by Jason Arnopp
CHAPTER ONE
Before we vanish into Satan’s gaping mouth, Bex wants to get something straight.
Sitting beside me in a very small car, she says, ‘So your new book’s going to be about the supernatural. Which you don’t believe in. At all.’
‘It’s already riling people,’ I tell her. ‘Did you see the bust-up yesterday?’
She scrunches her face. ‘Why can’t you accept that social media isn’t a part of my life?’
‘Because I don’t believe you.’
‘Last time I looked, in about 2009, social media was one big room full of people not listening to each other, shouting, “My life’s great!” I doubt this has changed.’
‘So why are you still on there?’1
Bex makes her frustrated, dismissive noise: the sound of a brief, chaotic catfight. ‘I have profiles, Jack, so old friends can catch up, but I don’t read anything. Social media makes me think less of people. I’d rather not know all the self-obsessed shit in their heads.’
‘How selfish of you.’
‘Won’t this book be kind of short? Just a great big atheist travelling round the world saying “Bullshit” a lot?’
I frown at her underestimation of the concept. ‘Obviously I’m going to keep it rational. But I’ll also keep a completely open mind. Social media’s full of people who think ghosts are real, so I’ll give them a chance to guide me in the right direction. I’ve got this ongoing list of hypotheses for paranormal phenomena, which I’m calling SPOOKS. That’s short for—’
‘I think I can do without knowing.’
‘And when the book’s done, I can at least tell all the mad believers, “Look, you had your chance to convince me and you blew it.”’
‘How very magnanimous of you.’
My hopeless love for Bex intensifies when she employs long words and sarcasm together. Long-time readers will recall her as the late-twenties fitness instructor I’ve known and shared a flat with too long for anything to happen between us. They’ll also know I’ve found it challenging to listen to her banging men in an adjacent bedroom. This may explain why my books tend to involve travel. (By the way, she doesn’t bang loads of men. She’s not like that. She’s been seeing a guy called Lawrence for six months, even if he is a smarmy chinless loser. And he is.)
I can openly discuss this love of mine because Bex doesn’t actually read my books. ‘Jack, I live with you,’ she once said while we half watched EastEnders and fully ate Chinese food on our big fat yellow sofa. ‘I don’t actually need to read these books. Why would I want to relive you overdosing on coke in our toilet?’
Apart from making the mistake of not reading my books, Bex is the most sensible person I know. In truth, I always seek her approval on my book ideas. Which makes me want to win her around on this one.
A burst of power makes our very small car rattle and hum. We roll forwards with a creak.
‘So,’ she says. ‘How was Greece?’
‘Italy,’ I say, forced to raise my voice as people start squealing behind us. ‘It caused the big bust-up. I did a bad thing and got yelled at by an exorcist.’
‘On Halloween. Perfect.’
‘Then I saw this weird YouTube video.’
Bex processes all this information. As our car gains speed, she settles on a question: ‘What video?’
‘I’ll tell you after this.’
And into the mouth we go.
So I’m deep in rural Italy, over twenty-four hours ago. The first stop on my epic journey into the supernatural world, which will see me visit a combat magician in Hong Kong, a ??? in ??? and a ??? in ???, not to mention a ??? in ??? (Eleanor: I’ll fill these in later, once I know who I’m actually meeting and where I’m going. If I forget, you can do the honours.)
I am about to enter a church.
The ancient building sits isolated and forlorn on a hill that becomes a sheer cliff face on one side. Hurl a stone from up here and it vanishes halfway down, caught by the twisted, arthritic fingers of bare trees. This church, this stone sentinel, keeps watch over dense woodland and clustered hills that mark the horizon.
Inside, it is functional, relatively bare bones. There are still a few of the usual looming statues calculated to intimidate and belittle, plus a few glistening symbols of opulence and power. Yet the most elaborate feature is the stained-glass window in the back wall, shot through with winter sun.
I always think the beauty of stained-glass windows is wasted on a church.
Everything is so quiet and serene, you’d scarcely credit the fact that in ninety minutes we’ll need an ambulance.
