Unbound Spirits

by Christine Pope

  Then his gaze fell on the garden hose that was coiled neatly in the garden bed off to his right. They might not be able to reach the vials of holy water now trapped inside Audrey’s room, but here was a way for him to have an unlimited supply.

  Another screech from a demon, and he saw that Susan had picked up the garden gnome statue he’d seen the day before and was wielding it like a club. The statue smashed into a demon’s head and shattered the pointy hat the gnome had been wearing, but there was still enough left to make an effective weapon.

  No more time to waste, though.

  Michael lunged for the hose, grasping it with one hand while he reached for the spigot with the other and turned it on. At once, a steady stream of water flowed out, but it didn’t quite have the range he needed. Positioning his fingers over the end of the hose, he flattened the flow of water into an arc that shot out a good ten feet from where he stood. The water splashed Audrey and Susan, both of whom paused in their demon swatting to give him indignant looks.

  However, as soon as he began to speak, comprehension dawned on their faces — and terror entered the shrieks of the demons.

  “I exorcise thee, creature of water, in the name of God the Father almighty, in the name of Jesus Christ, his Son, our Lord, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Put to flight all the power of the enemy, along with his fallen angels, through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire!”

  The water sluiced through his fingers, newly purified, and where it struck the demons, they smoked like the hellfire they’d come from. Their wings turned to shreds, and one by one, they turned to ash and scattered on the wind, until they were all gone and the courtyard was quiet again.

  For a second, no one moved. Then Audrey put a hand to her damp hair and grinned, her gaze meeting Michael’s with a warmth that was impossible to ignore.

  “Well, that’s one way to kick a demon’s ass.”

  Chapter 13

  They walked all the covered portals of the Thunderbird B&B, explored all its rooms. And in every one, Audrey couldn’t see or feel a single trace of the demons that had once lurked here. Even so, this time she and Michael performed the smudging ceremony as they went, just to make sure that all evil was driven from the property and that it would be returned to its original light and hospitality.

  When they were done, and were taking the smudge stick and its bowl back to her room, she caught a glimpse of the B&B’s ghost standing near the fountain in the courtyard. A brisk breeze had sprung up, but neither her hair nor her dress moved. She raised a hand, as if in gratitude — or possibly farewell — and then vanished.

  “You saw her?” Michael said in a murmur, and Audrey nodded.

  “I did. I think she’s at peace again — or as much at peace as any ghost can be. I wonder who she is.”

  “We could probably figure it out. We’d just need to take some time to research the history of this place.”

  Maybe so, and yet Audrey thought it might be better to let the spirit remain anonymous. She clearly had no malice in her — in fact, if it hadn’t been for her help, the Project Demon Hunters crew might have had a more difficult time dispelling the demons who’d decided to infest the property.

  A shake of her head, and Audrey replied, “No, that’s all right. Frankly, I just want to go home.”

  Michael reached over and took her free hand, squeezing her fingers gently. “Soon. Less than eight hours from now, we’ll be back in Southern California.” A brief pause, as if he wasn’t quite sure how to phrase the question, and then he said, “But whose home? Yours isn’t really safe, is it?”

  She’d managed to push all that mess out of her head for a while, but now she realized she still had a lot of unfinished business to manage back in Glendora. “I — I’m not sure. I mean, we closed the portal in Whitcomb’s mansion, but he’s clearly free to come and go as he pleases, isn’t bound to any one place. The last time I was in my house, it looked as though it had been cleaned up, but maybe all that was just an illusion. I haven’t had a chance to go back and check.”

  “We’ll look together,” he said. “But still….”

  Audrey knew what he meant. “I’d rather go to your place first, just to be safe. Then we’ll see what’s going on at my house. If it still really is trashed, at some point I’m going to have to get started on cleaning it up.”

  “I know. First things first, though. We’ll get back and figure out what to do next. We have a few days, since we don’t need to be in Santa Barbara until Monday.”

