I stayed on the Callen Farm with two other itinerant workers, James and Miguel, and got Saturday evenings off unless Mrs. Callen arranged to pitch a fit about something that was ‘not right’ and then Mr. Callen agreed to stay and try to fix it.  We never actually did any work at such times, but rather stood around and stared at the OIC, object-in-question, and advanced various theories as to what was broken with the tractor, or the clothes dryer or the telephone this month.  This seemed to be the compromise worked out between the Callen husband-and-wife team without words to spoil it because it was a tawdry deal.

Needless to say, this griped on me a great deal.  I am used to being free, more free than most other men, and I particularly find wasting my time to be terrible.  But upon mentioning this to Miguel, he laughed.

"We work hard. Relax.  The work will be there tomorrow. Besides, why do you think Mrs. Callen does this?"  I’d thought she did it because she was frustrated about how so many things around her house were out of order, and it was her way of punishing her husband for not fixing them.  But then I saw better, her ’spontaneous and unplanned outbursts’ were for keeping us, especially her husband at home.  Those nights when we left for James particularly who drank much, and fought much at the Silver Stallion, a local bar whose name reminisced about an antique bit of history, a local desperado who had defied the law for a few weeks, and been blown up into a great hero, and for Miguel who went to a nice country restauraunt and tried to catch the eyes of the pretty waitresses, and for me who wandered and read and prayed long into the night over things here like the town of Evansdale, and far, far away, and thus these were the times when Mrs. Callen was alone with her children.  Her husband thought of it as bowling night for him, and so she was alone out at the edge of what some sensitive souls might call ‘nowhere’.

Me it did not affect that way, but then again, I had stood at the edge of an Abyss that had no bottom, and seen the glowing eyes of the Dyzrimati striving to climb out after the Host of Heaven had thrust them in. I thought of the surrounding country as a rather pleasant farmland, but I could see in her eyes as she looked out across the flat plains, a fear.  And so she made herself busy, and loud, and painful to be around in order to quiet her fear of the land, and of the future which could only bring more pain. 

And that understanding brought and end to my fire.  She was fear, wrapped in terror, and esconced on a bed of propitiation to a pitiless Fate.  I doubted much if she had beheld a single pleasant hour where uncomplicated happiness touched her life in the last ten years.  But still despite my pity, I am not a man to sit about and do nothing.   And even more so my tears for her motivated me.  And so I sought wisdom from Above and from my history in how to make things work better.

And so when her complaints turned to the overgrown fence out front, I set with a will to work.  To my surprise, so did Josh after but a few moments.  Slightly ill at us, the other three men, Mr. Callen, James and Miguel did so as well.

We clipped the greening vines, and the old thorn strands of brown, and took an axe to two sprightly trees of fifteen feet in height, and six inches in diameter.  Once we set to work, it was done with surprising quickness.

And thus, Mrs. Callen came to criticize us, and before she spoke I knew her words.

"Thank you for coming out, ma’am. We’re taking a break before we straighten the posts, and tighten the barbed wire.  Thank you so much for coming out to offer us some of your very good lemonade."

She stood dumbstruck, and then managed a feeble reply that we needed to make sure we removed one rotted post, and got a good new one, mind you.  And then defeated, she left which was not how I intended to leave her.

James and Miguel giggled quietly, and Mr. Callen gave me a slow, measuring look as if he wondered what I was up too.  But it was with a will that we set out on the task, and Mr. Callen did none of his usual "I can’t find the tool, and so I must go and sit in the house for twenty minutes" of wasting time that he usually did on such late Saturday afternoons while we stood and waited for him.  The one time we needed a tool, Josh ran and got it right quick, at a near sprint.

I raised an eyebrow at Miguel.

"Sarah." He murmured back.  This meant little to me, except…Josh was a healthy young man, and Sarah was a female’s name…duh.  Hmm, this could complicate things.   Now I knew why Josh was so eager to leave the house tonight. 

