Diabolus Read Free Page B

the harmful aspects, such as cutting limbs open to let the evil spirits out, or submerging the patient in water to drown the demon. This is the twenty-first century, after all , he’d scoffed to one of the journalists who had brought the subject up, and less than a decade until the twenty-second . Both men knew that most of the techniques from a thousand years ago were ignorant, brutal, and completely unnecessary.
    Near the end of his brilliant first exorcism act, he’d pressed a key on his Biblet, activating an implant in the girl’s head that had been surgically added during the initial medical exam to determine her ailments. Since the Bishop traveled with a small contingent of assistants from the Vatican, there was no chance of the truth getting out, as the patients were always examined by the Vatican doctors, who were under the same orders from Pope Leo as Salvatore. The implant released a sedative, and the girl immediately stopped shrieking and passed out. Salvatore sighed in relief. His ranting, raving, shouting, commanding, and screaming while flicking holy water on her for an hour had made her screams of fear worse than the trauma she suffered from, which in turn made her Tourette's more volatile than normal.
    While she was asleep, the room was evacuated so that she could “gain her rest and begin her recovery.” While the bishop talked with holocasters, reporters, and local faithful including priests and other bishops from the area, his medical team was in the room administering the proper treatments to the girl. When the girl woke the next morning, she had improved so much that it seemed to be a miracle to those who had witnessed it. Within his first three exorcisms, it started to seem a miracle to more than just the witnesses. Salvatore’s name and his accomplishments exploded onto the front pages of all the network news sites, holovision news programs, and more importantly, the social networks that dominated the human addiction to technology.
     
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    Everything went wrong for Bishop Salvatore Domenico Antonelli in March of 2096. He’d done his best to keep from becoming too bold in his exploits, always preferring to talk about the Church’s involvement in the ordinary, and the medical achievements that those he visited succeeded from. He downplayed the exorcisms as well as he could, and when cornered, he simply told the story from his point of view as a man of the cloth. He was doing God’s work, and he was only a vessel, not the actual power that drove whatever darkness from the poor unfortunates that he’d had to administer the exorcisms to.
    Then came Joanna Marchand. The Toronto diocese had suggested Bishop Antonelli take up her case, and Antonelli agreed. Ms. Marchand suffered from severe schizophrenia, Post Traumatic Emotional Detachment, epilepsy, and the beginning stages of multiple sclerosis. All easily treatable if only she’d had the credits for it. As she was a disabled prostitute from the Downland section of Toronto, one of the worst ghettos to spring up in the last twenty years, she couldn’t afford the private care, and the Canadian Primary Health System claimed she qualified for no benefits because of her murky immigration status from America.
    Salvatore should have known it was too good to be true, but he’d fallen into the belief of his lie so completely that he almost imagined that the demons he had been driving out were real. Pope Leo had elevated him to become a Cardinal by the end of summer, and because of Bishop Antonelli, the ranks of Roman Catholicism had swelled from just under two hundred million when he’d started four years ago, to almost seven hundred million as of the first of January. Salvatore was humble inside still, thankful for his ability to help grow the church, his doubt and unease at the ‘scheme’ long burned away from his memory by his success.
    He performed admirably, as was expected after four years of refining the exorcism into an