The wakening, p.1
The Wakening, page 1
JG Faherty
The Wakening
FLAME TREE PRESS
London & New York
Signs of Possession
(from The Roman Ritual of Exorcism)
The following are symptoms of possession as described in The Roman Ritual of Exorcism. In most cases, a possessed individual will have one or more of the symptoms listed.
Victim speaks or understands unknown languages without any prior knowledge thereof.
Victim clearly knows things that are distant or hidden.
Victim can predict future events.
Victim has an intense hatred for holy things.
Victim shows a physical strength far beyond what the individual should be capable of.
Fear or loathing of the name of God, Jesus, Mary, or any of the saints.
Pain or physical discomfort in the presence of holy objects, upon hearing prayers or Scripture read, or witnessing sacraments being performed.
Supernatural activity, including but not limited to levitation, the appearance of unusual objects, and the presence of ectoplasm.
Stages of Possession
Oppression: When a demon plagues an individual. This can include physical torment, health issues, and even paranormal activity in the victim’s vicinity.
Obsession: This encompasses mental, physical, and emotional torment. Often a person will act irrationally and show signs of abuse.
Infestation: When a demonic entity takes residence inside a person. This can include all the above signs, plus speaking in tongues, levitation, stigmata, and psychic phenomena.
SECTION ONE – Opression
Los Angeles, Present Day
Excerpt from Good Morning with Josh and Jenny
Jenny Durso: “Tell me, Mr. Graves, what made this such a difficult case for you?”
Stone Graves: “I could name a dozen things, Jenny, but really what it came down to was information and interpretation. The Catholic Church actually has a list of signs, what they call symptoms, of possession. You can find it in The Roman Ritual of Exorcism.”
Onscreen behind Graves, a list appears.
Josh Black: “That’s some list!”
Graves: “It is. And usually it’s very accurate. But what they don’t take into consideration is that the presence of a supernatural being is a lot like getting sick in the winter.”
Durso: “How so?”
Graves: “Because you can’t always tell what you’ve got. A cold, the flu, a sinus infection. A lot of the symptoms are the same.”
Black: (points at list) “Ectoplasm and physical discomfort? Sounds a lot like my last flu!”
Audience laughter.
Graves: “Trust me, Josh. Having a demon or poltergeist in your house is no laughing matter. We learned that the hard way.”
On the screen, a picture of a covered body being taken away by two EMTs appears. The audience goes silent.
Durso: “When we come back, Stone Graves will tell us more about his new book, A Town Possessed.”
Chapter One
Guatemala, fifty-five years ago
Evil lives here.
Father Leo Bonaventura shivered as he entered the remote village of Tapajo. Satan’s presence lay across the tiny settlement like a malevolent blanket, woven between the scattered huts like a deadly miasma. Darker than the jungle night, more oppressive than the cloying, sulfur-tainted mist rising from the nearby river, it lapped at skin and clothes with an oily, invisible tongue.
“This way, Padre.” Benito, the native boy who’d met the boat at the dilapidated wooden dock, tugged at Leo’s sleeve. He wore a ragged tie-dye t-shirt and cut-off denim shorts. Despite his preoccupation with the coming task, the priest still managed to feel more than a small measure of discomfort at the boy’s knowledge of both English and Spanish. Not to mention his clothing.
Hundreds of years later and the handiwork of the Church is still evident everywhere, both good and bad. We brought them new languages, gave them education and clothes, and showed them the path to Heaven, but at what cost? Their identity, their culture.
Ahead of them, someone – or something – cried out, a long, animalistic howl that raised gooseflesh on Leo’s arms despite the stifling tropical humidity and heat. Hoarse shouts followed, a barrage of words in no language Leo recognized.
“Venga, Padre. Come.”
Leo realized he’d stopped walking. He forced his body to move forward, fighting the instinctive urge to turn and flee. Around them, the jungle sat silent, as if the birds and animals had gone into hiding or fled the area to escape the unnatural presence that had invaded their territory.
Benito led him to a large thatch hut on the far side of the village. A communal hall, perhaps, the priest thought. A group of about twenty villagers stood nearby. Waiting.
Waiting for me. Their last hope.
Their savior.
Although he kept his face impassive, Leo grimaced inside. He came not as a savior, but as a warrior. A big difference.
Unlike saviors, warriors didn’t always triumph.
Leo paused at the entrance to the hut, wiped sweat from his face and neck, and whispered a short prayer for safety.
“Gracious Saint Joseph, protect me and those around me from all evil as you did the Holy Family. Amen.”
As he crossed himself, he noticed the villagers repeating the gesture. More evidence of the Church’s subjugation of primitive cultures.
We force them to change their gods and promise them a better life, but we also bring diseases for which they have no resistance, and medicines that half the time don’t work as well as their own.
“Gracias a Dios que venites, Padre,” whispered an older woman. Thank God you came.
I hope her faith isn’t misplaced.
Leo nodded to her, took a deep breath that filled his lungs with oppressively moist jungle air, and then pushed through the vine curtain that served as the hut’s doorway.
