AFTER THE EXORCISM : book two
TABITHA SWANN
Chapter 9
Scout ran for over an hour through the quiet streets of St. Louis as the sun set. When it was dark she slowed and eventually ran around the back of quiet restaurant. Her legs were tired and her lungs were burning when she arrived. She stopped behind a row of dumpsters, out of sight of the street and the parking lot, and collapsed against a wall, sitting against it and almost hyperventilating. She dropped the book and the knife and put her face in her hands. She couldn’t cry. All she could do was stare into the dark hole she had created for herself. The sights and the sounds of Seline’s gruesome murder were burned into her eyes and ears. She couldn’t shake them. All she could hear was cracks and screams and when she closed her eyes Seline’s severed head was staring back at her, its mouth still trying to scream and its wide eyes fluttering.
She tried to slow her breathing down, to take deep breaths and relax her body one part at a time, but she couldn’t keep her thoughts away from the horror she had just witnessed. Her hands shook severely. She looked for her phone. She checked the pockets of her black jeans and her coat, but she couldn’t find it.
“Fuck!” she screamed, stamping her feet and bunching up her fists.
It took her thirty minutes to stop rocking backwards and forwards and reciting the night’s events in her head. When she stopped, she looked up and saw that she was still alone. Her shock was a kind of hypnotic state, where all she could think about was the violence. She picked up the book. She opened it and it was full of notes and sketches, but she couldn’t read it. She couldn’t focus. Her eyes looked at the words but her mind could not form the sentences.
Scout stood up. She tucked the knife into the back of her jeans and put the book in her coat pocket. She walked on unsteady legs around to the front of the restaurant, a small Italian place called Dario’s. Scout approached the window and looked inside. There were two couples eating at small tables, a married couple and a younger couple who looked uncomfortable, as if they were on an unsuccessful date. The staff chatted with one another behind the bar, bored and restless.
When Scout entered, a middle-aged male waiter approached. The waiter, a tall, balding man with small moustache, was smiling at first, but that faded when he saw the look on Scout’s face. Scout glanced at the wall and caught a glimpse of her expression, which was one of sweaty, horrified desperation.
“Are you…” the waiter said, wringing his hands. “Are you OK, miss?”
“Please,” Scout said. She swallowed and tried to think of what to say. It took her too long and the waiter was too concerned.
“Has something happened?” he said. “Please, come sit down.
The younger couple, bored of one another, did not take long to start watching Scout with interest.
Scout was led to a table in the corner and sat by the window. She was shaking uncontrollably. The waiter put a hand on her shoulder and she jerked herself away from his touch.
“Get off me!” she screamed. “Don’t touch me!”
The waiter took a step back and held up his hands. “OK,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Are you OK? Are you hurt?”
Scout had her hand covering her mouth. She looked around and both couples and the other staff, three men and one woman, were looking at her. The woman, the only one dressed in a suit, appeared to be the owner. She walked quickly over as soon as Scout screamed.
“Is everything OK?” she said.
“I need to use your phone,” she said.
“Look, you’re going to have to leave,” the owner said.
“No,” Scout said. “Please, I need to use your phone.”
“If you don’t leave right now I’m going to have to call the police.”
Scout jumped up. “Do it!” she shouted. “That’s who I want to call!”
The owner looked back to a bartender and nodded her head at him. He picked up a phone and started dialing.
“Please keep your voice down,” the owner said. “You’re disturbing our guests.”
“Someone was just murdered,” Scout said. “I just saw someone hacked apart!” She sat back down.
Scout thought about what she could tell the police. She thought about how she could word it. She thought about how she could explain her own involvement.
“What? Where?” the owner said. “Are you serious?”
And then Scout realized this was the second murder she had witnessed in the space of a single week.
I’m going to be a suspect, Scout thought. I can’t explain this. There’s no way the police aren’t going to arrest me. My life is over.
Scout’s panic suddenly changed its texture as another layer was added. Her mind was racing with a dozen different scenarios in which she ended up dead or in jail and one in which she threw herself onto the train tracks. That last one had come to her before. Usually she could dismiss it quickly and with little trouble, even if she couldn’t stop the thought from arising in the first place. Tonight, the thought lingered a little longer.
She put her hand on the book in her pocket.
No, she thought. I’ve had enough of running. I’ve had enough of threatening myself with the train tracks.
The shock of the violence began to turn into something else, something more like anger. The fear had become too much to bear, so in her mind she had turned it into something else.
It needs to stop, Scout thought. I can’t live like this anymore.
The bartender nodded at the owner.
“The police are on the way,” the owner said. “Everything’s go to be OK.”
“Maybe not,” Scout said. “But it won’t be like this. Not anymore.”
Scout stood up and moved away from the table. The owner jumped in front of her.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the owner said. “The police are coming. You can’t go out there.”
“Move,” Scout said.
“We just called the police. You can’t just report a murder and then walk away.”
“Please,” Scout said. “Get out of my way. I can’t be here. You don’t know what’s going on.”
