Exorcist

by Steven Piziks

  It was the latter that filled him with the most guilt, in those rare moments when he allowed himself to consider it. Merrin should be offering Emekwi comfort and solace, help shoulder the man’s burden of grief. Instead he had fled to Nairobi without even waiting a single day.

  But Merrin wasn’t a priest anymore, didn’t have to comfort the living over the graves of the dead. Will Francis was better suited to it. Let him handle it.

  But still the guilt remained.

  The entranceway was painted a dull green. A battered desk stood guard near the door, but it was unoccupied. The lighting was dim and oppressive.

  “Hello?” Merrin called. His voice echoed.

  No one answered. A staircase and several corridors led in various directions. Merrin chose a hallway at random and moved forward. Eventually he came across a black-clad nun, who informed him in a thick Irish accent that the offices were on the first floor and patients were kept on the second.

  “Is Father Gionetti here?” Merrin asked her. “I was told I should speak to him.”

  She made a vague gesture. “He’s out and about. If ye wander round long enough, ye’ll be sure to find him.”

  Merrin thanked her and turned to leave.

  “Be careful,” she called after him. “Ye can enter, but ye can’t get out.”

  Merrin didn’t stop to ask for clarification. Instead he climbed the first set of stairs he came across and found himself in front of another set of double doors. He pushed through them. Once he released the doors, they automatically began to swing shut, and only then did Merrin realize what the sister had meant. The doors were levered, and opened only from one side. He lunged, but the door slipped past his fingers. Both doors slammed shut. Merrin tugged on a handle. Locked. He would have to find someone with a key to let him out.

  Merrin turned and faced the chamber he had entered. His jaw dropped in shock. Patients, dozens of them, wandered around an enormous common room. All were dressed in loose hospital gowns and slippers—male and female, old and young. Most of the people were white, though perhaps six or seven blacks wandered through the mix. A few rickety-looking tables and ladderback chairs were scattered about. Heavy bars and grates covered the grimy windows. The light was gray, and the air was heavy with the pungent smells of urine and vomit.

  Most of the people had empty eyes. Some sat in chairs and stared at their hands or their feet or at nothing at all. Others shuffled about in their slippers, muttering or waving their hands. A young man in a corner opened his mouth wide and flapped his wrists. A gray-haired woman carried on an argument with empty air. A balding white man suddenly leaped onto the back of a black man and pummeled him with his fists. The black man dropped to the gritty wood floor, howling and trying to dislodge his attacker. None of the other patients interfered. Most didn’t even seem to notice. Merrin’s stomach turned. The assailant abruptly appeared to lose interest. He disengaged and wandered off, growling to himself. The victim remained hunched on the floor like a turtle pulled into its shell.

  Merrin finally spotted another nun. She was kneeling on the floor with a bucket of water, scrubbing at something on the boards. He made his way across the room, feeling like a traveler through a circle of hell. The nun looked up as he approached.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. This one was Italian, and her accent was so thick that Merrin could barely understand her.

  “I’m Fa—I’m Lankester Merrin,” he said. “I came from Derati to see Anton Bession. He’s a patient here.”

  “Mr. Bession is down in the chronic wing,” she said, pointing at a corridor Merrin hadn’t noticed before. “You risk to visit him.” And she went back to her scrubbing. The brush hissed against the floor.

  Merrin turned to go, then stopped. “Excuse me, but is this place really helping these patients?”

  The brush stopped. “Nothing can help these patients. They are lucky to have food and a place to rest their heads at night. Most of the time we have not enough to pay even that.”

  Merrin nodded. All too often the people who needed the most got the least. More evidence that God didn’t care. He stepped smartly down the indicated corridor. Patients hovered like ghosts, some wearing gowns stained with their own filth. Several doors faced the corridor. Each bore a card with a name written on it, though often the handwriting was barely legible.

  A young man plucked at Merrin’s sleeve. He was dark-haired and handsome. Clear, bottle-green eyes contrasted sharply with his fair skin. He wore brown slacks and a shirt with a collar.

  “Please…are you a doctor?” he asked timidly.

