I woke to the sound of Velvet sweeping the dust from the back porch and lay for a while listening to the stiff, rhythmic swish of her broom on the well-worn boards. Through the shutters, I could see the sun had begun to fall towards the earth, having slipped well beyond its zenith. Wanting only to sleep and sleep, I swung out of bed and rubbed my face to rouse myself. Outside, Velvet laid her broom aside and sat on one of the two rockers facing the field where the crater was. I approached and placed a hand on her shoulder. She laid her hand over mine.
“No one’s come back yet,” said she.
“We must be the first to waken.”
“No. It’s later than usual. You’ve slept near three hours.”
I checked the position of the sun and knew that she was right. Already I was sweating again for only a little of the heat had left the day. I sniffed the air and it smelled hot and dusty but clean.
“Come on,” said I.
In spite of the heat, I almost ran across the deserted field to the crater, with Velvet following not far behind me. The demon was gone and there were ruts in the ground leading out of the field.
“Spulicks! They’ve started without us!”
I ran back to the house to fetch the Ledger and without waiting for Velvet rushed over to Reginald Cleaver’s place where I was fairly sure everyone would be. The pathways of Long Lofting were empty, the cottages quiet but as I ran, the sound of a crowd up ahead grew louder. Cleaver’s place was set away from the centre of the village to minimise the stench of slaughter. Now, his house and abattoir were partially blotted out by the entire population of Long Lofting, about eight hundred souls. The quickest way to get to the front would be to skirt the crowd and Cleaver’s property and push in from the front.
A couple of minutes later I was squeezing between the wall of the abattoir and a smaller throng of onlookers. Reaching the front of the crowd I saw the source of the latest debate. Outside the abattoir was a hoist where Cleaver would shackle and lift larger animals before slitting their throats and allowing them to bleed out into the trough that collected the precious blood. Not a drop was ever wasted. The hoist was designed to handle even the largest cows and wild bison when we were lucky enough to hunt one down, but it was far too small for the demon. They’d got as far as chaining its ankles and raising them, but at full height, the hoist had merely lifted the demon’s legs off the ground.
“Keep those mules harnessed,” shouted Cleaver. “We’ll have to shift it to the bell tower. It’s the only place high enough for the job.”
“Now wait a moment,” said Leopold Prattle, puffing himself up to his full stature, “No one is going to perform a slaughter in the Great Father’s house.”
I couldn’t keep my mouth shut.
“It’s a flaming demon, Prattle. The Great Father’ll thank you for making his job a little easier.”
“When you’re ordained to speak on behalf of the Great Father, Delly Duke, you’ll be priest of this village. Some time after Hell freezes over, I should think.”
Everyone chuckled.
It could have been the heat haze but I thought I saw the demon twitch.
“There really is no other place but the bell tower, Priest Prattle,” said Cleaver, “And I think Mr. Duke does have a point. We’ll be doing the Great Father a favour.”
“What is wrong with you people? You don’t do favours for the Great Father. You love and you serve him. That is all.” Prattle sighed and sagged back into his more usual posture of burdened martyrdom. “However, as there is no other place to perform this task, I authorise you to use the bell tower on this one occasion.”
A happy shout went up from the worried crowd who thought that they were about to be cheated out of their feast in the eleventh hour by a religious technicality. At this rate, there were going to be a lot more faces in the church on the next holy day.
Cleaver lowered the demon’s feet and unshackled them. The crowd parted for the mule team and Rickett and Wiggery assisted the mule runner in re-hitching the demon. They dragged it away from the abattoir across the square to the church. The crowd followed, exhausted and hungry but full of anticipation. Half an hour later, having run a pulley system from the beams in the bell tower, Cleaver gave the signal and the demon was hoisted. This time they hauled it up until its head was hanging a stride and a half above the stone steps of church. Its wings hung outward and open, held at their tips quite willingly by Rickett and Wiggery. Its arms had been tied up behind its back to ensure that every limb would completely drain of its blood before slaughter. Its private parts, which had been a matter for public scrutiny since its arrival, hung down towards its belly and still drew stares and sighs from many of the women.
I grabbed Prattle by his skinny arm, immediately disgusted with myself for touching him, and said through clenched teeth,
“Are you sure you want them to do this?”
“A moment ago you were all for it.”
“No, I was only saying that if you were going to go ahead with it, there was no reason not to do it here at the church. I still don’t think that cutting up and eating a demon is a good idea.”
Prattle turned towards me then and I saw in his eyes what I should have noticed a lot earlier. He didn’t think it was a good idea either. He was frightened. It was obvious that all he’d been doing was chasing popularity and more backsides on church benches. When it came down to it, slaughtering a demon was not something he wanted to be involved with.
I pursued his weakness.
“You don’t have to go through with this, you know. You have enough power to stop them even now. You can threaten them with damnation and I can threaten them with the law and instead of eating the demon we can bury it and forget it was ever here. What do you say?”
I could see he was tempted. Perhaps it was his pride, though, that made him think about it for too long. I don’t think he could bear to accept that I’d been right from the start and that if he changed his mind now it would look like weakness, while my stance would look like strength. Our final chance at negotiation was interrupted by Cleaver booming at the crowd from the top step of the church where the demon’s neck was exposed and ready for his blade.
“Menfolk and womenfolk of Long Lofting, I proffer we chop the dragon’s head off and keep it as a trophy in memory of this day.”
The crowd cheered. They were starving; they would have said yes to anything at that stage. All they saw when they looked at that demon hanging down the entire front of the church from bell tower to steps was a big fat turkey ready for the oven. I suppose some of them might have been seeing steak or lamb cutlets, but they were all of one mind when it came to the demon’s noggin.
“Chop it off! Chop it off!”
