Leon Baar

Courting Demons

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2019 by Leon Baar

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, address: biuro@miloszbrzezinski.pl.

First hardcover polish edition X, 2018, Poland

Translation from Polish by Robin Gill
Translation and editing team managed by Agata Rybacka
Graphic design by Katarzyna Jędruszczak and Piotr Wyskok

ISBN 978-83-949857-6-9

TO WOMEN.
THOSE LIVING,
THOSE WHO LIVED
AND THOSE WHOSE LIVES WERE TAKEN

Prologue
Three years earlier

The knee hit the priest straight in the belly. He bent over double and slid to the floor.

“Serves you right,” screeched the teenager, who was tied to the bed. Below his dishevelled fringe his eyes were blazing.

“Bite the earth, god-botherer! And you, thump him!” he egged on the assailant, a slim forty-year-old in black. “For everything he’s done to me!”

The aggressor approached the priest, bent over in the corner, with a hesitant step.

“Christian... Friend... My friend...,” the priest fell silent when another kick forced the air out of his lungs. “I forgive you...,” he added in whisper after a moment. “They’ll take you to hell.”

“Ha, ha, ha! Who are you saying this to?” The boy strained his voice. “It’s you they’ll take there!”

The next kick to hit the prone priest was surprisingly precise and strong. This time the shoe struck the head, just behind the ear. God’s grace deprived the priest of consciousness.

“And why did you do it? What for?” The boy was now howling more than shouting, clearly excited by the dance of rage and resignation taking place in front of him. “And you, finish him! Finish him off!”

The attacker kicked the unconscious body time and again, hitting the temples and neck. Clearly sated and sweaty, he turned towards the bed.

“Thank you,” croaked the boy, raising his hands as much as the bindings allowed. “Please.... You don’t even know how much....”

He didn’t get to finish. The man, his hand trembling, grabbed a crucifix standing nearby and hit him right in the middle of his forehead. The edge of the brass base pierced the skull. The boy’s eyes glazed over in amazement. The blood released from under the skin flowed from the base of his nose, passed by his eye and trickled towards his parted lips.

The man looked for a moment at the boy’s tongue stiffening between his teeth, and then he raised the crucifix again. On its felt backing he could see traces of blood and bone fragments. The fingers let go of the handle, and the cross slipped onto the bed, creating a sickening red blotch on the bedding.

The executioner was gasping for breath.

He collapsed onto a chair standing next to him.

Suddenly, the door slammed open. The woman standing on the threshold covered her mouth with her hands, and then threw herself onto the bed.

“Son.... My son.... Johnny...,” she bawled, touching her son’s face. “Jesus, Mary.... Father Gregory!” she noticed the priest’s body rhythmically hitting the floor with his heels. “Do something!” she screamed in the direction of the cowering man.

He slowly raised his hands. He looked at them as if they were alien. Both were trembling.

“Lord, why hast thou forsaken me,” he muttered to himself. “Lord, why hast thou forsaken me!”

He repeated this over and over and over again until his eyes lighted on a screwdriver lying on the floor.

Chapter 1

The train juddered on the tracks, and Thomas’s pencil inertly dragged across the sheet of paper. And again. The notepad page looked like a scribbled medical journal. It was a shame that he had to return the book he was taking the notes from. Otherwise, he could simply have marked the extracts useful for his work and be done with it. He raised his head and beads of sweat dripped from his chin. Bloody trains. And the heat.

“The Greeks and Romans...,” he read the sentence that he’d started, but in the muggy air of the compartment he couldn’t for the life of him recall what he’d considered so special that it was worth making a note of. All his thoughts fled in the search for oxygen. He had a big elephant in his head, which sat its ass on his frontal lobes and – Thomas would’ve bet on it – let out a big fart. He put down his pencil.

“Are you writing something?” asked a small voice.

An hour ago they had entered his compartment. A woman and her brilliant, as he could hear, child. The great goddess of gluttony, who every now and then placed more and more victuals on the small table, and the demigod of chaos who was being offered them. With the remnants of reason the youngster refused, which the mother acknowledged with a nod and immediately put the food in her own mouth. She was sitting rearward-facing. Thomas was afraid that at some point when the mother was opening her fleshy lips, the momentum of the train itself would make the contents of her stomach, stuffed up to the windpipe, land on his trousers.

