“I’m telling you for the billionth time, they’re not working.” Michael flung the bottle of antipsychotic pills at Dr. Johan’s head, nailing her on the side of her forehead. A high-pitched giggle escaped his lips, though he never meant to laugh. Never.
He darted off the couch to her side, babbling apologies faster than his mouth could form the words. “Sorry, sorry, so sorry, sorry.”
This wasn’t him. Never, maybe, but in the past year, this was who he’d become.
Dr. Johan recoiled from his touch, cradling her forehead.
The horror of seeing genuine fear in her eyes eclipsed the horror filling him at his actions. He’d finally broken the one person left trying to help him.
Dr. Johan could’ve abandoned him six months ago, as his family had, yet she’d kept him on as a patient despite his current joblessness and lack of funds.
“Forgive me, please.” He knelt at her feet, hands clasped, head bowed. “I didn’t mean to yell or throw the bottle. Please.”
“Michael …” Dr. Johan slid out of her armchair and stood behind it.
Shame crawled up Michael’s throat like a snake.
“You have to give them more time to work. Maybe we haven’t found the right dosage to balance you out yet, but you have to keep taking them.”
“This dumb bitch couldn’t find her dentures even if she was wearing them.”
Shut up.
“Look at her.”
Shut up!
“Strangle her.”
What?
“Wrap your hands around her wrinkled throat and just keep squeezing.”
“Shut up!” Michael screamed.
Dr. Johan screamed and ducked behind the chair.
“Let me out.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“We are one, you and I. We want the same thing—to feast on that old bitch’s soul.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!”
Dr. Johan sobbed behind the armchair and shook as if she were experiencing her own personal earthquake.
Michael clamped a hand over his mouth to stop another giggle, but it escaped anyway. His other hand inched toward his crotch. No, no, stop. He rubbed himself through his jeans, relishing the psychologist’s fear.
“Yes. Oh, yes. It’ll feel even better when you’re on top of her, squeezing that scrawny throat.”
“I’m really sorry.” Michael grabbed his coat from the sofa and then bolted from the office.
“Look at that. The bitch’s skank secretary is still at lunch. We could’ve gotten off, undisturbed.”
“Shut up!”
Michael got into his car and slammed the door. He smashed his head into the steering wheel over and over until the pain made him dizzy.
The voice finally quieted, but it lurked in the back of his mind, taunting him with thoughts of strangling Dr. Johan.
There was no point in asking what was wrong with him because the answer seemed obvious.
His marriage had never been great, but Kelly had tried. She tried love, patience, marriage counseling, then tough love, and an intervention with her parents. They eventually had to split, or she’d be dead.
Every moment Michael had spent with her, he’d dreamed of pressing his thumbs into her soft throat.
Then, the incident had happened.
She was staying with her parents until further notice. He’d gotten lucky that she hadn’t pressed charges. Her father had wanted to—badly.
Things at work had deteriorated at the same pace as his marriage. Michael didn’t have friends there, preferring to be alone most days, but it was an escape at least. The structure of his job as an accountant at Saint Paul Medical Center provided an easy, mind-numbing routine until the urges manifested.
Then, the voice came.
Then, the complaints from his coworkers started.
Then … well, Michael hadn’t wanted to corner Denise in that closet. The hospital had fired him that afternoon.
Last year, his life had been tolerable.
This year, he would give anything for a do-over.
Michael opened the door to his townhouse and threw the car keys onto the floor. He went to the kitchen to grab a beer, but the thought of drinking it turned his stomach.
Damn useless pills. He wasn’t wrong about those. They hadn’t been working. Therapy hadn’t been working. The holistic-slash-aromatherapy-slash-acupuncture-slash-crystal healing-slash-meditation-and-yoga-guru were bullshit too.
“Strangling sluts will work wonders for our mental health.”
“Fuck you.” Michael put his hand in the doorway.
“You’re only hurting yourself.”
