Son of the Endless Night, page 29
Through the peephole Hillary saw the girl coming, confidently, up the steps toward the front door. Hillary could see her more clearly now. She was smiling. She was pretty, with a thin face and good cheekbones, but she was very pale, almost translucent in her pallor, as if she hadn't been well herself lately.
"Hi, Hillary."
The girl was still twenty feet away, climbing the steps in her red, red boots, so the clarity of her greeting was remarkable, as if the words had originated in Hillary's own mind.
Hillary was warmed by a resurgence of fever, shaken by tremors; she yearned for her bed, the covers piled high, the room closed and half dark and secure. She didn't want any company, nor did she want to talk to—
But her left hand, as she watched the blond girl approach, crept to the dead-bolt lock on the door.
She knew she had definitely decided to turn and go back upstairs, running if necessary, and not let the girl in, even for one minute, to find out her name and where she lived— Oh, you just moved into the neighborhood? Listen, I've got a bad cold, so if you'll excuse me— but her hand seemed unaware of her resolve, it had grasped the round knob that lifted the bolt, the stranger's smile was bigger and assured, she waved again as if she could see Hillary's eye pressed to the optical eyepiece in the door, she was nearly on the stoop, four steps more.
And there was a black cloud forming in Hillary's head.
The phone rang. Twice.
Hillary heard it, but faintly, as the blackness flowed down from her brain like a shadow mind at work, a strict guiding intelligence with a formality of purpose terrifying and unavoidable. The blackness crept along her spinal column; she felt a resonance that made her so drowsy. Her left hand worked the dead bolt; the lock opened with a snap.
The telephone rang again, as her hand dropped to the other lock on the door.
Oh, mother— !
She turned her head away from the door, fighting a lack of will.
"Open the door, Hillary. My name is Polly. And I want to come in."
It was a quiet, cool command. Allowing for no disobedience.
But the phone ringing. Ringing.
The other lock, though simpler, was hard to work with one hand. She needed to push against the door just a little, in the right place, so the bolt throw would turn cleanly. But she was looking toward the back of the house, where the telephone was mounted on a wall of the breakfast room.
"You can get that, Hillary, after you let me in.
"I'm waiting. Just have a look. I'm right here on the other side of the door.
"Let's be friends, Hillary. You need my friendship. And I need you."
Five rings. Six. Her mother probably thought she had fallen asleep. Oh, please don't hang up, I'm—
"You can call her back, Hillary!"
Hillary sobbed. "Oh, Goddd!"
She felt, from the other side of the door, a bolt of displeasure. The blackness like a cat nuzzling at the base of her spine, numbing all her nerves with a downward spread of entrenched claws. Claiming what remained of her will.
"GOD!" Hillary screamed, and found release. She tumbled backwards from the door, got to her feet, went flying down the center hall to the back of the house, the breakfast room with its hanging plants and striped yellow wallpaper. She felt as if something was pursuing her, the uncurling lash of a black whip; she seized the receiver of the telephone with both hands.
The whip touched her spine, lightly. Withdrew.
"Mother!"
"Hillary? Yes, what is it, what's wrong?"
Tears coursed down her cheeks. She had to pause to get her breath.
"Wrong— I— nothing. There was somebody at the door. A girl. But I didn't let her in."
It was beyond her powers to explain the creeping terror, the sensation of being gently pushed against her instincts to do something that would have devastating consequences for herself, for the family.
"Mom, when are you coming home?"
"Right now; I called to tell you. Hillary, are you sure you're okay? What did the girl want?"
"I don't know. I never saw her before! She must be somebody new in the neighborhood, maybe they moved into the Stoltes' house."
"I don't think anybody's bought it yet. Are you downstairs?"
"Yes."
"Well, go back to bed and I'll be there in twenty— "
Hillary gasped.
"What happened?"
"I don't know; nothing. I guess I'm just jumpy." But she thought she had heard a kind of popping noise, a brittle sound of breaking upstairs. She knew she was about to cry, from nerves, and wanted to get off the phone first. " 'Bye, mom, I'm okay, honest. I'll see you. I love you."
