Unbound Spirits

by Christine Pope

  Chapter 16

  Ariel Vargas was a very pretty woman in her early forties, and her sixteen-year-old daughter Kayla showed echoes of that prettiness as well, in her big brown eyes and sculpted little cupid’s bow of a mouth. However, both of them looked as though something had been slowly draining their lifeblood and energy away, eyes smudged with dark circles, faces pale.

  Audrey and Michael sat opposite mother and daughter at the big oak table in the dining room of the Vargas house, surrounded by antiques that matched the Italianate splendor of the large Victorian home. While not as big as the Whitcomb mansion, in many ways it felt far more gracious, possibly because it was obvious that Ariel and her husband — who was conspicuously absent from this meeting — had put a great deal of care into making sure their home retained its original character, while at the same time doing their best to keep it from feeling like a museum.

  “We had another bad night, I’m afraid,” Ariel said.

  Colin was off to one side, back using his expensive video camera rather than the makeshift of his iPhone, and Susan stood next to him, boom mike angled toward the table. Even though she really didn’t need to be there, Daniela stood on Colin’s other side, taking longhand notes on some paper held down on a clipboard. She did make the whole setup seem more professional, so Audrey supposed there was some point to her presence.

  Thin fingers with bitten-looking nails played with the handle of her coffee mug as Ariel went on, “The knocking just goes on for hours and hours. And then there’s the moaning — ”

  Kayla broke in abruptly, saying, “Mom, I don’t feel well. Can I go upstairs and lie down?”

  Her mother hesitated, looking over at Michael. He said, his tone very gentle, “Kayla, I’d really like to hear from you before you go and rest. Can you give us just five minutes?”

  Watching him, Audrey had to be impressed by his patience, the way his eyes met the girl’s in a friendly, yet concerned manner. There was something about him that seemed eminently trustworthy, and she wondered whether the Vargas women had been told that he was a minister.

  Kayla’s fingers clenched on the edge of the tabletop, but then she shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Do you hear the same things your mother does?” Michael asked.

  Another lift of her thin shoulders. Her hair had been bleached and then dyed a sort of magenta purple, but it had clearly been growing out for some time, since it showed about two inches of dark roots. “I hear the knocking sometimes. And then kind of a howling, like a dog that’s been left outside too long and is crying to be let in. But there’s no dog — our dog Missy died last year.”

  Audrey wondered whether the dog’s death had anything to do with the demonic infestation. It wasn’t the sort of question she thought prudent to ask, however, and so she remained silent.

  Michael’s eyes had narrowed for just a moment, though, which meant more or less the same thought had probably crossed his mind as well. His voice was still mild as he said, “But you don’t hear the moaning?”

  “No.” Now Kayla looked almost petulant, as if she was being accused of something she knew she hadn’t done. “My mother thought I was up there having sex with someone, but that’s just stupid. My boyfriend and I broke up two months ago and I haven’t been with anyone else.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to think?” Ariel said. “You can hear it all over the house when it starts up. Then I thought maybe she was watching porn somehow, even though we locked down her laptop after we discovered she’d been looking up all those rituals online, ordering all sorts of crazy books through our Amazon account.”

  As soon as these words left her mother’s mouth, Kayla’s face twisted in anger, distorting so terribly that Audrey had to force herself not to recoil. It was as though something inhuman was trying to tear its way out of her, forcing skin and muscles to perform incredibly unnatural contortions, turning them alien.

  Daniela gasped, but Susan’s boom mike never wavered, and Colin kept filming.

  Probably just glad he was able to get that on tape, Audrey thought, and the mundane observation helped to calm a little of the fear that had flared in her heart.

  Or maybe it was only the sight of Michael, who still looked at Kayla with that concerned but friendly expression on his face and hadn’t even blinked, that helped Audrey to steady herself. Somehow, as long as he didn’t seem worried, she couldn’t be all that worried, either.

