“You were the doctor on call for the Midfields. You found them all cut up. He looked inside for the voices but he couldn’t find them.”
The window lurched open, letting the wind howl through the room. Phillips stood there unable to do anything but stare.
“The voices of the dead own this place. If that blow isn’t gorged on blood, then vengeance will come to all.”
As Philips watched, Vanessa started to urinate, the stain spreading on the mattress beneath her. “The old fuck will say she won’t wash it. Won’t wash the piss. Won’t wash the blood. You washed it didn’t you? Those old ones, the ones in pieces on the floor.”
“How do you know those things, who told you?” Phillips said. He felt nauseous, his legs threatening to give way.
“They told me. They always talk. They never stop talking.” She was grinning at him, chin slick with saliva. She rubbed her bandaged hands in the stains on the mattress. “Dead. All of you will be dead.” She flung her hands towards him, spattering him with urine.
It was all Phillips could take. He left the room, rushing down the hall and then downstairs, fighting the urge to run.
“Dr. Philips, what’s wrong?” Bill said as he came from the kitchen.
“I can’t stay here,” Philips said, hurrying to the door.
“Dr. Philips, I don’t understand, what’s wrong with our daughter?”
Phillips turned to face Bill, sweat streaming down his pale face. “Nothing medicinal can cure what that girl has.”
“What does that mean? I don’t understand.”
Phillips said nothing; he opened the door and went outside, stumbling and almost falling over the doorstep. Bill watched him go, wishing he had some kind of plan on what to do next.
***
Vanessa was sleeping. Bill and Pam had spent the rest of the day following the visit from Doctor Philips cleaning their daughter up and replacing her bed linen to a campaign of verbal and physical abuse spewing from the mouth of their thirteen year old daughter, things nobody her age should know to say. It was a little after midnight and she was at last sleeping.
Bill poured himself a large bourbon and carried it to the sitting room. The sofa felt good and swallowed him in its embrace. He was so tired, not just physically, but mentally too. Pam had taken to locking herself away with her Bible and praying for help, but as an atheist, Bill couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t pray to a god he didn’t believe in, no matter how much he wanted some kind of intervention to take place. He looked at his forearms and the scratches that lined them. His daughter, his once polite and calm daughter and snarled and scratched like some kind of wild animal, speaking to him in a voice that wasn’t hers. He swirled his drink around the glass and swallowed it down in one, wincing at the taste. He didn’t drink often, and the heat made him cough.
“It’s the devil.”
He spun around as Pam entered the room, clutching the black Bible to her chest. Her hair was dishevelled, her eyes red from crying. The arrogance that had seemed like a part of her for so long was gone, replaced with something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
“It’s not the devil. She’s sick. Something with her brain,” he said as Pam sat in the chair.
“The devil is inside her. We both know it,” she replied, trying to smile, but failing. Instead, her bottom lip started to tremble and she looked at the floor.
“Pam, don’t start with all this religious crap.”
“It’s your fault,” she said, glaring at him “You brought us here; you knew what had happened in this house.”
“That people died? It’s just a house. Walls and a roof. Nothing more.”
“People didn’t just die. They were murdered. You moved us to a murder house.”
“Pam, look-”
"When anyone hears the word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is the one on whom seed was sown beside the road.”
“Don’t do it. Don’t start quoting from that damn book.”
“It’s all in here. This is our guide, Bill. Corinthians said it best.” She slapped her palm on the front of the book, closing her eyes as she recited from memory. “No wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” She looked at him and smiled. “Don’t you see? That’s our daughter. Our baby. He hides inside her, our angel of light.”
“Stop it. Stop it now,” Bill snapped, trying to control the fury inside him.
She started to leaf through the Bible, searching for a specific passage. “Don’t you see? We have to fight, we have to-”
He lurched off the sofa and snatched the book from her, tossing it across the room into the corner. She glared at him and went on, growing in strength even as he shrunk away.
“Put on the full armour of God, so that you will be able to stand firm against the schemes of the devil. That’s what it says, Bill. We have to fight, the battle between good and evil, the devil and-”
He slapped her hard, bringing the room into silence. It was the first time he had ever hit her, despite the years of niggling and pushing. She glared at him, cheek already changing colour.
