I did my best to not freak out. There was enough fear in this room and there was no need to make things worse. Demons feed on fear, and I had a feeling that with what happened with Lucy earlier, and the amount of fear hanging around the room, we were in for a Hell of a night.
Tor laughed suddenly. “Is it wrong to be scared of my own daughter?”
“No, not wrong,” Tabby said. “There are plenty of parents who are afraid of their kids, most though, just have severe behavioral problems. I think with having a possessed child, you have the right to be afraid.”
“Try to keep calm,” I said. “Demons feed on fear, and the more you aggravate yourself, the stronger you are making it.”
“What are you telling me, Jimmy?” Tor asked.
“I’m telling you that if you can, don’t think about your daughter tonight. Everyone needs to stay calm and I want us all to stay in this room. I don’t care what noise Lucy makes. The only reason to leave this room is if the alarm on one of her monitors goes off—anything else, do not listen. It is very tricky, this demon.”
“When do you really think we should get everything?” Will asked.
“Before the noises start.”
Tabby stood up. “Should we just go now? We can deal with the pee smell if need be.”
I nodded. “Let’s go.”
###
All of us left the library. We followed Tor out to the garage. I grabbed a bucket. Tabby grabbed the large pack of toilet paper Tor pointed out. Will grabbed a case of water. Then, we went back into the house. We all took turns using the bathroom.
When it was Will’s turn, I approached the bathroom door. “Don’t forget number two,” I whispered to Will through the door.
“Shut up,” he said from the bathroom.
Tabby, Tor and I had to fight not to giggle. Finally, giggling aside, we all made our bathroom visits. While things were about as serious as they could get, I felt we needed a little comic relief. A bathroom break was something safe to joke about, anything else, I wasn’t sure. As we walked back towards the library, I ran down the hall to the kitchen and grabbed Tor’s cell phone from the counter. We all made it back into the library without incident.
I felt unsettled though. The hair on the back of my neck was raised. Something big was going to happen. It made me wonder if I ever wanted to try to go to sleep again.
“Jimmy?” Tabby asked.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think we are being too cautious? I feel kind of silly now.”
I shook my head. “We know what we’ve seen at night. In particular, we know what we’ve experienced since you put the wards on this room. There was no way we could leave Tor and Will anywhere else in this house, Tabby. This has gotten a lot more dangerous. Don’t feel silly. This is the right thing to do.”
Tabby sighed. Tor and Will looked at me gratefully. What I wanted to know was how I became the leader? Who the Hell was going to comfort me when I got scared?
###
Just as I expected, along about three it began. Tabby, Tor and Will had settled into an uneasy slumber. I stayed awake. I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t explain it. I could just feel it in my gut that something was going to happen.
Then the pounding began. It started out softly, but gradually grew louder and louder until I could see something was trying to break Tabby’s wards. It was invisible, but each time it assaulted the wards, the wards glowed brighter. At times, they seemed to stretch, almost as if they were about to break. Then, the pounding stopped. I looked around. Tor and Will had their blankets tucked underneath their chins. Tabby was sitting up on her sofa. Like me, she was getting used to this.
Then, I heard a little girl’s giggle. I looked at Tor. Tor threw off the blanket.
“Stay still.” I told her.
The giggle happened again.
She stood up. “If Lucy’s okay…”
“Lucy is not okay,” I snapped. “This thing plays tricks. It tries anything to get you to leave the confines of this room.”
The pounding started again, more vigorously than before. This time, when it stopped, there was a figure in the doorway of the library—a figure of a little girl with pretty golden hair.
“Mommy?” It said hesitantly.
Tor started for the door and we grabbed her. “It’s a trick dammit! Lucy is upstairs in her room chained to her bed. This thing,” I pointed to it. “Is a cruel trick.”
Then the little girl disappeared. Tor whimpered.
“Come out, Mommy. I swear I’ll be good,” the thing said. I could not see it, but I could feel that it was definitely there. It was just hiding itself.
Tor looked at me.
I shook my head, “No.”
“What does it want?” she asked.
I stared at her. Hard. “Your soul, and I don’t think it’s above killing to get what it wants.”
The little girl appeared in the doorway, crying. “You don’t love me anymore, Mommy,” it said.
I kept hold of Tor.
“My baby,” she wailed.
I shook her. “That is not Lucy, Tor. It’s an apparition. It’s fake.”
She struggled and tried to break free of my arms. I looked over at Will. He was frozen in his chair. I rolled my eyes. He should be helping his wife.
“My baby,” Tor cried again.
I shook her again. She was playing on my last nerve. She was such a melodramatic idiot. ”That is not your fucking baby!”
It pressed its head against the film of the wards. It almost looked like her hands were pressed against glass.
“These wards only keep out things that mean harm,” I said. “Why else can all of us move freely, and it can’t come in?”
Suddenly the Lucy thing snarled; its face became an exact replica of the Lucy upstairs.
“You can stay there all night, I don’t care.” She smiled with her broken teeth. “I could always start a fire, you know?”
