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By Root 1124 0

I had witnessed and then the entire week rushed back to me all at once and I just kept haphazardly piling on the details—the Terby, the gravestone, the black hole in the field, the flickering lights, the intruder, the furniture that rearranged itself, the footprints stamped in ash, the dead animals, the video attachment, the wind, my father, how the house on Elsinore Lane was shifting into the house on Valley Vista—and, with my face straining, offered a muddled story that only I could make sense of. But Miller seemed to be taking me seriously. He kept jotting notes when a particular detail alerted him to, and he didn’t appear to be bothered by even the most outlandish claim. His expression wasn’t readable—he could have been drugged. He was taking the jagged, nonsensical plotline in stride. Where was the amazement? Where was the surprise? But then it hit me that, considering what Miller was here for, this was a common morning for him. I understood that his stance was routine, as was the gibbering of the frightened client. It did not relieve me to recount these events to someone.

I did not mention the missing boys or Aimee Light and the Orsic Motel, but I did tell him about the phone call from Patrick Bateman. At that point Miller interrupted me, looking up from the notepad.

“Who’s that?” Miller asked.

“Patrick Bateman? He’s a, um, fictional character . . . of mine.”

“Oh yes, that’s right. Yes, I remember.”

“I mean, he doesn’t actually exist. I made him up. I think someone is just, y’know, just impersonating him.”

“You think someone is impersonating him?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “Yeah, I mean, y’know, what other explanation is there? I don’t know what other explanation there is.”

Miller offered a thoughtful nod but then asked me, “Do you think someone was impersonating that thing you saw in the hallway last night?”

I started walking off the path.

“Um . . . no . . . no . . . that was something I had created . . . also.”

I realized that lurking somewhere in Miller’s question there was a theory being built and in an oddly soothing way I also realized that I was finally sitting with someone who was a believer.

Miller kept studying me. I had not taken off my sunglasses.

“I’m not sure . . .” I started haltingly. “I’m . . . how the house and these physical manifestations of these . . . um . . . fictional creations . . . are tied together but . . . I think that maybe they are . . .” I said this with a whispered desperation that physically pained me. Saying this out loud into the empty air of the diner, I grasped at whatever dignity remained. I sat up.

The silence lengthened while Miller took me in. He had removed his mirrored sunglasses—his eyes were a plain and milky blue—in a gesture that implied I ought to do the same, but I couldn’t; my eyes had sunk too deeply into their sockets.

“It’s hard for me . . . to admit all of this and . . . it’s hard for me to believe that any of this is happening, I guess, and it just escalated into this . . . event last night and . . . I’m here—I mean, we’re here—because . . . because I want these events to stop.”

“Otherwise known as the unexplained events.”

“Yeah,” I murmured, staring out at the flat and desolate land beyond the highway. “The unexplained events,” I murmured.

Sensing I was finished with my story, Miller shifted his girth around in the booth and said flatly, “Technically, Mr. Ellis, I’m a demonologist.”

I was nodding even though I didn’t want to. “Which is?”

“Someone who is an expert on the study and handling of demons.”

I stared at Miller for a long time before I asked, “Demons?”

This is not a good sign, the writer warned me.

Miller sighed. He had noted the disbelief in my grimace. “I also communicate with what you would call ghosts—if that works better for you, Mr. Ellis. In laymen’s terms, you could call me a ghost hunter as well as a psychic researcher.”

“So you basically study . . . anything that’s supernatural?” The words came out just as I had expected they would because the writer was telling me, You are in so over your head.