The Cleansing: a twisting psychological thriller you won't want to put down by J.A. Baker

Author:J.A. Baker [Baker, J.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloodhound Books
Published: 2019-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Me

Being pinned down, held fast by strong adult hands, stayed with me. The memory of being trapped, unable to move, haunted my dreams for years afterwards. And then there was their voices – the dreadful menacing incantations that echoed around the place, the acoustics of the high ceiling accentuating each and every word.

We exorcize thee, O every unclean spirit, satanic power, infernal invader, wicked legion.

I was trapped. At their mercy. Their hands on me, holding me still, their wild eyes and pale faces looming over me. It was the whole fucking ritual. It terrified me. I had no idea what was going to happen, what they were going to do to me. I expected the worst. And that was exactly what I got.

I had hoped that my mother, in her advanced state of pregnancy, would have helped me, tried to stop it, done anything she could to protect her child, to stop me from being subjected to the horrors that were inflicted upon me that day. Or any of the days my father decided I was possessed by demons and needed to be cleansed. But she didn’t. She may not have participated, but she stood by and watched, her face expressionless, her features a blur to me as she stood idly by and observed it all from a distance. Staring lifelessly, doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.

He was insane. I know that now. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure I knew it even then. In spite of the fact that I was only a child, I could see my father for what he really was – a psychopath. He wasn’t a religious zealot or driven by his allegiance to God. He was quite simply a psychotic man. And they were just as bad, his friends and allies, helping him, urging him on, insisting he was doing the right thing by me when all the time everybody knew that he was unhinged. They had the power to stop him, to persuade him that he had overstepped the mark, broken laws, risked losing his position within the church. But they didn’t. They backed him up, told him I needed to be reprimanded, enabled him every fucking step of the way.

I screamed and spat and thrashed about, which in turn fuelled their belief that I was indeed some sort of demon. Two of the most faithful parishioners that my parents called friends aided and abetted my father throughout the entire procedure. Their large hands on me, pressing my head back, forcing my limbs into place while my father stood over me, his voice a boom in the emptiness of the church, his voice echoing across every pew, down every aisle and up into the rafters where Jesus Christ hung, watching it all from above, his compassionate expression of no use to me whatsoever. I had been abandoned in my hour of need. Nobody to help me, nobody to rescue me from the hands of the adults who inflicted all kinds of cruelty upon me. I was alone.

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