He bolted upright and cupped my face. “I love you, Liz Cooper.”
“I love you, too,” I said, delighted. “What did you remember?”
“I can do better. I can show you.” He took my hand and led me through the house and out the back door. “On the drive to Chicago from Lancaster, I played an old Al Green cassette in the car a thousand times. My memory had nothing to do with being in Pennsylvania. If I’m right, I saw the symbol on the drive home.”
We crossed through the yard. Nick opened his garage door to a chorus of crickets and we went from the balmy night breeze into the hot, stale air inside. He flipped a switch. A high-wattage lightbulb dangling on a wire from the ceiling illuminated the cement floored, open-paneled, two-car garage stacked with boxes. The chirping stopped. Something small and fast scrambled under the tool bench across the room. I edged closer to him with an eye on the floor.
He went straight to the floor-to-ceiling wall of cardboard boxes in back, talking while he pulled cartons down. “I stopped for gas at a local rest stop in Indiana. The old coot behind the counter was listening to a preacher sermonizing on the radio. Before he would sell me gas, he asked if I was a religious man.”
I glanced toward the noise rustling under the tool bench. “Nick, I don’t think we’re alone.”
“It’s probably a mouse. Shuffle your feet. They’re more afraid of you than you are of them.” He set another box on the floor. “When the old man heard I was studying religion, he told me he met the devil in person.”
“The devil?” I said. “You must have loved that.”
“I thought the old guy was a crackpot. Just to be a smartass, I asked him what the devil was doing in Indiana and he said, ‘Fifty to life in the state pen for murder.’ I bought a bottle of pop, sat down, and listened to his story about a family who lived outside a small town south of the interstate. The head of the family introduced himself around town as Rick, the son of Satan and an advocate of magic and self-indulgence. Rumors circulated about devil worship, moonlight rituals, and debauchery. Pets disappeared. His children were caught stealing candles from the church. A few months in, a town council member contacted Indiana Social Services to report Rick and his wife for child neglect.” Nick slid another box off the stack and took off the lid. He looked inside and smiled. “Found it. Come on, let’s go back to the house.”
“What? Found what?”
“Go, go, go.” He picked up the box. “I hope it’s in here.”
I led him through the yard and opened the patio door, taking a last look over my shoulder for tagalongs from the garage. The only creature behind me was one very animated professor.
He set the box on the living room floor, rifling through papers as he talked. “Rick printed pamphlets promoting devil worship and sex magick. The children sold copies door-to-door.”
“He exploited his children?” I sat on the floor beside Nick. “You saw the pamphlets?”
“I think I have one. The man at the gas station felt sorry for the kids so he bought a few and kept the pamphlets as souvenirs after Rick got arrested. I convinced the old guy to sell me a copy. I wanted to show it to a professor at Oxford who studied devil worship.”
“So you brought the pamphlet to Oxford?”
“No. Once I got to Chicago and read it, I thought the content was tripe. Rehashed satanic and devil worship tenets from the sixties. Here it is.” Nick pulled out a five-by-seven booklet bound by staples. The cover, red print on a black background, showed an inverted pentagram with a goat’s head drawn in the center. Across the top, the title: “Divine Rights.”
Nick paged through, stopping intermittently. “I forgot how shoddy this was. He plagiarizes the hell out of every devil fad from the nineteenth century to the sixties, and rants like a hedonistic, occult flamethrower. How anyone deemed this—Liz, look, I found it.” He held up the pamphlet, pointing to a yellowed page.
The page on the left showed the inverted pentagram with the number 5 in the center. Three blurred Petrine crosses underscored the 5. At the top of the right-hand page, the misspelled header read “Vengence.” Beneath, “Thou shalt not turn the other cheak.”
I read through the text, appalled by the theme of hatred and frustration within blustering statements from “nobody owes you nothing but respect” (sic), to “payback is you’re right” (sic). The remainder of the pamphlet was filled with crass declarations of rules celebrating vices like indulgence, lust, and greed. Each rule was numbered inside the inverted pentagram image, some accompanied by crude drawings of figures enacting the benefits of self-indulgence and hubris.