Scout had looked out for the homeless woman, but there had been no sign of her since Father Piotr’s murder.
Father Piotr’s funeral was on a rainy Thursday morning back in St. Louis, Missouri. Scout had no formal clothes and instead wore black jeans and a black coat. She arrived twenty minutes before it started and lurked as far back as possible until she saw people begin to arrive at the modest church in which the funeral was to take place. Scout sized up every car that parked outside and studied every face as the people inside went in. Four cars in total arrived. Father Piotr did not have many friends left, it seemed.
Scout didn’t see her parents.
When she felt safe that they weren’t coming, a couple of minutes before the ceremony began, Scout went in and sat at the back. She recognized no-one inside. The service was short and impersonal. They were asked to sing two hymns. Scout mumbled her way through ‘All Thing Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’. Scout left after two graveyard workers carried the coffin away on a trolley.
Light rain stroked Scout’s face as she watched through the early morning fog from outside the graveyard as Father Piotr was lowered into the ground.
“Girl,” came a voice from behind. “Girl.”
Scout turned. She recoiled at the sight of the homeless woman who had been lurking outside her apartment.
“Come on,” the woman said, gesturing for Scout to follow. The woman started to walk away. She was carrying her sack of live rats. They were squirming around over and under one another in the sack, squeaking and squealing.
“Who are you?” Scout said.
The woman kept walking away. Scout looked around. No-one was watching.
Scout followed her.
*
The woman stopped under a railway bridge and waited for Scout to catch up. When she did, the woman jerked her head towards a gap in the supporting structure, a gap leading to a dark space behind. Scout followed cautiously, slowly passing through, watching every dark spot. She had her hands in her coat pockets, balled into fists. The woman placed a large wooden board over the gap in the bridge structure. The space was fairly contained. Only one wall was open, but was covered with a chain-link fence. It was cold and wet and smelled of old garbage, but it had a degree of privacy. A sleeping bag was rolled up on the concrete floor on top of a piece of card. A shopping cart held various empty cans, shopping bags and a few books. A small hand basket, presumably stolen from a store, was on the ground. The woman poured the contents of her sack into it. Six large rats tumbled out into the basket and she immediately flipped it upside down. The rats panicked momentarily and she placed a large rock on top of the basket, holding the rats inside as a makeshift cage. They turned themselves the right way, nipped at one another and then settled down.
“I know you,” the woman said.
“Who are you?” Scout said, trying to hold herself upright and look confident and braver than she was actually feeling. “Have you been following me? I’ve seen you outside my house.”
“You’re not safe,” the woman said.
“From who?” Scout balled her fists up tighter in her coat pockets. “From you?”
The woman rushed over to the chain-link fence and peered out. Her movements were fast and skittish. Upon hearing her voice, the woman seemed less monstrous to Scout. She didn’t sound crazy.
She sounded scared.
“Look,” Scout said, “what do you want?”
“Hail Father Satan,” the woman said.
Scout took a step back and her heart skipped a beat.
“She said that, didn’t she?” the woman said. “The nurse.”
“Wha- I-” Scout stammered.
“The nurse said that before she killed Father Piotr,” the woman said. “Right?”
“How do you know that?” Scout said slowly, considering the possible answers as she asked the question.
“She did, didn’t she?”
Scout nodded.
The woman pointed at an upturned apple crate on the ground. “Take a seat,” she said. The woman sat on her sleeping bag on the ground.
Scout sat. “Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m a friend,” the woman said. “I’m a friend of Father Piotr, so I’m your friend, too.”
Her voice was normal - no strange quirks to serve as warning signs of instability - with the hint of a French accent.
“My name is Seline,” she said. “I know about you, Liliana.”
“That’s not my name any more.”
“That is the name you were given. That is the name He knows you by.”
“Who? Who knows me by that name?”
“Father Satan.”
“Are you…” Scout stuttered. “Are you a Satanist?”
“No,” Seline said. “Far from it. I’m a nun, as it happens.”
Scout was taken aback. She almost laughed.
“I know I might not look like much anymore,” Seline said, “but my devotion is absolute.”
“You’re a nun?”
Seline nodded.
Scout looked around her home. “Why do you live here? Shouldn’t you live in a church? What do they call it, a nunnery?”
“I was rejected by the church,” Seline said.
“Was it because of the rats?”
Seline almost smiled. “They had something to do with it, but, not exclusively, no.”
A train roared above their heads, rattling the bridge and shaking the chain-link fence. Scout covered her ears. Seline didn’t mind it.
“I need to talk to you about your new friends,” Seline said. “You’re in a great deal of danger, Liliana.”
“Please,” Scout said. “Don’t call me that. I don’t want that name any more. In this city, after all I went through back home, my name is Scout.”
