Dead Sky

by Weston Ochse

  “How’s that?”

  “For one, I don’t believe you can speak French, or if you did, you wouldn’t have a Berber accent.”

  “I pegged the entity as North African. I was thinking Morocco.”

  “Could be. That or Algeria. The Berbers frequented both areas.”

  “What’s the other reason? You said one so there must be a two.”

  “The way it refused to fight at the end and allowed Brother Sebastian to pummel you. I could tell you were fighting it on the inside. Trying to make it stop.”

  Boy Scout thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I only wish that were true. I think it was busy trying to find a permanent location. By the time I figured out how to find it inside me, it disappeared. It somehow knows more about this than I do, and I don’t doubt that it will try again.”

  De Cherge’s eyes narrowed. “This is not something I wish to happen again. The brothers are worse for wear. As it stands, you will be leaving in a few days. Do I need to find a way to keep others safe from you?”

  By keep others safe Boy Scout had no question it meant either locking him up or chaining him down. “I hope that won’t be necessary. Something else bothers me,” he said, changing the subject. “The entity knew jujitsu, and not just any jujitsu. I myself am a blue belt in the Gracie Brazilian jujitsu. I might be able to buy that the entity had come across Japanese Small Circle jujitsu, but I can’t believe for one moment that it knew Brazilian jujitsu.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, although I can’t tell the difference between the two.”

  “There are variances. I’ve watched enough to know.”

  “My question, big boy, is why you don’t know how to speak French?” came a female voice.

  Boy Scout turned to the door.

  Preacher’s Daughter closed it behind her. She glanced at the wounded brothers, then shined the light of her wicked grin on Boy Scout. Just shy of six feet, she had the lithe build of an athlete. She wore black jeans with a tucked in T-shirt and a black denim jacket. Altra runners hugged her feet. Her high cheekbones hinted at American Indian ancestry. Her blonde hair was pulled into a pony tail. An army of tiny diamond studs hugged each ear.

  “Why would I know French?” he asked.

  “Clearly the Algerian used your skills at jujitsu to fight the abbot, which means that it had access—has access,” she clarified, “to your skills and knowledge.”

  “And?”

  “Jesus, Boy Scout. Is that what you’ve been doing for six months? Feeling sorry for yourself?”

  He glanced at her, then away.

  “Have you been skulking about in the dark all weepy-eyed because some other entities entered your body without as much as a by-your-leave? Because if that’s it, you need to relook your attitude. Clearly whatever is inside you—this Algerian—has been biding his time so that he could finally be in the driver’s seat, during which he learned jujitsu from you.”

  She poked him in the chest. Look at me.

  Grudgingly, he turned and looked at her, shame weighing his movements.

  “This Algerian also probably learned most—if not all—of your TTPs”—tactics, techniques, and procedures—“in addition to reliving your three-day fuckfest outside of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines in 1986. That you haven’t even tried to do the same to them is shameful.”

  And he knew she was right.

  “You have four enemy combatants who have hijacked you and instead of hijacking back, you’re hiding in a corner. Are you Boy Scout or Girl Scout? Do you get fucking merit badges or are you a cookie seller?”

  “I think you’re being unfair to Girl Scouts.”

  “Fuck Girl Scouts. I was a Girl Scout and I spent more time in front of grocery stores trying not to get groped while my mother tried and usually succeeded to one-up the other mothers while us kids stood at the doors one step away from selling our bodies for a few extra calories.”

  “I think you might have issues,” Boy Scout mumbled, wishing she’d leave and let him slip back into his pity corner.

  “Issues?” She stepped forward. “You want to see issues? I’ll show you some fucking issues.” She glanced at de Cherge. “And you! You should have been advising him better.”

  De Cherge raised an eyebrow. “Advising? Moi?”

  She snapped her mouth shut and curled a lip. She seemed about to say something else but turned on her heel, opened the door, then slammed it on her way out.

  The room was silent for a long minute.

  Boy Scout was the first to speak. “She’s right, you know? I should have been trying to figure things out better.” He shook his head. What had he been doing all this time? “The problem is I don’t know where to start.”

  “But you said you were able to find the entity.”

  “I sort of stumbled into it. I wasn’t sure at all—I’m still not sure what I am doing.”

  “I think I might have an idea,” de Cherge said.

  Boy Scout sat up a little straighter and almost avoided wincing.

  “We have a nun who recently came here from Turkey. She was possessed by a demon and exorcised. She might have some insight into what you’re going through.”

  “A nun possessed by a demon?”

  “She’s better… mostly.” De Cherge gave him a faraway look. “You’ll have to see for yourself. She knows about your problem and has shown some interest, but… you have to understand the sort of damage a possession can do.”

  An image of Boy Scout standing in the middle of the commissary being hit and unable to do anything about it strobed through his mind. “I’m just beginning to.”

  “Then it is settled.”

  “De Cherge?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you arrange to have chains put around my waist and me bound to them?”

  De Cherge seemed to be about to argue the point, then looked down and nodded once. “I can arrange that.”

  “I think it’s for the best.”

  “I, as well.”

