Read The Devil I Know: My Haunting Journey with Ronnie DeFeo and the True Story ofthe Amityville Murders for Free Online Page B

picture. Soon I felt my body leaving as a vision of the woman’s son, who had died from an overdose, visited me. His life had passed too quickly. I was falling now. I went to reach for the boy’s mother. The ground below my feet seemed to disappear. I felt as though I was suspended in air. The family members all got up from their chairs and stumbled into a protective huddle.
    My mother stepped between me and the family and commanded the entity, “Leave my child!” The candles lifted and smashed into the wall. I felt myself unable to respond as Jackie. Through the barrier of this other consciousness, I sensed my father trying to open the door of the séance room from the other side. It was splintering inward with his blows but not breaking. And I could feel my mother still standing before me, yelling commands.
    I sensed that I was no longer inside my house or the séance room. I had been transported to a darker place, where I was now trying to get my bearings. I saw a wasteland of smoking trees burned to the stumps. Yet it was cold, my breath visible in front of me. I sensed many pairs of eyes peering at me, blurred faces, sobbing. I couldn’t make a sound.
    From opposite ends of the billowing smoke, two men walked toward me. One wore a jumpsuit; the other, gleaming-eyed, wore a dark business suit and had his hair slicked back into a short ponytail. He handed the man in the jumpsuit a piece of paper and a pen. I could see their mouths move but couldn’t hear their words. As the man in the jumpsuit turned to walk away, the pen he’d used turned into a shotgun.
    I turned, and the bright-eyed man suddenly grabbed me by my throat. “Remember me,” he said. He threw me across the room, and I staggered several times trying to get up. Then he disappeared, and I was in a different room, where everything was upturned and broken. It was a different house, unfamiliar. I grabbed for a banister to right myself, but my hands only slipped off. A streak ofblood stained the banister where my hands had been. The walls began to shake, jarring pictures from their hooks and a chandelier from its mounting.
    As the crystals of the chandelier shattered against the floor, I heard laughter from the top of the steps. The man in the jumpsuit was there, yelling down to me.
    “You’re too late!” he shouted. “I’ll be back!”
    I felt the house was going to cave in. Gun blasts echoed off the walls. I covered my ears, then my eyes. When I opened my eyes again, I was back at the séance, crumpled on the floor. The members of the family were no longer there. They had all run out screaming.
    My father ran over and picked me up. I saw my mother standing in the corner of the room, a fevered expression on her face. She was rambling, spouting words I didn’t recognize. My father took me to my room and lay me down in bed.
    There was a room in our house that usually stayed padlocked. It was opened only when Mary felt an exorcism needed to be carried out. The room had a small pull-out bed, lots of religious relics, a large Sicilian Bible, a wooden chair whose straps made it look eerily like an electric chair, and a chalked circle around the bottom of the chair lined with candles, open jars, and mirrors.
    I wasn’t supposed to see the exorcisms at that age, but like any child, I was often too curious for my own good. I knew when they happened because the special door would be unlocked, the atmosphere in the house wouldchange, and my mother would sit alone for hours, preparing.
    One day, I sneaked over and watched. A man was brought in, along with a priest and the local doctor. The man was strapped to the chair, terror stamped on his face. My mother, calm but intense, began the rite, chanting, moaning, growing in fervor and volume. This lasted until the following morning, when she finally declared the spirit cast off. I wasn’t frightened by my mother’s behavior or by the presence of the priest and the doctor. What I still carry with me, however, is