Mr. Callen showed me how to use the line tighteners, as it had been a century or so since I’d used one, and we reposted the posts.  The rotten one we replace with a trunk of one of the trees we had chopped down, after bathing its foot in a toxic black gunk that I’d hesitate to dowse my worst enemy in.

And then little Lisa, all of seven years old, came up to say a few words.

"Mommy’s crying."

Mr. Callen gave me a harsh look, and left for the house at a shambling run.  I waited until he was in, to head to the house myself.

A few steps up the wide, but sagging steps, and into the front of the house.  In the living room, I called out.

"Tell her not to worry so much. The Steak Palace doesn’t worry so much about which dress is right."

Note, I was doing something very hazardous and tricky.  Interfering between a man and his wife is downright dangerous.  Even the most mild and reasonable fellow is likely to get a little testy when someone pokes their nose in.

Mr. Callen stuck his head out into the hallway.

"Say what?"

"Well, I mentioned to one of the children to make sure to tell  you that I was taking you both to the Palace tonight."

I was dancing on the edge of being dishonest here.  Subtlety and normal human reactions are not my usual forte’.  I had said I was taking the family, but ‘you both’ is a subset of ‘family’ so I was technically accurate.  And I was sure that Josh wanted Sarah-time, so…

"We didn’t hear of this." Mr. Callen said skeptically, his face slightly darkening.

"The Palace…?" I heard breathed out by Mrs. Callen like I was talking of Heaven and its Pearly Gates instead of a rather ordinary wagon-wheel bestrung establishment where the manager also wore a cowboy hat, and the food tended toward steak and fish and potatoes.  But frequently glamor is in the expectations of the mind rather than in the actual site, or perhaps all sites have glamor to the eyes that can see.  For it is true, Glory sits but a thin veil away behind the most common leaf in a tree, and the faded wallpaper of the room I stood in as a supplicant.

Mr. Callen made a face while I wandered in thought, and I smiled.

"I told Tyler." I said truthfully enough. Of course, Tyler was eleven, and a perfect example of ‘in one ear and out the other.’  The words of the adults in his life made so little impression on him that he might as well have been adopted by ghosts who cooked, and supervised his chores, and he would have likely not noticed.

I heard some excited babble from the other room, and Mr. Callen got pulled into the room.  Soon enough, a tear-streaked, but properly dressed woman came out of the room, and grandly informed me that they would be ready in an hour, and I was to please make sure to shower before going.  Then she paused, and there was a confused look on her face for a couple seconds.

"Thank you, Tadeusz." She said, and then fled back to her room.  I smiled faintly to myself, laughing inside at, as Shakespeare put it, what fools we mortals be, and went out to see that Miguel and James had finished up.  They were slowly toting tools back to the workshed when I walked up.

Josh was taking my hot water in the shower in the barn.  He wanted to present his mother with him fully dressed, a fait accompli.

"Miguel, how deep and insightful into the future are you?"

He looked at me with a thoughtful glance, and then smiling asked me just how badly the favor I wanted was going to hurt.  So, I told him I wanted him to stay here and babysit Tyler and Lisa, and whats more, volunteer to do this.

He groaned, but cheerfully for Miguel was truly a kind man.

In ways, he had gotten the worst end of the day.  He had worked hard, and instead of relaxation, he would have to work more while the others played.

"How is this about the future? Granted, the farmers need a night out, but …" James grumped which I thought unfair because he was not the one paying a price, but then perhaps he was paying since he wanted justice in a world not frequently overrun with it.

"What happens if you heal an apple tree, my friend?" Miguel asked, and James paused, and then he laughed.

"Better you than me.  I know of a cold one or three that has my name on it. " And so he left for town on his motorcycle without another word.

And so it was when a car filled with laughing youngsters pulled up, and Josh came out nicely dressed in pressed jean shirt and black pants that the driver mocked and told him that his mother would not let him go.  I saw beyond the driver, a hulking young man, to a slim beauty in the back seat whose eyes fluttered up to Josh and down nervously.

