Demons by Wayne Macauley Page A

had looked for and not found until now. Every other voice she’d heard was
shallow, tinny, screeching; the voices of her friends, the voices on the radio, the
television, the voices coming out of speakers in shopping centres and railway stations.
All that cacophony had faded and here, right up close and at the same time somehow
everywhere, was a voice spoken only for her.
    The Lord’s people were desert dwellers, said Lyall, and the Lord gave unto Abraham
all the land he could see to the north and south and east and west so He could make
with Abraham a covenant that far from the cities of the Nile and the Euphrates these
were his lands, the lands of the plain, and they were like unto the dust of the earth
and if you could count the dust of the earth you could count their number and they
were many. And the Lord with His mighty hand smote the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah,
said Lyall, and rained down fire and sulphur on them because the cities bred wickedness
while Abraham’s people walked with God, they were pure and like unto the white lambs
with their shepherd. And no city was spared God’s mighty wrath because in every city
the wickedness of man was manifest. And He saw how it was not those iniquitous people
of the city that were His chosen but those camped in tents under the stars, tending
their flocks and moving across the plains, building stone altars and kneeling in
the dust and bowing down to the Lord in honour and thanks; these were His people
and these would be blessed and the others would be cursed. And when the Lord God’s
only begotten Son came down from Heaven didn’t He too walk in the dust of Abraham
and let the dust of Abraham’s people gather in the hem of His garments and didn’t
He chase the moneylenders from the Temple and say: Woe unto thee Chorazin and Woe
unto thee Bethsaida and Tyre and Sidon and thou Capernaum which shall be brought
down to Hell? Yea verily we must turn our backs on the cities of the plain and not
look behind lest we turn to salt. We must look up and find God, under the stars,
in the trees, the grasses, the crystal water of the lake. Behold the birds of Heaven,
they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin.
    So I turned away, said Lyall, from the people of the city, and I did not look back
while behind me, lo, the smoke went up as the smoke of the furnace and I came here,
Elena, to start anew, to be with nature and through her closer to my God. And I didn’t
look back then and don’t look back now—my wife, my children, they are dead to me,
consumed in God’s mighty fire—and nor should you look back, now that you are here.
Those allergies you talk of are the Devil’s work and the marks on your skin his stigmata,
the Devil’s brands. Let Satan be cast behind—Get thee behind me, saith the Lord—so
we might raise our eyes to God and see everywhere His good works.
    Lyall visited every morning and every morning he spoke like this. They shared cups
of tea on the chairs out in the sun and sometimes strolled down the grassy slope
and stood looking at the lake. Soon it seemed right that Elena should visit Lyall,
and she did. He drew a map of the path from her house to his and one morning carrying
the oatmeal biscuits she’d baked she followed it around the lake until she came to
the tree with the white mark on it that pointed the way up through the bush.
    Lyall’s house was not so much a house as a shack, built in among the trees from rough-sawn
planks, second-hand timbers, odd weatherboards and sheets of ply and scavenged windows
and doors under a corrugated roof. There was a sort of sitting area outside with
an old wooden table and a couple of chairs. Above Lyall’s door a wooden cross was
fixed, and painted on the door itself in one continuous white line—head, body, tail—was
a fish. There was a small dog tied to a stake nearby, a scrawny, mangy thing; it
didn’t bark at