My Best Friend's Exorcism

by Grady Hendrix

  He laughed nervously.

  “I think I know a place,” Abby said.

  “Great,” Brother Lemon said. “We just have to get her there. There are all kinds of demons. There are demons of confusion, and nihilism, and self-harm, and anger, and pride. There’s demons of infant baptism, Roman Catholicism, Jewish mysticism. They all know different things, like some know about theology, and some know about nuclear missiles, and some know a whole lot about science. But the one thing they all have in common is that they’re sort of wily creatures. So we have to have a backup plan for what to do if the demoniac—that’s your friend—says yes, she’ll get in the car with you, then at the last sec she changes her mind.”

  “Like, trick her?” Abby asked.

  “Or drug her,” Brother Lemon said casually, looking off into the distance behind Abby.

  “This is a bad idea,” Abby said. “I’m sorry, I—forget I came.”

  “What?” Brother Lemon said, leaning forward and waving his hands. “It’s not a big deal. Sometimes, you know, you have to break a few eggs.”

  “She’s my best friend,” Abby said.

  “Not anymore,” Brother Lemon said, staring at her. His eyes were green and beautiful. “She’s a demoniac. One possessed by a demon. She’s a creature of Andras now.”

  “What?” Abby asked.

  Brother Lemon enveloped her wrist in an enormous hand and pressed it to the table, lightly but firmly. “You know why I’m talking to you like this? Being so open and up-front? Because I’ve seen who’s inside of your friend, and I’m scared for you. This demon wants to isolate you. It wants to drive everyone else away. Then, when the time comes, it’ll make the demoniac wipe herself out and take you with it. You won’t have anyone left to help you when that hour is upon thee.”

  It sounded crazy, nuts, insane. But also very close to what was really happening.

  “Demons are ideas made flesh,” Brother Lemon said. “Bad ideas. The one inside your friend is discord, anger, and rage. He is the bringer of storms with a smile like lightning, brother of owls and giver of nightborn intelligence. He is the cleaving that can never be healed.”

  Abby didn’t dare to breathe.

  “Have you seen a lot of owls around?” Brother Lemon asked. “Heard them calling at night? They sense their master is near. You think I’m lying? Then tell me, is your friend trying to sow discord? Is her goal to turn friend against friend, family against family? Does she spread lies and deceit that bring down punishment and wrath on the innocent while the guilty go free?”

  Abby thought about Margaret. She thought about Glee. She thought about Gretchen reporting her daybook stolen. She thought about the notes Gretchen had brought Glee, and she knew that Gretchen had written them. She didn’t want to nod, but it was the truth.

  “You are not alone, Abby,” Brother Lemon said. “I’ll be your listening ear, your strong shoulder, and at any time, you can walk away. But don’t let Andras make you silent. Talk to me.”

  Tears slipped down Abby’s nose but she was determined to speak. It took fifteen minutes for her to tell Brother Lemon everything.

  “Yeah,” Brother Lemon said when she had finished, handing her a tissue from his fanny pack. “That totally makes sense. All those things happened over Halloween, which is the number one day of power for Satan. Andras often pretends to be a good guy as a smokescreen for his own agenda. The whole communist hunts in the fifties? Those were Andras. He uses chaos and anarchy for his own ends.”

  “He sounds bad,” Abby said in agreement, balling up the soaked tissue and trying to figure out how ruined her makeup was.

  “Abby,” Brother Lemon said, “do you know how this ends?”

  Abby shook her head.

  “It ends when your friend is crazy and in Columbia State Mental Hospital,” he said. “It ends with her smearing poop on the walls to make occult symbols of devil worship. Or it ends when she takes pills and dies, or eats a shotgun. And she will take people down with her. You told me a little bit about this Gretchen, and it sounds like she was a good friend. Well, if you’re her good friend, you can’t abandon her now. I know all the stuff I’m saying sounds pretty gnarly, but your friend is no longer in that body. She is somewhere else, lost and scared and alone. It’s up to us to save her.”

  “How do we get her to the place?” Abby asked after a moment. “You know, if she won’t come?”