And then Mrs. Callen came down the steps in all her glory, followed by a dark jacketed Mr. Callen.

"Of course, Dale, I’m letting Josh go." She bent Josh’s head to her mouth, and kissed him, and whispered a few words.

He smiled faintly, and climbed in back. The driver zoomed the car in reverse, and spun it out into the road to an accompaniment of girlish shrieks and boyish bellows.

"That Dale." Mr. Callen said softly.

"He’s always competed with Josh, and Josh always took the charge too. Even though Dale was a year older and bigger."

"Seemed to me like Dale wanted to compete with someone he knew he could beat, but Josh never listened to me when I said that. Always thought the sun and moon rose on Dale’s shoulders." Mr. Callen rumbled out.

I nodded. Another situation to fix, I wondered if that was what I was here for.

And we went out that night.  I found as many excuses as I could to excuse myself from the table.  I think I checked the dessert bar for twenty minutes, and visited the bathroom four times before I was rescued by a lady coming in to ask for help since her car was stuck in a small ditch just outside town.

I excused myself, and practically pushed Mr. Callen back down into his seat, being careful not to break the chair, and left to go help, and to get out of the way of the two who were rediscovering why they had married each other without my wet blanket company.

Outside town, the lady cooed reassurances to a  small infant she had left in the car (which was not yet illegal in this universe) which rickety machine had slid into the ditch.  They were newcomers to town, and I could tell from the nervous look in the mother’s eye, and the thinness of the both that food had been hard to come by.

Fortunately the car was barely stuck, but the young lady trembled from tiredness which had landed her in the ditch.  Me, I just ‘leaned’ on the car, and it popped out of the six-inch deep ditch.  She took it in stride, although greatly rejoicing as if it was normal for a guy to be able to do a casual eight hundred pound push.  But then I’ve found many well-meaning women to be utterly clueless about the guys in their life, and the potentials that that guy has and does not have.  In ways, many women treat guys as djinn…you make your wish and the djinn works his magic.  Poof.  So to this young lady, it was not a problem at all that I had apparently bent the laws of physics into a pretzel, after all, I was a guy, a djinn.  The only thing preventing other guys from doing such was their unwillingness to do so, so getting in the way of a woman’s desires was done out of pure meanness of spirit.

So I accepted my plaudits with a tentative smile, and then beckoned down the road in the other direction. 

"There is a food place, not totally nice, but respectable. I think I should drive it there to make sure the car is okay."  Phew, I had invented that excuse off the top of my head.  Really what I wanted to do was stuff some food into the stylishly dressed, but rail-thin girl, and her cute little moppet, but how to do it without offending pride?

I said something rude about pride under my breath as I got the car into gear, and we drove to the Silver Stallion on the very outskirt of town.  She objected to my offer to buy her dinner in a very nice way.

"Look, lady, the way I figure it, you owe me a favor. I’m not going to feel happy until I know you’ve had a solid meal, and the tyke too.  I’ll just drop you off here, and then I’ll mosey on my way, but not before I see you dig into a big burger at least one big bite.  And if you don’t I’m going to call you rather mean for making me worry about you."

The aggravation in my voice must have tickled her funny bone because she laughed, a clear light note like a flute, and the baby gurgled as well.  Usually I don’t get that aggravated, at least not in my voice.  By the time, I’m that vocal, usually people are dead, and the problem is solved.  This whole talking to people to help them out thing rather than dictating at the point of a plasma cannon was tough,  or perhaps I had forgotten human manners a bit in the centuries.  I knew some charm, but I had tended toward bluntness.  Now I was trying for subtlety and persuasion that depended on sweetness, and it taxed me, both my skills and my endurance. 

So we walked inside, Lydia and her son J.J., and I found them a table by the wall, and looked across to see James at the bar with a dumbfounded look on his face.  I traced the line of his eyes back to the door where Lydia and J.J. waited, and both them were staring too.  J.J. had his arms reaching out toward James…the universal baby sign for ‘pick me up, daddy.’

