My hand was trembling so violently I could scarcely grip the brass doorknob, which was hot to the touch. Though we were only separated by a few inches of solid wood, the voices on the other side of the door sounded miles away.
“You’re not Celia,” Jack whispered, as if to himself. “You’re not my baby.”
“No, Jack,” the voice rumbled. “No I’m not. But Celia’s going to hear all about her daddy tomorrow.”
Something new came into Bittner’s face then, and his right hand finally seemed to steady. His fingers looking sure now, he drew the gun from his holster. But rather than imbuing him with confidence, this seemed to bring him only puzzlement and dread.
“Jack Bittner,” the demon’s voice said. “Aged forty-six. Twenty-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department…”
The gun rose, Bittner’s hand as steady as a surgeon’s.
“…died last night in an upscale Lincoln Park home…”
Bittner stared at the gun as if it had transformed into a deadly viper. “What are you doing?”
When the demon spoke again, its tone was celebratory. “Time to join your mommy in hell!”
The full realization of horror stretched Bittner’s rough-hewn features. He uttered a breathless little moan.
The barrel drifted toward his open mouth, penetrated the barrier of his quivering lips.
Bittner’s eyes were moons, his moan going shrill.
His lips wrapped around the slender barrel.
His trigger finger whitened.
I looked away a moment too late. I saw the finger squeeze. I saw the rear of Jack Bittner’s head explode like a bloody firework.
The door swung toward me, its edge narrowly missing my face. Danny stumbled in. He stopped beside me, gaping at Jack Bittner’s slouching form, which toppled sideways as we watched.
The demon, unmasked, turned and grinned at us. It was still Casey’s body, but nothing about that face resembled human feeling. Or perhaps it was the horror we all wore beneath our carefully constructed masks.
“Jesus,” Danny whispered.
“Run,” I said.
Chapter Nine
Sutherland was in the hallway, his forehead bloodied and gathered in a taut bump. I realized at once how it had likely happened. Bittner had somehow gotten back inside, overcome Danny, taken his gun and then subdued Sutherland too.
Liz and Carolyn stood adjacent to Sutherland and Danny, with Ron a little ways off.
Footsteps sounded within Casey’s bedroom.
“Come on,” Danny said, sweeping Carolyn into his arms. I put a hand on Liz’s back to get her moving. Sutherland looked bemused, but he followed us anyway. From behind us somewhere, Ron was pleading for us to wait up.
But we couldn’t wait. The demon was coming.
“We can’t leave Casey,” Liz said, her voice shrill.
“We won’t!” Danny shouted over his shoulder. “But I’m getting Carolyn out of here!”
We sprinted for the stairs, but even before we got halfway there, I could see something was wrong. I heard a multitude of deep, cracking sounds. The spindles of the banister seemed to undulate in the meager light of the corridor.
“Wait a second,” I called as we drew nearer, but Danny either didn’t hear me or was too frightened to heed my words.
He and Carolyn were five feet from the top stair and running at full speed when the whole thing gave way.
There was an unearthly groaning noise, followed by a series of harsh staccato pops. Splintered wood and scraps of carpet twirled through the air like pinwheels. Danny skidded on the wood floor, and for a terrible instant I thought both he and Carolyn would go tumbling over the edge of what was now a ragged snarl of shattered boards and nails. His need for self-preservation evidently secondary to his desire to keep his niece safe, Danny hurled Carolyn bodily away from the yawning drop-off.
But Danny’s momentum carried him over the abyss.
His feet went over, his legs and hips. I heard a terrible scraping sound as his belly raked the protruding barbs of broken stairwell. Just when I was sure he would plunge screaming to his death, Danny’s left hand snagged one of the few remaining banister spindles. The narrow wooden cylinder groaned with the strain, but it held long enough for him to grasp the edge of a rug with his other hand.
The staircase had crumbled completely and now, I saw with a downward glance, lay in ruins in the formerly grand foyer. Not only would Danny’s drop amount to a twenty-foot free fall, he would be landing on a nasty heap of jagged shards that would almost certainly prove fatal.
