Playing Saint

by Zachary Bartels

  “When the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and not finding any, it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds it swept and put in order. Then it goes and takes along seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.”

  He closed his Bible. “I think that young man was going back for seconds, in a sense. Or, more likely, he was way beyond seconds, like he was seeking out more unclean spirits.”

  “Is that uncommon for victims of demon possession?”

  “That’s the point, Parker. He wasn’t a victim—at least he didn’t see himself that way. When Jesus cast the legion of demons out of the Gadarenes demoniac, the man’s immediate response was to worship Jesus. He wanted nothing more than to follow him—literally. He became an evangelist, proclaiming the freedom from bondage that can be found in Christ. The same thing happened with Mary Magdalene. Jesus drove seven evil spirits out of her, and she was his servant to the very end, even to the grave and beyond. In fact, she preached the first ever Easter sermon: I have seen the Lord! That’s almost always what happens in Scripture when someone is delivered from this sort of oppression. But not with this man.”

  “Do you have any idea why not?”

  “I’m going to go out on a limb here, Parker, and buck the party line a little bit. A lot of people in my circles want to allegorize Jesus’s teaching about the demon who returns with seven more and finds the place swept clean—to make it into a parable, a simple spiritual truth. But I think that misses the bigger point. Whatever spiritual truth we can glean from this, it’s clear that Jesus actually meant what he said here.”

  “But most theologians don’t take it literally?”

  “I don’t think it’s a question of literal versus spiritual. This text, rightly understood, teaches that outward reform and religious rituals are no permanent remedy for the soul because the problem lies in the heart and will. Jesus is using this one example—exorcism—to teach that truth.” He hesitated a moment, then asked, “Do you want my theory?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m only telling you this because you already said our conversation is confidential. My thought is this: what if a person could somehow leverage this phenomenon? What if they experienced this increasing of their capacity for evil, increasing power—and started wanting more and more? A wicked man could seek out exorcism from different channels, different traditions, even different religions for that matter, sweeping the place clean, adding square footage, installing more bunks and bathrooms, to press the analogy. He would make himself more and more inhabitable, more hospitable. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s what he was doing.”

  “But if that’s possible, why wouldn’t more people do it? Or maybe they do, right? Maybe every pro athlete is really packed full of evil spirits . . .”

  Dr. Graham shook his head violently. “No, no, no. Being demonized is not like taking steroids or getting superpowers. It’s a horrible thing. Terrifying. That’s one reason why everyone delivered from demons in the New Testament is endlessly thankful. Evil spirits tend to torment people, throw them into fires, cause them to cut themselves. If I’m right about this, there must be something different about this particular man. Or maybe he has a high tolerance for torment. Maybe he even likes it.”

  “Do you happen to remember this man’s name?”

  “It wasn’t Damien. Well, it might have been, but he didn’t call himself that.” He pursed his lips in thought. “Both times I saw him, he called himself Danny.”

  It was Parker’s turn to lose all color. He realized he was squeezing his hair at the roots, and returned his hands to his lap.

  “His given name is Daniel Banner,” he said, gesturing at the photo. After a short silence he added, “I’ll admit, Dr. Graham, I’m scared. I was hoping you’d tell me something that would make all the angst and fear melt away. No such luck, huh?”

  “If you’re afraid this man is going to kill you, I don’t have a remedy for that.”

  “That’s not it. If he wanted to kill me, I think he would have done it already. What I’m afraid of is some kind of spiritual confrontation—me versus the powers of darkness. I’m afraid I’d choke.”

  “You versus the powers of hell? Yes, you’d be hamburger, and so would I. Remember the Epistle of St. Jude—‘But Michael the archangel, when he disputed with the devil and argued about the body of Moses, did not dare pronounce against him a railing judgment, but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” ’ If you make it your personal battle, you’ll fall. Do you remember the seven sons of Sceva, the high priest?”

  “Sure. That’s in the Book of Acts. They were casting out demons in Jesus’ name, but they were using it as a magic charm or something.”

  “Exactly. And the demonized man turned on them and beat the tar out of these seven strapping, young men.”

  “I understand,” Parker said.

  “Do you?” The professor zipped up his coat and looked off in the distance. “You want a strategy for spiritual warfare? Is that what you’re looking for?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess so.”

  “Well, listen carefully, because this is complicated: ‘submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you.’ ”

  “It’s that simple?”

  “It’s simple, but it isn’t easy. There are a whole lot of people running around out there wanting to defeat the powers of darkness, thinking they can resist the devil and send him running, without first submitting themselves to God. If you skip step one, it doesn’t work.”

  “What does that look like? Skipping step one?”

  “Like the seven sons of the high priest, like Peter swinging his sword in the garden. And it looks a little like you, Parker. It looks like your positive pep talks on TV, your appearances at all the big events, but without calling anyone to true repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

  “You know what you need? You need a scandal; that’s what your ministry has been missing.”

  Parker’s scalp prickled, and his mind was again filled with the image of Brynn Carter and her ever-evolving version of events. He locked eyes with Dr. Graham. How did all these people already know?

