Demon Child

when I was a single, working girl. I read the non-fiction as well. Somewhere in the previous generations of Bruckers who lived in this house, someone had more than a passing interest in witchcraft and demonology. There are many books on the subject, distributed on shelves throughout the house. Surely there are a few of them right there, in your own bookcase.”
        Jenny turned to look at the shelves.
        Two blood-red bindings stood out. Embossed on each spine was the title of the two-volume set: BLACK MAGIC IN AMERICA.
        “In my readings, I came across two volumes published locally in the middle of the last century. Publishing was a much different proposition then, and the economic situation made it feasible for regional publishers to sell and prosper on titles of little interest to anyone beyond a few hundred miles from their home plant. Both these volumes had been published hi Philadelphia. One was entitled Warlocks and Witches of Pennsylvania; the other was Cursed Be the Wealthy”
        She paused, and Jenny did not feel that it was her duty to urge the older woman on. Rain on the windows, thunder on the roof, lightning against the glass all filled the silent moments until Cora continued her story.
        “According to those books, Sarah Maryanna Brucker, Alex's great-great-great-aunt, left home in 1849, at the age of seventeen, to travel with a band of gypsies who earned their living performing in a circus of moderate size. Her family did everything they could to trace her, to no avail. She was lost to them. Until 1860, eleven years later, when she returned home with a child. She wished to be taken back into the family, to give her baby the Brucker name. It was a swarthy, dark-eyed, sharp-featured child of four, obviously part European in its heritage. Sarah's mother had died in her absence. Her father, embittered by his daughter's foolishness eleven years before, blaming his wife's death on a broken heart caused by the daughter, refused to allow her in the house.”
        Thunder. Rain. The blood-red bindings of the books on the shelf directly across from the foot of the bed. The creak of floorboards.
        Cora continued:
        “That night, Sarah Brucker returned to the mansion, this house, and built a fire on the grounds. At that time, there were a few tenant-farming Negroes living in lesser houses among the trees. When Sarah began chanting gypsy phrases into the fire, her eyes never leaving the house, her father ordered the blacks to remove her. None of them dared. At last, as she finished her curse in English, her father could no longer tolerate the display. He physically removed her from his property, along with the frightened child that was his grandson.”
        “He sounds like a cruel man,” Jenny said. “She made a mistake, of course. But she was still his daughter.”
        “The books say that he was eccentric and that neighbors considered him perhaps a little mad. He had always been a cold, aloof man. When his daughter ran away and his wife died shortly after, he became even colder, harsher, more withdrawn. His servants ran all his messages and did all his errands. He rarely left the house. When Sarah returned, toting a child born of a gypsy father, it was the ultimate disgrace, the ultimate tragedy, the straw that broke his back. He seems the sort of man who never learned much forgiveness, and he was not about to change his personality at that point.”
        “And what exactly was the curse?” Jenny asked. She felt as if she wanted to get in the bed she sat on, pull the covers over her head and make herself a warm nest. Her hands were so cold that they looked like white porcelain.
        “Sarah pledged that every generation of the Brucker family would contain a child haunted, a child possessed, a demon child as she called it. This child would seek the wolfbane, would howl at the full moon and find a craving for blood.”
        “A werewolf? Why, that's silly!” But she did not feel much like laughing at her aunt.
        “That night, after Sarah was permanently dispatched from Brucker land, her father died.”
        The air in the blue room seemed terribly stuffy. Jenny wanted to open one of the windows. But she knew that would only let the rain and the thunder in, and they were worse than stale air.
        “How-how did he die?” Jenny asked.
        “In those days, medicine was not as good as now. It is simply recorded that he could not get his