  “‘Santa Barbara’?” she repeated, a little startled. “I thought that location had fallen through.”

  “So did I, but I guess Colin worked on them a little more, and now the shoot is back on.” Michael smiled down at her, a welcome warmth in those gold-lit gray eyes. “Much better than having to go back to Colorado, isn’t it?”

  “Definitely,” Audrey said, her tone vehement. It would be a long time before she felt it was safe to set foot in Colorado again. Not that anything of what had happened to her was the state’s fault, but she still thought it would be better to stay far, far away, just to be safe. After all, she had no idea where the Whitcomb-demon had gone, or where he’d turn up next.

  Hopefully, not back in Glendora. But he had no real reason to be there any longer, not with the portal destroyed and his former home now owned by strangers. He had to have gone somewhere else to regroup. With any luck, he’d be sufficiently distracted that he wouldn’t bother them until after they were done filming the show.

  They went into her room and put away the abalone shell and the smudge stick, both of them carefully wrapped in plastic. Everything else was already packed, and they’d made their farewells to a very grateful Jackie and Edgar Samuels. Susan and Daniela and Colin had left about twenty minutes earlier, all of them clearly eager to get back to home base as well.

  Still, Audrey couldn’t help feeling a small pang as she got into Michael’s rented SUV and they headed toward the freeway. Even though the demons had been vanquished and the property was safe enough now, she couldn’t quite rid herself of a nagging feeling, as if they’d left something unfinished.

  “What’s the matter?” Michael asked as he pointed the Grand Cherokee north on the 10 Freeway. “That was a job well done. And you and Susan were pretty magnificent, fighting those demons. You should’ve seen the grin on Colin’s face as he was getting all that on his phone.”

  “I’m not really sure,” she confessed. “Just that something feels…off. You’re right — the Thunderbird B&B seems as though it will be fine, and I can’t really think of what else we might have done, but….”

  He lifted his right hand from the steering wheel and laid it on top of hers. Just for a few seconds, but it helped to feel his touch. “You’ve had a harrowing few days. I’m not surprised that you feel a little off balance.”

  Audrey nodded, but she still had this niggling sensation inside her, as if her newly awakened spider sense — or whatever you wanted to call it — had picked up on something her conscious mind couldn’t quite comprehend. Well, just like a word that evaded memory or a name that didn’t immediately surface, there was no use in trying to force the situation. Either she’d figure it out, or she’d realize that she really was just having the heebie-jeebies for no particular reason. Right now, she was still trying to get used to these newfound powers of hers, and it wasn’t always easy to tell what was a true psychic twinge and what was just regular garden-variety anxiety.

  Leaning her head back against her seat, she said, “That’s probably all it is. And it’ll be good to have some time off before we have to go up to Santa Barbara. What’s the story on that one?”

  “Another old house,” Michael replied. “It has a long history of paranormal activity — the daughter of the original builder committed suicide there when her parents stopped her from eloping with the son of their head gardener.”

  “Lovely.”

  He did
n’t exactly smile, but she noted a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “In general, happy houses are not the ones that are haunted, or that become infested. Negative energy draws negative energy.”

  “So we’re dealing with another haunting?” Once again, Audrey thought of the spirit who lingered in the Thunderbird B&B. She couldn’t have been more than twenty or twenty-one when she died.

  “Not exactly. Or rather, the ghosts in Langdon House are well documented, and were disclosed to the current owners when they bought the place. California law.” His gaze flickered sideways at her. “But I suppose you already knew that.”

  “Yes,” Audrey said. Not every state had that sort of law on the books, but in California, buyers had to be informed if a property they were interested in had any kind of documented spirit activity. “The ghost clause,” her father had once jokingly called it when they were talking about their own hundred-year-old house and its complete lack of any kind of ghosts or spirits. “So what’s the story?”

