#demonicpossession — Public Fediverse posts

51RA

They stamped his body in sections beneath white factory lamps.

The men on the line did not know his name, though some of them felt it move in the machines before ever they heard it. They knew only that the air in Bay 4 had changed over the past few months. It had become charged in some way difficult to explain without sounding foolish. Small things accumulated. The press would shudder once before starting, as if waking from unpleasant dreams. Finished receivers, lined in neat rows, sometimes gave off a smell like struck flint though no spark had touched them. More than one worker complained of hearing what sounded like breathing through ear protection, a slow, deliberate inhalation and release beneath the pounding of stampers and the whine of torque drivers. Most laughed it off. Factories had their noises, their quirks, their little ghost stories. Men who spent ten hours a day amidst repetitive thunder began to hear all sorts of things.

But Owen Kreel had worked the line for seventeen years, and he knew the difference between a bad bearing, a loose panel, and something for which there was no mechanical name.

The first time he truly noticed it, a lower receiver had come down the conveyor and stopped directly before him, though the belt was still moving and the others behind it continued their slow approach. That should not have been possible. Nothing stopped without jamming the line. Yet there it sat, black and unfinished, rocking ever so slightly as though it had arrived under its own intention. Owen stared at the serial engraving panel, waiting for the code to blink into the screen above his station.

Instead, for the briefest instant, he thought he saw letters already there.

S I R A

Then the belt jerked. The receiver slid on. The monitor filled with ordinary production data. Owen said nothing.

That night, he dreamed of a great hall filled with rifles standing upright like candles. Not piled, not racked, but planted muzzle-up in a black floor that shone like church stone after rain. Between them walked a tall figure in a long coat, his hands clasped behind his back, moving with the calm assurance of a bishop inspecting graves. Owen never saw his face clearly. Only the cheekbones, the severe brow, the mouth that seemed always on the edge of pronouncing sentence. The figure paused before one rifle and laid two fingers against the barrel almost lovingly. At once, all the others turned—not physically, for they had no heads to turn, but inwardly, spiritually—toward that touch, as brambles turn to light. Owen woke with his heart hammering so violently he thought for a moment that someone had been pounding on his chest from the inside.

By dawn, he had persuaded himself it was nothing.

That was before the first shooting of autumn.

The television over the breakroom refrigerator showed the same images all afternoon: parking lot tape fluttering in a cold wind, ambulances, a woman collapsed against the hood of a cruiser, children being led in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders. The model name of the rifle was spoken and respoken by anchors with grave expressions and professionally moderated sorrow. Owen stood among the others holding a paper cup of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand. Nobody said much. A few cursed the killer. A few muttered about mental illness. One man began, reflexively, to complain about how the media would twist it, but even he could not summon conviction. On the screen the camera cut to a close-up of investigators carrying evidence bags. One bag contained part of a shattered black receiver.

Owen spilled his coffee.

There, just for a second, under the harsh bloom of the news camera, visible through blood smears and fingerprint powder, was a marking like a scratch or flaw in the metal. A tiny hooked incision near the serial block. Owen had seen it before. Three days earlier, at his own station, on a piece he had assumed defective and sent back down the line.

He told himself it could not be the same one.

But after that he began to see the mark everywhere.

Not on every unit. That would have been simple. This was worse. It appeared only on certain pieces, and never exactly the same way twice, yet always with the unmistakable coherence of a signature. Sometimes it looked like a hooked thorn. Sometimes like a stylized numeral. Sometimes like the vertical of an I crossed by accident. Once, after a twelve-hour shift, he found himself tracing it on a fogged bathroom mirror before realizing his finger had moved without instruction from his mind.

His wife, Mara, asked him twice that week if something was wrong. Owen told her he was tired. It was the season, he said. Mandatory overtime. Election noise. The world being what it was. He did not tell her about the dreams, nor that he had begun waking with words in his mouth that felt old and metallic, as though he had been sleeping with bullets under his tongue. He did not tell her that at work, when the riveters screamed and the line thundered and all the men bent in rhythm to the making, there were moments he felt less like a laborer than a priest attending some dreadful liturgy.

Soon he could no longer ignore the sense that the rifles were not being manufactured.

