Practical Demonkeeping

really, I’m from Paradise. It’s a little town about thirty miles outside of Newark.’ Then he started laughing and rolling around in the dirt holding his sides.
    “‘How can I get rid of you?’ I asked.
    “‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’ve told you everything that I have to.’
    “At the time I didn’t know how dangerous Catch was. Somehow I realized that I was in no immediate danger, so I tried to come up with some sort of plan to get rid of him. I didn’t want to stay there at the farm, and I didn’t have anywhere I could go.
    “My first instinct was to turn to the Church. If I could get to a priest, perhaps I could have the demon exorcised.
    “I led Catch into town, where I asked the local priest to perform an exorcism. Before I could convince him of Catch’s existence, the demon became visible and ate the priest, piece by piece, before my eyes. I realized then that Catch’s power was beyond the comprehension of any normal priest, perhaps the entire Church.
    “Christians are supposed to believe in evil as an active force. If you deny evil, you deny good and therefore God. But belief in evil is as much an act of faith as belief in God, and here I was faced with evil as a reality, not an abstraction. My faith was gone. It was no longer required. There was indeed evil in the world and that evil was me. It was my responsibility, I reasoned, to not let that evil become manifest to other people and thereby steal their faith. I had to keep Catch’s existence a secret. I might not be able to stop him from taking lives, but I could keep him from taking souls.
    “I decided to remove him to a safe place where there were no people for him to feed on. We hopped a freight and rode it to
Colorado
, where I led Catch high into the mountains. There I found a remote cabin where I thought he would be without victims. Weeks passed and I found that I had some control over the demon. I could make him fetch water and wood sometimes, but other times he defied me. I’ve never understood the inconsistency of his obedience.
    “Once I had accepted the fact that I couldn’t run away from Catch, I questioned him constantly, looking for some clue that might send him back to hell. He was vague, to say the least, giving me little to go on except that he had been on Earth before and that someone had sent him back.
    “After we had been in the mountains for two months, a search party came to the cabin. It seemed that hunters in the area of the cabin, as well as people in villages as far as twenty miles away, had been disappearing. When I was asleep at night, Catch had been ranging for victims. It was obvious that isolation wasn’t going to keep the demon from killing. I sent the search party away and set myself on coming up with some kind of plan. I knew we would have to move or people would discover that Catch existed.
    “I knew there had to be some sort of logic to his presence on Earth. Then, while we were hiking out of the mountains, it occurred to me that the key to sending Catch back must have been concealed in another candlestick. And I had left them on the train with the girl. Jumping off the train to escape Catch may have cost me the only chance I had to get rid of him. I searched my memory for anything that could lead me to the girl. I had never asked where she was going or what her last name was. In trying to recall details of my time with her I kept coming up with the image of those striking blue eyes. They seemed etched into my memory while everything else faded. Could I go around the eastern United States asking anyone if they had seen a young girl with beautiful blue eyes?
    “Something nagged at me. There was something that could lead me to the girl; I just had to remember it. Then it hit me—the wooden bracelet she wore. The initials carved inside the heart were E + A. How hard could it be to search service records for a soldier with the first initial E? His service records would have his next of kin, and she was staying with his family. I had a plan.
    “I took Catch back East and began checking local draft boards. I told them I had been in Europe and a man whose first name began with E had saved my life and I wanted to find him. They always asked about divisions and stations and where the battle had taken place. I told them I had taken a shell fragment in the head and could remember nothing but the man’s first initial. No one believed me, of course, but they gave me what I asked for—out of pity, I