“Francis, is that you?” an elderly woman said.
“Hey, mom,” Franco said. “It’s me. I’m just grabbing something.”
Scout came in and saw Franco’s mum sat at the dinner table. She had her head in her hands and was staring down at a plate of spaghetti. When Franco walked out of his room carrying a crucifix, she perked up and smiled. Scout saw the change. It was an act; one Scout had performed herself.
He said, “You good, mom?” and kissed her on top of the head.
She nodded. “What are you up to?”
“I’m just helping a friend out,” Franco said.
His mom turned in her chair and her face lit up upon seeing Scout. “Oh, a girlfriend?”
“Not like that,” Franco said.
Scout blushed. “Hi,” she said, waving.
“You could do much worse,” Franco’s mom said. “She’s a good-looking girl. Why won’t you go out with her.
Franco laughed and took the Bible off a shelf above the television.
“Where are you going with my Bible?” she said.
Scout and Franco ran down the stairs to the first floor. Franco knocked on three doors on the same side of the building. One of them., answered first, a black woman in a bathrobe with her hair in a towel.
“We’re using your window,” Franco said. He looked at Scout and said, “Come on.”
Scout apologized to the bemused resident as she walked through her home. Franco opened the window in the lounge and looked down. It was only one floor up.
“You sure about this?” Scout said.
“Ain’t no tunnels,” Franco said. “It’s this way or we walk out past the police cars.”
Scout looked down. Franco dropped the bags and his boys below caught them.
“Your turn,” Franco said.
Chapter 12
Scout and Franco spent the night in a beat-up Ford Mustang parked in a secluded spot near the river. The engine was running most of the night to keep the heaters going. The lights were off to not draw attention. Scout climbed into the back seat with a blanket.
“You gonna tell me about how you know about all this shit?” Franco said.
“It happened to me,” Scout said. “Like I said. I wasn’t lying.”
Franco looked out through the windshield across the river. “Possessed?” he said. “For real?”
“So,” Franco said, looking back at her, “you are, like, living proof that God exists?”
Scout stayed quiet. She pulled the thin blanket up to her chin.
“If there’s a Devil, right, there’s gotta be a God,” Franco said. “There’s gotta be.”
“After what God let happen to me,” Scout said, “I want nothing more to do with him.”
“How’s that?” Franco said. “You still here, right?”
“He nearly killed me,” Scout said. “He ruined my life.”
“Were you possessed by God?” Franco said.
Scout said nothing.
“There we are then,” Franco said. “How did it end?”
“Two priests,” Scout said. “They took it out of me and killed it. After that, nothing was the same. I moved away from home, got a job, and disappeared.”
“Sounds to me like God saved your ass, gave you a new life and put your ass in a car with a handsome brother and you’re complaining about it.”
Scout had thought about it that way before. She had tried to tell herself that very thing over and over, but it never stuck. She felt broken by the whole event. And she needed someone to blame.
She was a victim. Scout realized she had been thinking like a victim, behaving like a victim, embracing her victimhood with open arms, and running from anything approaching responsibility. She took no responsibility for anything that she needed to do. She had tried to talk herself out of therapy, out of attending the group, out of meeting people. Scout realized that she had talked herself out of living.
And tomorrow night, she thought, I might die.
“Will you turn the fucking heating up please?” Scout said. “It’s freezing in here.”
“This is as far as she goes,” Franco said. “Don’t see why we can’t stay in a motel anyway.”
“The police will have my picture everywhere by now.”
“You on the FBI’s most wanted,” Franco laughed. “Osama Bin Scout.”
“I killed someone,” Scout said.
Franco looked back at her. He nodded. “We all done some shit we not proud of,” he said.
Franco rubbed his hands together and put them next to the heater.
“How come you get a blanket anyway?” he said.
“Why are you doing this?” Scout said. “Why are you helping me?”
“You kiddin’ me?” Franco said. “You seen us. All we do is sit around and talk shit and mess with people all day, man. Shit gets boring. So, yeah, I can help a girl shoot some fuckin’ demons or whatever the fuck this is.”
“Seriously?”
Franco smiled. “I’m just being a hardass,” he said. “I seen you around a lot, with your hood up and your pretend badass walk. I know you ain’t like that. I got a bit of thing for ya.”
Scout laughed.
“Hey,” Franco said. “No smiling now, you get me. We serious motherfuckers.”
Scout nodded. “Serious as a heart attack,” she said.
Franco laughed. “Man,” he said, “you a real cheeseball.”
“No smiles,” Scout said.
Scout leaned forward in her seat and kissed him.
“What was that for?” Franco said.
“In case I don’t get through this alive,” Scout said.
“Well, we coming out of this alive now, that’s for damn sure,” Franco said.
“It might get scary,” she said.
Franco smiled, “Scary I can do.”
Scout swallowed. She was trembling, but only half from the cold. She mumbled, “You should come back here, get some of this blanket.”
Franco stared at her and raised his eyebrows.
