22

A Prison Without Bars

As that winter passed, slowly and torturously, the events in the Snedeker household escalated and tensions increased. The mood inside the house seemed to grow darker along with the weather outside; it grew increasingly worse as the clouds darkened and it began to rain, worse still as snow began to fall and turn to thick, icy mud beside the roads.

Everyone in the family moved through the house expecting something horrible to happen; more often than not, they weren't disappointed. Things moved of their own volition. Everyone, at one time or another, heard voices. They saw shadows that weren't there. They spotted things rushing by them from the corners of their eyes. Small sections of the house were inexplicably colder than others.

Stephanie had moved back into her room with Laura, and Peter had moved back into his room as well. So Michael was left alone in his room downstairs.

Very late one night, he came running up the stairs screaming for his parents. They awoke instantly and rushed into the hall, where they found him running toward them, arms spread and eyes round.

"Mom! Mom, he came back!" Michael shouted, throwing his arms around Carmen's waist.

"Sh-sh-sh, Michael, who came back?" she asked, holding him.

"That guy, that guy Stephen and me saw! He came to me tonight!"

"Oh, it was just a dream, sweetheart, that's all, just a dream."

Michael backed away from her, shaking his head, and insisted, "No, no, it wasn't just a dream, it was more, I mean, I was still in bed, but I was awake! And I couldn't move, I was paralyzed!"

Carmen and Al exchanged a long look and Al gave her a slight, but helpless, shrug.

"Would you like to sleep somewhere else tonight, honey?" Carmen asked Michael.

After a moment, he nodded. "Can I sleep on the couch?" he asked quietly.

"Sure you can. I'll get blankets and pillows from the hall closet." She turned to Al and whispered, "You go on back to bed, I'll be there in a minute."

Once she'd set up a bed for Michael in the living room, Carmen tucked him in and gave him a kiss.

"Mom? If he comes again...can I call you?" "Sure you can, sweetheart. You just call and I'll be here."

Back in bed, Al stared up into the darkness as he whispered, "This is gonna keep up...and get worse, isn't it?"

"I don't know," she whispered back.

"What're we gonna do if it does?"

"I don't know."

He reached over and took her hand in his. It took them quite a while to get back to sleep.

After that night, Michael began sleeping on the living-room sofa regularly. Unlike Stephen, he heard no protests from his parents and no one in the house complained; in fact, they were very cooperative. One morning, while he was getting ready for school, Carmen offered to bring a few things up from his room and put them in the hall closet so he wouldn't have to go downstairs. He accepted her offer eagerly and told her what to get for him.

She waited until early that afternoon to go downstairs. Somehow, she just kept remembering there were other things to do around the house. It took a few hours for her to admit to herself that she just didn't want to go downstairs. She knew what was down there...funeral things...burial things...death things...things she didn't want to be near.

Besides that, many of the frightening events that had happened in the house had happened down there, things that Stephen had tried to tell them about, things they had ignored.

But she had promised. And someone had to go downstairs.

Finally, she did. She told herself she didn't have to go any farther than Michael's room, that all the really bad stuff was deeper in the basement and that she really didn't have anything to worry about.

But when she went downstairs, something happened to her for the first time; it was something that would happen to her again and again throughout the coming months.

When it happened, she was taking socks and underwear from the floor to be washed, clothes from the backs of chairs and from the closet for Michael to wear to school, and clean socks and underwear from dresser drawers.

Suddenly, she froze. There was a feeling in the air, as if it were shifting, being stirred up...as if something were cutting through it rapidly, approaching fast.

Standing before Michael's dresser with socks and underwear in her hands, Carmen gasped as something enveloped her, something like a very dark shadow as thick as pudding; it engulfed her, swallowed her, embraced her entire body and held her in paralyzed terror for what seemed an eternity.

And then it was gone, and Carmen collapsed to the floor, curled into a fetal position and gasping for breath. When she had finally collected herself, she looked at the clock.

It had only been seconds...not an eternity.

She got up, gathered Michael's things quickly and hurried upstairs, still a little stooped and gasping.

"Aunt Carmen, what's the matter?" Laura asked, rushing toward her in the hall.

In an instant, Carmen decided not to tell her. She straightened up, smiled a little and said, "Oh, I guess it's just those stairs. I haven't used them enough, I suppose, 'cause they wear me out."

"Oh. Jeez, you scared me."

"No, nothing...nothing."

As she caught her breath, she put Michael's things in the hall closet, relieved that Laura had not caught her in the lie.

