Dante's Depths Ch. 01

This chapter is exposition and contains no smut. Don't like, don't read and wait for chapter 2. Also, I received a hate comment recently that told me "you should never write again". I feel the need to mention this because if I was a different writer, I might be badly hurt. Fellow authors, never, EVER take a hate comment to heart. Constructive criticism is appreciated, but flat insults are typically trolls that have nothing better to do. Now, on with the story!)

1

Luke Bishop watches as the sun sets into the hills, a large serving of clear white wine in his fluted glass. It isn't his first drink tonight and surely wouldn't be the last. He's on the patio of the Crescent Moon Motel, watching the sky through his thick frames. The tremor in his hands fades with each sip of the drink. He knew he had it--the Irish curse--but would he listen to reason? With his Holy Gift in tow (which seems to him lately like another curse), he doubted he would ever know another way of living and was unwilling at the moment to try.

Luke gets a text letting him know that his ride is here. He fills up his emergency flask with Tito's vodka and hides it in his coat's hidden inner pocket. He comes inside, slides on his loafers and heads down the dingy stairs, the walls reeking of cigarette smoke and dust. He has to supposedly exorcize someone-- a rare occurrence that typically results in him encountering a mentally ill person rather than someone possessed. Still, he has his blessed salt and holy water in his satchel, ready to burn any creature of darkness he might run into.

When he arrives, there's a timid, scrawny women with a blonde bob. "Thank you for coming, Father. Please, come in, and take off your shoes."

Luke slides his shoes off in their mud room, then heads up the creaky wooden stairs. There's some kind of machine on the right side of the wall to carry someone in a wheelchair upwards safely with a seat belt hanging down and a lever.

"So, run through what we spoke about on the phone," he says. He omits the fact that he was blackout drunk at the time and that his notes on the matter are illegible in his drunken chicken scratch scrawl that would make a doctor's crappy signature look like calligraphy.

If this arises suspicions, the woman (She emailed him before--he remembers her name is Rebecca) doesn't express them. "It's my mother," and the farther they travel up the stairs, the worse he feels. The negative, evil energy is a gross feeling that brings back up the whispers of the Damned. They're still faint, thank the Lord, but the psychic silence he previously had is broken, shattered. He takes solace in the fact that his energy must be causing the creature the same distress, two forces clashing against each other.

"My pastor says you're the best around, which is why we had you come up all this way. She mainly moves objects around, causing a ruckus. She flew a plate into my father's face the other day-- we had to bring him into the ER with a concussion. He's there now, something off with his pulse. My sister is with him and they should be home soon, and I'd love to have this issue resolved by then. Every day it's something new, each phenomena weirder than the last. I don't want it to progress any more than this," she says with a shudder.

They finally arrive at a door at the end of the upstairs hall where he can hear the beeping of a heart monitor and the weak wheezing of someone without much time left. The door opens, revealing a frail woman with a dyed brown pixie cut and purple glasses. She's in a red sweater that seems to swallow her and has a quilt tucked around her.

"Who are you?" she croaks.

"Hi Mom. This is Father Bishop. She's usually very independent, but her health took a rapid decline recently. She's usually sharp as a tack, but has had bad brain fog lately."

"Don't talk about me like I'm not here!"

Luke cringes in sympathy, heading to the bedside and taking her by the wrinkled hand. Her nails are almost purple and some of her nails have broken off. The whispers are now at a regular volume, with an ache in the back of his skull.

"I'm going to perform a ritual. Could you sprinkle this salt around the bed, please? And I'll need you to leave in case it gets dangerous."

This is where some loved ones would argue, but Rebecca simply nods, quickly performs the task and scurries off.

"Will this hurt?" asks the old woman.

Luke opens his satchel. He doesn't answer.

"She asked you a fucking question," spits a deep, rumbling voice, and though it comes from her lips, its painstakingly obvious the voice doesn't belong to her.

"For you, demon. Not for her."

A good exorcist's work is never done, he thinks to himself. A heavy cross to bear, truly.

The door slams closed and locks abruptly.

"Just you and me, pastor."

