Gino held a knife. He’d taken a life. Guilt pulsed through his body like a snake slithering through his veins. The nightmare that was real.
The boy had been possessed, moving through the village with singular purpose: to kill. Men, women, children. One after another. No one stopped him. They hesitated in their fear, and he slit their throats. They fought back, and he tortured them in ways Gino had never fathomed, wished he’d never known or seen. When the boy reached the third hut, the screams and cries of the dying awakened those still sleeping.
Gino’s friend Ravi, the village elder who had brought him to this forsaken Central American country, tried to stop the boy, yet the boy was no longer of this world but of the next. He held Ravi with one hand- impossible, but Gino had seen it with his own eyes! Held him up and snapped his neck with a squeeze.
Impossible, except that the boy was possessed. His eyes were dead. Evil flowed through his body, not blood.
Ravi collapsed in a heap on the parched earth, his neck at an impossible angle.
Gino ran back to his small hut and took up his crucifix and Bible. He could taste evil, feel it crawling on his skin, hot and seductive and fearsome. He could hardly breathe as the screams and cries of the dead and dying vibrated in his head. His hands shook, but if he did nothing to stop the slaughter, the demon would kill all ninety-seven people in this small, poor village.
He ran out to confront the beast.
“In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave!”
The boy flinched, as if stung by a bee.
Gino, emboldened by the power in his voice, began the rite of exorcism.
“In the name of the Father, and of the …
The boy slit the throat of a woman who knelt in prayer. Her dying eyes accused Gino.
… you told me God was loving and merciful … you lied to me … you brought death to our peace …
And Gino knew then that her unspoken words were true. It was his fault; he’d brought evil with him. He must destroy the damn book!
“Gino,” the demon mocked, and he saw the true face of evil slithering beneath the boy’s skin.
He called upon St. Michael the Archangel.
The demon laughed. “Geeeeennnoooooooooo …
His head hurt and blood dripped from his nose. Still he continued the exorcism. He threw holy water on the boy’s body. Steam rose from his skin as the beast cried out in pain, a demonic scream that seemed to come from under the earth as the child fell to his knees.
Gino’s strength grew.
Then the demon rose, laughing, and lightning struck a hut, trapping the family inside the blazing room.
Gino spoke the words that had been so effective before. Why didn’t they work now? Where was God? Where was St. Michael?
Or was it him? He’d opened the book, but he hadn’t read. Had the demon been inside, waiting for his weakness to crack a seal he didn’t know was there?
“Leave the boy, Satan!”
He felt his feet rising from the ground.
I am dying.
He hovered two feet off the ground, trapped and helpless as the demon set another hut on fire. And another.
In the demon’s excitement over the fires, he dropped the knife.
Gino continued the exorcism ritual even while levitated; the demon faltered, but never stopped. Gino, however, fell to the ground and the knife was within his reach.
He clenched it. It was infused with evil, but he held on. It burned his flesh, but he held on.
The next hut went up in flames. If anyone ran, they were thrown through the air as if by magic.
As if by magic. The book!
Gino rose to his feet, knife dripping innocent blood, and with strength he prayed for, he cut the demon’s hand off. Small snakes slithered out of its body, spreading the darkness, the evil, coming for him. He stabbed the demon once, twice, three times …
The boy fell to his feet. Smoke filled the air, whirled around him; he felt the demon touch his soul, then scream as he disappeared into the earth, and the ground was scorched.
“F-Father.”
The boy’s eyes were dying. Dying. Gone. He died. Innocent. At Gino’s hand. He dropped the knife and prayed for death, but God wasn’t merciful.
Gino searched his hut for the book he’d found last week in an abandoned, crumbling structure that at first he’d believed was a church hundreds of years old. He should have known from the arcane and profane symbols on the remaining walls and floor that the church wasn’t dedicated to God. If he’d never gone inside he would never have found the book.
He searched the entire village three times before collapsing in exhaustion.
The book was gone.
His penance, it seemed, was purgatory on earth. Reliving the nightmare, the fear, the suffering, the murder of an innocent boy. The endless searching for a book that seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Gino woke from the violent memories every night these last few weeks. So often, in fact, that he feared the dark and dreaded sleep. He took to walking the halls alone, praying for peace, praying to be free.
For two decades he’d fought the memories, beaten them back, and they were finally gone. For years they were gone. His penance had been paid. He had been healed in the loving presence of God, his faith restored … but then the memories had returned, worse than before. Vivid. The taste and scent and feel of blood on his hands, in his nose, twisting him in knots so tight he couldn’t eat or sleep or think.
Repent. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
Chants from the chapel drew him out of his bed and he stood, feet bare, his sleep shirt brushing against his old, gnarled knees.
He looked down and saw snakes. Small, baby snakes, slithering. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t move. He squeezed his eyes closed.
“Gino, come to us, as it is above, it is below.
“Robert, come to us, as it is above, it is below.
“Lorenzo, come to us, as it is above, it is below.”
They were all being summoned to the chapel, every one of them. They were sinners; they needed to repent and be cleansed. Be punished.
You have been forgiven. Stay.
He opened his eyes. The snakes were gone.
“Gino, come to us, as it is above, it is below.”
Gino didn’t notice the tears streaming down his face as he turned the knob and left his room. He walked down the hall, heard other doors opening, heard the chanting in the chapel.
He needed the pain to stop.
He stepped into the chapel and smelled blood. It was his own.
Rafe’s chest burned as if he’d been stabbed with a knife. He reached down to pull the knife out …
“Rafe-”