Arriving half an hour late at 1.30 p.m., I barrel in looking windswept and interesting. Eighty-year-old Father Primo Di Stefano greets me with a stiff smile and matching handshake. Sporting a large black frock, he is flanked by two frosty aides, who are both short and stocky, in black shirts and grey trousers. The only real visual difference between these two is that one has facial hair, so let’s call them Beard and Beardless. I also have a handy Italian translator at my disposal, named Tony. So he’ll be Translator Tony, obviously. Despite his werewolf-hairy hands, a monobrow crowning shifty brown eyes, and teeth you could ride a Kawasaki between, Tony’s the only halfway personable guy here. We bond over a cigarette outside, when he admires my brass Zippo. A dull, tarnished old thing these days, but it does the job.
Di Stefano does not run this church. To all intents and purposes, the priest is a guest here, like me. One of the Pope’s most trusted foot soldiers, he is based in Rome and has travelled many miles to commandeer the place on a mission of mercy. Specifically, he has come to drive the Devil out of a thirteen-year-old girl with the use of words, gestures and a great deal of biblical Sturm und Drang. This man claims to have carried out over two hundred exorcisms. As a purely incidental side effect, this has provided him with material for a lucrative string of books detailing his crusades. The titles include At War with the Devil, My Lifelong Battle with the Antichrist and of course Satan & I. That last title is my favourite, like a wacky sitcom. ‘In this week’s episode of Satan & I, Father Di Stefano attempts to throw a house party for friends, only for his mischievous flatmate Satan to slay them all while denouncing God!’
Bitterly cold winds sail up and down the aisle as Father Di Stefano, Translator Tony and I literally pull up a pew for a chat. We have time to kill before the subject of the priest’s latest ritual arrives.
Exorcism can be traced back through millennia to the dawn of civilisation. Right from the word go, man was all too keen to ascribe sickness, whether physical or psychological, to evil spirits. And of course people from the ancient Babylonian priests onwards were all too keen to present themselves as exorcists. As saviours. The most famous was allegedly Jesus Christ, who couldn’t get enough of it.
Di Stefano considers exorcism more vital than ever in the online age. ‘The internet,’ he tells me via Tony, ‘has made it much easier to share information, but not always good information. People experiment with Ouija boards and get themselves in trouble. And then they call us, asking for help.’
This man has the lived-in face and manner of a mastiff dog. There is not the faintest flicker of humour in his dark eyes. He is barely tolerating me. His aides hover within earshot, which always irritates me during interviews. I ask for them to move further away, but the request is rudely ignored. I soon discover that Di Stefano’s hearing is poor when he wants it to be – when I ask a challenging question, for instance. At other times, when I say something he wants to pounce on, his ears sharpen the hell up.
Di Stefano has granted a fair few interviews over the years – most notably when he’s had a new book out – but as far as I can tell, no journalist has been allowed to watch him perform an exorcism. Today feels like a concession to the modern media, a canny PR exercise: if the Church is seen to be helping people, it stays relevant in the eyes of the world. And if there’s one thing religion should be worried about these days, it’s relevance. There’s no question that
converting Jack Sparks would be quite the coup.
I can’t help but picture Di Stefano conducting an exorcism with an entirely straight face, then bursting into uncontrollable fits later on, the moment he shuts his front door behind him. Just hooting at the nonsense he gets away with on a daily basis. But there’s undoubtedly a very serious side to all this. After all, Di Stefano deals with often quite severely distressed people of all ages (except babies, seemingly. Babies are so consistently insane that it’s hard to tell if they’re possessed, unless they start floating about). The lion’s share of these people arguably suffer from some form of mental illness, or have experienced abuse.
‘That is true,’ allows Di Stefano, to my surprise. ‘Very often we realise, you know, that a person does have a mental illness or there is some other history there. In those cases, a demon is not to blame after all. When this happens, of course, the person will be sent for the correct treatment. The need for an exorcism is actually very rare.’
‘How can you tell when an exorcism is required?’ I ask.
