***
Chuck pushed himself up from the mattress when he heard the doorbell. The chimes were at the top of the steps; he heard them clearly. His stomach roiled; he stretched back out until the bell chimed again. Unrelenting knocking followed.
Get that, Adam, will ya? It’s not for me, buddy, you get it.
Chuck shook himself, swallowed hard, and left his chilly room. He climbed the stairs, heard a woman’s voice ask about Megan. Heard Emily give a couple of one word answers. He paused at the top of the stairs.
Then . . . what? Is that a scuffle? Adam, what should I do? Where are the guns?
He crept through the kitchen. Heard the woman call out for help. What was she doing to Emily? Why was Emily so quiet?
Take that knife, Chuck. There, on the counter. Use that knife.
Chuck picked it up without a sound, bent low and crawled to the hallway. He held the knife to his face, saw his eye reflected back flat and colorless, turned the knife over and saw Adam’s silvery eye. He winked. He put the knife at an angle near the floor and out into the hallway. The tiny reflection revealed the scene in part. A large woman, hat and coat still on, was seated on the couch, her back towards him.
He pulled the knife back and stuck his head around the corner. He spotted Emily seized in the woman’s clutches. The walls and the windows huddled around them.
Words. Strange words. Was the woman swearing at Emily? What lord? Whose lord? Devils? Demons? Soul-whores?
He ran his finger along the blade, grasped the knife’s handle in his fist, raised it up, and swept it back in an arc. Still low to the floor he fixed his attention on a pile of crumbs that trailed from old linoleum to dirty carpet.
Attack her, you fool! She’s hurting Emily. Don’t listen to her words. She speaks nonsense. Don’t listen! Chuck, Adam, one of you stand up and get her out of here.
The things that woman was saying! That name! She said that name! The One True God!
Chuck put his fists to his ears, the sharp end of the knife pointing heavenward.
Resist. We must resist.
***
“You’re doing great, Meg,” Ben called out. He was skating backwards in front of her, swerving left and right, ready to catch her if she hit a rough patch again. She’d never make the Olympics in a million years, he laughed to himself, but she showed determination and grit. She didn’t whine once about all the spills she had taken the first hour. She had improved dramatically as soon as some kids had shown up to skate. Now they shared the shoveled area with a couple of them while another one was borrowing Ben’s shovel to make a spider’s web path for a game of tag. Meg wasn’t ready for that, but he suspected she would stubbornly want to try it.
“Getting tired yet?” He slowed and let her glide into his chest. As soon as he had her in his arms those predictable heart-stopping rockets went off in his chest. He leaned in and kissed her forehead. He controlled their balance as they coasted to a stop.
“Yeah. I think my ankles are going to break.” She tilted her face upwards. Her action was obvious and he brushed her mouth with his lips and would have kept on kissing her if a pair of young voices hadn’t started in with high-pitched mocking.
“We have an audience,” Megan grinned. “I liked this place better when we had it to ourselves. And now look,” she pointed over his shoulder to where a group of middle schoolers were heading their way.
“You want to go into town and get something to eat?”
“Sure, but I didn’t bring any money.”
“Not a problem.” Ben patted his pocket. “Hey,” he yelled to the kid with his shovel, “I’ll be back for that in half an hour. Okay?”
He helped Megan to the bench where they changed back into their boots. He laced the skates together, flung them over his shoulder, and grabbed Megan’s hand.
“So,” he said, “we can walk and talk and figure out our problems.”
“What problems?” Megan began. “Oh, yeah . . . I forgot. Those problems.” He didn’t need to analyze the flat note in her voice.
“So . . . of the three of them, Cori, Chuck, and Emily, which one do you think needs the most help or needs help the soonest?”
Megan mulled it over as they came to a partially shoveled sidewalk. “Well, as far as dangerous goes . . . I can’t decide. Emily attacks herself. Chuck attacked me. And Cori, well, what she did to that fat guy was positively unbelievable.” She stretched out the last couple of words with weighted meaning. “Have you ever seen anything like that?”