  “The house’s present owners have been there for five years. During that time, their daughter has gotten increasingly obsessed with black metal music and the occult. At first, they didn’t try to intervene, because they thought she was just going through an exploratory phase, was just being a teenager. But things have gotten worse.”

  This all sounded far too familiar to Audrey, and not in a way she appreciated. Frowning slightly, she said, “I hope you’re not trying to imply that the kind of music she listens to has pushed her over to the ‘dark side,’ or whatever you want to call it.”

  “No.” His tone was even, and he didn’t look away from the road. “I was a punk rock kid during high school, and look at me now.”

  Audrey’s eyebrows lifted. “Seriously? I would never have guessed.” Mostly because his over-long hair seemed such a part of him that it was hard to imagine it buzzed short or worn in a mohawk or something.

  “Hardcore. My hair was dyed blue for a while. You can imagine how much my parents appreciated that.” Now he chuckled a little, although his expression grew sober again soon enough. “Anyway, Kayla’s parents made sure to express to Colin and me that they didn’t believe the music had anything to do with it. They were more worried about the books she was reading. Sometimes her mother could hear her reading the rituals aloud in her bedroom, which of course is a very dangerous thing to do.”

  “Like playing with a Ouija board,” Audrey said, thinking of the one they’d found in the Thunderbird B&B’s storage shed.

  “Except even worse. Ariel, Kayla’s mother, said she’s heard strange noises inside the walls, like something’s moving around in there.”

  “Rats?”

  “She called an exterminator. They couldn’t find anything. One night, she saw a black form moving down the upstairs hallway, but Kayla was in bed, and her son Aidan was also asleep.” Michael’s fingers tapped on the steering wheel, as if the movement somehow helped him remember all the details of the case. “Actually, it’s been so bad this past week that Ariel’s husband Luke has moved out and taken Aidan with him. Kayla wouldn’t leave the house, basically threw a hysterical fit when her parents tried to get her to go with them to a hotel. So Ariel and Kayla are there alone. I think that’s why Ariel got in touch again — she really didn’t want the publicity of being on the show, but now she’s willing to do it because she’s afraid for her daughter.”

  Audrey could understand that. Raising children was hard enough. Trying to deal with one who might or might not have called a demon into the house put matters on an entirely different level. “The situation does sound pretty dire. Just please tell me that we don’t have to actually stay in the house this time. I don’t feel like having to dodge flying crosses when I’m trying to sleep…or do other things.”

  This time he smiled for real, eyes crinkling at the corners behind the sunglasses he wore. “No, I put my foot down on that one as well. We have rooms at the La Quinta Inn in Santa Barbara — nice and normal and definitely not haunted.”

  “Well, thank God for that.” She was quiet for a moment, watching the early spring desert landscape — surprisingly green here, just north of Tucson — pass by outside the car window. However, her thoughts were far away, with a troubled girl in a California coastal city. “Do you think you’ll have to do an exorcism?”

  Michael shot her a surprised glance. “I’m surprised a psychologist would suggest something like that.”

  “I’m not suggesting. I’m asking what you plan to do.”

  He didn’t reply at first, although once again his fingers tapped against the steering wheel, indicating that he wrestled with an inner conundrum. At length he said, “Until I meet her and see how bad the situation is, I’m not going to say yes or no. When I talked to Ariel, I told her that it might be a possibility, just to see whether she would be open to the suggestion. The family isn’t religious in any way, so at least Ariel said she would be all right with me handling the duties if it turns out to be necessary.”

  “Have you ever performed an exorcism?” Audrey asked, genuinely curious. As a psychologist, she knew she should be fundamentally opposed to the practice, and yet there were accounts that seemed to show that an exorcism had worked, even if it had only done so via the placebo effect.

  Well, that was what she’d once thought. Now she knew that demons were real, and so exorcisms by extension were a necessary evil. At least they were a rite of last resort, one undertaken only when all other options had been ruled out and it was clear that mental illness wasn’t involved.

