“Another incident, you said?”
“Yeah. There's a lady in my apartment—” His mouth seized, and his lips locked together like the airlock of a space ship, preventing another syllable from escaping.
“And I take it she isn't waiting for me to meet her.”
“No. She's—”
“I understand.” Paul let out a sigh, released the teabag, and leaned back in his seat. “That's not going to look good when the police show up.”
Scott's heart banged against his chest. “You called them?”
“Not yet, but we're going to have to. Can't leave a body lying around your apartment. And I'm not moving it. I just want to know how it got there.”
“She was going to banish the monster. She did her spell, and, well.”
Paul nodded. “I see.”
“Let me guess, you think only Catholic priests should mess with that kind of stuff, right?”
“No. There's—I've worked with a lot of people, of many different faiths. You don't have to be Catholic to experience these things. I've seen a lot, but I'm not going to sit here and tell old ghost stories. For the moment, I'll just say that I try not to judge.”
“They're going to put me in prison, aren't they?”
“You didn't do anything, right?”
“I sat there and watched it happen.”
“It would be hard to arrest you for homicide because someone had a heart attack in your apartment.”
Scott's mind filled with a snapshot of her face, that cheery, rosy-cheeked, friendly person he’d led to her death. “There's still a candle burning,” he said.
“Better go snuff it out before it burns the place down.”
Paul stood and lifted a cell phone from his jacket pocket. “C'mon, let's go.”
In the apartment, Scott snuffed out the candle. He tried not to look at the body. Hours ago she was full of life, and his only hope. The word “body” drifted through his mind, and he dwelled on it. Landers was right. There was most definitely something contained in a person that wasn’t encapsulated by human flesh. Some mystical force that gave off golden sparks when it was sucked out. In the classroom, it was easy to pretend that the human experience could be summed up as a biological machine, but staring at a cold body, that was something else entirely.
“Should I?” started Scott. He surveyed the room. “Should I hide any of this stuff?”
Paul stared at his phone, still in the hallway. He dropped it in his pocket and entered, stopping at the threshold. As his eyes landed on Serena, his expression changed. That everlasting poise disappeared. His jaw fell, prying his lips slightly ajar. His cheeks hollowed. “Aw, shit.” His tongue poked free from his closing lips. He stared unmoving at Serena’s corpse.
“What?”
Paul’s eyes shifted to the pile of trinkets. He approached and knelt beside the mess. His fingers took the silver pentagram resting on the small plate. He wiped the smooth metal with his thumb. He mouthed her name. “Serena.”
He dropped the item in his shirt pocket. “Don't need them asking that question. Leave the rest. The two of you were meditating together. Anything else, you're too shaken up to talk, and you can fill them in later. You don't want any demon talk slipping out.”
Scott watched Paul’s eyes as they peered back into his own. He imagined that anyone else on Earth would throw accusations at him, and shove him into police custody, but this guy remained unnaturally calm, despite everything happening around him.
Something moved out of the corner of Scott’s eye. A flash of red, then blue, coming from the window. A couple of minutes later, the police walked in. One of the men was dressed in a cream-colored cotton jacket and khakis, the other two in blue and black uniforms. The uniformed officers passed him a short glance, and strolled around the apartment, while the other man examined Serena's body. As he knelt down, the bald spot in the middle of his thinning gray hair became visible.
“What happened?” the man asked.
“Kids were meditating together,” said Paul, “then this one freaked and keeled over.”
“You were here when it happened?”
“No sir.”
“And what about you, son? You want to tell me what happened?”
“I—Just like he said. She was telling me to imagine colors and stuff, and then she was d—”
Scott’s head dropped, and tears fell toward the carpet. The room spun, and his knees went weak. Paul caught him around the chest as he started to fall, lowering him gently to the ground.
“I see,” said the man.
One of the officers glared at him. The other prowled the room, probably looking for evidence, and stopped in front of his desk. The officer shuffled some papers around, and opened the top drawer. “What are all these pills?”
“That's my medicine. I take antidepressants and sleep aids, and some other stuff my doctor prescribed.”
“There's a lot of bottles in this drawer,” said the officer, wading through the orange plastic cylinders with his fingers. He scooped a couple up and examined the paper labels. “Did she take any of this?”
The other uniformed officer dug through Serena's purse, while the man in khakis joined his friend to peruse the pill bottles.
“Paul,” said the officer with the handbag. “Do you know what this stuff is?”
The officer held out a small plastic baggy, which Paul opened and sniffed.
“Mint and lavender.”
“Why would she have that?”
“Who knows? New age kids carry weird stuff.”
The officer’s attention turned to Scott. “Were you kids smoking anything in here? Don't lie to me.”
“No, nothing.” He was emotionless. He had no energy left to care what they thought.
The officer knelt before the makeshift altar on the carpet. He picked up a tied bundle of leaves and smelled them. “Mmmhmm. What kind of meditation were you doing?”
Ignoring Paul's earlier advice, Scott answered, “She was doing a protection spell for me.”
