(POV Shift: First Person)
The Connecticut grass was cold and damp beneath my knees. The air smelled of normalcy, of suburbs, of a life I had lost several eternities ago. But beneath that facade, the Warren house was a silent scream. The darkness emanating from the basement window was a pit of malice, an invitation I had no intention of refusing.
My objective was clear: protect the girl, sever Valak's connection, clean up this mess. My new mantra.
The basement entrance at the back of the house was secured with a sturdy-looking brass padlock. A mundane problem. In my old life, I would have looked for a rock. Now, I simply opened the shop on my HUD.
[UTILITY SHOP]
Lock Picks (Basic Set) - $5.00
Industrial Duct Tape - $2.00
Chocolate Bar (Flavor: Bittersweet Victory) - $2.00
I bought the lock picks. They materialized in my hand with a soft green flash. In less than thirty seconds, the padlock yielded with a satisfying click. The god, it seemed, had not only made me a ghost hunter but also a petty thief. I opened the door and descended into the lion's den.
The artifact room was exactly as I had imagined, but worse. The air was heavy, dense, charged with the psychic residue of hundreds of cursed objects. It was like being in a room filled with loaded guns pointing at each other. I saw the cymbal-playing monkey toy, the possessed samurai, the piano that played by itself... it was the Warrens' horror greatest hits.
And in the center of the room, the ultimate proof that my prophecy was correct: Annabelle's consecrated glass display case was shattered. The small sign warning "DO NOT OPEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" lay among the broken shards. The rocking chair was empty. And the doll, with its plastic smile and lifeless glass eyes, was gone. Evil was loose in the house.
I ascended the stairs towards the main house, the "Exorcist" in hand, feeling less like a hunter and more like a support technician arriving at an office where all the computers have a virus. A very, very bad virus.
(POV Shift: Third Person)
Judy Warren knew she shouldn't be afraid. Her father always told her faith was a shield. Her mother told her love was a light. But in that moment, huddled on the living room couch, with the lights flickering and whispers slithering from the dark hallways, her faith and love felt very small. The house was no longer her home. It was a cage she shared with the monsters of other people's nightmares. The phone was silent. Her babysitter was terrified and locked herself in her room. She was alone.
She heard a creak on the stairs leading up from the basement. She flinched, curling into a ball, expecting to see the blood-stained bride or the ferryman with coins for eyes. But the figure that appeared in the doorway was none of the creatures she knew.
It was a boy. A teenager, not much older than herself, dressed in a strange hoodie and with dirt smudged on his face. He looked exhausted, bruised, and held a terrifying-looking weapon. But his eyes... his eyes were not a monster's. They were the eyes of someone who had seen too many monsters and was very, very tired of them.
Alex looked at her. There was no surprise on his face, only a quiet, grim confirmation. His gaze swept the room, noticing a book falling from a shelf on its own, a lamp swinging without a draft.
"Judy," he said, his voice quiet, but carrying an authority that made her stay still. She didn't ask how he knew her name. At that point in the night, nothing made sense anymore. "I need you to do something for me. I need you to call your parents. Right now."
Judy hesitated for a second. Her father had told her not to talk to strangers. But this boy didn't feel like a stranger. He felt... like help. She nodded, slid off the couch, and ran to the kitchen phone. She dialed the long international number her mother had made her memorize for emergencies. She heard the tones, the click of the connection. Someone answered on the other side of the world, a British police officer's voice. She asked to speak with Ed or Lorraine Warren.
Seconds later, her father's voice, strained and panicked, came through the line. "Judy! Are you okay? What's wrong?"
"Dad... there's someone here," she whispered. "He wants to talk to you."
She looked at Alex. He stepped closer and held out his hand for the phone. Judy handed it to him, and he put it to his ear.
(POV Shift: First Person)
"Mr. Warren?" I said into the receiver. The silence on the other end of the line was complete. I could imagine his shock, his brain trying to compute my voice coming out of his own telephone.
"Yeah, it's me. Alex," I confirmed, so he wouldn't think he'd gone mad. "Look, we don't have much time. I'm in your house. You were right. The doll's loose, and I think Valak's using her as a remote access point. Situation's... active."
I heard a choked gasp on the other end, probably Lorraine. Ed started yelling questions, but his voice was overlapping with the static of the bad international connection.
"No, I can't explain how... yeah, the house is... listen, listen to me..." I tried to say, but my attention was diverted.
Behind Judy, who stared at me wide-eyed, a shadow lengthened from the hallway. It wasn't a normal shadow. It was tall, distorted, with the silhouette of a ragged wedding dress. The temperature in the kitchen dropped twenty degrees in a second. Judy let out a choked cry and pointed a trembling finger.
It was the Bride, one of the more aggressive manifestations Annabelle used. She glided into the kitchen, a rusty knife in her hand, her empty eyes fixed on the girl.
Keeping the phone clamped to my ear with my shoulder, I raised my free hand and made a reassuring gesture to Judy to stay behind me. Then, I looked directly at the apparition.
"Hey, hold on a second," I said to the Bride, my tone that of someone scolding a rude child at the movies. "I'm on an important call. It's really rude to interrupt someone when they're on the phone."
The Bride stopped, her head tilted with an unnatural crunch. She seemed genuinely confused by my utter lack of panic. I seized her hesitation.
Without taking the phone from my ear, I raised the "Exorcist" with my right hand, aimed from the hip, and fired.
BOOM!
The blast was deafening in the kitchen. The muzzle flash lit the room for an instant. The silver cross-tipped bullet impacted the Bride's chest. There was no violent banishment like with Valak. The manifestation simply fell apart like smoke, screaming silently as it dissolved into nothingness. The pressure in the room vanished instantly.
I lowered the pistol, its barrel smoking. I put the receiver back to my mouth. On the other end of the line, chaos was total. I heard Ed yelling my name, Lorraine praying, the British police officer asking what the hell that noise was.
"Sorry about that," I said as calmly as I could muster. "Service out here is hell. Calls cut out a lot." I paused, glancing at Judy to make sure she was okay. She stared at me with a mix of terror and reverent awe. "As I was saying, Mr. Warren, situation's under control for now, but the doll is still missing. I need to find and contain her. Any suggestions for her favorite hiding spots?"
(POV Shift: Third Person)
In a damp, battered house in Enfield, England, Ed Warren stood with the phone glued to his ear, completely speechless. He had heard his daughter's voice. He had heard the boy. He had heard his daughter's scream. He had heard the boy say the most absurdly calm sentence he had ever heard. And then, unmistakably, he had heard the blast of a high-caliber firearm through an international call, followed by the boy returning to conversation as if there had simply been a bad connection.
Lorraine grabbed his arm. "Ed! What was that?! What's happening?!"
Ed slowly lowered the phone. He looked at his wife, at the police officers, at the disaster of their current mission. His mind, which had always been able to compartmentalize horror, to face the profane with faith and logic, was met with a variable it couldn't process.
They had a teenager, a sarcastic, troubled streamer, acting as a demon exterminator in their home, halfway across the world. A young man who treated hellish manifestations with the disdain of an annoyed office worker and who, apparently, was winning.
"Lorraine," Ed said, his voice trembling for the first time in years. "I think... I think our boy just put a ghost on hold."
He realized that his personal war with Alex, his anger, his resentment... it was all irrelevant. They were in the middle of something new. Something no book, no ritual, no investigation had prepared them to face. And their only hope, their only soldier on the front lines, was the boy he had, less than an hour ago, wished he would never see again.