more G2H tour crafts for tumblr to feast your eyes upon… my dress. original sketch/proof of concept from well over a year ago -> wearing it to the manchester gig. dyed the dress, stenciled the design, made iron-on pieces for everything, finished edges + added detail with fabric paint. making 1000 sorority letters t-shirts in undergrad prepared me for this! zero HQ pics of it on me, somehow, and all the ones i do have my left boob looks ridiculous. but wouldn’t trade it for the world and am obsessed with it. crossing my fingers i get to trot it back out for some US shows this year…
set post demonology, premise is prentiss is actually possessed at the end of it, inspired by the exorcist; [pt 1 (prologue) | pt 2 (prentiss pov)]
reid pov, first of a 2 parter. jumping forward here to possession manifesting in bau.
“You? You? You?” The voice was terrible. It rasped and pitched, and wound around him; it seemed to emanate from everywhere but the quaking form before him.
From the years 1977 to 1979 Janet Hodgson produced a convincingly sepulchral voice, likely from the vestibular folds of her larynx, as evidence of poltergeist activity … Like kargyraa or heavy metal growls … the effect is guttural, ruptive vocality, the simultaneous production of two vocal pitches, and no lasting dysphonia …
He thought if he told himself this enough it would take on the feeling of truth. Even less plausible was how she knew he was there, staring her down through the reciprocal mirror: profiling only looked clairvoyant to those who weren't in the know. It relied on patterns and order. Everything was disorder now, unknowable: he feinted right and she jolted with him, leaned mockingly forward when he stepped back.
That almost scans, he thought miserably. It had a sense of meter because of how it racked through her body, stressed syllables spasming along her outstretched arms and upturned palms. He thought back, god, years now, to Emily poking his cheek on the jet, her characteristic mischievous dryness: so lifelike. Demons, he thought, were supposed to speak out loud the things you couldn't speak, or hadn't: dark secrets, unconfessed sins. This sounded more like the beginning of a half-baked profile. Married to the work, as it were; goes home alone; lives an empty, rationalistic life, finds only minor, smug joys in it. And so it would go. Mommy issues, daddy issues, the good doctor a bundle of half-exposed neuroses waiting, ripe, for Emily’s bare teeth to plunge into them.
“You're a wicked piece of shit! You want your father dead, you want your mother dead— are you pretending this isn't real so you can pretend you're not full of rotten SIN?”
He said nothing. The ideas didn't hurt, not really— in some dark night of the soul he knew he might one day walk through, he might well level the same accusations at himself. But there was a sting to it, the sting of a furtive, peripheral glance, an appraising, judging eye. A whisper in the hallway, its syllables blurred but still discernible as his own name.
Demonic possession, he thought, was a diagnosis borne of desperate, needful hope. It was the hope that the ones you loved could not see you as you were, and were empty of the vastness of cruelty in the world. A mother thought, I should never fear my child, Q.E.D. ... Its corollary hope was that they were only right because of cosmic intervention. Without demonic intervention, the world you confronted was arbitrary and malicious: right under the surface of things, welling up through fractures and fissures, was meaninglessness, which was the same as evil.
Emily stood up, and her head tilted as she regarded the reciprocal mirror which— again— she should not have been able to see through. And it tilted further, degree by degree, to an angle that seemed to teeter on the edge of biological possibility. Her arms trembled, shoulders juddering up and down, like she might explode into a thousand pieces of defective clockwork. Like there was a second ghost in the machine, jamming it. She stepped forward in slow, odd lurches, until she was inches away. He fought the urge to take another step back. The lines of her face seemed alien, even as they were so painfully familiar. She was deathly pallid, as if carved from stone, an impression reinforced by the unnatural stillness of her usually animated features. When she spoke, nothing moved but her mouth.
“Ah. I see. Too smart for this, aren't you, Doctor? It's just a profile, isn't it, Doctor? Just vocal effects, just a collection of half-remembered facts and deductions, just psychosis circling the drain of this vapid little mind's worst suspicions. If that's true, you win, boy. Something very nasty and small in you is vindicated, isn't it?”
He said nothing.
Two knuckles of Emily’s right hand rapped on the glass. “I KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE…”
The sound of heels slapping irregularly on linoleum interrupted the impasse. Penelope, winded, flushed red with panic and exertion, holding in her hand a thin binder covered in—
“Is that duct tape?”
