Demonologist

by Laimo, Michael

  Kristin’s car was parked out front.

  He parked alongside the red Mustang. Grabbed his cell phone and got out of the car. The sun cast a blanket of warmth upon him as he strolled nervously up the walkway leading to her residence. He tried to peek through the front window, but couldn’t see past his shadowed reflection in the panes. When he cupped his hands on the glass, he glimpsed only an unoccupied living room.

  A door creaked open in the attached townhouse next door. A middle-aged man wearing jeans and a golf shirt emerged, holding a Mervyn’s bag. He eyed Bev suspiciously. Bev smiled weakly and shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling, and probably looking, guilty.

  “Help ya?” the man asked, an eyebrow raised, the eye below probing him.

  “My daughter,” Bev answered, defensively. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

  “The man grinned, as though impressed. “Ah, you must be the rock star.”

  Bev returned the grin, fingernails probing the dust in his pockets. “That would be me.”

  The man drifted forward, offered a handshake, which Bev accepted uneagerly. “Joe Caputo. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Bev Mathers.”

  “I’ve heard much about you from Kristin.”

  “You see her often?”

  “Often enough. We are next door neighbors, of course.”

  “Any idea where she is right now?”

  Joey shrugged his shoulders. “Saw her getting into a limo last night. ‘Bout seven or so. Last I’ve seen her.”

  “A limo?” His heart started pounding. Be available.

  Joey nodded. “Yep. Nice big fancy black one.”

  “You see anyone else get in?”

  “No...is there something wrong?”

  Bev shook his head. Ran a sweaty hand across his face. “No, just being a parent.” His voice wavered.

  “Gotchya. Got two of my own. Both married for years. And I still worry.”

  Bev peered about the manicured complex. A flock of black birds flew overhead and group-landed in a cherry tree across the street, filling the branches. An uncomfortable silence emerged. Finally, Bev said, “I’m gonna wait out front a bit. Hopefully she’ll be home soon.” A limo will arrive at your residence at 6:00. Be available. Had Kristin received the same invite? No, impossible, Bev thought. They’d talked all about it at the restaurant yesterday. She would have mentioned something to him.

  Joey nodded, said, “Well, nice to meet you,” then paced away with a smile of doubt.

  Bev watched Joey Caputo get into his car, back out, and drive away.

  He poked out a Camel, lit it, diverting his attention to the motionless birds in the cherry tree that seemed to be staring down at him. He rubbed his tired eyes, then stared back up at the birds and thought with dismay how awful he felt, both physically and mentally, as though he were on a slow-sinking ship, the water now up to his waist.

  The lava...

  Five minutes passed. The birds remained strangely quiet, not a squawk nor a rustle of feathers to be heard. He tossed the half-smoked cigarette to the floor, snubbed it out, then walked back to the townhouse window and gazed inside. Nothing different. Only his tired reflection staring back at him as he backed away. On a whim, he tried the door.

  The knob turned. Open.

  He pushed the door. It creaked as he entered in silence. A sense of unreality immediately consumed him, thoughts of actually having to continue his career as a musician taunting him; his mind, rightly so, was devoid of any creative inspiration at the moment. Ain’t doing nothing until I find Kristin, and until I get myself feeling better. Wouldn’t be the first time someone in my position had to take some time off for mental health.

  Closing the door behind him, he felt a chill...a tearing premonition that seemed to fill his heart with shards of ice. He turned around and gazed about the empty townhouse. For a moment he stood still, studying the untouched living room, sniffing the stale air. Then, he stepped forward, overcome with an eerie sense of...of inception. He shivered. Something, he thought, is about to happen.

  He paced across the living room, checking out the coffee table, the sofa and loveseat, wondering for the first time why Kristin had left the front door open. Unlike her to be so careless. The room—it was undisturbed, everything cleaned and neat as though she’d been expecting company. A limo? Yep. Nice big fancy black one. Arms folded to counteract the invading chill, Bev crossed into the small eat-in kitchen, which was just as immaculate as the living room, oak table polished, the sink’s surface sparkling white.

