Exorcist Road (8 page)

For Jack Bittner had not only escaped the cruiser, he had managed to arm himself. He strode toward the bed with the gun trained on us, a look of deadly calm on his pitiless face.

“This is for your victims,” Bittner said. “This is for those poor kids you destroyed.”

The door behind Bittner slammed shut, but he hardly seemed to notice. He lumbered inexorably on, looking intent on finishing what he’d begun earlier.

Bittner stopped just shy of the footboard, the barrel fixed on the back of the demon’s head. I realized then that the beast hadn’t even watched Jack Bittner approach, had instead watched me watch Bittner. And as I gazed into those lurid red eyes, I understood why. Its lips stretched into a sly grin. Bloody slaver drooled off its teeth and pooled onto my face.

I don’t know now if it would have made any difference had I warned Bittner of the impending attack. My conscience says it would have. My reason, however, points out the appalling suddenness of the onslaught, the manner in which the creature sprang and spun at Bittner like some agile jungle cat.

The gun fired once, and the plaster over the headboard exploded, showering me with grit and dust. I pushed onto my elbows to see Bittner windmilling his arms as he blundered backward, the demon affixed to his upper body like an inoperable tumor. I crawled forward on the bed just as Bittner landed on his back.

He was slapping at the demon—at some point he had apparently dropped the gun—and I could hear the demon’s deep, throaty voice taunting him in some indecent-sounding language. I thought at first the demon would simply lean down and bite Bittner’s face off, but that, I soon understood, would have been too quick.

The demon actually climbed off Bittner’s supine form. Bittner scrambled to his knees and had just retrieved the gun when a new voice said, “No, Daddy.”

Despite how bloody Bittner’s face was, I could distinguish his eyes well enough. They were huge, starey. “Celia?” he said.

“No, Daddy,” the voice repeated. “Don’t leave me, Daddy.”

Jack’s face crumpled, the enormous man breaking down.

“Why are you moving away, Daddy?” the girl’s voice asked, and when I turned and stared at the demon, I received another shock.

Though nothing at that point should have amazed me—not after all I’d seen—the vision of Celia Bittner standing there in the murky bedroom still took my breath away. She had long blonde hair tied into a ropy braid. She wore pink pajamas that emphasized her little potbelly. She looked perhaps five years old.

“I didn’t wanna move,” Jack said, and after all the man had said and done, I have to admit that I still pitied him. Never on a human face had I beheld such an expression of sorrow and longing. “Daddy didn’t wanna move away, honey. It was your mother…”

“Mommy says you don’t care about us anymore,” Celia said. I noticed she was clutching a small beige teddy bear to her chest and had no doubt that this was the same stuffed animal Celia had carried with her when she was a young child. The demon, I felt certain, had mined these images, this voice, from Bittner’s memory. But the effect was uncanny. It was like time had reversed and the child Celia had been was standing in the room with us.

Bittner was up on his knees. “Honey, you’ve gotta believe me. Daddy would’ve never left if it were up to him. I love you—” his face crumpled again, his words coming in a ragged rush, “—I love you more than anything. I didn’t want to go.”

“Then why did you?”
the voice demanded, and I fancied I could hear a hint of the demon’s true malicious tone buzzing around the edges of the child’s voice.

If Bittner heard it, he gave no indication. “It was your mom’s decision. She…she didn’t want Daddy anymore. She—”

Celia’s face hardened, a cold, calculating intelligence permeating it. “Are you saying my mommy’s a whore?”

It acted on Bittner like a slap in the face. He actually recoiled and blinked for a moment. “Honey, please don’t talk like—”

“Please don’t talk like that,”
the voice mimicked, and though the pitch was still the same, the tone was eerily wicked, the buzzing darkness in the voice more pronounced. “You always want control.”

I began to edge around them. The closed door was perhaps twelve feet away. Someone was on the other side of it, hammering. Yet the sounds were oddly muffled in here, as though Casey’s bedroom existed in a separate reality, another dimension.

Bittner was on his knees, had a hand extended toward Celia, or the thing pretending to be Celia. “I’m not trying to control you, honey. Don’t think that. I just want to teach you the right things, you know?”

Was there a flash of vermilion in the girl’s blue eyes? The skin seemed to be tawnier, more aged.
“Control is all you want,”
the voice said, and now there was as much of the demon in it as there was the young Celia.
“You wanted to control Mommy, and you want to control me.”

If Bittner sensed the changes, he didn’t let on. He walked on his knees toward Celia, the gun holstered now, both his hands extended. “No I don’t, baby. I only want to be near you. I just want to be—”

“No pierced ears, Celia!”
the voice said in a vicious singsong.
“No going on dates!”