" 'Bye, honey. Twenty minutes."
Hurry.
With this unspoken plea Hillary replaced the receiver. She had lost one slipper in her flight down the hall to the breakfast room. Her bare foot was cold. She could barely make out the slipper lying on the floor of the center hall, halfway to the front door. There was no more light coming in through the narrow windows that bracketed the door. It was black as midnight out there on the stoop. She felt that she would never get as far as the stairs.
The doorbell rang, nearly jolting her out of her skin.
Near the phone on the wall was a very old woodcut, a Renaissance version of madonna and child, framed in gold. She snatched it down from the wall and held it against her breast, went up the back stairs, two at a time, gasping.
The door to her room was closed. She hadn't closed it.
Hillary put a hand on the brass knob, still clutching the semisacred woodcut. The knob was so unexpectedly cold her moist hand almost froze tight to it. She lost a little skin when she jerked it away.
"Oh God and Mary and all the saints please protect me!''
There was a sound on the other side of the door, a gurgling noise she couldn't identify. Then in a moment of horrified insight she realized what must be happening. Putting her hand into a pocket of her robe, she turned the doorknob through the pocket and entered her room.
On one corner of her study desk, where a lamp burned, the water of her twenty-gallon tank and her collection of fish were pouring through a hole in the glass, flooding the carpet. There were no cracks or jagged edges: the hole was perfectly round, about four inches in diameter. The edges of the hole were so smooth it appeared not to have been cut by any sort of instrument; rather the glass seemed simply to have dissolved, or dematerialized, where the water rushed through.
50
Conor and Father Merlo took adjoining rooms at the Holiday Inn on Interstate 91 at the Greenleaf Avenue interchange. Adam Kurland had insisted on accompanying them to the jail and being present during the priest's interview with "my client"; Merlo told him plainly that he expected unpleasantness. Adam said that both the police and the prosecutor's office now objected to Rich having visitors, and would undoubtedly refuse to let Conor and the priest meet with Rich alone.
Merlo said, "Find out if they can let us have a room without windows or furniture. A small stool is all I need."
In his room at the Holiday Inn the priest bathed, shaved, changed into his size forty-six long black mohair suit and a Roman collar and spent an hour in solitary meditation and prayer, while in the other room Conor fidgeted and Kurland, sitting on the edge of the bed, made telephone calls. Lindsay Potter had not asked to be included.
Father Merlo tapped on the connecting door when he was ready. He was not smiling. He had a black bag in one hand. Conor did not have to be told what was in it.
"I'm going to bless the two of you now; we don't want a repetition of what happened the last time you met with Richard."
He said a short prayer, anointed them with holy oil, and made the sign of the cross over each man's head. Conor's head was deeply bowed, and he added his own prayers half aloud. Adam, looking discomfited in a sporty plaid suit, gazed sidelong out the windows and kept quiet.
"What do you think will happen?" Conor asked the priest.
"He should be provoked when he sees me."
"Do you mean Rich?" Adam asked.
"No. That's not who I mean."
"Will you exorcise him today?" Conor said.
Merlo laid a hand briefly on his shoulder, but there was a weight of sympathy in his hand, and sorrow in his eyes, which caused Conor's heart to falter.
"The first thing I have to be sure of is that there's a need for either a lesser or major exorcism— the Roman ritual— before one can be authorized. The Church wants indisputable proof of possession. And preparing for a major exorcism is like preparing for a war— there are formal necessities, such as a black fast, and no exorcist works alone if he wants to survive the experience. For now I'm only after information."
"We're running late," Adam announced, looking at his watch.
Adam drove them in his car the fifteen miles to the county courthouse in Chadbury. There he conferred, alone, with the officer in charge of the jail, Steve Wendkos, a tubby man with a balding head and an astonishing mustache, so much uncontrolled hair it looked like an explosion of copper filaments beneath his nose. The jailer emerged from his office and shook hands with the priest, gazing up at him in mild astonishment.
