long tunnel. At the end he aphorism a bright light. He had seen a movie about this once you were supposed to go toward the light.Time had lost meaning for The Breeze. He floated down the tunnel, for a whole day, but to him it seemed only minutes. He was just horseback riding the buzz. Everything was copacetic. As he approached the light, he could make out the figures of people waiting for him . Thats right your family and friends welcome you to the next life. The Breeze prepared himself for a actually bitchin party on the astral plane.Coming out of the tunnel, The Breeze was enveloped by an intense white light. It was warm and comforting. The peoples faces came into view and as The Breeze floated up to them, he realized that he owed every one of them money.PREDATORS While night fell on some like a curtain of foreboding, others were meeting the advent of darkness with excited anticipation. Creatures of the night were rising from their resting places and venturing forth to feed on their unsuspecting victims.They were feeding machines, armed with tooth and claw, instinctively driven to examine out their prey, gifted with stealth and night vision, perfectly adapted to the hunt. When they walk the streets of Pine Cove, no ones garbage cans were safe.When they awakened that evening, they found a remarkable machine in their den. The supernatural sentience they had experienc ed the night before had passed, and they retained no memory of having stolen the tape player. They might have been stimulate by the noise, but the battery had long since run down. They would push the machine out of the den when they returned, but now there was a twine on the wind that drove them to the hunt with urgent hunger. Two blocks away, Mrs. Eddleman had remove a particularly gamey tuna-fish salad, and their acute olfactory systems had picked up the scent even while they slept.The raccoons bounded into the night like wolves on the fold.JENNIFER For Jenny, evening came as a mix of blessing and curses. The call from Travis had come at five, as promised, and she found herself elated at being wanted but also thrown into a quandary about what to wear, how to behave, and where to go. Travis had left it up to her. She was a local and knew the best places to go, he had said, and he was right. He had even asked her to drive.As soon as she had hung up, she ran to the garage for the shop vac to clean out her car. While she cleaned, she ran possibilities through her mind. Should she pick the most expensive restaurant? No, that might scare him away. There was a romantic Italian place confederation of town, but what if he got the wrong idea? Pizza was too liberal for a dinner date. Burgers were out of the question. She was a vegetarian. English food? No why punish the guy?She found herself resenting Travis for making her decide. Finally she opted for the Italian place.When the car was clean, she returned to the house to pick out what she would wear. She dressed and undressed septette times in the next half hour and finally decided on a sleeveless black dress and heels.She posed before the full-length mirror. The black dress definitely was the best. And if she splashed marinara sauce on it, the stain wouldnt show. She looked good. The heels showed off her calves nicely, but you could also see the light-red hair on her legs. She hadnt thought about it until no w. She rummaged through her drawers, found some black scanty hose and slipped them on.That problem taken care of, she resumed her posing, affecting the bored, pouty look she had seen on fashion models in magazines. She was thin and fairly tall, and her legs were tight and muscular from waiting tables. Pretty nice for a thirty-year-old broad, she thought. Then she raised her arms and stretched languidly. Two curly tufts of armpit hair stared at her from the mirror.It was natural, unpretentious, she thought. She had stopped shaving about the same time she had stopped eating meat. It was all part of acquire in touch with herself, of getting connected to the Earth. It was a way to show that she did not conform to the female ideal created by Hollywood and capital of Wisconsin Avenue, that she was a natural woman. Did the Goddess shave her armpits? She did not. But the Goddess was not going out on her first date in over ten years.Jenny suddenly realized how unaware she had become of her look in the last few years. Not that she had let herself go, but the changes she had made away from make-up and complicated hairstyles had been so slow she had hardly noticed. And Robert hadnt seemed to notice, or at least he had not objected. But that was the past. Robert was in the past, or he would be soon.She went to the bathroom in search of a razor.BILLY WINSTON Billy Winston had no such dilemma about shaving. He