by Lincoln Cole
Arthur turned toward the front window. Another woman tried to crawl her way inside. He stepped over to the table, grabbed the errant golf club from the floor, and then used it to shove her outside. She fell backward into the bushes, and Arthur grabbed a corner of the couch.
“Help me!” he shouted to Jackson.
Jackson, though in a daze, snapped out of it when Arthur shouted at him. He rushed over, grabbed the other side of the couch, and together, they pushed it into place to block the window.
When Arthur turned back, he saw another man come around the corner from the kitchen. He ran straight toward Father Paladina with a raised pitchfork. Arthur raised his pistol, took aim, and fired at the man’s kneecap.
The bullet hit, and the man fell with a scream, clutching at his knee.
“You shot him,” Jackson said in shock.
“He’ll get over it.”
Golf club in hand, Arthur stalked over to the other doorway and took up position behind Niccolo, ready to hold everything at bay as long as he could.
◆◆◆
At first, it felt like a fire in the pit of Niccolo’s stomach; gradually, it spread through his entire body. He chanted out the words of the Rituale Romanum. And though he didn’t think about the words at all, they simply flowed out of his mouth. He opened himself up as a vessel, letting the faith take hold. All the while, he prayed to become an instrument, and it felt as though he stepped outside his body and stood watching everything happen rather than participating.
Gradually, his voice increased in volume and intensity, though not his intention for it to do so. The demon clutched at the chair next to it, trying to crawl away and making hissing and gasping sounds.
Then Niccolo remembered something from his last trip here. The doll, the one that had moved around. Demons used physical objects to strengthen their hold on their hosts, and he realized that the one-eyed doll had become such an object.
After turning, he rushed through the house to the room where he had seen it. Arthur shouted at him to stop, but he ignored the man. He rounded the corner and saw the myriad dolls on their shelves.
The one he searched for, with its red hair and missing eye, lay on the floor. The paint had faded, and its dress had torn. It still smiled, but now the grin looked sardonic and twisted.
He picked it up from the floor and rushed back out to the living room. “The salt!” he shouted. “Where is it?”
Jackson turned to him, dazed. Blood ran down his face, and he looked about to fall down, but he pointed toward the floor where the salt had fallen.
Niccolo dashed over to it. He dropped the doll and shook salt onto it. Where it touched the doll, it sizzled, and the gasping noises Rose made intensified. When he looked back at the old woman, all her confidence had gone. The demon grew furious and terrified, realizing what Niccolo was about to do.
“I will kill the woman,” the demon said. “I will take her with me when I go.”
Niccolo ignored the demon. “I need a lighter,” he said, turning toward Arthur. “A lighter!”
Arthur stood facing off against a burly man wielding a shovel. Without turning to look at Niccolo, he slid a hand into his pocket, drew forth a lighter, and tossed it toward him.
Deftly, Niccolo caught it, falling back into the rites of exorcism. He knelt next to the doll, flicking the lighter to bring a flame to life, and then held it to her hair.
It combusted quickly and forced him to back away as it burned. In only seconds, the doll became a raging ball of fire on the floor, and then it had gone. It left behind only a pile of ash and dust.
With renewed focus, Niccolo turned his attention to the demon. It now looked terrified as it tried to crawl away. His words poured forth like a heavenly song, opening up inside him. No longer himself, he’d become just a vessel, locked in a battle of wills against this demon. It didn’t stand a chance.
God stood on his side.
His voice reached a crescendo. The battle raged behind him, bringing shouting, gunfire, and screaming and yelling, but he blocked it all out.
At some point, Niccolo deviated from the rites in the Rituale Romanum, though he had barely any consciousness of doing so. He spoke other chants and verses. Words poured forth, entreating the demon, challenging it, and pressuring it. The intensity built until it reached a crescendo. Rose screamed.
“I will kill her!”
Niccolo closed his eyes, focusing all his energy into one final push. One moment of clarity came, through which he could reach out and touch the demon. He could show it God’s love and forgiveness and prove to it with finality that it did not belong here.
“I will kill this vessel if you do not stop!”
“No,” Niccolo said, opening his eyes and smiling. “You won’t.”
He reached forward, touched the old woman on the forehead, and with his finger, made the sign of the cross on her forehead.
Everything went quiet.
It happened instantly. He had expected a dramatic shout or scream like in the movies, but it proved the exact opposite.
Heavy breathing reached him, and he turned around to see Arthur and Jackson standing behind him. Arthur looked ragged and beat up, holding a golf club. Around him lay several unconscious people. Jackson appeared exhausted and barely able to keep his feet as he leaned against a couch, holding it up against a window.
The rest of the attackers all lay on the floor, out cold. Many of them looked like they hadn’t even made it into the fray yet, and still, they lay unconscious. It had ended.
Everything had finished.
Arthur burst out laughing.
“Not bad, Priest,” he said. “Not bad at all.”
Epilogue
Arthur didn’t plan on sticking around in Everett for long after things had calmed down and the exorcism had finished. He didn’t want to linger in Rose’s home when the authorities showed up. That never turned out as a good place to end up in his line of work.
