Kitty Raises Hell

I’d made up another batch of the blood-and-ruin potion. I should come up with a better name for it, like “Eau de Ick.”

“Don’t put it around the house,” Tina ordered when she saw it.

“Why not? I don’t want anything to burn down again.”

“We want this thing to be able to get in so we can talk to it. That can’t happen if you use that crap. But you know, keep it around. Just in case.”

We also brought along extra fire extinguishers. Just in case.

They set up a table like last time, but this time, Tina filled it with equipment. She might have been showing off an encyclopedia of medium and spiritualist tricks. There was a Ouija board—a new one, since the previous one was contaminated, she claimed; a pad of paper and a pen for automatic writing; a couple of heavy wires, like straightened coat hangers—dowsing rods; a plumb weight on a string; a bell.

“This must really be damaging your sensibilities,” I said to Jules. “All the table-rapping séance tricks, and here they are, for real.”

“I’m trying not to think about it,” he said, distracted as he tested yet another microphone, this one set up in the kitchen in the back of the house.

Perfect haunted-house setting, and I wasn’t sure anymore that this was a good idea. I’d felt safe at New Moon, and look what happened there. I didn’t at all feel safe here, and we hadn’t done anything yet.

The behind-the-camera techs left, and Jules, Tina, and I gathered in the front room, what would have been a parlor, now empty except for the round card table and filmy lace drapes over the front window.

“Right, Gary, I think that’s it. We should be all ready to go now,” Jules said into his headset microphone. Gary had woken up and demanded to come along. Jules and Tina argued, and Gary compromised by waiting in the van, observing via the monitors and speakers. I used the blood potion around the van, so at least they’d be protected.

Jules listened for an answer, gave a curt nod, and looked at us. “Ready?”

“What’s going to happen?” I said. “What can we expect?”

He said, “When the fakes do it, there’s a lot of swaying, moaning, convulsing, eyes rolling back in heads. That sort of thing. Their voices change, get really hoarse and deep and the like. Maybe that’s really how it works. Tina, is that how—Tina?”

Tina went very, very still. She hadn’t even sat down yet. She stood in the middle of the floor, arms straight at her side, fingers straight out, head canted to one side as if listening for something. Her eyes were closed, her back straight, like she’d just frozen there. And I knew something was happening, because her smell changed. It was subtle, like the difference in smell between the same perfume worn by two different people. She still smelled like Tina—hip twenty-something woman. But there was something extra now. A touch of brimstone. I tensed up and bit my lip to keep from growling.

Jules and I stood about five feet away from her, afraid to move.

“Guys, are you getting this?” Jules whispered into his headset. I didn’t hear the response, but I assumed it was affirmative.

“Tina?” Jules said. “Can you hear me, Tina?”

“No, no,” she murmured. Her voice wasn’t hoarse, deep, or scratchy like Jules warned it might be. It was her normal voice. Maybe a little sleepy, like she was hypnotized.

Then she tipped her head back and spoke a rapid stream of gibberish.

“Oh, my God,” Jules said.

The speech cut out.

“Now,” Jules hissed at me. “Kitty, talk to it.”

“It?”

“Yeah—the demon, whatever it is. You’re talking to it now.”

Her eyes were closed, her face was blank. There was just the smell, and the hair on my neck standing on end.

“Hello? What do you want? What are you doing here?” I asked it.

She twitched a smile that made me flinch. I didn’t want this demon to have a face, any face, much less Tina’s. I didn’t want to see the expression of malevolence.

She spoke a few more words. Her voice was rich with laughter. I still didn’t understand her. Our demon didn’t speak English, apparently. But I could tell it was teasing me. That it thought very little of me.

“How do I convince you to go away? I want you to go away.”

Now she frowned and spoke a couple of terse words. A denial.

“Did the Band of Tiamat call you, or did the vampire Roman? Whoever it was—how did they do it? Are they paying you? Or do you just like mayhem?”

She laughed, rich, teasing laughter. It didn’t sound like the voice Jules had recorded from New Moon, but it had the same tone, the same mocking emotion behind it.

I didn’t think I could really talk this thing into confessing all its sins and leaving us alone. We were trying to learn more about it. Get some kind of clue to its identity that we could use to finally discover what it was and how to banish it. But I couldn’t help venting some of my frustration at it.

“Mick didn’t do anything to you. There was no reason to touch him. If this is about me, you should be coming after me, and I gotta tell you, you’re a really lame demon if you can’t get past a little blood on the ground and have to go after the guy who’s undefended. You’re a coward.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have resorted to name-calling. Oh well.

