“This is an anthropologist we’re going to see,” Father Jackson shouted. “Dr. Horace Tully. He’s supposed to know a lot about the local weirdos. Father Fogarty suggested him.” He turned to me and grinned. Left unvoiced was the suggestion that Father Fogarty was a weirdo himself.

“It can’t hurt, I suppose,” I shouted back. “Also, it gets me out of the house. I’ll go along with almost anything that will do that.”

“You and your husband don’t get along too well, I take it.”

“That is a subject in no way related to the one in hand. Also, it’s not my husband I’m afraid of in that house.”

“Tell me what you meant by that remark of yours when you hung up on me last night.”

I told him what had happened on the road, not dramatizing it but just relating it in a few sentences. Then I told him about my conversation with the boy at the Webers’ and about seeing the meeting room. For some reason I was reluctant to mention seeing the man outside my window.

“Well, I’m sure the meeting room wasn’t a hallucination anyway,” Father Jackson said.

“Damn you, I was almost killed.”

“I’m sure it was very real to you, Mrs. Caine. You had an experience. I never doubt an experience, only its causes.”

“One thing I forgot to mention yesterday. When I asked Duff about his nightmare the night his father was injured, he said that he had been dreaming of seeing a man on a horse.” Then I knew instantly what Father Jackson’s response was going to be.

“That could’ve suggested the horseman to you.”

“Oh, to hell with it,” I yelled. “Turn back, please. Why are we going to see this man if you don’t believe anything I tell you?”

“I repeat, it’s only the causes I doubt.” After a while he added, “You know as a Catholic you don’t have to believe in the devil, Mrs. Caine.”

“I’m not a Catholic!”

“As a Christian then. There’s nothing in the Bible that demands it. If Satan does exist, why isn’t his creation mentioned in the Book of Genesis, where all the other important acts of creation are listed?”

“I don’t know.” My head was beginning to ache from the roaring of the motor and the bouncing of the car. It seemed to have no springs either.

“You could bring up the Apocrypha—the Book of Enoch, for example, where we read about the war in heaven and the fallen angels—but there is nothing in the Old Testament proper that can be used as evidence for the existence of devils. Moreover there is nothing in the New Testament either—including the temptation of Christ on the mountain—that can’t be explained in terms of pure symbolism.”

“Or the desire of the authors to entertain their readers.”