With revulsion thick in my throat, I grabbed the priest’s wrist to
restrain him. The flesh under my hand was strangely hot, greasy, and as
vile to the touch as might be a corpse in an advanced state of decay.
In places, the meat of him was disgustingly soft, although in other
places, his skin had hardened into what might have been patches of a
smooth carapace.
Until now, our bizarre struggle had been desperate yet at least darkly
amusing to me, something that you couldn’t laugh at now but at which you
knew you would laugh later, over a beer, on the beach, this round house
fight with a chubby clergyman in a chintz-choked bedroom, a Looney Tunes
collaboration between Chuck Jones and H. P. Love craft.
But suddenly a positive outcome didn’t seem as assured as it had a
moment ago, and it wasn’t amusing anymore, not slightly, not even
darkly.
His wrist joint was no longer like the wrist joint you study on a
skeleton chart in a general-biology class, more like something you might
see during advanced delirium tremens while drying out from a ten-bottle
bourbon hinge. The entire hand turned backward on the wrist, as no human
hand could do, as if it operated on a ball joint, and the pincers
snapped at my fingers, forcing me to let go before he had a chance to
cut me.
Although I felt as though I had been struggling with the priest long
enough to justify having his name tattooed on my biceps, he had been in
this pummeling frenzy for no more than half a minute before Roosevelt
tore him off me. Our usually gentle animal communicator communicated to
the animal inside Father Tom by lifting him off the floor and throwing
him as if he were no heavier than the real Death, who is, after all,
nothing but bones in a robe.
Cassock skirt flaring, Father Tom crashed into the foot board of the bed,
causing the pair of suicides to bounce as though with postmortem
delight, springs singing under them. He toppled facedown to the floor,
but instantly sprang to his feet with inhuman agility.
No longer chanting about his faith, now grunting like a boar, spitting,
making strange strangled sounds of rage, he seized a walnut chair that
featured tie-on cushions in a daffodil print and slip-on daffodil arm
protectors, and for an instant it seemed that he would use it to smash
everything around him, but then he pitched it at Roosevelt.
Roosevelt spun away just in time to take the chair across his broad back
rather than in the face.
From the television came the mellifluous and emotional voice of Elton
John, with full orchestral and choral accompaniment, singing “Can You
Feel the Love Tonight? ” Even as the chair was cracking against
Roosevelt’s back, Father Tom threw a vanity bench at Sasha.
She didn’t dodge quickly enough. The bench clipped her shoulder and
knocked her over an ottoman.
As the furniture struck Sasha, the possessed priest was already firing
items off the vanity at me, at Bobby, at Roosevelt, and though bestial
sounds continued to issue from him, he also snarled a few broken but
familiar words, with a vicious glee, to punctuate his attack, a silver
hairbrush, an oval hand mirror with mother-of-pearl frame and handle in
the name of the Father a heavy silver clothes brush and the Son’a few
decorative enamel boxes and the Hoh, Spirit! “a porcelain bud vase that
hit Roosevelt so hard in the face he dropped as if he’d been smacked
with a ball-peen hammer, a silver comb. A perfume bottle sailed past my
head and shattered against a distant hulk of furniture, flooding the
bedroom with the fragrance of attar of roses.
During this barrage, ducking and dodging, protecting our faces with
raised arms, Bobby and I tried to move toward Tom Eliot. I’m not sure
why. Maybe we thought that together we could pin him down and hold the
pitiable wretch until this seizure passed, until he regained his senses.
If he had any senses left. Which seemed less likely by the second.
When the priest fired the last of the clutter from the arsenal atop the