Personal Demons

by David Morrison

  Dee sniffed at the last part. Clearly there were pride issues involved.

  Before I could quiz him over his last sentence, he pressed on with his explanation of the history.

  “As the war became increasingly bitter, the demons stopped giving a damn about humanity altogether. They evolved into corrupted creatures, and they blamed humans for the whole mess. The angels, meanwhile, well a lot of them seemed to enjoy hunting and killing other supernaturals a little too much. They suck just as bad as demons in their own way. Don’t be fooled by all the golden glowing eyes and white feathered wings. They’re as much a bunch of sadists as regular demons. They even came after the djinn, even though we were doing our best to sit it out and not get involved.”

  “Right,” I said, trying to get my head wrapped around it and only partially succeeding.

  “Despite that, some of us tried to carry on in our ‘helper spirit’ roles as before. We didn’t take sides and kept our original forms and powers. The original djinn. Both sides ended up looking down on us for not getting involved – and the ‘G’ word got thrown around a lot.

  “None of it matters now, because of what happened seventy years ago, which brought the whole sorry civil war saga to an end.”

  “What was that?”

  “The dimension we all come from, Arcadia, is a vast source of magical energy. It’s where warlocks and witches draw power from to cast most of their spells. Our dimension isn’t like heaven or hell - it’s much closer to the Garden of Eden. Nice place, decent weather, good for a laugh. Or it was until everyone went to war.

  “Anyway. The gates between this world and our dimension, the magical realm, were closed, or maybe Arcadia was destroyed. I don’t know how or why, but those of us left have been stuck here ever since. The remaining angels and demons on this side pretty much wiped each other out in the last seven decades, most of them wearing meatsuits. There’s maybe a handful of us left as far as I’m aware. I’m the only true djinn I know of on this side.”

  “That must kind of suck,” I said.

  “Yeah, it does actually. Almost as bad as getting it in the neck for being a British-Indian kid. If I have to hear one more idiot tell me to ‘go home’ I swear I’ll show my true form just for the hell of it. Anyway, as I was saying, mate...”

  “Are we?” I asked, eyes narrowed and voice sharp.

  “What?” Dee replied.

  “Mates?”

  “Of course we are, but, see this is why I didn’t want to tell you because I knew you’d freak out. I’m doing this as an absolute last resort because of the danger you’re putting yourself in.”

  “I’m not freaking out.”

  “You are a little bit,” Dee said with his familiar, cheeky grin. It was eerie, seeing this djinn-thing that had the tone and mannerisms of the kid I’d known for five years.

  “Fine, but you can hardly blame me. I mean, this is beyond weird. What...how are you...I mean who are you? How old are you? Why are you wandering around as a sixteen-year-old British-Indian kid?”

  “See? I knew you’d freak out,” Dee replied. He sounded smug about it.

  “Idiot,” I said.

  Dee chuckled through sharp teeth.

  “Look, seeing you like that is too much, would you mind changing back to, you know, Dee for now? I mean, you can do that right? Change back?”

  “Sure,” Dee said.

  His body reverted to the form I knew. Teeth and nails retracted. Skin lost its blue tinge, eyes returned to their normal brown colour. There he was again, Deepak Patel. My best mate since I was eleven.

  Except he wasn’t Dee at all.

  “So, who are you?”

  “As near as I can remember I’m a hundred years old. I think. The problem is that since the portals between our worlds were locked, everything’s been hazy. We draw our energy from our dimension, and with the connection severed everything is more difficult. My memory is fuzzy, especially since I took this human form. In the past I could shift from spirit to physical form in the blink of an eye. It was a great party trick. Now the best I can manage is to shift into something close to my original physical form and a small bit of telekinesis here and there.”

  “Tele-what?”

  “Telekinesis. Moving stuff with my mind. Good grief Jayce, have you ever read a comic book?”

  “No, not really. Batman sometimes. You can move stuff with your mind?”

