The Devil Dances, page 12
part #2 of Nick Englebrecht Series
I nodded. “Good enough.”
“So, tell me what you’re planning to do once you know what we’re dealing with.”
“Destroy the altar, for starters. Problem is, I can’t get near it to destroy it. Hell, my dad can’t get near it, that’s how powerful it is. I mean, Morgana, it’s a god.”
“That makes sense, seeing how the Lucifers, whatever else they are, are still creatures of God. But maybe you can spin that to your advantage.”
“How do you mean?”
“Nick, it’s a god that was defeated at one point in the far past. By God, the being that created your bloodline. That means it has vulnerabilities.” She thought a long moment. “Maybe you’ve already got the tools available to you.”
I sat forward. “I’m listening.”
“During the original battle that put away all the other gods, your grandfather was some big, hotshot warrior, right?”
“A general, yeah.”
“Well, what weapons did your grandfather use? Has your father ever told you that?”
“He’s talked about the Morning Star,” I said, and then realized she might not know what that was. “It’s the bident, the sign of my father’s house. You know, the fancy two-pronged staff? Except everyone today thinks it’s a pitchfork the Devil has, but it’s really a warrior’s weapon. My dad uses it to drag souls to Hell.” I knew enough of my family’s history to know that the Morning Star was originally a weapon of God’s, and that long before the Fall, He had bequeathed it to His most beloved archangel, Lucifer. It had His blood on it, which was the reason the members of the Lucifer line could judge souls with it.
I imagined Morgana nodding. “Maybe you can get the bident from your dad. If it defeated the god once, it could probably do it again.”
I thought about that. “Dad’s not going to just hand it over.”
“Think of it as a contingency plan, then. Let me get to work looking over these books, find out more about this thing. Maybe there’s another way.”
I nodded. “Thanks, Morgana.” After I hit END, I looked over the picturesque front yard with its white picket fence, the dusty dirt road meandering beyond, and the green and golden fields in the hazy, sun-baked distance. It all looked so idyllic and picturesque, like something you’d find on a motivational poster about teamwork or perseverance. It almost felt obscene that an ancient god of bloodshed, terror, and sexual violation could exist here, or that if Morgana failed me, I might need to beg, borrow or steal my dad’s pitchfork in order to defeat it.
Yep. The fun never ends in my life.
The kickoff of the Swartzcopf Rumspringa surprised me, frankly.
I had read enough about Amish life to make me believe that courting only happened after a long, somber church service on a Wednesday evening. According to my friend Jacob, after the church meeting ended, a young man approached a young woman and asked to drive her back to her home in the young man’s buggy. There they held hands and talked in the coach house for a while, until the lights went out in the house, signaling the end of their “date”. From there, the young woman decided if she wanted to marry the young man. No bed courtship was involved—but then, things were sometimes done differently, even among members of the same Ordnung. In that way, the Pennsylvanian Swartzcopf Ordnung was its own strange beast.
When I asked Abraham about it that night, the two of us standing on the edges of the town square where dozens of paper lanterns had been hung, he said that the Swartzcopf here were so small in number that bed courtship was being encouraged after the night’s festivities. I had a feeling there would be many marriages after tonight, and in nine months, many new Swartzcopf.
Vivian had asked me to wear one of the men’s black suits. I really wasn’t a suit kind of guy, but because she’d asked—begged, really—I’d given in. So there I stood, among all the other nervous young studs in their own dark suits and hats, some kicking stones and tugging on clothes, waiting for my girl to arrive. Abraham walked the crowd, nodding encouragement or offering sage advice to the group of young, unmarried men who had never known companionship past Rosie Palm and her five sisters.
“Are you nervous?” he asked me when he saw I was tugging on the too-short sleeves of my borrowed blue Swartzcopf shirt, and to my surprise, I found I was.
Vivian suddenly appeared. She’d worn one of the women’s long black dresses and white aprons, and like the other young, courting women, she’d worn a white bonnet, the sign of the unmarried virgin. I walked up to her and she linked her arm through mine. “You look beautiful, Viv,” I told her.
