Page 56 of Splintered
“He’s going to kill himself! His back will break!”
“Stay back! For your own safety!”
Evan curled upward, impossibly higher, his spine grinding as he returned to that shape, the one Ben still saw whenever he blinked. Impossibly curved.
“Dr. Kao!” Father Mathew called.
Dr. Kao appeared, taking a picture of Evan’s contortion. “Opisthotonos noted.” She called out the time. She checked her phone again, connecting it to the sensors she’d placed on Evan’s chest. “His pulse is racing! Over 200 beats per minute!”
“Safety!” Evan bellowed. He started to laugh, a wicked, hoarse laugh. “There is no safety in this house!”
“God, whose nature is ever merciful and forgiving, accept our prayer that this servant of yours, bound by the fetters of sin, may be pardoned by your loving kindness.”
“Shut up!” Evan screamed. His head whipped toward Father Mathew. He was still contorted in his backbreaking curve, and he bared his teeth, snarling. “Do you remember Italy, Father? I fought you there! And you lost then, too!” His eyes were pitch black.
Everything from that first night slammed back into Ben. The screams, the wailing. The black eyes, the crack of Evan’s spine as he’d seized. The terror, the helplessness, the hopelessness.
“Evan!” He tried to reach past Father Mathew, tried to reach for Evan.
Evan snapped his teeth at Ben, hard enough to hear, hard enough to shatter teeth. He did it again, snarling as he bared them. He was a caged animal, something wild. Something inhuman. “Fuck off!” Evan snapped. His eyes seemed to stare through Ben, into him and then beyond him. “This is all your fault!”
“Do not listen to the demon,” Father Mathew said. “Everything that comes out of its mouth is a lie. It wants to hurt you. Do not let it.”
“Fuck you, you stupid priest!” Evan roared. “I should never have come to you! I should never have talked to you!”
Donna’s sobs rose over Evan’s screams, her shock, her tears. William wrapped her in his arms and hid her face in his neck. He stared Evan down, his chin held high.
“And fuck you, Dad,” Evan hissed. “Why do you think I never told you anything about my life? You had one vision for me, one! I knew I couldn’t ever live up to what you wanted for me. I knew you’d hate me. So I hated you first!”
“Nothing will ever make me hate my son,” William said calmly. “You speak lies, demon. My son is the best part of my life, and he always will be.”
Something seemed to sag in Evan, wind sapped from his sails. He flopped back to the bed, silent, limp, almost lifeless.
Ben waited beside Father Mathew. He stared at Evan, willing his chest to rise and fall.
“Holy Lord, everlasting God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who once and for all consigned that fallen and apostate tyrant to the flames of Hell. Hasten to our call for help. Snatch from ruination and from the clutches of the noonday devil this human being made in your image and likeness!”
Evan spat at Father Mathew. “Fuck you.”
Father Mathew pulled a vial of holy water from his cassock and unstoppered it one handed.
Evan’s eyes went wide. He sneered. Tried to back away as far as his restraints would allow.
Father Mathew flung drops of holy water over Evan. Ben watched them spatter his shirt, his shorts, his face. His arms and legs, where his shorts had ridden up and exposed his thighs.
Evan screamed, shrieking at the top of his lungs. He roared, and his eyes rolled back as he trembled, as if he was trapped in another seizure. Around him, the house creaked, wind battering the windowpanes until they trembled.
“Pulse rate is 250!” Dr. Kao called. “He has to come down soon or I’m injecting him with a sedative!”
“I cast you out, unclean spirit, along with every Satanic power of the enemy, every specter from Hell and all your fell companions. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Begone and stay far from this creature of God!” Sweat beaded on Father Mathew’s brow, collecting in the furrows and creases.
“For it is He who commands you, He who flung you headlong from the heights of heaven into the depths of Hell. It is He who commands you, He who once stilled the sea and the wind and the storm. Tremble in fear, Satan, you enemy of the faith, you foe of the human race, you begetter of death, you robber of life, you corrupter of justice, you root of all evil and vice, you author of pain and sorrow!”
Evan thrashed again, tugging on his restraints so hard the bed jerked across the floor. He raged, hollering at the top of his lungs, gibberish and nonsense, roars and curses. He screamed his hate, hate for Ben, for his mom and dad, for Father Mathew. His eyes flashed between pitch black and a cloudy white, his eyes rolling up in his head and then back down as he snarled at Ben and Father Mathew.
“Why do you stand and resist, knowing as you must that Christ the Lord brings your plans to nothing?” Father Mathew kept praying.
“It isn’t me!” Evan bellowed. The syllables were stretched, elongated over each other, his voice both deep and high at the same time. The sound was otherworldly, unnatural, something beyond anything Ben had ever heard. Like a reverberation echoing into infinity, the high and low end of a scale screaming at once.
