He scanned the street as he exited the bungalow. He wondered briefly if all the houses in the area had the same layout. The facades all looked the same to him. Satisfied that no one was watching, he quickly got into the driver’s seat.
He did not need to scan the street. He never did. His anchors always told him. Recent events made him wary. The encounter with the veteran, whom he could read nothing from, was primarily the reason. He opened the large envelope and inspected the contents.
At least he was worth it.
Placing the three counterfeit passports back inside, he started the car. All the passports had release dates dating a year back, complete with stamps of supposed travels. The passports were Colombian, Thai, and Filipino. He considered each one as his next destination. Now that he got what he came for, he could fly anywhere he wanted.
Where to, where to?
He asked himself as he waited for the light to turn green. The events of the past days hung heavily on him. He was bummed with being thrown out of what could have been a good harvest, at the same time, he could stop thinking about the creature that so easily foiled him.
The encounter with the veteran also left a bad taste in his mouth. He would have dismissed him as one curious incident, a glitch so to speak, nothing more. He would have until he saw the local paper that morning. On the bottom right of the front page was news of an accident that happened the night before. A woman drove into a pole and died. The woman on the paper looked eerily like the woman whom the veteran refused to take money from.
“So, I have seven years left, eh?” He said aloud. “Bullshit.”
He agonized between heading back to the motel or finding a bar to pass the time in. The sun was just about to set, it was still early. Too early for supper. None of the options seemed particularly attractive to him, mostly because he was not in a hurry. He thought about finding a mall of an outlet where he could check outgoing flights.
Hmmm.
His skin crawled. He felt excited and fearful as he took the ramp to Central Freeway.
Why not? Why the fuck not?
~0~
He only prayed on three occasions – after getting up, before going to bed, and when the need arises. Cain felt the need. The set of prayers he uttered, including one for St. Cain, took a quarter of an hour to finish. He felt lighter after and began considering the situation.
What did she mean by No?
Cain reviewed what he has been told about the child. Imaginary playmates were not alarming. Despite what the father told him, the high level of detail was not at all uncommon. He ruled that out and focused on what the wife related to the husband, and what the husband confessed to him just minutes ago – black eyes.
Due to the nature of his work, the rising popularity of black-eyed children was not a new thing for him. Because of his involvement however, he knew them to be false. The rising popularity indicated it was something new, perhaps something shared online and spread like wildfire. He examined it from another perspective – what if it was true?
Cain decided it didn’t make sense as well. The stories of so-called black-eyed children had one thing in common – nobody knew them. They just appeared. They were just there.
There was no doubt in his mind that the family was going through the classic signs of demonic possession. A rash of inexplicable events, an escalation of said events that usually resulted in the weakening of a target’s will, and finally, possession itself.
The younger child seemed unaffected. She appeared to be of sound health and cheery disposition to be expected of child her age. As opposed to the majority of mindset, even in his circle, children are not at all oblivious to things that happen within their spheres. They just had a better ability to not focus on things that didn’t matter to them, an ability that disappears as they grow.
If not her, then who?
Cain had to take a step back. He knew too well that first-hand accounts are not to be taken as truth. In this case, he only had, mostly, the father’s accounts. That was what the interview he would be conducting was for. He considered the possibility that the target was one of the parents. Matt related to him that he had seen his wife spaced out and remained spaced out for an extended period.
Of course, that was also true for both children. Then, Matt himself told him about his own episode. How he did not remember getting out of his clothes, or walking out the room, or going downstairs. And it happened right after he got overwhelmed by what he saw. He passed out and had no recollection of anything else until he came to his senses the next morning.
As far as he knew, there was no reason at all for these things to be happening. Entities prey on the weak-minded, that was true, but a weakness in the mind is only exploitable when a person is having a kind of internal turmoil.
All the legitimate cases he investigated and handled brought that to light. People are prone to claiming and touting all manner of things about a victim, portraying them almost like saints. One of the common lies is about the person being happy. That was always proven wrong when the victims themselves gain control of their faculties and start pouring their hearts out.
The incidents began manifesting a day after their housewarming – an event that might be a little stressful for a control freak, but not stressful enough to weaken the mind greatly for an entity to come swarming in.
The thought brought his focus on the older child. Aside from what Matt told him regarding Emmy seeing and hearing something just before, the child appears to be the first target, yet that also did not make any sense. The most common causes of depression or high levels of anxiety in children the same age as Gina was pressure at home or at school. The family did not seem like the kind to overly pressure their children to the point of breaking. And school was out. Bullies were, for the most part, out of the question. Cain made a mental note to ask if there was internet in the house while already preparing questions for Gina in his head.
He felt the emotions around him heighten as the sun started to disappear. Cain understood. While it was mostly superstition, there was also a strong case for why paranormal things, the kind the family was experiencing, happened at night. The truth was, it could happen at any time, at any hour. People are wearier come nightfall, that was the reason.
Everyone is a target then? That would be a first.
He turned his thoughts towards the moments just before he crashed. He remembered an intense sense of heaviness, almost as if there was an intent attached to it. The very real pressure he felt in his head, and the pain that came after was the biggest puzzler for him.
In all his years both professionally and while he was still tugging along with Father Ramirez, he has never experienced anything like it. Even when the entity was lashing out, they’d never been able to hurt anyone directly. There were cases where people fainted, but they always turned out to be heightened emotional excitement. Worries and fears rising up to such a degree that the mind shuts the body down. He did not have that. Even considering the heaviness he felt, he knew there wasn’t enough time for it to build up to a degree that would cause him to shut down.
Cain took out his phone and dialed his mentor’s number.