The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (32 page)

“You’ve pissed this thing off, and now you need to stay away. You don’t need to be dragged down with me. You keep trying to pull me out, but look, I made a pact with him, and now he’s inside me, and I guess that’s the end
of it. You done enough. You made me human again. I’m at peace now, whatever happens. So save yourself and get away.”

As I stood in the hallway holding the phone, I could sense its presence. The stench of rotting meat was seeping into my nostrils. The air had gone icy. Screaming voices, distant at first, started climbing on top of one another again until they were shrieks pressed up against my ears.

Somehow, I could hear Ronnie’s voice over the shrieks. “Tell me you won’t do nothing, Jackie. Please.”

The phone went dead. There was only a loud, sustained beep. My eyes darted around. I felt it all around me, infuriating in its patience, just lying in wait. My bedroom door seemed to zoom toward me and then stop, until I stood only inches from it. Under the screaming there were moans and the sounds of voices praying in Latin. My bedroom door swung open, admitting a stench that was even worse. I slapped my hand over my nose.

Under my covers there was a lump, like the outline of a large child or small adult. The back of its head was facing me, and its hair was sticky and matted to the pillow. I couldn’t move.

“Jackie,” a voice said from the bed. “Come to me.” The outline raised itself from the waist and threw the covers off, cackling. It was my mother, her flesh torn, her scalp bloodied, her face covered in bile.

I seldom pray, but I prayed now.
Please don’t let her come near me. Please.

I was nailed to where I stood.

“You thought I forgot you,” she said. “Look what you
did. Why did you leave me? Why? You will come home. Oh, you will come home.”

I collapsed to the floor.

When I opened my eyes, she was gone. My bed was untouched, the covers still pulled tightly under the edges of the mattress from that morning. It had got inside me, and it was taking over.

The phone rang again. Ronnie, calling back. I told him I didn’t know why the phone had gone dead. He didn’t pause. “I’m scared for you, Jackie. I’m not going to make it back to the other side, and I understand that now. I’m on the wrong side. I’m a monster, and I’m meant to die as a monster. Don’t you see? I made the pact, and it’s been sealed. There’s no saving me. It’s all over. If you do this, you won’t get back to your own body. You’ll die or become one of us, one of the people who are damned.”

“You can be saved, Ronnie. So can my mother, and so can Joanne.”

“It ain’t worth it for you, Jackie. I’m a done deal. It’s finished for me. But you don’t have to feel bad. Look at everything you’ve given me. The first thing I ever asked you was to help me feel human, and you did that.”

“We aren’t done, Ronnie. Because you’re stronger than you think you are, and you didn’t sign any damn contract with Lucifer. That was only in your mind. The only weapon you have is you. It isn’t holy water or empty words from fake priests. You can do things. You can be strong against this.”

“It ain’t worth it, Jackie. I’m scared all the time. But at least I can feel things, thanks to you.”

“Ronnie, your whole family is wiped out. What do you have to lose? You’re even too scared to live on the outside. You told me that. You’re in prison, living with a demon inside you. You’re the walking dead.”

“Maybe so, but I’m still around. That’s good enough for me. I don’t need more than that. There’s no reason for you to go where I’m going.”

“Ronnie, it isn’t decided where you’re going yet. Your life isn’t over. We all have until the very end to determine our fate. Don’t give up. I know what you’re feeling. When you look at yourself, you see the grown man who can reflect on the things he’s done, but you also see the stupid kid who gave in to bad impulses. But there’s such a thing as redemption. That kid is gone. You’re a different person now.”

“But I still see that kid. All the time.”

“Of course you do.”

“When I look in the mirror, I see a double image. I see me now, and I see me then.”

“I know. And you’re scared that it’s the same person. But you have to believe that the person you are now is different from the person you were then.”

“Before all this shit happened with my family.”

“That’s right, Ronnie. Before all this shit happened with your family.”