Niccolo had done it, and that was impressive as hell. Usually, a priest in his situation would apprentice with a real exorcist for years before taking on one alone. This one had also happened under extreme duress. He didn’t know many people who could stay calm in the face of something like this.
He couldn’t stick around to congratulate him. The people of Everett would stay safe—though it would take months for things to return to normal—and the time had come for him to move on. He stayed long enough to help patch up the civilians he’d wounded in the fight. Arthur had half expected for Niccolo to chastise him for hurting some of them as badly as he had, but Niccolo didn’t say a word.
He felt more relieved than he’d expected when they verified that all of them would live. Even the one who’d come through the window and cut himself badly, and the one he’d shot in the knee would be fine after a few months. Even Rose would survive, though with a broken hip; an incredible feat considering how long the demon had lived inside her.
Without the demon in Rose or Bishop Glasser here to anchor them, they had all lost their grip on the host. Arthur had no illusions about what had happened, though. Bishop Glasser left Rose here because the demon had remained too weak to travel with him, and all of this had brought a distraction to give him time to hide his trail. Though proud that they had saved the people of Everett, Arthur knew it would cost him quite a bit.
What he didn’t know, however, was how the bishop had managed to summon so many demons in the first place. He had something, an artifact maybe, that was beyond anything Arthur had ever faced before. To bring in so many demons, even weak ones, like this was unthinkable, and he couldn’t leave something so powerful in the hands of the bishop.
About an hour after everything had ended, he prepared to leave. He felt bad for the poor priests trying to explain what went down out here. The Church would send people to help cover everything up and create stories for why the people couldn’t account for several days of their lives, and things would go back to normal.
The townsfolk would
fill in the details, making up situations just to have some explanation of why they’d awoken injured at Rose’s house. No matter how outlandish, if they believed the tales they told themselves, then nothing else mattered. Few of them would ever think “demon,” and none of them would say it out loud.
Arthur had grown used to seeing this defense mechanism, and after a couple of stories in the newspapers, and a few weeks, the entire situation would become a distant memory for most of the people who had come here with their axes and bats.
Arthur stood packing up to leave when Niccolo and Jackson came out to see him. He had hoped to slip out before they noticed, but they seemed to have guessed his intention.
“What will you do now?” Niccolo asked.
“Find Bishop Glasser,” Arthur said. “I don’t know what he planned to do out here or what his end game was.”
“What do you mean? It’s over.”
“No,” Arthur said. “Whatever the bishop planned, it has only just begun. I need to stop him.”
Niccolo hesitated, staring at Arthur for a long moment. “I’ll come with you.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll only slow me down.” Arthur shook his head.
“Like hell I will,” Niccolo said. “The bishop did this to these people. We all trusted him, and he betrayed that trust.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re prepared for something like this.”
“I’ll talk to the Vatican and force you to take me along if I need to.”
Arthur frowned. He realized Niccolo’s words pointed mostly to a threat, but the fact that Niccolo had threatened at all and felt willing to put himself in danger reinforced the idea he’d had earlier.
Niccolo had changed a lot.
For the better.
“Fine,” he said. “But do me a favor and stay quiet about it. We don’t need to get the Church involved in any of this just yet. Take some time here, fix this with Jackson, and get your affairs in order, and then meet me in one week in Colorado.”
“Colorado?” Niccolo asked.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “I’ll give you directions.”
“Then what?”
Arthur climbed into the passenger seat and closed the door.
“Then,” he said. “We’ll go hunt down Bishop Glasser.”
About the Author
Lincoln Cole is a Columbus-based author who enjoys traveling and has visited many different parts of the world, including Australia and Cambodia, but always returns home to his pugamonster, Luther, and wife. His love for writing was kindled at an early age through the works of Isaac Asimov and Stephen King, and he enjoys telling stories to anyone who will listen.
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Raven’s Peak
“Reverend, you have a visitor.”
He couldn’t remember when he fell in love with the pain. When agony first turned to pleasure, and then to joy. Of course, it hadn’t always been like this. He remembered screaming all those years ago when first they put him in this cell; those memories were vague, though, like reflections in a dusty mirror.
“Open D4.”
A buzz as the door slid open, inconsequential. The aching need was what drove him in this moment, and nothing else mattered. It was a primal desire: a longing for the tingly rush of adrenaline each time the lash licked his flesh. The blood dripping down his parched skin fulfilled him like biting into a juicy strawberry on a warm summer’s day.
“Some woman. Says she needs to speak with you immediately. She says her name is Frieda.”
A pause, the lash hovering in the air like a poised snake. The Reverend remembered that name, found it dancing in the recesses of his mind. He tried to pull himself back from the ritual, back to reality, but it was an uphill slog through knee-deep mud to reclaim those memories.
It was always difficult to focus when he was in the midst of his cleansing. All he managed to cling to was the name. Frieda. It was the name of an angel, he knew. . . or perhaps a devil.
