Practical Demonkeeping

been content to hang out on the roof of the cave while Homer ran his business below. But on the first night of Homer’s extended hours when the bats woke to find their home invaded by harshly lit mushroom pickers, their tolerance ended.
    There were twenty customers in the caves when the lights went on. In an instant the air above them was a maelstrom of screeching, furry, flying rodents. In the rush to exit, one woman fell and broke a hip and another was bitten on the hand while extracting a bat from her hair. The cloud of bats soon disappeared into the night, only to be replaced the next day by an equally dense cloud of landbound vermin: personal-injury lawyers.
    The varmints prevailed in court. Homer’s business was destroyed, and once again the bats slept in peace.
    A depressed Homer Styles went on a binge in the Head of the Slug. He spent four days in an Irish whiskey haze before his money ran out and Mavis Sand sent him to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. (Mavis could tell when a man had hit bottom, and she felt no need to pump a dry well.)
    Homer found himself in the meeting room of the First National Bank, telling his story. It happened that at that same meeting a young surfer who called himself The Breeze was working off a court-ordered sentence he had earned by drunkenly crashing a ’62 Volkswagen into a police cruiser and promptly puking on the arresting officer’s shoes.
    The farmer’s story touched off an entrepreneurial spark in the surfer, and after the meeting The Breeze cornered Homer with a proposition.
    “Homer, how would you like to make some heavy bread growing magic mushrooms?”
    The next day the farmer and the surfer were hauling bags of manure into the caves, spreading it over the peat, and scattering a completely different type of spore.
    According to The Breeze their crop would sell for ten to twenty dollars an ounce instead of the fifty cents a pound that Homer received for his last crop. Homer was enraptured with the possibility of becoming rich. And he would have, if not for the bats.
    As the day of their first harvest neared, The Breeze had to take his leave of their plantation to serve the weekend in the county jail (the first of fifty—the judge had not been amused at having barf-covered police shoes presented as evidence in his courtroom). Before he left, The Breeze assured Homer that he would return Monday to help with the drying and marketing of the mushrooms.
    In the meantime, the woman who had been bitten during the debacle of the bats, came down with rabies. County animal-control agents were ordered to the caves to destroy the bat colony. When the agents arrived, they found Homer Styles crouched over a tray of psychedelic mushrooms.
    The agents offered Homer the option of walking away and leaving the mushrooms, but Homer refused, so they radioed the sheriff. Homer was led away in handcuffs, the animal-control agents left with their pockets filled with mushrooms, and the bats were left alone.
    When The Breeze was released on Monday, he found himself in search of a new scam.
    A few months later, while incarcerated at the state prison in Lompoc, Homer Styles received a letter from The Breeze. The letter was covered with a fine yellow powder and read: “Sorry about your bust. Hope we can bury the hatchet.”
    Homer buried the letter in a shoe box he kept under his bunk and spent the next ten years living in relative luxury on the profits he made from selling psychedelic mushrooms to the other inmates. Homer sampled his crop only once, then swore off mushrooms for life when he hallucinated that he was drowning in a sea of bats.

35
BAD GUYS, GOOD GUYS
    Rachel was drawing figures in the dirt of the cave floor with a dagger when she heard something flutter by her ear.
    “What was that?”
    “A bat,” Catch said. He was invisible.
    “We are out of here,” Rachel said. “Take them outside.”
    Effrom , Amanda, and Jenny were sitting with their backs against the cave wall, tied hand and foot, and gagged.
    “I don’t know why we couldn’t have waited at your cabin,” Catch said.
    “I have my reasons. Help me get them outside, now.”
    “You’re afraid of bats?” Catch asked.
    “No, I just feel that this ritual should take place in the open,” Rachel insisted.
    “If you have a problem with bats, you’re going to love it when you see me.”
     
    A quarter mile down the road from the cave, Augustus Brine, Travis, and Gian Hen Gian were waiting for Howard and Robert to