The Unexpected Exorcist: Episode 19

The Phantasmic Four Stages Of Demonic Possession

Recap

Last week on The Unexpected Exorcist, we found out about Sister Catherine’s difficult past. Why her dying mother didn’t want her to go into the storm shelter, and perhaps, why she became a nun.

Father Stevens barely made it out of the orchard with his life after an attack by a murder of crows. Or did he? This week we are back with Father Andersen who is approaching the orchard home with Chet Larrabee.

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- Adam Lutzi Rockwell

The Larrabee Fruit Farm

Father Andersen pushed his demon-glasses tightly against his face and walked cautiously toward the Larrabee’s home with Chet.

“I’m Father Andersen,” he said.

“I’m Chet. Chet Larrabee. Own this place. Where’s that other priest going? He’s really high-tailing it. They told me on the phone the church was sending two of you. That it might take two of you to… to fix our situation.”

Father Andersen glanced over his shoulder. Father Stevens was gone. Disappeared around the bend in the road.

“Father Stevens went for help.”

“Help? What kind of help? Isn’t that why you’re here?” asked Chet.

“The kind of help we will need if we want to survive the day,” Father Andersen said in all seriousness with a gray face.

“Survive? What are ya’ talking about?”

Father Andersen attempted to speak in his best possible English, but Swedish was his first language. He had lived in the United States for over ten years but could never master the nuances of American-English. Or the humor, as it was often pointed out to him by his colleagues at the DED.

Transferring from the EU’s Department of Exorcisms was a dream he had had for years. He wanted to experience American culture. It had always fascinated him. Now, Father Andersen just wanted to get back to his home church in Gothenburg, Sweden, and live the quiet life. The life of a simple priest. But he knew that would no longer be possible after what he had seen. After what he had done. They would always come for him. The demons. He would never be free.

“Yes, Mr. Larrabee. Survive. You have a bigger problem than you might imagine. I should say… we have a bigger problem than we had come prepared to deal with.”

Father Andersen studied the second floor of the home but didn’t understand what he was seeing. There were multiple entities in the home. All in the northeast corner of the second story. That was where Chet Larrabee’s wife was located. Of that he had no doubt. A large, purple demon had manifested when they pulled up. It was unlike anything he had ever seen. Definite class-one. It comported with what Sister Catherine had described in her after-action report.

He was sure they were in trouble. He silently prayed to God as they walked.  They were both quiet.

Father Andersen stopped abruptly, just twenty yards from the house.

“Well, come on now, Father. Don’t go ostrich on me. Let’s get this over with. I want my Janey back to normal!”

“Before entering this domicile,” said Father Andersen, “please tell me how long this has been going on. The local parish was not able to give us much information. Just that your wife…” he looked in his notes, “… Janey… might be possessed. They were right about that, I am afraid. What else can you tell me?”

“Well, Father, a couple months ago things in our house started going crazy. Things flying off the shelves. Bumps in the night. You know, the usual ghost shit. We thought the place was haunted, that my Pappy had finally come back from the grave.”

“Pappy? What is a Pappy”

“That’s my father, Father.”

“I see,” Father Andersen said robotically. He had counseled so many people he had become cold to everything.

Father Andersen knew exactly where the story was heading. Possessions always took the same route. Well, usually. What was happening in the Larrabee home wasn’t a simple haunting.

Possession has four stages, which usually take place over the course of two to eight months. The first stage is infestation by demon. This is the stage where people think a simple ghost lives in their house. Most people rightfully laugh off a ghost haunting. It was the 5% of hauntings that turned out to be something much worse.

If the demonic force was allowed to linger in the home for very long, the second stage was reached. Oppression by demonic forces.

Chet continued, “Janey started getting real depressed. Then anxious. She wouldn’t leave the dang house. I thought that was kind of weird because she said the house scared her. She said she just couldn’t go outside, so I paid the doctor to come out here on a house call. That doctor said that Janey was experiencing… umm… oh yeah, seasonal affective disorder. Gave her some Prozac and anxiety meds. Nothing helped. She just kept getting worse.”

Father Andersen put his finger on his chin, thinking. “Did Janey take the medicines?” Three out of four times when the DED was sent out on an exorcism it turned out to be a false alarm. Usually. This wasn’t one of those times, as he could clearly see.

