by Peter Nealen
But Father Ignacio was standing in front of me, his crucifix held high, and bellowing, “In nomine Patris, et Fili, et Spiritus Sancti! By the Power of God, the might of His armies, the Archangels, Seraphim, Cherubim, Principalities and Powers, by the intercession of the Holy Mother and all the Saints, I command you to come out of him and begone!”
Whatever that thing was, it didn’t like that. A blast of foul-smelling wind hammered us, apparently originating where Paul was nearly suspended in midair. He’d shut up, but now his mouth was tightly shut, his teeth gritted, blood flowing from between them, a pained moaning sound escaping from between his clamped jaws.
I could almost swear, even in the dark, that there was a shadowy hand clamped around his neck.
The thing was starting to take shape there in the hallway, the same amorphous, smoky black mass, bulking to block out the far window, holding Paul in front of it. Red sparks seemed to swirl in it, growing and widening until there were at least a dozen glowing red eyes regarding us with an ancient malice that threatened to drive us to our knees.
It spoke, then. Or that is the closest I can describe to what it did. The words were ugly, blasphemous, little more than a low, sinister, vile litany of hate. It spat the words at us viciously. Meanwhile, Paul’s back was arching farther and farther back, and I thought I could hear his spine start to pop.
“Let him go!” Father Ignacio bellowed hoarsely. “In the Most Holy Name I command you!”
It hissed at him. Whatever this thing was, it was powerful. It was going to put up a fight.
Father began the litany, the same one that he’d led us in the first night. Our guns weren’t going to touch this thing. He didn’t even have to pull out his prayer book, even if he’d been able to see it in that increasingly pitch-black hallway. There was no light visible from the windows or even the fire in the living room, now. The shadow had engulfed everything. We might as well not even have been in the hall. There was only us, the darkness, and far too many red eyes.
It wasn’t trying to converse with us; it was just battering us with its never-ending stream of blasphemies and curses. The air stank of sulfur and rot, with an underlying metallic tang, like the taste of blood. It was hard to breathe. Father prayed on, and we called out the responses, sometimes faintly and hoarsely, as the horror before us lashed at our minds.
Charlie suddenly fell on his face with a grunt. Without losing my place in the litany, I bent to help him, though Eryn got to him first, rolling him over onto his back. Blood was flowing from his nose and his ears. His eyes were rolling back in his head.
“Charlie!” I shouted. “Fight it!” I grabbed his hand and looked back up at the demonic apparition before us, continuing to pray through gritted teeth.
Charlie’s hand tightened on mine, then he pulled, trying to free it. I wasn’t sure what he was doing, but I let go, and he crossed himself, his hand shaking like a man with palsy. But he did it.
That had an effect. The thing seemed to recoil, and Paul dropped to the floor. The smoky, viscous darkness of the demon still filled the hallway, but the sheer force of it seemed somehow lessened, battered back by the barrage of prayers. As Father Ignacio advanced on it, crucifix held high, it shrank, then, with an ear-splitting shriek, it suddenly slammed out of the closed window behind it, like a rushing wisp of smoke.
Father slumped. Charlie lay on the floor like a dead man. Only then did we hear the renewed sounds of battle outside, the howling and gibbering of the skinnies, the occasional gunshot, and those eerie, faint horns in reply. Soon, even those faded.
“That was too easy,” Father Ignacio said, straightening painfully.
“Easy?!” Miller exclaimed. He looked around at the rest of us incredulously. “I’m still not entirely sure what just happened, but ‘easy’ isn’t the word that I’d use to describe it.”
“Expelling an entity that strong can take weeks,” Father Ignacio said. “This isn’t over.”
“Why is it playing cat and mouse?” Frank asked. “If it’s as strong as it looks, it can stick it out and fight. Why come at us and run away again?”
“To wear us down,” Father said. “To make us doubt. To sow those seeds that poison faith. To make us start to wonder if all our prayers are for nothing, since it keeps coming back.” He all but snarled. “It will only work if we let it work. Remember that. That’s their MO. They can only get us to destroy ourselves.”
