A CASE OF POSSESSION

Emil Gresham was a middle-aged psychiatrist, single and without a direct family. He used to attend the religious services of the Church of the Nativity, whose parish priest often met his material needs, since Gresham had few clients, and the few he had, all ended up committing suicide. His colleagues considered him a jinx. He himself had tried repeatedly to commit suicide, but without success because he always tried to kill himself with pistol shots and he had terrible aim. But suddenly, one day his luck changed and it was because of something as trivial as the buying of an onion. And this happened as follows:
Envious of the Church of the Nativity’s success in attracting parishioners, the devil had opened a grocery store just in front of it. It’s not clear why the devil considers grocery stores to be the natural competition of churches. Demonology specialists usually attribute this wrong view to poor information about the work that goes on in churches. The point is that one day Emil Gresham entered the grocery and bought an onion. Paradoxically, later it was learned that he really didn’t like onions and that what he wanted to buy was a leek but he was too shy to ask for it. That was a turning point. Since then, his aptitude as a psychiatrist increased spectacularly and hence the influx of patients. People who entered his office crammed in a straitjacket, came out turned into wise men. After going through his practice, a guy who frequented Central Park dressed as a rabbit and stealing sandwiches and hot dogs became a personal adviser to President Roosevelt and a main ideologue of the ‘New Deal’.
However, all these successes would have a counterpart: Emil Gresham began to behave strangely. He adopted the voice of Mickey Mouse and one day, while he was attending to a hypochondriac patient, he began to turn his head 360 degrees at great speed until his head fell off his body. From then on, he acquired the habit of keeping his head in a locked cabinet. The head was the one that would talk with his patients from inside the cabinet while the body wandered randomly through the house hitting the walls because of the lack of vision. On one occasion, during one of these blind walks, he fell down the stairs and became unconscious. It was this incident that blew the whistle on him. (TO BE CONTINUED)