She blushed sweetly and said, “Thanks, Nick. You look really handsome, yourself. Just like a prince.”
We definitely stuck out less as we followed the other couples into the town center. Abraham stood at a pulpit and delivered a brief sermon about the responsibilities of adulthood, the power of family and community, and the goodliness of upholding traditional Swartzcopf values in the face of a changing and increasingly Godless nation. Honestly, I felt a little odd—and somewhat long in the tooth—to be standing there amidst a sea of sixteen-year-old virgins hoping to get laid for the first time, but Vivian seemed to agree with the advice that Abraham was offering the young, courting couples, and she nodded her head at appropriate times along with the others.
Mary and the other women had laid out a buffet of meat pies and sweets. After Abraham concluded his sermon, the couples migrated to the tables, and I watched as the young men built platters of food for their young women. Confused, I looked over at Vivian. She stood beside me, looking prim in her dark dress, and said, “Now you’re supposed to bring me dinner. That’s what Mary told me. It’s kind of a test to see if the boy can figure out what his girl likes.”
“Ah.” I worked my way down the buffet table, adding a little bit of everything to Vivian’s plate. Well, everything but the Brussels sprout casserole. Vivian liked just about everything imaginable but Brussels sprouts.
She was smiling when I led her to one of the long picnic benches and we sat down side by side. Another couple sat across the table from us, the girl carefully looking over her suitor’s choices, nodding her head or shaking it with disapproval. The young boy looked worried.
“Does it meet with madam’s approval?” I asked Vivian.
She smacked me on the shoulder. “You’re supposed to take this seriously!”
I laughed. “You’re right, and I apologize.”
She looked over my offering carefully before beginning to eat. I was proud to have made the proper choices. “How did your parents meet, Nick?” she asked between bites.
I felt a little jarred by her question.
She saw my surprised expression and said, “I just mean… it seems so unusual. How did he… you know… choose her?”
“They met in college,” I told her. “My father was teaching a class in theology and my mother fell in love with him. But I don’t know why he was there, if it was just to teach or to find someone. Her, specifically.”
“You never asked him?”
“No.” The truth was, I had never really wanted to know. It was easier for me to believe it was all some kind of dark happenstance. I liked thinking that more than believing something like their meeting was pre-destined or pre-arranged, or that fate or God had had a hand in it. I preferred a God who sometimes lost control of His Creation to one who deliberately allowed evil things to happen in this world.
“You’re lucky,” Vivian said, picking at some of my choices. “I’ve always wondered… you know, who my father was. What he was. But I was a teen pregnancy. After I was born, my mom just left me. I know her name, and where she lives, but I’ve never gone to see her. I guess I’m afraid to find out.”
I realized I had a perfect opening to tell Vivian the truth. I opened my mouth, but again, what came out was, “Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
“Do you believe that, Nick?”
“Yes, Vivian. I do.”
She gave me sympathetic eyes and touched my hand. “I guess maybe in your case, that’s true.”
I was so lost in my own miserable thoughts that I almost didn’t recognize the shrill, musical squeal of a fiddle. The sound of it jerked my attention away from my own worries. A pair of Swartzcopf men had assumed Abraham’s place at the pulpit. Unlike him, though, they were both seated in cane-backed chairs, one playing a fiddle, the other a flute, neither without some great skill. I was surprised because, as far as I was aware, the only musical instruments that Jacob was allowed in his Ordnung was a harmonica, and only to keep the youth in tune for church choirs while they sang a cappella. He said playing more complicated instruments was on par with self-expression, which called unnecessary attention to the individual.
Vivian became animate. “Mary told me about this, too! She said Abraham is allowing music and dancing tonight.” She grabbed my hand and stood up. “Dance with me, Nick!”
