by Mark Henry
Hitch glanced out his window, a pained expression on his face, his eyes seeming to bleed shadows from the ducts.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know we joke about you being imaginary. But you’re real to me. You’ve been there for me when no one was.”
Hitch turned to her and patted her hand. “Likewise. But they don’t think I’m your symptom, Luce. You get that don’t you? They think I’m something else. Something horrible. Something evil.”
“Come on. You’re not evil, just an asshole. Besides their files are about me, not you.”
Luce stopped short of telling him that those same doctors had suggested that Hitch was her trigger to become violent. They hadn’t been there that night, though, and their tests couldn’t detect the fact that Hitch had merely been very angry—hell, Luce had been furious and had every right to. They thought that she had scratched Polly and not the rats, that she had turned a table over on Aaron, breaking his leg, but it had been Hitch.
She’d watched him with a detached glee, as though she were watching the bad guys in some crappy teen movie get their just desserts at the hand of the protagonist’s ghostly protector. In that sense, it had been almost wholesome, if you disregarded the blood and the sound of the bones snapping. In fact, Aaron had required some bone grafting—the word transplant popped into Luce’s mind, but she didn’t really know why, she hadn’t followed either Polly’s or Aaron’s recovery following the incident. It was kind of difficult to do from her padded cell.
“Is that what you really think?” Hitch asked, giving her the kind of look he often did when she said something really stupid, wincing, head tilting.
Luce shrugged and began to look around the interior of the van, a few identification cards on lanyards hung from the rearview mirror. As she leaned in toward them, the face took a familiar shape, blond, close-cropped hair, beady eyes.
Aaron Statlender.
“Where did you get this van?” Luce twisted around to look in the back but Hitch caught her cheek in his palm.
“Look at me, Luce,” he said. “I need to tell you something.”
She nodded, straining to see over the obstruction of his thumb at the lumpy figures in the backseat. Dread beginning to flood into her.
“You didn’t kill them, did you, Hitch?”
He sighed, disappointedly.
“Did you?” she shouted, swatting his arm away and getting a full view of what lay behind them in the backseat.
Aaron sat with his palms on his knees, spine rigid and head tilted backward at an odd angle, but when her eyes found him, it rose. Aaron meeting her gaze and smiling in a familiar way that reminded her of Hitch. She glanced at her friend and that thought seemed to be verified. He wore not just a similar expression, but the exact same one.
“Are you all right, Aaron?” Luce asked.
Aaron didn’t answer, rather he himself nodded toward Hitch as to say, “Pay attention to him, Luce.”
Beside Aaron, a nearly imperceptible lump of clothing and skin was the crumpled body of Polly Petruschka. Luce reached back and felt for a pulse on her neck and was relieved that the woman was still alive. Things were already getting seriously weird without the addition of the dead body of Luce’s teenage nemesis.
“Luce!” Hitch shouted. “Listen.”
She spun toward him. “You’re going to shout at me? I don’t know how you figure that’s called for, not after this insanity.” Luce jerked her thumb in the direction of the backseat.
“I have to tell you something,” he repeated, but his tone suggested something she didn’t want to hear.
Or was it something she already knew. Something she wished she didn’t. Sister Mary-Agnes’s words sprang back into Luce’s mind. We believe you have some experience that would prepare you.
Luce couldn’t feel less prepared at that moment and if Hitch was about to tell her what she thought he was, then she’d rather be running windmill-armed from a horde of zombies than hear it.
Luce had the uncontrollable urge to bolt, her hand inched toward the van door and that was when Aaron lunged from the backseat, gripping her shoulders and pulling her back so tight against the seat, she thought she’d suffered whiplash.
“Listen!” he hissed.
…
Wade tossed the secondary report into the passenger seat and sped away from the valet stand toward the last place in the world he expected to find Luce, but the only place he knew had been infected by whatever it was that haunted her.
Whatever he was. “Hitch,” she had shouted.
