by Nick Lavitz
Past Mistakes
An Emily Voss Novella
NICK LAVITZ
1.
I don’t often get called for exorcisms. People tend to think the clergy are the right group to go to for that sort of thing.
People sometimes get lucky. In rare cases when a real demon needs to be dealt with, a priest might show up who actually knows what he’s doing. More often, the priest who answers their call doesn’t understand much at all. He (because it’s always a man) probably doesn’t even believe in possession himself. Even when they do believe, priests assume they can call on some higher power and that's all there is to it.
Faith without knowledge is like a kid with a match. He can make the fire come but can’t control it once it’s there.
In my present situation, all that was irrelevant. There was no demon here that I could detect. A priest, even one trained in exorcism, would have waved his trinkets and spoken his words to no effect.
There was something wrong with the place though, even if I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was.
My boots left smudges on the faded carpet of the hotel corridor. The owner didn’t seem to care.
“You come highly recommended, Miss Voss. Ah…”
“You were expecting someone different. I know. I get that a lot.”
“Well, perhaps not so much different as, ah, older.”
I get that a lot too, although I’d assumed it was the piercing, hairstyle, shredded jeans and leather jacket that had put off the conservative and homely owner of this decrepit hotel. That and the fact that I’ma woman.
Mr. Etram was dressed in clothes that looked like all the colors had faded, but I suspected he bought them that way. He wore a tie, the knot too tight and off to one side, a dyed-in food stain near the bottom. He was shorter than me. I’m not small, but I had a good three inches on him.
While my own standards aren’t very high, I’ve spent plenty of time in hotels of varying quality, and this one ranked poorly. The color scheme was 1970s by accident. The colors faded to a semi-monochrome mustard-yellow that was not the original intention. The wallpaper was peeling. The carpet felt sticky under my boots, as though dirt had penetrated it to the point where nothing would ever wash it out. The lights didn’t flicker, but the glow wasn’t constant, as though the cabling in the walls had trouble carrying the electricity around.
The entire place deserved a refit.
He noticed me noticing and his lips tightened in disapproval.
“You find my hotel in poor condition.”
It wasn’t a question, but it’s best to at least try to stay on a client’s good side.
“I’m not here to judge.”
“It used to be quite the establishment, not so very long ago.”
“I’m sure. But the recession, right?”
He looked intently at my face for a few moments, perhaps judging the stud through my eyebrow in the same way I had judged the state of his hotel; the results of poor choices.
“Let me ask you Miss Voss. Do you really, truly, know what you are doing?”
As a general rule, I have no problem taking money from the gullible rich. Taking money from this business, or this man, would be too cruel. I decided I’d let him down easy.
“I do. I’m a professional in my little, disrespected field. So, please believe me when I tell you there’s nothing here.”
It wasn’t strictly true, but he had asked me to perform an exorcism and there was certainly nothing here to exorcise. Just a malaise hanging around the place like a bad smell after a kitchen accident.
He looked surprised, so I continued, “I’ve seen what happens when something comes through. It leaves a taint, like a smell, and it’s not here. I can’t feel the presence of anything unnatural or demonic happening here in the recent past. I’d happily take your money and say I’d removed something. I can wave some incense around and say a few words in Latin if it makes you feel better, but there’s nothing here to banish or capture.”
“I’m afraid you must be mistaken, Miss Voss.”
This was a first. A client trying to convince me that there was some demonic presence when I was trying to convince them of the opposite.
“What makes you think that?”
“Come with me.”
I followed him as he walked briskly down the corridor. He walked past the elevator, not even pressing the call button, and took the stairs.
He waved his hand at the doors that were spaced equally apart. “We’ve put all the current guests in the East wing since that is the area least affected. These rooms are all empty.”
We reached the ground floor and kept going to the basement.
I have what I consider to be a perfectly rational, near-overwhelming fear and loathing of basements and enclosed spaces. I wasn’t going to let my potential client know that, so I followed him down the stairs anyway, my gut clenching as we descended below ground.
“We haven’t had an incident as such, but it’s not difficult to see that something very odd is happening.”
In the poorly lit hallway, he unlocked a door with a key that hung from a crowded keychain and led me into a small, windowless office. There was only enough room for a desk and two chairs, and the desk was taken up with a computer and a screen, with a little room left over for some papers. The hotel’s accounts and guest register were spread out on the wooden surface.
He picked up a manila folder and handed it to me, then carefully took a seat. He seemed to do everything carefully.
I took the other seat and looked inside the folder to find a collection of photographs of the hotel in better days.
I recognized the corridor we had just been in, with cream carpets and fresh wallpaper. The rooms were in much better condition, with clean windows allowing sunlight to bathe the spaces in bright colors.
“It must have been quite the place when it was younger, your hotel.”
“Take a look at the back of the photographs.”
I turned a couple over and found each was stamped with a logo and the words, “Estaminet Photography, 4221 West 76th Street.” Beneath each stamp, the date the photo had been taken was written in pencil. They were all three weeks old.
