Lure of the Night Read online

  We left the restaurant and I said goodbye to Dad and Megan. We went home, Mom was unusually quiet. Just before bedtime, she said something curious. “You don’t need to believe everything your father tells you, Claire.”

  I nodded. “Ok, Mom.”

  What on earth did she mean by that? It was strange that night, I had weird dreams about New Orleans, black guys playing jazz music, shops selling voodoo stuff, chickens sacrificed, running around graveyards without their heads. I awoke several times in the night, wondering if my dream of Ethan was about to re-occur, but it never happened. The following day I was effectively grounded, I was well behind with my homework and Mom was in a tough kind of mood after meeting with Dad, so arguing with her was going to be a waste of time. I wanted to go out to the Andros house again, but it wasn’t going to happen. Besides, next weekend I was visiting Dad in New Orleans, so maybe he would fill in some of the answers I was looking for. A week in the Louisiana city was something to look forward to, to break the monotony of this stuffy, stifling little town. It was partially the reason for going, that was what I thought, to break the monotony as well as find out more about the mystery of Ethan and his family home of Andros. Maybe New Orleans would be my kind of town, for sure I felt like a Martian visiting planet earth in this place. Over lunch, Mom did a quick check of my wardrobe.

  “You can’t visit the city without some nice clothes, Claire, do you need anything special?”

  “I could do with some T-shirts, Mom, a new skirt and a pair of new jeans would be nice. Maybe some underwear.”

  She grinned. “What about a new fur coat at the same time? I’m not made of money you know, especially since I lost my job.”

  I pulled a face, fur, yuck. In the end she took me to the local mall and bought me three T-shirts, ones I’d liked but hadn’t seen before in the store, one of them had ‘Boys like Girls’ written in bloody letters on the front. She bought me a new skirt and threw in a black hoodie, some skinny jeans and a new pair of Converse hi-top sneakers.

  “You can’t wear your Doc Martens all the time, honey.”

  At least I wouldn’t go visiting looking like some nerdy kid from a Kansas farming community. We got home, I finished up my homework and I spent the evening researching New Orleans on Google. One clip caught my eye. It said that in certain areas of rural Louisiana, some plantations had the exterior keyholes turned upside down to prevent entry of the ‘undead’. Weren’t they vampires? It also said that unhappy spirits of the dead were believed to bring disease into households. Ok, then. For many years, yellow fever epidemics were blamed on such as these unhappy or evil spirits. Early cemeteries in Louisiana were often placed far from towns, many times at a crossroads, to discourage the spirits from finding their way home. These tactics were called ‘confusing the spirit’. Ok, it was great for the tourists, I guess, but not really much help to me. I wasn’t planning on raising the dead, not just yet, anyway.

  It wasn’t that I thought my dad was a vampire or anything like that, although that would be both so cool and totally and utterly ridiculous. At the same time, he was involved in something, that was obvious, and as his daughter, it concerned me to know what it was. This voodoo, vampire, black magic thing was a bit like religion, lots of rumors but no real proof that it existed. It was good for the people involved, people like Father Ryan who had some status in the town as the local Catholic priest and other ministers who made their living, their careers, out of people’s belief in their particular take on the Almighty. I mean, not to knock them, but they couldn’t all be right, could they? The tourist industry in New Orleans and other places relied on this mysterious, religious and black magic stuff. Like Andros, when it wasn’t being ripped apart by earthquakes. Divine retribution, ha, divine bullshit more like. Shit happened, that was a lesson I’d learned early and lived with every day of my life. Thinking about Father Ryan who made his living as a Catholic priest reminded me of what Dad had said, that it wasn’t his main activity. That was interesting, so what was the spitting priest up to when he wasn’t in the confessional box frightening old ladies? That would be a juicy piece of gossip to uncover.