“You should-”
Franco got out of the driver’s side door and climbed in the back. Scout had never seen a guy move so fast. She laughed. He sat next to her and pulled some of the blanket over himself. Scout leaned next to him. She lay her head on his chest.
“No funny stuff, now,” Franco said, trying not to smile.
Scout closed her eyes and listened to his breathing. “No funny stuff,” she repeated, smiling.
Scout hadn’t been this close to anyone since before her possession. A month ago, she would rather throw herself off a tall building than suffer through human contact. Tonight was different. She finally had someone on her side. Even though she was scared to death of what tomorrow would bring, tonight just having someone with her made all the difference. She was scared, but she was also relaxed. Her mind wasn’t racing. She wasn’t someplace else or wishing she could disappear.
She was happy just where she was.
Such a feeling didn’t happen to Scout very often.
Franco ran his fingers through Scout’s hair, stroking her. Scout wasn’t cold at all any more, but she was still trembling. She turned her face up towards his. She looked into his eyes, and then down to his lips, deep in thought. Scout leaned in and kissed him gently.
“Oh, no,” Scout whispered gently. She laughed. “Funny stuff.”
Scout caressed his chest as he kissed her again. She turned and lifted her leg and placed it on top of his. She kissed him hungrily and moved her hand down his chest and underneath the blanket. Franco ran his hands over her body. For the first time, it felt like it was her body, like it belonged to her and no-one else. She wasn’t borrowing it. She wasn’t wearing it like an ill-fitting suit. It was her.
And it felt good.
*
Scout woke in the morning with the cold enveloping her. She shivered. Franco wasn’t in the car. Scout sat up quickly and looked for him. She spotted him standing at the river’s edge, peeing into the water.
She pulled a handgun from the door pocket and checked it was loaded.
Today’s the day, she told herself. Today’s the day.
If today isn’t the last day of my life, Scout thought, it will be the last day of my imprisonment.
She resolved that whatever happened - whether she ended up in the insane asylum or prison or on the road with no money - she would be happy to be free. Like a person dying of a terminal illness who can think of nothing but being well, Scout only wanted freedom for the horror of her past and the threat of its recurrence.
The car was clean. It wasn’t stolen and the plates were legit. They drove across town after taking a moment to gather three rats and placing them in an empty shopping bag. Franco took some persuading to grab them. When they were done and the rats were squealing and turning in their plastic prison in the trunk, Franco drove the car past Central Woodward Church slowly.
“You think they’ll come back here?” Franco asked. “After what you’ve learned? Don’t you think they’ll be expecting this?”
Scout shook her head. “No-one of them will be expecting me to do this. They look at me and they see a broken little girl. They see someone who’ll hide and wait for it all to go away.”
“That ain’t you,” Franco said.
“That ain’t me,” Scout said. “A couple of weeks ago, yes. I was walking in there nearly crying I was so scared.”
“They won’t see us coming,” Franco said.
“I’m going in now,” Scout said.
“It’s four in the afternoon. You gonna wait and hide?”
“Exactly. I’m gonna have a look around, too. At six, I’ll head down into the basement, just in case they start arriving earlier than expected.”
“What you taking?”
“I’ll take a shotgun and a handgun and my knife.”
Franco pulled the car over on a side street.
“If you cut through a couple of yards, you can get in through the back.”
Franco loaded a shotgun into a sports bag. He handed her the knife and the handgun.
“You good with how to use these?”
Scout nodded. “What are you going to do?”
“If this is the plan, this is the plan. I’ll come in at five after six. I’ll come in strong, make them all shut up and sit down. If anyone moves, I’ll blast them.”
“Stick to arms and legs at first,” Scout said. “They’ll all be scared. It doesn’t mean they’ll all be possessed. I need one more thing…”
“The rats?”
“The rats.”
“There’s a crowbar in the trunk. Be sure to grab that, but don’t make a mess of the door or they’ll know you’re inside.”
Scout got out and threw the crowbar into the sports bag with the shotgun in and slung the bag over her shoulder. She walked around to the trunk and pulled out the writhing bag of live rats.
“Don’t let those fuckers bite you,” Franco said.
“I’ll see you inside,” Scout said. She walked to the driver’s side window and kissed Franco.
“You bet your ass you will,” Franco said.
Scout walked through someone’s yard with as casual an expression on her face as she could manage considering she was carrying a small arsenal of weaponry and a bag of rats. She hopped the back-yard fence and was on church ground. Behind the church was a cemetery. She walked between the gravestones. Keeping watch for any traffic driving by. Scout caught sight of someone walking towards the church down the sidewalk and she took cover behind a large statue of an angel. When she saw it was a man walking a happy, bouncy Dachshund, she continued making her way towards the church.
Reaching the back door, she pulled the crowbar out. She tried the door handle, but it was locked, as expected. She looked for a less obvious entry point. As she circled the back of the building, she saw a window, low to the ground, small and rectangular.
It was the basement.
