by Mark Lukens
It was almost Halloween and many of the front porches were already decorated with fake skeletons, jack-o-lanterns, and other spooky decorations. The weather was cold, the air chilly, but at least it hadn’t snowed yet.
Danny was almost five foot ten inches tall and he thought he might grow a few more inches in the next couple of years. His dad was six foot two, so maybe there was hope for a few more inches for him.
The thought of his father entered his mind, and he tried to push it away. Why think about him? Paul didn’t want anything to do with him or his sister. He never came to Cleveland anymore, and he had made it perfectly clear that he didn’t want them coming to visit him in Boston.
Danny mentally shrugged. He didn’t care.
But that was really a lie—he did wonder why his father didn’t want much to do with him or his sister. But what could he do about it?
His father left them when Danny was seven years old. Danny remembered crying and begging him not to go. He begged him on the phone to let him come see him in Boston. But Dad always said no. Not right now. Not a good time. Busy working.
Whatever kind of work that was.
Danny didn’t even know what his father did for a living. Something to do with a big Catholic church in Boston, but he was always so vague about the details whenever Danny asked about it.
Maybe he was a janitor there or something and he was too embarrassed to admit that to his kids. Or maybe he was a drunk. Or a bum living off of the Church.
Danny didn’t know if his dad had a girlfriend or had remarried. He didn’t know much about him at all.
Whenever he talked to his father on the phone, he tried to ask him questions, but his father always found a way to turn the conversation back around to Danny’s life.
He saw a picture of his dad in his mind as he thought about him. Maybe it was a distorted picture, distorted by time, a picture he had seen when he was fourteen years old, which was the last time Paul had come to Cleveland to visit him and his sister. But he remembered Paul as being tall and strong. He had dark hair and tanned skin even though he hardly ever seemed to go outside. He was quiet, brooding, and he didn’t waste a lot of time with words. In fact, nothing seemed to be wasted with his father: no extra words, no unnecessary movements, no possessions that weren’t useful; he was a master of efficiency in every way.
Oh well. He pushed the thoughts of his father away, not sure why he was even thinking about him.
Danny was thin, but he was lean and beginning to show some muscle. He had taken a weightlifting class this year even though he had been a little nervous about it. And, of course, Danny got the class with many of the football and basketball players in it. On the first day of class, the coach let the students split up into groups of three or four guys each, and Danny joined up with the two weakest and skinniest and most nervous-looking kids in the class. But, after a week of working out, the coach switched some of the groups around. He took Danny aside and asked him why he was working out with those two. The coach had seen Danny pushing himself, far out-lifting them already, and he knew those guys he was with weren’t even trying. So the coach put Danny with another group.
Danny managed to get along with the other two guys in his new group—both of them were on the football team, one of them a starting receiver—but he wouldn’t exactly call them friends.
But, little by little, Danny felt that he was beginning to come out of his shell, and he knew that the weightlifting had been a big help, a confidence booster. Maybe after—
Danny stopped walking, his thoughts jarring to a stop.
He stared down the sidewalk at a man who stood half a block away.
Danny glanced around. There weren’t too many people out on the street right now. There was an old man working in his garden. There was a woman sitting on her porch, talking on her phone, braying out a shrill cackle.
He wasn’t sure what bothered him about the man standing half a block away. He was long past being afraid of strangers—he was too big now for someone to abduct him and throw him into a van.
Wasn’t he?
Danny started walking forward again.
The man wasn’t moving.
He just stood there on the sidewalk. Motionless. He was dressed only in a short-sleeve white Polo shirt, tan khaki pants, and brown shoes; the cold weather didn’t seem to bother him. He was about as tall as Danny but a little bigger and broader in the shoulders. He was just an average blond-haired, pale-skinned guy standing alone on the sidewalk. That’s all. Nothing to be worried about.
But Danny was worried.
He stepped off the sidewalk and out onto the road, giving the stranger a wide berth as he passed him.
Danny didn’t want to stare at the man, but he couldn’t take his eyes off of him as he walked by, like he wanted to see where the man was at all times.
It was the strange expression on the man’s face that gave Danny the creeps. The man was smiling, but it didn’t look like a regular smile—it looked like a twisted, half-smile that didn’t touch his lifeless, dark eyes.
The man didn’t make a move as Danny walked by, except to turn his head slowly so he could follow Danny with his dark eyes.
Danny even waved at the man, a weak, half-wave. But the man didn’t wave back. He didn’t say anything. He just watched him with that strange smile on his face.
Once Danny was past the man, he started running. The panic that had been slowly building up inside of him as he walked past the man had erupted and he just started running. He was afraid of the man, even though there didn’t seem to be a reason to fear the stranger. The man had done nothing wrong; he hadn’t made any kind of threatening gesture towards Danny. But Danny couldn’t help feeling afraid.
He ran for two blocks and then stopped and turned around, breathing hard as he stared down the sidewalk.
