Free The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper

Guazzo offers fifty ways to tell if possession is real, and includes the sensation of ants under the skin, along with accurate foretellings of future events and voices in your head saying things beyond your own understanding, but which are nevertheless true.
    These three signs come to me in particular, as my flu-like symptoms include a maddening whole-body itchiness that has me considering jumping out of the vaporetto to be cooled by the waters of the Grand Canal. And what is to be made of the list of cities the presence within the man uttered, along with the numbers? Is it a code? Addresses? Phone numbers? Whatever they are, they came attached to a date a few days from now. April 27th. When “the world will be marked by our numbers.”
    And then my father’s voice. Telling me it should have been me.
    I told you not to think , O’Brien says.
    All the landmarks I’d learned from the guidebooks slide past as the vaporetto approaches the hotel, but I can’t recall their names now, letalone the tidbits I’d learned about their histories. They are merely old, pretty buildings. Free of the reverence I’d brought to them yesterday, the façades suggesting only falsehood today, elaborate decoration meant to disguise their original owners’ lusts and greed. How can I see this? It seems that with my flu-that-isn’t-a-flu has come a kind of X-ray vision, one capable of looking into structures—into the people who made them—and seeing their base motivations. A perspective that brings with it a terrible despair. The claustrophobia of being human.
    It’s a feeling that precedes the return of a memory. Something I have expertly ignored through scholarship, family life, the thousand little tricks of avoidance the mind can be trained to perform every day. But now it comes back with such vividness I am powerless to dim its images.
    My brother, drowning.
    His arms thrashing at the water of the river behind our family’s cabin, his head under and not coming up. Then his arms stop, too. He drifts downstream. Slower than the current, as though his feet dragged along the river bottom in resistance even in death.
    I was six years old.
    “Mister Ullman?”
    Someone is standing over me. A man in a black suit, reaching down.
    “Yes?”
    “Welcome back to the Bauer. You have enjoyed your afternoon?”
    I RUSH UPSTAIRS TO OUR SUITE . I T ONLY TAKES A MINUTE OR TWO, but feels torturously longer. What draws it out are the new horrific images of what I will find in the room once I open the door.
    Tess hurt.
    Tess snarling and thrashing like the man in the room, the babysitter helpless to restrain her.
    Tess gone.
    I’ve failed her. I was tricked, sent to the house in Santa Croce as adiversion. The goal was not to record a phenomenon, but to separate me from my daughter in a foreign city so that she might be taken away.
    Yet when I kick the door to our suite open, she is there. The sitting room’s glass doors open wide, the Grand Canal sparkling outside them. Tess writing in her journal on the sofa, the babysitter watching a muted soap on the TV.
    “Dad!”
    Tess rushes over to me. Rewards me with an embrace that is almost enough to make my illness lift away from me.
    “You’re all hot,” she says, touching my hands, the sides of my face.
    “I’ll be okay.”
    “Your eyes.”
    “What about them?”
    “They’re all, like, seriously bloodshot.”
    “Just a touch of flu. Don’t worry, sweetheart.”
    The babysitter stands behind Tess, trying to maintain her smile. But she too finds my appearance distressing. A glance at the front hall’s mirror and I see why.
    “Thank you. Grazie .”
    I hand her a wad of euros roughly double the negotiated fee, yet she takes the bills with some reluctance, as though whatever ails me might transfer from the paper to her.
    When she’s gone, I tell Tess we have to go.
    “Because you’re sick?”
    “No, baby. Because . . . I don’t like it here.”
    “ I like it here.”
    “It’s not the