I let go of Liz and dove forward. I knew I wasn’t powerful enough to support Danny’s weight by myself, but perhaps I could supplement his strength long enough for Father Sutherland to arrive. I grasped Danny’s right hand, the one with the poorest hold. Our fingers twined together. His eyes fastened on mine, and I could see how frightened he was. Without thinking, I seized his wrist with my mutilated hand. Despite the soul-destroying agony that erupted in the ragged stumps of my missing fingers, I held on and began towing him toward me. Danny gritted his teeth, and I realized that between us we were lifting him to safety.
Seconds later, a large hand seized the back of Danny’s shirt and joined us. My peripheral vision told me it was Father Sutherland. With our pooled strength, we dragged Danny up onto what remained of the landing, but before I had time to catch my breath, my attention was arrested by Ron’s raised voice.
“…any second now,” Ron said. He was crouching next to the three of us, but his eyes were fixed on the hallway outside Casey’s room.
I jerked my head around, certain the demon would be stalking toward us, but despite the dimness of the corridor, I could see well enough that the space was empty. Either Casey’s possessed form was lurking somewhere else on the second floor, or it hadn’t yet exited the bedroom. Either way, we had to think fast.
“What’s down there?” I asked, nodding toward the sooty corridor beyond where Liz stood with Carolyn clutching her around the waist.
“The guest room,” Liz said.
“Are there stairs leading—”
“No,” she said. “This and the stairs at the far end are the only ways down.”
We looked with crawling dread toward the corridor outside Casey’s room.
Ron shook his head. “No way in hell I’m going that way.”
“There’s nowhere else to go,” Liz said.
Ron nodded toward the missing staircase. “Let’s jump down here.”
We looked at him in disbelief.
“What?” he said. “Would you rather deal with that monster?”
Sutherland grasped Ron by the front of his Blackhawks jersey. “That monster has your son. Will you forsake Casey?”
Ron didn’t say anything to that, but the look on his face suggested he would absolutely prefer sacrificing Casey if it would ensure his own survival. I glanced at Liz, who was regarding her husband with such dead-eyed loathing that I couldn’t imagine the pair remaining married. If they survived this ordeal, of course.
Sutherland knelt over Danny, who sat clutching his belly. In the semidarkness, I could see how the front of his shirt had been shredded, the way the navy-blue material glistened. He looked like he’d been gored by a bull.
Liz joined our huddled group, fingers still cinched around her daughter’s shoulder. “We need to get you to a doctor, Danny.”
“I’m fine,” he said, but the way he grimaced belied his words.
Ron paid no attention to his brother. “We gotta get out of here!”
“There’s nowhere to go,” Danny said.
Sutherland glanced about. “What about the windows? Is there a way onto the roof? Maybe a tree close enough…”
But Liz was shaking her head. “There’s nothing. Not unless you want to fall two stories.”
“There’s only one thing,” Danny said. He looked up at Sutherland. “You guys gotta do what you came here to do.”
Sutherland returned Danny’s gaze f
or a beat, then turned to me.
“Father Crowder?” Sutherland said. I looked at him, and though he appeared haggard and far older than his sixty-one years, the resolve in his face gave me hope.
“We have to save Casey from the demon,” I said.
Danny nodded. “Goddamn right.”
Sutherland permitted himself the ghost of a smile.
I took Liz by the arm. “You and Carolyn go to the guest room.” When Liz started to shake her head, I said, “This is about keeping your daughter safe, not me trying to be a hero. The farther she is from that thing, the better.” Whatever mistakes I’d made that evening, this seemed to be the right thing at that moment. Liz swallowed, reached up and touched my face. In her brimming eyes I saw gratitude and what might have been a deeper regard.
Ron seemed to catch it too because he stepped toward us. “Hey, what the hell—”
But he never finished. Because behind us erupted such an unholy blast of laughter that my flesh broke out in goose bumps and an icy chill raced up and down my spine.
