ecesis

prologue.

The people from Troy still call it the house of the devil, even after the devil had died long before any of Troy's oldest residents were even conceived.

In that house lived the man who's called the devil now, and all his family, the Moores, a name which still bears a pinch of shame, like the glaring eyes of the shoppers when a mother's baby won't stop crying, and a twinge of sympathy, the type you'd feel for a lost puppy. The thing that made him so evil is hard to pin down.

Legend says that in the Christmas of 1896, the devil's sister threw a party. The devil wasn't invited. Furious, he crashed the party, Sleeping-Beauty-style, and the devil's sister fought with him. As the guests went home frantically, whispering words of comfort to their children and words of confusion to anything above that would answer, the devil and his sister's words rang out through Troy.

No one agrees on what happened next. Some say there, at the wrecked party, he murdered his sister. Others say he raped, then murdered her. It does not matter what others say, because that is not what most say.

Most say the devil returned home, and stayed there for a time - a day, a few, a week- thinking of what happened, what he'd do, if anything.

The screams came on the first day of the new year, the bad omens hand in hand. Blood was running down from the river, and the town was in a frenzy, only intensified by the discovery of the devil's sister's body. Biblical plague? Unlikely, they were all good, God-fearing Christians. Animal mauling? Unlikely as well. Murder? Perhaps.

"Perhaps" is all that is needed to spark the fires of a manhunt, this case against the devil. So the manhunt began, despite the fact no one saw him leave his house, nor could he have ripped up his sister's body the way it was.

He ran into the woods behind Troy, and evaded the manhunt for days.

The devil was found dead, having hung himself in the woods. Even though it's said the devil's body was burnt, not buried, everyone agrees that all over the body were scars and bruises. Dried blood stained his shirt. No one knows what happened, but he was remembered in Troy forever.

At least that's what Mama's told me.