Deliver Us from Evil (14 page)

Shame-faced, Claudia admitted that she hadn't believed a word her daughter said. “I was certain this was a nightmare, so calmed her down and sent her back to bed.”

“But
you
knew it wasn't a nightmare,” Ed said to the daughter in a kindly tone.

“No one could convince me it was just a dream,” Monique replied, looking Ed firmly in the eye for the first time. “Not my mother, not you, not anybody in the world!” Her big eyes challenged anyone to disagree. I didn't doubt her truthfulness for a second.

Warm weather brought a brief peace to the house, and Claudia said she'd completely forgotten her daughter's “bad dream” until she had a horrendous experience of her own the following winter. “I was sleeping by myself—my boyfriend was away—when something came into my room. I felt it breathing loudly on my ear. Then I felt myself falling forever and kept thinking ‘God help me!' I was paralyzed with terror but knew whatever was in the room with me was pure evil. I was fighting the evil feeling with everything I had.”

I knew this wasn't sleep paralysis, a rare medical condition that usually starts in childhood and causes people to become temporarily unable to move or speak, either while they're falling asleep or as they're waking up. Not only was everyone in the house affected, but terrifying phenomena were also taking place during the day, while the family was awake.

Closing her eyes briefly, as if to consult images on her eyelids, Claudia resumed her story. “I thought I got out of bed at this point and saw my children flickering on the walls as if they were floating. I tried to speak to Carolyn and Marybeth, but no sound came out of my mouth. The furniture looked all wavy and transparent. When I got to the kitchen telephone, I dialed my mother's number, but the person who picked up was my dead husband! ‘Hello,' he said, and I screamed, ‘Hurry home and help me!' As soon as I spoke, I was back in bed again.”

Watching Ed closely, trying to gauge his reaction, she asked, “Do you think this was an out-of-body experience?”

Ed agreed it might be, but felt he had to make an important point. “The voice you heard was
not
your late husband! It was a demon
speaking
in his voice.” The evil force was using a frightening, but also oddly reassuring disguise for its malevolent intentions. I've heard of this happening in other cases, where the phone would ring and the voice of a dead relative would be heard on the line. This is a most cruel and confusing tactic of the demonic.

When I returned to the kitchen, something peculiar happened. I was facing the dining room, where double doors led out to the patio. Since it was now dark, the glass doors were like a mirror, reflecting everything in the room. A sudden movement caught my eye: A shapeless black mass glided from right to left inside the room, right in front of these doors, then disappeared through the wall. True to my police training, I immediately went out on the patio to search for an intruder. There was no one—no one human, anyway.

That wasn't the first time I'd seen a strange shadow like this. People often ask if I ever saw any ghosts or demons when I was growing up. Actually, it was only after I entered the Work that I started having preternatural experiences. Once you give the demonic recognition, you draw them to you—something I didn't realize when I began this Work. Now I understand that when you get involved in investigations, you cross a line, and once you cross it, you can never go back. The chances are high that you will be disturbed and harassed in your own home, because the demonic never forget and never stop seeking revenge.

That revenge comes in ways you'd never expect. In the winter of 1992, my wife had a harrowing encounter in our home. I was off on a case and she was watching TV, while Christina slept. Suddenly Jen saw something out of the corner of her eye: a huge black shape about eight feet tall, with no features at all. She felt a terrible chill and every hair on her body stood on end. The shadow was at the doorway of our baby's room! Paralyzed with fear, she watched as it glided down the hall and vanished. As soon as she recovered enough to move, she crept cautiously into our bedroom, got one of the bottles of holy water that's always present, and sprinkled it everywhere.

By the time I got home, she'd gotten over her fright and was boiling mad. “You go off on these cases and bad things happen when you leave,” she shouted. “I'm scared to death being here all alone with a baby. Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life worrying about shadows and creepy stuff I don't even like to talk about?”

