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The preacher smelled the barn before he entered. It wasn’t the everyday barn-smell that some found so comforting—hay, animal dung, iron and leather, sun-seasoned wood. No, this barn smelled like a charnel house, even from outside: fresh feces, the sting of urine, old blood and feverish sweat. The big doors weren’t latched, and swung open easily when the preacher shoved them.
There was a single hurricane lamp within, hanging from a nail in a stud. It gave off a sickly yellow-white light. In that greasy illumination, the preacher saw a barn like a hundred others he’d seen—earthen floor, stalls for stock, tack and tethers arrayed on hooks, hay all round and a loft above.
But there the normalcy ended.
Presently, the barn was hell.
Ordure was smeared on every rail and stud and wall in animal swathes and scrawls, sometimes forming words and blasphemous graffiti. There was a cartoon Christ on an upside-down cross, and Delphi saw the look of strange surprise on that Christ’s face almost immediately. The barn’s occupant was quite the artist, especially in the medium of his own excrement. Likewise there were stick-simple figures of men and women engaged in all sorts of unspeakable sex acts, sometimes with each other, sometimes with animals, sometimes with men wearing the shapes and skins of animals. The shapes and contours and images were all of the simplest sort, but they were just evocative enough that their subjects were unmistakable.
And then there was the word… a single word scrawled over and over again, above and between and on top of the terrible cartoons and caricatures. Mill himself slipped past the preacher and pointed to a bloom of the word, repeating again and again in a tight formation like a bed of dandelions on an otherwise clear lawn.
“There now,” Mill said, with some desperation. “That’s when we knew somethin’ wasn’t right. All the rest . . . that coulda just been the boy goin’ mad, or fevered or what-not . . . but where does he get words and letters like that? It looks like something, but I don’t know what it is!”
The preacher stared at the strange phrase for a long time. He recognized it instantly, but he refused to believe what he was seeing. He had to stare and be sure, almost expecting what he thought he saw to dissolve and become something else entirely if he gazed at it long enough.
It didn’t.
“It’s Greek,” the preacher said. “They made us dabble with it at seminary.”
“Well, what the hell does it say?” Mill asked.
“It says ‘Delphi’,” the preacher said. “My name.”
“Reverend, reverend, reverend!”
That had been the barn’s lone occupant, practically invisible to Delphi since his entrance—the barn’s sorry state having drawn the lion’s share of his attention. The preacher turned toward the sound of the voice and saw a teenage boy, no more than fifteen or sixteen, tied up in one of the stock stalls.
There was something terribly wrong about him. His eyes weren’t the bright blue or big, sloe-brown of a strapping, eager youth, but the sickly jaundiced, red-rimmed yellow of a dying old man. Likewise, his flesh, where visible above his soiled, matted night shirt, was ripped and torn, festering in some spots with sores and infected lacerations. Behind his cracked lips, the preacher saw blue-black gums and a slithering tongue that coiled like a snake in its den.
Mill must have seen the preacher’s eyes appraise the boy’s condition. “I hit him once or twice,” he said sickly, “when he said the worst things. But I didn’t cut him. That’s why we tied him up. He done that to himself, with his nails. You look at ‘em, you’ll see dried blood and skin under ‘em.”
“I ain’t the only one,” the boy-thing said.
“You shut your mouth!” Mill shouted.
The preacher held out a hand, trying to calm his host and keep him well back. Testing a hunch, Delphi drew a small, nickel cross out of his trouser pocket and held it out before him. He moved nearer the thing in the stall.
The boy-thing scowled. As the preacher neared, the boy shrank further, as though he could disappear into the filthy, frayed old blanket gathered underneath him and the rank bed of hay that littered his stall. Delphi kept closing, one foot in front of the other, cross held out before him.
The boy hawked and spat a thick glob of pink and green phlegm. The throat-bullet sailed straight and smacked the cross square-center. To the preacher’s own surprise, the phlegm bubbled, hissed, and threw smoke the moment it touched the nickel.
“Christ almighty!” Mill whispered behind him.
The preacher wiped the cross on a nearby hay bale.
“Fuck you and the god you rode in on,” the boy croaked.
“What’s his name?” the preacher asked Mill.
“Ahz-ahz-el!” the boy-thing croaked. “Many names in many lands!”
“What’s your boy’s name?” the preacher demanded.
Mill finally answered. “Daniel. Daniel James Scott and—” Mill seemed to choke. For a moment, the preacher thought he was going to vomit, but the man only coughed up a sickly sob and a round of fresh tears. “He’s a good boy, reverend—was a good boy, before . . .”
The preacher stepped nearer. “Course he was. Now listen to me, and listen good—this thing . . . it’s got nothin’ to do with your boy bein’ good or bad, you hear me?”
Mill nodded.
“I mean it! I need you and your wife in a prayin’ state of mind. Thinkin’ on this thing in that horse-stall as your boy and not just some hellspawn takin’ up residence in him ain’t gonna help. I need your heart and your mind set on what’s best in Daniel—every reason you miss him, every reason you want him back.”
“Is there somethin’ you can do?” Mill asked.
“Not a goddamn thing,” Daniel croaked. “Look under the good reverend’s fingernails and ask him why they won’t come clean—”
The preacher turned on Daniel and leveled the little nickel cross. The devil in the horse-stall cried out and shrank, then let loose with a barrage of curses that made the preacher blush.
“Reverend,” Mill said.
“Get out,” the preacher said. “Me and Azazel need some time alone.”
