Practical Demonkeeping (10 page)

Rachel Henderson lived alone in a small house that lay amid a grove of eucalyptus trees at the edge of the Beer Bar cattle ranch. The house was owned by Jim Beer, a lanky, forty-five-year-old cowboy who lived with his wife and two children in a fourteen-room house his grandfather had built on the far side of the ranch. Rachel had lived on the ranch for five years. She had never paid any rent.

Rachel had met Jim Beer in the Head of the Slug Saloon when she first arrived in Pine Cove. Jim had been drinking all day and was feeling the weight of his rugged cowboy charisma when Rachel sat down on the bar stool next to him and put a newspaper on the bar.

“Well, darlin', I'm damned if you're not a fresh wind on a stale pasture. Can I buy you a drink?” The banjo twang in Jim's accent was pure Oklahoma, picked up from the hands that had worked the Beer Bar when Jim was a boy. Jim was the third generation of Beers to work the ranch and would probably be the last. His
teenage son, Zane Grey Beer, had decided early on that he would rather ride a surfboard than a horse. That was part of the reason that Jim was drinking away the afternoon at the Slug. That, and the fact that his wife had just purchased a new Mercedes turbo-diesel wagon that cost the annual net income of the Beer Bar Ranch.

Rachel unfolded the classified section of the
Pine Cove Gazette
on the bar. “Just an orange juice, thanks. I'm house hunting today.” She curled one leg under herself on the bar stool. “You don't know anybody that has a house for rent, do you?”

Jim Beer would look back on that day many times in the years to come, but he could never quite remember what had happened next. What he did remember was driving his pickup down the back road into the ranch with Rachel following behind in an old Volkswagen van. From there his memory was a montage of images: Rachel naked on the small bunk, his turquoise belt buckle hitting the wooden floor with a thud, silk scarves tied around his wrists, Rachel bouncing above him—riding him like a bronco—climbing back into his pickup after sundown, sore and sweaty, leaning his forehead on the wheel of the truck and thinking about his wife and kids.

In the five years since, Jim Beer had never gone near the little house on the far side of the ranch. Every month he penciled the rent collected into a ledger, then deposited cash from his poker fund in the business checking account to cover it.

A few of his friends had seen him leave the Head of the Slug with Rachel that afternoon. When they saw him again, they ribbed him, made crude jokes, and asked pointed questions. Jim answered the jibes by pushing his summer Stetson back on his head and saying: “Boys, all I got to say is that male menopause is a rough trail to ride.” Hank Williams couldn't have sung it any sadder.

After Jim left that evening Rachel picked several gray hairs from the bunk's pillow. Around the hairs she carefully tied a single red thread, which she knotted twice. Two knots were enough for the bond she wanted over Jim Beer. She placed the tiny bundle in a babyfood jar, labeled it with a marking pen, and stored it away in a cupboard over the kitchen sink.

Now the cupboard was full of jars, each one containing a similar
bundle, each bundle tied with a red thread. The number of knots in the thread varied. Three of the bundles were tied with four knots. These contained the hair of men Rachel had loved. Those men were long gone.

The rest of Rachel's house was decorated with objects of power: eagle feathers, crystals, pentagrams, and tapestries embroidered with magic symbols. There was no evidence of a past in Rachel's house. Any photos she had of herself had been taken after she arrived in Pine Cove.

People who knew Rachel had no clue as to where she had lived or who she had been before she came to town. They knew her as a beautiful, mysterious woman who taught aerobics for a living. Or they knew her as a witch. Her past was an enigma, which was just the way she wanted it.

No one knew that Rachel had grown up in Bakersfield, the daughter of an illiterate oil-field worker. They didn't know that she had been a fat, ugly little girl who spent most of her life doing degrading things for disgusting men so that she might receive some sort of acceptance. Butterflies do not wax nostalgic about the time they spent as caterpillars.

Rachel had married a crop-duster pilot who was twenty years her senior. She was eighteen at the time.

It happened in the front seat of a pickup truck in the parking lot of a roadhouse outside of Visalia, California. The pilot, whose name was Merle Henderson, was still breathing hard and Rachel was washing the foul taste out of her mouth with a lukewarm Budweiser. “If you do that again, I'll marry you,” Merle gasped.

An hour later they were flying over the Mojave desert, heading for Las Vegas in Merle's Cessna 152. Merle came at ten thousand feet. They were married under a neon arch in a ramshackle, concrete-block chapel just off the Vegas strip. They had known each other exactly six hours.

Rachel regarded the next eight years of her life as her term on the wheel of abuse. Merle Henderson deposited her in his house trailer by the landing strip and kept her there. He allowed her to visit town once a week to go to the laundromat and the grocery
store. The rest of her time was spent waiting on or waiting for Merle and helping him work on his planes.