Over the next few days, Stephanie cried out twice in the night because she said the "shadow-blob" had moved through her room again. Laura had been asleep at the time and had not seen it but, after the second time, Stephanie said she did not want to sleep in her room anymore.

Carmen didn't know what to do with her. She asked Laura if she'd mind sharing a bed with Stephanie to make her feel better, and Laura said that would be fine.

Al became more and more uncomfortable with going to work and leaving them alone, but he had no choice. He'd been feeling very weak and helpless lately. He was used to having at least some control over the events that surrounded his family. When Stephen became so ill, that confidence began to chip away. And now...this. He felt that everything around him—his entire household—was out of his hands. Something he couldn't see and did not understand had taken control.

Their home had become a sort of prison. They didn't have enough money to move at the moment. They couldn't just pick up everything and go get another place. They would be there for a while...with whatever was there with them.

The weeks passed and turned into months: long, slow months that stretched out beneath heavy clouds black as soot. The winter grew colder, more bitter.

The children cried out at night.

Voice spoke to all of them at times—from nowhere—at all hours of the day and night.

Sometimes the smell of rotting meat, at other times the smell of human feces, assaulted them in one part of the house or another, a smell so thick and eye-watering that they were certain that, should they look down at their feet, they would find themselves standing in a pile of rotten, decaying filth. But there was never anything on the floor around them and the smell only lasted an instant, a sickening stench wafting by in a breath, there and gone, almost tauntingly.

But there were, at times, flies. Real flies that were really there—or at least seemed to be—but never for very long.

One cold winter evening, a fuse blew and Al went downstairs into the basement to fix it. He had long since replaced the lightbulbs in all the sockets and, when he reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned on a light.

When he flicked the switch, the opaque glass globe covering the fixture remained black, giving out mere speckles of the light from the bulb. As Al frowned up at the light, the blackness that seemed to be smeared over the glass moved...squirmed...

As he listened in the silence, he could hear a faint hum coming from the blackness, a thing buzzing.

The blackness was made up of flies—hundreds, maybe even thousands of flies crawling over the globe and twitching in a pool around it on the ceiling, their wings humming as they crawled over one another in black, writhing heaps.

Al stared at them for a long moment, his jaw slack, eyes opening slowly from a squint to wide, gaping amazement, frozen in place, his finger still on the light switch.

His voice a mere breath, he whispered slowly, "Where...in the hell...did you come fr—"

All at once, the flies became airborne and flew in a swarm toward Al's face.

Al threw his arms up protectively and let out a strangled cry of horror through clenched teeth, closing his eyes tightly, so surprised that he was unable to turn and run back up the stairs. He expected to feel them over him, feel the small vibration of their wings, the tickling-twitching of their movements, but...

He felt nothing.

Slowly, very slowly, he lowered his arms and opened his eyes.

The flies were gone. They were nowhere in sight. He couldn't see them, and he couldn't hear them.

There was a noise then, deep and throaty, sounding at first like a groan, then becoming a low, evil chuckle. It came from nowhere...but from everywhere around him.

Al took a long, deep breath, set his jaw, crossed himself and— although it took some silent, internal fighting—he ignored what he'd thought he'd heard, opened the French doors and went into the next room, flipping on lights on his way to the fuse box. But he stopped a moment to take a careful look at the light overhead.

There were no flies this time.

He wound his way through the basement to the fuse box, opened it up and reached into his pocket for the fuse he'd brought from the kitchen drawer.

That was when the smell hit him.

First, it smelled like roses, a strong, sweet, flowery odor. Al froze, looked around slowly and allowed himself a slight smile. It was a good sign, the smell of roses; it was a sign of blessing, a sign of peace and safety...a sign from the Virgin Mary herself.

Al's nerves calmed, the tensed muscles in his body relaxed slowly. The scent of roses had made him feel much better. In fact, he could still smell it as he replaced the fuse.

And then, quite suddenly, the smell changed. For the worse.

Al recoiled as the air filled with the odor of spoiled meat. He slapped a hand over his nose and mouth as he leaned over to retch dryly. Coughing as he stood, he slammed the fuse box shut, turned and hurried back through the basement.

The odor was everywhere.

As he moved through it, the smell changed. It went from rotten meat to the smell of a vast open sewer—the smell of massive, uncontained shit. The odor filled his nostrils and clung there, clogged them like thick grease.

Al hurried through the basement, his hand over his face, but in the middle of the room that used to be Stephen's, he weakened and dropped to his knees,-the thick, cloying smell was overpowering and literally pushed him to the floor, shedding tears and gagging.

He walked on his knees for several feet, trying to get to the stairs, but in a moment the smell was gone.

