Chapter 3 #2
Sloane looked…annoyed. She did not look haunted, or spooked, or even particularly surprised by this brush with the paranormal.
“Satan worshippers aren’t even real,” she said, and finally Max figured out what she was talking about.
“I’m pretty sure they are,” he said. “I mean, there’s something for everyone, right?”
“Were you super sweaty earlier because you were up here decorating the floor?”
“If I were going to try to bamboozle you, I’d do a better job,” Max said, and she looked so irritated that he couldn’t help but grin.
“Come on. A chalk pentagram? There’s not even a circle of salt around it.
You gotta have the salt, otherwise the demon will escape.
” He turned the camera on, then looked up at her, pretending to be horrified.
“You don’t think the demon escaped, do you? ”
Sloane was examining the floor again and didn’t bother to look back up while she flipped him off.
“We’re in the attic of the Bellwether, and we just found a pentagram on the floor,” Max narrated. “It’s pretty spooky up here, even during the day. We’re right above what used to be an illegal speakeasy during the 1920s.”
“Illegal speakeasy is redundant,” Sloane said, just out of frame.
“That’s my lovely assistant,” Max explained.
“Neither of those things is true.”
He kept the camera trained on the pentagram, which looked like it had been made with sidewalk chalk, and looked over at Sloane.
“You’re lovely,” he said simply. Sloane made a face, and he laughed. “Why are you arguing with me?”
“Lovely is a whole type,” Sloane said. “There’s a personality element. Lovely people are…I don’t know, gentle and nice and pleasant.”
“My lovely assistant and I will have to agree to disagree,” Max said. “Anyway, looks like someone might have been doing some summoning up here, though it’s hard to tell of what. There are no scorch marks, so it’s possible they were unsuccessful.”
“That’s how you determine success?”
“It’s one method,” Max went on and shot Sloane a quick glance. She was trying not to smile. “I’m not familiar with the symbol in the middle of the star, but maybe that’s the name of the demon they were trying to contact? And those symbols around the outside are…”
He trailed off, frowning.
“I think that one is the symbol for yen,” Sloane said, still off camera. “The Y with the lines through it.”
They were quiet for another moment, and then Max pointed. “Is that the Do not iron laundry symbol?”
More silence.
“I think it is,” Sloane finally said, and kept moving the beam of her flashlight around the circle. “Is someone trying to summon a…Japanese finance demon? Who doesn’t iron?”
“Sloane,” Max said, his camera still trained on the circle. He bit the inside of his lip so he wouldn’t start laughing.
“What?”
“I know what they want the demon for.”
“What? Why does your face look like that?”
“Money laundering.”
“Oh, my god,” Sloane muttered. She was obviously trying not to laugh. “That’s it, I’m done. I’m leaving. The ghosts can have me if they want.”
“Come on,” Max said, laughing. “That was good.”
“Did you make this thing? Did you put this on the floor just so you could make a terrible money-laundering joke?”
“Please,” Max said. He was actually a little offended. “If I’d put it here, I’d have come up with a better joke.”
Sloane grumbled an unconvinced grumble, and Max remembered the camera was on.
“Hard to say who, or what, drew this,” he started.
“A person,” Sloane offered.
Max cleared this throat. “The chalk looks very recent, though in an environment like this, I’m not sure how long that new-chalk look would last. There’s no sun or wind exposure up here.”
“Whoever did this didn’t want to burn the hotel down,” Sloane went on.
Now she was crouching on the floor and holding up one of the melted candles.
“This wasn’t stuck to the floor. I think they melted the candles somewhere else and then brought them up.
Do demonic cultists care about that kind of thing? ”
“Maybe?” Max said. “It’s not like there’s fire exits. Maybe they’re smart demonic cultists.”
Sloane put the melted candle back on the floor, then poked at one chalk line and examined her fingertip in the beam of her flashlight.
“Pretty sure you’re right that this is chalk,” she confirmed, rubbing her fingertips together.
“There was an outside chance it was ash or something, maybe? But I don’t think so. ”
She settled onto her knees, playing her flashlight over the circle again. Max wondered if she remembered that she was being recorded, but then she looked up, directly into the camera.
“I’d put, like, fifty bucks on bored teenagers or something,” she said.
“Are teenagers responsible enough not the burn the place down?”
“Some of them probably are.”
Max sure hadn’t been, but decided not to bring that up.
“That would help the symbols make sense. Though I’m pretty sure you can google demonic letters or something and come up with, you know, not these. Is there something else in the middle there?”
Carefully, with his camera still up, Max stepped forward.
Sloane put one hand on a blank spot on the floor, frowning.
Then she leaned in slowly, her denim shorts riding up over her hamstrings.
