Blessed Are the Wicked Page 2

  I sat awake the rest of the night, waiting for the chime. Four o’clock in the morning rolled around and there was no chime. Five in the morning rolled around and, again, there was no chime. Finally, six in the morning rolled around and the clock began to chime normally, on schedule, like it should have.

  Bravery always comes with the rising of the sun. In the morning light, everything always seems manageable and okay. Maybe that is the reason I have never left Union. In Missouri, there is always a morning to follow the night. There is something to be said about where you put down your roots. I fought to make this my home, and I wasn’t willing to give up the fight. To run now, it seems to me, would somehow lessen the victory. This is where I made my stand in life and, crazy as it might seem to some, it is very much a part of who I am now. Union is my home––nightmares, craziness, ghosts, and all.

  Home Sweet Home

  It is not easy to live your life as one of the haunted, you know? You can’t exactly go on Dr. Phil for help, and at that time, Oprah wasn’t calling. Where do you go and how do you begin to pick up the pieces, after the fallout? Everything within my life had been destroyed and I found myself now standing within the wake of my recovery, waiting for the next aftershock to hit. It was becoming very apparent to me this was going to be very different than any other type of recovery a person could go through. The paranormal storm was still looming on the horizon, and I could still feel its darkness pressing on my soul. It could be so easy to be seduced back into that darkness. All it would take was a single thought or the right action on my part, and I would find myself right back where I had fought so hard to battle my way home. It would be so easy to find myself lost once more. Lost is something I never wanted to feel again. Being lost is a situation no one wants to find themselves in. I had been on the edge of demonic possession and now I just wanted to stay stable, together, and calm. As a family, we had already been through enough. I needed to keep myself from slipping back into the grasp of the darkness, the abyss. How do I begin to explain the situation to someone who has never been there? How do I begin to tell you the fear I had of going backwards, and the strength I needed to move ahead?

  Then there was Helen, the woman who lived in the house after I did. Helen, whose family I tried to help out of the same hell I was living. Helen, who had found herself going from the mother of the neighborhood to a possessed monster who wanted to kill anyone and everyone in her wake. Helen was doing her best to put on an I-am-completely-healed face, but the truth is, we all knew she wasn’t. They were never able to exorcise the demon completely from her, because her health issues made it impossible. The exorcism would have killed her. Instead, she was drugged to the point of submission. I looked into her eyes and I knew somewhere, hiding beneath the drug-induced glaze, hid a monster, and it always sent a chill through my body and a tear to my eye, because I still felt responsible for not being able to talk her out of the house sooner. Would she ever be the same again? Sure, we put on a public show that everything was all right, but for those of us close to her during those first years, we knew the truth. We were all living with the monster subdued. I feared at any moment the monster would come out, ready for battle, and try to hurt or even kill one of us once more. The possibility was always there.

  It has taken me a long time to come to terms with those months, and even years, that followed the Screaming House haunting. Wouldn’t you like to think it all ended once the door closed and we walked out of the house? To think that the nightmare ended as we started to piece our lives back together again? The truth is that sometimes the aftershocks can be more dangerous than the earthquake itself. This haunting has made an irrevocable change in my life. I will never be the same person I was in the beginning. People around me were used like pawns, all in a game of cat and mouse. And in the end, I was oblivious to the lengths to which evil will go to in order to destroy a soul.

  Something Happened to Me

  I had something happen to me recently, which upset me. I am talking really upset me. It brought back those memories from the Screaming House so clearly, I felt like I was back there living it all over again. I was taken immediately back to 2001 when I first moved into the old white house and began the fight to keep my family together and sane. I could hear the loud banging noises from the floor above and the house screaming all over again. Our house was supposed to be the perfect house for the perfect family, like the ad had stated. Our house quickly turned our nightmares into reality. I can remember the shadows moving from one room to another trying to find us after we had fled the house and I can remember what it felt like to carry my child in shock out of the house in my arms. All those memories in an instant were once again present and real.

  I thought I was over it. I thought I had put it all behind me, but I was wrong. The voice of Lorraine Warren, the paranormal investigator, kept coming back to me with the warning that she gave Helen right after leaving the house in those early days: “It is far from over.” I have to admit, in those early days I did not understand what she meant. None of us did. It was as if we thought we could magically go back to normal lives without a second thought as to what had happened or what we had lived through. I tried to forget it all. I tried to forget the screams, the shadows, Helen standing on my porch with black eyes and a gun behind her back. How do you forget someone trying to kill you? How do you forget all of those things, which never made sense, and somehow live your life with people who would never really understand the total impact of what you had been through? I felt like my family and friends were in pieces, and I was scrambling around trying to put everyone back together again. Surely this is how those who have lived through a war must feel. I felt like we had been through a war. Damaged goods left behind in piles of rubble with shrapnel in our backs, but our eyes were not blinded. Unfortunately, we could see. We could see clearer than we ever had in our lives. Over and over, with each passing year, Lorraine’s words have proven to be true. This was the case recently, when once again I was reminded of Lorraine and her words of wisdom: “It’s far from over.”