Grimacing now, with some kind of pent-up anger or righteousness of its own, it kept talking at me in its own clipped, musical language. It sounded superior, mocking. It had to know we couldn’t understand it, right?

“Come on,” I muttered at it. “Surely an all-powerful demon of the netherworld could set aside a few eons to learn English.”

Tina—her body, at least—was sweating. A drop ran from her damp hairline down the side of her face, which was pink and flushed.

“Oh, my God,” Jules said. “Kitty, she’s burning up.”

It was burning Tina up from the inside, just like it did to Mick.

Chapter 17

“We have to get her to wake up,” I said, moving toward her, getting ready to shake her out of it.

“No!” Jules intercepted me. “It’s supposed to be dangerous to touch someone in a trance like this.”

“Then what do we do?” I said shrilly.

“I don’t know. God, Tina, you didn’t tell us what to do. Tina!” Her eyes flickered behind her eyelids, but she didn’t wake up. Her lips were still moving in the demon’s rant, but her voice was a whisper. She was breathing harder, and I could feel the heat coming off her. She was going to burn up in front of us.

I ran to my bag in the corner and grabbed the jar of blood goo, the one Tina wouldn’t let me use on the house. I opened it, then I splashed it on her. Just threw the whole bottle of gunk right at her.

The sticky, blackened potion spattered over her like mud, over her clothes, her face, her hair. The voice cut out, and she fell, sprawling flat out like she’d lost her bones.

Jules and I crouched beside her. I touched her face; the skin was warm, damp, feverish, but not burning up. It seemed to be cooling off, even. Jules went to one of his equipment bags and found a bottle of water, which he tipped to her lips. Most of it spilled out the side of her mouth, but her throat showed swallowing movements.

“Tina? Come on, wake up,” I murmured, hoping that she would both wake up and still be herself. I didn’t want to have her on my conscience, too.

“Tina,” Jules said, more sternly but just as desperate.

Her eyes squeezed shut, then blinked open. She groaned. “Did I black out? Ow, my head.”

She touched her forehead, and her hand came away sticky. Patting herself, her fingers landing in spots of blood goo, she grimaced in disgust. “Oh, gross! What happened? Don’t tell me we’re going to log the first verified case of genuine ectoplasm on top of everything else.” Then she looked closer at it. “Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.”

We helped her sit up. She looked like she wanted to crawl out of her own skin.

“What do you remember?” Jules said. He touched his headset. “Are the recorders still running? Are we getting all this? Tina, do you remember anything at all?”

“I don’t remember anything,” she said, sniffing, trying to wipe off her face with hands covered in slime. Exhausted, she looked on the edge of tears.

“Maybe we could go over the video footage,” I suggested. “Hey, there aren’t any fires started anywhere, are there?”

We did a quick check of the house and didn’t find anything burning, which was a huge relief. This was still just another haunted house. It felt like the only thing that had gone right in weeks. That, and the potion had worked and saved Tina from spontaneously combusting.

At Tina’s insistence, we went back to the hotel suite so she could shower. She wasted no time and soon emerged with wet hair and fresh clothes, squeaky clean. Within a half an hour, we were gathered around the video playback screen on Jules’s laptop.

“Here we go,” Jules said, tapping keys.

The camera angle showed Tina in profile, frozen in her unnatural, possessed pose.

She frowned. “I don’t remember any of this.”

“Probably for the best,” I said. “Can you imagine? That thing was using you. Like a puppet or something.”

She paled, looking nauseated, her lips pursed. “Thank you for that image. I may never sleep again.”

Oops. It only got worse when Jules started the audio portion. Tina’s voice came out of the speakers, we all recognized it, but none of us understood a word she was saying. Not even Tina.

“What is that?” she said, her horror plain.

“Looks like a classic case of glossolalia,” Jules said, almost happily.

Glossolalia. Speaking in tongues.

“That’s it,” Tina said, leaning back in her chair, holding her head in her hands. “I’m never, ever doing that again. It’s all Ouija boards from here on out.”

Nobody argued with her. We were all rather horrified. I had expected some kind of warning, but the possession of her had just happened. The demon had slipped into her presence without any sign. We’d had so little chance to react.

Tina was carrying a jar of blood goo with her at all times now.

“I don’t think it’s glossolalia,” Gary said, looking even more quizzical with the gauze over his eye. “In classic glossolalia cases, the subject speaks an unknown or made-up language. I think this is a real language.”

“But which one? Do you recognize it?” Jules said. “There are demonic languages. The medieval Cabbalistic writers talk about a language of demons, a language of hell—what if this is it?”

“No. There’s got to be a more logical explanation,” Gary said. “Don’t go over the deep end on us now.”