The view was unpleasant, as was the smell. She was past the age when a living organism could easily carry such a mass. Sitting itself was evidently difficult for her. Thomas imagined her heart thumping between the buttery mounds of fat. If aliens were to come to Earth, it would be difficult to convince them that everyone in the compartment belonged to the same species.

The child, whose trajectory the mother incompetently tried to control, was currently climbing up the luggage racks.

“You comin’ down, or what?” she asked with her mouth full. The boy paid no attention to her. His shorts slid off his rounded belt, revealing pink bum cleavage.

“The Greeks and Romans...,” Thomas was leaning over his sheet of paper again. He could still survive the last few minutes of the journey. “The Greeks...”. They said that a man’s body is more perfect because its average temperature is slightly higher. Maybe that was why he suffered from the heat so badly? “The Romans...”. They said that if you want to investigate a confusing case, you have to find the woman in it and understand her role. And again, it was the truth. Thomas discreetly raised his eyes. At the very end of the feast, the goddess wheeled out the big guns against the walls of his self-control. Two boiled eggs and goat’s cheese. The cannon fired: the stink reached his nostrils. A month of rest, after which he was returning to work, pissed off in a second.

“The Greeks and Romans...,” the sentence in his head died as it was born. Shit – he thought, feeling the vice of rage squeezing his head harder and harder. And that was a very bad sign.

Find the woman? Which one in this case? Maybe his mother? She’d died seven months ago. Here, the Romans were right. For him, she’d been both a lighthouse and a port.

During her funeral, he’d decided not to say goodbye to her. After all, he would always be able to talk to her – he was working on a place for her in his own head. On an enclave where his mother would never grow old and from whence she would never leave. But time had shown that more bad than good had happened this way. She stopped being herself. Only recently had he realised that this had somehow knocked away the support she had given while she was fully independent and imperfect. Living, and not animated. He deceived himself that he would talk to her, and instead he only kept asking himself questions, which, like a ventriloquist, he answered with the mouth of the dummy animated by his own imagination.

He holed up in his work, but was wrong in thinking that poring over books, working with the Church, and tracking down the demon-possessed would help him forget that the fragile castle of his peace and quiet stood on a regularly flooded shore. Perhaps looking for signs of possession and provoking unclean souls was too difficult for someone who was trying to crawl out of the swamp by pulling his own hair.

But then, to the delight of the Romans, another woman appeared. Maria. The exorcist. One of the first in the whole Church. As if especially prepared for him by fate. Thomas’s subconsciousness stuck to her, as if to an air bubble discovered by accident under water. Together they were to form a team. A team, although – as the parish priest put it – “God forbid, a couple!”. It was an elegant formulation.

Again, he could devote himself to work, but now, for a change, he found balance within it. At first, he supported himself with the priest’s energy, her charisma and self-confidence. Along the way, he did what was required of him: he read books, memorised, searched for the possessed and trembled with excitement at the thought of the next day, when he would do something together with Maria again. Anything.

He had never done so well before.

Or maybe he’d just become better at lying to himself? “You didn’t deserve it all”, “You’re cheating yourself again”, said a voice heard only by him. At first, he strained to hear whether it wasn’t his jealous mother who spoke. But no. It was a completely alien tone, which he didn’t recognise, certainly not his own. Then another one joined it. Finally, there were evenings when a whole choir of voices emerged in his head in unison with a song reminding that nothing can last forever and the day of payment was inevitably approaching. Probably a higher sum than expected. He got scared, realising that every minute of orderly life increased his debt. Just like when you flip a coin time after time and it always lands on tails. You know it’s probable, but you feel in your bones that somewhere beneath the surface of reality a counterbalance is rising and the universe is finally going to fight for it. You realise that there is no reason to believe that there is anything like a counterbalance to random events in the universe, and that every tails increases the chance of a heads, but you also just can’t cope with the irrationally growing tension.

