Our Lady of Mercy Hospital, OLM, was built in the late sixties, over ten years before I would be pulled into the world and almost thirty years before the day came for the exorcism. But it was constructed for this purpose. It maintained its façade as a hospital for decades while it waited for my arrival. The arrival of the tainted one. The people here aren’t really doctors and nurses or even patients for that matter. They are all just playing their parts. Actors with degrees in medicine and surgery pretending to know nothing of the secret rooms in OLM, or the broom closets that no custodian has ever been in. Or the buttons in the elevator for a floor that no one has seen.
After a few days on the unit I realized that the priests weren’t coming to perform the ritual. That they were in the hospital watching but they couldn’t intervene in this struggle. They were waiting for me to perform the exorcism myself and at first I thought that I could force the thing out. As it is written: “He will vanquish the darkness within and without.” My first attempt was shoving my hand down my throat and convulsing the salisbury steak and tater tots into the toilet. It didn’t work. The thing was deeper inside me than my stomach.
I still thought that I could force it out though. One night when I was again strapped to the bed for misbehaving I saw the spot on my leg where the Nephilim seed seemed close to the skin. It looked like an ingrown hair on my left thigh. I was wearing the boxers that my father had dropped off at the hospital for me. The boxers had the elastic stretched beyond return and a safety pin bunched the band together. I understood the reason for this. I unclipped the pin and bent it open like a tiny dagger.
I folded my right leg under so it propped up my left. I stretched the skin of my leg as tight as I could so it wouldn’t get away and with the pin in my right hand I go in after it. There is pain. The thing wants me to stop. It’s going to try to use my own body to persuade me to not chase it further. I dab at the blood beginning to bead up on my leg with the hospital sheet. I can almost see it shifting its position in the muscle. I try to make the hole in my leg a little bigger so I will be able to grab it between my fingers. I start going in at angles with the pin. I will have to pull it out with my fingernails, possibly wrestle this tapeworm thing to the ground, tear it apart with my bare hands. It’s quick though. Once I start to see it, it moves deeper in my leg. The hole is growing, about the size of a dime, and the sheets are getting speckled with blood. I can almost grab its tail when out of the corner of my eye I see a shadow in the window of the door.
I look up, there’s a nurse staring in. Her eyes are big and then she starts shouting things muffled through the door. There is fear in her face. She sees how close I am to pulling it out. They’re not prepared to have this alien creature thrashing around on the floor of the room. They need more preparation to keep it contained. The room is suddenly filled with orderlies, nurses, gauze, alcohol, sponges, and new sheets. Someone yells at someone else, “How did he get this in?” as the pin is taken from my hands. There is an injection to my arm. The room begins to lose definition. The corners become blurry and slowly the commotion dies down and all the actors and actresses leave the room and the door closes again.