Page 65 of Sin of the Saints

Dawn comes and pricks me with its light as though I don’t deserve it. I flip through Belle’s notebook, focusing intensely on every word she’s written.

When she’d just arrived, a few years ago, I fulfilled my professional duty in the coldest way possible. I had to be remote, objective and not get involved with the lost souls my job obligated me to save. I was at the start of my path and felt it was the opportunity I’d been waiting for to jumpstart my career and prove myself, especially when at the end of my internship I was told a replacement was being sought for Prof. Sapienti at the Catholic Institute for Wounded Souls, and that the institute’s administrator had asked for me personally. I was always a spiritual person, believing that faith had healing power, and I wanted to apply that to my field of specialization and make my mark.

“The Devil is in them,” the administrator kept saying. “We must redeem their souls and banish him from them.” Belle, according to him, was the most difficult case of them all. Theysay wounded souls are unaware of the madness dwelling within them, but not Belle. She was perfectly aware of the impurity taking hold within her. She was aware of everything. On the one hand she sought to banish it, on the other she understood that the corruption was not just part of her, it was her essence.

She didn’t speak much those first few days. She was busy self-flagellating for her failed suicide attempt. She thought God was punishing her by preventing her from leaving this world, and that her whole life was torment for her actions and thoughts.

At mass the administrator preaches that our patients lack faith and thus their souls are in torment. Hell is not just what awaits them in the next life if they don’t find their faith, they walk this world and will continue to do so, lost in the darkness, damned, until God’s light shines upon them. Only then will the Devil in them be banished and their mental health returned to them. In his worldview, these two things go hand in hand.

Scientifically, my prognosis for Belle was that her death instinct was pronounced. She suffered from self-destructive disorders, depression and was suicidal.

Her father’s worldview matched the administrator’s. He thought she had to find God on the road he had walked, the only way he had prepared for her since childhood, that he had determined for her. But unfortunately, her obsessive searching only drowned her in her madness. So I asked her to write, hoping writing would be less overwhelming for her.

At first she had difficulty trusting me. I don’t think she’d ever trusted anyone in her life. Over time I realized that whenever she opened up to another person, she’d experienced exploitation and harm. In her twisted perspective, she’d learned that that was the way of the world, and I was no different. She kept asking me: “What do you get out of this, besides your miserable salary?” If she only knew that I ultimately lost the only stable thing in my life because of her.

When I finally managed to get her to open up to me, after introducing the world of books and writing to her, she saw me as her guardian angel. She saw the good in me even when I myself believed that I’d lost my way, being captured and practically possessed by her darkness. The day she noticed that I coveted her and that I was no different from anyone else in her life after all, I became a devil in her eyes, and she gave him a name. She saw me as Hillel Morningstar. And worst of all, she blamed herself for my having gone astray.

“You were supposed to be different, you promised me,” she said in tears. “You were supposed to save me and instead I dragged you down with me.” Maybe I shouldn’t have let her research Judaism, but I believe that as Christians we must know our past. Our savior Jesus Christ was Jewish.

The more I browse her notebook, the more horrified I am to discover that on every blank piece of paper that doesn’t contain the story she made up, she’s scribbled the passage: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth1.” She became obsessed with the origins of the world.

I remember my talk with Mr. Fleming, and realize he was right. He wouldn’t have shown her that abominable painting if I hadn’t pushed her to it.

The more I try to decipher her, the more the truth about her slips away from me. I’ve never had a patient like Belle. She told me about herself through the entity she believes resides within her. The one she’s ashamed of, who the world rejects and seeks to banish so she can heal. She gave her the name Lilith. Every character in her fiction represents someone in her true story, but the true identity of Libretto remains beyond my reach. She only spoke his name in one session. And despite the courage she found, he vanished as quickly as he’d appeared and she shut herself off. Libretto represents her nightmare. The head of the demonic Council that came to life the night she went outfor her first and last class party. Four teens locked her in the game room. Trent, Leo, Kelly and Tiffany. What happened that night remains a mystery to this day. The parents of the four privileged kids armed them with the finest lawyers and managed to evade punishment. A gag order blocked any possibility of public discourse and her war for justice. In addition to all that, the person in charge of the gag order was her father of all people. Thus Belle’s tragedy was silenced and erased as though it had never happened. Thus her father erased her, again, and earned a seat of his own as a Council member.

That was why Belle felt a certain sympathy with Lilith’s character. Like her, she too had been erased, condemned to be whispered as a terrifying and accursed secret, a secret to be ashamed of.

But her erasure doesn’t cancel out her nightmare. It exists within her, dictating the course of her life since that night. Six council members oversee the rules by which she lives, with Libretto leading them. And yet… who is he? I tried to divine his identity through her father without exposing too many details, so as not to violate doctor-patient confidentiality, but he knew of no such person. His indifference and desire to blow me off just reinforced the loathing I felt for him.

Though she hadn’t revealed just what had happened that night, all the hints Belle had scattered into the fiction she created implied that she’d undergone an especially cruel sexual assault. But the chapter about her nightmare doesn’t line up with the information I’ve managed to glean about that night.

I remember the fear her face had expressed during that session when she dared to speak Libretto’s name, when footsteps were heard outside my office door. I suspected it was a staff member or a patient, but no speculation sat right with me and I found myself at a dead end.

I flip back to the chapter she called “The Nightmare” and read it again, for what must be the thousandth time, but again find myself in endless pondering that leads nowhere. All her mentions are breadcrumbs left on a path that goes nowhere.

Belle gave the demon living in Libretto the name Ashmedai. Ashmedai is a king of demons in Jewish and Christian tradition, a demon of rage. They believe his mother was the demoness Naama, who also appears in Belle’s story. If I could only find out how her mother was connected to Libretto, but unfortunately, she ended her life and Belle’s father refuses to speak of her.

I keep paging through until my eyes fall on a sentence she wrote:And what if demons don’t roam around them at all? Is it possible they’re within them? During dreams the unconscious mind brings up the most talismanic desires. Could sleeping humans secretly long for what they fight against when they’re awake?

I read the paragraph again and try to crack the mystery of her, and then it hits me. Is Ashmedai the inheritance her mother, who bears the name Naama, left behind for Belle after she died?

His name repeats in my head again and again.

Ashmedai.

Ashmedai.

A…s…h…

Is it possible Libretto isn’t a real person after all?

There’s a knock on my office door, and I raise my eyes from Belle’s notebook, still stunned at the last chapter she wrote and didn’t bother to say anything to me about at all. She knew about the impending treatment. I was so upset during our last meetingI didn’t notice she’d written another chapter, which said she was ready for it, ready to give in. Was the mention of Libretto’s name a last chance for her to admit the truth she’d hidden from me?

Ellis peeks over the door. “You got a few minutes?”

I look at the clock – it’s a quarter to eleven.Damn it, fifteen minutes until the time of Belle’s treatment.

“What do you want?” I don’t hide my loathing of him, I couldn’t even confront him since that day of the quarterly review in the administrator’s office, but he doesn’t seem to mind because he comes in and sits across from me.

---