‘Oh, my God!’ Erica’s heart began crawling up to her throat. Tears welled up in her eyes. ‘Gwen.’

‘You better listen carefully, Erica, because I’m only going to explain this once. Are you ready?’ Without waiting for a reply the demon explained the rules to his game. ‘That’s it,’ he said when he was done. ‘Simple, isn’t it? All you have to do is answer me. So . . . shall we begin?’

Erica was shaking so much she had to hold the phone with both hands.

‘Here we go. First question.’ To heighten the suspense, the demon added a long, stagnant pause. When he spoke again, his words came out slowly and syncopated. ‘What was the last post you uploaded to your social media page?’

Instinctively, Erica’s head moved back a couple of inches. She doubted her ears.

‘What? My last post? What is this? Are you serious?’

On the screen, Gwen’s lips began trembling.

‘Yes,’ the demon replied. ‘I’m very serious. You update your page several times a day with the kind of needless information about your life that no one really cares to know, don’t you, Erica?’

Erica looked lost.

‘So I want to know what your last totally unnecessary post was about. That was less than five minutes ago, remember? You added a picture to it.’ Another pause, this time a lot shorter than the previous one. ‘You have five seconds.’

Erica blinked once. Twice. Three times. To her, this made absolutely no sense.

‘Four . . . three . . .’

‘Umm . . . I posted a picture of my popcorn and my wine, saying that I was just getting comfortable to watch some Sunday night TV.’

The demon stopped counting.

Silence.

Erica waited.

Still silence.

For a moment, Erica doubted her answer. ‘Isn’t that right?’

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’ The demon laughed such a guttural laugh, Erica felt her blood run cold inside her veins. ‘Yes.’ He finally accepted it. ‘Of course it is, but you doubted yourself for a second there, didn’t you?’

Erica felt so relieved, she almost wet herself.

On the screen, Gwen’s terrified eyes moved right and stayed there for several seconds. A couple of tears rolled out of them, but Erica was so confused, so lost, she failed to notice something very odd. The tears didn’t roll down her cheeks. They rolled to the side of her face.

‘Question two. Answer this one right, and this exercise is over. You and your sister win. Answer it wrong and . . .’ The demon didn’t finish his sentence.

Erica sucked in a difficult breath of air.

‘Your mother’s death anniversary, Erica, when is it?’

‘What?’ Fear exploded inside Erica’s mind and heart. ‘My mother’s?’

This time the demon gave no explanation. He didn’t repeat the question. He simply began counting down. ‘Five . . . four . . .’

Dr. Barnes’ trembling shifted from her lips to her entire face. A second later, she began sobbing violently.

Every year, on the anniversary of their mother’s death, Gwen would take flowers to their mother’s grave. Erica had tried joining her on her very first visit. At the time, Gwen was fourteen years old and Erica thirteen, but Erica never made it. At the entrance to the Home of Peace Memorial Park, on Whittier Boulevard, Erica froze.

‘C’mon, Erica,’ Gwen had said. ‘Let’s go.’

Erica couldn’t speak. All she could do was shake her head.

‘Erica, c’mon.’ Gwen had reached for her arm to lead her sister in with her, but Erica was as rigid as a statue. Her muscles had literally stiffened in place. That was when Gwen noticed how much her sister was shaking, and how sweaty and clammy her face was. Seconds later, she had started hyperventilating.

‘Erica, what’s wrong?’

Still, Erica couldn’t speak. Her eyes had started moving from left to right frantically, focusing on nothing at all, as if she was about to have a seizure.

Erica never made it through the gates. She had to wait on the other side of the road while Gwen said a couple of prayers and placed the flowers they had brought with them on their mother’s grave. It was only much later that they found out that their mother’s funeral had been such a traumatic experience for Erica that she had developed coimetrophobia – fear of cemeteries. She remembered her mother, but her condition had caused her to push everything related to her death to the absolute edge of her mind.

‘Three . . .’

Erica’s breathing became labored.

‘Two . . .’

She tried to think.

‘One . . .’

Nothing.

‘Time’s up, Erica.’

‘No . . . please . . . I . . . I don’t know the answer. I have this condition . . .’

‘I told you the rules,’ the demon cut her short. ‘No answer – your sister gets punished.’

‘No . . . please . . .’

‘And remember, if you look away, she gets punished again. You have to watch it. Now let’s have fun.’

Finally, the image on Erica’s smartphone widened horizontally, allowing her to see past the edge of her sister’s eyes . . .

. . . And what she saw filled her heart with horrifying fear and panic.

Seventy-One

As Hunter parked in front of his six-story apartment block in Huntington Park, he peeked at his watch – it was coming up to 11:00 p.m. He leaned his head back on to the seat’s headrest and looked up at the aging building for a moment. By one of the windows on the second floor, an old man sat chain-smoking cigarettes. With every third drag he had, he would cough two or three times before spitting down on to the sidewalk below. On the fourth floor, Margaret Dixon, a very sweet lady in her early fifties, was staring out the window of apartment 416, teary-eyed. Every night, without fail, she would stare out of her window at the road below for several long hours, waiting for her husband to come back from his night shift. Her husband, Philip, had been involved in a work-related accident several years ago. He had died that same night.

A far-away siren dragged Hunter’s attention away from the building and he wondered if going home right now was really the best idea. Sleep, if it came at all, wouldn’t be until the very early hours of the morning. His brain was still wide awake and he wasn’t looking forward to another night either tossing and turning in bed, or pacing the length of his small apartment.

He began contemplating taking a drive down to Santa Monica or Venice Beach when a completely new idea entered his mind. He considered it for just a few seconds.

‘Oh, what the hell. Why not?’ he said, staring into his own eyes in the rearview mirror. He shrugged and reached for his cellphone.

‘Hello,’ a female voice replied.

‘Hi, is this Tracy?’

‘This is she, yes.’

‘Hi, Tracy. It’s Robert. Robert Hunter?’ He thought that he would have to help her out with a little bit more information than just his name, but he was pleasantly proven wrong.

‘Oh, the mysterious detective. What a surprise.’

Hunter took that as a good sign.

‘Is this a bad time?’ Out of habit, he consulted his watch again.

‘No. Not at all. I was just about to . . . do nothing, really.’

Hunter smiled. ‘Funny, me too. Listen, I know it’s quite late on a Sunday night, not really the best night for going out, and you probably have lectures in the morning, but I was wondering if you would like to go grab a coffee somewhere.’

‘You mean . . . somewhere that’s not the UCLA library?’

‘Preferably not.’

Hunter heard Tracy laugh. The laugh was followed by a short pause.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ she replied at last, ‘I have a better idea. Why don’t we go somewhere where they serve something a little stronger than coffee? There’s a great bar not that far from me. How long will it take you to get to West Hollywood?’