Hell

by Tom Lewis

  HELL

  The Possession and Exorcism of Cassie Stevens

  A Novel

  Tom Lewis

  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material, other than excerpts or quotes contained in blogs or reviews, is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of the author/publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 Tom Lewis

  All rights reserved

  Contents

  Forward

  Abandon All Hope

  Cassie

  The "After"

  Ye Shall Be as Gods

  The Black Mass

  The "Other"

  A Tale of Two Deaths

  Coming Home

  Father Sean

  Innocence

  Drums of War

  A New Calling

  Childhood's End

  A Warning

  The Lighthouse

  Dreams

  It Came Back

  The Grave

  Voices

  The Periphery

  Dr. Switzer

  Kyle

  What the Moonlight Brings

  The Breaking Point

  Old Friends

  Awakening

  The Death of Hope

  Believe

  Redemption

  Katie

  Fate

  The Tape

  The Bishop

  Something Wicked This Way Comes

  What Rough Beast

  Ten Years Later

  The Author

  Aftermath

  FORWARD

  When we speak of demons, it’s with regard to incorporeal entities known as spirits. Spirits are unique in that, while they are able to interact with matter, as is often witnessed in hauntings and poltergeist activity, spirits do not consist of matter, nor are they bound by physical laws that regulate matter.

  A demon, or evil spirit, if you will, is a particular subspecies of spirit that is forever locked in a perpetual state of hatred and rage — a hatred of life; a hatred of humanity; a hatred of creation; a hatred of beauty — in a sense, they bear a hatred of all things that make existence pleasurable. Hatred, you might say, is the essence of the demon.

  No one can list with any degree of certainty the precise sequence of events that lead a particular individual to become the target of a demonic attack. Yet in the clarity of hindsight, we’re often able to isolate factors that certainly contributed to such a state. Or, more precisely, factors that opened a person to vulnerability for such an attack. The case of Cassie Stevens presents us with one such example.

  When considering the tragic events that occurred at the garment mill on the night of November 21st, when viewed in the clarity of hindsight, their inevitability seems certain. And of Cassie Stevens’ presence at the site of those events being a contributing factor to the fire that claimed thirty-six lives, there remains little doubt among Church officials. The speed, persistence, and tenacity of that fire, despite the heavy rainfall that night, support a finding of its supernatural origin.

  While opinions differed as to the nature of Cassie’s affliction, the consent among Church and civil authorities was unanimous that the phenomena first began to manifest itself on October 31st.

  That was the night Cassie Stevens died.

  And, as was the conclusion of the Ecclesiastical inquiry into the matter, that was also the night something followed her back from the other side of death.

  That something was a demon.

  — From “Into the Periphery” by Rev. Sean McCready. Reprinted with permission.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Abandon All Hope

  “Through me the way to the suffering city;

  Through me the way into eternal pain;

  Through me the way among the people lost...

  Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.”

  — Inferno by Dante

  ****

  October 31

  A fierce storm raged across the sky. Lightning flashed in blinding streaks and thunder echoed through the hills. It was the night of All Hallows Eve — the night that once celebrated death — and a lone car sped down a lonely forest road beneath its dark shawl. The storm that swept in that night wasn’t like most storms to rattle the New England Coast. This storm brought something grim and ominous, and it would soon descend on the four teens in that car.

  Sixteen year old Cassie Stevens watched from the backseat as rain pelted the windshield in thick splatters. It could almost be hypnotic, she thought, the way the wipers slapped away the water. Or even calming...

  That is, it could be calming for anyone else...

  But it couldn’t be for Cassie. She hadn’t experienced calm in three months.

  Not since the night It entered her.

  Her friend Trish sat beside her in the backseat and upfront was Silvia in the passenger seat. Seth was driving, like he usually did when they hit the raves. They were all her age.

  Seth was a special breed of asshole, who raged for the pure sake of rage. Like the girls, his hair was dyed black as his soul. But while the girls dressed more goth, his style was punk, with long black jackets, torn jeans, worn out concert shirts, and boots.

  The rave had been at the usual spot — an abandoned garment mill twenty miles outside their small coastal town of Capetown, Maine. They had arrived shortly after sundown and were hammered and stoned within the first half hour. That was something Seth was good for — he always had pills.

  He also knew the rites — the dark ones they practiced on those moonless nights amongst the graves.

  “Can you turn it down?” Cassie shouted over the punk rock music that pounded from the stereo. It had been blasting the entire drive and her head was throbbing.

  Seth shot her a smirk in the rearview mirror, then cranked it up. Cassie glared for a moment, then settled back in her seat. She glanced out the window to her right. Dark silhouettes of trees swept past, masked by thick splatters of rain. She breathed on the window to fog it up, then wrote “Seth needs to die” with her finger.