  On the wall over the table, Bev gazed at a series of photographs framed in a montage: pictures of Kristin at various ages, most of them with Bev. One photo on the bottom was of Bev and Julianne seated on a sofa, smiling as they cradled an infant Kristin. Bev placed a finger against the photo of Julianne. She does look like Rebecca Haviland, he thought, smiling, thinking of his time spent last night with the Rock Hard Magazine publicist.

  Feeling a sudden, remorseful need to apologize to Rebecca for his hasty departure this morning, he grabbed his cell phone.

  Started dialing her number.

  As he did so, he gazed at his hands.

  And froze. The phone fell to the floor.

  Because they’d stopped hurting him, he’d forgotten about the mysterious scars he’d obtained while sleeping. Now, looking at his hands, he saw that the scars had healed over. Once red and sore and bleeding, the deep gouges in his palms were now inexplicably dried and scabbed over. What should have taken a few days to mend, had taken only a few hours.

  Shaking his head with confusion, flexing and staring at his hands in disbelief, he picked up the phone then slowly paced out of the kitchen, stopping in the foyer to stare at his hands and reaffirm the fact that the scars were nearly gone. In a cloud, he made a left down the short hall into the first of two bedrooms.

  Here the walls were painted off-white. Curtains, drawn, blocked the view of the courtyard out back. The twin bed had been made, throws placed carefully atop the fitted spread. The bathroom door in the far left corner was ajar, brilliant white wall tiles gleaming beneath the skylight.

  Finding nothing of interest here (and feeling a bit uncomfortable snooping in his daughter’s bedroom), he exited back into the hallway and stood before the closed door to the second bedroom, which Kristin used as an office for her work. He pushed the door open and stood attentively in the entranceway, gazing in sudden bewilderment at the contents of the small room.

  In stark contrast to the rest of the house, here existed a major clutter of items, although everything seemed to be situated in its own respective area, as though, despite the presumed chaos, Kristin knew exactly where everything belonged. Magazines and newspapers were piled three feet high—rows that ran the entire length of the far wall. A desk was situated against the right wall beneath the curtained window, a computer, reading lamp, and telephone nearly buried beneath a mountain of textbooks and papers. Her closet had been left open and from within more books spilled out. It’d been perhaps eight months since he was here, and at that time the office had been kept as immaculate as the rest of the home. So what happened? Bev stepped over a crooked pile of data folders, to the desk.

  He flicked on the lamp and eyeballed some of the papers there, mostly scattered writings of recent articles, interviews, and notes for her work at Rock Scene. Alongside the desk on the floor sat piles of books stacked at various angles, their bindings bragging a myriad of topics: Rock Hard Magazine’s 100 Greatest Live Albums, Conducting Interviews With the Famous, How To Write A Bestselling Novel, Research In Demonology...

  “What the hell,” he muttered, crouching down to make sure he’d read the book’s spine correctly. He had. And, reading further down the pile, he noticed many more odd titles mixed in with the more common journalistic publications expected of Kristin: Summoning the Dead, The Harsh Spirit World, Paranormal Studies. He picked up the first book he spotted, near the top of the pile, Research in Demonology, and quickly thumbed through it. N
early four-hundred pages of text peppered with artist’s renditions of historic people, as well as black and white photos of archaeological sites and the curios discovered in them. Portions of the text had been highlighted throughout.

  Impulsively, he turned to the book’s index. Ran a finger down the A’s to...

  “Here it is,” he muttered surprisingly, as well as a bit shaken. “Allieb. Page 238.” He turned to the indicated page. On it was an undated pencil sketch of a man wearing all black clothing. He was completely bald, with a black goatee and thick black eyebrows that curled up at the outer edges like handlebars. His piercing eyes, sharp and narrow and almost reptilian in nature, stared up at Bev from the yellowed page. Beneath the picture ran a few lines of subtext:

  Artist’s rendition sketch of Allieb, a Demonologist from Israel, and the self-proclaimed son of the demon Belial. Stories date back to the first millennium BCE. Purported to have slaughtered and cannibalized thirteen children in an effort to embody demon spirits from the underworld. Was later captured and buried alive by the people of Jerusalem in the very tomb he created for his sacrifants.

