Nocturnal Emissions (6 page)

VI: The Black Dog

There was another detonation of thunder, this time like a volley of cannons.

As if startled to madness by the increase in the storm’s violence, that distant dog began to howl even more loudly. Even more wildly. Venn knew, now, that the sound was coming from the vicar’s church, at the edge of the sheep farm’s pastures.

He stood at the window again, his nose almost pressed into the glass, expecting to see—in the flash of the next lightning bolt—a man with his arms spread toward the heavens, standing in the churchyard. He did not. And yet, he did see something, after all. A black shadow moving through the blackness, like a fish darting across the bottom of a murky pond. When again the sky was lit, Venn saw a great black dog, big as a
Newfoundland
, trotting between the headstones in the churchyard. He thought he could hear the thud of its massive paws, now. The banshee-like howling came with it as it bounded into the road. There, picking up speed, it was like a locomotive—bearing down on the farm of the Widow Brook.

It was moving along the straight path, which ran through the heart of Candleton.

Venn whirled away from the window, snatching up his red spectacles from where they lay folded. He left behind him the lamb’s head atop the writing desk, the handle of the letter opener jutting up from the center of its forehead.

««—»»

“Mrs. Brook!” Venn thumped her door with the heel of his fist. “Susan!

You must open up…hurry!”

Only moments later, the widow opened her door, wrapped in a dressing gown, her hair in wild disarray. “Father Venn?”

He seized her hand, nearly jerking her off her slippered feet, but she managed to catch herself and run along after him even as he drew her roughly down the stairs to her first floor.

“What is it?” she implored.

Venn dragged her directly to the door and out through it, into the very night itself. And then, not easing his pace, diagonally across the yard—away from the house.

They both threw glances over their shoulders. And only seconds after they had escaped the cottage, they both saw the dog as it hurled itself off the straight path at the last moment, directly at the farm house without breaking its stride. But Venn didn’t know whether it was just him who caught a glint of metal jutting up from the center of the dog’s forehead, as if a large nail or a railroad spike had been partially imbedded there.

Like a living battering ram, the great black dog drove its skull into the front door of the cottage, and then there was a blast of light almost like another lightning flash, an explosion almost like another thunder clap. The repercussion swept outward in all directions, making the racing pair stumble and grab onto each other to keep to their feet. Still gripping each other’s arms, they watched as a ball of fire billowed up into the night sky, the thatched roof of the house instantly and entirely ablaze, the windows all shattering as if picked out by bullets.

Venn quickly fumbled his red spectacles onto his face.

Along with the swirling sparks like locusts—and the black smoke that unfurled into the sky to merge there—Venn caught a glimpse of a rising dark form beating wings of shadow. Embers for eyes. Then, it too was lost in the greater darkness.

“Dear God,” Susan sobbed, clinging to him. “It was Black Shuck!”

“No,” Venn muttered. “It was Reverend Trendle’s dog.”

The widow looked up at his face. “Reverend Trendle?”

“He killed your husband, Sue. He’s more than a cleric. He’s a conjurer.”

“But…it can’t be possible!”

“That was his dog, was it not?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “It was one of them, in any case.”

Venn looked at her upturned face again. “One of them?”

“He once had a litter of them. Four, I believe. Later, one was missing.

Then recently, he seemed to have only two.”

Venn gazed off in the direction of the vicar’s church. “Then one of them still remains.”

««—»»

The conflagration attracted several of the men who labored at the sheep farm, who arrived in a cart from the town itself. Venn and Susan, who had been watching the vehicle’s approach from the threshold of the shearing barn, came forward to meet it. Venn told the men in his most authoritative clergyman’s voice to bring the woman safely back to the center of Candleton with them, straight away.

“What of you, Father?” Susan Brook asked breathlessly, squeezing his arm before climbing up into the wagon.

“I hope to meet you there,” he told her. And he waited for the cart to turn and dwindle back toward the town, the licking flames a wall behind him, before he walked along the road—the fairy path—himself. Walked toward the Anglican church of the vicar, John Trendle.

««—»»

Just as had been the case earlier that day, when Father Venn neared the stone church, a dog started barking from inside it, either having seen him through one of its dark windows or having simply sensed his approach.

He crossed the churchyard, and stopped a short distance from the front doorway of the church. Even as he did so, a huge black dog emerged—fol-lowed by the elderly Reverend Trendle, who planted himself beside it.

“More questions about the farmer Brook?” the vicar rasped.

The dog growled deep in its chest, a sound like another storm rolling in.