The owner looked around the restaurant and saw that her guests were watching her. “You’re not going out there,” the owner said. “This is serious. If you’re lying, you’re in deep shit, girl.”
“I’m not going to ask you again,” Scout said.
She tried to push past and the owner shoved her back into the corner where she fell back into the seat. Scout jumped up and without thinking she pulled the knife from the back of her jeans and pointed it at the owner.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” she shouted. “Get out of the fucking way!”
The owner threw up her hands and one of the guests screamed. Scout slashed the knife at the air in front of her to keep her away as she edged towards the door.
“I’m leaving,” Scout said. “If you try to follow me I swear to God I’ll stab you.”
The knife was shaking in mid-air as she couldn’t keep her hand still. She pushed her back against the door and shoved it, but it wouldn’t budge. She glanced back and the sign read: ‘pull’. As she looked back she saw the waiter take a step towards her. She pointed her knife at him.
“Do you want to get stabbed?” Scout said. “I’m just trying to leave, you dumbass!”
Scout pulled the door open with her free hand and took three steps backwards until she was clear of the doorway. She turned and ran, bumping into a potted tree and almost falling. Righting herself, she ran towards the tallest building on the horizon. It wasn’t especially tall, but neither was anything else in St. Louis, but she knew it was in the center and could find her way to the train station
using it as a landmark. She ran for fifteen minutes, taking a less-direct route in case the police were looking for her, and then walked the rest quickly, trying to draw less attention. Towards the center the city became more crowded and Scout started to feel safer.
With the train station in sight, Scout discreetly disposed of the knife in a trash can in the street. The last thing she needed right now was to be caught with a concealed weapon on top of everything else.
She bought a ticket back to Detroit and tried to ignore the cost of it and the likelihood of spending much of the next month hungry because of it. On the train, she sat as close to the middle of the carriage as she could, to avoid having too many people walking by her from the entrances on either end. She turned up the collar of her coat and slunk down in her seat, looking up only to show her ticket for it to be punched.
Once she was sure she was away and no-one on the carriage was watching her, she took out Seline’s notebook. She opened it to the first page. A message, above an address, read: ‘This book belongs to Sister Seline Mercier. Should you find it please return it and the Lord’s light will shine upon you.’ Handsome sketches around it depicted flowers and trees, seemingly drawn from life. She had been a talented artist. Seeing her sketches, the result of Seline’s own hand interpreting a moment she was inhabiting, something she saw which moved her while she was alive, made Scout immeasurably sad. All she could think about was the amount of pain she had just experienced. Scout resolved to make it count.
I’m going to do something with this book, she thought. I’m gonna make them sorry they ever met me.
Scout replayed the scene in her head and tried to figure out who the other attackers were. She was usually good at identifying people based on their body shape and size and how they moved - a natural consequence of avoiding eye contact with everyone since her possession - but she couldn’t place the other attackers. The elephant could have been a woman. The pig was a man. But which man?
The only men in the group were Joey, who was a skinny nothing of a man, and Michael, the middle-aged, portly widow who was terrified of his wife’s ghost and had barely enough energy to lift himself off his chair at the end of the night.
Tara, Scout thought. How could she do this?
She felt sick to her stomach. She liked Tara. Everything about her soothed and comforted Scout. She seemed like kindness personified. Scout felt as if she had just watched Tara murdered, too.
She needed time to think. She needed someone to talk to.
She turned the first page and started to skim through Seline’s notebook.
It had everything.
It was an instruction manual in exorcism. It contained a list of symptoms of demonic infestation. They included fever, derangement, speaking in tongues or languages not learned, mysterious starvation despite feeding, greying skin, loss of eyesight, vocal transformations, change in character, deviant behavior, obsession. It was a long list. Scout recalled her own symptoms, and she noted that Seline had not included a description of the after effects of possession, the memory loss, the panic attacks, the severe depression, the suicidal thoughts, and the stigma. What followed was a bestiary, a catalogue of known demons, living and dead and those named in the Bible but with no confirmed presence on Earth. They were not in any kind of order that Scout could see. They looked grotesque, like obscene and twisted versions of animals and birds and insects.
And there he was.
“Asmodeus,” Scout said to herself.
The writing was written in a decorative script. The description, in perfect handwriting, stated that Asmodeus had the head of a lion, the body of a wasp, and the tail of a crocodile. The lion had two enormous, all-black eyes, more like wasp’s eyes. The sketch, finely detailed with a sharp pencil, sent a chill down Scout’s spine. It wasn’t right. It didn’t strike her as right. She couldn’t remember seeing Asmodeus, but she knew there was something of him in this picture.
Scout studied the notebook. She would have to learn the exorcism ritual inside out if she was to use it. The idea that Seline may have been wrong did not enter Scout’s mind. There were demonic forces at work in Detroit. If she was right about the group, about them wanting Scout specifically, then she it wasn’t a fight she could run from.
Scout was done running.
