by Peter Nealen
The big dog padded down the hallway, his lambent golden eyes fixed on Paul. The young man shrank back from the dog, fear written all over his features, but ran up against the wall at the end of the hall.
Magnus sniffed around the room, looked at me as if to shrug, and then turned his baleful stare back on Paul. He wasn’t growling, but there was still nothing friendly in his regard.
“Ray, can you take Paul with you and get him some chow?” I asked. I wanted to discuss this with Father Ignacio, preferably out of earshot of our guest. It didn’t mean that we’d be out of earshot of whatever was screaming or whispering in his ear, but at least we’d lessen the tension a little bit. And I really didn’t want Paul, who was already tired, scared, and flighty, to hear what I was going to say.
Ray just nodded, and held out a plate-sized hand to Paul, to usher him out to the kitchen. Magnus padded out past Ray, as if to give Paul a clear path without having to ease past him, but stopped at the doorway and watched him. I got the distinct impression that Magnus didn’t want to let Paul out of his sight, which only exacerbated my own concerns.
Once they were gone, and we had some modicum of privacy, I turned to Father. He was watching the doorway they had disappeared through, a deep frown furrowing his already craggy features.
“What does it mean that he’s hearing voices that we can’t?” I asked. “And does it have anything to do with what happened last night?”
“Nothing good, and almost certainly, in that order,” he answered.
“I thought the defenses here were better than usual,” Eryn said, stepping close by my side.
“They are,” Father Ignacio said. “The house and grounds are blessed on a yearly basis. But the fiends of the Abyss are slippery, and sometimes all it takes is the right conduit walking in the door.”
“You think that Paul brought something with him,” I said. It wasn’t a question.
“Wittingly or not, yes,” he replied bluntly.
“So, what do we do?” Eryn asked. “Do we need to perform another exorcism?”
But Father Ignacio shook his head. “I doubt he’s actually possessed,” he said, “or if he is, it’s by something far subtler than usual.”
“Which means big, bad medicine,” I noted. I had to agree with him. Paul didn’t fit the mold of the possessed that I’d seen. Anything inside him that was successfully hiding had to be extremely subtle, patient, and dangerous.
We’re talking “Lord of the Abyss” dangerous.
“Indeed,” Father rumbled. “But, like I said, I don’t think that he’s actually possessed. If he was, I suspect that the commotion last night would have been centered on his room. He’s marked, though, almost certainly. Sometimes that’s all it takes.” He rubbed his chin, his callouses rasping against his stubble. “I’ll perform a stronger blessing,” he said, after a moment. “Rather like last night’s, but longer and more explicit. It should, hopefully, drive off whatever followed him here.”
“We’ll see if we can’t get him a little more calmed down, and maybe see if we can find out more about what it might be while you get ready,” I said.
“Just be careful,” he cautioned. “I know I don’t really need to say this, but if whatever we’re dealing with is as subtle as it seems to be, trying to find out too much about it might just be a very, very bad idea. Remember, these things are slippery, and they’re consummate liars.”
I just nodded. He was right. That was a risk we all faced when dealing with the demonic. The Otherworld presented its own hazards, but demons were vastly more cunning than any human or Otherworld creature ever has been or ever will be.
Imagine a creature as old as time, unbound by the flesh; a creature of pure intellect. It knows more, by nature, than you ever will. Now imagine that this creature has gone bad. That it has drowned its nature in hate and deceit. For all intents and purposes, there is nothing left of it except hatred and lies.
Yet remember, it still possesses all its knowledge. Which means that it knows you. And it hates you. It hates you more than you can comprehend, because you simply cannot comprehend this thing, which, like I said, isn’t bound by the physical. It doesn’t get hungry, or tired, nor does it ever weary of hating you. It hates everyone and everything. Even itself.
Many have scoffed at warnings not to delve too deeply into certain areas of knowledge. Knowledge is good, they insist, and to forbid knowledge is just a sign that whoever is issuing the warning only wants people to stay ignorant, placid, and controllable. But some knowledge is a trap.
