Yesterdays Exorcism

Yesterdays Exorcism

Salt. Small and Crystalline. Its course texture ground steadily against the priest’s eyes. He wanted to shut them. The wind offered no escape from it’s constant and abrasive battery. He allowed himself the luxury of blinking, his blood red eyes wearily focusing upon the young woman that stood before him. She appeared almost childlike in nature, a girl barely in her adulthood. They were the only two people upon the flat plane. Two lone figures planted firmly upon the desolate lake. It’s water had dried up years ago, leaving only dead soil tainted by salt. No life would grow here again.

“What’s the matter priest?” The young woman smiled at him mockingly. Her white clothes stained with patterns of blood that appeared deliberate, as if designed by an artist. “Too afraid to use it are you?”

The priests eyes glared as he drew his attention to the dagger clutched tightly in hand. Even underneath the dull grey of the overcast sky, the metal blade shined bright. A focal point to the violence of which it implied. He wondered how it had come to this. Yesterday he understood his place in the world. Evil and innocence had been known quantities.

“Tell me I’m wrong Helen. Tell me it wasn’t you.”

The young woman smiled wryly at him.

“You would like that wouldn’t you priest? Your entire world is crashing down around you and I can repair it with just a sentence.”

“Dammit! Just answer me. Did you kill them?”

She giggled. The sound was a mockery of childhood purity, echoing out through the flat salt plain. It sent shivers down his spine.

“I killed them,” she said quite plainly.

“But it wasn't you was it? You weren't in control of your actions.”

“If I say I wasn’t your world settles back to normal.”

“Just answer the question Helen.”

“Why bother when you already know the answer?”

His grip tightened around the handle of the dagger. The soft leather was alarmingly comfortable in his hands, molding perfectly to their curvature. He had never threatened violence upon a person in his life, yet he raised the blade high above his head.

“Don’t play games with me,” he screamed at her, brandishing the dagger wildly. He was well aware that his actions appeared more desperate than intimidating. He tried to control himself but his mind would not obey. It swam with haunting implications that fed upon his mind like tiny insects. Pincers biting and gnawing at the unraveling folds of a fragile sanity. He begged that he was somehow wrong. That he was overlooking something important that would reduce this chaotic tangle into something that at least approached comprehension.

“Oh I killed them Priest, but maybe you already knew that. Maybe that’s why your holding that dagger. And maybe you might use it. I’ve seen you use it before.”

She stared at the dagger hungrily. Eyes wide, slowly licking her lips. A devil brandishing the mask of innocence in a deplorable parody.

The priest flashed back to yesterdays exorcism. Helen’s parents had been so relieved when he arrived on their doorstop, garbed in the traditional black robes of an exorcist, his silk purple scarf idly flapping in the cold breeze. They had confided in him. Confessed that they suspected their own daughter responsible for a series of local murders.

They had shown him her diary. There were no sentences in it, merely shadowy drawings of some unknown horror and the word, ‘Help’, written over and over again on each page. As soon as he had laid eyes upon Helen, there had been no question in his mind that she was beset by something dark. Something Demonic.

He held a strange duality of opinion upon demon possession. Detesting how an innocent was unfairly molested by the clawing and chittering phantoms of another world. Yet part of him felt an odd sense of sadness. His colleagues believed them to be ruthless creatures that conspired to deprive humanity of its hope, by corrupting those viewed as pure and wholesome. What could be more soul destroying than the slow corrosion of childhood innocence? He had never quite agreed that a demons motivations could be so singular, especially now. Because of her. Because of Helen.

“Your not under Satan’s influence anymore, are you child?”

“No, you saw to that didn’t you priest. You drew that pathetic creature from my body and pierced it’s black heart with that long shiny dagger of yours.”

The priest had done just that. After performing near twenty exorcisms within his life time, none had been as easy as Helen’s. The creature had barely protested when it was drawn from her body. He had expected the usual vicious atrocity. Waited for the gleaming fangs to hunger violently for flesh. For the long splintered fingernails to seek out his bones. For it’s keen and red lidless eyes to burn with an impossible hatred. He waited for all of it. Anticipated the ruthless assault, ready to both subdue and condemn.

It never came. The beast was raised out of Helen’s body almost as lifeless and limp as a stillborn child. Instead of the usual attack filled with unbridled rage the creature had simply turned towards the priest and complacently stared at him. He remembered that face, sunken eyes staring at him from it’s white hollowed skull. It’s features contorted into an expression that had conjured more fear and horror than the priest had ever known. It was not a look of hatred or rage, but of some reproachful resignation.

At the time he had denied that it. Pretended that his mind had been playing tricks. It was all he could do to not let it overwhelm him, but it was a lie. He could not place what it was or even why, but at that moment he had known that something was gravely wrong. Something that had such far reaching consequences that not even he could parse exactly what the significance of that expression had been.

