THE EXORCIST (but unfortunately for everyone involved, he is German about it)
Father Faust and the Limits of Professional Courtesy
The room was freezing.
Not poetically. Not atmospherically. Literally freezing.
Frost crawled across the windowpanes. Candles shuddered in their holders. The bed rattled with enough force to suggest either a powerful demonic presence or extremely poor craftsmanship.
At the foot of the bed stood Father Johann Georg Faust.
Black cassock, immaculate. White collar, severe. Ritual book in one hand, silver crucifix in the other, green eyes glinting behind his glasses with the exact expression of a man whose evening had already been wasted by incompetence.
On the bed lay the afflicted girl, thrashing under the blankets, hair wild, limbs jerking, the whole situation aggressively committed to spectacle.
Then the demon opened its mouth and roared:
“YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL.”
Silence.
Faust lowered the ritual book by half an inch.
Charles, who had somehow been allowed into the room and now stood near the wardrobe like a decorative emergency, blinked. “Mon Dieu.”
Vlad, leaning in the doorway with elegant skepticism, folded his arms. “Crude.”
Faust stared at the bed for a long moment.
Then, in a tone dry enough to preserve herbs:
“That is your opening line.”
The demon hissed. “PRIEST.”
“Yes,” said Faust. “Obviously. And you’ve chosen to begin with obscenity and maternal provocation. Lazy.”
The bed jolted so hard it slammed against the wall.
The girl’s head twisted with a violent crack.
Charles made a small, horrified noise.
Faust did not move.
“If you damage the host’s cervical spine before I finish, I will be annoyed.”
The demon snarled.
Faust looked at the angle of the girl’s neck and frowned. “And burdened with paperwork.”
The lights blew out.
Then flared back.
The girl lurched upright with that hideous, unnatural grin and snarled, “YOUR GOD HAS NO POWER HERE.”
Faust turned one page of the ritual text.
“Your scriptwriter has no power here either, apparently.”
The demon screamed. The candles guttered. A chair in the corner tipped over for emphasis.
Then the levitation began.
Slowly, dramatically, the girl rose from the mattress, rigid as a plank, hovering above the bed while the blankets slipped down around her legs.
Charles gasped. “She’s rising!”
Vlad tilted his head. “Predictable.”
Faust looked up once.
“Yes,” he said. “A suspension display. Intimidation by elevation. Very old-fashioned.”
The demon grinned wider. “MAKE ME FEAR.”
Faust’s expression did not change. “At the moment, I fear upholstery damage.”
That earned him another furious shriek.
The bedframe banged against the wall. The air stank of sulfur, cold iron, and theatrical overcommitment.
Faust stepped closer, cassock whispering over the floorboards. “Now listen carefully. I have tolerated the vulgarity, the furniture abuse, and your frankly adolescent devotion to pacing. But if you vomit on my cassock, I will become extremely unpleasant.”
A hush followed.
Vlad sighed. “It will vomit.”
Charles clutched his crucifix. “I knew it.”
The demon convulsed forward and unleashed a violent stream of green bile across the room.
Faust stepped one inch to the left.
The vomit missed him completely and struck the wall with a wet, apocalyptic splatter.
Faust turned his head slowly to inspect the damage.
Then he closed his eyes.
“…Uncivilized.”
The demon cackled with renewed confidence.
Then, swollen with infernal pride, it drew itself higher above the bed, voice splitting into something jagged and ancient.
“EGO TE MALEDICTUM DOMINUS INFERNI, OMNIS LUX TUA CADAT, ET NOMEN TUUM IN CINERE—”
Faust raised one finger.
“Stop.”
The room did not stop.
The bed continued to slam against the floor. The candles guttered. Something cracked in the walls.
Faust, however, had already disengaged.
“…What,” the demon snarled, “did you just say.”
“That is not a sentence,” Faust said flatly.
Silence hit the center of the room like a dropped weight.
The demon blinked.
Faust lowered the ritual book slowly, like a man realizing the experiment had been compromised beyond salvage.
“You began in the accusative,” he continued, tone cool and surgical, “then veered into melodrama and debris. The structure collapsed halfway through. Whatever followed was less a curse than a public breakdown.”
Charles made a small choking noise.
Vlad turned his head, shoulders shifting once.
The demon stared.
“I AM SPEAKING THE TONGUE OF HELL.”
“No,” Faust replied. “You are speaking the corpse of a language being puppeteered by a moron.”
The girl’s body lifted another foot off the bed.
Faust did not look up.
“Your syntax is unstable. Your case endings are inconsistent. And your pronunciation suggests you learned Latin from someone equally unqualified.”
He adjusted one cuff.
“Also, it is dominus inferni, not whatever that performance was supposed to be.”
The demon recoiled, genuinely offended. “I AM A PRINCE OF HELL.”
“And yet,” Faust said, already reaching for his satchel, “you conjugate like a panicked schoolboy.”
Charles doubled over.
The demon snarled, voice rising, trying again.
“EGO TE, SACERDOS, IN NOMINE TENEBRARUM, DAMNO IN AETERNUM, ET OSSA TUA—”
“No,” Faust said.
Not louder.
Just final.
He snapped the ritual book shut.
“I will not participate in this.”
“YOU CANNOT REFUSE ME,” the demon roared, thrashing hard enough to rattle the bed frame loose.
Faust bent to pick up his satchel, movements brisk, efficient, and entirely disengaged from the supernatural crisis still unfolding.
“I can,” he said. “And I am.”
“Because of the Latin?” Charles asked weakly.
Faust straightened, expression glacial.
“Because of the Latin.”
The demon stared in disbelief. “You are abandoning the rite over grammar.”
“I tolerated the obscenity,” Faust said, ticking it off with faint irritation. “The levitation was pedestrian. The vomiting was unnecessary but survivable.”
He slipped the crucifix back into its case.
“But this,” he said, “is academic negligence.”
Vlad covered his mouth fully now, shoulders shaking.
The demon tried again, louder, angrier, more desperate.
“EGO TE MALEDICTUM, SACERDOS STULTE, PER IGNES INFERNI ET UMBRAS MORTIS, PERDAM ET FRANGAM ET—”
Faust winced.
Actually winced.
“No,” he said. “That is worse. You’re just arranging nouns near each other and hoping terror fills the gaps.”
He turned toward the door.
“Father!” Charles hissed. “You can’t just leave it like this!”
Faust paused at the threshold.
Without turning, he said:
“Fetch Ed and Lorraine Warren.”
The demon blinked. “What.”
“This has passed beyond sacrament and into American improvisation,” Faust continued. “They seem better suited to your interpretive approach.”
The demon sputtered, genuinely insulted now.
“I AM NOT AN AMERICAN PROBLEM.”
Faust opened the door.
“Your Latin suggests otherwise.”
And with that, he stepped out, closing the door behind him with quiet, immaculate finality.
Inside, the bed slammed once more.
Then:
“…Was my pronunciation actually that bad?” the demon muttered.
Charles wiped tears from his eyes. “Catastrophic.”
