"From All Ill Dreams": excerpted from the collection, "Patapsco Spirits"

A gratis ghost story for summer

As mentioned in my previous post, while I’m in Trondheim, I have scheduled a few free “extraordinary posts” to drop into your mailboxes. This one is a story taken from my book, Patapsco Spirits: Eleven Ghost Stories. It has been called “especially chilling” by one reader, and it struck me that a good chill during these hot summer days might not be the worst thing to send your way. If not one of my “top three” favorites, it’s one of my more “mystical” tales, and so I deem it a suitable fit for this Substack. And once again, perhaps it will inspire you to purchase the whole volume, if you don’t already have a copy. It’s available from all booksellers.

**************************

“When all those ancient Jewish and Christian writers referred to ‘evil spirits,’ they weren’t necessarily talking about ‘fallen angels,’ you know. As they saw it, ‘evil spirits’ could just as well be the ghosts of the malevolent dead.”

It was an early February evening in 1983, and I was visiting Father Thomas Benson at “the Hermitage,” the small, brown-shingled chaplain’s cottage. He was an octogenarian when I knew him in the nineteen-eighties. He would pass away before the end of that decade. I was fifty years his junior, just starting out as a newly ordained Episcopal priest, and he, for his part, was serving as chaplain for the “Sisters of All Souls,” an order of Anglican nuns not far from the parish where I was assigned as curate. The convent, with its eighty-eight acres, was an island of monastic peace, set apart and buffered from the bustling outside world by the surrounding barrier of Patapsco State Park.

Father Benson wasn’t only a priest; he was also a doctor, a man of medicine, a psychiatrist with degrees from Johns Hopkins and renowned in the field. For decades he had exercised a chaplaincy at Spring Grove Psychiatric Hospital, and during that time, before his wife of forty-odd years had died, he had also been the rector of the same parish where I was currently assigned. These days he resided in this pleasant little home on the convent grounds. And for me, he was a mentor and guide.

On this singular winter evening, after sharing a simple supper, we had become involved in a discussion about, of all things, demonic possession. I confess, I had expected him, as a man of medical science, to be dubious about the literal existence of “evil spirits” or “demons,” confident that he would likely – as I tended to do – relegate them to a variety of illnesses that the ancients could only explain by means of myth and traditional belief. Jesus, I supposed, must have been an astounding healer of sorts, curing persons afflicted with various diseases and mental distress, but I interpreted references in the New Testament to “evil spirits” as nothing more than imaginary personifications of mental and bodily maladies. I had been surprised to discover that Father Benson assumed no such thing.

“Some of the phenomena deemed to be the work of ‘evil spirits’ were, no doubt, epilepsy or mental illness,” he told me. “But others, I now believe, were not. Like you, I used to doubt that ‘evil spirits’ exist, but my experiences over the years have profoundly shaken my old physicalist presuppositions. You see, I’ve had a fair share of personal encounters with things that defy easy explanation. I’m a man of science, but some things…”

He paused for a moment, looking off into the shadows in the corner of the room. Then he looked back in my direction and casually made his observation that “evil spirits” had been thought by the ancients to be, at least in some circumstances, spirits of the dead. It was a view I had never heard expressed before, even during my time at seminary. It intrigued me.

“There’s one case especially that has never ceased to haunt me,” he went on. “It lingers with me still. It involved three people – a man and his two wives. That is to say, it involved his first wife, who died, and his second wife, who was a patient of mine at Spring Grove. The man had also died by the time his second wife came into my care.

“Now, here’s the thing: I say the second wife was in my care, but I’m not certain that that’s the right way to put it. I had before me, without question, the physical shell of the woman, but I can’t say for a fact that I didn’t have the first wife on my hands at the same time and occupying the same physical shell. To add to the strangeness of the case, the man who had been married to both women had died terribly, with his mind torn to shreds. And his mental disintegration – and the accounts indicate this very strongly – was intimately tangled up with his marriages. Spring Grove still has the case files. And I had copies of them made for my own records.”

I was a bit confused by all this. “Are you suggesting,” I said, ruminating on his words and trying to make sense of them as they related to our larger discussion, “that the ‘spirit’ of the first wife, after she died, somehow continued to disturb this man and his second wife…?”

