Chapter 12
“Should we start with the basement door?” Tom felt like packing his shotgun.
“Nah. That’s just to get us rattled. Just the beginning. When’s the last time you went to confession, Tom?”
Tom turned red. “Years.”
“Why don’t you collect your thoughts for a minute and give me your confession? There is great power in this sacrament and it will make you stronger during our … purification of this house. Then I’ll say a blessing over you. We’ll say a prayer together and start cleansing this house and your property.”
Tom thought. He wasn’t a big sinner. Some cussing. Some unkind thoughts about the people running the world and the government. But maybe that wasn’t a sin. He missed Mass—a lot. Oh, and let’s see, he murdered a man on Saturday. That might be a tough one. He sat in the chair motionless. He couldn’t lie to Father Bob. He would either have to confess it or avoid it.
Father Bob sat in the overstuffed chair across from Tom. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair and finally he leaned forward. “Tom, come on. I bet I know old ladies with more to confess than you.” The laughter in his eyes faded as he looked at Tom’s face. “What’s wrong?”
Tom swallowed hard. “I know your vows as a priest bind you, but I need your promise as a friend also, that you will not repeat what I tell you to anyone without my permission.”
Father Bob nodded, and Tom began with his search for the calf and ended with him pulling up in front of the priest’s house. Tom felt so much better when he finished; he leaned back in his chair and relaxed. In the distance thunder rumbled.
Father Bob rubbed his face and stood up. He walked around the room several times, deep in thought. He was so serious and quiet that Tom began to get nervous. “Father, was I wrong—?”
Father turned on his heel and faced Tom. “Of course not, I wish you had an Uzi and shot all of the beasts! No! You did absolutely right and I want you to be at peace with that. I’m just angry with the cops. These people carry on and thrive, because the cops don’t want to get involved. I don’t blame you; it’s just that the system makes me so angry.” He was pacing now. “Where do they suppose so many of these missing people go? And the abducted children? Not all of them are taken by groups like this, but many are.” Father stalked over to the whiskey bottle, had another pull and offered it to Tom. Tom shook his head. “Okay then, I could talk all night. Let’s finish your confession and let’s get this filth out of your house; then I can think about where we go from here.”
He gave Tom penance to be completed later. They knelt and said some prayers together. The Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be and finally the prayer to Michael the Archangel, a prayer Tom had heard before but didn’t know by heart. As they prayed, the noises in the basement increased and came to a crescendo during the prayer to Michael. Father asked protection on each of them, the house, everything in the house, the property and everything on the property. As they stood to begin, the house was still again.
Almost on cue, the storm reached the house. Wind gusted hard into the windows and blew papers off the desk and ruffled magazines on the coffee table; Tom hurried and closed the windows. Outside the night was weirdly black with thunderheads; a great bolt of lightning struck the east side of the ranch. “That was close!” Tom said; the thunder echoed his words.
The power went out and they both cracked up. “I feel like I’m in a Three Stooges movie,” laughed Father Bob. He produced a lit candle, and the sweet scent of beeswax touched Tom’s nostrils. He gave the candle to Tom and lit three more. He put two on either end of the coffee table, cleared off the magazines and replaced them with the Bible. He also put two smaller books on the table, the jar of salt and the jug of Holy Water. He turned to Tom. “Got a hammer? And some small nails? For these,” he explained, showing him the pile of crucifixes.
Tom found what they needed and they began to put them up. Father Bob explained that if they put a crucifix on the outside of every door to the house it would deter anything or anyone evil from entering. “Of course, I say ‘deter’; an entity of great power might only hesitate.” For further protection, they placed a crucifix where it would be the first thing seen upon entering the house. There were only two doors to the house, so this was easy. However, the back door was right next to the basement, and Tom was starting to get the heebies just going near it. They put up the crucifixes, and the basement door trembled in the doorjamb. Tom began to sweat.
