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  • The Exorcist in Love
  • Tom French (bio)

Think of it as a love story like no other. What you are about to read can be described, without exaggeration, as an intragalactic, interstellar tale of reincarnated passion. A cosmic romance unfolding during the dusk of one age and the dawn of another. All of it taking place between real people. All set in Pasco County, Florida.

The basics: Boy meets girl. Girl is not like girls. Girl has unusual abilities and interests—this is putting it mildly—but opts for a conventional life, at least on the surface. Girl marries boy, has family, endeavors to be normal. Many years down the line, after multiple experiences purportedly involving demonic possession, lights in the sky and other phenomena not explained by science, girl abandons normal thing. Girl decides boy is wrong, all wrong, and that the forces of darkness have possibly replaced him with a copy of the husband. Girl divorces boy/dark copy of boy, descends into depression, and seeks solace in her career, which happens to be battling evil and channeling communications from what she believes to be a bevy of aliens. Alleged aliens, who apparently know a thing or two about the hell of modern romance, take pity on girl and set her up on a blind date with—

Wait. We’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The Exorcist Contemplates the Master Plan, Rides a Hurricane, and Defies Her Mother

When it started, the exorcist was still a child.

This was many years before she began talking to the dead and to those who were never alive. Before she figured out who she was and what she was and accepted that she did not fit. [End Page 321]

It was also before she took her wedding vows and brought five children into the world and then stepped off the cliff of the edge of her life, before she opened herself to visions, before she confronted the entities with “No” and then cast them back into eternal darkness. Before she took dictation from another corner of the galaxy, before she brought her son to visit his grave from another lifetime, before she had any idea what to think about the face at the window or the dream of the baby in the woods, before she devoted years to pondering the mysteries of the universe only to discover that there was nothing more than her own heart.

For Laura Knight, it started long before any of these things.

It started several decades ago, when she was growing up on the west coast of Florida. Even then, she lived on curiosity. That is where it really began: with Laura’s monstrous, breathtaking, epic curiosity. From early on, she refused to believe in randomness. She was sure there were cosmic blueprints, an underlying grid of meaning, and she wanted in on it. She devoured libraries of books. She immersed herself in particle physics. She pored over Freud and Jung. She studied Greek to aid her reading of the New Testament. She longed to understand the matrix of the tides, the language of the periodic table, the seductive progression of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

But understanding these things was not enough. Laura hungered not just to comprehend, but to experience.

So one day she climbed into the storm.

It was 1966, and Hurricane Alma was spinning cartwheels in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, Laura was fourteen years old and living with her family on a farm in northern Pasco County, outside Hudson, less than half a mile from the coast. She had heard on the radio that Alma was generating mountainous waves, and she wanted to behold their ferocity for herself. She asked her mother to take her to the beach, but the answer was no.

As Laura recalls it, she made her move late that afternoon. Her mother dozed off while working on a crossword puzzle—all these years later, Laura is still astonished that the woman actually labored over something so mundane in the middle of such a spectacular day—and Laura grabbed some binoculars and slipped outside. She was headed for her favorite tree, a towering camphor that she had often...

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