I really wasn’t the dancing type any more than I was the suit type. I loathed it, in fact. Had I actually gone to my senior prom—instead of going out with my friends that night to get drunk, stoned, and feel up girls at this punk club down in the Bronx—I’m sure I would have wallflowered all night like some pathetic loser. And don’t give me that look; this was the late 1970’s, remember. You try to dance in a robin’s-egg-blue tuxedo and a ruffle-fronted, super-fly-style shirt.
I made plenty of noises of protest as Vivian dragged me into the middle of the melee of young couples, then turned to face me, taking my hand in one of her own, and setting the other on my shoulder.
“Vivian, I really…”
“Oh, be quiet,” she said sternly. “Follow my lead.” She pushed gently against me and we took a step back, turned, and then repeated the motion. I watched out of the corner of my eye as the boys did the same with the girls, pushing them a few steps back, then turning. It reminded me of some medieval ball dance, or something from Revolutionary France. Step, step, turn, step, step, turn. Simple, really, a caveman could do it, but I realized after some time that the way we were positioned on the green, all the couples were making a kind of giant spiral even as the fiddle and flute intensified, and the air filled with music and fecund summer meadow-smells. There were spirals on the god’s altar, I remembered, among other symbols. Very soon we were on the inside, and with each turn, it brought Vivian and me closer to the eye of the giant symbol we were forming in the middle of the town square with the other couples.
She was smiling and leading me on. I had to struggle to keep up. I wanted to say stop, that this whole thing was wrong, but suddenly it seemed too much. I realized I was tired of always being suspicious, always mistrusting everything and everyone. I just wanted to have fun with my girl. The music invigorated me. The evening was washing away, becoming colder, but the cold enlivened me.
“Isn’t this fun, Nick?” she said to me with a broad smile.
“Yes,” I agreed. “It is.” I smiled back, feeling happy and content for the first time in my life.
We danced, turning faster and faster, hemmed in on all sides by the other couples. It was then I realized that a lot of the couples were feeling each other up, like at the clubs that Vivian and I visited. I watched the boys palming the girls’ asses, the girls rubbing their breasts against the boys’ chests. I knew it wasn’t normal, not in this setting, but it sure as hell was damned hot.
I felt a momentary spike of confusion, followed by a growing concern. I wanted to enjoy myself—I felt I deserved it—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that things were off-kilter somehow.
“Vivian…” I began, begging her to stop, but she changed things up then. She shifted both hands to the back of my neck, angling my head so she could kiss me, crushing her lips against mine even as we continued to turn in a tight circle like dervishes, turning, turning, even as the fiddle and flute found their crescendo.
Something crunched underfoot. I glanced down at our quickly shifting feet and saw the small, mangled body of a barn swallow being trampled by us. Something hit me in the shoulder, and when I turned to glance at it, I realized it was another swallow. Another smashed into the ground behind Vivian, and within seconds at least two dozen small, very dead avian bodies began pummeling the ground around us. My heart lurched up into my throat at the sight, though I don’t think Vivian noticed, and I know for a fact that no one else did, not the way everyone was lost in groping and kissing on the green.
I broke away from her, trampling dead birds as I maneuvered out of the circle of couples. Suddenly everything was frosty cold, windy and nightmarish. The night seemed both black and unfriendly. I didn’t recognized anything at all. The clouds had covered the moon and the only light came from the hellishly burning paper lanterns. I turned and pushed past a young couple lost in a serious game of tonsil hockey, stumbled over a few more bird bodies, and then ran for the barn.
And people wonder why I don’t dance.
I was sitting in the loft, my back against a hay bale, watching the grove like a poor man’s sentinel and listening to the last of the music playing down in the square, when I become aware of a presence closing in on me. I’d never liked being taken by surprise. I scuffled up in the hay and sawdust, then saw the flickering light of a lantern as a young man ambled toward me. His face was carved in shadow, but as he lifted the lantern, I recognized the horsey face and silver glasses. “It’s you. Isaac.”
He gave me a dour nod before moving closer. “And you’re the daemon.”
