Duel with a Devil at Sundown

“Yeah, that’ll work. ‘Unholy demon, Lord of the Flies, my name is John Westlake, and this is my band. With their help, I would challenge you to a guitar battle.’”

      “‘Oh, the stakes? My eternal soul, once pledged to God in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church, now freely put up against your golden guitar.’”

           “‘The most bitchin’ axe Ol’ Scratch ever dared to forge.’”

           “‘The gilded six-string what sent the Archangel Michael running back to heaven with his tail between his legs.’”

           Laughter among three of the four twenty-somethings traversing the desert in an RV. Grace brooding, pensive, in the passenger’s seat and John smiling behind the wheel while Adam and Peter hovered over them between parted curtains in the cab. “You guys didn’t have to come,” John said, “But I’m glad you did.”

           “We wouldn’t wanna miss you beat the devil.”

           “What if the devil beats him?” she asked.

           “Not gonna happen.”

           “You’re good, John, but you’re no virtuoso.”

           “Don’t have to be. I play with soul. Lots of it. A demon can’t do that.”

           “He’s right. It’s in Ephisians.”

           “Exactly. Plus, I have you guys.”

           “Not really fair, is it?”

           “It’s a demon.”

The RV came to the crossroads in the late evening. The sun lay firmly in the west now and the totality of its brutal reign over the desert waned with each passing minute and they hopped out of the trailer one after another. John came last but passed them by to look, undistracted, at the barren landscape. Red rocks and brown sand. The odd scrap of vegetation. Purple-gray shadows of mountains to the west. The crossroads, though marked, little more than dirt and barely visible to the naked eye next to the landscape it had carved into. No cars in any direction. He grinned.

           She spoke to him and interrupted his trance. “Help them with the generator.” He turned his head to her and nodded and beckoned the two others to the rear of the vehicle. From it they produced the generator and a gas can which they fed to the generator and started it up. They connected it to the RV and from the RV they produced power strips, then a foldable poker table and four lawn chairs to surround it. She brought out the tequila, triple sec, and lime juice; the ice, the salt, the blender, and four mason jars. She set it all up on the table, plugged the blender into one of the power strips and got to work. John produced a spray bottle of holy water, scooped right from the church font, and applied it liberally to his person. He said Hail Mary and made the sign of the cross with his right hand and passed the bottle to the others who followed his example. She was last, trading the bottle to Adam for a rim-salted mason jar half full of frozen margarita. She sprayed it to appease John but she sprayed to her left, missing herself entirely, and John didn’t notice. She prayed.

           Three young men and a young woman in the middle of the desert, standing, facing each other in silence now, misted from the blessed water, drinking her frozen margaritas and nodding in satisfaction. John was the first to finish his drink and handed her his empty jar before starting back to the RV. She went back to the poker table to make another round of drinks, not wanting to take part in what he was to do next. She’d told him this beforehand and he’d agreed to it as long as she’d swear to be there for the rest of it. She had so sworn, confident that the rest of it would never come.

           John carried the materials out in an old oak chest he’d bought at the antique store and carried them out to the crossroads’ point of intersection. He opened the chest and first removed a box of white chalk and drew a large pentagram in the dirt while the others watched. She started up the blender again, her back facing them, while he drew a circle around the cursed shape so that each of its points touched the circle’s border. The margarita she’d made for him was strong and he was feeling the buzz now and he completed the circle with a self-satisfied flick of his wrist, creating the smallest break in the envelopment which none of them noticed. He stood up and admired his work and dusted the chalk off his hands.

The unholy art lay in the sand about twelve feet in diameter and each segment of the pentagram had enough empty space for a person to stand in without disturbing the chalk. Five candles came from the chest and he placed them at each of the pentagram’s points. Then he paused. “I forgot the salt.” He turned to her, still crouched at the last candle he’d placed. “Grace, I need your margarita salt.” She snorted, turned, and threw the pocket-sized tin at him. He caught it and tossed it to Peter. “Do me a favor and sprinkle that around the circle please.”

“There’s not a whole lot of it.”

“Then sprinkle it thinly but be sure to cover the whole border.”

Peter did so with the utmost care, but he was skeptical of the material’s efficacy. “I’m not sure you’re supposed to use margarita salt.”

“Why not?”

“Isn’t it, like, not pure enough? There’s spices and stuff in it.”