“Ye— yeah. Story for later, if there is a later. It's the 50s Roman Ritual, Latin and English—”
Reid took it from her hand, and leafed through it. It was only the exorcism ritual, printed in lurid black and red on printer paper, with a series of early modern-looking woodcuts, dubiously demonic, interspersed throughout. The duct tape binder was also red and black, like the ritual needed a mall goth twist. He knew, roughly, the structure, and less roughly the symptoms— sudden fluency in unknown languages, impossible knowledge and clairvoyance, preternatural faculties of mind and body, and then, plurima concurrunt, they built a case. The problem was that the symptoms are highly publicized. If one were to, say, experience a delusion of possession, then the only limit to its believability would be the psychotic's own faculties, and knowledge of the appropriate literature. A vivid imagination could do a lot with The Exorcist alone. Emily's mind, he thought miserably, had probably more faculties at its disposal than religious mania typically got to play with.
“Why do you have this? Is it legitimate?” He asked because it felt like an appropriate question. It was unimaginable that it mattered. Vatican authorization would, but that had never been an option, and scarcely worth thinking. Otherwise the rite was largely impromptu and malleable, its efficacy less dependent on particular ritual structures than on the personal and institutional support of the exorcist. He remembered Father Silvano performing the rite in English, as if the possessed themselves were listening. Some concession to the families, maybe, or guilty refusal to profane the more traditional form of the rite with murder.
Maybe those racking shudders moving Emily's shoulder blades like tectonic plates were stifled demonic laughter. Again, he rehearsed the logic: it's psychogenic nonepileptic seizures. It's stress. It's the setting; like Anneliese Michel, the confluence of psychological crisis and Catholic belief breeding the delusion of possession. Hysterical strength. What Freud would call the death drive. Emily's breadth of knowledge to deploy; profiles, languages, past cases— and anything else they didn't know about her. The Catholic upbringing never came up before this. He wasn't even sure she did believe, but nonbelief had never been a true barrier to religious mania.
“Some of my witchier friends were into that dark hand path stuff? I— um— I don't know how accurate it is, I think it was pre-Vatican II because extra Catholic? I only had it here because Kevin was— well, I already said later, it doesn't matter. It's just the only thing I have on hand that I think could be useful at all—”
Reid nodded grimly. The wildness in Garcia's eyes was no doubt a mirror of his own— here they were, in a place beyond order, following whatever logic they could scavenge. Later, he knew, he would feel that he hadn't been himself during all this, and that none of them had. The idiom was acting like a man possessed. The idea of it was manic excitement, but they were all running cool. Garcia's shoulders were set with a grim determination he knew he'd never seen in her before. She was flushed and skittering through the halls, speaking out of tempo with her racing mind, but her bearing was solid, her posture almost regal. The same must have been true for him— the lancing tension in his neck was also keeping it higher. His hands were clammy but they were still.
We're rising to the challenge, he thought, and immediately rejected the idea. It was fairytale nonsense, from the same universe of fictionality as the idea of demonic possession.
Campbell, he reminded himself, has been rightly discredited.
But inexorably in his mind, parallel to that knowledge, was the structure of the hero's journey. This their supernatural assistance (divine?); to come, the first threshold. The door to the interview room seemed to burn in his mind.
Rarely did he have to remind himself so urgently to be rational. The hero's journey was a trial of the self; it brought the hero to rights with his cosmic system. That evil was vanquished and order restored was largely secondary. It's bullshit. You're being stupid.
Garcia spoke, breaking his mounting frustration. "Is anyone— you know. Seriously going to do an exorcism?”
"No, I— no. Rossi’s getting her a doctor. We can't feed the delusion.”
Penelope rested a shaking, clammy hand on his wrist. "Right. Yeah. Um— what’s going to happen?”
Emily suddenly and dreadfully stilled.
Coarse and hollow, the voice came again: “Come up, Reid! Come up, you fearful jesuit!”
“What?”
Reid blinked, furrowed his eyes. There— on Emily’s bookshelf. Under a tall, cream-colored candle in amber glass: Joyce’s Ulysses. A copy of Dubliners leaning against the candle, its spine creased, colors chipped off.