Wade had heard the name before, of course. The thing inside Catherine had called itself that, among other names, many other names. He could be completely wrong, but if he wasn’t then there’d be some trace of the demon on the lamp.
Astaroth.
When he pulled up to the Brink of Sanity the police had thinned to a single unit and, unfortunately, they seemed to be investigating the disturbance in their room. Wade parked the car and strode up to the open door, nonchalantly.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s going on in here?”
The officer, a gruff, pie-faced type, jittery from too much coffee and clearly clueless as to what the evidence on the floor of the bathroom meant.
“None of your concern, sir. But as far as I can tell, some crackheads got into a fight and one of them threw a lamp. It’s not even broken.”
The officer turned a pained squint to the motel manager, who stood just inside the door puffing away at a cigarillo and sweating profusely. “In fact, I think I’m done here. Unless there’s another issue.”
The cigarillo shook in the manager’s hand and Wade keyed in on the man’s anxiety. Hiding something, he thought. Hopefully something beneficial.
When the officer left, Wade entered the room and picked up the lamp, turning it over in his hands until he found what he was looking for.
A black, bilious smudge curled around the base in the shape of a finger. A charred remnant of a demon and a powerful one. Wade held his hand over the mark and felt the same experience he’d had hovering over the image of Astaroth. His fingertips tingled, drawn to the surface marks like magnets.
“Dammit,” he cursed and turned to the manager. “Did you see the crackheads leave?”
“Yeah,” he said amidst a cloud of noxious fumes. “They left a while ago, the man carrying the woman over his shoulder, tossed her into the back of his van like she was luggage. I was sorta worried that he was one of them serial killers. Didn’t seem to give a crap if she got hurt anymore.”
Wade whistled. “That’s terrible.”
A few minutes later, Quince had returned with an address for Polly Prentiss’s accommodations in Portland about twenty minutes away, but Wade figured he could make it in ten. He floored it and tore out of the motel for the last time.
…
“What do you remember about the hospital, Luce?” Hitch said, rubbing his chin officiously.
“Hardly anything! I was twelve and wasn’t big on journaling. Why are you doing this?”
“It’ll become clear if you just comply,” Aaron whispered. “I understood instantly. I should have known you’d be too dense to pick it up.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me then, ass?”
“It’s Hitch’s story to tell.”
Hitch sucked at his teeth as his usual irritability returned full force. “How about you both shut up, so I can clear this up. And while we’re at it. Drive us back to the Tiger Lounge. We’ve got business there. Business with a certain glass-eyed friend of yours.”
Luce rankled, still plotting her escape, but certain forces, namely Aaron’s viselike grip on her shoulders, encouraged her compliance. She cranked the van and pulled out of the parking garage as Hitch began his tale.
“I want you to know I was perfectly content with our arrangement, Luce. Even after the good doctors attempted their banishment. Don’t believe for a second what you read, girl. There’s much more to us than simple schizophrenia. Sure,” Hitch flipp
ed his hand in the air. “You’re quirky, but you’re not hallucinating.”
Luce shook her head, the van drifting toward the curb as she took in what he was saying.
“They brought in priests and a nun. Oh that one was a real winner. I could smell the alcohol on her from a mile away. I believe you’ve met her since. Sister Mary-Agnes?”
“Dear God, what are you saying, I was possessed?”
“Not was. Are. We’re buddies, you and I?” Hitch slapped his palm on her shoulder, brushing Aaron’s hand aside. “Aaron and I have a similar arrangement, but only after the bone grafting. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how that happened, do I.”
“But how did you possess the bone they used for Aaron’s transplant?”
“I’m in many places, many people, I maneuver through time and cells quite fluidly, but mostly I lay dormant until I find a particular body useful. It doesn’t suit me to be too visible unless I have a purpose and right now, purposes have converged.”
“Aaron?”