So Thomas kept himself busy; he didn’t go back home, he maundered around the city until late to collapse on his bed, utterly exhausted. Several times he slept in the park, at the railway station, or in completely random places. And still the foul voices were getting better at searching out the moments when he was trying to rest – and then they attacked.

Fear grew in him slowly and finally bloomed with panic, flowering and overpowering every thought. One day he woke up on a bus stop bench with the thought that if something simply happened to Maria, it would all be over. And that he could be a discreet catalyst for such an event. Then, for the first time, anger grew in him because of the dawning comprehension that constant escape was driving him into madness.

The symptoms were becoming clearer and clearer. The inner beast held sway to such an extent that sometimes it tore itself off the leash. Three times, Thomas had brought himself to such a state that he had struck the demon-possessed. Once, even a child. He was ashamed. And this shame drowned out the fury for long weeks, finally giving way to the field of depression, and then, through a narrow gap of hopelessness, the beast easily squeezed itself back. Rested and ready to fight. He raised his hand again, this time at a woman, shouting the words from the Book of Exodus: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. At that moment he’d been sure he was in the right, but his principals had considered his act to be far beyond the rules. He was lucky that neither the victims nor their families complained to the police. After some time, he decided that maybe they should have. The priest was of a similar opinion. They would probably throw him out instead of treating him with kid gloves and giving him another chance, but he was apparently difficult to replace.

Thomas looked at his right hand – old, wrinkled, with uneven fingers, overgrown with dark hair, although he himself was a pale blond with an intimidating face under rather unkempt, thinning hair. The nails on this hand were slightly ridged, which could indicate a liver disorder. But Thomas had a healthy liver. This was evidenced by the other, left, hand. His own. Thirty-five years old, with the long slender fingers of a violinist, and with even nails. Handsome. Bland. His strange, right old hand was the reason for his occupation. And it was that hand which provided him with work for life, whether his employers liked it or not. It was too valuable. His meticulousness, knowledge and memory could be exchanged, but not the hand, not at all.

That’s why they didn’t throw him out, but after one of his offences they sent him “to rest”. He complied. He read, took notes, slept, ate. He read again. His almost photographic memory was stuffed up to the rim. Descriptions of rituals, signs of visitation and forgotten knowledge about ways of selling out to the devil made his mind reel.

He lost focus. He was supposed to rest, but again he only distracted his attention. There was no internal transformation. He simply replenished his strength and the beast in him also regenerated.

The heat of the last few days had become an additional torment for the body, and the stench of the goat’s cheese and eggs pulled out by the woman were the last nail in the coffin. If he ever went on vacation again, maybe he would spend it differently instead of deepening his knowledge. Sleeping more? Meditating? Maybe he would go to a psychiatrist to get medication? It’s possible to meditate for twenty years, with doubtful results. Psychotropic drugs would always help. And in a few minutes. Unfortunately. Now he was coming back and it was too late to correct the mistake. He needed a sober mind. This was his life. There had never been a right time. Always either five to twelve or five past. His thoughts went round and round as if in a washing machine. There was no way to focus.

He raised his head and frowned, looking at the woman in the compartment.

“Will you eat, Jeremy?” she asked her son, who made a protracted sound like a dying sheep. The kid was temporarily lying under the passenger’s seat, sneakily looking at Thomas’s hand. He saw the old fingers with matchhead-like nails. A familiar anger in his head stretched out its limbs and shook its mane. “No,” he said to himself, and kept his hands relaxed.

The woman leaned over the peeled eggs. She looked like a nightmarish parody of Saint Lucia, who vowed chastity until death, and then gouged out her eyes to disfigure herself so she would not be sent to a brothel. Apparently, the cart that was supposed to take her from her house could not be moved. Her eyes later regrew, hence she is depicted looking at a tray where her own eyeballs lay.

The boy’s mother, closing her eyelids, first put one egg into her mouth, then the other, after which she opened her eyes wide. It looked as if the white balls she’d swallowed had returned to their place.

