Son of the endless night, p.23
Son of the Endless Night, page 23
"I don't know what to do, Paul."
"Nor do I. Suppose we order some lunch, then we'll talk about it again."
42
While Conor and the monsignor were making their choices from the luncheon menu of the Storrow Club, Dr. Margaret Renquist met Richard Devon in a stuffy interview room at the district courthouse in Chadbury. He had been in jail for one day less than a week and was still being sedated, a dosage of Thorazine she thought appropriate; the tranquilizer would not interfere with his taking of the standardized intelligence tests she had brought with her, and should not significantly affect his test scores.
Renquist was a heavyweight handsome woman in her fifties, and she liked a lot of pearls with her pinstriped business suit and frilly mayonnaise-colored blouse. Her hair was an almost iridescent shade of red, like the choice plumage of a fighting cock. She used rimless glasses for close work, popping them on and off the bridge of her nose as adroitly as a jeweler with his loupe. The glasses were fixed to a lapel of her jacket by a gold chain.
Her eyes came to grips right away. His were shy and tired, light-sensitive, irritated. "I could use a smoke," Rich muttered, looking at Adam Kurland.
"Dear, I'm a lifelong asthmatic, but if you must. I want you to be comfortable."
"Well— " Rich figuratively backed off from the unopened pack of Marlboros the lawyer had produced, and looked around at the straight wooden chair he was supposed to sit in. Renquist was already seated, opposite the empty chair at a small scarred table. He stifled a yawn and licked his dry lips, a boyish, deprived mannerism. He sat down slowly and tried to find something to do with his hands. There were two manila folders on the table, a ball-point pen, a notepad to Renquist's right, a clear plastic carafe of water that was three-quarters full, white Sty-rofoam cups. Finally Rich leaned on an elbow and partially shielded his face from the strong slant of light coming through Venetian blinds. His eyes, vaguely silvered, the pupils large, were bluntly motionless. Adam stood against a wall with his arms folded, watching him.
"Did we wake you?" the psychologist said indulgently, in response to his lassitude.
Rich yawned again, nodded. "There's not much to do. I sleep mostly in the daytime."
"And not at night?"
"He doesn't let me sleep at night," Rich said, in a voice so low and unemphatic she had to lean urgently over the table to catch the last syllables.
Adam stirred restlessly.
"Who doesn't?" Renquist asked, with her squinting, aggressive smile. "Is there someone in the cell with you?"
The lawyer, knowing better, shook his head. Rich seemed
not to have heard the question; then his head turned queerly, neck stretching: a smile broke out. It was not a happy smile. The facial muscles were abominably strained and his eyes danced in a kind of delirium. But almost as soon as the smile appeared, it switched off; his lips closed in a bleak line. He said nothing. They all waited, hearing a droning voice explaining a point of law in another room, courthouse echoes. A clangorous old elevator gate. Spiffy heel taps on marble. Finally Renquist acknowledged the impasse by squaring her shoulders and uncapping her gold Cross pen.
"You're Richard Devon. Do you have a middle name?"
"Padraic," Rich said promptly, adding, with a shading of admonition, "but I never liked being called Paddy."
"Richard Padraic Devon. Age?"
"Twenty-two."
"Do you know your social security number?"
After a moment's hesitation he reeled it off, then looked up at Adam. "Is my brother coming?"
"No, not today, Rich. He's in Boston."
Rich accepted this news with a solemnity that bordered on sorrow. "What day is it?"
"Thursday."
"I see."
"Richard," the psychologist said, reclaiming his attention, "when you're sleeping, how do you sleep?"
"On my back."
"I mean do you sleep well, or restlessly? Do you wake up frequently?"
"Yes, I do."
"Are you bothered by nightmares?"
Rich stared at her, then through her, with almost blinding intensity. Then he suddenly dropped his gaze, reached out carefully, and opened one of the folders on the table. He looked at the Stanford-Binet tests.
"This is going to be a waste of time. I can tell you my IQ is 136, which isn't bad."
"We'll get to those."
"If they're necessary."
"They're very necessary."
"If you say. I can't tell the difference anymore."
"About what, Richard?" "What's a nightmare, and what isn't. When I'm awake and when I'm asleep. Am I supposed to be crazy?"
