After The Exorcism: Book One

by Tabitha Swann

  “Prettier,” he said. “You look prettier now.”

  Scout wanted nothing more than to be able to be around someone, a guy, and to have a normal relationship. She wanted someone to come home to, someone to listen to her, to support her, to hold her without her wanting to run away. She had seen something in Joey at the group, felt that he really understood something about her.

  But here he was, drunk, telling her she was pretty.

  He was like any other person in that nightclub.

  He was making her feel as small as she normally did.

  His face dropped when he noticed that she was feeling uncomfortable. His expression switched from flirty to sincere. The switch was a tactic, Scout knew. People don’t switch from one to the other that quickly unless it’s because they thought of a better way to get what they want.

  “Seriously,” Joey said, with a serious face, “I read about what happened to you.”

  “I told you what happened,” Scout said, trying to sound calm and casual and friendly, despite bubbling up inside. “You don’t need to fucking Google it.”

  “I was just interested in what-” Joey said.

  “I have to go home,” Scout said, not waiting for him to explain how interested he was in anything.

  “Is that your name?” Joey said, not hearing or not listening to her.

  Scout could see that he was about to say it. It was one of two names she had planned never to hear again. She had just started saying one of them to see if she could. She had absolutely no interest in the other. “I have to go to sleep,” she said, and she started walking away towards where Dianne was sat on a low wall playing with her phone.

  “Liliana,” Joey said.

  Scout stopped. She turned and looked at him.

  “Liliana,” he said again. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

  Tears hit Scout’s eyes. She instinctively tensed up.

  Joey noticed, and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t-”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Scout said.

  She walked away from him.

  “Everything OK?” Dianne said. “Who is that guy?”

  “Just another asshole,” Scout said.

  Scout was haunted by the name all the way home.

  It was the last word on her mind as she eventually drifted off to sleep at seven in the morning.

  Liliana.

  When she woke up at three, she opened her bedroom curtains. The homeless woman with the sack was sat on a bench in the courtyard below. She saw Scout open the curtains and straightened her back.

  Scout felt the urge to run away building in her. It had taken a lot of courage to move to this city and a lot of strength to persist in living on nothing before eventually finding a job. In her less critical moods, Scout was almost proud of herself. She didn’t want to run again.

  But she couldn’t live like this.

  She had to get better. She decided to get better.

  Scout looked at herself in the mirror and said, “You are stronger than you think.”

  Chapter 5

  Scout listened to guided meditations on the bus as it rattled her around across half of Detroit as the sun set.

  “You are fine just as you are,” the recorded voice of a gentle old woman told her.

  Scout concentrated on her shoulders as she was told. She let them drop. She concentrated on her hands. She let them loosen. She imagined the warmth of the sun on her skin. The ocean sounds gently brushed up and down her ears.

  “Be kind to yourself,” Scout was told. “You are a miracle.”

  However, when the bus stopped outside Central Woodward Church and she took out her earphones, Scout was still shaking. Her legs felt like they were made of rubber as she stepped down onto the sidewalk.

  Minnie Mouse’s hands pointed to tell her she was five minutes early. Scout took a deep breath and counted to ten before she crossed the street.

  The sign outside the church read “JESUS FORGiVES THOSE WHO ASK”. The parking lot was already full. Everyone was already here. Scout didn’t allow herself to think about it in case she chickened out. She walked straight for the door and went inside. She didn’t allow herself the usual minute or two before entering the room to prepare herself. She just walked in.

  “-and maybe we could do something with that?” Tara was saying. Upon seeing Scout, she stopped her train of thought. The group was sat in their circle with coffee. Joey was stood at the table at the back, grabbing a donut.

  Scout smiled at Tara.

  Tara’s face lit up. “Scout,” she grinned. “I’m so happy you came. Please, come in. Get yourself a coffee and something to eat. We haven’t started yet.”

  Scout took off her gloves and nodded. “Thank you,” she said.