They were being prepared.

It was around this time that the old man came into the gun shop.

The shop stood forty miles from the plant, out past a line of cornfields already gone brown and a stand of bare trees black against the lowering sky. Owen had gone there before, though never with any real pleasure. He told Mara he was looking for parts for a deer rifle inherited from his father, which was not entirely false. In truth he had gone because he had started to feel that if there was an answer anywhere, it might lie not in the factory but in the places where the finished bodies came to rest before entering the hands of their owners. If there was a haunting, perhaps it deepened at the point of choosing.

The bell over the door gave a dull, funereal clatter as he entered. The shop smelled of old wood, solvent, rubber mats, and a faint undernote of mildew. Rifles lined the walls in patient ranks. Glass cases held pistols like relics. A television in the corner played a hunting show with the sound turned off. Behind the counter stood a young clerk with a trimmed beard and an eagerness in his face that made him look almost childlike. Near the back, seated beside a rack of black semi-automatics, was an old man in a dark coat with a cane laid across his knees.

Owen noticed him at once not because he moved, but because he did not.

He sat absolutely still, as if he had been there for years. His face was narrow and bloodless, his hair a thin silver swept behind the ears, his eyes hooded but very bright. There was something ecclesiastical about him, though not in any comforting sense. He looked like a minister defrocked for cruelty, or a judge who had confused punishment with righteousness so long ago he no longer remembered the distinction.

The clerk asked if Owen needed help.

“Just looking,” Owen said.

The old man smiled without showing teeth.

“That is how it begins,” he murmured.

Owen turned. “Excuse me?”

The clerk either had not heard him or pretended not to. He busied himself with a receipt printer that had suddenly begun to chatter.

The old man lifted one hand from the cane and gestured toward the rifles behind him.

“Most people believe they choose these,” he said. His voice was soft but had an odd carrying power, each word landing with careful weight. “But objects have their devotions too. They wait for the hand fitted to them. They have a patience greater than ours.”

Owen should have left then. Instead he found himself stepping closer.

“I know you,” the old man said.

“No,” Owen replied, though the denial came weakly.

“Not by name. By trade.”

A pulse began to throb in Owen’s neck.

The old man’s gaze shifted to the nearest rifle on the rack, a black carbine with a rail system like exposed vertebrae. “There are houses in the world,” he said, “and there are lineages. Men think they invent lineages because they stamp their trademarks into steel. It is the other way round. The lineage chooses its workshops. It passes from forge to forge, flag to flag, century to century. Sword, musket, repeater, carbine. Each age gives it the body it deserves.”

Owen swallowed. “What are you talking about?”

At that the old man looked at him fully, and the eyes were so pale they seemed almost colorless.

“I am speaking,” he said, “of Sira.”

The name entered Owen like cold water poured down the spine.

He took a step backward. “Who told you that?”

The old man’s smile broadened very slightly. “He did.”

From the wall behind him came a soft metallic tick, as though one of the rifles had shifted on its peg.

The clerk looked up at last. “You okay, sir?”

Owen glanced toward him, grateful for the interruption, but when he looked back the old man had not moved by so much as a breath.

“What is Sira?” Owen asked, before he could stop himself.

The old man considered him. “A principality,” he said at last. “A hunger. A masculinity severed from mercy. The ecstasy of force. He has worn many names. Mars in polished marble. Tyr in frost. empire, nation, defense, honor, destiny. He likes whatever title men use when they want to kill without having to call it killing.”

Outside, a gust of wind struck the building and made the front glass shiver in its frame.

“He is not the gun,” the old man continued. “Do not make that mistake. The gun is only his favored mask in your age. He resides wherever metal extends grievance faster than conscience. But certain forms suit him especially well. Repetition suits him. Modularity suits him. Civilian devotion suits him. A thing built not only to fire, but to signify. To reassure. To threaten. To complete a certain kind of broken man by giving his fear a skeleton.”

Owen wanted to laugh, or curse, or walk out, but all three impulses failed in him. “Who are you?”

“A witness,” said the old man. “Too late, as witnesses usually are.”

Then, leaning forward slightly:

“And perhaps a coward. I have seen him before.”

