Beware the Night (4 page)

With my tour of the house, I can sometimes pick up vibrations about the situation. I’m not psychic, so I can’t rely on my intuitions 100 percent, but every human is born with some degree of a sixth sense, as a gift from God. My big mistake, in this case, was walking through the house alone. I started with the upstairs, where there was a recently vacated apartment the family had been renting out. As I walked into the apartment, a doorknob in one of the rooms started rattling. I’ve run across this kind of low-level bullshit from the demonic in other homes, so I noted the location for further investigation.

The rooms inside were unnaturally dark. When I found the light switch, I saw why: Everything was painted a deep, vivid black. Even the windows were so thickly coated that no light from the outside could penetrate. I searched the place, but the former occupant had left absolutely nothing behind. I would have loved to get a look at
his
possessions, because I was ready to bet my next paycheck that this guy, whoever he was, sure as hell didn’t spend his spare time praying the rosary! I made a mental note to ask the family about their ex-tenant.

In the first-floor apartment, where the family lived, I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary in Gabby and Dominick’s bedroom, or those of the three younger children. In the future bride’s room, I saw an extremely bright ball of light whiz past me and vanish down the hall. I’d seen a blazing sphere like this once before, in an earlier case, so wasn’t particularly alarmed. I returned to the living room to ask the Villanovas if any of them had ever experienced this strange phenomenon.

My question created a family uproar. “Yes, I’ve seen that light,” Luciana exclaimed.

“So have I,” added Gabby. “It’s scary.” One by one the other members of the household described various occasions where the ball of light had appeared to them.

Only Dominick was silent. He looked disappointed. Finally he interrupted the discussion of the light with a grumpy outburst.
“I’ve
never seen it! How come
you
can see these things, Mr. Sarchie, and I can’t?” He actually sounded insulted that the evil spirit hadn’t manifested itself to him.

“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “Just be thankful that you don’t.”

He gave a grudging nod of agreement, and I resumed checking the house. The remaining rooms were normal enough, though the kitchen was rather messy and the sink was piled with dirty dishes, I headed downstairs. I didn’t have any sense of evil when I first entered the basement, but when I got to a storage room with double doors, I could feel menace from eight feet away. The feeling was so overpowering that I stopped dead in my tracks, so afraid that I couldn’t move. I’ve been a cop for a long time and have been scared plenty of times before, but I always have reacted aggressively—that’s how I’ve trained myself. This was different: I couldn’t take my eyes off those doors, my heart started racing one hundred miles a minute, and I couldn’t catch my breath. Then the pain started in my head—it wasn’t like a headache, but a piercing pain in my right temple that I’ve sometimes experienced on other cases or during exorcisms.

As the pain in my head got stronger, my stomach churned and I felt like I was going to vomit. There was no outward sign of anything that I could see—just a feeling of hellish terror and absolute evil. I was too frozen to move my lips or speak, so in my mind I commanded the demon to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. It released its hold on me just enough so I could reach the bottle of holy water in my pocket. I threw holy water at the doors and was able to back away to the stairs—not daring to take my eyes off those dreadful doors.

Once I reached the living room, where the family was waiting, the pain and the sick feeling disappeared. I took Joe aside and told him what had happened.

“Ralph, I think you should take a look at this,” he said, handing a note the “ghost” had dictated to Gabby the night before.

One sentence immediately leapt out: “Harm will come to those below. Beware the night!”

Chapter Two

Nightmare’s End

W
HILE
I
WAS
under attack in the basement, Joe had uncovered an alarming new twist to the case. About two weeks after the spirit began playing its smoke-and-mirror games, Gabby’s oldest daughter, Luciana, was subjected to a series of stunningly cruel preternatural assaults. Although the young bride-to-be was definitely the beauty of the family, with her long wavy black hair, pale olive skin, and dark flashing eyes, she had a sullen, almost hostile expression on her face. Everything about her radiated such an intense misery that it surrounded her like a thick, black cloud. You got the feeling that if you said the wrong thing, she’d lash out with thunder and lightning.

