Chapter 12: A Case of Demonic Possession
“What the hell is that?” Dr. Ira Rosenfeld asked the man to his right in a tired and altogether fed-up tone.
“It’s the schizophrenic, Doctor. Tried to calm her before, but the Demerol isn’t working.”
“Screams like a bloody banshee,” Rosenfeld muttered to himself before continuing with his reading. The blasphemous screams continued for more than an hour before being cut short. The men were too far away from the room to hear whatever happened afterward. Neither had had any peace since Shirley Cohen’s arrival two nights ago, so they welcomed the quiet, without even considering why she had finally stopped her ranting and screaming.
“Do we have a diagnosis yet, Doctor?” Rosenfeld asked. He shot a look at Dr. Caspar Gavorkian, then put his head down. In all the years he had known Gavorkian, the man had never liked being looked at, and Rosenfeld was too afraid of him to ask why.
“She has been here two days, and you’re asking for a diagnosis?” Gavorkian retorted. “I’ve barely even had time to look at her, what with all the screaming she’s been doing. I’d kill for a next of kin.”
“And we don’t have one yet?” Rosenfeld queried.
“No,” he answered bluntly. Feeling Rosenfeld’s eyes stray to study him, Gavorkian began to explain. “She’s not from Montana, and we have no definite ID—only that she calls herself Shirley Cohen. The local police found her walking naked, covered in blood, speaking some strange language and chanting. She’d stop and draw hexagrams, octagons, and pentagrams. Looked like a satanic ritual, if you must know … though the witnesses—yes, there were a few—said they saw no one else. I would say it was attempted suicide. Still quite possibly sacrifice to the dark lords of hell, but I doubt if she hurt anyone.
“So she might be a Satanist,” Gavorkian continued after a pause. He had been a psychiatrist for just over four years, after spending years practicing as a geriatric physician. The ritual killing of his first wife had spurred him into the career change. She had been a practicing member of the OTO.
“They found her with the pentagram on her stomach painted in her own blood,” Gavorkian said. “She said she was known throughout the Badlands as ‘the fair maiden.’ She was appearing in Black Masses everywhere, claiming to have the second sight. She claimed to be able to converse with demons and even might have said that she was carrying something of Lucifer’s—perhaps she’s pregnant with his child. If you ask me—” His words were once again cut off at the sound of Shirley’s bloodcurdling screams.
Eastmont, a facility for the mentally disabled, had opened in 1967 as a peaceful place of sanctuary for those with mental disabilities. But now it was a training center, and medical students came here to get their first taste of a psychiatric facility—or, less tastefully, a nuthouse. Dr. Rosenfeld had been in charge for just over ten years and had given it a better name than most other psychiatric facilities in the country. It was very rarely more than half full, but it could hold up to twenty patients at a time. At this time, there were only ten, and most of these were in lockdown for security purposes. This number included Shirley Cohen.
“She calm yet?” Rosenfeld asked the guard sitting in front of the monitor by the locked doors of the security ward.
“Shirley? Quiet as a lamb, Doctor … been talkin’ a bit, casually, though. You know, ’bout her wanderin’ the road since Lucifer set her free.” He nodded politely as Rosenfeld passed through the steel doors.
The corridor he found himself in was paneled in dark chrome from wall to wall, broken only by the steel-rimmed windows on each of the five doors. The doctor strode down to the end of the long corridor; Shirley Cohen was in the last room. He peered through the small glass window on the door. The girl was sitting quietly on her bed and staring blankly at the walls of her cell. He was careful not to disturb her meditation, for that was what he thought she was doing. Rosenfeld fumbled with the keys in the lock, slid the dead bolt over to the right, and opened the door.
Shirley was sitting quietly on her cot, her back toward the door. In a patient, quiet voice, the doctor spoke. “My name is Dr. Rosenfeld. You can call me Ira.”
“Ira,” she repeated, and Rosenfeld immediately knew he was talking to Shirley herself—no alternate personalities, no haunted doppelgängers. This was Shirley.
“I’ve got to ask you a few questions, Shirley. Is that okay?” he asked in the kindest voice a heartbroken man could manage.
“Everyone wants to ask questions—so many questions,” she muttered. “Why ask questions when I can already answer them? I’m feeling okay. I don’t have many childhood memories, but I remember watching lots of television. The usual reality TV they have nowadays doesn’t interest me. I never indulged in too many sweets, never used food to assuage my anxieties. My father’s a rabbi. Who is my father? He’s a great man, a leader—not the divine Lord but almost … thereabouts. And yes, the weather is good today. I can see the sun through that little window up there, through that steeple—strange place for a steeple, but I can see it through the ceiling.” As her bony finger trembled upward to point to the thick brick wall above her, Rosenfeld felt a chill run up his spine. She had answered every question he had thought of; she had simply plucked them from his mind.
