Fr. Tim and I left the church, and walked over to his rectory, a small, Victorian-era house. We entered it, and took a flight of steps down to the basement, where Fr. Tim kept his office.
"You have the case file, I assume. Followed the procedure?" I asked.
"No, John, I'm just playing it by ear, winging it," he said in a bemused voice, which took the edge off the sarcasm. "Of course I followed procedure. The bishop didn't even want to proceed at all unless we were absolutely sure, especially given what happened in the last case. He's had his hands full keeping that story out of the press; you can imagine the circus that would descend on us if the details of that got out."
I could only imagine.
We often saw stories in the newspaper about failed exorcisms, of patients being killed by shamans, or well- meaning but profoundly misinformed lay people; of cases where patients were held without water, or beaten to death, by people who thought they were doing God's will. What we did was of a profoundly different kind. Our procedures protected us from charges of sensationalism or abuse; we collected pages of medical and psychological testimony, as well as the results of tests we had devised to differentiate mental illness from possession. A schizophrenic will occasionally let loose a torrent of scatological profanity in a voice that doesn't sound like their own. A drug-addict can overwhelm you with seemingly superhuman strength from time to time.
Very seldom will they be able to levitate; very seldom will they respond to the presence of hidden sacramentals; very seldom are they able to distinguish between Holy Water and tap water. I have been cursed at by mental patients; that is never an occasion for surprise. Frequently the site of a Roman collar will provoke the mentally ill; occasionally it will even provoke muttering from the perfectly sane.
But very rarely will a person curse you in Aramaic, or tell you of sins you committed years ago and had never remembered to confess, or tell you precisely what a relative in another city was doing at that exact moment.
Fr. Tim unlocked the filing cabinet, and pulled out a manila folder.
"Man or woman," I asked him, before opening it.
"A boy of ten," he said.
"Suspected cause?" I asked.
"Well, events started about a week after a sleep-over party that the boy had for his little league team. According to the interviews, they were playing with a Ouija board."
"Anything unusual or paranormal occur that night?"
"No," said Tim. "Some of his friends were making fun of him because he seemed scared of it, though."
"To them, it was a game. To him, it was something different. Is he a sensitive at all?"
I disliked using the word, but it was a fair enough description, and some times, even he new age types got something right. Sensitives are, in their parlance, people who are unusually receptive to spiritual things.
"Not that anyone is aware of. Up until a few months ago, he seemed like a completely normal, happy kid. A better than average student. No reports of visions or him being prescient, or anything. He does have a love for animals. Always bringing home strays, that kind of thing. But nothing out of the ordinary."
I opened the folder, and looked at the medical reports. The boy's conduct had begun to deteriorate. Problems in school. Disrespectful to his teachers, starting fights on the playground. Verbal cruelty toward a disabled classmate. Playing with matches; starting small fires.
The last one reminded me of something.
"Tell me Tim, any foreign languages?"
"French," he said.
"You speak French?" I asked.
"Enough to recognize profanity in it. And some other language I can't identify. Sounds like an American Indian dialect of some kind."
"A dollar says it's Iroquois."
Tim looked at me. "Have you heard of this before?"
"Similar to one of my cases a few years back," I said.
I continued to read the medical reports, and the psychological analysis. One psychologist saw nothing unusual about the boy, just some acting out to get attention.
The other psychologist said that his interview began well enough, but then as he asked him questions beyond mere conversation, the boy's manner and facial aspects had seemed to change. His voice had become deeper, and more worldly. The boy had begun to make fun of him, to respond to his questions dismissively. Then he had begun to respond to questions in French. The doctor spoke French, but only conversationally; the boy began to discuss psychology with him in French that was impressive in its vocabulary and erudition, peppered with remarks so gravely insulting and disturbingly profane that the doctor began to get uneasy. The doctor wanted to hypnotize the boy, because he thought he might be experiencing some sort of past life regression. In looking through his desk drawers for an object to use as a pendulum; he found a small crucifix on a chain. When he dangled it in front of the boy and asked him to focus on it, the boy became deeply agitated, and began to curse violently. The doctor also noted that the room began to grow cold. He first thought that it was his imagination, but he began to see his breath as he exhaled. The doctor said that it seemed like a more or less classic case of demonic possession according to the literature on the subject, but he would not say so except confidentially. The boy's words to him on concluding the interview were "I shall never let him go."
"Reading the psychologist's report," I said to Tim.
"Pretty discouraging, huh?" said Tim.
"Actually, I was going to say the opposite. The demon used the singular, rather than the plural. We might be only facing one here," I said.
"Could be lying," said Tim.
"Yeah, well, they do that, too. But usually when they are trying to frighten, they like to claim there's a whole bunch of them. It's a matter of pride for them. They invite in all their friends."
"You said you had a similar case?" Tim asked.
"Drive me back to my rectory, and I'll show you the case file."
