by Jane Heller
“It’s not a dictionary either.”
“Well, then what do you suggest we do?”
“For starters, I think we ought to calm down,” said Jeremy. He smiled. “We’re in this together, ya know?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe we should just pick a page at random and start reading to her. Maybe we can cast the devil out of her body just by saying a couple of thee’s and thou’s.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“You do it. You’re the performer.”
Jeremy opened his Bible and began reading from some psalm or other. He had a surprisingly commanding speaking voice, much like his singing voice, I realized, and I found myself sitting back in my chair and listening attentively to what he was saying. The gist of the passage seemed to be that love not only conquers all, it conquers evil; that the only way to defeat Satan is to treat one’s fellow human beings with affection, respect, generosity, tolerance; that when we show our love for ourselves and others, we strip Satan of his power and cast him out of our lives.
“Jeremy,” I interrupted him. “Did you hear what you just said?”
He nodded.
We both looked over at Frances, who was still sleeping soundly. If the devil was listening, he wasn’t letting on.
“Keep reading,” I suggested. “Something’s bound to happen sooner or later.”
“I hope it’s sooner,” he said. “The incense is killin’ my sinuses.”
“Yeah, well the chicken is making me nauseous. I think it’s starting to turn.”
“Could be. It was sittin’ in my truck all afternoon. In the sun.”
I gagged. “Just read for another few minutes and let’s see if anything happens.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“I’ll call us a cab and we’ll call it a night.”
Jeremy opened the Bible and was about to read another passage when Frances stirred.
Oh God! It’s the devil! I thought, the lasagna backing up in my throat. He’s going to speak to us! Through Frances!
I tried not to panic, but all I could think about was that damn movie, where the devil makes Linda Blair growl and swear and throw up all over those poor priests.
I wanted to scream, but Jeremy placed his forefinger over his lips, indicating that I should keep quiet.
So I kept quiet. And then Frances moved again, and this time she opened her eyes. Wide! She stared at us but didn’t seem to know who we were, her gaze glassy, trancelike, as if she were under a spell. And then she spoke, only the voice wasn’t hers.
“Aghhhhhhh,” she said, sounding not at all human, much the way I sounded when the devil made me growl.
I jumped off my chair and scurried over to Jeremy’s, then plunked myself down in his lap and threw my arms around his neck.
“Aghhhhhhh,” Frances said again. “Aghhhhhhh!”
I closed my eyes and clung to Jeremy, fear gripping me so tightly I could scarcely breathe.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Jeremy whispered. “I’ll make it okay.”
He pushed me off his lap and then moved his chair closer to Frances.
“Can you hear me?” he said. To her. To Satan.
Frances looked at him, but seemed not to register his presence.
“It’s time you showed yourself,” Jeremy went on. “Time you got your ass out of this town.”
I braced myself for the devil’s response. And yet when it came, I was totally unprepared.
“Look!” Jeremy pointed in the air.
The Perdue Oven-Stuffer Roaster was levitating! The bird had risen up off that white carpet and was floating two feet from the ceiling!
I couldn’t contain myself. I screamed.
Frances, or should I say Satan, began to laugh. A high-pitched cackle that made my skin crawl.
“Oh, shit. Now look what he’s doin’,” said Jeremy.
I followed Jeremy’s gaze to the dining room table and saw that the boom box that had been playing our Exorcist theme music was melting! Like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz! What’s more, the cross and star that had supposedly been protecting Frances’s body were flying across the room like 747s and didn’t stop until they landed in the powder room around the corner—in the toilet. Another cackle came out of Frances, just as we heard the toilet flush!
“Let’s get outta here!” Jeremy shouted, taking my arm and leading me toward Frances’s front door.
“But we’ve got to talk to him,” I said, desperate to leave but determined not to. I had been waiting a long time to confront Satan. As terrified as I was, I had to seize my opportunity. “How else can we convince him to let me out of the bargain?”