Outside the storm raged. Large trees around the yard swayed like giant ragdolls. The door quit rattling, but the wind howled at the windows so loudly he could barely tell. The lightning increased and illuminated the inside of the house like a strobe light. The accompanying thunder reminded him of the cannons he heard at a Civil War reenactment years ago. It had been a long time since he had seen and heard such a storm. Is this the fucking weirdest moment of my life? Having a priest exorcise my house by candlelight in the middle of a thunderstorm?
Father Bob ignored the basement door and beckoned Tom to the living room. He opened a little box filled with Saint Benedict medals. “We will put these above every window. We can either nail them above or hang them from the curtain rod.”
Tom thought it was overkill for about half a second and then wondered if he was nuts. After what he and Cami experienced he knew there was a dark side.
Putting the medals up took longer, as there were ten windows. They finished and returned to the living room.
“I will be saying some of these prayers in Latin. They really hate Latin for some reason, or at least the prayers seem more effective against them when said in Latin. If I say one in English that you know, say it with me. Never speak directly to a demon. That’s a mistake. I will speak to anything we encounter—you are my spiritual assistant. It’s best for you to pray silently to yourself when you can’t join me in the Latin prayers.” Tom nodded and put his hand around the Saint Benedict medal at his throat.
“Scared?” the priest asked.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“I am too—a little.” Father Bob patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry. We’re not dealing with a possessed person here, which would be a thousand times worse, just a house.” He handed Tom a small flashlight. “Put that in your pocket. Just in case.” Then he had him take a book of matches, a lit candle and a spray bottle that he had filled with Holy Water. “Are you ready?”
“I guess.” Tom couldn’t hear anything in the basement and had a half-hearted hope that everything would go easy.
“I need you to stay close with that candle so I can read,” Father said.
Tom nodded. “Why candles?”
“Because they hate them—I’ll explain later.” Father Bob put the two small books into pockets under his robe. Tom put the book of matches into his shirt pocket. He held the candle in his left hand and the spray bottle in his right, feeling like some kind of religious gunslinger.
They went through each room of the house with Father Bob blessing it and Tom misting it with Holy Water when the priest told him to. It went fast and quietly except for the noise of the storm. They reached the back porch and the basement door last. He blessed the room, and Tom gave it an extra good misting, but nothing happened.
“Tom.” Father Bob gestured at the basement door. Tom got the spray bottle pointed at the door and started to pull the trigger when the door slammed open and a foul, icy wind shrieked out, blasting him. In the split second that the candle was still lit, Tom saw someone at the bottom of the stairs. He jerked his arms to his face, shielding it against the gust; the basement door slammed shut. He and Father Bob stood in the back porch in the dark; Tom shuddered and slowly lowered his arms.
“Light the candle, Tom.” The priest’s voice was hard to read. He hooked the trigger of the spray bottle in his belt loop and got the candle relit. The air was still foul, and he realized he had been holding his breath. It was a mix of every awful thing he’d ever smelled. An outhouse on a
mid-August day, the dead animal pit he’d seen as a child, vomit on the tilt-a-whirl at the carnival, and the stale air of the old folk’s wing at the hospital. He gagged and then put the candle closer to his face. The sweet, natural smell of the golden wax seemed to overpower the air around it. Father Bob joined him, and they stood across from each other breathing the air around the candle.
“Remist the room—you’ll be amazed,” Father Bob told Tom when he had caught his breath. Tom resprayed the room, and as the Holy Mist flew through the air and dropped, the stench was gone. “Back to the living room,” said Father Bob. They went back to the living room. Tom could see the process was taking longer than he thought, as the candles had burned down low on the table. Father Bob replaced them and refilled the spray bottle for Tom. The storm had finally passed over the ranch and moved north of them. The thunder boomed in the distance but was growing fainter. The new silence was worse than the storm.
“I saw something down the steps in the basement.” Tom’s voice was unsteady. He had not realized how much it had bothered him.
“I’m sure you did. Care to go into detail?”
