Chapter 19
“I hope I didn’t disturb you,” he said, when Hazel opened the door. “Didn’t quite seem the thing to just skulk through your yard without saying hello.”
She blinked at him, simultaneously caught off guard and conscious that she was wearing ripped jean shorts and a pink tank top with a picture of a goose and the words Honey, No below it.
She hadn’t put shoes on either. Maxwell, by contrast, was wearing a blue-and-white striped shirt and cream-colored flannel pants, with a pair of binoculars around his neck. He looked like a Brooks Brothers ad.
“No. I mean, no, you didn’t disturb me. You don’t have to come up and say hi every time, though. But I’m glad you did,” Hazel added, trying to stay on the right side of the line between don’t put yourself out and go away.
Casper nudged his way past Hazel’s legs during the silence that followed, giving her a sea breeze kind of sensation on her right calf. Maxwell didn’t seem to notice as the dog passed by him. Hazel added not magically sensitive to the list of attributes she seemed to be compiling.
Staying on the other side of a screen door felt odd, like Maxwell was a Jehovah’s Witness or a kid selling magazines for a free bike. “Sit down and rest a minute, if you’re not in a hurry,” Hazel said, and slipped out onto the porch to join him.
Maxwell stepped out of the way for her, but she still passed close enough to smell bergamot and lavender—old-fashioned cologne, Hazel thought—and to briefly find her gaze fixed on the hollow of his throat, where he’d left the first button of his shirt undone.
She hurried on toward the steps, risking babbling in order to move the conversation along too.
“I’ll get some chairs one of these days.
I should have done it before, but I’ve been busy. ”
“I noticed a bit more activity about the place,” he said, gesturing to the dug-up bits of the yard. “Can’t say I disagree with your priorities, especially if all your visitors keep popping up out of the blue. It’ll do you no good to encourage us.”
His quick grin broke the awkwardness, and Hazel smiled back at him as she sat down on the edge of a step. “Yeah, if I’m not careful I’ll get Girl Scouts.”
“Or encyclopedia salesmen.”
“Do those even exist anymore?”
“Ah—” Maxwell carefully arranged himself beside her, stretching his long legs out on the steps and angling himself to face her as much as the arrangement allowed. “Perhaps we’re just that out of the way here.”
Hazel laughed. “Very Twilight Zone. I’ll keep an eye out for velocipedes.” She glanced sideways at him, letting her eyes wander just a little bit, unobtrusively, over his firm thighs. Morale was important. “You’re still my only visitor so far.”
Only living visitor, but we don’t need to get that specific.
“You don’t count that journalist, I take it?”
“I barely count him as a journalist.”
“Quite right. He hasn’t bothered you again, I hope?” he asked, some of his previous humor making way for what looked like real concern.
“No, he hasn’t been back.” The video didn’t matter, Hazel decided. It would only open up the whole subject of her career. She smiled at Maxwell again, touched. “Thank you for asking, though.”
“Only decent thing to do.” He cleared his throat and looked back out at the yard, where Casper had flopped down in the sunshine. “Are you, ah, planning to stay out here for long?”
Locals had asked Hazel that before. “I think so,” she said, giving the answer she’d rehearsed and wanting for the first time to provide more detail. “It depends a little on how my work situation evolves. It’s a nice place, though—well, the area is. Hopefully, the house will be soon.”
“I get the impression you’re working awfully hard at that.”
“As hard as I can without dynamite,” she said, making Maxwell chuckle and feeling triumphant when she did. “Freeing the world from the menace of Cold War decorating choices.”
“Do I dare inquire?”
“Let’s just say that the kitchen has one of those ceilings that looks like somebody coated it with cottage cheese. You can probably extrapolate.” She nodded when he pulled a face. “Exactly. I guess that was a trend back then—it was a bizarre era.”
“Can’t think of an era that wasn’t, one way or another,” said Maxwell.
He’d focused on Hazel again, watching her out of eyes that were a particularly pretty shade of green.
Under that gaze, she found herself very aware of the thin fabric of her tank top and the bare length of her legs.
She wished she’d run a comb through her hair.
Stop that, she told herself, without any real force, and pulled out a question to make her brain shut up. “Are you a historian professionally?”
“Oh, strictly an amateur, and I doubt I even qualify for that. I dabble. The classic dilettante, I fear—many hobbies, no real calling.” He sighed and began to rise. “And speaking of hobbies, I fear I’ll miss the proper light if I stay too long.”
“And I’d better get back to the fight.” Hazel pushed herself to her feet. They stood close together again for a moment, the scent of bergamot and lavender filling her nose, and her skin prickled at Maxwell’s proximity.
Without thinking, she licked her lips. She saw him swallow.
“Thank you for dropping by,” she said in a rush, and held out a hand because she couldn’t think of anything better to do.
Maxwell took it immediately, his fingers warm and smooth. He hesitated while sensation rushed up Hazel’s arm and over her body. Then he blinked, as though remembering the next step, and shook firmly. “Thank you for having me. Good luck with the decoration.”
“I hope you see some interesting birds,” said Hazel.
Watching him walk away was a bad idea, and so she only let herself do it for a minute or so, just to see how the sunlight played in his hair. She could have that much as a treat. She was doomed, right?