I brushed hay off my black jacket. “I haven’t seen you since that day at the festival.”
Isaac bit his lip. “I’ve been staying with Abraham and his family.” When he saw I didn’t follow, he added, “I don’t come from here.” With his free hand, he made a little spiral to indicate this place, Zion. “I come from a smaller Ordnung up in Ohio.” Now that he spoke more, I recognized the soft, flat, Midwestern drawl lurking just beneath his Pennsylvania Dutch accent.
“Swartzcopf?”
“No, Andy Weaver Amish. But this spring, I and a few others were invited to join the Swartzcopf, if we were willing to submit to the Ordnung.” Like the first time I’d seen him, he wore no jacket, and his shirtsleeves rolled up so when he shrugged his strong, bony shoulders, the muscles and sinews rippled through his bared forearms. “New breeding stock, you understand.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?” When I didn’t immediately answer, he asked to bum a cigarette.
I handed him one from my pack, along with my lighter. “Does that happen a lot? Breeding stock being imported from other Ordnungs?” I nearly grimaced when I said it. It sounded so impersonal, like Clydesdales being shipped to other parts of the country, but Isaac took no offense.
“Yah, well. It was a good opportunity to see something new.” He moved past me to the edge of the barn loft and glanced out at the festivities still going on. He sucked down the cigarette hungrily. I saw no joy in his face. He sat down on the very edge of the open loft. I sat down beside him. “My Ordnung was so small the kids weren’t coming out right, like. Being born sick and deformed. The girls would sometimes go into town in disguise, find English to mate with. How pathetic is that?”
I shrugged. “I guess you do what you need to do.”
“Yah.” Isaac didn’t sound pleased with his lot in life.
“If you’re unhappy, why don’t you leave?”
He snorted smoke out his nostrils. He removed his black hat and raked his fingers through his blond, pageboy hair so it shushed thickly in the silence. “I did run away. Twice. But going out there into the English world with no money? Barely any education? Can’t find a job? Unless you get yourself a good halfway house, it’s nearly impossible. This place is all.”
We sat in silence for some time and smoked side by side. Distantly, an owl hooted, a lonely, haunted sound.
Finally, I said, “So why did you lure me here, Isaac? Is it to get you out? Did you see an opportunity?”
Again, Isaac’s hair shushed in the dark, though this time I could barely see the gesture. He was all angular darkness and glinting glasses and burning cigarette butt to me now. “Ain’t about me. It’s Caleb.”
“The young man who died.”
He was silent a long moment. “You gotta find out why. And why Grandmother Knapp died as well. I know the two are connected.”
I got a funny feeling somewhere between my shoulder blades. That always told me I was onto something. “Any particular reason why Caleb means so much to you?”
Isaac instantly lifted his head. “My reasons are my own.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You ran away twice with him, didn’t you?”
He rubbed at his eyes. “Wonnernaus, English,” he said defensively, which was a polite way of telling me to mind my own business. “Just find out what happened.” Finished with his smoke, he grabbed at a thick, knotted rope used to pull open the now-locked trap door in the loft, and scrambled down it like a monkey, hand over hand, muscles bunching. I thought about following him down, then decided against it. Playing Tarzan had never been my strong suit. I took the stairs like a reasonable adult and came out behind the barn.
I was a little surprised to find Isaac standing there with his hands in his pockets, staring off into Mulberry Grove as if hypnotized. “It’s there, isn’t it? The thing that’s been hurting the girls?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He turned to me, and his face was stark with fear. “And it’s afraid of you. I know. It’s been quiet the last few days. The girl I’m courting stopped having bad dreams.”
“You’re courting?”
He lifted and dropped a shoulder. “Have to, if I’m to stay in the Ordnung. But she’s sweet,” he added like he had to convince me. “I like her. Her name’s Ruth.”
The woods crackled faintly. It might have been deer. But Isaac still shifted a little closer to the wall of the barn. He worried his bottom lip again and said, “You have any more cigarettes?”