The shop lights flickered. For one impossible instant every rifle in the place seemed to deepen in color, black turning to a kind of abyssal sheen that swallowed reflection. Owen smelled hot oil and something else beneath it—something like a battlefield after rain.

“When?” he asked.

The old man tapped the cane once on the floorboards.

“Whenever men discover that industry can manufacture destiny.”

The clerk finally intervened, smiling uneasily. “Sir, are you shopping for anything in particular?”

Owen blinked. The old man was simply an old man again, thin hands folded over his cane, expression faintly amused.

“No,” Owen said hoarsely. “No, I think I’m done here.”

He left without remembering the walk to his truck.

That night the dream returned, but now the hall of rifles was a cathedral. The black floor stretched farther than sight, and the planted weapons rose in long aisles beneath an unseen vault. At the far end stood Sira.

He was not monstrous in shape. That was the most dreadful thing. He possessed the severe beauty of authority, tall and lean, clad in something like a military coat cut with liturgical elegance. His face was gaunt, his mouth composed, his eyes dark hollows lit by a disciplined fire. He looked neither young nor old. He looked inevitable. Around him there clung no chaos, no slobbering demonic frenzy, but order—perfect, ceremonial, merciless order.

When he spoke, his voice was the sound of boots in a corridor, of bolts sliding home, of a crowd falling silent before a podium.

You have helped build my chapels, he said.

Owen tried to run, but in dreams one rarely runs well.

The rifles all around him began to whisper.

Not loudly. Not with words at first. Only a susurrus like men reciting vows under their breath.

Then one voice separated itself from the rest, and Owen realized with horror that it was his own.

He woke with his throat raw and his hands clasped together as though in prayer.

His wife was already up.

He could hear the TV in the kitchen serving up the news.

There had been another shooting.

51RA

They stamped his body in sections beneath white factory lamps.

The men on the line did not know his name, though some of them felt it move in the machines before ever they heard it. They knew only that the air in Bay 4 had changed over the past few months. It had become charged in some way difficult to explain without sounding foolish. Small things accumulated. The press would shudder once before starting, as if waking from unpleasant dreams. Finished receivers, lined in neat rows, sometimes gave off a smell like struck flint though no spark had touched them. More than one worker complained of hearing what sounded like breathing through ear protection, a slow, deliberate inhalation and release beneath the pounding of stampers and the whine of torque drivers. Most laughed it off. Factories had their noises, their quirks, their little ghost stories. Men who spent ten hours a day amidst repetitive thunder began to hear all sorts of things.

But Owen Kreel had worked the line for seventeen years, and he knew the difference between a bad bearing, a loose panel, and something for which there was no mechanical name.

The first time he truly noticed it, a lower receiver had come down the conveyor and stopped directly before him, though the belt was still moving and the others behind it continued their slow approach. That should not have been possible. Nothing stopped without jamming the line. Yet there it sat, black and unfinished, rocking ever so slightly as though it had arrived under its own intention. Owen stared at the serial engraving panel, waiting for the code to blink into the screen above his station.

Instead, for the briefest instant, he thought he saw letters already there.

S I R A

Then the belt jerked. The receiver slid on. The monitor filled with ordinary production data. Owen said nothing.

That night, he dreamed of a great hall filled with rifles standing upright like candles. Not piled, not racked, but planted muzzle-up in a black floor that shone like church stone after rain. Between them walked a tall figure in a long coat, his hands clasped behind his back, moving with the calm assurance of a bishop inspecting graves. Owen never saw his face clearly. Only the cheekbones, the severe brow, the mouth that seemed always on the edge of pronouncing sentence. The figure paused before one rifle and laid two fingers against the barrel almost lovingly. At once, all the others turned—not physically, for they had no heads to turn, but inwardly, spiritually—toward that touch, as brambles turn to light. Owen woke with his heart hammering so violently he thought for a moment that someone had been pounding on his chest from the inside.

By dawn, he had persuaded himself it was nothing.

That was before the first shooting of autumn.