Trudeau had stopped screaming, and stopped shooting. There was no sound from her room. Eventually, someone was going to have to check on her, but I was in no hurry. Getting my head blown off after surviving a demonic attack would just be embarrassing.
Eryn started toward Paul, who was now slumped on the floor, bloodied and motionless. While the rest of us were still regaining our equilibrium and waiting for the other shoe to drop, she was concerned about helping him.
I could never be sure, later, if I’d actually heard it, or just had a hunch that manifested itself as Sam’s voice. “Watch it!” he called out, right in my ear. I grabbed Eryn’s arm and pulled her back, away from Paul, as the young man came up off the floor with a lunge, spitting blood, his eyes rolling in his head, reaching for Eryn with fingers like claws.
“He’s still possessed!” Ray snapped. “There are two of them!”
Pushing my wife behind me, I stepped forward and hammered the buttstock of my Winchester, which was still in my hands even though I hadn’t been able to use it in the confrontation with the shadow demon, into his head. It was entirely possible that the head trauma would kill him; I’d seen it happen before. But more than likely, the demon would keep him as intact as it needed. I’d seen possessed soak up punishment that should have killed them ten times over.
Paul crumpled under the blow. His eyes were still open, glaring hate, but he was down, at least for the moment.
“Get some rope and a chair,” Father Ignacio said grimly, glaring down at Paul. “Ray will help me. The rest of you, stand watch and pray. I expect this thing’s big brother is going to try to break up the party before dawn.”
Chapter 10
It was only another two hours until the sun came up, but it felt like a lot longer than that.
Magnus had slipped back out, taking the Renfield with him. While the rest of us kept watch on the windows and the front door, with Miller stationed on the hallway, just in case Trudeau got froggy, or worse, Father Ignacio and Ray tied the possessed Paul to a chair and started the exorcism.
Our prayers on the defense started to become simple and repetitive, if only because it was hard to concentrate with all the noise that Paul was making.
“You are wasting your time, priest!” a guttural voice that sounded nothing like Paul’s, and that didn’t sync with his lips, the one time I looked back while it was speaking, said. “This one was mine since before you ever arrived at that house! And through him, I will reap all your souls!” It let out a horrible, cackling laugh. “Do you think I don’t know your sins? The dark, secret ones that you hide from, even in the sick darkness of your own hearts?”
“Be silent, in the Name of God,” Father Ignacio commanded. “You are forbidden to speak unless I bid you. The Power of the One in Three compels you.”
With a wordless snarl, the thing inside Paul snapped his jaws shut. The clop was painfully loud, even over the noises coming from outside.
Because as Father had predicted, the shadow demon hadn’t given up. It was howling and roaring around the outside of the house, rattling the door and the shutters. It didn’t settle for that, though. Having already been confronted, it was screaming curses and blasphemies at us from out of the dark, along with awful threats of what it would do to us, which I will not repeat. Ever.
Father Ignacio, with Ray accompanying him, was praying the Rite of Exorcism in a loud, if hoarse, voice, while Paul thrashed and snarled and tried to scream through clenched teeth. Paul’s nose was bleeding again, and more blood was running from between his teeth, and weeping from his tear ducts. Wha
tever was inside him was nasty.
And, while I tried not to think about it too much, given everything else that was going on, I couldn’t help but wonder if the demon’s claim that it had owned Paul from the get-go wasn’t at least verging on the truth. He had, after all, come straight to us as soon as we’d banished the entity in the house in Spokane, and we’d already suspected that that incident had been orchestrated to draw us out. I was starting to think that Paul was simply another player in the same game.
I shunted the thought aside, and concentrated on reciting the Pater Noster, over and over and over, focusing on each word of the prayer as I said it, making it a prayer instead of a mantra. My head ached, my nostrils seemed suffused with the sulfur and burned blood stink of sorcery and demonic manifestation, and my eyes felt gritty and raw. I hadn’t gotten much sleep over the last couple of nights; none of us had.
