Reverend Medhurst could feel the young man’s trepidation at what had happened just a few minutes ago – a distinct ripple of fear that coursed through his crossed hands as they rested on the author’s head. But John was, or at least thought he was, an unbeliever. So there was no way the reverend could prepare him for what might happen in the next few minutes. Still, he had no choice. He had to see this through to its conclusion, as he had over the last many years – more times than he cared to remember.
Finally, he drew himself to his full height and spoke the beginning words of the cleansing. His voice echoed off the stone walls and filled the church.
“I BIND BY THE TRUE GOD ... THE LIVING GOD. IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER ... AND OF THE SON ... AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT... ANY EVIL FORCE THAT MAY WISH TO HARM THIS SOUL NOW BEFORE ME.”
And, just like that, all hell broke loose.
But it wasn’t the kind of nightmarish infernal action writers or moviemakers would often depict. John didn’t flail wildly about, his arms thrashing at the air; he didn’t froth at the mouth; he never wailed like some demon ejected from the depths of Hell; he didn’t spout blasphemies or speak in some strange and ancient tongue.
In fact, John didn’t react at all. The response to the reverend’s first words of the ritual was indeed overtly physical, but it was aimed more at the cleric than at the young man he was attempting to help.
A murky black storm cloud billowed into being just inside the oak-wood front doors. An instant later, a totally unnatural wind erupted from it, whistling down the center aisle of the church, picking up speed and force as it came. It was like some living, breathing thing charged with only one purpose: to end the exorcism – the cleansing – before it had barely begun.
By the time it reached the reverend and John, the devil wind had become a roaring beast, the air around it alive with swirling dust and debris. The savage apparition slammed the microphone and stand to the floor with a loud thud, the first casualty of its onslaught.
Then it was upon them.
It hammered at the old cleric, ripping at his clothes. It whipped the strands of his thinning hair around like a doomed flag about to be shredded from its flagpole by a Maine nor’easter.
Though under attack, the reverend fought to stand his ground, his crossed hands firmly clutching John’s head. He appeared surprised by this sudden assault; but he refused to give in to it. He defiantly shouted the opening words of the cleansing ritual a second time:
“I BIND BY THE TRUE GOD … THE LIVING GOD ... IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER … AND OF THE SON … AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT...”
*******
At the center of this chaos, John was completely engulfed by the dark, tornado-like wind. And although his hair and clothes flapped wildly about his body, he stayed on his knees, eyes closed, looking for all the world as if he was experiencing some kind of out-of-body experience.
And that was exactly what was happening. He did not react to the wildly savage attack, because he never felt or heard it. The events taking place in St. John’s Church might well have been taking place on some other planet. John G. Jones was some … where else, some … place else. He was at some other point in time and space, locked in a vision-like experience that he would not have been able to explain to anyone at that moment, even if wanted to.
John was floating, falling – tumbling, really – through something akin to the inky blackness of space, peppered only with distant points of light. He could still hear the reverend’s words, but they quickly began to fade in the distance, soon replaced with a soft wailing moan.
And then, somehow, abruptly, he was staring at himself, off in the far distance. He looked very small in the vastness, trapped inside a gigantic version of the Dark Sigil, a twisted ominous shape as big as the galaxy itself.
The wailing moan increased in volume.
John’s now tiny body slowly lost all hint of color. He was rapidly taking on the same dark shadowlike hue as The Dark Sigil itself.
The wail reached ear-shattering volume, and then oscillated into a ferocious shriek.
John cried out, suddenly wracked with pain – the same pain he’d felt in St. John’s Church. But now, instead of being centered in the pit of his stomach, the pain ripped at every joint and tore at every muscle. It threatened to burst his brain, to blow apart every organ in his body as it seared the very blood pumping through his veins.
So this is how it ends, he thought. This is what it’s really like to die. A strangely distant flash of thought wondered how it could be so different than he had imagined, or even read about. But mostly he just hoped it would end soon. He was sure he couldn’t take much more.
