Free Rochester Knockings by Hubert Haddad

The reverend was annoyed by these absurd associations that kept bombarding the mind’s emptiness.
    â€œCould you leave me to work on my sermon, I have to readjust the brains of a bunch of renegades gaining strength . . .”
    â€œWhy is it that you don’t believe them?” the mocking young woman confronted him, her eye of infinite blue landing on the knife of his mouth.
    â€œIn those stupid stories of knocking spirits? I adhere only to the Blessing of Jesus Christ!”
    The reverend watched the outline of his daughter vanish in the shadow of the landing. She didn’t close the door behind her, and her laugh, turned toward invisible presences—undoubtedly her old long-haired Yorkshire tumbling down the staircase or the Mynah bird holding forth in the pulpit of his cage in the vestibule—reverberated back up to him, rendered almost unreal, like another time, long before unhappy Violet’s first attack of neurasthenia.
    Forehead lowered over the Bible, he placed his head between his fists to hear no more of the world’s noises. Meditating on a sermon the night before delivering it was a respite for him, a break from his prosaic duty, which was either to entertain a mass of dolts and simpletons or to frighten children. A single ray of true light in these narrow minds could do more harm than a loaded revolver. How to grant them glimpses of the Lord’s ways? Since Luther, the Moravians, and the Holy Club, there was no other way to announce the Good News than by making the church thunder with horrors and curses. Outside or in the coalmines, mortals understand only the thunder of God, all of them blind to his lightning. Back in the day, John Wesley, founder of the Church, ran like Attila through the moors of England, reading and writing his sermons on horseback, the conquest of souls his exclusive ambition. In the haunted high plains of America, it was better to have to deal with masses of unbelievers or papists in favor of slavery than with a single necromancer.
    Reverend Gascoigne leafed through his Bible. With the dexterity of a Monte card player, he flipped from the Pentateuch to the Book of Nahum, from Leviticus to the Proverbs. His finger rested without hesitation on the useful verse, echoing from countless homilies. And so the Eternal God said to Moses: “Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” And so the king of Manasseh offending the Eternal God placed Baal and Astarte in the Temple and immolated his own son; like the Philistines, he surrounded himself with sorcerers and false prophets.
    â€œO house of Jacob, come you, and let us walk in the light of the Lord!” the pastor whispered.
    Then, without reading anything more than folds of his memory:
    â€œMay you never find among you anyone who would put his son or daughter in the fire, no one who exercises the trade of diviner, astrologer, augur, magician . . . Enter into the rocks, and hide thee in the dust, so as to avoid God’s terror and the brightness of his majesty.”
    Abruptly stopped short, he told himself that if the Prophets, great and minor, were all firmly diverted away from this funereal form of prostitution, it must be because they thought the gift of prophecy was wrong. Ending his arbitration, he exclaimed:
    â€œAnd the soul that turneth after such as have familiar spirits and after wizards, to go a whoring with them, I will set my face against that soul, and will cut him off from among his people.”
    But what persons, falling into weakness, could be so demonic to have at heart the desire to rekindle the flames of hell? Closing his eyes, he took on a more assured voice:
    â€œRejoice in being alive and without sin, give to the Lord all authority and power over impure spirits!”
    The reverend remembered King Saul in quest of a necromancer capable of intervening in God’s fierce deafness toward him. His servants found him a woman