Some people like total darkness – they say they find it restful. Me, I slept with a nightlight on when I was a kid, and I still do. Complete darkness freaks me out. I read once where Freud is supposed to have said that fear of the dark is subconscious fear of death, which the dark symbolizes. Of course, a lot of people think Freud was full of shit.

  Personally, I think it goes back to prehistoric times, before man figured out how to make fire. The blackness between sundown and sunrise must've been an uneasy time for Joe Caveman, especially when there was no moon. Most predators see better at night than people do. In the dark, a man can't tell what's creeping up on him with dinner on its mind – until it's too late.

  Some things never change, I guess.

  Suddenly, a light illuminated the video screen – bright and sudden, like you find on a film set. You know how it goes – some guy yells "Lights!" and, boom, the sun comes out. What I was looking at on the screen didn't exactly fill me with eager anticipation, however.

  The red circle, which was maybe ten feet across, looked like it had been carefully painted on the concrete floor. The five-pointed star inside it had also been done with care, probably by someone who understood the consequences of getting it wrong. It was easy to see the detail under those bright lights.

  Inside the circle squatted two heavy wooden chairs. One of them was stained and splattered along its legs and side with a brown substance. When it was fresh, the brown stuff might have been red – blood red.

  A man sat in each chair. There was nothing remarkable about them – apart from the fact that they were both naked and bound firmly to the chairs with manacles at hands and feet.

  Not far from the chairs stood a cheap-looking table, its wood scarred and pitted. Someone had laid out a number of instruments there, including a small hammer, a corkscrew, a pair of needle-nose pliers, a blowtorch, and several different sizes of knives.

  A man's voice could be heard chanting, in a language that had been old when Christianity was young. This had been going on for several minutes. The men in the chairs sometimes looked outside the circle in the direction of the chanting, other times at each other. The one with dark hair looked confused. The other man was blond and clearly the more intelligent of the two, because he looked terrified.

  Then came the moment when the air in the middle of the pentagram seemed to shiver and ripple. The ripple grew, but never crossed the boundary of the circle. After a while, some thin white smoke began to issue from that shimmering column. Over the next minute, the color of the smoke went from white to gray, then from gray to black. The chanting continued throughout all of this.

  The column of smoke gradually took the form of a Class Two demon. I blinked. Class Twos are hard to summon, being near the top of the demon hierarchy. The wizard these people were using must've been pretty good.

  I'd encountered a Class Four the previous year that Karl had saved me from, and those things are so dumb they don't even have language – they're all appetite. Class Twos are different. They manifest an appearance that's almost human-looking, and they speak every language known to humankind, as well as their own tongue, developed over the millennia spent together in Hell.

  The demon looked in the direction the chanting had come from and spoke angrily in Demon, demanding to know who had dared to summon him.

  The voice from off-screen came back, firm and fearless. I listened for a bit, then whispered to Karl, "The wizard's threatening to lay a whole bunch of hurt on the demon if he doesn't obey the wizard's commands."

  Karl looked at me. "How the fuck do you know that?" he said softly.

  "I speak Demon. Sort of."

  I'd studied their bastard language off and on for over ten years, and was still a long way from fluent. But I figured understanding it might save my life one day – or, more important, my soul.

  The demon gave a piercing scream and doubled over. The wizard must have zapped him pretty good.

  When the hellspawn spoke again, it was more conciliatory – for a demon, that is. Then it bowed its head in acquiescence. The wizard had better hope the demon never got out of that circle, or he was going to be a long time dying – and death would only be the beginning.

  "The demon agreed to cooperate, and the wizard just told him to possess one of those guys in the chairs," I muttered so only Karl could hear.

  The dark-haired man went suddenly rigid. He threw his head back as if in great pain, the muscles and tendons in his skin standing out all over his body. This lasted for several seconds. Then, all at once, the man seemed to relax. He looked around the room, and the circle, as if seeing them for the first time. His facial expression was one he hadn't displayed before. It combined cunning and hatred in roughly equal proportions.

  Then the wizard's voice said a couple more words in Demon. He spoke sharply, as if giving a command, and that's exactly what he was doing. I swallowed. Things were about to get very ugly, I figured.

  The shackles holding the dark-haired man to the chair sprang open, as if by their own accord, and fell clattering to the floor.

  The dark-haired man walked slowly to the table and surveyed the instruments that had been lined up like a macabre smorgasbord. He turned and looked at the blond man, a terrible smile growing on his thin face. Then the dark-haired man picked up from the table the pair of pliers and the blowtorch. After taking a moment to make sure that the blowtorch was working, he walked over to the chair where the blond man sat chained, naked, and speechless with terror.

  What happened next went from zero to unspeakable in a very few seconds. Soon afterward, it went beyond unspeakable, to a level of horror that there are no words to describe.

  Twelve very long minutes later, the blond man gave one last, agonized scream and escaped into death. We sat there and watched him die.

Then somebody must've pressed Stop, because the screen went mercifully dark. A few seconds later, the lights came on.

  The nine people in the room sat in stunned silence, blinking in the sudden brightness. Then everybody started talking at once.

  There had been eleven people in the room when the lights were turned off. But there'd been enough residual glow from the big monitor for me to see two tough, experienced police officers quietly leave over the last few minutes, one with a hand clasped tightly over his mouth.

  I was glad nobody would know how close I came to being number three out the door.

  My partner Karl leaned toward me and said softly, "Sweet Jesus Christ on a pogo stick. And people say vampires are inhuman."