He was a generally quiet neighbor, but he would always nod his head and smile at passersby. We decided he was a nice guy, and assumed he was a law-abiding, tax-paying American citizen like the rest of us.
My friends and I never remember him moving into the neighborhood. My family was one of the first ones to buy a house in The Village, and we never saw moving vans in Damon�s driveway. This never struck us as particularly odd. We just as soon figured he had moved in during the day while everyone was at work, and was unusually speedy.
We never saw Damon outside without some sort of jacket or coat, even under the blaze of summer. Those of us that knew him, however, eventually grew accustomed to this tradition, though it never failed to shock us�to some degree�that he would sit on his porch the first day of summer dressed in blue jeans and a wind breaker. And as soon as autumn set in, out would come his parka as Damon sat on his porch next to an electric space heater.
Nearly a year after Damon had come to The Village�sans a moving van�a girl named Elizabeth purchased the house next door to him. She was about nineteen, fresh out of a high school somewhere in Missouri, and was in town for an internship. Elizabeth did all of her own gardening, and had a gorgeous front lawn. After a month or so, Damon began talking to her from his porch while she gardened in the evenings. What surprised us more than anything was the fact that he seemed to start all their conversations.
On occasion, we would see Elizabeth sitting on Damon�s porch with him, talking and drinking lemonade in the summertime, though Damon himself never drank anything with ice in it. Weeks later, when my friends and I took walks through the neighborhood every other evening, we always made it a point to go past Damon�s house. Through the light of the setting sun, we could see Damon at his dining room table� eating dinner with Elizabeth. Naturally, we decided there was more to them than there had been when Elizabeth first moved next door to him.
After a few more months, Elizabeth stopped gardening. I supposed we assumed she was getting busy with her internship and hadn�t the time for it. Within another seven months, she sold her house and disappeared. We all assumed she had simply moved away, though we never saw moving vans in her driveway, and we never saw anyone carrying boxes to Damon�s house, so the possibility of engagement or marriage was eliminated.
In a year or so, everyone had forgotten about Elizabeth. Everyone, it seemed, except Damon. In that year, he was hardly seen on his porch. When he was, he was standing, and never remained outside for long.
Then last summer he came outside to sit on the porch again, though he wasn�t alone anymore. Toddling up and down the steps or in the grass was a young boy. We never heard Damon call him by name. The only way he addressed the boy was, �son.� The boy had the same thick brown hair as his father, but his eyes were a startling shade of baby blue�a baby blue that reminded everyone of Elizabeth.
My friend Jennifer and myself worked up the courage one evening to approach Damon and his playing son. We smiled at the boy and he smiled back, all gums save for four teeth. His eyes lit up still further as he caught sight of the pentacle necklace Jennifer wore. In his baby-like curiosity, he toddled to her, and tried to reach up and grasp the necklace. Still smiling at him, Jennifer knelt in the grass and held the necklace out from her chest so the boy could see it. The child�s eyes glazed over strangely as he stroked the zirconium-studded, encircled star.
Jennifer laughed lightly and stood, then patted the little boy on the head. �He�s so adorable!� we gushed. �Looks just like his dad!� Damon smiled at this and invited us to join him on the porch. We got into idle chat, and before we left, Jennifer and I offered our babysitting services.
�On, no thank you,� Damon politely declined. �I�m rarely anywhere I can�t bring him along with me.�
Jennifer and I returned home after the sun set.
The next day, fire trucks roared through the neighborhood and stopped at Damon�s house. I stepped outside and thick smoke filled my lungs. Looking down the street, I saw Damon�s house ablaze. The firefighters battled the fire all day, but couldn�t save the house. When the few charred bricks cooled, they started sifting carefully through the ruin. Damon and his son were never found. In what had been a bedroom, one of the younger firefighters noticed the pattern in the ceramic tiling on the floor�a pentagram. In the center on the inverted star was a stone table, undoubtedly an altar. On it, untouched by the flame that consumed everything else, was a leather-bound book of Satanic spells.