I laughed. “No you won’t. If you destroy this house, you destroy the connection to that ley line.”
It smiled. “You are too smart for your own good, Priest.”
Then, it disappeared.
“Is everything okay now?” Will asked.
“Hell if I know. Tabby and I have had nights that nothing happened. There have been nights with just noises. Then, there are nights where the beasties come. So, is this all tonight? I don’t know.”
Tor and Will looked at me expectantly.
I stared back at them. “I do not know everything, you know. Tabby knows a lot more than I do about most of this. Why are you looking at me to save you?”
I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. They really had put me on a pedestal, and I didn’t like it. They needed to stand on their own feet once in awhile. Jesus Christ, I felt like I was dealing with a couple of ignorant teenagers and not adults that were supposed to at least be as mature as I was.
“Because you are a priest,” Tor said.
I laughed. “I’m not a priest. I quit, remember?”
Tabby looked at me. “What if God’s rules and the church’s rules are two different things?”
I had no answer to that.
###
The rest of the night, nothing happened. I watched the night fly by staring out the window. It was calm, but it was a normal calm. All I saw through the windows were trees. There was nothing freaky going on outside. Snow covered the ground and ice glinted from the branches of the trees. It looked like a winter wonderland.
Things were so calm now. I kind of expected more. Maybe Lucy knew the real fight was coming? Hopefully, I could get someone here soon. If I couldn’t, I didn’t know how much more we could take. I was exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come. I couldn’t stop thinking about things, and it was only my brain causing this round of insomnia.
I looked over at Tabby. Her sleep was a comfort to me. I watched her chest gently rise and fall with every breath.
I knew it wasn’t normal. Watching people breathe was
odd, but it was something I’d done for as long as I could remember.
Whenever I felt stressed out, watching someone breathe helped relax me. Maybe because breathing was a normal function, and maybe it grounded me because I knew my sister stopped breathing a long time ago.
I missed Candy. She’d been my protector for so many years. She was the one who bandaged my knees when they were bloody, and nursed me when I was sick. I hadn’t felt right since her death. Suicide sucked. I looked back out the window and stared out into the night. No one understood the feeling of loss you get when someone kills themselves. When someone dies, most people assume that it will be the same as when anyone else dies. People are sad for awhile, and then over time, the pain doesn’t hurt anymore. The difference is that when someone commits suicide—they decide to die. They make the honest choice to stop living and the rest of those, those that care about them, are left wondering what they could have done to keep them from killing themselves.
“Jimmy?” Tabby asked. “Are you okay?”
I turned around. Something must have woken her up. I looked at her. “Yeah, why?”
“You’re crying.”
I wiped my hand across my cheek. I felt wetness.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I was thinking about my sister. That’s all. I still miss her, even after all these years.”
“How old was she when she died?”
“Eighteen. She was eighteen.”
###
Tabby and I watched the sun rise. I could see why Tor chose the house then. The sunlight danced over the ice on the tree branches. It was so pretty. The evil of the house just didn’t match up with the land around it. Black must have made the house the way it was. The land itself wasn’t bad. It couldn’t be, not to have mornings look like this.
Tor woke up not long after the sun finishing rising.
“That was interesting,” Tor said.
“Calm in comparison to some nights,” I said.
She nodded. “Do you think it’s okay to leave the room now?”
“Probably. The stuff during the day seems to be confined to direct contact with Lucy. I don’t know if she’s saving her strength for the night, or if some of the things that are helping her with her tricks are nocturnal.”
Tor stretched. “Well then, I’m making omelets for breakfast. Come along, you can pick out what you want.”
Tabby and I couldn’t refuse that. I jumped up from the sofa. As I turned towards the doorway, I noticed Will.
“What about Will?” I asked.
Tor headed towards the kitchen. “He’ll wake up when he wants to. It’s not like he isn’t safe in here.”
I couldn’t argue with that. “Very true.”
I followed Tor into the kitchen, Tabby took up the rear. Sun was streaming in through the window when we walked into the kitchen.
Tor immediately got to work beating eggs and I poured us each a cup of coffee.
“So Jimmy, what’s your agenda for the day?” Tor asked.
I took a sip of coffee. “As soon as it’s a decent hour, after morning mass, I’ll call the local priest— see if I can get his attention. If not, I’ll contact one of my old seminary professors.”
Tor stopped beating the eggs, set the bowl on the counter and came over and hugged me. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for trying to save my little girl.”
I smiled. “Anytime.”
###
After we ate, I accompanied Tor to Lucy’s room. I was no longer going to let anyone move around the house alone. It just wasn’t safe—except for in the library where last time I looked, Will was snoring.
When we got to Lucy’s room, Tor gently opened Lucy’s door. She was asleep, her chained arms lay beside her on the bed.
I helped Tor refill Lucy’s feeding tube and change the glucose drip on her I.V..
We said nothing to each other the entire time. Tor had tears in her eyes when we were leaving, but I paused just inside the door. On the other side of the door were deep scratches in the wood. They were gouges like someone made them with massive claws. I quickly snapped a picture with my cell phone.