Though it was midnight dark, Venn lifted his deeply tinted red spectacles to his face. Now, where the dog’s blunt face had only been a black mask, two red eyes with silver pupils glared in place of its own.

“Only questions about you, John,” Venn replied.

“Why did you come back here, Venn?”

“I told you—I am the one with questions to be answered. Such as how you have learned these secrets you possess. These…spells…conjurations…what-ever one might call them.”

For several moments, Trendle hesitated. The dog snarled in the interim, its upper lip curling back to bare its slick teeth. Then, the reverend said, “My father built our cottage on a crossroads of two fairy paths, Venn. My two sisters and a brother died before the age of six. I’m sure it was the forces flowing through there that killed them. My father went mad, drank himself into the grave. My mother died not long after. But I, Venn…I survived.

Where my family were poisoned, were leeched, I was made strong. I was a lightning rod.”

“And you used this force to raise demons? In the service of the Lord?”

“I do what I must!” Trendle spat.

“Even murder priests?”

“One man’s priest is another man’s infidel.”

“You quote a chapter of the Bible that doesn’t exist in my own, John. But then you seem to have a personal acquaintance with our Master.”

“I know Him better than you, Venn.”

“There, you may be right. I don’t understand God. But these days, I’m not so certain that He even understands Himself.”

“Blasphemer!” Trendle shouted hoarsely. In his fury, he almost staggered.

“Tonight, you’ll die like the other two of your poisonous order!”

“That,” Venn told him, “is quite impossible.”

From one pocket of his coat, the old vicar produced a mallet. From the other, a chisel. Before the priest could even utter a sound of protest, the vicar bent over his massive dog, centered the point of the chisel between its eyes, and with one great blow hammered the spike deep into the animal’s brain.

With a terrible yelp, its legs went out from beneath it, and it thumped onto its chest, its tongue lolling out only to be bitten in its snapping jaws. Its hind legs dug into the ground, but more in a nervous reflex than in an effort to rise.

With a final convulsion that shook its entire frame, the animal died.

Through his lenses, Venn saw the red eyes wink out. But at that same moment, a puff of black smoke like the dog’s final exhalation curled out of its half open mouth. This mist rose, and deepened, and broadened. It began to turn in on itself, to billow in reverse, to twist itself into something more tangible.

Something with wings. And in its uppermost part, two red eyes with silvery pupils snapped open.

The Hebrew letters fitted together like bricks. The cells were joined into a body. The demon took on its finished form.

Though the creature’s skin was like obsidian, and it was naked and its flapping wings were like those of a raven, the red-eyed demon had the wrinkled, feral features of the Reverend Trendle. On legs bent crooked like those of a dog, and with fingers hooked into talons, the hovering being alighted on the ground and started toward the priest. Grinning wickedly.

There was a screech like that of a hawk, a sound that seemed to rip the flesh down the length of Venn’s back. Then, from the night sky, another ebon figure alighted. A second pair of fiery eyes glared. Though this second demon had his own face—or
because
it had his own face—Venn was just as horrified by it as he was by the first. And yet it had answered his unspoken call. It followed his unuttered instruction. His genie freed from the lamp.

The two demons flung themselves at each other, and Trendle cried out in rage and fear.

Later, one of the farm laborers who had remained behind to futilely battle the fire would relate that in the glow of the blaze and the flashes of lightning, he distantly saw the two clerics standing apart from each other. And they seemed to be bellowing, shrieking at each other. Or perhaps it was the wind, the thunder. He even thought he saw a whirlwind sweep up a funnel of dust between the two men. But he did not see—and even Trendle did not see—what Venn did through his stained glass lenses.

The two demons tore at each other with their claws, gouging each other’s naked flesh, tearing fistfuls of glossy feathers from the other’s wings. Trendle’s pet, his double, used one of its hind legs to open the belly of Venn’s. Instead of blood, black smoke gushed out. With a roar, as if in pain and outrage, Venn’s creature spread wide its jaws and clamped its mouth onto the throat of its oppo-nent. Shook its head in a frenzy like a dog with a hold on a cat.

The blurred frenzy of limbs and wings collapsed to the ground. Venn’s demon did not let go, despite the claws that slashed its arms and shoulders.

But it was streaming more and more smoke like squid’s ink from its opened belly. The bleeding smoke that rose up from both of the beings’ many wounds began to obscure them, so that they appeared shadowy as they had before they’d fully formed. Still, through the fog the crimson eyes glowed.

But one of the pairs of eyes faded, and blinked out. Embers turned to ash.