  Eileen mouthed, “Hello, sweetheart” at Scout.

  Scout didn’t speak to Joey and he made no attempt to speak to her. They sat on opposite sides of the circle. The group had laid out an extra seat for Scout before she had arrived.

  Scout sipped her coffee as best she could with trembling hands.

  “OK,” Tara said, clapping her hands together. “I’m so glad we have a full house today. This is great! I hope everyone has been doing well. I’ve been thinking of you all. Scout, you’ve been in my prayers.”

  Scout smiled her thanks.

  “First things first,” Tara said. “Eileen suggested that maybe we could do something together one night later this month. We can figure out the details. I’ll put something on our Facebook group. A few ideas were going for a meal, maybe bowling or a trip to the movies. We’ll sort something out.”

  Tara sat down and looked around at the faces of everyone present.

  “Who’d like to share first today?” she said.

  Scout looked around. No-one was jumping up to speak, but they were all comfortably silent, waiting patiently for someone to volunteer.

  Say something, Scout told herself. Say something. You can do this. This is a safe place. You’re safe.

  Scout raised her hand a little.

  At first, Tara didn’t notice. “Anyone want to share this week?” Tara said. “Anyone want to tell us what’s going on in their lives?”

  Eileen noticed. “I think… Scout?” she said.

  Tara smiled. “Scout, how are you, darling?”

  Scout smiled nervously. “I’m OK,” Scout said.

  “Do you want to tell us about yourself? You can talk about whatever you like and tell us as much or as little as you want. There’s no judgement here.”

  “OK,” Scout said.

  “This is a place for listening and healing,” Tara said.

  Scout stood up.

  “Take your time,” Tara said.

  “Thank you,” Scout said. “Um, hi,” she began, looking around the circle and seeing only smiles and nods.

  This is safe, she told herself. This is safe. This is safe. This is safe. I am OK.

  “I haven’t spoken to everyone yet, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not very… Well, I don’t want to criticize myself. I do that a lot. Hello, anyway. My name’s Scout. I’ve lived in Detroit for two years, but I don’t know anyone here. I keep to myself, mostly.”

  Eileen reached out and touched her on the arm. Scout smiled at her and took a deep breath.

  “I never speak to people like this,” Scout said, “so I feel like I want to get everything out while I still… while I still feel like I can. I don’t like not speaking to people. But, it’s a good way to hide from myself, from my past.”

  Tara nodded in understanding. Scout thought maybe she had been in such a place herself.

  “I felt like if I didn’t tell anyone about my past then maybe I could carry on and live my life as if I was someone else,” Scout said, with a tremor in her voice.

  Scout took a shaky breath. She tried to recall all the nights this past week she had stayed awake until five in the morning whispering her story to herself, practicing, but it was all gone. She was telling her story as if for the first time. She hadn’
t needed to practice, she realized.

  “Two years ago,” she said, “I believe I was-” She stopped herself. She nodded to herself, telling herself to do it right. She looked up. She spoke to Tara. She made her voice louder, more forceful. She decided in that moment that she was going to tell it how it was without self-criticism, without self-pity. “Two years ago,” Scout said, “I underwent demonic possession.”

  She closed her eyes for the briefest of moments and enjoyed having the information out of her body. She enjoyed a split second of freedom from it before she had to go into the details.

  “I was twenty years old and living with my mom and dad in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where I grew up. It started as a sickness. It started with these inexplicable headaches. They would leave me screaming on the floor. For months, I had these headaches. After that, then came the voices.” Scout laughed a little with a tear in her eye and said, “I thought I’d gone insane. I thought the headaches were getting to me. I even convinced myself I had a tumor. I was sure of it. I had weeks to live, I thought, maybe a couple of months at best. The more convinced of this I became, the less I left my house. All sorts of doctors looked at me and I had all kinds of scans and tests, but there was nothing. They thought maybe it was psychological.”