The cheese she didn’t touch, meaning she didn’t eat the goat produce, which a few hundred years ago would have been enough for her to have been seen as a witch and burnt at the stake. She may have counted on the small mercy of being killed first, provided that she gave away her fellow guilty women from the area. “For everything that people did in those days to people out of envy and greed, and in the name of the law and faith, the Church should apologise at every Mass,” thought Thomas.

His memory, bursting with excerpts from books, prompted whole pages and passages as though in a frenzy. Unmarried women, living reclusive lives among herbs and animals, treating the needy, were sent to the fire first. It was as if being alone and happy was forbidden. Nothing heated his rage as effectively as the beastliness towards those who had the audacity to live differently.

The gossip of an envious neighbour was enough for “an alderman with a mayor in the market square to burn the witch having lit the blessed candle.” Hot water, vinegar, pouring boiling oil into her throat, smearing with burning tar, placing a burning metal sheet against her sides and starved rodents to her breasts, trapping biting bugs on her belly under a cupping glass, burning her genitals with a red hot iron even before the trial, so that the devil had no access to them and so they could not cast curses on the jury... Even the acquitted had no return to normal life as women, wives or mothers. The community treated the cripples and their whole families as lepers. Thomas tried to pull himself together, but he couldn’t stop the horrible flood, and images kept coming in waves.

In any case, in the witchcraft trials no one defended the accused, who, strangely enough, were almost always the poorest women. When in 1673 the rich wife of Adalbert Frederick, a wealthy citizen of Kobylin, was accused of witchcraft, the burgher Bijak declared that, having previously served as mayor, he had conducted many witchcraft trials, but had not heard of Ursula Frederick ever being accused of witchcraft. This was enough to set her free. The poor were almost never released.

Hundreds, thousands of civic documents studied in search of techniques, signs, traces or forgotten methods of tracking the interference of evil forces in our world, willingly or not resulted in increasing contempt in Thomas’s head towards people as a senseless multitude, and disgust with the dark ages. And accusations?

The miller John Johnson testified that he “saw the accused when she was collecting and picking some herbs near her cottage. I know no more, only that they said to her that she must know things.” The sentence? “She was playing with spells, which she took through herbs... then she is to be burned alive at the stake for this sin.” Another one was convicted because her husband was found in the basement of a burgher. How did he get there himself? According to his testimony, he returned home, where he found his wife smeared with a strange ointment and escaping through the chimney. And he tried to pull her back. He also flew up the chimney and suddenly found himself in that cellar, where his wife was already enjoying wine. He jumped to her, but she crossed herself and again flew away in the form of a cloud of dust, this time home. The husband also crossed himself, but in his case, surprisingly, it didn’t work. He was found blind drunk the following morning. He told the whole story. His wife was buried up to her neck, and her protruding head was burnt and crushed with a boulder. What the dogs later picked out from under the stone was theirs.

Another page in front of the eyes of his imagination. Sometimes he had the impression that he had no control over it at all. As if something suggested the thoughts to him. Thomas did not have to read all this, but his innate curiosity pushed him further than others in his profession.

The woman sitting in the compartment would have no chance. She was literally a reservoir of signs and would not even have to undress before the court. First of all, discoloured fingers, probably from cigarettes, but who would care? The finger coloured blue, yellow or red was a sign of the devil – everybody knew that. Similarly with the three freckles at the corners of an imaginary triangle, appearing in the middle of her face. They were found on the back, under the armpits, on the inner thighs, between the buttocks – which the accused could not check for herself, of course. This was enough to send her to the stake.

Thomas looked at her jewellery. The pièce de résistance was a necklace with three cheaply shiny letter “A”s. What could the letters mean? Only three hundred years ago they would have been “known”: Argiel, Atriel, Apatat. A spell to bind the devil after being summoned so as not to hurt the summoner.

Rubbish.

Even demons cannot be bound, let alone devils.

Jeremy got out from under the seat, no longer hiding his interest in Thomas’s mismatched hands. He had inherited his crooked nose, asymmetrical lips and drooping left eyelid from his mother. Another nail in the coffin, also for the child. The inheritance of the mother’s worst traits was an inevitable sign of being possessed by a succubus.

