"Okay, smartass. This all leads to one of the key points to my thesis. There are all sorts of books about demons and demonic possession that survived from the Middle Ages and later, but almost all of them were written by the Church or by clergymen scholars, who cast demons as ... well, demons. One of the main claims of the Regensburg IX document was that there was no discernible difference between angels, devils, and demons ... that they were all part of the same species."

"Dove," she said as she patted his hand, "I went to the same Catholic school you did. Everyone knows the Devil is just a fallen angel."

"The differences according to the author of R. IX is more confused .... Look, you read my silly thesis. What did the demon say about that?"

"Well ... according to Perfesser Pitt-Rivers, a war broke out in the heavens, and it raged across the universe until the two sides fought their final and decisive battle here on Earth. Afterwards, the losing army fled to some unidentified 'other region,' where the winning army trapped them. But, and this is the sort of creepy and sort of cool part, some soldiers from the losing army didn't flee Earth. They abandoned their angelic forms and stayed here, where, according to the manuscript, they survived ... by hiding among us."

"Question. If creatures in Heaven are angels, and those in the other region ... Hell ... are demons, what are the creatures who stayed on Earth?"

"Does it really matter what you call them? Like you said, if they exist, they live among us, taking over human bodies in some sort of creepy ... possession, and they just pass themselves off as humans. And that's the part that weirds me out a little. Doesn't that mean anyone you meet could be one of them?"

"Maybe," he said with a faint shrug. "So?"

"Yuck. It's freaky. And I got my eye on you, because you said they prefer taking over the bodies of the weak and dying."

He started laughing. "As a matter of fact, I did write that," he teased. "Are you convinced a demon took me over when I was in the hospital?"

"No," she said in a tone that sounded somewhat like appeasement, "but I think it's what got you interested in the whole thing." She then added, more reluctantly, "... and, okay, maybe I thought that for a split second. But I'm not crazy anymore, so I don't want to hear it."

"Anyway," he went on with a smile, "the pith of this ... let's just call him a demon. The pith of the demon's story in R. IX is that God really wasn't a god at all. He was just another angel, a very powerful angel, but just an angel. And the war in Heaven wasn't about rebellion, it was about the fact this uber-angel, who R. IX demon admitted was one of the most ancient of their kind, started bossing the other angels around and began claiming that he, the uber-angel, had created the rest of them."

"Are we still Catholics?"

"Not that I've thought of that in twenty years, but I suppose we are ... until we see an article of excommunication."

"So, when was your last confession?" she asked.

"To you, a couple of weeks ago. Can we get on with this?"

She felt that goofy smile spread across her face.

"I'll take that for a yes," he said. "But I don't think you have to worry about bumping into any angels or demons. According the R. IX demon, creatures like him are incredibly rare. Vast legions of angels were killed in the war, and most of those few who survived split into the two camps of Heaven and Hell. Though the demon was convinced it was just a matter of time before the war flares again. Either way, the ones who stayed on Earth afterward and hid were only a tiny handful."

"How can you tell who's possessed by a demon?" she asked. "You never said."

"You mean, can they fly?"

"Yeah, for instance."

"It wasn't always obvious who was speaking in the manuscript. Sometimes it was in the direct voice of the demon. Other times, it was an unknown writer ... or maybe two. It's never perfectly clear. But the manuscript said the demon revealed himself to the writer one day. The two apparently had known each other for many years before that, and the writer had never suspected anything until that point and required some convincing. It was only after the demon did some miraculous things that the writer believed him."

"So, no. There's no way to tell if a person is inhabited by a demon?"

"No ...," he said as if thinking, "... I lie. There was one thing the manuscript said. Often the weaker Earthly demons have a hard time possessing human bodies. They apparently don't have the strength of will or the power to quiet the human spirit within, let alone the power to expel that soul completely. That's why the possessed person sometimes has fits and exhibits erratic behavior, which I presume is the sign of some sort of inner struggle."

"Is that why they prefer victims ... or hosts ... who are already weak?" she asked. "Because the spirit in such folk is already on the ropes?"

"Oh," he said with a nod, "good point. That might well be the case. Either way, the stronger demons don't have that problem. They're powerful enough either to expel the existing human spirit or to take over and merely push the human identity aside. Some are even subtle enough to hide within a human host without the host knowing they are there. Though," he cleared his throat, "sometimes when a powerful demon does assume dominance, the person begins to exhibit personality changes."

"Busted!" She stood pointing a finger. "I knew you were one of them. You're sleeping in the barn tonight."

"Technically, Kate, we're both sleeping in the barn tonight. But I'll just curl up in a chair here."