“Scout,” Seline said, “what do you know about Spiritual Survivors?”
Scout frowned. “What about them? I’ve been twice.”
“They are not what they pretend to be,” Seline said. “They’re not a support group. That church hasn’t functioned for years. They have ideas about you, Scout, I’m sure of it.”
“I don’t know you,” Scout said, raising her voice. “How can I believe anything you say? You live under a bridge and you’ve been following me around with a bag full of rats!”
“Scout,” Seline stood and walked over to her, “I’m an exorcist.”
Scout stood up and took a step away from her. Seline grabbed a book from her shopping cart and opened it up for Scout.
“Look,” Seline said. “You’ll recognize these prayers. I don’t know how much you remember of your own exorcism, but the prayers in this book are the as those that were said over you.”
‘Deliver us, O Lord!’ was written in bold marker. Around scrawled prayers were sketches of demons and animals such as bats and hawks and moths and other winged creatures.
“You should know,” Seline said, “they didn’t just kick me out of the nunnery. They put me in a hospital. They said I was mentally ill.”
“I can see why,” Scout said.
“I was in there for five years,” Seline said, looking at the ground. “It isn’t a joke. You don’t know how lucky you are to have avoided a place like that. So many people who undergo demonic possession end up in a straight-jacket, you wouldn’t believe. Five years of sitting in an empty room reading the same ten fashion magazines and watching the same mind-numbing television programs over and over while people chattered and screamed.”
“Why did they put you there really?” Scout said. “Are you crazy?”
“I’ve performed close to a hundred exorcisms in my life. I have a system. They were never interested in my system before. But when the daughter of an influential politician became infested by demons they decided it was proper that they knew what I was doing with her. They sent along an observer. He saw the guns and panicked.”
“Guns?”
Seline nodded. “And he got in the way. He was scared. He’d
never seen a real exorcism before, only read the sanitized version in handbooks.”
“What happened?”
“We lost the girl, and the church launched a secretive enquiry. The media reported that the girl died of cancer. The observer, he told them everything I did. He told them I was unstable. I tried to argue my point. I got carried away.”
Seline rubbed the back of her neck.
“I ended up punching the head nun,” Seline said.
“How did you get out?” Scout said. “Did you escape?”
“You got me out,” Seline said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Scout said.
Seline’s voice wavered as she spoke. “I was locked away and just discarded,” she said. “My methods of exorcism were so extreme they would rather just put me away and hope the problems stop by themselves. The world was ready to forget me. But I had one friend left. Father Piotr would visit me a couple of times a year. He came to me in that place with a story of a young girl who was exhibiting strange behavior. As things got worse, he came back. He asked for my advice on your case. He had tried everything, but the demon was locked in and there was nothing he could say to draw it out. I told him what to do and how to do it, and Piotr followed my instructions. No exorcism is easy. The younger priest, he couldn’t take it. But Piotr helped you to free yourself.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Scout said.
“You’re wrong. Half of the battle of an exorcism lies with the possessed host. You fought for your life, Scout, and you won.”
“I don’t feel like I’ve won anything.”
“You have your life. And I’ll be damned if someone’s going to take it away from you after all you did to fight for it.”
They paused an allowed a train to rumble by overhead.
“Piotr told the church how I had guided him through the process. In return, the church put in a request for my release. They told me never to go back to the nunnery, but they set me free. You set me free. You gave me that opportunity.”
“I have to go,” Scout said. She turned and grabbed the board to move it aside.
Selina slammed the board shut with her hand. “You’re not getting it,” she said. “This group, they’re not good people. I’ve been watching them for four months now. They’ve had three new members in this time. The first two have disappeared. You are the third. I think something is wrong with that group. My rats, they can’t stand to be near the church.”
The rats under the basket started squeaking at one another. Seline looked at them with an expression approaching horror.
“Oh, no,” she said.
The rats were becoming frantic.
“We have to go,” she said. “We have to get out of here right now.”
“What the hell is going on?”
“Exactly,” Seline said. “Hell.”
The rats bit and clawed at each other. They drew blood and became more manic with every passing second.
“It’s getting closer,” Seline said.
The low thunder of an approaching train grew louder as the rats’ squeals reached fever pitch. They scratched each other’s eyes out, tore off tails with their teeth. The basket had become a rat-powered blender and they were shredding one another in a frightened frenzy.
“What are they doing?” Scout said.
Seline pulled a knife from under her long coat. “They can sense evil,” Seline said. “They are attuned to demonic behavior. If they can’t abandon ship, they get violent. If you put rats in a bag, they'll always be a little crazy and noisy. But when you come close to a demon, to real evil, they will bite and claw and kill anything to try to get away. Pretty soon you just have a bag full of blood."
