Hyde Expels the Ghost from a Woman's Body! #1
The twenty-first century.
Religion preferred to discuss refined, elevated things. It avoided any mention of demons, angels, heaven, or hell. One might say it had become little more than an intellectual parlor game for the educated.
But those who truly wished to speak of God had no choice but to believe in the absurd as well—demons, hell, and ghosts. It was written in the Bible, after all.
I had thought the same, though concepts like “demons” or “hell” never quite landed for me; I simply had no personal experience of them—
“Abbess Midnar, just who is Miss Lucy Emma?”
After what had just happened, it felt as though the very horizons of the world were expanding before me.
Lucy Emma. Locked away in that solitary cell, she had been curled into a tight ball on the cold stone floor, sleeping soundly until I woke her. So what, then, had been the presence I spoke with while standing outside that door? What had existed on the other side?
“You came looking for me at this hour just to ask that?”
Abbess Midnar narrowed her sharp eyes beneath the glow of the oil lamp. She rummaged through a drawer, produced a long-stemmed pipe, lit it, and exhaled a thick plume of smoke. As the acrid scent filled the air, she spoke again.
“Looks like you saw something.”
“I’ve begun to wonder whether Miss Lucy’s condition might not be a simple illness after all. Is she truly possessed by a ghost?”
“……”
Instead of answering, Midnar simply studied my face. She exhaled another stream of smoke, then tapped the ash from her pipe onto a scrap of parchment on the desk.
“You look rather pleased, Hyde.”
I looked pleased? Was that how it appeared?
In a way, she was right. Anyone who contemplates God cannot turn a blind eye to the existence of demons and ghosts. And the reverse is equally true. If the possessed exist, if demons exist, then the great God must necessarily exist as well.
From the beginning I had prided myself on having communed with an absolute, personal Being. Struck by lightning while sitting at a computer. Dropped into this strange world. And through the Holy Grail, I had even experienced the miracle of turning time itself backward.
I was living proof of miracles—an omen that God existed in this world. That Miss Lucy Emma, in her distress, had appeared before me felt like providence itself, a stage prepared for some greater design. Perhaps everything had been leading to this very day.
Midnar rose from her seat. She closed the window, drew the curtains, double-checked that the door was locked, then sat again and let out a long, weary sigh—as though preparing for a lengthy journey. At last the old nun, after long hesitation, opened her mouth.
“Lucy’s mother was a high-class courtesan. Young, beautiful, and sharp as a blade. We lived in the same city. She did filthy work, yet her soul was brighter than anyone’s.”
A courtesan with a bright soul. Was such a thing even possible? Was she some sort of Mary Magdalene from the Scriptures? I had a dozen questions, but I kept my mouth shut so as not to break the flow of her story. Midnar glanced at me and continued.
“Though she was a whore, she was more beloved by God than anyone. As proof, He granted her a gift—the gift of prophecy.”
The gift of prophecy. The ability to foretell various events. It was a common enough story in the Bible; prophets and spiritual leaders were expected to possess it as a matter of course. And an ordinary courtesan had held such a power?
“Is that true? Not some delusion?”
“Her prophecies were accurate. She could predict exactly when rain would fall or when a client would arrive. Emma herself always called it coincidence, but I knew better.”
“……”
“I wanted to pull Emma out of that filthy mud. So I summoned people from the Order. I wanted her to renounce the life of a prostitute and become a nun. Looking back now, it was a fool’s errand—I only dragged her from the mud and threw her into a fire. Emma was tormented by the Order’s priests until she became a being who could prophesy nothing but terrible ruin.”
“Terrible ruin?”
“Yes. Things like a great war breaking out… or the Whore of Babylon giving birth to a mass murderer. Plenty of nonsense, but plenty of truth as well.”
The Prophet of Ruin. I had heard that name before, back when I was operating as the Great Sin Seat Rust and preparing to invade the capital, Royal Road. There was said to be a saintess on some island who prophesied destruction—now the truth of that rumor was becoming clear. That saintess had not been Midnar.
“It was inherited.”
“Yes. The seed of sin was passed down. Lucy is Emma’s daughter—and the one thing someone most desperately wants to hide, his own disgrace. Boy, do you know which priest the Order sent to take charge of Emma?”
“Could it have been Arud Gregory?”
“Exactly. Sharp as if you’d oiled your brain, aren’t you? Arud Gregory—the idiot they now call Pope—was Emma’s assigned priest.”
So that was it. The pieces of the puzzle clicked neatly into place. Pope Arud Gregory. Through Emma’s prophecies he had risen from a mere priest to the supreme seat of the papacy. And in my estimation, Lucy’s very existence was Gregory’s weak point. The Pope’s illegitimate child. In other words, the hidden princess of the Allied Kingdom. There was a reason she was never allowed to leave this island. Lucy herself was a fang that could sink into Gregory’s throat. That was why they had kept her locked away until the very moment the Great Sin Seats overran the capital.
Now it made sense.
“Lucy inherited her mother’s talent. But what we once thought a gift became an ominous curse. That poor child will only ever recite the ruin she never asked for.”