  “Only little stuff. A pen rolling across a table for no reason. A coin spinning in the air for a second too long. The odd untied shoelace here and there...”

  The penny dropped. I gawped.

  “All those times you predicted when someone was about to trip over and stuff. That was you. You were doing it, not predicting it.”

  Dee grinned, “Yeah, well. You’ve got to have some fun, right?”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “Hey, it made us both laugh and no-one ever got hurt so what’s the harm?” Dee replied.

  “So what have you got to do with all this stuff that’s been going on? Why are you here?”

  “I didn’t have any choice. I was bound to you when you were a young child by a warlock.”

  The more Dee talked, the deeper the rabbit hole got.

  “I need an aspirin,” I said.

  *

  The white limo passed through Avebury. The village, in the south west of England, is famous for its three stone circles. One of them is the largest megalithic circle in the world and surrounds the six-hundred resident village, making it a major tourist attraction.

  The circles aren’t as impressive as Stonehenge, although almost as well known. They have no horizontal roof stones and many of the original stones have long since vanished, leaving the three circles incomplete. Like Stonehenge, however, the reason for the circles’ construction is unknown. There are multiple theories, often to do with rituals, funerals or ancient astronomy.

  The fact is that no-one knows why these massive stone monuments were built by our ancestors.

  The limo didn’t stop at Avebury. Instead we kept going for ten minutes past the village until we came to a small road marked with a ‘Private Property’ sign. A little further along that road and reached a tall metal gate with a two-metre high wall stretching around the grounds on the other side.

  The gates opened automatically. We drove through a well-tended estate towards the mansion in the centre. The weather had turned sour in the meantime, with grey clouds covering the sky and the first few drops of falling rain threatening a downpour.

  A few groundskeepers were working the gardens. They stopped to observe as we pulled up in front of the mansion.

  Victoria Pryce was waiting to meet us.

  Chapter Twenty Three: Further Dee-Tales

  “So there I was, minding my own business up in Newcastle. Playing the odd prank, floating around. I was keeping a low profile since the portals had been shut. I’m a djinn, after all. If Section 19 found out about me, I’d be hunted and killed.”

  “Wait, you already knew about Section 19?”

  “They’re scum,” Dee said, the vehemence in his voice taking me by surprise. He tried to calm down.

  “Section 19 has murdered supernaturals for as long as I can remember, but it really got bad after World War Two. That was when the purge happened, in the fifties and sixties. It was brutal. The fey had already left by then and locked the doors to their realm. They did that during World War One, I think. The odd one or two got left behind.”

  “The fey?”

  “Yeah, the fey. Fairies, trolls, leprechauns, that kind of thing. Whole different subset.”

  “Right.”

  Of course.

  “Back to me. I got pulled down south by a warlock I didn’t recognise. There’s not many of them left anymore, incidentally. There’s so little magical energy in the world now that it’s more practical to do most things the mundane way. Your average mobile phone has got more power in it than a magic wand these days. Anyway I was magically bound to this
one-year-old kid. Instructed to protect him. I wasn’t given a reason for it, nothing.”

  Dee paused, then added; “The kid was you.”

  “I’d figured that much out.”

  “Right. So for the first nine odd years, that’s what I did. Hovered around you in spirit form and kept you out of danger. It was insanely boring. I mean, there wasn’t any danger. I had one job and there was nothing to do. The most exciting moment was stopping you sticking a fork in a plug socket when you were three.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “Well, you were three. After a decade, man I was bored. There were none of my kind in the area to hang out with. I had you and nothing going on. So I decided to see if I could still materialise into a physical form. The wording of the spell which bound me was pretty vague, it was some seriously shoddy spellcasting to be honest. So I wondered if the spell would let me adopt a form that would fit in with protecting you. Like being a schoolkid. It turned out I could do that.

