Chapter 28 #2
I couldn’t understand who was talking now, the me in the dream or the me in my mind or the me who was sleeping in the bed, tears beginning to leak down my face as the horror of truth slowly filled me.
“You knew?” I squeaked, and this time my voice was high, thin, manic. I clawed at my own belly, thinking of the writing on the walls, the writing on my own skin. It wasn’t possible—it couldn’t be possible. Mordechai had known me for fifteen years! Had I been possessed all that time?
“Why did you really want me around?” I demanded. “Why did you stay my friend, why did my mom—” All of the air whooshed out of me. “She knew, didn’t she? You told her.”
“Delia.”
“She knew,” I said again, my voice raw. A lifetime of my mother’s fear clicked into place—the drinking, the distance, the relief when I left with Mordechai. She hadn’t been protecting herself from the world. She’d been protecting herself from me.
My tirade should have penetrated Mordechai’s benevolent exterior, but nothing seemed to.
It was like rainwater battering against a steel door.
But the last accusation made something shift in his expression.
Something hard and fierce. And betrayal warred with crowning achievement in the deepest, darkest part of me.
“You needed me, didn’t you?” The thing inside me accused, my words coming out in short, gasping fish breaths. “You trapped me.”
“I didn’t know your name. Didn’t know that Delia could identify you.” Mordechai shook his head. “I know it now, though. And understanding is all it takes.”
I smiled in the dream. I could see myself. It wasn’t a good smile. “Not all.”
Mordechai held up his hand with its gleaming shofar. “Begone from her.”
“And how shall I leave?” My voice channeling the demon was silky smooth now, my shoulders back, my hands loose.
Not like me at all…or more like me than I ever understood.
“How shall I leave this dear girl. Through her eye? She would be blinded. Through her hand? She would be crippled. How would you have me leave this vessel you have allowed me to fill for so many, many years?”
Fifteen years—and that was just the years that Mordechai had known me. How long had I been carrying the spark of this evil inside me, the seed that was growing into rotted fruit? No friends. My own mother afraid of me. The one adult to ever care about me actually using me for—
“Is it true?” The voice that spoke was mine again, only I sounded young, way too young, and Mordechai looked deep into my eyes.
I didn’t know what he saw there, but he didn’t bend.
He wasn’t weak. I may have been breaking apart in front of him, but he stared at me with eyes that were not intended for the supporters of the afflicted, but for the afflicted herself.
And when it got to this point in the exorcism, the afflicted saw what I now saw. A soldier of God.
“You have done this before, dark one,” he said, his voice like distant oceans and faraway shores.
“You and your brethren but especially you. And now you shift, you turn like a snake in the grass, rooting out your own, sending them into oblivion, crippled and fleeing. I know you do it. I’ve watched you do it. ”
I smiled, my voice like polished ebony. “Do you want to know why?”
Mordechai raised his hand. “I do not. Your time on this earth is through—”
“No.” The word was sharp, a slap, and I looked at Mordechai in amazement.
These were new words, words I didn’t know.
The rabbi banished demons from mortals but he didn’t send them back to Hell or wherever demons went when they died.
He simply let them go. So what was he doing here? What was he trying to prove?
Mordechai kept his hand held high. “Return to the abyss, foul one, and trouble her no longer.” And then he started saying other words, Latin words that I should have known, should at least have been able to remember, but a horrible grinding noise filled my ears, my mouth, my lungs, and I couldn’t stop the agony of it from carrying me along its tide.
Mordechai thrust both hands toward me, and I felt a tearing in my gut, my stomach cramping hard enough to make me cry out.
But I didn’t fall back, I didn’t crumble.
Instead, I reached for his hands, relishing the moment when our fingers connected and I grabbed hold of him, his eyes going wide and his mouth stretching open in a snarl of rage and surprise.
“Begone from her!” He shouted, and I laughed at him, feeling my own heart swell as his body matched itself against me, frailty against youth but not just youth; youth bolstered by unspeakable knowledge and truth.
Mordechai’s face darkened to a sickly reddish gray, and I threw him from me, hard—harder than I’d ever thrown anything in my life.
My head was full of words, then, words and anguish and pain.
“Get away!” Mordechai yelled. “Begone! Leave!”
I saw the scene for the last time etched into my brain.
Rabbi Mordechai, still alive—still alive!
Scrabbling on the ground, his hands shuddering and twisting in the dirt.
I wanted to spit on him, the disgusting weakling.
There was blood on his face, and I reveled in it.
He hit his head on something when he fell, one of the feeble stones of his beloved people, marking the end of their short, tragic lives.
Marking his end too.
He scratched a word into the dirt with shaking, bloody fingers. PALE...
And finally, I saw it.
In the memory, I saw what I’d obliterated with my foot as I’d scrambled away—the rest of his message. PALEMERIOUS. Mordechai had named my demon—or I’d given him the name somehow. And with his last breath, dying in the dirt, he’d handed back to me the weapon I needed to fight the thing inside me.
While I’d destroyed the evidence. Scraped it away as I fled.
“Begone,” he’d whispered. Not commanding the demon this time. Just begging me to run—to flee.
To live.
And so, I ran.
I jerked awake a second time, clutching the pillow, then spun around, trying to understand where I was.
The clock on the bedside table was the only light in the room.
It blinked at me, 2:37. As I stared, the numbers seemed to blur, rearrange, shift.
37:2, then 2:12. Then I blinked again, and the clock steadied. 2:12 a.m. Two o’clock in the morning.
I stared at the four walls of this room and felt a strange calm drop over me.
Sitting in the house of horrors, I felt curiously apart, even safe.
I reached out my hands and looked at them as if I’d never seen my own body before.
I stood, turning around. There were things in this house.
I could feel them now, more than ever. They scrabbled around, preying on the minds of those who lived here like parasites, sucking out their lives bit by bit.
They hung in the darkness, chittering with excitement, drinking in the pain, the fear.
Not just of the weak and the infirm but of the strong.
They were noticed here, they were given their due.
The entire house felt not like a gleaming, pristine home of the affluent, but a dark, dirty hovel.
Hunched over on itself, squalid and broken, as if it hoped one day it would collapse into a pile of cursed stones.
And then the evil would leak out over the earth, slithering away to do its bidding on the back of someone else.
But I could face these demons now, I thought. No matter how bad it got, no matter what I needed to do, I could face this evil.
Because I was worse.
The thought should have broken me. Instead, I felt cold, clear, and ready.
I stood in the dark room and whispered the name aloud for the first time, tasting its shape in my mouth: “Palemerious.”
Inside me, the demon went utterly still.
“I know what you are now.” I smiled. “And I know what I am too.”