Where two demons had fallen, only one rose. What was left of the other dispersed around the vague legs of its murderer. In the blended mist of their blood, however, neither Venn nor Trendle could tell which of the creatures had survived.

Trendle cried out inarticulately, and backed away several steps, as the foggy, wounded demon turned in his direction and staggered toward him. It stretched wide its arms in a gesture more like a yearning for help than a motion to attack. Like a child begging its parent to ease its suffering.

Trendle caught his heel. Began to fall back. Where at first it seemed the demon had needed his embrace to support itself, now it supported him. Its arms went around him. The great wings, from Venn’s position, nearly blotted the vicar from view. But for one moment, Venn saw a perversion of his own profile, leaning in as if to kiss the reverend.

Venn heard the man wail, briefly, before the demon burst into a fire ball—and was gone. And when the flash of fire had quickly diminished, the Reverend Trendle had vanished as well, except for a small mound of steaming gray ash.

Hit by a bolt of lightning, the laborer who witnessed the event from a distance would suggest. Or maybe
, a victim of Old Shock himself

VII: The Cross

Father Venn walked the straight path, the inferno that had been the Brooks’ cottage becoming small behind him, until he could no longer smell it, feel its heat on him.

He entered the thick of Candleton. There, he lingered briefly, wondering where the workers had brought Sue Brook. He wanted to go to her. They had held onto each other in their fear, back at the farm. She could touch him, and he her. He could bleed, whatever that blood might really consist of.

He stood there in the central road, looking from one yellow window to another. Like a lost child, wondering which home belonged to him. He numbly stepped back to let wagons rattle past him, headed toward the farm to engage the fire.

Ultimately, Father Venn turned away from the yellow windows and continued along the straight path. Leaving the center of his old town, and leaving his flock now without any shepherd whatsoever. But maybe that was better for them.

««—»»

It was becoming light on the horizon by the time he finally, slowly made his way to the crossroads that the villagers called the Cross. A delicate patina of light lay over the earth like a thin foil of hammered gold, and shadows were tinted a pale violet. It was the most fragile, the most ephemeral phase of the day.

Where the two roads met, intersected, Father Venn stopped. A man was waiting for him there. Father Lodge came forward several steps to meet him, smiling subtly. Father Lodge, no longer rooted to his own spot.

Before he spoke, Venn looked off down the right side of the crosswise road. It dipped somewhat into a hollow, and that hollow was filled with a thick morning fog rolling in, it would seem, from some nearby pond or water-mead.

The light of dawn glowed on the thick mist, tinging it gold as well. But as Venn had been raised in this area, he knew there was no body of water down that way. He had never seen such a dense fog along that path. And when he raised his spectacles a bit to look out from beneath them, he saw that the fog was no longer there. The path clear, its borders glittering with dew.

Lowering his specs in place again, he looked back to Lodge, to see that the older priest was extending his hand.

“I’ll be needing those, now, Alec,” he said.

It took Venn a moment to understand what Lodge meant. Then he realized he was referring to the spectacles. He realized that now Lodge could touch them where he couldn’t before.

But before he removed the spectacles, before Lodge was no longer visible to him, he asked, “What about Father Dewy?”

“He’s gone on ahead of you.” Lodge tipped his chin toward the crosswise path. Toward the gold-lit roiling mist. “The old woman, Baptista, too.”

Venn nodded, and smiled faintly. “And what about you,
Edmond
?”

“I’ll be staying for a while. It comes to me that I have some things to do.”

His smile broadened. He wiggled his fingers for the spectacles that Venn had had made for himself, a year ago now.

“Don’t be long,” Venn told his friend, then removing his red spectacles.

The older priest did not vanish, after all. He stood there as solid as a man in the flesh, as solid as Venn himself appeared, accepting the specs and fitting them on his nose.

“Some sort of justice has been achieved,
Edmond
. But I’m not certain that I’ve learned anything.”

“Perhaps the learning is about to begin.” Father Lodge rested his hand on Venn’s shoulder for a moment. “Go home, Father Venn.”

Venn turned toward the right-hand path, and though he could no longer see the golden fog he knew it was still there. He walked toward it. Savoring the feel of his last steps on this hard path. Relishing his last breaths of crisp autumnal air. Admiring the gilded coronas of the rough hedges. He walked slowly. Unhurried. Though there was a tinge of melancholy, a nostalgia in advance, it was not reluctance he felt. Or fear.

It was simply that it was a time for him to be at ease. His time—at last—to rest.