“Shut up.” Michael slammed the pantry door on his fingers. He dropped to his knees, screaming. Tears poured down his cheeks. Curling into a ball, he cradled his hand between his thighs and prayed for the pain to fade.
It eventually dulled to a throbbing ache, and Michael hobbled to the bathroom for some aspirin.
He flopped onto the bed, still clutching his swelling hand, and swallowed the pill dry. The voice remained quiet— for now—but every once in a while, it polluted his thoughts with images of his hand around Dr. Johan’s neck.
I’ve tried every damn thing. Michael curled tighter into himself.
In his heart, he knew the voice wasn’t schizophrenia. Couldn’t be. He’d just turned thirty-three when this nightmare began. No one developed schizophrenia at thirty-three, right? That shit happened in a person’s early twenties.
His family, bosses, various therapists, and poor Dr. Johan were wrong. Had to be.
Only one answer made sense. He’d dabbled with it a few times in grade school, like everyone else, right? Read a few books. Looked stuff up online. Attempted a few spells. For fun. Kelly had found it creepy, but the occult had helped him survive his abusive parents, an awkward childhood without friends, and kept him entertained during a lonely adulthood.
I’m … I’m possessed.
Michael sat up and said the words out loud. “I’m possessed.”
Finally, just saying it felt right.
You’re a demon, aren’t you? he asked the verbose creature sharing his head.
He waited.
For once, it didn’t respond. He kept waiting, but it remained silent.
That night, not one thought of strangling a random woman in his life crossed his mind.
Michael arrived at Holy Mary the Divine Church at ten thirty p.m., as instructed. A nun whispered for him to sign in and told him to take a seat in a row of metal folding chairs at the back of the reception hall. A group of people were talking to each other in a semicircle in the middle of the room. Father Thomas, Michael assumed, was the priest holding court at the front. He had a soothing radio voice that put Michael at ease, even from afar.
The search to find a priest who took his claims seriously had lasted months, then a few months more to find one who would perform an exorcism. The voice—or Mickey, as Michael had taken to calling his homicidal parasite— made every day a lesson in depravity.
Each minute brought fresh visions of murder and an almost-overwhelming urge to kill. Almost.
That one bitch … woman in the grocery store parking lot had gotten lucky the bag boy showed up when he did.
Then, there was the drunk brunette with tacky red streaks in her hair who had gotten into his car, thinking he was her Uber driver.
“Dumb slut.”
Michael shook his head. Stop it.
Her face had slowly reddened. Her eyes had rolled back.
Her small hips bucking against mine as she struggled for air.
Stop. It.
He’d caught himself in time before she …
The front of his jeans tightened. Stop it.
His and Mickey’s thoughts blended more and more each day. The exorcism couldn’t happen fast enough.
“You’re only hurting yourself.”
“Shut it,” Michael snapped.
People in the semicircle turned to stare.
“Shh!” The nun put a finger to her lips.
The AA meeting or Bible study or whatever finally ended after a half hour. People took their sweet time filing out. Each person lingered as they spoke to the priest. Michael was ready to pull his hair out when a guy poured himself another coffee and leisurely ate a powdered doughnut from a box next to the coffee station.
Eventually, Father Thomas was the last person besides Michael left in the room.
“Are we doing it here?” Michael’s voice broke on the last word. Nerves caused his hands to shake.
“Hello. You must be Mickey.” Father Thomas shook his hand.
“Michael.”
The priest placed his hands on the sides of Michael’s face and stared deep into his eyes. “Yes. I feel the demon vibrating on top of your skin. Usually, they bury themselves far into a victim’s mind.”
He ushered Michael into the church. Inside the well-lit house of God, the nun was setting something up at the front by the altar. Sandalwood incense permeated the building. It itched Michael’s throat, but he tamped down on a cough. He was sinful enough as it was.
Mickey started sending visions of him strangling the nun. “Who does this little God whore think she is to shush us?”
Michael tried to look everywhere, except at her soft white throat, which had a brown mole the size of a pencil eraser at the center. Tried and failed.