“I’m suggesting something you’ll find even more alarming,” said Father Benson. “It’s a complicated story but bear with me. It touches on the subject of possession we’ve been discussing, or at least the possibility of it. The man and his second wife both underwent therapy with two separate analysts. Spring Grove procured all their case notes. As the result of circumstances at home between her – the second wife – and her husband, she reached an emotional breaking point which brought her to the hospital and to me. I’ve kept all the paperwork on all three individuals – hundreds of pages – upstairs in my office. It’s one of the few sets of files I’ve held on to over the past twenty years. If nothing else, assuming we keep an open mind about it, it’s a case that forces us to entertain the possibility that one person’s psyche can be possessed, against his or her will, by another person’s – after the other person’s death.”

I began to understand, somewhat foggily, what it was he was telling me.

“Can you give me the whole story?” I asked. “Because now you’ve got my curiosity sparked.”

“I can do better than that,” Father Benson replied. “I can show you the notes themselves while I tell you about the case. I think you’ll find it fascinating, at least.”

So it was that he put before me that evening the copious notes and transcripts he had kept preserved since the early sixties and, as he did, he told me the story of – as I have called them here – John Harvey and his two wives, Elaine and Irene. When Father Benson died a few years later, I was able to obtain possession of his papers; and now that sixty years have passed since the events described in those files occurred, I believe they can be related without hurting any living soul. All three of the persons involved in the story are now deceased. I think their story is worth recounting, even if only for the sake of reinforcing Father Benson’s belief that there are happenings in this world for which science offers no satisfying explanation.

***

When John Harvey married Elaine in 1954, he had already seen some warning signs – “red flags,” we might say. But being young, in his mid-twenties, he had also dismissed them. He was in love, after all, and she was charming and vivacious most of the time, a shining light in his life. She doted on him, and the few things he found in her words and actions to upset him he allowed himself to believe were only minor character flaws. Besides, he told himself, who hasn’t got character flaws? He stuffed them away in the broom closet of his mind.

Among these intentionally “forgotten” forewarnings of difficulties ahead, which he only brought back into the light for examination after it was too late, there had been the incident of the engagement ring. He had been working hard at the funeral home, just starting out in his chosen profession. His income was nothing fabulous and he had to be careful with every dollar he earned. But Elaine, unrealistic about the modest level of his income, had acquired a wish for a particular style of engagement ring – a ruby surrounded by diamonds – which was uncomfortably pricey for John’s meager budget. She had pointed it out to him in an outdated jewelry catalogue that she had kept for years in anticipation of the big moment, telling him it was the ring she had always imagined on her finger. The ruby, she explained, signified the passion of true love and the surrounding diamonds represented guardian angels.

John wanted to please her, whatever the expense to himself, so he went in search for a ring that matched her specifications. He visited a slew of jewelry stores, but without success until, at long last, he found a shop that sold a ring that appeared to him to be close enough in style to the picture she had shown him. He bought it, had the box wrapped elegantly, and intended to give it to her on Christmas Eve, the day on which she had requested they become formally engaged. However, as soon as she learned from him that he had already bought the ring, nearly a month before Christmas, she insisted that she be allowed to inspect it. She wanted to be sure he had purchased precisely the right one.

Reluctantly, he took her up to his apartment, pulled out the ring in its wrapped box, unwrapped it delicately, and let her view it. At which point, she burst into tears, flung the box and the ring into a nearby armchair, and began to shout angrily that he had stupidly, callously purchased the wrong ring. It wouldn’t do. He had obtusely gotten the wrong one, she informed him, and should have known it. If he had just bothered to pay any attention to her at all – the failure to do so being, as she expostulated, a failure of love – and had really studied the picture she’d showed him, like a truly loving man would have done, he wouldn’t have dashed her hopes to pieces like this. Perhaps, she told him, he’d even done it on purpose – though why he would do something so petty she couldn’t begin to fathom.

John Harvey was beside himself, both irritated and wounded, and demanded to know what exactly was wrong with the ring – after all, it had a ruby and diamonds.

“The ring I showed you,” she said furiously, “had a ruby all surrounded by diamonds. I told you what that meant to me – love surrounded by angels! This one has a ruby, but the diamonds are on either side of it, not all around it.”

Her anger passed as quickly as it had flared up, however, and Elaine soon cooled down and gushingly forgave him. At first, she wanted him to exchange the ring, but John made it clear that this was the only one he could find that looked anything like the one she wanted. After more tears (she reassured him that she wasn’t angry anymore, just sad) she relented, saying it was a lovely ring after all. He had rewrapped it and on Christmas Eve they went through the pretense, in front of their gathered family members, of his “surprising” her with the engagement ring. She told everybody present that it was precisely the ring she “had always dreamed about.”