Suddenly, she cupped her hands and presently brought forth a handful of Lorna Doones.
“My favorite,” said the doctor, surprised that she had offered him his favorite cookie.
Steady, Ira, he cautioned himself. Don’t start jumping to farfetched conclusions of telepathy or magic. In states of deep concentration, people have been known to conjure up extraordinary skills and lose them just as fast as they get them.
His thoughts were stopped from branching any further when Shirley uttered, “You skinned your knee playing tennis the other day. You must look after it; it is becoming infected with streptococcus.”
Dr. Rosenfeld now gave Shirley his full, rapt attention. He looked down at his knee, but there was no discerning the large scab through his dress pants.
Shirley’s face seemed to distort, and she appeared to become a whole new person. Her eyes thinned at the edges; her cheeks grew wider, and her mouth became wider. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but Rosenfeld would swear in any court that her hair had momentarily lightened and that she had aged at least fifteen years. She looked almost like a different person. When she spoke, he realized that her voice had also changed. It was deeper, but not necessarily more masculine. It was raspy and thick and seemed to throw out perfumed air with every aspiration: “Hello, Ira. My name is David. Would you like to ask me some questions, too?”
“David?” Rosenfeld felt as if he had been stabbed in the heart. “Hello, David,” he croaked. “And who, exactly, are you?”
“I’m insulted, Ira! You don’t recognize your own brother? It’s been a few decades, sure, but it’s not like I’ve aged!” It laughed then, and Rosenfeld recognized the laughter immediately. It was that of his brother.
“But it can’t be you!”
“Yes, one would think the matter of being dead would get in the way! But the boss is quite lenient when it comes to matters like that.”
“Boss?”
“Oh, you know. The head honcho upstairs.”
“I don’t believe you. Tell me something that only we would know.” Rosenfeld couldn’t believe it—the voice, the laugh, and even the eyes belonged to David. But it couldn’t be him; it was impossible. There was no heaven. There was no hell … so how could David—an atheist like David—have spoken from the dead?
“Здравствулте!, брат. Rachel здесь слишком, она говорит мне вы украсило ванную комнату потом. Mauve и серый цвет оно? Вы всегда любили цвет серым.” The David-Shirley-thing said and smiled.
Rosenfeld stepped away toward the door, his eyes wide, his mouth agape.
“Hello, brother. Rachel is here too—she tells me you d
ecorated the bathroom afterward. Mauve and gray, is it? You always liked the color gray.”
After Rachel, Rosenfeld’s wife, had slipped and fallen in their bathtub, she had hit her head on the glass door, fallen forward, and cracked it open onto the marble floors, killing herself instantly. Afterward, Rosenfeld had changed his home’s interior. He had told no one of this, feeling somewhat ashamed of his actions. And, yes, he had redecorated in mauve and gray.
David had also been fluent in many languages, one of those being Russian; the brothers had learned it together when Ira Rosenfeld was just a teenager. How would Shirley know that they had spoken Russian? Feeling overwhelmed, Rosenfeld had told the David/Shirley … whatever … he had been speaking to that he had to go. He left quickly and soon joined Gavorkian in the study.
“Well?” Gavorkian asked the minute Rosenfeld walked into the office.
“Multiple personality disorder,” Rosenfeld said with an air of exhaustion before slumping into the burgundy armchair in the corner. “And she’s been meditating. Expect her to be able to read minds for at least another few hours.” Rubbing his temples with his left thumb and forefinger, Rosenfeld undid his tie with his free hand and sank even further into the chair.
“Either its schizophrenia or it’s a case of demonic possession!” Rosenfeld quipped. It had been a joke, but Gavorkian took the comment seriously.
“Hey, I read a paper on that once. The symptoms of schizophrenia and possession are very similar. I’d like to have a look at her, if it’s okay with you. Not tonight—tomorrow. I need time to reread all the old text on it.”
Too tired to even laugh at his colleague’s notion of possession, Rosenfeld was still an atheist and wasn’t planning to start believing in a demon of some kind—or even that his own brother had possessed the girl in lockdown. He sat back in his leather recliner and reached for the pipe in his left pocket … he shortly produced a Lorna Doone cookie and popped it in his mouth. “You can question her all you want.”
Birthing the Lucifer star Page 25