The thing outside seemed to sense the redoubling of my prayer, and howled its rage. The shutter in front of me banged loudly as if under the impact of a massive fist. The fact that there was an unbroken window between the shutter and the outside only made it that much creepier.
Paul’s thrashing was getting more violent, the noises getting past his teeth more strident and vicious. The demon inside was putting up a fight.
Dimly, I could hear Miller’s voice. He was trying to say the Our Father, but he only knew the first six words, or at least, that was all he could remember. He just kept reciting, “Our Father, Who art in Heaven. Our Father, Who art in Heaven,” over and over and over.
It was better than nothing.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the faint light of dawn started to shine through the shutter slits. Even though we knew it was out there, there was no eclipse of that light as the demon outside went past the windows; it was utterly incorporeal now, though its attacks were as loud and as violent as ever. But as the first actual ray of the sun hit the side of the house, it suddenly went silent.
At the same moment, Paul suddenly threw himself backward with a crash, and the muffled screaming and howling and gnashing of teeth stopped as he went slack and limp.
Ray and Father Ignacio waited, watching carefully. It wasn’t a good idea to take anything at face value, where these entities were concerned. They’d already demonstrated that quite vividly.
But as time went on, Paul didn’t move. Trudeau wasn’t making any more noise. It was just as quiet outside, except for the faint sound of the wind in the treetops.
The light in the shutter slits brightened. I risked moving to mine and peering out.
The meadow was empty and still in the growing light of day. The night was over, and it seemed that the worst of the attack was over, at least for the moment.
Ray moved in and checked Paul. He was breathing, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. The blood was drying on his face, and didn’t seem to be oozing from every orifice in his head anymore. But we still couldn’t be sure that the demon was gone. And from the look on Father Ignacio’s face, he strongly suspected that it was just playing possum.
“Carefully untie him and take him to his bed,” Father said. “Until we can be sure of him, he’ll have to be restrained there, too. Otherwise, things could get…nasty.”
That was an understatement, given what we’d just seen.
With Frank helping, Ray untied Paul and hefted him, carrying him to his room. Once there, it was short work to tie him down so that he wouldn’t hurt himself or anyone else.
Once that was done, I turned to Miller. “I think you had probably better be the one who checks on her,” I said. I didn’t have to elaborate. He knew I was talking about Trudeau, and he knew why he had to do it. He gulped and nodded. He was looking pale and shell-shocked; his eyes were open just a little too wide. I hoped that he could handle Trudeau.
He went to her splintered door and knocked, carefully. A little too carefully; the knock was barely audible from outside, never mind inside, where Trudeau was presumably a little shocky herself.
He waited, though, as if he thought she should have heard it. I was about to reach past him and knock on the door myself when he took a deep breath and knocked more firmly. The door creaked inward just a bit as he did so. “Karen?” he called.
There was no answer. He tried again, louder this time. “Karen? It’s me, Simon.”
She still didn’t answer. So, keeping out of the doorway, he pushed the door open.
No gunshots came through the open door. A sour smell came out of the room. I felt a twist in my guts. We’d left her alone because she had been a danger to all of us, borderline hysterical with a pistol in her fist. But what if, while we’d been focused on Paul and the manifestations outside, something had happened to her? Miller shot me a look that told me he was thinking the same thing and started inside. I was right on his heels.
Special Agent Karen Trudeau was sitting up in the bed, the sheets twisted around her, staring at the door unseeingly, her eyes bloodshot and glazed. She was breathing fast, in quick, terrified pants. She was also soaked in her own sweat, and had clearly vomited at least once.
“Karen?” Miller ventured, stepping closer. She gave no sign that she saw or heard him. Her pistol was still clenched in one white-knuckled fist, the slide locked back on another empty magazine. Miller reached out and gently pried it out of her grip, putting it on the nightstand beside the bed.
Only then did she start out of her reverie. She looked at Miller without comprehension for a minute. Then her eyes cleared a bit. “Simon?” she asked, in a small, papery whisper.
