I took a step backwards, but the bedroom door flew shut behind me, and when I tugged at the decorated brass handle, it refused to turn.
‘David!’ I shouted. ‘David!’
There was no answer. He had probably closed his own bedroom door as well. I turned back and stared at the chair in horrified fascination.
‘What do you want?’ I demanded. ‘Just tell me what the hell you want and you can have it.’
‘You are not ready yet,’ whispered the chair. The voice seemed to echo from the drapes and the furnishings all around me.
‘Ready?’ I asked. ‘What do you mean by ready? I’m totally ready. You tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you. Just let my son out of his coma, and leave my family alone.’
‘All these demands, and yet nothing for yourself.’
‘I don’t want anything for myself.’
‘That’s why you’re not ready. But, you will be.’
I circled around the back of the chair, and by some nerve-racking process, the curved face on the front of the chair seemed to rotate right around so that it was staring at me wherever I went. I paced nervously backwards and forwards, shooting anxious glances at the chair from time to time like a cooped-up madman looking at his jailors.
‘All right,’ I said, remembering the questions that David had asked me in the car, ‘I want you to make me rich.’
‘That is not a true desire. You are content already with what you have.’
‘I want another woman. A sexy, voluptuous woman. I want ten women. I want them all right now, here, on this bed.’
‘You have no such wish.’
‘Who says I have no such wish? Suddenly, I do. I want to be wealthy and I want women. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have the power to do it? Or are you all sham?’
‘I am no sham. But for you, money and women are not crucial needs. When the time comes, you will be crawling across the floor to beg me for what you want. That is the only way.’
‘Did Williams beg you?’
‘Of course.’
‘What did Williams beg for?’
‘Williams begged for release from his jealousy and his torment. And I gave it to him.’
‘What did Sam Jessop beg for?’
‘Sam Jessop begged for the opposite of what you will beg for.’
‘I don’t understand. How do you know what I’m going to beg for?’
‘I know it well. I have known it for longer than you could ever imagine.’
‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘if Sam Jessop begged for the opposite of what I’m going to be begging for, what will I beg for?’
‘You will know, and understand, when the time comes.’
I continued to stalk furiously and nervously around the bedroom, slapping at the walls and the furniture with my hands, jittery and almost out of control. That whispering voice was as frigid and frightening as hell itself, and somehow I knew that the riddles it spoke were true. The day was going to come when I was going to need something so desperately and so abjectly that I was going to cling on to the legs of that chair and plead with it to give me what I wanted.
But what? What was I ever going to want so badly that I was prepared to crawl to some demonic piece of furniture?
‘What do you expect me to do now?’ I asked the chair.
‘I expect you to sleep.’
‘With you in the room, staring at me?’
‘You need to rest. Your destiny requires it.’
‘My destiny? What the hell do you know about my destiny?’
‘I am your destiny.’
I sat down on the edge of the bed. My pulse-rate must have been way over 100, and I felt as if I were teetering on the edge of some vertiginous girder, sixty storeys above the street. I couldn’t even think straight any more. The presence of that devilish chair seemed to mix up my mind so that the thoughts cut in and out like a radio being turned from station to station. ‘What happens if Jonathan – can’t possibly sleep – even try to escape but – can’t get rid of the chair – can’t –’
Then, I sensed a vibration in the air. Very low and subtle, like the rumble of a very distant aeroplane. I turned, and the chair appeared to be wavering, and losing definition. Then, with the soft whoomph of a collapsing vacuum, it disappeared.
At the same time, with a definitive click, the door-handle turned, and the bedroom door swung open by itself.
I got up from the bed, and searched the room with the overelaborate intentness of a half-wit. I lifted up the drapes, looked under the bed, even opened the drawers of Sara’s dressing-table. But there was nothing there. No chair, no satanic manifestations, no nothing.
I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.
‘Ricky Delatolla,’ I breathed. ‘What the hell is it that you’re going to want so bad?’