Joe’s polite request that Luciana put on her St. Benedict medal, instead of leaving it on the table in front of her, immediately set off sparks. “I had a medallion of the Blessed Mother on a chain around my neck and this morning it was gone,” she announced angrily, glaring around the room as if she suspected one of her relatives of stealing it while she slept. “It was real gold too!”

“Don’t worry about it,” my partner soothed. “The demon could have made your medallion disappear, to stir up trouble and turn you against the other members of your family. These spirits
want
to get you people at each other’s throats. Why don’t you put the other medal on?”

“The string’s too long,” Luciana complained. She handed the medal to Carl, who was hovering in the background, looking both protective and wary of his fierce fiancée. Although he was only about twenty-five, his hairline was already receding, making his broad forehead and large, hawklike nose even more prominent. He was dressed entirely in black and wore a gold earring on his left ear. Reaching in the pocket of his rather tight jeans, he took out a Swiss Army knife and carefully trimmed the offending string.

“What are you doing? Now it’s too short!”

As Luciana looked on peevishly, Carl cut more string from the ball we’d brought. “Is this okay?”

She grabbed the necklace and pulled it over her hair, taking care not to snag it on her thick ponytail. “I guess so,” she reluctantly allowed. Suddenly embarrassed by her display of bad temper, she added, “I’m sorry to be such a bitch, but I only got a half hour of sleep last night.”

“Forget it,” advised Joe. “I know you’re very upset and scared. Let’s bring Ralph up to speed about the problems you’ve been having.”

No longer animated by anger, she slumped back in her chair, as if she were carrying a very heavy weight on her thin shoulders. “Several weeks ago, around 2:00
A.M.
, I was reading in my room. I had a glass of water by my bed, and when I got up to turn on the hall light for my sister, who was out at a party, the glass flew at me and just missed my head.”

This was the first attack on her person—and her screams brought the whole family running. Afraid to sleep alone, she spent the next night in her sister’s room. In the middle of the night, the bunk bed the two girls were sharing began shaking violently, actually jumping up and down off the floor. Again the family was jolted from sleep by screams, but as soon as they turned on the light, the shaking instantly ceased.

This is characteristic of infestation; scary things happen in the dark and stop when the light goes on. It’s a typical demonic head game, where the goal is to create fear and bewilderment, as the victims ask themselves “Was the bed really shaking, or was it just a nightmare? Did we
both
imagine it?” Although the evil spirit operated covertly at first, it became more brazen each day. Infestation quickly progressed to outright oppression: No longer did the evil force flee at the flick of a light switch—in fact, it even began attacking during broad daylight.

Each time the demon picked on the same person: Luciana. “I get scratched every day,” she told us. “Usually I get wide red marks up and down my arms that go away very fast, sometimes in minutes. One night, around two in the morning, I felt a very painful burning on my skin and woke up with a pentagram scratched into my stomach. Another time my arm started burning and stinging like it was on fire. When I looked in the mirror, I saw the number of the Beast—666—written on my arm in huge red welts.”

Why the bride-to-be became the focal person is rather puzzling: Her two teenaged sisters both said she was the strong one, their beautiful, high-spirited, and rather willful leader. Yet, in the Work, I’ve found there’s no predictable pattern that explains why one family member is singled out for diabolical abuse, except that people are attacked through weaknesses the demonic are quick to exploit. Very often the focal person is a child, since these bullying spirits love to pick on kids. It’s a cruel but effective tactic: While the evil spirit was clearly out to get the mother, what better way to break down a parent’s will—and reduce her resistance to possession—than by brutalizing her child?

Although the dark power could have accomplished the same thing by going after any of Gabby’s four children, I had a theory why Luciana bore the brunt of the abuse. Since the force of doom was posing as a pitiful ghost of a woman who was murdered on her wedding day, it may have reasoned, with perverse logic, that a mother would be most empathetic with its alleged anguish if her daughter, a genuine bride-to-be, was also suffering.