The low roof magnified the humidity to almost sauna-like conditions, and Leo found himself mopping more sweat from his face before his eyes finished adjusting to the dim, green-tinted interior, where the only light came from two small candles atop a wooden crate.
“Leo. Thank God you’re here,” someone said in a wheezing voice.
Halfway across the circular dwelling, two men knelt next to the prone form of a boy, the child nude except for a ragged towel covering his private area. The man who’d spoken, Father Jorge Sanchez, rose to his feet, the cracking and popping of his ancient joints audible to Leo from ten feet away. Sanchez wore the purple silk stole of an exorcist over the customary black shirt and trousers. His clothes clung to his thin shoulders and round belly, plastered on by sweat. It was the first time Leo had ever seen him without the traditional black cassock. As he approached Leo, he removed his thick glasses and wiped uselessly at them with a stained handkerchief.
Time has not been kind to him. Leo watched his old mentor’s stiff movements. Ten years since I last saw him, but he looks like he’s aged twenty. Is that one of the hazards of the position? Will it happen to me as well?
The idea of growing old and losing his faculties disturbed Leo deeply, which surprised him. He’d only recently completed his studies in exorcism and been assigned his first Church posting, in Guatemala City. Until now, he’d never contemplated his own mortality. He quickly pushed the thought aside to focus on the matter at hand. The matter he’d trained the past five years for; that had, in fact, been his sole reason for joining the Church.
To rid the world of Evil.
Behind Sanchez, the boy on the ground let out a loud moan and his body went into convulsions, legs and arms shaking, heels drumming against the dirt floor, head whipping back and forth. Even in the badly lit confines of the hut, the child’s eyes stood out, wide and white against the darkness of his skin and the surrounding gloom.
“Ay, Dios mio.” Sanchez hurried back to the boy.
As Leo followed, he felt the gaze of the boy’s parents, who stood near the back of the hut. Ignoring their pleading looks, he set down his traveling case and knelt while Sanchez whispered passages in Spanish from a tattered Bible.
“You must be the doctor,” Leo said to the other man, who gripped the boy’s arms and attempted to hold him still. “I’m Father Leo Bonaventura.”
“John Zimmerman.” The doctor was thin and pale, with close-cropped hair almost the same carrot red as Leo’s. He looked a few years older than Leo’s twenty-four. Leo guessed he’d recently graduated medical school and had to complete some kind of foreign service in return for a reduced tuition. A black medical bag sat next to him, closed. That simple fact indicated the man had already done everything in his power for the boy.
Which was why Jorge sent for me.
The idea of his mentor needing help worried Leo; it had, in fact, led to many hours of lost sleep during the four-day trip from Rome to Guatemala.
If things are so bad the teacher has to turn to the student….
The boy screamed again, the same primitive cry Leo had heard while walking through the village. Without warning, the boy sat up, easily breaking free from Zimmerman’s grip even though he couldn’t have been more than twelve years old and all of seventy pounds.
“You!” the boy shouted and pointed at Leo, who fell back in surprise. “I will see you dead, Leo Bonaventura. Your heart will boil and I will d evour your soul!”
The child stood, the cloth falling away to reveal an erect penis. He waggled his hips in a crude, suggestive manner. Leo wondered how he could have thought the boy was short, seeing him tower over their heads. Then the doctor gasped and Leo looked again. The boy floated a foot above the ground, hovering in the air like an angel.
Or a demon.
Leo didn’t doubt the existence of demons. He’d read too many tomes, heard too many stories from Sanchez and the others at the Vatican, had seen too much himself in his young life, for there to be any doubt.
However, he hadn’t been a hundred percent sure about the native boy’s condition until now.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he whispered, making the sign of the cross with his thumb.
“Fuck your God!” the boy screamed, his face contorting into a mask of rage.
Leo reached for his bag, which contained his Bible and exorcism paraphernalia, but Sanchez was faster. Standing with surprising speed, the old priest cast a handful of holy water at the child, who shouted in pain and fell to the dirt floor.
“Nāṉ uṉṉai narakattil pārppēṉ!” the boy cried, and then his frail form began to shiver uncontrollably, as if he lay naked in a snowy field instead of a sweltering jungle. The doctor looked up at Sanchez, who nodded once and then motioned to Leo.
“Come with me. We must talk.”
“But the boy…?”
“The demon will not return for an hour or so. Anibal has been like this for more than two days. He has…spells…but in between he is mostly delirious with fever.”
“Spells?” Leo held the fiber curtain aside so Sanchez could walk through. “Is that what you’re calling them?”
“Yes. What words would you prefer? Manifestations? Fits? Seizures? Haven’t you learned words mean nothing? Things are what they are, regardless of what you call them.”
Sanchez led them to what appeared to be a gathering place. Groups of logs had been peeled, notched, and fitted together to create crude benches. They took seats and Leo sighed. Although the temperature still sat well into the nineties, the evening air felt cool and fresh on his skin compared to the sweltering confines of the hut.