“I’m going to check on our daughter,” he said, walking past her and going upstairs. He flicked on the light switch at the top of the steps, casting its ugly yellow glow on the hallway. He stood there for a moment, palm stinging from striking his wife and the lack of guilt he felt, but also afraid of his daughter. It was madness, and the more he thought about it the less sense it made. She was just a girl, a child, and yet he couldn’t help but feel fear. It was the reason he was so unwilling to accept that his wife might have been right. It was also the reason why he was afraid to move and go towards Vanessa’s bedroom door. For all her preaching from the Bible, Pam had been right. It was a murder house - that was why it was so cheap - and he had bought it anyway. He knew the story of course, about how the old couple took in a lodger who happened to be a wanted criminal. What happened next was the subject of some speculation. It was said that the old couple had found out who their new guest was, confronted him with it and were killed for their troubles. The confusion about the whole case surrounded the way in which they had been killed. The man they had taken in was a petty thief, a bank robber who killed with a gun if he had to. The old couple who lived in the house, however, had been butchered, ripped to shreds and left for days whilst their fugitive lodger lived there with them, enduring the stench before apparently shooting himself dead. It made no sense, and because of the circumstances, the price was significantly lower than it should have been, which, for people in a situation as desperate as they were, was vital. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, or God, Heaven, Hell or anything else. Science and evolution were the things he believed in. Nature adapting and shaping the world around it until it expired to be replaced with new life. That had been his belief since he was a child, but now, he was starting to wonder what if?
What if there was something else, something beyond that which was known, in a place beyond the explanation of science. What if….
He pushed it from his mind. It would be no good to anyone if he started to believe the Bible talk. Their daughter was sick, and if it meant they had to take her to a hospital and have her admitted to fix it, then that was what they would do.
He heard a sound. A thud coming from Vanessa’s room. The hairs on his arms bristled to attention and he had to fight the urge to go back downstairs, even if it meant facing Pam and what he had done to her. He moved towards Vanessa’s bedroom door, hoping and praying that she was asleep and appreciating the irony of how quickly a person could turn to a deity even if he didn’t necessarily believe in it. Every sense was attuned as he approached the door, every creaking floorboard underfoot, the soft sound of Pam reciting from her Bible and of course the sounds coming from Vanessa’s room. He stood at the door, staring at the wood, then at the door handle, unable to open the door, he simply couldn’t do it.
Another noise. A bar
k of laughter, or maybe a growl. Soft and hard to hear but definitely coming from his daughter's room. He took a deep breath, knowing he was about to see something horrific, something he would never be able to forget. He opened the door and stepped inside.
The smell hit him first.
Vanessa was standing on the bed, her hands caked with her own excrement, which was also splattered on her legs and on the sheets. She was using it to write on the walls, some of it bloody where the cuts on her fingers had opened. Bill looked around the room, taking it all in, reading the words she had written and was still smearing on the walls, grunting to herself as she worked and oblivious to his presence. There were obscenities, words nobody in the family would ever say. There were also words that he simply didn’t understand. As he watched, she was furiously penning the letter K. He looked at the rest of the word and wondered what it meant.
GOGOK
“Vanessa, what are you doing?” he asked, the words falling flat in the atmosphere of the room. She turned to look at him, and he realised she was changing into something he didn’t recognise. She was dirty and sweating, her pale skin covered in scabs and lesions. The transformation had been rapid and frightening.
“What’s wrong, Bill? Never seen shit before?”
“Come down from there. You need help.”
“It’s too late for her, Bill. Too late for all of you.”
“Stop it, stop doing that!” he shouted, taking a step into the room.
She turned to him, still standing on the bed and reached behind her. When she showed him her hands, they were covered in excrement. She rubbed it into her skin, and into her mouth, smearing it over her face. “It’s just shit, Bill. We all do it.”
He gagged, somehow avoiding throwing up. He knew then that the creature on the bed wasn’t his daughter. Something had inhabited her body and was manipulating her like a marionette, making her snarl and twitch. Bill backed up to the door, pressing himself against it and watching as the foul thing on the bed continued to write on the walls using its own excrement.
“I told you,” Pam whispered in his ear. She was standing next to him, clutching the Bible to her chest, cheek still red where he had struck her. He hadn’t even heard her come upstairs. “Only God can help us now, only he can show us the way through prayer.”
Bill had no answer, and even if he did, couldn’t speak. He was numb as he stared across the room. As they both watched, she urinated where she stood, ignoring it as it spilled down her legs and further stained the already filthy mattress.
“We need to restrain her for her own good,” Bill said, still fighting nausea.
“You can’t help her. You have no faith. God and I will fix this.”
He glanced at her, realising he was staring at a stranger. He wondered when the woman he once loved had been replaced by the bitter, delusional woman who stood beside him, clutching her Bible hard and silently mouthing prayer.
“This isn’t about faith, Pam. This is about our daughter. Look at her. She’s obviously ill. I think we should speak to Doctor Phillips again.”
“He won’t come back here. He senses the evil even if you choose to ignore it.”
“She’s not evil. She’s our daughter. It’s Vanessa, not a monster.”
She turned to him, eyes defiant and frightened. “Not anymore. That’s not our daughter.”
“Then what do you suggest we do?”
“I have an idea.”
NINE
The first light of a hazy dawn was starting to filter into Hope House. Bill and Pam sat on opposite ends of the kitchen table, Bill cradling a cup of coffee, Pam doing the same with her Bible, cigarette hanging from her mouth, its end mostly ash as she stared into space.
Bill set his cup down, hands still shaking and covered in scratches. “Did we do the right thing?”