If so, the plan worked: Gabby immediately asked “Virginia” what other spirits were in the house. Naturally, the demon had an answer: “She said there were two poltergeists in the house,” Gabby reported. “One was good, and the other poltergeist was very nasty and dangerous.”

Joe winced. We both hate this term, which has become popular with parapsychologists, at least the ones who believe in spirits—and some don’t. They explain away cases of infestation, oppression, or actual possession as the work of “poltergeists,” a German term for “noisy or mischievous spirits.” (Others claim they are the result of natural phenomena like electromagnetic energy or underground springs—anything but the demonic.) That makes diabolical powers sound like a bunch of pranksters who are just out for some spooky fun. It’s like saying rapists and muggers are simply socially challenged party animals, not a very real menace to society.

I don’t care if you don’t believe in the Devil—I just pray you and your family never feel his wrath and undying hatred yourself. What I do object to is parapsychologists who “investigate” hauntings from the scientific point of view, going in with their cameras and gaussmeters instead of holy water and relics. They take their readings, snap some pretty pictures of spirit energy, and go on their merry way, while the family is left in a nightmare. How the demonic must delight at this! What better spin to put on their mission to destroy humanity than to claim it’s just the harmless mischief of so-called poltergeists?

My partner didn’t let this go by. “The game here is good cop/bad cop, or good poltergeist/bad poltergeist—except that there’s no such thing as a ‘good poltergeist’ because this is just a euphemism some people use for the demonic. Make no mistake about it: The only spirits in your home are
evil
spirits, bad guys.”

After scaring Gabby with its ominous pronouncement about the nasty poltergeist, the demon moved into phase two of the con game—volunteering to “help” the family with the very problem it had inflicted on them. This reminded me of human criminals who surreptitiously break a store’s front window, then show up a few hours later to offer the unsuspecting shopkeeper their overpriced repair services.

The malignant force didn’t stop there. That same day it sent yet another “ghost” to vouch for its kindly intentions. “I saw my father, who died a couple of years ago, standing in front of me,” Gabby explained. “He called Virginia ‘the lady’ and said she was a good person. He came to me four or five times, and we had long conversations. One night DJ saw him too and spent a good hour talking to him.”

“Was there anything unusual about his appearance?” Joe asked.

“To me, he
was
my father,” Gabby insisted. “He talked about things from my childhood that only he and I knew about. You saw him, DJ—how did he look to you?”

The little boy hesitated, then decided to be truthful. “Don’t get mad, Mom, but I don’t remember Grandpa that good from when he was, you know, alive. When I was sitting on the couch with him, his face was all wrinkled up and he looked really old. He had a brown suit on and was wearing jewelry. He talked in my ear, kind of loud, and said my mom should listen to ‘the nice lady.’”

DJ squirmed around, refusing to look his mother in the eye. “One time he talked to me at school, and I got in trouble with the teacher for not listening.” He paused again, then blurted out angrily, “I didn’t really like Grandpa that much. It was very cold when he was around, and I felt funny inside.”

Although neither DJ nor his mother noticed any oddities about the apparition, I was certain this was another satanic impostor, trying to add to “Virginia’s” credibility with its little plugs for her supposed goodness. Its uncanny knowledge of Gabby’s childhood proved nothing, as the entire population of Hell has access to the events of human lives and can quote them when it serves the demonic purpose. Clearly this innocent child detected something disturbing about the spirit, even if he didn’t have the words to explain exactly what it was. There’s always some sign of the diabolic presence, even if it’s not as obvious as a pair of cloven hooves.

Although the demonic can masquerade as anyone, even a saint, there’s always some telltale sign—something wrong or out of place—if you know how to look for it. The Devil came to one of St. Francis of Assisi’s followers in several guises, trying to destroy his faith. All of them failed, until Satan took the form of a crucifix. Pretending to be the Son of God, he told the pious man that his prayers and penances were pointless, as both he and St. Francis were already marked for damnation. The brother was deceived and lost his devotion to his spiritual leader until the saint reminded him the words of Jesus would never plunge a person into sorrow and despair but fill him with love and joy.