Page 113 of Night Songs

She watched the minute hand move in a circle around the mother-of-pearl face, and she demanded he talk to her.

She wanted to make a new deal. He owed her at least that. After all these years. After all the deaths, and all the lonely children left without anyone to love them.

Still, he did not answer. After tormenting her for months, his voice in her ear singing those terrible songs and showing up at the cabin to threaten her child, only now, when she really needed him, he refused to speak.

Midnight came, and then went.

She screamed for him, but she received no answer. Only the sound of buzzards beating their wings in the treetops and the caw of crows gliding over the empty road.

This was only a game to him.

She stood up and walked into the woods toward Papa’s old church. He’d died a decade prior, along with her grandmother, her aunt, and her bastard uncle. The rest were still here somewhere, tucked away in the hills. She wondered if they’d recognize her, but she was kidding herself; she knew they would. Now, more than ever, she could feel herself returning to what she once was—a lonely demon child roaming the woods, listening to songs no one else could hear.

As she walked among the trees in the dark, she thought of the night she left Craw Valley for good. Her uncle had come home drunk from the logging camp, stripped down to his stained white underwear, and cornered her in the kitchen with his large pale body glowing beneath the full moon.

She’d tried to dodge him like she usually did, but that night he was quick, and he grabbed her by the shoulders and thrust her over the counter. She heard him fumbling with his buckle, and she reached for the knife in the butcher block and plunged it into his side. He reeled back and fell to the ground, and she sat on his chest. She pulled the knife from his fleshy belly, and blood sprayed her face and clothes. She held the knife above him, the blade sparkling in the moonlight, and watched the black holes in his eyes expand. Then she cut a slash in each cheek, so that even when she was gone, she’d never be forgotten.

Up ahead in the trees, a faint light appeared, and she saw it was the cave, lit up at the mouth, music pulsing from within. She walked toward it, daring herself to keep going. Then she entered, and a wall of life engulfed her. The cavernoushollow was filled with people and flickering candles. The air was humid with damp and sweat. A woman clanged away on the warped piano as if possessed, and the choir shrieked.

The preacher, a young man with unforgiving blue eyes in a white robe, was calling for all those in the grip of the devil to come forth. One by one, people from the crowd wandered up to the pulpit as if in a daze, and she wandered up with them.

She stood before the preacher, and he brought his hand up and passed it over her face.

He told her he could sense him. The devil. He was in her, all right.

It felt so good to be validated. To be in the presence of a believer.

The preacher told her to kneel in front of him, and she obeyed. She bowed her head, and he shouted for the sinners to think of all that they had done, the rot inside of them that the devil feasted on.

Every Sunday when she was a little girl, they forced her to go to the front and have the devil cast out from her body. She never felt a thing.

This time, though, she felt something. She thought of everyone she’d hurt: Hess, Rhea, Tima, Phoebe, Martha, Clayton, Tate, even her own mama. Everyone she’d ever loved, she’d lied to and betrayed. What had she done with her life other than follow her silly dream of becoming a star? She was so ashamed.

Maybe she deserved it. The curse.

But maybe there was a path to redemption.

Maybe this man could cast her evil out.

She felt hands placed all over her body, and then the preacher started to bark again, this time addressing the devil directly.

He said, “Out, demon! Out, devil! By the power of the Almighty and the Everlasting Love of his Son, I order you to leave this woman. This church. This holler. Slither back to the wet hole you come out of!”

She felt something wriggling in her belly, moving up through her chest, and then up her throat, nearly choking her. She watched a snake slowly exit through her mouth, its silken scales rubbing against her lips.

Afraid to move, she watched its corn-colored body slide across the dirt floorto the preacher in front of her, moving up his shoe and disappearing beneath his white pant leg.

She tried to warn him, but no sound came from her mouth. When she looked into his blue eyes, she no longer saw his indifferent cruelty.

There was wily evil staring back at her. It was him.

She shouted, “Let’s make a deal, you son of a bitch.”

He smiled. “What does thou have to offer?”

“I’ll give you whatever you want—my voice, my money, my fame.”

“But I do not desire those things.”