Cap moved as well, picking up a few other things from the floor. She saw they were mugs, and realized with a start that he was helping the priest on his sudden mission to find some tea. It was almost too bizarre. The proper thing to do following a supernatural attack wasn’t to sit down and have tea. It was to run like hell and not look back.
Yet here they were. Running hadn’t worked, so maybe this was the best thing for now. A moment later she found herself pawing through piles of debris as well, looking for the boxes of tea that had to be here somewhere. The three of them searched in silence for a few minutes. It was strangely calming. Hell itself could knock at her door, but she could still serve a guest some tea on a cold night.
Cap reached out and flipped a light switch near the door to the living room. Nothing happened, and Sarah felt dread seep into her bones once again. The light would not come on. Nothing was working right, nothing was acting as it should. It was all wrong, all strange, this house had ceased to be hers and become the property of an intruder.
“Ah-ha!” said Father Michael, and held up a half-crumpled box of Sleepytime Tea. The teapot began to whistle at almost the same time, and Father Michael went to the stove. He turned off the gas, then wrapped his free hand in the end of the dark coat he wore over his frock and moved the teapot off the burner. Cap, meanwhile, was picking chairs up from where they had been tossed and putting them around the table.
Sarah sat down next to Cap. Father Michael poured hot water in the mugs on the table. It could have been an evening visit from the neighborhood vicar for all the fuss anyone was making. She clung to that thought. She needed a moment of normalcy, even if it was imposed normalcy, forced like a shutter over a window that allowed an unpleasant view.
The three of them steeped their teabags in silence. Sarah kept wanting to get up and look out the windows, but Father Michael seemed unconcerned. He sipped at his tea, then set the mug down and inhaled deeply, as if by doing so he could gather in even more of the tea’s soothing taste.
“Very good. Very good indeed. Thanks,” said Father Michael. He sipped again, and Sarah saw his gaze flick over to Cap. Her husband, unlike her, had not taken his eyes off the kitchen window. Sarah remembered how the dark creature in the mist had only moved when they were not looking at it. Perhaps she should be watching. Though she knew that attempting to keep the thing at bay forever by this method would be ridiculous.
Then again, nothing else had seemed to work.
The priest’s voice cut into her thoughts. “Don’t worry,” said Father Michael. “We have a few minutes before they try again.”
Sarah saw confusion and despair warring on Cap’s face. The expression worried her. Cap had always been her rock, her salvation. Even during the worst crises, even during –
(the thing that had broken her life, separated it into The Before and The Now)
– the most awful moments, she had been able to count on him. To act, to do not merely a good thing, but the Right Thing. If he was himself grasping for understanding and for safety, what chance did she have?
“Before they try what?” said Cap. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Sarah mentally added the words, “And I’m not sure I want to know.” But she didn’t say them. Because she understood instinctively that they had to know. They had to know in order to survive. Even if knowing challenged everything they had understood before, even if knowing meant they had to dance on the knife edge of insanity. It was their only hope.
“No, of course you don’t,” agreed Father Michael affably. “I’m so sorry.” He sipped again at his tea, then pushed it aside. He clasped his hands across the shelf of his ample belly, and his eyes looked suddenly far away, as though he was lecturing a bored congregation. Or living a memory.
“They keep selling this house,” he finally said. “I keep telling them not to, but they keep selling it.”
“What do you mean, ‘they keep selling it’?” said Cap.
“Money-hungry bastards,” said the priest, his voice low and angry. Then his gaze snapped back to the present, and he smiled at Sarah and Cap. He looked embarrassed, as though to express such a thought was unlike him. “Oops, I mean ‘realtors.’” His grin faded then, and his eyes were once more fixed somewhere that was not precisely with them. He was in another place. And Sarah suspected that the place was a dark one. Just as she had The Before, so she sensed that the priest also had suffered pain and loss. Her soul ached for him. Though she did not know him, though he was a stranger, she sensed a kinship with him. They were fellow passengers on a dark ride.
“This house, as I’m sure you’ve noticed,” said Father Michael after another moment, “has certain… problems.”
Cap grimaced beside her. “That’s like saying Antarctica gets a bit chilly sometimes.”
“Just so,” said Father Michael. He chuckled. “Just so.” He sipped his tea again. When he put the mug down, he looked around, and after apparently failing to find what he was looking for he shrugged and wiped his mouth and chin with the back of his sleeve.
Lightning flashed, and its reflection bounced strangely off the white tile of the kitchen floor – what little of it was still visible under the scattered contents of the cupboards and cabinets. The electrical discharge illuminated the priest’s face and threw harsh shadows across it. He looked suddenly like a skull, grinning at her from above a priest’s frock. Sarah shuddered internally, and couldn’t help but think that this was an omen of doom.
“So,” she said, as much to derail her train of thought as to add to the conversation, “this has happened before?”
She already knew the answer, even before Father Michael nodded and took another sip of his tea. Sarah was aware her own tea was probably cooling rapidly in the cup, but she felt no further desire to drink. No matter what she might wish, normalcy would not return with a tea party. Perhaps it was gone forever.