Bittner’s chest shuddered, his voice thick and weary. “I didn’t say that. I only said I wanted to meet the boy before you went out with him. You know, so I could—”

“So you could intimidate him!”
Celia snapped, and now there was nothing at all girly about the voice. It was all hornets and echoes, the demon’s full-throated drone.
“So whoever went out with me could see what a tough guy you were, so he could see the gun on your hip.”

Something finally clicked in Bittner’s mind. His face went slack with dismay. “You’re not…you’re not…”

“Celia?”
the voice roared. The sound of it made me want to squeal in terror.

I was five feet from the door.

The Celia-thing was expanding, the demon no longer resembling a child, but rather a noxious, misshapen beast. Its face loomed toward Bittner’s.
“Celia despises you. You abandoned her!”

Bittner whimpered, his hand quivering toward the grip of the gun.

“Yeeeesss,”
the demonic voice said, nodding, the eyes a hellish red now, the vertical disks of pupil narrowing in savage glee.
“Go for your weapon, Jack. See where it gets you.”

My hand was trembling so violently I could scarcely grip the brass doorknob, which was hot to the touch. Though we were only separated by a few inches of solid wood, the voices on the other side of the door sounded miles away.

“You’re not Celia,” Jack whispered, as if to himself. “You’re not my baby.”

“No, Jack,”
the voice rumbled.
“No I’m not. But Celia’s going to hear all about her daddy tomorrow.”

Something new came into Bittner’s face then, and his right hand finally seemed to steady. His fingers looking sure now, he drew the gun from his holster. But rather than imbuing him with confidence, this seemed to bring him only puzzlement and dread.

“Jack Bittner,”
the demon’s voice said.
“Aged forty-six. Twenty-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department…”

The gun rose, Bittner’s hand as steady as a surgeon’s.

“…died last night in an upscale Lincoln Park home…”

Bittner stared at the gun as if it had transformed into a deadly viper. “What are you doing?”

When the demon spoke again, its tone was celebratory.
“Time to join your mommy in hell!”

The full realization of horror stretched Bittner’s rough-hewn features. He uttered a breathless little moan.

The barrel drifted toward his open mouth, penetrated the barrier of his quivering lips.

Bittner’s eyes were moons, his moan going shrill.

His lips wrapped around the slender barrel.

His trigger finger whitened.

I looked away a moment too late. I saw the finger squeeze. I saw the rear of Jack Bittner’s head explode like a bloody firework.

The door swung toward me, its edge narrowly missing my face. Danny stumbled in. He stopped beside me, gaping at Jack Bittner’s slouching form, which toppled sideways as we watched.

The demon, unmasked, turned and grinned at us. It was still Casey’s body, but nothing about that face resembled human feeling. Or perhaps it was the horror we all wore beneath our carefully constructed masks.

“Jesus,” Danny whispered.

“Run,” I said.

Chapter Nine

Sutherland was in the hallway, his forehead bloodied and gathered in a taut bump. I realized at once how it had likely happened. Bittner had somehow gotten back inside, overcome Danny, taken his gun and then subdued Sutherland too.

Liz and Carolyn stood adjacent to Sutherland and Danny, with Ron a little ways off.

Footsteps sounded within Casey’s bedroom.

“Come on,” Danny said, sweeping Carolyn into his arms. I put a hand on Liz’s back to get her moving. Sutherland looked bemused, but he followed us anyway. From behind us somewhere, Ron was pleading for us to wait up.

But we couldn’t wait. The demon was coming.

“We can’t leave Casey,” Liz said, her voice shrill.

“We won’t!” Danny shouted over his shoulder. “But I’m getting Carolyn out of here!”

We sprinted for the stairs, but even before we got halfway there, I could see something was wrong. I heard a multitude of deep, cracking sounds. The spindles of the banister seemed to undulate in the meager light of the corridor.

“Wait a second,” I called as we drew nearer, but Danny either didn’t hear me or was too frightened to heed my words.

He and Carolyn were five feet from the top stair and running at full speed when the whole thing gave way.

There was an unearthly groaning noise, followed by a series of harsh staccato pops. Splintered wood and scraps of carpet twirled through the air like pinwheels. Danny skidded on the wood floor, and for a terrible instant I thought both he and Carolyn would go tumbling over the edge of what was now a ragged snarl of shattered boards and nails. His need for self-preservation evidently secondary to his desire to keep his niece safe, Danny hurled Carolyn bodily away from the yawning drop-off.

But Danny’s momentum carried him over the abyss.

