20. Erin.
20
Erin.
“ Case study #142: The Devil’s Den .
On March 21st, 2043, authorities sent a team of State Exorcists led by Robb Warden to Hulett, Wyoming, to investigate reports of demonic activity. They found proof of the existence of a satanic cult practicing rituals and summoning demons. A week after their arrival, on March 27th, the team infiltrated the headquarters of the cult, called the Devil’s Den. But they had underestimated the threat greatly and six exorcists died on site. Robb Warden escaped, and a few hours later called reinforcements. In the days that followed, the State Exorcists aided by special forces and the local police raided Hulett. The first publicized raid against demons in history resulted in the arrest, exorcism, or killing of one hundred and twenty-one possessed individuals. It was the first official show of power in the fight with Hell. Robb Warden received the Silver Star medal for his bravery. This chapter will examine possible preventative measures for the regrettable events of March 27th […]”
-Extract from the State Exorcist’s Manual , edition of 2047.
WYOMING / NEW YORK, 2043
When I woke up two days later on the riverbank, shivering from my damp clothes and my brush with death, I’d never felt so utterly lost in my entire life. I’d been a State Exorcist for a day, but I was now their enemy.
Would they come after me? Did Robb tell them what I was? For all I knew, it could already have turned into a manhunt, and they’d find me at any moment.
I should have been on the move, but I sat under the tree—a weeping willow—and cried while cradling my wounded hand. Robb had tried to kill me. I knew I was only alive because he’d held back and cut my wings instead of taking my life, but I couldn’t shake the sense of betrayal. I was still me, and I’d saved him from a certain death. He should have been on my side. I’d have gone to Hell and back for him.
Night fell, and the cold crept up from the river. I remembered vaguely that it was still early spring, and the only reason I hadn’t died of hypothermia during my coma was because of the body armor I wore. Despite my wings tearing the back, it still kept some of my body heat.
Dry blood and dirt crusted the gash along my face and neck, but it wasn’t my primary worry. The horns were. They went up, a good twenty-inches-long, like giant teeth with a spiral shape. My neck cramped from the extra weight to carry.
“Fuck…” I sobbed.
I pulled on them. They were soft to the touch, but as hard as stone. I couldn’t get rid of them by myself, not without proper tools. I doubted a simple iron file would work this time.
“ You need to find food and shelter ,” said Lucifer. “ Your strength has been depleted. I had to give you sips of my power to keep your heart going while you were unconscious. But too much, and it will kill you. ”
I would have cried some more if I hadn’t been so dehydrated already. Drinking the river’s water was tempting, but it could make me sicker.
I wanted to just let myself die on the riverbank, but Lucifer wouldn’t let me.
My legs gave out twice before I got to my feet. I made my way downriver, slowly and clumsily. The night sky was heavy with clouds, but my mutated eyes caught on the little light there was and I could see clearly. My socks were still damp inside my shoes, and I’d lost feeling in my toes. Lucifer was right. I needed to find shelter or might not make it.
After forty minutes, the forest gave way to pastures where cattle grazed. A ranch stood on top of a rolling hill. I had to risk it; I couldn’t go further.
The windows were dark, and the place was quiet. Robb had said that the cultists bought most of the properties and land in Hulett. Would I walk in on a family of possessed, or did I leave their bodies back at the Devil’s Den? I couldn’t face an enemy in my state, but neither could I keep going.
I knocked and waited, shoulder propped on the wall to stay upright. When I heard no sound coming from inside, I turned the doorknob. It was unlocked.
The house was cold and empty, but it felt almost expectant and welcoming, too. But that might have been my imagination. I was eager to rest and wanted to ease the guilt of breaking into someone’s home.
I rushed to the couch and grabbed a blanket. I threw it over my shoulders, teeth chattering.
“ Food, little one ,” said Lucifer. “ You need food to replenish your energy. ”
He was right. I could feel exhaustion pulling me down and this time I might not wake up again if I didn’t eat something first.
I dragged my feet to the fridge and collected everything that could be consumed easily. Ham, yogurt, cheese, a bottle of soda… Then also peanut butter and crackers I found in a cupboard.
I brought my loot to a room with cardboard boxes—it looked like they used it as storage—and sat on the floor, hidden from view in case the house dwellers came back. I fell on the food like a ravenous wolf and washed everything down with soda. I was too tired to even taste anything.
When, finally, I couldn’t muster the energy to swallow another bite, I fell asleep on the ground, fresh tears welling in my eyes.
