It hovered above on the ceiling,
It only would come at night,
My sister said she’d a feeling
It was dark, and was full of fright,
The light would glimmer and slowly fade
As the Moon came over the hill,
The globe grew dimmer in light and shade
Than a candle that flickered still.

I’d lie and I’d stare at the corner
Where the cloud had begun to swirl,
It had little form and no meaning
When first it began to unfurl,
But then came the claws in the ceiling
The eyes in the cloud glowing red,
And Clara would scream and be reeling
With her hands pulled over her head.

I thought that if I could disperse it,
It would run on back to its well,
And perhaps the Devil could curse it
Or find it a place in hell,
I beat at it with a baseball bat
But it seized the bat with its teeth,
And wrenched it out of my wretched hands
With a strength beyond belief.

It grew a cloak and a pair of horns
And roared with an orange flame,
It burnt a patch on the ceiling then
And I saw it had written its name,
‘Askarametch’ it had written there
The demon that lived in our well,
I said to Clara, ‘it won’t be long
I’ll be sending the demon to hell.’

In daylight hours I filled up the well
With bracken and poisonous weeds,
Then as the sun was beginning to fade
I’d add Belladonna seeds,
A gallon of petrol damped it all down
Till the Moon had begun to rise,
Then what I struck had it all lit up
To match the red demon’s eyes.

We never see clouds on the ceiling now
It doesn’t seem able to come,
The only thing is the sulphur smell,
It’s potent, I give you the drum.
It drifts on in from the well outside
And hangs in the bedroom air,
Clara will spray Devil’s Nightcap for days,
It’s better than demons in there.

David Lewis Paget