James shuddered like a solidly hit tree, and suddenly Lydia was flying up to him, a stick-built kite of beauty, but just so breakable as to make you afraid for her.

"Come back home, James."

"I-I.."

"I didn’t mean those words. I don’t like my cousin better. He’s not a better ……"

"He’s rich." James said hoarsely. "I never will be."

"And his wife always came around to grind in my face how much she had. And you were right, I never saw it."

James wavered, and then J.J.’s hand brushed his cheek, and with tears in his eyes, he took his son back into his arms, and got up from the bar. He then took her into his arms, and the three hugged for a long time while J.J. crowed to all the world in a language we all understood even if it was baby gurgle.

"I’ve got my daddy!"

The waitress eventually interrupted them to say she had burgers, and then James saw me.  I smiled crookedly, and turned back to the door.

"Oh, T, Josh and his mates came in a while back, got some beer."  James said.  He looked a bit troubled.

"They was heading to the Point to race." And old man with sparkling blue eyes said from next to me.  I hadn’t noticed him there before which was odd, because although I’m not the most perceptive of versers, I do tend to watch out for potential threats.

A sudden feeling of disaster coming struck me, an avalanche of malice aforethought for hate’s sake, and I looked back at the surfeit with joy and repentance James, and smiled.

"I do need a favor. I need to borrow your car."  He blinked, and nudged Lydia who looked baffled, but accepting, and so he took the keys and tossed them to me even as he walked in one big human hug to the table at the wall where burgers and fries and a plate of mushed up veggies awaited them.

And thus, they did not see me sprint outside, neither did they hear me burn a dime’s worth of rubber screeching out of the parking lot, so lost were they in their private heaven.  I felt evil twining through the clouds, and a will set against mine so that I would turn the wheel at a moment ill-advised.  But for me driving is easier than walking, and so with an irritated prayer to the Most High I asked for help in banishing the daemons in the dark that troubled my mind, and twitched my steering wheel, and they were gone.  Then I began to pray in earnest.  At first it was for speed on the way, and so it was that I flew through town without cop or traffic light slowing me.  And then I prayed for Josh, and for the Callens, and for James, and for the town.

I felt something, something malign in the night, hovering over the town, and I wondered if it had become aware of me.  So I prayed at the end for me, for blindness for the spirits that sought me.

"Let them forget I passed this way, and see not my footsteps, O Most High." I prayed, and spun up into the gravel road that led left, sinister ward, into the wilder lands near the river on the far side of the town from the Callens.  That car did yeoman service that night as I flew through the dark, and thus I came to a bridge over the river.

It was a metal skeleton, clad with concrete for its roadway, triangles of steel, its backbone, and it spanned the Sunder River for a hundred yards.  It was the marvel of the tri-county area, and yet it served no great purpose since it was off the beaten path.  A simpler bridge down at the ford would have worked better.

As I barrelled up to the crowd gathered at one end, I wondered why this bridge, why here?

"Get up!" Screamed a man with a whip in his hand, and crude fabrics on his back as a dozen slaves of Oriental descent scampered up hill from a large rowboat, with chains behind their backs.  The whip flashed as one went down, and cut deep into a leg.

Later that night, the slaves gathered to themselves in their pitiful campfire while the masters drank themselves drunk.  And they began to chant…to speak words of a working that would bring something hideous into the world.

Myself, from the future, I wanted to cry to them. Don’t be fools.  Just cut the bastards throats and be done with it, but that course frightened them.  Far better they decided to summon something from the Pit to do the job for them.  Which it did.  And then it came back to the campfire of the slaves, and ate them as well.

I was on tainted ground.  The very soil shrieked of innocent blood, and of not-so innocent blood, of evil choices, and evil deeds taken by willing souls.  I wanted to stop the car, to shriek out a challenge to the Creature.  But I had seen it.