  • • •

  I went to a conference to give a lecture on the Screaming House. It was being held at an old, deserted hospital in the middle of Nowhere, Tennessee. The kind of place that in most cases would have been demolished had it not been for someone getting the idea to preserve it for paranormal research. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot to be learned from a location like this, which is active beyond anyone’s expectations. The deserted hospital is a gold mine of evidence, just waiting to be captured and studied. But there is always a part of me that wonders about the ethical implications of studying these lost souls. Where do you draw the line when dealing with the dead, and how would you feel if one of your loved ones was one of the many on display for research? I find it ironic that we will sign our bodies away to scientific research upon death, and I wonder if there is any difference between the research and our study of lost souls. This is why I am very careful to try to support only those organizations that accept donations to preserve old buildings, and not those who operate only for profit. At this point, the hospital appeared to be doing everything it could just to keep its doors open. The historical preservation of the building was something I could support, and that is why I was there. Such places provide investigators with a place to go to learn their craft and to experiment with new ideas and research. Better to do it in a facility like this, than on a family that is living an unstoppable nightmare.

  This particular building also had the added gem of an old psych ward on its upper level. Anyone doing paranormal research will tell you old psych wards or psych hospitals are always especially interesting, because of the types of activity they seem to either draw or maintain within their walls. This psych ward was no different.

  Generally, when I go on these speaking engagements, I am the last person you will find participating in the investigation part of the event. It is not that I don’t want to participate with the others;
it is because I am more comfortable working my private cases with a smaller group. I feel that every time I investigate, I take a chance. Let’s face it, the Screaming House marked me for attack at any opportune moment. So, if I am going to take a risk, I would rather it be to help someone than to run around a building simply for the hell of it. What do I need to prove to myself ? I already know what is out there. I have lived through enough and have seen my share. Such was the case that weekend at the hospital investigation.

  Everyone had broken into groups, and they were investigating the building, each group breaking off onto a separate floor. I went inside the building because I needed to find someone. I asked a young guy, who had never been to a haunted location before, to come with me. He was standing outside because he was a little more than spooked by the investigative processes going on inside.

  We looked everywhere for the person I was looking for, but we couldn’t find them. The only place left was the top floor, where the old psych ward was located. I thought there would be a group up there and gave it no thought as we headed up the stairs. When we got onto the floor, I called out but got no reply in return. We walked around to the hallway, and that’s when I could feel the energy rushing toward me! I turned to face it just at the moment it hit me in the chest, throwing me against the wall!

  My first thought was the novice kid I had come up to the floor with. I knew if this thing knocked me to my knees it would go after him, too. “Run!” He didn’t move. He just stood there looking at me in shock. “I said run!” Puzzled and shocked he yelled, “What?” I was trying to gain my footing. “We are in trouble. Move it! Run!” My words finally registered with him and we were on the move. We hit those stairs and did not stop until we were all the way down.

  Thank God the kid was one of my son Matthew’s friends, who had been traveling with us. I told him not to tell a soul. When Matthew found us, he took one look at me and knew something was wrong. He thought it was my heart, or that I was overheated. I did not tell him what had happened. I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t find the words, and I didn’t want to worry him even if I could. So, I kept what had just happened to myself. My chest hurt where it had hit me. It had hit me where it knew it would hurt. You see, I had recently had two stents put into my heart. My chest was hurting like hell, and I felt completely wiped out emotionally and physically. At that moment, all I wanted to do was go home. I wanted the safety of my home. I wanted to hide.

  When we got home the next day, I called Lydia, my daughter, to tell her we had made it home safely. When she asked me how the trip went, I completely broke down. It all came rushing out in a flood of emotions that shocked me as much as I am sure it shocked Lydia. I told her everything. I was angry I let it do that to me. I was angry I let it catch me with my defenses down. I was angry, and the truth of the matter was that I was scared. There it was: I had said it. The words came rushing out before I could stop them. I was scared. After all of this time and all of these years, it still had the means and the capability to frighten me. It knew where to get me. I was scared because it reminded me of those years during the Screaming House nightmare. I thought those feelings were long gone and buried. They all came rushing right back to the surface. I was scared because I never wanted the nightmare to come back to haunt me. Lorraine was right once again: it would never be over.