I woke up some time later, groggy and in pain. I rubbed my eyes and looked through the window. The sun was high in the sky. I’d slept for the entire night and late into the day.
“Lucifer?” I whispered.
He was the only constant in my life.
“ You are fine ,” he said. “ No one entered the house since you fell asleep .”
I relaxed. Maybe I’d really killed the occupants of the place. It wasn’t a comforting thought, but at least I wasn’t in immediate danger. The State Exorcists still hadn’t found me.
I walked through the house on shaky legs, getting my bearings. In one room, I found a wardrobe with a man’s clothes. They were too big for me, but it was better than keeping my tattered body armor on. Against all odds, my phone had survived the fight and my dip in the river. The rest of my things were at the farm where I’d left my bag. They were lost for good. I couldn’t risk going back.
Eventually, I could no longer delay the inevitable, and I looked at my reflection in the tall mirror beside the bed. I gasped when I beheld my horns for the first time. They were… impressive, to say the least. Tall and slender, like the ones I’d seen on the herbivores in the savanna in documentaries. But they were as pale as polished bone.
“Shit…” I breathed out.
I needed tools, but couldn’t find any useful ones in the house.
One look at me, and the world would turn against me. Demon. The Devil himself.
I went outside, hoping no one would just happen to drive by, and checked the other buildings. The cows watched as I tried to find anything to cut the horns. Didn’t ranchers dehorn their cattle? But no luck.
I went back to the house, mulling over ideas. At any moment now, the exorcists could come crashing down on the house. Lucifer wouldn’t go down easily, and that’s a fight I wouldn’t survive in my weakened state.
In a streak of genius, I sat in front of the computer in the office. It wasn’t password protected, and I did a quick search. The closest vet clinic was forty minutes away in another town. They had two vets who cared for farm animals. I plugged my phone in and called them.
“Hello,” I said in a shaky voice. “I have a cow stuck on a fence… Do you have tools to cut horns?”
The vet arrived before nightfall. They’d agreed to squeeze me at the end of their shift if I paid for their hefty urgency fee and the gas.
I felt bad for what was about to happen, but I didn’t have a choice. The vet was a blonde woman in her forties. As she walked up to the door with her large bag, I snuck up behind her.
I felt wretched as I held a knife to her throat and said, “I’m sorry, but I really need your help.”
She gasped and dropped her bag. “Fuck! You’ve got to be kidding me…” she mumbled.
“Get inside, please.”
She opened the door reluctantly and stepped inside. I followed her with the bag.
“I’m a vet. I don’t have money on me, I just—” but she trailed off as she finally faced me and saw the horns. Her eyes widened. “Oh.”
At least she wasn’t screaming at the top of her lungs. It would make things easier.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, gesturing to my head. “But I really need your help to cut these horns. I couldn’t get rid of them myself… They’re very heavy and…” I was babbling nervously.
The back of her leg hit a chair in the living room, and she sat. “Are you a demon?”
I grimaced. “No, I’m human.” Not entirely a lie, was it? “But I’ve mutated, and… I got horns.” I hesitantly pointed to my back. “And stumps, from my… wings.”
“No shit,” she said, looking dazed. “You’re possessed.”
There was no denying it. The demonic trade had become common knowledge.
“Yes. But he won’t harm you. He’s different.”
Lucifer chuckled in my head. Was I advocating for the Devil?
“How old are you?” she asked, surprising me.
“Seventeen.”
“God damn it. What’s your name?”
I hesitated. What hurt could it do? As soon as I’d set her free, she would go to the police, and they’d connect the dots.
“Jon,” I said.
Jonah had died on the day his mother tried to kill him, even if his name took longer to follow him to the grave.
“Well, Jon, are you going to kill me?”
“No?”
This time, Lucifer laughed openly, and I cringed. I was terrible at threatening people. I could deal with demons, but not humans.
The vet sighed. “Come on, let me see those horns.”
Her voice had taken on a motherly tone. It could have been a trick, but I was so tired and lost that I was willing to risk it just to have an adult tell me that everything was going to be okay. I knelt on the carpet in front of her and tucked the knife between my legs. Seconds later, I felt a weight pulling on my head as she examined my horns.
“They’re real alright,” she said. “Incredible.”
“Can you cut them?”
“Oh, yes. The base is actually smaller than cows’ horns. It shouldn’t be too hard. And I can numb the surrounding skin to help you with the pain.”
My chin wobbled. “Thank you. And my… stumps?”
She frowned. “Show me.”
I unbuttoned my shirt and let it slide over my back.
