Chapter 11 — The Confrontation
Cid saw the second car pull up just as Daniel stepped out of the first.
The engine shut off and the driver’s door opened. A woman climbed out, pulling her coat tighter against the cold as she walked around the front of the car with the quick confidence of someone used to arriving after the tension had already begun.
Daniel looked up.
“Good. You made it.”
She checked her watch.
“You said five-thirty.”
“I know.”
“I’m early.”
“That’s why I asked you.”
Cid and Tomas stood near the curb beside the equipment cases. Daniel waved them over.
“Cid. Tomas. This is my sister, Cindy.”
She gave a brief nod.
“So you’re the outside crew.”
Cid wasn’t sure whether that sounded respectful or doomed.
Tomas shut the trunk.
“She’s helped before,” he said quietly.
That explained why Father Moreno had not objected when Daniel mentioned her two nights earlier.
Someone always had to remain outside.
Someone had to watch the street.
Someone had to move the family quickly if panic broke loose. Someone had to stop a mother from running back into the house because she thought she heard her child cry. Someone had to stop a father from turning fear into courage at exactly the wrong moment.
Cindy’s role was not spiritual.
It was practical.
Daniel explained it plainly.
“If the family breaks, she handles them. If we need the street cleared, she handles it. If someone freezes, she gets them moving.”
Cindy shrugged.
“I also brought blankets, water, and a first-aid bag, which is apparently my contribution to holy warfare.”
That settled it.
She wasn’t there to watch demons.
She was there because fear makes ordinary people irrational, and someone had to think clearly about bodies, movement, and breathing.
Then she looked toward Loomis Street.
For a moment she said nothing.
The house looked exactly as it always had.
Narrow brick.
A weak porch light.
Curtains half drawn.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing ruined. Nothing that would warn a stranger away.
Just another house on a winter block in Chicago.
Which somehow made it worse.
The neighborhood had learned how to live around it.
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Two houses down a television flickered blue in a front window. A man dragged a trash bin toward the alley without ever looking toward Loomis.
People do that when a house goes wrong.
They stop asking questions.
Then they stop looking.
Eventually they behave as if nothing strange had ever happened there at all.
Cindy let out a quiet breath.
“That’s smaller than I expected.”
Daniel followed her gaze.
“It always is.”
Tonight the family was still inside.
Preparing.
Father Moreno had been very clear about that.
Daniel knocked once.
The father opened the door immediately.
Cold air slid out of the house.
Not winter cold.
Something thinner.
Sharper.
Cid felt it along the back of his neck as he crossed the threshold.
Inside, the family had done exactly what they had been instructed to do.
Lights burned in every room. Interior doors stood open. No one was alone.
The kitchen table had been cleared except for an open Bible. The grandmother sat beside it with a rosary wound tightly through her fingers, praying softly in Spanish.
The mother stood near the stove reading from the Psalms, her voice steady in the careful way people read when they are trying not to think too far ahead.
The daughter and the boy sat together on the couch.
Their shoulders touched.
No one had gone upstairs.
No one had separated.
No one in that house lived naturally anymore.
That was the real damage.
The cold mattered.
The footsteps mattered.
The knocking mattered.
But what fear had done to the family mattered more.
They no longer moved by preference.
They moved by avoidance.
They no longer used the house.
They endured it.
Father Moreno stood in the living room beside Pastor Elias, studying the space slowly.
Then he nodded.
“You did well.”
The mother lowered the Bible.
“Is it enough?”
Moreno answered gently.
“Faithfulness is enough.”
The grandmother crossed herself.
The family left first.
Daniel and Dave walked them across the street to the home of a church couple waiting for them.
The father kept glancing back.
The daughter refused to look at the house at all.
The boy didn’t look back either.
He watched the men.
That unsettled Cid more than fear would have.
Expectation.
Once the family was settled across the street, the team gathered briefly on the porch.
Moreno spoke quietly.
“No one speaks to anything unless I ask.”
Everyone nodded.
“No emotion.”
Another nod.
“If something happens, stay steady.”
Daniel glanced down the dark hallway.
“Understood.”
Moreno looked toward Elias.
“Let’s begin.”
They stepped inside.
The door closed.
And the street changed.
It was still the same block.
The same sidewalks dark with winter snow.
The same quiet houses.
But once the team disappeared into Loomis, the neighborhood felt thinner somehow—as if the ordinary world had become a surface stretched over something waiting underneath.
Cid stood near the curb with Tomas and Cindy.
The porch light cast a narrow cone of yellow across the steps and part of the sidewalk. Beyond that the street dissolved into winter darkness.
Cindy shoved her hands into her coat pockets.
“Okay,” she said softly.
“This is the part where I pretend this feels normal.”
No one answered.
Tomas placed the thermistor unit on the hood of the car.
Cid checked the recorder.
They watched the house.
Minutes passed.
Nothing happened.
The porch light held steady.
The windows remained dark.
A car rolled slowly through the intersection at the end of the block.
Somewhere down the street a dog barked once and stopped.
Normal sounds.
But none of them sounded convincing anymore.
Because the men were inside now.
And everyone outside understood what that meant.
Cindy glanced toward the parish couple’s house across the street, checking the mother behind the curtain, checking the boy.
Then she looked back at Loomis.
“You two ever get used to this?”
“No,” Tomas said.
“Good,” she replied quietly. “That would be worse.”
Then her phone chimed.
All three of them jumped.
Not because it was loud.
Because every nerve in them was already tight.
A few soft piano notes drifted into the frozen air before Cindy even pulled the phone from her pocket.
Slow.
Thin.
Unmistakable.
Tubular Bells.
The theme from The Exorcist.
Cindy froze.
Tomas muttered under his breath.
Cid’s heart kicked hard in his chest.
Cindy pulled the phone free, killed the sound immediately, and said,
“I’m sorry.”
For a moment the three of them just looked at one another.
Then the tension rushed back in.
Because the house was still there.
And the cold around it had deepened.
Something moved inside.
A chair scraped across the floor.
Faint.
But unmistakable.
All three turned toward the windows.
Silence returned.
Then a door closed somewhere upstairs.
Not slammed.
Closed.
Cid kept his eyes on the second-floor hallway window.
Something shifted behind the curtain.
Just slightly.
Then the curtain stilled.
He felt the same sensation again.
Not danger.
Attention.
As if something inside the house knew exactly where he stood.
Across the street the little boy appeared in the parish couple’s front window.
Cindy saw him first.
“He shouldn’t be there.”
The boy stared directly toward Loomis.
Then, slowly, he smiled.
The same small smile Cid had seen in the window two weeks earlier.
Before any of them could move, the boy lifted one hand—
and waved toward the house.
The cold deepened around them.
Inside Loomis, something heavy struck the floor.
The sound rolled through the quiet block.
Tomas wrote down the time.
None of them spoke.
The confrontation had begun.