  I went into school the next morning, I was happily anticipating the coming weekend, waiting to learn the answers to all of the questions I had for my dad. But for now I had to be careful, I was just waiting for my tormentors to strike, especially after the spat between Ryan and Dad in the restaurant. Stella, Fiona, Britney and Mae were lurking on the steps as usual. Except it wasn’t as usual. All four of them just nodded in a cool sort of way as I went past them. That was not good. These four girls were about as friendly as an Arab when you tried to steal his camel. I looked down at my clothes, short, tartan school skirt just like they were wearing, nothing showing under the hem. My trusty Doc Martens, no gaping holes in my thick school pantyhose, blouse and school blazer were all ok. Did I have something on my face, a make-up blunder? I opened my locker and looked at the mirror, nothing wrong there, I just wore the usual faint trace of makeup that wasn’t enough to upset the teachers. Hair looked fine, swept back into a ponytail. Nothing, so I was very, very suspicious. We had our civics class and once more there was our old friend Father Ben Ryan back on the stage to explain to us how we could avoid eternal damnation.

  I could have saved his time. In my case I was already doomed, I experienced varying degrees of damnation every day, it was called life. Life with people who never seemed to be on the same wavelength, as if I saw the color red as red and they saw it as blue, a total opposite. The priest was on form again this morning, quickly working himself up into a foaming storm. I guess the kids nearest the front got his spittle all over them. If I were them in the front row, I’d have put up an umbrella to stop the spit getting on me. I think I’d be looking for an AIDS test. I mean, priests! Who knew what they’d been up to these days or where they’d been? So he ranted on and we got the dark forces of hell speech, repent to be saved, no sex before the age of forty, well, before marriage, anyway. He went into his ‘evil stalks the earth’ rant and finally came to an abrupt end, even the teachers were startled, waiting for him to reveal more of the mysteries and dangers of life to us ungrateful sinners. But he was finished, he nodded to Mrs. Granger and stalked off the stage. I don’t know who started it, but lots of them started to laugh, even more so than before, I couldn’t blame them. He’d completely blown his top. We filed out of the hall still giggling and started towards our classrooms.

  I was on my own, thinking about some of the weird things that had happened to me recently when a door next to me opened, Stella and Fiona literally leapt out, grabbed an arm each and pulled me into the room. I was so shocked I didn’t even have time to resist too much. Until I saw Father Ryan standing inside the room, Britney and Mae were with him too. The room stank of some kind of spicy incense. Ryan looked at me with his blazing, loopy eyes.

  “Claire Winter, you have the devil within you. I can remove it for you. But you must come with me to a place of safety.”

  “No thanks, I’m fine where I am. Aren’t you a bit old to be playing around with schoolgirls?”

  “You think to mock me, to mock the severity of demonic possession?”

  I was getting a bit nervous now. “Er, look, I’ve got to get to my class. Let me go.”

  That was to Stella and Fiona, who still had hold of my arms. They just grinned, it wasn’t a pleasant grin. Malicious was a word I would have used to describe the way they looked. Ryan started incanting some sort of chant form a thick, leather bound book he was holding. It wasn’t in English, I guessed it was some sort of Latin. He droned on, it was a foreign language. I’d heard it before in some kind of a movie, was it Arabic or something, maybe Greek? But I was getting seriously worried by now, this was no ordinary hazing.

  “Look, you let me go or I’ll call the cops,” I shouted. His voice rose to a high pitch, then he shouted, something totally unintelligible in crazed sort of voice. He seemed to sober up after that, he gave a meaningful look to Stella, she peeked ou
t of the door and came back in and nodded.

  “It’s all clear,” she said to him.

  He rummaged in his case came out with a hypodermic syringe. I couldn’t believe this was happening, this was a school, a safe environment and Ryan was a Roman Catholic priest. Then he came towards me and lifted the syringe.

  “This will calm you down for your journey, Claire, just relax while I give it to you.”

  Then I kicked out with all of my strength and caught him right between the legs. He screamed in pain and shock. Stella and Fiona jumped back in alarm and I took the opportunity to pull myself free and go for the door. They came after me and I hit out, knocking Fiona to the floor and struggling with Stella. Then the others came to help, the priest and the girls. They had hold of me and were dragging me to the floor, I despaired of ever getting out of there, this was worse than the normal shit I had to stand every day, much worse. Abruptly the closed door opened with a crash as it hit the wall behind it. A look of fear crossed their faces as they felt a violent wind surge through the opening. It was amazing, like a tornado, but this was indoors. At one point, the wind seemed to almost become an entity with a shape, a faint, ghostly outline, an outline of something familiar. The four girls and the priest were all thrown backwards, but I was able to run through the open doorway.