“Let’s talk about
that house, Ronnie. Forget the Lutzes for a second. There is a presence and a spirit in that house, and it’s evil. But it isn’t pigs with red eyes and marching
bands and all that foolishness the Lutzes wanted people to believe. The people who debunked it said it themselves—the Lutzes were trying to throw the whole kitchen sink in there. That book had every ghost and goblin you could possibly dream up. It was just silly. But they weren’t wrong that there’s something inside those walls. And the only way to get rid of it is for me to go there and be one with it.”

“I should have burned that place down when I thought of it that day. Listen, Jackie, it’s too late for me. Whatever it is that got in me got in me, and I guess it’s there for good. And now it’s getting to you; I know it is. So back away and leave me be. Have a regular life.”

“Ronnie, if I don’t do this, it will happen again. But this time it will be my house. You once told me I held the keys to hell. Maybe you’re right.”

“Jackie, Christ, I’m asking you this. Walk away, okay? Just walk away from me. No—run. Run as fast as you can. Leave your house. Everything. Just go, okay?”

“I can’t. You’re not the only one locked up. I’m in prison, too. He owes me something, and I’m planning to collect.”

“Save yourself, Jackie.”

“I will, Ronnie. I will. The only way I know how. By going back. And you’re coming with me.”

I was eight when I first learned I had the ability to
travel. I’m not talking about acting as a channel for psychic energy, the spirits of those who have passed. I’m talking about actually going to another place.

It’s called astral travel, and it’s a technique used not only in occult practices but also in FBI training, the aim being to expand agents’ minds and perspectives as they try to tease apart cases that seem like black holes. The purpose of astral travel is to go to a different time or place. Those of us who do it well can achieve full transformation. We can feel the seasons change, alterations in body temperature. I’ve trained countless policemen and detectives in the technique. It’s grueling. The more open-minded ones are disposed to do well at it; the others never get there.

It’s also a dangerous technique, for the same reason regular physical travel has its risks: you never know what you might bring back with you.

I’d been playing outside, down by the train tracks, when a dark feeling swept into my head. Something told me to rush back home. When I got through the door, I heard my mother say that my brother, Billy, wasn’t feeling well. I went to his room and sat by his bed, worried. Billy was a strong, strapping kid, built like my dad. He was seventeen then, handsome in that I-don’t-give-a-shit way teenage boys have. But he looked terrible. His face was pallid and his eyes were squeezed shut in pain. He kept balling up, bringing his knees toward his stomach, and crying out. My father had taught me to power through discomfort like this, and I in turn had learned to hate weakness. I hated seeing Billy giving in to this, whatever it was.

My mom and dad walked in the bedroom and looked Billy over, neither one saying a word. Finally my dad turned to my mom and said, “Go to bed.” Then he picked Billy up like a rag doll and walked out. I ran over to the window to see my dad laying Billy down in the backseat of the car and placing a blanket over his body. This was a kid who played in the swamp, walked the railroad tracks with me. Now I got the terrifying feeling he might never come home. My mom didn’t listen to my dad—she got in the car with him, and off they went.

Hours passed, and I didn’t move from that window. I didn’t care if my mother took the switch to me—a strip of bark taken from a tree and used like a belt, and one of her favorite forms of punishment. I was waiting for my brother.

The car pulled up hours later, the house now in darkness.
I ran down, calling for my brother. My mom walked into the house, put her purse down, and said, “Your brother is in the hospital.” I stood still, trusting nothing and nobody. The house seemed empty, matching my feeling inside. Even when my sensations were negative or frightening, I was usually sure of them. But this was a feeling I hadn’t encountered, and it chilled me deep down in my bones.

My dad walked in the door and saw the look in my eyes. He crouched down to me. “You best get on now,” he said, which meant I’d better do something to occupy myself because otherwise I was going to kill myself with worry, and there was nothing he could say that was going to make me feel any better.

“He’s strong,” I heard my mom say. That put me over. I ran to my bed, flopped onto it face-first, and started to cry. I put Billy’s smile in my head. His voice. The image of us talking together, sitting, reading, taking walks down by the swamp.