“It has happened many times before,” said the priest. “This house… it’s a bad place. An evil place.”
“Where… what happened to the people who lived here before? Before us?” she said.
“Gone,” said Father Michael gloomily.
“Dead?” said Cap.
Father Michael shook his head. It looked like it took all his strength to do so, as though the motion had stolen something from him. His shoulders slumped slightly. “No. Not just dead. Gone,” he reiterated. “And believe me, gone is much worse than dead.”
The priest looked down. He did not elaborate or explain. His hands grasped the mug. They turned it around and around on the table, a nervous motion that spoke eloquent volumes of the man’s fear.
Sarah couldn’t watch it for long. She stood – slowly, her belly had changed her center of gravity so much that sometimes she lost her balance when standing up – and went to the kitchen window. She looked out.
There was nothing but mist and trees. All was silent, the night quiet. It was beautiful. Beautiful and terrifying at once.
Something glinted in the mist. She thought she saw a glint of silver, the flash of a knife and perhaps the vague outline of a tall hat passing through the fog. Then it was gone. Sarah looked for it again, but could not see it.
She turned away from the window. As she did, she felt herself tense, and expected the window to crash in behind her, the homicidal ghost coming at her with his knife and his fearful double grin. Or perhaps it would be one of the other specters that had come at them: the gallows ghost, the boy with the head that had been shot to pieces… even the crawling monstrosity from the road.
But the night stayed silent. The glass remained intact behind her.
“Why aren’t they attacking us now?” asked Cap. “They’re trying to get us, aren’t they? So why not keep at us? Why withdraw and wait?”
Father Michael nodded sagely, as though Cap were a favored seminarian who had just asked a particularly astute question. “They used up all their energy on their last assault. So they will wait. And in a
short while… they’ll come back.”
“Then we run again,” said Cap.
Father Michael shook his head quickly. “You’ll run right to them.” He sighed. “No, I’m afraid that the only way out is through. You’ll have to fight them.”
Cap snorted. “How do we fight ghosts? Do you have a proton pack under your coat?”
Father Michael smiled thinly, though not a trace of happiness could be seen in his eyes, which were dark as coals in the blackness of the kitchen. Again, Sarah felt as though she were glimpsing a bit of the future. As though she was not looking at a man, but at a soul already doomed, though he might not know it yet. Then Father Michael pursed his lips, and Sarah’s premonitory feeling grew even more pronounced.
“An exorcism,” said Father Michael.
Cap fairly pounced on the word. “An exorcism?” he said skeptically. “Isn’t that for possessed people?”
Father Michael shook his head. He was fat enough that any neck he might have was invisible under folds of flesh. The effect was strange, his head swiveling back and forth as though attached directly to the Roman collar via a complicated system of ball bearings. “An exorcism is for anything that suffers demonic intrusion. Like this house.” He leaned forward, his face close to Cap’s as he said the next words: “Like you.”
Cap jerked back as though the priest had tried to bite him. He looked afraid for a moment, raw terror making his handsome face temporarily ugly, lines of horror changing him from her husband into a fearful ghoul. “No,” he said, and as he said the word his expression settled down a bit. Sarah knew that he was hiding fear behind a mask of doubt. “This is too much. I’m sorry, but I just don’t –”
“Believe?” the priest interjected, finishing Cap’s sentence for him. Father Michael laughed. The sound rang off the kitchen walls hollowly, bereft of mirth. “You don’t have to believe in God for Him to love you. And you don’t have to believe in the devil for him to come for you.”
Cap looked at Sarah. She could see pleading in his eyes. She knew that he was begging her without words to say something, to bring the conversation back to reality, to something that he could believe in, something of flesh and blood that he could confront, could fight off.
But Sarah was silent. She couldn’t bring reality to this place. Reality had fled long ago, leaving behind only a mockery of life, a mad facsimile of the real world whose only inhabitants seemed to thrive not on food and oxygen and water but on fear and tears and death. So she turned away, looking instead at Father Michael.
“What do we have to do?” she said. And she felt like the words were less a call to action than a submission to the inevitable. As though she had already played this game, and knew how it ended, but was helpless to prevent it. What had been thwarted in The Before was going to be replayed here.
She was going to die.
18
The Third Day
3:37 am
***
Cap wanted to scream at Sarah. More than that, he suddenly felt murderous. He loved his wife, loved her more than anything else in his universe. But at that instant, at the moment when she asked what they had to do, he wanted to throw himself at her and pound her into silence.
The feeling surprised him. He almost choked on it, actually gulping as he sat there, as though he could swallow it down and make it disappear.
He loved Sarah. She was his everything, his best and strongest reason to live and to enjoy his life. But there was no denying that he felt like killing her, too. Because in asking the priest what to do, he felt like she had not merely agreed to their deaths, but was actively helping them along. And the primal part of him, the part of him that would not sacrifice itself willingly, not even to protect Sarah, was angry. She was not his wife for a moment, she was just a threat.
Cap held himself still. He didn’t move a muscle. It wasn’t him that wanted this, wasn’t him that suddenly ached for his wife’s death. Or at least, it wasn’t the him that he wanted to be in charge. And until that part of him was gone – or at least pushed back into the darkest recesses of his heart and chained up – he wasn’t going to move.
