The Exorcee

Chapter Eleven

Once the caffeine hit my ventricles, I realized I was feeling pretty good. A weekend’s respite had erased the last of the aches and pains from my latest scraps, I was riding that giddy high you get from staying up all night, and this already intriguing case had upgraded to absolutely fascinating. ’Long as the sister didn’t take a steel ruler to my cerebellum in the next few minutes, I thought this might actually end up being a nice day.

“Have a seat, Mr. Belmont,” she said. I figured I’d wait till the severity left her voice to remind her that it was just “Belmont.” The honorific made me want to jump up and look around for my dad.

“Thank you, Sister.” As I sipped my vaguely hazelnut-tasting coffee, I took a moment to do that thing I’m supposed to do and analyze my surroundings. It was a small room with two desks, festooned with the trappings of the Faith—crosses, pictures of the Blessed Mother, and a daily calendar of Scriptural quotations. Today’s was from Isaiah: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast, and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will never forget you. See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands.” The window looked out on the parking lot and there was only one door. Best bet for a weapon, apart from a pair of scissors in the pencil-jar, was the mini-fire extinguisher to my left. (Or the scalding coffee in my hand, come to think of it.)

She sat down behind one of the desks; I was situated in one of the facing chairs. “Principal Bloom is at a conference in Bennington for the next two days—which is fortunate for you, as she would most certainly have summoned the authorities at once.”

“I have a whole evolving theory on the interplay of fortune with temporal affairs.”

“I do not doubt it. You strike me as being quite intelligent, as well as quite cynical. My own theory is summed up by Lady Julian of Norwich.”

I knew this one. “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

“Clearly, some pains were taken with your education.” She sighed. Dear God, she was beautiful. “Mr. Belmont—I believe in Lucifer, the Enemy. I grew up in the Congo. I have seen men with machetes butchering the innocent and laughing—and I have seen worse things than men. Fr. Colbey tells me it is your task to find those who are Possessed.”

“Or possibly Possessed. I came here tailing a man called Norman Grey. . .” And I went into the whole thing. Rather like Fr. Joe, she listened with total attention until my account caught up with the two of us sitting in the office. I even explained about my extra half-sense which, apart from blurting it in the hallway just now, I never mentioned to anyone—except of course the padre. Even Hatfield didn’t know about that little advantage of mine (unless he’d figured it out for himself—he was awfully smart). When I finished, there was a long deep quiet in the room.

“Mr. Belmont—”

“Sister?”

“Yes.”

“Would you please just call me Belmont?”

And finally, a shadow of that merry smile of hers returned. “If you wish. I believe you—Belmont. And I am concerned for the soul of this Norman Grey, and all those who follow the Enemy. But I have to think of my children first.”

I nodded. “Of course, Sister. But what’s happening to Grey must be tied together with their plans for Danny somehow.”

Her face darkened again. “And you have no idea what those plans are.”

“No. Except that if they could turn him, he’d be an extremely powerful ally.”

Sister Immaculée shook her head. “I do believe you. Still, it is difficult to conceive of Danny Wright as some manner of super-man. He—he has always been so sweet, and normal, and—” She paused. “He did lift a fallen tree off one of his classmates during a field trip last year. But people can do extraordinary things—”

“Sister, my grandfather lifted a tractor off my cousin when we were kids. I’m well aware of the hidden potentialities of the human form. But you’ll have to take my word for it that this boy’s potential goes far, far beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”

“Well. I suppose—if you are right—then at least he is able to protect himself. But he and I must discuss all this in private before I can make any decisions on what to do next. Perhaps I should speak with his guardian as well.”

I asked, as casually as I possibly could, “He doesn’t live with his parents?”

An edge of severity returned to her expression. “Obviously, I cannot divulge personal details about my students. I should not have said anything.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll tell you what—why don’t I give you my number and you can contact me after you’ve talked things out with Danny.”

She nodded slowly. “Yes. . . That might be best. I will give you mine as well.”

Aw yeah, got her number! Shut it, Belmont, you putz.

After we exchanged digits, I got up and we shook hands again. “Peculiar circumstances, Sister, but just the same it’s nice to have met you.”

“You as well. May I ask what you plan to do next?”

“Right now I think I’m going to go home and ponder that very question. I promise I’ll keep you informed on developments.”

“I appreciate that, Belmont. We will speak again very soon. God bless you.”

“Thanks.”

As I left the school and headed back up the street to my car, I was trying to avoid thinking directly about Danny and his excessive—Danniness. Instead I focused on reviewing the odd string of happenstance that had brought me here. Evidently Asshole Alpha had come here this morning merely to confirm that Danny was still in town—possibly because my attack had made them nervous. But that happened Thursday night, and I wasn’t watching them Friday morning; they could have checked on him then. Maybe they did, but they lost track of him over the weekend. Back at Sacred Heart, first semester used to end on Friday of the third week of Advent—four days hence, in other words—to give families a week of down time before Christmas Eve. Same set-up here, most likely. If the GOB was planning to accost young Master Wright in some way, it seemed like a reasonably solid bet that it would happen sometime this week.