  Chapter Four

  Atlas Meditation Grotto Number 4

  THE NUN WAS Sister Renee de Lydia, originally Jessica Fontaine. Born in Los Angeles, the daughter of a Catholic missionary, she’d been active in school and a cheerleader for her high school football team until her father had moved the family to help restore the Sumela Monastery in northern Turkey. She’d initially fought the move away from her friends and everything she’d known, but soon came to love the eighteen-hundred-year-old cliff-hugging Eastern Orthodox Monastery. She’d had the run of the place and rapidly found her solace in the beauty of the Black Mountain and its hawk’s view of the surrounding countryside.

  Soon after she turned eighteen, they began the excavation of the monastery’s St. Barbara Chapel to bring back the icon that had been buried by the Greeks who’d fled persecution in the 1920s. One of the holiest artifacts of Christianity, the Panagia Gorgoepekoos, was an icon of the Virgin Mary alleged to have been painted by the Apostle Luke. She was one of the first to see the uncovered icon and that moment changed the path of her life.

  Not only did she decide to give her life to Christ at the moment she spied the impossibly beautiful Virgin Mary, but something was let loose that had been guarded by the icon. Something that would not only result in the deaths of her mother, father, brother, and seventeen other workers in the monastery, but would also come into her and inhabit her for seven hundred and sixty-three horrific days.

  Boy Scout observed the small figure of the young woman in her black and white habit. When she turned to him as he approached, he saw the haunted eyes amidst a comely but shadowed face, and he knew that something terrible had happened to her. He’d seen that same look on an old woman in Croatia who’d watched as every man and boy in her town was shot and shoved into a ditch by a squad of Serbs. He’d seen the same look on a young boy whose sister had just been evaporated by a roadside bomb in Iraq. He’d also seen that look on a picture of an old Jewish man returned to Auschwitz, the memori
es of the Holocaust both personal and global.

  De Cherge had made it so that they wouldn’t be disturbed, selecting one of the several secluded meditation grottos on the property for the meeting.

  Boy Scout approached slowly. His hands were cuffed, the chains running from them through a belt at his waist, then down to cuffs around his ankles. One of the officers at the Twin Peaks police department had loaned them to the abbot without question, probably because he’d seen his fair share of craziness.

  He watched her watch him as he approached.

  She sat on a backless stone bench, knees together, hands in her lap.

  He positioned himself on an identical bench across from her, mimicking her position not only because it was less threatening, but because it was all his chains would allow.

  Bougainvillea with giant red flowers surrounded them, creating a solid, leafy wall of shrubbery. The grass beneath their feet was thick like it could only be in California. From somewhere off to his right a bird whistled occasionally, its bright notes the only sound other than an occasional bristle of wind through the leaves.

  He let a minute pass before he introduced himself.

  “Hello, I’m Bryan Starling. I was hoping you might be able to help me.”

  She cocked her head much like a bird and regarded him. She chewed at her lip for a moment, then asked in a voice older and more worn than she should have had, “What does it feel like? Does it feel like you’re full up and there’s so much pressure your skin will explode? Does it feel like fingernails are scratching the inside of your brain, occasionally tapping, like they’re either eternally bored or sending you hidden messages in Morse code? Does it seem as if someone is whispering to you right on the edge of your hearing, telling you something you really need to hear, but can’t quite manage? Does it feel anything like this? Does it feel anything close to this?”

  As she spoke, he imagined everything she said and was horrified by the questions. When she finally finished, he slowly shook his head and said, “No. It feels nothing like that.”

  “Then you have no idea how bad it can be. Do you know who they are—the things inside you?”

  “One is an Afghan. I call him Ahmad’s Friend because of a thought we once shared. Another is a North African—a Berber according to de Cherge. The third is a boy who has remained silent. The fourth keeps hidden. But there seems to be something else, something I can’t yet discern.” He swallowed. “But I feel it... watching me.”

  “I’d be most worried about that one. After all, what’s it doing while the others are busy?”

  Again, she offered a dreadful ponder, one he didn’t even want to think about.

  “How do they present?” she asked.

  “When I dream, I sometimes dream of things that must be their memories. Occasionally, I’ll find myself in a fugue—no, not a fugue. I don’t know what to call it. One moment I know what’s going on, then there’s lost time followed by a moment where I once again know what’s going on but think I might have gone somewhere. Yet I never really moved.” He laughed self-consciously. “Does that even make sense?”

  “It does. How did they get in you? Do you know?”

  He laughed again, this time in pain and remembrance. He told her about the mission they’d had in Afghanistan with the three giant burning objects in the sky… so much like UFOs, but something far older and of an original Earth quality. He told her how they’d all thought they were going crazy, dreaming of the same burning sky, a girl, and a goat which turned out to be some crazy psychopomp representing something all too real. He explained how they’d awoken in an ancient cistern, mind-linked to an even older Zoroastrian being known as daeva, put there by the Mevlevi dervishes, an order of Sufi mystics who were using strangers as lures to troll The White for their missing leader and even more ancient beings. He told her of the Falling Man, and the Napalm Girl, and then the Burning Monk who spoke to him, then of the spider creatures that had climbed down his throat, then the escape, then the explosion that almost killed them all, and finally the whispering that began in earnest then disappeared, worrying him even more because he knew there were things inside him that should never have been there.