“Are you trying to tell me that this was the condition of the hotel less than a month ago?”
“Yes, Miss Voss, that’s the problem.”
“But there’s nothing here. I would have felt it.”
“This is your department, not mine. Perhaps it has left, and will return later?”
I reached out with my senses, searching for the unseen in my surroundings. There was nothing here except the decrepitude of the building and its furnishings, and that odd sense of not belonging that had nothing demonic about it at all.
“It doesn’t work that way, and even if it did, I’d feel something, some lingering residue of its passage into our world. I’m getting nothing demonic at all.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing demonic,” I repeated. "What I can sense is the residue of demonic activity, not the demons themselves. If they breach the barrier between worlds, or create fire, or perform rites, then it leaves a taint or a feeling that I'm sensitive to. That taint hangs around for a while."
“So, something perhaps not demonic?” he asked.
I pulled off a leather glove and put my hand to the nearest wall, to one side of the door, closing my eyes. I let down my guard, sought out the vulnerability in myself that allowed me to sense things. My awareness gradually spread through the room and into the walls.
Damp, mildew, bricks. I breathed out and let my awareness drift further.
Pipework, cabling, girders, a few rats. Always that sense of otherness.
“
I’m not getting…”
There. Something omnipresent, more than the pipes and the girders. Something immobile and empty, so big I'd failed to notice it. Something I had no word for. I reached for it and was suddenly drawn into it, nowhere and everywhere at once, lost beyond my ability to understand how. Falling and burning and breathless, trapped in an infinite void and watched by something omnipotent and malevolent.
I pulled my hand away from the wall as though scalded. There was an awful moment when I thought I was either dead or worse, unaware of my surroundings. Then I lurched to his desk, grabbed the garbage pail and threw up the burrito I’d had for lunch.
When my stomach was empty, I retched a few more times for good measure, then collapsed to the floor, my back against the old wood desk, keeping well away from the walls and all too aware that I was deep in the building and beneath ground.
It took an effort to climb the stairs and get outside. I was sitting on the hood of my car holding a cigarette in fingers that wouldn’t stop shaking, and wondering at how sweet the air was, and how everything suddenly seemed to have color once more. I hadn’t noticed at the time, but the inside of the hotel had had the life sucked out of it until it was nothing more than a grey, rotten, ashen husk of itself.
“So,” said the manager, shading his eyes against the sun, “something after all?”
The bastard looked relieved, as though I had an answer for him.
“I’m going to have to double my fee,” I started.
“But you’ve done nothing but observe and vomit in my office,” he replied, offended. “I expect results if I’m to pay you at all!”
“That’s fair. Payment on success. But the extra’s not for me; I’m going to have to bring in some help.”
2.
I have two pricing structures. The first is that I can cost very little. That’s because I’m ripping you off, waving a North American or Indonesian or Chinese charm in the air, chanting a few words stolen from Latin, Hindi and Arabic, and dirtying your carpet with salt bought at the local supermarket. For the privilege of this service, you will pay anywhere between fifty and five hundred dollars. Canadian, US, I don’t really care. You’re actually paying for nothing and the only cost to me is the three kilos of salt and the guilt I’ll carry around for the next few days. This, fortunately, is the bulk of my work.
I can also cost a great deal – as much as several thousand dollars (US, please, in most cases payable in advance). This is because you have a real, not hallucinated, honest-to-goodness demonic infestation on your hands and I’m one of the few people who can deal with it without getting myself killed, or worse. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee I won’t die or have my soul displaced and my body used as a marionette until it dies of shock. I’ve come pretty close a couple of times, hence the price tag. As my banker father liked to tell me, when we were still on speaking terms, there ought to be a relationship between risk and reward.
Not many careers lead to exorcism. In my case, it came as a by-product of spending too much of my early twenties pretending, and half-believing, that I was a witch. I’d go to conventions with my “coven.” We would also occasionally meet in the woods after dark, wearing clothing and performing rites so embarrassing that I cringe to think back on it.
Convinced we were authentic, we would seek out genuine-looking books (grimoires, if you please), from shops that took advantage of our gullibility. We would occasionally nick our thumbs and put a few drops of blood in a copper pan or spend money we didn’t have on strange herbs that stank when they burned and made our hair smell for days. We wore our hair long and tended to dye it black or red. Being a witch was more about style than substance. We sat around in circles a lot. I’ve spent more time as an adult holding hands with girls than with boys, which, since I don't swing that way, is kind of sad.
The danger with not knowing the difference between something authentic and something fabricated is that one day you come into possession of a book that isn’t make-believe. Given our practice to date, we managed to translate enough of it to carry out a poor semblance of the ritual it contained. Then our innocent, eccentric and embarrassing hobby turned into a tragic story of minds lost and enmities created. Of the thirteen of us that considered ourselves a coven at the time, four are dead, seven are incarcerated either in mental institutions or in prison, one is a housewife in Oregon, and I’m still fighting my demons, literally as well as figuratively, since Ahazu is still out there somewhere.