  “That fucking bitch shouldn’t have touched my stuff,” Kayla said, although that didn’t sound like her voice, either, guttural and rasping and nearly an octave lower than her regular intonation.

  “It’s hard when someone messes with your things, I know,” Michael told her without missing a beat. “What happened to your books?”

  No reply, except the table began to rattle. Looking more weary than afraid, Ariel lifted her coffee mug before it tipped over, and Audrey did the same with both her water glass and the one that sat in front of Michael. He didn’t move, however, but only sat there calmly, fingers steepled in front of him, his whole aspect rather like that of Mr. Spock from Star Trek, even though he didn’t resemble the character at all.

  “Did your mother throw them away?”

  Now the shaking spread throughout the room, making the chandelier above them dance and the china in the cabinet rattle so much that Audrey feared it might shatter into pieces at any second. Even though Kayla’s mouth was clamped shut in anger, a low growling emerged from her throat, guttural, something that sounded like no human being should have been able to produce it.

  Audrey forced herself to sit still, trusting that Michael knew what he was doing. It was one of the hardest things she’d done yet, because fight-or-flight hormones surged in her blood, telling her that she needed to get the hell out of there.

  “Ah,” he said at last. Only that one syllable, and yet it seemed to be enough to break the tension. The growling abruptly stopped, and Kayla stared at him in confusion for a moment, as if she couldn’t quite recall who he was or what he was doing there.

  Then she turned and fled the room. The pounding of her feet on the stairs sounded very heavy for someone so light and thin.

  For a long moment, no one spoke. Audrey was acutely aware of the red light on Colin’s camera, telling her that he was still filming, that he wasn’t about to miss a single moment of any of this.

  At last, Michael turned toward Ariel Vargas. “I think I need to see upstairs now.”

  He didn’t quite know why he was prolonging this. The scene in the dining room had already told him that Kayla was clearly possessed. The growling, the way a face that didn’t seem to be quite hers had emerged from her thin features, the way she’d made the room shake — they were all classic signs of a demonic infestation that had moved on to possession.

  However, he’d also seen the fear in her mother’s face, the worry that he was about to tell her possibly the worst news she would ever hear. It couldn’t hurt to walk around the house a bit more, get a feel for what he would have to do here. Even if he told Ariel on the spot that he would have to perform an exorcism, it wasn’t as though he could turn around and do it right then. He was working on his own and not formally sanctioned by any church, but there were still rituals he needed to follow to prepare for the ordeal. The soonest he could possibly do anything would be the following morning, and even that might be pushing things.

  He went upstairs, Ariel immediately behind him, Audrey and the others bringing up the rear. Michael knew he couldn’t allow himself to think about Audrey too much, because he couldn’t allow any thoughts but those focused on Kayla and the current situation to occupy his mind. Audrey had already proven that she could handle herself in a crisis situation, and so he had to trust she would do the same here.

  The house was truly magnificent, with its high stained-glass windows and dark moldings and reproduction wallpaper. A William Morris design, he thought, slate gray picked out with gold and crimson, but beneath the surface beauty of the place, he could fe
el the pulsing heart of something dark and evil, something that wanted to bring pain and suffering and destruction to this house. Even though she might not consciously be able to sense these things, they clearly weighed on Ariel; her footsteps seemed to drag the closer they got to the upstairs hall, as if some unseen force was doing its best to keep her away.

  Michael sensed it as well but kept going. It was too late to back out now, and even if he could, he wouldn’t do that to the woman whose daughter had been overcome by a force older than the world. Who else could she turn to? The Catholic church was reluctant to help even its own parishioners in these sorts of cases, let alone someone who was at least agnostic if not an outright atheist.

  Well, that was something she’d have to work through on her own eventually. People caught up in demonic struggles like this rarely remained atheists.

  The door to one of the rooms on this floor was shut. He looked over at Ariel, and she nodded.