Thomas closed the book with the gesture of a satisfied inquisitor and got up exactly when the train jerked and started to brake. At the last moment he caught the luggage rack. Behind him, an intergenerational hell broke out. Apparently Jeremy had decided to let himself be carried away by inertia, which this time resulted in a loss of his physical integrity. Thomas did not even look. Humanity interested him more on a general level. Individual persons – not at all. He left the compartment without saying goodbye and moved towards the carriage door. They were approaching the station.

He had completed five years of preparation for the profession in four semesters. His father always told him that “a normal pace is for chimpanzees”. When he finished his law degree before the accident, he also made it before the deadline. The education system based on the rule “No child left behind” was adjusted to intellectual dawdlers. When, after the accident, he was approached about cooperating with the Church, he did not yet know how much there was to learn, but he decided to repeat the deed. Just to get back to his old path as soon as possible. And soothe his conscience, somehow.

Compared to routine seminary activities, he was spared lessons in voice, confession and spiritual direction. However, he had much more to do with the history of the Church, the theory and practice of exorcism, and finally psychology, which he sincerely hated.

Classes daily from morning to evening, homework at night. Along the way additional tasks that filled him with the greatest disgust. In the first semester he was to get to know a stranger and gain their trust so they agreed to give him their photo ID. Then return and report. The temptation to cheat was born. It was possible to do so. But if you were under observation, things could become seriously complicated. Thomas failed honestly. He only passed the confidence test in the third semester. He paid a man for dinner. Paying was permitted. During your studies, money could be spent at will. Your own money. As long as it sufficed. Life at the expense of the Church began only after the final exams, with acceptance for the position.

Then there were tasks number two, three and so on. At the same time normal classes: Latin and Italian, possession and haunting, rituals, superstition culture. Students had two years to complete the last practical task. Plenty? Considering the amount of work with normal classes – very little. You had to find and expose the unclean spirit in a demon-possessed person, gain their trust by introducing yourself as a non-believer, and, finally, report it to your mentor. Thomas had six months to do it. Again he failed. The possessed was detected in less than a week, but he did not gain her trust. On the contrary – he scared the victim so much that a few weeks later she died of exhaustion in a hospital abroad. Nobody could help her, the doctors did not know the source of the illness. It was a secular hospital – no priest.

However, since Thomas had finished his classes quickly, the time needed to complete the course was extended. Again, he had no problem finding an unclean soul. This time a woman helped him. Coincidence? Maybe.

The most important test which he was to pass was hidden from him until the end. During his studies and interactions with the faithful, the possessed, working for the Church, he had not only to declare his lack of faith, but also to remain an unbeliever. This was required by his function during exorcism. This was a rarity among students. Thomas was exceptional in this respect. He said that the virus of faith had given him a wide berth. His employers were very happy, although the metaphor did not make them smile.

The inconvenience was that the training had to take place in secret. Once, also on the move, he listened on the train to the lies of a young man who was bullshitting a girl that he was an exorcist; that there were secret courses where he was trained in martial arts, and even in the use of weapons. Like James Bonds. All lies. No martial arts or weapons will help you when the devil thinks it’s worth doing you harm. In the face of possession, you have only your head and what’s in it. Thomas seemed to know everything, but he couldn’t keep his hands to himself.

As soon as the carriage stopped, he stepped out onto the platform with deliberation. Maria was standing nearby. Light hair, so straight it looked like it’d been drawn on, lightening in the summer and timidly turning a reddish hue in autumn. Slightly shorter than him. And almost one third younger. In the air shimmering from the heat, she appeared like a mirage, and the tip of her head reflected the sharp light of the setting sun with a halo. Slim and smiling, but not carefree. Proud, but not inaccessible. In her black cassock she must have been melting from the heat, but her face and posture revealed nothing. He inhaled the station air, trying to catch her delicate fragrance. The anger dissolved without a trace.

