Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
The revelation of the lake house demons was subtle at first, almost a knowing more than any real sense or presence.
But the floor seemed to shift beneath my feet, to give a kind of rolling shudder.
Mrs. Bell and Max squawked and took several steps back, and I got the sense that they were holding each other, fingers wrapped tightly around each other’s arms, unselfconscious in their panic. Fear, the great uniter.
Then the walls grew wet. All of Joe’s words, his repetition of letters and numbers, his crazy Ouija symbols and crude, foul drawings.
They seemed to shimmer and writhe out of the walls as I spoke, undulating with misery.
As I stared at them, certain ones flared, bright and bold, words I didn’t know, couldn’t understand.
AgramonBalban slid together, streaming down the walls.
AbyzouNaamahAshtaroth. And then, another line, a word all on its own, prideful and fierce. Sonillion.
How many demons’ names had Joe learned over the years? And which one had kept him trapped in this unholy well of pain?
As I stared, the words scrambled again, running together. The letters swelled and burst, draining onto the floor, and hissing when they came into contact with the holy water.
The walls were crying, I finally realized.
The walls were giving up their burden of darkness—and crying.
Tears upon tears flowed down and over the floor, and I felt the knowing swell inside me, the reality of what had happened here.
It wasn’t any old demon infestation—not here; not for Joe. It was so incredibly worse.
And since I didn’t know any one name, I’d have to banish them all.
“Shedim,” I said, remembering the collective word from my library reference books—and the flow stopped.
A wailing sound and loud crying swept up and around the room, wrapping me in its misery.
The ducks themselves started to shake and splinter, some of them, coming apart as if from the inside.
But the shedim were not possessing this place, they were infesting it.
They needed to go. They…and whoever led them.
Because there would be one solitary leader, I thought. One with the power over the rest.
What was that demon’s name?
The silence inside my head mocked me. For ten years—fifteen? longer?—there had always been an answer waiting. Knowledge I didn’t earn, understanding I shouldn’t possess. Now there was only my own ignorance echoing back at me.
I stared grimly at the writhing names on the walls. Agramon. Balban. Sonillion. They meant nothing to me. Without Palemerious, I was just a twenty-five-year-old with a high school diploma trying to read demon graffiti.
Willing the understanding to come to me, I pressed on. “Shedim, begone from troubling this place, this man’s still-tethered spirit. He was never yours to claim. You know that. You have always known that.”
I should have seen the next thing coming.
There had been all those catalogs and cardboard boxes in high stacks, everywhere.
They were neat and orderly, stuffed to the ceiling in rooms other than this.
There had to be a reason for them. I’d taken them to be insulation, and they were, in a sense.
But they were also protection from what else lay buried in those walls.
Knives. Whether Joe had papered the walls over after driving the blades into them, or if his words and symbols and drawings had merely covered over the gouges, he had tried to fight the walls himself, at least for a while. And he left his weapons intact.
The first blade hit me broadside, flat against my shoulder.
The second was better aimed. As it sliced into my skin, the shedim’s cries grew louder, more harrowing, their demand for blood, for sacrifice thrumming through me.
They would leave but they would have their due, I realized.
Carol Ann hadn’t died. Joe, in the end, had died—but not here.
They wanted death, these creatures, these byproducts of whatever the hell had happened here. They wanted blood.
Right now, they wanted my blood.
Another slice across my forearm made me gasp. The blade bit deep—deeper than it should have. I felt it scrape bone. Hot blood sheeted down my arm, spattering the floorboards. The shedim shrieked with joy at the smell of it.
I saw the shadow loom larger in front of me. A cut ripped through my leggings, the knife clattering off my shin. The wounds bled freely, too heavily for what should be shallow cuts, and I realized I hadn’t prepared for this—I hadn’t prepared.
Rabbi Mordechai hadn’t taught me the ways of the exorcist; I wasn’t an exorcist. I didn’t know his rituals and protections. I didn’t even really know his God. I only knew the tiniest portion of the exorcism process.
Enough to take out these assholes, yes.
But I wouldn’t be taking them out easily—or well.
Palemerious, they whispered, with a hideous giggle. Palemerious…
My eyes snapped wide, sudden clarity jolting through me—
“Fuck!” Pain seared across my chest as something much more real and pointy than clarity stuck me in the shoulder. Another projectile slashed across my face, and another nearly punched through my shoulder, spinning me around.
I flashed with anger, full and bright. “Begone, shedim, and take your brethren all. Fill this place no more and never come back. This place and these people are barred from you and all who serve you and all you serve!”
The laughter started then, long and loud—rich and bold—but somewhere, deep within it, there was a kernel of desperation.