Steve said, "Prisoner's been behaving himself the last couple of days, sits on his bunk and talks to himself mostly. But I think one or two of us should be in there with you, Father. This man here"— he nodded to Conor— "is, I've been given to understand, a professional wrestler, but even he took a beating when the prisoner went on that rampage. They doubled his dose of tranquilizer; still, you never know."
"He'll be in his straitjacket, won't he?" Merlo replied. "I don't think we'll have any trouble. I tend to have a calming effect on them anyway."
"I can believe it. Well, okay, then— Duke!"
A dinky young man with a cast in one eye and a grudging manner took the visitors down a flight of iron steps into the basement, past a huffing boiler and down a corridor where gray paint was peeling off the walls in parchmentlike scrolls. Unshielded bulbs overhead provided illumination. Their footsteps echoed. Adam was whistling nervously through his teeth. Away from the boiler and the steam pipes it was drearily cold.
"Killed a rat down here the other day, size of a cocker spaniel," Duke smirked. If he hadn't been in uniform Conor easily could have imagined him in a shabby pool hall plotting supermarket robberies with equally unpromising confederates. They stopped at a metal door painted dark red. Duke unlocked it and turned on the single light, a hundred-watt bulb screwed into a porcelain socket on a wooden beam. It left areas of darkness in all four corners of the room. Just as well. The room was dank, the floor unswept. A single window high on one wall was black with filth, covered with a grill. Iron pipes, bitter-orange with rust, crisscrossed beneath the ceiling. The top of Father Merlo's head nearly brushed them as he walked in and looked around. Adam coughed gloomily into a handkerchief.
The priest placed his bag on the single stool in the room and opened it. He took out a purple silk stole, kissed it, and draped it around his neck. Then he sank into a meditative state that was almost like a trance. Duke waited with them, fiddling with the worn strap on his holster, which housed a very large revolver, until two more of the jailers brought Rich into the room.
His guards stood watchfully on either side of the prisoner, out of range of his feet should he decide to kick at them.
In the dingy straitjacket Rich looked lopsided, harrowingly deformed. In a straitjacket everyone appears crazed. Rich more so: or perhaps, Conor thought, he was influenced by preconceptions of his brother's condition that so long had preyed on his mind. Rich's pallid face, a little slack from opiates, was calm enough, even when his eyes took in the priest standing tall as a ship's varnished mast between Adam and Conor.
"Hello, Conor. Hello, Adam. Who's this?"
"I'm Father Merlo, son."
Rich's mouth twisted slightly; his tone was rougher. "I don't need a priest. I especially don't need a nigger priest who licks the cunts of menstruating nuns."
"Watch your mouth!" Duke snarled, and the other two guards raised their batons, but Merlo held up a hand.
"It's okay," he said, sounding disinterested to the point of boredom.
Duke said over his shoulder, looking as if he yearned to blast away at Rich with his Colt Trooper, "Ten minutes, Father, that's what Steve said. But that's all the time you're gonna want to spend with this guy."
He left the room still glaring at Rich; the other guards followed, and the door was closed and locked from the outside.
Rich looked around at the door, then back at his visitors. He smiled, preoccupied. "I'm going to take this thing off," he said.
He began to bend and twist and jerk so frantically and strenuously that Conor took a step toward him. Merlo held him back. His own face was impassive as he watched Rich's fierce struggle with the cruel binding garment. Adam, who had been checking out the tape recorder in his hand, stopped to watch with his mouth open.
In less than thirty seconds the straitjacket lay on the floor, unbuckled but not visibly ripped, and Rich was flexing his cramped arms.
"Better," he said. He raised his eyes to the priest. There was bitter hatred in them. His voice deepened. "What do you want?"
"I want to know who you are."
Deeper still; a rumbling. "What is your need to know?"
"I would do the will of God."
An odor saturated the room like brown fog. It was the odor of untreated wounds and charred flesh, of black vomit and cesspools and mass open graves. Of a world totally corrupt, ravaged and dead as it hurtled one last time around the sun. Conor threw his hands to his face; Adam was staggered and nauseated.
Father Merlo swiftly took from his black bag white surgical masks steeped in holy water.