  “GHB,” Brother Lemon said. “Weightlifters use it all the time. It’s a dietary supplement, but it knocks you right out if you take too much. Hard to get, though, and tricky to use. Demons may be evil little suckers, but they have to eat and drink just like the rest of us. Slip some in her drink, then we’ll take her to the car and convey her to the site of deliverance.”

  “I don’t know . . . ,” Abby said.

  “Well,” Brother Lemon said, shrugging his massive shoulders, “you think about it, and when you do know, you give me a call. But don’t wait too long. Your friend is probably still alive somewhere, but who knows for how long.”

  They walked out to the parking lot together, and on the way Brother Lemon said:

  “Want to see something?”

  Abby hesitated.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something in my car.”

  Abby followed but hung a few steps behind, remembering all the stories about men in white vans stealing girls from mall parking lots who were never seen again.

  Sure enough, Brother Lemon drove a white minivan, which set off alarm bells inside Abby’s brain. She looked around to see if anyone was watching as she followed him around to the back. He opened the door, and she checked to make sure she had a clear escape route. Just in case.

  “I thought you might have your friend here with you,” he said. “When you called? So I got all loaded up and ready to rock and roll if needed.”

  He unzipped two electric blue surfboard bags. Inside were nylon straps, handcuffs, a straitjacket, duct tape, ball gags, chains, collars, a leash and muzzle, a leather hood, shackles.

  “It’s for our safety, of course,” he said. And then he laughed and clapped his hands. “Hot darn, I’m excited,” he said, hopping from one foot to the other.

  Beds Are Burning

  “I’m ruined,” Glee sobbed.

  It was later that evening, and Abby had just answered the phone.

  “I can only talk for a minute,” Glee continued, her voice drunk with tears. “You have to know it wasn’t me.”

  That “me” turned into a keening whine and more crying.

  “It’s going to be okay, Glee,” Abby said.

  “No,” Glee said, suddenly clear-headed. “It’s never going to be okay again. We’re leaving. But someone has to know it wasn’t my fault.”

  “What happened?” Abby asked.

  “He sent me those letters,” Glee said. “All those letters saying he loved me and he’d never felt this way before and that he’d wait until I graduated and then quit his job and move to be near me wherever I went to college. He said that. And she said I had to talk to him, and when I did, he acted like he’d never noticed me before.”

  “Who said?” Abby asked.

  “I was humiliated,” Glee said, not stopping. “And I remember drinking orange juice and she said she’d put a little virtue in it, and then I remember being at the copy shop and then the sky was spinning all around me and then this.”

  “Who said?” Abby repeated. But she knew.

  “You know exactly who it was,” Glee said. “It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t . . . I have to go.”

  Abby called back but the phone was off the hook, and the next day Glee had disappeared; her family swept her out of sight and swallowed her up. But Abby knew she was broken in a way that might never be repaired.

  Of course she knew the name that Glee didn’t say. It was Gretchen.

 
; Abby couldn’t stop her alone, but who was going to help? Not Brother Lemon. No one carrying handcuffs and duct tape in their trunk was a real solution. Not Glee. Not Father Morgan, because he was gone, too. So Abby went to the toughest person she knew: Margaret.

  Margaret had been out of school for weeks; probably being treated for anorexia privately in her home, where the Middletons could keep an eye on her. Before going to her house, Abby stopped by the Market and picked up a bunch of red carnations. On the way out, she spotted a pint of Frusen Glädjé pralines and cream—Margaret’s favorite, but was that the sort of thing you took someone with anorexia? Abby wasn’t sure but decided to get it anyway. By now Margaret was probably bouncing back; nothing kept her down for long.

  The Middletons had houses all over Charleston, but their downtown house was an enormous wooden pile on Church Street with the roots of a live oak busting up the sidewalk out front, cracking the first two brick steps that led to the door. It was an old Charleston single house, so it had two columned porches stacked up on the side, pulling the massive wooden wreck slowly to the right, collapsing gracefully in a two-hundred-year swoon.