It was a Terygzymati, a hideous thing, with five limbs, each one a different length than the others, and bedecked with claws.  But, in truth, a strong man with a stout heart, and a good right hook could dispose of one such beast.  They gained their power from what others give them, and from the horror of their look.  Many a victim has seen one, and fallen to the ground, and waited for death when a strong defense would have saved them.

There was no way, the creature was going to come out to my challenge.  It would take one look at me unveiled, and know in a heartbeat (if such things had hearts instead of a howling emptiness) that I would rend it to pieces, and that quite joyfully whether we met on the physical or the spiritual plain, such a low-order demon would rarely attack one such as I.

The crowd seemed to block my path with a bestial frenzy to it, but I merely pushed down harder on the gas, and suddenly self-preservation overruled the the demon’s influence, if it was here, and the need to look cool.  They scattered like leaves hit by a leafblower, and I rocketed in through and onto the bridge.

And as if that was a signal, the two cars in front of me were off with a squealing of tires. In the right sat Josh, in what must be a borrowed car.  In the left sat, Dale in his rather sweet, even I am forced to admit that, powder blue convertible.  Sarah, with an unhappy look had surprised herself by waving the hankerchief.

I saw the game as I barrelled around Sarah, skidding on my breaks to lose speed so as to not slam into either of the cars in front of me.  At the end of the bridge, the road narrowed to one lane which ran between two blood-red painted low concrete walls.

There was only room for one car.

But to my surprise, Josh, perhaps, no definitely driven by focused purpose had pulled ahead.  His car was smaller, less tricked out, and thus less weighty than the fancier convertible.  I relaxed a bit as we tore down the bridge.

Josh had the clear lead of a two-thirds car length nosing ahead of Dale’s car, and Dale would have to give in in this stupid game of chicken.  But then I saw Dale screaming at Josh, and with a redness to his face that did not look natural.

Ah yes, the Demon. For you see, we humans are really excellent at getting ourselves into really stupid messes, but whenever something is absolutely, collossally so stupid  and messed up that even a child would know better, or well someone even worse, a supposedly mature adult, and yet it goes on, I suspect the influence of demons, or of government which is often the same thing.

Dale could not let his favorite punching bag off the hook.  But even he had to  have enough sense to let death clarify things for him just like the crowd had dove out of my way just seconds ago.  But he wasn’t.

He nudged the others car, and Josh shook his head. No more was Josh going to lie down and accept second-class citizen status.  He had something to prove to pretty, winsome Sarah, and to himself.  Unfortunately, he didn’t realize his opponent had quite literally gone mad, been possessed possibly, influenced certainly by infernal forces.

And so I unbuckled my seat belt, and mouthed a short, very short prayer.  A wordless cry for "Help!"

So Dale smashed his car into the right side of Josh’s car intending I believe to knock Josh into the river, but my car piled into the back of Dale’s car straightening it out temporarily, and forcing us in a three car traffic splash toward the slender hole.

After that, it was really simple.  If you have absolutely no fear of death, almost any reasonably fit man or woman could have done as much.  As we slid forward, I stood up, stepped onto the hood of my car, and stepped over onto the back of the convertible.  It was not difficult. Everything was quite steady as both boys applied death pressure to their brakes and the cars skidded as smooth as glass, well slightly ruffled glass, anyways.  From there, I ran forward, jerked Dale’s steering wheel slightly in passing onto his hood, and jumped sideways to Josh’s car.  From there, I picked up Josh after slicing his seat belt with my Irish prince’s dagger given to me by the High King in Tara, and hoisted the heavy farm lad to my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.  Then, I stepped back into Dale’s car, and kicked the steering wheel of Josh’s car.

That last part might have required more coordination than most have, but really there was enough time for someone to have dropped Josh if they wanted to, and then reached out with a hand.