“Does he seem like he’s in a bargaining mood?” Jeremy asked.
“No, but maybe if we read him some more of the Bible he’ll chill out a little,” I said. “Or we could sprinkle another bottle of Evian on him. We can’t give up, Jeremy, just because he made a chicken levitate.”
“If we hang around here, he could do something worse. Much worse.”
Just then, Frances emitted another “Aghhhhhh,” followed by that hideous cackle. I went back into the dining room, put my hands on my hips and confronted the devil.
“Why don’t you stop playing games,” I said.
“Aghhhhhhh,” he growled.
“Oh, cut the growling,” I snapped. “If you’re so powerful, Satan, let’s see if you can speak.”
Another cackle, then, out of Frances’s slackened, lipstick-smudged mouth came: “I have a message for your boyfriend.”
The voice was deep, menacing, as low as the cackle was high. And it was monotone, mechanical, like those computer-generated voices you get when you call someone’s voice mail.
“You have a message for my boyfriend?” I said. Jeremy was hardly my boyfriend, but I reminded myself that this was not the time or the place to discuss the status of our relationship.
“Yes, the fisherman,” intoned the voice. “The singing fisherman.”
“I’m right here,” said Jeremy, who stepped up in front of Frances and tried to look brave. “What’s the message?”
“It’s about your fa-ther,” said the devil, drawing out the word and making it sound like a taunt, a mocking. “I gave the old geezer another heart attack. Only this time I gave him a major leaguer.”
Another heart attack? But only the day before, Mike Cook was in such good health that the doctors were going to send him home!
Jeremy ran into the living room, picked up the phone on the end table, and quickly called the hospital to check on his father’s condition. When he hung up, he said nothing. Instead, he grabbed my hand and pulled me out of Frances’s house so fast that I left my purse there. We ran and ran and ran—four or five blocks or so—and it wasn’t until we hit Route 1 that we finally stopped to catch our breaths.
“What did the hospital say?” I asked between gasps of air, my chest heaving, my heart racing.
“They said my father took a sudden turn for the worse,” he panted, “and they don’t expect him to make it through the night.”
Chapter 24
We took a taxi straight to the hospital, where we were told that Mike Cook was in the Intensive Care Unit. Since only members of a patient’s immediate family were permitted on that floor, I waited in the hospital lounge while Jeremy checked on his father’s condition.
“He had a massive heart attack. They’re callin’ him ‘critical,’” he explained when he appeared in the lounge just before midnight and sat on the couch next to me. He looked exhausted, his customary swagger gone. “The doctors didn’t see it comin’ at all. They don’t understand what happened.”
“Of course, they don’t,” I said. “Who’s going to suspect that it was the devil that caused this heart attack? But we know that he did it to punish us. Just the way he caused the first heart attack. To punish you for spoiling the River Princess’s opening.”
Jeremy put his head in his hands. “What are we gonna do, BS?” he m
urmured.
I almost reached out to stroke his back but didn’t know if he would welcome the contact.
“We’re going to pray that your father pulls out of this,” I said. “And we’re going to get the devil out of town before he does any more damage.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure we are.”
“Come on, Jeremy. We’re not defeated yet. We made real progress tonight. We got the devil to talk to us. Now we just have to get him to listen to us. Do you remember the exact moment when he began to reveal himself through Frances?”
Jeremy shook his head.
“Well, I do. You had just finished reading the passage in the Bible that talked about the power of love. It was those words, Jeremy, that ultimately smoked him out of Frances’s body. He got scared when he heard all that.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
I shrugged. “I just do,” I said. “Maybe because I’m a darksider. Maybe that gives me a special intuition where the devil is concerned. I don’t know for sure. I only know that we’ve got Satan where we want him now.”
“Tell that to my father.”
“I will. As soon as he’s feeling better. And he will feel better, Jeremy. Because the devil’s days in Banyan Beach are numbered. All we’ve got to do is—”
“Is nothing,” he cut me off. “I sure as hell am not goin’ back to Frances’s house with a Bible and a dead chicken. Not in this lifetime.”