The chant grew louder. Prattle and I stepped back from Cleaver to make some distance.
I glanced into the crowd and saw Velvet had arrived, her face full of amusement and curiosity. I gestured to her to get back to the house but she just smiled at me and waved back.
Cleaver put the blade of a long knife to the demon’s throat and drew it towards himself while pressing against the skin. It opened a deep groove in the creature’s neck but no blood came forth. He proceeded to saw towards the demon’s spine and the rift in its flesh grew wider becoming a second mouth. Inside were the demon’s muscles and vessels for air and food and gore. Though severed in cross section, not a drop of fluid came forth from any part of the wound.
Cleaver’s long bladed knife sawed and sawed until he reached the spinal bones and there he sawed even harder to split his way through two vertebrae. The head was almost free. Cleaver’s sweat sprinkled the stone and evaporated in moments. The crowd’s cheering died down as the work progressed; all had seen slaughter before and all were surprised there was neither blood nor fluid within the demon. With a gristly snick, the knife slipped through the discs and ligaments between the bones and parted the final flap of skin at the back of the demon’s neck.
The head fell.
It hit the top step of the church with a dull, bony knock. It bounced upwards surprisingly high and flipped over. Instead of rolling down the church steps towards the waiting onlookers, the head landed on the stone at Cleaver’s feet. The severed neck hit the granite with a fleshy slap and for a moment or two there was total silence. The crowd, perturbed by the lack of blood, weren’t sure whether to applaud or hiss. Then the demon’s eyes, which had been open but blank ever since it landed on its back in the cabbage field, blinked. A few people at the front of the crowd tried to take step back but found they were hemmed in by those behind them. Even those who weren’t sure what they’d seen sucked in a startled breath.
But when the demon smiled, pulling its thick leathery lips back even farther exposing rank after rank of jaundiced fangs, the gasps came back out as screams and holy petitions. The entire village tried to reverse from the head and many stumbled over with others falling on top of them. Those in the dirt scrambled away on hands and knees. The outer edge of the crowd expanded and broke until everyone felt they’d reached a safe distance. Rickett and Wiggery abandoned their respective wing tips and ran down the steps to join them.
Cleaver, still holding his knife and panting, hadn’t moved. From his angle, he couldn’t see what was scaring the villagers but when the demon’s body began to move he started back, raising his hands up to protect himself and dropping into a half crouch. The great wings of the beast, slack all this time, began to beat against the wall of the church. The wind they made would have been welcome in that heat if it hadn’t signaled life in such a monster. Dust and stone chips flew from the wall where the wing bones made contact. Cleaver must have thought it was the demonic equivalent of a beheaded chicken’s twitches and flutters and that it would settle down. He didn’t move far enough away and one of the wingtips caught him a solid blow on the shoulder. He flew like a straw doll thrown by a spoilt child and landed ten strides away on his face in the dirt. His knife landed harmlessly beside him.
The demon’s body bent in half, it snapped the ropes restraining its arms and its hooked fingers reached for the chain that held its ankles. Its attempts were clumsy and ill-coordinated because it couldn’t see what it was doing. When the hands did take hold of the chain, the talons flicked against the rusted links, cleaving them like twigs. The metallic snap of sheared iron was followed by the sound of the demon’s body collapsing into a headless heap at the front door of the church.
The impact dislodged the head and it bounced down the rest of the steps with a dizzy look on its face until it came to rest on its ear in the dust. The crowd of villagers dispersed still farther, some of them taking shelter in their homes, others peering around the walls of cottages or trading posts. A few froze where they were, caught in the open expanse of dirt that served as the village gathering place and market square.
The body of the demon tried to stand. With a clawed foot standing on one of its wings, it tripped onto its chest, tearing a hole in its flight membrane and rolled into the dirt. The head grimaced with frustration and a hint of embarrassment. Its lips moved but without air from its lungs the vocal chords were useless. The body pushed itself up from the ground again and this time stood swaying in the middle of the square. I’m certain the head would have been turning from one direction to another to assess the situation, had it still been attached. Instead, the headless thing walked carefully a few steps with its arms out in front of it like a shepherd looking for black sheep on a winter’s midnight.
It didn’t find its head. It found Cleaver, still stunned from the impact and in a good deal of pain. It found him because it kicked him as it walked, rolling him over a few times. Then the demon’s body crouched down and waved its flattened palms around until it found him trying to crawl away. I saw the smile come back to the demon’s face as its body stood up and brought Cleaver to the space where the head should have been. I thought the body believed it had found its head because it pushed Cleaver into the space above its shoulders over and over again. That was before I noticed what the head was doing: chomping—the teeth clashing against each other. The demon was trying to eat Cleaver, but luckily for him it was impossible. After some more fruitless chewing, the demon, its head looking truly disgusted with itself and its body looking about as useful as one of Rickett and Wiggery’s cabbages, let Cleaver drop to the ground.
I’d seen enough by that stage. I ran forward towards the bottom of the church steps while everyone else was still either backing or running away. I heard Velvet, the sweet little blossom that she is, screaming my name and begging me to stay away. I darted behind the demon’s body and, careful not to let my fingers get near the mouth, I snatched up the demon’s head, fought my way to Velvet and dragged both of them away. The head was about twice the size of my own and far heavier than I’d expected it to be. After a few yards I was exhausted and sweating cupfuls.
“Here, Velvet, take hold of one of these horns. We’ve got to keep the head hidden from the body and then we’ll all be safe.”
“The things I do for you, Delly Duke, no other woman has ever endured.”
“Carrying a demon’s head must make a nice change then,” said I, panting.
Velvet took hold of that horn like the good woman I’ve always known her to be. She even managed a laugh at the jumble-headedness of what we were doing.
“Where are we going to put it?” asked she.
“I know the perfect place,” said I.