“Yes, it’s me,” Miller answered. “It’s Simon. Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, in the same small voice. I watched, worried. Something had certainly happened in there. This was not the same arrogant, self-righteous, and angry Karen Trudeau who had shot at us earlier. “Am I alive?”
“Yes, you’re alive,” Miller assured her. “It’s morning. It’s over.” I doubted that, but voicing those doubts at that moment would have been extremely ill-advised. Unless I missed my guess, Trudeau had gotten a pretty intense initiation into the world of the uncanny, and she was in an extremely fragile state of mind at the moment.
She started to shake. “What is happening?” she sobbed. “Am I losing my mind?”
Miller looked at me helplessly. He was perhaps the least qualified person in the house to answer that question, and after what he had just witnessed, he realized it. He was as in over his head as she was, and he knew it. But he had to answer her. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on, not really, but it’s pretty obvious to me that there’s a lot going on that we don’t understand.”
Her red-rimmed eyes turned and finally saw me. A shadow of the reflexive hatred she’d already shown flashed into them. “What’s he doing in here?” she demanded.
“He was helping defend us, including you, all night,” Miller said. “These people aren’t the bad guys, Karen.”
She didn’t answer, but the look in her eyes said that she was anything but convinced. So, that at least hadn’t changed. Not that it was a good thing. But she didn’t hold the glare; after a few seconds, she looked away.
Leaving the two FBI agents to pull themselves together as best they could, I backed out of the room and pulled the door to. I should probably see about trying to fix it during the day, provided the things outside left us alone long enough. The sounds from outside had also died with the coming of sunrise, but if the Renfields were still human, I considered it entirely possible that they might well try again in daylight. After all, daylight hadn’t stopped the skinnies.
The presence of “Renfields” brought a whole new set of questions to mind, and with things quieted down, I meant to get some answers.
In the living room, Frank was sitting on the couch, slumped against the back and with his bare, brown feet sprawled out in front of him. He was staring at the crucifix hanging above the hearth. Kolya had his breviary open and was praying Lauds in Russian. Eryn was in th
e kitchen, getting something together for breakfast. If she had been anyone else, I would have suspected that she was trying to distract herself from the horrors of the night before. But knowing Eryn, she was acting out of a genuine concern for all of the rest of us. She’s like that. She’d worry about her own nightmares later, once everyone around her was taken care of.
It was a strength, but it was also a weakness. I had had to hold her tight many a night, when the things she kept bottled up until after she had cared for other people came out. I went to her and slipped my arms around her waist.
“Are you all right?” I murmured.
She stopped and leaned against me. “No,” she whispered. “Not really.” She sniffled suddenly. “Last night…it was like Silverton all over again, Jed.”
“I know.” We’d seen some nasty stuff in our time together. The Walker had managed to wreak more destruction than the manifestations at Silverton, but had lacked the sheer, concentrated, demonic evil of what had happened there. Last night had been an all-out attack from the denizens of the Abyss. Those are scarier than just about anything else you might encounter, anywhere. “But we won there, and the Captain’s near. As long as we don’t break, we’ll still win.”
“I know,” she said. “But it doesn’t make it any easier. I’m scared, not just for us, but for them.” She didn’t have to say that she was talking about Miller, Trudeau, and Paul. “What’s going on? Why is this happening now, and here?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, after I kissed her. Even after a sleepless night of fighting demons, it still felt amazing. “But I think I need to find out.” I gently disengaged and turned back to the living room.
Ray had gone to his own room after we had put the unconscious Paul in restraints, and had just come out with Father Ignacio. I crossed my arms. “Things seem to have calmed down a bit, Ray,” I said. “I think we need to discuss some things.”
Ray looked suddenly weary. “Yes, we do,” he said. “I’ve kept it a secret for twenty years, but I think that our present situation is directly related to it, so I’ll tell you the whole story. But only after Magnus comes back. He knows at least as much of it as I do.”