Still on his knees, Al froze. He removed his hand from his face slowly, lifted his head, looked around, sniffed the air.

It was gone.

Moving quickly, he stood, hurried to the stairs and, in a rush, left the basement.

The winter gradually began to recede. The snow began to melt and occasionally, patches of blue sky appeared between the dark clouds.

Al began to drink even more than usual. As the frightening events that took place in the house steadily grew worse, he felt weaker and more out of control, more helpless against...whatever it was that had decided to target them.

Carmen, on the other hand, held fast to her faith. She prayed more, she always kept her rosary with her, she wore a crucifix around her neck at all times. She refused to let the fact that Father Wheatley's blessing of the house apparently did no good whatsoever to sway her faith; she told herself that didn't matter and just kept praying, kept asking God to be with her family, to watch over her house and her family, to protect them from whatever evil, supernatural force was plaguing them.

Sometimes they had conversations late at night in bed.

"You're drinking a lot," Carmen whispered one night as the two of them cuddled together.

"Whatta you expect?" Al whispered back.

"Well, is it necessary?"

"Whatta you think? I mean, maybe that doesn't excuse it, but good Lord, I've been... I've been—"

"Okay. Yeah, I know, honey, things have been, uh..."

"Things have been fuckin' scary, is what they've been."

"But remember, we still have God on our side."

"So, where is He?"

"He's here, sweetheart. If He wasn't, maybe we would have been hurt. Maybe we wouldn't be here." Al pulled away from her and said, "Yeah, I know, but..."

It was on a summer evening that Laura went out on a date with a pleasant, tall, muscular young man who arrived to pick her up while Carmen was preparing dinner. Al invited him in and they chatted for a few minutes until Laura was ready to go.

Michael had gone down the street to a friend's house for the night, and Stephanie and Peter were quietly occupying themselves on the living-room floor—none of the children spent time alone in their rooms anymore.

They ate dinner in silence, as they had been doing every night for some time, and they ate it in the living room before the television. In spite of the silence, though, the tension was not as thick as it had been lately. There was more of a feeling of calm in the house, as if things might be all right...at least, for the time being.

After dinner, they watched some more television, Al had a few more beers, Carmen sipped a cup of tea, and eventually everyone started heading for bed. The children were reluctant and Carmen kept waiting for them to ask if they could sleep with her and Al; she decided that if they did, she and Al couldn't very well say no because now they knew the kids had good reason to be afraid.

But they didn't ask. Peter was very sleepy, and shuffled, droopy-eyed, to his room. Stephanie asked if it was all right if she stayed awake in her room until Laura got home. Carmen told her that would be fine. After all, it was Friday night and she didn't have to go to school the next day.

Al went to bed first and, after she'd given the kids their goodnight kisses, Carmen joined him.

"Is it just me, or do things seem better tonight?" she asked.

"Yeah. Maybe. A little. I guess." He was very reluctant to be too optimistic.

They cuddled beneath the covers, unable to sleep for a while because they were waiting for—actually expecting—something to happen. But their room remained quiet and calm and, eventually, the two of them dozed into a light sleep....

Carmen awoke to a scream late in the night. It took a moment for her to understand what the screaming voice was saying.

"Aunt Carmen! Aunt Carmen please help me, my God, dear Jesus, please, please help me!"

Running footsteps thumped through the house.

Instinctively, Carmen reached over to her nightstand and grabbed her Bible, on top of which lay her rosary.

The bedroom door burst open and Carmen sat up. Laura stood slightly silhouetted in the doorway wearing her usual long nightshirt.

"Aunt Carmen!" she cried. "Aunt Carmen!"

Carmen got out of bed, Bible and rosary tucked beneath her arm, and headed for the door, saying, "Laura, what's wrong, honey, what's the matter?"

Al did not wake up.

Laura threw her arms around Carmen's neck, much the same way she used to when she was just a small child and, while they were embracing, Carmen led her into the hall and pulled the bedroom door closed gently.

"What's wrong, honey?" she whispered.

"It's playing with me again, Aunt Carm, it's doing it again!" she hissed, pressing her face into Carmen's shoulder. "It was picking at my bra before I got undressed and then I reached for my rosary and the cross came off—just came off, like it was pulled off—and then it started pulling at my blankets and touching me and, and, a-and—"

Carmen put her arm around Laura and began to lead her down the hall, saying, "Okay, okay, just calm down, it's all right now. We'll go to your room and we'll, um...whatta you say we read the Bible together for a while?"

