Beware the Night (25 page)

We found out later that while we were in the house, doing the exorcism, Nina actually suffered a heart attack. Were she not in a hospital at the time, she never would have made it. Rose spoke to her after she got out of the hospital, and Nina was happy to report that the house had a different feel to it. There was no longer a sinister sense of foreboding. No more feeling of terror on the stairs. Nor were any more family possessions broken or destroyed. She even put the chandelier back up.

But even though we were able to bring the case to a close and the Satanist family was evicted from the house, a few months later Nina lost her battle against the demonically induced disease that had ravaged her heart. Upon hearing the grim news that she’d passed on to her final reward, I bent my head and prayed.
Rest in peace, Nina, where no demon can ever touch you.

*   *   *

I thought this was the end of my Work in this Queens neighborhood, but I was wrong. A few months later I got a frantic call from one of my investigators, Phil. A friend of his was in terrifying trouble, and once again Satanists were on the scene. To my amazement, the new case was only a few blocks from where Nina’s family lived, but it was in a different type of building—a six-family apartment house—and involved a
very
different coven from the one I’d encountered before.

This unsavory group weren’t stylish professionals trying to hide their diabolical bent; instead, they flaunted it in the most garish manner imaginable. They looked like gang-bangers. Their heads were shaved and they sported satanic tattoos. Each member wore an inverted cross around his neck, and scared the hell out of everyone else in the building, including Phil’s unfortunate friend. If the group’s appearance wasn’t alarming enough, these characters were actually seen catching stray cats around the neighborhood to sacrifice to the Devil. Such behavior marked them as “dabblers” rather than serious Satanists, but made them no less dangerous.

Their activities weren’t news to me: I was all too familiar with these particular perpetrators. So were the local cops, who suspected them of spray-painting “666” and satanic slogans on several buildings in the area and of other offenses, ranging from drug dealing to armed robbery. The delegation of tenants from the Satanists’ building who had summoned me and Joe also accused them of black magic. To help us handle what sounded like a rather dangerous case, we brought three investigators: Scott, Phil, and Chris.

What made this otherwise quiet neighborhood such a hotbed of satanic infestation? What most people don’t realize, until they’re threatened by it themselves, is how common Satanism really is. By some estimates there are over eight thousand satanic covens in this country. In just about every American city, black masses are now available on a weekly basis, in a choice of locations; some covens have become so specialized that they limit their membership to pedophiles from the clergy or lesbian ex-nuns.
The Satanic Bible,
by Anton LaVey, has sold over a million copies, and urges those who buy the book to “hold Satan as a symbolic personal savior, who takes care of mundane, fleshy, carnal things.” Such messages are finding a ready audience in schools, since most of them now have at least a few self-professed witches among the student body, whether practitioners of white or black magic. Wearing satanic emblems has almost become a fad among today’s disaffected youth. No wonder demonic possession is on the rise!

The problem, ironic as it sounds, is the current
lack
of belief in satanic spirits. As Father Martin says, “the belief that [the Devil] doesn’t exist at all is an enormous advantage that he has never enjoyed to such a great degree. It is the ultimate camouflage.” As priests and ministers are toning down sermons about fire and brimstone, the Devil is quick to capitalize on this situation, by drawing in dabblers who truly have no idea what they’re letting themselves in for.

Whether you believe in black magic or not makes no difference to those who seek to use it against us. In fact, the less you believe, the more likely that you won’t know how to protect yourself if you’re attacked this way. This situation is all the more to the liking of the legions of sorcerers, black magicians, witches, warlocks, Satanists, and other practitioners of the occult.

Or, if you are curious about the dark arts yourself and are tempted to try a spell or two, be warned: The Devil
doesn’t
protect his own, since his relentless hatred for humanity extends even to those who profess to serve him. Full of guile and perversity, he and his demons simply bide their time, then swoop down to destroy these people without a second thought.

