Beware the Night (29 page)

Despite this promising sign, no further progress was made that afternoon—just more yelling and threats. The second day wasn’t much different, except that I began to have horrifying visions during the exorcism. Grim crime scenes I hadn’t thought about in years washed my mind with relentless gore. Cockroaches and scorpions marched through rivers of blood, burned bodies rose from the ground like mummies in a horror movie. I began to imagine terrible things happening to my wife and children—thoughts that are so appalling that I refuse to relive them in print. My fondest memories were indelibly tainted by the poison this demon was spewing, and my worst ones were crashing around me.
Don’t listen,
I kept telling myself,
it’s not real! The Devil mixes truth with lies and twists it into horrible perversion! This is insanity, a glimpse into Hell! God knows it’s not me thinking these things!

Focusing on God is the best way to arm yourself against mental attacks from the demonic. Because this form of psychological warfare is so common in the Work, I try to push these thoughts out of my mind the moment they enter, before they take hold in my imagination. I don’t consider myself dreamy or prone to flights of fancy, but the demonic can seize on any thread of memory or emotion and weave it into something hellish. This has also happened to me during exorcisms of houses—I’ve read the Pope Leo XIII prayer hundreds of times and know it by heart, but when a mental attack strikes, I’ll suddenly start stuttering and lose my place. Having been my partner for so long, Joe knows without my saying so that it’s time to spray me with holy water before I lose it completely.

If blocking the thought doesn’t work, I picture a big, silvery cross and concentrate only on that. It’s similar to the Christ light I mentioned earlier, which can be used for the same purpose. You just imagine yourself surrounded by a pure white light that goes from the top of your head to the bottom of your heels and use it as a shield against evil thoughts.

But even with these comforting images to protect me, by the end of the second day of Michael’s exorcism, I was so mentally drained that my spirituality was at an all-time low. After an exorcism, you just want to get away from it all. I don’t mean that I’d lost my faith, but you do take a psychological beating when you go up against pure evil. Once you have felt the demonic invade your mind, even for a moment, you never feel the same again.

The next day was Sunday, which we’d set as our day of rest from the exorcism. As Joe and his wife, Alla, were walking to evening mass, a heavy branch fell from the top of a tree, narrowly missing them. After mass, they met me outside the church, and Joe told me what had happened. It was a calm night, with no wind at all. We walked back to the spot and looked at the branch, which was large and would have certainly killed Joe if it had hit him. There was no sign of rot—it wasn’t a dead branch. It had been ripped off the tree with tremendous force. We saw this was a second attempt on Joe’s life by the demonic. There was no need to say anything: We both knew the psychic’s prediction had just come true.

Since Monday was the day of the Triumph of the Cross, the bishop, Joe, and I brought relics of the True Cross with us. I sat behind and to the right of Michael with my relic at the side of his head, and Joe held his relic to the back of the housepainter’s neck. Then Bishop McKenna stepped forward with his relic, for the part of the ritual that goes (in English), “Behold the Cross of the Lord. Depart, Enemies!”

At the simultaneous touch of
three
relics—the number that symbolizes both the demonic and the Holy Trinity—Michael’s eyes went wild, darting from side to side. He wouldn’t turn his head to look at any of the crosses, but there was no escape from the sight of them. What I saw in his eyes will be with me for the rest of my life: It was the look of a cornered beast that was trapped and frightened, but vicious at the same time. As a cop, I have seen people in all states of rage, anger, hate, pain, and death, but I can’t describe his reaction in these terms. They say the eyes are the window of the soul, but what I saw there was not human. It didn’t contain one ounce of humanity, and I will never forget it.

This soul-searing moment wasn’t a turning point. The end of the third day was the same as the beginning of the first: Michael wasn’t freed. For whatever reason, the powerful demon that had him in its grip wouldn’t leave. The painter seemed pretty much resigned to ongoing possession, despite the torment it caused him.

“How do you feel?” the bishop asked in a kindly tone.

“I know you did your best, but it’s still there.” The housepainter sounded weary. “I guess that’s just how my life is meant to be.”

Although the bishop offered to set up another exorcism, Michael declined, then thanked all of us for our efforts.

“I’ll always pray for you,” Bishop McKenna said.