Her words were like a kick in the balls. I'd signed on for the Work, but my family hadn't. Why should they be subjected to harassment from Hell? It was like having somebody I'd arrested show up at my door or threaten my family. I did my best to calm her, then got another bottle of holy water and performed an exorcism of my own home, with the Pope Leo XIII prayer. We fell asleep in each other's arms around dawn, under the relic of the True Cross that hangs over our bed.

Not satisfied with scaring the shit out of my wife, this demonic spirit showed up again a month or so later. This time I was home, lounging on my living room sofa in front of the TV, when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. A big black shape was moving away from Christina's crib! Although the room was dark, the shadow was blacker than darkness. I have often heard people I've interviewd describe shapes they could see clearly in the dark, things so unnatural that they appeared to be swallowing up darkness. Now I knew exactly what they were talking about. I got off the sofa like a madman—I don't think my feet even hit the floor—and ran to my daughter. To my relief, she was sleeping peacefully, but the feeling I had was utter terror. Even after using holy water, I couldn't sleep all night, knowing that a demon had been so close to my baby girl.

The worst incident of all was in 1995. Christina, who was then five, peeked into her baby sister's room and screamed. “I saw something that was all wavy, like it was melting,” she told me later. “It was leaning over Daniella's crib like it was going to pick her up. I yelled to Mommy, ‘One of those things you and Daddy see is here—and it's getting Daniella!'” Jen raced into the room and saw the shadow hovering over the crib. Just as she frantically picked up the baby, the formless mass vanished. My wife and daughters fled the room, with Christina in tears, slamming the door behind them.

I was wild with rage when I got home from work and heard about this. When I entered the Work, I knew that anyone who goes up against the Devil pays a price. I'd expected that for myself, but not for Daniella, who is now four and weighs all of twenty-five pounds, most of it her long silky hair; or for Christina, nine, a sturdy little athlete who loves soccer and horror movies, just as I did as a kid. Yet I've discovered in case after case that's exactly the M.O. of satanic spirits: One of the cruelest ways they get at people is by attacking their children. This raises the fear factor much higher than if I were the sole target, and has caused me to feel tremendous stress and guilt.

To safeguard against satanic attacks, I've done my utmost to make our home extremely repellent to evil spirits, just as my burglar alarm and gun make it hostile to thugs of the human variety. It's not just holy water and blessed salt that I rely on, but I have made God—not the Devil—the center of my life. I avoid dwelling on demonology. In my everyday life, my focus is on being a husband and father. Even when I'm actively involved in a case, as I was here in D.C., I devote attention to it only during the investigation or when I'm writing up my report on it. To obsess over occult horrors is unhealthy and dangerous to the soul; lifting up your eyes to the wonder and majesty of God's creations is the cure. It's only through His mercy that we can survive dark nights of evil.

*   *   *

When I returned from my search of the patio, none of the McKenzies said a word to me, yet I could tell they'd seen the shape too. They just nodded their heads in grim satisfaction, as if to say “See, we told you so!”

In the family room, Claudia was describing the times when they could actually hear the demon entering their basement. The portal—the opening in the spirit plane that lets a fiend from Hell enter our world—was the laundry room, the site of the satanic rituals. The family could always sense when the spirit was coming. Your body will react to pure evil, even if you may not understand what you're feeling. Sometimes the spirit crept up the stairs silently, as the family members' bodies instinctively broke out in icy sweats; other times its steps were so loud that it sounded like someone was running with cinder blocks on his feet. The footsteps always started in the basement, and the family's terror would mount as they pounded up the stairs toward them. The noise provoked terrible fear, since the family members never knew what horrible thing would happen next.

Ed asked Claudia to pound on the wall to show what the steps were like. He'd done this in other cases, so we could get an idea of what the noises sounded like to the family, but no one can ever really reproduce exactly what was heard. The mother slammed her fist into the wall three times, and with each blow her kids and boyfriend upstairs literally jumped out of their chairs. That's how thoroughly the demon had trained them in terror. I comforted them by explaining it was just Claudia, demonstrating the sound for Ed, and they settled nervously back in their seats.

