by Ted Dekker
“Daniel, listen to me,” the priest said, dropping to one knee beside him. He had something shiny in one hand. “I’m not here on my own, do you hear me?”
He quickly slipped one end of what Heather now saw were handcuffs around Daniel’s wrist. Two feet of chain ran between the shackles.
“Your pain is known and suffered by another . . .”
Seymour snapped the other end of the handcuffs to a large steel screw eye embedded in the timber behind the chair. She understood why he’d moved the chair.
Daniel’s hands rested on his lap now. He seemed unaware of the restraint dangling from his right wrist.
“Another was tormented for the sin of Eve.”
Daniel’s cries changed tone. His head hung and his shoulders shook, but the tone of his sobs became sharper, the shaking more rapid.
He was crying? Or laughing?
A low chuckle echoed through the root cellar, then grew to a harsh cackle. Daniel lifted his head and faced the ceiling, eyes closed. He was laughing, open mouthed, shaking with each laugh—a breath-robbing chortle that seemed impossibly long.
All the while, Father Seymour casually went about the business of retrieving his crucifix and the prayer book.
The laughter died to a few pronounced chuckles, and Daniel lowered his head, eyes still closed, grinning like someone relishing an amusing memory. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
The smile vanished and his voice dropped to a whisper. “I was there.”
Heather was so taken aback by the complete change in him that at first she didn’t hear the words spoken by the father. She wanted out. To claw her way to the door and throw herself into the clean air outside. To run from the clearing, into the trees, to the car, anywhere but here.
Then she remembered that she’d begged Father Seymour to come for this very reason.
The priest was reading from the prayer book. “Do not remember, O Lord, our sins—”
“Too late.” Daniel’s eyes snapped wide. Black as tar. A grin twisted his lips, one corner up, one down. He swiveled his head and stared at the priest through two holes that peered from the darkest abyss.
“. . . or the sins of our forefathers. Do not punish us for our offenses, and lead us not—”
“Into the filthy priesthood when we ourselves are so extravagantly guilty of the same sins we hope to absolve the whore of.”
Daniel was rattling off the interruptions as if he knew what the Father would read. Seymour dropped his eyes back to the page and continued quickly.
“And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Save this man, your servant—”
“You’re barking up the wrong tree, Seymour. Yap, yap, yap.”
“Let the enemy have no victory over him. And let the son of iniquity not succeed in injuring him—”
“’Cause his body’s a temple and his mind’s already a garbage hole filled with maggots.”
“Send him help from the Holy Place, Lord. And give him heavenly protection—”
“A box full of condoms or a book about how it’s all about the vibrations and chemicals will do.”
“Lord, hear my prayer and let my cry reach you.”
Daniel shifted his black stare to Heather. The temperature had fallen twenty or thirty degrees so that his breath came in vapors.
“Hello, Heather.” His voice shifted higher. “Do you want to be my friend?” It was a young boy’s voice. “Do you want to join Adam in the box?”
“I compel you in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth,” the priest said calmly, “what is your name?”
The smile on Daniel’s face faltered for a moment, then twisted again.
“Would you like Eve in your box? You nasty little sow.”
She’d never known Daniel to use foul language of any kind, and his use of it now repulsed her nearly as much as the black in his eyes. The stench of urine smothered her, and for the first time she saw that his teeth were black again.
“What is your name, unclean spirit? I demand in the authority of Je—”
Daniel jerked his head to face the priest and snarled. “What right do you have to compel me to do anything?” He stood; the chain snapped taut. He glanced down, then continued, only momentarily distracted. “You didn’t learn your lesson in France? How are your ribs, Father?”
Seymour stiffened.
“Did you tell her why you became a priest? The real reason?”
The priest’s mouth parted, but he didn’t seem able to speak.
Daniel looked down at his wrist, then back at the screw eye. When he faced them again, his eyes were blue. Normal.
An expression of terrible anguish twisted his face, and Heather knew that her Daniel had surfaced. She took an involuntary step forward.
“That’s it, Daniel. You can do it, you’re strong. I love you.”
He froze. Lifted his face and screamed at the timbers etched with the words Eve’s Holy Coven.
She didn’t know if this was her Daniel or Eve’s Daniel until he lowered his head and drilled her with eyes as black as midnight.
“You love me? Is that what you told Mitch?” Eve’s Daniel asked in a slow drawl.
Heather stepped back. She hadn’t told anyone about Mitch. He was hardly more than an experiment suggested by her therapist nine months after the divorce. She had to break free from Daniel, the therapist had insisted. She’d advised something intimate with another man. Heather had embraced the advice with a passion that lasted a month, then dropped it and retreated to her basement to resume her obsession with Daniel. With Eve.
“What’s the matter, Mitch witch?” Daniel growled. “You don’t want the beans spilled?”
She lifted a trembling hand to her mouth.
“The next time you look at me funny, I’m going to split your box with a bat. Teach you to let your mind wander.”
Father Seymour had recovered.