  Merrin shook his head. “I’m a visitor.”

  “Oh, thank God. You have to help me.” He looked around, but the only people in sight were other patients. “I don’t belong here. I’m not insane. My brother got me committed because Dad left me most of his estate.”

  “Really?” Merrin answered in a carefully neutral voice. He looked around, hoping to see a doctor or another nun.

  “You don’t believe it,” the young man said, and tears filled his eyes. “Oh, God—you have to believe me. I’m going nuts in here. Look at me! Do I look like them? My name is Danny Walsh. My father was James Walsh. My brother’s name is Adrian. He got married last month to a girl named Melissa—my girl! It was in all the papers. You can check!”

  Merrin wavered. Danny had a point—he didn’t look at all like the slack, vacant people around him. He wore clean clothes instead of a filthy gown, and he was clear-eyed and well-spoken.

  “Maybe I can talk to the doctor,” Merrin said. “Do you know where he is?”

  “I’ll take you to him,” Danny said excitedly. “This way.”

  He led Merrin back toward the common room. Danny’s steps were light and firm.

  “Thank you for helping me,” he said. “A few more days in the place and I really will go insane. God. It’s not like I could help what happened to those children.”

  Merrin stopped. “What children?” he asked casually.

  “The ones who wanted me to eat them,” Danny replied in a matter-of-fact voice. “I wasn’t going to hurt them, anyway…just take a couple bites.”

  Merrin turned and walked back down the corridor, ignoring Danny’s heartfelt pleas for him to come back. Eventually they faded. One of the doors he passed shuddered as something slammed into it from the other side. It shuddered a second time, and a third. Then it stopped.

  Suddenly Merrin noticed he was alone. The last twenty feet of hallway was empty of people, as if someone had drawn an invisible line they instinctively knew not to cross. He watched an old woman with snarled gray hair shuffle toward him, then veer off. Her toothless mouth worked, silently mouthing words only she could hear, but she wouldn’t come any closer.

  The door at the end of the corridor had a thick, grimy window. The air around Merrin was growing chilly. His shirt felt too thin, in fact, and the end of his nose felt cool. He checked the card tacked to the door and made out the name Anton Bession in crabbed handwriting. The man was once the Derati site’s original chief archaeologist, and now he was here. Merrin peered through the dirty glass of the window. He was just able to make out a man inside, sitting at some kind of desk with his back to the door. Merrin tried the door handle, but it was locked. Of course. Feeling thwarted, he turned to go, intending to look for someone with a key.

  A click stopped him.

  The door had drifted open a crack. That was strange. Maybe Merrin just hadn’t pulled hard enough. He hesitated, then poked his head into the room. The smell slammed into him like a physical force. Human waste with overtones of rotting food. It made the main room of the asylum smell like a lilac bush in comparison. Brown smears on the walls testified to part of the stench’s source. Fighting to keep his gorge down, Merrin stepped inside.

  Ice-cold air washed over Merrin and chilled him instantly. His breath hung in the befouled atmosphere like dirty fog. He stood rooted to the spot in shock and bewilderment. What the hell was going on?

 
Bession continued to hunch over the desk, hard at work on something Merrin couldn’t see. Pictures hung on the walls, stuck there by the filth. More paper demons leered at Merrin. He fished a handkerchief out of his pocket and pressed it to his nose in an attempt to filter out the smell.

  “Mr. Bession?” Merrin choked out. Bession didn’t respond. His right arm moved, as if he were drawing or writing. “Mr. Bession, you worked on a dig in Derati.”

  Bession laughed, an icy sound that fit the room. Outside, Merrin heard faint shouts, screams, and the thud of flesh striking flesh. A fight had broken out in the main room. Merrin became acutely aware that he was standing alone in a cell with a madman. He shivered with both cold and unease.

  “You drew a picture of an idol,” Merrin said. “Where did you see it?”

  There was a slow tapping sound from the floor near Bession’s desk. Bession continued his work. Merrin didn’t know what to do, so he kept talking.

  “Was the idol in the church?” he asked. “Mr. Bession?”

  “Father Lankester Merrin.” The man’s voice was hard as stone. Merrin froze and his stomach tightened.