There were other premarital clashes. These were provoked by what she alleged were his inadequacies in consideration, his lack of true affection, and his wandering eye. The last item on that list would become the most frequent charge, although John assured his analyst that he had always been conscientious to a fault in that regard. During their first year of marriage, nonetheless, Elaine repeatedly brought up the subject of “other women” with John. It soon became evident to him that she perceived other women – and frequently his male friendships, as well – as a threat to her relationship with him. She would, for instance, make acerbic and improper remarks about the married secretary who worked with him at the funeral home, sometimes in unexpectedly coarse terms, always implying that the woman clearly had sexual designs on John.

There was another episode that occurred early in their marriage, not seven full months after the wedding, that presaged worse to come. John and Elaine had found a new, larger apartment for themselves. One summer day, John came home only to have Elaine meet him with flashing eyes and wild accusations of infidelity. She held out her hand to reveal an earring she had discovered between the tiles in the bathroom. She knew it wasn’t her earring. “So, just who the hell’s is it?” she wanted to know. “One of your girlfriends?”

With patience, he managed to calm her down, reminding her that there was no way he could have brought a girl home without her knowing it, that he worked all day, that the thought had never once entered his mind. She had to agree on the spot that that was true, but for months afterward she returned repeatedly to her suspicions that he had been womanizing behind her back.

As time went on, she developed a knack for bringing up the subject just as he was trying to turn in for the night. This became such an anticipated part of their nights together that he started to regard it as intentional on her part – that she took some sort of perverse delight in tormenting him in this fashion. As a result, his ability to do his job well during the day was soon deteriorating from lack of sufficient rest at night. He took to dosing himself with sleeping pills, sometimes washing them down with whiskey.

Most alarming of all, she would often repeat over and over to him in a hissing whisper, right beside him in the same bed and right in his ear in the darkness, as the pills and the alcohol were taking effect on his exhausted brain, “I hope you die, I want you to die…”

Over the next two years, she developed animosities toward every one of his colleagues’ wives, and repeatedly found excuses to argue with them at job-related social functions. Her behavior, in private and socially, degenerated. It reached the point where he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t cause a scene in a restaurant or at a store while shopping or at a dinner engagement. She seemed to have an abnormal sense for the inappropriate and erratic wherever they were, and John found himself apologizing almost habitually to all sorts of people when she was out of earshot. She could smilingly belittle people to their faces or fly into angry confrontations with friends and strangers without provocation. She would frequently become melodramatic or histrionic on occasions, especially when she had been drinking. More than once, with great embarrassment, he had had to drag her away from some gathering simply for propriety’s sake. And always, before an audience, she would “jokingly” discuss what she considered John Harvey’s many shortcomings, including his sexual ones. In more private settings, she either professed to adore John as “the most wonderful man in the world” or else loathed him as “the worst husband on earth.” Either he was to be set high on a pedestal or to have his effigy cast into the gutter. Sometimes it was both within the space of five minutes.

At some stage she commenced threatening suicide on a recurring basis. The reason she gave, which she asserted loudly and groundlessly, was that her husband was secretly being unfaithful to her with all sorts and ages of women. On two or three occasions she dramatically locked herself in the bathroom and pretended to be killing herself, complete with sound effects. After breaking down the bathroom door the first time this occurred to “save her life,” he realized what a fool he had been. He found her sitting on the edge of the tub, a contemptuous look on her face. All she did was walk past him into the bedroom, slamming its door behind her.

He never tried to “save her life” again, permitting her histrionics to simmer down in their own good time.

She would, on other occasions, proclaim her undying love to him, using a peculiar turn of phrase that gave him the jitters every time she used it: “I’m going to get you, get you, get you and eat you all up.”

His breaking point came when she began to make indecent comments about the female corpses he tended to at the funeral home. She accused him of secretly having necrophiliac urges. She elaborated the charge with revoltingly graphic details, revealing an imagination on her part that left him psychologically shattered. The pictures she painted made his flesh crawl. The inevitable result was that he transferred his revulsion to her physical person, avoiding direct contact with her as much as he could. He had no doubt whatsoever that she took a twisted delight in watching him squirm.

Finally, John could stand it no longer and took his troubles to an analyst. The sessions continued for some weeks and John laid out honestly what he was enduring. The analyst understood John’s situation. Elaine’s mental illness was one with which he was familiar – he had encountered it before – but, unfortunately, he could offer little hope for a cure.