Only a couple of rats were left, scrapping and covered in blood on the bodies of their kin.
“Help me with this,” Seline said.
They moved the board together.
“Come on!” Seline took Scout’s hand and pulled her so hard out of the gap in the support that she nearly dislocated her shoulder.
Out onto the road under the bridge, Seline stopped.
“Oh, shit,” Seline said.
“You swore,” Scout said feebly.
Two dark figures stood out dark against the thick fog. They were stood under the bridge, completely still.
They each held a long machete.
“Who is that?” Scout said.
“We need to leave,” Seline said. “They know who I am. They’ve been after me for some time.”
Seline pulled Scout’s hand to run in the opposite direction, but they were stopped in their tracks. Another person was stood in the center of the road on that side. The person walked towards them a few steps, out of the fog, and became clearer. The person was wearing oil-stained coveralls and a mask in the shape of a pink pig’s face. That person also held a machete.
Three voices at once all came from the same person, a man’s, a woman’s, and the voice of something else: “You have an appointment with Father Satan,” they said.
The two figures behind them closed in, walking out of the fog, revealing themselves. They were dressed in coveralls and animal masks, too, a monkey and an elephant.
The monkey and the elephant spoke in unison: “All hail Father Satan.”
The pig closed in and spoke to Seline in three voices at once: “The gateway belongs to us.”
Seline turned the knife in her hand. Her other hand squeezed Scout’s. She let go and pulled her exorcism book out of her coat and handed it to Scout.
“You’ll need this,” she said. “They will never leave you alone. You’re too important. You need to fuck them up.”
Scout was in shock. She muttered, “You swore again.”
Seline took out another knife, a small scuba knife. “If any of them get close, stab them in the crotch.”
Scout held the book in one hand and the knife in the other.
The monkey and the elephant advanced slowly behind them. The pig closed in from the front.
“The pig,” Seline said. “I’ll take the pig.”
“What do I do?” Scout said, shaking.
“You run like hell itself is chasing you,” Seline said. “Because it is. If you get out of here, you have to do something about this group. They will never let you go. One of the group is possessed, maybe the leader. Use the book.”
“But, I don’t know what-”
“You have to try!”
The pig, the monkey and the elephant began to laugh hysterically in each of their three voices simultaneously. The pig swung its machete its hand playfully. The pig was the tallest and broadest of the three and had a masculine build. The other two were smaller, though Scout couldn’t tell if they were men or women.
“Now!” Seline said.
Seline and Scout ran at the pig at the same time. They split and went around different sides. The pig raised its machete and as it did Seline dived at him with her knife out. She cried out as the pig threw a kick and connected with her knee with a loud crack, splintering it in the opposite direction to which she was lunging. As he did this, his arm swung through with the machete.
When her knee was cracked to one side, Seline tumbled and cried out and at that moment Scout looked back at just the right time to see the pig’s weighty machete bury itself halfway down into Seline’s shoulder. Blood sprayed up in a red mist, covering the pig. Seline screamed in torturous agony and convulsed on the end of the pig’s machete.
Seline didn’t look up as she screamed, “Run, Liliana!”
The pig yanked its blade free of Seline’s flesh and bone, cracking and tearing on its way out, leaving Seline’s shoulder half dangling off.
“No!” Scout shouted. She took out her cell phone and dialed 911 and watched as the monkey and the elephant bounced up to where Seline lay helpless on the floor.
“911 operator. How may I direct your call?”
Scout lost the ability to speak when she saw the monkey slam its machete down into Seline’s wounded shoulder, almost seve
ring her arm completely and leaving it dangling by a thin chunk of flesh to her body. The blood went everywhere. It ran down the slight slope of the road towards Scout.
“How may I direct your call?”
Seline was screaming louder and more desperately than Scout could imagine any human being doing. It was an animalistic yelping and screeching of fright and pain. The elephant swung its machete into Seline’s back and it stuck in her bones with a sickening crack. Seline’s screaming became even more frenzied as the machete hits started coming in a flurry. The pig, the monkey and the elephant hammered their blades into her body over and over, coating themselves in her blood and shredding her body into pieces while she was still alive.
Scout thought she saw her head still screaming soundlessly even after it was hacked off and rolled a little away from her body.
Scout tasted vomit at the back of her mouth. She dropped her phone.
“Tara!” Scout shouted.
The monkey looked up. It lifted up its mask.
Tara’s eyes were completely black.
Scout turned and ran.
The pig and the monkey and the elephant started howling with laughter with three voices each, a chorus of human and inhuman cruelty.
Scout ran, numb with shock. She didn’t know where she was going. She didn’t stop for anything.
CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO
After The Exorcism: Book One Page 6