At that instant, he began to hear the soft strains of a melodic, almost angelic tri-tone. It engendered a feeling of peace and, yes, even joy.
This tone grew in intensity ... and suddenly there were stars, and millions of bright objects, some so close they looked as if he could reach out and touch them: suns, moons and nebulae that burned against the darkness. As he watched in rapt awe they whirled and whirled, compressing, morphing into what seemed to be a living spiraling … something – something he could not begin to put a name to.
Though he never consciously realized it, the intense pain that just an instant ago had threatened to tear him apart, limb from limb, was already fading.
The suns, moons and nebulae slowly compressed themselves into a singularity: a single entity encompassing the total brightness of them all. It was a thing of intense light, all comforting curves, golden spheres and circles; a gigantic version of the shape that Jennifer wore on the chain on her neck: a “pure” symbol as big and bright and strong as its counterpart was evil.
The Light Sigil grew in size and the melodic tri-tone swelled to encompass John. It rapidly forced all hint of the mournful wail and the intense pain to nothingness.
The Dark Sigil shrunk back, curved into an arc – first one, then another, lapping over itself. As the brightness expanded, it began to even lose its darkness; it became a sickly shade of grey. Moments later it was unable to hold onto even that. Soon it swept away and John was unable to see it at all through the wonderful golden light.
Now a smaller but just as astonishing doppelgänger swept free of The Light Sigil. In seconds it took shape ... an amorphous form, vaguely humanoid, but made of breathtaking golden light. Just the sight of it made John feel warm all over. As the extraordinary light figure drifted closer, a voice – if anything so angelic could be called a ‘voice’ – sounded in his head, like intricate, tingling chimes.
John couldn’t comprehend what it was saying: the words were there, all right, but for some reason he couldn’t seem to decipher them.
“Am I dead?” he called out, his voice sounding dull and cumbersome next to the angelic words he’d heard in his mind. “This must be Heaven? It can’t be anything else.”
But then the words in his head finally took shape. And there was a strange familiarity about them, like some long-forgotten memory that plucked at the edge of his conscious thought, just a hairsbreadth out of reach.
“John! Come this way.”
John struggled to remember where he’d heard the voice before, as it called again with more urgency now.
“John! Hurry!”
Without doing anything he could take credit for, John found himself at first drifting, then racing towards the light-figure. As he went the form took shape … and now he knew why the voice had seemed so familiar. This warm, smiling, marvel of light was an ethereal version of Jennifer, floating there in space, calling to him.
“Hurry, John. There’s not much time.”
John found himself babbling; what else could he do?
“H...how can you be…?Where is … this? W.. what are we doing here?”
“No time for questions, now. Follow me. And stay close.”
The words of the ethereal form of Jennifer held a warmth John couldn’t ever remember feeling before. Just hearing them made him feel safe, somehow. Without really
thinking if it was a good idea or not, he streaked alongside this Ethereal Jennifer as she raced off past moons, stars and suns, towards the outer edge of The Light Sigil.
The pair reached The Light Sigil and Jennifer’s ethereal form stopped, turned, and smiled at John. Her entire body began to glow even brighter, somehow lit from within ... until she was wrapped in a blazing cocoon of illumination hovering in space. It was hard for John to clearly make out the details inside this glowing ball, but there was no doubt she was naked.
As he watched, a hand, then an arm, drifted from the cocoon, the long delicate fingers motioning him to join her inside. Again without a thought as to the sensibility of such an action he moved forward, entered the ball of light and instantly transformed into an ethereal glowing naked version of himself. A short beat later the two refulgent beings were wrapped in each other’s arms, looking like some alien Da Vinci painting, two joined star-creatures spiraling in the cosmos.
John was in ecstasy; filled to overflowing with a feeling of warmth, of belonging, of perfect union, like nothing he’d even known. He wanted to cry out. He wanted to try to express the intense feelings that filled his being; but instead he just floated there, feeling happier than he had ever felt before.