“The ‘down’ side,” his analyst told him during one of their sessions, “is that her condition is virtually untreatable. I can try to talk to her if she’ll come in. But usually, people like Elaine won’t come in, and if they do, they won’t believe they have a problem. Everyone else has problems, but never them. I have yet to meet anyone with your wife’s condition that I can get close enough to to treat.”

John agreed that that would likely prove to be the case with Elaine and that there was little chance she would agree to see an analyst. However, he’d give it a go, he told the doctor. To his surprise, when he worked up the energy to propose the idea to her, Elaine agreed to it. As she put it, if it would help John deal with his problems, she was willing to oblige.

So, she went. Once. She emerged from the session in a rage, demanding to know what John had told his therapist about her. She verbally cudgeled John in the car on the way home.

“He’s a goddam fraud,” she snarled. “But they’re all goddam frauds. It’s obvious you told him I’m crazy – thanks for telling lies about me. I know you really want a divorce. You want to throw me over for one of your girlfriends. I always knew you’d betray me. Typical of you, using a shrink to get what you want.”

When John saw his analyst again, the latter told him flatly, “You can’t go on living in proximity with her. She’s not able to love like other people do. The nearer someone gets to her, the more likely they are to get irreparably cracked by her. Her notion of love is possession, pure and simple. As far as she’s concerned, you belong to her. I’m not telling you how to go about getting free of the situation. I don’t know what your conscience will allow. But there’s one thing I’ll tell you straight. People like Elaine should never be in a relationship. I know that sounds harsh, but it’s true. She’ll ruin your mental health at the very least. For your peace and possibly your physical safety – I’m not exaggerating when I say, ‘physical safety’ – you need to extricate yourself.”

Feeling all the mixed emotions such advice is bound to elicit, John ultimately made the decision to divorce Elaine. Overall, he was a quiet, diffident, rather unimaginative man. Perhaps it was his retiring nature that provoked some deep-rooted hostility in Elaine. One gets the sense, reading through the transcripts of John’s statements to his analyst, that she wanted to stir up something in him that seemed deficient in her eyes. She often attacked him, for instance, because she claimed he lacked “manliness.” She was, it seems, the more aggressive sexually, so much so that she accused him frequently of “incapacity.” At any rate, reticent and pacific as he was, he firmly resolved to divorce her. A simple separation wouldn’t be enough. He felt that his sanity was beginning to hang in the balance. He needed to sever the cords as brusquely as possible and start over. He was only thirty-two, he told himself, with lots of life still ahead of him.

So, one evening, after some understandable foot-dragging and two vodka martinis, he worked up the nerve to announce his resolution to an unsuspecting Elaine. There was disbelief, tears, fury – in short, a scene. Plates and pans were flung in his face, suicide was threatened yet again, and John, both relieved and unwavering, simply walked out and found himself a hotel room for the night.

Elaine took sleeping pills. When John returned to the house the following morning, he found her in bed. She was dead.

***

Looking at the photograph of John Harvey attached to the case notes, I see a clean-cut, dark-haired, nicely dressed, square-jawed man in his thirties. His height was recorded as six-two, he weighed two hundred and six pounds, and his eyes were hazel. At the time of his first wife’s death, he was pulling in what was considered a fine salary and the couple had graduated to a brand-new split-level home in the suburbs. He had, in other words, what it took to attract a young woman’s notice, and he had attracted Irene’s even before Elaine’s death. Truth be told, as his marriage was disintegrating, Irene had also attracted John’s. They had met at the barbershop where she worked part-time as a manicurist. They began slipping off together to share lunch at a local diner two or three times a week. Despite whatever risk that that immaculate impropriety might have appeared to invite in the eyes of anyone paying attention to it, their friendship was a chaste one. That changed, of course, almost as soon as John became a single man again. It took less than a year for them to become engaged and to marry.

Irene was the opposite in many ways of Elaine. She was as quiet and shy as John, never raised her voice, didn’t drink or smoke, enjoyed playing Bridge and watching soap operas in the afternoons, and she read romance novels and magazines about movie stars. At first, she wasn’t sure she wanted to live in the same house where Elaine had ended her life, but John sold the old bed and purchased a new one, had the home’s interior redecorated, and got rid of every item that might conceivably remind them of Elaine’s existence. Even photograph albums with pictures from the former marriage were purged or pitched. Irene was satisfied with the result. Like her husband, whose vocation kept him in constant touch with the dead, she didn’t suffer from squeamishness or believe in ghosts. So long as the physical reminders of bad memories were blotted out, the past was a closed book in Irene’s consciousness.

