Past Mistakes

by Nick Lavitz

  I held my arms out to either side. “Mr. Etram, this is Raymond. He is the most sensitive awakened soul that I know, and we were lucky he happens to live in the city. Raymond, it’s everywhere, but I found it through the walls.”

  “Should I have hired him instead of you, Miss Voss?”

  “He’s more sensitive than I am, but I’m better at kicking demon ass. You’re likely going to need both of us.”

  “You’re not better,” said Raymond, reaching out to touch the wall with the tips of his huge fingers. “You’re reckless, and you’ve never been able to tell the difference.”

  I sat my skinny ass down on the edge of Etram’s grubby little desk and waited for Raymond to do his thing. I hated being here, and it had taken every ounce of strength I had to force myself down into the basement again. Now that I was aware of it, I could imagine the empty thing coiling through the walls of the building, even though all I could see were dirty floors and peeling wallpaper.

  Raymond’s eyes were closed, and his head bent forward, which did ugly things to the flesh of his neck. His aggressiveness disappeared when he listened for the other side, as though a gentle boy emerged from beneath the layered complexes and miseries of his daily life.

  It’s the same for most of us. It takes innocence and vulnerability to sense the things that hide in plain sight, and we all cultivate that part of ourselves to continue to be able to do our jobs, even if we bury it under layers of attitude and gallows humor.

  Raymond’s lunch involved something quite garlicky, and he didn’t make it to the pail. Also, he climbed the stairs at a dead sprint and made it out of the building in under twenty seconds.

  “You could have fucking warned me,” he said, testing the suspension of my car by sitting on the front of the hood and staring at me as though I’d personally attacked him.

  “I did, and you mocked me.” I felt smug but I was very happy to be back out of the building. “And if Mr. Etram over there is going to pay us, we’re going to have to figure out how to remove its effect from the building.”

  Etram was closing the door to the hotel, carefully, before coming to see what we had concluded. He was still a few yards away when Raymond leaned over to me, a huge hand grabbing my shoulder.

  “Between you and me,” said Raymond, “if we don’t deal with this, getting paid will be the least of our worries. I got a strong sense that it noticed me noticing it.”

  “Mr. Raymond, any further insights into what is devouring my hotel?” asked Mr. Etram.

  “A few ideas,” he muttered. “None of them good. I need to discuss it with Emily, and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.”

  4.

  The reason we couldn’t identify a demonic possession was because it wasn’t a possession as such. That should have been obvious, since the demonic can only possess living beings and the hotel didn’t qualify.

  Despite doing something others can’t understand, the awakened, as we like to call ourselves, don’t do more than scratch the surface of demonic knowledge.

  We’re almost totally ignorant of our area of expertise, fumbling in the dark with talents we don’t comprehend. What little we do know comes more from instinct than any real knowledge. There’s no school or apprenticeship that teaches how to summon, banish or otherwise fight a demon. Ancient texts are generally obscure, misleading and wrong. A few are plain dangerous. Recent knowledge is better since the modern world is better at recordkeeping. But even here, there's almost nothing of value. The consequences of being awakened tend to make us introverts, loners and generally antisocial so we share very little with each other. There are no reliable texts, few firsthand accounts and we tend to die young. Everything we think we know is at best a metaphor for what's really going on.

  Despite being considered among the best in the business, neither Raymond nor I had any experience dealing with anything other than your typical garden-variety demonic possession. This generally involved kicking a demon out of someone’s mind and body, then holding it in place long enough for it to go back to wherever it came from since demons need the anchor of a physical body to stick around in our world.

  Where do they go? We don’t know. Where they come from? We don’t know either. What can suck the life out of a building, crawl through its very foundations and stare back at us from an abyss we didn’t know existed until we looked into it?

  Not a clue.

  We were relying entirely on instinct. Fortunately, Raymond had good instincts.

  “I don’t know what to call it. A thinning perhaps, or a tunnel, or a shortcut. Perhaps a fold.”

  “Between where they are and where we are?”

  “I guess.” Raymond looked unhappy with the results of his analysis.

  “Ok,” I said, “but why would it happen? Is it natural? Something about the hotel itself?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “That’s not helpful.”

  Raymond swiveled his chair to look at me, his weight swinging forward as he rested his elbows on his thighs.

  “Listen. It’s deliberate; it has purpose…design. Something’s digging through to us, here in our world, on our plane of existence, whatever you want to call it. The hotel’s important; it’s like a tethering point. There’s something about it that makes it possible for the thinning to exist there. What we feel at first is the space between worlds, which is what feels so vast and frightening, but that’s separate from the thing trying to cross it, which is what I felt looking back at me, across that gap."

  “Ok. You’re saying a demon's causing it? That’s good, we can fight that.”

  “Something that wants to come through, and something on this side, facilitating it, making the hotel a suitable anchor. Probably both acting together to make this possible.”

  “If it’s powerful enough to do this, it’s powerful enough to possess anyone in the hotel when they’re unconscious. No lack of potential hosts there. Why go to all this trouble?”