“She’ll be all ours after we get rid of the priest.”
Sweat beaded on Michael’s upper lip. “Father, please hurry. I don’t know how much longer I can hold him back.”
“Your struggle will soon be over,” Father Thomas said. “God willing.”
The nun crossed herself and bowed at the altar. She’d drawn with chalk a white circle, outlined with runes that Michael had never seen before. Inside had the Lord’s prayer written in Latin.
“Please, Michael, this is silly.”
“What do I have to do?” Michael asked in a pleading tone.
This nightmare would end here and now. He’d rebuild the life he’d had. His mind would finally be his own.
“It’s been so long that you don’t remember, do you?”
Father Thomas instructed him to remove his shirt and then blessed Michael with holy water the nun had handed him. He repeated words from the Bible in a long, running drone.
“Michael, okay, you win. I’ll go quiet again. Don’t do this.”
Father Thomas continued on. Time stood still while moving at sound speed. The nun raised her voice in song. Michael didn’t recognize all the words. Some were English, some Latin, some Hebrew, yet most were in a guttural ancient language he remembered, but couldn’t recall when or where or what they meant, but they sounded familiar.
“Michael, you are only hurting yourself,” Mickey begged. “Stop this thing.”
Michael had never heard desperation in Mickey’s voice before. He smiled.
The nun started dancing, her arms flapping like a dying bird.
His skin itched, as if hives had erupted all over his body and then fire ants joined in.
Father Thomas’s voice bellowed and fell to a whisper. The ancient words from his lips collided like boulders. The nun handed him a black chef’s knife with symbols inscribed on the blade. He took it, and then she screamed garbled gibberish at the circle on the floor.
Blueish-green sparkles twinkled, then exploded in a blinding blast of light. Father Thomas slashed a cross deep into Michael’s chest. He didn’t feel pain from the knife’s edge, but the rest of him was on fire.
“Please, we’ve been together since I was a boy. Don’t leave. I’ll let you stay in—”
Roars of thousands of demons boomed from the portal. Michael’s skin melted like hot butter. His screams drowned in the inferno of sound.
The light first ripped globs off him, then snatched whole chunks.
“Michael!” Mickey’s voice was the last thing Michael heard before the portal sucked him in.
The blue-green aura engulfed him.
Mickey opened his eyes, blinking to adjust his sight. Sunlight beamed through the stained-glass windows of Holy Mary the Divine Church. Each panel depicted the crucifixion of Christ.
“Here, son.” The nun handed him a cool bottle of a green sports drink and helped him to stand up.
His chest hurt. Someone had bandaged his wound.
“Thank you, Sister. Is he—it gone?”
“Yes.” She smiled at him. “You’re free and whole and in God’s grace once more.”
“Hmm.” Mickey looked around. “Where’s Father Thomas?”
“In bed, resting. He hasn’t performed a service like this in a decade. Took more out of him than he’d expected.”
“Hmm.” Mickey examined her lovely mouth and then scanned down to her neck and the little brown mole. “Will he sleep for a while?”
“Unfortunately,” she said. “But you can return tomorrow afternoon if you need to talk.”
The nun got down on her knees and picked up a sponge from a water bucket next to the circle. She wrung it out.
Half the circle was already gone.
Mickey licked his lips.
Then, she started scrubbing off the rest of the runes and circle.
“What’s your name, Sister?” Mickey had to know her name. She being his first and all. He couldn’t just call her the nun when he replayed this moment later.
“Sister Katherine.” She looked up at him with a sweet smile, then turned back to her work.
“Lovely.” Mickey stepped closer to her, then hesitated, almost expecting Michael to show up to slap his hand away.
There was no Michael.
Mickey grabbed Sister Katherine from behind by her throat.
“What ar—”
Mickey’s thick hands cut off her voice.
He squeezed, digging his fingers into her soft skin. “Shhh.”
She never got a chance to scream.
Copyrighted 2024
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stacy benedict 