O’Toole House Chapter 14
Gabriella’s ability to remain nicer than Bradley was tested about half an hour later when his phone rang again as he was washing their latest mountain of dirty coffee mugs.
“If it’s work related, can you get that?”
“How would I possibly know if it was work related?”
Bradley sighed irritably, but he was still elbow-deep in dishwater. “Could you just get it anyway? Bring it over here.”
What mysterious secrets was she about to learn about his personal life? But when she brought it over and held it up to his ear for him, he greeted the person, scowled, then asked Gabriella to take it.
“This is Gabriella,” she said as she brought his phone into the living room and he dried off.
“Gabriella, this is Nick Bana.”
She did not want to fucking deal with this right now. But he didn’t sound as confidently furious as he had in every other conversation. Instead he sounded like maybe he was terrified.
“How can I help you, Mr. Bana?”
“I need to talk to you and your partner.”
She glanced at Bradley. “Hang on, I’m putting you on speaker.”
She pressed the speaker button and put the phone down on the empty computer station (she wasn’t going to imagine the sparks or the screams) as Bradley came into the room.
“I mean, in person,” Nick said. “It’s about the demon.”
“The non-existent demon who calls your daughter a whore in the stories she makes up?” Gabriella asked.
Bradley looked at her, but she shrugged. So what? Maybe she wasn’t nicer.
“Please,” Nick said. “Can you just meet me somewhere?”
“Where?”
“Anywhere, please.”
Gabriella glanced at the clock. “Saskia is in at two,” she said to Bradley.
“Two-thirty,” Bradley said. “At the public library.”
“Thank you,” Nick said desperately. “Thank you so much. I’ll be there.”
He hung up without another word. “Now he wants to talk?” Bradley muttered, picking up his phone and putting it in his pocket. “This better be good.”
***
When they sat down around the table of a small library study room, Nick Bana was visibly nervous.
“How’s your daughter?” Gabriella asked.
“She’s with her mother,” Nick said. “She’s alright.”
“Good.”
She looked over at Bradley, who was watching Nick in the dim room. “Thank you for meeting me,” Nick said.
“Tell us what we need to know,” Bradley said. “You’ve been wasting our time for days, so if you want to tell us, then tell us.”
Nick took a deep breath. “Should we go back to the house?” he asked.
“I’m not going near your fucking house until I know what I’m dealing with,” Bradley snapped.
Nick nodded, looking around the otherwise empty room. There was the table, a couple reading lamps on its surface, and four chairs around it. But nothing else.
“The demon is real.”
“We know,” Gabriella said before Bradley could say something worse.
“But it’s not what Sarah thinks it is. It’s my fault, the demon’s been around a lot longer than the time we’ve been in the house.”
Both Gabriella and Bradley stared at him. This was the O’Toole house, it was crawling with demons. Wasn’t it?
“Start at the beginning,” Bradley said.
“When I was twenty years old, I made a deal with a demon.”
Bradley stood up suddenly, walking out of the study room without a word. Gabriella watched the door slam shut, then turned back to Nick. “I’m going to record this conversation,” she said, pulling out the little voice recorder she’d taken off of James’s desk.
“That’s fine.”
“Alright,” she said, hitting Record. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was in college,” Nick said. “I lived with a couple guys, Tom and Rich. They were good guys, we all got along. We lived in this old apartment just off campus and…”
“The demon?” Gabriella prompted.
“Sorry,” Nick said, shaking his head. “Tom was one of those guys who just wanted to be successful. He didn’t have a passion for any particular type of business, he just wanted to make a lot of money and have a lot of power. But he was bad at it. And one of his more, I don’t know, witchy friends? She got him interested in the occult and how intertwined in business and power it is.”
Gabriella didn’t actually know that, but she wasn’t surprised either. “So he started researching and he came across the idea of making a deal with a demon. Me and Rich thought it was bullshit. But Rich was ambitious too. He was an artist. Have you heard of Rich Sinclair?”
“Yeah,” Gabriella said slowly, nodding her head.
Her cousin Bobby had talked about Rich Sinclair at some point when the cousins were all hanging out years ago. He was an artist and one of his instructors had adored Sinclair. Bobby had talked about other artists too, but she remembered the example of Sinclair’s art that he’d shared had been seriously creepy. This had been right after Sinclair’s death, if she remembered the lecture she’d received correctly.
“That was him. He was already incredible back then, but he wanted to be recognized and he didn’t want to wait until he was older to get it. And Tom knew how to work that ambition, you know? He always did.”
The door opened and Bradley came back in. “Amelia said McEnerney is out in the Berkshires for the next couple days, but we’ll get in touch with him.”
“Who?”
“An exorcist who can maybe help you if you haven’t fucked yourself over too much.”
Nick nodded shakily. “You can keep going,” Gabriella said.
Then she turned to Bradley. “We’re recording.”
He motioned toward the recorder. “There?”
“Yeah.”
Bradley leaned in close. “We’re recording this interview on March fourteenth. Subject could not be bothered to share the truth with the only people who could help him, until his daughter was hospitalized in a completely avoidable situation. Did I miss anything?”
Great, as if he didn’t currently have enough complaints against him. Nick looked like he was about to cry, but Bradley just gestured toward him. “Carry on.”
“He had a ritual and he wanted to try it, but it needed three people. Tom got Rich on board after promising this would make him the biggest star in the art world.”
That had come true, according to her cousin Bobby. “And you were the third?” she asked.
“I was,” Nick said. “But there wasn’t anything I wanted enough to do it. He got me drunk on a Saturday night. I mean, we were all drunk, but he got me drunk enough to finally agree to it. And when I tried to back out the next day, he had also gotten me to sign a contract that claimed it would cost me more money than I’d ever seen before to back out.”
