I said, “That’s nice to know, but how does that help me?”
“Like you, I am an academic, so really, we are both walking encyclopedias of useless information. I suggest you contact a spiritualist.”
“Ghosts, spirits and specters? You’re joking.”
“Absolutely not. Think about all the unseen and unfelt stuff zipping through your body even as we speak: gravity waves, radio waves, neutrinos, dark energy, dark matter. I would not be so quick to judge given all the blind spots in human perception. I’m giving you the card of a known medium, one Madame Gertrude Blavatsky. Maybe she can shed light on your problem.”
I took the proffered card, called the woman, and arranged for her to visit my home.
When she showed up at my door the next day, she was an eyeful. Tall and barrel-chested, adorned with enormous Elton John diamond-studded eyeglasses, and sporting flabby, pendulous breasts that could have substituted for pontoons on a catamaran, she looked crazy more than anything else. Her flaming red muumuu, imprinted with golden runes, stars and four-leaf clovers, added to her overall air of wackiness. But for all that, she spoke in a gentle whisper. She didn’t waste any time reading me the riot act.
“I felt the negative energy as I drove onto your street. It got stronger the closer I got to your house. I will venture to say that this house is infected with a legion of spirits, no doubt compressed into the object you described on the phone. We will do a séance to identify the spirits and then go from there. We’ll do that now.”
“I thought séances only took place in the dark around midnight.”
“The atmospherics and cheap signaling of frauds. Spirits exist outside of time. The hour means nothing to them.”
“How do we do this? Ouija board?”
“No. Too unreliable. Too easy to be compromised by wishful thinking and subconscious desires. We sit a table with a glass of water and candles. Fire and water are two things that can be easily manipulated from the beyond and don’t leave room for the interference of a human agent. We ask yes or no questions. Yes, the water boils; no, the flame flickers. Simple. Are you ready?”
“Shouldn’t my family be here?”
“No need to inject variables. Less is more.”
“Okay then. I am as ready as I’ll ever be.”
We sat at the dining room table holding hands, the scissor box in the table’s middle.
She didn’t beat around the bush. “Spirits of the netherworlds, travelers upon and within the ether, Cosmic Ones, Old Ones, Dead Ones we gather here today to know your mind and understand your presence here. Are you with us, and if so, do you have a message for us? If yes, make the water boil; if no, then blow on the flame.”
The answer was not what she expected. To be sure, the water boiled. But the candle flickered as well, and then all the doors in the house began slamming and opening and slamming. After a few minutes, it got quiet and both candle and water settled down.
Blavatsky asked, “Are you angry with this man?”
The candle flickered.
“Are you angry at someone or something else?”
The water boiled.
“Are you someone who has departed from the earthly plane?”
The water boiled.
“More than one?”
The water boiled again.
“Many?”
The water boiled again.
“Besides the departed, is there anyone or anything else with you here?”
The water boiled.
“Many?”
The water boiled.
“Demons?”
The glass exploded and the house shook down to its very foundation.
“We’re done here. I can’t do anything to help you. Cleansing this house of one or two wayward spirits is one thing, but an army of demons conjoined to the essence of the departed is out of my league. This is one for the priests. And for that, you will need proof. I’ll bill you later.”
She then gathered herself and left.
I waited a few days to calm down. I said nothing to my wife and kids about the matter. When I felt up to the task, I bought a cheap crucifix. The plan I had in mind was to set up a video recorder and then hang the crucifix after everyone had fallen asleep. For myself, I would slip out of bed and hide behind the drapes to watch what would happen.
That is exactly what I did. I bought the cross at a five and dime, went home and ate dinner with my family, watched some television, and then we all retired for the night. I pretended to be asleep, and when it seemed as if my wife were well on her way to dreamland, I slipped out of bed, down the stairs, and hung the cross above the mantle. I flipped on the recorder and then hid behind the drapes and waited.
I can’t say what happened next was wholly unexpected. The box began to vibrate, gently at first, then more violently until the box lid flew open and the scissors levitated up to the height of the crucifix, hovered for a moment, then shot into the crucifix and began furiously cutting it to pieces with all the accuracy and finesse of a sushi chef.
When the crucifix was nothing more than splinters adorning the mantle and floor, the scissors dropped back into the box, which snapped shut behind them.
At that moment, I went from skeptical empiricist, to a believer in every ghost story and weird tale I had ever heard.
Now I was deathly afraid to touch the box. I went to the local parish priest and explained the matter to him. At first, he thought I was pulling his leg, but my apparent sincerity, along with my video, convinced him to investigate the matter. I also filled him on the séance and Blavatsky’s conclusions.
“At first blush, it sounds like a poltergeist is operating in your home. That usually involves a spirit or energy that creates physical disturbances, such as making loud noises, levitating objects, and destroying them. But what you’ve described seems more focused and so more like a haunting. But as your medium seems to believe, it may be more than that. I suggest that together we repeat the crucifix experiment. I’ll have the deacon come along as an additional live witness. And we’ll record it all. If your mad scissors dissect the crucifix absent a visible corporeal agent, I will contact the Vatican and they can bring in the big guns.”