“Your vile-mouthed distractions don’t change the fact that you are defeated by the power of the Christ who is—”
A roar beyond the capacity of the human throat cut the air for a brief moment, then stopped. Daniel had thrown his mouth wide for a split second, but Heather wasn’t sure the sound had come from him.
Then softly, pleading. “Don’t.”
“Unclean spirit!” the priest snapped. He was trembling. “By the mysteries of the incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus, I compel you to tell me your name. Your nature.”
“Eve did this,” Daniel whimpered. “Eve took Adam.” His eyes cleared and once again he looked normal.
Her Daniel, torn by anguish, pleading. “Please, Heather, don’t let him do this. You know me, you know I would never allow him to hurt you. I came for you. I gave myself for you.” Tears spilled from his eyes. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. You know my heart . . .”
“Don’t respond!” the priest said. Then to Daniel, rushing his words, “I am speaking to you, unclean spirit. Eve, what gives you claim to this soul who seeks to be free?”
“Please, Heather. Will you invite me into your heart? I will come and make my home with you and never leave. We can put all of this behind us.”
Father Seymour took a step forward. “No!”
But Heather hardly heard him. Daniel’s words drew her with a cord made thick and inseverable by two years of separation from the man she loved.
“I was wrong, Heather. I died and I saw. He helped me see the truth. I’ve felt the fear running through my bones, and now I know it’s real, it’s very real.”
“Eve, I command you to reveal—”
“Shut up, Father! This isn’t Eve. It’s Adam. Daniel.” To Heather, “We were wrong. But it’s not like the priest says. You can help me. Your love. He didn’t have any love as a boy. You have to save me. But only you can do it. Love me, take me back, accept me into your heart. Quick, before the boy comes back!”
His words confused her, but a thread of sense running through them reached her. The inner child. The boy w
as yearning for love. Love covers a multitude of sins, it was said. Daniel had frequently talked about the power of love over faith.
Daniel was crying, begging for her mercy. Everything in her wanted to comfort him. She realized that she was crying as much as he was.
“Do you kill those whom you love?” Father Seymour said.
Daniel blinked, confused for a moment.
“Please, Father, this isn’t about you. You’re going to get me killed!”
“Does Eve punish those she befriends, making a mockery of that very love? Does she kill them like a sacrifice? Was it Eve who killed sixteen women?”
“Father, Father, please! I’m trying to get us out of here. Alex Price killed them, you fool! But there’s something in me, I know that now. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“No, it’s not.”
Heather was no longer sure what to think. This was her Daniel speaking, not Eve’s Daniel. She’d learned to trust his judgment, his intelligence, his capacity to understand complex situations like this. Now, confronted with the truth about himself, he had found a way?
“You fool. You fool.” Daniel sat hard. “He’s going to kill us all.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
DANIEL WAS.
But at times he couldn’t be sure of that. So it had been for countless hours now, nearly as far back as he could remember.
When he was sure, he pleaded with himself not to be sure, because if Daniel was still alive and this wasn’t just another nightmare, then something very, very wrong had happened.
Somehow he’d found himself back in the black box. This time he’d invited the boy to be his friend. What had happened then was so confusing that it got lost with the question of whether he really was or wasn’t.
But he was.
The fear he’d felt after dying was back, but stronger. At times completely immobilizing. At times he couldn’t even move his eyes.
It was as if the fear had actually taken physical form and become boiling black waves made from blood and feces and bile. He’d melted and become a part of it all.
And the confusion . . . Nothing made sense to him. He’d written hundreds of pages about how the mind fabricated things like evil and hell and sin, and yet if he wasn’t mistaken, which he could be, he was drowning in the very evil he argued never existed.
The boy was there, right beside him, screaming in rage at the priest, running naked through his mind. Presenting arguments that made only some sense.
In moments of fleeting clarity, Daniel thought he knew some things. Like the fact that this wasn’t simply something in his head. That evil was real and palpable, and that he’d found the worst of its kind.
That the boy was real. Eve was a real thing. A ravenous beast who was disturbed at being interrupted by this priest.
In many ways, he loved the boy and hated the priest. Hated Heather. Hated God, who was real, and Eve, who was at the moment even more real.
Daniel felt his eyes darken.
He’s going to kill us all, you pitiful little wench.
“He’s going to kill us all, you pitiful little wench.”
I hate you, you sick sow.
“I hate you, you sick sow!”
FATHER SEYMOUR STEPPED over to Heather, turned her away from Daniel, and whispered.
“He’s speaking confused half-truths. Don’t assume because he looks normal he is. You understand that the enemy here is Eve?”
“Yes.” She wiped at her tears with a trembling hand. “He’s in so much pain.”
“He’s baiting you. Nothing horrifies them as much as having no place to live. I think the same Eve who possessed Alice Brown in this twisted religion, Eve’s Holy Coven, is with us now. She’s a killer, make no mistake.”
They were both whispering, urgent.
“I think I can help him, Father. He’s in pain—”
“Not in your own power you can’t! I don’t think you understand what we’re dealing with here. This spirit may have once been satisfied with torment, but now it takes human life, making a mockery of Christ’s sacrificial death, celebrating the fall of Eve in the garden. It will kill Daniel, and then it will kill you.”