But in St. John’s Church it was utter chaos. The Reverend Medhurst, although still under attack, fought desperately to stand his ground. His crossed hands were still firmly placed on John’s head, the wildly improbable wind was still ripping at him, but he did not stop shouting the words of the cleansing.
“I BIND BY THE TRUE GOD, THE LIVING GOD. IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, AND OF THE SON, AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT ... ANY EVIL FORCE THAT MAY WISH TO INTRUDE ... INTERFERE ... DISTURB, OR DISTORT THE LIFE OF THIS CHILD OF GOD!”
The howl of the wind was joined by a violent rattling as the massive oaken doors of the church began to shudder, their aged solid steel hinges barely able to contain them. A beat later, the rattling was dwarfed by a bizarre hissing as ash-white smoke erupted from the ancient wood. When it cleared a moment later, an image of The Dark Sigil was seared into them.
The rattle finally reached an ear-piercing screech, and the doors exploded, savagely blown apart as if hit by a mortar shell, driving knife-sharp splinters of wood and flying debris through the air.
The reverend was forced to halt the invocation, if only for a moment. He threw his arms up to protect his face and moved sharply to his left. A large shaft of ruptured oak swooped by, missing him by inches and smashing into the altar with a wicked thud. Before he could begin to regain any hint of composure, his beloved church erupted around him:
Hymnals danced through the air like a swarm of maddened bats.
A pair of candelabra lifted from the altar and streaked past the reverend and John like some golden tumbleweed … then crashed into a row of pews.
The row of pews ripped from the floor with an agonizing groan and hurled through the air, shattering against a stone sidewall.
In the sanctuary, the reverend could barely stand, still battered by fierce wind. But he nonetheless hovered over John as the madness grew.
John seemed entranced. Eyes closed, he still appeared not to notice any of the chaos around him.
In the unearthly Utopia where John found himself, the two glowing star beings were still wrapped in each other’s arms, slowly rotating in their cosmos dance. Here, in contrast to the battle in the church, all was at peace, the only sound the melodic tri-tone.
Suddenly, The Dark Sigil – sharp angles and cutting edges – wheeled back into existence, a short distance from the glowing pair. The ethereal form of Jennifer saw it immediately and shouted a warning. “Don’t look at it, John! Only look at the light! Only look at me!”
Her warning came too late. Curious, John hesitated and then turned to look at the new arrival.
“Noooo!”
Jennifer’s agonized cry echoed in the emptiness as the Dark Sigil charged forward and slammed into the lattice of light. The unlikely universe in which John found himself exploded, the sheer magnitude of the eruption instantly swallowing up the ghostly Jennifer and both the Light and Dark Sigil.
In an instant everything was gone, leaving only John as he had arrived: afloat in the darkness of space. But now, a short distance away, as inconceivable as it seemed, floated a bizarre facsimile of The Amityville House. Its front door hung wide open; its infamous sickly-red flashing turret-eyes winked on and off like a malfunctioning stoplight.
Before John could move he was sucked inside ... and the door thunked shut behind him.
In St. John’s Church, the reverend leaned into the alien wind. His hair and clothes flew about, his cassock welded against him. But he refused to give in to the bizarre onslaught. He struggled to stay, standing over John, arms spread wide now, shouting for all his might.
“YOU CANNOT WORK YOUR FOUL DESIRE HERE! THIS CHILD OF GOD SHALL FROM THIS TIME FORWARD BE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE TRUE GOD ...”
As if in defiant response, the statue of the Virgin Mary tore itself from the wall with a loud moan and leapt forward, aimed directly at the cleric. But Medhurst seemed to be protected somehow. The hurtling statue fell short and shattered against the stairs at his feet, bare inches from John.
The force of the unearthly wind rose in intensity, its wailing cry approaching that of a gale-force hurricane. Still defiant, still upright, his hands still reaching for John, his feet still firmly planted on the ground, the reverend did not fall … but he was unable to stop himself from being physically torn away from the young Australian.
