“But you saw it?”
“I saw a patch of fog, smelled sulfur, felt the cold of Hell…it’s all vague things that an active imagination could dream up.”
“Wow.” Her tone was dry. “You’re really into this sceptics thing.”
“On the contrary.” He turned too sharply, too fast, onto a busy street, taking advantage of a tiny break in the traffic. The super-car’s tires squealed. “It’s the fact that I believe in the demon’s presence that has everyone doubting me.”
“Why?”
He kept the Rocinante’s speed dead on the limit. He’d known he’d have to tell Clancy the full story—or let Doris do so. He concentrated on his driving so that he wouldn’t see dawn in her eyes the mix of pity and helplessness with which his family, and those few who knew his obsession, regarded him. “It began when Phoebe died.”
Clancy closed her eyes a moment in sorrow and sympathy for Mark. It had been seven years since his fiancée died. Apparently, the pain was still raw. Her grandma had never mentioned Mark becoming serious about another woman. Dates, yes. Commitment, no.
“Do you remember Phoebe?” he asked.
Clancy had to clear her throat. “Yeah. She was beautiful.”
Mark had come back from college, fallen in love with the young actress, and they’d gotten engaged. Phoebe and Mark had been the glamour couple of the year. They’d been chased by the paparazzi, photographed kissing on the famous Hollywood sign. They’d been feted and envied. Phoebe had been preparing for the wedding of the decade.
“The camera loved her,” he said quietly. “When you watch Chime of Red, her last movie, she is luminous.”
Clancy sought for a tribute, one she could offer honestly. The truth was, she hadn’t liked Phoebe Shannon. She’d envied Phoebe her beauty, confidence, and Mark. But she hadn’t liked her. Which was fair enough. Phoebe hadn’t even noticed Clancy. To the actress, Clancy had been a skinny kid; someone to dismiss as of no account. She’d always looked impatient and called Mark away when he’d taken the time to ask Clancy about her schoolwork or exams. “Phoebe was a star.”
“She was.” He shifted gears and the Rocinante growled. “She sold her soul for it.”
Clancy stared at him.
He focused on the road. His profile was hawk-sharp, all masculine angles and stern distance.
“You mean that literally, don’t you?” she asked slowly.
He flexed his hands on the steering wheel. “Yes.”
The Los Angeles traffic gathered strength around them. People were on their way to work, resigned to travelling two hours or more just to get there. “Where is the sceptics’ museum?”
Mark cast her a quick, incredulous glance.
He’d just told her that his tragically dead fiancée had sold her soul, and she’d asked the location of her potential employment. But she needed time to think. Did people sell their souls in the twenty first century? It sounded medieval.
“Just off Hollywood Boulevard,” he answered her question.
“Right. Okay.” Even with LA traffic they were only ten to twenty minutes away. Her mind bounced from practicalities she could handle—jeans and sweatshirt with a leather jacket weren’t exactly job interview dress, but this was LA so maybe it was okay?—to the literally unthinkable. “Why on earth would you think Phoebe sold her soul? She had everything.”
He stopped at a red light and turned to her. “That ‘everything’—her movie roles, her incredible beauty, her star quality—were part of the contract. Phoebe sold her soul to a demon. When the demon came to collect it, at the site of the car crash, she tried to give him my soul, instead.”
“No,” Clancy protested instinctively. Mark and Phoebe had been in love. Phoebe couldn’t possibly have tried to trade his soul for hers. It couldn’t be true.
The light turned green. Mark shifted gear and the Rocinante accelerated smoothly. He had himself and the powerful car under control. “Believe me, I remember it vividly. And I wasn’t hallucinating, as people have tried to suggest. I was cut up, my leg was broken, but I didn’t have concussion and I wasn’t dreaming. Phoebe was hurt, badly. There was blood coming out of her mouth. Her face was perfect, but her body crushed. The blood bubbled when she spoke.”
Clancy shuddered.