John, on the other hand, after the initial happiness of a new life with a beautiful young wife gave way to the day-to-day realities of making a living, started to have a nagging suspicion that things weren’t so easily left behind as all that. As he told it to his analyst later, his misgivings really took off when he had a chance meeting with a middle-aged woman at the funeral home. The occasion was an open casket viewing, and throughout it he couldn’t help noticing that she kept looking over at him with what seemed to him to be a worried expression on her face. As the viewing drew to a close, he decided to ask her if everything was all right.

She told him, with no appearance of embarrassment, that she was a medium and sensitive to the presence of spirits. She showed him some newspaper clippings that she carried in her purse. They were articles about her. One was an interview with her from The Baltimore Sun, the rest were anecdotes about how she had helped the Baltimore City and Howard County police find the remains of three murdered persons. I will refer to her here as “Mrs. Crawford” instead of giving her real name. Police officers who were interviewed in the articles confessed that they had initially been skeptical about Mrs. Crawford’s psychic abilities, but that without her assistance they might never have recovered the remains they were hoping to find. She had made believers of some of the toughest, most pragmatic men on the force.

After she had told John Harvey all this, she asked him pointedly, “Do you ever have the sense that someone you can’t see is standing close by you, watching you? Even following you, maybe? Someone – how do I say this carefully? I don’t want to alarm you – someone who might have something against you?”

John hadn’t told anyone that lately he had felt precisely something of the sort, especially when he was alone. At odd moments, while working on a corpse, he had caught some movement out of the corner of his eye, as if somebody were standing between him and the wall, casting a shadow he could never quite see directly or creating a hazy distortion of the light. And then there were his nightmares, which plagued him two or three nights each week, in which Elaine’s anger-distorted face would rise up before him and he would hear those words she had used as a sickly endearment – “I’m going to get you, get you, get you and eat you all up.” Her voice was so sharp and clear in those dreams that they invariably woke him with a jolt. They didn’t seem to come from his own head, but from outside.

“Why do you ask?” John asked Mrs. Crawford.

“I can see a spirit quite close to you,” said Mrs. Crawford, glancing beyond him as she spoke. “Very close to you – and watching your every move. She’s a ‘she’ and she follows you. She’s an unhappy, I think bitter presence. And, dear me, she’s powerful, too; I’d say she’s not to be trifled with. Resentful is how I’d describe her. Possibly prone to be violent.” The woman stopped and stood staring past John. Then she continued, “She doesn’t mean you any good, young man. Do you know who she might be?”

John simply nodded his head. “I think I know her,” he whispered.

Mrs. Crawford looked concerned for him and patted his hand. They were standing in the foyer outside the viewing room, off to the side away from the people who were beginning to file out. Suddenly, with a small yelp, Mrs. Crawford withdrew her hand quickly from his, as if she had just received an electric shock.

“She doesn’t like it when I touch you,” she said. “She knows that I know she’s here and she’s very annoyed about that. She pushed my hand off yours just now – it felt like static.”

“Can you help me?” John asked, suddenly feeling desperate.

“If she were amenable, I might be able to converse with her. I get the impression she wouldn’t be at all willing, though.” Mrs. Crawford looked into John’s eyes sadly. “I’m not an exorcist,” she explained, “and I fear that’s what’s called for here. Do you belong to a church?”

John shook his head.

“I believe it’s my first wife,” he said, and as he said it, he felt a wave of guilt and shame wash over him. He knew his face was red and flushed.

Mrs. Crawford backed away, but it wasn’t John she was backing away from, he realized, but from what she evidently saw behind him. Something had unexpectedly seemed to horrify her. John glanced behind him, saw nothing, and turned back toward Mrs. Crawford, who was shrinking against the lobby wall, her eyes still fixed over John’s shoulder.

“She says you killed her.” Mrs. Crawford whispered.

“That’s not true,” protested John.

“That may be,” said Mrs. Crawford, her face ashen. “But she blames you for whatever happened. Look, I have to go – my husband’s waving me over. But for God’s sake, get some help. Find a priest or someone who performs exorcisms.”

And before John could respond, she hastened away.

