Geoff Clams: Exorcismus (part 1)

By PRSD, on Saturday, July 25, 2009

A new chapter opens on Geoff Clams‘ life in his regular column.

We had been blessed with a period of relative calm during which the sunshine had been blistering, unbridled and unbroken for sweet weeks on end. The English summer had hit its brief stride and, for a while, the gardens of the valley had sprung back to life, teaming as they daily were, with relatives and visitors and children splashing in inflatable pools. My partner Judith and I were enjoying a rehabilitation of sorts. She seemed genuinely happy and, over those long days, I was somewhat freed from the feelings of dread that had been chipping away at my comfort and sanity too. Much-needed respite. While it lasted.

On Thursday the 25th of June it was Jude’s birthday. We had decided to hold a barbeque for about twenty-six friends that evening. The day had been perfectly bright and incredibly fine. Over the afternoon, I had been preparing food and inflating balloons, in between bouts of book-reading and cider-quaffing on the back patio. At teatime, Judith came home from work and I gave her a birthday card, a compilation disc of classical music and a gold necklace. We went to bed.

Not long after, people started to arrive with gifts and bottles of wine. In less than an hour, the garden decking was crowded with guests, their spirits audibly high. Summer is generally very good for people. Especially the English. It’s the one of those rare things we can all feel good about.

Our neighbour Hugh, who had brought over a large box of shrimp and some good bourbon, took over cooking duties at seven o’clock whileI went inside to change into a clean t-shirt. On my way to the bedroom, I was stopped in the hallway by one Geraldine Soaper as she emerged tearfully from the bathroom. Geraldine was a fellow committee member from Project Duvall in Buckfastleigh, a free-spirited woman in her mid-thirties who lives near Ivybridge with her thirteen cats. Like me, she had never nailed down a definitive career in any one vocation instead preferring to saunter from one thing to another with itchy, insatiable feet. From what I knew, she was mainly into healing and crystals and stuff. We are usually on the same side of most arguments when it comes to big committee decisions.

Unbeknownst to Geraldine at this particular time, she was about to set in motion the next chain of events. She gestured me towards the bedroom, asking if she could have a private word and I obliged her. We went in and closed the door behind us. I sat her down by Jude’s dressing table as her eyes welled up again. With my hand on her shoulder, I asked what the matter was.

‘Oh, where to start?’ she shrugged, wiping tears and mascara from her left cheek with a tissue, struggling with the right words; ‘Geoff, this is going to sound completely and utterly insane to you, i’m afraid.’

‘Believe you me Gerry, nothing shocks me anymore,’ I sighed, ‘please, go ahead and try me.’

‘Okay,’ she raised her eyebrows, crumpled the tissue in her palms and looked up at me with untamable sincerity. ‘There’s something very bad in your house Geoff.’

‘You mean Mr Gruff?’ I ventured after handing her a packet of wet-wipes from the windowsill.

‘Mr who?’

‘Mr Gruff is our pet name for him,’ I laughed, ‘the ghost who lodges with us. You’ve picked up on him?’

‘I have the knowhow Geoff,’ she said, rising from the chair and turning to face me with a burning seriousness that was incandescent. ‘I’d like to try and do a cleansing here, sometime very soon. Regardless of whether or not you or Judith believe in the paranormal, I am telling you that there is something incredibly nasty here, and it seeks to harm you.’
This was ominous. One mystery giving way to another. The dead wreaking mischief now. Yeah, whatever. Who will set us free?

‘Well, he’s been pretty quiet of late, apart from the other week when Jude was ill.’

‘What are the nature of the attacks?’ she asked as I stifled a weird, involuntary smile with my front teeth

‘I wouldn’t call them attacks as such. Having said that, he did knock a clock off the mantelpiece, which was a first. It flew quite a way through the air, landed near me.’

I had never really processed the implications of Gruff. In all honesty, I had never wanted to dwell on him. I’m open-minded enough to accept the existence of rogue energies and bizarre phenomena. To implicate disembodied spirits is pushing it. Especially for a psychiatrist’s son.

‘This clock,’ she asked, ‘did it have any sentimental value to either you or Jude?’

‘Yes. Yes, it did.’

Geraldine reached into her handbag and pulled out a small writing pad and a chewed red biro. She sat down on the bed as I began to recount all of the things I could remember. Two summers ago, my sister’s little boy, who was staying in our spare bedroom for the weekend, awoke screaming in the night. He said that he had seen an old man standing by the full-length wardrobe mirror, making a ‘funny noise like an angry dog’. He was so inconsolable that he had to be picked up a night early. There was the week when things kept going missing and turning up in odd places; the television remote control in the freezer and Jude’s bible in the bathtub surrounded by dried flower petals from the Pot Pourri dish on the windowsill. The night when the study door slammed so hard of its own accord that the bottom hinge came free from the doorframe. A Christmas dinner that turned embarrassing when the oven was tampered with. My 38th birthday, when a few of my friends and I were smoking cigars and taking brandy during the early hours; a gust of wind that blew through the front-room, free of context. Constant flickering light bulbs. Geraldine noted everything down with investigatory relish.