The television over the breakroom refrigerator showed the same images all afternoon: parking lot tape fluttering in a cold wind, ambulances, a woman collapsed against the hood of a cruiser, children being led in a line with their hands on each other’s shoulders. The model name of the rifle was spoken and respoken by anchors with grave expressions and professionally moderated sorrow. Owen stood among the others holding a paper cup of coffee gone lukewarm in his hand. Nobody said much. A few cursed the killer. A few muttered about mental illness. One man began, reflexively, to complain about how the media would twist it, but even he could not summon conviction. On the screen the camera cut to a close-up of investigators carrying evidence bags. One bag contained part of a shattered black receiver.

Owen spilled his coffee.

There, just for a second, under the harsh bloom of the news camera, visible through blood smears and fingerprint powder, was a marking like a scratch or flaw in the metal. A tiny hooked incision near the serial block. Owen had seen it before. Three days earlier, at his own station, on a piece he had assumed defective and sent back down the line.

He told himself it could not be the same one.

But after that he began to see the mark everywhere.

Not on every unit. That would have been simple. This was worse. It appeared only on certain pieces, and never exactly the same way twice, yet always with the unmistakable coherence of a signature. Sometimes it looked like a hooked thorn. Sometimes like a stylized numeral. Sometimes like the vertical of an I crossed by accident. Once, after a twelve-hour shift, he found himself tracing it on a fogged bathroom mirror before realizing his finger had moved without instruction from his mind.

His wife, Mara, asked him twice that week if something was wrong. Owen told her he was tired. It was the season, he said. Mandatory overtime. Election noise. The world being what it was. He did not tell her about the dreams, nor that he had begun waking with words in his mouth that felt old and metallic, as though he had been sleeping with bullets under his tongue. He did not tell her that at work, when the riveters screamed and the line thundered and all the men bent in rhythm to the making, there were moments he felt less like a laborer than a priest attending some dreadful liturgy.

Soon he could no longer ignore the sense that the rifles were not being manufactured.

They were being prepared.

It was around this time that the old man came into the gun shop.

The shop stood forty miles from the plant, out past a line of cornfields already gone brown and a stand of bare trees black against the lowering sky. Owen had gone there before, though never with any real pleasure. He told Mara he was looking for parts for a deer rifle inherited from his father, which was not entirely false. In truth he had gone because he had started to feel that if there was an answer anywhere, it might lie not in the factory but in the places where the finished bodies came to rest before entering the hands of their owners. If there was a haunting, perhaps it deepened at the point of choosing.

The bell over the door gave a dull, funereal clatter as he entered. The shop smelled of old wood, solvent, rubber mats, and a faint undernote of mildew. Rifles lined the walls in patient ranks. Glass cases held pistols like relics. A television in the corner played a hunting show with the sound turned off. Behind the counter stood a young clerk with a trimmed beard and an eagerness in his face that made him look almost childlike. Near the back, seated beside a rack of black semi-automatics, was an old man in a dark coat with a cane laid across his knees.

Owen noticed him at once not because he moved, but because he did not.

He sat absolutely still, as if he had been there for years. His face was narrow and bloodless, his hair a thin silver swept behind the ears, his eyes hooded but very bright. There was something ecclesiastical about him, though not in any comforting sense. He looked like a minister defrocked for cruelty, or a judge who had confused punishment with righteousness so long ago he no longer remembered the distinction.

The clerk asked if Owen needed help.

“Just looking,” Owen said.

The old man smiled without showing teeth.

“That is how it begins,” he murmured.

Owen turned. “Excuse me?”

The clerk either had not heard him or pretended not to. He busied himself with a receipt printer that had suddenly begun to chatter.

The old man lifted one hand from the cane and gestured toward the rifles behind him.

“Most people believe they choose these,” he said. His voice was soft but had an odd carrying power, each word landing with careful weight. “But objects have their devotions too. They wait for the hand fitted to them. They have a patience greater than ours.”

Owen should have left then. Instead he found himself stepping closer.

“I know you,” the old man said.

“No,” Owen replied, though the denial came weakly.

“Not by name. By trade.”

A pulse began to throb in Owen’s neck.

The old man’s gaze shifted to the nearest rifle on the rack, a black carbine with a rail system like exposed vertebrae. “There are houses in the world,” he said, “and there are lineages. Men think they invent lineages because they stamp their trademarks into steel. It is the other way round. The lineage chooses its workshops. It passes from forge to forge, flag to flag, century to century. Sword, musket, repeater, carbine. Each age gives it the body it deserves.”