Scout tried to pry the window open, but it wouldn’t budge. She looked around for a moment and just listened. She heard only crows and distance traffic. She took off her coat and placed it over the glass and with a single jab, smashed the glass with the curved end of the crowbar. The sound was loud, but not loud enough to be heard by anyone who might have been driving by. Scout removed her coat and scraped away the shards of glass which still clinged to the window frame. She lay her coat over the frame before climbing through. She just about fit. Her coat tore on the shards when she pulled it through.
Inside, she put down her sports bag and the rats, who were writhing around but not yet in a frenzy. The basement was dimly lit by the window at the back and a similar window near the front. Rows of shelving sat draped in cobwebs. On the shelves were boxes of files and scrapbooks.
Drawn in chalk on the ground in the center of the basement was a five-pointed star, the sign of the Devil. Around it was scattered bones which had been stripped of their flesh and bleached dry. Some of them were big and some were small.
All looked human.
There were two skulls and two sets of thigh bones in a pile a little away from the pentagram. They looked a little burned and were sat on the remains of a small fire.
The missing new group members Seline had mentioned.
In a pile on the ground nearby was two sets of women’s clothes. Scout looked through them. She found drivers’ licenses with photos of bored young women adorning them. They looked no different to Scout. It made the pain of their discovery that much worse. Would someone have found her skull a year from now, forgotten and dusty in the basement?
Within the pentagram were old, dried out animal pieces. There was the head of a rat, six sets of crow wings and a pile of chicken feet. Scout pulled out Seline’s notebook. There was something familiar about this scene. She flipped through the pages and came to bestiary.
Each entry had a list of ingredients.
Could they be spell recipes? Scout thought. Is this how you summon a demon?
She paused a moment and felt a deep stirring terror within her.
Had someone summoned Asmodeus to take her?
Scout turned the pages slowly, watching grotesque, piecemeal monsters go by one at a time. She was drawn to their eyes every time. There was a depth to them, a threat. Seline had been a talented artist.
A rat’s head.
Crows’ wings.
Chicken feet.
Scout scanned lists featuring monkey hands, cockroach legs, a baby’s foot. She found the entry in the bestiary that matched the mangled old remains on the ground.
Popobawa. That was its name. Seline’s notes were brief, but ominous: ‘Master of deception, fear. Devourer. A single soul. A single host.’ The image was an amalgamation of the animals named in the recipe.
Had they summoned it already or is that why they wanted Scout? Was she to be the soul? If so, who was to be the host?
Scout sat in the corner and read the ritual and clutched the crucifix until it got too dark to see well enough to read. In seeing the remains of women who had been sacrificed in the name of evil, Scout had a newfound longing to reconnect with the forces of good. She found herself praying for the first time since her possession.
“Dear Lord,” she whispered as she closed her eyes and clasped her hands. She stopped almost as soon as she began. She thought of what Franco had said, that God had given her a second chance, rescuing her from the jaws of the Devil. In her heart, Scout felt clear for the first time. She felt uncorrupted. She felt as if she could trust enough to ask for help. “I am in a bad place right now,” she said. “I need to ask forgiveness. I’ve done terrible things.”
Scout opened her eyes to her dim surroundings.
“I’ve done things I will never be able to forgive myself for. But, right now, it’s the first time I’ve ever had the hope of a better life, not a life of running and hiding and never speaking to anyone, but a real life. And I need your help to get it. I will pay for what I’ve done, for the mistakes I’ve made. I swear. All I want is to be free
of the demons. All I ask is that you give me a chance at a life.” She unclasped her hands. “Amen,” she added.
It was five minutes to seven in the evening when she heard cars begin to pull up in the parking lot above.
Scout loaded her shotgun and checked her handgun. She tucked her knife into her belt. She took a rubber band from around a stack of letters on one shelf and used it to tie back her hair.
She was about to find out if she was to get her chance.
As another car pulled into the parking lot, its lights scanned across the ceiling of the basement and something glistened in the corner of the room. Scout walked over to a small box.
Inside the box was three masks: a monkey, an elephant and a pig.
Scout picked out the elephant mask.
Elephants never forget, she told herself.
The bag of rats became frenzied. It quickly turned into a bag filled with blood and dead meat.
Chapter 13
“Welcome, Franco,” Tara said. “We weren’t expecting a new friend tonight. This is a great surprise. Please, would you like to introduce yourself to the group? We’re all aware of how difficult it can be, the first time.”
Franco stood and looked around the room. The nine who were there on Scout’s first night were there again. Joey was there, Jess, Eileen, Michael the principle, and others who were less interested in speaking. Scout could see everyone through a crack in the door as she stood out in the hallway. They were acting as if nothing was wrong, as if nothing had happened. They laughed at Franco’s bad, self-deprecating jokes. They chatted happily among themselves in the pauses between speakers. Tara seemed completely at ease.
Scout started to create a script in her head for what she would say to the group. As soon as she noticed she was doing it, she stopped. She had Seline’s notebook in one coat pocket, a bible and a crucifix in another. A gun and a knife were tucked into her pants. In her hands was a tactical shotgun.
She was ready.
She just had to accept it.
Scout knocked on the door and the chatter immediately stopped.
“Hello?” Tara said.
After The Exorcism: Book Two Page 3