The White Night (21 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ford Atticus Ford

I’m here at
Newport’s police station, sitting in a suspect interview room, and the lights
overhead burn my eyeballs as if they’re scrubbing them with bleach. They’re too
bright, too white, for my darkened mood.

My chair is your
standard, uncomfortable plastic piece of crap, purchased with taxpayer money on
a limited budget, and I squirm to get comfy. I’ve been waiting here for over three
hours. Maybe longer. I’ve lost track.

I have a room-temperature
cup of coffee sitting on the table that someone brought five minutes after
depositing me here, though I doubt that’ll do any good for the nausea roiling
in my gut like a volcano bulging on the eve of eruption.

Why the nausea?
Well, a couple of things: thinking about the squishy crunch of that poker
sliding through a used-to-be-human neck, combined with the fact that I am
absolutely torn up about the fact that they won’t tell me if Ulie is okay. I
tried to have them get word to Melanie, to let her know that I’m okay, and
they’ve yet to give me an affirmative on that as well.

Matter of fact,
I’m surprised she doesn’t have a lawyer here yet. Although, more than likely,
knowing Melanie, she hopped in her car and is on the way here.

I risk a sip of
the coffee. It tastes even worse with the lack of heat. I grimace and think
about how Lauren will never get to drink coffee again and my stomach spins
around the uneven bars like a drunken gymnast.

I feel horrible
about what happened to her, I really do.

I had so much
stale hatred for her, but I was coming around. Could be that I’m feeling
sentimental and sad now that she’s dead, but no matter what I thought about her
past transgressions, I’ll admit that I could’ve learned to enjoy her company.

Eventually.

You know, like how
you despised broccoli as a kid, and now as an adult you can tolerate it as long
as it’s seasoned properly.

Anyway. Lauren was
more than broccoli, and it’s so damn unfortunate that she had to go out like
that. I’ve been sitting here wondering if I could’ve done anything for her, and
I’ve come to the conclusion that no amount of spiritual antibiotics would’ve
cured what ailed her, so she’s in a better place.

Or, at least she’s
in a
different
place. Let’s hope her soul travelled the right direction.

That gets me to
thinking about Ulie again and I feel a lump well up in my throat.

Dogs are
heaven-bound, no matter what. If anything happened to him…

Ugh. Man, this
sucks.

Ulie is the child
I never had. My heart aches that much.

I left the poor
guy cooped up inside the condo with Grandma Death Eyes.

I was mentally wavering
on the way here, but I specifically remember babbling about my little buddy and
that he was in terrible danger.

I shout at the
two-way mirror, “Can somebody please find out what happened to my dog?”

As expected, the
silence continues.

Before they tossed
me in the squad car, while I was sitting at the kitchen table, hands cuffed
behind my back, I also managed to remember the camcorder, mentioned it to the
uniformed officers, and then prayed like I’ve never prayed before that it
caught everything.

There’s also the
matter of the two empty black-eyed children in the bathtub, and I have no
fucking clue how I’m going to explain what they were doing there. I also
realize how patently insane it’ll sound if I try to truthfully explain why
I
was there, and how the celebrity television host and beloved local girl, Lauren
Coeburn, had gotten possessed and then tried to kill me, which resulted in her
lying on the living room floor with a poker sticking out of her like she was a
demonic corndog.

The only reason
I’m not cuffed now is that the uniforms and the detectives in charge, Carson
and Jaynes, recognized me as “that guy, the one from the ghost show—you know,
Graveyard
Something or Other
.” This was followed by a round of whistles and
exaggerated
oohing
and
aahing
, along with a knowing set of
smiles.

Then they promptly
shoved me into this austere room with a single table, two chairs, and a two-way
mirror. There’s a camera up in the corner watching my every move. Not that they
need it. The only thing I’ve been able to do is sit here and relive the last
few minutes in the movie of my mind, over and over.

Again, the whole
scenario is further proof that it’s all connected.

The afterlife, I
mean, and the energy that bonds it together.

Master, whatever
his actual name might be, had sent messengers.

