The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders (35 page)

“No one breaks a pact with me!” Lucifer wailed. “Who do you think you are?”

I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a large wave curling toward the shore, climbing higher. I squeezed Ronnie’s hand as hard as I could. “Wake up now, Ronnie. Wake up. Go back to Green Haven.”

He couldn’t hear me. He was still fixed by the demon’s fiery eyes and thundering words.

“Ronnie, go back, dammit!
Go!
”

I didn’t know if he could. But I fled, hoping he’d have the courage to do the same.

When I opened my eyes, I was in my bed, the sheets damp, the room smelling of sand and salt water. I remember Will and Joanne, who saw that I’d returned, rushing to my bedside and handing me water and a cool washcloth.

“I don’t know if he made it,” I said. Then I was out.

The phone rang
the next day, midmorning. Just as it had happened the first time we’d spoken more than a year earlier, Joanne accepted the collect call from the operator
and then, not knowing whether I was conscious or not, handed me the phone. I was groggy, but present.

“Ronnie?”

“I’m back,” he said, his voice shaking. “I’m here.”

He was a mere human being who happened to have been a perfect vessel for darkness. And he had fallen all the way into the black depths of evil. He wasn’t the first casualty, nor would he be the last. But even for those who have committed evil, there is the possibility of redemption.

“Thank you, Jackie.”

“You did it. You did it for yourself.”

“He invited me to church today.”

“Who?”

“Father Fernando. This morning. He asked me if I wanted to go to church. I asked him, ‘What’s different? Why you asking me now?’ He didn’t say why; he just asked me. I went.”

“What did you do there?”

“I prayed. For my family. All of them.”

“You’re free, Ronnie. The chains are broken.”

He was crying. “Thank you.”

“It was you, Ronnie. I was just there to help.”

“Hey,” he said, his voice changing. “Why you still coughing like that? I thought if I’m better, you’re supposed to be better. What’s wrong?”

“It’s over for you, Ronnie, but not for me. Not yet.”

I had nearly finished preparing the room when Will
came in. I was preparing it for travel. And for battle.

“Jackie,” he said. “You need time to recover. Don’t do this.”

“No—it has to be now. While we have the upper hand. While he knows I’m strong.”

“Jackie.”

“Help me, Will. There isn’t much time.”

We prepared the room the same way we had for the trip to the house on Ocean Avenue—drawing a chalk circle around the bed, adding offerings to the gods of protection, calling on the spirit guides. We added conjuring items to invoke the gods, including a voodoo doll my mother had made in her own likeness, using her own hair for the doll’s head.

Voodoo dolls are not used in the way one sees them used in the movies. They are summoning tools, symbols
of invocation, and never used to visit harm on another. Every practitioner of the religion knows that to do so only invites the same harm right back.

The doll was more than fifty years old. It was one of the few items I’d kept of Mary’s, and it had been hidden away for years, wrapped in a canvas sack. On the doll’s body we drew voodoo symbols; around its neck we hung a skeleton key, said to have the power to open the door to the other side. I took a mojo bag I’d made, containing my own blood, and placed it on top of the doll. To claim her spirit, I would need to hold it down.

Will and I glued old coins from our travels around the world together in spots around the circle, symbols of the journey we’d taken and the union of our spirits. We lit the candles—three black, three white—and drew veves around the circle. I placed my grandfather’s walking stick in the center of the circle. Finally, the two mirrors, the same ones we’d used before. Reflections of oneself and windows to the other side all at once.

When everything was prepared, I looked at Will and Joanne. We called Uncle Ray into the room. Then I took my place on the bed, avoiding my daughter’s eyes. I didn’t want her to see the slightest glimpse of trepidation in me.

I glanced at the thermostat on the bedroom wall, which had hovered around eighty-five for weeks. It read sixty-two. Will, all ten of his fingers covered in white tape, entered the circle and began pounding away at his drums, two large bongos from Brazil that he’d used in hundreds of previous rituals. Will had traveled with me before, and
I can always recognize the precise moment of his leaving. He begins to sweat heavily and his eyes flutter upward.

