Free The Witch and the Englishman by J.R. Rain Page A

sink, or jeans over the backs of my dining room chairs.
    Now we sat in my living room. He was on the couch. I was in one of my straight-back chairs. He was still wearing his cop uniform; that is, the long-sleeved shirt and boring slacks. He was rumpled, of course. Always rumpled. I was in jeans and a tee-shirt, and not so reumpled.
    “ They have Liz Turner under a suicide watch,” he said.
    “ A good idea, but I don’t think it will work.”
    “ What do you mean?”
    “ It’s going to kill her, Detective.”
    “ When you say ‘It,’ do you mean the demon?”
    “ Yes.”
    “ And how would ‘It’ kill her?”
    “ My guess? Probably creatively.”
    “ And how...” Smithy struggled for words. He sat forward on the couch. His shoes were mostly unpolished and scuffed. “How on earth could it kill her?”
    “ It has complete control of her.”
    “ But how?”
    “ Possession. You’ve seen the movies.”
    He stood suddenly, ran his fingers through his thick hair. He was a short man with thick legs. He paced before the couch. “But this isn’t a movie, Allison. Demons don’t possess people in the real world.”
    “Then you don’t live in the same world where I live, Detective.”
    “ But how is it possible? I don’t understand.”
    “ There are worlds layered over ours. Higher and lower dimensions. Whatever you want to call it. But there is an unseen world that mostly stays unseen. Unless...”
    “ Unless what, dammit?”
    “ Unless someone opens a doorway of some type.”
    Smithy digested this, and then sat on the couch again. “We have Liz Turner’s psychiatric test results. She’s a paranoid schizophrenic. She’s one of the most extreme examples the jail psychiatrist had ever seen. You name it: delusions, paranoia, hallucinations.”
    “Or possession,” I said, cutting him off. “I wasn’t talking to the girl. I was talking to the thing that possessed her.”
    “ A demon?”
    “ It called itself ‘the devil’ at some point, but I think it was being melodramatic.”
    “ Oh, God. This isn’t happening.”
    “ Denial doesn’t suit you, Detective.”
    He ran a palm over his forehead and cheeks, the picture of a man grappling with the Great Unknown. When he was done having his little cop temper tantrum, he finally looked at me. He didn’t look good. He looked...defeated. There was nothing about this case that he was trained to cope with. Hell, there was nothing about this case that anyone was trained to cope with. Except, maybe, an exorcist.
    “I did some research on Billy Turner’s house,” he finally said, sitting back. He looked like a man who needed a drink.
    “ Oh?”
    “ I went down through the records of the last six owners since the place was first built. Took me all day today.”
    “ Sounds like a good use of a homicide detective’s time.”
    “ Not really. There’s going to be hell to pay later, trust me. But, until then, I uncovered some information.”
    “ Lay it on me.”
    I expected the detective to take out a notepad, but I was wrong. He had, apparently, logged all the information away in his noggin. “Seven owners...seven violent deaths. Four of them suicides. Two of them in the house.”
    “And the other two?”
    “ In prison.”
    “ Prison for what?”
    “ Murder. In fact, Billy Turner and his daughter, Liz Turner, are the only living owners, past or present, of the house on Mockingbird Lane.”
    “ And they won’t be for long,” I said.
    “ Unless we do something about it?” he said.
    I shook my head. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do, Detective.”
    “What about removing the demon?”
    “ Did a Beverly Hills homicide detective just ask me about removing a demon?”
    “ I did, and cut the shit. I’m doing my best to wrap my brain around this. What if we removed the demon? Would that save the two of them?”
    “ Maybe,” I said. “But...”
    “ But their damn auras, right?”
    I nearly asked again if a Beverly Hills homicide