The world is a vast, dark, and confusing place. It’s not meant for us to understand. It does not open up the pages of its history and its past for us to look at and comprehend. It does not feel for us or pity our ignorance. All the world does is exist, allowing us to endure as long as it sees fit. The inner workings, the mysteries behind the curtain, we must struggle and toil and fear while we labor to find out what lies beyond it all. What few precious glimpses we get are given to us by the sweat of our brow, and the answers we receive are rarely what we want. The world does not exist for us. We are just guests, visitors passing through. It has been in existence longer than any of us, and it will continue to endure long after we are gone.

I stare at the screen, glimpsing an image of something that I should never see, that no man or woman should ever see. Priests and holy men have claimed for thousands of years that things like this exist, but I paid none of them notice. I brushed their hocus pocus off like an old tattered jacket, ready to be thrown away and updated for the modern era. Churches were nothing more than tax loopholes for me, and anyone who practiced a religion was just ignoring and hiding from the horrors of the real world. No, for me, religion has always been a joke. I put the Bible in with all the other fairytales and fantasies that men have dreamed up over the years, no more credible than any other supposed holy book. Why believe in something that clearly isn’t there? And let’s pretend that there is a God, clearly he or she gave up caring about the world a very long time ago. Whatever deity might be out there, he clearly made a mistake when he created us.

But everything about my faithlessness is cracking, fracturing, and shattering within my empirical, cynical, jaded mind as I watch the few precious frames moving across the screen. A total of three frames capture the entity, the thing, the being. Three frames and two of them are very, very blurry, hazy, and it’s nearly impossible to tell what the thing is. I look at the images displayed before me, trying to comprehend what this is. I can see the entity. I can see what it is with my own eyes. There’s no question of tampering, playing around with the footage or anything like that. I’m looking at it and I see it. I see it for what it is. I am looking at death, a demon, a devil, a soul, something that is travelling from David Marcus to some baby-faced young man. I look at the thing and all the questions, the faith, the hypotheticals, and the theories evaporate. This is it. This is the truth.

I am looking at the dark side of the moon and I know without a doubt that they were all right. I’m not sure if it’s just a specific religion that believes in these sorts of dark spirits, but all of those that believe in them, they’re now credible. I look at the thing and I feel repulsed by it—horrified by it. This is the establishment of something that I never expected to see, not in a million years. I expected to die and rot in the ground, my mind and soul gone. But now, I’m stuck here wondering amidst a maelstrom of thoughts whirling around my baffled and terrified mind. What does this mean? What am I supposed to do with this?

I think the last time I stepped inside of a church was when Kate and I got married. I remember that it was one of the few times that I ever actually went into a church and I remember it being cold and strange, a sort of tomb. Nothing about it felt warm and welcoming and all of the pictures of Jesus made me want to roll my eyes and wonder why I was there. Marriage is not a religious thing, no matter how many times the Jesus freaks try to tell you it is. To the real world, marriage isn’t established until the government gives you a slip of paper and calls it good. So I never understood why we were there, wasting money and time on a stupid ceremony, because after all, there was no god watching us, smiling on us with delight and happiness.

But now that I know that this thing is real, why wouldn’t God be real? Why wouldn’t there be some light side to this darkness? A yin to the yang. I mean, what good is it to pick and choose with this stuff? What good is it to believe in the darkness but not the light and this is well beyond belief, this is fact. This is proof. This is the cold, stone reality of the situation unfolding before me in three simple frames. I am dealing with the supernatural. I am dealing with the mystical here.

“Are you seeing this?” I ask Lola, just to make sure that I’m not the only one here who is completely insane, looking at a demon or something on the screen. I can hear her fingers moving every time she clicks for the screen to shift. We watch the thing, pulling free from David and descending upon the unsuspecting young man again and again, but I need to hear her say it. I need to know that I haven’t completely cracked and I’m not the only one who is seeing this. I need to know that I’m not going absolutely insane.

“Yeah,” she breathes as though she’s been punched in the diaphragm, without any true emotion to it. Just a breathless release of the word. “I’m seeing this,” she says finally. I stare at the screen, looking at the shadowy figure, moving with such speed and terrifying agility. No one could have seen it. The camera can hardly comprehend the speed with which this thing has jumped bodies.

