Cold Hands

"But then when Anna (or her body, anyway) got up and came closer to us, I regained some of my senses. She was awful, she was all beaten up and bleeding, there was this milky film over her wide-open eyes, and I wouldn't swear to it, but I don't think her legs had moved. It looked for all the world like she was standing on tiptoe and just the tips of her big toes were skating or gliding over the floor towards us. I don't know, maybe I'm making that part up. But there she was, reaching for Bev, who looked like she was just going to cry.

"I imagined Bev, in a few days or even hours, looking as beaten and broken as poor Anna, and I felt it well up from the pit of my stomach. I loved Bev, I really do love her, and it was a physical, real, force in me. My mouth opened, and it was ME again, my voice said 'I Love You, Beverly, and I'm sorry, I Love You.' I looked at her and concentrated on the feeling of loving her, and how precious and brave she was, and how beautiful and good, and I knew it would work. I used my own heart, big and hard and throbbing, to… PUSH. It was hard, but once I broke through like that, I used it to squeeze the Incubus out of me like dirty water from a sponge."

From an interview with Beverly W., recorded October 15

"At first, I heard Alonzo's voice like it was at the end of a long tunnel. I was ready to give up, but he said he loved me, and I remembered why I was there, and I knew I loved him to. At last, we were together and the Demon wasn't between us anymore. He was right there with me, and I said I loved him too, and I felt this deep warmth rise up inside me, not the kind of hot flare from a spark or a match strike, but the full pressure of an oven that's been on all day, or sunshine in the desert. I was back in my body, and I could hold him, and I could cry, and I could kiss him and hold him some more. I did all that at once, and he did it back, and the Demon wasn't in us anymore.

"Anna was two feet away, she looked confused, or angry, and Alonzo turned to her and said 'I Love You, too, Anna. I know you're in there somewhere. We both love you and want you back.' I saw what he was trying to do, and I said 'Yes, Anna, I Love you, please, don't be scared, come with us, come back, we Love you. Then Alonzo took it further, he reached out and took her in his arms and kissed her. But it wasn't really a kiss, it was more like he was trying to eat her face. He opened his mouth wide and covered her mouth and nose at the same time, like he was trying to do CPR breathing or something."

From the Spirit journal of Alonzo M., October 11 (continued)

"Up until that point, I hadn't realized that R had been riding me, too. I should have known, my hands were cold when I first touched Bev, she even said so. He'd been with me the whole time, using my body to smuggle himself back into his room! I guess Demons aren't the only spirits who can be clever. He gave me just the slightest of pushes to make me clamp onto poor Anna's face and I felt him shooting out of me like a goddamn firehose. It was like a sixty-second sneeze. I thought I was going to deflate and leave an empty Alonzo-skin there with them, but I somehow held up until my face let go of hers.

"She staggered backwards with her hands on either side of her head and ten different expressions on her face all at once. Then she twisted and snarled and shrieked like she'd been stabbed. 'YOU!' It was screaming and saying 'NO, NO, THE GIRL IS MINE, MINE, MINE!' and stuff like that. Bev and I were just staring at her, holding on to each other, and I was embarrassed to realize that I still had my dick up her ass. Anna twisted herself around and whipped her head into the mirror, breaking loose another set of triangular shards and cutting open her feet on the ones already on the floor."

From an interview with Beverly W., recorded October 15

"There was some kind of fight going on INSIDE Anna, a fight for her soul, and the Demon was winning. It was trying to kill her before we could drive it out with Love. Alonzo and I pulled apart… he popped out of my butt with a surprisingly loud noise… and we were on her, I'd pulled along one of the blankets from her bed, and we were somehow wrapping her up in it, trying to cushion her from the glass and the walls and whatever else she might fling herself into. We wrestled her to the floor, and I noticed we'd kept her clear of the window, too, thank God. I shouted out to Elizabeth to call the ambulance, and we were holding her between us, saying we loved her and asking her to fight it, and Alonzo was saying something to Richard, too. I guess he thought he'd put Richard… the one he'd been talking to… into her with that big weird kiss.

"After a while, Anna stopped thrashing around so much and went limp in our arms. I heard her crying and saying she loved us, and she said 'Thank You,' and calling to Richard. We opened the blanket and she was covered, I mean slathered head to toe, with a thick coating of clear white-ish slime. Damned if I know what it was."

From the Spirit journal of Alonzo M., October 11 (continued)

"In the end, the Demon was facing the full measure of four different hearts, strong and brave and full of Love for Anna. I wish I could take credit and say I vanquished the beast, but it simply would not be true. At most, I was Richard's ambassador and I had a good heart, or at least I was just his trojan horse. Richard was the architect of the plan, and he loved Anna, because she lived in his room and he cared about her, and death doesn't matter so much when Love is in charge. Bev is simply the kind of woman who's capable of such great love that she would jump into a frozen river or something to save a stranger's life. But Anna herself is the real hero. She fought the hardest and the longest of us all, preserving her dignity against impossible odds, facing literally supernatural forces, and saving enough of her own personal spark to try and win herself back. If she hadn't done the work from her end and reached back out to us, no amount of pulling in the world could have gotten her out.

"As I write this, Anna is in the hospital. Thankfully, most of her bodily injuries turned out to be pretty superficial. The emergency room put her on painkillers, gave her a few stitches here and there, and cleaned and treated her skin with antiseptic salves. They admitted her to a room in the general wards for observation, and Elizabeth and Todd are there with her, now. They both want to stay with her until she's well enough to go home. They say it's important that she can't feel alone, and I agree.

"Bev is right here in my room with me, helping me with the details, and I would like to say right now, for the record, that I am in fact deeply and passionately in love with her, and I wasn't just saying it or feeling it because that's what the situation demanded. I love her and I want her with me as long as I draw breath, and beyond. No, and it's not just because sex really is indescribably better without the condom, either. Love you, Bev.

"Richard, the real Richard, has fully recovered the use of his name, and is comfortably restored to his haunt in Anna and Elizabeth's room (though he says he'll appear in my window every once in a while to see how I'm doing, too). He says he's looking forward to their return, and that he wants to keep them safe, just as he's done for everyone else who's lived there in the thirty years since his death. Besides, he thinks that Anna is pretty cute, though he's understandably shy about approaching her. Anna still has a lot of recovery and healing to go through, and he knows this better than almost anyone.

"I can't say for sure where the Incubus is. I hope Anna and Richard drove it all the way back to Hell.

"I'll try to go back and piece together as much information about this whole situation as I can. I talked to Uncle Roy, and after he said 'You did WHAT?!?!' and yelled at me for an hour, he insisted on sending someone to talk to me, interview witnesses, inspect the building, and other stuff like that. Apparently, there are people like us out there who make it their business to keep track of this kind of thing. They must keep a low profile, because I've never heard of them. I guess Uncle Roy's rule is more popular than I thought."