Owen swallowed. “What are you talking about?”

At that the old man looked at him fully, and the eyes were so pale they seemed almost colorless.

“I am speaking,” he said, “of Sira.”

The name entered Owen like cold water poured down the spine.

He took a step backward. “Who told you that?”

The old man’s smile broadened very slightly. “He did.”

From the wall behind him came a soft metallic tick, as though one of the rifles had shifted on its peg.

The clerk looked up at last. “You okay, sir?”

Owen glanced toward him, grateful for the interruption, but when he looked back the old man had not moved by so much as a breath.

“What is Sira?” Owen asked, before he could stop himself.

The old man considered him. “A principality,” he said at last. “A hunger. A masculinity severed from mercy. The ecstasy of force. He has worn many names. Mars in polished marble. Tyr in frost. empire, nation, defense, honor, destiny. He likes whatever title men use when they want to kill without having to call it killing.”

Outside, a gust of wind struck the building and made the front glass shiver in its frame.

“He is not the gun,” the old man continued. “Do not make that mistake. The gun is only his favored mask in your age. He resides wherever metal extends grievance faster than conscience. But certain forms suit him especially well. Repetition suits him. Modularity suits him. Civilian devotion suits him. A thing built not only to fire, but to signify. To reassure. To threaten. To complete a certain kind of broken man by giving his fear a skeleton.”

Owen wanted to laugh, or curse, or walk out, but all three impulses failed in him. “Who are you?”

“A witness,” said the old man. “Too late, as witnesses usually are.”

Then, leaning forward slightly:

“And perhaps a coward. I have seen him before.”

The shop lights flickered. For one impossible instant every rifle in the place seemed to deepen in color, black turning to a kind of abyssal sheen that swallowed reflection. Owen smelled hot oil and something else beneath it—something like a battlefield after rain.

“When?” he asked.

The old man tapped the cane once on the floorboards.

“Whenever men discover that industry can manufacture destiny.”

The clerk finally intervened, smiling uneasily. “Sir, are you shopping for anything in particular?”

Owen blinked. The old man was simply an old man again, thin hands folded over his cane, expression faintly amused.

“No,” Owen said hoarsely. “No, I think I’m done here.”

He left without remembering the walk to his truck.

That night the dream returned, but now the hall of rifles was a cathedral. The black floor stretched farther than sight, and the planted weapons rose in long aisles beneath an unseen vault. At the far end stood Sira.

He was not monstrous in shape. That was the most dreadful thing. He possessed the severe beauty of authority, tall and lean, clad in something like a military coat cut with liturgical elegance. His face was gaunt, his mouth composed, his eyes dark hollows lit by a disciplined fire. He looked neither young nor old. He looked inevitable. Around him there clung no chaos, no slobbering demonic frenzy, but order—perfect, ceremonial, merciless order.

When he spoke, his voice was the sound of boots in a corridor, of bolts sliding home, of a crowd falling silent before a podium.

You have helped build my chapels, he said.

Owen tried to run, but in dreams one rarely runs well.

The rifles all around him began to whisper.

Not loudly. Not with words at first. Only a susurrus like men reciting vows under their breath.

Then one voice separated itself from the rest, and Owen realized with horror that it was his own.

He woke with his throat raw and his hands clasped together as though in prayer.

His wife was already up.

He could hear the TV in the kitchen serving up the news.

There had been another shooting.

The curiouse case of the demonic possession of Thomas Darling.

In 1596, certain leaders were asked to investigate the demonic possession of 13-year-old Thomas Darling. Among these leaders was one Edward Wightman. Make a note of that as it will come up later. Another name to note is John Darrell. Darrell will be fairly central to our story.

Before we go any further, you should probably know that the Puritans did not believe that the reformation had gone far enough. They wished to flush out the last vestiges of Catholicism in the church. Also, being a witch was illegal.