Thomas recognised the difference between a girl and a woman. The first has curiosity in her eyes, she is brave, a bit naive, greedy for emotions, ready to dive without looking at whether there is enough air to swim out. This is what men are attracted to. One glance and you can see that in a few years’ time this shine will have paled. The eyes will become prudent – they have seen things, and the ears have heard things. So many reasons for crying that they won’t be taken in by a throwaway “everything will be alright”. Responsibility, bookkeeping of the costs of errors – all this can be seen in the eyes of a woman. A woman looks at you with no curiosity, and when she falls in love and moves into your apartment, she always has one bag packed, just in case. No longer flirtatiously, but sincerely, she starts to be ashamed of her body. She no longer believes that anyone can love her completely. And rightly so. Every gesture, every man’s sentence in the first millisecond is received with a grimace saying “yeah, right”, after a while turning into regret – “how did I react to this when I was younger?” And then there is only a theatrical mask of surprise, happiness, sometimes even tears. Everything somewhat forced, with her hand on the handle, always ready to cut off whenever the situation doesn’t meet expectations. What about spontaneity? Sometimes, after a drink or two... Besides that, they are only spontaneous towards their own children. Maybe that’s why he missed his mother.

And Maria? Maria was on the threshold. She still had a lot of youthful hunger for madness; at other times, as if for a test, she switched on her femininity, wisdom, prudence, stiffness. She played with it for a while and then put it away again. Thomas had once decided that he would like to witness how, to the horror of other women, the priest would carry this girlhood through the threshold of maturity, without any harm. The harpies will probably throw themselves at her to scratch out her eyes, but even if that happens, she will be living proof that it’s possible. In the old days, she would have inevitably been accused of witchcraft.

Thomas had believed for a long time that he also had similar traits, but since he met Maria, he had had to come to terms with their deficiency. It was enough for him that they were clothed by her body, somewhere next to him. He just had to be careful not to frighten them or, worse still, not to corrupt them.

“How was your journey?” She asked. Because what else was she supposed to ask about?

“Great,” he lied.

She stretched out her hand. He squeezed it. It was cool.

“I bet,” she gazed at the mother scrambling from the carriage and shouting loudly for Jeremy. “You look like a hundred misfortunes.”

He also looked around. Behind the obese woman there were two Muslim women in burqas.

“Religion enslaved those women with clothes,” he commented.

“Would you also say that priests are enslaved with their clothes by our religion?”

“On form, as usual,” he smiled lightly.

“It’s great that you, too, as usual...,” she didn’t finish. “Do you want to change? Freshen up?”

“Should I? Are you already dragging me somewhere?” For a moment he wondered if he was tired enough to go home. Surely he was not.

They walked towards the underground passage. There were jackdaws on the hot roof of the station. Their wings drooped and their beaks were ajar, as if they were screaming, and someone had turned off their sound. He realised that he was looking for animals everywhere. On sidewalks, balconies, in the grass. When he still socialised, he used to move away into a secluded corner under the pretext of playing with a cat or dog. He was pleased that this had not changed after the accident. At least one thing. Maybe he should get a dog again? He’d had one when he was small.

“This heat is murderous,” he noted when they entered the tunnel under the platforms. The nice chill titillated them.

“You don’t see God in it,” she answered.

“Whereas you see Him everywhere.”

“Yes, but seeing God is like seeing a picture too close. You see a piece, as if you know what’s in it, but you can’t comprehend the whole thing. Or as if you’d been in the museum for half a day, someone asks what you saw there, and you describe a huge white ball that you looked at for half an hour. Maybe you’d mention another couple of exhibits. Your description would in no way reflect everything you’d seen there, though, let alone the impression contact with real art made on you. Do you see?” She glanced at him.

“It’s all the same to me,” he didn’t have to hide his sincerity. “Haven’t you stopped being a religious cyborg yet?”

She threw an indifferent glance at him. Now he felt her fragrance more intensely. Violet? “Stigmata usually smell of violets,” his thoughts were escaping into associations again. The curse of a photographic memory. Everything was associated with something.

“I’m glad you came,” she smiled at last and jumped down the last two steps. “Although it’s a shame that you haven’t rested. I don’t know what they were hoping for. As if they didn’t know you, right?”

Why did she talk to him so much?

“Are you happy that you’re back at work?”

“In fact, I didn’t leave at all,” he said. She grew serious. He realised that she might have understood his words differently than he would have liked.

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