He was breathing in long, steady pulls. “Perhaps you should leave.”
“No! No, he needs me.”
“You have no power here!”
Heather didn’t understand what rules or principles governed this order, wasn’t sure she wanted to understand. But it bucked every instinct she had about the proper order of things.
She closed her eyes and nodded. “Okay. I believe you.”
“Thank you.”
They turned around to face the chair and Daniel.
But it wasn’t Daniel sitting in the chair. It was Alex Price.
Dressed in a black shirt and dungarees, legs crossed, hands on his lap. The chain lay on the ground, cuffs sprung.
“Take your eyes off the prize, Father Seymour?”
Heather looked for Daniel, but there was no sign of him. How was that possible? Alex could have stepped out of the deep shadows from where he’d been watching, she thought.
But Daniel . . .
Then she saw the priest’s pale face. He wasn’t looking at Alex Price. He was staring at the ceiling above Alex Price.
Daniel’s shirtless back was pressed against a thick tarred beam, and his arms were spread wide as if crucified on the ceiling. But there were no nails or ropes to hold him in place.
He stared down at the top of Alex’s head with coal eyes, perfectly still.
THIRTY-NINE
FATHER SEYMOUR LOWERED his eyes. For a dozen heavy beats, Heather’s heart pumped blood through constricted veins. No one spoke, no one moved.
Daniel was stretched out on the ceiling, staring down without expression. Bare chest white and dry.
Alex sat directly below him, looking at them without any apparent concern.
Father Seymour kept his eyes locked on the man he had unwittingly let loose on the world so many years earlier.
Heather watched her husband and thought that in that moment, he was neither her husband nor Daniel. A passage from Martin Malachi’s book came to mind. Many leaders in the Catholic church, the author said, refused to accept that a person was truly possessed unless certain common physical phenomena presented. In particular, stretched skin or a distortion of the face, violent smashing of furniture, the repeated slamming of doors, tearing of fabric—all without any apparent reason.
And levitation.
When she’d asked the Father why, if all this was really happening in the world, it wasn’t common knowledge, he’d simply said, “But it is, dear. Just not for those who’ve had the wool pulled over their eyes.” She’d pressed him to explain, saying that the presence of such phenomena couldn’t possibly be hidden from the public. “It can be, if evil’s primary objective is to keep such blatant displays of itself largely hidden.”
She now understood with a clarity that shook her bones. This was Daniel. But this wasn’t Daniel.
He was alive—she could see the vapor spilling from his nostrils as he slowly breathed the chilly air.
“Hello, Alex,” the priest said. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Is it?”
“Not really, no.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Heather couldn’t seem to tear her eyes from Daniel’s body, inexplicably plastered above them. A fear she hadn’t known until now pressed into her, past her chest, coiling around her heart and lungs. The overwhelming presence of evil wasn’t coming from her mind, she knew that wholly.
Horror was a physical presence, united with the air itself, slipping past skin and bone to squeeze that part of her she’d never before acknowledged.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Alex said. “I’ve waited for fifteen years.”
“You know that Daniel doesn’t belong to you.”
“No, he doesn’t. He’s Eve’s now. They’ve become friends.”
“That’s how you kill them?�
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“I don’t kill them,” Alex said. “She does.”
“If this is your act of atonement, what is your sin?”
Alex cocked his head ever so slightly. “You should know. It was you who showed me my sin.”
“Losing your faith.”
“I was wrong,” Alex said. “You were right.” He removed his hands from his lap and spread his arms wide. “And now we’re here.”
“If I helped you understand then, let me help you understand something else now. You were not dismissed for your lack of belief in the supernatural.” Now the priest spread his hands. “It was your profound lack of faith in the proper order of things that became your downfall. Which is the real reason we’re here now.”
Alex Price offered him a wry grin. “That’s your version.”
“That’s the only version that can save you, Alex.”
A drop of liquid fell on Alex’s hand with a light splat. Heather glanced up and saw that another tear was about to fall from Daniel’s fixed face. Alex stared at the tear on his hand. For a moment she thought she saw regret.
He wiped the tear from his hand, unfolded his legs, and stood. “In this sanctuary, my version is the only one that counts. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Both of you.”
“Or?”
Alex shrugged. “Or Eve may become upset and take her as well.” He looked at Heather. “And we know that this one will be easy for Eve. She’s hardly better than he. Even worse, now that she’s seen and still doesn’t believe.”
“I do believe,” Heather said, voice high and unsteady.
“The question,” Father Seymour said, turning to the table with the two burning candles, “is believe what? What happened in this room to twist your heart into knots, Alex?” He studied the walls and the ceiling, settling on the words carved there. Eve’s Holy Coven.
“What world beat the truth out of you?”
“A world that you could not survive,” Alex said. “Believe me.”
“Not surprising. Very few survive this world with their faith intact.”
“Exactly, but those days are behind us. Please leave so that Eve can finish what she started.”
The priest turned back to him. “Alice beat you here, didn’t she?”
