“Are you angry with me?” Kiki asked.
“No. I’m worried but not angry.”
“Worried about us?” Kiki asked.
“Only when you disregard my observations. I don’t have to be right, Kiki, but I’d like you to listen to my words. I came down here to be with you. And if it’s in a library full of books, so be it.”
“You look at me as if there is something wrong with me.”
“There was, but I can see it’s gone now.”
Kiki stared at Alan. “What are you talking about?”
“Not here. Not now.”
“Here and now or I’m going to leave and go back to the Atwater renovation by myself.”
“Sit down. I swear if you leave before I’m finished, we’re done.”
Kiki sat down hard. Her hands started shaking. She was going to lose Alan, and it was all her fault.
Alan pulled out a file from a briefcase. He took a moment and added the stills he had printed in the business room of the hotel this morning while Kiki was showering.
“Do you know what a negative elemental is?” he asked her.
“No.”
“Simply put, it’s a demon ghost. It has all the attributes of a ghost, including it can possess a living being. It needs to feed off the souls of the dead. It can be caught, and has been caught, but we’re not sure how it can be destroyed yet.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
Alan pulled out the photos one by one that displayed Kiki under the control of the elemental.
“Eyes get red with photos.”
Alan pulled out a digital photo frame he kept in his briefcase containing pictures of him and Kiki. “You don’t get redeye.”
Kiki picked up the frame. “You keep this with you?” she asked, her voice soft.
“If I’m called out of town or have to sit and wait on a client, I like to look at you, at us.”
Kiki put her hand on her heart. Her eyes filled up. “I’m so touched.”
Alan gently took the album away and tapped the pictures. “Sometime Sunday, this thing got ahold of you. According to your crew…”
“Cid.”
“No, your crew, Wayne too.”
“Oh.”
“According to your crew,” Alan repeated, “you started to change. You took on an edge and seemed to encourage recklessness on the job site. You could have killed Jessie when you threw the hammer at him.”
“It was a pique of temper not possession. You need more than that to prove to me I was possessed.”
“Do you remember showering yesterday morning?”
“Yes, Sally insisted and loaned me her salt… her salt scrub.”
Alan laid down a picture of a pooling mass oozing from under the door into the hall. “That’s an elemental that was forced from your body because of the running water and the salt scrub.”
“I remember feeling so good. I just assumed it was because I was going to see you.”
“You got dressed, checked on the men, and that’s when the elemental possessed you again.”
“I didn’t feel anything.”
“You wouldn’t. Evidently, from the research I have, once you are possessed, they can slip in and out of your body like a hot knife in butter.”
“But I’m not possessed now,” Kiki said.
“What do you remember of yesterday’s trip here?”
“I must have dozed off.”
Alan told her about the conversation and her grabbing the steering wheel and, finally, showed her the proof of the elemental’s retreat away from the car.
Kiki stared at the photos. She took each one and set it down, forcing herself to remember. “Here, I was sharpening a knife in the dark… I was hoping Cid would return first so…” Kiki paled.
Alan wanted to hold her and make it all go away, but he knew Kiki had to go through this in order to see things clearly.
She set a picture down of the whiteboard. It was altered instructions written in all capitals.
“I wasn’t worried about code,” Kiki remembered. “Me! If anyone would have told me that you could cut a corner by ignoring code and other safety measures, I would have fired them on the spot.”
“Do you remember anyone trying to reason with you?”
“Maybe… Carl told me to my face that he would not allow Sally to share a bedroom with me because I was possessed. I thought I heard wrong and he meant obsessed.”
“Perhaps the elemental didn’t want you to hear the truth.”
“All the guys tried to get me to see reason. I remember seeing, first, Jesse as an extension of Cid and then Sally. Anyone agreeing with Cid became the enemy.”
Kiki looked at the still of Jesse’s injury from the video. “Alan, I want to see the whole video.”
Alan plugged his headphones into his phone, cued up the video and handed it to Kiki.
“My god, if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn this is Mimi pulling an elaborate prank, but I remember bits and pieces.” Kiki handed Alan’s phone back to him. She reached in the folder and pulled the photo of the Hangman picture Cid took after Sally gave him the paper.
“This is written on an invoice I was supposed to be checking… I don’t remember doing this.”
“I think the elemental was preparing you to hang Cid. Sally stopped you from choking Cid with wire minutes before we left the Atwater property.”
“I was puzzled by why I was holding on to the wire…” Kiki said. “On my contractor’s license, I swear I would never intentionally hurt a member of my crew, even Cid.”
Alan handed her his phone once again. “Forgive me for doing this. This is a tape of our car trip.”
Kiki listened and handed it back to Alan. “That’s not me. Well, pieces of me. How could this have happened? I’m very aware of myself.”
“Burt Hicks was under the control of an entity for months, and
