The Devil Dances (9 page)

“Ah, Vivian Summers.” He looked skyward. “
So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication
.” He winked at me. “She’s hot, son, but no.
You
own her soul, so the Whore is yours to do with what you want. You look after her now.” He smiled in at me, a warm smile full of wisdom, time and patience that crinkled the corners of his shockingly blue eyes. “Take care, Nicky.”

“Fuck you, Dad.”

“There’s my boy.”

Note to self: The next time you see the Devil standing on the side of the highway, leave his sorry demonic ass out there and keep driving.

The fair grounds were closed when I reached the festival, but there were still buggies and long buckboard wagons parked in the spaces reserved for them. The rain had stopped by then, leaving everything wet and muddy, and the air humid, fecund, and clinging to my skin. A string of paper lanterns illuminated the parking lot where several horses clattered against the rain-slick gravel and about a hundred remaining Swartzcopf men and women were busy loading their unsold wares into the flatbeds, heads down, round black hats or bonnets slick with moisture as they handed wooden crates full of trinkets and produce down a long line, from one hand to another.

I parked Daisy about a hundred yards away and hoofed it over the puddles toward the small group. Almost like they had some internal radar attuned to just my kind, they picked up on my presence immediately and all looked up at once. The first Swartzcopf man I came upon squinted myopically up at me from behind his glasses, then immediately turned his back as he went back to stacking feed bags in his flatbed. I looked for other men with glasses, but every man here was older and bearded; the boy from the fair was nowhere to be found, and a part of me wondered if he even came from this colony.

“He’s not here,” a voice rang from behind me.

I turned around in the parking lot and found an old Plain woman in a black bonnet standing there in the light summer rain, watching me from behind her fogged up glasses. “The boy you’re seeking is not here.”

She looked to be in her mid-seventies, small and bent crookedly, but there was wisdom in the severe lines of her face and strength remaining in her body. She looked like a woman who had shouldered many burdens in her lifetime. Normally, I got an immediate gut feeling when new people approached me, a kind of psychic red light or green light that was never wrong. I decided I liked the old Plain woman. She had gumption and eyes that I trusted.

I put my hands in my pockets. “You know him?”

“No. But I know the colony. You been all the talk since you were here today, Daemon.”

I raised my eyebrows at that. “You have the Sight.”

“No, but my daughter-in-law does. She said you and your mate were here earlier, that you have come to poison our lands.”

“I assure you, Mrs. …?”

“Knapp.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Knapp, I have no intention of poisoning anything.”

“I told them that.”

That
surprised me.

She hobbled forward. A few of the Swartzcopf men turned to watch us, but I noticed they made no move to interfere in this strange midnight encounter. Naturally, a part of me wanted to question her connection to Caleb, but a bigger part of me was just plain impressed with her courage in approaching me. Lesser men often turned away.

When she was close enough that she didn’t need to squint, she reached out and touched my arm, briefly. She laid her fingers upon my sleeve and tugged on it. Her fingers were incredibly strong. “You feel like a real man. I did not expect that. Is it true what they say about your command over the spirit world?”

I saw no point to lying, since Mrs. Knapp obviously knew quite a bit about me and my kind. “Yes, ma’am. The demonic hosts are under my dominion.”

“Good.” She smiled then, showing weathered, yellow teeth. “In that case, I welcome you into my household, Daemon.”

rode down to Mrs. Elsie Knapp’s farm with her, the two of us sitting on the buckboard of her buggy.
It was a long, sweaty, bumpy ride, but at least we got to know each other better. She explained that her grandmother had had the Sight, so even though she herself had not inherited it, she was still familiar with the phenomenon. Not long after he was married, it was discovered that her son John’s wife also had it. Mary Knapp, John’s wife and Mrs. Knapp’s daughter-in-law, acted like a kind of first-warning system to the colony when it came to matters of spiritual evil.

I didn’t appreciate the spiritual evil reference, but I found their system pretty clever.

Elsie Knapp had relied on Mary’s assessment, as well as colony word-of-mouth, to better understand what had happened today. When she’d heard that Vivian and I had shown up at the fair, a pair of daemons (which, in itself, was rare, in her opinion), she’d quickly hitched her horses and ridden down, hoping to find us. But by the time she’d arrived at the fairgrounds, we’d already gone. She said she was happy to see I had returned.

“Not too many people are thrilled with my presence,” I said. The other Swartzcopf, crammed into their buggies and flatbeds, had elected not to speak to me on the ride home, and when we finally pulled into the barn moments later, one of Mrs. Knapp’s many grandsons took the horses from her but immediately turned his back on me.

