possessed and to others. If this demon has brought Alton Blackwood’s spirit from out of time into time once more, to keep the killer’s promise, then it won’t kill your family using the house, Mr. Calvino. It will kill the family using someone in the house whom it has possessed.”
John wanted to get up from the table and step out of this soiled atmosphere, onto the porch. A cold front as hard as ice itself had come in from the north the day before. Although the sky hung as dark as iron, the air was polished bright, invigorating. But a desperate hope kept him in his chair.
“Who is at risk of possession?” he asked.
“Anyone,” said Abelard. “Perhaps not one who lives in a truly saintly state. Though even if I knew such people, I wouldn’t need all my fingers to count them.”
“But it must be easier to control a corrupt man like Andy Tane, to force him to commit murder and even suicide.”
“You’re speaking now of two different things. When the intention of possession is for the corruption and destruction of the one who is possessed, one weakness of character or another is enough to open the door to the entity.”
With ashen eyes, Abelard watched as he tapped the burnt end from his Marlboro into the glass ashtray.
He continued: “The demon can exert such total control as you suggest only in those who have turned away from grace and isolated themselves from redemption.”
“Billy Lucas was a fourteen-year-old boy. And not a bad boy, judging by the evidence.”
“According to the law,” Abelard said, “how old must a murderer be to stand trial as an adult?”
“In most jurisdictions, children are generally presumed to have the capacity to form criminal intent by the time they’re fourteen.”
“Then let’s suppose they haven’t fully developed the capacity to make sound moral judgments until that age, either. And even then, if they received no previous spiritual guidance, might they not be as vulnerable to total control as this Andy Tane you mentioned?”
“But surely an innocent child—”
“Most children may be innocent. Not all. You must have known or heard of a murderer even younger than Billy Lucas.”
“This case several years ago. He was eleven.”
“Who did he kill?”
“A ten-year-old playmate. And brutally.”
With thumb and forefinger, Abelard plucked from his tongue a shred of tobacco that was stuck to it. He flicked it in the ashtray.
“You mentioned Mrs. Lucas’s belief in the healing power of herbs and obelisks and geodes. There might be medicinal value in certain herbs but not in crystal animals and the rest. How passionately did she believe in this?”
John shrugged. “I don’t know. She bought a lot of that stuff.”
“Some of it voodoo.”
“No. I didn’t see any evidence of really bizarre stuff like that.”
“Didn’t you say the shop sold High John the Conqueror and wonder-of-the-world root?”
“They sold hundreds of herbs and powdered weeds. Those names stuck with me because they were unusual.”
“They’re both voodoo powders. Oh, I’m sure the shop isn’t a nest of wild-eyed voodooists and that its proprietor has no malevolent intent. Sounds as if they sell the golden calf in a large variety of forms, and no doubt with the sincere conviction that they’re doing good.”
Events of the past few weeks had in a sense broken the world as John knew it into colorful fragments that, like the bits of glass at the bottom of a kaleidoscope, kept shifting to form an increasingly complex reality.
Abelard said, “But if Mrs. Lucas had true, deep faith in the efficacy of these things, perhaps her son came to share that faith.”
“Maybe he did,” John said. “He had several of these things in his room, but neither his sister nor his grandmother did. Why does it matter?”
For a long moment, Abelard watched a ribbon of smoke serpentine from the end of his cigarette, as if it might take form the way that the vapor from a magic lamp morphed into a genie.
Finally he said, “Have you ever heard that using a Ouija board is dangerous because in trying to communicate with spirits, you can open the door to dark forces?”
“I’ve heard it often. I thought it might even be a warning on the Ouija-board box.”
Abelard smiled thinly. “I don’t believe the government’s gone so far yet as to require that. There are many ways to open the door to that waiting darkness. And there are things we do that both open the door and also leave us vulnerable not merely to possession but also to loss of control. This Reese somebody you mentioned …”
“Reese Salsetto.”
“He worshipped money and power,” Abelard said. “That opened the door but also made him vulnerable to full enslavement. Likewise, an obsessive blind faith in material things—crystals, herbs, geodes, powdered weeds—can sometimes be like consulting a Ouija board. And if you believe only an obelisk and wonder-of-the-world root can save you, if you insist on attributing supernatural powers to objects that of course do not embody them, then you’re not merely vulnerable. You are utterly without defenses.”
As if so much talk of doors had opened one in the sky, a sudden wind blew down into the yard, conscripted an army of dead leaves into its service, and assaulted the nearby window with them, so that John startled, though Abelard did not. The wind’s second breath was less ferocious than its previous one, and as the leaves fluttered away, the first snowflakes of the season flurried against the glass. They were as large as silver dollars and as intricate as lace mantillas.
John said, “If I unknowingly invited it, could I be possessed?”
Watching the snow at the window, Abelard murmured, “That’s not the question you really want most to ask.”
After a silence that drew the ex-priest’s stare to him, John said, “If I was possessed, could I be controlled so completely that I might be used … to kill even the people I love the most?”
Through the haze of cigarette smoke, Abelard searched John’s eyes and offered his own for searching. “I don’t really know you that well, Mr. Calvino. I don’t know you well enough to say.”
“On December tenth, when I believe we’re all at risk …”
“Yes?”
“Will you spend those twenty-four hours with us. In our home?”
“Eight years ago, I was unfrocked. Not excommunicated, but stripped of my priesthood and all authority.”
“You still know the rituals of exorcism.”
“I know them, but it would be a sacrilege for me to say them in my present condition.”
With the nimble fingers of his free hand, Abelard extracted a fresh cigarette from the pack on the table, conveyed it to his lips, and lit it from the butt he was discarding.
John listened to himself talking as if listening to a third man at the table. “I’m terrified that I might be as defenseless as Billy Lucas. As defenseless as Andy Tane leaping from that window with Davinia. What if I feel it clawing into me … and I don’t have the clarity of mind to do what Brenda Woburn did, the clarity to kill myself before it can take me and … use me?”
Peter Abelard savored his new Marlboro, blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling. Then he leaned forward in his chair, forearms on the table where the oilcloth was worn, and at last said, “You aren’t alone. Remember, the forces of darkness are balanced by the light.”
“I pray,” John said.
“Good for you, Mr. Calvino. So do I. But beyond that—don’t let fear blind you to every saving grace you’re offered.”
“Such as?”
“Such as any that may be.”
“Please, for God’s sake, I need more than riddles.”
Abelard considered him for a long time, his eyes seeming more steely now than ashen. At last he said, “The