“Chili powder in this one,” said Grace, without turning to face them.

“Yeah, chili powder.”

“It’s fine. Just make sure the circle’s covered.”

Peter continued sprinkling. “Table salt, that’s what you should’ve gotten.”

“I meant to, dammit.”

“You should’ve.”

  “It’ll be fine man. I don’t think salt purity is the point of the ritual.”

“What’s the point, then?”

“The mens rea.”

“The what?”

“The intent.”

“Whatever you say.”

           Adam came to the circle as Peter finished, now sporting a gray felt cowboy hat with a brown chinstrap and holding a new margarita and nodding at his friends’ work. “Looking good fellas,” he said, and held up his drink, “Grace’s got round two ready for ya, just in time it looks like. Unsalted rims now though. Obviously. Still good.” The three of them rejoined her at the poker table, John and Peter each taking a half-refilled mason jar and a lawn chair on adjacent sides of the table. John looked at the sun and saw it still far east from the mountain shadows and took it as a sign to enjoy his drink slowly, setting the pace for the others to do the same. The tequila took a stronger hold on them, easing their uneasiness, and soon they fell back into the banter they were used to and for a half hour or so they laughed and talked about things back home. In concert with their words the generator hummed. 

           They finished their drinks then took to unloading the rest of their equipment out of the RV and to the circle by the crossroads. John’s cherry-red Stratocaster and Peter’s Precision bass. Grace’s Yamaha keyboard in Adam’s arms and Grace behind him carrying the stand. A second trip back for the amps and John’s pedal board and all the accompanying cords wrapped around their necks and shoulders and a third for Adam’s eight-piece drum kit. They set it all up around the circle via the extension cords and topped off the generator with a half-gallon of gasoline. By the time they were done the sun was starting to disappear behind the mountains, bloodletting the landscape and turning their silhouettes black as they began their soundchecks. John fiddled with the gain on his amp, debating how rude a sound was rude enough under the circumstances while Grace set her keyboard to the Leslie organ setting and Adam adjusted the height of his seat. 

Peter and John shared an electronic tuner between the two of them and when they were finished they started their warmups as Adam tested his high hat. John started his scales slowly, moving up the fretboard shape by pentatonic shape and increasing his speed as he went. He did this too quickly for his own good, losing accuracy in tone and pitch in favor of speed but the distortion from the amp masked the imperfections and he lacked the ear to notice them anyway. After a few rounds of this the sun was nearly gone he was satisfied that his fingers had regained their muscle memory and played the scales a bluesy goodbye for his own amusement. He unstrapped his guitar and set it against his amp in the sand, got matches from the old wooden chest left beside them and started lighting the candles as the others continued to fiddle with their instruments.

“Why lavender?” one of them asked.

“The website said lavender was best.”

“Oh.”

“It’s dark. I can’t really see my keyboard.”

“Do you actually need to see it?”

“I mean, at least a little bit.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. Angle your back toward one of the candles.”

“Uh, okay. That kinda helps I guess.”

“Are we all ready?”

“Hold on, let me adjust my seat again. . . okay, ready.” A thumbs up and two nods.

They each again made signs of the cross and John took a small, spiraled notepad from his pocket. Facing the center of the pentagram he opened the notepad and frowned as he began to recite the Latin he had written down earlier but now could barely read. Grace smirked as he focused as he mispronounced and misgendered the words of the incantation. She relaxed, having increased confidence now that his ritual would fail. Latin had never been his strong suit. Too much work. She had been especially good at it and the nuns had always sung her praises to her parents and her mother was satisfied that her belt-based study incentives had done her oldest child well. She shuddered at the thought of the night she and John were caught with the Ouija board and couldn’t fathom the beating she’d have gotten for something like this. And John’s bad Latin went on in harmony with the ever-present drone of the generator and the staticky feedback from his amp and now crickets, who chirped their mating chirps until the demon came.

