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other members of the household described various occasions where the ball of light had appeared to them.
    Only Dominick was silent. He looked disappointed. Finally he interrupted the discussion of the light with a grumpy outburst. “I’ve never seen it! How come you can see these things, Mr. Sarchie, and I can’t?” He actually sounded insulted that the evil spirit hadn’t manifested itself to him.
    “Don’t feel bad,” I said. “Just be thankful that you don’t.”
    He gave a grudging nod of agreement, and I resumed checking the house. The remaining rooms were normal enough, though the kitchen was rather messy and the sink was piled with dirty dishes, I headed downstairs. I didn’t have any sense of evil when I first entered the basement, but when I got to a storage room with double doors, I could feel menace from eight feet away. The feeling was so overpowering that I stopped dead in my tracks, so afraid that I couldn’t move. I’ve been a cop for a long time and have been scared plenty of times before, but I always have reacted aggressively—that’s how I’ve trained myself. This was different: I couldn’t take my eyes off those doors, my heart started racing one hundred miles a minute, and I couldn’t catch my breath. Then the pain started in my head—it wasn’t like a headache, but a piercing pain in my right temple that I’ve sometimes experienced on other cases or during exorcisms.
    As the pain in my head got stronger, my stomach churned and I felt like I was going to vomit. There was no outward sign of anything that I could see—just a feeling of hellish terror and absolute evil. I was too frozen to move my lips or speak, so in my mind I commanded the demon to leave in the name of Jesus Christ. It released its hold on me just enough so I could reach the bottle of holy water in my pocket. I threw holy water at the doors and was able to back away to the stairs—not daring to take my eyes off those dreadful doors.
    Once I reached the living room, where the family was waiting, the pain and the sick feeling disappeared. I took Joe aside and told him what had happened.
    “Ralph, I think you should take a look at this,” he said, handing a note the “ghost” had dictated to Gabby the night before.
    One sentence immediately leapt out: “Harm will come to those below. Beware the night!”

Chapter Two
    Nightmare’s End
    W HILE I WAS under attack in the basement, Joe had uncovered an alarming new twist to the case. About two weeks after the spirit began playing its smoke-and-mirror games, Gabby’s oldest daughter, Luciana, was subjected to a series of stunningly cruel preternatural assaults. Although the young bride-to-be was definitely the beauty of the family, with her long wavy black hair, pale olive skin, and dark flashing eyes, she had a sullen, almost hostile expression on her face. Everything about her radiated such an intense misery that it surrounded her like a thick, black cloud. You got the feeling that if you said the wrong thing, she’d lash out with thunder and lightning.
    Joe’s polite request that Luciana put on her St. Benedict medal, instead of leaving it on the table in front of her, immediately set off sparks. “I had a medallion of the Blessed Mother on a chain around my neck and this morning it was gone,” she announced angrily, glaring around the room as if she suspected one of her relatives of stealing it while she slept. “It was real gold too!”
    “Don’t worry about it,” my partner soothed. “The demon could have made your medallion disappear, to stir up trouble and turn you against the other members of your family. These spirits want to get you people at each other’s throats. Why don’t you put the other medal on?”
    “The string’s too long,” Luciana complained. She handed the medal to Carl, who was hovering in the background, looking both protective and wary of his fierce fiancée. Although he was only about twenty-five, his hairline was already