  Tara was fidgeting with the sleeve of her knitted jumper, a look of genuine compassion across her face.

  “It wasn’t psychological,” Scout said. “The voices, the whispering, I didn’t understand it at first. It sounded like gibberish, like five people muttering scary gibberish in my ear. I didn’t know what it was. Eventually, as time went by, I could do less and less. The headaches got worse and worse, my moods got worse and worse, and I was shutting out the world completely. It got so it spread, this pain. It was so bad, I couldn’t control my own body when it came. I would wet myself, right wherever I was standing. I would stay awake all night drinking to try and get myself drunk enough to sleep through the headaches and the back ache and the stomach pains. My skin was getting paler, my hair was falling out, my teeth were coming loose. I was sure I was dying.”

  Scout pressed her tongue against her teeth instinctively. None of them were wobbling now. Jess caught her eye and glanced away, casting her eyes down.

  “My parents didn’t know what was wrong with me. They thought maybe I was on drugs or that I had mental problems. I thought maybe I did, too. Well, there were no tumors. As far as the doctors could tell, I wasn’t dying. But I was almost rotting. My body was falling apart. My fingernails were coming loose, too.” Scout smiled and wiped away a tear. “Twenty years old and I was just… disintegrating.”

  Scout suddenly felt very heavy with the weight of what she was saying. She had never verbalized any of it before. She had never made it concrete for anyone else or for herself. Her practice runs were matter of fact A to B, this happened and then this happened tales. She hadn’t made herself feel it. She sat down. Elaine put a hand on her shoulder and Scout was too absorbed in her memories to recoil, and after a moment it felt nice.

  “I started to understand the voices,” Scout said, looking down at her tears landing on her red sneakers. “I was bed-ridden, house-bound, and the only thing anyone could do for me was leave me to rot. I was lying around listening to music, singing Marvin Gaye songs to myself and imagining having the kind of life where the things he was singing about meant something to me. It was… But, no. The voices wanted me. No-one else could even look at me. When they asked if they could come in, I said yes.”

  Scout looked up at the group. Their looks of compassion, just that fact that they were listening, made her stop crying.

  She laughed, “That’s the last thing I really remember, saying yes, inviting them in. The rest is a blur. I’ve had hypnotic therapy to try to recover more. I want to remember what happened to me so I can forget about it, if that makes sense. Once I know, I can bury it. It’s my body. I walk around in it every day. And I don’t know what they’ve done with it. I look at my face in the mirror and I don’t know what’s happened to it. I hear my voice speaking and I don’t know what else it’s said. My parents turned to the church. They brought in priests for an exorcism. They tell me it worked, and I feel like it did work. I’m… myself… again. Whatever myself is now. Those men strapped me to a bed and did God knows what to me for weeks at a time until something worked. Some days, I can still feel the ropes around my wrists.”

  Scout rubbed her wrists involuntarily.

  “I wasn’t a bad person,” Scout said. “I didn’t think I was a bad person. I didn’t do anything stupid. I went to church. I don’t know what I did to deserve all of this. I don’t know if I can love a God that allows that to happen.”

  Scout straightened her back.

  “I’ve been training myself to say his name,” Scout said. “The thing that entered me, it had a name. Until a few days ago, I had never said it out loud. I’ve never told anyone. The voices would whisper it to me at night. I think he was all of the voices. I don’t know what he was, but I knew where he came from.”

  Scout took a few shallow breaths. She rubbed her shaking hands together.

  “His name,” Scout said, “was Asmodeus.”

  Scouts hands started shaking even more. She felt herself filling up with grief. Her lips started to tremble and her vision started to cloud. She lowered her eyes to close herself off from the people around her.

  “I didn’t deserve that,” Scout said, her voice small and breaking.

  She closed her eyes and sealed herself inside a bubble of her own making.