We all peered down the hallway at the figure standing unmovingly outside Casey’s bedroom door.
“Go,” I whispered to Liz. Reluctantly, she took Carolyn’s hand and receded into the guest bedroom. I heard but did not see the door close.
“Take out your Bible,” Father Sutherland said.
But it was already in my hands.
Chapter Ten
Sutherland and I approached the waiting figure. Behind us were Danny and Ron. I trusted Sutherland and Danny to stand. Ron would abandon us shortly, I felt sure.
Sutherland began, “Save me, O God, by thy name, and judge me by thy strength.”
I knew the psalm well enough to recite it by memory, but I kept my eyes on the Bible Sutherland had given me so I wouldn’t be distracted by the demon’s horrid countenance. “Hear my prayer, O God; give ear to the words of my mouth.”
“You weak, puling cowards,” the demon said. Far from seeming distressed by our reading, the demon’s face was twisted in an attitude of scornful arrogance. “Watch what faith has reaped.”
The objects on a table ahead of us began to rattle.
Sutherland pressed on. “For strangers are risen up against me, and oppressors seek after my soul: they have not set God before them.”
“Behold, God is mine helper: the Lord—”
My words were drowned in a vortex of noise. The demon, its clawed hands outstretched, was levitating the objects on the table: a small Tiffany lamp, a silver candleholder with a cream-colored candle, an old-fashioned rotary phone and a carving of either a bear or a wolf.
It was difficult to tell with the objects rising and beginning to spin.
“Father Crowder!” Sutherland shouted.
My voice quaking, I finished, “—the Lord is with them that uphold my soul.”
The demon roared and extended an arm, its fingers splayed toward us. Obediently, the carved figure rocketed toward my face. I whipped my head aside at the last moment and then groaned with regret as it crashed into Danny’s forehead, lashing his skin and sending him flailing backward with his hands clamped to his wound.
“Holy fuck,” Ron whispered. With a quick glance I saw that the crotch of Ron’s sweatpants had darkened. The cloying odor of urine clotted the hallway air.
Sutherland went on as though nothing had happened, “He shall reward evil unto mine enemies and cut them off in thy truth.”
The demon’s grin flared in ghoulish delight. With a flick of its talons, it sent the lamp careening toward Ron. The racing object knifed through the air between my head and Father Sutherland’s, and when it connected with Ron’s face, there was an awful crunching sound—Ron’s nose imploding—and then a boneless drop to the floor, the fragments of colored glass decorating Ron’s body like strewn wild flowers.
Trembling, I stared at Ron’s motionless form.
Sutherland gripped my forearm. “The response, Father Crowder.”
I answered, my hands so palsied I could barely read the text, “I will freely sacrifice unto thee: I will praise thy name, O Lord; for it is good.”
As Father Sutherland continued the psalm, the demon began to chortle.
“Silence,” Sutherland commanded. “For he hath delivered me out of all trouble: and mine eye hath seen his desire upon mine enemies.”
“Says I’m the monster,” the demon rasped, its red, slitted eyes shifty and knowing. “Says I’m the monster, but look at what he does.”
Sutherland went on. “Give ear to my prayer, O God; and hide not thyself from my supplication.”
“Supplication?” the demon said. “Did you make Kate Harmeson supplicate before you raped her? Before you opened her belly like a Christmas present and ripped her earrings out for souvenirs?”
When I didn’t proceed, Sutherland said, “Attend unto me, and hear me: I mourn in my complaint and make a noise.”
Did I detect the slightest agitation in Sutherland’s voice? The strain of ignoring what the demon was saying?
“And Joy Smith,” the demon cooed. “Her barrettes are under your floorboard.”
“I said silence!” Sutherland yelled. “Father Crowder?”
“Under his floorboard, Jason. You’ll find a pair of panties belonging to Ashley Panagopoulos. The waistband is torn from when the good Father ripped them off her.”
“Don’t listen, Father Crowder.”
But I was listening. Listening hard.
