Sins of the Fathers

by John Richmond

TEN

  ON THE EVENING of the sixth day into the ordeal with his son, Frank Mason decided it would be best to bring Jeremy home. Whatever was wrong with his boy wouldn’t be cured within the sterile confines of a hospital. He had watched as his son was subjected to every physiological, neurological, and psychological test available to modern medical science. He’d watched his boy wince and spit through countless tubes of drawn blood, sweat and shriek within the cervical cylinder of a banging MRI, and howl like a jackal as positrons from a CAT scan attempted to map his malady. Every last test had come back negative.

  Through it all, Mason had scrutinized the neurologist, Riley. Even as he ordered all those pricks, and scans, Riley had known there was nothing physically wrong with the boy. It wasn’t some scam. Mason would have sniffed that out in heart beat, but Riley was holding something back. He used his tests like a detective with a magnifying glass, but behind the lens his face was already set. At the end, Mason believed that Riley used the tests to rule out what the problem was not. He already knew what it was, but for some reason he wouldn’t come out with it.

  Mason had called a private nursing company and had Jeremy’s bedroom converted into a hospital room, complete with monitoring equipment and restraints. Also included in the package was Emma Grouwe, a burly psychiatric nurse with over fifteen years’ experience in state mental institutions. She sat sentinel over the boy during the day. Mason’s men took rotating shifts at night while Emma slept in the guest suite.

  During his fits, Jeremy was capable of incredible strength. While in the hospital, a third shift nurse strayed too close while the child lay sleeping under heavy sedation. His small boy’s hand darted out and hardened around her wrist like a manacle. The nurse’s screams brought the security guard. He found her slumped against the far wall of the room, silent and wide-eyed. In her lap she cradled what looked like two left hands before the guard realized that her right hand had been sheared around at the wrist. The guard whirled to find the pale, naked boy painting strange geometric shapes on the wall with his own feces.

  Mason had paid well to keep the incident quiet. The security guard now drove a brand new Mustang. The unfortunate third shift nurse had to sign a report stating the cause of the spiral fracture to her wrist as accidental, but her medical costs were paid in full, as was the remainder of her mortgage. As added insurance, Mason had Sinclair take some photographs of the security guard with a smile on his face and a blonde head in his lap. (The guard’s wife was a brunette.) The nurse was not as easy to push into a situation as compromising, but she had two young children and that would be enough leverage if the need ever arose. You could get a mother to stick her own arm into a pot of boiling water and keep it there if you held a gun to her kid’s head.

  But that was all another matter. Now that Jeremy was home, Mason could exert some fucking control over the situation, get his boy some real help. He put his hands on the top of his desk and exhaled. Doctor Riley sat across from him, hands on his knees. It was cold in Mason’s study. He disliked perspiration, but a bead of sweat winked within Riley’s hairline.

  “Thank you for coming, doctor.”

  Riley smiled, his lips shaking around the corners. “I don’t usually make house calls.”

  Mason smiled back. Riley had information he needed. He knew what was really wrong with Jeremy, but Mason wasn’t going to get it out of him with hammer and tong. The doctor required a certain finesse. Mason needed this man’s help willingly. “Of course, but please rest assured that your compensation will be more than adequate.”

  Riley looked at the floor. “I appreciate that, Mr. Mason.” He caught the carved wooden eye of one of the severed-head feet of Mason’s desk, and looked for something else down there to stare at. All he got was the lolling tongue of the head on the opposite corner. Riley gave up and looked back at Mason. Jesus, this guy was like Gomez Addams minus the kooky charm.

  “It’s not a matter of money,” Riley said.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s just that,” Riley looked away again, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do for your boy.”

  Mason sat back and tented his manicured fingers. “I see,” he said and studied the other man. At length he came out with it.

  “Doctor Riley, why won’t you tell me what’s wrong with my son? You know goddamn well what it is. Don’t pretend not to. Why haven’t you said anything?” Mason saw it scroll across Riley’s face, that pained look he’d seen so many times during Jeremy’s stay at the hospital that seemed to say I know, but can’t tell. Mason slammed his fist down on the desktop. “For Christ’s sweet sake! What is it? What the hell’s wrong with him?”