Next, Artie told his tale—a brief one, since he'd had few encounters with the unearthly force. Well into middle age, he had the beefy build of a man who made his living through manual labor and drank a lot of beer afterward. He was wearing worn blue jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off to reveal tattoos on both of his massive biceps. Having spent some time under the tattoo needle myself, I admired the intricate workmanship of the fire-breathing dragon on his left arm. For all his size, he seemed a bit shy and mumbled his words, perhaps because his speech was rough and uneducated. “One time I thought I heard one of the twins crying and went into her bedroom to tease her back into a good mood. There wasn't nobody in the room, but when I looked at the bed, I seen a baby doll lying on the pillow—with real tears in its eyes. It wasn't the kind of doll that cries, just a regular plastic doll. I don't know how to explain it.”

The next occult episode was at 4:30
A.M.
, the hour this hard-working man customarily got up on weekdays, since he had to be at his job by six. “I came out of our bedroom and seen what looked like a monster. There ain't nothing else I can call it. It had rough fur sticking up all over its body, and was hunkered down like it was hiding. I looked at it and just kept on walking, hoping it wouldn't see me. It vanished.” He had one other run-in with the spirit a few months later: This time it took the shape of a man's shadow, much larger than Artie's own, and moved along the floor beside him, deliberately keeping step with him. Strangely—or perhaps not so strangely—one of his coworkers sensed that he was having problems and gave him a rosary when he got to work that day.

Claudia confirmed that she'd also heard a baby's cry, as had several other family members and visitors. The bizarre phenomena didn't stop there, she added. “We'd just come back from church with our friend Jamie, and sat down to say some special prayers, when my younger twin, Marybeth, said her stomach was burning, as if she'd just been scratched. I lifted her shirt and she'd been clawed from hipbone to hipbone, in a wide red line that was welting up. I was in awe and didn't know what to do.”

She, Marybeth, and Jamie folded their hands and resumed their prayers for a few minutes, until Marybeth let out a loud yelp of pain. “Mommy, my face is burning,” she cried, and Claudia saw
three
side-by-side scratches appear on her daughter's cheek. There was that number again, the calling card of the demonic.

“All I could think was that
it
was angry that we were praying,” Claudia said. Obviously worried that we might have doubts about such an incredible incident, she quickly added, “Marybeth couldn't have done it to herself, because her hands were in a praying position the entire time. Then my friend Jamie cried out:
She
was getting scratched too! We all heard growls and saw red marks appear on her face, her forearms, and her chest.”

The attacks became increasingly physical. The next day Claudia's niece, Jessica, felt the demon's claws, which raked her face and arms so hard that she bled. “The kids looked like battered children,” Claudia said. “I felt we had to get out of that house, so we went to my brother's home.”

There the family discovered that they could run, but they couldn't hide. “
It
followed us,” Claudia explained, “and the children were attacked again. Marybeth was scratched right in front of me, on the face. It burned her, and she was looking pretty bad. It was a horrible feeling that as a parent, I couldn't protect my own child. I put her in between me and my boyfriend, and we put our arms around her, but she
still
got scratched.”

Not satisfied with these cruelties—or the abject terror it had already aroused—the demon showed an even more sadistic streak when they returned home. That night it told the terrified twin that it had a special plan just for her—a girl's ultimate nightmare. As Marybeth sat sobbing in the living room, with tears and blood streaming down her ravaged face, she saw a terrible sight—so horrible that she could barely describe it to us. With her eyes fixed on the floor, the thirteen-year-old told us, “I looked through the bedroom door, and it was lying on the waterbed, with its legs open.”

She stopped there and gave her mother a pitiful, imploring stare, as if to say “Do I really have to go on?”

“We've all seen it differently,” the mother interjected. “To me, it looks like a beast with short black fur.”