The Accidental Exorcist (2 page)

Abby squeezed her eyes
shut.

Let out a shriek.

A loud slam.

Rattling metal.

Something grabbed her arm. Yanked her
violently to one side. Her heart lodged so tight in her throat she
couldn't speak. She opened her eyes expecting to find the ashen
features of a female Hannibal Lechter.

Instead, it was the dark complexion of
Sergeant Grimes, the prison guard. She had pulled Abby aside and
stood between her and Cheryl. “Sit down, Morgan!”

The chain attached to her ankle
restraints was pulled taut, like those connected to her wrists.
Cheryl glared at them, then smiled as though nothing unusual had
happened. She complied, sat nicely in her chair, tossed an errant
lock of wiry hair from her face, and put her hands in her lap. Her
entire demeanor transformed in an instant. She could have easily
passed for one of the Stepford wives, so docile and sweet. “What’s
the matter, Dr. Lee? You look like you’ve seen—”

“
Shut your mouth!”
Sergeant Grimes turned to Abby, rolled her eyes and murmured, “Let
these psychos talk too much and they try to get into your
head.”

“
Yes, well…there’s usually
a component of verbal manipulation involved.”

They stepped out of the meeting room,
but not before Cheryl waved goodbye with childish innocence and
called out, “Thank you so much for coming to visit me. It was so
nice to meet you, Doctor!”

Superficially, there was nothing in
Cheryl Morgan’s behavior that deviated from anything Abby had seen
before, in both the legit “criminally insane” and the fakers. But
there was something about her that struck a dissonant chord within
her. She couldn’t say exactly what that was, but it was something
deeper than a visceral reaction to the shift of Cheryl’s multiple
personae. This disturbance resounded in a place deep within Abby’s
thoughts. Somewhere deeper than she had been aware of, a place she
didn’t know existed, heretofore.

Grimes took her gently by the elbow
and led her down a long hallway with flickering white tubes
overhead. But for the soft padding of their feet, all was silent.
Every now and then, the cries and shrieks of other female inmates
could be heard echoing through the shut doors that led to numerous
rows of cells. The Maximum Security Wing, however, remained deathly
silent.

Abby stopped and regarded Sergeant
Grimes with a look of concern, meant to conceal her uneasiness at
effect of the Cheryl Morgan episode. “You’re Ms. Morgan’s
correctional officer, right?”

“
One of ‘em.”

“
Have you observed
anything unusual in Ms. Morgan’s behavior—I mean, given that she is
a psychopath?”

“
She sure talks a
lot.”

“
To whom?”

“
Herself, other inmates in
the cells around her.”

“
What does she talk
about?”

“
Different things,
‘pending on who she is at the moment.”

“
How many personalities
have you encountered?”

Grimes rubbed her earlobe between her
fingers. “Oh, I’d say...geeze, I’ve lost count. Maybe ten or
more.”

“
Ten?”

“
That I’ve seen. But you
don’t keep track of crap like that. You give ‘em their food, take
‘em to the dog walk, hose ‘em down, and don’t let them talk too
much.”

They continued to the end of the
hallway. A dim light shined through the tiny square window at the
upper part of the reinforced steel door. Grimes put her hand on the
scanner and punched in a security code into the keypad.

The locks disengaged loud and abrupt,
echoing down the hall. Made Abby wince. Her heart stopped for a
beat or two. In the intermediary area by the check-in desk, actual
sunlight nosed its way into C-Block. Flecks of dust floated in the
air like pixie dust, when in fact, they were nothing more than dead
skin particles.

Grimes put her hands on her belt.
“Anything else I can help you with, Dr. Lee?”

Abby took a deep breath. She couldn’t
count how many times she’d visited potentially insane suspects, but
none of her past experiences led her to this degree of
disorientation and….anxiety. All she wanted to do was go home and
take a long shower and try to forget the experience. But her
scientific curiosity refused her any such indulgence. “How do the
other inmates regard Ms. Morgan?”

“
Oh, they’s scared a’ her.
Some of ‘em got all spooked and superstitious and crap. Call her
some kinda voodoo-witch-doctor or somethin’.”

“
Why’s that?”

“
She get into their heads,
ya know? Fact, just last week, Jessie Harper gone and hung herself
with a noose she made out of her pants. They say Cheryl Morgan
voodooed her and made her do it.”

Trying to shrug off the chill creeping
up her spine, Abby huffed. “Many inmates harbor suicidal
tendencies—”

“
Nah-ah! That Harper girl
was a tough bitch! She’d a killed everyone around her before she
ever done anything to herself. She was always mad and violent to
others. But to herself? She was all narci—narccis…”

“
Narcissistic.”

“
Yeah, that’s the word. No
one and nothing could have made her do that. But there she was one
morning, hanging in her cell.”

“
What makes you think
Cheryl had anything to do with it?”

Grimes’ demeanor grew intense. She
gazed straight into Abby’s eyes. “Her cell was right next door. And
besides, the other inmates heard Cheryl whispering to Jessie all
night, the night before.”

“
More than likely an
unfortunate coincidence.”

“
We’ll never really know
now, will we?”

For the better part of her adult life,
Abby had considered herself open-minded, able to consider the
unlikely, sometimes even the impossible. But today, her credulity
tank was running on empty, even though that something deep within
warned her not to ignore it. “Some things are as good as fact.
Thanks for your help, Sergeant.”

“
Anytime, Doc. Come and
visit any time.”

A wry smirk. “Yeah.”

Halfway to the exit, Grimes called
out. “Hey Doc, what’s the verdict?”

Abby stopped, turned around. “The
trial’s next month.”

“
I mean, are you going to
report her as criminally insane or not?”