  The source of Frank Mason’s money was a mystery to Riley, but he knew enough to be afraid of the man. He was powerful and dangerous and now Riley had to tell him something so terrible about his son that a diagnosis of brain cancer would be a sunny day by comparison. Riley looked back down into the rolling eye of the severed head. He took a deep breath and sighed. Finally, at least, he would be able to tell someone else.

  “Your son’s possessed, Mr. Mason.” He looked back up.

  Mason sat and stared, blank and impenetrable. His eyes roved over the doctor’s face, searching for any sign of dishonesty or sickness. Riley was worried and afraid, but he was telling the truth as he believed it. Mason thought about all those tests, all those negatives. He thought about the weird double voices that issued from his son’s face, a face that somehow wasn’t Jeremy even though it looked like him, as if some Hannibal Lecter had removed the boy’s skin and wore it for a mask. He sat back and nodded. “All right, tell me.”

  Color flooded Riley’s cheeks. “You believe me?”

  “Let’s just say at the moment that I don’t dis-believe,” Mason said and got up. He walked over to a bookshelf and pushed the spine of a leather bound tome. Riley squinted, but couldn’t make out its title. The book and several of its shelf mates slid aside, revealing a crystal decanter filled with brown liquid and two tumblers. Riley muttered, “Hmh,” and almost smiled.

  “Scotch okay with you, doctor?” Mason asked over his shoulder.

  “Please,” Riley said. A Darvocet would have been even better, but beggars can’t be choosers.

  Mason handed Riley his drink and sat back down behind the desk. He took a long inhale over his scotch, but didn’t drink it. He just held it, turning and swirling the liquid.

  “Aside from the tests and his behavior, what makes you draw such an unusual conclusion?” Mason asked. “You don’t strike me as a religious fanatic, doctor.”

  “I saw it before.” Riley yanked down half his scotch. “Once.”

  “A possession?”

  “Yeah… No. When I say ‘I saw it before’ I’m not talking about just another case of possession.” He paused, took another drink and continued, his voice wet and raw. “It was another case of demon possession, sure, but that’s not all.”

  Mason did his best to hold his impatience in check. “You’re not making sense, doctor.”

  “I know it, I know it.” Riley took a breath. “When I say ‘I saw it before’ I mean that I saw it before, the thing, the—the demon—that’s in your son.” He finished his scotch and gazed into the empty glass. “I know that fucker.”

  Mason leaned forward and filled Riley’s tumbler. “Tell me.”

  Riley raised his eyebrows. If Mason was going to throw him out on his ass for being a quack, he would have done it by now. He took a sip and let his mind find a set of memories he’d buried a long time ago. It was a little scary how easy it was to unearth the bones of those bad days, how close to the surface that corpse lay. Had it been doing a little digging on its own?

  “I was still in residency, working the ER. This was near to fifteen years ago. I was going to specialize in internal medicine, surgery.” Riley gave a rueful smile. “ One night they brought in this kid, stab wound to the chest with an ice
-pick. He was just some homeless kid that had gotten attacked. The wagon boys—the EMTs—they even had to shock him a couple of times to bring him back.

  “We get him on the table and it turns out it’s really not too bad a deal.” Riley’s face receded into memory, eyes losing focus. He made a circular motion over the left side of his chest. “The ice pick had just missed the main arteries, but it punctured and collapsed the lung. I tied off a couple of bleeders and re-inflated the lung. We closed up and I turned my back.” He trailed off.

  “What happened?” Mason’s voice was soft, patient.

  “He grabbed a scalpel and tore up a couple of people. Anesthesiologist and a nurse.”

  “The kid woke up? Wasn’t he—what do you call it? Wasn’t he under?”

  “Oh yeah, he was out cold. Came in unconscious, but you can’t mess around anyway. We made sure to dope him on top of that. You can’t have people waking up when you’re mucking around in their chest cavities.”

