Dark Debts (24 page)

Michael had been naïve enough to assume that “yes” meant “give me the text and I'll read the responses.” To Bob, it was a license to begin indoctrination procedures.

They took a cab to Bob's church. Bob led Michael to a classroom just off the fellowship hall. He instructed Michael to have a seat in one of the chairs, then Bob went to the green chalkboard up front. He picked up a new piece of chalk and broke it in half.

“Remember Venn diagrams?” he asked.

“I remember hating them,” Michael answered, his mind flashing on connecting circles with shaded areas and letters, and identities like “all attorneys named Sam who drive BMWs.”

“This isn't complicated,” Bob said, drawing a small circle on the board. “And it will help you to have a mental image.”

He drew an
M
inside the circle.

“Mind,” he said, as if that was supposed to make sense to Michael. He drew a larger circle around the
M
circle. He labeled that circle
B
.

“Body,” Bob said. “Home of the mind.” He drew another circle, intersecting the
B
circle, and labeled it
W
.

“Will,” he said.

“Whose theory are you diagramming?” Michael asked.

“Mine,” Bob said. He drew a larger circle around the
W
and
B
circles and labeled it
S
.

“Soul,” Michael said, getting the direction, if not the point. Bob nodded.

“Now,” he said, “Father Bob's Crash Course on Possession Theory.” He smiled; he was enjoying this.

“Is there going to be a quiz?” Michael asked.

“The final exam is tomorrow morning, and this is the only chance you've got, so pay attention.”

Michael smiled and nodded. Bob's face became deadly serious. “Most people think there are four stages to possession.”
Most people? Most people would have you committed.
“I see the actual possession stage as a couple of phases, although it's all a continuous process,” Bob continued, returning to the board. “The first stage is
infestation
,” he said as he wrote the word on the board, then began to draw another diagram.

“
D
for demon. Don't worry about what he is or how he came to be there; we don't have the time, and it's not important right now. During the infestation phase, he hovers here, on the periphery, looking for an entry into the body and therefore the will. There are a lot of physical manifestations at this point. Things the Ingrams described: lights turning on and off, toilets flushing, drawers opening and closing. Also, unidentified sounds: scratching, banging, hissing. The demon is stalking its prey. The point is to make the potential victim disoriented, off balance . . .”

Bob went to the board and drew again. “The next stage is
obsession
,” he said.

“The victim having been weakened, the demon starts to move in. Invades the soul, weakens the body and the will. Physical manifestations decrease, usually. Most of what is going on at this point is now going on inside. The victim feels agitated, anxious, ill-tempered, has trouble sleeping. People around him will notice a personality change, often a drastic one. The demon's influence starts to manifest itself in the actions of the victim. Danny's mood swings, outbursts. Older victims lose their defenses against old vices or pick up new ones—various addictions, mainly, which weaken the consciousness and consequently the will. All of which helps the demon accomplish its goal—to weaken the victim; mind, body, and soul.”

Michael nodded. He couldn't believe he was sitting here with a straight face, listening to a lecture on the operating patterns of demons. Part of him—in fact, the vast majority of him—had never believed any of this, even when he was begging the bishop to let them proceed with the exorcism. There was another part of Michael, though, to which all this hocus-pocus made some kind of sense, even rang true—as if it were something he remembered from another time, another place.

At the board, Bob was drawing again.

“What I call first-stage possession,” Bob explained. “The victim still retains full consciousness at all times, but he is strongly invaded. He might start to hear voices, maybe even see things.”

“Like what?”

“Bizarre animals, part human, part goat or pig—demons are very partial to cloven hooves, don't ask me why. Sometimes they're winged. Sometimes they're reptilian. Sometimes there's nothing but a vague black cloud. People who've seen it describe it as blacker than any earthly black.”

People who've seen it?

Michael's mind flashed on a commercial he'd seen for some reality-based (
yeah, sure
) mystery show: two men in overalls, with thick Ozark accents, describing the crashed UFO and dead aliens they'd chanced upon in the woods: “
Four were layin' on the grah-yund.
”

Bob was still talking.

“ . . . more sounds. Smells. The victim is assaulted in all his senses, even in his dreams. Dreams become violent and deeply disturbing; they cast a pall over the victim's waking hours, as well. The point of all this is to exhaust the victim and weaken his will until the demon finds what is known as an ‘entry point.' ” He stopped for a moment, giving Michael time to take it all in; then he went on. “We'd be here all night,” he said, “if I tried to explain that to you. The simplest way to put it is that the victim is weakened to the extent that he does something—he commits some act,
of his own will
, that aligns him with the Evil. Evil can never gain an entry without an invitation. It might pound at the door to provoke the invitation, but the victim himself is the only one who can open that door.”

Michael wanted to ask what kind of action the victim had to take—what had Danny done, for instance—but he had a feeling it was another “we'd be here all night” question.

“Then,” Bob said, solemnly, “there's stage two. That's where we are now.” He stopped to draw it.

Whether this was a lot of medieval hogwash or not, Michael felt an involuntary shiver as he watched Bob extend the “demon” circle to encompass the circles of body, mind, and most of the will.