“So you went along with it?”
“I did,” he said. “I thought his contract was legally binding. So I thought about what I wanted most in the world and, when the time came, I reluctantly went through with the ritual. I didn’t want to, though.”
“But you did?” Gabriella asked.
“Yeah.”
“Of your own free will?”
“Yeah.”
“Were you influenced in any way, magical or otherwise?”
These were standard questions, but she felt sick asking them. “No,” Nick said.
“Keep going.”
“It was a ritual. I didn’t see the demon, not exactly. But I could feel him in the room and hear his voice in my head,” Nick said, moving a hand vaguely near his dark hair as he spoke. “I just wanted it to be over, so when it came to my turn, I didn’t try to negotiate or anything the way that Tom and Rich did. I asked for stability for my future family. That was all I wanted.”
Bradley looked at him steadily. “What?” Nick asked.
“Is that bullshit?”
“No!”
“These other assholes asked for money, fame, power, and all you wanted was for your future wife and kids to have stable lives?”
“Yes,” Nick said. “He agreed to it, I got the contract, and I signed it.”
“You got the contact that night?” Gabriella asked.
“Yeah.”
“Was it paper? Do you still have a copy somewhere?”
“Yeah, um, yeah it was. But I don’t have a copy of it, it disappeared when I signed it.”
Great. “So what happened then?” Gabriella asked.
“Nothing immediate. But then Rich’s career took off. It exploded before we even finished college and he became this legend of the art world. But it was because he negotiated. He got that, but the time frame was moved from twenty years to ten.”
“And then he died,” Gabriella said.
Just like Bobby had said. He’d been in tears over the death, it had been so unexpected. Rich Sinclair had only been thirty years old. “What about Tom?”
“His career took off too,” Nick said. “But after Rich died, he left it all. He joined the priesthood and was cloistered. But he died too, a couple years ago.”
“What did he negotiate?” Bradley asked.
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “But it’s real. And my twenty years are almost up, so I just wanted to fix it without telling Sarah.”
“Why?”
“Would you want your husband to tell you he made a demon deal and didn’t even get anything out of it?” Nick demanded. “I didn’t get stability until this house. We had Melissa and we were struggling. Sarah left her job because daycare cost more than she was making. But then I lost my job and neither of us could find anything for a while. I finally got my position now and we bought the house. I tried to find out how to get out of the deal. I didn’t want to make it!”
“Reluctantly signing is still signing,” Bradley said.
“I know,” Nick said. “I understand that. And when I couldn’t find out how to do it, I turned to trying to get that stability. If I died without getting stability for my family, then it was all a waste.”
“I don’t even know what to say,” Bradley said, shaking his head.
Gabriella knew that wouldn’t necessarily stop him. “If it was just going after me, then it was fine,” Nick said. “I brought the demon into our lives. If it wants to scratch and yell and remind me that it’s taking me, then fine. But I didn’t want it to bother Melissa or Sarah.”
“It’s been bothering Melissa for months!” Gabriella exclaimed. “She’s told you about it. She’s terrified! And she says you just ignored her.”
“I hoped if we ignored it, it would focus on me instead.”
“Yeah, well, it didn’t.”
“What do I do?” Nick asked suddenly, his eyes bright with tears. “I accept that it’s going to take me, but what do I do for my daughter?”
“You keep her the fuck out of that house,” Bradley snapped.
“Wait,” Gabriella said. “That’s why the house was quiet after we cleansed it, because you weren’t there. And then after the psychics were in-”
Bradley scoffed, but she ignored him. “You were gone with Melissa.”
“Yeah.”
“And you don’t sleep upstairs. Are you ever upstairs?”
“No, I wanted to keep it away from Melissa’s room.”
It was almost noble, if it wasn’t so fucking stupid. “And the cellar?”
“I work down there sometimes.”
Gabriella thought back to the crumbling fieldstone and damp floors. “It’s not great, but it keeps it away from her,” Nick explained.
“No, it fucking doesn’t,” Bradley said, sounding almost defeated.
“So it isn’t O’Toole’s demons,” Gabriella whispered to Bradley. “Then is it just coincidence that they moved into his house?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But now we’re doing two investigations.”
He ran a hand over his face. “Fine,” he said to Nick. “At least you’re telling us now. I can’t promise anything, but I can pull Father McEnerney in yet again.”
“It’s not coincidence,” Nick said, looking at Gabriella. “I knew the story. When I saw the listing was so cheap, I looked into why it might be and found the demon story. But it meant the house was cheap enough that we could afford it. And I thought maybe it was a sign. Like, this was my demon fulfilling its end of the deal.”
She was going to kill him. But first her mind was turning all of this over in regards to the O’Toole house’s history. Was there anything else to the story or was it really just that this demon-haunted man decided moving into a demon house was the right choice?
“How long until it’s been twenty years?” Gabriella asked.
“Two weeks.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bradley muttered.
“Right,” she said. “We can’t make any promises. Demonic activity used to be an entirely different section of the Foundation, but it’s been moved over to the more generalized teams lately. But let us talk to our captain and the exorcist we work with and we’ll get back to you shortly.”
“Thank you,” Nick said.
“But in order for this to work, you have to tell your family.”
Gabriella attempted to look stern. She knew it wasn’t always successful but right now, based on Nick’s expression, it was working. “Tell them so that they know what’s going on. And tell your daughter you believe her. This has been horrible on her and you’ve made it worse by claiming not to believe it. So make sure she knows.”
“I will,” he said with a tinge of desperation. “I promise.”
“We’ll do what we can for you.”
He nodded, then gathered his things and hurried out of the study room.
Gabriella shut off the recorder. “What the fuck do we do?” she asked Bradley.
He shrugged and she tried not to convince herself that James would have an answer for them.
