Everything started happening pretty quickly after that.
Chapter
Thirty
The revelation of the lake house demons was subtle at first, almost a knowing more than any real sense or presence. But the floor seemed to shift beneath my feet, to give a kind of rolling shudder. Mrs. Bell and Max squawked and took several steps back, and I got the sense that they were holding each other, fingers wrapped tightly around each other’s arms, unselfconscious in their panic. Fear, the great uniter.
Then the walls grew wet. All of Joe’s words, his repetition of letters and numbers, his crazy Ouija symbols and crude, foul drawings. They seemed to shimmer and writhe out of the walls as I spoke, undulating with misery. As I stared at them, certain ones flared, bright and bold, words I didn’t know, couldn’t understand.AgramonBalbanslid together, streaming down the walls.AbyzouNaamahAshtaroth.And then, another line, a word all on its own, prideful and fierce.Sonillion.
How many demons’ names had Joe learned over the years? And which one had kept him trapped in this unholy well of pain?
As I stared, the words scrambled again, running together. The letters swelled and burst, draining onto the floor, and hissing when they came into contact with the holy water.
The walls were crying, I finally realized. The walls were giving up their burden of darkness—and crying. Tears upon tears flowed down and over the floor, and I felt the knowing swell inside me, the reality of what had happened here. It wasn’t any old demon infestation—not here; not for Joe. It was so incredibly worse.
And since I didn’t know any one name, I’d have to banish them all.
“Shedim,” I said, remembering the collective word from my library reference books—and the flow stopped. A wailing sound and loud crying swept up and around the room, wrapping me in its misery. The ducks themselves started to shake and splinter, some of them, coming apart as if from the inside. But the shedim were not possessing this place, they were infesting it. They needed to go. They…and whoever led them. Because there would be one solitary leader, I thought. One with the power over the rest.
What was that demon’s name?
The silence inside my head mocked me. For ten years—fifteen? longer?—there had always been an answer waiting. Knowledge I didn’t earn, understanding I shouldn’t possess. Now there was only my own ignorance echoing back at me.
I stared grimly at the writhing names on the walls.Agramon. Balban. Sonillion. They meant nothing to me. Without Palemerious, I was just a twenty-five-year-old with a high school diploma trying to read demon graffiti.
Willing the understanding to come to me, I pressed on. “Shedim, begone from troubling this place, this man’s still-tethered spirit. He was never yours to claim. You know that. You have always known that.”
I should have seen the next thing coming. There had been all those catalogs and cardboard boxes in high stacks, everywhere. They were neat and orderly, stuffed to the ceiling in rooms otherthan this. There had to be a reason for them. I’d taken them to be insulation, and they were, in a sense. But they were also protection from what else lay buried in those walls.
Knives. Whether Joe had papered the walls over after driving the blades into them, or if his words and symbols and drawings had merely covered over the gouges, he had tried to fight the walls himself, at least for a while. And he left his weapons intact.
The first blade hit me broadside, flat against my shoulder. The second was better aimed. As it sliced into my skin, the shedim’s cries grew louder, more harrowing, their demand for blood, for sacrifice thrumming through me. They would leave but they would have their due, I realized. Carol Ann hadn’t died. Joe, in the end,haddied—but not here. They wanted death, these creatures, these byproducts of whatever the hell had happened here. They wanted blood.
Right now, they wanted my blood.
Another slice across my forearm made me gasp. The blade bit deep—deeper than it should have. I felt it scrape bone. Hot blood sheeted down my arm, spattering the floorboards. The shedim shrieked with joy at the smell of it.
I saw the shadow loom larger in front of me. A cut ripped through my leggings, the knife clattering off my shin. The wounds bled freely, too heavily for what should be shallow cuts, and I realized I hadn’t prepared for this—I hadn’tprepared.
Rabbi Mordechai hadn’t taught me the ways of the exorcist; I wasn’t an exorcist. I didn’t know his rituals and protections. I didn’t even really know his God. I only knew the tiniest portion of the exorcism process.
Enough to take out these assholes, yes.
But I wouldn’t be taking them out easily—or well.
Palemerious,they whispered, with a hideous giggle.Palemerious…
My eyes snapped wide, sudden clarity jolting through me?—
“Fuck!” Pain seared across my chest as something much more real and pointy than clarity stuck me in the shoulder. Another projectile slashed across my face, and another nearly punched through my shoulder, spinning me around.
I flashed with anger, full and bright. “Begone, shedim, and take your brethren all. Fill this place no more and never come back. This place and these people are barred from you and all who serve you and all you serve!”
The laughter started then, long and loud—rich and bold—but somewhere, deep within it, there was a kernel of desperation. A tiny ember of fear, of doubt. I latched onto that ember, blew into it with a mighty breath that had never blown a shofar, had never cried in unison with holy men, but which burned—burnedwith the righteous fury of the power that raged within me. How dare anyone—anything!—defy me when I would have them leave. How dareanythingkeep me from breaking that which demanded to be broken?How dare any creature born of evil try to defy my?—
Within me, something opened wide, eyes bright, jaw huge, staring into the shadow creatures who writhed in wet agony before me for a moment more.
And I knew their leader. Just like that.
