Bonum Vir stood in front of Cleo’s residence. He was surprised and to be honest, a tiny bit annoyed that his significant other had not yet answered her door. They had plans, as well as extremely hard to get reservations for dinner and he did not want to be late. As Bonum took a few steps back from the door, he looked to the end of the street. As he used his phone to call Cleo again, he noticed smoke near the top of the hill, above the former Pound Pediatric Hospital & Research Center. Was that lot on fire again? Bonum Vir scrutinized the horizon more carefully but could not further identify anything out of the ordinary, until he observed a police car had come to a full stop, just a few feet from where Bonum Vir was standing, late model phone in his hand, tie around his neck, unaware of the very bad news which was about to be conveyed to him by the officer in the car.
Eyes narrowing, Bonum watched intently as the officer got out of the car, holding a phone. Bonum now had his phone on speaker, and it had been ringing but there had been no reply until that moment when he heard the sound that indicated Cleo’s phone answered his call. No one said anything.
Carefully, the officer, holding Cleo’s phone, took a step closer towards a confused Bonum, and addressed him: “Who were you trying to reach?”
Bonum Vir glared at the officer, with growing and uncharacteristic umbrage; “My girlfriend. What are you doing with her phone?”
“What is your name, son? You’ll be needing to come with me.”
“I’m Bonum Vir, I’m not your son, and what are you doing with my girlfriend’s phone?”
The officer sighed, mostly to himself, “This phone you’ve been calling was recently recovered at the site of the former Pound Pediatric Hospital & Research Center, where a fatal accident appears to have occurred this evening.”
Bonum had gone with the uniformed officer and identified the now late Dr. Cleo Mariniere. The authorities’ best guess was that Cleo had died of unexpected, but completely natural causes. Oddly, her nostrils and mouth had been slightly, faintly blackened with what might be soot; her remains reflected no signs of assault. There was no soot in Dr. Mariniere’s throat and there had been no indications of a large fire at the ruin. There was nothing that could burn there, anyway, all that was left of Pound was stone and dirt.
Bonum had driven back to Pound after departing the coroner, nearly in the middle of the night, to search for Renwick, and to personally confirm the details that had been relayed to him by the authorities. A portion of the area had been cordoned off.
Under the cast of the full moon, Bonum incredulously confirmed to himself there had been no large fire there recently. He surveyed the hillside with rancor; still no sign of the dog.
Several hours later Bonum Vir sat in his home office. The genetic genealogist had been crying into his hands, and now looked out of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his home office over to the full moon glittering above the dawning metropolis.
As Bonum continued his gaze, his silk tie still around his carefully shaved neck, and what he had intended to be Cleo’s engagement ring still in his hip pocket, his adroit mind desolately recollected to that moment in time, just a few short hours ago, when the biggest problem he had, in this ever expanding world, was that his girlfriend was late for dinner.
Later that week, Bonum Vir shivered in the well lit mausoleum in continuing disbelief. Dr. Cleo Virginia Mariniere’s funeral had just concluded. Their plans, gone. Their future, vanished.
“Aren’t you that guy from the parking lot?”
“Bonum Vir. That’s right.” He collected his thoughts, self-consciously touching his face, recalling to that evening, and to the high pitched shriek that had emanated from a distance as he had happily walked hand in hand with Cleo. He studied Nurse Tusadera’s gloved hands. Bonum could see very long, pointy, dark burgundy fingernails beneath the sheerness of her black net and leather gloves; her scent hinted moribund. Involuntarily, Bonum shuddered.
Renwick ran as fast as he could, picking up improbable speed. As Renwick ran faster and yet even faster, the goldendoodle with kindly eyes, in a wide white collar, began to glitter and glow. His dog parts, to an onlooker, would have seemed to be alternating between disappearing and once again reappearing, and transforming to human parts. Renwick fully rematerialized as human. He stopped running. This was the part he had not yet fully mastered. Renwick now stood, again as a man, his personhood clothed and cloaked, and he found himself again just beyond the lobby of the Pound Pediatric Hospital & Research Center. Also again, the year was 1753, and it was the night of the fire in which Emily Ann Pound and her hospital playmates had most brutally and cruelly perished.
