The Dark Man (16 page)

“Yup,” Mike says, matter-of-factly. “Ready to rock?”

I can’t quite tell if his enthusiasm is manufactured so he’ll be on my good side as I ponder his offer, or if he’s now legitimately excited about the investigation. My guess would be a mixture of both.

“Here goes.” I reach for the doorknob again and turn it gradually. I don’t know why I’m trying to be quiet. That bastard inside already knows we’re here. He probably sensed us coming before we hit the 1500 block on this street.

The door, weighty on its hinges and off-balance, swings inside without my help, screeching as it goes, and my thoughts instantly go back to how well that sound would’ve played during an episode. We would’ve magnified it, placed a couple of layers over it and, presto, you’ve got this chill-inducing shriek that sets the mood and tone for the next hour.

Mike, ever the gentleman, motions inside and says, “After you.”

I actually hang back for a moment. It’s not often that I get legitimately scared, but whatever’s inside here has the potential to do some major league damage to our souls, and I do something that I haven’t done since we went into the Hopper house for the first time years ago.

I say the Lord’s Prayer, loudly, raising my voice into the long, deep, dark entryway, as if I’m talking into a tunnel that leads straight to hell. I touch my crucifix necklace, which feels warm against my skin, and make the sign of the cross over my chest.

Mike joins me, and to any of the neighbors, anyone passing by, we must be a sight. Two grown men, praying
into
a house.

When the prayer is finished, I add, “Hear me now, demon. You have no dominion over my body, or the body of my friend, Mike Long. You have no right to my soul, or the soul of my friend. We are here under the protection of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Once we enter, you are not allowed to touch us. You are not allowed to harm us in any way. We are protected by Almighty God, and you will obey us and listen to our orders. We are here to ask questions. We are here for information. And, above all, we are here to free the soul of Louisa Craghorn, and we are here to demolish your control over her surviving husband, Dave Craghorn. Do you understand us? We are protected by our faith, we are here to take back this house, and we are here to wreck your fucking ass.”

Mike chuckles. “Forever and ever. Amen.”

“Let’s do this.”

Mike and I step across the threshold. We make it three steps inside, enough to clear the path of the swinging door, and it slams behind us, the powerful shock echoing throughout the house.

We barely have time to flinch and look behind us, hoping that it was the wind, before we hear a malicious, throaty growl coming from upstairs, which is followed by the thundering sound of footsteps stampeding down the stairs.

“What the—” Mike says, unable to finish his sentence, as we’re both hammered in the chest and thrown into the corner where we fall limply like old jackets.

Mike moans and sits up, rubbing his rib cage and looking like he didn’t make it off the canvas after the referee’s ten-count. It takes me a second, too, because I feel like I’m breathing through water. With a hit like that, who knows what’s going on inside my lungs, but I can’t stop now. I can’t back out and run away.

“Where’d it go?” Mike asks, whipping his head around as if he can spot the next impending attack.

I do the same. For the moment, the energy in the hallway feels different, as if we just experienced a paranormal Hiroshima, and the aftereffects of the atomic blast are settling down. “Gone, I think. Feels …”

“Lighter,” Mike says. “You’re right. Hit hard and fast, now it’s gone.”

“For the time being.”

“Oh, it’ll be back.”

“Gonna be a take-no-prisoners kind of night.”

Mike has managed to get to his feet, and he agrees with me as he clasps my forearm and pulls me up alongside him. He says, “Three guesses what’s showing up on our skin right now, and the first two don’t count.”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?”

We both lift our shirts, and, as expected, we have wide, red splotches that are condensing to claw-tipped handprints. It looks as if Mike got the left and I got the right.

“Son of a bitch. That hurt.” I’m still having trouble trying to get a full breath. I double over and wobble with my head cloudy and knees weak. I count to twenty with my eyes closed, inhaling and exhaling in a steady rhythm, and when I look up, Mike is gone.

It’s a weird thing, this sensation I’m feeling, because at once I’m feeling abandoned—that childlike fear of being left alone, away from my mother—and terrified of the remote possibility that our enemy has snatched Mike out of thin air.