Often it was mental illness or a prank. As an adept seer, Father Andersen knew what was up there. Something he had never seen before. This was no prank.

The DED only employed six adept seers. It is not something that could be learned. It was a gift given by God to the few humans that could handle it.

“Yes, sir, I made sure she took them medications.”

“Good. That is good, Mr. Larrabee. Then what happened?”

“Janey started acting strange. Up all night and when she fell asleep, she woke up with the night terrors. Screamin’ and cryin’. She kept telling me there was an evil in the house. It was all around. I heard bumps and such but didn’t feel anything evil. Don’t even know what evil would feel like. I can tell you that what she was going through was awful and she believed it was real. I just don’t know anymore.”

A tear formed in Chet’s eye. “Now, she just spends her days stompin’ around her big knitting room speaking in tongues.”

Father Andersen was sympathetic, but he had a job to do. The third stage of possession was Obsession. Laymen usually didn’t understand or believe in the progression of demonic possession. If only the Larrabees had called their parish sooner. The demon could still have been stopped with ease at the obsession stage.

Before Legion was unleashed.

The final stage, of course, is possession. When the demon has taken over the human host completely. It was almost impossible for the human victim to fight off the demon on their own at that point. Their soul, their consciousness, is pushed so far down that, if they survive the possession, the victims often don’t even know they were possessed.

If a victim of possession does not get professional help from an exorcist, a gateway to Hell is opened directly into the human-vessel. Up to twenty-seven demons can reside in an adult human. Willing or unwilling.

Father Andersen moved to the front porch. He put his hand on the front of the porch and felt the home.

Blackness came over him. Legion screamed through the wooden beams of the home. He let go, shaken.

He looked over his shoulder at Chet, fear in his eyes. “Mr. Chet, I need you to think. What precipitated all this?”

“Precipitation? Well, there’s been some snow.”

“No, Mr. Larrabee, not the weather. Did you bring anything into the house before the possession began?” Father Andersen was an impatient person with an incredibly bad bedside manner. “A new piece of furniture perhaps? Usually, it is an old item. What did you bring into that house?!” he almost shouted.

A light bulb went on in Chet’s head. “I know exactly what brought that God damned demon into the house! We went to this estate sale over in Antioch just before all this started and Janey bought a Ouija board! A stupid Ouija board! And I just let her!” He shook his head. “We shouldn’t have been messing around with that thing.”

Father Andersen often heard tales of the mysterious Ouija board from his subjects. Ouija boards were the biggest myth in the world of demonology. Oftentimes, structure-bound ghosts interacted with the boards, but demons could not be summoned through the use of the board. The planchette would need a diamond mounted in it to create a working gateway. These were extraordinarily rare.

It was all the stories of movies and tall tales. A year earlier a boy in South Carolina played a prank with a Ouija board, making his mother believe that he was possessed. When Father Andersen and Father Stevens arrived on scene at that supposed possession, he immediately saw it was nothing. It turns out the boy had seen a movie that used a Ouija board to summon the devil. All he wanted was to get out of school.

“Is there anything else from this sale?”

“A wooden urn.”

“No, that would not be it.”

“But it’s an urn!”

“A WOODEN urn.” It could not summon a demon.

“Well, the only other thing she bought was a fancy old pearl necklace. Lady said it was vintage.”

“Did you say pearl?

“Yeah, Father, it’s her new favorite piece of jewelry. She wears it all the time. It looks good on Janey.”

Father Andersen immediately suspected the pearl. Vintage jewelry was especially dangerous to the unsuspecting public. One never knew where the precious stones or diamonds originated. If a demon enchantment was placed on the pearl, anytime in the past, it was dangerous.

A pearl was the perfect demonic gateway. It was the only precious stone that came from within a living being. If an enchantment had been placed on the pearl by either a demon or a demon’s familiar, or even used by an exorcist to capture a demon, the pearl became a permanent gateway. Until it was sealed in gold or destroyed.

“Come, Mr. Larrabee. We must get that pearl necklace off your wife and destroy it. God knows how many demons it has let into your home.”

“Destroy her necklace? Are you kidding me? If Janey wakes up and finds out we stomped on her favorite piece of jewelry she’ll kill me! Wouldn’t that be defeating the purpose of all this?”

“If we don’t destroy that pearl, if it is what caused the manifestation, all the demons it has let onto our plane will wreak havoc on our world.”