And that was what they did. Laura curled up beneath the covers and Carmen sat on the side of the bed. By the light of the bedside lamp, with Stephanie still sound asleep on the cot a few feet away, Carmen began to read quietly from Psalms, hoping to soothe Laura's fears.

It seemed to work for a little while. The room was quiet, the only sound being Carmen's soft, half-whispered voice as she read.

"'Remember the word unto thy servant, upon which thou hast caused me to hope,'" she read. "'This is my comfort in my affliction, for thy word hath quickened me.'"

Laura's breath began to come slowly, rhythmically, her eyes were closed and her body relaxed.

Then she sat up suddenly, tossing away the covers, eyes wide, her body trembling, her lips quivering as she gasped, "Do you feel it? Feel it, Aunt Carm, it's coming, it's coming right now!"

Carmen stopped midsentence, her words stuck in her throat like chunks of glass, because she suddenly felt swollen with fear. For a long moment she couldn't breathe, as if all the oxygen were somehow being sucked out of the room by... something, and the air grew cold, and there was, without a doubt, a new presence in the room with them.

"It's here!" Laura breathed. "My God, dear Jesus, it's here!”

Carmen looked around the room and reached for her rosary, clutching it in her fist, her Bible closing between her legs as she recited rapidly, "Our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name"— Her voice grew louder as she began to feel more and more suffocated, as if she were being smothered by some invisible force—"thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us—" Her voice rose to a shout as the atmosphere in the room became even more oppressive and the air filled with the stench of untended garbage. "—and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil amen Lord, amen Jesus, please, God, take it away."

Laura heaved a sigh and tried to catch her breath as she panted, "It's gone. It's gone, Aunt Carmen. It went away."

Immediately, Carmen opened the Bible again, searching for Psalms. When she found it, she began to read in a trembling voice, " 'Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous, for praise is comely for the upright. Praise the Lord with the harp, sing unto him with—'"

"Do you feel that?" Laura interrupted, sitting up again, her voice more frantic than before. She threw herself at Carmen, wrapping her arms around her shoulders.

Suddenly, from the cot beside the bed, a small, shrill and frightened voice cried, "Mommy! Whatsamatter?"

Carmen started to respond, but her breath was suddenly taken from her and she was pushed back on the bed as something wet and slimy—but absolutely invisible—brushed past her arm. She propped herself up on one arm and watched as that invisible something slithered beneath Laura's nightshirt and then quite visibly clutched at and fondled her breasts.

The bedside lamp, which was the room's only source of light, began to flicker tenuously, threatening to black out.

"Oh God," Carmen groaned as Stephanie began to scream. Carmen immediately began to recite the Our Father again, this time very loudly. "Our Father who art in heaven! Hallowed be thy name!"

Laura began to scream, "Oh Jesus, oh God!" as the thing began to move back and forth beneath her nightshirt, painfully squeezing her right breast, then her left, then her right, over and over again.

"Thy kingdom come! Thy will be done!"

Stephanie left the cot and huddled beside the bed, embracing Carmen's legs and still screaming.

"On earth! As it is in heaven!"

Laura began to writhe on the bed as she screamed, slapping at the lumpy shape that continued to move beneath her nightshirt, in turn brutally squeezing her breasts and thrusting itself between her legs.

"Give us this day our d-daily br-br—" The rosary slipped from Carmen's hand and she choked on her words, slapping her hands over her mouth as she watched what was happening to her niece, helpless.

Stephanie began to sing in a ragged, tearful voice: "Jesus loves me, this I know...for the Bible tells me so...lit-tull ones to Him be-long...they are weak but He is strong—"

After setting her Bible aside, Carmen reached down with one hand and patted Stephanie's back, saying quietly, "Please calm down, honey, please, sweetheart, just calm down." With the other hand, she groped for her rosary and, when she found it, she began to recite the Hail Mary very rapidly as she slowly pulled her legs away from Stephanie and began to make her way to the door.

"Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen, Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art—"

Before she got very far the second time, Stephanie began to cry, "Don't leave, please, Mommy, don't leave!”

Carmen stopped and said quickly, "Honey, I have to go call Father Wheatley, we need him right now, we need him, so please—"

The bedroom door opened and Al stood in the doorway wearing his robe, his eyes wide, mouth open, and he asked breathlessly, "What the hell's happening?" But it took only an instant for him to see what was happening. "Oh God," he breathed, "oh God oh Jesus what's happening, dear Jesus what's happening...."

"Go get me the phone!" Carmen said urgently.

He was back in a moment with the cordless telephone and handed it to Carmen, keeping his distance from the bed, where Laura was still under attack by the invisible arm that writhed and groped and clutched beneath her nightshirt.