Father Renwick ventured only between these two worlds now. In the form of Father Renwick, the kindly and dedicated exorcist who had arrived at Pound versed of the evil with which he would spar, and in the form of a canine.
Further, as Renwick was about to perish in the fire that brutally incinerated Emily Ann Pound and her hospital playmates, just at the moment the flames were about to render him unconscious, Father Renwick, the he corporeal, would instead dematerialize, and as quickly reappear, in canine form, a goldendoodle, at the present day grounds of the former Pound Pediatric Hospital & Research Center, now a heap of ash and dejection. After this transformation Renwick was always exhausted.
Taking on canine form, in the present day, when he’d wandered to the doorstep of Dr. Mariniere, and allowed her to find him there, Renwick’s otherworldly instincts had led him to a potentially fearsome ally to the children of Pound.
However he did not have sufficient mastery over his form to have saved Cleo. It was agony for Renwick, who had successfully exorcised so many demons before arriving at Pound, to completely comprehend that he now had to recruit yet another human ally from the present day, in his continuing campaign to defeat The Nanti.
Renwick had not had any luck attempting to conduct his human allies into the past of that fiery evening, which by now he had gruesomely relived several times. Each time ended identically: about to be rendered unconscious by the rapidly engulfing flames, he found himself in the present day, in the form of a goldendoodle, wandering the ruins of the Pound Pediatric Hospital & Research Center.
Renwick thought back to the days when his body had been much younger. The higher ranked priests in his order, in lieu of an elevation in rank, had voted and agreed to issue Renwick a commendation, recognition for the strenuous work he had already performed saving the possessed souls of afflicted children near Salem, Masschussets, before his appointment to Pound. He was in no way inclined to suffer Emily Ann Pound and her playmates to fall subject to The Nanti’s demonic assaults and provocations.
Father Renwick had not been completely unsuccessful in his negotiations twixt his two worlds. That autumn evening, the first night Dr.Cleo Virginia Mariniere had fallen through to the afternoon of the fire, Renwick had been able to rescue her, carry her out, and even to take her to the front of her home, where he had originally allowed her to find him. His old stagecoach had materialized for assistance. Although Renwick had been able to spare Cleo that evening, he wasn’t certain why he’d been able to help her that way. Skies thundering in front of her home that night, he had rather suddenly, and not entirely consciously, taken on the form of the goldendoodle again, and had watched in amazement as the coach dematerialized into the evening. Cleo, with her back to the street, had been focused on opening the door and leading them inside, and thus had not seen it happen.
Perhaps, Renwick considered, it depended on the human he chose as an ally. Cleo had been particularly open to his suggestions and had on many occasions removed his leash, and otherwise complied with his unspoken requests to her.
As Father Renwick dejectedly considered past failures, he compassionately reminded himself of the many souls he had delivered from demons before he had ever arrived at Pound Pediatric Hospital & Research Center.
Renwick could only conclude that instead of trying to take his chosen human ally back to the night of the fire that brutally exterminated Emily Ann Pound and her playmates, he was instead to find some way to stop The Nanti in the present. Perhaps the past could not be changed no matter how much mastery Renwick attained over his shifting forms.
As night descended upon the Pound Ruins, Renwick as goldendoodle carefully crossed the road to the old neon lit gas station, where Bonum Vir conscientiously, yet dejectedly, filled the tires of his late model car with air.
“Where did you come from, fella? Been looking all over for you! Thought I’d never see you again, for certain. Why didn’t she chip you, Renwick?”
For the first time in the days since Cleo’s sudden demise, Bonum Vir genuinely smiled as he led the white collared goldendoodle to the back seat of his vehicle and shut the passenger door. Bonum Vir would take the dog home, give him a fragrant bubble bath, and try to sleep, for the first time in weeks.
Indefatiguedly curling up in the backseat of Bonum Vir’s coupe, Renwick’s kindly eyes blazed intensely, like the fires that had failed to consume him.
Across the road, at Croatoan Cemetery, a fisher watched jealously and howled viciously.
(Editor's note: Renwick The Exorcist is a fictional ghost story.)
🎃🎃🎃 Happy Halloween