“What is it?” I ask her, as if she’s some great theologian who could give me the answer to that kind of a question. She looks at me with the kind of eyes that want to scream that she has no fucking clue and demand an explanation as to why she should have a clue what that thing is. Honestly, I was being hopeful. I was praying that she might have an explanation for me.

“A demon?” She shrugs at me.

I look at the screen and try to comprehend it. I don’t know a thing about demons. I know as much as anyone, that they make pretty decent horror movies and that they’re not supposed to be real, but here we go. It’s like learning the unicorns are real and that they have a penchant for murdering throngs and throngs of people. I mean, I know as much as the next guy. They’re evil, spiteful spirits that are damned to hell to torture people and stuff along those very rigid lines. This isn’t what I thought demons were supposed to look like. I thought they were supposed to be red and have bat wings and horns. I thought they were supposed to sport goatees and possess little girls to torment and mock priests, not convince their hosts that morbid suicides were in fashion.

“I suppose it kind of makes sense,” Lola says to me. “I mean, wouldn’t a demon do this sort of thing to people?” She bends over and starts typing onto her keyboard like someone harnessed the Road Runner’s speed and injected her with it. I listen to her, marveling at how anyone could type that fast. Her eyes are scanning the screen, her pretty face illuminated by the glow of the monitor as she tunes me out along with the rest of the world. She scans the screen with fire in her eyes. She’s hooked. She wants this. I don’t blame her. This is the strangest thing I or anyone I’ve ever known has experienced in their collective lives. “There’s tons of this stuff online,” she says to me over the monitor. “I mean, most of it is speculation and scriptures or testimonies, but there’s not a whole lot here that would align with what we’re seeing on the screen.”

“Narrow your search to suicides,” I suggest, looking at the screen. If this is in fact a demon, then it has a strong desire and penchant to see its victims kill themselves horrifically and brutally. It gets off on all of this death and carnage. It wants more of it. Like any other killer, it likes what it’s doing and it’s feeding off of it. It’s escalating because it wants more. It’s almost as if the thing is addicted to the death that it’s causing.

“I’m not seeing a whole lot,” Lola answers. “Most of the stuff listed is that the devil is tempting their children or spouses into committing suicide, but in the end they all believe that it’s a moral choice. That’s why they all seem to think that it’s a damnable offense against God or whatever.” She looks up at me from over the monitor. “Do you believe in God, Detective King?”

“I’m not sure what I believe in anymore,” I tell her, looking at that being on the screen. I honestly don’t know what to believe. I suppose that I should believe in God the same way that I believe in gravity or air. It’s been proven. It’s there. What is happening to the world?

“Here we go,” Lola says finally. “It looks like there’s a reference to a thing called a Harvester of Sorrow. It’s a malignant entity that feeds off of the willingness to commit bodily harm. They say that it’s an old fallen angel that saw the wickedness of man and wanted to poison the hearts and souls of mankind by forcing humans to kill themselves, therefore damning them to eternal torment and suffering. It feeds off of the sorrows of humanity and the collective suffering of our existence.” She looks at me from over the monitor. “I think we have a winner, King. It says that the entity will jump from host to host, feeding on their misery until they are ready to end their lives or when the entity finds a more attractive host. This sounds exactly like what we’re seeing with this thing.”

I have to agree with her. Whatever this thing wants or whatever its agenda is, it’s definitely jumping from host to host, convincing them to kill themselves. I shake my head. If we lived in the world of fairies and goblins, this would work as evidence to Mendez and the others. I could bring them this video and point to it, declaring a demon as the perpetrator, but that’s not how it works. How am I going to tell Mendez that it’s a demon? Maybe that’s not an option anymore. I’m not hunting someone I can lock away. I’m not hunting someone that the judicial system can just deal with like the rest of the scum in this wretched city. I look over my shoulder at Lola.

“Does it say how you stop it?” I ask her.