“Mary Ellen Alspaugh. He took her brassiere.”
“Lies, Father Crowder. ‘Because the voice of the enemy, because of the oppression of the wicked—’”
“Shelby Farnsworth’s promise ring. It had belonged to her grandmother.”
Sutherland didn’t miss a beat. “For they cast iniquity upon me, and in wrath they hate me.”
“Oh they hated you all right, Sutherland, and who can blame them?”
“Lies,” Sutherland said, teeth bared.
“Like Katie Wells,” the demon went on. “He snipped off her middle finger and added it to his collection. Despite the fact that it’s beginning to rot, he sniffs it every night before bed. The good priest jacks off to it while he replays the murder in his mind.”
I was staring at Sutherland, who kept his eyes studiously trained on the demon. When it became apparent I wasn’t going to join in the reading, Sutherland seized my arm, shook me. “I told you the demon would lie,” he said. “You’re playing right into its hands. Now, when it matters most, you’re weakening—”
“But when it grabbed you—”
“It read my thoughts, yes,” Sutherland interrupted. “And where do you think those thoughts originated? The man in my confessional, Jason. He told me everything. Have you no faith?”
“Faith in God, yes. I have less and less faith in man.”
“Read the psalm, Father Crowder.”
“Why would the man in your confessional talk about all the things he took from the victims?”
The demon was grinning at us.
“Because he was proud of them,” Sutherland said. “The man was a monster, can’t you see that?”
“So much detail,” I said, more to myself.
“The Scripture, Father Crowder.”
“Did you do it?”
Sutherland was breathing hard. His teeth were bared, and his silver hair hung in lank, sweaty strips on his pink forehead. “You’re letting the demon divide us. You have known me for eleven years, Jason. Must I give you a detailed account of my whereabouts on the nights of the killings?”
I didn’t answer. The demon was laughing softly.
An iron grip squeezed my forearm. I stared at Father Sutherland, at the creased, sweaty forehead, the fierce blue eyes. Could this man be the murderer of six innocent young women? Could this be the defiler of their bodies, the rapist who violated each of them both in life and in death?
I wanted to believe he was not. I wanted to believe Peter Sutherland was the man I’d always revered. But try as I might
, I could not. I didn’t know whether he was the Sweet Sixteen Killer or simply a man who’d heard too much, whose mind, in absorbing the confession of a diabolical killer, now contained the poisonous seeds that had taken root in his mind.
The demon’s laughter swelled.
And I realized that my belief in Father Sutherland’s guilt or innocence mattered little. For whether Casey had anything to do with the killings or not, he—the boy in the baseball cap I’d seen on the refrigerator downstairs, the boy who liked the Beatles and LeBron James and who was always polite and cheerful to me on Sunday mornings despite the earliness of the hour—did not deserve to die, nor did he deserve to be usurped and tortured by a presence beyond human understanding.
Casey Hartman was a good kid. He deserved to be manumitted from this filth.
I rose. Opened the Bible Sutherland had handed me. “I rebuke you, accursed serpent, by the power of God,” I said. “And I demand that you depart from this child’s body.”
The demon’s eyes narrowed.
Sutherland continued with me in unison, “I order you by the might of the Holy Spirit and the name of Christ to depart from this innocent flesh.”
For the first time that night, a flicker of uncertainty entered the demon’s eyes. “He’ll kill again,” the demon told me. “The blood of more children will be on your hands if you permit him to escape this house.”
I faltered, but only for a fraction of a second. “The power of Jesus Christ compels you. Tremble before His mighty hand.”
The demon snarled, took a backwards step.
Sutherland joined me. We advanced on the demon. “Jesus Christ orders you to abandon this flesh. God Himself demands your departure from this house.”
The demon took another backward step. “I’ll destroy his body. I’ll leap from the window.”
“You’ll do no such thing!” I shouted. “By the power of the saints, I demand you leave his body!”
The demon staggered, but did not fall.
Sutherland moved apace with me. “Jesus Christ casts you out!”
Exorcist Road Page 9
