Sympathy for the Devil - By Tim Pratt Page 0,186

Everything smells like rotting apples. All night long, I’m dreaming about eating wormy apples.”

For a second, we’re afraid Ed might tell us his dreams. Nothing is worse than someone telling you their dreams.

“So what’s the deal with the peacocks?” Bones says.

“Long story,” Ed says.

So you know how the road to the house is a private road, you turn off the highway onto it, and it meanders up some until you run into the house. Some day I’ll drive home and park the car in the living room.

There’s a big sign that says private. But people still drive up the turnoff, lost, or maybe looking for a picnic spot, or a place to pull off the road and fuck. Before you hear the car coming, you hear the peacocks. Which was the plan because this guy who built it was a real hermit, a recluse.

People in town said all kinds of stuff about him. Nobody knew. He didn’t want anybody to know.

The peacocks were so he would know when anyone was coming up to the house. They start screaming before you ever see a car. So remember, out the back door, the road goes on down through the orchards, there’s a gate and then you’re back on the main highway again. And this guy, the hermit, he kept two cars. Back then, nobody had two cars. But he kept one car parked in front of the house and one parked at the back so that whichever way someone was coming, he could go out the other way real fast and drive off before his visitor got up to the house.

He had an arrangement with a grocer. The grocer sent a boy up to the house once every two weeks, and the boy brought the mail too, but there wasn’t ever any mail.

The hermit had painted in the windows of his cars, black, except for these little circles that he could see out of. You couldn’t see in. But apparently he used to drive around at night. People said they saw him. Or they didn’t see him. That was the point.

The real estate agent said she heard that once this guy had to go to the doctor. He had a growth or something. He showed up in the doctor’s office wearing a woman’s hat with a long black veil that hung down from the crown, so you couldn’t see his face. He took off his clothes in the doctor’s office and kept the hat on.

One night half of the house fell down. People all over the town saw lights, like fireworks or lightning, up over the orchard. Some people swore they saw something big, all lit up, go up into the sky, like an explosion, but quiet. Just lights. The next day, people went up to the orchard. The hermit was waiting for them—he had his veil on. From the front, the house looked fine. But you could tell something had caught fire. You could smell it, like ozone.

The hermit said it had been lightning. He rebuilt the house himself. Had lumber and everything delivered. Apparently kids used to go sneak up in the trees in the orchard and watch him while he was working, but he did all the work wearing the hat and the veil.

He died a long time ago. The grocer’s boy figured out something was wrong because the peacocks were coming in and out of the windows of the house and screaming.

So now they’re still down in the orchards and under the porch, and they still came in the windows and made a mess if Ed forgot and left the windows open too wide. Last week a fox came in after a peacock. You wouldn’t think a fox would go after something so big and mean. Peacocks are mean.

Ed had been downstairs watching TV.

“I heard the bird come in,” he says, “and then I heard a thump and a slap like a chair going over and when I went to look, there was a streak of blood going up the floor to the window. A fox was going out the window and the peacock was in its mouth, all the feathers dragging across the sill. Like one of Susan’s paintings.”

Ed’s wife, Susan, took an art class for a while. Her teacher said she had a lot of talent. Brenner modeled for her, and so did some of our kids, but most of Susan’s paintings were portraits of her brother, Andrew. He’d been living with Susan and Ed for