Ben shook his head. “I gotta believe it’s what magicians do when they create those illusions on stage. There’s some higher power or energy or something that can be controlled with brain waves.”
“Do you really believe that?” Megan cocked her head his way, watched him give a noncommittal shrug, and continued, “Because I know what I saw, and . . . I keep thinking of Mrs. Beridon’s card and the phrase ‘demon-possession’. If someone like her believes that’s possible, then . . . I don’t know, I guess it’s possible.”
“Hmm,” Ben said, “so you think Cori is possessed?”
It was an effort to affirm such a crazy assumption, especially in the middle of a bright, white day, but Megan nodded. “Yeah, maybe. And Chuck and Emily, too. I mean, think about it, Chuck goes into trances and talks in two voices and . . . honest, Ben, he walked on the ceiling and attacked me.”
“I believe you.” He squeezed her hand. They stopped at the corner before crossing and Ben added, “Maybe demon possession mimics the symptoms of other things, like schizophrenia.”
“Yeah, or epilepsy.”
“Right.”
They came to the alley behind the stores and followed some tracks to the back entrance of a coffee shop. Ben held the door for Megan and they stomped their boots on the inside rug.
***
The room buzzed and the atmosphere was sharp and pungent with tension as Mrs. Beridon called forth every phrase that had worked for her before. She commanded authority. She pronounced her words with conviction to rule over the demon. She trusted that she was in the right place at the right time to do exactly what she was doing. Emily convulsed. The hefty woman fought to capture Emily’s flailing arms and arrest her spasms.
She knew the only thing that would work and it wasn’t holy water or consecrated oil. She wouldn’t recite any incantations or touch her with a silver cross or yell jumbled up ecstatic words of nonsense. There was only one name to which these demons responded and only if the speaker had the proper belief, authority, and faith. Carla Beridon did.
She spoke the command and prayed.
Emily was burning up. Her body was a fiery furnace, each cut in her arms and thighs a blazing flame. Her stomach was far from settled, she ached in every joint and her bones vibrated with a dreadful weariness from head to foot. A slower burn began to scorch her thoughts.
What is that woman saying?
There was an air of expectancy flavored with dread, but not her own. She, Emily, was hopeful. But the terrified pleas sent shivers up her own spine the instant she realized that the voice in her throat was of another world.
She forced her eyes open and saw nothing but the dull green walls. Then slowly, with a gradual and unhurried recovery, she could see the furniture, the windows, the ceiling, and finally the woman.
She heard the woman speak the sacred name, command the demon to depart, then bow her head in prayer.
With a sudden and bewildering jolt her own mouth screeched out a torrent of blasphemous curses more profane and wicked than anything Emily knew. But before the awful echo reached her ears the memory of it ceased. She was clean.
The blistering fever was gone.
***
Resist. We must resist. Chuck rose with the knife cold in his hand. No, close your ears. Do not listen. Run. Go upstairs.
The unsettling dissonance of Emily’s shriek gave him time to dart through the hall, grab the banister, and pull himself up the narrow staircase. He made no sound. He moved as
the breath of hell.
There. Safe. She was not speaking to us. The name means nothing. Do not listen.
Chuck entered Cori’s room just as he heard the name again. It seared his ears with an intolerable off-pitch resonance, wrecked his balance, and cast him to the floor.
Get up. Get up. The devil’s children walk with earthly feet.
Get away! Climb. Hide.
He clambered up the ladder and scrambled across the attic boards.
Use your claws! To the hatch. Slide away. Away.
Chapter 18
Megan nibbled at the impossibly sweet dessert that Ben had bought her; a drizzle of hot chocolate syrup over the brownie satisfied her need for something warm. He had coaxed her out of the inexpensive hot chocolate, the traditional after-skating drink she expected, and persuaded her to try this pricey item as soon as they finished their hamburgers. Meanwhile he sipped on a frozen Coke. She teased him for ordering the icy drink on a ‘snow day’ no less.