The demons are liars, supernaturally good ones. To delve too deeply into lore surrounding them is to risk getting sucked in by their lies. And the end result of believing the demons is self-destruction and damnation. Always.
I knew this, and Father Ignacio knew that I knew it. But some warnings can never be repeated too many times, so I simply nodded my understanding, trying to assure him that we’d step very carefully.
He disappeared back into his room. Eryn and I headed out into the common room.
Paul was sitting at the table, a plate of bacon and eggs in front of him, picking at it, while Ray sat across the table from him. Kolya was sitting by the window, watching down the road, and Magnus was sitting up next to Ray. Magnus was so big that his head easily topped the table, and he was watching Paul intently.
No wonder the guy was just picking at his food.
I sat down next to Ray, and Eryn grabbed a chair across from me, next to Paul. He looked sideways at her, and then hunched over his plate again. He didn’t even glance at me.
“Paul,” I began, “I know you had a rough night. Frankly, all of us did, though it sounds like you had it worse than the rest of us. But we need to know everything you can recall from your experience in that house. Because I think you’d agree that whatever happened there isn’t over.”
At first, he didn’t seem to have heard me; he kept his head bowed, shoving his eggs around his plate with his fork. When he did respond, it was a low murmur that I couldn’t make out.
“I couldn’t quite catch that, Paul,” I said. Ray was watching him carefully, and with a glance over his shoulder I saw Kolya was still sitting by the front window, but with his eyes were now fixed on Paul’s back.
“I already told you everything I remember,” Paul said, his voice still muted, just loud enough to make out his words. “That’s all.”
Which was probably the truth. Traumatic memories can get jumbled, if only because of the adrenaline dump into the brain while the events were going on. I still had to take time to piece together the events after a particularly hairy encounter, usually with the help of anyone else who had been there at the time.
But it wasn’t going to be enough. “Have you ever encountered something like this before?” I asked him.
He looked even more uncomfortable. He didn’t look up, but kept staring at his plate. He shrugged half-heartedly. “I’ve seen some strange stuff a few times,” he said.
“Like what?” Ray asked. He was trying to ask gently, but Ray can be intimidating, between his size and his untrimmed hair and beard, at least until you got to know him.
Paul hemmed and hawed for a few more minutes, still poking at his eggs with his fork. They had to be getting cold by then, but he still didn’t seem all that interested in eating.
“Well, I’ve been on a few ghost hunts,” he finally mumbled. “I’ve always been kind of fascinated by that sort of thing. And there was a séance, about a year ago.”
Four—no, make that five, including Magnus—pairs of eyes focused on him a little bit more intently. You don’t hear much about séances anymore. But they still happen, and for those of us in this line of work, they’re an immediate red flag. Remember what I said about the dangers of studying the demonic? This is no different. Whenever someone starts communicating with something that can’t be seen, they’re running a hell of a risk. Because you’ve got no way of knowing just what it is you’re talking to.
“Did anything
happen at this séance?” Ray asked.
Again, Paul hesitated. It was hard to read him; he was still in the slumped, weary posture he’d been in when we’d sat down, and he wouldn’t lift his head from his plate. “Yes,” he replied, after a moment.
When he didn’t appear to be forthcoming with any more details, Eryn prodded, “What happened, Paul?”
He squirmed a little in his seat. “It wasn’t anything any of us could really agree on,” he said after a moment. “Some swore they hadn’t actually seen or heard anything.”
“But you saw or heard something,” I said flatly. “Or both.”
He hesitated again, then nodded fractionally. “Both,” he said. “I think.”
I was about to lose my cool. This was like pulling teeth. And it was really starting to bother me; not because of my own impatience, which I will admit is one of my vices, but because the longer he dawdled and hemmed and hawed and didn’t tell us what had happened, the more I began to suspect that it had been something bad, something that probably made him that much more susceptible to the influence of the Abyss. And I suspected that he knew it, and knew that we weren’t going to react well to it.