“Actually, no. Polly here, our miserable bully, has come across some information that I find to be quite intriguing about our dear one-eyed Bishop. It seems he’s playing for the dark side. There was no coincidence that he showed up at the Tiger Lounge while visiting Portland. He had business there but not, as Polly’s one-track mind presumed, of the perverted variety, though make no mistake perversions are rampant at the Mommy Parties.” Hitch rankled with distaste.
“He’s an investor or something?”
“Something. He’s invested certainly, but not in the pleasures of some perverts who love adult babies. He’s using the dark thoughts and desires to focus a ritual that makes it much easier for demons to slip into the world and possess the living.”
“And you don’t want that to happen?”
“Hell no. I like my piece and quiet. Don’t you enjoy our friendship?” Hitch turned to look in the back seat. “Don’t you, Aaron?”
“Well yeah,” Aaron said, excitedly. “Who wouldn’t? Why I love the time we spend together, it just makes me…”
Luce watched as Hitch rolled his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “That’s enough,” he said.
Luce pulled the van into the parking lot of the Tiger Lounge and Hitch and Aaron spilled out. Aaron yanking her door open and Luce onto her feet beside the still-growling van. He reached in and cranked down the engine without releasing her.
“So we’re going in, Luce, and you’re going to be quiet and cooperative, do you hear me?”
Luce strained against Aaron’s grip. “What about Polly?”
Hitch waved off the idea. “She won’t mind. She’s so shot up on the drugs your lover pumped into her she’ll be out for days!”
“Well I won’t help you!”
“Ah, well. Then we’ll do it the easy way.”
“There’s an easier way? Why would you shoot for—” Luce closed her mouth as Hitch approached, the outline of his human form deteriorating, stripping away from him and flapping in the air like wet gray ribbons, seal skin slipped around Luce’s wrists, suckling there, climbing up her arms, wrapping around her throat.
She opened her mouth to scream but Hitch had shoved himself inside by then, all that was left of Luce were the tears running down her cheeks.
…
Amidst a shimmering patch of glass-and-steel buildings blooming beneath the towering overpasses of the interstate like nightshade stood Blake Hotel—a place far too hipstery to require a preceding article as pedestrian as “the.” Wade left the Porsche idling in the portico to the lobby, grabbed his tool kit and a fake pizza insulator bag and rushed inside.
“Pizza for Aaron Statlender,” he said, patting his hand on the front desk.
The clerk whipped her head in his direction, her severe black bob floating out in one piece like the fabric of a skirt. Narrowing her eyes, she approached the shiny glass tablet in front of her, flicked through a list and then returned her assessment to Wade.
“445. And make it quick. No dawdling.”
Wade barely heard the parts after the room number. He was already scuttling across the marble floor to the elevator. Stowing the pizza bag in his armpit, he dug for the key card hack in his small caddy.
The doors slid open.
Darting to the left, Wade skidded to a kneel in front of room 445, slipping the card in and the wires connected to it into his phone. The app began to run immediately, scrolling through a sequence of numbers and dashes until it finally beeped and the light on the door latch turned green.
Wade pushed in, hoping he’d made the right assumption that the room would belong to both of them. He wasn’t disappointed. Makeup was scattered across the bathroom vanity like someone had already been rooting through it for government secrets. Wade, hoping for something different scanned the room for anything that looked like notes, papers, files.
Nothing.
He tore open all the drawers. Empty. The luggage was full of clothing and nothing else. He was about to give up when he looked into the mirror above the dresser and saw a sheaf of paper peaking out from between the mattress and box spring. He turned and threw himself across the closest bed, ripping the file from under the other.
He righted himself and opened it.
The handwriting was messy and full of rigid lines and small loops, if he didn’t know what he was looking at, Wade could have mistaken it for an EKG readout. Blips and runs and blips. He squinted, catching certain words that resonated. Bugenhagen was one the popped, pretty effortlessly. The Tiger Lounge was all over the notes to include a few diagrams laying out the interior.
