Deliver Us from Evil (16 page)

Here's my mother-in-law's true story, exactly as she told it to me. She was awakened one night by a suffocating pressure on her chest. When she opened her eyes, she saw a hooded specter. Its body appeared solid, but when she looked where the face should have been, there was only blackness. It looked like a monk, but its words were full of unholy menace: “I'm going to kill you!”

Beyond fear or even dread, Carol turned to prayer and began to recite the Hail Mary. The pressure on her chest grew more and more intense, and after reaching the words “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death,” she lost consciousness. Her plea for help was heard, and she woke up the next morning to the sound of birds singing. She used the holy water I'd given her, and over the next several days, it slowly washed her terror away.

*   *   *

The McKenzie family, however, was still trapped in a web of fear. Convinced that the demon would hunt them down wherever they fled—or be lying in wait when they arrived there—Claudia and the exhausted children all huddled together on Jessica's waterbed like cornered animals. Even with every light blazing and big, muscular Artie standing watch at the door, no one could sleep. Their hearts pounded, and their nerves were so on edge that if one of them moved, everyone jumped. Periodically, the house made some tiny creak, and they all screamed.

The incubus, however, didn't attack that night or the next. For the next month it did absolutely nothing, except let the family marinate in their own terror, not knowing when—or how—it would next assail them. You might say it was toying with them, playing a cat-and-mouse game. With bestial cruelty, it was waiting for its prey to be lulled into a false sense of security.

Gradually the family let down their guard and resumed their old sleeping arrangements, except that the children now slept two to a bed, with the twins in one room and Monique in her cousin's room on the first floor. That's when the predator from Hell pounced.

“It was a Sunday,” Jessica explained. “Sunday is never a good day in this house—and on a scale of one to ten, this Sunday was a ten! I woke up sweating and looked at the clock. It was three o'clock in the morning. That's when a lot of horrible things happen here.”

Her cousins, the twins, also woke up drenched in sweat. “We heard crashing footsteps, looked at each other, and said, ‘It's coming!'” Carolyn added. To their incredible relief, the steps ran past their door and stopped.

Jessica, who'd been sleeping on the waterbed with Monique, shouted, “It's at
our
door!” Astonishingly, the locked door swung open, and a huge dark shape oozed into the room.

“I felt it land on the bed,” the cousin continued. “It was leaning over us, and the waterbed went crazy! It was shaking like the ocean during a storm. I was thrown against something, maybe its chest. The thing was roaring at us so loudly that I could feel my whole body vibrating from the noise. I was scared to death.”

Claudia was jolted from the first sound sleep she'd had for a month. “The children were screaming hysterically, and over the din I heard Monique shrieking at the top of her lungs ‘Mom, it's getting Jessica!' I fell out of bed, trying to run to them. It felt like I was running in slow motion and would never get there in time. My legs felt like lead.”

It seemed like an eternity before she reached Jessica and Monique. “Their room was as cold as a refrigerator. I threw my body across theirs and saw something running out of the room. It looked like a blur, it was moving so fast.”

The twins began shrieking in terror.
The beast was now standing at the foot of their bed!

“I pulled the covers over my head to hide,” Marybeth said, “but the thing got on top of me. It was screaming horrible things in a male voice. What it was saying was so awful I couldn't possibly repeat it, but I thought I'd die of fear! I tried to scream, talk, anything, but I couldn't even whimper. It was all over me like a blanket, and I was suffocating.”

Wild with rage and terror, Claudia burst into the room, ready to take on ten demons with her bare hands, if that's what it took to save her child. Once again the satanic stalker departed, in a blur of black. “None of us could stay in that house another second, so we got in the car at 3:00
A.M.
, and went to my mom's house. I hated to do it, but there was nowhere else to go. Can you understand that? Nowhere to run!”

Mercifully, Claudia's elderly mother and the rest of the family were spared any further torments that night. They dozed fitfully, reliving their ordeal in grotesque dreams. The next morning, the widow reluctantly drove the girls home, fearing what might happen to her mother if the family stayed in her house too long.