  “The problem was, I couldn’t turn back into my spirit form. There wasn’t enough magical energy left in the world, so I was trapped in the body I’d created. The best I could do was keep shifting bit by bit as I ‘grew up’ so to speak. Even getting into my true physical form, the one you just saw, I can only get halfway there.”

  “So you’ve just been pretending to be my mate. Because you were forced into it.”

  Dee groaned.

  “See, this is the whole freaking out thing I was talking about. No, I am your mate. After so many years in this body, I’m as much Deepak as I am the djinn. It’s all fuzzy, like I said. I’m still your mate, right? I know this is all a shock, but I’m still Deepak. Just a bit extra. Like a guardian angel Deepak. Except not an angel cos those guys suck. They’re almost as bad as the vampires.”

  “Vampires are bad?” I said.

  “The worst,” Dee said darkly.

  “Okay,” I said, “then why did you put up with Maxwell’s bullying? Couldn’t you have shifted into your djinn form or something, freak him out?”

  “Yeah, sure. And have Section 19 after me? No thank you very much. I’d have been dead by the end of the week. Why do you think I don’t go into my djinn form every time someone has a go at me? Same reason. Hunted to death by Section 19. Or maybe some angels, if there are any around. Oh, and let’s not forget about the vampires while we’re at it. Keeping a low profile was the only option.”

  That was a fair point.

  “So you were watching over me my whole life? That’s kind of creepy.”

  “I was often just in the area, checking out any potential threats and stuff. Of which there were very few. As I said, it was mind-numbingly boring. Bridge End is a real supernatural backwater.”

  “Until last week,” I said.

  “Until last week,” Dee agreed, “Until it all went nuts. I think the demon hound was tracking me. It was probably scared out of its wits and looking for a familiar scent. The whiff of Djinn energy. I doubt it was originally going to attack us, it probably just wanted a stroke and some food. The problem is it shouldn’t be here at all. They’re from our dimension, the one that’s locked, or maybe destroyed, I don’t know. How the hound got here is a total mystery.”

  “You seem to not know as much as you do know.”

  “I’m telling you all I can, mate. That’s all I’ve got. That’s why you need to stay away from all of this. It’s dangerous and everything is too uncertain right now. There’s nothing I can do to protect you, especially not if you go off on this silly spy mission. In the past I could have switched into spirit form and tagged along, but now...”

  Dee left the sentence hanging.

  My need for an aspirin hadn’t decreased in the meantime and I really needed some space.

  “I need to think about this,” I said. My voice was flat, maybe a bit cold, but how was I supposed to react? It was too much for me to take in.

  “Look, it’s getting late and I need to get the paint job done.”

  “I can stick around,” Dee said, “talk some more?”

  “No,” I said with a flat tone, “I need to go over all of this on my own.”

  Dee looked crestfallen. Later I realised all of this had been really difficult for him. From his perspective he’d ‘come out’ and he needed his friend to be cool about it. At the time I was too busy feeling betrayed. My best friend had been lying to me for years. Yeah, sure, okay so I’d sort of been doing the same but that wasn’t the point.

  “You aren’t going to go, are you?” Dee said, “To Avebury? Now I’ve told you everything?”

  “No,” I lied, “I won’t go. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

  Dee got out of the car and reluctantly left the garage. It took me until ten to finish the paint job. I knew there were a bunch of questions I still needed to ask Dee, but my head was already reeling.

  Once I was done I retrieved my mobile phone from the desk drawer, locked the garage and went home. Mum had already gone to bed, which was just as well. I didn’t want to talk about anything with her.

  *

  Victoria Pryce was leaning against one of the pillars that flanked the polished oak door of the mansion. This was a proper old-school mansion, like something out of Downton Abbey. I’d never seen anything like it in real life. Major Wilson had told me the Pryces came from old money. I hadn’t considered what that meant until now. They were rich – I mean really rich.

