vast majority of people who think they need an exorcism or who appear to need one—they’re suffering only psychological illnesses of one kind or another.”
“This isn’t just psychological.”
“I didn’t say it was, Mr. Calvino. I’ve done many exorcisms over the years where the demonic presence was real. And there were times when the demon was so powerful and so firmly embedded in its victim that no matter how often I performed the Ritual, no matter how very profound the prayers I employed, regardless of repeated blessings with the sacramentals—water, oil, salt—I failed utterly to force the possessing presence to depart. But then …”
His voice had grown quieter as he spoke, until his last two words were a whisper. And his stare drifted down from John’s eyes to the smoke curling off his cigarette.
“But then?” John pressed.
“In each of those instances, when all seemed lost, I witnessed a divine visitation that expelled the demon from the afflicted. Divine visitations, Mr. Calvino. Is your willingness to believe so elastic that it can stretch that far?”
“I’ve seen the demonic. If it’s real, so is its opposite.”
Abelard said, “We don’t live in Biblical times. God doesn’t appear in burning bushes and the like. Angels no longer materialize in all their winged glory. I think the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don’t deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore. In my experience, when the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.”
John waited as another smoky silence unraveled with Abelard lost in thought, but at last said, “Tell me, please.”
“With the Ritual, I repeatedly failed to evict the presence in a twenty-year-old man whose possessor had caused him both terrible physical maladies and deep depression. Then a neighbor boy knocked on the door and insisted he could help, though the parents of the afflicted twenty-year-old had never breathed a word to anyone about my visits to their home or my purpose. This child was only five—but had a tremendous presence. He brought with him a hush, a sense of peace I can’t convey with words—and he brought an ordinary drinking glass. He went to the bed and pressed the open end of the glass to the chest of the afflicted young man and said simply, ‘Come out.’ I watched a darkness rise out of the young man’s chest and fill that glass, not like smoke or like anything but itself. The boy turned the glass over, and the darkness rose from the glass and hung in the air half a minute, less, before dissipating. The victim instantly cast off his long depression, and the horrible impetigo sores that antibiotics couldn’t cure healed in minutes as I watched. In another case, a beautiful stray dog that no one had ever seen before wandered into the house and lay beside the afflicted, its head on his chest, and a similar cure was effected.”
When after another silence Abelard made eye contact again, John said, “And your point?”
“Don’t let your fear blind you to every saving grace you’re offered,” Abelard repeated. “Look to the children around you, animals if you have any. One of them may be an avatar of the divine.”
As if Abelard had been unnerved by recalling these incidents, his hand trembled when he brought his Marlboro to his mouth.
John tried once more: “Even if you couldn’t perform an exorcism or anything, if you could stay with us that day just to provide … your counsel.”
As he smoked, Peter Abelard held John’s stare again, this time as if daring him to look away. Eventually he said, “So … do you know why I was defrocked, Detective Calvino?”
“Yes,” John said, and with dismay he realized that although he meant to manage his expression, a trace of disgust surely could be read in his face by anyone as perceptive as Abelard.
“That I broke my vow of chastity is bad enough. That I was drawn so strongly to teenagers is perhaps the more damning factor. Boys or girls—it didn’t matter.”
John looked at the window. The first fluffy wheels of snow had spun away, and smaller flakes drove through the day.
When he could look at Abelard again, he said, “It’s just that, I’ve nowhere else to turn.”
“The watch on my right wrist,” Abelard said, “keeps perfect time. The day in the date window is correct. The watch on my left wrist has no batteries.”
He extended his left arm for John to look at the dead watch on his thin wrist.
“The date in the window has to be reset from time to time. You see now—it’s set eight weeks and three days ago. I reset it every time I fall. It’s my reminder of how weak I am. It shows the date on which I last had sex with a teenager.”
Colder than the day beyond the window, John said, “Eight weeks, not eight years.”
“That’s right. I no longer get what I want by manipulation and by the betrayal of trust. I pay for it. I struggle to resist. I pray and fast and subject myself to pain, needles acutely placed, trying to force my mind off the path I am about to follow. Sometimes, I succeed. Sometimes not.”
The pain in Peter Abelard’s voice was exceeded only by the self-loathing. John could hardly bear to meet the man’s bleak eyes as he listened to his confession, but he knew too well how anguishing it was to despise oneself, and he could not look away.
“Then I go to those parts of the city where men go for this,” Abelard continued. “You know the places I mean. Any policeman must. I seek out the young ones, the runaways. Boys or girls, it still doesn’t matter. They’re already selling themselves, so I haven’t taken their innocence. I’ve just corrupted them further, as if that matters much in the ledgers of Hell.”
John slid his chair back from the table. He didn’t quite have the strength to get up at once.
“No demon rides me, Mr. Calvino. There’s only me in me. I seek redemption so imperfectly. You have a boy of thirteen. My eyes roam over what they wish, as if I’ve no control of them. Does your eleven-year-old look a bit more mature than her years? There’s no demon in me, but God help you, Mr. Calvino, you don’t want me in your house.”
John got to his feet.
Abelard breathed dragon plumes upon the table and said, “Can you find your own way out?”
“Yes.”
As John reached the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, Abelard said, “If you really pray—”
“Yes, I’ll pray for you.”
“Not for me,” Abelard said. “For my mother suffering with the cancer. Pray for her. Surely it’ll mean more coming from you than from me.”
As John followed the canyons of the crowded house, the looming furniture seemed more Gothic than before, hulking and dire, and the scent of cigarette smoke on the air seemed now as bitter as ipecac on the tongue.
Outside, the frozen sky, the freezing air in brisk motion. The cleansing sluice of falling snow. The black arachnid limbs of dormant trees in falling snow. Barren yard and battered fence and broken concrete and falling snow.
At the curb, he stood beside his car, reluctant to get in behind the wheel. The cold pinched his face, and snow lasted on his lashes until he blinked.
Twenty years to the day.
Twenty years and counting.
Breathing in snow, breathing out the stale scent of cigarettes, he could not at once get rid of the smell of smoke.
Overhead, wind whispered through the naked limbs and shook the younger branches, rattling them like the fragile bones of small dead things.
Twenty years to the day.
And he had nowhere to turn for help.
The time had come to sit with Nicolette, to share with her his once irrational-seeming fear that Alton Turner Blackwood was in the world again, to tell her the one thing he had withheld from her about his confrontation with the killer on that long-ago night. The time had come to make some plan for the tenth of December, if any plan could possibly be made.
He got in the car, started the engine, drove into the street.
This evening, he would pray for Peter Abelard’s mother, for Abelard as well. He would pray for his lost family,
