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She looks at him and smiles brightly.
“I’m a monster. But not as much as I used to be.”
“Ignore her,” I tell him. “She’s just showing off and hardly ever eats people anymore.”
Traven looks at me, not sure if I’m kidding.
“If you’re in the exorcism business, you must know a lot about demons.”
“Qliphoth,” he sax201D; ys.
“What?”
“It’s the proper word for what you call a demon. A demon is a bogeyman, an irrational entity representing fear in the collective unconscious. The Qliphoth are the castoffs of a greater entity. The old gods. They’re dumb and their lack of intelligence makes them pure evil.”
“Okay, Daniel Webster. What happened at the exorcism?”
Traven takes a breath and stares at his hands for a minute.
“You should know that I don’t follow the Church’s standard exorcism rites. For instance, I seldom speak Latin. If Qliphoth really are lost fragments of the Angra Om Ya, the older dark gods, they’re part of creatures millions of years old. Why would Latin have any effect on them?”
“How, then, do you perform your exorcisms?” asks Vidocq.
“My family line is very old. For generations we served communities the Church hadn’t reached or wouldn’t come to. I use what I learned from my father. Something much older than the Church and much more direct. Best of all, God doesn’t have to be involved. I’m a sin eater, from a long line of sin eaters.”
Candy comes over.
“I don’t know what that is, but can I be one, too?”
I give her a look.
“How does it work?”
“It’s a simple ritual. The body of the deceased is laid out naked on a table in the evening, usually around vespers. I place bread and salt on the deceased. I lay my hands on the body. The head. The hands. The feet. I recite the prayers my father taught me, eating the bread and salt.
“With each piece, I take in the body’s sins, cleansing the deceased until the soul is clean. When my father died, I ate his sins. When his father died, he ate his sins, and so on and so on, back centuries. I contain all of the accumulated sins of a hundred towns, hamlets, armies, governments, and churches. Who knows how many? Millions I’m sure.”
I take a pack of Maledictions from my pocket and offer one to Traven.
“Do you smoke, Father?”
“Yes. Another of my sins.”
“Light up and we’ll ride the coal cart together.”
I light two with Mason’s lighter and hand one to the father.
Traven takes a puff, coughs a faf, couglittle. Maledictions can be a little harsh if you’re not used to them. Really, they taste like an oil-well fire in a field of fresh fertilizer. Traven sees the pack in my hand and his eyes widen a fraction of an inch.
“Are those what I think they are?”
“The number one brand in Pandemonium.”
He holds the Malediction out and looks at it.
“It’s harsh, but not as awful as I thought it would be.”
“That’s Hell in a nutshell,” I say. “Tell me about Hunter.”
