“Tina,” Jules said, more sternly but just as desperate.
Her eyes squeezed shut, then blinked open. She groaned. “Did I black out? Ow, my head.”
She touched her forehead, and her hand came away sticky. Patting herself, her fingers landing in spots of blood goo, she grimaced in disgust. “Oh, gross! What happened? Don’t tell me we’re going to log the first verified case of genuine ectoplasm on top of everything else.” Then she looked closer at it. “Oh God, I think I’m going to be sick.”
We helped her sit up. She looked like she wanted to crawl out of her own skin.
“What do you remember?” Jules said. He touched his headset. “Are the recorders still running? Are we getting all this? Tina, do you remember anything at a
ll?”
“I don’t remember anything,” she said, sniffing, trying to wipe off her face with hands covered in slime. Exhausted, she looked on the edge of tears.
“Maybe we could go over the video footage,” I suggested. “Hey, there aren’t any fires started anywhere, are there?”
We did a quick check of the house and didn’t find anything burning, which was a huge relief. This was still just another haunted house. It felt like the only thing that had gone right in weeks. That, and the potion had worked and saved Tina from spontaneously combusting.
At Tina’s insistence, we went back to the hotel suite so she could shower. She wasted no time and soon emerged with wet hair and fresh clothes, squeaky clean. Within a half an hour, we were gathered around the video playback screen on Jules’s laptop.
“Here we go,” Jules said, tapping keys.
The camera angle showed Tina in profile, frozen in her unnatural, possessed pose.
She frowned. “I don’t remember any of this.”
“Probably for the best,” I said. “Can you imagine? That thing was using you. Like a puppet or something.”
She paled, looking nauseated, her lips pursed. “Thank you for that image. I may never sleep again.”
Oops. It only got worse when Jules started the audio portion. Tina’s voice came out of the speakers, we all recognized it, but none of us understood a word she was saying. Not even Tina.
“What is that?” she said, her horror plain.
“Looks like a classic case of glossolalia,” Jules said, almost happily.
Glossolalia. Speaking in tongues.
“That’s it,” Tina said, leaning back in her chair, holding her head in her hands. “I’m never, ever doing that again. It’s all Ouija boards from here on out.”
Nobody argued with her. We were all rather horrified. I had expected some kind of warning, but the possession of her had just happened. The demon had slipped into her presence without any sign. We’d had so little chance to react.
Tina was carrying a jar of blood goo with her at all times now.
“I don’t think it’s glossolalia,” Gary said, looking even more quizzical with the gauze over his eye. “In classic glossolalia cases, the subject speaks an unknown or made-up language. I think this is a real language.”
“But which one? Do you recognize it?” Jules said. “There are demonic languages. The medieval Cabbalistic writers talk about a language of demons, a language of hell—what if this is it?”
“No. There’s got to be a more logical explanation,” Gary said. “Don’t go over the deep end on us now.”
Jules said, “There are thousands of possible languages. We can’t rule out ancient ones, either. How are we going to figure out which one this is?”
“Call it a hunch. Give me a sec.” Gary turned the laptop toward him, closed the video screen and called up a Web browser. Within a minute, he’d found the site and played a video.
I couldn’t make out individual words, but it had a clipped rhythm to it. And Gary was right—it was familiar.
“What is it?” Tina said.
Gary showed us the screen, which was a mass of squiggling script. A video streaming in the corner showed military Jeeps rumbling down a yellow, dusty landscape. If I had to guess, I’d say Gary had found an Arabic news site.