The next day we set to work. I half-expected the experiment to fail, such that I would look like an idiot. But no sooner had I hung the crucifix than the box began to convulse. The lid flew open and the scissors slowly rose. Only this time, they didn’t aim for the crucifix. Instead, they slowly turned toward us. A moment later, they shot across the room straight into the priest’s forehead. But they didn’t stay there. They retracted from his skull, then plunged into his eye, then back out and then into his other eye, and then into his throat, then out again, and in a blizzard of stabbing motions turned him into a human pincushion.
The deacon and I fled before it could have its way with us. When we returned with the police, the priest had been butchered as thoroughly as any pig before a pagan feast. The crucifix had been reduced to a pile of ethereal wood dust. As for the scissors, the police found them in the box, devoid of blood. The police tried to confiscate them as evidence, but they could not pry them from the box, nor lift the box itself, despite the strenuous efforts of several brawny men and an iron crowbar.
If it were it not for the video, I’m sure both Deacon Brown and myself would have been tried as murderers. When news of the episode made its way onto social media, complete with the video—no doubt leaked by someone at City Hall—my house was surrounded by news persons all wanting to hear the story.
Every time my family or I went out the door, we were badgered by the media. Apparently, someone had claimed that my house was haunted by the Jersey Devil. And they kept asking us if my Great Aunt Clarissa was the great granddaughter of the same Mother Leeds, who gave birth to the Jersey Devil.
I told the media I didn’t know anything about the Jersey Devil, but took the opportunity to pump them for information. According to one newsperson, the Jersey Devil is a modern American myth. Suppose
dly, Mother Leeds had twelve children. When she discovered that she was pregnant with a thirteenth, she flipped, cursing the child by exclaiming, “Let it be the devil!”
On the less-than-blessed day, the child exploded from her belly, spraying everyone in the room with blood. It then unfolded its wings, bit off the mid-wife’s head, and flew out the window. The legend holds that it terrorized the countryside, killing and eating everything from cattle to human babies and small children.
Now the whole thing made sense: my bloodline was cursed. My home had become a House of Atreus, where the sins of the ancestors get passed along generation after generation like current flowing down a wire. Naturally I kept my suspicions from my wife and kids, who had just moved back in following the closing the of the crime scene.
Apparently, the deacon had made a few phone calls, because, a week later, two cardinals and four priests from the Vatican appeared at my home. They said they were going to remove the box and dispose of it so it could cause no further damage. They said we needed to stay with friends until they had concluded their business. I told them that I would send my family to stay with my mother, but I, as the homeowner, had every right to be present. My motives were born of curiosity. And pure profit. After all, a video of a genuine supernatural event with witnesses was worth its weight in gold. And apparently, those madcap scissors had no beef with ordinary people, just those in priestly attire, so I was safe.
One of the cardinals explained to me that the scissors were like a Menger sponge—a fractal object with an infinite number of cavities in which an infinite number of spirits and demons can be held.
“Certain demons are charged with performing specific functions and are granted certain powers to operate on this plane. The spirits of the witches could not have done the things you claim to have witnessed without some help.”
“But if you exorcise them, then won’t they be free to infect someone or something else?”
“We’re not going to exorcise them from the shears. All we need do is break the spell that holds the box to the mantle. Once that is broken, we will transport the box to a Vatican vault, deep underground, where we keep all the evil infested relics we capture.”
So, it came to pass that we assembled in my living room along with several video recorders and prepared to liberate the box from its demonic iron grip. Rather than a sacramental exorcism, the priests would simultaneously perform both a containment and unbinding ritual, the former to ensure the demons stayed in the shears and the shears stayed in the box, while at the same time liberating the box from the mantle and the house.
The Vatican security team took the added precaution of erecting a sanctified metal screen between the box and us, so that should the scissors escape their confinement and shoot at us, they would collide with a hardened steel barrier impervious to their cut.
The priest opened the Malleus Maleficarum, otherwise known as The Hammer of Witches, and turned to the appropriate page containing the pertinent binding and unbinding spells. I expected Latin, as it was the language in which that handbook for witch hunters had been written, or at the very least, an English translation of it, but the priest spoke in an alien, otherworldly tongue, one that made my skin alternately crawl and tingle. Apparently, there are two different versions of that weighty tome: one that deals exclusively with witches penned in Latin, and another—this one—written in the arcane cosmic language reserved for the removal of Lucifer’s foot soldiers on earth.
One of the priests leaned over to me and said, “Rest easy, he speaks a containment spell to ensure the shears can’t leave the box before he breaks the charm that binds it to the mantle. The language is strange because it is the language of hell itself, the very tongue in which the Dark Prince addresses his minions there and here on earth. Be calm, for God is with us. Show no fear, even if you feel it, because demons feed on fear. It is the staff of diabolic unlife.”
