Possessed by Peter Laws

Author:Peter Laws
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allison & Busby
Published: 2019-07-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Matt lifted the spoon and shovelled some more granola into his mouth. He liked this stuff with its chunks of coconut and squirrel-feed ingredients. They made his current favourite self-delusion much easier to believe: that this sugar-soaked bowl in his hand was somehow healthier than his usual, beloved Coco Pops.

He clipped his elbow on his second scoop and a single wet crumb of sultana, raisin or whatever the heck that was (rat turd?) scattered onto his paper. He picked it up with pincer fingers and set it neatly to the side. Underneath was his open A4 pad, covered in his chaotic handwriting. Wren once likened Matt’s handwriting to a bunch of spiders marching across a pad, before someone slammed it shut and crushed them all.

He stared at the page and thought, Behold! Roll up! For here lies the astounding and soon-to-be-world-famous Matt Hunter Tests for Demonic Possession! – patent pending.

He sighed – and shivered a little too. Running such tests sounded like a good idea at the time. Cool, even. And the notion had come from a genuine hope that when Kissell’s clients failed these tests they’d at least consider that wild and unpopular outside opinion he kept suggesting. That maybe Abby Linh, Tom Riley, the airport cat lady and even that baseball cap hunk Richie were just normal human beings who needed actual support, not hysterical prayers. That motivation remained, and that’s why he was still going ahead with these elaborate TV experiments. Yet, as he stared at his list of challenges, with a spoon handle hanging like a cold cigar from his mouth, he knew his big contribution to this TV show could turn into a kind of laughable, satanic game show.

There was that other thought, too. That niggle.

What if they beat his tests somehow, even by fluke? Like test number three, for example. He’d planned on putting out five identical glass bowls. Four filled with ordinary tap water and one with Holy Water. All at identical temperatures. When he asked them to dip their fingers in, one at a time, what if they somehow flinched and squealed when they touched the blessed one? He took another gulp of tooth decay and upped the numbers with a shaky pencil. Forget five water bowls, let’s make it ten. And heck, let’s do that water test a further ten times. Ten rounds with ten bowls, and he’d mix them up every round. So the chances of getting all ten rounds right would be … he started jabbing the rubber on his calculator, and scrawled out the stats. Yikes. They’d have a one in ten billion chance of being right all ten times. A psychic demon of the occult might ace that test. There was no way anyone from the real world was going to consistently beat that.

The plan was to head into uni this morning and get all these tests set up. He had all of today and this evening to get them shipshape and standardised. Then at 10 a.

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