But rather than Mike having experienced some sort of paranormal rapture, he rounds the corner from the living room, snapping his equipment belt with one hand and handing me his GS-5000 with the other. I take it from him and enjoy the comfortable bulk in my hands. It’s almost like a security blanket to me. If I can communicate with what’s on the other side, I’ll know whether it’s an entity that I can approach, or something that requires extra protection from the Big Man upstairs. Whether it was birthed from human loins or the fires of Hades, it’s essential to know what’s there.

Mike opens a bottle of water, and instead of sipping it, he sniffs at the opening. He scrunches his nose and asks, “Does holy water go stale?”

“What?”

“I mean, does the blessing wear off?”

“I doubt it.”

“Good, because I’ve had this same stuff since that episode in Missouri, the one where we thought that right-hander was terrorizing the family of clowns. Remember?”

“Yeah, what a disappointment.”

As it turns out, our entire crew, producers and all, were thoroughly duped by the Morgansterns, who just happened to be a family of professional clowns hoping to gain more exposure for their entertainment company. Lesson learned.

I ask Mike what our plan of attack is.

“Beats me. This is your gig, Ford. I’m just along for moral support.”

I feel a cool rush of wind crawl across my exposed skin—my arms, hands, neck, and cheeks—and I know that there aren’t any open windows in the house. It’s almost as if this demonic entity is caressing me. “Let’s move,” I tell him. “Feels like it’s coming back for another round.”

There’s nowhere to hide, of course, and I’d rather be in action than simply standing in front of the firing squad, waiting on demonic possession bullets to come flying at my head.

We coordinate our efforts around the living room, kitchen, and hallway, checking each of our spotcams. They’re still working, and while I would love to spend an hour or two scanning through them to see if they picked up evidence while we were out for dinner, we don’t have the downtime that we would on a normal investigation.

Mike and I, we’re in an active, live-fire situation, and the enemy isn’t going to sit back while we hunt for proof of his existence.

Mike says, “I don’t know why, man, but I feel like this goddamn thing retreated upstairs. I feel safer down here, though.”

“While the answers we
want
are upstairs.”

My hands are sweaty. I wipe them on the legs of my slacks. Mike used to chide me about how my hands got wetter than a dog’s tongue the first few times we filmed. It’s not an easy thing, being entertaining.

Mike sees me swiping my palms and grants me a pass, because a second later he’s doing the same thing. I tell him, “Here’s the plan. We don’t need to bother with EMF sweeps or anything generic. That’s just telling a zebra he has stripes. We head up and jump immediately into the DVR. We’ll do a few sprint sessions to see if we can come up with a name.”

“Works for me,” Mike says.

There’s power in a name, which is why we’ll try to wrangle it out of this sucker.

He adds, “He’s not gonna give it up easily. This ain’t prom night where everybody’s eager.”

It occurs to me that we’ve been wasting too much time. “Shit, Mike. Let’s move. Hurry, hurry.” He’s chasing me up the stairs, asking what the problem is, as we take them in leaps of twos and threes. “We should’ve been up here right away trying to talk to Louisa while that fucking thing charges up again.”

Mike says, “
I’m
out of practice.
You
should have known better.”

I let the jab go because it’s the truth. Then again, I haven’t faced anything this overwhelming since the Hopper house. I’ve spent the past two years tracking down murderers and victims in the afterlife, but nothing like this.

I start the digital voice recorder in my hand, pop the earbuds in, and say, “Louisa? Are you here? It’s Ford and Mike. Do you remember us from earlier? We just want to ask you a few questions. And listen to me, Louisa, you don’t have to be afraid of us, but you do have to be afraid of that thing when it comes back. It knows why we’re here, it knows we want to give you peace, and as soon as it can, it’s going to come for us, and for you. Can you tell me if you can hear my voice?”

We wait in relative silence. I hear nothing but the thin whisper of white noise humming through the minuscule speakers wedged in my ears.

The floorboards creak underneath Mike’s feet, and I don’t bother to mark it on the recording because, for the time being, I don’t care about reviewing these tapes tomorrow. I’m not concerned about what I’ll be doing in a week. I am focused on the now.

I want this fight to end before sunrise.

I want to have some solid evidence for Detective Thomas.