  Bev shuddered, feeling suddenly cold. Alarmed. The story...it was the same one Father Danto told at the party. Christ, what are the odds? Bev closed the book, disconcerted with the coincidence. Too coincidental, too crazy. First the priest, and now my daughter.

  Judd Schiffer’s words came back to him like a sudden shot in the arm: Last night, someone sacrificed a goat on the lawn outside the rectory. It had been decapitated, its carcass gutted and impaled on a large crucifix. Its entrails were laid out into a pentagram shape beneath the cross.

  What the hell is going on? Bev wondered, confused, feeling suddenly weak in the knees. Nothing. Nothing. Don’t be alarmed. It’s your anxious mind building mountains out of molehills. It’s nothing more than some crazy nutty coincidence.

  He gazed around the room some more. As his eyes adjusted to the mess, he began to notice even more textbooks and magazines and tearsheets on subjects concerning the occult, psychic phenomenon, and demonology. He picked up a folder from the floor and within discovered a stack of handwritten pages. He skimmed through them, noticing paragraphs pertaining to black masses, séances, and the occult.

  “What is all this?” Bev asked himself aloud, reading a passage scrawled in Kristin’s handwriting:

  Proper performance of demonic worship is most suitably effected during the black masses of numerous individuals, although demons can still be exhorted from afar with the assistance of other demons that have already been assembled beyond their strickened confines. ‘Evil’ is then perpetrated upon the worshipping masses in the form of copulation and other commissioned desecrations of an extensively lecherous nature. Necrophilia and Zoophilia are common practices amongst cultists, alongside additional extreme sexual acts that utilize statuettes of Christ and the Virgin Mary as phalluses. These phalluses are lubricated with the blood and feces of virgins and inserted into the mouths and anuses of those conjugating with the bodies of those sacrificed.

  Bev flipped to another page dealing with ritualistic murders. He read it slowly, frowning and shaking his head with utter disbelief, thinking of Kristin and recalling his conversation with her at the Forum party:

  “Any new projects?”

  “Well...yeah...”

  “Care to tell me about them?”

  “Yes! But not now, dad This is your party! We’ll talk about it soon.”

  Was this what she was referring to? If so, then she’d apparently been wrapped up in it for quite some time. He gathered an armful of folders from the floor and sat at the desk. Racing through them, he found pages and pages of minutely detailed pencil sketches, indiscernible symbols of an astrological nature interspersed with pentagrams and ram’s horns and other representations of a dark sort. Paper-clipped to many of the drawings were pages of handwritten text describing each piece in utter detail, including its history, meaning, and purpose. Bev flipped to the page attached to a sketch of a woman figure seemingly crucified on a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary. He read:

  Rituals during the holy time of Sabbat use the Virgin Mary as a role model, whereas her form would be erected at an altar. In one known sacrificial ritual, a pregnant woman would be fettered to the statue, her legs wrenched open wide with ropes or chains tied to brass cherubim on the altar. Members of the congregation would engage in oral sex with the woman. Ivory phalluses would then be blasphemously inserted into her anus and mouth while the priest masturbated on her vagina. After his ejaculation, the ‘priest’ would batter the woman’s swollen belly with a crucifix until the dead fetus fell out, which was subsequently gathered in a chalice and fed upon by members of the congregation as an offering of the Host.

  “My God Kristin,” Bev uttered in an anxious tone. “What are you into?” He dropped the folder on the desk and picked up another. His eyes searched the papers frantically. He read various essays on black masses and the actions of its willing participants. In a short time, he fell upon on some rather troublesome lines of text:

