Statement 0161009

[fumitory]

"Statement of Benedict Dearborn regarding the death of his parents in 1996. Statement recorded direct from subject, 10th September, 2016. Statement begins."

"What happened to my parents requires an unfortunate preamble of context. My father did not murder my mother, he did not commit the sin of killing himself. Michael and Cecilia Dearborn were killed by an invasive, malignant entity not native to this material realm. They were its prey.

For as long as I can remember...I always felt the need to be protected.

I remember as a child, before I could even write the alphabet, I needed to cover myself in protections. I called it, 'making myself safe,' when I had to put a name to it, when my parents observed this behavior in me. I would take anything — pen, marker, paint, didn't matter — and scribble things on my skin. Completely intuitively; if you put a pen and paper in front of me now and ask that I recreate them, I genuinely couldn't. What they looked like didn't exactly matter, I think. I believe it was the sheer intention of it.

What I wanted so desperately to be protected from... I wasn't entirely sure. I could never articulate it to my parents or to the doctors that I was asked to explain my behaviors to. For as long as I can remember, I had often been some variant of afraid — nervous, attached to my parents, guarded, suspicious. In moments that were quiet enough to hear a pin drop, I could feel a gravity hovering just at the edges of my periphery; I would wake from nightmares that had so little context that as I reviewed them while awake, I could scarcely recall them, and they never left more of an impression on me than just the general prickling haze of being afraid. I lived with the overarching and rarely-yielding sensation that there was something looming just out of sight, something preying upon me, even before I could ever experience something that would teach me to know what that feeling is. Being...prey. This baseline to my daily life birthed in me a very...unpleasant assortment of anxieties and behaviors from a very early age.

I was too young for psychological diagnoses, but even then my childhood physician suspected it could be early signs of obsessive compulsive disorder. Drawing my protections on myself was considered to be a possible compulsion, and that one became a problem by time I started primary school. It was seen as strange and perhaps disruptive to others early on, but eventually my instructors began to suspect I might be writing test answers under my shirt sleeves in an attempt to cheat, and you can see where that quickly went... I was never so offended by anything more than the gentle claim that I might cheat on a test. But my parents had a difficult time explaining things in a sensitive and efficient manner to the faculty, and in the nicest ways that they could, they had to...urge me to stop. Well, that wasn't their approach by any means, my parents were very understanding, and when they couldn't understand me...they were patient.

But I couldn't forever live in my own little bubble, tucked away from the standards of society. I was getting older, old enough to be able to begin confronting things with a critical mind, able to perceive and internalize things I was learning now. I was maturing. So did my desire to be safe.

And one day, on a quiet Sunday afternoon after we'd returned home from church, I was sat in the garden when I...made my first friend. Peter.

For the longest time — years — I actually hadn't known if they were real or not; I initially thought they might be real, even despite how strange it was to find someone, seemingly older than myself, appearing to me out if thin air, but as I discovered that they could come and go in but an instant, and especially that they could not be seen in any way that I'd ever encountered before, glowing with the sort of light that refracts through crystal like a living prism — kaleidoscopic in detail every time I tried to focus down on the edges of them — I realized they couldn't be real in the same sense that I am 'real.' I'd thought Peter might have been a faerie, actually. Never occurred to me that they could have been imaginary. Everything about them was beyond my scope of my imagination as a child. What I knew was that my parents couldn't see them. When we met, I asked what they were, and they paused for consideration; I thought that was odd, who has to stop to think about what they are? Then they answered me: 'the name of the thing that I am, no human has ever been able to perceive, let alone speak.' I can't speak for other children, but that was quite beyond what I could have come up with on my own at age seven. The sound of their voice was stranger still, as if every voice I'd ever heard spoken was drawn from my memory to translate their language to me, not a discordant blend, just...so layered and intimate as to neutralize into one echoing tone.

I supposed that they didn't have a name then, so, I called them...Peter. We'd read from the book of Peter at church that morning.

I asked Peter what they were doing in the garden, and they smiled at me. 'You wish to be protected, do you not?' They asked me, plucking something so private and visceral out of my mind and speaking it into the air as if it were barely a sensitive matter at all. 'That is why I have come to you now. I will keep you safe.'

That's all Peter wanted. For years, all they did was...kept me safe. Consoled me with their internal glow and distant-yet-present voice until my parents would arrive to my bed in the middle of the night. Or if they were not there to see to me at all. The shadowy lingerings of things in the corners or staring into the back of my head ceased almost completely. The nightmares abated. I was safe.

Until something came home one night, five years later.