did his legs and underarms as a effect of course every time he showered. The idea of conforming to a diet soft-drink ideal of the perfect woman didnt bother him in the least. On the contrary, Billy felt compromised by the fact that he had to maintain his appearance as a six-foot-three-inch tall man with a protruding Adams apple in order to keep his job as night listener at the Rooms-R-Us Motel. In his heart, Billy was a buxom blond harpy bat named Roxanne.But Roxanne had to stay in the closet until Billy finished doing the motels books, until midnight, when the rest of the staff left the motel and Billy was alone on the desk. Only then could Roxanne dance through the night on her silicon chip slippers, cam stroke the libidos of lonely men and breaking hearts. When the iron tongue of midnight told twelve, the sex queen regnant would find her on-line lovers. Until then, she was Billy Winston, and Billy Winston was getting ready to go to work.He slipped the red silk panties and garter belt over his long, thin legs, then slowly worked the black, seamed stockings up, teasing himself in the full-length mirror at the end of the bed. He smiled coyly at himself as he nip the garters into place. Then he put on his jeans and flannel shirt and laced up his tennis shoes. Over his shirt pocket he pinned his name badge Billy Winston, Night Auditor.It was a sad irony, Billy thought, that the thing he loved most, being Roxanne, depended on the thing he desire least, his job. Each evening he awoke feeling a mix of excitement and dread. Oh, well, a joint would get him through the first three hours of his shift, and Roxanne would get him through the last five.He dreamed of the day when he could grant his own computer and become Roxanne anytime he wanted. He would quit his job and make his living like The Breeze fast and loose. Just a few more months behind the desk and he would have the money he needed.CATCH Catch was a demon of the twenty-seventh order. In the pecking order of hell this put him far below the archdemons like Mammon, master of avarice, but far above the blue-collar demons like Arrrgg, who was responsible for leeching the styrofoam taste into take-out coffee.Catch had been created as a servant and a destroyer and endowed with a simplemindedness that suited those roles. His distinction in hell was that he had spent more time on Earth than any other demon, where, in the order of men, he had learned to be devious and ambitious.His ambition took the form of looking for a master who would allow him to indulge himself in demise and terror. Of all the masters that Catch had served since Solomon, Travis had been the worst. Travis had an irritating streak of righteousness that grated on Catchs nerves. In the past, Catch had been called up by devious men who limited the demons destruction only to keep his presence secret from other men. Most of the time this was accomplished by the death of all witnesses. Catch always made sure that there were witnesses.With Travis, Catchs need for destruction was controlled and allowed to build inwardly him until Travis was forced to unleash him. Always it was someone Travis had chosen. Always it was in private. And it was never enough for Catchs appetite.Serving under Travis, his mind always seemed foggy and the fire inside him confined to a smolder. Only when Travis directed him toward a victim did he feel crispness in his thoughts and a blazing in his nature. The times were too few. The demon longed again for a master with enemies, but his thoughts were never cle ar enough to devise a plan to find one. Traviss will was overpowering.But today the demon had felt a release. It had started when Travis met the woman in the cafe. When they went to the old mans house, he felt a power surge through him unlike anything he had felt in years. Again, when Travis called the girl, the power had increased.He began to phone what he was a creature who had brought kings and popes to power and in turn had usurped others. monster himself, sitting on his throne in the great city of Pandemonium, had communicate to a multitude of hellish hosts, In our exile, we must be behold unto Jehovah for two things one, that we exist, and two, that Catch has no ambition. The fallen angels laughed with Catch at the joke, for that was a time before Catch had walked among men. Men had been a bad influence on Catch.He would have a new master one who could be corrupted by his power. He had seen her that afternoon in the saloon and sensed her hunger for control over others. Toget her they would tackle the world. The key was near he felt it. If Travis found it, Catch would be sent back to hell. He had to find it first and get it into the hands of the witch. After all, it was better to rule on Earth than to serve in hell.