I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.
My reflection splashed his face with water, brushed his teeth, and swilled out his mouth with Scope. Then he switched off the bathroom light and let me go to bed.
I’ve always hated sleeping alone, no matter how much I complain about Sara’s jiggling and joggling, and the way she always tugs the comforter off me. I read for a while, The World Almanac and Book of Facts, in a circle of solitary light, and I learned that 690 million people speak Mandarin, while only 230 million people speak English. Mind you, only two million people speak Samar-Leyte.
After twenty minutes or so, I put the book down, and switched off my bedside light. I lay back on the pillow, staring at the ceiling, and listened to the sounds of a Southern California night. An owl in the distant eucalyptus. The rustle of squirrels. And that sad wind that blows from the mountains at night towards the sea.
My fear of the chair had become, over the past two days, almost a normal state of existence. Nothing had ever scared me so much in my life before, and I knew that if I survived, nothing would ever scare me so much again. I could face a mugger, or a mad dog, or a riptide off the beach, because none of those dangers threatened my human integrity. I could face up to them, and struggle, and even if I lost out, I could go down fighting.
The threat of the Devil’s chair, though, was different. The threat of the Devil’s chair was that I was going to have to crawl, and beg, and lose all of my spirit. That was what scared me, the idea of being reduced to a grovelling creature who would do anything, absolutely anything, to escape whatever fear it was that the chair could arouse.
I was still awake half an hour later when I thought I heard a slight furrowing sound. I opened my eyes wide, and raised my head, and listened. I was so silent and so tense that I could even hear the blood rushing through the veins in my ears.
‘Who’s that?’ I said, in a loud, false voice. ‘Is there anyone there?’
There was nothing but silence. But then I thought I saw a dark oval shape rush across the white shaggy rug and disappear behind the end of the bed.
I could just see my face in the shadowy mirror of Sara’s dressing-table. It was a white mask of utter fear. Slowly, as carefully as I could, I drew my feet up from the end of the bed, and retreated backwards so that I was sitting on the pillow with my back against the headboard. There was something down on the floor at the bottom of my bed and I thought I knew what it was.
I groped for the lightswitch, but my hand caught the edge of the shade and knocked the lamp off the bedside table on to the floor. The rug was very soft, but I heard the bulb break against the metal side-support of the shade. Now there was nothing but me, the darkness, and whatever was concealing itself at the end of the bed.
‘David!’ I called. ‘David!’
I should have vaulted out of bed and made a break for the door; but some intuitive feeling warned me that my feet were bare, and that it was a good ten paces to the door, and that whatever was waiting for me was far faster and far more predatory than I was. Maybe it was better to stay up on the bed, out of harm’s way.
But then, I heard a scratching noise, as if scaly in
sect claws were pulling at the sheets. And, to my horror, the comforter at the end of the bed bulged up, and shifted jerkily with the movements of the creature that was concealed underneath it. I let out a low, shuddering, ‘Oh, no. For Christ’s sake. Oh, no.’
The bulge in the comforter hesitated for a moment. I stayed where I was, paralysed. Then it made a sudden rush across the bed towards me, and even though I leaped back, striking my head against the bedside table, the Devil’s dark trilobite scurried out from under the sheets and ran right up my bare thigh towards my groin, heavy and jointed and prickly with earwig legs.
I screamed. I rolled over twice, slapping at it with my hands. Then I felt a sharp sting as it bit me right inside the curve of my leg, next to my balls.
Still screeching, still panting, I seized the creature’s writhing, muscular body in both hands, and pressed my thumbs relentlessly into the thinner shell that protected its belly. I heard the shell crunch, like a soft-shell crab, and my hands were suddenly full of broken pieces of crustaceous material, and wet slime.