"That's a word I never use."
His appeal having been tabled, Rich was attracted by the sound of Adam coughing lightly into his fist. "Something's happened," he said to the lawyer, "that you don't want to tell me about. Is it Conor? He's okay, isn't he?"
"Sure, Rich. Why wouldn't he be?"
"Threats have been made. He's not liked."
"Conor isn't?" Adam said, raising his chin and fingering a patch of razor burn on his throat. He glanced at Renquist, who sat twiddling with her glasses, casting fleet little ellipses saturated with rainbow color on the wall opposite the windows. Her eyes were so tightly screwed up in concentration only pinpoints of pupils showed.
"Who made the threats?" the lawyer asked.
Rich shook off the question with a doleful twitch of the head. "But it's his daughter. Hillary. She's the one who has the weakness; there could be trouble. Maybe I shouldn't ask Conor to visit me anymore. Still— I have to let him know. Karyn was buried this week, wasn't she?"
"That's right."
His grief, cold and compressed, flashed by with the stealth of a comet in funerary space. "Karyn's dead and gone. Polly's not so gone, though; I'm telling you now there's going to be big trouble."
Renquist wrote something on her notepad, looked up with a hard jutting meaningless smile. She reached for a cup and the carafe of water, momentarily taking her eyes off Rich.
"Better not touch that."
She stayed her hand. "Why not?"
"You can't drink anyway. It's frozen solid."
The psychologist, as if taking a dare, jauntily picked up the carafe; but she dropped it quickly, wrist unhinged by the weight. The carafe made a hard clunking sound on the tabletop, rolled in a clumsy half circle.
"Was I right? Frozen."
Her smile broadened, but she seemed numbed by this phenomenon. "It wasn't frozen earlier. How did you know?"
"I know a lot of things," Rich said curtly. "None of them good. I try to know everything— what I don't know can hurt me." His eyes whipped to the lawyer. "What did happen, that you're trying to keep from me?"
"I don't think it has any bearing on your case," Adam said. "The police were interested in talking to him, I know that much. The innkeeper— Windross— he was found three nights ago beside some railroad tracks in Massachusetts. Run over by a freight train."
"Goddam!" Rich said explosively, momentarily agog with implications. Then the news seemed to fade from his mind. He sat in a slump, worriedly, and took a deep breath. Before long his motor began to race. His lips jittered, and then he said, spilling the words out, "What it is— there's no dead or alive. Only there or not there. See? Sometimes the lines are crossed. I don't know how it happens. Or we ask for it. Point of entry: the solar plexus, or else from the left, at the base of the brain, where the neck and spine are joined. I'll be punished for talking so much, I know it, but I— Take my word for this. The human race is in worse trouble than ever. He's been waiting and waiting. Time, shit. Time means nothing to him."
"Him again?" Renquist said brightly, tapping her pen on the notepad.
"Yeah," Rich said, leaning a little toward her, elbows on the table.
"Can you tell me his name?"
"He doesn't want me to. This early."
"Why is it too early?"
"I don't make the plans or set down the rules," Rich said firmly. "My tongue is tied."
"Is it?"
"Want to see?"
"If you want to show me."
Rich opened his mouth a little and, modestly, stuck out the tip of his tongue.
"Looks all right to me," the psychologist said.
His mouth widened. Another half inch of furry tongue protruded.
"There is some coating. You're not digesting your food properly, which is certainly understandable."
"Ah, ahhhh," Rich went, head back, jabbing a finger toward his glottis. The gristly rings of his windpipe were apparent beneath the stubbled skin of his throat.
"Now, Richard."
"Ooookkkkk!"
"I am looking. There are no knots in your tongue. So you can tell me." The psychologist took off her glasses and smiled expectantly at Rich's distended face; his complexion had deepened from crimson to plum. Saliva wormed down his chin. "It won't go any farther than this room," she assured him.
There was a loud popgun sound; Adam flinched as something gleaming white shot like a projectile from Rich's mouth.
Maggie Renquist's head jerked, she uttered a cry of pain and consternation, clapping both hands to her face.
And in the next instant, in the blink of an eye, Rich did an amazing thing: a backflip from a sitting position, winding up prone on the floor behind the chair, face down, arms rigidly at his sides.