  Abby parked on the street and rang the doorbell, heard the chimes echo deep inside the house, and then waited, scanning up and down the street to make sure no one spotted her. She didn’t know why, but she felt like she was doing something wrong. She rang again. Somewhere inside, an Irish setter barked. Finally she heard the front door crack open and a man yell:

  “Beau, no! Stay, dummy.”

  Heavy footsteps tromped across the porch, making the house shake, and then the door opened.

  Riley stood in the doorway, looking down at Abby. He was too cool to admit he remembered her, if he even did.

  “Hey,” Abby said, trying to sound cool. “I’m friends with Margaret. I came to see her?”

  Riley slumped one shoulder against the door jamb and picked something from between his back teeth with a finger.

  “She’s sick,” he said.

  “I brought her Frusen Glädjé,” Abby said, holding up the plastic bag. “It’s better when it’s soft, but I don’t want it to melt everywhere. And I got her flowers?”

  Riley studied the tip of his spit-slicked forefinger for a minute, then threw the door wide and walked back into the house, the porch boards cracking and popping beneath his feet.

  “Close the door,” he called over his shoulder as he disappeared inside.

  Abby followed and closed the street door as best she could, but it was so warped by humidity and layers of old paint that it barely fit in its frame. Then she followed Riley into the dim interior.

  Old Charleston houses were everything you didn’t want in a coastal home: they were big, they were uninsulated, and they were made of wood. They cost a fortune to maintain, but if you owned one you cared more about living south of Broad than you did about money. Besides, shabby chic was the order of the day. Every downtown house’s exterior looked exactly the same: neatly painted white columns, shining coats of fresh paint on the exterior walls, glossy black shutters pinned back from the windows, scrolled wrought-iron fences and gates enclosing microscopic front yards. But every interior, hidden from public view, was its own secret study in decay. Ceilings sagged, walls cracked, paint blistered, plaster peeled, sometimes down to the lath, but the owners just shrugged and walked around the holes in their floors, or ate in the kitchen if the dining room ceiling had collapsed. Families of humans coexisted peacefully with families of raccoons living in the walls, and when fires were lit for the first time in winter, the pigeons living in the chimneys asphyxiated and dropped down the flues in swirls of sooty feathers. The help constantly swept the floors to pick up the flakes of lead paint that rained from the ceilings. Plaster dust showered onto plates at dinner parties when someone walked across the floor upstairs. Doors couldn’t be opened because the keys had been lost years ago or the locks had rusted shut. The right kind of people endured these inconveniences without complaint because, if they didn’t, it was a sure sign they had no business owning a real Charleston house after all.

  Abby entered the dark front hall, just as Riley’s broad back disappeared toward the kitchen. She stepped over a rolled-up carpet and followed him into the dining room. A hole in the ceiling over the mahogany table showed the raw cedar joists holding up the second floor, and the china and crystal in its breakfront rattled and chimed as she walked across the uneven floor. Then she was pushing through the swinging doors and entering the bright back kitchen.

  The light hurt her eyes. This was the one renovated part of the house, along with a rear addition that had central air. Riley was sitting at the sleek white island, eating a banana and a jar of peanut butter with a knife. A copy of Hustler was open on the counter in front of him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Spoons,” Abby said. She clanked open the overloaded drawer next to the buzzing refrigerator, yanked it past the point where it stuck, and grabbed two mismatched spoons. She threw them in the bag with the Frusen Glädjé, then slammed the drawer closed with her hip.

  “Don’t be long,” Riley said, studying his Hustler with peanut-

  butter-sticky fingers. “I’m not supposed to let anyone see her.”

  “When’s your mom coming back?” Abby asked.

  Riley shrugged and turned another page, revealing a woman in too much makeup displaying her vagina. Abby went out of her way not to look. She walked past Beau’s pillow, where the Irish setter looked up at her, shivering, and headed up the servants’ stairs at the back of the house, balancing her bag and the flowers, the spoons clinking against each other as she went.

