Free Exorcist Road by Jonathan Janz

iniquity,” Sutherland read.
    “Deliver us, O Lord.”
    “From fury, prejudice and enmity.”
    “Deliver us, O Lord.”
    At the continuance of our words, Casey first grew very still. This wasn’t the stillness I had witnessed upon first arriving that night, but was rather an alarmingly portentous posture, the alertness of his expression somehow gravid with anticipation. In other words, I realized at once it was not Casey who was now present in the room, but rather that diabolical other who reveled in torturing its host and frustrating our efforts to free the boy. The creature’s mouth was slack in a parody of a grin, the look in its eyes far away, almost dreamy.
    I had a nasty vision of a mentally challenged person nearing orgasm and shooed the notion away, though it seemed revoltingly apt. Drool was leaking from the corners of the creature’s mouth, the teeth apart in that foolish, infuriating grin. And as paradoxical as it might sound, despite the creature’s idiotic expression, the impression its features conveyed was as ancient and knowing as any I had yet beheld.
    That was when Casey’s knees began to crack.
    My first worry was wholly irrational—perhaps conditioned by countless films about demonic possession and Satanism, I worried the walls themselves were groaning and preparing to give way. I cast a feverish glance at the ceiling, the floor, but found these surfaces as solid as before.
    “From vulgarity and carnal thoughts,” Sutherland read.
    I stared openmouthed.
    “From vulgarity and carnal thoughts ,” Sutherland repeated.
    I remained dumbstruck, terrified by the groaning, cracking noises that filled the room.
    “Father Crowder!” Sutherland yelled.
    I jolted, realizing I’d ceased responding to his invocations. But I couldn’t find my voice and didn’t even bother locating my place in the Bible. I was too fixated on Casey’s legs.
    They moved at first as though someone had snagged the skin of his kneepits and was hauling steadily downward. Then the movements became convulsive, erratic, the knees somehow grinding deeper into the mattress and then causing the mattress to creak.
    The rapture on the creature’s face grew more obscene. I noticed with distant revulsion that its phallus was engorged, made tumid by the damage it was inflicting on its innocent host.
    The knees continued their descent into the creaking mattress, and now became audible the discordant twangs of snapped mattress fibers, the force of the sinister gravity actually causing the mattress to split open.
    The scrawny legs formed unnatural Vs now. The sounds of tearing cartilage and cracking bone were dreadful. Blood squirted from the distressed flesh. Jagged shards of bone punctured the skin. His patellas, drawn downward into a space unable to accommodate their platelike width, first domed the whitened flesh sheathing them, then exploded in purplish geysers, spewing bone fragments and gristle into the air.
    I would like to claim I maintained some vestige of decorum despite the grisly scene playing out before me, but I have set out to record events faithfully, and must therefore admit to vomiting then. Thankfully, I was able to thrust open a window before I lost control. I saw, as I gave up my the supper to the tempestuous April night, that below Casey’s window there was a precipitous drop-off of three stories onto a stone patio that lay at basement level.
    Suddenly fearful of tumbling out the open window and fairly confident my bout of vomiting had ended, I rammed shut the window and turned to find the awful contortion still in progress. Now, though the knees were so far buried in the lacerated mattress that I could no longer distinguish their gory ruins, a new, atavistic fear arose in me that the boy would simply be devoured by his own bed. For that was what appeared to be happening. The creature’s bonds, I noticed with a crawling dread, were serving now not to contain the creature, but were rather inflicting harm on