After The Exorcism: Book One

by Tabitha Swann

  With money for donuts being refused, Tara had enough small change to make the bus home, the fifty bucks from Dr Maddox having gone to overdue rent payments. Scout walked three blocks down to wait at a bus stop which wasn’t directly outside the church. She stood a few feet back from it beside a tree, just in case Tara drove by. Scout wanted to get home fast and she wanted to be around Tara more, but, more than that, she didn’t want to intrude. She needed their help and she didn’t want to become a burden.

  She ate her donut in the dark, dreaming about one day feeling OK. She had finally found a place where she might be able to discuss her past without judgement, without people branding her as some religious freak with mental health problems.

  I was possessed, she thought. That’s how I’ll say it. I’ll just say, I was possessed.

  Old Detroit rolled by as Scout drifted in and out of sleep. Boarded up homes, empty store fronts and lots filled with rubble passed outside the window. Scout thought about her home in Anadarko, Oklahoma, about the open expanses surrounding the dilapidated town, the quiet she wanted to escape.

  Something squeaked from the back of the bus and brought Scout back to the present, away from the burning and the screaming and the shouted prayers that always lingered on the periphery of her consciousness.

  She turned and glanced back. The bus was empty but for a teenager obsessing over his phone and an old woman at the back. She was skeletal thin and her hair was dirty and matted almost into dreadlocks. She wore a long coat with three or four layers underneath and a long woolen scarf draped around her. In one hand, with her fingerless glove, she held a burlap sack.

  There was another squeak from the old woman’s direction.

  Her eyes, bright in the context of the dirt covering her face, were trained on Scout.

  Scout turned back quickly. She glanced in the dark reflection of the bus window, looking past her own tired face, and saw that the teenager was paying no attention to the strange squeaks from the rear of the bus.

  The woman was whispering something Scout couldn’t quite make out.

  It sounded like a prayer.

  *

  The projects of Elmwood Park towered above Scout when she stumbled off the bus alone a little after midnight. She took off her woolen hat and pulled her hood over her head. The apartment buildings were alive with light and noise on the inside, but everyone knew better than to be on the street. Scout shuffled her backpack onto two shoulders and placed her hand on the can of mace in her coat pocket. The thought of the sheathed scuba knife in her backpack made her nervous, but that nervousness would give way to panic without it.

  Scout tried to tell herself she was safe.

  She had lived in Detroit just under two years now, always in Elmwood Park, being the cheapest part of town to live in, and, in that time, she had developed coping mechanisms to get her through the fear. Scout visualized herself in a park, a pleasant city park with picnics and Frisbees and dogs running freely to greet which stranger looked the friendliest at the time. With this in her mind, and with a deep concentration to avoid thoughts of anything else, Scout could walk through the darkest alleys and into the most intimidating stairwells in the dirtiest, most crime-ridden city in America.

  Scout adopted her standard look of angry impatience, of nearly shaking with fury, as she picked up the pace towards her building, Lovell Tower.

  “Hey, asshole!” someone shouted. “Where you going? You live here?”

  A group of drunk teenage boys were gathered in the courtyard. One of them had noticed her. She glanced over at him.

  “Oh, shit, girl!” he shouted. “You fine! Hey, guys. Look at this little fox!”

  Scout didn’t adjust her course, staying straight on-line to the entrance of her building. An adjustment of course was an admission of fear, and an admission of fear was an invitation for people to commit violent acts upon you. Scout had seen it happen, and as a 5’ 2”, twenty-two-year-old woman, she could not afford to show such weakness.

  “Where you going, baby?”

  Lovell Tower stood black against the dark brown haze of the night ravaged with pollution. The dirty yellow moon hung lifeless in the sky and no stars could be seen above the roofs of the projects. Elmwood Park, as with most of Detroit, had a very real ceiling above it, a canopy of smog and filth that weighed down upon her people. Scout was used to the grime and the dirt of small-town Oklahoma, but the oppression of the big city had taken some getting used to.

  Scout had stayed, because it was better than the alternative.

  In Detroit, Scout was no-one. And everyone else was no-one to her.

  When she was walking through the projects with her hood up, her back hunched and her face twisted in a scowl, her status as a nobody was a threat. She could wind up in a construction yard down the road, her mangled corpse discarded under a pile of sheet metal. Her murderer would walk free, amused for the evening. Her body would be discovered only thanks to the stench of its decaying.

  But when she was alone in her apartment, free from phone calls or social visits or mental health professionals dropping by to complete their reports, her status as a nobody was saving her life.

  Guns didn’t scare Scout. What scared scout was what was on the other side of death.

  She had glimpsed it, and it had taken a long look at her, too.

  She never wanted to see it again, and she never wanted it to see her either.

  Scout breathed a small sigh of relief as she reached the entrance to her building and saw that none of the boys were following her. Unlocking the door, she pushed through into the lobby. The floors were wet with leaking pipes and the walls were covered floor-to-ceiling in the names of gangbangers in blue and pink paint. A stray cat hissed at itself in the corner, past the elevators which served as public bathrooms.