Wade shuffled through the stack until something caught his eye that made his breath hitch in his chest. A name.
Lucid Montgomery.
And a near hour-by-hour rundown of her whereabouts over several days, including their private moment in the alley. He turned it over and looked at the last entry written, apparently, just prior to Luce’s mistaken seduction of Bishop Bugenhagen.
What the hell are these two doing? Wade wondered. Why would they be following Luce so closely?
It didn’t make sense.
On the last page Wade noticed a signature in the same scrawl. Aaron Statlender. The handwriting belonged entirely to Aaron. Wade couldn’t isolate any document geared specifically to Polly Prentiss or the reality show they produced.
Was it possible?
And why?
Wade folded the sheaf in half and crammed it into the empty pizza bag. There didn’t seem to be any other lead than the Tiger Lounge.
Chapter Fifteen
Luce had once been a fan of those cable shows that chronicled supernatural events as though they were actual news. Shows where ghosts touched people’s chests when they were showering or breathed on them when they tried to get to sleep or whacked them in the back with two-by-fours for no apparent reason, except when the person related the story, you could tell they deserved it. In the shows about demonic possession, there seemed to be a common thread, an insistence that the person was trapped inside their body, somehow aware that bad things were happening, that they were in the grips of an evil, unconscionable thing but unable to do anything about it, except document it for their later appearance on a semi-scripted reality show.
In not one of these shows did Luce recall the possessed describing the experience as being shitfaced drunk.
Not. One.
From the minute Hitch took control of her body, much like he’d stepped behind the wheel and pushed her into the passenger seat with a palm to the cheek, Luce simply felt loopy and, sort of okay with the whole thing. She didn’t think he was going to let her body rot like the girl in that movie. Hitch was, after all, pretty obsessed with cleanliness, having the whole butler thing going on. The fact that occasionally he would dress down, sometimes helped to make her forget that he saw himself that way.
Regardless, what they didn’t tell you about being possessed.
She felt like she could write a self-help book with all sh
e was learning, but because the feeling of being possessed was very similar to being drunk off her ass, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t remember any of the funny quips that were popping into her head, her writing ability would probably be impaired.
Luce sauntered through the crowd, a sinister smirk at play on her lips. When she reached the bar, she tossed her hair over her shoulder and glanced at her henchman. Aaron swelled from the shadows and took a flanking position opposite her.
But the real her floated somewhere in the periphery, slightly above but not in such a hallowed position that she felt like an angel on her own shoulder, unless angels could be seriously pissed off.
“You’re such an asshole, Hitch. You know that?” Her voice floated away.
I do know that, princess. Her face glowered up at her as though she were visible and she supposed she was, like Hitch had been when he was imaginary.
But not now.
He was all too real and not a friend.
Scanning the faces in the room, Luce lit on one that looked kind of familiar, in that he looked a whole lot like Carlito. What brought it home was the sunglasses he wore. Sunglasses plus dark glasses, in most cases, doesn’t mean you’re sporting a possibly linty jawbreaker for an eyeball, but in this case, yup.
Luce followed her body as it moved across the room, drink in hand—whiskey on the rocks, so not her drink and for the Tiger Lounge it was downright obscene not to dowse the liquor in sugar, juices, and umbrellas. There was clearly something wrong with this woman.
Why could no one see that?
Luce watched in horror as Hitch drove her close to Bishop Bugenhagen, even going so far as to rest her hand on the cleric’s right buttock. She would have thought the man would have jumped at the goosing—Catholic priests had no business being comfortable with a hand on their ass—but Bugenhagen merely tilted his head and smirked.
Luce willed her hovering being to squeeze in and listen.
…
Wade came through the back door of the Tiger Lounge and nodded to the night manager who’d hurriedly offered him a job following his audition. The man wore a smile like it was a facial tic, too severe, too jumpy, a lot like his curly comb-over that rippled across his shiny bald head like a ruined wire Slinky.