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“Good. Never clean up after monsters.”
“My son isn’t a monster.”
“I’m not talking about your son.”
Vidocq goes into Hunter’s room.
“What my associate is saying is that when powerful supernatural forces are at work, without proper preparation any encounter can be extremely dangerous. My advice would be to not enter the room at all and to keep it locked unless Julia or one of her associates is here.”
Jen nods and stares, a little surprised at Vidocq’s accent. She relaxes a little. Even in a pile of splintered furniture Vidocq is a charmer.
Candy and I go inside while Mom and Dad watch from the hall.
I kneel down, take some packets of salt I lifted from Roscoe’s, and sprinkle a white line across the entrance. Vidocq sticks iron milagros down one side of the door frame with some green hardware-store putty.
“I have to close the door for a second,” I tell the Sentenzas.
I get out the black blade and carve a protective rune into the wood on the inside of the door frame.
Vidocq reaches for my hand like he wants to stop me, but he’s too slow.
“Why are you destroying their house further? Why not put an ash twig over the door?”
“Why don’t we send the demon roses while we’re at it? I hate hippie hoodoo.”
Vidocq rummages in his coat and finds ash powder in one of his vials. He reaches up and sets it on the frame oft" the frver the door.
“Okay,” I say to K.W. and Jen when I open the door. “Nothing should get out of here.”
“Thank you,” Jen says.
The room is a wreck. It looks like it was worked over by Linda Blair on a crack binge. One of the windows is boarded up. There are holes in the wall where it looks like someone punched through. The place hums with residual dark hoodoo, like there are wasps in the walls. I don’t think the Sentenzas can hear it, but Candy, Vidocq, and I can. Something bad was stomping around in here, but I have no idea what. Vidocq is blowing some kind of powder into the air and watches it settle on the floor and furniture. He looks at me and shrugs. Candy is over by Hunter’s closet. I look at her and she shakes her head.
Vidocq prowls the room, trying different powders and potions, trying to identify the magic residue. Candy paws through Hunter’s closet and dresser.
I ask, “How did the whole thing start?”
“I guess it started with the migraines,” says K.W. “His head would hurt and he’d get real sensitive to light. He said there were ants eating their way into his brain. I get migraines sometimes, too, so I’d give him some of my Imitrex and put him in a dark room. Sometimes it helped, but other times it made things worse. I’d hear him talking and he said it was to the voices in his head. After a week of that, things got really bad.”
Jen picks up the story.
“Hunter stopped sleeping. He said he had horrible dreams. Things were chasing him. Not to hurt him, just to have him. He drank coffee and energy drinks to stay awake, but he’d fall asleep anyway. There would be marks on the walls where he clawed them. His hands would be bleeding. It was like Thomas all over again.”
Hunter’s bed is just a bare mattress. The scene of the exorcism. All four corners are stained with blood. The kid cut himself on the restraints during the ritual. The rest of the mattress is stained with every fluid a human body can produce. There are deep claw marks by the head of the bed. Even some bite marks.
“Did he ever take anything more powerful to stay awake? Speed? Amphetamines, I mean.”
K.W. says, “I know what speed is. And no, not that I’m aware of.”
Candy stands at the foot of the bed looking. It’s the sigil Julia told us about, which was burned into the ceiling. I can’t place it, but I’m sure I’ve seen it before. I snap a picture with my phone.
Neither parent has moved from the door. Jen has one hand over her mouth as she watches us ransack her younger son’s room.
“What you’ve told me so far could be anything from a bad batch of acid usttch of to a brain tumor. When did you start thinking it was supernatural?”
Jen says, “There was the time I found him floating in midair.”
Vidocq stops pouring his potions.
