Melchor Valverde stepped into the apartment already knowing he could not save her.
It wasn't prophetic certainty, nor divine decree. It was simply experience—complex, brutal—and his hard-won ability to recognize his own limitations.
He had learned that evil, once rooted, is not exorcised; it is transferred.
Sometimes it mutates.
It changes to survive, to destroy those who dared to corner it.
Sometimes it slips into a withered old man whose body already craves the grave.
At times, even into a rat, carrying it toward an impossible escape through the sewers.
Once, the damned thing lodged itself in the unborn daughter of someone he tried to help. Goddamn—this work crushes the soul.
A fucking demon in a tiny body before it even had the chance to breathe.
And other times—like now, most often—it settled inside an eleven-year-old girl, turning her into a cage without bars, without exit, with just enough weight to shatter everyone around her.
"Are you alone?" asked the mother, lips cracked and bleeding, more fissured than broken.
Her voice was that of a woman who no longer prays, but still believes.
There are no atheists in the trenches, thought Father Melchor.
"No," he said as he entered. "I am never alone." He added, reflective. Then, with something resembling peace, he gave her the old reliable: "I am with God."
The apartment reeked of damp.
Old, moldy clothes piled on foul-smelling couches covered in plastic. The wood of the few remaining sturdy pieces of furniture rotting. Gelatinous soup in a burnt pot creeping toward freedom in mucous crusts.
A muted newscast flickered on the television in the back, the image vanishing and returning like a promise of love refusing to surrender to the treacherous routine of human feelings. If anyone had been listening, perhaps they would have heard a reporter describing savage new attacks on animals in a Japanese zoo. But how could any of that matter to the priest when here, tied with laundry cords to a white chair, was the girl—Fátima.
"Am I being punished?"
"She's burning with fever," whispered the mother, as though that were the worst of it.
Valverde noticed the sweat dripping from the child's skin.
She smiled at him.
He ignored her.
He ignored them both.
He knew that anyone who witnessed an exorcism without spiritual preparation ended up with their mind turned into a sack of shattered glass: you look into it, and you cut yourself.
He told the mother to leave.
"What if she needs help?"
"Do you have a rosary?"
"Yes."
"Pray it outside."
"Do you think it will help?"
"No."
She trembled as she disappeared down the hall.
Melchor knelt.
He did not pray.
He drew out his knife, his hands cold and clammy. It wasn't part of the Vatican protocol, of course. But he no longer belonged to the Vatican. Not even to the Church. He had been excommunicated after the Tijuana case, when a boy ended up blind and the bishop lost three fingers. Since then, he had worked alone—without permission, without a safety net. A diver without oxygen in the murky waters of the soul.
"Fátima," he said, "if you're still in there, give me a sign."
The girl spat clotted blood at him. And in spitting, she spoke—but not with her own voice.
"Melchorus. You are not worthy. You are not pure."
"I know."
He tightened the knife in his left hand. With his right, he drew an inverted cross in the air. Not as blasphemy, but as an anchor: if everything is reversed, the symbol must be too.
Fátima screamed. Not mere screams, but deranged howls. Her eyes rolled entirely white. She bit into her tongue and split it down the middle. The chair rattled violently beneath her.
"I command you, in the Ineffable Name, come out of her!"
The ceiling lamp exploded. The TV went dark.
This isn't going to work…
A scream from the mother clawed at the walls, reminding him they were not alone. That no one is ever truly alone. There was nothing he could do—and at this point, nothing he tried would help. If anything, it would make things worse.
He glanced at his tools.
Shrugged.
Wanted to cry.
The girl began laughing at him, mocking.
But the priest could not move. Not because he was paralyzed by otherworldly force—if he left now, he would lose what little faith he still clung to. The breath he needed to keep forcing oxygen into his lungs.
"She asked me in, Melchor. She prayed to me. Begged me. Implored me to enter. And so here I am."
It was true. He could feel it.
Fátima had opened the door. Not out of malice, but out of hunger. Hunger for attention. Hunger for affection. Hunger for anything that might rescue her from abandonment. Like so many other girls.
"Her mother's friends were the only ones who noticed her. They got her mother drunk, and then gave Fati all their attention."
Fucking bastards, thought Father Valverde.
"Do you know what it's like to be eleven, invisible to your mom, yet a blazing beacon for her friends, Father?"
Melchor lowered his head.
"Yes."
"Well, now she's giving me her full attention, isn't she, Mommy?!"
"Exorcizo te," whispered the priest, but with all his strength, "immundissime spiritus, omnis incursio adversarii, omnis phantasma, omnis legio, in nomine Domini nostri Jesu Christi."
And in that moment, the girl broke.
The sound was inhuman, like dry branches snapping.
A crack of bones.
Crash.
Blood streamed from her nose, from her tear ducts, from between her legs convulsing in weakening spasms. She seized once more. Then blood seeped shyly from her ears, before gushing from her mouth.
The priest froze.
The spirit was gone.
Of course.
But not the right way. It had shredded the child's body on its way out.
Melchor stepped closer, pressed two fingers to her neck.
Nothing.
He pried open her eyelids.
Empty.
As if her soul had been sucked out in that final shudder.
"I'm sorry," he said. Not to God. To the girl.
In the background, the mother shrieked. She ran toward him, shoved him aside, collapsed at her daughter's limp body.
"You killed her! You killed my daughter!"
Melchor said nothing. He gathered his bag, his knife, his broken faith, the money on the table, and fled, muttering:
"Ex verbo, discede. In silentio, moreris."
He descended the stairs as though fleeing an invisible fire, while the city outside waited—dark, immense, indifferent to his defeat.
And from the shadows of a park, as he watched police swarm the building, stripping off his collar and folding the black cassock until he was just a man in T-shirt and jeans, he answered the phone that had been ringing nonstop.
"Father, is that you?"