‘Thanks Geoff. We need to assess this correctly before we attempt anything. I’m going to pop by with a friend of mine on… Sunday, shall we say?’

‘If you insist. Sunday’s good for us. Who’s your friend?’

‘Look, there’s no way I can put this lightly but,’ she took a breath with closed eyes, ‘this could be beyond my level of expertise. On the quiet, I’ve been cleansing houses of trapped souls for most of my adult life. I’ve never had to deal with a demon.’

Against any kind of better judgment, my heart spluttered into a fast beat, ‘A demon?’

‘I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry. Please, just keep an open mind but also, try as best you can to forget everything that’s been said here today. Go back to the party and we’ll pick this conversation up on Sunday, okay?’ She pulled her things together and started quickly for the door. I got there first and placed my hand on it.

‘I don’t believe in demons Gerry. And I don’t want to bring any weirdness into the house, it wouldn’t be good for Jude. Mr. Gruff aside, we’ve had a bad time of it lately. Weird stuff happening.’

‘Geoff,’ she spoke with wizened brown eyes in fevered bursts of breath, ‘I’m telling you now to desist from naming this thing. Don’t trivialize it, don’t try to communicate with it. Certainly, never challenge it. Don’t let Judith become too aware of the situation until we can ascertain what the situation really is. This isn’t a trapped spirit or a remnant of someone who lived here before.. you understand?’

‘Go on.’

‘You have something elemental and inhuman in this house. It might well have chosen one of you before birth. It might be ingrained in the foundations of the building, or even in some inanimate object. Demonic hauntings are targeted and extremely dangerous for all concerned, Geoff’

‘How can you be so sure of what you’re saying to me?’

‘Because of what just happened to me in your bathroom. Don’t ask me to repeat what that was. I promise I’ll fill you in on Sunday… and please,’ she implored, pushing her left hand with its overlong puce-painted fingernails onto my chest, ‘keep a close eye to Judith.’

Old Mrs. Frattelli, breaking with her self-imposed quarantine, came through the back gate at eight to great fanfare and we wheeled the upright piano out onto the decking where she played some jazz pieces. The evening rolled on in a superficially pleasant manner and we all got quite drunk; lighting candles on the plastic picnic table as night began to fall. There was plenty to attend to. I buzzed around in the sweltering dusk, filling plates with expensive food and restocking wines here and there. Conversations continued in earshot; some banal, some worth sticking with and some barely coherent. In truth, my mind was jammed with thoughts of Geraldine’s demon. Perhaps there was a new enemy in my midst now. Fleeting premonitions about the coming night that danced impishly and mockingly to the tinkling of the blue piano; more empty threats from beyond the ether.

Hours later and with a majority of the guests now gone home, Judith came running out onto the decking with her mobile phone held aloft. ‘You lot aren’t gonna believe this,’ she gushed almost breathlessly into the night, ‘Michael Jackson’s bloody dead!’

After a murmur of disbelief and flustered chatter, we went inside with our drinks to watch the news channels, groping for what little info we could find on the matter. Of course, I had to recount my Jackson anecdote to all and sundry. I had met him in 1989. I was working at a Californian summer camp for children with leukemia when we were all suddenly invited to the Neverland Ranch to meet the man himself. I held a fifteen minute conversation with him, mainly about roller-coasters. He had given my young charge a gift, which I later inherited from the child when he sadly lost his battle. All true.

* * * * * *

Poignancy and dread permeated the hot night like a blanket of muggy sadness. There came a drunk dream featuring the dead King of Pop that seemed to progress in fits and starts. Some terrible thing pounding on the walls, scratching at thin wood; and, inexplicably, an hourglass that filled slowly with fright and death. His ghostly pallor looming out from a sea of murky, metal paint; front, right and centre-stage like an omnipotent mirage. The backwards walk. That glove. An ancient panic. Three o’ clock is the superstitious hour of evil, by some accounts. Waking to the sound of muffled growling, I made my way through feverish darkness, to the front room and to the telephone. Who you gonna call, Geoff?

It rained terror against the patio doors; the smell of wet, thirsty mud and bin insects hovered around the billowing white curtains. I crushed the window shut and sat by the phone in a square of soft, blue moon-glow. I couldn’t stop myself from phoning crazy Geraldine. There was no way I could ever hope to sleep again without knowing. I was sorry for waking her up, but I just had to know.

Upon washing her hands in the bathroom earlier that day, the entity had apparently yanked Geraldine’s hair back violently. In the steam of the bathroom mirror she saw the two words, scrawled like brutal, angular daggers: ‘Judith dies.’

To be continued…