The Demon Catchers of Milan (22 page)

Then she was face-to-face with me, her skin rippling with the power that had taken it over, the mind that rode her mind. Her hair stood on end, her hands bunched like claws, her eyes rolled up to the whites, her jaw worked and chattered, and all around her the terrible, banal gloom of possession dimmed the candles.

I could feel her hot breath on my face. It stank. I’ve never smelled a corpse, but now I know what one smells like. She raised her claws on either side of my temples and I felt her arms tense to strike. I couldn’t seem to do anything about it.

She struck.

All I felt was the rush of air. Her fingers stopped, floating and tight, less than half an inch from my head. She tried again, and again, and again, deafening me with her shrieks. I didn’t have time to be afraid.

Sobbing, she groaned, “All were invited,” and with one last shiver, she fell, slamming onto the pew in front of me. I looked down, and all I saw was an unconscious girl.
Did I look like that?
I thought.

TWENTY

Il Caso della Famiglia Umberti

E
milio ran to her and knelt, putting a hand to her temple, cupping the curve of her skull. I felt the bite of jealousy in my stomach. “Nonno,” he said, looking up, and Giuliano nodded as if Emilio had said a great deal more. He turned to the priest, saying in a low voice, “Get the rest of them out of here.”

“We need to take
her
out of this holy place,” the priest growled back. His middle-aged face was wan, and he looked almost too tired to be terrified, but I could see him bracing himself. Behind him, the still figures from the
presepio
looked on.

“No, Father. She’s not at fault. This would best be dealt with in this house.”

I didn’t get that—hadn’t he and Emilio thought that taking Lucifero into the Duomo would have been stupid?

“Francesco, Anna Maria, I need you,” Giuliano was saying. “Matteo, you, too. Do you have your—?”

At their nods, he added, “Good.”

When were they ever without their cases?
I wondered. He didn’t ask Emilio.

He turned to his wife.

“
Cara
, I need you, Francesca, and Brigida to take Mia home.” I scuttled down the pew toward him.

“
Nonno
, please! I should stay,” I found myself saying. I didn’t know why, but I knew I was right.

He frowned at me so fiercely I thought he was going to yell at me like he had when he had asked if I was betraying the family. My insides turned cold.

“This is much, much too dangerous,” he replied in a low voice that warned me I’d spoken too loudly.

Around us, the acolytes were ushering everyone else from the church. The priest stayed.

I stood up straight and faced Giuliano. I took a deep breath.

“Believe me,” I said, low and clear. “I just saw.”

He blinked. I think he’d expected me to pitch a fit, or whine, or do something kid-like.

He didn’t stop frowning, but rather than answer me he turned to the priest again. I waited. I had a feeling that this was one argument I was going to win.

The priest, on the other hand, didn’t see that he was going to lose.

“Father Giacomo,” said Emilio gently, “when she wakes, the
unholy being in her will still be there. If we take her into the street, we may not have time to get her to sanctuary before he comes back.”

“Who says you’re going to work on her, or do whatever it is you do?” the priest replied, his voice rising as the last of his parishioners hurried out the door. “You know I know—you know everybody knows. I protect you, I say nothing to my superiors. But this! This is too much! You should never have let
her
in here, if you knew the danger!”

He pointed at me, and Giuliano abruptly changed his mind.

“
She
is just fine! She’s even right—she should stay for the exorcism. You, Father, should stay, too; one of your flock is in the most mortal danger you can conceive of, and I think you are too wise and good a man to refuse her your help.” He paused, looking at Father Giacomo. “Aren’t you?”

Pretty manipulative; I had started to notice that about Giuliano. The demon, however, was the one who ended the argument, when the girl opened her eyes. She looked up at the ceiling of the church and laughed softly, a sound like sand pouring from the mouths of the dead.

“Father, help her. Let us help her. You know us. You know that we do the best we can—” said Giuliano.

Father Giacomo didn’t answer for a moment. He looked at her, lying on the stone floor between the pews. She looked back, insolent, smiling. Then I saw a flicker, as if the girl inside were still there, and her eyes shut again.

The priest said, “Show me.”