He was expressionless, all emotion locked down. Outside the car’s tinted windows, the sun shone in a near cloudless sky, as if it was summer and they travelled in a forever season of joy. However, inside the car, it felt ominous, the atmosphere heavy with a suppressed emotional storm. “The demon appeared among the car’s wreckage. Phoebe had been driving. Speeding. She was laughing and reckless. The roads were wet. She skidded. I shouted for her to turn into the slide, but she fought the wheels. We went off the road and hit a tree.”
A eucalyptus tree. Clancy remembered the details. She remembered all too vividly the footage of the crash all over the news media. Phoebe’s expensive sports car had been mangled and crushed.
“The windscreen exploded. There was nothing between Phoebe, me, and the concertinaed hood of the car. The demon appeared on the hood. It appeared about a foot high, like a garden gnome statue, but glowing orange, and then, it grew larger and larger, till it was man-height and man-shaped. It stopped glowing—except for its eyes.”
He stopped for another red light. They were nearly at Hollywood Boulevard, the exclusive wealth of Beverly Hills giving way to gritty real life.
“‘I have come for my soul,’ the demon said.” Mark stared straight ahead at the rusting, white delivery van in front of them. “It stretched out its hand to Phoebe and she said, ‘Take Mark’s.’ The demon laughed. It shrank down to gnome-sized again, sat on the wrecked hood, and laughed while I listened to Phoebe’s bubbling breathing, and tried not to believe any of it was happening.”
Around them, people did the ordinary things people did when stuck in traffic. They talked on their phones, bopped their heads to music, applied make-up.
He squeezed the steering wheel. “When the demon stopped laughing, it said, ‘Phoebe Shannon, you are a hellish delight. I’m glad we made our contract.’ Then its arm extended like stretched toffee and it put its hand to her throat. She managed one word.”
The traffic surged forward as the lights went green.
“What did she say?”
“She said its name. Faust.”
Mark parked a block away from Hollywood Boulevard where secure parking would keep the Rocinante safe. After naming the demon, he and Clancy hadn’t said anything more. For himself, he needed the silence to force the lid back on the volatile mix of old emotions of anger, betrayal and fear. They were the raw mix that distilled into the determination that drove him.
He got out of the car and walked around it to meet her. “My great-grandfather Edgar bound the demons so that they couldn’t enter our world via cameras.”
“I remember the story.”
Of course she did. Growing up at the Yarren Estate, she would have heard it enough times. How his great-grandfather had survived the First World War and become one of the founding members of the Collegium—the group of magic users who protected mundanes and magicals alike from rogue mages and magical attacks, such as those that killed so many in the Great War. The first major act of the new Collegium had been to seal all cameras against demons using them as portals into this world.
“There was a reason photographs used to be developed using a silver wash,” Mark said as they strolled out of the car park. “Silver protects against evil. Edgar used that in the Collegium spell. People no longer had to fear the possibility that the camera would truly steal their souls.”
Clancy shoved her hands into the pockets of her leather jacket. “The thought of my soul being stolen always gave me the heebie-jeebies when I heard that story.”
“And it happened—until Edgar and the others prevented it with their master spell in Paris in 1920. Once he’d set it, Edgar came here to California to join the emerging movie industry, secure in the knowledge that dem
ons couldn’t contact people through the new moving images. But he couldn’t have anticipated digital photography.”
She rocked to a stop on the sidewalk. “No silver.”
“Precisely.” He was pleased that she was thinking and not merely humoring him in what others considered his delusion. “The Collegium believes that Edgar’s spell holds against demons entering all images regardless of the silver content in their processing. They point to the fact that no demonic possession happened via a painting after Edgar’s spell sealed all cameras.”
“But you disagree?”
“Demons play a long game. I think they’ve been waiting for a chance to exploit a hole in Edgar’s spell and Faust found it with digital photography. He doesn’t contact his victims via their image, but buries the invitation in the code that writes the software.” They stood in the shadow of one of the tall apartment blocks, in the grimy rear of it with the stink of discarded cigarettes and trash. “You see, demons never simply stole a person’s soul, they bargained with them.”