For a few minutes they sat without speaking, and once more Leo took note of the jungle’s unnatural silence. Without the background noise of animal sounds, the low gurgling of the lazy river reached him clearly. A loud moan came from one of the other huts, followed by the unmistakable grunting of two people engaging in intercourse. Leo frowned, and his old mentor noticed.
“It is the demon’s influence.”
Leo considered this. It was unusual for a demon to affect those surrounding the possessed individual. He tried to think of which ones might be capable, but the lack of information made it impossible to narrow down the possibilities.
“What else has been demonstrated?” he asked, his voice hushed, an unconscious reaction to the stillness all around them.
“Pardon?” Sanchez jumped slightly, as if startled from a doze. Knowing what the man had been through the past week, Leo wasn’t surprised his old friend had nodded off.
“You wouldn’t have called me all the way here for bouts of seizure and occasional levitation. To ask for my help, for anyone’s help, you must have a very good reason.”
Sanchez sighed and nodded. “You know me too well. Should I start at the beginning?”
Leo nodded. “That is always the best place.”
“Sí, así es.” Sanchez took off his glasses and attempted to clean them again. With a smile, Leo handed him a clean handkerchief. “Ah, thank you. Yes, that’s better. Where was I?”
“The beginning.”
“Yes. Dr. Zimmerman called me a week ago, asking for my help. He studied medicine in Rome and we had met several times while I performed last rites. He said he had a patient suffering from fever and convulsions and none of his medicines had worked, just like nothing the family had tried had worked before that. In his words, ‘I believe the Devil has taken this boy.’ When he told me the local priest had died while ministering to Anibal—”
“What? A priest died here?” Leo’s shock came as much from his having heard nothing about it, despite being in a parish only fifty or so miles away, as from the sad fact of its occurrence.
Sanchez nodded, his face grim. “Yes. Father Hector Ecchivaria. He walked out of that hut and threw himself into the river. His body hasn’t been found.”
“Hector? I heard he died in a boating accident on his way to visit a village.”
“The local government didn’t want a story about demons spreading to other areas.”
While Leo digested that news, Sanchez continued speaking.
“When I arrived, the boy was as you saw him just now, shaking with fever. The first thing I did was begin a prayer for good health. No sooner did I speak the first few words than Anibal sat up and swore at me, much as he did to you before.”
Leo allowed himself a small smile. “Yes, he does seem to have quite a way with words.”
“More so when you find out he neither speaks nor understands English.”
Despite the heat, a cold shiver ran through Leo’s body. “Are you sure? Even if his family doesn’t speak it, plenty of trading boats pass through here. Others in the village speak it. The boy could’ve picked up any number of foul words from them, or from the sailors.”
Sanchez shook his head. “No, his family assured me those were the first words in English they had ever heard him utter. Even so, he has spoken in other languages as well. Tamil. Hebrew. Latin.”
“So, speaking in tongues. What else?”
“He has immense strength. You saw how he pushed Zimmerman to the ground? I’ve seen him break free of four men at once. Then there is the levitation. And finally, he shows a complete intolerance for anything holy, including the names of God, Jesus, or any of the saints.”
“All of the signs,” Leo said, as much to himself as to his onetime teacher. “But that’s not why you called me. Something is different this time.”
Another nod from Sanchez, his dim figure more spirit than human in the darkness, an image that made Leo shiver anew.
“Besides his foul epithets, Anibal has also spoken…a name.”
“What was it?”
“Asmodeus.”
Leo’s thoughts dissolved into nothingness. For a moment, his whole body went numb. He no longer felt the sweltering heat, the savage mosquitoes, the rough wood of his seat. He opened his mouth, but it took several seconds for the words to form.
“Asmodeus? Are…are you sure? Perhaps you misheard—”
“I didn’t. He repeated it more than once. He even said it while speaking to me in Spanish. He referred to himself as Lord Asmodeus, the one before whom someday all shall bow.”
Leo stared at the old priest, who’d seen so many things in his life, and saw fear in his friend’s eyes. Asmodeus was more than an ordinary demon. A prince of Hell, one of the original banished ones. A fallen angel who commanded legions in the name of Satan and served as the Dark One’s left-hand confidant. Many ancient writings referred to him as the many-headed beast and the demon of lust.
If he truly has come into our world….
“Wait,” Leo said, as a thought came to him. “One of the first things you taught us is that demons lie. How do you know it’s really Asmodeus?”
“That is the reason I sent for you.” Sanchez gripped Leo’s arm. “I have made three attempts to banish this evil from the boy, but it only grows stronger. Its foul presence is spreading through the village. You can feel it, it permeates the air like a terrible odor. For days now, the animals of the jungle have been dying and the people of this village…several have taken their own lives in the river and others have experienced episodes of unbridled lust, even rutting like beasts right in the center of the village. It has grown steadily worse since…Father Ecchivaria’s visit. I fear he may have attempted to drive the demon out on his own.”
“What? An untrained priest performing an exorcism?” Leo gave an involuntary shudder. “Why would—?”
“We do not know what he did or did not do. Perhaps he simply read the rites to appease the family, or test the boy. Of course, if he did carry out the rites….”