  “Yes, that’s Kayla’s. Maybe I shouldn’t let her shut the door, but the sounds were so awful when I tried to keep it open — I stuck a chair under the knob a few days ago, and I didn’t sleep at all that night, what with all the banging and the howling and moaning.”

  “And your husband?” Michael asked, his tone very quiet, although he knew the boom mike probably picked up the question anyway. He knew something of the particulars, and understood why Luke Vargas would have taken his son with him and gotten the hell out of here, but one would have thought he might have at least attempted to take turns watching Kayla so his wife wouldn’t be trapped here day in and day out.

  Ariel made a sound of disgust. “He says he’s keeping Aidan safe. Which, I get it, but Aidan’s in school most of the day. Luke could come back here and help me out, since he can do his job from home, but — ” Tears glittered in her eyes, and Michael saw how she swallowed to keep herself from breaking down completely. “Kayla’s not his, you know. She was two when we got married, and he’s always said he thought of her as his own, but I guess when push comes to shove, it’s a whole different story. Anyway, forget about getting any kind of help from him.”

  “I’m sorry,” Michael said, knowing how inadequate those words must have sounded. This kind of ordeal was difficult enough to manage with someone by your side. Having to do it alone — “We’re here,” he went on. “I won’t leave until your daughter is well again.”

  She managed a tremulous smile. “Thank you, Mr. Covenant. And now” — her thin shoulders squared, as if she was steeling herself against what was coming next — “now we’d better go inside.”

  Her hand turned the knob, and the door opened.

  Even though he had some idea of what to expect, Michael couldn’t help recoiling at the stench that boiled out into the hallway. Trash left rotting in the sun for days, feces, vomit — it was as though they had all been thrown together in some sort of infernal cauldron and brought to a boil. Behind him, he could hear Audrey and Colin and Daniela gagging and coughing, but he couldn’t worry about them right now. There was a bathroom down the hall; they could go in there and throw up if they needed to.

  As bad as the smell was, though, what he saw in that room was worse. Runes and sigils had been scratched into the lovely molding and expensive wallpaper, and others had been painted on top of them in what he thought was probably fingernail polish, dark shades of maroon and gray and black. The air here was icy cold, at least thirty degrees colder than it had been in the rest of the house, and he saw his breath billowing white in front of him. Unfortunately, the cloud of his breath wasn’t quite thick enough to obscure the sight of Kayla writhing on the bed.

  Her eyes had rolled back in their sockets, showing only white, and fresh scratches had appeared on her forearms and cheeks. Worse, though, was the way her T-shirt had been pushed up to show the plain white bra she wore underneath, the swell of her small breasts. The pale skin of her belly seemed to undulate in a grotesque fashion, as if unseen fingers were caressing her. That was probably why she moaned the way she did, as if caught in the throes of some unholy pleasure.

  It was the most obscene thing he’d ever had the misfortune to witness. Next to him, Ariel put her hand to her mouth, but she didn’t move, didn’t speak, as if she no longer had the strength to cry out against the thing possessing her daughter.

  Michael turned away — not because he didn’t have the strength to see what was happening on the bed, but because he knew this was not something Colin should be recording. “Turn the goddamn camera off,” he told him.

  His producer looked offended. “Are you having a go? This is amazing.”

  “Turn it off, or I’m going to fucking break the damn camera.”

  For a second, their eyes locked. Colin was the first to break the contact; he gave an awkward shrug and said, “Okay, mate. Don’t get your knickers in a twist.” And, reluctantly, he toggled the switch to put the camera in standby mode. Standing behind him, Audrey looked stricken, Daniela nauseated. And Susan had quietly switched off the mike so none of the conversation would be recorded.

  Kayla appeared oblivious to all this. Michael knew she was caught in the thrall of the thing that now inhabited her body, that her consciousness was so far subsumed that she could have no idea of what was going on around her. That was some comfort, but not much.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Michael said. “We can go back downstairs now.”