“I-I think it was him.” No actually, he knew it was him. The tall figure of his nightmares was in his basement.
“Yes. I was afraid he might be, especially when you told me about the jewelry. It’s a little late for this advice, Tom, but be very careful about what you bring into your home. Objects can retain energy from their owners. The closer the object was to the person, the frequency of its use by a person and its function; all have an effect on the object. Now if our nasty devil-worshipping acquaintance wore this necklace every day of his sorry life and made regular habit of Satanic ritual, that’s some powerful stuff. For his spirit to be suddenly disconnected from his body adds to the chance that he just hung around where he died. When you and the cop came and took his necklace, which was probably important to him, it was a natural to follow you home. Spirits and demons much prefer a dwelling to haunt. And if there are people there to play with, so much the better.
“People into voodoo and black magic use the same course. They can mail you a little present or take an object of yours and make your life much more difficult.” Tom paled. “Let’s take five.” They sat down. The only sounds were the tick of the clock and the storm in the distance.
After a few minutes, Tom asked, “Can these spirits or beings hurt us?”
“Yes. There are those that would argue with me, but I’ve seen too many freak accidents and weird things happen—ceiling fans coming unscrewed and falling on people, people being startled when they are standing on a ladder or distracted when they are using power tools, kind of impersonal incidents like that. They love to play with electricity and electric-powered gadgets, because that’s what they are made of. I have seen more personal severe attacks where the person is clawed, violated, thrown about and so on, but the worst attack is when they get into your mind. It’s horrible and I’m certain it shortens a person’s life. It’s a glimpse into hell, really, and when it’s over, you feel like someone tramped through your soul with sewer boots on. Vacant, empty, despairing, filth, abomination, pure hatred, gray, hollow—these are words I would use to describe it.”
Tom leaned forward. “It happened to you?”
“You can’t help with an exorcism and not have it happen to you. And it is usually worst for the priest in charge; he’s the main focus of the attack. They know everything about you, everything you are ashamed of, and they will tell everyone in the room via the possessed. But they can’t read your mind. Thank God. They have to guess from your expressions, reactions and what they know about you. Having a poker face can really help you in an exorcism.”
“But, we are not dealing with a possessed person here … so it shouldn’t be that bad.”
Father Bob rubbed his hands together and stood. “No, it shouldn’t. It may be demons. It may be a ghost. It could be both. If it’s who you think it is, it will be a very nasty ghost. So it may take longer than I thought. As you can tell, you may be relighting that candle a few times and that’s why we have the flashlight, but I want you to try and relight as soon as possible. The candle, the Holy Water, the crucifix, these are tools—very powerful tools, but the only power here is Jesus and He is going to help us. The biggest mistake people make is trying to fight evil on their own. Jesus is the only power that that thing in the basement fears, and we will drive it out with Jesus. Any self-pride or belief in your own power can be dangerous—even deadly for both of us. If the demons or ghost discern that you are working on your account—all hell really does break loose, because they only fear Jesus Christ.”
Tom nodded. He would really try to pray when they dealt with the basement. Up here with the storm and watching Father Bob, he had prayed a little, but his concentration was scattered. He was going to have to try harder. He stood, picked up the candle and wrapped his hand around the spray bottle of Holy Water. “Ready?”
“Yeah. Now, Tom, we are going to advance as slowly as we have to—kinda like a battlefield. When we’ve secured an area, we’ll move forward. Upstairs was easy, I blessed it thoroughly and I couldn’t sense any problems here. Downstairs … is going to take awhile.”
Chapter 13
They approached the basement door and again Tom misted it with Holy Water. He braced himself for another foul blast of air. Nothing. They stood there for a moment in silence.
“Let’s put up another crucifix,” said Father Bob. They went back to the living room and came returned with the tools and nailed up a crucifix exactly opposite the basement door. “And let’s put another one on the door itself.”