Still, something inside of him had sensed it. The sunken and monstrous face invaded his mind. The demon had not even struggled when the he firmly sank the dagger into it’s white, leathery hide. Deep down he had suspected that ending the demon’s life would not cease the intense feeling that he was missing something. After all, here he was; the salt lake. A harsh and unforgiving grave to the handful of innocent people who had their lives taken away at this very spot. And Helen, the poor girl who’s body had been used as a vessel of Satan. Bent against her will she had been forced to kill all of them, but the picture still would not form properly in his thoughts. The docile hellspawn was only one piece of a puzzle that he felt wholly incapable of solving.

In truth he already had but dare not contemplate the meaning of it. Unfortunately such thoughts can only be repressed for so long before they begin to snake back into awareness. It was the reason he had returned to confront Helen. The reason he stood there on the salt plain, his long shadow bleeding into hers. The exorcism had been a success, yet it’s implications continued to hound him. When he had begrudgingly phoned Helen’s parents to inform them that he wished to check in on the girl before leaving town they hadn’t answered.

When he visited the house his worries had been correct. Helen’s mother lay dead upon the front porch. There had been no need to walk inside to confirm that the father had met a similar fate. Left with no where else to go the priest had returned to here, where it all began, upon the remains of a dead lake. Helen had been waiting for him patiently. What part had she played in this horrible tragedy?

“I drew the demon from you. Saw it with my own eyes! Why did you kill them Helen? Why did you continue?”

“Your smarter than this priest. Surely you’ve worked it out by now.”

The truth welled up inside of him like sour bile. Their had been inconsistencies in Helen’s exorcism other than the surprisingly subdued nature of the evil that had possessed her. He remembered Helen screaming at him, her voice twisted into demonic snarls that matched no timbre or pitch capable of a human. He remembered it dominating her small room as she shouted over and over again, 'You can’t take it from me, you can’t take it.’

Demons were creatures of habit. They referred to themselves as 'we’ and 'us’ supposedly because they were a collective evil. It was another common belief that the priest had trouble agreeing to. The erratic and frantic nature of the demons he had exercised seemed to have a quality that was almost schizophrenic. Their inability to refer to themselves as an individual appeared to be the result of a schism between their existence and the body in which they inhabited. One thing was certain. A demon is wholly incapable of recognizing that it is an individual self, and therefore
does not use the word; me.

It echoed in his mind. A dull thudding that threatened to break him upon every cruel repetition.

‘You can’t take it from me. You can’t take it from me.’

The priest could not stand it no longer. It was time that he confronted her. Exposed the truth. Exposed it to himself.

“Your parents showed me your diaries. The only writing in it was the word ‘help’, written over and over again.”

“And your point priest?”

“It wasn’t you that was asking for help.”

The girl clapped once. Her smile so wide that it appeared inhuman.

“Very clever.”

His worst suspicion was true.

“You used it didn’t you? You used it to kill!”

The girl laughed frantically.

“You priests are all the same. So fearful of these pathetic creatures you call demons. Well they are nothing!” She was shouting now, her lip turned up into a hateful leer. “I let my mind wander into the darkest corners of human awareness and do you know what I found? Not a legion of bloodthirsty demons. But a confused gaggle of wretched and confused creatures reaching out for some lifeline. Desperate to cling to anything that would bring some sense of life into their pathetic half existence.”

His mind whirled. The moral and ideological convictions that he had shaped over his lifetime, were in an instant, all but destroyed.

“No, stop this. Your lying!”

He knew she wasn’t.

He had thought her diary to be a desperate plea. The handwriting all she could muster to convey her cries of help whilst held prisoner in her own body. But those desperate pleas did not belong to Helen, and it had not been by her will that they were put to paper. The girl had never begged for help. The desperate plea for salvation had belonged to the demon.

“Do you know what I did priest? I stretched my arm out and grabbed one of those pathetic creatures. It was so easy. The power it gave me and you!’ She pointed towards the priest, her hand shaking violently. ‘You took it away from me. But there are more. So many more. And no one will ever believe you priest."

Nausea brought about by inability to comprehend the situation was suddenly replaced by a rage so intense that it was blinding. White and hot, surging up from inside of him, a typhoon of heat. He lunged at her, grabbing a handful of silky blonde hair, ripping it towards him. Her neck snapped backwards violently. She snarled in protest but he over powered her.

“I won’t let you kill again.”

“Thou shalt not kill, priest. You really think yourself capable of using that dagger on me?”

His hands were shaking. He had come to this town to destroy evil. An evil which had murdered eight innocent people. He had been ready to kill the monster that tormented them. That tormented Helen. To slay it and drive it back into the depths of hell. Did it really matter where it had come from? If he was willing to drive his blade through the heart of the demon, why not this girl? What difference was there between them?

It was she that was guilty of the crimes that he had so readily punished the demon for. Did that not count for something? How many innocents had he sent to the grave? How many souls reaching out for help had he ruthlessly thrown into blackened depths, to be crushed by the sheer weight of it’s stark isolation? None of them? All of them?

The dagger sank into soft skin, piercing the girls heart, just as he had the demon’s yesterday morning. Blood turned grains of salt into miniature kaleidoscopes of brilliant red hues.

She died in quite silence.

The priest began to cry.