  Ariel Vargas turned a pair of shocked eyes on him. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “I am…but not today. This sort of thing requires preparation — I could splash some holy water on her, try to shock her out of it, but that would only put the demon on the attack, something that could have dire consequences for your daughter. And there are some matters we need to discuss before I get started.”

  “We can’t leave her like this — ”

  Unfortunately, they had to. Whatever Kayla was suffering now, it would only be made much worse if he went off half-cocked, so to speak. “How long do these episodes last?”

  A deep breath, and then Ariel replied, “Sometimes as much as an hour. But not longer than that.”

  It could have been worse. He’d read of cases where the victim of a possession had been caught in this kind of a demonic assault for twelve hours at a time. But Kayla would come back to herself, and probably wouldn’t remember anything of what had happened, except that she would be exhausted and physically aching from the abuse her muscles had just suffered.

  But alive. That was the important thing.

  Rather than try to convince Ariel of that, Michael only said again, “Let’s go downstairs,” and backed out of the room, forcing her to follow — and forcing the rest of the crew to get out of their way. He allowed himself a single glance at Audrey, saw how white she was, how the pinkish-brown lip gloss she wore stood out against her pale skin.

  There was no point in telling her that this would get easier over time, because it never did.

  By unspoken agreement, they all went back to the dining room and sat down. Colin was still sulking, but at least he kept quiet, for once understanding that he was out of his element here.

  This next part would be hard, and yet it was necessary. He said quietly, “Daniela, do you have the paperwork?”

  She nodded, then lifted the top paper of her clipboard so she could get to the release form underneath, then handed it and her ballpoint pen to him. “Here you go.”

  He took the paper and pen from her, then put them down on the dining room table and pushed them toward Ariel.

  “What’s this?” she asked, looking down at the form in front of her.

  “It’s a release form.”

  Her brows pulled together. “I already signed one of those. Your producer” — she gave Colin a single contemptuous look — “emailed it to me, and I signed it and scanned it and sent it back.”

  “That was the standard release form,” Michael explained. “It allows us to film in your house, and it also allows us to use your image and your daughter’
s image on the show. But this…I wasn’t going to ask you to sign it until I knew for sure.”

  “Knew what for sure?” Ariel asked, although, judging by the way her voice trembled, Michael thought she knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “Knew that your daughter was possessed by a demon.” He folded his hands on the tabletop and tried his best to look capable but nonthreatening. “I’m going to perform an exorcism on her, Ariel, but before I do that, you need to sign a waiver releasing me from any liability. I will be as careful as I know how. I will do everything to free your daughter from the control of this entity. But there is no guarantee — the exorcism might not be successful. The demon might hurt her as it desperately clings to her body. And….”

  The next two words came out in a whisper, as if she knew what was coming but didn’t want to acknowledge that terrible possibility. “And what?”

  “And there is the chance that she may die.” Michael wished he didn’t have to be so blunt, but he knew that Ariel needed to understand the risks they were taking. “It’s happened before. Not in my personal experience,” he added hastily, “but the precedent is there. This isn’t like getting a tooth extracted. The process carries a great deal of risk with it, but it’s the only way for you to get your daughter back.”

  Silence then, as Ariel stared at him, so pale he wondered that she didn’t faint, and he tried not to look over at Audrey, at the stricken expression on her face. Surely she must have known how dangerous an exorcism could be, even if demonology wasn’t her particular field of expertise.

  Still in a whisper, Ariel asked, “What happens if I don’t have you perform an exorcism?”

  Somehow, Michael had known she would ask such a question. He pulled in a breath, then said, “These outcomes can vary from case to case — ”

  “I don’t care about that,” she cut in. “Just tell me the worst-case scenario.”

  “Worst case, she’ll still die,” he said bluntly. “The demon will continue to use her, drain her energy, until her body can no longer take the abuse. That’s the worst case. Otherwise, she could survive, but her mind would break, and she would no longer have any lucid periods like the one I saw this afternoon. You would have no choice but to institutionalize her.”