  “How do you know my name?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

  The tapping sound picked up speed. A scarlet puddle oozed from under the desk, slow, slick, and shiny. Bession’s arm moved faster.

  “I said, how do you know my name?” Merrin shouted. The door behind him slammed. Bession slowly rose to his feet. He was large and bulky. Merrin backed up a step, then reached behind him and tried the door. Locked. Had one of the other patients…? Bession turned around. The front of his gown was torn to shreds, and he was clutching the front of it together. Blood leaked steadily from between his fingers and streamed down his front.

  “You’re hurt,” Merrin said, knowing how stupid the comment sounded.

  “No,” replied Bession, his eyes locked onto Merrin’s. “I am free.” He moved his fists away from his chest, and the bloody remains of his shirt fell open. A bleeding swastika gleamed wetly on his chest. Merrin tried to back away, but his spine already pressed against the freezing cold door. The noise of the fight outside grew into a roar.

  “God,” Bession said in the voice from Merrin’s dream, “is not here today, priest.”

  The words turned Merrin’s knees to water, and he slid down the door to the icy floor. His breath puffed in great clouds, his feet and hands turned numb with cold. Bession opened a dripping fist, revealing a long shard of glass. The tip of Merrin’s index finger throbbed. Bession pressed the point of the shard to his own neck. The noise of the fight outside grew into a roar.

  “No!” Merrin tried to shout, but it came out as an incoherent croak.

  Bession rammed the shard home. It made a faint hiss as it sliced through skin and muscle. Blood spurted, then gushed in a fountain. A wide grin spread across Bession’s face, and his arm kept moving, sawing with gleeful precision. Merrin heard a pop and the whistle of escaping air as the glass opened Bession’s windpipe. Merrin pushed himself backward as hard as he could, as if he could push himself out through the unyielding door. A scattering of blood, already cold, spattered his face and the drawings, making it appear that the figures were bleeding. A long, gruesome moment later, Bession’s legs buckled and he collapsed in a bleeding tangle.

  The room went dead quiet, and the roar of the fight outside stopped. Merrin heard nothing but the booming thud of his own heart. Carefully, he pushed himself to his feet and looked down at the mess that had been Bession’s neck. Strings of ruined skin and meat hung from the gash, and blood formed a glistening puddle. Nausea oozed through Merrin’s stomach, and he threw up. Vomit splattered across the floor. When Merrin was finished, he noticed the room was no longer icy.

  His eye fell on a piece of paper poking out from the shadows pooled around Bession’s bed. Merrin wiped his mouth on his sleeve, edged around the twitching body, and picked the paper up. It was a charcoal drawing of a church—the church. There were the four Michael statues, though it took Merrin a moment to recognize them—they were near-formless blobs. The crucifix, done in much greater detail, hung upside down just behind them.

  The strange thing was that another building was seated on top of the church. It looked like a pre-Christian temple, though the drawing was rough and it was hard to tell. A handful of human figures inside, done in detail like the crucifix, engaged in various sex acts. Merrin frowned, the theological side of his brain shifting into gear despite the gory surroundings. The picture’s symbolism was obvious—decadence and pleasure over love and faith. His first instinct was to drop the paper back on the floor, but something else made him roll it up for keeping. He stepped around Bession’s body again and reached for the door, expecting it to be locked.

  The handle twisted like a frog under his hand. Merrin leaped back. His foot slipped in the vomit and blood that slicked the floor, and he fell heavily against one wall. An old man, bald, hook-nosed and wearing a priest’s collar, entered the room. Two white-clad orderlies—natives, by their coloring—hurried into the room. One of them had a swollen eye and the other had dried blood on his nose. They had clearly been involved in the fight outside. Merrin wondered how the nun with the scrubbing brush had fared. The old priest looked down at the mess that had been Anton Bession, then gestured at the orderlies to see to the corpse.

  “I hope he finds peace,” the priest said. His accent was Italian. He turned to Merrin. “I’m Father Gionetti. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Seven

  St. John’s Sanitarium, British East Africa

  The devil turns against its friend.