“But we can’t give up now. We just can’t.”
“‘We?’ Listen, BS. You gotta count me out from now on,” said Jeremy. “I’d like to help you out of this mess, but not if it means sacrificin’ my father’s life. I can’t afford to piss the devil off if he’s gonna take it out on my dad.”
“Oh, and I can afford to piss him off? He could just as easily give my brother a heart attack as he gave your father one.”
“Yeah, but he hasn’t. Ben’s not lyin’ in a hospital bed with tubes comin’ out of him.”
“Not yet, but who knows what will happen next? I need your help, Jeremy. You said last night that we were in this together.”
“That was last night,” he said. “Obviously, things have changed. Now, I gotta lie low for a while, BS. You’re gonna have to handle this stuff without me. I’m sorry.”
“So am I,” I said, feeling even more abandoned than when Mitchell told me he was walking out on me.
Oh, I understood full well that it was unfair to make Jeremy choose between me and his father. After all, he had no obligation to me. I wasn’t a member of his family. I wasn’t even one of his friends. I was just Ben’s kid sister, an old high school classmate who had avoided him for years and then suddenly walked up to him and asked him to save her life! Still, I had come to count on him in the brief period since I had trusted him with my story. It had been such a relief to tell him I was a darksider, to be able to talk to him about the devil, to be able to…to…what else?
I thought for a minute, trying to determine exactly what I was feeling. It had been more than a relief to spend time with Jeremy, I realized. It had been fun. Yes, despite the traumatic and terrifying moments, I had actually enjoyed sparring with him, trading insults with him, being with him. And now, he wanted out? No more exorcisms? No more pizza dinners? None of it?
I stood up from the couch.
“Your father seems like a nice man. I really hope he makes it,” I said, aware of the catch in my voice.
Jeremy looked at me but remained seated. “Me too, BS. Me too.”
When I got home, I ran to my answering machine, hoping that Jeremy had called from the hospital to tell me he had changed his mind about helping me. But he hadn’t called. Ben had called. He left a message saying that someone had poisoned every single one of his emus and that they were dead—and so was his emu business.
The devil was striking back at my family, too, I thought with a shudder, thanking God that, if Satan had to destroy something of Ben’s, it was his livelihood, not his life.
Since it was too late to call Ben back, I flopped onto my bed, thoroughly spent from the evening’s activities, and lunged for the remote control on the night table. I hoped a little late-night TV would distract me. Pete jumped onto the bed and curled up next to me, giving my toes an occasional lick as I flipped from one channel to the next. The last thing I remember as I drifted off to sleep was some blow-dried anchorman on CNN talking about a new cure for snoring.
I couldn’t have been asleep for more than five or ten minutes when Pete began to bark.
“What is it?” I asked as I tried to rouse myself, rubbing my eyes until I could focus. It took a few seconds before I realized that Pete was no longer sprawled out across the bed and CNN’s blow-dried anchorman was no longer on the screen. Pete was now standing next to the television set and the person on screen was none other than Chrissy Hemplewhite!
“What on earth is she doing on TV at this hour?” I said. I didn’t even bother to ask how the television had gotten switched from CNN to our local NBC affiliate. Pete, I assumed, had gone channel surfing again.
He responded to my question with more barking.
Remembering the “Jeopardy” experience and how significant it had turned out to be, I sat up in bed and paid close attention.
“…This special bulletin is coming to you from the Channel Five Storm Center. It has been nearly three years to the day that Hurricane Andrew devastated the Miami area,” Chrissy was saying. “Andrew came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane, which means that its winds were in the 131 to 155 miles-per-hour range. Our exclusive Channel Five weather technology projects winds of similar or greater force for Hurricane Frances, although Frances isn’t behaving like any storm we’ve ever seen.”