Pam glared across the table. Like her husband, she too was covered in scratches and bites at the hands of their daughter. “You saw what happened. You know how serious this is. Only the Lord can help us.” As she spoke, the ash fell off her cigarette onto the table. She absently wiped it away.
“Enough of the god talk. You won’t find the answers to this in that damn book of yours.”
She set the book down, leaving her palms flat on the cover. “Don’t take this out on me because you have no faith. Why can’t you see this isn’t something medicine can help with?”
“So what do you think it is? What am I supposed to believe?”
“Believe in our lord. Believe he will show you the way. He has the answer,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette in the stuffed ashtray
“So you don’t know either,” Bill said.
“It’s this place. This house. Nothing good can exist here. If you weren’t so stubborn, you would feel it too.”
“It’s just a house. Bricks and mortar. It’s not evil; you need to stop thinking that book will save you.”
“You saw her, you saw that thing upstairs.”
“That thing is our daughter, Pam. It’s Vanessa.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s not. Not anymore.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this.” He took his wallet out of his pocket, opened it and tossed it on the table so she could see the photograph of the three of them that was in the clear sleeve at the front. It was a happier time before the problems started to appear. “Look at it, Pam. She’s still the same person. Nothing’s changed. She’s sick, that’s all.”
“She’s evil. She’s inhabited by the devil.”
“That’s enough,” he snapped. “You already had us restrain her. Do you have any idea how that felt? To tie our own daughter to her bed, leaving her there in her own mess? Do you even comprehend it, Pam? Hearing her say those things, to have her bite and scratch and abuse us? Because I don’t think you do.”
“That’s enough; I don’t want to hear this anymore.” She stood, chair legs scraping across the floor. For a moment she stared at him, eyes defiant. “There is nothing else you can do to help. God and I will fix this.”
“Where are you going?” he said as she started to walk towards the door.
“To fix this. The word of God will drive this evil out of her.”
“Then I’ll help you-”
“No,” she snapped. “You have no faith. There’s nothing you can do. Stay here, Bill. Call your doctors, consult your science. I’ll fix this problem.”
He sat and watched her as she went, Bible in hand and made her way upstairs. Bill stared out of the window, watching the leaves skitter in the wind.
***
The smell in the room was almost unbearable. A combination of human waste, sweat and ammonia. Pam clutched the Bible to her chest, relying on her faith to get her through, then entered the room and closed the door. Vanessa was tied to the bed frame at the wrists and ankles, which were raw from her struggles to free herself. She was filthy, and still covered in her own mess. Her skin was slick and almost completely grey, hair greasy and plastered to her skin. Mother and daughter locked eyes.
“It smells in here,” Pam said, striding with as much confidence and bravado as she could muster to the window. She pulled at it, trying to force it open then noticed it had been nailed closed again.
“She did it to keep me out.”
Pam spun around staring at the monster strapped to the bed.
“They see me outside and think the nails will help.”
“What are you? Why did you come here?” Pam said, clutching the book tighter to her body.
“Come here?” the drooling, snarling thing in the bed said. “I’ve always been here. This is my place.”
She held the book out in front of her, trying to keep the tremble out of her voice. “You are banished from here. Leave this place.”
Vanessa laughed, thrashing against her restraints. “God has no power here.”
Pam opened the book to one of the bookmarked passages she had prepared. “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you
.”
“Come on, cunt, keep going,” Vanessa said, licking her lips.
Pam gasped, turning to the next passage. “When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he-”
Vanessa cut in, reciting the verse along with Pam. “Then he sayeth, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth empty, swept, and garnished.” Pam stopped speaking, staring open mouthed at the thrashing as Vanessa went on, recalling the passage word for word. “Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last of that man is worse than the first. Even so, shall it be also unto this wicked generation.”
“Don’t you dare utter the word of God. You have no right,” Pam whispered, realising that she was out of her depth.
“Words mean nothing,” Vanessa hissed, leaning forward as far as her restraints would allow. “This is all your fault. You brought her to me. She hates you. Did you know that? Your daughter wishes you were dead, wishes it was just her and her father. She blames you for bringing them here.”
“Father of lies, your words mean nothing,” Pam whispered.
“You and your addiction. What a twisted, broken creature you are. Full of anger and blame, selfishness and arrogance. That you have the audacity to call me evil is ironic.”
“Silence, creature. You are banished from this girl,” Pam said. She took the crucifix from around her neck, and held it out to Vanessa, watching for a reaction.
Vanessa spat on the crucifix. “Fuck your God.”
Pam leaned closer, the crucifix just inches from her daughters snarling face. She strayed too close, though, and Vanessa grabbed her mother’s outstretched wrist, her grip like iron even with the restraints holding her in place. Images entered her mother’s head, a lightning show of visuals which she felt and experienced in the instant they happened.
She saw a village burning, the children screaming as their flesh bubbled and peeled away from bone.
Whisper: The untold stories Page 7