Seize the Night

knew you would laugh later, over a beer, on the beach, this round house fight with a chubby clergyman in a chintz-choked bedroom, a Looney Tunes collaboration between Chuck Jones and H. P. Lovecraft.
    But suddenly a positive outcome didn't seem as assured as it had a moment ago, and it wasn't amusing anymore, not slightly, not even darkly.
    His wrist joint was no longer like the wrist joint you study on a skeleton chart in a general-biology class, more like something you might see during advanced delirium tremens while drying out from a ten-bottle bourbon binge. The entire hand turned backward on the wrist, as no human hand could do, as if it operated on a ball joint, and the pincers snapped at my fingers, forcing me to let go before he had a chance to cut me.
    Although I felt as though I had been struggling with the priest long enough to justify having his name tattooed on my biceps, he had been in this pummeling frenzy for no more than half a minute before Roosevelt tore him off me. Our usually gentle animal communicator communicated to the animal inside Father Tom by lifting him off the floor and throwing him as if he were no heavier than the real Death, who is, after all, nothing but bones in a robe.
    Cassock skirt flaring, Father Tom crashed into the foot board of the bed, causing the pair of suicides to bounce as though with postmortem delight, springs singing under them. He toppled facedown to the floor, but instantly sprang to his feet with inhuman agility.
    No longer chanting about his faith, now grunting like a boar, spitting, making strange strangled sounds of rage, he seized a walnut chair that featured tie-on cushions in a daffodil print and slip-on daffodil arm protectors, and for an instant it seemed that he would use it to smash everything around him, but then he pitched it at Roosevelt.
    Roosevelt spun away just in time to take the chair across his broad back rather than in the face.
    From the television came the mellifluous and emotional voice of Elton John, with full orchestral and choral accompaniment, singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”
    Even as the chair was cracking against Roosevelt's back, Father Tom threw a vanity bench at Sasha.
    She didn't dodge quickly enough. The bench clipped her shoulder and knocked her over an ottoman.
    As the furniture struck Sasha, the possessed priest was already firing items off the vanity at me, at Bobby, at Roosevelt, and though bestial sounds continued to issue from him, he also snarled a few broken but familiar words, with a vicious glee, to punctuate his attack, a silver hairbrush, an oval hand mirror with mother-of-pearl frame and handle— “in the name of the Father” —a heavy silver clothes brush— “and the Son” —a few decorative enamel boxes— “and the Holy Spirit!” —A porcelain bud vase that hit Roosevelt so hard in the face he dropped as if he'd been smacked with a ball-peen hammer, a silver comb. A perfume bottle sailed past my head and shattered against a distant hulk of furniture, flooding the bedroom with the fragrance of attar of roses.
    During this barrage, ducking and dodging, protecting our faces with raised arms, Bobby and I tried to move toward Tom Eliot. I'm not sure why. Maybe we thought that together we could pin him down and hold the pitiable wretch until this seizure passed, until he regained his senses.
    If he had any senses left. Which seemed less likely by the second.
    When the priest fired the last of the clutter from the arsenal atop the vanity, Bobby rushed him, and I went after him, too, just a fraction of a second later.
    Instead of retreating, Father Tom launched himself forward, and when they collided, the priest lifted Bobby off the floor. He wasn't Father Tom at all anymore. He was something unnaturally powerful, with the strength and ferocity of a mad bull. He lunged across the bedroom, knocking over a chair, and slammed-jammed-crushed Bobby into a corner so hard that Bobby's shoulders should have snapped. Bobby cried out in pain, and the priest leaned into him, punching, clawing at his ribs, digging at him.
    Then I was in the melee, too, on Father Tom's back, slipping my right arm around his neck, gripping my right wrist with my left hand.
    Got him in a choke-hold. Jerked back on his head. Just about crushed his windpipe, trying to pull him away from Bobby.
    He retreated from Bobby, all right, but instead of dropping to his knees and capitulating, he seemed not to need the air that I was choking