Hurricane Frances?
I got out of bed, ran to the television, and turned up the volume.
“…Normally, we can track a hurricane from the moment it forms as a tropical wave or disturbance in Africa and then gathers strength in the Caribbean,” Chrissy went on. “But this hurricane literally popped up out of nowhere on our radar screen—just within the past few hours—and, according to the coordinates, it appears headed straight for Banyan Beach. We’re projecting landfall sometime within the next twelve hours.”
A major hurricane? Hitting Banyan Beach within the next twelve hours? After we’d had weeks of a drought?
I couldn’t believe it! Floridians still hadn’t gotten over Andrew and now the devil was socking us with another, potentially more devastating storm? Yes, it was August, and yes, it was the height of the hurricane season, but I’d lived in Banyan Beach long enough to know that hurricanes didn’t form overnight. They took days to show up. Weeks, even. There was always plenty of time to prepare—stock up on canned food and bottled water, install hurricane shutters or board up windows with plywood, hop in the car and get as far away from the center of the storm as I-95 would take you. But this time there was no warning whatsoever. We were as vulnerable and helpless as we could be, which was just the way the devil wanted us, I supposed. His sitting ducks. Or, more to the point, his dead ducks.
“…Once again, we want to alert our viewing audience that the National Weather Service has issued a Hurricane Warning—that means a strike is expected within twenty-four hours—for the entire Denton County, with a special warning for the residents of Banyan Beach,” Chrissy said. “We urge those residents to evacuate their homes, particularly if they live in low-lying areas within one mile of the town’s waterways. A list of shelters will immediately follow this news bulletin. Meanwhile, we encourage everybody to remain calm, exercise extreme caution, and stay tuned to Channel Five for further updates.”
I tried to think what to do next. Sleep was out of the question, obviously. If the storm was going to hit around noon the next day, I only had a few hours to prepare for disaster.
By nine o’clock the next morning, I was ready for the devil and his hurricane. Having lived in Florida for so many years, I knew the drill. I also knew that keeping busy helped to relieve the te
rrible anxiety that came with the anticipation of a major storm. I put the hurricane shutters in place over the windows, moved all my deck furniture into the garage, shopped for canned goods, bottled water, and extra batteries, filled my bathtub with water in case the bottled water ran out, and packed a suitcase. Since my house was on the ocean and was, therefore, likely to be among the hardest hit, I assumed I would have to evacuate the area and spend the foreseeable future in a shelter. But shelters didn’t allow pets, I reminded myself, and I wasn’t going anywhere without Pete. I called Ben and asked if Pete and I could wait out the storm at his cabin. I also told him how sorry I was about the emus, but didn’t mention that if it weren’t for me, they would still be alive.
Throughout the morning, I listened to the weather reports on television, which kept predicting that Banyan Beach would feel the brunt of the storm between noon and one o’clock. By nine, the sky had darkened, a light rain had begun to fall, and the wind had picked up slightly, but there was still plenty of time to get out, plenty of time to evacuate the house.
My plan was to pack Pete and my belongings into the car and drive over to Ben’s at nine-thirty.
But then Mitchell called. No, he wasn’t worried about me. He was worried about the house. His house, as he didn’t hesitate to remind me.
“Don’t forget, I’ve got an investment in that place,” he had the nerve to say. “Chrissy and I will be moving in as soon as the divorce is final.”
“I won’t forget,” I said. “I’ve done everything to prepare your house for the storm.”
At about nine-forty-five, Suzanne called to ask if I’d spoken to Frances since my dinner at her house the night before.
“No, why?” I’d asked.
“Nobody knows where she is,” said Suzanne. “Charlotte asked me to call everybody in the office to see if they had a place to stay during the storm, but I haven’t been able to reach Frances, and I’ve been trying her since eight o’clock this morning.”
My God, I thought, was Frances still passed out in her dining room chair, oblivious to the deadly storm that was about to hit Banyan Beach?