We drove in the car that Tim's parish had provided for him, Tim at the wheel, with me in the passenger seat reading more of the file.
Tim's notes.
The boy's mother, though not particularly religious, had asked to see her parish priest. She mentioned the boy's symtpoms. The priest asked them to come to Mass that Sunday, and said he would bless the boy, afterward. The boy became agitated as the Mass went on, and during the Offertory, he had began to mutter profanities under his breath, which naturally disturbed the people around them. The boy's mother had to take him out of the church. Afterwards, as the priest had approached him in his stole to try to give a blessing, the boy broke away and began to curse at the priest.
The priest referred the matter to the bishop; the bishop had, since Fr. John was on leave, asked for Fr. Tim, since he had worked with Fr. John and Fr. Ricardo some years before.
Tim ran a series of tests. The boy seemed cheerful enough as they met in the boy's home, and Tim saw nothing unusual at work, until at one point Tim excused himself, and went out to his car. He retrieved a vial of holy water, a third class relic (a piece of cloth that had been touched to the bones of the Cure de Ars, St. John Vianney), and a Bible.
When Tim reentered the house, the boy's manner was completely different. He said to Fr. Tim, "I thought we were going to play nice, priest," and began to curse in French, referring a number of times by name to St. John Vianney, although the relic had never left Tim's pocket and he had not mentioned it to him. The room also had become markedly colder; Tim also had a digital thermometer in his jacket pocket, and it had dropped to 45 degrees.
Tim then took out the Bible, and calmly began to read a passage he had marked with the ribbon. Philippians, 2:1-11.
"Kid freaked out at Philippians?" I asked.
"When I got to the words 'and under the Earth' he physically attacked me," said Tim. "It took both his parents and an uncle to restrain him."
I closed the file.
"So you concur, then?" asked Fr. Tim
I looked at him. "I knew in the confessional," I said. "Just from the tone of your voice. If you had any doubts, you've answered them to your satisfaction. That alone, Tim, is good enough for me."
We pulled into the the driveway for the rectory of my parish. It was on the south side of town, St. John the Baptist, or as the colloquial expression of my old neighborhood had always referred to it, "Southside Johnny," to differentiate it from St. John the Apostle church on the hill. The south side of town was a blue collar neighborhood, once predominantly Irish, now predominantly African-American. In the diocese, Southside Johnny was perceived as being a poor parish. The church was old, and badly in need of repair. The rectory had been broken into a few times. Its collections were generally pretty thin.
The church was poor in everything except faith. It had a school that, despite the failing radiators and the badly patched roof, routinely won spelling bee contests and National merit scholarships where the public school down the road functioned largely as a prep school for the state prison. St. John the Baptist had won the CYO league basketball tournament for so many years in a row that the league's runner-up trophy was proudly displayed by whoever won it. At 9:30 each Sunday, it's mass featured a gospel choir that would have been perfectly at home in an A.M.E. church, followed by the diocese's only Tridentine Latin mass at eleven, with the same choir singing all the responses.
Unlike Tim, I was not a pastor; the church was not mine, but was rather the parish of Fr. Bob Wannamaker, a highly eccentric old priest who could hold all of these seeming contradictions in his head. Fr. Bob was kind enough to house me, even though I rarely did anything for him except occasionally assist at Mass or fill in for him at a funeral if he was away on retreat. We sometimes had long discussions about the nature of evil; Fr. Bob felt that he confronted the physical weapons of the enemy in his parish -- crime, violence, and drug addiction -- where I confronted the more supernatural weapons of the enemy, dealing with cases of possession and infestations. He felt that there was no real difference between these things; they were simply different tools employed by the same enemy, who absolutely hated humanity and was trying to destroy it in any way he could.
He felt that a lot of priests did not understand this -- that the priests in the diocese, and there were plenty, who did not believe in my ministry -- simply had too narrow a view. He always said to me that there was profoundly more to life than meets they eye; and that priests who denied the reality of the enemy would soon enough come to doubt in the reality of the Lord. He himself had never performed an exorcism or even seen a person who was possessed; but he had seen gangs and the effects of drug addiction, and understood everything I told him of my work in reference to his own. His own parish had not had a case of possession in the time I was there. He occasionally wondered about this, but he said "I guess we have enough enemies already that the Lord sees we don't need any more."
I thought there was a simpler explanation. The demons avoided Southside Johnny because they couldn't stand the sheer amount of love that the parish radiated.
We came to the rectory, and Fr. Bob answered the door.
"John," he said. "Tim. What are you boys up to?" He said it as if he was our father; in retrospect, he was old enough to be.
"I have a case that I've asked for John's help on," said Tim.
"I'm guessing you weren't coming over to play bridge," he said. To me, he said, "You back for good, John?"
"Yes, I am, Bob. Been away on a little vacation."
"You needed it," said Fr. Bob. "Good to have you back."