* * *
After her forgotten ham sandwich came more renovation—the popcorn ceiling, tragically, was beyond one woman’s ability to change—and then a stab at research.
Her first real clue came from a book about haunted houses.
It was cheaply published, and the cover was an amateur Photoshop nightmare, but in one of the cases, the author mentioned the need to distinguish haunting from infestation and referenced, in passing, a Thomas Fowler who’d tried to study demons before meeting a literally sticky end in the 1980s.
It wasn’t much of a reference. The book didn’t even mention him again.
Hazel hadn’t seen any mention of other people researching demons who weren’t weird fundamentalists or operating at least a hundred years before she’d been born, though, and when she’d read through the rest of the book without learning anything but weird California laws, she turned to the internet and searched for him.
Only four entries came up, and two of them were quotes from the same book Hazel had read.
One was an obituary that didn’t mention Fowler’s cause of death at all.
The fourth was an archived discussion from an obscure Usenet group, the sort that started with alt.religion and added five more words to signify that it was not like those sheeple over at the general alt.religion.occult.demons group and furthermore probably had a dozen members at its most active.
weird guy, wrote regardie76, probably chucking stones as far as they could from inside a glass house.
wanted to be the Hunter S. Thompson of the outer worlds.
cocaine and ritual dont mix, kids—he got results but the results also got him, if you know what i mean, and his notes were a FUCKING MESS, not even lovecraft crazy just bouncing from one subject to another. whoever edited his articles was a hero.
Hazel put down her Diet Coke and leaned forward. Casper napped with his head on her feet, the bare-walled living room lay quiet around her as she followed every word of an exchange from more than twenty years in the past.
A poster calling themselves Wolfsong asked how regardie76 knew about it. A third, samfoolishgamgee, asked what kind of notes Fowler had left. Naturally, regardie76 hadn’t left them in the dark for long.
we used to go drinking together in LA, well, and sometimes more than drinking. i’m no DARE kid.
shit, man, i’ve forgotten half of it by now & i dont know who got his notes in the end, i think his sister took most of his stuff. but here’s what i sort of recall.
demons don’t have matter in this world, obviously, but they kinda suck matter onto them when they manifest, blood and flesh is the easiest, that’s why the sacrifices.
they have ranks and stuff, goetia was right about that, but they also have types.
he thought each type had a kind of matter that it attracted and a kind that hurt it.
he made a big chart of it but i dont know how he worked out the correspondences.
honestly i dont know how much evidence he had for any of this—he definitely had SOME real contacts but also, again, a lot of cocaine.
if a demon wants to stay outside its own world (which i guess is hell, tho F.
thought that was too Xtian) it needs to set up an anchor.
he couldnt decide if that was a place or an object.
usually they do that in the ethereal, it’s easier, but F.
said could be physical in places with lots of carnage etc.
demon world doesnt have a sun.
There was a little more, but the font was old and the spacing was cramped. Hazel sat back and rubbed her eyes—and when she looked again, the letters started moving.
They fell like leaves in October. A d and an l plummeted to the bottom of the screen, then the whole word cocaine, and then every letter on the screen was skittering downward in clumps while Hazel stared, her hand frozen just above her mouse.
I’ve stayed too long at the fair, Hazel thought.
She’d meant just to dip into the internet the way she had been doing, limiting her time online, but finding the post and then reading it had drawn her in.
Now it was too late. The air was chilly around her hands, and the text on the screen reformed itself while she watched, creating entirely new paragraphs.
i was drinking with him the night he died and i almost went with him, he made a lot of sense even on the drugs.
he was the kind of person who made sense at the time even when he didn’t later.
he was this little guy with hair that kept getting in his eyes and i tried to kiss him when we were both drunk, and he said no, he needed his blood and his will to be pure, and i asked how the cocaine fit into that plan.
he got mad and said i didn’t understand and i said i understood he was scared and hiding behind bullshit, and i walked out, and the next time i saw him it was like that big Monty Python foot had stepped on his head.
the police had to pick skull fragments out of the carpet in his apartment.
they didn’t suspect me because they didn’t suspect anybody, they didn’t know how anybody could have done it, and he was just a weird little punk, so they never knew and i never knew, not really.
sometimes i dream about him. I’m giant and i’m squeezing his head between my hands,
Hazel read with fascinated horror. She’d just gotten to the end of that line when a black hole appeared in the middle of her screen.
The void expanded, or the rest of the display fell down it, until the silver frame of the laptop surrounded pure blackness. It only took half a minute, and just as Hazel was getting her head around that, it changed again.
Now it showed an image like the one she’d glimpsed in Clarence’s room.
Glowing orbs, moving slowly, hung like jewels in a stretch of silver-blue that swirled as Hazel watched it.
Patterns on the closest one suggested continents, but Hazel only half saw those.
The immense face between the spheres was what really got her attention.
It was a necrotic-looking mottled gray and elongated so that the eyes were pits and the mouth was a silent scream.
Hazel didn’t think it was in pain, though.
She would never have claimed to read its expression really accurately, would never even have wanted to try, but the impression she got from that open maw was a shriek of rage.
Some of the orbs floated behind it, only faintly visible.
Hazel shrank back, shielding her face with one hand out of pure instinct, desperate for those empty eyes not to see her. She glimpsed the view between her fingers for a few more seconds.
Then her laptop screen exploded.