I rolled over again, and managed to dislodge the insect’s fangs from my skin. Then I scrambled to my feet, holding it up in front of me, while it twisted and wriggled backwards and forwards, and its poisonous-looking rear pincers lashed at my unprotected forearms. The damned thing was so strong and so vicious that I could hardly hold it, and I knew that if I couldn’t think how to kill it soon, it was going to wrestle its way free and attack me again. Already, my groin was beginning to feel cold and numb, and the backs of my hands were smothered in blood.
Limping, cursing, struggling from one side of the corridor to the other, I carried the trilobite along to the head of the stairs, and then down to the living-room. It grazed me twice with its tail, and I could feel an unpleasant prickling sensation in my arteries, as if I had been injected with metallic salts.
The fire was still glowing red-hot in the hearth, although it had burned quite low since we had gone upstairs to bed. It would have to do.
The trilobite fought even more viciously as I approached the fireplace. But I managed to hold it against the stone mantelpiece for a fraction of a second with my left hand alone, while I grabbed the poker with my right. I shoved the poker deep into the rippling embers of the fire, and then secured my grip on the insect again with both hands.
Again and again and again the trilobite wrenched its articulated body from side to side, but I managed to pray and to hang on. Maybe it had lost some of its strength from being crushed. Maybe I was just too determined for it. But it didn’t take long for the end of the poker to glow bright red, speckled with white fiery sparks, and then I knew I had beaten it.
Pressing the creature hard against the stonework with my left forearm, I seized the red-hot poker, drew it back, and then thrust it right into the insect’s jointed head.
There was a sharp sizzling noise, and a smell like burnt varnish. The insect gave such a violent muscular spasm that I dropped it, and it fell on to the hearth with a horrible clattering noise. I jumped away from it, my nerves thrilled with fright, and for a moment I thought it was going to come scuttling after me again.
Instead, it rolled and unrolled itself around the hearth in mindless reflexive agony. Sometimes it twisted itself right into the hottest part of the fire; but then it jerked its way out again, its scales covered with powdery ashes, its legs singed and crippled.
I heard a step on the stairs, and turned. It was David, halfway down, in nothing but his long-tailed English dress shirt, and his socks.
‘My God,’ he said, ‘what’s happening?’
I pointed with a trembling poker to the squirming trilobite in the fireplace.
‘I’ve killed it,’ I said.
‘You’ve done what?’
‘I’ve killed it. I stuck it in the brain with this.’ I held up the poker and I knew there were tears in my eyes.
David came down the rest of the stairs, and cautiously approached the hearth. The insect was giving one or two last jerks. Then it lay still.
‘Do you think you should have done?’ David asked me.
‘David, it attacked me. I was lying in bed and it made a rush for my legs. In fact, it practically bit my balls off.’
David looked at me seriously. ‘You don’t think that perhaps the chair is going to take its revenge on you for this?’
‘Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What else was I supposed to do? Lie there like a sucker and let it eat me up alive?’
‘I don’t know,’ said David. ‘But the point is that you haven’t really killed it.’
‘It’s dead, isn’t it?’
‘This particular manifestation of it is dead, of course. But it’s a familiar of the Devil. It never really dies. And what worries me is how the chair is going to arrange its next revival.’
I was shaking. Cold, naked, and stung by the trilobite’s venom.
‘I think I need a drink,’ I said, in a hoarse voice.
‘Of course,’ said David, going over to the drinks cabinet. ‘But you’re going to have to think about this. You’re going to have to be doubly careful.’
‘How’s that?’ I said. I dropped the poker back into the hearth.
David sucked in his breath. ‘Last time, the creature was born out of your pet dog. What’s it going to be born out of next time? Your wife? Your son? You?’
He handed me a whisky and I drank the whole glassful in one gulp.
‘I’m going to talk to my priest,’ I said, flatly. ‘If I need anyone’s help right now, it’s God’s.’