Joanne took her place on the floor inside the circle, turned on the ritual music, and began reciting chants from the old ritual book. She, too, had become an experienced traveler, and her brink of departure was as familiar to me as Will’s. As her voice rose and its tone shifted, I knew she was beginning to take wing.

Ray stood at the opposite end of the circle, making notes. It was his task to record and bear witness.

The chandelier above me began to swing, at first in slow circles, then faster. The bedroom lights started to switch on and off. Amid the chanting and the drums, I started to feel faint.

In front of my bed, before I swooned, my grandfather materialized, summoning me. I felt myself rise above the boundaries. It’s a kind of weightlessness, but more a feeling of free-floating. Something else materialized: the tunnel I’d been in as an eight-year-old clinging to life on an operating table.

I focused hard to stay away from that tunnel, and I was traveling again. The sensations around me changed, and now I heard the squawking of seagulls and the amplified sound of waves breaking against the shore, not soft lapping but loud, violent crashes.

I opened my eyes to see foamy water rushing over my bare ankles. I was lying in the sand wearing only a long white robe, one I’ve used often in my ceremonies and rituals. As I stood, I noticed, on my right, a brilliant light. I turned back to my left, and a swirl of sand swept across
my eyes. I was back at Coney Island, on the empty beach, this time alone.

And then, as had happened with Ronnie and me, a man emerged out of nothingness, a seeming blur on the horizon one moment and the next a startling figure a few feet in front of me. He was the man who’d taken my hand in that tunnel and warned me that it was not my choice to interfere with the gears of destiny. Lucifer.

Sand continued to whip around me, but around him, everything was still. His pale white face gleamed against the black of his hair, and his eyes glimmered like sunlight on the ocean. I told myself not to be distracted by his form.

“I knew you had it in you!” he laughed. “Well, this is the day, Jackie. I’ve been waiting as long as you have.” In his laugh there was menace and deceit, as always. But I thought I heard something else in that laugh, too. Fear. “I’ll give you the chance to go back. You can’t win.”

He had my mother, and now he wanted Joanne. I swept the sand off my robe and looked into his eyes.

His smile turned into a scowl, then he produced a coin out of the air and tossed it. In slow motion I saw it turning over and over, droplets of blood falling from it as it spun. As I followed its turns, I felt myself becoming mesmerized.

“Mom!”

It was Joanne’s voice, far away but getting through. The coin fell to earth as I turned, along with the man. There was Joanne, standing on the boardwalk, yelling. “Mom, don’t!”

“Jo?”

“Don’t listen to him, Mom! Follow my voice! You need to go back!”

He was drawing me into his trance, and my daughter was trying to keep me from falling into it. I shook my head, regained my sense, then turned and ran across the sand.

Joanne was gone,
and I stood in front of the Surf Hotel, its facade identical to how it had looked when my mother finally succumbed to the devil’s grip, decades ago. I was back in the same spot, in the same time.

I placed my hand on the doorknob, trying to stay present in this realm. The urge to travel back and wake up climbed through me again and again, and each time I pushed it back down.

A pair of pimps pushed their way past me into the hotel, just two examples of the lowlifes that now occupied it. I walked into the hotel and saw the same oily clerk I’d seen years before, seated behind a desk with iron bars protecting him from the night crawlers, drug addicts, vagrants, and thieves who now roamed the space.

I started to climb the steps, the cracks and chips in the dark-green paint of the walls emphasizing the decrepitude that had taken over.
Sometimes you can’t go forward until you go back
, Mary said to me once. Now I understood.

A tortured scream issued from somewhere deep in the recesses of the floor above me. I followed the sound of the voice from which it came, pushing past the drifters
and junkies stumbling their way up and down the staircase. In their stupor, they didn’t notice me. Or maybe I was pushing my way through a sea of dead souls.