“Come on, take a taste,” she tempted. “It’s so good.”
“It’s more fun watching you enjoy it. Do you know that you hum at the beginning and end of each bite?”
“I do?”
“Yeah, it’s cute.”
They smiled at each other. It was time to get back to serious business. They had talked about skating while they waited for the waitress to bring them their order. Neither one was anxious to talk about demons as they related to Cori, Emily, or Chuck, but they had to.
“So, tell me about Chuck. Where are his parents?”
“Believe it or not, they only live a couple of blocks away. I think he does the same thing I do, lives in both houses off and on. I offered him a place to stay last fall because his folks kicked him out when he went kind of berserk on them.”
“Were you guys friends?”
“Uh, not in a long time, but I knew them, Chuck and Adam, in elementary school. They weren’t totally identical, by the way, you could tell them apart.” He took a sip and moved his feet, putting them snug against Megan’s.
“And does he go to the doctor for his, um, schizophrenia?”
“Oh, yeah, like once a month. He was institutionalized for a while, but I guess their insurance only covered so much and they had to let him out. Then he did some weird stuff that got him put in the alternative school. They can handle behavior problems better there, I guess.”
“Maybe, um,” Megan held a forkful aloft as she formulated her thought, “maybe the demons can mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia just enough to fool the doctors . . . or . . . maybe they can get into people who have mental problems to begin with. You know, because they’re open to it.” She took a bite, but didn’t hum as she waited for Ben’s response.
“That makes sense. And Emily was open to it because she’s so sad and depressed and Cori is open to it because she uses drugs.” He started to crack his knuckles then stopped when his phone rang. He checked the short text message. “Crap.”
“What?”
“Oh, nothing, just a pick-up game I missed.” He finished texting back and looked at her. “But I had better things to do.”
He reached across the table and placed his hand palm side up next to hers and Megan slipped her left hand into his. Her heart did a little flip-flop.
“So,” she said, “are we solving the problems?”
“Well, we’re figuring them out.”
“I wonder if they each have their own demon or if it’s the same one and it makes each of them act different.” She finished the dessert and added, “Maybe it is a ghost, the ghost of that murderer, Bobby Joe Kinton, who killed his mother and sister. That’s what the Ouija board said.”
“When?”
“When we were in Cori’s room . . .” Megan frowned. “Oh, I forgot. When I asked the board if it was the ghost of Bobby Joe . . . that pointer thingy moved to the yes. And I said that would explain Emily’s nightmares and why Chuck walked on the ceiling and how Cori could levitate things. And you know what she said? She said she saw me floating in the middle of my room when I was asleep.”
Ben squeezed her hand, made her look at him, “It’s not a ghost.”
“I didn’t believe in them before this week, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I’m possessed, too.”
He flickered a doubting smile and shook his head. “What about that lady, your social worker? She doesn’t have ghost-buster on her card, but she does have demon possession listed. I, uh, I talked to my mom a little bit and I . . . I think we need to look it up in the Bible.”
Megan almost let go of his hand. “That kind of shocks me. I didn’t expect you to say that, but, huh, we can do a search on the internet a lot easier than flipping through ten thousand flimsy pages.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
“You know,” this time she did pull her hand out of his, took her napkin and wiped her mouth, “I thought from the first that there was something odd about that house, but if the others moved in after their problems started, then it’s not the house. I can see how they have some sort of mental problems going on, but what about me? My problem is a legal one.”
Ben shrugged. “Demons are contagious?” It was easier to make a joke.
***
There were two demons tormenting Chuck as he slid down the chute. They closed his ears, blinded his eyes, and stilled his vocal cords. They filled his thoughts with ridicule, contempt, and hatred. Their rage seethed with a pounding frenzy that held no relief for him until he hit the floor in his room and crumpled to a mental oblivion. The void and nothingness of his stupor lasted only a few minutes and then he awoke to a headache so agonizing that he crawled to the mattress on his hands and knees.
No one shared guardianship of his movements, not even Adam.