Monique was the most deeply affected by the nightmarish attacks. “When I was cooking, I'd get strange urges to pick up a bottle or knife and attack the rest of the family. Was I losing my mind? I was afraid of myself, and told my mother that this just wasn't me.”

Jessica was also buckling under the stress. “My hand kept moving from side to side, against my will. I had a constant feeling of horror, as if I was splitting into a good side and a bad side. My hands felt like they had claws—and I wanted to scratch someone.” She stared at her hands in disbelief, as if they might betray her at any moment. I noticed that she'd clipped her nails very short.

Were these bizarre thoughts signs of possible possession? Actually, horrible visions or disturbing impulses are common during oppression and even can occur during infestation, as I'd already seen in the graveyard case, where the young mother was frightened by sudden, overpowering feelings of rage, hostility, and hatred. This is a form of psychological warfare, the internal aspect of oppression, where the demonic amplify a person's negative emotions. It's only natural that Monique and Jessica would be angry about their dreadful ordeal and might wish, at times, that someone would be punished for putting them through all this. With fiendish cunning, the demon eagerly seized on these fleeting feelings and turned up the volume until the children's own thoughts became all but unrecognizable to them.

Yet what made these violent urges so peculiarly distressing was that they weren't
completely
foreign to these girls. On some deep unconscious level, they did want to hurt somebody, just as they'd been hurt, scratched, and terrorized in their own beds. Who wouldn't? We all have a dark side: A psychiatrist once wrote that “bad men do what good men dream.” With savage brilliance, the demon had confronted these children with the worst thoughts they'd ever had, during the worst time of their life, as if to say “See how vile and evil
you
are.” No wonder Monique questioned her sanity, feeling that only a monster would fantasize about stabbing her relatives!

Strange as it may sound, I was actually quite impressed at how
well
these kids were holding up to the mental and physical abuse they'd suffered. By the time oppression sets in, most families are quite dysfunctional. The people usually become extremely despondent and go off in their own little worlds—or turn on each other and quarrel constantly. This family, however, had the psychological fortitude to band together in their supernatural adversity instead of letting it break them apart. Perhaps it was because this was a house full of women, accustomed to sharing their feelings and fears with each other.

Suspecting that her family's reactions might sound demented to outsiders like us, Claudia emphasized that they were normal people, caught up in a highly abnormal situation. “If anyone had told me ten years ago that this would happen to us, I would have thought they were totally insane. I didn't believe in demons—or the Devil. I thought it was just superstition. But after living in
this
house, and all the awful things my family and I have seen and felt here, I not only believe in the Devil—I'm convinced he's here in my house.”

The demon greedily drank in the family's terrible dread and gained strength for its next rampage.

Not waiting for the witching hour of 3:00
A.M.
this time, it crept into the twins' bedroom around midnight a few weeks later. Although its feet made no sound that a human ear could hear, both girls woke up, instantly sensing that the malevolent force was stalking them. Too intimidated to open her eyes and confirm that it was there, Carolyn feigned sleep, while Marybeth peeked cautiously out from under the covers. “I saw a tall dark figure standing by the door. It was thin, like a shadow, and darker than the darkness of the room. It came at me in a rush: It was at the end of the bed, then it was on top of me!” To her unimaginable horror, she realized she couldn't move or speak. “I felt a tingling, pins-and-needles feeling all over me and especially up my legs. It was even
inside
me! The sensation was so intense that every part of my body was lit up like an electrical current was running through me.”

Frozen helplessly in her bed, she felt an immense weight on her chest, belly, and thighs, as if a large, dangerous animal were settling on top of her. “It was pushing on me so hard, I felt like I was being pushed
through
the bed or maybe pulled into it with a magnet. The more it pressed, the harder and harder it was to breathe: For about a minute, I was smothering, then I somehow got my breath back and yelled for my mother.”

