Chapter Seventeen

The Reverend’s next gig was in Cheneyville, Louisiana. They arrived in Cheneyville later that afternoon, after stopping at McDonald’s for lunch. Reverend had been very specific about their need to stop at McDonald’s and get Big Macs. Grace and the driver would have been rather surprised if he’d told them the reason he wanted McDonalds so badly was not because he had a craving for the secret Big Mac special sauce, but because a knee high demon named Nubbins had told him they were stopping for lunch at McDonalds and getting a large supply of Big Macs, or else things were going to get very ugly.
So, they ate their McDonald’s as they drove on to Cheneyville. No one, apart from the Reverend, noticed Nubbins grabbing one of the Big Macs and then sitting back down in the front seat. Nor did they notice the joyful munching noises and appreciative grunts Nubbins made as he ate his Big Mac.

“Holy shit, these are even better than they told me!” Nubbins exclaimed. He popped up over the back of the seat and grabbed another Big Mac. “I could eat these all day!”

Just wait until you get the McDonald’s shits, you little fucker, Cyrus thought to himself. The rest of the ride in to Cheneyville was uneventful for everyone. Grace thought Reverend Milton seemed unusually quiet, but didn’t comment on it. He had said he’d slept poorly, after all, and there’d been an awful lot of empty mini-bar bottles in his room that morning. She assumed he had a massive hangover.

After they’d checked in to the hotel in Cheneyville, and Reverend Milton had put his things in his suite and gotten settled (at least, as settled as he could get), he decided to go for a walk. Yes, a nice walk to see the town. Maybe check out some of the local churches and meet the local clergy. Yeah, that’d be good.

He set off from the hotel at a brisk pace after a quick flip through the phone book in the hotel. He had found the address he wanted in a matter of minutes. Nubbins watched him do this, smoking a cigarette, entirely disinterested. Now the little demon followed Cyrus, just a couple steps behind him. He had swiped a couple little bottles of booze from the mini-bar, and every now and then would take a drink as they walked.

After a few blocks, Reverend Milton reached St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. He chuckled to himself as he went up the steps and into the church.

“Confessing your sins isn’t going to help you,” Nubbins said. “It wouldn’t even if you were Catholic, since I’m here to see to it you can’t do your penance.”

Reverend Milton grunted, and continued into the church. He walked directly to the font, scooped up all the holy water he could hold in two hands, and threw it directly on Nubbins.

Nubbins did not burst into flame. He did not boil away. He did not hiss, bubble, moan, screech or suffer in any noticeable way. He did take out his pack of Parliament Lights and examine them. They were soaked through. He looked at Reverend Milton with the kind of smoldering hate only a demon with a ruined pack of cigarettes can produce.

Nubbins uttered something in a demonic language, and Reverend Milton started to feel kind of strange. Kind of, itchy. Small red welts popped up all over his body, and quickly grew into large boils.
“What the fuck?” Reverend Milton said as he looked at the back of his hands which now had four or five white-headed boils on each of them.

“You wrecked my smokes, you son of a bitch,” Nubbins said. “The next time you try to pull that shit, I’m going to get really old testament on you. You dig me?”

Reverend Milton looked at the little demon, who was looking hard back at him. Cyrus’s shoulders sagged.

“I dig you,” he said.

“Damn right. Now, let’s go get me a carton of P-funks, jerk,” Nubbins said.

They left the church again, entirely unnoticed by the priest. There was a convenience store a couple of blocks away, where Reverend Milton went inside and and bought Nubbins a carton of Parliament Lights.

After that, the two of them went back to the hotel, where Reverend Milton ordered room service for himself and the demon, who wanted to try nachos. Reverend Milton looked in the mini-fridge, noticed the whiskey was all gone, and called room service again and had them send two bottles of Jack Daniels along with his food order.

Cyrus Evander Milton planned on spending the evening getting supremely drunk. Then he was going to spend the next day drunk. And the next. Then he figured he’d sober up long enough to do the revival without anyone smelling liquor on him, before coming back to the hotel and getting good and drunk again.

This plan would have worked out extremely well, too, if the little demon hadn’t managed to drink both bottles of Jack Daniels while Cyrus had been in the bathroom.

Not long after that, the demon had made a distressed little sound, clutched at it’s gut and ran for the bathroom. It is best not to consider the noises that came from the room, but suffice it to say, Nubbins experienced everything the combination of McDonalds and whiskey has to offer.

Half an hour later, Nubbins emerged from the bathroom, lit a cigarette and said, “I strongly suggest you do not enter that room for the next two hours.”

Reverend Milton decided it would be prudent to follow the little demon’s advice, and avoided that end of the suite for the rest of the evening.

Eventually, sheer exhaustion overtook Cyrus, and he slept all night. Nubbins curled up on one of the easy chairs in the suite and slept as well. If he weren’t evil incarnate, he’d have been kind of cute.