1986

January 1:

Happy New Year. This year, Mary, I will find out what killed you.

January 24:

For his seventh birthday, I took Dean shooting again. He wanted to fire one of the big guns —that’s what he called them. I let him shot the Browning, but I steadied his hands. Sammy wanted me to help him make Dean a card. It was like a normal day, like we were a normal family with a mom who was off shopping or at work or something. Instead of dead. That illusion never lasts. I can’t afford to let it.

January 29:

April 16:

There’s a reason why they call it Devil’s Gate.

We were supposed to turn Devil’s Gate into a devil’s trap. But I made a mistake, and Bill died.

It’s a slot canyon, used to flood all the time (Arroyo Seco isn’t always seco) until they put in a spillway and built the reservoir. But odd things happened there. Four kids in three years, from 1957-1960, vanish without a trace. Other people see things. No one will talk about it. Bill was sure that something had come up through the canyon thirty years ago, and was about to again. Some kind of hellspawn. So we went there to catch it in the act and take care of it. Hellspawn, that’s the word he used. I don’t know if I believe in Hell. But I do remember the Black Shuck, and the way Mary’s spirit was transformed in Blue Earth. That came from somewhere. Was it a demon? I don’t know if I believe in demons. I’ve seen people who thought they were demons, and acted like demons —but how would you know the difference between a demon and a shape-shifter? How would you kno?

I’m avoiding it. This is how Bill died.

At the mouth of the spillway we found this godawful fluid trickling straight out of the concrete. Dark brown, stinking of sulfur. It burned your fingers to touch it. Bill drew a figure around it, he called it a Devil’s Trap from a book called the Key of Solomon. Psalm 90:13. He used charcoal to draw the trap on the wall of the spillway around the sulfur, and then I laid it out on the ground in front of the tunnel, using salt. Kosher salt, no added iodides. Bill said this was important. He started watching the sky as the sun set. The first stars would tell him when the hellspawn was coming through, he said. I looked up with him, but the stars just looked like stars to me. I have so much to learn. There I was in Pasadena, the boys back at the roadhouse. I wasn’t being a father. I was being a hunter. I was hunting. And while I looked up at the sky, I made a simple mistake. I didn’t pay attention to where my feet were, and I scuffed the salt. Just a little. But enough that when something came out of the mouth of the tunnel, nothing stopped it.

It looked like smoke, and sounded like a million flies. Bill looked down from the stars just in time for it to flow right into him. He started jerking like a condemned man in the electric chair, and two voices were coming out of his mouth. One was the thing, the hellspawn. I don’t know what language it was speaking, but its voice was horrible. It was the sound cancer would make if it could talk. And Bill, he kept saying over and over again, John, shoot me, shoot me, John.

So I did.

It was the worst mistake I ever made. It was careless and stupid and it got a good man killed. A husband and father, and a damned good hunter, and I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to Ellen. And Jo, poor Jo. She’s four years old. How am I going to tell her? I can’t just let Ellen do it. I’m responsible. It was over in less than a minute, Bill Harvelle dead and me standing there with a gun in my hand listening to the echo of the gunshot in the hills and the echo of that awful hellspawn voice in my head.

And to the end, Bill was teaching me. With his body dying and something inside him, he staggered over to the sulfur-stinking wall and let the smoke back out —straight into the Devil’s Trap on the wall. Then he took a step back, careful not to do what I did, and then he sat down and died leaning against the spillway wall under the Devil’s Trap he’d drawn. He saved my life even though I took his. It was a hunter’s death.

I copied the Devil’s Trap, but I didn’t need to. I couldn’t forget it if I wanted to.

May 2:

Tahlequah, OK. Sammy is three years old today. We celebrated with an ice-cream cake. He was still wearing most of it when he fell asleep. Dean’s sleeping too, the two of them in the bed. The room only has one bed. I’ll sleep on the floor, if I sleep at all. Some night it’s enough to watch them sleep, and know that if they start to have a nightmare I’ll be right there to stop it.

May 17:

This would have been our eighth anniversary. Eight is bronze.

September 5:

Dean started second grade. I watch him like a hawk. He makes me swear that I’ll take good care of Sammy before he’ll go to school. God, I love that kid. I have the day with Sammy while Dean is learning whatever kids learn in second grade. Sammy’s a very different kid. He hasn’t taken to the idea of hunting bad guys, and he’s still too young to really understand what it means to avenge his mother. To him, her death just means she’s not here, and he doesn’t remember her. For him, Mary is a word. A mother, to him, is something he never had —but he’s still supposed to be sad that she died. I don’t think he gets it. How could he, really?

October 30:

I saw an exorcism today. Or something that looked like an exorcism. According to Jim, there really are demons. I don’t know if I believed that —he’s a pastor, so of course he does, but… demons? From Hell? Even after the things I’ve seen these past three years (almost), I can’t quite make demons fit. But between watching what happened to Bill at Devil’s Gate, and what I saw today… i don’t know.

Jim knows I have the journal. After he was done, and the girl was looking around like someone, who’d just woken up from the worst nightmare you can imagine, he took me back to his church and had me copy down a shorter version of the Rituale Romanum exorcism ritual. Usually, he said, you don’t have to read the whole thing. Most demons can’t hold out that long. But he wants me to copy the whole thing just in case. So I’m going to. I don’t know if I believe in demons, but I’m not sure I can disbelieve them anymore, either.

In the expulsion of demonic forces or energie residing in an individual, soul possession, command of one’s motor and abilities.

The Rituale Romanum was widely used in the midto late 13th century in most of eastern Europe until the church banned its use in the beginning of the 14th century. Initial studies indicate that this anti-curse was particularly helpful in ridding the individual of unwanted guests. The first part of the ritual expels the entity from the host. The second half of the ritual banishes the spirit back from whence it came. Repeat the incantantions as follows:

On the completion of the first part of the incantantion the demon may take one or more of several forms ranging from liquid to gaseous to corporeal to any combination of the aforementioned. Great care must be taken in performing the second part of the ritual. The demon upon expulsion can become very powerful without the need of a host. Beware that the spirit can enter a host through any opening in the host. Keep your eyes open and mouth shut.

In Michigan, they call October 30 Devil’s Night.

November 2:

Mary has been dead for three years. She doesn’t know that Sammy has learned the alphabet, and likes to catch bugs. She doesn’t know that Dean watches his little brother like a hawk every minute, with an expression on his face that says he’s willing to die to keep Sammy safe. She doesn’t know that it’s because I have drilled it into Dean and Sammy is his responsibility. He’s eight years old, and I’ve told him his brother’s life is in his hands. Mary, I didn’t have any right to do tha. But what else could I do?