Father Andersen moved quickly to the front door. “Come Mr. Larrabee, we are going to have a long day ahead. Hopefully we can hold out until the tactical team arrives. If the tactical team arrives.”

“The tactical team?” he asked.

“Yes. A team of highly trained exorcists. We will do our best. Perhaps we will survive. Perhaps.” Father Andersen’s famous bedside manner again.

Janey howled from upstairs just as Father Andersen put his hand on the door handle. The entire house creaked and groaned.

Father Andersen couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The whole house pulsated with randomly changing auric colors. It wasn’t just one demon.

It was Legion.

For the first time in a long time, Father Andersen was scared. He wished he’d had a swig of the whiskey he had in a silver flask in the glove compartment.

He would have to do this one stone sober.

He turned the handle and they went in.

The DED HQ

Uziel and Sister Catherine casually walked up another white hallway eating hamburgers out of tin foil wrappers. Uziel examined his burger and shook his head. “Sister, I’d eat just about anything right now because I need calories, but this is almost as bad as my high school cafeteria food.”

“I think it’s good,” she said, wolfing it down. “You’re too picky.”

“Too picky? If I can’t get my smoothie maker and protein powder down here, I’m gonna’ go crazy.”

He messed around with his shielded demon-glasses. They agitated his nose and he scratched under the rim.

“You are the first person to complain about the food. It’s free for cripes sakes.”

“You can’t live on this kind of food. We need some clean protein. Elk meat. Fresh spinach. Heirloom potatoes. This…” he looked down at his burger, “… can barely be considered nutrition. You don’t eat this on the regular, do you?”

She got a coy expression and shrugged her shoulders.

“You are killing yourself! You cannot eat this more than once a week. We’ll work on it. Together. It’s a good thing you met me.”

“Oh, you’re going to be a blast in the field. I suppose you won’t let me get In-And-Out either?” She finished her burger and licked her fingers.”

“I’m just trying to help, you know I was a dietetics minor in college?”

“You don’t say?”

“I need to see the gym. I work out three hours every morning. I eat what I eat for a reason and I’m in perfect health.”

Uziel was a biohacker of epic proportions. He sometimes became a bit obsessive about it and he knew it. It really annoyed his last two girlfriends. “If we’re going to eat burgers like this every day, we might as well just start smoking.”

“Start?” she asked.

“You better be joking.” He shook his head and finished his burger, crumpled the wrapper, and searched for a garbage. At the end of the hallway a garbage can overflowed with trash. “Did a demon get out? This is filthy.”

Sister Catherine examined the mess and shook her head. “One of our two janitors has been out sick with some virus for the last week.”

Uziel pulled the sack up and started to put the garbage that was on the floor in.

“Anybody can just pick it up. Jeez.”

“Umm, you’re not supposed to do that. A union thing. Come on, clean freak.”

He tied off the bag and they continued down the hallway.

“We’re here,” said Sister Catherine.

“We’re where?”

“The tactical equipment room. Don’t get weird in there.”

“Weird? How could anything get much weirder?”

They stood in front of another door, but this door was different than the rest. It was a dark metal with elaborate Latin phrases, hieroglyphs, and other symbols he didn’t recognize etched into the side of the door. What appeared to be the face of a demon with two emerald eyes and an open mouth was the center of the door.

“Quaint,” said Uziel, stepping back from it. “Looks more like the gateway to Hell than the equipment room.”

“Give me a second.” Sister Catherine whipped out another weird, oversized skeleton key. She put it into the demon mouth and applied slow pressure. The key seemed to need some cajoling.

“Wiggle it,” said Uziel.

“I got it!” She wiggled it. “This door can be tricky.” She shimmied the key and it finally turned.

“See! Wiggling always works.”

The sound of clanking came from the mechanism deep inside the door. Sister Catherine stared into the eyes of the demonic relief and recited from memory, “Paecipio tibi per nutu dei, ut dinos nos ad introitum invenia.” The door groaned, and then opened two inches. “Come on,” she said, pushing it open.

“What did you just say?”

“I’ll teach you the phrase later. Now, onto business. Keep those demon-glasses on.”

“Okay.”

He followed her into the room, definitely not expecting what he found.

<Episode 18 | Table of Contents | Episode 20>

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