I hadn't known anything about my father's previous work as an exorcist; he'd given that work up before I was born, but it turns out that on the occasion, rare ones, Michael would assist my uncle, Tobias, on particularly...complex calls. I think by the time I was twelve my father had only assisted Tobias enough times to count on a single hand with digits to spare.

And that is...how it came into our home. My uncle had been called to pry away the possession of a spirit that had latched onto a young girl, just a child, barely older than I was. Tobias feared for the girl's safety for the whole ordeal, and he asked my father to assist him that night. I think that must have been the last time I saw my father, in earnest. Because what I woke up to the next morning...wasn't my father.

I'd caught him acting strange when I saw him the next day. I hadn't felt so unsettled in years. He began doing odd things, like standing in rooms staring with a ferocity at photos of our family on the walls or whatever shelved furniture we had, hissing soft little words to himself that I couldn't understand. He would watch my mother or myself with too much intensity to be normal for my father...and only when we weren't looking. I caught him in the kitchen, half in the fridge with a package of raw meat — beef or steak, something red — just...peeling it apart with his bare fingernails, like a child playing with wet dirt in fascination. He noticed me and addressed me, but I was petrified, and I ran to my room. To say nothing of the scent of sulfur and something that I didn't know then was rotting blood that would appear from nowhere in those moments that I found the hairs on my body standing painfully on end. This went on for two days, and I was too terrified to say anything to my mother — what could I say? What could I say that it wouldn't hear me? I don't know that she even noticed anything strange about the thing masquerading as her husband.

The way he smiled when talking to my mother or myself was entirely foreign to anything I'd ever seen on him...equal parts mean and gleeful for all but a moment before his face would relax down into something closer to...'normal.'

Late on the second night after we'd all gone to bed, I heard him get up and enter into the corridor, stopping to stand just outside of my bedroom door. He stood there for nearly two hours in the dark, my bedroom door not even entirely shut to him, open enough to show me a mere sliver of his silhouette against the already dark hall, and something...just vaguely shining. I don't know if it was his eyes, his teeth, or a saliva-drenched mouth in general, because I tried so desperately not to look at him. He stood there and breathed through the silence as if he were...excited. The thrill in the urgency of his breath turned my stomach. Peter sat beside me the entire night, even after the thing in my father's skin finally turned and walked back through the house. I don't remember falling asleep, but I must have. I only remember crying too much to fall asleep, for hours after, until I suddenly awoke to daylight.

I was exhausted that day. It was a Saturday, I was home from school, and I'd made up an excuse that I had homework I wanted to finish before I would have to attend church with them the following day." Ben chuckles a sound so hollow and dry that one doesn't need to see his face to sense the ache in it. "The last thing I ever said to my mother...was a lie. An excuse for me to go hide because I was so afraid to be near him.

And I left her with him. With it. I went up to my room and a few hours managed to pass while I clung desperately to a book to keep my attention, and I even considered taking a nap to reconcile the horrible quality of no sleep I had gotten the night before. What I ended up doing most was sitting in a dull, stunned silence and stared out the window into the garden, growing numb with the exhaustion that resulted from my fear.

I think that's why I didn't notice the sounds at first. The walls of our home were not extremely thick; any bump could easily be someone setting something on the kitchen counter, shutting a cabinet... Even hearing my mother's voice wasn't immediately atypical, until I heard he pitch of it. The sharp, throaty sound that came as a reaction to something, one that sounded...scared, reactionary.

And was clipped short with the sound of another impact. And then, she screamed. I'd never heard such a sound from her in my life, and for the next few seconds, it repeated that same terrible pattern: her voice going shrill, and then a thump that cut her to silence. Then, she would yell again, bump, silent, in an increasing repetition until her voice untangled down into pleading, weak moans that quickly became too soft for me to continue hearing.

But the thumping sound didn't stop with her. That sound kept going, for a half minute that felt like an entire damned hour. I was so scared that my own heartbeat started to blend into the sound of something solid hammering into something else. I felt sick. I was so scared.

I don't remember leaving my bedroom, but I remember how numb but aching my legs felt as I reached the bottom of the stair, seeing through the entrance of the dining room, and so much...deep, dark red on the floor, pooled so heavily in the rug. My mother laid on the floor so limp that every thud shuddered through her slack arm. When I looked for her face, all I could see was a mess of bright red and red so dark it looked black. She didn't...have a face anymore. What was once her head was just...flattened and hollow.

The man pretending to be my father was straddled over her. He was beating her with the cut-crystal candlestick holder that used to sit proudly with its matched mate on our table. It was from their wedding.

The thing wearing my father was reveling in the viscera, the blood, like a young child. It was...playing with the gore of her. Beating upon her like she were a toy.