  “I think it wants to come through on its own terms, in its own form.”

  I sat down on the desk hard enough to put symmetrical bruises in my ass. This was bad news. Demons are supposed to be almost immortal in their plane of existence. If they came through without the need to possess someone, would that mean they were as powerful here as they were over there?

  “That’s not possible,” I said.

  “I think it is. I think it’s almost done, that it could push through at any time now. It just needs something to finish closing the connection.”

  “Miss Voss, this is unexpected. I thought you would be calling tomorrow.”

  Etram’s voice over the phone sounded as faded and musty as he appeared in person.

  “Yeah, we figured it was better to deal with this now before it gets any worse.”

  “Ah. Yes, well, the sooner the better. Obviously, from my point of view.”

  “Good. How do you feel about a fire drill?”

  5.

  The hotel guests were gathered in the street and Raymond and I were in a hotel room on the second floor where we both felt that the Thinning, as we had come to call it, was the strongest.

  Salt circles surrounded each of us, with a larger circle around both. You can never be too careful.

  Raymond made the first move by calling for otherworldly forces to reveal themselves. He did it in passably fluent Latin, but aside from a minor tremble in the underlying wrongness of the place, it had little effect.

  I tried a confrontation, which usually brings out any demonic presence. It wasn’t very original but sometimes the simple things just work. They didn’t this time. Nothing responded to my challenge.

  Raymond and I looked at each other. We had anticipated these tactics would fail but it didn’t hurt to try. The alternative was less pleasant, but there’s never anything pleasant about doing what we do, so we shut our eyes and got on with it.

  I let down my guard, opened my awareness and let the wrongness of the place slith
er into my mind. Raymond would be doing the same. To confront something, you have to be in its presence. In our world, that means opening yourself to the reality that it exists before you can defeat it.

  It was quicker this time, partly because I knew what I was looking for, and partly because the Thinning was that much stronger than before. I became aware of the awful void between us and whatever place lay beyond. The nothingness of it was unpleasant but not threatening. On the other side, however, and pushing its influence through the void, infecting everything, was something truly malevolent. Its presence was the emotional equivalent of a stench, something rotten that you could only sense with your soul.

  I could feel now what Raymond had described – a sense that whatever was there was pushing through, applying pressure to the boundary between worlds and deliberately narrowing the distance between our side of reality and theirs.

  We were against something far more powerful, far more knowledgeable than us. Something able to bridge worlds. This was clearly a fight we weren't equipped to handle, so I turned to Raymond to call off our experiment when I saw Etram at the door to the room, a half-smile on his lips.

  I barely had time to open my mouth and cry out when he threw a pail of greasy liquid directly across the outer circle and Raymond’s inner circle, breaking both. Whatever he had thrown had its own powers because, with an imperceptible flash of blue static, Raymond's protective wards blinked out of existence.

  Etram's voice still had that annoying nasal characteristic that I associate with manipulative weasels, but for some reason it sounded much more threatening now.

  “When I looked at you, Miss Voss, and found that you were unsuitable for my purposes, I didn’t know that you’d then bring me someone with such wonderful potential.”

  Raymond looked in horror at his broken circle as we both felt the presence of something ancient and malevolent, a pressing darkness that came from everywhere at once.

  Within moments, it didn’t take any particular gift to notice something unnatural was going on. The remaining wallpaper darkened and shriveled and the carpet blackened, starting where it met the walls of the room and spreading rapidly inward, stopping around my protection circle but covering the ground under Raymond’s feet in an instant.

  It had never occurred to us that Mr. Etram himself might be possessed, that our own client was the source of the problems with his hotel. Demons weren't supposed to be wily like that. Our oversight was about to cost Raymond dearly. The diminutive hotel manager’s facial features were now visibly twisted by whatever had taken control.

  “So many people I had to sacrifice in these walls to bring our worlds together, over so many months, always without drawing attention. We are not patient creatures, Mr. Raymond. Can you imagine the dedication it has taken to reach this point?”

  Raymond was muttering under his breath, no doubt invoking every protection he could think of, but we both knew that without the circle, whatever was coming would blow through his wards as though they were made of paper. If he crossed into my circle now, he would remove my protection, and I could do nothing for him without leaving my own sanctuary.

  Etram pulled a nasty-looking curved knife from under his jacket. Rusted where the hilt met the blade, it bore a number of runes I didn’t recognize. The two that were familiar to me I knew from the tragic ritual I had participated in so many years ago. They could only relate to the summoning of a greater demon, and I knew from bitter experience how that ended for all concerned.

  Something began to appear between Raymond and the wall nearest to him. The sort of thing you can only see if you’re not looking directly at it, as though it were not entirely here yet.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Raymond that your life is the required payment for passage.” Etram still spoke in his dry, matter-of-fact way. “I promise it will be an important death, one that will go down in history as the beginning of a new age.”