  The stairs were steep, dark, and narrow; a long-ago fire had caused smoke damage that scaled the avocado-green walls. Abby emerged in the high-ceilinged upstairs hall and walked toward the front of the house, the wood floors creaking all the way; finally, she pushed open the massive door to Margaret’s room.

  The curtains were shut, the room was dark, and it was dank with the humid smell of sickness.

  “Margaret?” Abby called into the shadows.

  The bed was an enormous pile of blankets and tangled sheets, slept in but empty, glowing white in the dimness. Abby picked her way toward the bathroom, where a nightlight was burning, and then jumped when the bedsheets spoke:

  “M’Riley?”

  Abby froze.

  “Margaret?” she asked.

  “Abby?” Margaret sounded as surprised as she could muster with her weak voice.

  “I brought Frusen Glädjé,” Abby said, holding up the bag in the darkness, hoping that Margaret could see her from wherever she was. “And spoons. We have one mission: to eat all this ice cream.” Then she told a merciful lie, one she hoped would put Margaret in a receptive mood: “Wallace asked me to bring you flowers. They’re carnations, of course, which is exactly what he would pick.”

  “Why’re y’here?” Margaret moaned, and the sheets thrashed.

  “Because you’ve been out of school for weeks.” Abby walked over to the bed and reached under the tasseled shade of a bedside lamp. “And even though you’re mad at me, you’re still my friend.”

  She clicked on the light and immediately wished she hadn’t.

  “Oh,” Abby said. When she couldn’t think of anything else to say, she said it again. “Oh.”

  Margaret was a yellowed bone buried in dirty sheets. A withered thing, lying weak and helpless, eyes E.T.-sized, face gaunt. Her hair was as colorless as her eyes, and it was thin and started high on her forehead; Abby could see too much scalp. Thick foam was caked in the corners of Margaret’s mouth. She blinked in the light, and greasy tears slid from her eyes.

  “Wallace didn’t . . . give you anything,” Margaret rasped. “Quit being . . . so fucking nice . . . all the time . . .”

  When Margaret spoke, Abby saw a gray fuzz coating her tongue. She looked away, trying to focus on so
mething—anything—else.

  “I got poisoned . . . ,” Margaret rasped. Then she dragged a skeleton’s claw from beneath the blanket, the bones barely covered with skin, fingernails growing into calcified talons as her cuticles retreated. “Someone . . . poisoned me . . .”

  In Abby’s mind, the pieces slot-machined into place. She set down the carnations and took one of Margaret’s ice-cold hands.

  “Was it the German milkshake?” she asked.

  Margaret gagged and Abby saw every tendon in her cheeks flex.

  “Don’t talk . . . ,” Margaret gasped as her throat spasmed.

  “. . . about food . . .”

  “But you have to eat,” Abby said. “You look like an Ethiopian.”

  Margaret’s watery eyes focused on the plastic capsule of Frusen Glädjé. Her tongue snaked out and slid over chapped lips. Her shoulders hunched, her skull lifted, and for a second it looked like she was going to sit up, but then she flopped her enormous, fragile head back down onto her pillows. Fecal air puffed out from beneath the pile of blankets.

  “They want it to . . . pass through my system,” Margaret said. “But I’m . . . hungry . . .”

  “And here I am with Frusen Glädjé,” Abby said, smiling. “It was meant to be. Just a spoonful.”

  Margaret was too weak to nod, so Abby went to the vanity and dragged the frilly white piano bench to the side of the bed and sat down. She cracked the top of the plastic pint and then peeled back the white film, setting it faceup on the bedside table. Instantly, the cold, snowy smell of ice cream filled the sweaty room.

  Margaret’s lips slid up to reveal her teeth. They looked huge compared to the rest of her sunken face, and Abby realized she was trying to smile.

  “Good?” Abby asked.

  “Lemme jus’ . . . smell it first,” Margaret said.

  Abby held the ice cream underneath Margaret’s skull nose and watched as she closed her eyes and seemed to fall asleep. Margaret’s nostrils flexed slowly as she got stoned on the scent of frozen, whipped sugar. None for Abby, though. Even though her mouth was watering, she didn’t think she could keep anything down in this room.