The vet hissed. “Jesus. Who did this to you?”
This time, I could not hold back my sobs. “A friend.”
She dropped a gentle hand on my shoulder and squeezed. I cried harder.
I’d found an unsuspected ally in the storm that was my life, and my bravery crumbled.
She let me cry for a moment, then said, “We’ll take care of what’s left of your wings first. The faster we disinfect and stitch them, the faster they’ll heal. I’ll need to cut the stumps off if you want to go back to normal. Are you okay with that?”
I nodded eagerly. “Yes. Please.”
I couldn’t live with the remnant of Lucifer’s wings under my clothes like a humpback.
We placed a towel on the kitchen table and I laid on it, naked to the waist up. Erin—she’d given me her name—had to inject a good amount of painkillers until I couldn’t feel the skin around my stumps anymore. She worked on them for an hour.
She threw the pieces of flesh inside a trash bag, and I tried not to think too hard about it. She made me talk about my demon and my life to keep me busy. I kept it all vague, of course, and called Lucifer my traveler.
Erin finished and cleaned the blood, then she made me turn and hung my head at the end of the table to take care of my horns.
“I’ve brought the electric saw we use to cut horns on adult cows,” she explained to me after numbing my scalp. “It’ll be loud and scary, but it’ll be quick. You should close your eyes. It might bleed a lot, but there’s nothing to worry about. The head has a lot of blood vessels.”
I knew that from experience, so I wasn’t scared. My only worry was that she might have changed her mind about helping me and just sever my head with her saw to get rid of me and my demon. But it would be a quicker death than what certainly awaited me at the hands of the State Exorcists, so I was willing to take the risk.
“Okay,” I said, and closed my eyes.
She was right; the tool was loud. But it worked, and in the matter of minutes my horns had fallen off to the floor.
“What a waste,” Erin said, throwing them in the trash bag. “They were quite majestic.”
“Thank you,” I whispered, shaking like a leaf. Majestic or not, I felt so much lighter.
She checked the gash along my face and neck where Robb had cut me. The scabs came off easily, revealing the pink line underneath. It had already closed up.
“Well, nothing more I can do about that,” she said. “It’s clean. I’m sorry, but you’ll have a scar for life.”
I got off the table. “No, I won’t.”
She didn’t seem convinced, but said nothing more on the matter. “Go take a shower to wash your hair. It’s matted with blood. I’ll fix us something warm to drink. Do you have hot chocolate or tea?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s not my house.”
She froze, then asked warily, “Did you kill the owners?”
“What? No.” At least not upon arriving on the property. I couldn’t be sure if they were among the possessed I killed at the church. “The house has just stayed empty since I arrived yesterday. I needed a place to rest and get warm.”
Erin sighed and looked around. “Well, then. I better clean that shit up.” She eyed the blood on the kitchen’s floor. “Go take a shower, I’ll manage.”
I obeyed and disappeared into the bathroom, all the while wondering if she would be up to adopt a teenager and his demon. She’d cared more for me in the last hours than my mother and father during the years I lived with them.
I cried a little more under the water.
“ I am sorry for the pain my mutations have caused you ,” Lucifer said, taking me by surprise.
He rarely showed remorse.
“You saved me,” I simply said, shoulders low from exhaustion and anguish.
The pain I felt and the blood I’d lost meant I was alive. If Lucifer hadn’t taken possession of me on my seventh birthday, I would have bled out on the basement floor of our old house.
I felt a little more human as I stepped out of the shower half an hour later.
Erin, truthful to her words, had made hot chocolate. I sat with her and we drank in silence. Nothing had ever tasted so good.
“What now?” she asked, eventually. “Do you need me to drop you off somewhere?”
I smiled weakly. “That would be nice. Thank you. Any town will do.”
“Where will you go?”
“I’ll manage.”
I couldn’t just tell her. She might send the State Exorcists on my trail.
She sighed and patted my hand. I felt new tears welling in my eyes.
“I’ll send you money as soon as I can,” I said. “For… everything.”
“Don’t worry.”
“I will. I promise.”
She smiled. “Just stay alive, Jon. And I’ll be happy.”
It turned out she had a son my age.
We drove back to her town, and she dropped me off at my request to the rest area with a truck stop by the interstate. I had nothing on me but my phone and stolen clothes. I couldn’t take a plane back to New York without papers. And, for all I knew, I would get arrested as soon as I stepped into the airport.
“Take care, Jon,” Erin said through the window of her car.
She looked sad. I don’t think she expected me to survive long. I didn’t either, to be honest. My days were numbered.
