Exorcist Falls

by Jonathan Janz

  Meeks had gripped my forearm in an attempt to stave off my attack, and though his fingers were powerful—the flesh of my forearm was bloodmoist from his viselike grip—not even his panic strength was enough to wrest my steadily squeezing fingers from his head. Through the blistering sheet of hatred, I felt the cartilage around his eye socket give way, a hot burst of sclera, the tender bones of his nasal cavity splintering. My forefinger harpooned his temple, the flesh furrowing like sea-tender blubber. My middle and ring fingers caved in his cheekbone with a meaty crunch, even my pinkie finger puncturing the distressed skin of his cheek. My thumb was buried almost to the last knuckle. I could feel the gray mush of his brain squishing like hot porridge.

  Meeks’s big heels drummed on the candy-strewn floor.

  I became aware of someone beside me recoiling in horror. But I was intent on my work, the demon in me reveling in the huge man’s death throes.

  “Mother… fuckers,” Randy Connelly growled. Somehow, he’d broken loose of his attackers. Though injured, though the pain from his fractured vertebrae was etched on his sullen, whiskered face, Connelly was also enraged by the undoing of his robbery attempt.

  Clutching the gun, he rose.

  A ripple of rage swept through me. How could the group of onlookers—there had been no fewer than four of them attacking Connelly—have neglected to strip him of his weapon? It was unfathomable. Yet typical of human beings. All passion, no calculation. And now it was incumbent upon me to accomplish what the hapless group of fools had failed to bring to a close.

  So be it.

  The patrons nearest Meeks’s convulsing body—the two teenagers and the white-haired man—were gazing at me with superstitious terror. I couldn’t blame them. I had seen Casey’s face when Malephar had possessed him: eyeballs swirling into bloodred marbles, teeth tapered to fanglike points, features angular and vulpine. An effigy of darkest evil.

  Dylan had been transfixed by the sound of my demonic voice. He stood apart from the others, slack-jawed with fright.

  I rose to my full height, stalked toward him.

  “Your...” he whispered, swaying on his feet. “Your eyes…”

  “Eat this, Father,” a voice said from directly behind me.

  Had I been in control of my body at that moment, I’ve no doubt my brains would have exploded out of my eye sockets. Connelly, the leader of the vicious criminals, squeezed the trigger less than a second after he uttered his crude valediction.

  But I was not under my own power. I was governed by Malephar. And for the second time in twenty-four hours, the demon saved my life.

  So quickly I could scarcely believe it, my head whipped sideways, though not crisply enough to escape the ear-splitting concussion of the gunshot, nor the slug’s lethal trajectory. My eardrum was transformed into a pulpy goulash from the blast, the slug dug a messy trench through my hairline just above the ear, and Dylan, directly in the line of fire, cupped his throat, which began to gush blood.

  Instinctively, I clapped a hand to the scorched wound in my head, fought off the spiraling vertigo that threatened to upend the room. As I staggered sideways into the refrigerated glass, Connelly said, “Dammit, Dylan, you shoulda moved!” and somewhere beneath my pain and disorientation, I sensed sorrow in Connelly’s voice.

  I knew this was my opportunity to disarm Connelly, yet my body felt sluggish, unwilling to comply with the rigors I was demanding of it. In some way, I realized, the gunshot had unseated Malephar, and the demon was struggling to regain control of me. Though doing so cost an effort and seemed like the sickest sort of compromise, I allowed my will to recede, and in its stead felt the immediate rushing forward of the demon.

  Malephar’s dire strength coursing through my veins, I turned, leered at Connelly, who had taken a step toward Dylan, who’d sunk to his knees, the blood dumping over his chest.

  Connelly did not see me, only continued staring at Dylan, who clasped his gushing throat, whose face, even in the wan light, looked unnaturally pallid.

  “Why didn’t you move, Dylan?” Connelly whined. “I never meant to hit you.”

  I was three feet from Connelly, who seemed to have forgotten all about me. But I hadn’t forgotten about him, about the men he had killed, about the children he had poisoned. All because of money. All due to base greed.