*   *   *

Like the Salvatores before them, these victims of the second satanic coven also had learned to dread the stairs in their building. The downstairs neighbor heard her three-year-old scream with terror one afternoon while he was playing on the building’s steps. “Mommy, he won’t let me go,” the boy yelled from the second floor. When she ran to help, the child was drenched in sweat, trembling from head to toe, and crying that he’d seen a ghost with big teeth, dressed in a black hooded cloak. “It had no nose,” he added—a clue I quickly picked up on, since, as I’ve said, the demonic, unlike ordinary ghosts, often have some oddity of appearance when they manifest themselves to humans.

While the mother initially dismissed the incident as the product of an overactive imagination, she took it more seriously when her three-year-old spit at a picture of Jesus a few days later. Meanwhile, other tenants were complaining that the building’s basement gave them the creeps and stopped using it for storage. A woman on the third floor saw an eerie black shadow float up the stairs at midnight; another tenant woke up in the middle of the night to find a man with a goatee sitting on her sofa and staring at her.

“I was stunned and rubbing my eyes to see if I was still asleep,” she told me. “I turned around, and when I looked back he was gone. I went psycho and ran around my apartment saying, ‘Whoever you are, go away and stop scaring me!’ When I told my neighbor about it to see if I was losing my mind, she said I was describing a man who’d died in the apartment over ten years ago. The next day I put crosses in every room.”

After seeing the floating black shadow, the third-floor tenant found herself shaking with fear every time she had to use the stairs to her walk-up at night. “When I go up, I have my back to the wall and cling to the banister, then creep up because you get a feeling that something is right behind you. When I turn around, I don’t see anything, but I’m petrified that someone is going to push me down the stairs. There’s such a strong presence of evil that my friends tell me that they also go up the stairs with their backs to the wall and feel like something dreadful is lurking there. Some of them won’t come over anymore; they’re that scared.”

To rid the building of its inhuman inhabitants, five of us went over to exorcise its three floors. Cases like this are dangerous because we don’t know exactly what kind of black magic we’re up against—or how we might be attacked. Even if we were able to clear the building of the things that are there, they won’t stay gone, because the Satanists will invite them back. We still wanted to help these people, so we split up and went to different locations around the building to perform our rituals.

I was in the apartment across from where the devil-worshippers lived. Just then the Satanists’ leader, a man named Lewis Williams, came up the stairs. Someone had tipped him off to what we were doing, because the daughters of one of these families hung out with these guys. I was purifying the apartment across the hall from his with blessed incense when I heard conversation in the hall. Someone with a heavy New York accent was asking “Who are these people? What denomination are they?”

I looked out in the hall and saw Williams, who was standing at his doorway. He sneered at me, so I sneered back. He was holding a copy of
The Necronomicon,
which is an extremely evil book. On the inside cover there is a warning: “
The Necronomicon
’s magick is nothing to fool around with and may expose you to psychological forces with which you cannot cope. Remember, if you tinker with these incantations, you were warned!” Psychological forces, my ass! What you will be dealing with is demonic spirits, as Lewis Williams later found out.

This book is dedicated to the late Aleister Crowley, a notorious Satanist who was known as “the Beast.” The editor of this book goes on to thank a whole group of people, including a demon he mentions by name. Imagine that! Thanking a demon for terrorizing humanity and seeking the ruin of souls! Apparently, this demon wasn’t particularly placated by thanks, since the second edition of this book mentions someone associated with its publication who is plagued by “poltergeists.” Well now, we all know what poltergeists really are, so why don’t these people have the guts to come out and say so?

This preface adds that the group who put out this book have experienced a number of bizarre occurrences that nearly cost them their lives, then hints around about another potential effect of this extraordinarily evil work. In an apparent Freudian slip, the editors say that people who come into “possession” of this book may experience “changes in consciousness.” I think it’s pretty obvious what those so-called changes would be—and what kind of risk people who read
The Necronomicon
are running. It may be hyped as the ultimate book of spells, or the godfather of grimoires, but I consider it a publication of pestilence.