"I'm a Catholic priest," he clarifies nonchalantly, opening his satchel which is flung from his hands by an invisible force and out the window, glass shattering violently.

Luke presses his mouth into a tight line and furrows his brows. The demon is a powerful one, at that. He'll have to break out the big guns.

This is going to be a long night, for sure.

2

To call the death of Rebecca's mother an exorcism gone wrong would be an understatement. It was a disastrous failure that sent Luke spiraling for weeks, from bar to bar, town to town to avoid nosy parishioners. How could he call himself a priest when he didn't have the banishment spell memorized word for word? He'd gone in a confident man and left that house a nervous wreck.

I can see your heart and know you're a sinner, too, it'd said, hovering over the bed like the elderly woman was just a marionette, limbs held up but loose and lifeless, the heart monitor's quick beeps filling the room. I'm done here, anyway, he'd said, and dropped the fresh corpse onto the bed, the long ring of a flatline roaring in Luke's ears.

For a demon to kill its vessel is unheard of and suspicious, but he'd been too distraught to report it.

A knock at his door woke him up from a restless, booze-induced slumber. The clock read 3:00. His slippers scratched against the floor as he dragged himself to the door and opened it. What he saw was a young woman with bright green eyes and a long blonde ponytail, dressed in a pink pencil skirt, mary janes and a white cardigan. She could've been anywhere from in her teens to twenties with a baby face. Either way, she radiated beauty and youth in a way that would make other women jealous.

Luke cursed himself for automatically being struck by something as vain as looks. "It's 3 in the morning, dear. Do you need something?"

"It's actually three in the afternoon, Father."

Yikes, thought Luke.

"My mistake. I've been...ill."

"I need your help." She held up a bandaged arm. Luke's first thought was that the poor thing had cut herself, but then he heard it; the whispers, faint but very apparent with the presence of this teenager.

"Come in," he said, and led the stranger into his home.

Ellie's story was this: she'd been walking home from field hockey practice when she crossed paths with a rabid dog. She knocked him dizzy with her stick, but not until he'd bitten a deep wound into her forearm. Animal control was called, but Ellie didn't stick around to even take the phone call, hiking up a tall tree until they arrived to take the animal away from her. She didn't know what the fate of the dog was, and had terrible guilt for hurting the animal despite it being clear self-defense.

"Where do you go to school, Ellie?" he asks as he takes a swig of his flask, hidden behind the door of the fridge, within earshot but outside of her view.

"Saint John's College. I'm a Freshman."

"Take a medical leave. You won't want to be around people if you have what I think you have."

God, his head hurt. He was going to bed after this, that's for sure.

When he arrives with a glass of ice water, the girl wipes the back of her sweaty forehead with her palm. Ellie begins to unbutton her cardigan. "I feel like I'm having a hot flash," she says, revealing a tight grey lowcut top with fraying spaghetti straps. She was busty, with thin arms but a thick chest. Her face turns red. "I also have had... uh, breast growth? But that could just be my um, period..."

Luke swallows dryly. "Right... That does narrow it down then." He stands up and walks over to his book shelf to pull out his beat-up tome of demons.

"Do you want to fuck me, Father?" says a different voice. It's lower and not as nasally as the girl's, and when Luke turns around Ellie's top is being pulled over her head to reveal a bra that's several sizes too small, the nipples poking out from the top of the garment. When the top is off her head he can see only the whites of her eyes.

"This girl is a slut, so I'm sure she won't mind. Banged a quarter of the football team in her first semester."

Luke drops the tome, then falls to the floor, scrambling for the right page to banish the demon. A small beige bra hits him in the face.

"Don't be like that," she croons, and a quick look over at the couch shows that the demon is now massaging the girl's large breasts with manicured hands. "Pour us a drink. I'm here for a good time!"

Luke starts the chant, a quick reader. But before he's through, the tome is yanked from his hands and, for the second time that month, thrown at the window, only this time it doesn't crash through the glass but it still sends loose papers everywhere.

Two telekinetic demons in one week? And after a swig of vodka while hungover? God sure knows how to test him, but he's determined to rise to the challenge. After all, that's what he should do if he's a good priest. Right?