His feet went over, his legs and hips. I heard a terrible scraping sound as his belly raked the protruding barbs of broken stairwell. Just when I was sure he would plunge screaming to his death, Danny’s left hand snagged one of the few remaining banister spindles. The narrow wooden cylinder groaned with the strain, but it held long enough for him to grasp the edge of a rug with his other hand.

The staircase had crumbled completely and now, I saw with a downward glance, lay in ruins in the formerly grand foyer. Not only would Danny’s drop amount to a twenty-foot free fall, he would be landing on a nasty heap of jagged shards that would almost certainly prove fatal.

I let go of Liz and dove forward. I knew I wasn’t powerful enough to support Danny’s weight by myself, but perhaps I could supplement his strength long enough for Father Sutherland to arrive. I grasped Danny’s right hand, the one with the poorest hold. Our fingers twined together. His eyes fastened on mine, and I could see how frightened he was. Without thinking, I seized his wrist with my mutilated hand. Despite the soul-destroying agony that erupted in the ragged stumps of my missing fingers, I held on and began towing him toward me. Danny gritted his teeth, and I realized that between us we were lifting him to safety.

Seconds later, a large hand seized the back of Danny’s shirt and joined us. My peripheral vision told me it was Father Sutherland. With our pooled strength, we dragged Danny up onto what remained of the landing, but before I had time to catch my breath, my attention was arrested by Ron’s raised voice.

“…any second now,” Ron said. He was crouching next to the three of us, but his eyes were fixed on the hallway outside Casey’s room.

I jerked my head around, certain the demon would be stalking toward us, but despite the dimness of the corridor, I could see well enough that the space was empty. Either Casey’s possessed form was lurking somewhere else on the second floor, or it hadn’t yet exited the bedroom. Either way, we had to think fast.

“What’s down there?” I asked, nodding toward the sooty corridor beyond where Liz stood with Carolyn clutching her around the waist.

“The guest room,” Liz said.

“Are there stairs leading—”

“No,” she said. “This and the stairs at the far end are the only ways down.”

We looked with crawling dread toward the corridor outside Casey’s room.

Ron shook his head. “No way in hell I’m going that way.”

“There’s nowhere else to go,” Liz said.

Ron nodded toward the missing staircase. “Let’s jump down here.”

We looked at him in disbelief.

“What?” he said. “Would you rather deal with that monster?”

Sutherland grasped Ron by the front of his Blackhawks jersey. “That monster has your son. Will you forsake Casey?”

Ron didn’t say anything to that, but the look on his face suggested he would absolutely prefer sacrificing Casey if it would ensure his own survival. I glanced at Liz, who was regarding her husband with such dead-eyed loathing that I couldn’t imagine the pair remaining married. If they survived this ordeal, of course.

Sutherland knelt over Danny, who sat clutching his belly. In the semidarkness, I could see how the front of his shirt had been shredded, the way the navy-blue material glistened. He looked like he’d been gored by a bull.

Liz joined our huddled group, fingers still cinched around her daughter’s shoulder. “We need to get you to a doctor, Danny.”

“I’m fine,” he said, but the way he grimaced belied his words.

Ron paid no attention to his brother. “We gotta get out of here!”

“There’s nowhere to go,” Danny said.

Sutherland glanced about. “What about the windows? Is there a way onto the roof? Maybe a tree close enough…”

But Liz was shaking her head. “There’s nothing. Not unless you want to fall two stories.”

“There’s only one thing,” Danny said. He looked up at Sutherland. “You guys gotta do what you came here to do.”

Sutherland returned Danny’s gaze for a beat, then turned to me.

“Father Crowder?” Sutherland said. I looked at him, and though he appeared haggard and far older than his sixty-one years, the resolve in his face gave me hope.

“We have to save Casey from the demon,” I said.

Danny nodded. “Goddamn right.”

Sutherland permitted himself the ghost of a smile.

I took Liz by the arm. “You and Carolyn go to the guest room.” When Liz started to shake her head, I said, “This is about keeping your daughter safe, not me trying to be a hero. The farther she is from that thing, the better.” Whatever mistakes I’d made that evening, this seemed to be the right thing at that moment. Liz swallowed, reached up and touched my face. In her brimming eyes I saw gratitude and what might have been a deeper regard.

Ron seemed to catch it too because he stepped toward us. “Hey, what the hell—”

But he never finished. Because behind us erupted such an unholy blast of laughter that my flesh broke out in goose bumps and an icy chill raced up and down my spine.

We all peered down the hallway at the figure standing unmovingly outside Casey’s bedroom door.

“Go,” I whispered to Liz. Reluctantly, she took Carolyn’s hand and receded into the guest bedroom. I heard but did not see the door close.

“Take out your Bible,” Father Sutherland said.

But it was already in my hands.