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resting. A gauze square was taped over his left temple. It actually made him look tough.
“Gary, it’s good to see you conscious again,” I said, smiling.
“Good to be conscious. I had no idea Denver would be this exciting,” he said.
“It usually isn’t. Most of our ghost stories are the garden-variety kind.”
“Who wants garden variety when we’ve got this?” Jules said, nodding at one of the screens.
“What is it?”
“Here, watch,” Jules said. We crowded around the laptop.
A video clip filled the screen. It had the grainy, filtered quality of a low-light, night-vision-type camera. Everything in the scene had a green tinge, but I recognized the view: looking along the bar at New Moon, across the back half of the restaurant, including the table where we’d worked and a partial view into the kitchen. A stainless-steel worktable and the industrial gas grill were visible, along with some shelves of pots, pans, utensils, and packages. It was one of a half dozen cameras the crew had set up before the séance.
The time stamp in the corner ticking off seconds was the only indication that time was passing. Nothing in the clip showed movement; we sat still around the table. And these guys watched film like this for hours. Even if you scanned through using the fast-forward button, it must have been tedious. But they’d also had a lot of practice. I certainly wouldn’t have noticed the anomaly that Jules pointed out.
“There, there it is. You see it?”
He put his finger on the screen showing where, on the upper corner of the kitchen doorframe, a tongue of flame emerged. It looked white and glaring in the night-vision footage. It was like a fire had started on the inside of the wall, then burned through, licking outward and expanding like an explosion. One moment it was a hint of fire, emerging in one or two places. The next moment, a wall of fierce fire blew from the kitchen through the dining room, pushing air and heat—and the table, and us—before it. This was the fireball that had roared out to shock us. The rest of the film showed us reacting, panicking, the table knocking Gary’s head, me running for the fire extinguishers, Ben running after me, and so forth. Pandemonium.
The fire itself seemed to come out of nowhere.
“Spontaneous building combustion?” I said. If it could happen to people, why not structures?
“There’s usually a reason a place catches fire like that,” Jules said. “I talked to the investigators about this. They haven’t finished their report, but they haven’t found anything obvious like a gas leak or faulty wiring, or ignition of flammable materials, which is usually what happens. In an older building like this, there’s any number of things that can go wrong, but there’s something else. I didn’t see it until I went through it frame by frame. The investigators wouldn’t have caught it.”
He proceeded to show us, backing up to the point where the fire started and clicking forward, a half second at a time. The flames moved almost like they were alive, dancing, swaying, each step and unexpected flicker captured on a split second of video. When the fireball burst, a brilliant sphere of light expanding out, searing my eyes, it was almost beautiful. Like some cosmic event rather than a destructive earthly force.
Jules hit pause and pointed, his excitement clear. “There, do you see it?”
I’d never have caught it. No one who didn’t have the investigators’ experience in looking for weird shadows, blips, and anomalies in video like this would have seen it.
A human figure stood outlined in the middle of the billowing flames.
It was off-color, a slightly more golden tinge than the fire surrounding it, a heat mirage within a heat mirage, shimmering at a different angle. But it had a head, body, legs, and arms, spread in something like ecstasy.
A frame later, it vanished, melting into the rest of the fire. The image only lasted for a split second. At full speed, the clip just looked like flames changing shapes.
Jules backed the clip up, so that we were all staring at that figure, unreal, undeniable.
“Is it someone in a suit?” I said. “Like one of those fireproof stunt-guy suits?”
“Except that it just disappears,” Jules answered. “Granted, fire does strange things, it’s unpredictable, but it’s right there on the video.”
I should have been happy to see a form, an actual enemy—the demon. We now had an image, a being that reveled in fire, maybe used it to destroy. But that also meant we were dealing with something sentient, with a mind, a will, and a mean streak. My gut felt cold.
Jules, at least, seemed happy at the discovery. “This is proof. It’s proof.”
“Proof of what?” Ben said.
“The impossible.”
Ben pointed at the screen. “Just so you all know, the insurance company is buying that it was an accident. So I don’t care if there’s the slightest hint of supernatural nastiness going on with this. I don’t care if you find Casper the Friendly Ghost playing with matches. If any of you talk to the insurance company, it was a gas leak due to the age of the building. That’s what’s going on the paperwork, that’s the story, and we’re all sticking to it. Got it?”
Full-on lawyer mode. That was my honey. “Got it,” I said.
From the sofa, Gary shook his head. “A video like that is too easy to fake. It’s not good enough for proof.”
