Madisonville Murder, Part 10
Damned if you Do
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“Abort!” I yelled. “Abort!” But it was clear that, though Virginia was sharing what she saw and heard with me, she wasn’t monitoring what I was doing at all.
“What’s wrong?” asked Gavin, looking around as if he feared my shouting would attract demons.
“It looks as if Dr. Curtis sold his soul to bring his son back to life—or something like that. If we succeed in what we’re trying to do, the boy will die. I can’t let that happen.”
I resumed watching through Virginia’s eyes, hoping that she wouldn’t do anything before I could find a way to stop her. She watched Curtis’s son as he reached the bottom of the stairs and turned the dining room, probably on his way toward the kitchen. Her long pause made me wonder if she was having the same thoughts I was having.
But then her eyes stopped following the boy, and she started to climb the stairs.
“No, don’t!” I yelled. I reached for the door handle, but Gavin grabbed my arm.
“What are you going to do?” he asked. His tone was gentle, but I could hear an undertone of urgency. “If you just go charging into the house, you risk exposing Virginia—and yourself.”
“I can’t let a kid be collateral damage,” I said, shifting my vision back to my own eyes so I could look at Gavin. “I have to stop her.”
“What if the boy isn’t really alive?” Gavin asked. “Have you ever heard of Satan being able to do resurrections?”
That question made me pause. If Virginia’s magical senses were supplying accurate information, demonic magic had taken the place of the boy’s heartbeat, and he looked dead. But seen through normal eyes, he would look perfectly fine. And he’d moved like a sleepy teenager, not some stumbling zombie. He was going to the kitchen for a snack, which almost certainly wouldn’t be someone’s brain.
“He appears to be alive,” I said. “I don’t know how we could ever tell if he’s really alive or not. Are you prepared to take the risk that what Virginia’s seeing really isn’t a living boy?”
When I said seeing, I realized that I’d been ignoring Virginia’s visual feed for too long. When I switched back to it, I realized she was creeping down the upstairs hallway toward what had to be the master bedroom. I had only a minute or two at most before she started her performance—not time enough to stop it, unless I burst into the house as Gavin feared. That would be risky, but there was another way I might be able to stop Virginia from doing something that would put a kid’s life in jeopardy.
Looking through my own eyes again, I pulled out my cellphone and started dialing.
Gavin grabbed the phone out of my hand. “Are you crazy?”
“If the police respond to a 911 call, Virginia, who is invisible, remember, will be able to slip out.”
“You hope,” said Gavin.
“Give me the phone, or I’ll run down the street screaming. That’ll get police here almost as fast.”
Gavin hesitated for a moment, perhaps wondering if I was bluffing. But he knew me too well to take the chance. “Here,” he said, handing the phone back. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“So do I,” I said as I dialed 911. “I think I just saw someone breaking in to 5703 Montpelier Avenue. I—” I ended the call, interrupting my own sentence, to increase the sense of urgency. The operator might assume that the caller had just been attacked.
“They’ll think that was a prank call,” said Gavin.
“They’ll send someone to check, anyway,” I said. “That’s protocol.” I knew the 911 system couldn’t detect anything more than what cell tower my phone was pinging off of, but I turned the phone off, just to be sure.
“If they look around, they may see us sitting in a car for no particular reason—parked on a street where neither of us lives. Unlike Virginia, we aren’t invisible.”
I hadn’t considered that problem. My first impulse was to drive away, but we might not make it out before the police arrived.
“We just duck down when we see them coming,” I said. “We’re a block away, and there are a lot of cars parked on the street, anyway. I doubt they’re going to inspect every one of them.”
I switched back to see what Virginia was up to. My heartbeat and breathing speeded up as I realized that she’d already started putting on her show.
Dr. Curtis was sitting up in bed, his gray hair in disarray, bathed in the glow of whatever angelic form Virginia had assumed. His eyes looked wild from the shock of finding an angel in his bedroom.
“It is not too late,” Virginia was saying. “You only need to repudiate the pact, and you’ll be free of it.”
“But…but my son!” said Dr. Curtis. The expression on his was poignant enough to make me almost want to forgive him. Almost. But he had sent Cynthia to Hell, one way or another. How could anyone forgive that?