  I got out of the limo and held a finger to my lips and showed Victoria the post-it note on my phone, upon which I’d written:

  PHONE BUGGED BY SECTION 19

  Victoria nodded, took the phone out of my hand. Hooked a fingernail under the back of the phone and flipped it open. Took out the battery. Handed the phone and the separated battery back to me with a shrug. She knew I wouldn’t risk switching it back on. I had just as much to lose as she did with Section 19 listening in.

  “You’re here,” she said with a smile.

  “Yeah. This place is...wow.”

  “I’m so glad you made it,” Victoria said. She lifted up her right hand and spoke into her sleeve, “Okay, he’s here. Lock him up with all the others.”

  Chapter Twenty Four: The Facility

  Victoria realised by the look on my face that her joke had not gone down well.

  “Jason, I’m kidding!” she said, stifling a small laugh at my horrified expression.

  “Thanks!” I replied. She’d nearly given me a heart attack. Victoria Pryce: Really smart, very good looking, lousy sense of humour.

  “Sorry,” she added, “I couldn’t resist. Come inside. ‘Enter freely and of your own free will’ as they say.”

  “Who says?”

  It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “Never mind,” Victoria said, “come in.”

  She walked through the mansion’s large oak front door, beckoning at me. After a brief hesitation, my heart still thumping after her joke, I followed. Not a second too soon, either. As I entered the mansion, the black clouds overhead let out a torrential downpour. It was only the early afternoon, but it was dark enough outside that you’d have mistaken it for late evening.

  “So, I guess I should show you around,” Victoria said. We were standing in a sumptuous wood panelled foyer with wide stairs leading up to the second floor. Old paintings of people I didn’t recognise dotted the walls. Expensive looking vases sat on small, ornately carved wooden tables. The space smelled clean, everything polished and sparkling.

  “The mansion? Sure.”

  “Your choice. I could spend hours showing you around a choice selection of old paintings of my thieving, murdering, slave trading ancestors. Or I could show you the cool stuff.”

  “Let’s go with the cool stuff,” I smiled.

  Victoria smiled, nodded, “The cool stuff it is, then.”

  We took a left down a short corridor as opulent as the entrance hallway. Victoria stopped at a section of the wood-panelled wall. She pressed one of the panels and p
art of the wall slid open to reveal a hidden elevator. We stepped inside.

  “Going down,” Victoria Pryce said, pressing the ‘down’ button on the panel. The elevator descended.

  “Tell me you have a secret underground base.”

  “We have a secret underground base,” Victoria confirmed.

  Awesome!

  The journey down took about a minute, but we were moving fast. We must have been four or five hundred metres below ground by the time we stopped. The doors opened and we stepped out into a cavern around two hundred metres across. The whole space was filled with computers and a dozen staff monitoring them. The atmosphere was calm and quiet.

  The elevator had stopped at a gantry which stretched all the way around the cavern. I looked down at the space in wonder. I looked up, estimated that the top of the cave was a hundred metres above us.

  “You’ve got a damn batcave,” I marvelled.

  Victoria looked puzzled.

  “No, there are no bats here,” she said, “I can assure you this is a sterile environment.”

  She was being serious.

  “Never mind.”

  One of the huge screens caught my eye. A familiar shape was displayed, pacing around a large cage. The demon hound.

  “Hey, is that...?”

  “It is,” Victoria confirmed.

  “You have it locked up?”

  “I’d rather not,” Victoria replied, “but so far we don’t know what it is, where it came from or how dangerous it might be. It took us three days just to work out what to feed it. We had to start with small doses to make sure we didn’t poison it.”

  It’s a demon hound from another dimension, I thought, and I know this because my best friend is a demon – sorry a djinn. No, really. Hey, I’m as surprised as you are.

  I didn’t say it though. As benign as Victoria appeared, lousy jokes aside, I was still a bit suspicious. Moorecroft had suggested that she was behind the attack on Section 19. I’d decided to keep some of my secrets to myself for the time being.