None of this deterred Williams from standing there, right in front of me, and reading aloud this diabolical book to counter my prayers. It didn’t work. He suddenly broke off his reading and actually ran from me. From my years on the street, I’ve seen assholes like him before. They like to cause fear in people, but I wasn’t intimidated in the least. My prayers were a lot more powerful than what he was reading and he knew that. He had been an altar boy in his younger years, and even in his warped mind, he recognized the power of Catholic prayer. He exited the building—fast.

Before he left, I shouted to him,
“The Necronomicon
is a very bad book.” He smirked and replied, “That’s good.”

We resumed the ritual. In order to evict evil spirits in a building, we need access to every apartment, but that was out of the question in this case. We did our utmost to make the areas we were in extremely hostile to diabolical forces, but the fact that some of the tenants had no desire to rid themselves of evil was a problem. Lewis Williams, for example, was sure to invite it back in. Despite these handicaps, our prayers seemed to contain the malevolence in the building: Phil’s friend told him that after our exorcism, the terrifying phenomena stopped.

When we finished our Work, we left the building to find fifteen Satanists standing menacingly outside. Knowing how bad this group’s reputation was, I was armed with my gun. I wasn’t looking for trouble, but if I’d found it, I was ready for whatever might come. Scott was Connecticut martial arts champ for eight years. I’ve studied martial arts for twelve years. Joe is a Vietnam vet and knows how to handle himself in a fight. And we had Phil and Chris, who are gutsy guys too.

While we were there to help people spiritually, none of us would back down from these guys. I try very hard to be a good Catholic, but if you slap me in the face, I won’t turn the other cheek. I’ll probably knock your teeth out. That’s the attitude we used to walk out of there without any trouble from the Satanists.

Like my other case in this area, this investigation ended with a death. A week later I got a call from my investigator, saying that Lewis Williams had taken a gun and blown his brains out. He’d told one of the girls who hung out with him that he “couldn’t control
it
any more.” If only he’d listened when I told him he was reading a dangerous book.

Chapter Ten

Busting the Devil

L
IKE POLICE WORK
, exorcism is a dirty, dangerous job. Since most people will never become possessed or even witness an exorcism, it’s hard for them to even imagine how foul and dreadful the ritual can be, just as it’s impossible for the average person to grasp what it’s like actually to investigate a really gruesome crime, instead of just reading about it in the newspaper as you have your morning coffee. Recently I got a radio call about a fire at a schoolyard. When I arrived on the scene, the odor was overpowering. When I got closer, I found out why. The smoldering object, which initially appeared to be a large pile of rags, was a corpse, so charred that I couldn’t tell if it was a man, woman, or, God forbid, a child.

Try, if you can, to imagine how I felt standing there, with my nose filled with the stomach-turning stench of roasting human flesh, looking at what used to be a human face. Most of the features were burned away, except for a mouth forever frozen in its final scream. I hoped like hell that this person was dead
before
he or she was drenched in gasoline and torched like yesterday’s trash. The other officers who responded reacted just as I expected, stifling their horror in coarse cop humor. I know this makes us sound like horribly cold sons of bitches, but it’s a cop’s defense mechanism. Just as doctors in a hospital burn unit distance themselves from their unbearably injured or maimed patients by cracking jokes among themselves about “crispy critters,” the officers on the scene dehumanized this victim with sarcastic suggestions about what his or her name might be. “How about Bobbie-Q?” one cop joked, while another said, “Or if it’s a girl, what about Suzy-Q?”

I joined the grim camaraderie, just as I did at another horrific crime scene. Responding to a report of shots fired in a Brooklyn project, my partner, whom we affectionately called B-Dog, and I found pools of blood in the lobby and followed the trail up the stairs. We started seeing bloody handprints, showing that some horribly wounded person had crawled or dragged himself upward. We carefully stepped around the handprints, to avoid contaminating the evidence. With each step, the smell of iron got stronger and the blood thicker. When we reached the tenth floor, we found the victim—a young, muscular guy wearing a green Army jacket, lying facedown in a huge pool of blood. He’d been shot several times and died in a crawling position, with one leg bent and one arm still reaching for the next step.