"Not until I'm satisfied it's safe with you lurking about. Wait ... you said, 'miraculous things.' What did the demon do?"

"That was something else that was never really clear. Remember in the thesis I wrote that the demon felt constrained to 'lessen' itself?"

"Yeah, but I wasn't sure what that meant."

"Neither was I ...," he said, "at least not completely. It's been years since I thought of this crap, but I got the sense it meant two different things. One, the more powerful demonic or angelic spirits are simply too vast to inhabit a human form without compressing or diluting the demon spirit in some way, which seems to diminish their might. The second ... well, like you said, this demon claimed it and a few others had deserted the losing army and stayed on Earth. That act marked them as enemies of Heaven above and Hell below, though the manuscript didn't phrase it in exactly that way. So, the Regensburg demon lived in fear of being found out by either side. Since doing powerful, angel-like things is what he referred to as 'noisy,' he avoided doing anything miraculous for fear of exposing himself."

"Okay, that makes sense then ... I guess. But what kind of things can this demon/angel do without getting the law on him?"

"My Latin was never really all that good," he replied with a short laugh. "The best translation I could come up with is that the demon could do a few 'parlor tricks'—you know, moving small things with his mind, controlling animals, even influencing humans other than his host, if he had a lot of time and patience."

"But no flying?"

"If it makes you feel better, Kate, all manner of Catholic saints were supposed to be able to fly or levitate. Maybe the bloke who flew over your house was St. Thomas Aquinas ... or some monsignor on an inspection tour from the Vatican."

"He looked a little seedy for that," she said with a frown, "but I can't believe I didn't think of that before. I've been so busy looking for online videos that I didn't think to look into history and mythology."

"Those are both full of stories about people doing miraculous things, but haven't you had any luck at all finding Flying Guy videos online?"

"A few. There were two recent ones in Chicago. The first wasn't flying. It just showed this tall woman chasing a car down and beating the hell out of the driver. But it was obviously fake. And the same for this supposed angel who flew a woman to the hospital in some northern suburb. You couldn't really see anything. They were just BS .... But you tell me. For a guy who doesn't believe in demons, you take this manuscript you researched pretty seriously."

"That's a long story. There was just something about that particular manuscript. It was one of twenty or so produced in Regensburg at about the same time, and each one has a notorious history. This one ... I don't know. Scholars of religion have this thing they call 'divine history.' It's the tone religiously inspired writers take when writing so-called histories of religious events. It's a type of writing all chocked full of awe and reverence. I got none of that from this manuscript."

"What did you get from it?" she asked as she leaned back in her chair.

"A lot of people think it's fake. Well, let me correct that. Of the very few who study such things, most believe it's a fake."

"Why?"

"Partly because of the inconsistencies in the manuscript's composition. The parchment carbon-dates to the thirteenth century, but there's no reason the parchment might not be a well-scrubbed palimpsest, or the text might have been expertly altered later. The language is strange. It's mostly written in passable Church Latin, but parts are in High German and in Middle English."

"That's one thing you never explained in the thesis. Why was a manuscript compiled in Germany written partly in English?"

"I wish I knew. I haven't studied the other Regensburg manuscripts, but I read somewhere that some of them suggest English was widely used in that part of Germany then. Don't ask me why. But that isn't the part most scholars find offensive. It's what the manuscript says that gets them flustered. Regensburg IX takes a very practical, very secular view of the world. First, it clearly suggests there is no God, only the angel/demons, which the text treats more like an alien species than heavenly beings. And then there's the cosmology ... literally. I know I didn't bring a lot of this up in the thesis, but the manuscript claims stars are just suns that are very far away, and around those suns other worlds circle, and some of those worlds have inhabitants."

"Get the fuck out."

"The language on that point is open to interpretation, which is why I didn't bring it up in the thesis, but that's what I took away from it. Like I said, most scholars think R. IX is nonsense, just a latter-day forgery. And they have a strong case, especially since very little was written on any of the Regensburg manuscripts before the last thirty years or so. They may all be twentieth century forgeries."

"Eli, it took you a little while to get to the point, but that is incredibly cool."

"But it doesn't get us one step closer to figuring out whether demons are real or knowing who this Flying Guy is."

"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, dear Horatio," she said as she got up from her seat.

"I thought I was 'Dove,' now?"

At that precise moment, a strange and rattling howl split the air, and Kate, who'd been moving back toward the kitchen for another beer, shrieked, turned, and launched herself into Eli's lap. It very nearly upended the chair in which he was sitting.

"El Chupacabra!" she cried out.