And then my journey began, as though my body was being stretched in directions from the inside. My muscles were flexing, tensing, like they were bracing for flight. It was similar to the sensation of being in a plane as the engine starts to whine and the big machine starts to thunder down the runway. You feel yourself quickly giving up control of your own physical form and space, though still you have a fleeting connection to the earth. The plane accelerates, speeding along, as different forces act on your body at once. You’re racing, rumbling, and then, suddenly, the feeling of lightness and air. You’re traveling
again, but now into a realm that feels nothing like the one you left only seconds ago. You’re in flight.

This is how it felt. My body was traveling. I felt outside of myself yet aware of every sound and movement. And then I opened my eyes and I was next to Billy, lying in a hospital bed. There were tubes in his nose and an IV drip in his arm. Machines beside his bed beeped quietly. His eyes were trying to open but couldn’t. At the house, Billy had looked yellow; now he looked gray.

Suddenly his hand reached out and grasped mine, and his eyes opened briefly. “I’m okay,” he said. “Go back. You can’t stay.”

As I walked toward the door, I noticed the bed beside Billy’s. It had been folded up, and an IV pole stood next to it with a half-empty bag swinging from it. I went to the elevators. The doors opened, and a red-haired kid with hair parted to the side was looking at me. He had dark circles around his eyes and white tape on his arm. He was terribly thin. And, I realized, I could see through him. “Tell my mother I love her,” he said. It was the kid who had been in the bed beside Billy’s. I ran out, my feet never touching the ground.

I was back in my room, in my bed. I jumped up from it and ran downstairs, calling my parents. “I saw him,” I said. “I saw him. Billy. In the hospital.” I started to cry.

They looked at each other. “Jackie,” my mom said. “You must never leave your own body. You’re too young to control what you might face.”

My dad took a cold cloth to my face and said, “Calm down. Billy just had to get his appendix removed. That’s
all. He’ll be home in a few days. There’s nothing to worry about.”

I lay in bed that night trying to fall asleep when the cold sweats started to attack me. Waves of nausea started to make their way through my stomach, and then I vomited something unrecognizable. As I lay moaning in bed, I registered the huge shadow of my father in my doorway. Part of me sensed him rushing to my bedside. Another part heard him yell to my mother, “Hurry, get the car! She’s burning up!”

At the hospital, my father ran to the desk with me in his arms, bundled in a blanket. I was still throwing up. “You have to help me,” he said. “My daughter is very ill. I also have a son in here.”

I was rushed into a room and placed on a cold table. It felt as though someone was twisting a knot of pain in my side over and over. Doctors were poking at me with instruments.

“It’s my brother’s pain. I took it,” I told them. They ignored me. “The girl’s delirious,” one said. “Give her something for the fever and take her home. She’ll be all right.” They took me home. My mom told me in no uncertain terms to stop what I was doing, it wasn’t helping anyone. She, more than anyone, should have known I had no choice.

I took the pills, but the fever got worse instead of better. I couldn’t hold food or water. The shakes worsened, too. By the following day, I couldn’t move or speak.

My dad came to my side and took me in his arms. “Put her back in bed,” my mom said.

“Like hell,” my father answered, running past her to the car. He arrived at the hospital and said, “You get me a doctor. Now.”

Now I really was delirious, and I couldn’t make out much of what anyone was saying, though I processed the words “dying” and “
now
.” I was wheeled fast down a corridor and into a room with bright lights.

People were moving around me with antlike efficiency. I was hooked up to this machine and that. I was slipping in and out. They called my parents into the room—my mom, complaining, had gotten in the car after all—and said, “We have to move fast, we don’t think she’s going to make it.” My appendix had ruptured overnight, and the poison had attacked my small body. They would have to filter out the contaminated blood. Lots of it. One doctor told my mom she might want to make arrangements. “You just do your job,” my mother said. But I died on the operating table anyway.