  “You took my life,” I said in Mandarin Chinese, my voice that of Huan Tseng, the twenty-one-year-old delivery boy Connelly had slammed into, drunk, with his black SUV. In a flash I saw Huan’s startled expression, witnessed the glancing impact of the SUV as its grill pulverized Huan’s body. Then the terrible crunch of the bike and the Chinese boy’s bones as the SUV actually accelerated, Connelly too shitfaced to discern the pedals under his feet.

  Connelly stared at me, his dingy hazel eyes huge and horrified. “The fuck?”

  “I was just trying to earn money for college,” I said in a tongue I’d never uttered before.

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re saying,” Connelly murmured, backpedaling.

  “The delivery boy,” Malephar explained in his dark rumble. “You murdered him and you never even said you were sorry.”

  Connelly passed a hand over his lips, retreated toward the front of the store. “I don’t know what your problem is, man. Just get the fuck away from me.”

  I stalked toward him, marveling at his stupidity. He’d forgotten he was the one with the weapon. He’d also apparently decided his grief over the dying Dylan was immaterial when compared with his need to escape this growling priest who spoke Mandarin in a dead man’s voice.

  “Just get your…your weirdo shit away from me,” he said, all traces of bravado absent from his voice.

  I strode toward him, and as I did, a bar of spectral green light from the overhanging EXIT sign fell across my face. Connelly saw me and bellowed in terror, his fingers actually clamped on his cheeks, the gun he grasped striking him a rough blow on the side of the face. So ridiculous was the gesture and so deep was my contempt for him that I decided to prolong his suffering. “Do what you did to those men in prison.”

  “Prison?” he said.

  “Kill me, you worthless piece of filth! Show these people what a brave man you are!”

  Like someone who’s taken a powerful sedative, Connelly raised the gun and aimed it at me. The muzzle bounced wildly, yet at such close range he couldn’t miss. He squeezed the trigger. At the same moment I dove to his left, sprang to my feet, half-spun him so he faced the glass door.

  “What are you—” he started, but I’d already buried my fingers in his brown hair. He opened his mouth, a yowling scream starting deep in his throat, but then I was bashing his face into the hard glass door, the impact so great that the thick glass shattered.

  Had the concussion of his forehead on the door been the only injury Connelly sustained, he might yet have lived. But the shards of glass were of such a wicked sharpness that his face was carved up beyond recognition. A sheet of skin from his hairline to the bridge of his nose peeled down and hung in a flap over his lips, which were frothing blood. One eye was frozen in a permanent stare, the eyelid having been sheared off. A sickle-shaped hook of glass had slashed the other eye, so that ocular fluid was sloshing down Connelly’s cheek.

  I hauled his failing body close to me, Malephar’s strength easily supporting Connelly’s superior weight. I brought my face close to his, whispered, “You’re disfigured, Connelly. You’ve always been a sniveling, cocksucking shitstain, but now you’re a freak. A hideous abomination. I should let you live like this. But instead…”

  I moved away from him, so that the onlookers in the rear of the store could see I had nothing to do with what was about to happen. The gun had been lost in our scuffle, but there were plenty of lethal objects strewn about Connelly.

  He leaned down, and despite the fact that he was effectively blind, his fingers selected a crescent-shaped shard perhaps seven inches long. I delighted in the way the vicious edge sank into his fingers as he brought the s
hard nearer his throat.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “What are you doing?” he moaned. Perhaps he didn’t realize what Malephar was forcing him to do.

  The curved glass sank into his throat just below the Adam’s apple. Then, as his scream devolved into a gurgling wail, the glass sliced a vertical line through his voicebox, continued through the soft tissue up to his chin. Then, with a flick, the shard completed the inverted cross in his throat, the severed jugular jetting all over the entryway.

  I had a fleeting worry that Malephar would refuse to cede control, that he would turn his considerable powers on the innocent patrons. But almost immediately I felt the demon’s grasp slackening, felt the diabolical power drain from my limbs.