“So will I,” added Joe, giving Michael’s arm a friendly squeeze. “You can always call me.”

I also prayed that our efforts might bring him some relief in the future or had helped weaken the demon. Joe refused to be discouraged by the result, pointing out that our efforts may well spare Michael the most heinous form of demonic captivity: perfect possession. In ordinary cases of possession, even though the person’s will breaks down and he can no longer fight off the invading demon, his soul—contrary to what most people believe—still belongs to God, not the Devil. Only when the person
voluntarily
surrenders his spiritual essence, by making an actual pact with the Devil, can he suffer perfect possession, lose his immortal soul, and consign himself to eternal damnation. As the great exorcist Father Martin once said, “Ralph, if you ever come in contact with someone who is perfectly possessed, run like hell!”

Michael’s exorcism wasn’t the end of the case for him—or for me. Every September since then, the demonic has gotten its revenge on me for the moment of sheer terror it felt in the bishop’s church. It didn’t do this through outward phenomena, such as hideous apparitions or formless black shapes. Instead, it acted under the cover of darkness, with a new form of psychological attack. Every September since this exorcism, my life suddenly becomes a battleground.

Now, the people who know me best will tell you I’m not the easiest person to get along with. You might say there’s a touch of Michael in me, because I can be bad-tempered, nasty, and argumentative. Yet even with these combustible traits, the problems I’ve had in this particular month aren’t always my fault. The first September after the exorcism was when Joe and I had our big blowout, after my partner got lost on the way to a case. Our split resulted in the New York organization we’d run together breaking up, which is why I worked alone during some of the supernatural cases I investigated. We didn’t speak for six months after this quarrel.

When I finally did call Joe, we got to talking about what happened, and he said, “Ralph, do you know what month we had the fight?”

I replied, “Yeah, it was September.”

“Right,” he said. “Now remember this: Michael!”

His words hit me like a sledgehammer. The exorcism! I said that all made some sense, but when I’m done with a case and no longer working on it, I forget about it. No point in dwelling on evil, unless I’m giving a class or lecture on the Work. With all the stuff in my life, Jen, my daughters Christina and Daniella, and the Job, I didn’t pick up on the connection, but Joe has a more analytical mind than I do and is forever looking at possibilities I’d miss on my own. He’s also very inventive about adapting and developing prayers for the different aspects of our Work.

Joe feels that during this exorcism, I may have inadvertently been too casual or gleeful about tormenting such a potent demon with my relic. He suggests that in my zeal to help Michael, I went a step too far and got personal with the satanic spirit, unleashing its undying wrath into my life and relationships. I have to admit that there’s something to what he says. Today I’m more relaxed than I used to be, but back then I would yell “Charge!” and run right in rather than standing around thinking things over.

I’m the same way as a cop: It’s a wonder that I don’t get my ass shot off more often! With his clear, sensible thinking, Joe is always the one who reins me in. And now that he’d figured out that it was the demonic—so rightly described as a “cause of discord” in the Roman Ritual—that had busted up our partnership, we made up and resumed battling Hell’s armies together.

The next year, 1995, I had a serious problem on the Job that kept me from being promoted to sergeant. That September I was on foot patrol, alone, in an area notorious for drugs and shootings. While I was checking a rooftop that was a known drug hangout, all of a sudden I saw someone exit a stairway onto the rooftop of the next building. The man drew a gun and started firing at the building across the street. Through a window, I saw kids in an apartment, playing a video game—clearly in danger of being hit or killed by his bullets.

I yelled to him to stop, but he didn’t hear me, so I decided to shoot at him to protect those children, or anyone else, from being wounded or worse. Whether I hit him with any of my rounds or not is unknown, but he fled the scene without leaving any blood trail. The department investigated the incident and my firing of my weapon. Fortunately, I was eventually vindicated. It wasn’t until five years later, however, that I finally got my sergeant’s stripes.

Despite my problem on the Job, 1995 was a happy year on the personal front: On September 29—the Feast of St. Michael, the Archangel—my wife and I were blessed with our second daughter, Daniella. I was a wreck while Jen was in labor because she’d had such a difficult time with Christina, whose umbilical cord was wrapped around her foot and was finally born by emergency C-section. And Jen had had problems with bleeding during this pregnancy. I brought holy water and sprinkled all four corners of the hospital room.