At this same moment, as preposterous as it seemed, John found himself standing in the living room of a Dutch Colonial structure. Draped as he was in an eerie blood-red light, few of its features were clearly discernible, but John was sure that he was, somehow, standing in an unearthly version of the Amityville House.
He barely had time to ponder how any of this could be possible when a deep hissing filled the room. It was rapidly joined by a low crazed buzzing. Then, with no warning, a sea of red insects – could they be flies? – swept into the room. In seconds the swarm covered him from head to foot. They surged into his ears, clawed at his eyes, clambered over each other in a frantic attempt to enter his nostrils and mouth. He wheeled about, arms upraised, covered by a living mass of irate insects. His muffled cry was barely audible over the insane buzzing and hissing.
“Noooo!”
At this instant, the Reverend Medhurst’s distant words were somehow there, echoing around the room, breaking through the wild cacophony.
“THIS CHILD OF GOD ... SHALL FROM THIS TIME FORWARD BE UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE TRUE GOD ...”
For no immediately obvious reason, the horde of insects suddenly erupted outward like shrapnel from an exploding grenade ... and was gone. But before John could even react to this sudden freedom from attack, a wailing moan – the agonizing cry of a lost soul doomed to an eternity of pain and suffering – oozed into the room. In seconds it escalated to a deafening volume, rattling walls, windows and even the door.
John was again under attack.
He stumbled back, bent at the waist, hands jammed tight against his ears. He shouted into the air, his words bouncing off the blood-red walls of the living room. “Who are you? WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?”
The wailing abruptly dissipated. The only sound that remained was a sibilant breathing that slowly, slowly resolved itself into a single word, moaned over and over again: “Mine! Mmmine. MIIIIIINE!”
John straightened and tried to look in every direction at once, but he saw no one. He was suddenly, almost irrationally, angry. He’d been in a place like nothing else he’d ever known. He was at true peace for the first time in his life. And somehow this whatever-it-was had ruined it all. That’s it, Ocker, he thought. Now I’m royally pissed-off! He shouted his defiant anger into the air. “That’s it, blue. Either tell me what this is all about, or piss off and let me go back where I was!”
There was no way John could be prepared for what happe
ned next. A brutish figure, wielding a huge axe, charged into the blood-red room: hair a knotted mess; eyes their own shade of fiery red. The weapon rose into the air, and before John could move it hammered down, driving deep into his chest with a loud sickening shlump.
John reeled back and stared at the wild man in disbelief.
This bizarre, almost unrecognizable version of Brendan Babbitt ripped the newly bloodied head of the axe from John’s chest. He pulled it back and up, clearly planning to drive it once again at his target. “Ya can’t ‘ave it!” he bellowed, spittle flying. “It’s mine! MIIIIIINE!”
John stumbled back, a stream of blood sploshing from his chest, with the metered beats of his heart stuttering, jumping … slowing …
Life was ebbing from him.
It was at that instant that the reverend’s voice was heard again, stronger and louder than ever before.
“THIS CHILD OF MAN IS NOW UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE ONE GOD...THE TRUE GOD...”
This feral version of Babbitt wheeled about, bawling into the air, his words a guttural wail. “Noooooo! ‘e’s’ mine! ‘e’s mine!” But at that instant, with Babbitt’s shriek still echoing in the nothingness, an enormous lightning flash threw the entire scene into a blaze of light, blocking everything from view.
In St. John’s Church it was as if no time had passed. The wind’s howling wail rose to an even more frantic pitch. It battered the reverend who had once again regained his position. He hovered over the kneeling John like a guardian angel, arms outstretched, defiantly uttering the final words of the cleansing.
“I HEREBY SEVER ALL CONNECTION TO ANY EVIL FORCE NOW PRESENT IN THIS CHILD OF GOD ... THAT IT MAY NO LONGER INTRUDE, INTERFERE, DISTURB, OR DISTORT HIS LIFE!”
Amityville Horror Now Page 6