***

John Harvey didn’t search out a priest or an exorcist, but the notes from this period show that he sought help from a psychotherapist – a different one than before – instead. Unfortunately, the files are missing pages, and those notes we have don’t contain the same ampleness of detail as the earlier ones. The information in my possession falls short of giving us anything like a full picture. However, it seems obvious to me from what I do have that his encounter with Mrs. Crawford had shaken him profoundly. More than that, his nightmares of Elaine became nightly occurrences, and he felt as if she were also dogging his daily movements. He knew his feelings were illogical, neurotic, paranoid, delusional… but he couldn’t dismiss the sense of oppression. And that sense kept growing.

He found himself talking irritably to “her” under his breath when he believed he wasn’t being overheard. But Irene overheard and she quickly became apprehensive about his mental state. She pressed him, and he finally told her about Mrs. Crawford and what he was going through. Neither he nor Irene were religious persons, so the idea of going to a priest for help struck them as a throwback to “Dark Ages” superstition. This was the twentieth century, after all, and they were sophisticated modern-day suburbanites. His analyst, for his part, dismissed John’s fears as the re-emergence of suppressed guilt feelings and unresolved trauma resulting from Elaine’s suicide. He prescribed pills to help relieve his anxiety. He recommended diversions – golf, bowling, swimming, light entertainment, relaxing music, that sort of thing. He encouraged romantic outings with Irene. Normal all-American suburban life, in other words, with an emphasis on “normal.”

“And, for heaven’s sake, keep away from people claiming to be mediums,” he added. “That way lies madness.”

Over the next six months, John stopped seeing his analyst while Irene, on the other hand, began going to one. The cause for her seeking help was the ever more erratic nature of John’s behavior. His words and actions were starting to unnerve her. She had, as mentioned, already noticed his tendency to “converse” in audible whispers to Elaine, often behind a locked bathroom door, as if the latter were alive and responding to him. He seemed to think that he couldn’t be heard, but the walls were thin, and the door wasn’t soundproof. More than once she overheard him repeat, almost in a state of childish hysteria, “No, you’re not going to eat me up! You’re not going to eat me up!” She didn’t know what those exclamations might mean, but they horrified her.

As the months dragged on, John seemed almost to have become two persons in one body. At times he was the mild-mannered, quiet man she knew and loved, but at other times he would turn off, become aloof and sour in temper, then sarcastic and belittling. In those moods, he would take to calling her “the replacement.” Sometimes, inexplicably, he would suddenly become angry with her, and on those occasions, he would refer to her as “the whore.” When he raised his voice to her, which he did more and more, it could rise to almost a falsetto. He sounded “screechy,” she told the therapist, as if he were mimicking a woman’s voice. The loud whispering in the locked bathroom continued and, in time, it was no longer a whisper, but full-throated and unrestrained shouting. She would still hear his blood-chilling cries of “You’re not going to eat me up!” – a protestation that had evolved into a desperate bellow. He would throw things around in the bathroom, whatever he could grab hold of – soap, shampoo, toothpaste, toothbrushes, pills. He would slam these items savagely against the mirror. Once he tore down the shower curtain with its rings and yanked a towel rack – screws and all – from the wall, leaving a gaping hole in the plaster.

In time, these displays of temper were daily occurrences. Irene was seeing her therapist twice a week now, frantic and on the point of leaving her husband. The downside of that “plan” was the fact that she had no money of her own. Her husband made all the money, and it was in a joint bank account. Her therapist asked if John was violent toward her, but she denied it at first. Possibly, at the time she was asked, he hadn’t been. That changed, however, and when the therapist asked her for a second time, she confessed that he had started slapping her – but only when he was drinking. He was fine when he was sober, she said.

“What makes him fly off the handle at you?” asked the therapist. “What pulls his trigger – anything you can think of?”

“I don’t know,” said Irene. “Sometimes it’s when I’m trying to calm him down, trying to hold his hand or something affectionate like that. It’s also when he… you know, when he calls me ‘the replacement’ and” – here the analyst mentions in his notes that her voice dropped to a whisper – “when he calls me ‘the whore.’”

“And then he strikes you?”

“Just with the palm of his hand,” she replied. “And only if he’s had a few drinks.”

“Does he drink a lot?”

“More than he used to. It’s every night… so he can sleep, he says.”

But then came the critical night when Irene, clothed only in her nightgown and bathrobe, fled their bed and home in terror, and drove straight to her parents’ house across town. As she put it later, she had “lost John for good.” That wasn’t, she told her analyst, a metaphor for the breaking of their relationship or the fracturing of their marriage. She meant quite literally that she had lost John. He just wasn’t there anymore. His mind, his consciousness, couldn’t be reached. His body was there, but he was absent – and something else had taken his place.