Our demon, my
nemesis, wanted to tell me he’s taking Chelsea back, and because he’s an
all-powerful sumbitch and thinks he can do whatever he wants, he throws down
the gauntlet, basically challenging me, wanting me to know that just for
funsies, he’s going through me to get to her. And if the Lauren Thing is to be
believed, Master’s intent was to stick his hand up my butt and use me like a
puppet.

I’ll tell you
what, dude—over my dead body.

He’s calling me
into the ring.

And I’ve never
been one to back down from a fight.

You know, except
for that time in elementary school when Danny Delp wanted to fight me by the
swings during recess.

I was a shy, quiet
kid growing up. During art class, the other rugrats would fashion crowns out of
construction paper and shove them on my head, calling me the Nerd King.

So, yeah, I kept
to myself a lot. Imagine that.

One day, in a rare
moment of peeking out of my antisocial shell, I had tried to stop him from
picking on Cindy Moss—who bore a striking resembling to Chelsea Hopper, come to
think of it. The teachers intervened, and Danny was far from happy about that.
I had taken his toy away from him, and now it was my turn in his spotlight.

I didn’t meet Danny
by the swings that day because I was smart, and because he was about three
times my size. He ruled the school. He had dozens of friends and lackeys that
he could order around. Totally a genuine cliché.

He always booted
homeruns in kickball and won every arm-wrestling contest.

I was the weird
skinny kid who watched The Exorcist over and over.

Danny and his
friends taunted me for several weeks after, called me a pussy and pushed me into
lockers. Knocked my lunch tray out of my hands.

I couldn’t take it
anymore, so you want to know what I did? My dad, Bill Ford, was ex-military, a
real badass with a high-and-tight haircut and muscles that had muscles. He used
to beat up hippies back in the sixties for shits and giggles, and among the
remnants of his past was a set of brass knuckles that I found in a cardboard
box in the corner of our attic. They were easily hidden in a backpack all
morning, and then under my jacket during a game of dodgeball.

Danny started his
crap and one good pop was all it took. He left for the hospital with a
fractured cheekbone and never bothered me again. That is, once I got back from
my month-long suspension and my parents paid his medical bills.

Plus, if you look
closely enough, you can still see the scar on my right ass cheek where my dad’s
belt buckle landed instead of the strap like he intended.

Needless to say,
not many people have examined my ass to that extent.

It’s not that I
enjoyed watching Danny Delp lying there in the mud on that rainy Thursday
morning, clutching his cheek and bawling as he writhed on the ground. I didn’t
like that part at all—okay, maybe a little—but I came away with something
different.

Whenever I tell
this story, I still get chills. That day awoke something inside me. Not
necessarily a fire, just…a different level of perception about the world and my
role in it. I
could
be strong. I
could
fight back if I wanted to.
I had the power to change things if I wanted it badly enough, or if something
had pushed too far.

I was entirely too
young to fully grasp the enormity of my realization, but now I can look at it
like this: if you go back to the metaphor of Adam and Eve’s apple, I held two
of them, one in each hand. One of the apples was made of a life that I could
create for myself. The other apple was made of a life that was handed to me by
external events.

One tasted sweet.
One tasted bitter.

One was
fulfilling. One left me famished and empty.

The choice was
simple.

Somewhere along
the monumental run of
Graveyard: Classified
, I went back to eating the
wrong one.

I sit up
straighter in the chair and cross my arms, feeling a hint of realization
beginning to manifest somewhere in my mind.

I think back to
that Very Special Live Halloween Episode, and the days and months leading up to
it, when I kept trying to convince myself, Chelsea, and Mike—
especially
Mike—that if Chelsea stood up to the demon and beat it, then she would be a
changed person for the rest of her life, ready, willing, and able to take on anything.
That was me taking a bite from both apples, the old Ford desperately trying to
regain control.

It’s like wiping
the condensation off a fogged up bathroom mirror when the understanding finally
settles in.

I suppose I was
channeling myself from the third-grade, and trying to reconcile that with
Chelsea’s situation. Deep down, floating around in my subconscious was a
well-intentioned desire for her to experience that kind of awakening, too.