Each morning Merle took off in the crop duster, taking with him the keys to the pickup. Rachel spent the days cleaning up the trailer, eating, and watching television. She grew fatter and Merle began to refer to her as his fat little mama. What little self-esteem she had drained away and was absorbed by Merle's overpowering male ego.

Merle had flown helicopter gunships in Vietnam and he still talked about it as the happiest time in his life. When he opened the tanks of insecticide over a field of lettuce, he imagined he was releasing air-to-ground missiles into a Vietnamese village. The Army had sensed a destructive edge in Merle, Vietnam had honed it to razor sharpness, and it had not dulled when he came home. Until he married Rachel, he released his pent-up violence by starting fights in bars and flying with dangerous abandon. With Rachel waiting for him at home, he went to bars less often and released his aggression on her in the form of constant criticism, verbal abuse, and finally, beatings.

Rachel bore the abuse as if it were a penance sent down by God for the sin of being a woman. Her mother had endured the same sort of abuse from her father, with the same resignation. It was just the way things worked.

Then, one day, while Rachel was waiting at the laundromat for Merle's shirts to dry, a woman approached her. It was the day after a particularly vicious beating and Rachel's face was bruised and swollen.

“It's none of my business,” the woman said. She was tall and stately and in her mid-forties. She had a way about her that frightened Rachel, a presence, but her voice was soft and strong. “But when you get some time, you might read this.” She held out a pamphlet to Rachel and Rachel took it. The title was
The Wheel of Abuse
.

“There are some numbers in the back that you can call. Everything will be okay,” the woman said.

Rachel thought it a strange thing to say. Everything was okay. But the woman had impressed her, so she read the pamphlet.

It talked about human rights and dignity and personal power. It spoke to Rachel about her life in a way that she had never thought possible.
The Wheel of Abuse
was her life story. How did they know?

Mostly it talked about courage to change. She kept the pamphlet and hid it away in a box of tampons under the bathroom sink. It stayed there for two weeks. Until the morning she ran out of coffee.

She could hear the sound of Merle's plane disappearing in the distance as she stared into the mirror at the bloody hole where her front teeth used to be. She dug out the pamphlet and called one of the numbers on the back.

Within a half hour two women arrived at the trailer. They packed Rachel's belongings and drove her to the shelter. Rachel wanted to leave a note for Merle, but the two women insisted that it was not a good idea.

For the next three weeks Rachel lived at the shelter. The women at the shelter cared for her. They gave her food and understanding and affection, and in return they asked only that she acknowledge her own dignity. When she made the call to Merle to tell him where she was, they all stood by her.

Merle promised that it would all change. He missed her. He needed her.

She returned to the trailer.

For a month Merle did not hit her. He did not touch her at all. He didn't even speak to her.

The women at the shelter had warned her about this type of abuse: the withdrawal of affection. When she brought it up to Merle one evening while he was eating, he threw a plate in her face. Then he proceeded to give her the worst beating of her life. Afterward he locked her outside the trailer for the night.

The trailer was fifteen miles from the nearest neighbor, so Rachel was forced to cower under the front steps to escape the cold. She was not sure she could walk fifteen miles.

In the middle of the night Merle opened the door and shouted, “By the way, I ripped the phone out, so don't waste your time thinking about it.” He slammed and locked the door.

When the sun broke in the east, Merle reappeared. Rachel had crawled under the trailer, where he could not reach her. He lifted the plastic skirting and shouted to her, “Listen, bitch, you'd better be here when I get home or you'll get worse.”

Rachel waited in the darkness under the trailer until she heard the biplane roar down the strip. She climbed out and watched the plane climb gradually into the distance. Although it hurt her face, and the cuts on her mouth split open, she couldn't help smiling. She had discovered her personal power. It lay hidden under the trailer in a five-gallon asphalt can, now half full of aviation grade motor oil.

A policeman came to the trailer that afternoon. His jaw was set with the stoic resolve of a man who knows he has an unpleasant task to perform and is determined to do it, but when he saw Rachel sitting on the steps of the trailer, the color drained from his face and he ran to her. “Are you all right?”

Rachel could not speak. Garbled sounds bubbled from her broken mouth. The policeman drove her to the hospital in his cruiser. Later, after she had been cleaned up and bandaged, the policeman came to her room and told her about the crash.

It seemed that Merle's biplane lost power after a pass over a field. He was unable to climb fast enough to avoid a high-tension tower and flaming bits of Merle were scattered across a field of budding strawberries. Later, at the funeral, Rachel would comment, “It was how he would have wanted to go.”

A few weeks later a man from the Federal Aviation Administration came around the trailer asking questions. Rachel told him that Merle had beat her, then had stormed out to the plane and taken off. The F.A.A. concluded that Merle, in his anger, had forgotten to check out his plane thoroughly before taking off. No one ever suspected Rachel of draining the oil out of the plane.

Howard Phillips, the owner of H.P.'s Cafe, had just settled down in the study of his stone cottage when he looked out the window and saw something moving through the trees.