“Nothing happened, at first,” he finally began. “It was like most of those ghost hunts. Just a bunch of people in a dark room in an old house, along with the guy who was running the whole show, sitting around a table with a couple of candles, while the guy in the middle tried to call up a spirit.
“It was corny, you know? A couple of people were giggling. He was chanting something, some kind of spell, he said. The candles were black, like you’d find in a Halloween store. It was like a cheap Halloween haunted house.” He stopped. He wasn’t even picking at his food anymore, but just staring at his plate.
“Did you see something?” Ray asked. “Hear something? Smell or feel anything?”
“After a while, even the people who thought it was all a joke stopped talking and laughing,” Paul said. “Nothing really had changed; the host was still chanting, the same lines over and over. But something felt different. Like laughing wasn’t a good idea.” He stopped again. “That was when I thought I saw something.”
“What did you see?” Eryn asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I’m still not even sure I actually saw it. But for a second, I thought I saw a face, above the host’s head. And it was looking at me. And then…well, I thought maybe I heard someone call my name.”
“Did anyone else see it?” Kolya asked. Paul started a bit, half looking over his shoulder at where Kolya was sitting. I didn’t think he’d quite realized that Kolya was there behind him.
“I don’t know,” he answered, and he sounded sincere. “Nobody could agree, afterward, if we’d actually seen anything or not. It was like you’d see it, but if you looked straight at it, it disappeared. And my memory was hazy, afterward; I never could decide if I’d actually seen something, or just thought that I had.”
Kolya and I traded a look over Paul’s shoulder. This was ringing all sorts of alarm bells. He’d already been exposed to some kind of bad medicine even before the Bed and Breakfast. Which had, presumably, already made him vulnerable. He might have been marked during the séance, if not before.
“How long have you been poking around the supernatural, Paul?” I asked quietly.
He shrugged again. “Since I was a kid,” he replied. “It’s interesting.”
“It’s dangerous,” Ray growled. “As I’m sure you should have figured out from the incident in Spokane. Hopefully it’s not too late.”
It was right about then that Father Ignacio came into the living room. He had his stole on again, and was carrying his kit. That went on the table, with the candles, crucifix, and prayer book coming out, followed by the flask of holy water that, like most of us, he kept in his back pocket most of the time.
Paul looked up nervously. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Are you going to do an exorcism on me?”
But Father Ignacio shook his head. “I don’t think that’s necessary, yet,” he replied. “I hope it isn’t. But there’s something not right here, so I’m going to bring some spiritual heavy artillery to bear, and see if we can’t set it right.”
With Ray and I helping him set up, Father launched into the blessing. The litany took a full thirty minutes, with pauses for the sprinkling of holy water around the house, inside and out. Afterward, Father offered to bless Paul, but Paul was watching the entire thing nervously, and shook his head. He said he wasn’t hearing the voices anymore, and he was fine.
We probably should have sent him on his way right then and there. But Magnus had settled down, and some of the odd feelings that had been clinging to the shadowy parts of the house had vanished after the blessing. We still needed to keep a close eye on Paul, and do what we could to bring him around to understanding just how serious his situation was, but it seemed like whatever had followed him had been driven off. At least for the moment.
After the blessing was over, Magnus seemed to be somewhat less wound up, at least inside. But he promptly spent a good deal of the early afternoon pacing around the outside of the house, sniffing the air and the ground, and occasionally simply stopping and staring, usually at the darker areas of the woods behind the house. Once I went out there when he was standing there, stock still and intent, and tried to see what he was looking at. Something was clearly still bothering the big dog, and that was concerning.
At first, all I could see was the shadows under the trees. The pine woods back there were thick; the yard around the house had been cleared out of deep woods. The trees didn’t start to thin out until about thirty miles down the road toward the valley below.