Adam was dazed by this feat, he couldn't believe what he'd seen. Renquist gasped several times; he turned his attention to her.
"What happened, Maggie?"
"My God— I don't know!" she exclaimed. "Something struck me here, in the face."
"Let me see."
Renquist lowered her trembling hands, and stared at Rich on the floor. "How did he get there?" She was feeling all round the bloody thing that protruded more than half an inch from her right cheek.
"I don't know, he just, uh, fell out of the chair or something, no, don't touch that, let me look."
On examination Adam saw that the object had the appearance of a front tooth, including the long exposed roots. The cutting edge was firmly embedded in the rouged flesh of Maggie Renquist's cheek. But he couldn't bring himself to trust his conclusions, so outlandish and improbable.
"Well, what it looks like, a, a tooth." His voice cracked immaturely, hadn't done that since he was fifteen.
She was standing, scraping her chair back, eyes on Rich.
"Never mind, I'm all right. Let's see about Richard."
He was catatonic, unbending. Moving him was like lifting the lid of a stone sarcophagus. Together, custodial, they laid Rich on his back. His eyes had rolled far up in his head. But his mouth was still open, and beyond the tranced rim they could see his tongue. Withdrawn like a moody serpent, but he hadn't swallowed it. His color was pale, not cyanotic, though Adam, hurrying, couldn't detect breath or pulse. The lawyer was having palpitations. It was obvious that Rich's upper right front tooth was cleanly missing from the burgundy socket.
"Get help," Renquist said sensibly. She staggered to her feet, wheezing. She touched her impaled, throbbing cheek and stared at the lying-down boy— motionless, but not dead, listening, like a seedbed, for rain.
She smiled as Adam beat it out the door, then began a slow retreat until she was standing in flecked slices of light, her back almost against the Venetian blinds, a little drop of blood coursing down her cheek from the wound. The many ruffles of her blouse fluttered like gills as her chest expanded hugely with the effort she was making to breathe. There seemed something vain and malevolent about his stasis, this state of ungrace. She sensed a presence, something reciprocally watching her, the impress of a calculating third eye secreted in flesh. With one hand she groped for her heart. Maggie Renquist was having an asthma attack. Smile still big and blase, but her eyes squinching shut from the oncoming pain and her lifelong fear of asphyxiation.
43
Conor, his throat scratchy from doing so much talking, took up his fork again during a pause to prod listlessly through the remains of the lobster salad he had ordered for lunch. Evidence of vigorous appetite surprised him. He hadn't been conscious of eating more than a few bites. His beer glass was almost empty again, there remained suds and a small half moon of gold in the thimble-sized bottom. He craved another but was uneasy about reordering. He hadn't kept count, but perhaps Monsignor Garen had counted for him.
Garen had been content with a green salad and a plate of chilled gazpacho; for the most part he had been a listening presence, studiously hunched, seldom raising his eyes from his meal even when he had questions to ask. Outside the window a flock of gulls broke apart with a noiseless big bang, creating an instant flurried universe before Conor's brooding eye: how often had God been provoked to say, Once more, and let's get it right this time.
The tickle in Conor's throat set him to coughing dryly; he sipped from his water glass.
"So," he said, "it's like a kind of— shadowy double-shuffling going on. I see Rich, and then I don't see him. There's somebody else he seems to be listening to, trying to please. Or appease. And then a peculiar, baleful light steals into his eyes and I know I'm seeing— the one who isn't Rich. The sensation is— more than eerie. It's terrifying."
"Um-hmm, um-hmm." Garen raised his napkin to his lips, placed it crumpled beside his plate, touched reflectively the small flashing crucifix worn outside his vest. "I know it must have occurred to you that what you've described may be a classic case of dual, or multiple, personality. In recent years psychiatry has come to recognize that these cases are far more common than once was thought possible."
"Psychiatry," Conor said with scant admiration, "is still an infant science. If there's any science involved at all. A couple of hundred years ago Rich simply would have been tried and executed for witchcraft."
"Joan of Arc is alive and medium well," Garen murmured, with a smile that revealed more gold than his crucifix could have contained; the body of Christ packed into one broad molar. The sight made Conor feel a little dizzy from chagrin.