On 17 February, 1596 Thomas Darling began to have a series of fits which were to continue throughout the next five months. Earlier on this day he had come across an old woman in a wood wearing a grey gown with three warts upon her face. As he passed by her, he passed wind, to which she responded, ‘Gyp with a mischief, and fart with a bell. I will go to Heaven, and you will go to Hell.’ Suspicion for having bewitched Thomas fell on the sixty-year-old Alice Gooderidge who, like her mother Elizabeth Wright, had long been suspected of devilish practices. She was arrested and confined in Derby gaol on 14 April.

Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts, pp. 150 – 191 [link]

This is where our main characters enter. Many of our cast, here, are Puritans. This is important because factional infighting will soon join us.

Puritans taught that miracles were a thing of the past. The Catholics claimed only their priests could do miracles. The Anglicans (and other Protestant groups) claimed, “nuh-uh, we so can do it too.”

I’m sure this will not become a problem.

To carry our story forward, I’m just going to quote from another work:

Darling was a passionate Puritan, a fact that is expressed throughout the account. During one fit, he accepts that the ordeal may take his life, and his only regret was his inability to become a preacher so that he may ‘thunder out the threatenings of God’s word against sin and all abominations, wherewith these days do abound.’

The Possession of Thomas Darling: Adumbrations of a Jungian Psychohistory, Kevin Lu

It is Puritan exorcist, John Darrell, who is credited with diagnosing the names of the devils – Glassap and Radalphu – who were driven out through prayer and fasting.

Of course, nothing is so straightforward, and Darling faced repossession in the days that followed. Thus, doubt was cast over the work of Darrell and others involved.

No matter what happened next, someone was going to be cross about it. You see, many of the bigger gangs claimed the only power to fight devils. They could not all be correct. One S. Harsnett (who we will get to soon), said exorcist John Darrell was a big fat fake.

Thomas Darling resisted the reported repossession, claiming he was engaged in a series of spiritual wars. These wars featured demonic and angelic voices.

As I know at this present for a certainty, that I have the spirit of God within me: so do I with the like certainty believe, that in my dialogues with Satan, when I [quoted] sundry places of scripture, to withstand the temptations he assaulted me with: I had the spirit of God in me, and by that spirit resisted Satan at those times, by [quoting] the scriptures to confound him.

S. Harsnett, A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practices of John Darrel, London, 1599, p 290.

This was a big old problem, as Darling was claiming unmediated spiritual intervention with the aid of the established church. This was impossible to the established order and not exactly in line with Puritan teachings either. No matter who you asked, there was heresy all over the place.

This case led to some hot debate about which church, if any, had the power to cast out evil spirits. The Puritians claimed that the age of miracles had passed, which made the whole case problematic for them. The Roman Catholic church claimed sole authority, but the Anglicans (church of England) also claimed such authority. George More publicly suggested that if the Anglicans had such authority, then the Catholics were a false church.

Though the Puritians claimed that the age of miracles was past, they still wanted to claim ownership over exorcism via prayer, fasting, and reading the Bible. After all, if they could drive out devils, then God approved of the Puritans. The debate soon settles along faction lines as to who was right and who was a big fat fibber.

You might have thought this was the story suitable for a slocky horror movie, but no, this is a story of politics and power among a fragmenting Christian community. It would only be a matter of time until someone got so upset that someone else got killed.

Edward Wightman would later be the last person lit on fire for heresy in England. His participation in the Thomas Darling case is sometimes cited as an important step towards this fate. We will look at Wightman in a separate heresy post.

As for Thomas Darling, he continued to be a bit of a troublemaker maker but that is a story for another time.

#AliceGooderidge #cessationism #demonicPossession #EdwardWightman #fartWithABell #moreRightThanThou #Puritans #ThomasDarling #unmediatedSpiritualIntervention #witches

There's a link to my #writing #portfolio in my bio. But here's a quick post outlining some of the recent-ish writing I am most proud of.
- 'Under Surveillance: Delusion (Carl-Jan Colpaert, 1991)' #Noir City #32
- 'Under Surveillance: Brown's Requiem (Jason Freelance, 1998), #NoirCity #35
- Chapter about #ChadCrawfordKinkle & #AndyMitton's films for a #book about #folkhorror #films (forthcoming)
- 'House of Exorcism': a #journal #article about #demonicpossession in #Eurocult films (forthcoming)