Slowly the feeling faded. He became aware that Father Michael was staring at him, as though the priest could tell exactly what Cap was feeling in that moment. That was impossible, he knew, but he couldn’t shake the impression that Father Michael was looking into his darkest secrets. As though the cleric was watching not a man, not a thing of flesh and blood, but a naked spirit with its sins and shortcomings written clearly across its features.
Cap exhaled. He felt normal again. Sarah wanted to do this. She wanted to follow the priest. Cap wouldn’t stand in her way. He would stand beside her, and would throw himself in front of any threat that might come out of this darkest of nights. But he would not impede her in her path. He was her husband, and he didn’t believe that entitled him to walk in front of her, any more than he was required to walk behind her. They were partners. They would face the future side by side.
Father Michael still hadn’t moved. Cap realized the priest was waiting for him to ask what to do just as Sarah had done; was waiting for him to sign on to the mad path they were about to walk.
Cap nodded. “What next?” he said. “What do we do?”
Father Michael gazed at him for another moment, long enough that Cap almost felt like the priest had been somehow replaced by a wax replica of himself, perfect in detail down to every pore and eyelash, but incapable of moving.
Then Father Michael nodded and stood in the same movement. He was surprisingly graceful for such a fat man, his bulk seeming not excessive but appropriate to who he was, as though his divine authority was such that it required extra flesh to properly clothe it. Father Michael stepped toward the hall. Cap waited for Sarah to follow, and he rose from the table as well, taking his wife’s hand in his own as they went after the priest.
Father Michael walked quickly down the hall. He headed directly to the front door, not even so much as looking to the side as he walked. Cap looked, though, glancing into each of the other rooms as he passed them. They were still wrecked, still a mess, but at least they were empty of movement. The things that had come into their house were gone.
For now.
He heard a click and realized that Father Michael had unlocked the front door. He wanted to shout at the priest to stop, but the black-frocked man moved too quickly. Before the words were even halfway to his lips, Father Michael had not only unlocked the door, but thrown it wide open.
“Don’t!” shouted Sarah. Cap was glad to hear that he wasn’t the only one with misgivings. She had asked what to do next, but it seemed she was as uncomfortable with the answer as he was.
Father Michael didn’t give the slightest indication that he heard her words. He stepped out onto the porch. Cap stopped moving. He could still see the priest in the darkness outside, the large outline of the fat man standing still on the porch, but he realized that he expected something to dart out and grab the man.
Nothing happened. Father Michael turned to them, and though Cap could not make out the man’s face, he sensed his impatience as the priest waved them over to him.
Cap looked at Sarah. She was shaking, her entire body trembling slightly. “It’ll be okay,” he murmured, though he knew no such thing. But Sarah nodded and apparently took his words to heart. Her shivering subsided, and she continued down the hall. Cap had to either go with her or let go of her hand. He wasn’t willing to let go of her, so he kept walking.
They got to the door, the empty frame standing in front of them like an invisible portal between a universe of relative safety and one of infinite hatred and hostility, a place where danger did not lurk in the shadows but ruled from on high. Cap paused at the threshold of the world outside. He didn’t want to go. Didn’t want to follow the priest. But again Sarah continued forward; again he had to either continue on or leave her to go without him.
He was seized anew by that feeling of anger that had gripped him for a moment
before. This was all Sarah’s fault! He shouldn’t have to go on! Let her do it, let her reap the inevitable consequence of the path she was taking, but let her do it alone.
Cap stepped onto the porch.
The rain was coming down harder now, the drops no longer long silken filaments in the moonlight, but rather pearls of brightness that sounded almost like hail on the patio roof. The tip-tapping of the rain reminded Cap of something. But he couldn’t put his finger on it.
The sound of water on the roof, the sound of salvation.
Cap tried to remember where he had heard this sound before, but couldn’t quite place it. He sensed that the memory was important, perhaps even critical to understanding what was going on around them. But it fled from his mind, hid somewhere deep within him, in a dark place that his conscious mind was unable to enter.
Other than the rain, only mist could be seen. The cloaked figure that Sarah and he had both seen was nowhere around. Only rain, and mist, and the house. Nothing else existed.
Cap pulled Sarah closer to him. She put her arms around his waist and held him tight. He took solace in her embrace. It wasn’t enough to pull them free from the nightmare that had ensnared them, but it gave him the strength to say, “What now?”
Father Michael looked away from them, peering into the mist as though by concentrating hard enough he might be able to part its thick curtain and reveal what hid behind it. “An exorcism follows set patterns,” he said. “First the owner of the house must try to cast out the ghost or ghosts himself.”
“How?” said Cap.
“Tell them to leave.”
“Just tell them?” said Sarah. Cap’s own mind echoed her disbelieving tone. After all that they had gone through, the answer couldn’t be that simple. It couldn’t be just a matter of telling the intruding spirits – and other things – to leave. Besides, hadn’t they already done that? Hadn’t he already screamed – pleaded – for these intruders to leave them alone?
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