Reverend Allen stood in front of the altar at his church, tired. His thin fingers were bunched together in a knot. His eyes gazed wearily at the empty pews that fanned out in the distance. There was nothing easy about being in charge of a church; and he wished he could have avoided it.

With the wind picking up outside (the howling noise was unbearable), the first of the worshippers began filing in. Ms. Emily Jackson, fake-blonde, fortyish, serious and quiet, came in among the first of them, and was just making her way to the front pews when a heavyset man interrupted her with an “excuse me.”

Reverend Allen watched as the man asked Jackson for a date. She turned him down with a shy smile, then went to her seat. The man sighed, very loudly, pretty disappointed in the general run of things. Like a proud father holding his newborn, Reverend Allen looked approvingly at Ms. Jackson. Her legs were crossed demurly and she held her hat in her hands. When the man who’d hit on her sat down, he kept far back from her so that he wouldn’t be contaminated by her rejection.

After the service, Allen went in back for a can of pop. He fiddled with the small beverage fridge and took out a Fanta which he popped with clear satisfaction. It gave out a hiss of carbonation, a sense of lost physics lessons being applied.

He noticed there was a pentagram on the floor, a star rounded by a circle. It was the kind of thing his younger parishioners would draw. Yet, curious as can be, Allen walked over to it and stepped around it for a closer look.

The pentagram was drawn in white with small triangles running around the inside of the outer circle. There was a heavy scent of ozone hanging directly above it, probably from the defective oven that sat in the room, relic from another pastor’s administration. Allen stepped gingerly inside the pentagram and was surprised to find it warm to stand in, like standing on a metal grate bleeding exhaust heat.

While he was standing there, there was a puff of smoke in the room. Out came a demon, hairy fur that was colored red, twin horns, eyes like black obsidian. The demon smiled at Allen, showing a long tongue that coiled away dramatically. Allen couldn’t believe his eyes, but as the demon approached closer to the pentagram where he was standing, he got a whiff of its body odor and, yes, it was real.

For the longest time the two beings stared at each other, a chess match of social dominance. The pastor gave up first, winded by the eye-staring. The demon extended its arms in an attempt at breaching the walls of the pentagram but was stopped by an invisible wall. This mishap made it reconsider, which it did, but only for a moment; soon it was circling around the room with a hungry air, looking for blood.

The demon was more than two meters tall, built like a linebacker, all muscle and no fat, reddish tinged like the sands of distant Mars. The demon suddenly lashed out a leg at the pentagram, kicking through the invisible barrier and clawing the pastor with its sharp toes. At the first contact Allen yelped in pain and put his hands on his ripped trousers. The demon kicked again. This time, the high sweeping kick knocked a pair of teeth out of Allen’s skull, and his head rocked back. The demon, laughing now, reached into the pentagram to seize hold of the human’s shoulders; dragging him out, the way was clear for the killing to begin. Allen never stood a chance.