  She pushed open the door to the stairwell and stopped to do her routine check. She listened. She could hear screams of ecstasy, shouts of pain and the thumping of distance music, but in the stairwell was only the familiar dripping of leaking pipes and the whistling of the wind in cracked windows which were too dirty to let in any light.

  Scout started her climb to the fourteenth floor, to her home amid the noise.

  *

  The digital alarm clock greeted Scout with a glowing red “3 A.M.” Her eyes would not stay shut. Her mind ran through her story for the tenth time. She thought about the group, the Spiritual Survivors. She pictured their attentive faces and whispered to herself all the details she had tried to bury over the last two years.

  “Asmodeus,” she whispered.

  She hadn’t said his name since she was freed. She hadn’t allowed herself to even think it, for fear that he had not really gone away, that he might answer, “Yes?”

  She said it again, to make sure he wasn’t just busy for a moment and didn’t notice. “Asmodeus,” she said, his name weighing on her tongue and struggling to get off.

  Scout swung her legs out from under her blanket and stood. She walked across the room and out into the kitchen. The building was still squirming around, its late-night parties revving down with music still pounding somewhere up a floor and across the hall.

  As she passed the window which looked down onto the courtyard in the center of a square of four equally grim tower blocks, Scout stopped. She approached the window and pulled the curtain back further, widening the gap in the center.

  Someone was stood, alone, in the middle of the courtyard, completely still underneath the sole streetlight.

  “What the…” Scout whispered.

  Scout squinted and tried to look closer, but the figure was a little too far away.

  She picked her cell phone up off the kitchen table and swiped it open on the camera. The faint light of the screen illuminated Scout’s confused face as she pointed the camera down onto the courtyard. She tried to hang back somewhat - Elmwood Park was not a place to be caught photographing someone you didn’t know - but curiosity was getting the better of her.

  Scout z
oomed the camera in and saw the dirty long hair, the bright eyes and the scruffy scarf of the homeless woman from the bus. She was staring directly up at Scout’s apartment building. She was mouthing something again.

  Scout clicked the camera to take a pixelly photograph.

  The burlap sack was still in the woman’s hand.

  Scout couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw that something inside the sack was moving. Whatever it was seemed to be moving a lot, as if it was thrashing around and trying to escape.

  The woman lifted the bag over her head and looked directly at Scout, as if toasting her with it.

  “Holy fucking shit,” Scout said.

  She drew the curtains and took a step back.

  The crazy homeless woman had followed her home. Scout had no idea how she knew where Scout lived. There was no question in her mind that the woman was here to see Scout and that her being there was a personal message for her.

  It looked like a threat, Scout thought. She looked dangerous.

  Chapter 4

  Scout adjusted her top as she looked in the mirror, pulling it down somewhat to show more of her cleavage. She took a sip of a whiskey and lemonade she had made for herself. Industrial metal music played in her headphones, smothering her ears and shutting out the world. She applied her mascara and despaired at the dark patches under her eyes. Her preparation for work was always the same. Her list of tasks always followed the same pattern and had the same two goals, without the completion of which she couldn’t imagine walking into the nightclub: she had to drink two whiskey and lemonades, which she had now realized was enough to boost her confidence to the point where she could be around hordes of drunken people; and she had to convince herself that she was pretty, that her story didn’t show in her face, that she could look into her own eyes in the mirror without seeing sadness or fear.

  Havana’s was a cheap nightclub and its cheapness drew a varied crowd of college kids on a budget, manual laborers doing cocaine in the bathroom while their wives tended their children, and groups of single, older ladies with dreams of a younger lay. Scout had worked there long enough to be able to size people up very quickly. She had looked for work when she came to the city, hoping for office work or a retail job in a quiet store. The last place she would feel comfortable was a nightclub, but her ability to pay rent eventually topped the list of her key concerns, even above her own comfort. There was much about the job she still didn’t like. At a nightclub, she found, there was always that underlying threat of violence. Even when everyone was having a good time, violence was never out of the question and the possibility of a fight breaking out never really went away. With the mixed crowd, the drugs culture and the cheap alcohol, things could, and did, get very nasty very quickly. Scout felt safe behind the large bar, but the sight of violence and blood and raw anger still instilled terror in her.

  But there were things about the job she enjoyed.

  Scout hadn’t been to college. The formative years of her education were robbed from her. But being around college kids and working with people trying to put themselves through college, it sometimes allowed her to convince herself that she was one of them. It also allowed for the closest thing to intimacy she could stand. She worked in close proximity with everyone, shuffling around them behind a tiny bar, and the customers would often have to lean over the bar and shout their order into her ear. There was a brief closeness, without contact, that Scout almost enjoyed. She could get close enough to feel their words in her ears, but not close enough to touch, all while being able to watch everyone dancing and flirting and finding new people to go home with.

  Scout wanted nothing more than to have someone she could have around, someone she could talk to, someone who could touch her with love without her wanting to scream.