Eat the right apple,
Chelsea.

I had good
intentions, but what I didn’t take into account was the fact that there’s a
fuckload of difference between a bully named Danny Delp and a Tier One
right-hander who probably plays darts with Satan every other Saturday night
down at the local watering hole.

Whatever Master’s
actual name is—let’s call him Boogerface for now—whatever Boogerface has in
mind probably involves lots of planning, lots of deception, a tactician’s
dream.

Why go through all
the trouble?

Boogerface has an
eternity on his hands. He has time to entertain himself. Even if we send him
back where he came from, he’ll still be down below, boiling in the fires of
Hades for thousands upon thousands of infinite years to come.

It’s not a
far-fetched concept to assume that demons get bored.

This is all a game
to him. Chelsea is a pawn. Maybe I’m a knight. Mike’s a knight.

And Boogerface is
simply moving his pieces around.

I wish I could
figure out what’s so special about Chelsea, you know? Why her?

I think about what
Grandpa Joe said back in the Hampstead farmhouse, about how Chelsea is the key
to everything. I kept thinking that perhaps he meant that Chelsea was some sort
of catalyst to this spiritual war that’s about to take place.

Could be, though
now I’m starting to think it might be far simpler than that.

This is Cindy Moss
all over again.

Boogerface is
pissed off because I took his toy away from him.

Sure, Chelsea got
hurt in the process when he lashed out and attacked her, which was probably his
way of saying to me, “Now look what you made me do!” and to be perfectly
honest, so did Cindy back in the day, but what it all comes down to is this: he
wants revenge, and has been setting up his pieces since Chelsea’s parents took
her away that night.

If that’s the
case, then why didn’t he follow her to her new home when she left the first
time, before we even filmed the Very Special Live Halloween Episode?

Maybe he did, at
least a small part of him. She kept having those horrific dreams.

Maybe he had to
stay behind in the house, close to his portal to hell. I can’t say. I can’t
pretend to know the mind of a demon.

And then we
brought her back that night. We brought people, and cameras, and batteries, and
the black heart of Carla Hancock. We brought energy, millions of subliminal watts
of paranormal energy from all around the world with so many people focusing
everything they had on that one singular location.

Trust me, I know
my shit, but sitting here, in this empty room as I wait on somebody to come
talk to me, I think I’m just now realizing how lucky we got that Chelsea’s
attack wasn’t far worse.

We didn’t
necessarily save Chelsea from Boogerface forever, much in the same way that my
intervention didn’t stop Cindy Moss from getting picked on again, but we put
our noses where they didn’t belong.

And, again, much
in the same way that Danny Delp and his heathen cronies taunted me mercilessly
for weeks on end, often slapping and shoving Cindy Moss right in front of me,
asking, “Whatcha gonna do about it, huh, pussy?” it’s plainly obvious that
Boogerface has the same motivations.

He’s a playground
bully.

With an extremely
powerful right-hander like that, he can have Chelsea anytime he wants, and
anywhere he wants. It’s not necessary for the
Graveyard: Classified
crew
or me to be within a thousand miles of the Hoppers for Boogerface to take
control of Chelsea again.

This is about
exerting control.

I’m the weird
skinny kid who dared to defy him, who dared to stick up for his prey, and he
wants to teach me a lesson before he takes Chelsea back.

Fucker
. I
get it now.

Know what this
means?

Mike will get his
wish. I
have
to do the documentary.

What better stage
for David to take on Goliath?

It’s the perfect
showdown, and I’m bringing a set of paranormal brass knuckles with me, Boogerface.

***

Another fifteen
minutes pass before I hear a short rap on the door and in walk the two
detectives, Carson and Jaynes. Carson reminds me of John Madden, all the way
down to the wiry eyebrows sprouting from his forehead like a ball of cotton stuck
a fork in a light socket. He’s tall, round, and gives off the impression of a
jovial grandfather who’s ready to pull a lint-covered piece of candy out of his
pants pocket. Don’t let that fool you, though. This guy is sharper than he
looks. I picked up on that earlier when they shoved me into this human-sized
fishbowl.