Claudia and Jessica rushed to her aid, as Carolyn pounded the bed with the only weapon at hand—the pillow. “Go away,” she shouted. “Stop hurting my sister!”

Hoping there was safety in numbers, all of the women piled on the bed and held Marybeth in their arms. Incredibly, she said, “it started happening again, right in front of everybody: the feeling of paralysis, of unnatural energy in the bed. It started raining outside, really hard, and I was more frightened than ever. I started hearing beeps like a StairMaster or a heart monitor when someone dies; and we all heard a woman gasping for air. The noise sounded like it was coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. As soon as I could move, it was gone.”

The demon's deviancy didn't stop there, however. Over the next several months, it stalked the other females of the family, one by one.

Next was the oldest daughter, Monique. It wasn't silent, stealthy footsteps that woke her in the middle of the night but unbearable noise. Mysteriously, no one else in the house heard it. I've seen this before: The Devil can project a sound to the intended victim, which only she will be affected by, while the rest of the family is totally unaware of what's going on. The person singled out for this attack may attempt to wake her relatives but sometimes is unable to rouse them from sleep. It's another example of how the demonic can ratchet up the terror, by making the person feel alone and isolated.

“The noise sounded like someone was banging the walls and floor with a sledgehammer,” Monique told us. “At the end of the bed was the outline of a man, looking at me as I slept. I had the sense of something really evil and scary, like it wanted to kill me. It flopped forward, on top of me, and I actually felt it enter my body.” She blushed and paused for a minute. “You know, sexual intercourse. It hurt really bad, like I was being ripped open.”

Worse even than the physical rape, the thin teenager explained, was the mental rape. “I also felt a presence in my mind, full of evil and obscene thoughts. It was worse than pornography—it was sickening beyond belief. I wish I could erase the things I saw from my mind—they're like a stain that won't go away. Even though I couldn't move a muscle, my mind was fighting these visions the entire time, because I felt if I gave in, I'd die.”

Her cousin was the demon's third victim—and the most reluctant to tell her story. “I was real restless that night and couldn't sleep at all. I couldn't get comfortable and kept tossing and turning. Finally I was going to get up and have some milk, when I saw a dark shadow in the chair. It was laughing weirdly and walked toward the bed in a staggering, wavy motion. The whole room looked distorted, crooked in some way I can't explain. The corners were wrong, or something. The shadow also looked strange, not quite like a person. It had something red and glowing on it.” Jessica broke off her account and opened a can of Diet Coke.

After taking several sips, she started speaking again. “It jumped on me. I was fighting, flailing, convulsing, but … I wasn't really moving. I was lying on my stomach, soaked in sweat from
trying
to move, but something was pinning me down to the bed. It was heavy and nasty! I couldn't see what was holding me down, but I felt it on my legs and back, pushing me into the mattress. The pillow was pressing on my face and I was suffocating!”

She interrupted herself and tried to distract us with descriptions of frightening phenomena she'd experienced on other occasions. “We've seen a lot of stuff: heart-pounding sounds coming upstairs. You get so afraid that you're going under, losing yourself. It messes with us in so many different ways. I was being scratched; I was a real wreck and looked like an abused child. Sometimes I had big, wide, burning scratches.”

I sensed that she was being defensive, anticipating that we would blame her for whatever had happened in that bed, just as rape victims sometimes accuse themselves of dressing too provocatively, failing to heed some subtle signal of their attacker's intentions, or not fighting hard enough. Nobody pressured her to continue. We just waited patiently to see what else she might say.

Finally the words exploded from her. “It sodomized me!” She grabbed her soda, spilling some in her haste to get back upstairs to her family.

Claudia got paper towels and fussed over the spot. I'd already noticed her tidying up anything that was even the tiniest bit out of place, and wondered if being such a compulsive housekeeper was her way of trying to regain control of her chaotic, terrifying life. She might not be able to defeat the demon or even keep it away from her kids, but at least she could win the war against dirt.