She walked on, slowly. “So the contract you believe Phoebe made with a demon…”
He strode beside her, reining in his impatience at her “you believe”. Everyone doubted him. At least Clancy hadn’t dismissed his story out of hand. “The museum is just around the corner.
She flapped a hand, dismissing the museum and a potential job. “How do you think Phoebe signed a contract with this demon, Faust?”
“Does it matter?”
“What?” She dashed in front of him and stopped.
He stopped, too; a hair’s breadth from touching her.
“Of course it matters,” she said.
A ridiculous hope surged in him. “So, you believe me?”
“Get outta the way!” A deliveryman balancing three large boxes swore at them.
“Sorry.” Clancy grabbed Mark’s arm and tugged him to the side. “I’m not a demonologist. You should contact the Collegium.”
“I did.”
“And?” She released his arm.
On impulse, he clasped her hand as they resumed walking. After a moment’s hesitation, her fingers curled around his. Her trust helped counter some of the bitterness in his heart. “The Collegium sent out a demonologist twice when I reported happenings like the one outside my neighbor’s house this morning. Neither time did they find evidence of a demon’s presence.”
“It could have evaporated, the evidence, I mean.”
“Apparently a demon’s presence leaves a stain in this world for those sensitive to it.”
She considered that as they walked around the corner, emerging into a quiet street of tattoo parlors, thrift stores and some hopeful if unlikely souvenir shops for lost and wondering tourists. “If the Collegium sent guardians to the site of your crash, they must have sensed the demon.” She squeezed his hand. “Sorry to remind you of it.”
“It’s okay. The people who stopped to help Phoebe and me dragged us clear a few seconds before the car exploded. The flames and chemicals, and Phoebe’s death, obscured the demonic stain. I’m sure the demon arranged things that way. I’ve been tracking him. That’s why I’ve joined the sceptics’ club and others. I look for certain oddities.”
“So does the Collegium’s forecasters’ department.” Her objection was small and apologetic as they halted out front of the museum.
“Yes, but they’re not as single-minded. They’re looking for trouble everywhere. I’m tracking one particular demon.”
“And you think he’s aware of you?”
“I think he’s laughing at me,” Mark said flatly, and changed the subject. “Come on. Let’s go in. I’ll introduce you to Bryce.”
Clancy looked at the dark and shuttered museum with its gray sign proclaiming it the Museum of the Boring But True. Not exactly a catchy title. “Mark, the museum’s closed.”
“Bryce lives above it.” He released her hand and strode forward to hit a buzzer beside a discreet door.
“The boss lives above the shop,” she muttered. “I don’t think—”
“Who’s there?” An impatient voice emerged staticky and abrupt from the intercom.
Great. Her prospective employer was grumpy. Nope, she didn’t want this job. To be courteous—and because her grandma would ask—she needed to at least enter the museum. She sighed. What she needed was coffee and space to sit down and think about everything Mark had just told her. Did she believe him? He’d said her grandma didn’t. His family refused to. The Collegium had dismissed his story.
“It’s Mark, Mark Yarren. I’ve brought a friend. She might be interested in working in the museum.”
A short silence from the intercom preceded another burst of static. “I’ll be down.”
Mark gave her a crooked half-smile. “Bryce mightn’t have many social skills, but he’s a good guy. A talented software engineer.”
“A geek.”
“The world belongs to them,” Mark said. He looked so ordinary, as if he hadn’t just been discussing demons. The sun shimmered on his blond, sun-streaked hair and healthily tanned skin. “If you can code, you can—”
The shutters at the front of the museum rolled up. A subdued whine indicated that an electric motor powered their retraction. First the legs, in gray sweatpants, then the chubby torso covered by a blue t-shirt, and finally, an unshaven face with the beginnings of a double chin and its eyes squinched up as if at the brightness of the morning light were revealed.
Bryce Goodes regarded them for a long moment through the front glass door. Then he smiled and reached for the handle. “Mark! Good to see you, man. Come in.”
Mark put a hand to Clancy’s lower back, ushering her in first.
