A Dance With The Devil Ch 1

Intro / Prologue

         Jack Alistar sat in the back row of Gethsemane Lutheran Church and took in the scene before him. The sun was streaming in through the stain glass windows as the choir sang the opening lines of Amazing Grace. The pews were filled with good Christian families. Mothers and Fathers holding hands in the pew, children dressed in their Sunday best and sweet old grandmothers smiling as they sang along with the choir. It was the kind of scene that made one feel is if they had walked into a Norman Rockwell painting. And as much as Jack looked like he fit into the whole picture, he knew his past separated him from the crowd.





         It had been almost a decade since he’d set foot in a place of worship, or prayed, or even thought about God. He felt a little out of place, even though he had regularly attended services in this very sanctuary throughout his childhood. It felt as though his very presence was blasphemy. All these people, these families, the very ones that had welcomed him back with open arms, were there because they believed and they wanted to celebrate that belief. Jack was there to find out if he could still feel the wonderment that he had as a child, if he could really let go and give in to the faith, if he really had turned his life around.





Nearly thirty, Jack had been to hell and back countless times. He had gone looking for the worst and found it in spades. He had seen the way the devil danced through the fires and even joined in on occasion. A decade of Jack’s life had been spent slow dancing with demons.





The house Jack grew up in sat on a tree shaded street in a quiet neighborhood just blocks from where he now sat. A simple story and a half single family home that could have been taken straight from the pages of Better Homes & Gardens. The manicured lawn that his father took such pride in was bordered by a perfect white picket fence. The colorful gardens that his mother so carefully cultivated sat in perfect compliment to the blue siding and crisp white trim. The scene looked as though it came from a 1950’s public service announcement. This slice of Americana perfection sat on a block with a dozen other houses just like it. People there didn’t lock there doors at night, Jack and his sister Mary would run around the neighborhood all day and their parents never had to worry. It was the essence of Beaver Cleaver’s America.





Everything about Jack’s childhood seemed to be a slice the American dream. It was church services on Sunday, family dinners every night, and a blissful ignorance of the fact that the world wasn’t exactly like his own neighborhood. Everyone in town knew Jack and his family. His father ran the pharmacy at the local general store, his mother was the quintessential PTA mom, and he and his sister were their perfect children.


In high school, Mary was a straight A student and was elected the student council president. Jack was the star of the local football team, Homecoming King and was of course dating the head cheerleader, Beth Wilson. Everything about Jack’s young life seemed to be leading to bigger and better things. That, in Jack’s mind, was the problem.





He never quite bought into the whole thing, the whole perfect image that his family was so good at creating. It was natural for his father, mother and sister to want to be the family that everyone saw them as. Jack always wanted more. He wanted to know what else was out there; he wanted to know what imperfect was, and how it felt.