I don’t know what creeped me out more: The fact that the Vatican had sent a special team of exorcism commandoes to purge my house of evil, or the fact that the priest who just spoke to me smelled as if he had been farting into the robe for a week or more. Talk about stink. I kept waiting for my face to melt or the paint to peel from the wall. I think a little more time working on body hygiene and a little less of the spiritual kind would have done him and me a world of good. I wondered if the altar boys called him Father Fart Pants or Big Daddy Stinky Robes behind his back? Clearly the seriousness of the proceeding was momentarily lost on me and so my head was not in the game.
When phase one was completed, all was quiet as the priests, confident that the shears could not leave the box, prepared for the main event: unbinding the box from the house. Once more, the priests, this time in unison, began the ritual. Again, the tongue was cosmic, eldritch, from times and places before man walked the earth and before the earth itself, and perhaps before the universe itself was born.
Ordinary men, not trained in the occult arts, are not men to hear such things, nor think the things those dissonant hellish words inspire. As they proceeded, my hair stood on end and my ears rang. The mucus flowed from my nose as from a fountain, and my throat and mouth were as dry as the Sahara. My belly boiled and ached. I wanted to vomit but could not. I wanted to lie down the vertigo was so pronounced. But the priest next to me, without looking directly at me, without interrupting the ritual, slapped the back of my head and wagged his finger at me. He didn’t need to say anything. I knew he meant, do not lose faith; stand your ground.
I did, but started to shake, and the tremors only got worse. Moments later, the entire house joined me in a vibrational duet. Then it, and everything and everyone in it, began to vibrate. Odd smells permeated the house, ozone like, then sulfur like, then the odor of burnt wood and rubber. The vibration increased, as did the uncomfortable physical sensations.
The reality of the unreality dawned on me. I had jumped into a rabbit hole and now was falling with no end in sight. I was sweating profusely and scared shitless. The profit was flying out the window and I didn’t care. I just wanted the nightmare to be over so I could return to my family and my quiet academic life and forget the whole thing ever happened.
But, of course, that was not to be. Reality began jumping in and out of itself. Things would fade, then reappear. Straight lines and planes became wavy and curvilinear, as if the universe was melting in a great cosmic microwave oven. Even my acid trips as an undergrad could not compare with it for unadulterated trippy and weird.
Still, the priests stood their ground and maintained their heavenly choir. And then things ran off the rails in a big way. Where the metal screen had been, a tear appeared as a small rent at first, and then expanded, revealing a sea of stars. I expected all the air in the room and us to be sucked into space, but something was keeping that reality from interacting with ours.
I couldn’t ask any of the priests what was happening because I didn’t want them to break stride. They didn’t seem fazed by the sudden materialization of a cosmic window in a suburban neighborhood.
I desperately wanted to run but found my legs rooted to the spot where I stood. No, I was the involuntary spectator now, observing this battle for supremacy over a wooden box containing accursed scissors.
As I stood there silently bemoaning the situation, the box exploded. Its fragments peppered the metal screen even as the great cosmic window evaporated. The scissors were free. And they were smart. They sized up the metal screen. Rather than trying to plunge through it and run the risk of being stuck, they began to spin like a buzz saw, then oriented themselves so they could spin themselves through the metal barricade at the spaces between the armature and the grid.
By now the priests had stopped their incantation and were frantically trying to find a defense. The head priest was furiously flipping through the Malleus, looking for answers even as the scissors were buzz sawing their way toward him. A moment later, they buzz sawed his face at the nose, splitting his head in two.
This time, however,
they were not content to let the other priests escape. They went in hot airborne pursuit, cutting down one here, another there in a great massacre. Not even the two cardinals were spared the indignity of a stabbing by those possessed shears.
The funny thing is that I saw these things play out in vivid detail not with my earthly eyes, but someone else’s or something else’s. I think I was seeing through the scissors or whatever presence inhabited them. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s not really.
You see, when the scissors had finished their grisly business, they came wafting in on a gentle summer breeze and ever so gently slipped into my hand as if they had come home at last. Creepy yes. Creepy still, I can hear all those voices inside me, unearthly voices, angry voices. I was now large. I contained multitudes.
Since most of the event was caught on video, I was not implicated in the homicides. I did go on to write some best-selling books, did the talk show tour, and even consulted on a movie about myself. I did not tell anyone that the scissors are in my possession or that I am in theirs. It’s our little secret. Every now and then they want to come out and play. I don’t ask them where they go or what they do. I can guess. And, one way or the other, I hear about it.
One day, a black SUV drove up to my house. I was the only one home. I answered the door and was greeted by two very large men in black suits.
“Mr. Leeds, you have in your possession an object that does not belong to you and must therefore be returned to its rightful owner.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Blood and Blasphemy Page 20