A tiny ember of fear, of doubt. I latched onto that ember, blew into it with a mighty breath that had never blown a shofar, had never cried in unison with holy men, but which burned—burned with the righteous fury of the power that raged within me.
How dare anyone—anything!—defy me when I would have them leave.
How dare anything keep me from breaking that which demanded to be broken?
How dare any creature born of evil try to defy my—
Within me, something opened wide, eyes bright, jaw huge, staring into the shadow creatures who writhed in wet agony before me for a moment more.
And I knew their leader. Just like that.
“Sonillion,” I gasped, as the truth blasted through me with fire and rage, a wind whipping up out of nowhere. “Begone, Sonillion, and take your servants with you.”
Another round of chaos raged. All Joe’s suck-ass carvings were lifted off the low table in the middle of the room and thrown at me, like I was being stoned. I stumbled back, crouching down behind a couch, so they hit the far window, breaking it.
The roar of the wind grew louder as it screamed over and out of the house, a houseful of creatures banished not to hell, never to hell. I didn’t know where the demons went, but mine was not the power to rid this earth of them. Just from this place, for all eternity. Only this place.
And also from me-who-was-in-this-place, me who was power and truth.
I dragged myself to the shattered window, leaned out. Because I wasn’t done yet. I still had one more demon left to exorcise.
“Begone,” I whispered into the howling wind, my heart a stone lump in my chest, my hands numb, my blood slow and sluggish in my veins. “Begone, Palemerious. You must leave now, too.”
My mind seemed to crack wide open, and with my inner eyes, I saw a different storm, a different night. I was back in the cemetery next to Mordechai, who raised blistered hands as I backed away from him in horror. And I was here, in this broken house, confronting the thing he left behind.
“Begone,” I said again.
Time stopped, hung, and quivered in abject terror and pain.
In a moment of brutal clarity, I saw what awaited me without the demon I carried.
It was a world of emptiness. I would see only with my own eyes, I would feel only with my own touch.
I would relate to others only with the experience of a woman who knew nothing about anything, whose experience with the world failed in every way, circumscribed by poverty and ignorance and bone-crushing loneliness.
Mordechai was dead, and it was not as if Ethan was going to let me work with him.
I would be cast aside, adrift, as cursed at twenty-five as I had been at seven months, my mother bending over her swollen belly, pleading for God, the angels, for anybody to deliver her from the sin that was my corruption in her body, the life force that was even now ruining hers, sucking it dry, using it up, leaving her to face decades of privation and fear because of something she wanted no part of.
“Begone! You cannot stay here!” I still cried out, a thin, high cry, the cry of a child.
The shift in my belly was like my stomach being scraped out from the inside.
The rush of anguish in my blood nearly dropped me to my knees, but I couldn’t stop—couldn’t back down.
I had no other choice but to move forward, or I’d never be free. “Go!”
For one terrible, infinite moment, I felt him hesitate. Felt something in him reach back toward me—not with rage or possession, but with something I had no name for. Something that felt almost like—
No. I couldn’t think that. Wouldn’t.
“Go!” I roared again.
It went. Through one of the countless wounds on my arms, my belly, with a screaming, howling rage, a blowing wind of a thousand storms that punched up and through and out of me, Palemerious burst into the broken world, blending with the shedim, screaming through the lake house and out into bright and endless day…
And all was lost.
“Delia!”
Max was at my side, and I felt something unchunk from my shoulder, pain lancing me back to awareness as he threw something away from me. He pressed a thick pad of cloth over a dark and wet place on my shoulder, and I looked at him, afraid to speak. Dreading what might come out of my mouth.
“Delia, what is it? Talk to me.”
I blinked up at him.
“They’re gone,” I finally rasped. He’s gone. Forever gone and away from me. Empty. Wrenching. Gone.
I blinked harder, this time desperately trying to keep the tears that burned behind my lids from falling. But my thoughts were mine, no one else’s. My heartbeat was only heard by me. My skin stretched too tight over my own hollow shell, and I was alone, my demon vanquished and evermore gone.
I had won.
I had lost.
Everything.
“I can see that. Jesus.” Another person squatted down beside me, her worry and concern flowing over me like an unexpected balm.
A person I remembered—but didn’t know right away, as ancient names and places rippled through me, cities and villages, castles and kings, flowing through me and out of me in a spreading stain, whisked away by the wind.
“We need to get her to a hospital,” the woman said gently.
“No…no,” I managed, pulling myself to a sitting position. I’d started to shiver uncontrollably, but I welcomed that new, harsh pain, focusing on it while the whispers and knowledge of a thousand years swept away from me. “Just a church. And a…a Catholic one, this time.”