  —Kenyan proverb

  TALL PALM TREES waved gently in a late afternoon breeze scented with flowers. Gravel crunched beneath Merrin’s boots as he and Father Gionetti walked a winding pathway behind the asylum. It felt wonderful to be out in the fresh air after the horrors of bedlam. Every step that took Merrin away from the hospital made him feel immeasurably better. Gionetti walked beside him, easily keeping pace despite his advanced age.

  “You still haven’t told me how you knew I was coming,” Merrin said. “Did Sarah somehow contact you?”

  “No,” Gionetti said. “Rome did.”

  Merrin stopped. Gionetti didn’t notice right away and had to backtrack when he realized Merrin was no longer beside him.

  “What? Why?” Merrin demanded. “Why would Rome tell you I was coming down from Derati?”

  Gionetti clucked his tongue. “Have you drifted so far from God, Merrin, that you can’t see? Monsieur Bession was touched by the devil.”

  “Demonic possession?” Merrin scoffed. “Father, forgive me, but I can’t believe you would think—”

  “I never said Bession was possessed,” Gionetti interrupted. “Only touched.” He resumed walking, and Merrin was forced to move forward to continue the conversation.

  “Touched?” Merrin repeated. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “In 1647, the Ursuline convent in Loudun, France, was plagued by possession. Thirty-four nuns had been touched by the devil, committing unspeakable acts.”

  “Yes, yes, I’m familiar with it,” Merrin said dismissively. “Urbain Grandier was a handsome scoundrel who seduced the prioress and indulged in orgies with a number of other nuns. One account mentions a goat, but that was probably an exaggeration. It doesn’t mean the nuns were possessed—just horny and inventive. Grandier, meanwhile, refused to let Cardinal Richelieu tear down the Castle of Loudun, so Richelieu had a few words with the local prosecutor. Voilà! Grandier was brought up on charges of witchcraft. And the Church, ever merciful, tortured him by crushing his feet and legs to make him confess. When he continued to profess innocence, they burned him alive. It was sex and politics, nothing more.”

  “The accounts written at the time mention more than sex and politics,” Gionetti countered. “Nicolas Aubin, a Protestant pastor in Loudun, wrote that the nuns—I quote now—‘struck their chests and backs with their heads, as if they had their necks broken, and w
ith inconceivable rapidity; they twisted their arms at the joints of the shoulder, the elbow, or the wrist, two or three times around.’ He goes on to say that the nuns threw themselves backward until their heads touched their feet, and they walked in that position with amazing speed.”

  “That account has not been proven authentic,” Merrin pointed out. “For one thing, it was not written in Aubin’s handwriting. And in any case, Aubin was a Protestant with a chip on his shoulder toward Catholics. He’s hardly a reliable witness.”

  “Four priests were dispatched to exorcize the demons,” Gionetti continued. “Three of them were possessed themselves and subsequently died. The last one was driven insane by his brush with evil. That is what happened to Monsieur Bession. Evil walks in Derati.”

  Merrin wanted to laugh in the man’s wrinkled face. But then images flashed through his mind. The crucifix hanging upside down. The hyenas ignoring Joseph and tearing James to shreds. The glass shard that pierced Bession’s neck. The icy room. He remained silent.

  “You must be careful there,” Gionetti insisted. “Remember, he is the father of lies. He will seek to poison your mind.” He removed a book from his robes and handed it to Merrin. “You will need this against him.”

  Merrin stopped on the path and looked at the title. The Book of Roman Rituals. “The exorcism rituals? I’m no longer a priest.”

  “You will always be a priest, Father Merrin.” Gionetti patted his shoulder. “Your faith can save you.”

  “Then I am doomed,” Merrin said, and walked away.

  Dr. Sarah Novack stared down at the thick medical book. The sun had set over an hour ago, and the lamps burning on her desk didn’t provide nearly enough light. Still, she persevered. Sweat dripped down her forehead, and she paused in her reading to wipe it away. She jotted a note from the book, then went back to reading. The text swam in front of her eyes. Sternly she tried to force her eyes to focus, but they refused to cooperate.