Josh’s car took the new direction, especially since its wheels were no longer skidding, and it flipped, up and over us to crash on the bridge, and tail us as Dale’s car slid, scraping off most of the paint on the driver’s side in a shower of sparks.

We came to the end of our coast, and Dale shook like a leaf.  Josh held himself very still, and only moaned when I put him down.  I saw bitter fury in his eyes, and a snapped thigh bone where Dale’s car had impacted his and crumpled his driver’s door and with it the leg.

Dale took one look, and then heard Sarah screaming "Jooooosssssshhhhhh!" as she pelted down the bridge toward him, and he knew he had lost.  I think he knew he had lost something even more precious, but I could not tell as he bolted out of the car, and ran into the woods.  Another broken soul, addicted to the need for success on a tiny stage that he disdained and craved at the same time, and was I to fix this one as well, O Lord?

I slipped out of the car, and into the woods myself.  There was no need for me to be here, and I could tell from Josh’s face that he hardly saw me.  He was too dazed, and too full of bitterness at the attempted murder done by his ‘friend’.  Soon enough, he would be in the hospital, and others would ask him who I was, but for now, my or James and Lydia’s car was at the bottom of the Sunder, and good riddance.

I went back through town, and woke the used car salesman, and after making him promise with a reward and a threat if he lied, I bought another car with the gold sewed into the lining of my coat.  I took it, and left it at the Silver Stallion.

"Consider it a gift." I wrote on a note. "Now go home." I added.  It was a nicer car than the rickety thing they had had, and I expected he would think that Mr. Callen knew, and had bought it for him and her, and Mr. Callen was not a man to be gainsaid when he said ‘go’.  I sighed. I was becoming quite devious.

And then I found myself reaching into my pocket and pulling out a line of ten pieces of eight.  I secreted them in the crack of the back seat, where a teenage boy might find them, and wondered if I was being led to provide for J.J.’s college fund, or if the car would pass through more hands, and someone else that God wanted would find that gold.  Nevertheless, I felt sure that I was serving the purposes of the Most High, even though I was not entirely a cheerful giver.  Instead, I sighed a bit as the coins left my hand.  I would have to work on that cheerful giver bit, but like all things, even I, a centuries old creature of power am but a work in progress by the Most High.

And so I walked back to the Callen Farm, and saw Miguel asleep sitting upright on the parlour couch with Tyler tucked in under an arm to his right, and little Lisa leaning into his shoulder on his left.  Before him, on the floor, sat a stack of children’s books, and three empty glasses of milk.  I got the glasses cleaned up, and toted the two children to bed, and offered to carry Miguel to bed, but he laughed, and went outside for a smoke while I joined him.

"You know, this is what I want."  He waved about him, and I understood.  A farm with family, a wife and many children to enliven soil and buildings.

"How many?"

"Seven, I think."  He grinned in the dark, and we both laughed.  And then the next day, Mr. Callen, in a wonderful good mood spoke to us as we sat to breakfast.

"I saw a property.  Owner wants to sell right now.  Knows he’s taking less money than its worth, but he figures he’s got a chance to do something big and important, something to do with…" He paused and struggled with the unfamiliar words "’computer chips’.  I’m not sure why he thinks potato chips with numbers on them are going to be next big thing, but …." Mr. Callen threw up his hands helplessly. " He wants to sell. Its good land. Problem is, I can’t run this, and that.  And a farm really needs an owner. Not just a manager.  So I was wondering if either of you would be interested in going sixty-forty with me on the property.  You do the work, and I get my forty percent cut until its all paid off."

Miguel was actually trembling so I just smiled, and jabbed him lightly. He jumped.

"Ask him if it has eight bedrooms in the farmhouse." I said slyly.

"Why yes, it does, a real old-timey farmhouse…how’d you know?" Mr. Callen said giving me a sharp look at which point I’m afraid I fell backwards out of my chair as I tilted it backwards, and lost control in my wild laughter. Ah the Goodness of Him who sat on the Throne.  And I rather expect they were rolling on the floor in Glory too.