Page 38 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“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.religionand added five more words to signify that it wasnotlike 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, butthey 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. Adand anlplummeted to the bottom of the screen, then the whole wordcocaine, 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.