  I sit here today, writing this in the same apartment where Tommy (one of Helen’s misfits) was given a fatal overdose of heroin, just two blocks down the street from the Screaming House. You see, I never could get away, no matter how hard I tried. The closer I stayed to it, the more it would leave me alone. Sometimes I tell myself I am here to keep an eye on it, to make sure everything is okay, but I know I am just fooling myself. I have kept how close I am to the house a secret from the paranormal investigator John Zaffis, because I know what he would say to me. Is it I who is addicted to this land, or is it this land that is addicted to me? Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I should know: I am a master at crazy. I wrote the book. My close friend, the psychic healer Terri Spiritdancer, put a great perspective on it for me. She asked, if I were in an accident, would I put up a tent and live where the horrible accident took place? Well, of course, the answer was no. Then she said asked me why I was living here. Even though her analogy made complete and absolute sense to me, here I am writing to you today. I feel as if I am damned no matter which way I go, so I might as well be here so that at least I can see it coming. But I guess that is the story, isn’t it?

  [contents]

  Chapter 2

  April 1988

  My best friend, Zoe, sat across the table from me, shuffling the deck of tarot cards. Zoe was a pretty girl. She had beautiful blond hair and the most unique, sparkling green eyes you have ever seen. She placed the deck in front of me, tapping it three times with her finger. I had to laugh at the almost ritualistic way she was handling the cards in front of her.

  “Cut the cards three times,” she said with a mysterious tone to her voice.

  Zoe was notorious for being farcical in every aspect of her life. If you couldn’t do something in a dramatic way, then why in the hell bother doing it at all? I cut the deck three times very carefully, as instructed. Zoe pulled one card slowly from the tarot deck.

  “Okay, I will do just a simple one-card reading for you,” she said, with an all-wise and knowing voice, as she lay the card down on the table in front of me.

  It was a horrible-looking card. A lightning bolt was crashing into a tower, causing two people to fall headlong––I had to assume to their deaths. Fire, rain, and jagged rocks were gruesomely depicted in this morbid scene.

  “This is the Tower card,” Zoe said, deep in thought.

  “Well, it can’t be something good,” I replied, clearly worried at what I was seeing.

  “The tower is a façade, Steven––a lie or a deception. It is you fooling yourself, as well as someone fooling you; there is duplicity involved. You have been telling yourself you have changed, that you have left your old self behind. The truth is that you have not. However, you have built this deception up so high in your mind that when the full realization reaches you, it is all going to come crashing down with a bolt of lightning. When it does, you are going to understand true grief and profound fear like you never have before. But all is not lost. Through this grief and fear, Steven, you are going to gain such clarity of vision that you will no longer be held prisoner to things like desire or ambition, and you will begin the process of rebuilding your soul. Steven, you have to do this to understand your destiny; some might even call it your life mission.”

  Zoe was really into what she was saying, and when she got rolling like this she could sometimes really creep you the fuck out. At this point, I was thinking she had been reading too much Tolkien, or I was going to hear that Darth Vader was my real father in her next visionary statement. I had to giggle at the thought.

  “And I think you have been smoking too much pot again,” I said, as I hit her in the arm lovingly.

  “Seriously, man, this is what I am seeing here. This is some heavy shit. You got some bad juju coming your way, but it is all for the best,” she said, still way too seriously. Now, the last time she used the words “bad” and “juju” in the same sentence was the night she tried to put a curse on her ex-husband and caused every cat in the neighborhood to start screeching simultaneously. Well, you might want to think it was coincidence, but I was there and I saw what happened when she lit those black and red candles. I was poking fun at her that night, just like I was poking fun at her now. Maybe it would be in my best interest to get her off the subject, especially if bad juju was involved.

  “Are you coming to my wedding?” I finally asked. I had to know. The wedding was only a week away, and my fiancée kept asking me why we had not heard back from Zoe yet.

  “I really don’t think in my right conscious mind I can do that. I mean, after what I have seen here today, you are headed for d
isaster if you go ahead with this black wedding. I just cannot give my blessing to something like that, man.”

  She was actually serious. She was going to avoid my wedding because a deck of tarot cards gave her visions of disaster ahead. Well, I had news for her: I was going to avoid the next big event in her life because a visionary game of Yahtzee was going to give me doomsday visions of titanic proportions concerning her life.

  “You mean to tell me that after everything you and I have been through, you are not going to come to my wedding because you see bad juju in a freaking tarot card?” I really was astounded. Flabbergasted was more along the lines of what I was feeling at the moment.

  “Exactly. I love you, dude, I do, but this is some heavy-duty shit. I’m telling you this is some shit you should not ignore. Let’s put it this way, you go ahead with this wedding and you better hope you get at least one crucifix for every fucking room for damn wedding presents, because it is going to be fucking game on.” With that she took another big, long drag off the Kool she was smoking. We sat there for a moment, not saying a word.

  “Well, suit yourself. You are going to miss a good time.” I finally had to give in. With Zoe, that is what you eventually had to do. Once she had made up her mind, that was it. It was not like she was stubborn, but rather her resolve made it impossible for anyone to convince her otherwise.

  “Yeah, well, I’m sure that a good time is what they thought they were gonna have before they went to Carrie’s fucking prom, too.” She started laughing as she took another drag from her smoke. “But we remember how that shit turned out for her.”