One and the same when all was said and done.
She belonged to a past life, only the whispers of which he could recall. The ritual reclaimed him, embraced him with its fiery need. His memories were nothing compared to the whip in his hand, its nine tails gracing his flesh.
The lash struck down on his left shoulder blade, scattering droplets of blood against the wall behind him. Those droplets would stain the granite for months, he knew, before finally fading away. He clenched his teeth in a feral grin as the whip landed with a sickening, wet slapping sound.
“Jesus,” a new voice whispered from the doorway. “Does he always do that?”
“Every morning.”
“You’ll cuff him?”
“Why? Are you scared?”
The Reverend raised the lash into the air, poised for another strike.
“Just…man, you said he was crazy…but this…”
The lash came down, lapping at his back and the tender muscles hidden there. He let out a groan of mixed agony and pleasure.
These men were meaningless, their voices only echoes amid the rest, an endless drone. He wanted them to leave him alone with his ritual. They weren’t worth his time.
“I think we can spare the handcuffs this time; the last guy who tried spent a month in the hospital.”
“Regulation says we have to.”
“Then you do it.”
The guards fell silent. The cat-o’-nine-tails, his friend, his love, became the only sound in the roughhewn cell, echoing off the granite walls. He took a rasping breath, blew it out, and cracked the lash again. More blood. More agony. More pleasure.
“I don’t think we need to cuff him,” the second guard decided.
“Good idea. Besides, the Reverend isn’t going to cause us any trouble. He only hurts himself. Right, Reverend?”
The air tasted of copper, sickly sweet. He wished he could see his back and the scars, but there were no mirrors in his cell. They removed the only one he had when he broke shards off to slice into his arms and legs. They were afraid he would kill himself.
How ironic was that?
“Right, Reverend?”
Mirrors were dangerous things, he remembered from that past life. They called the other side, the darker side. An imperfect reflection stared back, threatening to steal pieces of the soul away forever.
“Reverend? Can you hear me?”
The guard reached out to tap the Reverend on the shoulder. Just a tap, no danger at all, but his hand never even came close. Honed reflexes reacted before anyone could possibly understand what was happening.
Suddenly the Reverend was standing. He hovered above the guard who was down on his knees. The man let out a sharp cry, his left shoulder twisted up at an uncomfortable angle by the Reverend’s iron grip.
The lash hung in the air, ready to strike at its new prey.
The Reverend looked curiously at the man, seeing him for the first time. He recognized him as one of the first guardsmen he’d ever spoken with when placed in this cell. A nice European chap with a wife and two young children. A little overweight and balding, but well-intentioned.
Most of him didn’t want to hurt this man, but there was a part—a hungry, needful part—that did. That part wanted to hurt this man in ways neither of them could even imagine. One twist would snap his arm. Two would shatter the bone; the sound as it snapped would be . . .
A symphony rivaling Tchaikovsky.
The second guard—the younger one that smelled of fear—stumbled back, struggling to draw his gun.
“No! No, don’t!”
That from the first, on his knees as if praying. The Reverend wondered if he prayed at night with his family before heading to bed. Doubtless, he prayed that he would make it home safely from work and that one of the inmates wouldn’t rip his throat out or gouge out his eyes. Right now, he was waving his free hand at his partner to get his attenti
on, to stop him.
The younger guard finally worked the gun free and pointed it at the Reverend. His hands were shaking as he said, “Let him go!”
“Don’t shoot, Ed!”
“Let him go!”
The older guard, pleading this time: “Don’t piss him off!”
The look that crossed his young partner’s face in that moment was precious: primal fear. It was an expression the Reverend had seen many times in his life, and he understood the thoughts going through the man’s mind: he couldn’t imagine how he might die in this cell, but he believed he could. That belief stemmed from something deeper than what his eyes could see. A terror so profound it beggared reality.
An immutable silence hung in the air. Both guards twitched and shifted, one in pain and the other in terror. The Reverend was immovable, a statue in his sanctuary, eyes boring into the man’s soul.
“Don’t shoot,” the guard on his knees murmured. “You’ll miss, and we’ll be dead.”
“I have a clear shot. I can’t miss.”
This time, the response was weaker. “We’ll still be dead.”
A hesitation. The guard lowered his gun in confused fear, pointing it at the floor. The Reverend curled his lips and released, freeing the kneeling guard.
The man rubbed his shoulder and climbed shakily to his feet. He backed away from the Reverend and stood beside the other, red-faced and panting.
“I heard you,” the Reverend said. The words were hard to come by; he’d rarely spoken these last five years.
“I’m sorry, Reverend,” the guard replied meekly. “My mistake.”
“Bring me to Frieda,” he whispered.
“You don’t—” the younger guard began. A sharp look from his companion silenced him.
“Right away, sir.”
“Steve, we should cuff…”
Steve ignored him, turning and stepping outside the cell. The Reverend looked longingly at the lash in his hand before dropping it onto his hard bed. His cultivated pain had faded to a dull ache. He would need to begin anew when he returned, restart the cleansing.