“Protection from what?”
His palms began to sweat, and his heart started another round of drumming. Dizziness increased. He thought that he might pass out. “Something to keep me from getting sick all the time, and help me sleep. Some kind of blessing for the apartment.”
“I see. Can I get your contact information? Just in case I have any more questions?”
Scott told the officer everything he wanted to know. Full name. Address. It was like being interrogated without the torture. The Zen attitude he used at work took over. He became a machine, dolling out minimal answers to every query. He handed his license to be photographed front and back by the officer's phone. They even took down his mother's address. Meanwhile, the guy in khakis walked the perimeter of the room quietly several times. One of the blue suits called in a report on his radio to request a coroner. Just when the investigation seemed over, the guy in khakis took his turn at questioning.
“You moved your bed earlier?”
“I—yeah. She said we needed more room.”
“Detective Wallace, by the way,” said the man. The detective chewed on his lower lip while he scanned the room again. “Looks like you did a lot of cleaning up. Am I going to find anything in that trash bag? Or on these towels?”
“What?”
“Am I going to find anything incriminating if I run lab tests?”
“No. We cleaned up before the meditation thing.”
He nodded. “Before the spell?”
“I—”
“I understand you’re a little shook up, son, but try to concentrate. This is important. If I’m going to find blood or drugs, it’s better if you tell me now. Think hard.”
He didn’t know how to answer. The detective’s words ran together in his head until he couldn’t decipher what the actual question was, or whether he should answer with a yes or a no. Luckily, the detective asked again.
“Am I going to find anything illegal in your apartment?”
“No, sir.”
“Okay. You don’t mind waiting outside then?”
Paul helped him to his feet, and he moped out the door. He stood in the tiny foyer at the bottom of the steps, staring into the street. It wasn’t long until an ambulance arrived, and workers carried a stretcher inside. They pushed it back through a few minutes later with a sheet-covered body on top. It was like living in a dream that he couldn’t wake up from. The passing of time surged and stopped repeatedly as his mind shifted from thought to thought. Sometimes a blank slate, sometimes worrying about the monster taking him. Even some thoughts about making it to work on time.
21
Scott sat outside the café, chin on his knees and jacket wrapped around him like a blanket. His arms held the bundle together, trying to keep the warmth in. A coffee cup hovered inches from his face, while the warm vapors steamed his glasses. He didn’t need to worry about spotting the creature if he couldn’t see. The screeching of chairs and the random sounds from the building when the door opened ceased to faze him. He was frozen, partially stunned by the dead body, and partially petrified by the thought of spending the rest of his life in a cell.
The chair to his left scraped against the pavement, and he felt the presence of a warm body dropping into it. The fingers of his free hand wiped the fog from his lenses. The movement of his new companion reflected in a few remaining droplets. He didn’t even shudder. He stared past the light of the overhead lamps, into the darkness blanketing the sky. At the end of the long road was a pair of stoplights, glowing red. Behind them, the taillights of an old vehicle. Another pair pulled on the road halfway between the two. The lights were everywhere. Those two eyes, everywhere he looked, peeking through the early morning fog.
“They aren’t charging you with anything. I know the detective. I gave him a couple more details when the officers left. He’s seen this kind of thing before.”
His head turned past the steam, staring right past the skinny exorcist in the chair beside him. The detective returned to his vehicle parked on the street. Maybe this was the right time to crawl into his hole and die. Words seemed to fall from his lips without any conscious prompting. “If I were you, I would stay as far away from me as possible.”
“We can figure this out.”
“It told me that it was going to kill you.”
Paul didn’t move. He didn’t flinch. Aside from the slight downturn of his lips, he’d resorted to his poker face. He seemed immune to everything surrounding the creature, but then, so did Serena.
Scott didn’t know how, but he had uncovered something neither of them had seen before, and their little magic tricks weren’t going to work against it.
“Did it say when?”
Scott’s emotions erupted deep inside, restarting his muscles and turning him from a depressed lump into an animated psychotic. He drifted the coffee cup out of the way in time for his legs to unfold, and he leaned onto the table, glaring in Paul’s eyes while a drop of warm fluid landed on his knuckles. “That thing just killed Serena, and you still think that you can do something about it? All you do is ask questions and speculate. How is that helping? What are you going to do? Throw salt at it and pray?”
Paul stared down at his feet. “She should have called me,” he whispered.
“What?”
“This was a little out of her league, and she knew it. Damn her pride.”
Scott pieced together the hazy puzzle pieces. “You. You knew her.”
Paul nodded and evolved a frown for half a second before his face returned to normal. His focus never shifted, even as his shoes squirmed against the concrete. The lack of words streaming out of him was unnerving, but understood. Nothing he could say would bring her back, and suddenly his loss became more important than Scott’s. It was bad enough having his own personal tormentor and losing a new friend, but the loss of a good friend would have been worse.