Di Stefano looks down his nose at me, regarding me like the rank amateur I am. His stare is unyielding, those eyes dead as a cod’s. ‘You get to know the sign of a true demonic possession,’ he says. ‘You can feel it. The feeling is completely different.’
So far, so vague. ‘How exactly does it feel when it’s a real demon?’ I persist.
‘The air feels . . . thick,’ he says, with distaste. ‘And black, like oil. It is . . .’ He rubs his forefinger and thumb together as he searches for the word. Then he exchanges rapid-fire Italian with Tony, who provides the word on the tip of Di Stefano’s tongue: ‘Oppressive.’
‘Also,’ the priest continues, ‘you can see it in the subject’s eyes. The eyes, you know, are the windows to the soul. You can see who, or what, is living inside.’
‘How do you know it isn’t all in your head?’ I ask.
That mastiff face crumples. No mean feat when your face is already a sponsored crumple-thon. He doesn’t enjoy this line of questioning, no doubt because it could just as easily be applied to religion as a whole. Still, he gamely indulges me. ‘As far as I know, I am perfectly sane. So are my exorcist colleagues. The things we have seen . . . the way people have behaved with demons within them . . . this is no make-believe.’ He gestures around the church. ‘You will see today, I think.’
‘Have you seen The Exorcist?’ I ask.
‘The movie? A long time ago. I don’t remember too much about—’
‘Are exorcisms anything like that?’
‘Sometimes they are,’ he says wearily. As if anticipating my next question, he adds, ‘But you know, exorcism existed for a long time before that movie. The movie took its cue from exorcisms before it. But I must say, I have seen things far more terrible in real life.’
I lean forward, quote-hungry. ‘Could you give me an example?’
Di Stefano recalls a middle-aged single mother in Florence who would cry blood. Her skin turned sickly green and broke out in open sores. When he tried to expel her demons in an attic room, she whispered the Lord’s Prayer backwards as she gouged out one of her own eyeballs with a rusty antique spoon. Di Stefano (then a mere assistant, in the late seventies) and his exorcism instructor restrained her, encased the eye in ice and rushed her to hospital. Despite a five-hour emergency operation, the eyeball could not be reinstated. Still, Di Stefano claims that they eventually exorcised the demon from this woman, who was reunited with her children.
When pushed for his very worst memory, he reluctantly dredges up the 2009 case of a ten-year-old boy in Milan. As he speaks of this boy, his full-bodied voice becomes little more than a murmur.
‘The first time I tried to exorcise him, he laughed in my face, as he broke each of his fingers one by one.’
‘Just the fingers on one hand?’ I ask, genuinely curious. ‘He couldn’t do both, right?’
Di Stefano glares at me, as if I’m trying to be funny.
He bows his head. ‘I could not save him. The demons had such a firm hold. I think they wanted to make a point, to scare me away from my life’s mission. During exorcism number three, the boy smashed his face against the corner of a glass table, blood everywhere. In number five, he threatened my nieces’ lives. He said he would cut all the skin from their faces as I watched, then force me to eat it.’
Translator Tony pops a square of nicotine gum into his mouth.
Di Stefano takes a moment to compose himself. ‘Two nights later, I had one of my visions.’
Ah yes, Di Stefano’s famous visions. His books are full of them. These visions physically root him to the spot and flood his mind with astonishing psychic sights. Interestingly, he rarely seems to tell anyone about them before their real-life counterparts occur. Why, it’s almost as if he pretends to have had the vision in retrospect.
‘In my mind, I saw the boy murder his sleeping stepfather with a hammer, then jump out of the window. And this actually happened, thirty minutes later. The boy, he jumped ten floors down to the busy road. Such a terrible, terrible . . . People said he screamed blasphemy as he fell.’
Satisfied that I can’t come back with a smart answer to such a grim story – or worried that I might ask for more information about that stepfather – he stands, ending our cosy chat. He needs, he says, to pray and mentally prepare.
As I leave him to kneel before the altar, I wonder how many exorcisms actually take place in churches. Aren’t the possessed supposed to burn up when they walk through the door, or at least protest and writhe around? Have these people never seen The Omen?