  She sat still through it all, staring at him through eyes that seemed to be unblinking. Once it was done, she stood and turned her back as she paced to the corner of the grotto, hands behind her back. He could see her inhale deeply several times, as if she were trying to control a rush of emotion. When she settled, she began to speak, her back still to him, but her low voice clear.

  “People generally aren’t raped, so they don’t understand how one can feel so violated. I think you have a taste of it—the violation. I can hear it in your voice. I went to Santa Monica High School for a year and was raped by a football player named Will Rigalski. I was fifteen then and thought it would be the worst thing to ever happen to me. I felt unsafe and my father found out and decided to try and make me safe again by taking me halfway across the world. Then when I was eighteen and in that old monastery halfway across the world, I did feel safe. I felt safe before we dug up the Virgin Mary. I felt safe before we unleashed it. What the Greeks hadn’t mentioned when they’d fled the monastery in 1926 was that when they buried the icon, they’d buried with her a hollowed-out bible that held the spirit of a major demon, one who, when it saw the residue of pain in my eyes, was eager to resurrect that pain and enter me, unbeknownst to almost everyone.”

  “Did it have a name?”

  She whirled about so fast and her anger was so sudden that he flinched.

  “This is my story. Do not speak until I have finished.”

  He gulped and nodded. The transformation from calm to someone who seemed keen on tearing his arm off had been fantastically swift.

  She turned back around, but not before he saw the tears that rimmed her eyes.

  “I’m sorry for that,” she said. “The exorcist said that I’d have some PTSD from the possession. Funny about PTSD. I thought you had to go to war or something. Whoever thought a girl would have it because an ancient evil invaded her mind?”

  She shuddered and continued. “Its name was Kimaris. The Lemegeton labels it—” she glanced at him as he stared blank-eyed back. “Sorry, the Lemegeton is also known as The Lesser Key of Solomon. It’s a spell book of sorts from the mid-seventeenth century. The Lemegeton indicated Kimaris as the sixty-sixth demon in the Ars Gotea—the first book of the Lemegeton, drawn from arcane books from far earlier. The Lemegeton describes the demon as a majestic warrior riding a black horse. It has the ability of locating lost treasures and holds the rank of marquis in Satan’s court. It supposedly has thirty legions at its beck and call. But that’s all marketing some seventeenth century group of men in dresses created to make up for the fact that they have—” She inhaled and shook her head. “I mean, that’s how Kimaris is described, but it’s anything but that. I found the demon to be a sniveling little bother, then when it had me locked out of my own body, it proved itself as cowardly as it was devious. There was nothing majestic about it at all, except perhaps the ignorance it displayed in thinking I wouldn’t fight to have my body returned to me, toe to soul and all.”

  Sister Renee turned to look at him, once again with the face of someone who’d been well-haunted. “Then I was the one trying to explode out of my skin, scratching at the inside of my own brain, tapping messages to a self who’d been hijacked by a sixty-sixth rate fallen angel. Ever want to do something but been unable to do it? Ever tried to take a step or lift a finger and not be able to?” She nodded. “Yes. I can see from your face that you know.”

  She moved to him so quickly he thought she was going to hit him, but instead she shoved her face toward his until they were separated only by inches. “How did it feel to be helpless?”

  “It felt—it felt...” He lowered his eyes. “I have no words for it.”

  She backed away and began to pace again. “Then you know. You know what it’s like.”

  He watched her walk back and f
orth, wondering how it had been for her to be locked out. Had she been screaming from the inside like he’d been? “De Cherge said you might be able to help me figure out how to get rid of these things.”

  “My exorcist called them travelers. He was aware of their existence and checked me for their possible presences. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out I was possessed. He concentrated his efforts on ridding the world of demons one little fucked-up girl at a time.” She shook her head again. “Sorry.”

  “These travelers… how did he check for them? Make sure it wasn’t a demon?”

  “Automatic writing. He gave me a blank notebook and a pen and had me fill it up. He told me not to think about what I was writing, just to write as fast as I could, using whatever words came to mind. He didn’t even want me to form complete sentences, just get whatever was in my mind on paper.”

  “And did you do this?”

  “I did. The hardest part was in the beginning because I thought I was so stupid for not being able to write complete sentences. But once I got over that, it went quick. Fifty-five minutes and I was done.”

  “How did he check it?”

  “He looked for patterns. For missing words and phrases. For words and phrases that said something. He searched for foreign words written in languages I didn’t know.”

  “What did he find?”

  “He said there was nothing extraordinary except in the space of fifty pages I’d used the word God three hundred and forty-seven times.”

  “That seems excessive.”

  This made a grin flash across her face, lighting it like a bolt of lightning might illuminate storm clouds. She came and sat across from him again. “It was. So, he had me do it again. And again, I used God three hundred and forty-seven times.”

  “Hardly seems like a coincidence.”

  “That’s what he said. So, we tried it a third time and you know what happened?”

  Boy Scout shook his head.

  She grinned madly. “I didn’t use it once.”