With a trembling finger, Carmen punched in Father Wheatley's number. She hadn't even looked at a clock but knew it was late and assumed he'd be asleep.

He was. His voice was thick and groggy when he answered, "H'lo?"

"Father Wheatley?"

"Mm-hm. Yeah, that's me."

"This is Carmen Snedeker, Father, and we—well, there's something happening here th-that, um—"

"What's wrong, Carmen?" he asked.

She told him. The words spilled out of her in a rush as she explained what had been happening, what was happening at that moment, and she told him they needed his help desperately.

She waited for a long moment as silence came over the line. Then, Father Wheatley cleared his voice and said sleepily, "Well, Carmen, tell you what. You sit down with Laura and do the Rosary with her. Do it over and over if you have to until she's calmed down and forgotten all this and can go to sleep."

Then he hung up.

Carmen kept the phone to her ear for a moment, her jaw slack with disbelief. Then she tossed it to the floor and leaned toward Laura, holding her rosary tightly.

"Sweetheart, it's gonna be all right," she said loudly. "It'll be all right, Laura." And then she began to do the Rosary as Father Wheatley had told her.

Until something tried to pull the rosary from her hands.

She stopped and stared at the string of beads which was taut, as if someone else was trying to pull it from her.

It won.

The rosary broke and beads scattered in every direction over the rug and over the wood floor, clicking against the wood and the walls.

Carmen stared at the mass of beads as they rolled over the floor.

"Hail Mary, full of grace," she began, her voice hoarse, "the Lord is with thee."

The thing beneath Laura's nightshirt began to retreat.

"Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus."

It slithered out from under the shirt and disappeared.

"Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."

The smell of rotten garbage was gone.

Laura stopped screaming, stopped squirming on the bed. She was still for a long while—everyone was—then she sat up slowly.

"Aunt Carmen," she rasped, "do we have to stay in here?"

"No, honey. No, we don't."

A bit later, Al and Laura were seated at the dining-room table sipping tea that Carmen had made while Stephanie had a mug of hot cocoa.

Carmen went into the living room, turned on a light, and searched for the magazine she'd gotten from Tanya. When she found it, she thumbed through the pages until she found the article about Ed and Lorraine Warren. Skimming through it, she found out where they lived—in Monroe—grabbed a pad and pencil and used the living-room telephone to call information.

Their number was listed and she wrote it down.

Then she returned to the dining room with the magazine and showed the article to Al. After he'd looked it over carefully, she said, "If our own priest isn't going to help us, we're going to have to go to somebody."

After frowning at the magazine for a while, Al asked, "How much do they charge?"

"I don't know."

"How do we know we can trust them? I mean it's a pretty weird thing to do with your lives, hunting down ghosts and demons."

"We'll just have to find out, won't we?"

A long moment passed, then he began to nod and said, "Okay, go ahead and call them."

Hands shaking nervously, Carmen hurried back into the living room and called the Warrens.

After a few rings, a very groggy woman answered. "H'lo?"

"Is this Lorraine Warren?"

"Mm-hm, it is. Who's calling, please?"

"Um, my name is Carmen Snedeker, and I read about you and your husband in a magazine, and I think my family needs your help because—" Suddenly, Carmen's words spilled out in a desperate rush as she explained to Mrs. Warren what had happened in their house that night and what had been happening for so many months. She even began to sob as she spoke, unable to hold back the tears.

"Sweetheart, sweetheart," Lorraine Warren said, sounding more awake now, "calm down and listen to me. I can't understand what you're saying, okay, hon? Just calm down a little."

Carmen tried, took a few deep breaths and went through some of it again. Lorraine listened silently, then, when Carmen was done, said, "Okay, honey, here's what you do. If this starts happening again tonight, have your husband hold up a cross or a rosary, whichever, and you say—shout it at the top of your lungs, if you want—'In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave this place now and go back to the place from which you've come!' Do you understand that?"

Carmen nodded absentmindedly, then realized what she was doing and said, "Yes, yes, I understand."

"But listen, that's only for tonight, okay? You do that tonight, keep doing the Rosary, all of that. Then, around nine in the morning, you give us a call. We'll come on over, okay?"

"Okay. I'll call you."

"You try to get some sleep, okay? If you have evil spirits in your home, you need to know they thrive on weakness. Not sleeping makes you weak, and they'll use that, believe me. And I'll say a prayer for you tonight."

"Yeah, okay. Th-thank you."

"God be with you, honey. Bye-bye."

Carmen hung up the telephone slowly and stared at it for a long while afterward. Nine o'clock tomorrow morning could not possibly come quickly enough....