Night Call (Book 2): Demon Dei Read Free

to—recognise.
    My shoulders ached from having my arms stretched over my head and from being jammed in a hole Mrs Arnold wouldn’t let me expand because ‘this house is heritage listed, young man, have some respect for your cultural foundations’. There were twinges in my neck that were probably the start of muscle spasms. My right foot had gone to sleep, thanks to being squashed between the wall and China cabinet (which I was not allowed to touch either, ‘Wedgwood, young man!’). And my freakin’ torch decided at that moment to die.
    Between me, the floorboards, the corner foundation of the house and the ground, there wasn’t a lot of space left to shake the bastard thing, but shake I did. Hey, it always worked in the movies. And sure enough, a hard shake brought the light back on. Pity that it took a smack against my head to work. And then the bloody thing was pointed right in my eyes when it came on.
    “Argh.” My startled cry blew up a cloud of dust into my face, which I promptly sucked in.
    “Did you find it?” Mrs Arnold asked through my ESP.
    There aren’t letters to express the true cadence of my response, so we’ll leave it up to imagination. However Mrs Arnold’s imagination dealt with it, her entire response was something about getting a real pest man to come get rid of her problem. Ignoring her, I scanned the torch around the dark crawl space.
    The beam fell onto a big lump that was even more out of place than the barbed wire—or not, depending on what you expected to find in crawl spaces, which in turn probably depended on the type of movies you watched. I have a t-shirt that says ‘Attention ladies: I watched “The Notebook”’. (Okay, I haven’t—watched the movie that is—but I do have the shirt.) I’m firmly in the ‘fully expect to find ghastly things in the crawl space’ camp, but I don’t admit that on first dates.
    Mr Wibbles, a prize winning Burmese cat of remarkable proportions, was pretty much reduced to mincemeat. If you liked your mince to have fur and bones. I don’t and I’m guessing most folk don’t, but apparently imps do.
    The creature crouched amongst the bloody remains, cheeks bulging with, judging from the scraps it had yet to eat, liver. It was, from pointed head to barbed tail, about a foot long, humanoid in shape and covered in greyish-red, wrinkly skin. About the biggest feature on it, apart from the tail, was its nose, which jutted out from its face like Pinocchio at a sports-scandal press conference. It had a pair of stubby wings on its back.
    So far, the imp hadn’t noticed me. It just kept stuffing its face, humming to itself. Imps were even more totally self-absorbed than your average paparazzi-baiting tween starlet. It was hard to get their attention, and really, why would you want it? They were foot long garbage disposal machines with less intelligence than a brain-dead chicken. Still, they didn’t mix with human civilization too well. When their natural food source ran short, they took to scavenging. However, you didn’t find them head first in your knocked over garbage bin. Rather, you often caught fleeting glimpses of them while they were carting off your Chihuahua, or dragging your prize winning Burmese through a hole in the floorboards.
    Imps. Small demons but they make up for it in ‘ eww’ factor.
    In the hand not holding the torch, I had a tiny tape player. I’d recieved a very strange look from the guy in the electronics shop when I’d rushed in and demanded one. He’d tried to sell me an MP3 player with speakers, and couldn’t understand why I thought that would be just a tad clunky. When I’d rushed next door to the music shop, they’d looked at me even more strangely when I asked for a cassette to play in my hard won tape player. Luckily, there are some people who still buy tapes, but probably owing to the personality type that would refuse to move into the digital age, the selection of tapes was thin.
    I hit the play