  I heard a voice that said, “Run, Claire, run.” I ran, all the way to my next class.

  During my life I’d encountered some real weirdoes and oddballs, people who might have been better if they were locked up, but the way they’d behaved today was something else. Especially the priest, at least Stella and her cronies were kids and presumably had been led by the nose. Not so, Father Ryan. He should know better, whatever crazy fantasies he had about God and Satan, he should know better than to condone, what amounted to kidnap and illegal imprisonment, in a school of all places. What the hell was he doing with that hypodermic, ‘take me to a place of safety’? Was he really going to give me a knock-out dose and kidnap me, it didn’t make sense? Until, I remembered the warning from the old woman, Eupraxia, to beware of people who were after me. But a priest! That was crazy.

  There was something else I needed to think about too, that strong wind, the gale that had thrown them back allowing me to get free. Because at one point, the wind had become like lines of force, that formed a ghostly shape. The shape was of a face, a face I had seen before, even in my dreams. The ethereal voice was a voice I had heard before, too. Ethan. Ok, so something really peculiar was going on now, I had not been asleep in bed dreaming, this was the cold, harsh reality of my miserable high school. I slowed down, walked into class and sat down, thoughtful about what I had seen, but I just could not work it out. There was only one explanation to fit the bill. If I discounted the paranormal, it was something in my own mind that I was starting to unravel. Except that when I caught sight of Stella, Fiona, Britney and Mae, they trooped in late and sat at the back of class, they were white with fear, all four of them. That was not in my imagination. What was the deal? If it was not in my mind, then it must be the paranormal, but that did not make sense. Not any sense I could see, anyway.

  I didn’t discuss it with anyone or report it. What was the point, if people believed you that made you a whiner, if they didn’t you were crazy? A priest trying to kidnap me, in broad daylight from school, good God, what next? They would send for the men in white coats to come and take me away. Long experience had shown me that the safest course was to say nothing. Joanna joined me at lunch.

  “What the hell’s the matter with Stella and her friends, I’ve never seen them look so strange? They look as if they’ve seen a ghost.”

  I could of course say ‘yeah, well actually they did see a ghost’, but what the hell?

  “I hadn’t noticed, they look pretty normal to me, normal for them anyway. Maybe one of the spells they were brewing in their cauldron went wrong.”

  They left me alone for the rest of the day, but I wasn’t fooled. Today was Monday, the long walk home when Mom was doing Pilates, or Indonesian Meditation or Nepalese Spider Dancing or something. I started to walk home after school, half hoping that they had been truly scared off and half expecting them to appear around the next corner like a dentist’s appointment, unwelcome but inevitable. They did not disappoint. I turned by McAlister’s Hardware and there they were, the four of them.

  “Hi, Claire, we want a word with you,” Stella said with a nasty, evil look on her face.

  I could not go forward and refused to back away, so I waited.

  “Nothing to say to us? My brother reckons you’re infected with Satan’s spawn.”

  “Yeah? Is it catching?”

  Her face darkened, got even nastier. I almost laughed then, they were so dumb with this pseudo religious nonsense, but you did not handle kids like this by laughing at them. Then the door of the empty store next to McAlister’s opened and Father Ryan stood there, stark, gaunt, lean and bitter. I had seen illustrations of the Spanish Inquisition in medieval Europe, when Catholic priests tortured people to get them to confess to being heretics. Or not heretics, I could not remember which. But in the illustrations, that’s how they always looked. What was this fruitcake going to do, burn me at the stake? His eyes truly frightened me though, glowing, deep and red, like the craters of an exploding volcano. Come to think of it, Stella’s eyes were glowing too, really glowing, I had never seen them look so strange, not that strange, anyway. The four girls grabbed me and started dragging me through the door, Ryan was still ranting.