  “How then?”

  “That’s just it, Mr. Mason. It shouldn’t have been possible. Being under anesthetic isn’t like being asleep. It’s chemically controlled death. A fraction more or less anesthetic per pound of body weight and you’ll either stay awake or just die. And on top of all that, the gas passer is always monitoring vitals, levels of consciousness.”

  “So the kid was never under.”

  Riley shook his head. “No, I thought of that. When we finally got him under control again—it took three big guys—I had the lab run his blood. He was swimming in acetylcholine.” Riley looked at Mason. “If anything, the passer had administered a little too much. It was impossible for him to have been awake.”

  Mason thought about Jeremy’s last fit. Sinclair was still nursing a twisted elbow from where the boy had grabbed and launched him across the room like a dirty suit. “Go on, doctor.”

  Riley stared into the air next to the desk. “It got worse over the next few days. We kept the kid as sedated as we dared, but it was pointless.” He looked back at Mason. “It was like the thing inside him was just toying with us. If it wanted the kid to be out cold, he was a rag doll, but if he wanted to suddenly jump up and dance a soft shoe on some poor orderly’s head it would get up and get to hoofin’.” Riley’s mouth twitched—a smile reconsidered or grimace controlled. “A few days after his surgery we moved the kid out of ICU into psychiatric. After he’d healed up enough, we ran every test available, same as your boy.”

  “The results were negative I take it?”

  “Every one.”

  Mason sat back, his chair creaked and he blinked. Riley was sure he’d just witnessed Mr. Mason make a mental note to either oil the chair or have its legs broken. He wondered what mental notes this man had made about him. Mason tented his fingers. “Why not insanity, schizophrenia?”

  Riley smiled. “Schizophrenics can’t do the things that kid could do.”

  “Such as?”

  “Levitation.”

  Mason sat forward. “He could levitate, like float off the bed?”

  “Oh, no. We strapped him down from the get-go. He levitated the furniture mostly. We had to take everything out of the room except the bed. Bolted that down.” Riley shuddered. “And he did it to me once. Lifted me right up off the floor about half a foot and just held me there for a few seconds.”

  Mason stared.

  “Made me sick. I threw up for an hour and a half.”

  Mason finally took a drink, a big one.

  Riley began to relax.

  “You understand, doctor, this is all very difficult to believe.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you have any evidence you can show me? Some kind of documentation? This must have been one of the most extraordinary cases of your career.”

  “To be sure, but I don’t have any evidence that would hold up in court so to speak.”

  Mason’s brow wrinkled.

  Riley sat forward. “Oh, it hid. It only showed itself for what it really was in the presence of myself and one other person, not counting the kid himself.” Riley took a gulp and stifled a belch. “Don’t get me wrong, it still acted out.” He shuddered again. “Those awful noises and double voices. What it did to the kid’s body, starving it of food, sleep. I’ve seen pictures of corpses out of Buchenwald that were prettier than that poor kid by the time it was all over. But all that activity was the sort of thing you could explain away if you wanted to. And believe you me, most people want to explain that kind of phenomena away if they possibly can.”

  “Who was the other person?”

  “What? Oh, the priest.”

  “You called a priest?”

  A slant slid over the doctor’s mouth. “No, he just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Called it ‘divine providence’. I called it a coincidence. It’s a Catholic hospital and every so often a priest will rotate through psychiatric. Ask me, it’s never done anything but set the patients off, but the board of directors has always loved that kind of crap. Neither here nor there.” He took another drink.

  “I was checking the kid’s vitals during one of the quiet times.”

  Mason interupted. “I thought you were a surgeon. What were you doing still on the case after he was moved to psychiatric?”

  “I couldn’t leave it alone. Used to tell myself it was scientific curiosity. I even used to tell myself that’s why I switched to neurology.” Riley slurped his scotch. “It was curiosity all right, but I don’t think it had much to do with science.”

  Mason asked, “So, the priest? You were checking vitals?”