  Of course, I thought as Connelly writhed and choked on the floor. Of course Malephar wants you to view it with your own eyes, wants you to feel the desolate guilt from killing Meeks and butchering Connelly.

  Someone was approaching from behind me, but whoever it was moved with a tentativeness that told me I was safe from an attack. Whoever it was feared me.

  With good reason.

  I turned and saw Ron and the Indian woman. The woman’s face was a disbelieving mask, but Ron’s expression was totally blank, as though he were studying a bare white wall rather than a mutilated criminal drowning in a pool of his own blood.

  “Why did he do that?” the woman asked. “Why did he kill himself?”

  I shrugged, tried and failed to keep the guilty edge off my voice. “He probably didn’t want to live after he shot that Dylan guy.”

  The woman looked at me. “What did you say to him?”

  I frowned.

  “Just before he slashed his own throat, you whispered something to him. What was it?”

  “Do we really give a damn?” Ron asked. “This piece of shit deserves exactly what he got. I’m just glad the Father here grew a pair of stones in time to bring this fucker down.” He slapped me on the back. “You done good, Father. I didn’t think you had that in you.”

  Far from feeling validated by Ron’s words, the guilt only cored in deeper. It was God’s approval I craved, not a sex-addicted stockbroker’s.

  Apparently reading the misery in my face, Ron said, “Look at me, Crowder.”

  I did.

  He said, “They probably don’t teach you this in seminary, but when shit like this goes down, there’s two kinds of people: the predators and the prey. You either get your throat torn out, or you do the tearing. I don’t know how you did what you did—hell, maybe it was luck, right? They were three of the dumbest fucks I’ve ever seen, but that’s beside the point. The point is, you did it. You killed ‘em. And everybody here’s alive because of that.”

  “He’s right,” a male voice said. I turned and saw the black man with the short woman at his side. He had an arm wrapped protectively around her. “It was awful, but we’ll testify that you had no choice. If anyone looks at that man’s face…” He glanced toward where Myron Meeks lay. “…we’ll just tell them the truth. He was trying to…”

  “Rape me,” a voice finished. We all turned and saw the two teenagers approaching. The one who’d been assaulted no longer looked like the same kid who’d entered the store. Her eyes were glazed hollows, her mouth downturned at the edges, not in despondency, I thought, but with the grimness of lost innocence. Outwardly, she was the same, but somehow she seemed thirty years older.

  She gazed up at me. “Thank you for stopping him.”

  I nodded, having no words to express how I felt. Ron started to say something, but the whine of police sirens drew our collective gaze toward the shattered door and the flicker of red-and-blue lights.

  “Fucking cops,” Ron said. “Now they show up, right? But when you need one, the fuckers are never around.”

  The Indian woman squeezed my arm. “Who needs a policeman when you have a priest?”

  Part Two

  The Demon in the Dark

  Chapter Nine

  The aftermath went by in a haze of questions and hushed conversations. They’d shepherded me outside and provided a folding chair in which to wait. The police bustled about and kept casting glances in my direction. Perhaps they were considering pressing charges but wanted to build a strong case first. I had, after all, been responsible for one death and was at least partially to blame for another. One officer, a red-haired woman about my age, took my account but didn’t offer praise or censure. Another policeman, whom I took for a detective, stood eyeing me from within the store, the glass between us having the effect of making me feel like some rare zoo exhibit: Step right up and see the priest who mutilates people! Though the detective wore a black, faded Goo Goo Dolls T-shirt and blue jeans with a rip in one knee, he appeared to be the one in charge. He was maybe forty, and several times the people taking pictures and interviewing witnesses came over to ask him questions.

  He spent most of his time scrutinizing me through the window.