  “You were saved before by the forces of evil, only if you come with me will the demon in you be exorcised.”

  They pushed me into a chair and the four girls held me. The priest started the weird chant, strange words that I hadn’t got a clue what they meant. Probably he hadn’t either, so I guess it didn’t matter. Then he reached into a briefcase on the floor and got out the hypodermic again. Whatever he intended for me, it was not good. Not good at all. I remembered Eupraxia’s warning again. He also had a medicine bottle and a plastic cup.

  “Perhaps you are frightened of syringes, Claire, I’ve prepared the mixture for you to swallow instead.

  “You must be crazy, I’m not taking any of that crap whichever way you want me to.”

  “Oh, you will, you will,” he snarled.

  He held my nose and I had to open my mouth to breathe, he pushed the bottle in and I felt the liquid enter my mouth. Then he stood back and started the foreign nonsense. After a couple of sentences, he looked closely at me.

  “Did you swallow it, is the spirit driven out?”

  He was bringing up the hypodermic, trying to make his movement look innocent, obviously to inject me to make sure. Idiot! He obviously had not ever been a ten-year old kid with a fever and a desperate mother trying to force some foul tasting medicine down their throat. Didn’t know the tricks of the trade, how to hold it in your mouth and spit it out when she wasn’t looking. They were all close to my face, waiting for Ryan to administer the drug in the syringe, to see my horror as his drug injected in my veins.

  I spat, they’d wanted to see something, I’d give it to them, I squirted the foul smelling, foul tasting liquid into the priest’s face. I had enough to give the girls a taste as well, squirting the last of it at them. I had time to notice that Fiona had her mouth open and she swallowed some of the liquid, good, then I was up and pushing the door open. They had not locked it, so it swung open wide and I was out into the street and running home. I didn’t hear anything behind me, I was clear, I ran home, not slowing until just before I reached the house. I dashed inside. Mom looked surprised.

  “Are you ok, honey?” she asked anxiously.

  What was I supposed to say? A crazed priest has twice tried to drug and kidnap me. The first time a weird, magic wind saved me, oh yes, it had the face and voice of Ethan. That was the surefire shortcut to the asylum. So I said nothing and went upstairs to do my homework. I booted up my PC and Googled ‘exorcism’ and ‘kidnap’. Some said exorcism
was still practiced, some said it was consigned to the dark ages, though more than one person had disappeared after they were reported as being possessed by the devil. But it didn’t make sense, like so many things in my life. I could tell that our local oddball priest was no believer, whatever he wanted it was nothing to do with exorcism or satanic possession. Once more, there was an agenda here that I knew nothing about, the only person I trusted to talk to me about it all was Dad.

  Then Mom called me down for dinner and asked me did I still want to go to New Orleans. That was like asking George Washington did he want to cross the Delaware River. I felt it was my fate, my destiny to go. I had a million questions for Dad and his enigmatic girlfriend, Megan. Questions that I hoped would clear up some of the mystery that I felt was part of me, part of my life. I knew that lots of girls thought they were different, but this was something else. I was part of a family history that was shrouded behind a thick curtain of secrecy, myth and mystery and it was time that the curtain was pulled aside. I would have to keep a very low profile for the rest of the week at school, make sure I always stayed with someone, not get caught alone.

  On the Friday evening I caught the late Greyhound bus to New Orleans. The journey lasted all night, we were due to arrive at New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal at just after seven the next morning. I was too interested in the places we passed on the way to be tired. Some creepy guy tried to talk to me, he was ok at first but he started to touch me on the arm, then the shoulder, it wouldn’t be long before he touched me somewhere more intimate. He asked me who I was visiting in New Orleans and I told him my girlfriend, we were setting up home and intending to get a civil marriage. I wasn’t sure if that was the right phrase for it, but his hand came away as if I was made of red hot iron and he gave me a sharp look of contempt, then moved away to another seat six rows back. A young woman of about twenty, was sitting in the seat in front, she turned around and smiled. “Neat move, that got rid of the sucker.”