The stranger was gone.
It was nothing, Danny told himself. Just some weirdo out for a stroll.
Danny hurried home, constantly peeking over his shoulder. He looked around one last time to make sure the stranger hadn’t followed him all the way home before he stomped up the porch steps to their front door.
When Danny stepped inside the house, he saw his mother with the cordless phone cradled between her ear and her shoulder. She paced as she talked, sighing and wearing an exasperated look that told Danny she was talking to his dad.
He found it strange that the thought of his father had just popped into his mind on the way home from school, and here he was calling the house. But that didn’t mean that he had any desire to talk to him.
Danny rushed upstairs to his room and stretched out on his bed.
The stranger he’d seen on the way home had really gotten to him more than he would’ve expected. The guy was definitely creepy. But there was more to it than that. The fear he’d experienced ran deeper, like to a subconscious level. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen that man before, or at least someone like him. He’d seen that strange smile and dead-eyed stare, those black eyes.
But where?
In his dreams, maybe?
Danny popped up from bed. He needed to get up and move and get the thought of the creepy guy out of his mind. It was just some man; that was all. Danny was older now, he couldn’t be afraid of the bogeyman anymore.
He was hungry. Maybe he would grab a quick snack before dinner.
CHAP†ER †EN
Rachael nodded at Danny when he came down the stairs and headed for the kitchen for his afterschool snack. She held the phone away from her face, her hand clamped over the mouthpiece.
“It’s your dad,” she whispered.
He nodded like he already knew that.
“You want to talk to him?”
“Maybe later,” he grumbled and went into the kitchen.
Rachael put the phone back up to her ear.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Paul said into her ear, continuing his conversation without missing a beat,” but I think you and the kid
s might be in some kind of danger.”
“Paul, please,” Rachael said, her eyes darting to the archway that led into the kitchen from the dining room. She moved into the living room, closer to the front door so Danny wouldn’t overhear her. “Don’t start with this stuff,” she hissed into the phone.
“I need you to believe me,” Paul said. “I just want you to be on the lookout for anything strange.”
I’m already talking to someone strange, Rachael thought, but she didn’t say it.
“Is there anywhere you can go for a few days?” he asked.
“I’m not going to put my life on hold, and my children’s lives, just because you’re getting another one of your premonitions.”
She heard her ex-husband sigh on the phone, and then he was quiet, already conceding to her.
“Just promise me that you’ll be careful,” Paul finally said.
Rachael softened just a bit. For a split second she heard a voice from the past—the old Paul—the Paul who was happier, more relaxed, a Paul who loved life and wasn’t such a fundamentalist crazie like he was now. She had never been sure what had changed Paul so much. It seemed to have started after Danny and Lisa were born, and then it was like he became more and more religious, and more and more paranoid to go along with it. And when Paul’s father died, Paul had changed completely by then.
Paul had told Rachael about how his own father had begun Paul’s training as an exorcist and Investigator for the Church. He never went into too much detail about the training, but he told her that there were a lot of physical preparations and studying and praying involved in the training. He had been trained to become strong in body, mind, and spirit—a true warrior in every sense of the word.
By the time Paul was eighteen years old, he had rebelled during that training. He wanted a different life for himself than his father had in mind for him. He got out of the house, out into the world and fell in with a street gang for a short time. He was even arrested, but never charged with the crime of attempted murder. That was something else from his past that he never went into too much detail about with Rachael.
Eventually, Paul worked two jobs so he could afford to attend a community college where he studied science. The college was where she and Paul had met. Paul seemed so quiet when she met him, but not a nervous kind of quiet; he seemed like a strong and stoic man. But it was his curiosity about the world that had attracted her to him. He had seemed so passionate about learning, about discovering new things, like so much of this was brand new to him. And it was new to him, she came to find out. He’d been home-schooled by his father, forbidden to learn much about science and medicine. When he hadn’t been home-schooled, he had gone to religious schools, some Catholic, and some not Catholic.
Paul had always promised that when he had children he would never raise them up like that, filling their minds with a doctrine and giving them no other choices or the freedom to make up their minds or draw their own conclusions about life. Rachael loved that about him.
They grew closer together and eventually they got married. It was a small ceremony, and Paul’s mother and father refused to attend. And when Danny and Lisa were born, Rachael meant to hold Paul to his promise he had made so long ago about not raising his kids in a strict religious environment.
But then Paul started to change.
“I will be careful,” Rachael finally told Paul on the phone. “I’m always careful with my kids.”
She thought about asking him what was going on in his life, but she knew he would dodge the question with vague answers. She also thought about asking him why he was suddenly so concerned about her and the kids, but she knew she wouldn’t really get an answer. And she didn’t want to open that particular can of worms even if he did confide in her. She didn’t want to entertain his fantasies and go along with them, to in any way justify his worries.
