Page 28 of Some Kind of Haunted

Harrison turns his bleary gaze on me, which feels oddly direct when Logan’s the one who voiced the question. “The demon deal, of course.”

I can hear Logan mutter something disapproving under his breath, but I am caught in Harrison’s warm gaze. Demon.

He said demon deal. I’m sure of it.

And he keeps going. “The harbinger is always a sign that the Feed is coming.”

The Feed. I think of that revolting slurping. The way it’s haunted me. I don’t know who’s doing the feeding or what they’re feeding on, but I know it connects. I know I connect.

I have heard the echoes of people screaming. They’re feeding.

“Okay, I’ll bite,” Logan says, in a voice he usually only uses while getting juries to do his bidding. Often by politely savaging his opponents. “What is the Feed? Some kind of agricultural festival?”

Both Jack and Harrison look at him like he’s the dumbest man alive—not something Logan is at all familiar with or knows how to handle, that’s for sure. He’s always the smartest person in any room I’m in.

“Demons, son,” Harrison says gently. “You have to appease the demons. Our ancestors made a deal.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Logan rubs his hands over his face, another rare show of exasperation. “Do you really think that bullshit is going to work on us just because we’re not from around here? I’ve spent half my life in courtrooms dealing with people who think a little faked insanity will get them out of jury duty or jail time. You think this act is going to scare us?”

But I am scared. Because I’ve heard the slurping. I’ve felt the pull. Maybe I don’t exactly believe in demons, but it makes sense in the context of everything happening right now.

It’s a dream, so maybe that’s why I feel like engaging with the information at face value. When I wake up, there will be no curse, no demons, no feeding. These are dream things, fictional things. I decide that means I should get to the bottom of them while I’m still in the dream. In dream world, no one looks at me with pity, like my mind is nothing but a bunch of rabid cats fighting each other.

“What does our grandmother have to do with demons?” I ask Harrison specifically, even though both Harrison and Jack turn their gazes to me.

“Every generation has its believers, its fighters,” the old man tells me, in the sort of voice that I can imagine has told a lot of bedtime stories. “Every generation has its cowards and its heroes. And so every generation must prepare for the Feed, which arrives on the back of a harbinger. Some say that the first harbinger came about thanks to the prayers of a woman who suffered an unimaginable loss at the hands of the demons. Subsequent legends call those prayers spells and the woman in question a witch from down in Missouri. Either way, the harbinger comes. Years can pass without a Feed, but there’s always another one on the horizon, and the harbinger always comes first. To let us know the Feed will follow.”

Harrison looks at me meaningfully. Jack looks away.

Logan scoffs audibly.

But in this moment, I know it’s me. The dreams. The sleepwalking. Everything I’ve been plagued by since I was a kid—things Logan was never haunted by.

I am a harbinger of doom.

And hey, this might be a dream, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to feel untrue when I wake up.

“You mean me,” I say, because it’s probably a good idea to make sure that I’m the one who can be depended upon to show up when feeds involving demons are on the menu. Not the sort of thing a girl should gatecrash if she’s not invited.

“I mean you,” the old man says kindly. “I knew the moment I saw you.”

Logan scoffs. “Did the demons tell you?”

Jack makes a low noise at that, but Harrison holds up a hand. “Not the demons. Your grandmother. She knew it would be you. She’s always known. We’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”

“You look like your mother,” Jack says as if he would rather punch himself in the face than tell me this. “Shockingly like her.”

“Yes,” Logan says impatiently, “there’s a strong family resemblance. Just like there are a lot of photographs in our grandmother’s house to help sell this story.”

“The original founding families of Midas made a deal with the demons,” Jack says, sounding about as impatient as Logan. “The demons promised Midas some years of peace and prosperity, some safe places and times. In return, the people of Midas would allow for a great feed to occur once a generation, in which the founding families would ensure that extra souls were in town for the demons to sate themselves with. Otherwise known as our annual festivals.”

Logan and I are so quiet I’m not sure either one of us is breathing.

“We’ll mark two hundred years of Feeds this Halloween. A bicentennial.” Harrison lifts his shoulder. “Each generation tries to stop them, but none have managed it yet. Sometimes winning is just surviving.”

Jack looks away from his grandfather then. I can’t read his expression, but it feels deliberate on his part. Maybe a sign he doesn’t agree? Or maybe Logan is right and this is all a joke and Jack is just hiding his face so we can’t see him laugh at us.

To me, though, this all feels serious and ominous and real. It feels plausible. It feels like an explanation for all the weirdness in my life. Forked tongues and threatening garden gnomes. Old women who act like they know me and want to hurt me. That creepy clock tower and all the slurping. Is this what I’ve been dreaming of all along?