  This wasn’t Cassie’s thought, but she still felt it in her mind. Like she had so many other thoughts over the past three months.

  “Hey,” Seth hollered back. “Can one of you beer me?”

  “Turn that shit down first,” Trish hollered back.

  “Beer me, or we crash.” And like an asshole, he took both hands off the steering wheel.

  Instantly the car lurched to the right, splashing into mud on the soft shoulder. Seth grabbed the wheel and corrected back onto the road...

  And headlights were coming right at them.

  The impact came within seconds. There was the jarring crunch as metal crushed in on itself; the feeling of time slowing; of being thrown and battered; of slamming into windows and doors; of metal bending and glass shattering...

  And then they were still. The car lay on its side in silence. There was no more music or engine sounds, only the patter of rain.

  Cassie had faded impressions of light and darkness. Like flickering images of a slide show, these impressions assaulted her — the rain pouring in through the shattered windows, peppering her face with wet pellets. The feeling of being trapped and unable to move. Unable to speak or cry for help. Unable to breathe...

  She had a vague awareness that she was dying. Out here in the rain. On this night. In this car. This was how she would die.

  This is how her mom would find her...

  A sudden lucidity struck her, and it was the first she had felt in months. The voices and thou
ghts that had filled her mind were gone, and her mind was free. She was free to feel, and think, and just be. And an anguished knot curled in her stomach over things she had done the past three months. Of the way she had gone off on her mom earlier that night. She would never have a chance to apologize. All she could do was whisper it softly in her mind.

  I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so, so sorry...

  Then it all stopped — the remorse and reflections — all of it replaced with a sudden, terrifying realization:

  Something was in the car with them.

  From the corner of her eye, she had glimpsed a dark shape that appeared like a shadow. It had vanished as she turned in its direction, but it wasn’t gone. She felt its presence remain — something unseen, and unheard, yet unmistakably felt. Like a whisper from the darkness of an empty room, or the putrid wretchedness of a bloated corpse, its presence filled the cramped space with a sickening aura. And that aura was of unmitigated hatred and horror.

  It was watching her.

  She had feared this moment would come. Ever since that night of the Harvest Moon, when they had gathered beneath its ghostly pall on that remote estate, she had known a reckoning would come. And now it had. She was dying, and this thing had come to exact its terrible toll. And no words could describe her terror at that realization.

  She was lost, and death would soon open its gates to an eternity of horror.

  They were always watching, she realized — every thought and deed; those things she thought were known only to herself — nothing had been hidden. They had been there in her darkest moments, lurking unseen in shadowed corners of infinite torment and despair. Always there. Always watching. And always waiting.

  We are Legion; for we are many.

  And now, as she sank into that abyss of endless darkness, It watched.

  And waited.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Cassie

  The Cassie Stevens who died on that bitter Halloween night was almost unrecognizable from the shy young girl of just a few years earlier.

  Cassie was only six when her family moved to the quiet seaport town of Capetown, Maine. Her father, Rick, had just been hired to teach physical education at St. Matthew’s High School, so they left the dry heat of Arizona for the weathered shores of New England.

  Capetown was quintessential New England with its Colonial-style wood-paneled houses and shops, and streets lined with elms. It was built on a peninsula that faced the mainland on its west side across a narrow sound. To its north were thickly wooded hills, and on its southern edge was the tip of the peninsula, where its historic lighthouse stood proudly against the rugged shore.

  Cassie was smaller than most girls her age and had grown self-conscious about it from years of teasing. Her hair was soft and sandy colored like her mom’s, and she usually kept it up in a baseball cap. Her blue eyes and freckled nose were from her dad.

  She had three addictions growing up — video games, comics, and writing. And writing probably topped the others. She ate it up and loved trying to imitate the styles of her favorite authors. And while writing short stories was fun, what she really liked writing was poetry.

  Rick coached Pee Wee league baseball at a town park during the summers, and Cassie often tagged along to work on her poems in the bleachers. Her mom, Alison, rarely attended the games and spent the time with other school moms or working on the ceramics business she had started from home. The result was Cassie growing up with a closer bond to her dad.

  After the games, her dad would take the team out for pizza at a parlor near the wharf, and it gave Cassie a chance to get to know the boys as friends. They often challenged her to the video games that lined the parlor’s back wall, and she usually kicked their butts. But it was all in fun. She was coach’s daughter, so they looked out for her.

  It would make their shun of her a few years later that much more painful.

  ****

  It was during the summer after third grade that Cassie met the boy who would impact so much of her life. She was in the bleachers that sunny afternoon when she spotted a new boy playing shortstop. He was her age, had blond hair, and looked like a “surfer boy,” as she later described him to a friend. His name was Justin Mahoney.