She shakes her head. “No,” she answers with a disappointed voice. “But I mean, logically, couldn’t you just find who the current host is and… you know… terminate them? I mean, it’s a pity for whoever has contracted the thing… demon… entity, but I seriously don’t see any other option to stop it. If it jumps to a new host and that host hasn’t had time to come in contact with anyone else like you theorized, then wouldn’t killing that host stop the cycle? Wouldn’t the demon be forced to end its hunt?”

Maybe, but what do we actually know about any of this? What part of any of this adheres to what is logical or what is comprehensible? Maybe the being could just jump from host to host without physical contact, then whoever pulls the trigger would be subject to being the next victim. I look at Lola, mulling over the possibilities. There’s too many variables, too many factors in the air. I need to start making progress on finding who the new host is before I actually start thinking about what I’m going to do to the entity to stop it from continuing onward with its plague.

“Lola, I need you to contact Mitch’s Grill and see if they have the name of whoever this kid is,” I tell her, pointing to the baby-faced asshole who flipped me the bird in the parking lot. He looks like he’s got military training, just from the way his hair is cut and how muscular his build is. If I have to go toe to toe with this kid, I’m going to get my ass whooped. That’s one thing about the military, it knows how to train its men and women. “You mind doing that?”

“No problem,” Lola says to me with an excited look on her face. She wants to be kept in the loop. She wants to be a part of whatever it is that we’ve stumbled across. I’m kicking myself. Leave it to Owens to get me caught up in a case that involves a demon of some kind. I stare at the screen as I listen to Lola talking to the manager at the Grill. She’s letting the footage cycle. Over and over again, I witness David killing himself, ending his life just like all the other victims. If only he had been the killer and this whole thing was resolved. How am I supposed to get revenge on a demon? I shake my head. This is a nightmare. “His name is Damian Sullivan,” Lola tells me, hanging up the phone and immediately going to work at her keyboard, searching for more, digging for information hidden out there on wires and electric highways. “The manager at the bar says that the waitress thinks he’s using a fake ID, but we’ll find out soon enough.” I give her a moment while she’s typing away. “Here we go, Damian Sullivan. It looks like our boy here just graduated from the Marine boot camp in San Diego and is now on leave with orders to Camp Pendleton. I’ve got a few friends over in the Marines that might be able to help us out. Since he’s a raw jarhead, we might be able to find out who he’s close to and when his leave is up.”

“Listen to me.” I walk back to the young technician and grab her arm, jarring her out of her little scavenger hunt while she’s going crazy trying to dig up information. She’s getting out of control in her excitement to keep going. She looks at me with her big doe eyes. “You need to keep all of this a secret. Even with those three frames, if Mendez or anyone else gets a whiff about what we’re looking into, then it’s game over for us. We won’t have jobs, lives, or anything to go back to. I want to catch this asshole and if we’re going to do that, then we have to keep it close to the chest. I’m going to start looking for this kid and I want you to lock that door the moment I leave and get this off that screen. And when you find any sort of new information, you’re going to feed it to me over the phone. You’re not going to tell anyone what we’re doing and if someone asks about me, you have no idea where I am. Do you understand me, Lola?” I ask her with fire and venom in my voice.

She looks at me with a stunned, nervous expression on her soft, sweet face and nods to me. “I understand,” she utters weakly. “I’ll keep it between you and me; and I’ll call you the second I get anything new.”

I look her over one more time, assessing if she’s capable of this sort of assignment. She’s barely been here a year and already she’s in way over her head. I don’t know if she’s aware of how much of a monumental career ender this thing is going to be if we screw it up or if anyone gets word of what we’re looking into. I’m sure the department’s shrinks and therapists will have a field day trying to decipher just what was it about this case that made me crack and start pursuing delusional lines of inquiry. They’ll hand the case over to someone else, probably White and Landsmen, who will ride the case into the ground, never finding out who it really is behind all of the chaos, and the demon will keep on killing. This is about the city more than it is about us. We’ll never be rewarded for the work we’re doing here and no one will ever know what it was we did to keep this city alive and safe. That’s the kind of reward the city offers us. I only hope that she’s willing to take it and think that a silent ignorance of all of it is enough of a reward.

BOOK: The Darkness Inside Us (A Detective King Suspense Thriller) (A Detective King Novel Book 3)

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