“Your son isn’t truly alive,” said Virginia. “He only appears to be so. In the long run, even he won’t thank you for—”
Virginia’s focus shifted abruptly to the window, which had a good view of the street. A police cruiser was stopping in front of the house. It wasn’t using its lights or siren, but the headlights seemed unnaturally bright to me, perhaps in contrast to the darkness all around the house.
“I will return in a day,” she said as if nothing outside was of any concern to her. “I expect you to have repudiated the pact by then.”
“No!” I said, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me. The only thing that kept me from despair was the look in Dr. Curtis’s eyes. He wasn’t going to break the pact, even if an angel told him to.
The glow around him faded as Virginia let go of the angel illusion and switched back to invisibility. She moved out into the hall but didn’t try to leave the house.
“What’s she doing?” I asked Gavin. “She’s not getting out of there.”
I felt Gavin’s hand on my shoulder. “Stay calm,” he said quietly. “I don’t know exactly where she parked, but she probably can’t drive off until the police are gone.”
That made sense, but I still felt as if I’d had too much caffeine. I wanted to do something…anything. I wanted to keep Virginia and the boy both safe—and get Cynthia out of Satan’s clutches. The first part would probably work out OK, but the third seemed impossible if I managed to achieve the second, and vice versa. How had I gotten myself into this mess?
Virginia slipped back into the master bedroom and stood at the window, watching the police, though she couldn’t tell much from a second story window. Based on the glow from flashlights, they were trying to check the sides of the house to look for signs of a break-in. They would find nothing. But I supposed they’d have to check the backyard, which would probably require them to knock on the front door, even though it was very late.
I couldn’t hear a knock through Virginia’s ears, but I did feel the front door swing open. One of the officers had tried it, and it was still unlocked through Virginia’s magic, so it opened. She wasn’t in a position to see, but I was sure they’d check for any sign of damage. But then they’d have to declare themselves, so any residents of the house wouldn’t panic and mistake them for intruders.
I heard a knock, followed by “Madisonville Police. Is anyone at home?”
Dr. Curtis started getting out of bed, and Virginia moved out of the bedroom to stand near the stairs, perhaps trying to get a look at the officers.
“My dad and I,” said a shaky adolescent voice. Curtis’s son must have stepped out of the kitchen and toward the officers. Instead of getting herself out of the way, Virginia moved silently down the stairs. What the hell was she doing?
Dr. Curtis, still unsettled by his angelic visitation, was moving slowly, but it sounded as if he’d gotten out of bed and was putting on a robe.
“We got a 911 call about a break-in at this address,” said one of the officers. “Where’s your dad? We’d like to speak to him.”
“Upstairs, but he’s a pretty sound sleeper. I’ll go get him.”
Virginia was at the bottom of the stairs now. The two officers looked stiff, but both had lowered their weapons on the reasonable assumption that a teenager in Star Trek pajamas probably wasn’t an intruder.
Their reactions made clear that they saw a normal boy. Virginia still saw a walking corpse with an inner glow from demonic magic.
She raised her hands, and I knew what she was planning. She would let the officers see the boy as she saw him. Depending on how well trained they were, one of them might panic and shoot. If Curtis’s son ended up dead again, he’d consider the pact broken.
A neat plan—but I couldn’t allow it to happen. Maybe the kid was some kind of undead, but he didn’t seem to know it. And if an officer killed him, then saw the body of a boy, that officer’s life would be ruined.
“STOP!” I commanded. I had no idea why I was trying something so obviously useless. I’d already established that Virginia couldn’t hear me. Yet we were connected in some ways. This was a Hail-Mary shot in the purest definition of the term.
I couldn’t tell if Virginia heard me, but her hands fell to her sides, and she staggered backward as if she’d been struck.
“What’s the trouble, officers?” asked Dr. Curtis from the top of the stairs. He sounded shaky, but the officers would no doubt attribute that to their sudden arrival.
“I was just telling your son that we got a 911 call about a break-in at this address. We were doing a routine check and found the front door unlocked, though there is no sign of forced entry.”
Dr. Curtis attempted a chuckle, though it sounded more like he was gagging on something. “I must have forgotten to lock it when I came home from work. Please feel free to have a look around, but I’m sure no one has broken in.”
“If you wouldn’t mind, we will do a quick check, just to be sure," one of the officers replied. “An experienced burglar can sometimes get in quietly.”