That was, after all, the question,
wasn’t it? Part of Abby wanted nothing more than to see Cheryl put
away forever, the proverbial key thrown away. And this too was an
unfamiliar feeling. But the professional in her compelled her to
execute her duties to the best of her abilities, with the utmost
integrity.

She shrugged. “I’m just not sure yet.”
And with that, she left hoping never to have to see Cheryl Morgan
again.

Much to the dismay of the public, the
court found Cheryl Morgan not guilty by reason of insanity. Even
though the D.A. dismissed Abby and her reports which concluded that
the defendant was in fact criminally insane at the time she
committed the murders, the defense under Jodi Bauer, found another
expert witness to testify to the same effect. None of the crimes
were premeditated, nor was there enough evidence to show intent, so
she should therefore not be held responsible for the
killings.

Bauer knew how strong a case they had
and didn't have much difficulty convincing Ted Morgan, the
defendant's husband and father of the victims, to persuade Cheryl
to reject the D.A.'s late offer for a plea bargain.

Unlike Rusty Yates, former husband of
Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children, Ted
Morgan remained married to his wife, though Cheryl had been
committed to the Spring Valley Institute out in El
Centro.

For the next two years, Abby kept in
touch with him for updates because she had developed a deep-seated
fascination for Cheryl’s condition. She also communicated with
Cheryl’s doctors over this period of time. Apparently, given the
proper therapy and medication—which she never had prior to the
tragedy—she was doing remarkably well. Hers doctor would soon clear
her for release and reintegration into society.

Ever since the court declared Cheryl
not guilty and sent her to Spring Valley, Abby had become somewhat
obsessed with the strange manifestations of her mental
illness.

In other case studies resembling
Cheryl's, Abby found several commonalities: acute personality
shifts, vocal modulation, and emotional manipulation of people
around the subject—some leading to self-inflicted
fatalities.

Among those similarities,
one peculiar factor showed up in the files of more than two of the
fifteen she’d examined: Questionable paranormal theories. At first
she thought of Sergeant Grimes and her ridiculous voodoo
conjectures. But over time, alone in her La Jolla apartment,
staring out into the surging moonlit waves, she wondered,
Are you truly open-minded, Abby?

To prove to herself she was, the very
next day she delved into the N.O.S. (Not otherwise specified)
subfolders of the following subjects: Marc Lucian, Josephine Damon,
and Marley Fitch, each of whose N.O.S. subfolders contained over
five pages of documented activity prior to their suicides. None of
them had turned violent towards others as Cheryl had, but they did
exhibit the same symptoms along with some unexplained phenomenon.
Oddly enough, each of these ancillary reports had been filed by
members of the clergy, Catholic, Pentecostal, and Southern
Baptist.

Ms. Damon had repeatedly cut her
wrists, but despite the bleeding which should have killed her each
time, she survived. Mr. Lucian was reported to have put a Jesuit
priest in the E.R. because he had somehow caused glass picture
frames and vases to fly around the room and hurtle at Father
McGhee’s head. Five stitches were required.

But the strangest of all was Ms.
Fitch. She exhibited vocal modulation (in chorus) and radical
shifts in personalities. Two of her home care attendants committed
suicide within the year before she took her own life.

Abby had not been able to reach any of
the clergymen who had worked with these subjects, but did notice
the word “exorcism” noted on two of the N.O.S. reports—Lucian’s and
Fitch’s.

It was then that she closed the
files.

Exorcism indeed.

She hadn’t been to church since she
left for college, but even then, this was something she never quite
understood. Though she knew many Bible stories, and even memorized
many of the scriptures as a child, the stories of demons were
always too frightening for her. She always avoided them.
Always.

Nevertheless, in the interest of
complete openness to possibilities, she decided to email several of
her colleagues and peers about the idea of a spiritual component in
these cases.

Now, given that each of them had at
least one or two PhD’s each, the tone of their responses surprised
her.

Dr. Keith Madden:
Are you out of your frikkin’ mind? (pardon the
expression).

Dr. Yelena
Svetlanova:
If you think the answer lies
in devils and occultism, you should turn in your degree and stop by
the local Shaman-Mart. I hear they’re having a half price sale on
crystals, rattles, and drums.

Kenneth Thomas,
PhD:
Psychologist, heal
thyself!

Only one person replied with a modicum
of decency. Freidrich Koehler, professor at UCSD, renowned for his
studies on unclassified psychological phenomena. Besides being the
most respected authority in his field, he had been her doctoral
advisor and mentor.

He simply wrote
back:
Come see me tomorrow, 8:00AM,
BYOC
(Bring your own coffee.)

Koehler’s office was a living,
breathing contradiction. On first glance, it looked like a tornado
had struck, hurling books and papers into absolute disarray all
over. But upon careful observation, and by his insistence, there
was order in the apparent chaos.

White froth from his latte lingered on
his unkempt mustache, beneath which a smile emerged. Never one to
waste time on trivialities such as grooming, the professor‘s
appearance had always evoked images of a hybrid between Johannes
Brahms and Albert Einstein. When he spoke, his shrill voice with a
weighty German accent only solidified the impression. Today was no
exception. “Well, well. Abigail Lee, what a pleasure. What’s it
been, fifteen years?”

“
Nine.” Seated on the far
left side of a worn, red leather couch, Abby reached over to the
end table to set her travel mug of Oolong tea down, but there were
too many piles of papers held together only by large black binder
clips.

“
Ah-ah!” Not the
manuscripts!” Koehler set his mug down, got up from his desk,
slipped his hand beneath the papers and lifted them with the
delicate hands of a brain surgeon. He then turned to the left,
squinted at a mountain of papers—some bound in clips, others
loose—and dropped them into the heap.

Abby grinned. “Was that the order or
the chaos?