Howard had spent most of his adult life trying to prove three theories he had formulated in college: one, that before man had walked the Earth there had been a powerful race of intelligent beings who had achieved a high level of civilization, then for some unknown reason had disappeared; two, that the remnants of their civilization still existed underground or under the ocean, and through extreme cunning and guile had escaped detection by man; and three, that they were planning to return as masters of the planet in a very unfriendly way.

What lurked in the woods outside Howard Phillips's cottage was the first physical evidence of his theories that he had ever encountered. He was at once elated and terrified. Like the child who is delighted by the idea of Santa Claus, then cries and cowers behind its mother when confronted with the corpulent red-suited
reality of a department-store Santa, Howard Phillips was not fully prepared for a physical manifestation of what he had long believed extant. He was a scholar, not an adventurer. He preferred his experiences to come secondhand, through books. Howard's idea of adventure was trying whole wheat toast with his daily ham and eggs instead of the usual white bread.

He stared out the window at the creature moving in the moonlight. It was very much like the creatures he had read about in ancient manuscripts: bipedal like a man, but with long, apelike arms; reptilian. Howard could see scales reflecting in the moonlight. The one inconsistency that bothered him was its size. In the manuscripts, these creatures, who were said to be kept as slaves by the Old Ones, had always been small in stature, no more than a few feet tall. This one was enormous—four, maybe five meters tall.

The creature stopped for moment, then turned slowly and looked directly at Howard's window. Howard resisted the urge to dive to the floor and so stood staring straight into the eyes of the nightmare.

The creature's eyes were the size of car headlamps and they glowed a faint orange around slotted, feline pupils. Long, pointed scales lay back against its head, giving the impression of ears. They stood there, staring at each other, the creature and the man, neither moving, until Howard could bear it no longer. He grabbed the curtains and pulled them shut, almost ripping them from the rod in the process. Outside he could hear the sound of laughter.

When he dared to peak through the gap in the curtains, the creature was gone.

Why hadn't he been more scientific in his observation? Why hadn't he run for his camera? For all his work at putting together clues from arcane grimoirs to prove the existence of the Old Ones, people had labeled him a crackpot. One photograph would have convinced them. But he had missed his chance. Or had he?

Suddenly it occurred to Howard that the creature had seen him. Why should the Old Ones be so careful not to be discovered for so long, then walk in the moonlight as if out for a Sunday stroll?
Perhaps it had not moved on at all but was circling the house to do away with the witness.

First he thought of weapons. He had none in the house. Many of the old books in his library had spells for protection, but he had no idea where to start looking. Besides, the verge of panic was not the ideal mental state in which to do research. He might still be able to bolt to his old Jaguar and escape. Then again, he might bolt into the claws of the creature. All these thoughts passed through his mind in a second.

The phone. He snatched the phone from his desk and dialed. It seemed forever for the dial to spin, but finally there was a ring and a woman's voice at the other end.

“Nine-one-one, emergency,” she said.

“Yes, I wish to report a lurker in the woods.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Howard Phillips.”

“And what is the address you are calling from?”

“Five-oh-nine Cambridge Street, in Pine Cove.”

“Are you in any immediate danger?”

“Well, yes, that
is
why I called.”

“You say you have a prowler. Is he attempting to enter the house?”

“Not yet.”

“You
have
seen the prowler?”

“Yes, outside my window, in the woods.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He is an abomination of such abysmal hideousness that the mere recollection of this monstrosity perambulating in the dark outside my domicile fills me with the preternatural chill of the charnel house.”

“That would be about how tall?”

Howard paused to think. Obviously the law enforcement system was not prepared to deal with perversions from the transcosmic gulfs of the nethermost craters of the underworld. Yet he needed assistance.

“The fiend stands two meters,” he said.

“Could you see what he was wearing?”

Again Howard considered the truth and rejected it. “Jeans, I believe. And a leather jacket.”

“Could you tell if he was armed?”

“Armed? I should say so. The beast is armed with monstrous claws and a toothed maw of the most villainous predator.”

“Calm down, sir. I am dispatching a unit to your home. Make sure the doors are locked. Stay calm, I'll stay on the line until the officers arrive.”

“How long will that be?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“Young woman, in twenty minutes I shall be little more than a shredded memory!” Howard hung up the phone.

It had to be escape, then. He took his greatcoat and car keys from the foyer and stood leaning against the front door. Slowly he slipped the lock and grabbed the door handle.

“On three, then,” he said to himself.

“One.” He turned the door handle.

“Two.” He bent, preparing to run.

“Three!” He didn't move.

“All right, then. Steel yourself, Howard.” He started the count again.

“One.” Perhaps the beast was not outside.

“Two.” If it was a slave creature, it wasn't dangerous at all.

“Three!” He did not move.

Howard repeated the process of counting, over and over, each time measuring the fear in his heart against the danger that lurked outside. Finally, disgusted with his own cowardliness, he threw the door open, and bolted into the dark.