Exorcist Road (9 page)

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!”

The demon lurched through Casey’s doorway.

We hastened after it. I experienced a moment’s terror that it would make good on its promise, that it would hurl Casey’s body through the window, because if it did I couldn’t imagine the boy surviving. The fall was precipitous, thirty or more feet down to merciless concrete.

We passed into the doorway and entered what appeared to be an empty bedroom. Recalling what had happened earlier, when I lay on the bed in enervated shock, I cast a panicked glance at the ceiling. But this time the demon was not clinging there, waiting to pounce on me.

This time the demon was hidden behind the door.

It hurtled from its hiding place and crashed into Sutherland. In a flash the Bible had tumbled out of his hands and was skidding across the floor, the demon grasping both sides of Sutherland’s head and dashing his skull against the unyielding wood floor. Precisely the way, I thought with a sense of fatedness, the Sweet Sixteen Killer had staved Ashley Panagopoulos’s head in.

Impulsively, I strode forward and aimed a kick at the demon’s head. My sneaker connected with its chin. Its head whipped back, its teeth clicking together, and as it turned toward me, its face contorted in a rictus of fury and enmity, I ripped the crucifix from my necklace and thrust it into its face.

Squalling, it tumbled backward, calling me all manner of names as it fell. A foul gust of breath assailed me, the withering odors of flyblown meat and spoiled milk. But I ignored these smells, ignored the fearsome rage stamped on the demon’s features.

I felt the power of the crucifix in my hand, the simple silver object seeming to vibrate in my grip, the power coursing up my arm, thrumming through the muscles of my upper body, endowing me with a power and faith such as I had never known. Unthinkingly, I leapt atop the demon and pinioned its arms to the floor with my knees. I shoved the crucifix against the sodden T-shirt, meaning to expunge the demon from the boy without searing his flesh. I had seen the demon ravage Casey’s body and restore it to its former state, but something told me any damage inflicted by the crucifix would be permanent.

The wet fabric of the shirt began to hiss as the crucifix seared into it, the demon writhing and baying in agony. But despite the terrible strength surcharging its limbs, I managed to keep it pinned to the floor, my voice bellowing above its frightful din, “Depart, Seducer! Depart, Transgressor!”

“No!”
it shrieked, its red eyes incandescent, its black tongue darting in and out of its purple lips.
“Don’t make me—”

“YES!” I roared. “Be gone, you foul pestilence! Depart from this innocent flesh!”

The demon bucked beneath me, a torrent of blood gushing from one of its flared nostrils. The crucifix began to sizzle the flesh beneath, the smell of the scorched T-shirt now tinged with the aroma of frying bacon.

“Get…off…me…”
the thing demanded in a deep, insectile voice. It sounded a thousand years old, ancient and fueled with the outrage of a besieged king.

“I will not release you,” I shouted, “nor will I have done with you until you release this boy.”

Sutherland was beside me, dazed but undaunted. “Our Father,” he said, “who art in heaven.”

“No!”
the demon yowled. Lightning blazed outside the window.

“Hallowed be thy name,” I continued. The whole house shook with the roar of thunder.

“Enough!”
it said, but beneath the bass rumble of its voice I could hear another voice, a feeble, pleading note. The sound of a child who has been adrift at sea for days and is in his extremity. A boy who desperately needs saving.

“Thy kingdom come,” Sutherland said.

The demon thrashed its head. One of its eyes had ceased to glow.

“Thy will be done,” I said.

Blood drizzled from Casey’s other nostril, but his struggles were abating.

“On earth, as it is in heaven,” Sutherland and I said together.

The demon opened its mouth, but the tongue within looked human again. And when Casey’s eyes fluttered open and shut, the lambent, red glow was gone, replaced by a stark white.

“Give us this day our daily bread…” we went on, and as the prayer continued, Casey’s struggles grew less and less violent. His upper lip and the sides of his cheeks were slick with blood, but his features were no longer pale and contorted like they’d been. The demon’s monstrous voice was gone entirely, the only noises issuing from the boy frail moans that sounded like he was experiencing nothing more dangerous than a particularly bad dream. The stench of roasted flesh still hung in the air, but smoke no longer rose from where the crucifix touched Casey’s skin.

“For thine is the kingdom,” we said, “and the power, and the glory, forever and ever.”

Casey ceased to struggle.

“Amen,” we finished.

In the silence that followed I was sure we had killed the boy. In exorcizing the demon, we had accomplished the very thing the demon had promised to do—destroy its host.

As I knelt over Casey, my face at his lips and my hand over his heart, I thought of Liz, deprived of her only son. How could we ever tell her what happened? How could we possibly inform her of her son’s death? There was no way to relay that sort of information to any parent, especially one as devoted as Liz. It would ruin her.