Practical Demonkeeping

dissolved into a whole agenda of first-date fears, which somehow seemed more comfortable than the limitless possibilities of positive thinking because she had been through them before.
    She took a bar of deodorant soap from the soap dish, lost her grip, and dropped it into the water. The splash covered the faint death gasp the water let out as the soap’s toxic chemicals hit it.

Part 3
SUNDAY NIGHT
Millions of spiritual creatures walk the Earth.
    Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.
    —John Milton
    13
NIGHTFALL
    Overall, the
village
of
Pine Cove
was in a cranky mood. No one had slept well Saturday night. Through most of Sunday the weekend tourists were finding ugly chips in Pine Cove’s veneer of small-town charm.
    Shopkeepers had been abrupt and sarcastic when asked the usual inane questions about whales and sea otters. Waiters and waitresses lost their tolerance for complaints about the unpalatable English food they served and either snapped at their customers outright, or intentionally gave them bad service. Motel desk clerks indulged themselves by arbitrarily changing check-out times, refusing reservations, and turning on the NO VACANCY signs every time someone pulled up to the office, proclaiming that they had just filled their last room.
    Rosa Cruz, who was a chambermaid at the Rooms-R-Us Motel, slipped “sanitized for your protection” bands across all the toilets without even lifting the lids. That afternoon, when a guest protested and she was called on the carpet by the manager, who stood over the toilet in room 103, pointing to a floating turd as if it were a smoking murder weapon, Rosa said, “ Well, I sanitized that, too.”
    It might have been declared Tourist Abuse Day in Pine Cove for all the injustices that were inflicted on unsuspecting travelers. As far as the locals were concerned, the world would be a better place if every tourist decided to hang bug-eyed and blue-tongued by his camera strap from a motel shower rod.
    As the day wore into evening and the tourists vacated the streets, the residents of Pine Cove turned to each other to vent their irritability. At the Slug, Mavis Sand, who was stocking her bar for the evening, and who was a keen observer of social behavior, had watched the tension grow in her customers and herself all afternoon.
    She must have told the story of Slick McCall’s eight-ball match with the dark stranger thirty times. Mavis usually enjoyed the telling and retelling of the events that occurred in The Head of the Slug (even to the point of keeping a microcassette recorder under the bar to save some of her better versions). She allowed the tales to grow into myths and legends as she replaced truths forgotten with details fabricated. Often a tale that started out as a one-beer anecdote would become, in the retelling, a three-beer epic (for Mavis let no glass go dry when she was telling a story). Storytelling, for Mavis, was just good business.
    But today people had been impatient. They wanted Mavis to draw a beer and get to the point. They questioned her credibility, denied the facts, and all but called her a liar. The story was too fantastic to be taken at face value.
    Mavis lost her patience with those who asked about the incident, and they did ask. News travels fast in a small town.
    “If you don’t want to know what happened, don’t ask,” Mavis snapped.
    What did they expect? Slick McCall was an institution, a hero, in his own greasy way. The story of his defeat should be an epic, not an obituary.
    Even that good-looking fellow who owned the general store had rushed her through the story. What was his name, Asbestos Wine? No, Augustus Brine. That was it. Now, there was a man she could spend some time under. But he, too, had been impatient, and had rushed out of the bar without even buying a drink. It had pissed her off.
    Mavis watched her own mood changes like the needle on a barometer. Given her current crankiness, the social climate in the Slug tonight would be stormy; she predicted fights. The liquor she stocked into the well that evening was diluted to half strength with distilled water. If people were going to get drunk and break up her place, it was going to cost them.
    In her heart of hearts, she hoped she would get an opportunity to whack someone with her baseball bat.
    AUGUSTUS
    As darkness fell on Pine Cove that evening, Augustus Brine was filled with an uncharacteristic feeling of dread. In the past he had always seen sunset as a promise, a