“Do what you need to do,” said Dr. Curtis, doing his best to seem the perfect, law-abiding citizen rather than the psychiatrist who helped pull people into Satan’s clutches—kids about the same age as his son.
The officers fanned out to check the back door and all the windows while Curtis’s sone started up the stairs.
Virginia got an even closer look this time, and the kid not only had demonic energy in his heart but all through his system. A network of thin lines like blood vessels spread through his entire body. He wasn’t really alive in the normal sense, but he walked up the stairs in a perfectly normal way and hugged his father on his way back to bed.
Virginia slipped out through the front door just as Dr. Curtis was coming downstairs to close and lock it. But instead of going to her own car, wherever that was, she seemed to be walking in our direction. Perhaps her car was too close to the house to move right now, just as Gavin thought.
But instead of hovering nearby, Virginia kept moving in our direction until she was rapping on the window of Gavin’s car. Gavin unlocked it so that she could climb into the back seat, after which she became visible. I shifted from seeing through her eyes back to seeing through mine.
“What exactly did you think you were doing?” she asked. For the first time, her tone reminded me of a demon’s.
“I was stopped you from getting a boy killed,” I said as calmly as I could. I wasn’t really telling her anything she hadn’t already guessed, and she showed no sign of being swayed by my motive.
“Don’t you understand? He isn’t alive. He’s a reanimated corpse. I’ll give the Devil his due—the illusion is remarkably good. It would have to be to fool his father. But you must have seen that he’s sustained by demonic energy, not by normal biological processes.”
“Answer one question for me, and I’ll admit I was wrong,” I said. “Is his soul still in his body?”
“No,” said Virginia, though she didn’t sound certain.
“How can you tell? Having seen through your eyes, it doesn’t look to me as if you can see souls, at least when they’re in bodies.”
“I can’t, but common sense suggests—”
“I’m not talking about common sense here.” I kept my volume low, but Virginia couldn’t have missed my intensity. “I’m talking about certainty. Because that’s the only way I’d consider letting you engineer his death. Yes, he has demonic energy keeping him alive, but if he has a soul, he’s still human.”
“So is Dr. Curtis, but would you have objected so forcefully if I’d pushed him down the stairs when I had the chance.”
“The doctor might deserve to die—though even then, I’m not going to be his executioner if I can help it. But his kid has done nothing wrong.”
“That we know of,” said Virginia, looking me straight in the eye. “What if his soul is elsewhere? His body could be controlled by a demon or even Satan himself. If that’s the case, he could find a way to do evil through the boy.”
“I’m not buying that. The kid would have to act like Curtis’s son. Demons aren’t great at long-term gigs like that, and Satan seems unlikely to spend the amount of time he’d have to if he were personally possessing the corpse.”
“The body could be animated by a damned soul,” said Gavin. He didn’t add, “Like Amanda,” though I knew what he meant.
“But he’s not doing a generic job. No one could fool the doctor without the boy’s memory and personality.”
“True, but I don’t know how we prove or disprove any of these theories,” said Gavin. “Can Alma see a soul?”
“Only outside the body,” said Virginia. “I’m not aware of anyone who can observe souls inside bodies.”
“Well, then the only solution is for the two of you to observe the guy and see what he does when he thinks no one’s watching. I’d join, but I’ve got football practice for the first part of the day.”
“I’m not sure that will prove anything,” I said.
“And it’s risky,” added Virginia. “The more attention that we pay, the more likely Satan will notice and intervene. Neither one of us is exactly his favorite person, anyway. He’d relish the chance to harm us.”
“The alternative seems to be to give up on helping Cynthia,” said Gavin. “But Dr. Curtis will just keep on going. How many more teenagers will he recruit? They may not all kill themselves, but they’ll all suffer.”
I looked at Virginia. “I’m game if you are.”
The half demon sighed. “Watching him might be worthwhile if it gets us onto the same page.”
“Then let’s do it,” I said. But in my heart, I still worried. If he turned out to be a teenage guy having a normal day, that didn’t really prove his original soul was in his body. And if he did something overtly evil, what then? I still couldn’t be enthusiastic about killing him.
Once again, I’d found myself in a “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situation.
Madisonville Murder is related to the Soul Salvager trilogy. (The action falls between the prologue and chapter one of the first book.)
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