Emilio and Francesco scooped up the girl and carried her, following the priest into the withdrawing room. Nonna squeezed Giuliano’s arm, then turned to go, taking Égide, Francesca, and Aunt Brigida with her. I watched them for a moment, then followed Emilio.

“Better set her on the floor,” Emilio warned when the acolyte pulled forward a long, cushioned bench. “She’s going to move around a lot.”

As they laid her on the floor, Emilio reached into one of her pockets and pulled out her wallet. He flipped it open, ignoring Father Giacomo’s protests, and said to Giuliano and Matteo, “Her name is Lisetta Maria Umberti.”

Giuliano took the wallet and passed it to the priest.

“Probably one of the Torino Umbertis,” Giuliano said. “To judge by the nose. We hardly ever have to deal with them; this isn’t one of their kinds of problems.”

Uncle Matteo pulled out his case and set it on a nearby table. Emilio struggled to his feet and reached into the breast pocket of his jacket for his own case. This time I could see the dark scar on the underside of it up close.

Emilio bent his head to check the girl’s pulse, then said, “Mia, come. You should feel this. If it’s safe for her to touch, Nonno?”

“She should know. Risk it. But careful, careful.”

He scowled. I knelt across the girl from Emilio, and let him take my fingers and press them against her neck.

“Feel it, if you can.”

For a moment, I didn’t, first because his hands were so warm and smooth, and I couldn’t get past the feeling of touching them, and second because my own pulse was beating so hard I could hardly feel anything. I took a deep breath and waited, and presently I could feel the flutter of the girl’s heartbeat tapping insistently at my finger like a plea. Interwoven with it, as if this were a particularly dissonant piece of music, was another pulse, pounding furiously, jolting out three beats for every one of hers.

I kept my fingers on her neck, fascinated, forgetting the pressure of Emilio’s hand over mine; then the second, fevered pulse changed. It felt like a finger poking at me from under her skin. I had just begun to get light-headed with terror again when Emilio said, “That’s more than enough,” and pulled my hand away.

“Did you feel that?” I asked.

“The double pulse?” he replied.

“Yes, and then the way that it—” I tried to find the words.

“Reached for you?”

“Yes,” I answered in a low voice.

“Yes,” he echoed thoughtfully. He held my eyes. “Do you think there’s any chance that you will let him in?”

I stared at him, unable to decide if I was offended.

“Not if I can help it,” I said. “No way.”

The start of a smile unfolded at the corner of his mouth. He looked relieved.

“Good,” he said.

He looked up at his grandfather, then added, “I think we both believe you should stay. But if you sense great danger, or if we tell you to go, you must go. Understand?”

He spoke quickly. We both knew that we had no time to lose, but that the words had better be said.

“Yes,” I said.

I looked down at the girl, feeling strange. Just as when I had faced her—really the thing inside her—in the church, I thought about how much had changed. The strangest thing of all was how little fear I felt. I mean, in a situation like that it’s a good idea to be afraid, but I didn’t feel powerless and paralyzed, the way I had at Signora Galeazzo’s, or even the way I used to at night, checking the doors in a time that seemed very long ago.

“What can I do?” I asked, and my voice did not shake.

Emilio smiled briefly: he seemed pleased by my question.

“Three things,” he said. “First, you can tell us any instincts you have, any sensations, like when you said ‘Majdanek’ at Signora Galeazzo’s. Second, you can protect yourself. Stay alert. Do not get caught up in what’s happening, no matter what. Keep returning to the Madonna in your mind.”

“And third,” said Giuliano, above us, having finished a low-voiced conversation with Father Giacomo, “you can ring the bell.”

Okay, I wasn’t feeling so brave after all.

Giuliano helped me up from beside Lisetta, and I followed him over to the table, where he opened his case.

Giuliano’s case was tidy and organized. The fine partitions
of aged wood kept every tool secure. Giuliano lifted out his small silver bell, wound around with a design of intertwining birds. I’d seen these same birds other places, I realized, like on the shopping bags that our very few legitimate candle shoppers took away with them, or on the lintel over the door to our apartment. I guess I hadn’t really paid attention. He held the bell out to me with such a serious expression that I realized this was an even bigger deal than I had thought.