"Breathe through these," he instructed them. Meanwhile he kept his eyes on the figure of Richard Devon, who flexed his hand and arm muscles but didn't move otherwise.
"Will you introduce yourself?" the priest said firmly. "We only have a few minutes, and I want to make the most of them."
"You will die, nigger! You will be torn to pieces on the first day of the Great Violence called Armageddon. You will see your blood stain the cobblestones in front of that shithouse St. Peter's! And we will drink your blood and brains from the vessel of your broken skull!"
Father Merlo sighed almost inaudibly and produced a wooden cross.
Something black and vile and unnameable began to ooze up out of the concrete floor as if it were as porous as a sponge. A pipe overhead burst and they were spewed with a yellow, puslike substance. Adam sucked wind violently, a loud scalded sound.
"Nothing can happen to you," the priest said calmingly, and then to the figure of Rich, "I command you to speak in the name of the Most Holy! What is your name? Who are you? Where have you come from?"
The skin of Richard's face was transformed as if he were an apple baking in an oven. The crusty blackened skin began to split and burst open. His eyes, twice normal size, stood well out of their sockets. His hair rose sizzling on end. And all the time he smiled, revealing black gums.
Adam slipped on the floor and fell down. He moved disconnectedly, as if hipshot, unable to get up again. He stared beseechingly at Merlo.
"You can't be hurt. He only wants to take your mind away from you. Resist. This is not the hour of his greatest strength." He turned his full attention back to the entity that was deforming the head (bones bulging soft as tallow beneath the skin) and the body of Richard Devon. Rich's chest swelled until his jail jumper ripped at the seams. With his crotch exposed, Rich began pissing, the wimpled head of his penis lashing about like a one-eyed snake extruded from the russet basket of his groin. Piss steamed in acid clouds when it hit the cold floor. He farted enormously, wild organ chords blaspheming.
Father Merlo looked displeased.
"In the name of my Lord Jesus Christ," he said, each word precise as a pistol shot in the farting din, "I command you to speak your name!"
The farting stopped, and the shit began to fly, pouring out of the possessed body. Then came the answering voice, cold as winter thunder:
"I AM ZARACH' BAL-TAGH!"
There was a simultaneous whinny of voices in the room, an excited chorus from a distant fenland lit by purple lightning, beaten to dust by the little hooves of the lesser Unearthly.
"BAL! BAL! BAAAAAAAL!"
Outside the locked steel door Duke and the other jailers stood at ease and smoked and kept their ears open. But they never heard a thing.
"And who is Zarach' Bal-Tagh?" the priest demanded. He knew already, but it was submission he was after now; he had the information he'd been seeking.
"BROTHER OF LUCIFER— ENEMY OF GOD!"
In the eyes of the possessed, empty as wormholes in wood, sparks glowed; dark twists of smoke spiraled toward the priest.
Merlo said, indicating Conor beside him, "What do you want with this man's brother?"
"I DIDN'T WANT HIM. HE WANTED ME. NOW SHALL YOU ALL HAVE ME!"
"What do you mean?" Merlo said grimly.
"YOUR CORRUPT AND MISERABLE WORLD HAS NEED OF A REDEEMER— ISN'T THAT WHAT YOU PREACH?"
"No one of us is so sick or troubled that he needs you. Go back where you came from, Evil One."
"I SHALL RETURN WHEN I CHOOSE— WITH ALL OF MY EAGER FOLLOWERS. WITH SOULS BEYOND COUNTING. THIS PUTRID HUNK OF MEAT IS ONLY THE BEGINNING."
"Richard was— he is— a good man. How did you trick him?"
"HIS OWN LUST BETRAYED HIM. AS EACH MAN'S SINS CREATE A LOVE OF ME."
Even as he spoke the taskmaster who called himself Zarach' increased the speed and intensity of his psychic attack on Adam Kurland, who of the three interrogators had the least strength to resist him. Adam was convulsed, his sickened, strained mind drowning in offal. Merlo decided he'd better end this quickly.
From his bag he withdrew an aspergillum, filled with holy water.
"I'll be back," he promised the possessor. "For Richard's soul— brother of Lucifer."