The more of these souls I shoved my way past, the more the stairs began to shake. Soon the entire hotel seemed to wobble, as though the ground beneath it was opening. Fear washed over me, but I didn’t stop. The scared child in me wanted to stop and turn around, run back into Will’s arms and never have to see the face of my demon-possessed mother again.

I was a few feet from the closed door behind which the pained screams continued to echo. The same detective I had seen all that time ago stood in front of the door. I grabbed the protection bag—my grandfather’s—that hung from my neck. I closed my eyes and I squeezed it tight, asking for courage and protection. My feet carried me forward, past the detective, and, as the door swung open, into the room.

My mother’s terrible screams ripped into me. There she lay, in complete possession. Bugs crept around the room, wandering past the Latin scrawls on the wall and ceiling and buzzing past the religious statues and items lying broken on the floor.

The thing occupying my mother looked up at me then, trying to catch my gaze. Forcing my eyes away from her, I instead saw an image of Joanne and Will praying and repeating the holy rite. They had traveled with me here. It wasn’t enough for them to absorb my illness in the tangible world. Here they were willing to sacrifice themselves, too.

I looked back and saw that Uncle Ray, the less traveled and less experienced, had been pinned to the wall by something unseen. His arms and legs were splayed, and he couldn’t move or speak. He was wearing Ronnie’s army jacket, and his nails looked the way Ronnie’s always did, long and manicured. As I looked, his face seemed to dissolve from his own to Ronnie’s, then back again. Next to him, on the floor, was a rifle.

The thing that had been Mary reared again. “Come to me, Jackie,” it said, but I held my ground, infuriating it. “What makes you so righteous!” it said. “Trying to save poor Ronnie. You couldn’t even save your own mother!”

I felt myself weakening.

“Pick up that gun,” it said, “and take care of the girl!” It was motioning to Joanne. “Do it!”

I was losing steadiness as the two realms fought against each other—the desire to retreat and the desire to stand firm.

“Jackie,” it said, calmer now, “your mother never cared for you. You’re nothing to her. Now pick up that gun! Show her the power you can have!”

“No!” I cried. “It isn’t you! Stop it!”

The thing fell backward toward the rotten mattress, moaning and arching its back. “Come to Mommy, Jackie. Come on, pick up the gun!”

I forced myself to look over at Joanne and Will, and I realized what was different this time. There was no priest in the room performing the rite over my mother. They, Joanne and Will, were doing it. Together. I felt in both
of them the truth and love that can alone defeat the darkest energies. Then I joined them, bending down to pick up my ritual book even though something inside me wanted to listen and pick up the gun. I looked at Will and Joanne again. My foundation. My connection. My life.

The first time, I had run to the bed, desperate to hear the voice or see the face of my mother, even though I knew she had long disappeared from this existence. Damned though she was, I’d still yearned for her love, enough to fool myself into thinking she was still somewhere inside that shell.

This time, I didn’t move, and I didn’t look. I knew better. She had become merely a vessel for wickedness. The demon became irate, shouting for me to pick up the gun, throwing objects across the room in a spasm of hate, goading me in every way it could think of.

From the guiding spirits of my ancestors, I summoned all the strength I could. I thought of Joanne, Will, and Ray combining their own forces to save me. Then I looked down and kicked the gun across the room. The devil howled.

I kept the pages of that ritual book open and didn’t stop commanding in the name of God. It seemed to go on without end. I read and held my fist up. The demon flung its body up and down, its forked tongue whipping from one side of its mouth to the other.

As I continued to read the rite along with Will and Joanne, I thought I saw something. I had looked toward the bed accidentally and seen it. No, it must have been my mind playing tricks. Letting my resistance down, I
glanced again. My mother’s eyes, flashing through every few seconds, alternating with the slitted eyes of the devil. I saw them. She was in there, fighting to get out.