  “Huh? Oh right. The kid was out like a light, but we’d stopped sedating him as heavily. Mostly just low levels of thorazine at that point. He was just so damn malnourished… Anyway, this priest sticks his head in the door. ‘New patient?’ he asks me, so I’m about to say ‘Yes, but it’s not a good time.’ You know the drill, get rid of him.”

  Mason nodded.

  “Then the kid puts his hand on my arm. I about have a coronary and jump across the room, but I don’t because it’s not the—the it this time. It’s the kid.”

  “How’d you know?”

  Riley paused. “Same way you’d know, Mr. Mason.”

  “Okay,” Mason said. “Go on.”

  “So the kid puts his hand on my arm and opens his eyes. God he looked so awful, so sick and so tired, so damn scared. He looked up at me and then over at the priest. I swear I saw him focus right in on that little white collar. It was the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen in my life. He looked at the priest and said, ‘Turn the light on.’”

  “What do you suppose that meant?”

  “Mr. Mason I’ve woken up in the middle of the night with that kid’s cracked lips in my imagination whispering those very words for years, and I still don’t know.” Riley looked at his lap, his voice low. “My guess is he was in a dark place.”

  “So,” Mason waved a hand, rolling on.

  “So, this priest comes in and sits on the edge of the bed.” Riley’s skin prickled, crawled. “He sits on the bed and just looks at the kid for a minute, doesn’t say a thing, just stares. Finally, I ask him what he thinks the kid meant and he just looks at me like I’m an idiot.” Riley smiled and shook his head. “He knew, just like that. He knew.”

  “How?”

  “I guess the same way I knew with Jeremy, Mr. Mason. I think he’d seen it before.”

  “You mentioned that earlier, that you knew the particular…demon. How can you be so sure about that?”

  “Something Jeremy—it said.” Riley sucked in a deep breath. “‘Would you like to be blood brothers doctor?’ When it was in the other kid, it said the same exact thing to me right after it went crazy with the scalpel in the OR that first night we brought him in.”

  Mason was quiet, considering. Finally he said, “So then what, this priest performed an exorcism, got it out of the boy?”<
br />
  “He performed the exorcism, yeah.”

  “And it worked?”

  “If what he wanted to do was make the demon laugh its ass off? Then yeah, it worked great.”

  “So he couldn’t help the boy.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Riley said and immediately regretted it. The light around Mason seemed to grown dense. That was the only way Riley could get his mind around it. He hurried on. “What I mean is that the exorcism didn’t work, no, but eventually the thing did leave.”

  “The priest got rid of it some other way?”

  “Well, I honestly don’t know, Mr. Mason. I wish I could be more clear about this.” And boy did he ever. Mason was losing patience with him fast. Riley had to hold himself in the chair. “He stayed with the kid night and day for something like a week, reading the bible, praying, going over the ritual for exorcism again and again. One morning it was just gone. I mean the kid woke up and it didn’t come back. He was finally able to heal up all the way and they left.”

  “They left?”

  “The priest took the kid with him. Legally, it was like the diocese adopted him. Ward of the Church, I think he called it.”

  Mason spun around in his chair and faced the window. Riley could see him in the glass, long fingers tented against his chest. His eyes were carbon points even in the semi-transparent reflection. Through the window, night fell on the sweeping grounds of Mason’s estate. Shadows deepened and opened the way for night creatures. In his mind’s eye Riley saw a moth caught in a spider’s web. It flapped and struggled, but the spider never came. In the end of his imaginary play, the moth died of starvation.

  “The priest,” Mason said, “he did something, got it out.”

  Riley answered the other man’s back. “I don’t know that for sure, sir.”

  “His name,” Mason demanded.

  “Father Neary. Uh, Thomas. Thom Neary.” Jesus, even his own father never made Riley stammer this much. “Father Thomas Neary, but when he left with that kid he left the service of the hospital as well.”

  Mason chuckled.

  “I don’t know how to find him, Mr. Mason.”

  Mason turned in the chair and favored Riley with a grin he could have done without.

  “I do.”