  Michael expelled a breath, then reached for one of the bottles of water that sat in the center console cupholders and took a drink. Then he said, “I assisted with one once. It was…grueling.”

  “Did it work?”

  “It seemed to, yes. The man I worked with — a Unitarian minister — gave me updates on the subject for a year afterward, said he appeared to have made a complete recovery.”

  This revelation comforted Audrey somewhat. If they had to take such a drastic step, Michael had some experience in the matter and wouldn’t be going in completely blind. Spurred on by something he’d said, she asked, “You’re a Unitarian minister, too, right?”

  “I was ordained in that church, yes, but I don’t practice.”

  Obviously, because instead he was busy giving lectures on the supernatural and chasing down demons. Somehow, that thought seemed uncharitable, and she pushed it away. Good thing he was an ordained minister, or that encounter with the demons at the bed-and-breakfast might have gone very differently. “Was it because of what happened with your brother?”

  He didn’t bother to ask her what she meant. Voice level, he replied, “If you mean because I realized he’d been possessed by a demon, well…yes. At the risk of sounding corny, I needed to be able to fight on the side of the light. We weren’t all that religious a family, either, and the Unitarian church appealed to me for a lot of reasons. Partway through my education, though, I realized I would never be a minister with a congregation. Getting ordained was just part of my toolbox, so to speak.”

  It seemed that he’d had a goal early on in the process. Audrey knew she couldn’t have said that for herself, had bounced from history to English lit in college before she settled on psychology as her major. Why, she really couldn’t have said for sure, except that she’d spent so much time seeing shrinks after her parents were murdered, she felt as though she was already pretty familiar with the field. The jump from psychology to parapsychology might have seemed strange to an outsider, but the strange, paranormal events that had occurred in her life told her there was more to this world — or at least the human mind — than met the eye.

  He glanced over at her again. “I hope you don’t mind getting involved with a minister. Some people have hang-ups about that sort of thing.”

  “Are we involved?”

  A lift of his eyebrows. “You tell me.”

  For a few seconds, she hesitated, not sure of the best way to respond. “We’re doing s
omething. I haven’t quite figured out what it is, though. But, either way, let me set your mind at ease — I don’t have any problem getting ‘involved’ with you. It’s not like Unitarian ministers have to take a vow of celibacy or anything, right?”

  “God no,” he replied, so emphatically that they both laughed outright, although Audrey wasn’t sure whether she would have been able to explain to an outside observer exactly what she found so funny.

  After that, they drove in silence for a while, but it was a friendly sort of quiet, one where they both could take comfort in the other person’s company and yet not feel any need to chatter about empty topics. Once again, Audrey could only smile inwardly at how easy she felt around Michael, and how she would never have believed such a thing was possible if someone had suggested it to her a few days earlier.

  They reached the outskirts of Phoenix’s sprawling suburbs and kept on driving, having agreed that they’d stop someplace less crowded for an early dinner, maybe Quartzsite or Blythe, near the Arizona/California border. And that was exactly what they did, stopping at a hole in the wall called the Bad Boys Café, where they dined on French dips and Reubens and got back on the road, comfortably full, in less than a half hour.

  There was still the stretch of California desert to get through, and the sprawl of the Inland Empire as well, but eventually they were back in places Audrey knew, Redlands and San Bernardino, and then Rancho Cucamonga as they jogged north to get on the 210 westbound and close up the short distance that remained until they got to Pasadena.

  As they passed Glendora and the Grand Avenue exit, Audrey couldn’t quite help but send it a longing glance, knowing they were passing by her home without even pausing. Michael seemed to sense her distress, because he said, “We’ll go back there first thing tomorrow.”

  “I know,” she replied automatically. “And it’s fine. I told you I wanted to go to your place. It just feels…strange.”

  He nodded. “I can see why you must feel sort of adrift. But we haven’t heard anything from Rosemary, which I assume must be good news. She said she’d be in contact if anything happened in Glendora that felt odd.”