I want to walk out of here victorious, with the demon gone, Louisa drifting toward the light, and Dave able to enter his own home again, without fear of pain, possession, or more scratches marking his damaged skin.

Can we do it? Can we be successful?

Or are we a couple of ants trying to take down an elephant?

While we wait for Louisa to make contact, I go over the details of the day in my mind, and something from earlier pokes its head out at me.

“Mike?”

He mumbles, “Mmm hmm?” in response, focused on the thermal imager in his hand.

“Didn’t you say there was something weird about the scratches all over Craghorn? Did it ever come to you? I was thinking about it just now, and—”

Mike says, “Hang on, I think I’m getting something here. Take a look at this. Down there at the end of the hall. You see it?”

I lean over to look at the small screen. Just like before, it’s too cold in here to get an accurate reading with the rainbow version of the heat signatures, so Mike has it on the black-and-white setting. It’s almost as bad, but better than nothing.

He points to a small white blob in the doorway of the western-facing guest room. “Right there. Doesn’t that look like something is peeking out at us?”

“Um, maybe a head and—whoa!” The thing, whatever it was, darts back inside the room. “Move, move, move,” I tell Mike, and we’re darting down the hall, bravely running into battle. I won’t say we’re storming the beaches of Normandy, because yeah, we’re not facing down the German artillery, but this is still pretty damn scary. You drop onto those chilly beaches in France, take a bullet to the chest, and you’re a goner. Here, in this house, if it’s the demon we’re running toward and not Louisa, either one of us could face a full-bore demonic possession and a lifetime of sitting in a padded cell, trying to gouge out our own eyeballs with that morning’s gelatin spoon.

Give me a German bullet any day. I’ll take the quick road home, thank you very much.

In hindsight, maybe we should’ve tiptoed to the door, but son of a bitch, I’m so amped and ready to kick some ass that I don’t hold back, and neither does Mike. He’s taken two direct hits from this thing, and I’m sure he’s itching to do some waterboarding with holy water.

We jam our shoulders together as we try to get into the guest bedroom, and it’s slightly comical. Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Jerry Lewis—shit like that, and it’s the kind of thing that Carla would’ve loved to add into an episode to show the viewing audience that, yes, indeed, we are also human. Goofy ones.

Mike wrenches his body to the side, and we fall through the doorway, stumbling into the open space. It’s undisturbed. Nothing has been moved. It looks exactly the same as when Craghorn showed me earlier today when I first arrived with the detective. It used to be a guest room, now it serves as a storage space, cluttered with a few cardboard boxes sitting about, some storage containers with multicolored lids, a pile of women’s clothes lying on the floor, still on hangers. My guess is, those belonged to Louisa, and this empty room is as far as he made it with them.

The thing I notice right away is that there’s the barest trace of a flowery smell in here.

It’s a good sign.

Mike inhales deeply. “No demon farts. What is that? Roses?”

“Perfume, yeah. Anything on the therm?”

“Just the ambient room temp.”

I hold up Mike’s GS-5000, readjust my earbuds, and say, “Louisa? Was that you? Please don’t be afraid. Do you remember us from earlier? This is Mike, and I’m Ford.”

I’ve done this for more than a thousand investigations, but I will never get over the chills that creep up my arm when I hear a voice from beyond the grave.

Every. Single. Time.

“I’m … here …
”

I quickly rap Mike on the shoulder. “I got her,” I say, and then I offer him the right earbud. He plugs it into his left ear and leans closer. “There you are. Thank you, Louisa. Listen, this is important. We don’t have much time. That thing—”

“
… demon …
”

It’s a whisper from a thousand miles away, but it’s right beside us, too. Distant, raspy, and full of fear.

“Yes, the demon. We’re here to help you, so it’s important that you listen to us.”

“
… trapped …
”

“Mike,” I say, nudging him. “Do you see her on the therm?”

He shakes his head, looks at me with a sharp squint, his mouth pinched, and frantically motions for me to keep talking to her.

“You’re trapped, yes, and we want to free you. I absolutely promise that we’re going to get you out of here, but in order to beat this thing, we need your help. We need a name, okay?” I slow down my words and make sure to enunciate. “Do you know its name?”