The Banishing (23 page)

I heard him again last night. I think this is the fourth time it’s happened that I saw Richard talking to himself…no! Not to himself, but to someone I couldn’t see. I think somebody was there, in the house with us. I could feel somebody there in the room with him. It scared me, badly. I was so scared, I thought I might pass out. Hearing him talk like that, about wanting to cause death, needing blood, as if he was obeying orders from somebody or something…I could see Richard was hearing something that had power over him. I heard him agree to have sex with me, again, to hurt me, again. I knew I was in for more pain, and I was right. I don’t want to talk about that.

From inside the bathroom, Mark was whistling a tune. Something Melissa didn’t recognize. She heard the showerhead turn on and the whiz of heavy water splattering the bath. Melissa turned back to Grace’s notes.

I can’t cope much longer. I don’t know what to do. I can barely leave the house to go to work, anymore. I’m calling in sick all of the time. My manager has threatened disciplinary action. What can I do? I look like a mess. Richard is worse than ever. He doesn’t talk to me anymore, only to that thing he keeps hearing. I wonder if he is going mad, and sometimes I wonder if that madness is contagious, because I don’t feel too straight-headed myself, anymore.

I spoke to Father Owen, again. He can see what’s happening…I can’t tell him everything, but I have said that there is something in this house making my husband do bad things to me. I thought he might call a doctor or the police or something, but maybe he is a good guy, because he just sat and listened, and he didn’t judge.

He said God loves me, wants me to get help, wants good things for me. I used to believe that, and I told him so. He said I must continue to believe it. When I told him some of the things I saw in the house—I swear there are shadows following me! —he told me about spirits, about demons. Things that frighten me beyond belief, but it had a ring of truth about it. What do I do? I tried to talk to Richard, asked him to get help, told him he was ruining our lives, but that made him worse. He acts as if he doesn’t know what he is doing, and I know it makes me sound crazy, but I believe him…he just doesn’t seem to know.

I think it’s the demon in our house. It’s controlling him. I told the priest that, and he offered to come by next week to bless the house. I asked him to come as soon as he could, because I was willing to try anything!

Melissa heard the bathroom door click open and she froze, shoving the diary beneath the bed sheets and quickly standing, making it seem as if she was about to change into her night clothes. When she heard Mark step out and descend the stairs, followed by the blare of the TV from the lounge, she took a deep breath, pulled out the book again, and continued reading.

I found out some stuff. Things that sound like they belong in some sort of horror movie. I went to the library—I wanted to find out about the house, to see if it had any history that might help me understand what’s going on. I thought they might have one of those old newspaper archives that I heard about, but they didn’t. I asked the librarian, and she said I could try using the internet—they had that there! —to search for any news articles to do with the property I was interested in.

So, I did that. I typed it into the search engine, and it was there. I had to go through a few pages, but eventually I found it. Dated 1989. A man called Sebastian Harping. Now, I know it all, and it all makes sense. I understand what the evil is, and I know I can’t do a thing about it.

Melissa looked up from the notes, and she could see, could
sense
the distress building in Grace as she wrote. Sebastian Harping. Who was he? What did he have to do with anything? Melissa turned the page and quickly scanned the rest of the notes, but found no further mention of the man, of the house, or of Richard. The last page was empty, save for a reminder for Grace to borrow a book she had seen at the local library:
Demons in Exile
, by E. F. Brown. Melissa ripped the small notation out of the last page and knew that she had to get to the library tomorrow. Whatever Grace had learned about Sebastian, whatever the book was she had so urgently needed to see, it had all happened shortly before she took her own life.

Before Father Owen had a chance to bless the home.

Melissa tucked the notebook inside her drawer again and went downstairs. She waited beside Mark, until he was tired and went upstairs to bed, before turning on the laptop and beginning her own search.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Why didn’t I try this before?
Melissa sat on the sofa, hunched over the laptop, waiting for the webpage to launch. She should have looked into the history of the house sooner, but Grace had helped her. Led her. Pointed her to the information she needed.

The search engine appeared at the top of the screen, and Melissa typed in Harping, Sebastian, 1989. A long list of articles appeared, many from news agencies. Melissa scanned down the page and felt her head spin as she read the titles that appeared before her:

Harping’s House of Horrors. Man Kills Six Women in Home.

Harping’s Trial Commences—Victims’ Families Arrive at Court

“Trying to Conjure Demons,” says Harping.

Death of Women in Satanic Ritual

Harping Commits Suicide as Victims Finally Laid to Rest.

Melissa scanned down the list of linked articles and felt a wave of nausea crash over her. Sebastian Harping has lived in this house. In
her
house. In 1989, he murdered six young women from the local area in a bid to conjure a demon. The women’s deaths, Harping believed, served as some sort of sacrifice. Melissa pulled up one of the articles and raced through it, her face taut with fear. Harping was 26 at the time and had been fascinated with the occult since his teenage years. He had been a typical loner, a recluse, and he didn’t make friends easily. He never had a girlfriend, according to the article.

Melissa moved the page up, reading more. He murdered all six women over a period of six months. On the sixth of December of 1989, he used their blood and organs in a ritual, some sort of bid to summon a demon. Six, six, six, Melissa realized, sickened.
The number of the beast.

Melissa shut down the computer and sat there in stunned silence. Thoughts hammered wildly inside her frightened mind. Sebastian had lived here. He had done those awful, awful things, here. Invited demons.

Those poor women...he killed those six women.

It had worked, then,
Melissa thought, her stomach twisting into icy knots.

Whatever he had tried to call, whatever he invited here, came.

It was working its power over Mark the way it had on Richard and to any others who lived here before.