They made a few more generic exchanges with each other, and then she hung up the phone after promising him again that she would keep an eye out for anything strange and be extra cautious these next few days.
She felt bad. She knew Paul really loved his children (and she was sure he might still love her), she just wished his mind wasn’t so screwed up. But she had to think of her children first, and she couldn’t allow them to be around him while he was living this delusional life of his.
Rachael looked out the front window with the cordless phone still in her hand. She could hear Danny in the kitchen making a sandwich or something. She could go into the kitchen and remind him that she was going to make dinner soon. But it didn’t matter, Danny would still eat dinner, too. Now that he was lifting weights in school, he was always hungry, and all he ever seemed to gain was muscle.
She stared out at the street and realized that a blond-haired man had been walking slowly past their house on the sidewalk. She hadn’t gotten a good look at him, and now he was almost past their house and out of view of the window. He was dressed in tan pants and a white, short-sleeved shirt even though it was pretty cold outside.
A chill ran over her skin as she stood there in front of the living room window. And then she hurried over to the front door and locked the deadbolt.
Had the man been smiling at her as he walked past their house?
She shook her head as she walked away from the front door and headed to the kitchen, not willing to let Paul’s paranoia get to her.
CHAP†ER ELEVEN
Boston, Massachusetts
It was Saturday, and Paul worked on his report for Father McFadden.
He was upstairs in one of the spare bedrooms in his house that he had converted into an office. This was the smallest of the three bedrooms, but it had the most furniture in it. The other bedroom was a guest bedroom even though he didn’t hold out much hope that his children would ever use it anytime soon.
Where the rest of his home was minimal and Spartan, his office was crowded and cluttered. A large desk was crammed against a wall with two large wooden filing cabinets stacked on top of each other on each side of the desk. Two tall bookcases took up another wall, all of the shelves crammed with books on Christian history, demonology, witchcraft, the dark arts, histories and cases of exorcisms.
Much of the walls around the room were covered with cork boards which Paul had tacked newspaper articles, internet printouts, and notes to. Many of the articles and internet printouts overlapped each other. He subscribed to eight newspapers and he scoured them for articles about anything paranormal. He had stacks of old newspapers in the corner, ready for recycling. He constantly searched the internet for any signs of the Darkness. He believed something was happening, perhaps signs of the End Times, and there were clues scattered around, they just needed to be found and pieced together.
Paul sat at his desk typing on his ancient desktop computer. The computer was old, but the motherboard and memory had been updated, along with a lot of new software added to it. On the desk beside the keyboard were his notes he’d written down after the failed exorcism the other night, and the small tape recorder he always kept with him.
He had listened to the recording a dozen times now and then he took more notes. He could hear his voice on the recording and the voices of Father James, Father O’Leary, Richard, and Julia. He re-lived the exorcism time and time again through that recording. He heard the rushing of wind when the electricity went out. He heard himself screaming at Richard to get the lights back on. He heard himself screaming at Father O’Leary to re-light the candles. And he also heard the running feet in the darkness and the slamming of the bedroom door that he now knew had been Father James bolting from the bedroom. The possession of Father James had happened so quickly, it seemed to have been almost instantaneous.
But he heard other sounds on the tape now as he listened to it over and over again, subtle sounds in the background when he turned the volume up all the way. He heard a whispering in the background, but it was more than one voice whispering—it was many voices. The voices were faint, but they were there among th
e background static. The voices in the background seemed to be whispering words in another language. Maybe Latin, but if it was Latin then it was a bastardized version of the language. Paul could only pick out a few words that he recognized.
And as the tape went on, he heard himself leave the bedroom and leave Father O’Leary alone with Richard and Julia. Then he heard Richard attack Father O’Leary. He heard the fear in the young priest’s voice. He heard him crash against the wall, the flames whooshing up. He heard the young priest’s dying screams.
Paul leaned back in his office chair, the old chair squealing in protest. He took a break from his report. He was a slow and methodical writer. And he was even slower at typing.
Legion
The name and the story from the Bible stuck in his mind. My name is Legion: for we are many, is what the demons had said to Jesus in the Gospel of Mark before He cast them out and into a heard of swine.
And the demons inside of Julia, and then Father James, they had referenced that story and the name Legion from the Bible.
But they weren’t Legion. No, they were someone else. The Terror By Night, the demon inside Father James had told him that. Paul didn’t know the demon’s real name, but he was certain he had been dealing with one (or many) powerful demon.
Paul got up and left his office. He went downstairs and walked through the living room to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. He’d gotten up early even though he hadn’t fallen asleep until three o’clock in the morning. After tossing and turning from eight o’clock until eight thirty, he decided that he couldn’t sleep anymore and he got out of bed.
He was worried about Rachael and the kids. He was also worried cops were going to be banging down his front door because of the three burnt bodies in the Whittier house. But Father McFadden had promised to take care of all that, and he had promised Paul that he wouldn’t be charged with any crimes.