  The old professor balked briefly at the intensity in Parker’s eyes. “I’m being clever, of course,” he said, his tone smoothing over. “Our word scandal comes from the Greek scandalon. It means a stumbling block, something you trip over. The Scriptures call the cross a scandalon. People trip over it and fall away if they haven’t been born again. Remove the scandal and you can grow a big audience, but what’s the point?”

  Dr. Graham tilted his head and tucked his chin, as if finally making a frontal assault on an enemy. “I’ve been following your meteoric rise, Parker. You need to learn the lesson that Satan learned the hard way: a meteoric rise, without submitting to God’s will, is the setup for a meteoric fall. Jesus said he saw Satan fall like lightning. I don’t want to see that happen to you.”

  “Well, don’t sugarcoat it.” Parker was tired of hearing different versions of the same speech.

  “I’m just trying to help you. Speaking the truth in love, as the Word says. And if I had to guess, I’d say you’re nowhere near ready to resist the devil. I think your fears are well-founded.”

  “So, what then? If it comes down to it, the devil will just claim my soul?” Parker asked, his tone sharpening.

  “I hope your soul is already claimed. And that’s your edge. That’s where you turn. When you confront evil, whether it’s a trial in your life, a temptation, or a full-on frontal attack, just look to the cross. Look to the man bleeding and dying there for your salvation. If you’ve given yourself to him, you can’t be overtaken by the evil one.

  “Right after Jesus described the temporary nature of heathen exorcism, he told a quick little parable.” Dr. Graham flipped back to the Gospel of Luke. “ ‘When a strong man, fully armed, guards his o
wn house, his possessions are safe. But when someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up the spoils.’ When you’ve got the Holy Spirit, no one can bind that strong man. No one can come in and claim your soul, Parker. Take comfort in that.”

  Parker believed Dr. Graham with every ounce of his being, and he knew it should comfort him. But for some reason, it had the opposite effect.

  His phone buzzed, and Parker grabbed the distraction.

  “Parker Saint.”

  “It’s me,” Father Michael said on the other end. “We want to drop off a package for you to look at, but Xavier is paranoid about leaving it at the police station. You think they’d open your mail?”

  “I’m not there anyway. I’m meeting a friend at Rosa Parks Circle.”

  “Any chance we could meet up when you’re done? This would be better discussed in person.”

  Parker glanced at his former professor, who was staring straight up into the sky. He could sense the older man waiting for an opening to restart the lecture. “We’re actually just finishing up, Michael. Where do you want to meet?”

  The Basilica of St. Adalbert was a hundred-year-old Romanesque church, her three jaded copper domes jutting up alongside an elevated freeway downtown, amidst office buildings and high-rises. Parker met the Jesuits at the rear of the nave. He hadn’t known what a nave was, much to Father Ignatius’s horror, causing Parker to bump “church architecture” to the top of his list of Internet search terms.

  “Do you see this, Protestant?” Ignatius asked, gesturing all around them. “The columns, the sculptures, the baldachin suspended over the marble altar, the purposeful combination of Roman, Byzantine, and Gothic influence, the sheer majesty. This is a church!”

  “Yeah, it’s nice, I guess,” Parker said, goading the priest just a little.

  Michael cut the exchange short by thrusting a manila envelope toward Parker. It was labeled Reverend Parker Saint in Sharpie. Parker carefully bent back the metal clips and tried in vain to fold up the flap, which was securely glued down.

  “Let me save us all some time,” Ignatius said, snatching the envelope and producing a shiny black knife from his belt somewhere beneath his jacket. Parker felt a spike of adrenaline at the sight of it—an almost exact duplicate of the throwing knife Ketcham had shown the detectives back in the Command Center. He took an involuntary step back. I will hang, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics.

  “Don’t worry, Protestant. The Inquisition is on hiatus,” Ignatius said wryly.

  In the envelope were three forensic photos of the back of a woman’s neck, a gloved hand holding her long black hair off to the side.

  “Who am I looking at?” Parker asked.

  “Isabella Escalanté,” Michael answered. “I was able to gain access to the GRPD’s crime scene photographs this morning.”

  “You hacked into their computers?” Parker was doubting anew his alliance with these men.

  “Of course not. I slim-jimmed the detective’s car while you and Father Ignatius were keeping him occupied at the youth center. But look here.” He pointed to a small black symbol on her light brown skin. It was an intersecting of four wedge-shaped lines. “Do you recognize this character?”

  “No, I’ve never seen it.”

  Xavier said, “It’s a Sumerian cuneiform character called a dingir. It denotes deity.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “The evidence technicians cataloged it as a tattoo,” Michael said, “but it doesn’t look like one to any of us. Looks like marker. We followed up with Isabella’s mother, and she knew nothing of any tattoo. Apparently Isabella had always been very much against them—thought they were ‘trashy.’ ”

  “Which means,” said Xavier, “that either she had a sudden change of heart, which is certainly plausible, or this is not a tattoo.”

