“Demons,” he said. “So you won’t have any problem killing them?”

It’s a question I haven’t answered for myself yet, so I wiggled out of answering it for him by replying, “That’s not what I said.”

Czarnecki leaned back in his chair. “Here’s one way to look at it,” he said. “Before Jesus, you got rid of sin through sacrifice. For every sin you committed, you slaughtered an animal and offered it up to God. Now, if one little lamb erased a wrong from your record, imagine how many a demon must clear. You’ll be in the black in no time.”

Too tired to respond, I rubbed my eyes with my palms.

“Sure you won’t have a drink?” Czarnecki said.

“No drink,” I said.

Czarnecki sipped his. “I don’t understand why anybody’d want to live forever anyway,” he said. “Not even in heaven. When I die, I want to sleep for a million years.”

I was struck again by how frail he looks in repose. His hatred for the monsters he’s hunted so long has dried him to brittle bones and leathery yellow flesh. In the right light, he looks dead already.

The refrigerator clattered, spooking me, and I used the momentum from the jolt to get to my feet. Czarnecki didn’t say anything when I walked out, didn’t look up.

Exhausted as I am, I was sure I’d drop off as soon as I hit the cot. My brain, though, keeps replaying what I saw in the shed, so I’m putting it down here—hoping, like a guilty criminal, that baring my soul will ease my mind. And now, God, let me sleep.

June 28, 1976, Bishop, California

After a long, rotten night I finally dozed off as the sky lightened and the first birds woke. When I sat up five hours later, weariness still clung to me like a spider’s web, but my mind was clearer, and I felt like I could put one foot in front of the other without falling.

The banana in the cardboard box that serves as my pantry had gone black and gooey. Ants swarmed it, squeezing through a slit in the peel to get at the mush inside. The apple next to it was fine, so I cut that into quarters and ate it with spoonfuls of peanut butter and a cup of cold instant coffee.

The day warmed quickly, and it was soon too hot to be reading my Bible in the van. I set up my chair in the shade outside and settled there. My eyes kept wandering to the shed, my thoughts to the creature that’d been locked inside it for almost a decade. I snuffed a flicker of sympathy by imagining him hunched over Benny the same way he’d hunched over Czarnecki, drinking his blood.