***
Emily felt the lightness more as a physical buoyancy than anything else. Before today she would have cringed at the unbearable shame of having this stranger, this nice lady, witness her breakdown. She would have needed to ease the mortification with a razor, but the lady was holding her hands, her head bowed, her words mumbled yet clear and Emily’s weightlessness was a joy.
“How do you feel, Emily?” Mrs. Beridon released her hands but held her gaze.
“Fine, thank you.”
“You were having a terrible episode. I don’t want to scare you, but this sort of thing is going to happen again. I can help you. Do you still have my card?”
Emily nodded.
“Good. We need to set up some appointments. This is going to be tough, but we can win.” She touched Emily’s sleeve. “May I look?” At Emily’s nod Mrs. Beridon gently lifted the fabric and revealed several scars.
Emily looked, too. They were almost healed. She watched Mrs. Beridon’s fingers trace a tickling line. She wanted to giggle. She felt elated, full of a happiness she hadn’t felt in ages.
“You don’t need to do this, Emily. You don’t need to punish yourself for anything. Not ever. Okay? Do you understand? Think of it this way,” she let go of the sleeve, “everything bad that you’ve ever done or ever will do has already been punished.”
***
As they came out the back door of the café Ben smiled at Megan’s complaint of feeling too full to try ice skating again.
“Didn’t you have fun?” He looked around the alley and dropped the skates onto a ledge of snow as she answered.
“Yeah, I did, but it couldn’t have been much fun for you . . . having to hold me up so much.”
He took a final quick look around and blocked her way. He wrapped his arms around her and said, “It was the most fun I’ve ever had on ice. Especially the part where we did this.” He leaned forward and pressed a kiss to her lips, a tender kiss that wrapped around both their souls and made their talk of demons seem like nonsense. Nothing was real except this sweet moment.
***
Cori pounded on Jason’s door until she saw him come from the back room. He waved her off and turned away. She pounded all the harder.
“Give
me my stuff!” she yelled. She wasn’t leaving until she got what she came for.
Jason stomped to the door and twisted the deadbolt. He threw the door open to a gust of wintry air and stepped outside wearing nothing more than a rock band tee shirt.
“Get the hell away from here.”
“I want my stuff now!”
He glared at her, waiting to see if she’d whirl him around in public with her magical powers. When she didn’t, he huffed out a heavy sigh. “All right. It’s inside – stay out here.”
Cori ignored his order and pushed in behind him. “Don’t worry, Jason, I’m not gonna hurt you. You’re an idiot and I take pity on idiots.” She sneered at him when he glanced back.
He found the bag where he left it and lobbed it at her feet. Several things plunked out including the ancient book on exorcism.
He squinted his eyes at her. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve been reading about this stuff and got yourself possessed. It’s dangerous stuff, Cori, all that fortune telling crap . . .”
“Fortune telling? Yeah, right. In five seconds your phone is going to ring. Five, four, three, two, one.”
Jason’s cell jingled in his pocket. They both let the interruption stun them into a wide-eyed union. “So . . . who is it?” Jason pulled the phone out and waited while it rang two more times.
“I don’t . . . uh, it’s a woman . . . wanting to cancel an appointment.”
Jason flipped the phone open and answered with doubt and suspicion in his voice.
***
“I can’t stay any longer,” Mrs. Beridon said. She gave Emily a generous hug and reminded her to call her soon. “Oh, I almost forgot the reason I came here.” She got her pencil and paper out again and wrote a message for Megan. “Here. Please give this to Megan. It’s extremely important that she read this today.”
She folded the paper once and handed it to Emily who only nodded.
Mrs. Beridon gave her a parting smile and rushed out.
Emily watched the vehicle slog away. The overjoyed happiness of a moment ago was dissipating in chunks now. The depressed and forlorn puppy dog look returned to her colorless face, but there was no one to see it. She unfolded the note and read: Megan, the judge is ruling tomorrow. You must be there. I’ll pick you up here at 8:15. Don’t go to school. Mrs. B.
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