  Scout cleaned glasses in the dark and the flashing red and pink lights as the music thumped itself into the foundations and she saw out of the corner of her eye that someone was pointing at her.

  Dianne, one of the youngest and prettiest bartenders, came over and tapped Scout on the shoulder. Scout winced involuntarily and then tried to smile.

  “This guy’s asking for you,” Dianne shouted over the music.

  Why would anyone want to talk to me over Dianne? Scout thought.

  She nodded and put away the glasses and got a smile ready as she moved down the bar. When she saw it was Joey from the group, her smile froze on her face. He waved and smiled and shouted, “I thought that was you!”

  A boy behind Joey shouted at him to get his attention and told him to order him a drink, too. It looked like he was with a group of friends. Scout forced herself to smile at him despite her stomach feeling like it had just dropped through the floor.

  “You work here?” he shouted. He was half-drunk already. Scout could see it in his eyes. It was gone one in the morning and that was usually the tipping point for most people: they would either go home to bed or stay out and commit to making themselves physically ill before leaving.

  Scout felt somewhat disappointed to see Joey there. He seemed like a serious

  “Are you OK?” he shouted. “How are you doing?”

  Scout smiled and nodded. As her co-workers danced around her, she prayed he wouldn’t mention the group.

  He showed none of the concern she had seen in him at the church. Here, he looked at her the same as any other guy looked at her. He was just normal. Scout wondered if he felt it, if he was really able to put his past aside and carry on without feeling it on his back at every second.

  Scout mimed a drinking motion and he nodded, seemingly understanding that she didn’t want to talk. He placed an order, leaning over and speaking inches away from her ear. She tried to pour the drinks for him and his friends quickly and neatly. She became aware that she was trying to impress him with how well she could function in her job, with how well she was coping. Seeing him acting as if nothing was wrong, as if he was OK, gave Scout that familiar feeling that she should be coping better, that she was somehow weak for being affected by everything.

  Once he had his drink and left, Scout watched Joey from afar. She caught sight of him interacting with different girls throughout the night. He had his arm around one girl who seemed to enjoy talking to him. At first, Scout felt ashamed of herself for not being able to go and have a “normal” life as he seemed to be doing. She had neither the money nor the confidence to get out and have a good time. She was living paycheck to paycheck and could hardly look at herself in the mirror, let alone feel good enough to introduce herself to someone new and believe that she was being anything but an unwelcome intruder.

  As the night continued, Scout’s initial shame, and the resentment she tried hard to bury, started to dissipate. She saw him dancing and served him more drinks. He became friendlier and friendlier with each drink he bought, and Scout felt like she might even be able to trick herself into thinking he was an old friend, a trick which often helped with her confidence.

  After three o’ clock, Scout stopped seeing him around. The lights came on in the club at five and Joey was gone. He must have gone home, Scout thought. She wondered, with equal parts disappointment and relief, if he had gone home with the girl she saw him with earlier.

  Scout and the other bartenders cleared up for an hour after the lights went up, as security mopped up the last few clubbers and escorted them outside to their cabs. The lights coming on always made Scout feel refreshed, as if she had emerged from being underwater all night. It was a great relief. Some of the bartenders themselves were somewhat drunk and Scout had been bought a few drinks during the night, but she felt solid. Though she also felt almost sickeningly hungry.

  “That boy liked you,” Dianne said.

  “Who?” Scout said.

  “That one who asked for you,” Dianne laughed. “I saw him. He couldn’t stop looking at you.”

  Scout blushed. “Nah,” she said.

  “Are you walking home?” Dianne said.

  Scout nodded and smiled. They alway
s walked home part of the way together.

  Scout and Dianne walked out into the fresh morning air, wrapping themselves in coats and scarves as the manager locked up and the other workers scattered in various directions. It was still dark, but it was quiet. In Anadarko, back home, the birds would have been chirping already, Scout thought. But there were few birds in Detroit.

  “Hey,” a voice came from the alley beside the club. “Scout, is that you?”

  Scout turned. It was Joey.

  “Joey,” she said. “You’re still out?”

  Joey was holding a near-empty bottle of beer in one hand. He swung it at his side and grinned. “Big night,” he said. “It’s my birthday.”

  Dianne smiled at Scout and said, “I’ll wait for you.”

  Scout thanked her and walked over to Joey. “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “I came back to see you,” Joey said. “I wanted to say hello.”

  Scout was uncomfortable. He was slurring his words and couldn’t stand upright without swaying. She couldn’t think of anything to say, but she didn’t need to. Joey said exactly what was on his mind.

  “I googled you,” Joey said.

  Scout’s heart sank. “What do you mean?”

  “I googled you to see more about you,” he said. He smiled apologetically. “I recognized your face. I remember you. It was big news at the time. I don’t think anyone else recognized you, but I did. I just… I was just interested.”

  “OK,” Scout said, annoyed, hoping he found nothing.

  “Scout,” Joey said. “That’s a nice name.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I better get going. I need my sleep.”

  Joey pointed at her. “You look different,” he said.

  He had found something.

  “I have to go,” Scout said.