The Demon Catchers of Milan #2: The Halcyon Bird

I
t was only a small candle. The first match went out, but the second took, and Nonno Giuliano nodded at the tiny flame like an old friend.

The man on the floor lay perfectly still, his eyes on the ceiling, in the middle of a rug full of shattered glass, his head twisted at a frightening angle. My cousin Emilio watched the candle take fire, then opened a palm-size notebook and began to read.

The man on the floor chuckled as the thing inside him stirred.

Beside Nonno, my cousin Anna Maria held a hand mirror. She waited like a guard, her eyes on the man on the floor.

The man turned his head, slowly, from one awkward angle to another. I could hear the bones in his neck grinding. He seemed to be listening to Emilio, but it was hard to tell. In the dim light, we could see his face, being molded like putty from the inside.

Emilio paused at the end of the page and looked at Giuliano. His grandfather lifted his hand. “Bell,” he said.

My cousin Francesco was holding the bell. It was his own, a miniature beaten brass bell from Guatemala that hung from a bright strip of fabric. He swung it in a careful circle, and it rang sweetly.

The man on the floor shuddered.

All our ordinary weapons, hidden in plain sight.

I didn’t have a weapon. Instead, I got to stand next to the man’s wife. “Keep a hand on her arm and an eye on her heart,” Nonno had told me when we arrived. With my free hand, I touched my demon-catching case where it sat in my breast pocket, wondering why I had bothered to bring it.

I kept my hand on the woman’s arm, rigid under my fingers. She stared at her husband. I had heard her voice when she called Giuliano, steady and even on the phone, not panicked like an ordinary client’s.

“Yes, we handle such things,” he had said. He never said the word
esorcisti
.

Francesco kept ringing the bell, and the man began to roll back and forth. A red rash like a burn began to spread up his
arms. I glanced at my cousins, my heart pounding, and I could see that Emilio, Anna Maria, and Francesco were frowning, their expressions almost identical. I knew those frowns; I knew they were afraid, and so was I. But Nonno’s breath rose and fell at the same even pace. The flame in front of him fluttered patiently with each breath.

The man began to scream in pain, batting at his arms. His cries were his own, not the voice of a demon. I tried to stay focused, tried not to get caught up in his suffering.

Giuliano gazed steadily at the man, one hand resting lightly on the table. At length, he raised his other hand, and Francesco silenced the clapper of his bell between two fingers. Nonno gestured for Emilio to begin reading again, but when Emilio tried to raise his voice above the man’s cries, Giuliano shook his head. Emilio nodded and lowered his voice.

I waited for the woman beside me to ask why we weren’t trying to do something to ease the man’s pain, but she didn’t. She wasn’t even shaking as much as I was.

The screams changed to roars, and we heard the demon’s voice clearly at last, raging and laughing, forcing its way past the man’s whistling vocal cords. The roars had a distant quality, as if the demon were speaking from far away, from beyond the corners of the room. Francesco rang the bell again.

Again, the demon bellowed. Again, Nonno nodded, again, the bell, again, the laughter, while all the while Emilio droned on.…

“TACE!”
thundered Giuliano.

I jumped. My ears rang in the silence that followed.

The man froze, and so did everyone else. I felt the woman’s arm tighten with shock under my hand.

“Lei mi sentirà
,” said Nonno, his voice calm again. “
Lei mi sentirà. Mi dirà il suo nome
. You will hear me. You will tell me your name.”

Another burn began to appear on the man’s arm, spreading slowly this time. He—or the demon—did not seem to notice it. Giuliano held his gaze.

“Il mio nome è Vendetta
,” whispered the demon, cold, guttural.

Oh, please
, I thought.
For real?
“I call myself Vengeance.”
This one should be easy, at least
. The melodrama of demons!

The woman groaned, and I glanced sideways at her. Nonno said to Francesco, “Three counts and pauses, until I say to stop.” Francesco nodded and rang the bell three times.

“Why have you come?” Giuliano asked.

“Il mio nome è Vendetta
,” repeated the demon, rolling the man’s head away, but at the ringing of the bell, he dragged his eyes back to Nonno and Francesco.

“Why?”

“Il mio nome è Vendetta!”
screamed the demon, until the bell yanked his attention back again.

“Very well. And have you had your revenge?” Giuliano asked softly.

“I am taking it now,” the demon told him.

“How does it feel, then?”

“Like a relief.”

“Truly?” asked Nonno.

The demon ignored him, twisting the man’s body, raising more burns, his hands an angry red. I felt nausea overcome me like a wave at the sight.
If you’re serious about this, you have to learn to face these things
, I told myself sternly. The burns on the man’s arms began to darken. Giuliano nodded, and Francesco rang the bell again, pulling the demon’s attention back once more.

“You cannot know what it’s like to have your heart broken by the one you trusted the most,” snarled the demon.

“But I do,” Nonno replied.

I flicked my eyes toward him, and I saw that my cousins had done the same. Giuliano had been married to Nonna Laura since they were practically kids. What did he mean?

“Not like this … or you would be like me,” the demon said.

“Would I?” asked Nonno, sounding curious.

The demon said nothing. His form crawled underneath the man’s skin, as if by shaping his borrowed flesh he could shape his own thoughts.

“Were you invited?” Giuliano asked gently.

“Yes!” came the snarling answer.

“You are lying,” Nonno said.

I knew he was right. How did we both know?

“I was called! I was told to come!” snapped the demon.

“Who would do that?” asked Nonno.

“I came because her heart commanded it!” the demon cried, and thrust one of the man’s hands awkwardly in the direction of his wife.

Only Emilio, Francesco, and I turned to look at her; Anna Maria kept her eyes on the demon, her mirror in her hand, fierce and ready, and Giuliano did, too. This was just as well because at that instant the demon snaked the other hand toward Nonno’s ankle. Nonno jumped back, nimbly for an eighty-year-old man, and laughed.

“Nearly got me, then,” he said.

Bizarrely, the demon laughed, too.

“I did, didn’t I?” he said.

For a moment, I imagined a world where we were not all enemies. But there was something in the man’s twisted face, the way the demon forced his lips to smile, that broke my heart with its cruelty.

The woman didn’t speak, even now. She only looked down at the man. I felt her arm soften under my hand, for a brief moment; then it tightened again.

“You see?” the demon said. “He broke her heart. I torment him as he has tormented her.”

The demon began to laugh again; but now, beside me, I could see that as the woman looked down at him, the lower lids of her eyes seemed to swell slightly. It took me a split
second to realize that this is what tears look like close up, before they spill out. Giuliano gazed at her for some time, keeping his feet out of the way of the man. Then he turned back to the demon.

“I do not think you were invited,” he said. “But will you leave when you are asked?”