The Servants of Twilight

He perceived no stench of decomposition, but that was to be expected if the canvas sack was moisture-proof and tightly sealed.

He sat at the edge of the grave for a moment, pretending that he needed to catch his breath. Actually, he was just delaying. He dreaded opening the dog's casket, not because he was sickened by the thought of uncovering a maggot-riddled golden retriever but because he was sickened by the thought of not uncovering one.

Maybe he should stop right now, refill the grave, and go away.

Maybe it did not matter what Joey Scavello was.

After all, there were those theologians who argued that the devil, being a fallen angel and therefore inherently good, was not evil in any degree but merely different from God.

He suddenly remembered something that he had read in college, a line from Samuel Butler, a favorite of his: An apology for the devil-it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case. God has written all the books.

The night smelled of damp earth.

The moon watched.

At last he pried the lid off the small casket.

Inside was a zippered sack. Hesitantly, he stretched out on the ground beside the grave, reached down into it, and put his hands on the bag. He played a macabre game of blindman's buff, exploring the contours of the thing within, and gradually convinced himself that it was the corpse of a dog about the size of a fullgrown golden retriever.

All right. This was enough. Here was the proof he had needed.

God knows why he had thought he needed it, but here it was.

He had felt that he was being. commanded to discover the truth; he had not been driven only by curiosity, but by an oh sessive compulsion that seemed to come from outside of him, a motivating urge that some might have said was the hand of God pushing him along, but which he preferred not to analyze or define. The past few weeks had been shaped by that urge, by an inner voice compelling him to make a journey to the pet cemetery. At last he had succumbed, had committed himself to this silly scheme, and what he had found was not proof of a hellborn plot but, instead, merely evidence of his own foolishness.

Although there was no one in the pet cemetery to see him, he flushed with embarrassment. Brandy had not come back from the grave. Chewbacca was an altogether different dog. It had been stupid to suspect otherwise. This was sufficient evidence of Joey's innocence; there was no point in opening the bag and forcing himself to confront the disgusting remains.

He wondered what he would have done if the grave had been empty. Would he then have had to kill the boy, destroy the Antichrist, save the world from Armageddon? What utter balderdash. He could not have done any such thing, not even if God had appeared to him in flowing white robes, with a beard of fire, and with the death order written on tablets of stone. His own parents had been child-beaters, child-abusers, and he the victim.

That was the one crime that most outraged him-a crime against a child.

Even if the grave had been empty, even if that emptiness had convinced him that Spivey was right about Joey, Charlie could not have gone after the boy. He could not outdo his own sick parents by killing a child.

For a while, maybe, he would be able to live with the deed because he would feel sure that Joey was more than just a little boy, was in fact an evil being. But as time went on, doubts would arise. He would begin to think that he had imagined the inexplicable behavior of the bats, and the empty grave would have less significance, and all the other signs and portents would seem to have been self-delusion. He would begin to tell himself that Joey wasn't demonic, only gifted, not possessed of supernatural powers but merely psychic abilities.

He would inevitably determine that he had killed nothing evil, that he had destroyed a special but altogether innocent child.

And then, at least for him, Hell on earth would be reality, anyway.

He lay face-down on the cool, damp ground.

He stared into the dog's grave.

The canvas-wrapped lump was framed by the pale pine boards.

It was a perfectly black bundle that might have contained anything, but which his hands told him contained a dog, so there was no need to open it, no need whatsoever.

The tab of the bag's zipper was caught in a moonbeam. Its silvery glint was like a single, cold, staring eye.

Even if he opened the bag and found only rocks, or even if he found something worse, something unimaginably horrible that was proof positive of Joey's sulphurous origins, he could not act as God's avenger. What allegiance did he owe to a god who allowed so much suffering in the world to begin with? What of his own suffering as a child, the terrible loneliness and the beatings and the constant fear he had endured? Where had God been then? Could life be all that much worse just because there had been a change in the divine monarchy?

He remembered Denton Boothes mechanical coin bank: There is No Justice in a Jackass Universe,