But as I stood there, I started to feel the gooseflesh rising on my arms. I couldn’t be sure, but it felt like there was something, some presence, back there in the trees. I just couldn’t see it.
I looked down at Magnus. He was still rapt, staring, not moving a muscle. I wondered just what he was seeing.
When I glanced back at the woods, there was no visible change, but the feeling of being watched by something malicious and amused redoubled. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone.
Magnus growled a little, then. I patted him on the head, while I kept my gun hand close to my .45. It seemed that our visitor wasn’t gone; it had just moved out of the house.
Magnus and I headed inside. This fight wasn’t over yet.
Chapter 5
The dream was different that night.
I heard my named being called. But this time I recognized the voice. Even as I got out of bed, I knew that I was still asleep, but I wasn’t frightened and disturbed like I had been the night before. I was calm.
In the dream, I walked to the front door and out onto the porch.
I called my guardian angel “Sam.” This wasn’t because he’d told me that that was his name; he’d never told me his name, and I’d never asked. It can be a bit disconcerting to be talking to an angel in the first place; you tend to just listen to what he has to say, and leave it at that. But he consistently appeared to me as a grizzled, white-haired, mustached cowboy, so I called him Sam in my head. I was sure he knew this, but he’d never commented on it. Probably because the only times he appeared to me were generally times when I needed a warning, so there were more pressing things to talk about.
He was presently standing on the porch, leaning against a post, his arms folded, waiting for me. There weren’t any lights on, but he was illuminated anyway, as if he were standing in the light of a lantern. I didn’t question it. He was an angel, and this was a dream.
He didn’t say anything at first; he just inclined his head down the road. That was when I saw the second figure.
At first glance, he looked like a tall man, broad-shouldered and wearing a gray shirt and jeans. He had a big, old-style revolver at his hip. His eyes were a light gray.
But I knew who and what he was, and I almost dropped to my knees right there. I’d first seen him when he’d saved my l
ife in Silverton. He made Sam look small and insignificant. This was the Captain of the Heavenly Host.
He walked up to the porch and stepped up. He towered over me, though his head still didn’t quite reach the overhang; it was more a matter of his sheer presence. I still remembered, as clearly as if I’d seen it the day before, the vision I had received the first time I’d met those piercing gray eyes. It had been as close to seeing his true form as my mind could handle—huge and powerful, awe-inspiring and terrifying, all at once. And even that had only been a shadow of what he really was. This was the Lord’s Special Operator.
“Jed,” he said, his voice rumbling deeper than any sound that I’d ever heard Magnus make. “I expect you realize what it means that I’m here.”
I nodded, my mouth as dry as cotton. St. Michael didn’t make an appearance unless the situation was truly dire. Usually “end of the world” dire.
“Well, it’s not quite that bad,” he assured me, leaning against the post across from Sam. I hadn’t said anything, but he’d known what I’d been thinking. “But it is bad enough that I felt that I needed to at least have a word with you. You know what’s come around, following that kid?”
“I’ve got something of an idea, Captain,” I replied.
“But only an idea,” he said. “You need to step very, very carefully. The rules are still in place; unless it breaks them, I can’t intervene, not directly. There’s some help that I can provide, though you still have to ask for it, and ask for it specifically. You understand?”
I nodded again. He’d help, but only when he was asked, and that within very particular, fairly narrow parameters. The angels have pretty stringent rules of engagement set on them, mainly to ensure that human free will is not interfered with. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that they have to sit back and wait while a demon runs amok, because the person being persecuted has to make the effort themselves to fight back, which often means asking for help.
“You’ve only seen the first stages of what’s coming,” he said. That put gooseflesh up my spine. His craggy face, which looked not unlike it had been carved out of granite, was grave. “Your enemies are coming at you from more than one direction. The demon is only the opening gambit. There are reinforcements on the way, and they’re almost as bad. If you let that thing in the woods get to you, you’re done.”