“Erin?” I said before she could drive away.
“Yes, honey?”
My heart fluttered at the pet name.
“You should take your son and go on vacation far away from here. Until things cool down.”
“What things?” she asked, properly worried.
“Stay as far away as possible from Hulett. Trust me.”
And that was that. She left, driving a little too fast to be casual. I’d spooked her with my warning. Good. At least she would keep an eye open. She had seen the Devil, and there was no going back.
“She was really nice,” I said into the night.
The only light in the parking lot came from the trucks and cars passing by. My shadow stretched over the asphalt before being devoured by the darkness. One moment I was a giant, the next barely taller than the weeds.
Erin had given me just enough human warmth to get me going for a few more days. It was a gift I would come to cherish above all else in the years to come.
“ Yes, she was ,” said Lucifer. “ You humans are fascinating .”
It took me three weeks to reach New York. I didn’t dare use my phone to access my bank accounts—in case the State Exorcists were tracking me—so I hitchhiked over six states.
I’d spent most of my life alone, the weird kid, and suddenly I had to learn how to read people. How to dissociate the ill-meaning ones from the good ones. How to socialize to get the help I needed. Lucifer helped. He was my guardian angel, whose voice guided me through trials and errors.
I had to beat up a few sexual predators who made the mistake of seeing me as an easy prey, but I also met amazing people.
I spent three days near a lake with an old couple and their two dogs, listening to their travel stories. They helped me take the stitches off my back.
I saved a man after a car accident by breaking the window and pulling him out of the wreck, and that night he invited me to dinner with his family.
I got a glimpse of what people’s lives were without demons. They knew about Hell—they’d watched videos and followed the News—but demons and their horrors only happened to others. They’d never know that they came close to Lucifer.
To survive, I stole food from gas stations, took showers at truck stops, and made friends with drivers.
By the time I reached New York, my wounds had healed, and I had no scars left. My horns grew back, the little nubs hidden under my hair, and I would need to file them again. This time without Erin’s help.
When I arrived at my father’s building, they refused to let me in. I looked like a street rat, with my dirty clothes and messy hair. They called him, and they finally allowed me in the elevator.
I knocked on the door of the penthouse, and my father opened a heartbeat later. We stared at each other.
“Jesus. Where have you been?” he said.
He didn’t look better than I did. He hadn’t shaved in a while, and his usually neat salt-and-pepper hair was a mess.
“Long story,” I said with an awkward smile.
He didn’t smile back. “Get in. Has anyone seen you?”
So much for a warm reunion.
“Just the guys at the entrance.”
He paced the spacious living room nervously. “Why are you here?”
His animosity was obvious, but he didn’t seem scared of me.
“I didn’t know what to—”
“The State Exorcists were here two weeks ago,” he interrupted. “They told me you deserted the force.” He snickered. “Ran away screaming during your first mission. I had to pay for your training. Fifty thousand dollars, Jonah.”
I stared, confused. “Wh—What?”
“I told you it was a terrible idea. You? An exorcist? What a joke. Do you feel all grown-up now?” He wasn’t even looking at me as he walked back and forth.
“ We should kill him ,” Lucifer said in my head. “ He has always been a waste of a human life .”
I shook my head, trying to think. The State Exorcists thought I deserted. Which meant Robb had told no one what I was. They weren’t after me.
“You’re lucky you’re still underage,” my father continued, unaware of my shock. “You won’t go to prison for desertion.” He shook his head. He looked exhausted. “Go take a shower. You stink.”
And that was that.
They’d taken my things out of my old bedroom, eager to get rid of me, but had left my bags of clothes in the storage room.
I stayed for a week, long enough to understand why my father was in such a state. At thirty-eight, his new wife, Miranda—the step-mother I barely knew—found out she had cancer.
They all hated my presence in their home. I was the unwanted visitor. The shameful reminder of my father’s past failures. My younger siblings observed me with mistrust.
I took my first gig that week, an exorcism for a small gang of demonic traders, and left with the money and a bag of clothes. I slept in hotel rooms during the day and kicked demons back to Hell at night.
I never saw my father again. I got a call five months later. Miranda’s demon had killed him, along with my siblings. In a desperate attempt to save his dying wife, he’d made a deal with demonic traders to fight her cancer. The creature took over, eventually.
My father, who’d called my mother ‘ the satanic whore ’, had made the same mistake as her in the end.
I inherited all of his assets and money.
Once it was all settled, I sent a hefty donation to Erin.