Free After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones Page B

well past what any human jawbone would allow. And the teeth. Those teeth.
    “Maybe he doesn’t have to subscribe to our rules of biology,” I said, looking around the circle for support.
    “He has to eat,” Gwen said, all on her own. “He eats that fish, right?”
    “It’s not a human hunger, though,” Lew said. “Just doing it for meanness, like. To show off, scare that kid.”
    “Good, good,” I said, wanting to stand because it’s the main way I know to think. “But, remember, this is eighty years ago for this old man remembering it now. What would you say if I offered that he just encountered a bad man in the woods that day, then, because of his upbringing,he started to remember him as the devil. He started to add the stuff he knew from Sunday school. Claws, flame, teeth…”
    “He does fall asleep before it all happens,” Evelyn said, hooking another stitch, pulling it through.
    She was our cynic.
    “But is it any less scary if it’s a dream or if it’s real?” Marcy asked.
    “Or even if it was just a serial killer,” Jackie added. “That’s pretty scary too, isn’t it?”
    “Damn straight,” Lew said, clapping his knee.
    “But for every killer there’s a cop, right?” I asked.
    Shrugging nods all the way around. This is what they would have been paying for, had they been paying.
    “So, follow me now. If there’s devils, then there’s also…?”
    “More devils?” Gwen said.
    “Kids,” Marcy corrected.
    “He means angels,” Evelyn said, stabbing with a needle.
    I nodded like I’d been caught, was about to shift gears into my thesis when Lew said, “But who wants to read a story about an angel, right?”
    I lowered my face to smile—he was right—and when I looked back up to the group, the twin doors on the other side of the gym were opening up.
    Because they were on cylinders, were designed to not crush fingers, we all got the guy’s outline before we got him.
    He was tall, spindly, top-hatted. His dark suit ragged at the edges, and not quite long enough for his legs or his arms.
    For an instant his eyes flashed, taking my breath away, but in the next instant he was wearing a pair of those old pince-nez, their twin lenses catching the light.
    Beside me, Gwen flinched. Jackie took her hand, pulled it across, to her own lap.
    “Speak of the—” Lew said just loud enough for the book circle, and chuckled.
    The spindly man hooked a stray chair by the door, dragged it all the long way across the wooden floor of the gym to us and set it down, opposite me.
    “Room for one more?” he asked.
    “How’d you hear about us?” I said, trying to sound casual.
    He gave me a smile and a wink, then flapped open a much-folded piece of paper. One of my flyers. All of which I was pretty sure I’d collected, once we had a quorum.
    “Looks like he’s invited,” Evelyn said.
    “A scarf,” the spindly man said, about her crochet-job.
    “Don’t know just yet,” Evelyn said back. Definitely a challenge in her voice. For all of us.
    We had a rhythm, had already relaxed into our assign-ed roles.
    The spindly man’s eyes made the circuit of our little circle, lingering maybe a touch too long on Gwen, then launching two fingers off his right eyebrow in salute to Lew.
    “Even the moneyhandlers,” he said, about Marcy.
    “And you?” she said right back to him, like he wasn’t the first ornery customer she’d had to deal with.
    “Just happened to be strolling by,” he said, refolding the flyer, stuffing it in the waist pocket of his vest. “What’s the story, doc?” he said then, right to me.
    I breathed in, breathed out.
    Evidently we were doing this.
    “Stephen King,” I said, then, pointedly, “The Man in the Black Suit.”
    “Ahh,” the spindly man said, his eyes on Gwen again. “The King man cometh. I know him well, you could say.”
    “We were just talking about how if you admit devils,” Drake said, “then that means the door must be open for angels as