“Yeah, I reckon you will,” Mr. Bell said. But there was no joy in it.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
“You think you can, I don’t know, cure us? The house, I mean? The family?”
The question startled me out of my sun-glare reverie. “Yeah, I do,” I said. I shouldn’t be so bold, I knew. Despite all my work with Mordechai and my brand-new research into demons and how to expel them, I was still seriously new at this. But I felt it in my bones that I could take out the mix of demons plaguing the Grahams once I got them to share their names. And I was good at getting demons to reveal themselves. Really good.
“Carol Ann is harder, since she’s not here,” I continued. “But if you can get the house and Joe and everything settled, prove what happened here, maybe her treatment could include some spiritual help as well. To get whatever’s inside her, you know…out.”
Or perhaps I’ll pay her a visit.
I didn’t even fight the cold chill that rolled over me—I’d been waiting for it. Hoping for it, if I were honest. “Anyway,” I said. “What about you? Will you go back to Chicago? Keep lawyering and all that?”
He chuckled a little grimly. “That’s the plan, yes. Assuming Mom and Dad are okay. Which after last night, man. That’s kind of hard to imagine.”
I remembered the violence of the Graham’s bedroom. Contained, but not controlled. “That was new too?”
“Him yelling at her? New for me. I mean, I wasn’t here when the horses were killed. But no one acted like there was any rift when I came home the next week. Mom was super tense, so was Dad, but they were just—upset. You know. I didn’t realize it was at each other.”
“It’s got to be hard when you don’t know why you’re doing things. When things sort of seem to happen without you directing them. And then your aunt…”
Max groaned. “What shesaid.” His hand tightened on the steering wheel. We hadn’t talked again about what the gun shop guy had said about Emily. I still couldn’t quite believe what she’d said, either, and I’d heard some things. “Who does that?”
He shot me an intense, almost pleading look, before staring back into the sunshine. “Because she’s not insane, you know,” he said tightly. “Or not insane like you would expect. She’s rational. She makes her own decisions. She drives. Eats dinner in restaurants. She does everything everyone else does. She’s not some creepy horror show victim who shuffles around for half the movie and then randomly starts attacking people.”
I smiled. “She wouldn’t necessarily be that way.”
“Well, she should be. If she’s possessed by fuckingdemons, then she should act a little bit more like it.”
The absurdity of his statement, even blurted in desperation, caught us both off guard. I squeaked a short, harsh giggle that I couldn’t quite keep contained, and Max coughed a separate bizarre, truncated laugh. His shoulders came down for the first time since the gun shop, and he sagged back against the driver’s seat. He shook his head. “I just don’t understand how this got soout of hand. I don’t know what we did wrong. What Carol Ann did that was so…wrong.”
I grimaced. “She didn’t have to do anything wrong, Max. Not really. That’s not how it works.”
Max didn’t say anything for a moment, and I found myself not wanting to look out the window or stare at the road. I needed to look at him, another person, when I made this statement. Even if he couldn’t look back at me.
I angled in my seat toward him. “Evil doesn’t need much of an invitation, okay? It prefers one, because it’s much easier that way. But it doesn’t need one. It doesn’t hang out waiting for a basement to get extra creepy or an attic to short out its wiring. It’s everywhere, all around us. It’s in churches and cemeteries. Nurseries and gardens. It’s in prisons and asylums, sure, but it’s also in kindergartens. It’s as much a part of creation as flowers and bunnies are. You can’t escape it by being good or by hiding from it. There are all sorts of nuns and priests who’ve been afflicted. If you want to go that far, Job in the bible, arguably one of the best human beings of all time, was afflicted. Life sometimes sucks that way.”
Max glanced at me, fear in his eyes. “So there’s nothing you can do?”
I shrugged. “Prayer helps. Blessings. Loving someone, letting them love you back. But you’re right—none of that’s foolproof.”
I gave him a reassuring smile. “The good thing is, once evil makes its move, it’s almost always easier to combat. It’s shown its hand, and in the case of a possession, it’s generally trapped inside the person its possessing. Which means it can be addressed directly and expelled. Ditto for a house or space that’s infested. You can identify it. You can learn its name. Once you do that, you have more control, because names are powerful.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Max sighed. “Except you’d probably need a whole phone book for my family’s problems.”
I smiled, and it felt like a normal smile. A natural smile. It felt strange, but also right.
We made it back to the house when the sun was beginning to set over the woods of the Graham estate. It was beautiful in a simple, unforced way, though the house looked too still and the paddock behind too empty. We pulled into the drive and parked behind a full contingent of cars, which made my heart sink and my stomach flutter all at once. “They’re all here tonight, it looks like.”
“Yep. At least we won’t have to sit through more lasagna though. That’s a bonus.”
“True.”
The house was weirdly quiet, even with the television going in the front room. A quick look showed both parents staring at the screen, and Sam on the floor in front of them, equally transfixed. Emily sat at the kitchen table, staring at her phone. The grandma wasn’t on the first floor, but Max seemed to have some sort of senior citizen sixth sense about her and glanced up. “She’s listening to music. I created a playlist for her.” He smiled. “The fact that she’s upstairs and Sam is down here is a very good thing.”
By common accord, we walked back to my room on the first floor. I didn’t want him to go, but that of course, wouldn’t work. It was one thing to fall asleep on the back porch together, this was different. And yet, it wasn’t his mom poking her head in to shoo us to our rooms, in the end.
