M. Hanover - Unclean Spirits

When she opened the door, a German shepherd was waiting. He froze when he saw us, his gaze shifting from Aubrey to me and back again. This was Charlie.

“These are the people I called,” Candace said. Her voice was unsteady. “They’re the ones who can help.”

I had never watched an animal’s expression change before. Charlie’s unease became something else. He nodded to me and then to Aubrey. If he’d been human, it would have been a perfect gesture of masculine greeting.

“Charlie,” I said, acting on a hunch, “could you go to Aubrey’s right hand and touch it with your left forepaw?”

Charlie barked once, and then did exactly as I’d asked. Aubrey’s brows rose. Candace Dorn touched her hand to her mouth. There were tears in her eyes.

“That isn’t Charlie in there, is it?” I asked.

She shook her head. The dog looked up at me with an intelligence that I could only think of as human. You wanted proof, I told myself. You wanted to be sure.

“Before this happened,” Aubrey asked, “had anything else changed? A new piece of art or some new person coming into your home? Was anything different?”

“No,” she said. “Nothing happened. It was just one day…”

“And when did your fiancé start beating you up?” I asked.

The silence was total. When Candace spoke again, she sounded defeated.

“After I called you,” she said. “After he found out that I’d called.”

Aubrey let out his breath like someone had punched him. Charlie the dog looked up at me, brown eyes fearful and resolute. When I knelt and put my hand on his ruff, he whimpered once.

“There are some things that can displace people,” Aubrey said. “Move into a body and cast the former owner out.”

“Like into an animal,” I said. “Unclean spirits. So when you said that you could handle the easy ones, this wasn’t what you had in mind, was it?”

“Not so much, no,” Aubrey said. “I think we’ll need Ex. If any of us can fix this, it’ll be him. He used to be a Jesuit. Casting out spirits was one part of the coursework.”

Candace Dorn stepped forward, her hand out as if she was stopping us. The unease in her expression made perfect sense to me. We’d just come into this sudden surreal hell that her life had become and started talking like we understood it.

“What are you saying?” she demanded. “What’s going on here?”

“There are things called riders,” I said, surprised by how informed and competent I sounded given that I only knew what I’d been told in the last day or so. “They’re spirits. Our best guess is that one of them took over your fiancé’s body and pushed his soul, or whatever you want to call it…”

I pointed at the dog. Charlie whined again. Candace didn’t kneel down so much as melt. Her spun, emptied expression was perfectly familiar. I’d felt exactly like that since my first visit with Eric’s lawyer.

“Aaron?” she said.

The dog-Charlie or Aaron or some combination of the two-stood up and walked over to her. The movement had a dignity that spoke as eloquently as words. I would never have done this to you. Candace started crying in earnest now, confusion and fear and relief. Aubrey already had his cell phone out. His face was gray and serious. I motioned him to come out to the front room with me.

Candace and her dog needed a moment alone.

Aubrey sat on the couch, explaining the situation in fast, telegraphic sentences. I could hear Ex’s voice compressed to a thin, synthesized version of itself coming from the phone. I stood with my arms crossed, looked out the window into the hot August night, and tried to make sense of my own heart.

My sense of doubt and confusion was gone, and in its place, something richer and stranger was growing. The tattooed assassins, Midian’s curse, Eric’s death. My alleged powers. None of those had been as convincing as the expression in the dog’s eyes.

So, okay, riders existed. Aubrey and Chogyi Jake and Ex and Midian weren’t suffering a group delusion. They were telling the truth. I’d seen the evidence now, and so at last I could really believe.

And Eric. I was standing now where he would have been, doing-however poorly, however uncertainly, with my near total ignorance intact-what he would have done. I was proud of him, and sad beyond words that I hadn’t known what he was when I could still have asked him about it.

There had to be a reason he hadn’t told me. All the things he’d done for me over the years, all the little intercessions that kept me out of trouble with my dad. He’d been watching out for me then, and so maybe he’d been watching out for me in this too. One thing was certain: there were more kinds of danger in this than I had ever imagined.

But he’d also left it to me. He’d left me the keys to the kingdom. So he hadn’t thought there were more kinds of danger than I could handle.

And that, oddly, was the answer I’d been looking for. The warmth in my heart was pride that he’d chosen me to take up his work. To step into lives like Candace’s. It beat the crap out of being a college dropout with a bad reputation and no family. And maybe he’d known that too.

Still lost in speculation, I didn’t notice the police cruiser slowing down until it pulled in behind Aubrey’s minivan. I watched the cop get out, consider the house and the back of the minivan, then turn on the flashing lights and mutter into a radio strapped to his lapel. Aubrey cut the connection with Ex and looked out with me. He muttered something obscene.

“He must have seen the shotgun. We can’t have this guy around when Ex shows up,” Aubrey said. “Let me go see what’s the trouble.”

He’d started walking past me toward the door, then stopped, his weight tugging at me. He turned to look at me, and I realized that I’d grabbed his arm. I hadn’t meant to, but having done it, I knew why I had.

“Don’t. Don’t go,” I said. Then, louder, “Candace? Hey, Candace. Your fiancé wouldn’t be a cop, would he?”

He came up the same path I’d walked with Aubrey half an hour before, the palm of his hand resting on the butt of his pistol. The flashing lights silhouetted him and hid his face. At my side, Candace was staring out the window and murmuring a constant string of syllables equal parts prayer and vulgarity. The dog stood between her and the door, still and silent and thoroughly undoglike.

From my glimpses through the window, I guessed the man was around two hundred pounds. He had a Taser, Mace, a pistol. He had a badge. For all I knew his murmured conversation on his lapel radio had been calling more police to his cause. Plus which, he was a supernatural beastie capable of God only knew what.

We had Aubrey, me, Candace Dorn, and a very intelligent dog. I didn’t like our chances.

“Okay,” Aubrey said nervously. “We’re going to be okay. We’ll just…we have to just…”

The man reached the door and pounded on it. The house itself seemed to tremble.

“Candace!” the man shouted. “Open the door!”

It was the voice-the anger and power and implicit violence in it-that snapped me into action. I took Candace by the arm, shaking her until her eyes shifted to mine. Her face was pale.

“You need to get out of here,” I said. “You and Charlie head out the back. Go to a neighbor’s or a friend’s. Anyplace it’ll take him a while to find you.”

“That isn’t Aaron,” she said. “It’s his body, but that isn’t Aaron.”

“I know,” I said. “Leave this part to us. Just get out. Do it now.”

The dog nuzzled her hand, whining slightly, then jerked its muzzle toward the kitchen. Let’s go. Candace drew a long, shaking breath while the thing in her fiancé’s body hammered the door again. She nodded, pulled me into an embrace as sudden as it was brief, and then she and Charlie the dog were gone.