He continued, splashing holy water onto Adam’s face and body again. For the first time, that painful, rictus grin faltered. Adam’s nostrils flared and he sneered at the priest. When Kim murmured an “amen,” some punctuation for the priest’s prayers, he gave a soft laugh.
It isn’t real, Meryam told herself. This is some kind of game, something Adam devised for the camera.
Meryam’s chest ached. Her right hand fluttered up to cover her mouth and she felt as if a barbed hook had been set deep in her gut and begun to tug hard, down inside her. In that moment she would have prayed to any god, given anything to be able to believe that it was all some prank, some hoax that Adam had not even shared with her.
Her eyes burned with tears she seemed unable to shed. Calliope had no problem weeping, but Meryam could not.
“Let your mighty hand cast him out of your servant, Adam,” Father Cornelius went on.
Meryam forced herself to breathe, inhaling deeply the unnatural warmth of the passage, the scent of tea and smoke haunting her. Beyond the priest, the demon’s charred horns still gleamed with reflected light.
On the floor, Adam began to shake. His grin twitched and his skull juddered against the ancient timber. A single fly buzzed past Meryam’s head and at first it meant nothing to her, just an insect, until it landed on Adam’s cheek and she heard Feyiz swear in Kurmanji beside her.
“Someone want to tell me where the fuck the fly came from?” Walker asked quietly.
For the first time, she heard fear in the voice of that stubborn, stalwart, brilliant man. Real fear, not simple trepidation. And it terrified her. Where had the fly come from, indeed, up on the side of this mountain in the middle of a blizzard?
The fly crawled across the bridge of Adam’s nose, wings twitching. Calliope whimpered and began to lower her camera.
“Keep shooting,” Meryam snapped at her, and she brought the camera back up.
Adam laughed as Father Cornelius continued his prayers. Adam’s head turned again and he stared at Meryam with boiling contempt.
“I should tell you,” the demon said. “I’m going to tell you, now, so I can watch your face when you hear it from this mouth.”
Meryam stepped forward. The heat and the thickness of the air seemed to try to hold her back but she waded through it. Hakan stepped in her way, almost as if he did not hate her, almost as if he wished to protect her, but she thrust him aside and dropped to her knees and stared into the eyes of the thing behind her lover’s eyes.
“He fucked her. Is that your big surprise? I don’t need you to tell me.”
The grin pulled so wide that she saw Adam’s lower lip split, and then her tears came at last.
“So you know?” the demon whispered. “No. You suspected but you didn’t know. Not until now. The pain in your eyes is glorious.”
“You pulled the strings,” Meryam whispered. “You made it happen.”
The demon smirked. “Of course I did. But I promise you, he made it easy.”
Meryam froze. She felt hands on her and shrugged them off, thinking they belonged to Hakan. Instead she heard Feyiz’s soft voice in her ear, and when he touched her again she allowed him to pull her away, out of the priest’s way. She glanced up and saw Walker’s sympathy, saw Kim’s fear, but she would not look at the camera again. Would not look at Calliope.
“Keep shooting,” she said, just in case the woman lost her nerve again. Calliope might want to look away, but Meryam would not allow it. For Adam’s sake, it would all be on film. After she was dead, he would be famous. He would be wealthy. He would always remember that she loved him.
Of course, she’d be famous, too. But she’d be dead.
The priest’s voice lulled her. She could only stand and stare. The lights flickered and the wind gusted for the first time in long minutes, forever hours, but the wind itself felt warm. The fly buzzed around Adam’s face and alighted on his lower lip. It crawled onto the teeth that were revealed by that terrible grin.
“I adjure you, ancient serpent, by the judge of the living and the dead, by your Creator, by Him who has the power to consign you to Hell, to depart now in fear. Yield not to my own person but to the minister of Christ. For it is the power of Christ that compels you, who brought you low by His cross…”
Adam continued to shake, slammed his head against the timbers again and again. The fly took wing again as he laughed, and then the insect landed upon the gleaming curve of his widened eye. He did not even blink.
Mr. Avci began to pray in his own language, to his own god. From far off to the right, in the shadows of the mouth of the passage there, Wyn Douglas sobbed loudly and began to shout denials, insisting that none of this could be happening.
Meryam’s skin stayed warm. Ice formed at the base of her brain. Her vision began to darken. How long since she’d eaten or slept? She wondered as she lost feeling in her hands and feet.
How long till morning?
Detached from herself, she spoke his name. Then she screamed it, as if she were watching his grip loosen from the edge of a cliff, as if she were watching him fall into an abyss. And wasn’t she, really? Meryam knew the answer, and screamed his name again.
Laughing, his whole body shaking, Adam began to utter the filthiest profanity. He lolled his head again, stared at her as he raised it and smashed it down on the timber floor, as if he wanted to watch her eyes while he split open his own skull. Meryam thought she might still be screaming, but she couldn’t be sure.
Walker and Hakan dropped to their knees. Father Cornelius might have shouted for them to do so. They grabbed Adam’s shoulders and pinned him down, and Walker held his head in place so he could not smash it against the wood again. Blood seeped through Adam’s hair and down the back of his neck, under the collar of his shirt.
When Meryam exhaled again, her breath turned to mist. She felt the warmth still, but the air had gone frigid. Something shifted beyond the priest and his helpers and she looked and saw that the horned, crushed skull of the demon had tilted to one side, as if the caved-in face, the charred and shattered eye sockets, had turned to gaze at her as well.
“Depart, then, transgressor. Depart, seducer, full of lies and cunning, foe of virtue, persecutor of the innocent. Give place, abominable creature, give way to—”
The lights went out. Someone shrieked. Seconds passed that Meryam could only count in the gallop of her heart, and then the lights flickered on again.
Adam’s eyes were closed. His chest rose and fell in a sigh. His color had improved, although the beads of sweat remained. He hitched another breath and his eyes fluttered open for a moment, then closed again. Meryam was sure he had looked at her. That Adam had seen her, not the other thing.
Behind the camera, Calliope whispered a “thank you” to whatever power she’d prayed to.
“Did it work?” Kim said. “Is that… Father, did it work? Is it gone?”
Father Cornelius dipped his fingers into the cup of holy water and drew the sign of the Christian cross on Adam’s forehead. Meryam felt a ripple of distaste, but beneath that ripple ran a river of hope.
Adam only sighed again at the priest’s touch.
“Cornelius,” Walker said grimly. “Damn it, is it gone?”
“I believe so.”
Hakan muttered his disapproval but Feyiz hissed him into silence and turned to the priest. “You did it.”
Father Cornelius did not look at him. Instead, he turned toward Meryam and for a moment she could only see the way Adam’s head had lolled to one side, and the crumbling, burned skull of the demon that had done the same. Then she saw the gentle sadness in the priest’s eyes.