  In the darkness, she felt again the fear that he was still inside her, listening. She waited for him to respond to his name. She waited for the voices to answer back.

  There was no answer.

  Instead, Scout felt gentle hands on her head. A hand lifted her chin and Scout opened her reddened eyes. Tara stood in front of her. She was in tears, too.

  Scout leaned forward and wrapped her arms around Tara. She hugged her tight, like she was the last person on Earth. Scout hadn’t touched someone like that since before the possession. She had shut herself off from humanity. Now, she wanted to come back into the world. She clung to Tara as if she was a life raft in the middle of the ocean. Tara stroked Scout’s hair. The group applauded. Jess and Eileen stood and touched Scout on the back and told her how brave she was and how strong she was. Joey watched from the other side of the circle. He couldn’t look at Scout. He looked ashamed.

  Scout cried in Tara’s embrace.

  There was no answer. Scout had said his name and listened and there was nothing there.

  For the first time, she allowed herself to believe that she was truly free, that her body was her own.

  Scout started to laugh.

  Chapter 6

  Tara let the engine run for a few minutes in the parking lot as the heating warmed up. She waved at Jess and Eileen as they headed back to their cars.

  “Thank you so much for the ride,” Scout said. “You don’t have to do this. I know it’s out of your way.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” Tara said.

  Tara set up her TomTom, keyed in Scout’s zip code and rolled the car out of the parking lot onto the street.

  “Thank you for sharing tonight,” Tara said, once they were going. “I know how scary it must have been. It means a lot that you trust us enough to share what happened to you.”

  “How did the group get together?” Scout asked. “Were some of you friends before?”

  “Through the church,” Tara said. “A few of us went to Sunday services. One Sunday, we just stuck around and talked and it turned out we had something in common.”

  “Ghosts?” Scout said.

  “That,” Tara said, “but, more importantly, we were all living in fear of something we couldn’t talk about with anyone else. We started meeting in a diner, and eventually we asked Father Jacob if we could use the church, put up a flyer, that kind of thing.”

  “Father Jacob, does he still work at Central Woodward
?”

  Tara nodded. “He’s a bit hands off, to be honest. He’s not very active. He does his sermon on Sunday, usually one of the same five he’s been giving for the last ten years, and that’s that. He’s a little old now, so his enthusiasm isn’t what it once was.” Tara laughed and said, “Look at me, labelling people as old. I’m as old as the hills. I should talk.”

  Scout laughed. “You’re not old,” she said.

  “Well, that’s very kind of you to say, but you have no talent for lies.”

  The remainder of the journey passed in comfortable silence as the TomTom politely pointed Tara towards the worst part of the city. Tara became visibly nervous as she drove deeper into Elmwood Park.

  “How do you find living here?” Tara said. “Is it… safe?”

  Scout shrugged. “It’s as safe as you make it, really. I carry mace with me. I’ve never had any trouble. Well, someone tried to break into my apartment once, but I think he was high.”

  “Oh, my god,” Tara said.

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “You have arrived at your destination,” came the robotic male voice of the TomTom.

  Tara stopped the car. Scout pointed at Lovell Tower which loomed over them. “That’s home,” she said. “Thank you so much for the ride home.”

  Tara smiled politely, but she looked uncomfortable. She looked around. A lone figure near the rusted remains of a children’s playground caught her eye. Scout saw her, too. She swallowed nervously.

  It was the homeless woman with the burlap sack. She was staring up in the direction of Scout’s apartment window. After a few moments, she must have heard the car’s engine. She turned. Her dirty face came into the light.

  Tara looked afraid.

  “I’ve seen this woman a lot recently,” Scout said. “I think she followed me home after the first time I came to the church. I have no idea who she is. I’ve seen her watching my apartment some nights.”

  Tara looked at Scout and said, “Are you hungry?”

  Scout said, “Um…”

  The woman started walking towards the car. The sack in her hand looked heavy and something inside it was shifting around. Something alive.