I open my notepad and review the SPOOKS List I’ve created . . .
THE SPOOKS LIST (Sparks’ Permanently Ongoing Overview of Kooky Shit) (Full disclosure: I had to ask social media’s hive mind to help with the ‘K’ word. Prior to that I only had ‘Kreepy’, which simply wasn’t good enough.)
People claim to have witnessed supernatural phenomena for the following reasons:
(1) They’re trying to deceive others
(2) They’ve been deceived by others
Those, then, are the only two viable explanations as I see them, in top-down order from most to least likely. It won’t surprise you to learn that I don’t consider ‘Ghosts are real’ to be a viable hypothesis. Neither can I entertain the notion that people can be deceived by their own minds to the extent that they ‘see’ a ghost. Not without the use of LSD, anyway, and in such cases the drug is clearly the mother of total delusion. I should know this better than most, after the incident with the dive-bombing spider-geese.2
What I’ll be looking to do, both here today and throughout this book, is to fit everything I see to one of the two explanations above. Should neither of them fit, I’ll potentially add a third explanation to the list.
That’s highly unlikely, I’m saying, but let’s get stuck in.
Thirteen-year-old Maria Corvi arrives on foot, alongside her fifty-something mother Maddelena. The frigid Halloween air converts their breath to vapour. They live somewhere off in all those forbidding woods, which offer few helpful footpaths. During the last hour and a half of my drive out here, I saw neither towns nor villages – just the occasional run-down cottage or cabin set far back from recklessly winding dirt roads. If this little church ever served a bustling community, then such a thing has long since dissolved.
At first sight Maria doesn’t strike me as demonic. Neither is she all cute-as-a-button smiley like Linda Blair’s Exorcist character Regan MacNeil, who was one year younger. Maria Corvi radiates the sullen nonchalance of your typical teenager who’s doing her best to mask fear. Look closer and you see that, like her mother, Maria is quietly desperate. The pair are decked out in the same plain, practical blue smocks and boots they wear for their work as farm labourers. Maria is pretty and worryingly thin. Gaunt, too, and those dark-ringed eyes suggest sleepless nights. Her unwashed black hair hangs halfway down her back.
Apart from a splash of grey up top, Maddelena is so self-evidently
Maria’s mother that they could be nesting Russian dolls.
I watch Maria carefully as she crosses the threshold into the church. Her flesh does not burn and she does not shriek. She does, however, bring a hand up to her throat and swallow hard, as if resisting the urge to be sick. Catching my eye awkwardly, almost shyly, she looks away and continues with her mother towards Di Stefano as if nothing has happened.
The priest greets Maria and Maddelena by launching into a formal speech in Italian. It reminds me of company reps who read legal tedium over the phone, while you play Candy Crush and say ‘Yes’ every thirty seconds. It very clearly reconfirms, no doubt partly for my information, that Maria and her mother have agreed to this rite. The Church, stresses Di Stefano, would only force such a thing on someone if they had harmed others or were deemed to be at risk of doing so.
‘Please do not be afraid,’ he tells the women. ‘Today, Maria, you will be free of the negativity that has no business within you.’ I later learn that ‘negativity’ is a euphemism the Church often employs. They claim it helps to avoid leading the subject through the power of suggestion. Which seems unusually sensible of them.
Maria nods, her expression neutral. I can’t tell whether she believes in this stuff, or is going through the motions for her mother’s sake. Did Maddelena find an Ozzy Osbourne album on Maria’s iPod and hurriedly dial the Vatican’s 1-800-DEVILCHILD hotline?
Di Stefano briefly explains why I’m present. Then he leads Maria to the strip of dusty floor that passes in front of the altar. Her mother signs legal papers handed to her by Beard (oh yes, legal papers – the Church likes being sued about as much as any other multinational corporation). Then he and Beardless usher her, along with me and Translator Tony, to our designated pew five rows back from the front.
Maddelena chews what’s left of her fingernails while Tony translates her. ‘I know this has to be done. But . . . she is my baby, you know? I do not understand. Why has Satan chosen her?’