* * * *

She couldn’t sleep. Her mind was wide open, full of thoughts that could not be silenced. She lay there in the darkness of the bedroom, the only sound the light tapping of rain as it flushed against the window panes. Mark lay beside her, his back turned to her and breathing slow and steady. Melissa wondered in that moment, in the silent calm of the house, if she was the one going mad.
Is this what going insane feels like?
she thought, over and over.

The clock on the chest of drawers beside her glowed red into the darkness, and she saw that it was 2:00 AM. A long night ahead, she knew. Sleep was an elusive stranger to her as she lay there, trying to mold and sculpt thoughts into something manageable, something comfortable.

Instead, the realization of what had happened under the roof in which she now lay—the sadistic, horrific horrors of the six murders committed within the rooms around her—kept her mind and eyes open. She knew she wouldn’t be sleeping, tonight.

She turned to Mark, watching the rise and fall of his back as he breathed, the duvet tucked tightly around him, and she suddenly felt the urge to pull him closer to her, to hold him. How long had it been since they embraced that way? Since they held each other? Made love? Not the intrusive, bitter rape that she had been forced to, but the tender love Mark used to lavish on her, that almost too-comfortable intimacy, as if their bodies belonged to the other, so close, so undeniably beautiful.

Now, all was ugly and perverse. Melissa realized she had begun to feel tired, not only of the evil things she had endured, but also from the battle of separating what Mark had done to her that really came from the…demon in the house. She had tried for so long now to look through what Mark was doing, the cruel things he had said and done, and to see that there was something behind the scenes making it all happen…that Mark was little more than a puppet to something much bigger.

The fault was not his, yet when she looked at him, she was reminded of it all…she hoped, desperately, that if they reached the other side of this hell she—no,
they
—were going through, that she could one day look at his face and not see those harrowing memories come to life.

That he would just be her husband. Mark, the man she adored.

Something moved, shifting beyond the bedroom door. A noise. Something ruffled in the dark, and Melissa snapped her head toward the door, straining to see through the mosaic of shadows and shapes in the darkness that surrounded her.

Someone’s outside the room!
Melissa sat forward, staring ahead, toward the door. She sat still, trying to hear, and after a beat of silence, she heard a giggle coming from the hallway beyond the door.

That thing is here, Melissa realized, and then felt stupid for even thinking it. It was
always
here. Had they ever really been alone since moving into the house?

Melissa shut her eyes, took three deep breaths, and tried to steady the swell of panic rising within her. She opened her eyes, glanced at Mark—still in a deep sleep—and realized he could be no help to her. In truth, she thought that if she woke him, it would suddenly be much worse, because when Mark was conscious, he could be trapped under the influence of…whatever it was.

Better that he stays asleep, she thought, throwing back the covers and stepping onto the bedroom floor. She tip-toed toward the bedroom door, pressing her face against it to listen.

Another giggle from beyond the door. “It’s me!” a deep, rasping voice said. Melissa jerked back, frightened at how close the voice had sounded to her.

Her heart was racing, clamoring against her ribcage, sending her blood into icy tides through her body.

“You have to go,” she said. She opened the bedroom door slowly and peered out into the hall.

Empty. Darkness. Shadows.

She stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her, leaving Mark in his sleep of oblivion.

She stood for a long moment, the sound of her breathing loud in the quiet of the house.

A giggle again, menacing and humorless, and this time from below.

Melissa walked over to the stairs, and holding onto the side rail in the darkness, descended slowly. “You have to go,” she whispered again to the darkness. “You know that, don’t you?” she said.

Again laughter. This time, the laughter boomed with a dark, foreboding power. It sent her skin rigid with ice, with fear. Such an inhuman, ugly sound.

“I know what it is that you’re doing now,” she whispered into the thick blackness of the hallway. “I know Sebastian called you here, and you came, didn’t you? You thrive on hurting women, don’t you? You like to control men so that you can beat us, rape us. Torture us? That makes you a coward. You know that, don’t you?”

Silence. No response, but she felt something change in the air about her, something stirring, something charged, like electricity passing along the walls and the air in which she breathed. A presence. Melissa knew instinctively that her words were giving it energy. Making it angrier, somehow.

She reached the downstairs hall and froze there, standing in silence. A ghost, an apparition of the night. Noise came from the lounge, and Melissa spun around, paced into the dark room, and saw that the TV had switched on, the volume full blast. She ran in, heading toward the power plug on the wall, and froze when she saw the TV screen.

On it, shaky and blurred like a home movie, was an open casket. Beside it crying, was Mark, shaking and sobbing, his face puffy and red from his tears. The camera jerked shakily toward the casket, surrounded by flowers, and inside she finally saw the body. Pale, waxy, taut skin, gray. Her. Melissa Sanderson. Dead. Both of her eyes had been crudely stitched shut, and her mouth too had been threaded shut, the skin puckered and ugly.

She suddenly felt sick and gagged, lurching forward at the sight meeting her on the TV screen.

Her funeral. Her death.

It’s not real. I’m here,
her thoughts retaliated as she stared at the ugly abomination.

The camera zoomed into the dead, threaded face—her face—and suddenly her body in the casket began jerking as somebody leaned forward to close the lid on her corpse.

Her body. Trapped inside. To decay.

“No!” Melissa screamed, falling to her knees, her eyes glued to the screen. “No! Stop it!” she cried out.

Suddenly, the TV screen flickered and turned black. The image and the noise faded to silence, nothing.

Melissa, still on her knees, shook with heavy sobs that filled the air around her. She let the tears fall, heavy and unbidden, her whole body twisted with each desperate cry.