  Etram was walking towards Raymond’s broken circle when some part of my brain made a decision I wasn’t entirely on board with. I didn’t realize what I had done until I was standing between Etram and Raymond, well outside my own circle, clutching in my right hand the amulet that always hung from my belt, the only thing of real power that had ever come into my possession and which had saved me once before.

  “Two for the price of one,” smirked the annoying little man. “A pleasure doing business with you Miss Voss,” and he lunged at me faster than any human could have.

  The knife curved up, aiming for my breastbone and my heart, but I’d been dealing with unnaturally fast predators for a few years now, and I was ready for him. I twisted my body to the left as I threw myself to the right and let the knife sail wide, flashing up past my face, those runes passing too close to my eyes for comfort.

  The knife flipped over in his hand as he reversed his grip and brought it back down again towards my side. I let my momentum carry me around in a spin and brought my booted foot up to his knee, bending it entirely the wrong way with the sickening sound of tendons and bones snapping and breaking.

  Etram wasn’t down on one knee for long. His leg straightened of its own accord and the knee snapped back into place. He cocked his head to one side and looked at me from a few feet away, the knife held loosely at his side.

  “You did say you were better at, how did you put it? Kicking demon ass? I’m impressed Miss Voss.”

  His hand came up, palm held out towards me as some guttural sound came from his throat and I was picked up and thrown back into the wall, hard enough to shift the brickwork, before collapsing on my hands and knees on the floor. It took a lot of effort to get back up. Casts like that cost demons dearly, and he wouldn’t be able to rely on them to win the fight if I could withstand one or two, but I had never felt raw power like that before.

  He was still smiling as he turned his hand, palm down, still held out towards me.

  Most demons fight you physically. It’s the easiest way to beat an opponent, and a demon can heal its host fast enough that they can afford to be reckless and violent. When they use their powers on the mind, it’s a different experience altogether.

  The act of possession involves dispossessing you of your body, imprisoning you in a small part of your own mind and taking over the rest. That's difficult, even for them, and takes effort. It's also something that we instinctively know how to resist since it's a battle fought with a home-field advantage.

  Initially, it feels as though you’re having a hard time thinking, formulating words, controlling your limbs. Everything becomes sluggish. Willpower is the primary defense, which is why they prefer to possess people who are sick of mind, depressed or weakened and preferably asleep at the time. They can do it to you when you’re conscious though; if they’re strong enough, if you're weak enough.

  I'm not weak, but I had never felt anything like this.

  The pressure on my thoughts was overwhelming and only long practice brought a potentially helpful incantation to mind. Getting my tongue around the words was almost more than I could manage but finally, one painful syllable at a time, I managed, “Angelus ex animi, animo defenderet.”

  It wasn't entirely right, but it was close enough. The pressure lessened slightly as at least one layer of defense snapped into place. It wouldn’t last long but this fight would be over before it mattered.

  Nevertheless, my body wasn’t responding to my instructions and I couldn’t find the strength or the balance to get off the ground.

  We stared at each other, him pushing into my mind, me holding him back, for what felt like an eternity.

  Finally, Etram pursed his lips in frustration.

  “This is unexpected. I had hoped to spare you death.”

  If the choice was death or possession, it was an easy one to make.

  The knife rose in the air as he approached me, preparing to bring it down onto my neck point first. Under his mental onslaught, I couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the blow and I knew it. Raymond w
as somewhere behind me fighting his own battle with whatever was manifesting in the air around him.

  Etram smiled as the knife began its downward arc, and my awareness slowed at the point of death. Who knew what would happen when I was killed by a blade such as this? I doubted it would be a natural end.

  I was as surprised as anyone when the blade bounced off my shoulder, a bright halo appearing around its tip as it reacted to something. It clattered to the floor and Etram staggered backward, holding his forearm with a look of shock, agony in his eyes.

  I’d never seen a demon show physical pain before.

  Something stirred deep inside me, coiling around the very fabric of my body and mind like a long-acquainted symbiote. Something almost a part of me and yet utterly alien. I didn't have the strength to identify it, or to hold it back, exhausted from the fight with the demon in front of me.

  The voice that came from my mouth was not my own.

  “You dare?”

  Etram fell to his knees.

  “I did not know!”

  What came from me next was pure power, not at all under my control, but I recognized its intent. It blew the demon out of the hotel owner’s body like a storm blowing through a pile of leaves. The real Mr. Etram fell to the floor, throwing up, crying helplessly and showing all the signs of the recently exorcised. The demon, instead of returning to its own plane of existence, was torn apart in ours, shredded to pieces like confetti, leaving a dark and foul stain on the wall behind the retching Mr. Etram.

  As the horrible influence dissipated, I regained control of myself and the presence inside receded almost immediately, but not before I heard its voice clearly in my head, like a double-bass being dragged through gravel.

  “Now that you know I am here, we shall have to get acquainted.”

  The dark presence in the room vanished as the barrier between worlds was restored, and the last thing I saw before passing out was Raymond, staring at me with a look of utter horror.