  Parker held the photo up near his nose and tried to focus. “But why would this symbol be so different? The others were in plain view and done with such demented creativity, painted with her blood. Why would the killer also draw this little thing in marker where no one would likely find it? And the Samaritan letter for ‘deity’? That’s just strange.”

  “Sumerian,” Ignatius corrected, “as in, the cradle of civilization.”

  “Right, sorry.”

  Xavier withdrew a few more photos from a folio and handed them to Parker. They showed Melanie Candor, dead, an image of a spade beginning at her throat and filling her sternum. Beneath it was a smaller image of a snake.

  “I would suggest that the stars, the 666, and the lightning bolt were for the police, the press, and the public, while the dingir was for the benefit of Merodach.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve met Merodach,” Parker said.

  “Perhaps you know him by another name: Marduk, a Babylonian sun god who essentially swallowed up many of the other heathen deities in the ancient Near East—Baal, Shemesh, and others. We read about him in the book of Jeremiah. He’s largely forgotten today, but clearly someone still remembers him.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “In Babylon, the two main symbols used for Merodach were the spade and the serpent or dragon.”

  Parker weighed this new information. “No offense, Fathers, but this could mean anything. Sometimes a spade is just a spade. It’s not always an obscure Babylonian reference.”

  Xavier shook his head. “The combination of these symbols and the unmistakable image of the dingir is just too much to be a coincidence.”

  “What about Ben Ludema? Did he have any Babylonian imagery on him?”

  “Don’t know,” Michael answered. “There were files from at least ten different cases in that guy’s backseat. By the time I found the right one and started scanning, Father Ignatius gave me the signal that you and the good detective were on your way back out.”

  Xavier fixed Parker with a solemn look. “We’d like you to try and gain access to the rest of these crime scene photos. I suspect there may be more of these subtler touches, perhaps overlooked by the police.”

  “I can probably do that. Ketcham seems to be running out of uses for me. He’s just giving me busywork now. Working through photographs keeps me occupied and out of his way.”

  “Great,” Michael said. “And keep in mind—it might be anywhere on their bodies. Doesn’t have to be the neck.”

  “Wait!” Parker shouted, pointing at the photo of the dingir. “That symbol was on the bottom of Melanie Candor’s foot.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. The coroner thought it was a tattoo, made some smart-aleck remark about it. I’d bet anything it was this exact symbol. And, really, who gets a tattoo on the bottom of her foot?” He furrowed his brow. “But I don’t get it. Ketcham has been through all those photos, and he went over every inch of the crime scene. Why wouldn’t he so much as mention that symbol to Troy and Corrinne?”

  Michael shrugged. “These days it seems like everyone in their twenties has a foreign letter tattooed somewhere on their body. It wouldn’t seem important if you didn’t know what you were looking for.”

  “Agreed,” Xavier said. “What I find strange is the lack of continuity. The dingir and the emblems of Merodach hearken back to some of the most ancient heathen worship on record. Then, the killer’s subject matter suddenly jumps forward thousands of years to the current pop-culture caricature of Satanism, the kind of thing popular in recent decades in the West—both amongst self-styled devil worshipers and in the reactionary American church. Instead of the religious culture of the Uruk period, we’ve got goat heads, pentagrams, and inverted crosses.”

  “Exactly,” Father Michael agreed. “It’s the difference between a wannabe occultist and someone who is deeply into the world of the demonic.”

  “What do you mean ‘wannabes’?” Parker asked.

  “Most of what we call Satanism can’t be traced back much further than the early twentieth century, when it was
cooked up by Aleister Crowley. It got a face-lift in the fifties and sixties by Anton LaVey and a few others, but its rituals, symbols, and catch-phrases have absolutely nothing to do with ancient occultism.”

  “Are you sure about that? My old neighbor claimed to be a Wiccan. She had this bumper sticker with a big pentagram on it, and it said ‘The Religion Older than Christianity.’ ”

  Father Michael laughed derisively. “Wicca’s even newer. Everything about it—the symbols, the Book of Shadows—it’s all made up in the last 125 years. Even the five-pointed star and inverted cross were actually Christian symbols centuries before anyone associated them with the occult.” He scoffed. “Older than Christianity—that’s a laugh.”

  Father Ignatius said, “And yet, this murderer seems to have a foot in both worlds.”

  “So what does this tell us about our perp?” asked Parker.

  An awkward silence followed.

  Father Michael tilted his head inquisitively. “Did you just say perp?”

  “I guess I, uh—”

  “It tells us that our perp has great knowledge of ancient spiritualism and the occult, but wants to appear to be in the same category as some metal-head kid who watches one too many eighties slasher flicks, puts on a hockey mask, and chops up his whole family.”

  “Any theories as to why?”

  “We think that the press was too dull to catch on to the Babylonian occult connection, as were the police—”

  “And their clergy consultant,” Ignatius interjected.

  “—and so the killer kind of dumbed himself down on purpose, as if to announce, ‘I really am a devil worshiper and these killings really are occult related!’ Why would he want to do that? Search me.”