Scott didn’t understand everything, but there was enough evidence to know that Paul had lost a companion, a student. He instantly felt guilty. He hadn’t given a moment of thought to Serena’s family or friends, or those of the recently deceased laptop chattering junkie. He didn’t think about a bar owner that would have to replace him. He never considered Mike and Maria’s loss. Now he had something new to be depressed about, the fact that he was so selfish as to look straight past anyone else’s anguish in the same manner that customers looked straight past him to pay for their gas.
“You’re right,” said Paul. “I haven’t done anything yet. That’s why I’m still alive. And you could probably use a friend right now. Whatever this thing is, it’s not going to stop. It’s not going to leave you alone, and you can’t fight it by yourself.”
“You could die, though. Why are you helping me? It already marked you.”
“If I’m already on the list, then there’s no getting away. I have to help you, or I might be next. Besides, it’s not the first time I’ve been threatened from the other side. Now it's your turn. I need you to tell me what happened up there. As many details as you can give me. I need to know what she tried.”
He leaned back in his chair, coffee safely on the table, and looked blankly away from Paul, toward the shop. The chairs inside were filled with innocent people who had no idea of the terror right next door. They carried on with their lives. Being happy or miserable didn’t matter. They were alive, and had no doubt that the same would be true tomorrow, a luxury he had given up on.
Life was such a precious thing. It was a shame that he’d taken it for granted for so many years. Through the course of his life, there was always a tomorrow, another day, a chance to set things right. There was always a chance that he would work up the courage to talk to the blond-haired girl. There was always a chance that he’d go out drinking with Maria and her friends.
That promise was dead now. Richard was right. He should have died the first night. That first glimpse should have been the last he had seen of the monster, but he managed to screw that up too, like everything else. His whole life appeared before him, selfishly squandered by living up to some false standard that he should work and go to school. Wasted on the idea that there was a straight path from point A to point B, and if he stayed on that path, everything else would eventually work itself out. A life spent worrying about himself and his feelings instead of considering anyone else.
“Scott?”
“I’m thinking.”
He huffed, watching a couple near the window share a laugh. What the hell could they possibly be so happy about? He wanted to stab Cupid, and parade the little bastard around Times Square on Valentine’s Day. He wanted people to realize the misery he felt. He wished they would wake up from their daydreams, and realize how much time they were wasting.
The fleeting happiness he observed in the window wouldn’t last. That guy would cheat on her, or she’d cheat on him. Former friends would become enemies, and once again, love would be destroyed. It was typical. Relationships didn’t last anymore. They were as useless as a phone that’s only good until the next upgrade, and then tossed in the trash. They always say, “better to have loved and lost,” but he would never find out for himself. Even if by some miracle, he defeated the monster, who would ever love him?
“Scott.”
He sighed. “I saw it better. I kept looking at it, but it wasn’t after me. As it paced, it became more clear. You know? The guy that died told me everyone around me would be first. The monster would take them all. That includes you.”
“I'm not interested in what some drug addict told you. What did you see?”
“It looked like a cross between a bear and a wolf, and maybe a lion. Red eyes, the same as before, they were the only feature sharp enough to make out. None of it was clear at first, but the longer I looked, the more details came out.”
“Like?”
“The tentacles. They were part of its hair. The hair on it's head anyway. The rest of it was fuzzy, too. I'm not sure, either fuzzy shadow, or hair. Anyway, t
he tentacles wrapped around Serena. Then it licked her.”
“It what?”
“It looked like, it licked her. Like a dog, leaning close to your face before assaulting you with its tongue. Maybe it wasn’t a lick, maybe it was sniffing. Creepy either way.”
“That's new.”
“I’m telling you. This isn’t one of your little ghosts. This is something else. Older than religion.”
“How would you know that?”
“It told me.”
Paul smirked. “You wouldn’t believe some of the bullshit stories that come straight from the mouths of demons, in so many languages. It’s probably right. Some of them were probably around before Christ, but that hardly matters. Religion examines these mysteries. It doesn’t create them or own them, it only seeks to explain them.”
“Is that how you ended up being friends with a palm reader?”
“I told you before that I try not to judge,” his voice gained a harsh inflection. “People of all faiths, at least those devout in their beliefs—we’re all chasing the same thing. We’re all experiencing the same things. We give them different names, and sometimes see them a little differently. People living in caves would hardly have quoted the Bible on anything, because it didn’t exist yet.”
Paul relaxed and flexed in his seat. “Serena and I held different beliefs, but we both wanted to help people. That’s all that mattered. She was young. Her faith led her astray from caution.”
He didn’t want to accept it, but Paul had a point. Maybe he puffed the demon’s words up too much. Just because Serena wasn’t prepared, didn’t mean that this guy would end up with the same fate. He continued to recount the memory. “Then Serena disappeared. I couldn’t see her through the thing. It told her to look, and to keep looking. Just a bit longer. I don't know if she could hear it, but I could.”
“Did it say anything else?”
“It said all of them would die. Everyone I talked to. It also said we were already dead. I think.”
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