What had propelled her out of bed was the sound of John’s voice crooning into her ear, his lips barely brushing it. It had jolted her from a sound sleep. She remembered the time on the face of the glow-in-the-dark alarm clock as her eyes snapped open – 3:10 in the morning. She had been facing away from John, toward the night table. John’s voice came out in a vicious-sounding susurration, his breath hot on the side of her face.

“I hope you die,” he was saying over and over, his head positioned just above hers. “I want you to die…”

With a sudden burst of energy, she flung herself around to face him. “John! What the hell are you doing?” She saw his eyes in the darkness, white-rimmed and glaring at her like an enraged creature. They seemed to glow from within.

“John?” shot back John’s voice purringly. “John? He doesn’t live here anymore, honey. He’s been eaten up. It’s only me now.”

At that, Irene switched on the light on her night table, jumped out of bed, grabbed her robe and the car keys, and rapidly made her getaway. John, she said, had made no effort to stop her. He remained right where he was, reclining in the bed; and Irene recalled that, as he watched her scramble to escape, the whole scene merely seemed to amuse him.

The following day, Irene’s father and her two brothers went over to the house to collect clothes and a few other items of hers and to confront John if he was at home. Irene was still much too shaken to go along with them. Indeed, she was frightened enough of John now to worry about her father and brothers’ safety. The men had taken her housekey and, when there was no response to their repeated knocking and ringing the front doorbell, they let themselves in. Inside all was quiet, except for the buzzing sound of the alarm clock coming from the bedroom. They assumed that John had left for work.

It was Irene’s oldest brother who found John sprawled and contorted on the bed, his eyes wide open and upturned in their sockets, one leg outstretched and nearly touching the floor, an idiotic grin on his face. He was stone-cold to the touch, ashen, and rigid. In that same room and not far from the very spot where his corpse now lay, Elaine had also died a few short years earlier. It was determined a day later that the cause of John’s death had been a massive stroke.

***

The church bell rang on the hill, signaling that Compline, the final monastic service of the day, was soon to begin in the convent chapel. It was eight-thirty.

“Shall we?” asked Father Benson. “I can finish the story after we return.”

We made our way up to the chapel in the darkness. Inside, the lights were low and the candles on the altar were being lit by one of the Sisters. The walls were whitewashed in the Cistercian style, the choir stalls and Rood Screen were of polished dark wood, and the high-arched plain glass windows looked out into the black night beyond. Once the service had gotten underway, the chanting of the nuns generated a soothing, otherworldly atmosphere. Here, I thought, is peace. Although I had felt discomfited by Father Benson’s unfinished account, Compline provided a respite. And certainly, the invariable texts of the office seemed to counterbalance the somber mood of the narrative.

“Brethren: Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,” the opening exhortation had pronounced. “Thou shalt not be afraid for any terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day; for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor for the sickness that destroyeth in the noon-day… For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways,” the text of the ninety-first Psalm had assured us. And the second verse of the hymn Te lucis ante terminum plead for protection from every spectral evil:

From all ill dreams defend our eyes,

From nightly fears and fantasies:

Tread under foot our ghostly foe,

That no pollution we may know…

And finally, the Reverend Mother prayed in a monotone for the community’s spiritual peace: “Visit, we beseech thee, O Lord, this habitation, and drive far from it all snares of the enemy: let thy holy Angels dwell herein to preserve us in peace…”

The same Sister who had lit the candles on the altar now extinguished them and then went to the rear of the chapel and rang the bell to signify the completion of the monastic day. With Compline concluded, Father Benson and I put our copies of The Monastic Diurnal back into the book rack, exited the chapel, and made our way back down the hill to the Hermitage.

“When I first met Irene,” Father Benson continued his account there, after pouring us each a scotch, “it was at Spring Grove, and she was in a bad way. She had been committed by her family after a series of inexplicably violent episodes. This was only two or three months after John’s death, mind you.

“The episodes had started almost immediately after his funeral. She had exhibited, at first, paranoid behavior, claiming she was being watched constantly and that someone was dogging her every movement. When her family members – her parents and her brothers and their spouses – objected that she was safe, that no one was following her, she accused them of not understanding her. She was staying at her parents’ home now, emotionally unable to return to the home she had shared with John.