I turned it over in my hand, and saw that the clapper had a carefully stitched leather cover. I reached to take it off, but he closed his hand over mine.

“Not yet,” he said. “I will tell you. Now, when you ring it, terrible things may happen. You understand? You saw how angry the spirit that possessed Signora Galeazzo got. This will be worse. Yet you must ring it. No matter what is happening to the girl, when I ask you to ring, you must ring. Understand?”

Even though I had seen what happened when a bell was rung during an exorcism, I still felt ridiculous nodding to him so seriously while I held this piece of silver that hardly filled the hollow of my palm; what could such a small thing do?

Uncle Matteo already had his case open on the table. He took out a candle that looked like a miniature version of one of the designs in the shop—a Roman milestone in deep gold beeswax—and set it in a candleholder. Father Giacomo brought in a plate with the Host on it: a jug of wine and a silver plate full of communion wafers. I noticed he was wearing a second cross around his neck, this one a heavy rosewood rosary with Jesus in
brass, looking very patient—much more patient than the priest, or the acolyte beside him.

The girl on the floor shuddered. Was this what it was always like? Periods of coma punctuated with periods of destructive, supernaturally powerful consciousness?

Anna Maria came back in just then—where had she been?—and saw the bell in my hand. For a moment, I thought she was going to kill me with a look. Then she turned to her grandfather and said, “Did a lot of news management outside. Got rid of some people hanging around.”

I could tell she really wanted to be thanked, and for a minute I thought her grandfather wouldn’t, but then I saw him glance at the bell in my hand, too.

“Well done,” he said. “Anna Maria, we are going to try Mia on bell. Can you help your father with book?”

“Yes,” she said. Her face softened. “That actually seems like a good idea,” she added generously, earning a sharp glance from her grandfather.

The girl on the floor shuddered again. Anna Maria took her father’s arm as he opened his notebook.

“What did you use—last time?” Uncle Matteo asked Giuliano, with a flickering glance at me. Too preoccupied at the time, I didn’t think about what he meant until afterward.

“Great-Grandfather’s Way,” replied Nonno. “But this time, let’s start with Gianluca’s Entrapment.”

Emilio rose from the floor and went to light the candle that his uncle had set up. Francesco joined him. Nonno turned and
looked me in the eye. I didn’t know what he wanted, so I just looked back, questioning. After a few seconds, he nodded and did the same thing to Uncle Matteo, then Anna Maria, then Francesco, then his grandson, then Father Giacomo and the acolyte waiting in the background. As he did this, the room somehow got quieter and quieter. At last, there was a perfect stillness and a feeling as if we were in a much larger chamber, a great open space, not this close little room. When Nonno was finished, he turned toward me and took my arm.

“Now,” he said.

I fumbled with the cover on the clapper. My hands started to shake, but then I got hold of myself and took a deep breath, thinking of the Madonna, wooden folds of blue and star-dappled mantle sliding across my mind. I held my arm out straight and shook the tiny bell over the girl on the floor.

When I heard that sweet sound, like sugar crystals on my tongue, I finally remembered that this was the bell that had rung at my own exorcism.

Below me, the girl’s eyes flew open as the force of the demon burst into the silence. Gloom gathered around her, just as it had in the sanctuary, filling the room. I lowered the bell in shock.

“Mine,” he growled, and grinned up at me: the rictus of a dead man, the most entrancing smile of the most charming man alive, both played out on a young woman’s mouth. I felt like puking and kissing him at the same time, it was that awful.

“N-not yours,” I said, and the bell shook, tinkling, in my
hand. He shook his head back and forth as if warding off flies. Nonno moved beside me, and I quickly pinched the clapper between two fingers to still it.

“Good; do the same next time,” he murmured.

“What, old man? Come to watch?”

The gravelly voice, emerging from the girl’s mouth, started a hideous wave of terror that washed over me.

“No,” replied Giuliano calmly. “To send you away again.”

The demon shrugged the shoulders of his stolen body.

“This one I can take with me, you know,” he said. “Like poor Martino.”

I almost dropped the bell, but no one seemed to notice. I felt cold with shock.