  I sipped a bottle of Mountain Dew provided by the Indian woman, who was treating me with more warmth than I deserved. I watched them talking to her, and though I couldn’t hear exactly what her responses were, I could tell from the earnest look on her face and the emphatic manner in which she gestured toward me that she was painting me in a favorable light. The detective in the Goo Goo Dolls shirt moved from the woman to Ron, who grew animated and appeared to enjoy recounting the tale far too much, given how ghastly it had been. The red-haired woman and the detective spoke to Ron for a while, and when they attempted to move toward the rear of the store, Ron followed them, clearly wanting to provide further details. I had no idea what he might be saying, but I put the odds at about ninety-nine percent that he was embellishing his role in the story. Finally, Goo Goo Dolls jerked a thumb over his shoulder to tell Ron to get lost. Ron exited through the fire door, which the police had propped open. The main exit, after all, was the site of Randy Connelly’s apparent suicide and therefore part of the crime scene.

  I didn’t want to think about Connelly now. Or ever again, for that matter. Shivering, I took a swig of Mountain Dew.

  “Don’t worry,” Ron said, coming over, his underjaw heavily-bandaged. “I had them call my brother. I know how tight you and Danny are.”

  He must have noticed how I paled because he said, “Hey, don’t worry. He’s got your back. If anybody can vouch for your character, he can.” A pause, Ron studying my face. “Or maybe we should call my wife, huh?”

  I squeezed the bottle in my hand, the plastic crinkling audibly. “If you’re going to—”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, laughing softly. “We’ll let that go for now. For now, mind you. I don’t take kindly to anybody tapping my wife, not even a guy who saved my hide.”

  “I’m not tapping—oh, to hell with it.”

  Ron grinned, shook his head. “That mouth of yours. I still don’t know how you became a priest.”

  “Neither do I,” I said, for once in complete agreement with him.

  ¨¨¨

  Ron tried to engage me in further conversation, but other than Danny, he was the last person with whom I wanted to spend time. I wandered over to the edge of the parking lot, sensed several sets of eyes on me. I turned and discovered the detective watching me through the window, his expression warning me not to leave.

  So I’m a murder suspect, I thought. I had killed Myron Meeks, of course, but perhaps I’d been wrong to allow the affirmation of the other witnesses to lull me into a false sense of security.

  How different this was than my expectations had been. Before, I’d harbored aspirations of becoming a crime-fighting hero, a priest endowed with the strength of God and the ability to harness the powers of darkness as well.

  But rather than metamorphosing into a holy vigilante, I’d become a pawn, the unwitting plaything of an entity far more formidable than I.

  Yet this wasn’t the worst. I had long been accustomed to being dismissed by other men, to being invisible to women. No one, save Father Sutherland, had
ever expected anything of me, and look where that got him.

  But what dogged me as I drifted through the parking lot, a prisoner to Malephar’s eruption of violence, was the renewal of my impotence, not of a sexual nature, but the overarching impotence from which I’d suffered since earliest childhood.

  A hint of sewage reached my nostrils, and beneath that, something else. There must have been construction occurring in one of the nearby buildings, because I also caught a whiff of sawdust, the grit of broken plaster.

  With a sinking feeling, I recalled an incident from my ninth year, a day I’d been looking forward to with the enthusiasm only a child can muster. My mom had been dating one of her long succession of boyfriends, a marina owner at the local lake. This man, Phil Garza, had been a do-it-yourself sort of guy, a carpenter on the side who made extra money purchasing run-down lake cottages, fixing them up, and flipping them for a profit. After dating my mom for several weeks, he made an effort to build a rapport with me. Since I desperately craved a father figure, I welcomed this interaction with an eagerness I now looked back on as heartbreaking. Phil asked my mother if I’d like to help him with a cottage renovation. My mom consented, hoping it would strengthen my bond with Phil. In the days leading up to that Saturday morning, I imagined myself driving a backhoe, wielding a sledgehammer, and engaging in other tasks beyond my abilities.

  Of course, the reality had proven far more mundane. Phil enlisted me to hold his tape measure, to select the proper tools from his toolbox, orders that I invariably got wrong since I didn’t know a wrench from a screwdriver.

  Phil grew increasingly impatient with me.

  The irony of this was that the very reason I didn’t know how to do any of the things he asked of me was because I didn’t have a father. So the lack of experience that came from not having a dad was preventing me from connecting with a man I fervently wanted to become my father figure.