Mill hurried out, and shut the big barn door after him. In an instant, the air was too close and Delphi felt like he’d choke, maybe even vomit. He searched for a bucket, but the only bucket he found was crusted with old piss and stained with a fresh turd that had half-missed its intended target.
So the preacher just choked back the bile rising up his throat and approached the stall. Before presenting himself he took another look at the walls, studying his name in Greek laid here and there upon it. Then he met the demon’s watery yellow eyes.
“What’s that all about?”
The demon smiled, shrugged coyly.
The preacher steeled himself. Though it sickened him, he clamped one hand over the boy’s bound right wrist and with the other pressed the nickel cross against the boy’s bare forearm. The cross sizzled, marking the flesh like a hot iron. The demon thrashed against its bindings and spat curses again.
“Cocksucker!” he hissed. “Horse-fucking, pig-rimming, ass-pounding son of a half-breed whore!”
Delphi removed the cross, noting that it had left a fresh, blistered scar upon the boy’s flesh. “Now I know you’re all talk,” the preacher said, “‘cause my momma was a lot of things, good and bad, but I know who both her parents were, and they was definitely of the same breed.”
“Probably brother and sister,” the demon sneered. “You inbred cunt.”
The preacher fought to control himself. He could feel his anger rising, but giving it vent would do him no good. He’d cast these bastards out once or twice before and he knew that his mindset, and the maintenance of his self-control, was of utmost importance.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I told you,” the demon said.
“Bull,” the preacher answered. “Azazel’s a big wheel. You tellin’ me Azazel took time outta his busy day to set up shop in some farmer’s boy i
n the Missouri backcountry? What’s your name?”
“Daniel James Scott,” the demon said, in the boy’s own voice.
“What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?” the demon asked.
“You know my name,” the preacher said. “You wrote it all over the walls before I ever got here.”
“I told him you were on your way,” the demon said in a sweet, feminine voice—the voice of the preacher’s own dead wife. “I told him just what you done to me, Zeb. How you abandoned me… abandoned everyone…”
The preacher’s body moved before he even knew what he was doing. One fist took the boy clean across his jaw. Something clattered, tinkling like a little bell, and Delphi realized distantly that he’d let go of the nickel cross when he struck the boy, and it had flown into an adjacent stall. He didn’t care, though. He was already bent over the trussed-up boy, both hands closing around his thin throat. The demon’s sallow face swelled and turned red, but its yellow eyes were alight with promise, and its cracked lips spread in a feverish grin. The preacher tightened his grip, felt the thing’s foul breath blow full in his face, saw its blue-black tongue wagging behind its rotten little-boy’s teeth like a serpent crushed beneath a rock. It wanted to die, by his hand, and he was willing to oblige.
Then someone was screaming—Ellie, maybe?—and strong hands, Mill’s hands, laid on the preacher’s shoulders and threw him off the boy. The preacher went sprawling. When he tried to rise, one hand fell in a pile of day-old shit and he slipped and fell again. He looked, saw Mill standing at the mouth of the stall, saw the demon in Daniel Scott writhing and laughing against its bindings, thrusting its pecker out toward him and cursing him with every thrust.
“We’ve got Lilly well in hand, reverend!” the boy-thing squealed, tittering with glee. “You were gone so long, and her cunny so dry from disuse, she’s begging the Thorn-Cocks to do her three times over while she writhes in coal beds and spreads brimstone ash on those fine, pale teats of hers!”
Delphi didn’t hear any more. He was on his feet then, turning his back on Daniel Scott and his hysterical parents, bounding out of the barn and making a sharp right. He was almost to the river, ready to turn west and follow its course again on foot—Hang my horse! Hang this whole goddamned farmstead!—when a stone or root fell in his path. He lost his footing and went sprawling forward. He fell face-first into the mud of the riverbank, and he lay there for a long time, trying to muster the gumption to rise and flee like he wanted.
Instead, he only managed to rise up on all fours and puke his peas and cornbread.
I ain’t up for this, he thought. I ain’t the one to do this. There’s nothing holy left in me. Nothing hopeful. Nothing strong.
“Preacher?” It was Ellie. She and Mill stood nearby, watching.
Let this cup pass from me.
“Preacher,” Mill said. “You all right?”
The preacher spat, then splashed Missouri river water on his face and swished some in his mouth to cut the bile. “A moment, is all. Guess the stench in there got to me.”
“He says terrible things, reverend,” Mill offered. “You shouldn’t listen.”
Delphi turned and studied the two in the moonlight. “What did you hear?”
“Nothin’,” Mill said. “We was outside—”
“More’s the better.” The preacher stood upright. His head swam for a moment, but he stayed upright, and in moments his swoon passed. “Nobody oughta hear such talk.”
“It’s all lies anyway,” Ellie said, but the preacher could tell she didn’t mean it, not really.
“That’s what you tell yourself,” the preacher agreed.
There was a long silence. Wind threaded the trees and the river burbled silently behind them, making little noise for such a big, moving body of water. I never took that collar off. Wearing that makes me the shepherd, whether I want to be or not.
Whether I deserve to be or not.
The preacher drew a breath.
There’s only one way to find out.
“I can’t make any promises,” he said. “I need a bible if you got one.”
“I got one,” Mill said. “Ain’t a big old family bible, but—”
“More’s the better,” the preacher cut in, and started back toward the barn. “I’m lookin’ for text, not weight. I need that bible, a bottle filled with fresh well water, and if you got it, a shot of whiskey.”
“Whiskey?” Ellie asked.
“Just a shot, in a glass,” the preacher said. “Keep the bottle outta my sight.”