A Call To Arms

Nestling on the northern most point of Lake Garda in Trentino, Italy, is a small town called Riva. Here, each day, sits a silver cropped man watching the lake. He sits as upright as the walking cane lying next to him, a cane which he does not need but carries to complete the feel of easy living. He watches the windsurfers, soaring across the water, hopping immaculately over the waves and he watches the tourists rumble past on the lake's ferries. He watches them admiring the surfers and catches their anxiety when they come too close to the bow of the boat. He watches as the surfer tumbles unexpectedly into the wind and struggles to pull his sail out of the water. He watches as the captain blows his horn helplessly. As the passengers begin to gasp and call out. He watches as the surfer is dragged under the oncoming ferry. He watches the water turn red and stands and stretches, deciding to head back towards his hotel in the neighbouring town.

As he wanders home, along the sun soaked coastal path, the man passes hundreds of holiday makers, gaily amusing themselves in the water. On the other side of him he passes dozens of memorial stones – it's a death trap that road. A young girl stands, hanging onto some railings, preparing to jump into the lake. Her brothers, already in, call her to follow them. She looks nervously at the drop. Her parents smile, barely paying attention. 'Go on,' her father tells her. She bites her lip and jumps. As she does so her foot catches the railings. With a jot, she is flipped head first into the rock wall beneath. The man smiles and walks on by.

'Lesson 1. Demons can be anyone. They can look like us, walk like us, talk like us.' TJ was instructing Milton.

'Right, anyone.' Milton looked at a beefy looking man with snake tattoos all over his arms and a big gash across his head.

TJ put his hand round Milton's head and pushed it sideways to look at a plump woman in a frumpy dress carrying four bags of shopping in one hand and a small child in the other. 'Anyone,' he repeated.

'Is she?' Milton asked, filled with wonder and dread.

'I don't know.'

'How can you tell? When they attack?'

TJ smiled wistfully, 'most demons aren't coming for you. They're coming for the shopkeeper, the barman or the professor. You need to find another way of knowing.'

Milton blinked, thinking furiously.

'Premonitions, warnings or just waiting and seeing,' explained TJ in response to Milton's puzzled expression.

'Right. Wait and see.' Milton muttered to himself.

In Riva, the greying tourist sat on his usual bench, once again watching the nervous wind-surfers. A second man appeared. He was the same man who, some days previously, had been banging impatiently on the door of a telephone box.

'I don't ask for politeness, brains or demonic skill when I hire you but please learn never to appear like that again. Otherwise, I will have to kill you.' The silver haired man said.

'Barbas,' the second man started, 'the witch has rowed with Guinevere. He left last night and has not returned.'

Barbas sighed. 'I thought my part in this was over.' He paused then, resigned to the inevitable asked, 'do we think he is with the tramps?'

'We cannot be sure.'

'Well,' Barbas smiled grimly, 'it looks as though my retirement will have to be delayed.'

'Has it ever occurred to you that cars are unnecessarily loud? It's the year 2027, surely they could have made silent cars by now?' Milton wandered how this was relevant to demon slaying. As the week had progressed, TJ 's anxiousness over training Milton had been replaced by a shy eagerness. He had started to elaborate on those topics that were more philosophical.

'There's no such thing as silence.' Milton hoped to stump TJ.

'Demons are silent. And humans may not be able to make silent engines but they could make inaudible ones. Why don't we? Noise is safe. It is reassuring. Not only boy racers like to hear the revving of the engine – we all do. But demons are silent. Their shoes make sound and their clothes do but they can rub their hands together and make no noise at all. They materialise and disappear, they can hide in walls or water and you will never know they are there. Next lesson; you cannot hear evil, or see it. You can't smell it. You must sense it.' TJ smiled. Milton could see the pleasure he was taking from their lessons and wondered if he wasn't more teacher than witch.

'That's all very well.' He said. 'But I don't know how to read a spell, how to – I don't know – do anything. I can't sense evil.'

TJ's face dropped. It was a subject he had been avoiding but Milton's practical lessons had bee a disaster. They had tried to coax it out of him and frighten it out of him. But when Sebastian blasted him, Milton managed nothing more than a nose bleed.

'He needs to go home' Sebastian interjected.

'No.' Milton couldn't contemplate going to San Francisco. He was shocked when Milo had said that was where he was born. Milton considered himself of the East Coast, maybe New York, but not sunny San Francisco. What was a nerdy computer programmer meant to do in San Francisco?