Bryce’s pale blue eyes tracked the gesture as he shuffled back from the entrance, giving them space to enter.
Space was in short supply within the museum. It was crowded! Display cases jostled with ordinary tables in a maze-like pattern. Shelves along the walls held more objects located in-between posters, the details of which Clancy couldn’t discern. The museum was long and narrow, stretching back, but since its side windows remained shuttered, the light from the glass front door and windows only dimly reached the first third of the exhibits. It was like walking into a depressed junk shop. The name of the museum seemed only too apt: the Museum of the Boring But True.
Then Bryce switched on the lighting. Overhead fluorescents flickered into life and a couple of spotlights glared onto what he obviously considered the jewels of the collection.
Now, Clancy could see that the posters on the walls were grainy photographs super-enlarged, and that every object was displayed with copious explanatory notes beside it. A large glass box held one of the “mermaid bodies” that had been popular in the nineteenth century, a hoax generally composed of a monkey’s skull and something like a manatee’s skeleton. Long, harsh black hair, likely horse hair, was stuck to the grinning skull.
She edged away from it as Mark made introductions. She politely held out her hand to Bryce. “Sorry that we intruded so early.”
“Not at all.” His hand was warm and dry, his grip firm, and it didn’t linger. “I was awake.” A smirk flickered across his face. “Mark knows I like to start my day early. So. How do you know Mark?” The question was purportedly for her, but Bryce stared at his friend.
Mark stood casually among the jumble of objects, seeming unfazed that the nearest object to him was an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus.
Clancy peered closer and tapped it discreetly. Papier Mache. This was some Hollywood prop! It was her imagination that had made it seem real. She’d freaked herself out.
As the shock of encountering the museum’s cluttered display eased, she realized that it wasn’t as pathetic as she’d assumed. The collection wasn’t some sad obsessive’s display of junk. It ranged widely across the spectrum of issues sceptics attempted to debunk, and the arguments outlined in the detailed display notes were reasoned and evidenced. Space junk sat beside displays on UFOs and aliens, health scares
were debunked, and political campaign ephemera (buttons, posters, flags) brightened up analysis of politically-linked conspiracies. The museum actually represented a lot of hard work and dedication. What it needed was some sparkle; some re-arranging to appeal to tourists who wandered in, off Hollywood Boulevard.
“Clancy’s an old friend,” Mark said. “We knew each other as kids.”
“A long term arrangement.” Bryce seemed delighted, and intrigued.
She stared at him, taken aback by the odd phrasing.
Mark frowned. “Clancy’s just returned to LA. When she mentioned wanting a job where she met people—”
“You thought of me.” Bryce laughed, turning away and heading for the rear of the museum. Stairs in the back corner, behind a “private” sign, indicated that was how he accessed his apartment.
“Of the museum,” Mark said slowly. He glanced at Clancy.
She shrugged. This was his friend and his idea.
“Have you any experience of working in a museum, Clancy?” Bryce called back.
He might be okay shouting the length of the building, but she wasn’t. She trailed after him, winding through the maze of display tables, with Mark following her. “I’ve not worked in a museum, but I’ve had a couple of casual retail jobs.” She couldn’t see Bryce any longer. He’d gone behind the staircase. “Maybe I’m not the right person for this job.” The museum was intriguing and she had some ideas on re-arranging the displays, but judging by his present rude behavior, Bryce would be a nightmare to work for.
She’d worked for the Collegium. One nightmare employer in a lifetime was enough. She stopped at the edge of the staircase.
“How do you take your coffee?” Bryce asked. “It’s only instant, I’m afraid.”
Oh. Oh, now she felt ashamed of her impatience. Perhaps Bryce wasn’t rude so much as socially awkward, as Mark had said. Shy. “Instant is fine, thank you. No milk or sugar.”
The boiling of the kettle filled the silence. Clancy fidgeted. As oddly fascinating as the museum was, it couldn’t hold her attention. She was back with Mark’s story. Would Phoebe really have sold her soul to a demon?
Hollywood Demon (The Collegium Book 6) Page 3