In fact—and here I reached old Dave and slid back in behind the wheel—that might have something to do with their bringing Grey to town. If they (somehow) knew about Danny’s power and hoped to harness it (somehow), it would make a certain degree of sense to bring in a turbo-charged operative of their own to help subdue him, assuming they (somehow) knew about Norman Grey. How would they know about Grey? How could they harness Danny’s power? How did they know about the kid in the first place?

“Damn it.” I fired up the engine and headed for the bridge back to Burlington. Way too many “somehows” here. But there was one piece of consolation. If those bastards thought the monster inside of Grey was a match for Danny Wright, they were in for a terrible surprise. He was whole orders of magnitude beyond their tie-clipped trump card. But what if—what if he—what if they—oh, hell.

Fishing blindly in the back seat with my free hand as I drove along, I managed to dig out the yellow wig that constituted the entirety of my admittedly minimalist disguise. I wasn’t worried about being spotted by Asshole Alpha, but I didn’t want them getting a clear enough look at my manly yet sensitive features to recognize me later on. Now don’t be concerned—I wasn’t going to go over there and burst in with no weapons or preparation whatsoever. I’m not crazy. I was just going to go knock politely on the door.

Dave and I pulled into their driveway at a sedate, non-threatening speed. Putting him in neutral, I got out and left the engine running. Didn’t even set the parking brake. It wasn’t as if I had multiple exit strategies: I wanted him ready to peel out at a picosecond’s notice. My—well—for brevity and convenience, we’ll call it my “plan”—was to be an out-of-towner asking for directions to UVM. If Uther was to be believed, and my gut told me he was, they were keeping Grey somewhere else. That meant my actual target wasn’t here, which was bad, but it also meant I didn’t have to worry about supernatural opponents, which was good. Not that I intended to engage the enemy—I only wanted a look at them. But then, I hadn’t intended to engage them last time either.

I knocked briskly at the front door and stood waiting. A look at them? What does that even mean? Honestly, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t secretly hoping their habitual greeting was, “Good morning, we’re the Grace of Baal and our sinister plans are as follows. . .” There wasn’t a specific objective here. That’s just not how I work. I wanted information and I wouldn’t get it sitting in my car, so the best I could think to do was poke at the situation and see what developed. I knocked again.

“. . .Huh.” Maybe they never answered the door. I could pretend to be delivering a pizza. Ooooh—pizza. I hadn’t had pizza in weeks. If I wasn’t ghoulishly tortured to death in the next couple of minutes, I should go get some pizza. Focus, buddy. “Right.” I trotted over to the garage and peered through the window. The Subaru wasn’t back yet. I stood there debating for a few moments, which was pointless since I already knew what I was about to do. Then I went back to the door and kicked it in.

It’s an old truism (and in my line of work, a highly useful one) that people don’t really want to call the cops. If they hear a single crash, no matter how loud or destructive-sounding, they’ll wait—and if they don’t hear another one, they’ll forget about it. Also, nobody assumes that a loud noise at ten in the morning is a break-in. I took a moment to glance around at the adjacent houses, and saw no sign that anyone cared or was even awake. I went inside.

“Crap.” They were gone. No question. The large open space just inside the door was empty but for a card table and some folding chairs. Sandwich wrappers, cans and bottles, a half-full ashtray. Beyond that was a desolate dining room, a ratty throw-rug abandoned on the hardwood floor, a broken lamp swept into the corner. A kitchen—bare gaping cupboards, an unclosed fridge with nothing inside but an old jar of applesauce. A decrepit-looking bathroom. I headed up the stairs.

Bedrooms, painted with scarlet pentagrams. Discarded mattresses. An inverted cross carved into the wall of the main hallway. That particular attempt at blasphemy never fails to amuse me. It doesn’t seem to occur to these keen-minded theologians that by flipping the cross, they’re reproducing the symbol which adorns the Papal throne in Vatican City in honor of St. Peter, who was crucified upside-down.

I came back downstairs and checked the basement, for form’s sake. Nothing. Hmmm. Further corroboration of my hypothesis that they planned to do something soon. Probably gathering in some central location. There had been at least seven of them in this house, but there could be dozens of them deployed in various locales around town. And I now had no leads on where they were, what they were about to do, or when it would happen.

Actually, that wasn’t quite true. I knew—or, at least, I could make an extremely educated guess—that it involved my new pal Danny in some way, and I had Sister Immaculée’s word that she would be in touch as soon as there was information to be shared. In the meantime, I was starting to feel hungry. And tired. And dirty. And my car was still idling outside, if no one had stolen it yet. I pelted back up the stairs. It was time to return to the Boardinghouse.