Yes, the demon came. Despite the imperfections in the ritual the mens rea was there and John had been right, the mens rea was what counted. The crickets had stopped the moment John had read the incantation’s final words and the desert was silent now save the machine-made humdrums and a small dust devil descended impossibly from the clear night sky, touching down in in the middle of the pentagram It kicked sand into their faces and instruments but left the candles and chalk untouched. The whirlwind dissipated and there, standing, a dark gray shape of a man. A shape was all it was, and it wanted for features. They could see no face, no clothes, no genitals. It stood with its extremities outstretched like the Vitruvian man and gave them a moment to nervously look among themselves before it opened its eyes, but it had no eyes, and where they should have been there instead shone a brilliant and impossible magenta. In silence it turned its head to each of them and their setup as if sizing them up then fixed its gaze solely on John. John closed his notepad and put it back in his pocket and stared back. He tried to tune out the humdrum now and the panicked profanity from Adam and the pious Hail Mary recitations from Grace and he thanked Peter silently for his stoicism and tried to speak without wavering: “Demon, I am -”

 “Save… the formalities,” Its voice was gravel, “I know… why you are here… and what you seek.” From nothing he produced a guitar of indescribable gothic beauty, a hellish vantablack hollow body whose strings shone silver in the starlight, inlays dotting the fretboard with the same unnatural magenta that radiated from the head of its master. This was a guitar made more beautiful by each soul it claimed and it had claimed many - nearly all more skilled than that of the recreant standing before it now. “After you,” the demon with the guitar said and the guitar watched with its master as the boy, shaking now, turned, picked up his guitar, counted his band into the song in four and began to play.

They played the Crossroad Blues, an old standard known to John through its appropriation by certain British artists who had sped it up and muddled it with overdrive and psychedelia and the band was playing it even faster now because they were terrified. But they succeeded in staying together and John brought the song’s skiffle-shuffle rhythm along like a freight train. Grace layered his playing with her keyboard while Peter pumped out steady eighth notes which Adam contrasted with a hi-hat heavy swing. A few measures of introduction, then John left the rhythm to Grace’s keyboard, hit his overdrive pedal and played with extra grit the usual vocal part as the beginning of his solo before he began to improvise. He didn’t play with much imagination, but he played with competence and a middling conviction which he mistook for soul. He knew his scales and he stuck to them, stylizing his conservative choices with slides and bends and hammered on and off excessively to mask his slow picking, and the result was something approaching respectability. 

           And it would have been enough, the demon knew, to win, unless the mistake came. And the mistake always came, and he knew it would come quickly this time so he waited patiently, sparing this one from most of the exhausting theatrics he often had to employ to throw off his more talented challengers. But after a few minutes the demon grew bored and decided to levitate a little, raising his arms higher to his side in blasphemous mockery of his opponent’s god and he spoke in dead languages with some of the more guttural Klingon phrases thrown in for good measure. And that did the trick - even in the darkness he saw their eyes widen as they played and the guitar player’s focus began to slip. The licks became more basic and the boy started to fall behind the rapid tempo of the rhythm until finally he went for a bend and missed his target note by a half-step, denigrating his planned perfect fifth into a hideous tri-tone, the devil’s interval.

And so the demon made his move, empowered by the boy’s inadvertent tribute. He played in the air, his guitar sounding with ghoulish reverberation, reproducing the unholy interval over and over as he slid down the fretboard, a cascading cacophony of devilish dissonance with the boy’s backup band bound to play behind him now. The boy dropped his pick in the sand and looked up, helpless and afraid. The demon played louder, levitating higher and higher, until finally he picked his last note at a glancing angle and the high-pitched pinch harmonic shrieked and filled the universe, a cosmic Krakatoa. The band’s amps shorted and their generator exploded and all they could hear was the note’s screeching sustain until it stopped and the air around the demon erupted in red smoke and for a moment there was no sound. 

The candles went out and the laughter came, deep and menacing. The demon, invisible to them now, encircling the band inside the pentagram. He passed through the guitar player first, then the other two males, the stolen holy water his tainted lubricant on their contorting bodies. The girl held a crucifix in both hands, arms outstretched, turning it toward each of her bandmates as she saw them reel from his bodily invasions so he could not get to her. He looked to get out of the pentagram, and in moments he found the gap in the chalk circle. The salt was too bastardized to contain him and it was spread too thinly. But it was enough to hurt, stinging his being like birdshot, but he pushed through the layer and then he was free.

They sat in the encircled pentagram, all four hyperventilating, then Adam vomiting. “Jesus,” John on the ground between labored breaths, still clutching his guitar - “Oh Jesus, what the hell was I thinking? Jesus Christ.” Grace came to him. “Grace. Oh, Jesus, Grace, I should’ve known better.” He looked up. Stars filled the night sky. The demon was far away now and the crickets’ steady love songs returned to the desert.