  After the game, Rick walked Justin and his dad over to meet Cassie. “Nice to meet you,” his dad said with a smile as they shook hands. But Cassie’s attention was on Justin’s green eyes. They gave her butterflies.

  “Hey,” Justin said with a friendly nod.

  “Hi,” she said back. Or at least she hoped she said something and didn’t just stare like an idiot.

  Justin’s family had moved to town less than a month earlier, and Rick asked if she would mind showing Justin around.

  “Okay.” She noticed her palms were sweating.

  When she got home that night after the postgame pizza, she ran upstairs and took a long appraisal of herself in her mirror. She thought she looked cute. Maybe a little tomboyish with the baseball cap. She tossed it on her bed. Now what to do with her hair that fell past her shoulders?

  “Does my hair look okay?” she asked her parents in the living room a few minutes later. It was down at the moment.

  “Sure, honey. Your hair looks fine,” Alison said.

  “What if I got bangs?” Cassie asked, motioning with her fingers just above her brow line.

  “There’s nothing wrong with your hair the way it is,” Alison said.

  Cassie frowned. She was hoping to hear that it looked good. She turned to her dad, who had been watching from the couch beside her mom.

  “Dad?”

  He smiled. “I think your hair looks pretty just the way it is.”

  That was the answer she was looking for. She grabbed him in a hug, then raced back upstairs. Once she was gone, Alison turned to Rick.

  “What on earth was that about?”

  Rick just smiled. “I think she has her first crush.”

  Rick was right, although Cassie would never admit it. She woke up early the next morning and removed the front basket from her bike and everything else on it that looked dumb. Then she biked over to Justin’s, and they pedaled off through town.

  Their first stop was the pizza parlor near the wharf. Justin was a game geek too, so they played several rounds of video games before heading off.

  Next came a sandwich shop, where they bought some sodas, then pedaled off down Main Street. They passed the old Mayflower Theater, a book store, a record store, and a collection of cafes and coffee houses. They finally reached the lighthouse on the bluff at the tip of the peninsula, and she led him down a trail to the tide pools on the rocky shore below it.

  On their way back, they stopped by the pet shop, where Cassie showed him the German Shepard pup she was getting. It was part of a deal she made with her parents if she aced her classes. Which she did.

  Justin came with Cassie and Rick when they picked up the pup later that week. She’d already named him Rex. They took him back to her house, where Alison finally got to meet Justin.

  Rick grilled hamburgers out back while Cassie gave Justin a tour of her house. It was a two-story Colonial house at the end of a cul-de-sac. There were three bedrooms upstairs and a living room, dining room, kitchen, and laundry room downstairs. Cassie’s room overlooked their large backyard, which Rex was already exploring. A dense forest bordered the yard, and Cassie often spent afternoons exploring its trails.

  Over the coming years, Cassie and Justin hung out a lot. A favorite ritual was dollar movie nights at the Mayflower Theater. Mayflower was an old bijou along Main Street. It had a single screen that often showed classics (John Wayne was Justin’s favorite). It lacked the frills of the multiplex across town, but you couldn’t beat dollar movie nights.

  Another ritual was going to the comic book store each month when the new comics came out and taking them down to the bluff near the lighthouse to read.

  There were also bike rides, and exploring, and hiking, and video games, and sneaking into the old lighthouse...r />
  Cassie and Justin became close friends by the time they started high school.

  And Cassie often wondered what it would be like to kiss him.

  But the winds of change were already blowing into her young life, and she would soon lose that opportunity. Along with something much more tragic.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The "After"

  With the start of high school came new faces, and one of those was Molly Daniels.

  Molly was every freshman girl’s worst nightmare. Already, at fourteen, Molly was captain of the freshman cheer squad, had legs that went on for days, and, as far as Cassie could tell, had been born with breasts.

  Justin was quarterback for the freshman football team and had caught the attention of most of the freshman girls. One of them was Molly. She approached him at a party after one of the games, and the two were dating a week after that. They made that perfect homecoming couple.

  Cassie was crushed when she found out. She stared at the short freckled girl in the mirror that night, and wondered why God couldn’t have made her tall and blonde and hot like Molly. In this new world of changing hormones, comics and dollar nights just couldn’t compete with tight sweaters and short skirts.

  She still saw Justin around school after that, and things were always friendly as they said “hi” to each other in the hallway, but the closeness was gone. And she didn’t really have anything to fill that void.

  March 7th of that year would bring the next change in her life; and while losing her closeness with Justin was crushing, this next change was catastrophic. It would forever divide her life into two periods — the period before that day, which she called the “before”; and the period after that day, which she called the “after”.

  Cassie was in Mrs. Mitten’s algebra class that morning, trying her best to pay attention and just stay awake. Mrs. Mitten had a talent for making an already confusing subject even more confusing. Luckily, Cassie had her dad to help her with her homework.