I screamed. It turned to look at me but it did so so slowly that it made my legs go weak. My father's face was covered in blood splattered off of my mother, but the expression was nothing that belonged to Michael. Gleeful and senseless, malicious and hateful. The growl that came off of my father's body's throat was like a sickening purr.

It rose and began to approach me. I was stupefied by everything I'd just seen, everything I'd endured for two days, that I immediately stumbled on the stairs and fell helplessly down to them. I must have already begun to cry, and I could already feel my sanity trying to dissociate from everything that was rushing up to me in that moment. My head felt light, my ears began ringing; I'm sure that I was hyperventilating as the thing came up close upon me, carrying the crystal bludgeoning tool. It was more ruby and garnet than crystal, then.

And that's when it screamed. The sound was so deafening that it split my concentration in a headache, so I didn't immediately see it when the corridor flooded with light. It took until the thing halted to gasp for more air for me to be able to dare a look, but by that point, Peter's voice was filling the very air itself. Mind-numbing sounds, sounds that I wouldn't learn until later were words, alien and impossible for me to comprehend. Peter sounded...vengeful. Peter sounded protective.

It sounded more like an argument than a fight as if the syllables that I could not perceive were equivocal to a punch to the creature's exposed underbelly. I tried to look, but even when I really tried, my vision was water-logged from my crying.

'Release the father,' I could finally hear Peter command, and I felt that familiar warmth that I knew to be their approach.

The voice that responded was unlike anything I had ever heard, gurgling and hissing, manipulating my father's voice. 'Release him, I shall.'

The wet crunch that followed the words was so profound, I don't know if the silence that came after it was real, or if it was just my own perception of the finality of that moment.

I suppose someone called the police. They even must have let themselves inside to find me. I remember so little, aside from the blurry view of the two corpses of what used to be my family drenching the floor in blood. When the police carried me outside, I'd thrown my voice out from crying; I could barely speak to tell them anything, or answer their questions.

What would I have told them, anyway?

Tobias was closest in proximity of convenience and of kin, and he came to the hospital for me. I don't know if it was a quick response, or if I just didn't process the length of time it took. In the matter of a few days so terrible that I've managed to nearly completely block away, I became his dependent, and he moved me in with him.

Those first weeks were so raw and hollow, but the fact that it was that way for both of us was something...of a comfort. Tobias hadn't seen it, seen what happened, seen what snuck into my home and made both of my parents disappear in an instant, and yet, it was as if he carried the same horrific weight with him that I was silently carrying. I didn't know what to tell him for days. I didn't even speak for days. Not even when I woke screaming in the middle of the night, nearly every night.

What I didn't know, despite the uncanny feeling of it, was that Tobias...did know, or at least, had the capacity to believe the story that I hadn't told yet. In fact, after the night of the exorcism they performed, Tobias saw enough to begin worrying about what might have really happened to his brother that night.

Eventually, some months later...turns out, not long after my uncle gave his statement to the Magnus Institute, Tobias decided to tell me what happened that last night that any of us saw Michael Dearborn. Tobias told me that he had been performing exorcisms for most of his adult life, that it was because of my father that he had begun to do so. That they had often performed those cleansings together. That they had done so, for what ended up being the last time, on that night two days before my parents died.

Tobias told me that my father stopped his work in banishments a few months before I was born. The entity that they were expelling from the body of a middle-aged man whose sister had called them to help, in an attempt to startle my father and unbalance him in his prayers, spoke of me by name. According to Tobias, Michael nor Cecilia had announced to anyone what they had privately decided they would name me. That was the first time Tobias would hear my soon-to-be name. Off a demon's lips.

Though the name managed to make the demon's mouth bleed for even uttering it, it still promised to relish in the despicable things it threatened to do to me, his unborn son. Understandably...my father did not take this well. He finally divorced himself from banishment work shortly after this event. He told Tobias how afraid he was that he might become the bridge that would lead a rabid wolf right into our den.

I've wondered, since, if that's what the terror of my formative years had been. Had we been cursed by that entity? Had I, perhaps, even marked since that day that that thing spoke my name, marking my life with haunting fear and hungry, predatory eyes before I could possibly conceptualize what evil could be?

My parents were killed, but that truth was not possible to report. In that world, that mundane realm of normalcy, he had to be declared a murderer, a man that had snapped and violently brutalized his wife to death, before committing suicide, on November fourth, 1995.

But the last time I saw my father, the last time my uncle saw his brother, was the night of November first. My father did not come back from that night. Something else, something other, did."

"Statement ends."