Did you ever wonder where demons live? Not in the ground. Not in fire. Not in the places the old stories warn you about. They live closer than that in the space behind a stranger's eyes, in the silence after a man loses everything, in the moment a soul finally let’s go and something else slides in to take its place. In 1919, on a ranch at the end of a road nobody uses anymore, in the body of a man who had nowhere left to go, something ancient made itself comfortable. It had worn a hundred faces before this one. It had walked through plagues and wars and watched empires rot from the inside, patient as rust. But this time was different. This time, it had plans of its own, plans bigger than anything it had built before, and a broken country that was hungry enough to hand him the keys. It found a hollow man with a dead man's dreams still rattling around inside him. It found a nation on its knees, aching for someone — anything — to make it feel powerful again. And it found a hunger so old it has no name in any living language, only a shape, and that shape was learning to smile for crowds. What it did not find — not for twelve long years — was the priest in the back pew who felt the wrongness of him the moment he opened his mouth to speak. The gangster who prayed every Sunday and killed every other day of the week, and who would trade his soul without blinking if it meant putting a bullet where it belonged. Or the woman closest to it all, who kept her secrets, her loyalties, and her heart in three separate locked drawers, and never let anyone see all three keys at once. This is the account of what happened when they finally came for it. Told by the only one who survived to tell it.