  The goal of the Master Demonologist (in addition to summoning malevolent spirits, his arts also include magic, abstract sciences, alchemy, language mastery, communication with animals, as well as numerology, and pneumatology) is to incantate demon spirits from the netherworlds through the art of self-possession, or, as discovered in many cases, the purposeful possession of others. During ‘projected’ possession, the recipient of the demonic soul will not immediately become aware that he or she has become ‘possessed’, as time must pass for the demon to ‘find’ its way out from the bowels of the individual into the physical body, or ‘vehicle’, of the person under possession. Eventually, all physical and mental functions are retained through what is referred to as ‘demonic invasion’, that being the time from initial conception to full-bodied possession. An immense alteration of personality takes place during the time of invasion, to a point where others around the possessed individual and perhaps the individual themselves will feel that a terrible mental sickness has set in. More of the common traits of an individual under possession are the mimicking of other people, dead or alive, the speaking of tongues previously unknown to the person, and the ability to calculate complex mathematical formulas. In more advanced stages, the person under possession may bear telekinetic capacities, or the ability to move objects without the use of physical coercion. The demonologist’s goals appear to emulate the abilities of the demon itself.

  Bev ran a hand through his hair, then pulled another page of text, and read it, fully absorbed:

  It can only be speculated as to what an individual may experience while under demonic possession. At first, they may feel suddenly ill, nauseous and dizzy. Tired, yet unable to sleep. When sleep does come, it is usually fitful and may be filled with surreal, enigmatic nightmares. Other physical symptoms may include those which suggest schizophrenia or epilepsy. These include hallucinations, delusions, convulsions and/or seizures, combativeness, automatism, and somnambulism. No less daunting are the physical symptoms that might lead the individual to believe he might be under extreme duress from panic, anxiety, or depression: fatigue, exhaustion, heart palpitations, chest pain, rapid pulse, dizziness, faintness, distorted vision, hyperventilation, aching muscles, cramps, stiffness, irritability, depression, insomnia, nightmares, loss of memory, lump in the throat, nausea, diarrhea, depersonalization, increased sensitivity to light and sound, stiff neck, burping fluids, numbness, tingling, tinnitus, jitteriness, tension, sweating, trembling, facial twitching, frequent urination, apprehension, unwanted thoughts, a fear of going crazy.

  A fear of going crazy?

  Bev placed the paper down, his mind caught in a whirlwind of confusion. Am I...? Could I possibly be...?

  “No!” he screamed, slamming his fists on the desk. He stood angrily, clearing the contents of the desk with a reckless swoop of his arm. “This is insane! I am not possessed by a fucking demon!”

  Well, there’s some major league strang
eness going on here, Bev. You start feeling all sorts of fucked up, then you go to a party where an archaeologist priest pins you in conversation about demonic sacrifices at the local church and his past history regarding an ancient demonologist called Allieb who sacrificed and ate children in an effort to summon demons from hell, and lo and behold, your now-missing daughter happens to leave her front door open and here you are snooping through her shit and what the fuck? she’s into the same demonology crap, and after an hour of poking around, Allieb’s in your face again and so is a more explicit explanation to all the terrible things that’ve been happening to you...

  No...

  He stood from the desk, feeling lightheaded, listening closely but not hearing voices or feeling that scratch-scratch-scratch of fingers along the surface of his skull. He careened slightly to the left, gripping the closet door for support. The room was eerily silent, save for the ticking of a clock in the living room and his rapid breathing. He peered into the closet. Deep in the darkness, beyond the initial barrier of books and magazines, he saw something: a hulking figure against the rear wall. He hesitated, not wanting to explore any further for fear of what he might find next. But, he’d felt a nagging temptation to dig, to unearth additional secrets—just as he had while gripping the envelope with his name scrawled on the front—the envelope which had remained in his back pocket for twelve hours until Kristin coerced him to open it. With a frown, Bev hunkered down in the entrance to the closet and shoved aside a pile of books.

  Against the back wall was a small metal trunk. Black, with two bronze clasps at either end and a flip lock in the center. He cleared the closet floor of the remaining articles—some books, a few pairs of shoes, empty shoeboxes, a dusty purse—then gripped the plastic handle at one end of the trunk and pulled. What’s in here? He dragged it out of the closet against the wall alongside the entrance to the room. First, he undid the side clasps, then quickly scoured through the desk drawers in search of a key to the flip lock. When one wasn’t found, he opted for a letter opener, which aided him in busting the lock after a dozen jabs.