A card fell out of the notebook. Scout picked it up and turned it over. It read: ‘NOVA Firearms, 417 Dante, Detroit. You need it, we got it.’
What the hell would she want with a gun? Scout thought.
She recalled something Father Piotr said to her before he was killed. The demon manifests physically and it is killed physically once it’s removed from the host.
Jesus Christ, Scout thought. Not only have I got to exorcise something, I have to shoot it afterwards!
Her confidence was slipping. But she moved past it. The decision had been made to do something, so something would be done.
Next problem.
How the hell am I supposed to afford a gun? Scout thought. First things first, though, I need to find out who attacked us, and I need an alarm system if they show up again.
For that, Scout needed rats.
Chapter 10
Rats Scout could get. There were more rats than people in her building. Lovell Tower was practically famous for it. She spent a morning with a potato sack and two cans of store-brand tuna flakes in the basement, trying to catch enough rats to fill a bag. She didn’t know if rats liked tuna flakes, but it’s all she had in her kitchenette. It didn’t take any time to overcome her squeamishness about the creatures. Not after what she’d seen recently.
She needed to know.
She put the rats in a bag and struggled to hold on to them all the way up the stairs to her apartment. As she passed a neighbor, she tried to smile politely and pretend her bag wasn’t squirming.
“You been rescuing kittens from the river?” her neighbor said, bemused.
“Uh-huh!”
Guns were more troublesome. There were as many guns in her building as there were people, but the people that owned them would not take kindly to them being taken.
After three days of staying in her apartment with her rats, listening to their every move, feeding them potato chips and talking to them, Scout thought that maybe no-one was coming to her apartment. When she started to feel a little safer, she decided to try Dianne’s place. Dianne lived a ten-minute walk away in a slightly more upmarket part of town. By Detroit’s standards, that just meant there was a gunshot heard every thirty minutes rather than every fifteen.
“What are you doing here?” Dianne said, answering her door pulling on a boot at the same time. “I’m just about to leave for work.”
“I need a gun,” Scout said.
“I can get you a gun,” Dianne said. “It’s about time you got one, living in that shit hole.”
Scout’s neighborhood, for once, was a help rather than merely a source of shame.
“I don’t have any money,” Scout said.
“Oh,” Dianne said. “That’s different. What do you want it for? You’re not going to kill someone, are you?”
“No,” Scout said.
“Is it that Joey guy from the club?”
“He’s part of it,” Scout said.
“I knew he was a creep just by looking at him.”
Scout waved at Dianne’s 5-year-old boy, but he was too hypnotized by the television to wave back.
“I have a gun with no bullets you can borrow,” Dianne said.
“What good is that?”
Dianna handed her a small pistol with a white grip. She shrugged. “You could scare him, I suppose.”
Scout frowned and took the gun. She put it in her pocket.
“Can you borrow money off someone?”
“No, I don’t know any…” Scout trailed off.
She remembered someone she knew with money.
And she knew where he lived.
*
It was dark, but still fairly bright on the street in the neighb
orhood of Woodridge. The big houses were hidden from the glare of the streetlights by rows of elm trees. The people in the big houses were hidden from everything unwholesome and uncomfortable about Detroit. Woodridge was a well-off suburb removed from the center. It had taken Scout an hour to walk there.
She found the house she was looking for easily enough. Dr Maddox gave her his address and home telephone number in case of an emergency. As she climbed over his gate and crept up his short drive, hugging the tree line at the side, Scout realized she really knew nothing about him. He was her friend, she knew. He had said it every chance he could get. And he was good at his job. The hypnotism was helping her with her memory. But that was all she knew.
She checked her watch. It was eight-thirty. She pulled out Dianne’s small pistol and felt the weight of it in her hand as she neared the house. Her knife was tucked into her belt.
A security light clicked on and Scout froze in its beam. Her heart stopped. She waited a moment for an alarm or a shout, but nothing came.
It must be motion-activated, she thought, pressing on.
As she sneaked around the side of the house, she heard the front door being unlocked and then opening. A set of heavy footsteps came out a small way and paused. Scout pressed her back against the side of the house and held her breath. She gripped the pistol tight and listened. After what seemed like an eternity, the footsteps sounded again and the front door closed. The security light went out.
Scout didn’t know what she would say when she got inside. She didn’t even know how she could get inside. She knew only that she had to. She couldn’t face the group with only a gun with no bullets and a knife.
Scout thought for a moment.
He knows me, she thought. If I try to break in and he doesn’t know it’s me, he might very well shoot me. I just need to surprise him and take him to his office to make him empty his safe. Maybe he has cash in the house.
Scout slipped her gun into the back of her jeans and pulled out her shirt to cover it. She took a deep breath and walked to the front of the house. She was just going to knock the door. She turned the corner felt the sudden blow of steel colliding with her head. She crumpled to the floor and her vision faded away as she was looking at Dr Maddox’s slippers.
After The Exorcism: Book Two Page 1
