I looked down into the smoking hole that used to be a house. Severed pipes spewed water sporadically, where they hadn’t been fused shut in wake of the violent exorcism I’d been forced to conduct. The water was slowly turning the sandy earth into mud. I shivered, partly from remnant fear, partly from tiredness, and partly from the chill of the desert night. It was supposed to have been a simple look-and-see kind of assignment. Things had gone sideways, bad sideways, so fast that there just wasn’t time for anything more subtle. There were some rules that you just didn’t ignore. Dimensional doorways into Hell must be shut was pretty high on that list of rules.

I kicked a clod of dirt into the hole. “Stupid demons.”

A wire that was somehow still getting power let out a shower of sparks when some water hit it. The house had been on the northern outskirts of Tucson, basically in the Catalina Mountains and the nearest neighbors wouldn’t have heard most of it. The unbelievable noise of an entire house being forcibly ripped out of our reality and cast into Hell, though, nobody inside two miles could have missed that sound. I shook my head and walked back to my rental.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

As I drove away, I muttered to myself. “Gran is not going to be happy.”

I passed some police cars and a fire truck about two miles away. My rental was nice enough, expensive enough, that they didn’t stop to question me. As I drove down 77, heading directly for the airport, I called Gran. I hated to do it. It was well after her bedtime, but she needed to hear what I had to say now. I had been right. After I finished walking her through it all, Gran was most certainly, unequivocally, not happy. She told me so. I agreed that it had been a screw-up, but not one of my making. The situation had been out of hand long before I got there. She was quiet for a few moments.

“Are you hurt, lad?” She asked in her unidentifiable accent.

I smiled a little. As far as I knew, there were only two people on the face of the earth that Gran called “lad.” I took more than a little pride in the fact that I was one of them.

“Nothing that a hot shower, being hundreds of miles outside of this jurisdiction, and a slice of your pecan pie won’t fix,” I said.

“I’ll have a slice waiting for you,” she said and hung up.

I’d never known Gran to utter the words goodbye to anyone. I had a suspicion as to why, but I declined to ask her about it. I think I was a little afraid of the answer. Anyone rational would have been if they suspected what I suspected.