Max knew he probably shouldn’t be looking, and he definitely knew he shouldn’t be fucking staring, but it was happening and Sloane wasn’t paying attention and as long as he didn’t start drooling or barking or something, he was probably fine.
He glanced down at the camera to make sure it wasn’t recording Sloane’s thighs. YouTube didn’t deserve them.
“I think I’m supposed to believe this is dried blood,” Sloane said, and pushed herself to standing. She then brushed her hands off on her shorts, which had returned to their regular length.
Before Max could say Don’t disturb anything, she’d hopped over the lines of the circle to stand just inside the innermost ring, then crouched down again.
“What’s the verdict?” Max asked, walking along the outside. He was pretty sure that if he tried to get in the middle, he’d fall over and ruin the whole thing, and then in the process somehow re-light one of the candles and burn the hotel down. Therefore, he stayed put.
“I don’t think it’s blood,” she said, and went to touch it.
“Oh god, don’t—”
Sloane rubbed a fingertip on the dark spot, then examined both, frowning again.
“It doesn’t flake the right way to be blood,” she said, and she sounded way too certain. “Dried blood does flake. But this is crunchier than blood flakes, kind of. Blood flakes are all crumbly. This is like…croissant flakes.”
“Wow,” Max said in his camera voice. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard of devil worshippers summoning a croissant. They must have been hungry.”
“I’d summon a croissant,” Sloane said offhandedly.
She was leaning forward again, careful not to smudge the chalk, one hand braced on the floor and the other pointing her flashlight, focusing so hard that her lips parted slightly.
Max knew he should be saying something—this was not good YouTube viewing—but her shorts were riding up again, over the slight curve of the backs of her thighs.
This time, her tank top had bunched up to reveal a slice of her lower back, ghostly pale in the ambient glow of the flashlight.
It was a centimeter wide, if that. Max checked the viewfinder to make sure the camera couldn’t see her thighs or her back—he was pretty sure she wouldn’t like that and he was incredibly sure he didn’t want to read what the fucking perverts in the comments would say—and allowed himself one more long glance.
He was still glancing when Sloane said, “I think there’s something else on the floor here.”
“Hmm,” Max said. “Brimstone? Sulphur?”
Sloane shot the camera a look of annoyed-but-amused patience, still on her hands and knees in the circle. Max was going to have to turn comments off on this one.
“If you look at it at the right angle, there’s something kind of shiny in the floorboards,” she said. “Maybe it’s demon slime. Are demons slimy?”
“Some of them, probably? I’m not a demon expert.” Demons were a whole thing, in Max’s limited experience. The few times he’d met people serious about hunting down demons they had been…intense. He preferred to stay away from that side of things. “I’ve got something we can try, though.”
Holding the camera in one hand, Max rifled through his messenger bag until he found another flashlight, this one shorter and fatter than the one Sloane wielded.
“You brought a black light to a hotel?” Sloane asked, now sitting back on her heels. “Brave.”
“I have a strict policy of never turning it on in my room.”
She snorted.
“Though I’m very sure the Hotel Bellwether cleans all its guest accommodations thoroughly and sanitarily between visitors,” he corrected. “A truly luxurious experience, here on the Southern California coast.”
“It’s got three pools, unlimited sunbathing, and possibly a demon,” Sloane added, and then Max clicked on the black light.
Immediately, half the room lit up with pale purple. Sloane gasped.
“Oh, shit,” Max said, slowly scanning the walls. “Wow.”
“Someone’s been busy.” Sloane’s eyes were wide. “This must have taken a while. Do you recognize any of this?”
“Not off the top of my head,” Max said, playing the black light over unfinished walls, bare wood slats with no plaster over them. The lower five feet of each wall was covered in…writing? It looked like writing, but nothing Max had ever seen before. It glowed pale violet blue under the black light.
It was creepy enough to make the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.
“You think this was done by the same person?” Sloane asked, standing. The summoning circle on the floor was glowing, too. New swirls and dots shone between the chalk symbols, though there was nothing there that was as strange as the walls. “That looks like handwriting.”
It did. The symbols on the floor looked painstakingly crafted, like whoever had done it hadn’t been familiar with what they were drawing.
The ones covering the walls, by contrast, felt different.
Messy and casual, like they were notes dashed off without much thought in language Max had never seen before.
They were spiky but graceful, each symbol close to the next but not touching, the lines tapering off to points.
“Do you recognize it?” he asked, just in case.
Sloane shook her head. “I mean, I’m not a linguist. There are plenty of languages I wouldn’t—”
From somewhere outside the room came the forceful, muffled whump of a door closing, hard enough to make the attic floor shiver.