“Soon, her sleep became disturbed. She started reliving in her nightmares that last night with John, and she would awake screaming. When her mother or father tried to calm her down, she was beyond reason or comfort. These ugly scenes soon became full-blown nightly hysterics. She would lock herself in the bathroom – just as John had done – and could be heard shouting as if someone was in there with her.

“Obviously, this couldn’t go on. Something had to be done. They brought her to her former psychoanalyst, and he talked her into entering Spring Grove for ongoing treatment of her anxiety – although it wasn’t easy for him to convince her to do it. She was becoming paranoid, distrusting everyone’s motives. Somehow, though, he managed to persuade her – and that’s when I entered the story, as you can see from the notes.

“By the time I met her, just three days after her arrival at the hospital, she was in a state of gloom and abject melancholy – on the verge of despair, actually. She would stand staring out the window for hours and anyone entering her room, me included, was lucky if we got so much as even a stony stare from her. She met us, it seemed, with sheer resentment. Well, it turns out she was being too heavily sedated, and that accounted for her icy immobility. Once I got the dosage reduced, she started talking.

“And this is where the story becomes exceedingly disturbing. What she told me didn’t make sense to me at first. That is to say, it didn’t make sense until I reviewed the notes her therapist had taken previously, which in turn led me to John’s story and then, through that, to Elaine’s. As I say, it’s disturbing because… well, because Irene imagined herself to be Elaine. At least, sometimes she seemed convinced that she was John’s first wife. She was at the same time, I could see, trying to hold on to her sense of self, but that seemed to her – and, frankly, to us as well – to be slipping away. She was losing her sense of self. And then she began to speak to me with Elaine’s voice. Not literally, of course, but as if she were Elaine and no longer Irene at all.”

I felt a cold chill quiver down my spine. “What did she say?” I asked.

“Here, you can see it’s in the notes,” Father Benson said. “Here – and here – and here.” And he began to read the words that Irene had spoken to him in their sessions:

“’I’m not Irene… Irene’s a whore, a substitute…’

“’I ate John’s soul – ate it up. Ate it up, ate it up…’

“’I’m Elaine, not Irene. There is no Irene now. It’s just me now…’

“’You can’t force me to leave here. She took my husband and substituted herself, the whore, and now I’m substituting her with me. I win. Win, win, win. Elaine wins…’

“And it goes on like this, page after page,” said Father Benson. “I’ll confess, listening to that day after day scared the hell out of me. How does one deal with something like that? And it got worse and worse. Frankly, no modern medical treatment worked. None at all. No medicine of any kind, no talk therapy, no antidepressants, nothing.”

There was a stretch of silence as we smoked and drank together and stared at the fire in the small fireplace, the psychiatric notes spread out on a low coffee table before us. Finally, I couldn’t continue in my state of suspense.

“So, what became of her?” I asked. “What happened to Irene?”

“You saw her this evening,” replied Father Benson, with a wave of his hand. “It all came round right in the end.”

“Saw her?” I said, surprised. “When? Where?”

“In the chapel, at Compline,” said the old priest. “The Sister who lit the candles before the office and who rang the bell.”

“That was Irene?”

“That was Irene,” he said. “She’s been here for the last seventeen years.”

“But how…?” I began.

“There are older methods than that which psychiatry provides,” said Father Benson. “Which brings me back to our topic of possession. What worked in the end was exorcism. That hoary, nearly universal act of commanding an intrusive spirit to depart. It took effort and it wasn’t easy on anyone involved, but… Well, it’s all there in the notes. Incidentally, she prays daily for both John and Elaine, she tells me.”

I looked at the old man. He appeared relaxed and ruminative.

“You know,” he said. “All we are, each one of us, is an aggregate of characteristics and qualities – if those are the best words – that we get from our heredity, birth, time, place, our genes, our education, and so on. Who knows what conditions made Elaine what Elaine became, poor thing, or John or Irene – or you or me, for that matter? Irene you now know about. She’s safe and doing fine. John and Elaine we can leave to God. Deeper than the aggregation of all our circumstantial qualities there exists a vital, salvageable essence. John is at peace, I believe, and Elaine, I feel certain, is healed or will be. There’s a great Syrian saint who once said we should even pray for the demons. Everyone’s deepest core is eternal and, as I said, we can leave it to God. Nothing can ever ‘eat that up.’

“Irene believes that and so do I.”

________________________________

Artwork: Edward Okuń (Polish, 1872–1945), Ave Maria, 1902; Andrew McCallum (English, 1821–1902), In Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire: Winter Evening after Rain