Yes, let’s do that, Tom thought, wondering why “let’s” meant he was doing the hammering and Father Bob was watching from a safe distance. He brought the nail to the door and jumped as his fingers brushed the wood. It was icy and the Holy Water was a film of frost. “It’s frozen,” he whispered to the priest. Father Bob nodded and gestured for Tom to continue. He began to pray the invocation of Michael the Archangel while Tom worked.
With the first stroke of the hammer there was a loud scraping across the basement floor and the sound of something big hitting the stairs. Tom winced and began to pray, “Please Jesus help me!” over and over in his head, because it was short, to the point and all he could manage at the moment.
He raised the hammer for the second blow and Father Bob prayed on. “… defend us in battle against the princes and powers and rulers of darkness in this world, against the spiritual iniquities of those former angels. Come to the help of men—” Bang! He whacked the nail again and something hit the door hard on the other side, pushing it tight against the frame. He heard cracking noises as the door was being pushed harder and harder. Tom stood with the hammer in front of him like a club. Father Bob nudged him with his elbow without stopping the prayer. “Pray to the God of peace that He crush Satan under our feet …”
Tom quietly placed the crucifix over the nail. The cracking stopped, and again Father Bob’s prayer was the only sound. “Make captive that Animal, that Ancient Serpent, which is enemy and Evil Spirit, and reduce it to everlasting nothingness, so that it can no longer seduce the nations.
“Shall we?” Father Bob nodded at the door. Tom tried the knob, frozen too, but it wouldn’t budge. He knew the lock was broken and the door was hanging there. He gently put his shoulder against it and pushed. It felt like it was nailed in place. He thought about slamming it with all his weight, but abandoned that idea when he imagined the door swinging wide at the last moment with him falling down the stairs into the abyss of the cellar and into the clutches of whatever was waiting in the darkness. Instead he removed the crucifix, stepped back and kicked it hard, catching himself on the doorframe as the door splintered and half of it fell down the stairs.
“Good,” said Father Bob. There was a final bang as the parts of the broken door hit the bottom of the stairwell and then nothing.
“Now what?” Tom wished he had a fire hose of Holy Water ins
tead of the little misting bottle in his hand.
“Pick up your candle, mist, pray and stay by me.” The priest smiled. His unperturbed attitude was difficult for Tom to emulate and that was annoying.
Tom picked up the flickering candle and stood at Father Bob’s left. They were at the entrance of the stairs, and Tom misted as far down the stairs as the sprayer would reach.
Father Bob began, “Unclean Spirit! Whoever you are and all your companions who possess this home. By the mysteries of the Incarnation, the Sufferings and Death, the Resurrection and the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ; by the sending of the Holy Spirit; and by the Coming of Our Lord into Last Judgment, I command you:
“Obey me in everything, although I am an unworthy servant of God. Do no damage to me, my assistant or to any of his goods or property.”
There was no sound from the black of the basement, and Tom realized he was holding his breath again and that his muscles were tensed as hard as a rock. He exhaled and he and Father Bob exchanged glances. They began the descent. Step by step, Father Bob prayed aloud. The candle flickered, but stayed lit, and Tom misted away. The circle of light now touched the edge of the stairwell and the broken door. The mist of Holy Water wafted down onto the wreckage, and Tom saw it ever so slowly begin to vibrate. Father Bob saw it too. “Behold the Cross of the Lord!” He thrust a crucifix towards the vibrating wood. “Depart, Enemies!”
The fragment rocked wildly and flipped up and flew directly at them. Tom ducked his head and stepped protectively in front of the priest and blocked it with his shoulder. It fell to the stairs and he stood on it, misting it like crazy.
“Tom.” Tom really was into missing the sucker.
“Tom!” Father Bob had to shake his arm. “I think that’s enough.”
Tom was shaking and realized he had been cussing. This, he thought, was probably unproductive. Through all this, the candle remained lit. Father Bob stepped past Tom and down towards the landing. “I exorcise you, Most Unclean Spirit! Invading Enemy! All Spirits! Every one of you! In the name—”
The Sacrifice Page 6