To make sure our newborn got off to a good start in life, I called Father Martin. In his book the father describes a case of demonic possession where the man wasn’t properly baptized as a child, leaving a foothold for the Devil to seize on. I didn’t want any slipups with my daughter, so arranged the best baptism of all—a christening by the father himself, who performed the ceremony when Daniella was only a few hours old, right there in the hospital.

Amazingly, Father Martin himself was baptized even sooner than that. He was literally christened in the womb, by his father, a very devout Catholic doctor who also delivered him. Because his birth, like Christina’s, was difficult, the doctor felt that his child needed all the spiritual protection he could get to arrive safely into this world. It seemed that the Devil knew Father Martin would grow up to be an exorcist and was trying to stop this from happening. Because little Malachi was a breech baby, Dr. Martin had to reach into the uterus to turn him around—and baptized him at that time, as any Christian layperson is allowed to do in an emergency.

I rejoiced that this extremely holy exorcist was baptizing my child, just as his own father had done with him. I felt that God had truly smiled upon me—and Father Martin.

The next year the demonic got another chance to divide and conquer. This time the confrontation was with my mother, and I managed to tick her off so much that I had to apologize from here to eternity before she’d speak to me again. As before, I wasn’t aware of the connection until Joe brought September to mind. I was furious with myself that I hadn’t taken some steps to prepare myself spiritually and steer clear of disputes.

The year of worst revenge, however, came when the satanic power got around to Jen and me. Now, I hope I don’t make her mad again by telling you that she’s as temperamental as I am, and our marriage has been a real rollercoaster from the start. The ride that September was straight downhill until we hit bottom. I withdrew into myself and became more and more impossible to live with. Eventually my partner on the Job got so concerned that he actually called Jen to find out what the hell was going on with me. I in turn saw nothing wrong, and didn’t realize where my wife and I were headed until it was too late.

For the entire month, we argued night and day about the most trivial matters. I even became enraged at a message one of our close friends left on our answering machine. Because I work the graveyard shift, I sleep during the day. Usually I can sleep through a ringing phone, but when the machine picked up, this friend was in a chatty mood and left a lengthy message. As she talked on, I became more and more enraged. I wanted to rip the phone right out of the wall and throw it out the window! When Jen got home from work, she’d barely taken off her coat before I lit into her like a lunatic about our talkative friend. Naturally, the nastier I was, the madder she got. We fought for hours, and she ended up throwing me out.

Having nowhere else to go, I went home to Mom. Although my mother is a wonderful woman, I was suddenly back to being her “little Ralph.” Staying with her was like reliving my childhood all over again, except that I was a grown man of thirty-five and a father myself. Instead of doing the sensible thing and calling Jen to apologize for acting like such an ass, I let the demon of anger mess up my life even further. I spent a few months living with my mother, and when I couldn’t stand that anymore, I took a little place of my own.

During this time I let my faith lapse and stopped attending church regularly. I sat around marinating in misery and broke off contact with everyone I knew, including Joe. Although we had two active cases, I left the Work, recognizing that in my angry, hate-filled state, I wasn’t emotionally stable enough to help victims of the demonic. To go up against the Devil in this frame of mind could lead to serious mistakes in judgment, potentially endangering myself or others. Nor could I hope to repair something as delicate as a marriage if I exposed myself to satanic influences when I was already in such a spiritually vulnerable frame of mind.

Miserable as I was, I refused to admit that I was giving the spirit that had attacked me through my weaknesses an easy victory. I was now literally hellbent on getting a divorce—and Jen felt the same. At the time I was too distraught to think about the demonic and its role in shattering my personal life. Later on Joe made the connection for me: As we both knew, the Devil hates love-and especially hates holy matrimony, because it’s a union made in the eyes of God. Because a strong marriage is an important support system for people like us, who are involved in the Work, Satan’s forces will work overtime to destroy our relationships, knowing that an angry, grieving, and emotionally troubled demonologist is likely to be powerless against evil. Just about every investigator I know has experienced marital problems that brought him to the verge of a breakup. Some of these marriages made it, and some didn’t. Because I’d let my marriage founder, the Devil now had one less foe in this world.