“They’re afraid, Daemon, and for good reason,” she told me as she let me help her down off the buckboard and then led me inside her cozy farmhouse.

I looked around the kitchen. There was a wood-burning stove and a pump sink. The rest of the room looked like something from a 1950’s cowboy show—the gingham curtains, china closet, a trestle table with built-in benches, picnic-style, long enough to feed a small army of men. Huge gunny stacks of dry goods were lined neatly against the back wall, near the pantry. I felt like I’d been thrown back in time. I expected to see Hoss and Little Joe show up anytime.

Mrs. Knapp undid the ties on her bonnet and hung it near the door. Under it, she wore a black
kapp
, the mark of the Swartzcopf woman. The Swartzcopf were the only Amish in the Lancaster area to wear black caps all the time. “The Church’s warned us plenty about English ways our whole lives. Our colony leader makes a point of mentioning it at every sermon. But you’re an entirely different animal, yah?”

“I suppose I am,” I said, trying not to drip rain on Mrs. Knapp’s polished hardwood floors. “Not afraid?” I said as she approached me to take my coat.

“I’m nearly eighty-seven years old. I’m too old to be afraid of anything anymore, Daemon,” she said as she hung my coat near the woodstove to dry.

“Nick,” I corrected her. I looked around the spacious room full of hand-woven rugs and Shaker furniture, every little thing neat and in its place. But
Nick
seemed a little too informal in this setting, so I added, “Nicholas, if you prefer.”

Mrs. Knapp nodded and started heating up some apple cider on the stove. Without prompting, she said, “Caleb was my grandson. He was shunned two years ago, and not long after that, he left the colony. Not many English understand the concept of shunning. They think it an act done in anger that the Swartzcopf throw their members over the fence to be consumed by the world, but it ain’t like that. We merely cease to acknowledge them. They become dead to us in spirit. We don’t throw them to the world, though many choose to leave after some time.” She looked up at me. “I understand you’re asking about him. He’s dead now, truly, yah?”

I hovered undecidedly. Even as a cop in New York, delivering the news of a loved one’s demise had never been my strong suit. I usually left that to my beat partner, Peter. “Caleb did die, yes. I was there with him.”

She looked at me, her eyes pale, washed, unreadable. “You saw him breathe his last. You comforted him?”

“I did what I could for him,” I answered. “Though I doubt he found any comfort in me, frankly. Most people don’t.”

She looked me over, from head to foot. “You’ve no high opinion of yourself, Nicholas.”

I shrugged. “I’m realistic.”

We sat with our mugs of hot cider and a half-eaten molasses pie that Mrs. Knapp had retrieved from the old-fashioned, non-electric icebox, and I asked her the inevitable question—the elephant in the room, so to speak. “Why was Caleb shunned?”

Mrs. Knapp gave me hooded eyes but spared nothing as she carefully sliced a piece of pie for me and plated it. “He had unnatural carnal relations during his Rumspringa… the running around time, when the young ones are allowed to leave the community for apiece and experience the outsider’s world. They’re encouraged during that time to explore themselves and their own desires so they may willfully be baptized into the Church. The young ones smoke and drink and fornicate. That is understood, even accepted. I, myself, had a romance with a young English boy during my Rumspringa. But there are some sins that are unforgiveable.” She didn’t go into more details than that, but I had a pretty good idea what she was talking about.

“And after his shunning… that’s when he left the community for good?”

“He joined the English world then,” she answered as her left hand fiddled nervously with the strings on her cap. “I did not see him in the flesh again, my Caleb.”

“I take it you loved your grandson.”

“Shunned or not, one does not stop loving a child,” she explained simply. “Caleb was my eldest son’s son. His name was Matthew. Matthew and his wife were killed in a buggy accident when Caleb was four. After that, I raised him and his seven brothers and sisters. It gave me great pain to see the colony turn its back on him, but what was done was done. If you never lose a child in your whole life, you will be a blessed man, Nicholas.”

I tried to imagine her great pain. I had never had a child to lose, but I
had
lost my mother when I was four years old—so young that I had difficulty remembering her face at times. My father had come for her then, had taken her to be with him in his kingdom, and I had never seen her again. I didn’t even know if she was dead, in the normal sense of the word. My mother lived in Hell; I had no idea if she was happy or not, if she missed me, if she even remembered me. I thought about touching Mrs. Knapp’s hand, trying to comfort her in some small way, but I’d long ago learned that my touch generally brought nothing but fear, misery and distrust to others, so I kept my hands to myself.