Garen, misreading his distress, said instantly, with a thin knitting of brows, "I'm sorry. That was a bumper sticker I saw on the street a day or two ago. Insensitive of me, it just slipped out."
Conor chuckled belatedly. "But what I was trying to say— "
"Oh, yes, yes. This is the age of the empirical readout. No behavior is so bizarre it cannot be expressed binarily. Our devils are all emotional, due to faulty linkages in the id."
"But that's not where you and I come from."
"The devil exists, we have no doubts about that, on papal authority. And the devil would persecute us all, out of envy and malice for the imperfection of not being God himself. His name is legion. Humankind would be in a sorry state indeed if we did not have the love of the Father to protect us from these treacherous and corrupting spirits."
"What I don't understand is how someone like Rich could be afflicted."
"Is your brother a good Catholic?"
"So-so. But he's not against the Church, like so many kids these days."
"Would you like coffee, Conor?"
"No, thank you."
The monsignor checked his watch. "I'll have to be returning to the conference table in a few minutes." He summoned their waiter with a raised finger.
Conor said, "It's really been very kind of you to hear me out."
"Not at all. I'm deeply sympathetic, it's a terrible ordeal for you and your family. I must say I feel most of your evidence for possession is circumstantial. An equally impressive case for, say, paranoid schizophrenia could be made. Of course I'm no expert. You should bear in mind that authenticated cases of demonic possession are great rarities, thank the good Lord. Thousands of claims are investigated each year; only a fraction require intervention by an exorcist."
"I truly believe this is a claim that should be investigated."
"Conor, I shall take the matter under prayerful advisement. And if I can help— "
The bill was presented; Garen turned abruptly to sign it.
"Will you talk to an exorcist?" Conor persisted, aware of being like a large ugly bleating child.
"But I don't know any," Garen said, sounding mildly exasperated. He pressed a fist to his mouth, perhaps repeating the spicy gazpacho. "The Church is not unlike the CIA in that respect. Of course we have priests with those rare abilities demanded of exorcists, scholars of the Mysterium Iniquitatis; but their work is secretive, their investigations dangerous. One may not know who they are unless one demonstrates a need to know. And I'm aware that there is a strict protocol to be observed, beginning on the diocesan level. Evidentiary requirements. It can take a great deal of time, Conor."
In the vestibule of the Storrow Club the monsignor gripped Conor's hands with enthusiasm, in sight of escape from what had been a glum luncheon; whorish bankers would be a relief after Conor's recitation of woe.
"God bless. My love to your wife and fine children. Expect to hear from me."
He took the elevator, turning inside to face Conor squarely, his smile cheery and correct; he made the sign of benediction as the sliding door closed him out.
Abandonment: Conor's heart dropped with the invisibly plummeting elevator. I am no longer a priest. Done. For a year or more after renouncing his vocation he had suffered vexing spells of numbness in his extremities— fingers, toes, once the whole of his left leg. Again facing his limitations and the remainder of a bleak afternoon, Conor went into the men's room and stood rockily in a stall for several minutes, nearly convulsed, aware that he had introduced too much noontime richness to his touchy digestive system. He belched, swallowing air freighted with the odor from urinal antiseptic cakes to drive out even worse air; farted dismally and at length. In a few hours he would wrestle; a week of neglect of his conditioning routines had made him vulnerable. He was injury-prone anyway. One bad fall could end his second-rate career. Hospitalization. No money coming in. All up to him, children's survival, Rich in jail, what good was he to anyone? Gray metal walls of the loo a sepulchre of guilt. Throw it up or piss it out. He settled for pissing. Clouded yellow, not healthy, kidneys again. The outpouring seemed to empty his head as well as his bladder. His brain wizening, dying speeded up beyond the limits of normal daily cell attrition. Less smart than he had been at this exact time yesterday. Tomorrow was a block of granite he would have to chip his way into. Time pressing in on him, hurry, mortality the shadow of a cliff on the nape of his neck. With the solid stream of urine reduced to a dribble, he shook his penis to clear out the last drops. Expect to hear from me. But Paul had been right: where was his proof to engage the attention of the professionally skeptical? He was no less certain of his conclusions, and prolonged waiting would be torment— for him, especially for Rich. He must act. Surely there were books on the subject of demonic possession, even the Boston Public Library would have them. Accessible to all.