So it wasn’t a simple tic. Prophecy… ruin… Honestly, none of it felt real. I felt as though I had stepped into some vast myth, as if I had become a character from a biblical tale. Midnar spoke again.
“Hyde, I hear you drove out that living devil, Rust. The letter from the Order was full of astonishing stories. Can you cast out the ‘something’ that has taken root in Miss Lucy Emma?”
It was true that I, Hyde, had driven out Rust. And since I could proudly claim to be a priest who walked closer to God than anyone, the answer to her question was already decided.
“Why not? I’ll give it a try. First, though, I’d like to speak with Miss Lucy myself.”
Would she truly prophesy? Was a real ghost or demon dwelling inside her body? Honestly, I still couldn’t quite believe it. Even the incident earlier, when I stood outside her cell door, might have been nothing more than my own imagination.
“Psyche! Milione! Good morning!”
Lucy Emma. From the crack of dawn she was racing around the nunnery full of energy. She threw her arms around Psyche in a tight hug, then immediately did the same to Milione.
“You crazy bitch! Get the hell away from me!”
Milione, of course, recoiled in disgust. In my opinion Milione Archibold was the crazier of the two, but she seemed completely unaware of her own double standards. That was typical of villains like her—generous toward their own faults, merciless toward everyone else’s.
Fortunately Lucy was an irrepressibly cheerful young woman. Undaunted by Milione’s hostility, she waved both hands wildly at me.
“Hyde, good morning too! Look! I caught this stag beetle this morning!”
She thrust an enormous, gleaming stag beetle toward my face. I wondered where on earth she had found one so large. Bowing my head politely, I replied,
“Good morning, Miss Lucy. I hope you are well.”
“Yep! I’ve got to go fetch water from the well now! See you all at breakfast!”
With a flurry of footsteps she dashed off toward the well. Watching her go, Milione clicked her tongue.
“What a complete lunatic. How old is she supposed to be, still playing with bugs like a little kid? Used to catch toads and centipedes, and she still hasn’t grown out of it! She’s totally insane!”
“Mili, why do you hate Lucy so much? Is there some reason or incident behind it? It doesn’t seem like it’s just because she catches bugs.”
“A reason? Oh, I’ve got one. When I was ten and my old man locked me up in this nunnery, that was the first time I met her. You know what she said to me?”
“What?”
“That I’d die before I turned fifteen! Who the hell says something like that to a stranger’s face?”
A truly horrific greeting, I had to admit. A tic? No—this sounded closer to schizophrenia. Back in seminary I’d done volunteer work and once met a schizophrenic woman who solemnly chanted “Crucio—” at me. For reference, “Crucio” is a curse of unbearable pain from a certain novel.
Milione pressed on.
“And that wasn’t all. She’d go on about how it would rain in the afternoon, or that survivors from a shipwreck would wash up on the island—all kinds of nonsense!”
Could those have been prophecies of ruin? After last night’s conversation with Midnar, the stories no longer sounded so trivial.
“And were any of them true?”
“True? Don’t make me laugh! I already passed the fifteenth birthday she said I’d die on! Do you know how scared I was on that birthday? And none of the other crap she spouted ever came true either!”
She claimed not to believe it, yet she had clearly been rattled enough to fear her fifteenth birthday. I probably would have felt the same.
“That crazy bitch just spouts garbage because she wants attention! That tic? Tourette’s? I bet that’s fake too! Just so people will look at her! That’s how orphans think!”
That’s how orphans think. The remark stung a little, yet it wasn’t entirely without merit. Among the brothers and sisters at the orphanage where I grew up, there had been kids who faked illnesses or told lies just to get the teachers’ attention. When you grow up starved of affection, your senses warp in all sorts of ways. It was a pitiful thing.
Psyche immediately bristled.
“Who on earth would fake an illness just for attention? Milione, no such person exists! Stop slandering Miss Lucy!”
The word “faking” had clearly struck a nerve. Psyche was perfect and kind in every way—except that she herself had once faked illness in her life. Milione only sneered at her.
“People like you who keep pitying her only encourage her crazier stunts. Remember the pig’s-blood writing? Sex is the meeting of cock and pussy. In the end it wasn’t Anemone’s doing, was it?”
She meant the words written in blood. Anemone, under torture, had confessed to being a witch, yet she had denied writing those words. She might have been lying… but if she wasn’t, then the real culprit was still at large. Lucy had pointed the finger at Anemone—no, looking back, she had never actually named Anemone for certain. She had only said she smelled ointment.
“That was Lucy’s handiwork. Just wait. Another incident will blow up soon enough.”
The moment Milione finished speaking—
“Kyaaaaaaah! The—the well water!!!”
A woman’s scream rang out from somewhere. We rushed over and found several women collapsed in shock in front of the well. What on earth had happened?
“Sister Nora! What’s wrong?”
Psyche asked. The freckled nun named Nora pointed a trembling finger at the well. When I peered inside, a dreadful sight met my eyes.
“Blood?”
The well water had turned a vivid, bloody red. While everyone else fell into panic, I noticed something floating on the surface.
“Bugs?”
They were dried insects—small, but numerous.
“These are cochineal bugs.”
Food coloring.