We never got to the part where we sent him back.
None of us talk to each other anymore, nor do we dress up and read Latin aloud while sitting in circles in the basements of abandoned houses.
I didn’t know how much to charge Mr. Etram, the gentle, musty, careful and prematurely aged hotel owner, for my services. This was because I had no idea what I was dealing with. I did know I’d need to double it because, no matter how unsavory the prospect, I couldn’t do this without Raymond, and he doesn’t work for free; which meant I had to go see Raymond.
Approaching Raymond is like defusing a bomb. He’s touchy, especially about his body. He’s unnaturally intelligent, quick to anger and insufferably arrogant. I’m not without an ego myself and dealing with him is always trying on my patience.
“The little witch has come to visit me in my humble home, what an honor. I wonder what she might need.”
I looked around the grubby garage with the broken 1971 Dodge Charger on stilts and held back the obvious retort.
“I’d like your advice on something.”
“Bitten off more than you can chew, Emily?”
Raymond’s not a small man. When he takes a train somewhere, they make him buy a second ticket, which is unfair, but then so is having to sit next to him in a standard width seat. It was a mistake to confuse his considerable girth with laziness, clumsiness or lack of physical strength, however. He was faster than his physical size suggested, and under the fat was plenty of muscle, even if he looked pale and unhealthy on the outside.
“Not exactly. It’s not what you might call a typical job though.”
“Are you going to get to the point soon, or just keep teasing?”
“I’d love to tell you what it is, but I don't know. It’s no demon, no spirit, nothing like that. It felt like something both vast and without identity. I couldn’t pin it down, almost couldn’t detect it at all, and when I finally saw it…I don’t know. It was so much bigger than anything I’d ever seen.”
“Huge but undetectable?”
“Undetectable because it had no purpose. No consciousness.”
“You’re so poetic when you’re confused, little Emily.”
“I’m trying to give you an idea of what it was like. Stop being an ass.”
“So, you want me to do this for you because it’s beyond your abilities.”
“I think, Raymond, that we’re going to have to do this one together if we’re going to stand a chance.”
The big man sneered at me. “I take eighty percent of the fee, that’s how it works if it’s beyond you and you need my help.”
I’d forgotten how much I loathed dealing with Raymond, but I knew him well enough to manage him.
“Never mind Raymond, I know others who are up for a challenge and I’m not sure you’re up to this. Also, this is an on-site job, and I hadn’t realized you no longer fit through your own front door.”
It was nasty and unfair to goad him like this, but I needed his help and I don’t share his love of long-winded confrontational negotiations; this was the shortcut to the endgame.
It worked. He blushed a violent red and lunged at me with unexpected speed. I only just got out of the way in time, taking several steps backward and to one side. A meaty palm grabbed at my hair and missed by inches.
“You know better,” he growled.
“And you know better than to try to rip me off, you pretentious asshole. Show me some respect. I’ve brought you six jobs so far, all of them w
ell paid, and you still treat me as though I can’t do the work when you know damn well I’m competent.”
“But not sensitive.”
I looked down at my feet, the guilt coming hard.
“No, not sensitive enough for this.”
It was Ray’s greatest strength and his ultimate weakness. When it came to the other side, he was the most sensitive practitioner anywhere. He’d been feeling the spirit world rubbing through to our plane of existence since childhood. Early reactions to a near-permanent awareness of the supernatural were misdiagnosed as autism and then as obsessive-compulsive disorder and finally as a form of mental breakdown. It had broken him as a child, resulting in a number of disorders. His obesity was a direct result. Every time he did a job, it cost him more than anyone should have to sacrifice. He made his living looking directly at the very thing that had ruined his life.
“So, you need me.”
I forced myself to meet his eyes.
“Yes, I need you, but you’re still only getting half. We both have to eat, and I take my share of the risk. I always have.”
I could hear his teeth grinding from across the room.
“Ok. When?”
We sorted the details of the next day’s meeting and I left his garage to drown my guilt at being a manipulative bitch in a glass of whiskey.
3.
“Who’s your friend, Miss Voss?”
“Why,” gasped Raymond. “Doesn’t the bloody. Elevator. Work?” He desperately hyperventilated in an effort to recover his breath.
“It does work,” replied Etram, looking upset at the accusation.
“She said it didn’t!” He almost shouted, pointing in my direction with a hand the size of a dinner plate.
“My mistake,” I said, “I didn’t realize since Mr. Etram doesn’t use it.”
“I don’t like putting myself at the mercy of whatever is affecting the building,” said the little man, who was wearing a completely different suit that was precisely as faded as the last one.
“How very melodramatic of you,” said Raymond, wiping some greasy hair out of his eyes and giving a narrow chair a baleful look as he realized he wouldn’t fit between the armrests. “Now where’s this malevolent presence?”
