A Tragedy in Triptych
III
Aloysius sat across a massive oak desk from Father Scalia, head down in a supplicating, servile manner. Scalia’s assistant, Father Wemble, sat nearby.
“You are right to be concerned. I believe it’s important we get to the boy before he gets any older. We’ll perform the rites of exorcism.”
Aloy crossed himself.
* * * *
Mamalee answered the front door without a greeting, casting her worried face down.
The two priests stood there in full garb, Scalia holding a polished wooden box, Wemble carrying a large white-leather-bound bible. When Mamalee did not step aside, Aloysius came behind her and pushed past. “Thank you for coming, Fathers.”
The grim-faced clergymen entered with curt nods.
Everett sat moping on his bed as Aloysius and the solemn priests entered his room. The silver cross Scalia carried reflected across the boy’s face, its harsh glint making the boy wince. He looked up at his father, knowing this would be unpleasant, but never guessing it would be life-shattering.
Aloysius grabbed the boy’s little arms, pinning him down on the bed.
Everett struggled, crying, screaming with greater strength than a small boy—but not enough.
Scalia crossed himself and chanted, looming over the boy as Aloysius and Wemble trapped his legs.
“Please stop!” Mamalee demanded. “You’re frightening him!”
“Quiet!” ordered Aloysius.
“The demons in him are powerful,” announced Father Scalia. “I’m afraid he will have to be bound!”
The priests deferred to Aloysius for permission, and he gave it.
He held the pleading Mamalee in a restraining embrace, as Father Wemble secured a leather strap, shiny and black like a malevolent eel, around Everett’s wrists. “Make them quit it!” the boy pleaded to his parents. Baby Candace’s cries rose from the next room.
“No matter what you hear, do not come in until we summon you,” commanded Father Scalia.
“Yes, Father.” Aloysius lifted Mamalee by the waist and scooted out the door with her.
“No, no, no!” Mamalee cried. “Please leave him alone!”
The priest slammed the door.
Mamalee, her face etched with heartache, rocked the crying baby Candace. She squeezed her eyes shut in denial as thumps and shouts emanated from upstairs.
Aloysius sat hunched over a coffee cup, staring into a deep scar on the table. Everett’s cries penetrated through the doors and walls: “No! You stop that! STOP STOP STOP!”
In his powerful baritone, Father Wemble chanted Latin phrases to drown him out, but Everett only cried louder. “MAMA!”
Mamalee rose—but Aloysius slammed the cup on the table and glowered at her until she sat.
There was a long time of utter monstrous silence. Even little Candace was quiet, staring up as though expecting something to burst through the ceiling.
Then the faintest of sounds. Perhaps it was Everett emitting some agonized muffled moaning, or perhaps not. It was a sound that did not sound like a small boy. It was a sound that a grown man did not make in the presence of a child.
Mamalee covered Candace’s ears, continuing to obey her husband, trusting that he knew best, that this would end with a new Everett whom Aloysius could love.
Then came a hoarse anguished cry, and another.
Not Everett. The two priests. And then a loud din of furniture breaking and thrashing and violence.
A new voice rose, one neither Mamalee nor Aloysius knew—raspy, low, and eerie.
Aloysius rose, dread painting his face. He blinked at Mamalee, showing uncertainty about this exorcism business for the first time since it had begun. “Fathers?” he called.
The low scratchy voice scuttled like a spider along gossamer sound waves, with a sinister sincerity.
Aloysius rose from the table and crept up the stairs. Mamalee held the baby close as she followed at a distance that almost felt safe.
Aloysius lunged to open the door to Everett’s room, and froze. Mamalee kept her eyes closed as she cleared the distance.
Everett sat naked on the floor, blood smeared all over his face.
Seeing his parents, he smiled. “Mommy ‘n’ Daddy!” he pronounced in the raspy voice.
Just a few feet away, Father Wemble lay on his back, eyes glazed, blood spurting up from his open zipper, where his penis once had been.
Father Scalia was pantsless and on his knees, face pitched forward, blood pooling at his knees, senseless gibberish wandering from his mouth.
Mamalee saw her good roast knife, the one Everett liked because it reminded him of the plastic accessories at the costume shop, the one that had gone missing. It was just under the bed, where he apparently kept it hidden along with the scary drawings he knew his father wouldn’t like.
Everett coughed as he pointed at something in the corner. “Very, very bad things!” said the boy in the kind of hoarse rasp that comes not from demonic possession as it turned out but from having one’s throat violated.
The priests’s crucifixes lay piled on top of two tubular red fleshy messes.
Scalia fell to his side, his face twisted by shock that could not be deep enough to block pain.
Everett made an inverted sign of the cross as he whispered, “Trick.”
* * * *
For Candace the first understanding that something was wrong came on a Halloween night. Mamalee and Daddy had spent the weeks before packing.
Candace would recall Mamalee begging her father to take Everett trick-or-treating. It was the only thing Everett talked about, the only thing that made him happy. Mamalee made him a mummy costume, and he wore it every day until the big night arrived.
Aloysius told the boy over and over what he was to do. ”I will choose a house. You just knock on the door, play with your toy knife for the count of ten, hold out your bag until they put some candy in it, then run back to me.” Everett promised he would.
Candace was not allowed to go. She was to stay home with Mamalee, playing Halloween games on the bare mattress until Daddy and Everett returned, when they would leave in the big truck Daddy had rented.
Candace knew what Daddy meant by “play with your toy knife,” but pretended not to. The year before, Daddy had taken Everett to a neighborhood where no one knew them and had let him join a group of kids. Everett did, and Aloysius followed them at a distance to watch. He saw them walk up to a house. When the door opened, the man who answered screamed, and all the kids ran away.
Aloysius ran to see what had happened and found Everett walking across the yard. Looking into his son’s goodie bag, he saw one of Mamalee’s good steak knives covered in blood. He realized that the man’s scream was not a joke on the kids; it was a roar of pain and fear.
The addled father took Everett home and scrambled the family for a quick departure. As they hit the highway,Mamalee’s crying alarmed Candace. “They will take him away!” she wailed. “Oh, my Lord they will take him far away, Aloysius!”
For once, Aloysius was kind and caring. “I’ll never let anyone take Everett away, no matter what,” he assured her.
Depriving Everett of Halloween was not an option. Mamalee could not take that from him, any more than she could let him be taken away. But on the following year’s Halloween, the boy ran away in the neighborhood where Father took him. He found a garden spade. This time, kids were the victims. The boy’s urge to kill was as strong as the family bond. There was nothing to be done except repeat the pattern, year after year.
Aloysius bought the truck, and moving every year on November 1st became a part of the Geelens family’s lives.