Tor looked at me and I shook my head. We left the room and closed the door behind us.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Just wait until we get back downstairs.”
When we reached the kitchen, I pulled out my phone and showed Tor.
Her hand went over her mouth. Her eyes were wide with alarm. “What caused that?”
I shrugged. “Whatever did it, didn’t hurt Lucy, I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Why’d you take the picture then?”
“More proof.”
Tabby walked into the kitchen. “Will’s still asleep.”
“Where were you?” I asked.
“Bathroom.”
“I thought we agreed we’d go nowhere without anyone else.”
Tabby rolled her eyes. “I really had to pee, and Will is in there snoring. I couldn’t wait, so I went to the bathroom.”
If it hadn’t been so serious lately, I would have found my interest in Tabby’s bathroom habits funny, if not odd. But with things the way they were, I couldn’t help but feel like she took an unnecessary risk.
“So wake up Will,” Tor said. “He’s slept long enough. We’ll get our baths,” she turned to me, “then you are free to do whatever you need to do.”
“All right,” I said.
Chapter Twenty Six
Pain is just a state of mind
It didn’t take too long, not really. Will was sitting in his chair. The blanket had fallen to his waist, but he slept on, snoring lightly.
“Will,” I whispered.
His eyes snapped open. He slept a lot lighter here than he had at my house.
I turned on my laptop and browsed for a few minutes.
I looked over at Will. “What’s the name of the Catholic church?”
Will rubbed his eyes. “St. Mary’s.”
I Googled it and wrote down a few numbers. I pulled out my cell phone and dialed. The phone rang three times before it was answered.
“St. Mary’s,” the voice said.
“Hello,” I said. I leaned back on the sofa. “My name is Jimmy Holiday and I could use some help. I need to talk to the priest.”
He paused for a moment. “You’re speaking to him. I’m Father John. What can I do for you, Mr. Holiday.”
“I’m calling on behalf of a friend. Will Andersen?”
The man coughed. “Yes. How is his daughter?”
“Not doing so well, the treatment at the hospital did not work.”
I could hear him rustling some papers. “That’s a shame,” he said. “Perhaps I can see if I can find another hospital—”
“No, Father. I… I really think you need to see Lucy. I don’t think she’s mentally ill.”
He cleared his throat. “And what do you think is wrong with her?”
I detected a snide tone in his voice.
“Maybe you should know that I used to be a priest,” I said.
“Really?” he asked. I could tell I’d gotten his attention.
“Yes, that’s a story for another day, I’m afraid.”
“Maybe today is the day,” he said. “Now really, why are you no longer a priest?”
He was starting to annoy me. “Quite simply, I fell for a girl.”
He snorted. “And you defiled your profession…”
It was getting to the point that I wanted to hit him. I really did. He was such a pompous ass. “Actually, I did not. My vow of celibacy was true until I left the priesthood, but I think that’s enough about me. I want to talk about Lucy.”
“Alright,” he sighed. “Let’s talk about Lucy.”
“I think she’s possessed.”
He began to laugh. “Honestly, Mr. Holiday, you had me going there for a minute.”
I let him get the giggle out of his system. “What six-year-old do you know that can speak: Russian, G
erman, Biblical Greek and Latin?”
“What?” he asked. He sounded like he’d just spit his coffee.
“She displays every sign. I have it all on tape.”
“Good God,” he said.
“So, we need your help.”
He coughed again. “I know nothing about exorcism.”
“Father, even I know that each diocese is supposed to have its own exorcist. Contact the bishop, and get back to me.”
He took down my number and promised to get me some word as soon as possible. All I needed was for them to come and investigate, and that was exactly what they would do next. I knew the church too well, much too well.
###
A couple of hours later, the good Father called me back. Tabby and I were sitting at the kitchen table watching Tor pour over several cookbooks, trying to figure out what to make us for lunch.
“Yes, Father,” I said when I answered the phone.
“When do you think it would be convenient for me to come visit Lucy and look at the evidence?” he asked. I could hear a little quiver in his voice. I wondered if his superior had reamed him or if he really was just scared.
“Hold on one moment,” I said.
I placed my hand over the mouthpiece of my cell phone. “Father wants to know when he can come and see Lucy,” I said to Tor.
“As soon as possible? Whenever he likes? Jesus Christ,” she shook herself.
I couldn’t stop myself from grinning. I uncovered the mouthpiece and put the phone back next to my ear. “Anytime would be fine, Father.”
The good Father was quiet for a moment. “Are precautions in place?” he asked.
I chuckled. “Are you asking if she’s restrained? Then yes, in fact recently we had to enhance the way she is restrained, you’ll see why in what we have to show you.”
He coughed. “Is this afternoon too soon?”
“No, Father. The family wishes for someone to help Lucy as soon as possible. This afternoon will work perfectly.”
He cleared his throat. “I’ll be by after one.”
“Do you remember how to get here?” I asked.
“Mr. Holiday, everyone knows how to get to Blackmoor.”
Then he hung up. He was such a prick. I really wished I didn’t need his help.