7
Exorcisings
After I’d washed the scratches on my arms and groin and sprayed them with Medi-Quik, I tugged on my dark blue velvet bathrobe and went downstairs to the library to call Father Corso. There was no sign of the chair anywhere, but I had the strongest of feelings that it was somewhere close. There was something in the air, like the irritating reverberation of a tuning-fork, or a bitter odour that you couldn’t quite place.
David had borrowed a green robe from the guest bathroom, and was sitting edgily by the fire with a glass of whisky. As I came down the stairs, he said, ‘You’re sure you’re doing the right thing?’
I walked straight through to the library without stopping. ‘No,’ I told him, as he followed me through the door and across to my desk. ‘I’m not at all sure that I’m doing the right thing. But I’m not at all sure that I’m doing the wrong thing, either. Are you?’
‘I don’t know. I just think you ought to be careful.’
I opened my black telephone book and found Father Corso’s number. ‘So far,’ I told David, punching out the digits, ‘being careful has lost me my dog, taken my son away from me, totally disrupted my life, and scared the living daylights out of me. It’s practically got me killed. Maybe it’s time I stopped being careful, and fought back.’
The phone rang for a long time in Father Corso’s house before it was picked up. A rumpled-sounding voice said, ‘Corso.’
‘Father Corso? I’m sorry to call you so late. It’s Ricky Delatolla.’
‘Ricky? What time is it?’
‘I’m not sure. David, what time is it?’
‘A quarter to one.’
‘Did you hear that, Father Corso?’ I asked him. ‘It’s a quarter of one.’
‘Well, Ricky, what is it that needs to be discussed at a quarter of one? Nothing’s wrong, is it?’
I took a deep breath, ‘As a matter of fact, there is. I want you to perform an exorcism for me.’
This remark was followed by a silence so long that I thought Father Corso might have put the phone down. But I could hear him breathing, in a steady, thoughtful rhythm, and eventually he said, ‘You’re not drunk, are you, Ricky?’
‘No,’ I told him. ‘I really wish I were.’
‘You know what I feel about demons and mystical manifestations, don’t you, Ricky? As far as I’m concerned, they’re really not part of the modem religious situation. The devils we’re facing today are all the psyc
hological mismatches between personal aspirations and eco-sociological strictures.’
‘Father Corso, I wish, just once in a while, you’d speak English. I need your help with a demonic presence. I don’t care what you call it. A psychological mismatch, whatever. But it’s here in my house and it’s scaring me to death, and it has to be gotten rid of.’
‘You want me to chase out an evil spirit?’
‘Who else is there?’ I screamed at him. ‘You want me to call a plumber?’
‘Ricky, please,’ said Father Corso, hastily. ‘There’s no need to get hysterical. Now, just tell me what kind of – well, what kind of evil spirit you think you’ve got there.’
‘Father Corso,’ I said, ‘I have the Devil’s chair. The throne of Satan himself. It’s in my house, and it’s wrecking my life. Jonathan’s down at the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy in a coma, my dog’s been slaughtered by a giant insect, and I’ve only just managed to fight off that same insect myself.’
There was another pause. Then Father Corso said, ‘Are you serious about this?’
‘Do you think I’d call you at one in the morning to make a joke about it?’
‘Very well,’ Father Corso told me. His voice sounded shocked. ‘Just stay there – stay at home – and I’ll be right round.’
‘You’ll hurry, won’t you?’ I asked him.
I put the phone down. David was standing by the globe, steadily propelling it around and around so that it softly rumbled on its mounting.
‘He’s coming?’ he asked.
I nodded. ‘He still doesn’t believe me. But he will when he gets here. Let’s hope he knows how to perform an exorcism. It’s not the kind of thing they tend to teach them at Catholic seminaries these days. They seem to be more interested in Jung and the collective unconscious, and nude encounters.’
David slowed the globe with his fingers, and stopped it precisely with the prime meridian uppermost. ‘Greenwich,’ he said. ‘A fine observatory, a sloping hillside, trees, and the River Thames. I used to walk there with Jennifer, years ago.’
‘Jennifer was your wife?’
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