photo by the author
"So that's why you work the night shift," I said. Her beautiful black pearls of eyes bore into me with an intensity and a seriousness I hadn't experienced in ages.
"Yes," she said, leaving it at that, but I was certain there was more to the story. She was holding back. If there's one thing I've learned in my short time on earth it was that intuition doesn't lie, and the way she looked at me - there was something hidden in her gaze.
I'll spare you the details but one thing led to another and I found myself in what could only be described as a whirlwind, forbidden romance with this woman, and came to love her deeply for a time. I still do, even though we haven't crossed paths for nearly a decade.
She was the most devout Roman Catholic I'd ever met, and spent her days talking about Jesus and "Mother Mary" and praying the rosary with fervor and intensity on the borderline of obsession. First Friday Devotions were mandatory. Eucharistic Adoration at the local church was her second home.
She kept a little amen corner on the secondhand dresser in her small apartment, and every night before bed she'd kneel sweetly with her rosary and pray, sometimes to the point of tears.
An encounter after dark
The shadows on the wall flicker in sync with the candlelight against the kitschy cut-out of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the dresser, clothing the room in somber and religious garb. It could almost be a chapel.
I lay there beside her caught between the world of twilight and the safe haven of the bedroom, and she breathes softly beside me but I know she isn't sleeping. A cheap box fan drones in the background, drowning out the house sounds and the steady whine of the traffic outside her derelict little apartment.
Sleep doesn't come easy for her, but no matter how hard she fights it's a losing battle, and she drifts off into dreamland beside me.
A scream pierces our makeshift bedroom chapel like a banshee, desperate, with her arms flailing and grappling with the sheets like she's in a fight for her life against unseen enemies.
I'm awake with a start, the soft flicker of the candles against the sober face of Jesus Christ still the only light, but my heart is pounding. The image of Christ seems to be the only beacon of calm in the abrupt maelstrom of this night's terror.
"No,noooo! I can't breathe, something is choking me", she says, her lovely black eyes taking on a manic and piercing intensity. " There's a black mist above the bed it's always just like this."
She bolts upright and I put my arms around her, her heart thumping. "It's just a nightmare, nothing more." "This happens to everyone". I try to comfort her, more annoyed than anything else. After all, her abrupt display of terror ruined my sleep, and as a guy, my default setting is to grin and bear it, man up, and deal with it.
It was a forbidden romance but I loved her in my own way, so I took a deep breath in the darkness, took a long look at the sober and disinterested gaze of the cheap-looking and tacky Jesus image on the altar, and asked her to tell her story.
And out it came.
Her story, her struggle
She was the victim of childhood trauma. There was a story about being tied up by thieves and threatened with rape when she was young. I never got out of her whether or not the rape happened, and I didn't pry. I know when I should use the surgeon's knife and dig deep and when I should step back and leave things hidden.
All I know is that she loved sex, rough sex, the kind of animalistic dance that is a thing of fantasy for some men. She loved to be dominated in the bedroom in a pornographic way that sometimes surprised me even as a man. Was it trauma welling up or was she just into that sort of thing? I will never know.
Sleep never came easy. Every moment she tried to rest her eyes even for a short catnap the horrible images would resurface. A dark room - fear - -masked men - rope, alcoholic breath under veiled threats, and violent scenes of rape. It would replay like an earworm in the mind, like something out of Groundhog Day from hell, and with the devil in the place of Bill Murray.
Other times it would come like a black mist, overtaking her in fitful dreams and choke her out of sleep. She'd get up breathless and frightened and tell me that there was a black mist above our cheap bed and that it was trying to choke her. I never saw or felt anything out of the ordinary, and yet it was all so real to her.
We discussed it at length, and there were times this woman in her early 40s would be so scared she'd ask me to drive her out to the local Catholic Church parking lot well past closing hours so she could sit next to the wall outside the chapel where the Eucharist was kept so she could pray these night terrors away through tears.
A blessing
It's late summer in Florida and we had just gotten out of one of those Latin Masses where everybody looks like they just stepped out of Little House on the Prarie or The Bells of Saint Marys aside from the smartphones and modern cars. The drably clad trads have all left the chapel and returned to their homesteading and it's just the three of us, me, my woman, and the young cassock and collar-wearing priest.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" I ask her, and she lowers those pretty eyes and giggles like a child. "What can it hurt?" "Go tell him." She scrunched up her face shyly, took my hand, and approached the young priest who was lost in his thoughts in a room full of 1950s-era Catholic relics nobody but the traditionalists cared about.
He was an antiquarian, an old soul, lost amongst his Pre Vatican II treasures of frilly holy cards of the Infant Child of Prague and dusty old tomes by Garrigou Lagrange and Pius IX.
"Father, can I ask you something?", she squeaked meekly. He was a good priest, a kind young man in his mid-30s, and very gung ho about his Leave it to Beaver Era Catholicism, so he put away his relics, smiled, and nodded his head yes.
Standing alone together in this dark chapel she told him everything - the unremitting night terrors, the way it was wearing on her soul and taking its toll on her body, and how she wanted to be free. He suddenly took on a very serious look and stepped back, put on his stole, and asked her to kneel.
Thunder rumbled ominously outside the chapel in the late summer sky, and the stained glass took on a drab and dreary look. He stood there, eyes closed in concentration as he intoned his prayers in perfect ecclesiastical Latin.
I stood back against the wall near one of the ornately carved bas reliefs of the Stations of the Cross and watched her kneeling there, her eyes closed and her face set in a somber mask of prayerful intensity.
Just like that it was over, and she stood up and thanked him. He looked so serious in that black cassock and purple stole, a modern-day Van Helsing slaying psychic vampires in anachronistic garb. His face was kind but grave, and he bid us farewell but gave me a look on the way out the door that made me pause.
We walked out the doors of this gaudy-looking retro church in rural central Florida and into the leaden skies pealing thunder and the empty parking lot. What just transpired was intense enough that we didn't speak on the way to the car, we basked in silence, exhausted and shocked that we actually asked a trad priest for some sort of archaic blessing.
Moments later it happens.
Deliverance
She's on her knees in the barren whitewashed empty parking lot, clutching her throat like an unseen force is choking her. Thunder cracks in the distance, punctuated by the sounds of State Road 250 and the melancholic metallic whine of modernity.
"Something evil is leaving me," she says, her lovely face turning beet red in the late afternoon drab. She starts dry heaving and retching in the parking lot and tears are streaming down her face."
Panic sets in. What the hell do I do? All I could do was start praying, fumbling with a rosary. I was never that religious but something about this girl and this strange turn of events made me feel a visceral need to pray to a God I'm not sure I actually believed in.
Was this demon stuff real?
I'd always been a fan of horror movies and had read every book on exorcism, demonology, and spiritual warfare I could get my hands on, but did I actually believe in any of it?
Not really.
It was more about following my curiosity than anything else, but this…this made it seem so real.
The thunder continues to crack overhead, and a light warm rain starts falling. My heart is racing. I'm hugging her in the empty lot getting soaked and she is crying softly. "What the hell just happened?" "I feel better now.", she said. And just like that it was over, all that drama like something out of an 80s horror film.
So we drove home, saying nothing, just trying to take in what just happened.
All I know is that the nightmares stopped. It made me question a lot of things, especially the reality of evil spirits, and all these years later I still think about her and that strange and terrifying episode in the parking lot of that Church in rural central Florida.
Do these unseen things exist? I don't know. I can't say for sure. All I know is that this story is not a work of fiction.