Jonny has an idea.

Jonny stood quietly with the old woman. This whole thing seemed strange. Why would a tenured professor, a guy who one might think would have his proverbial shit together, suddenly go nuts and barricade himself in his office (or maybe on the roof) and not come out? “So can you tell me about this man? Do you have any idea what might have made him snap?” Jonny asked. Delores Duckworth paused. “Arnie’s always been a strange bird, and I suppose academia attracts those sometimes. The last few years, he’s spent all the more time with his nose shoved in his books. He’ll go into his office and not come out for days—sleep there even. He never misses a class, but sometimes in the summers he’ll disappear for weeks at a time. No one knows where he goes,” Duckworth said. “I think he went off the reservation enough that his wife left him, and he just couldn’t handle it anymore,” she postulated.

Jonny mulled this over in his head. He’d used his powers earlier this very day, he noted, and even a body as beautiful as Leah’s was of limited use if he confined himself to only the human methods of crime-solving. Being a demon had its advantages. Leah’s eyes glowed red as Jonny raised his hand. Delores had her back to the officer at the moment, and Jonny laid his hand firmly on her shoulder. “Delores,” he began, her eyes glowing red too and her body relaxing, “I’ve got to use some unconventional methods here, and I can’t have you seeing what I do, so you’re going to remember this as a time when I used this beautiful, curvy body of mine to **** my way through the door as a part of a heroic effort to save the professor, and you’re going to make sure you tell my boss what I did. What’s actually going to happen, though, is that you’re going to go to sleep while I do my work,” he said. “Curvy body . . . door . . . sleep,” Delores mumbled just as her body collapsed limply to the floor of the hallway. She lay there ****.

Jonny turned toward the door. “And off I go,” Jonny said as his vessel disappeared in a puff of black smoke. He reappeared just a few feet away on the other side of the door to the office. Jonny looked about the at dusty and crusty old room, filled to the brim with ungraded papers and journal articles and books with yellowed pages. “Chubworth?” Jonny called out. No answer. “What have you been up to prof?” Jonny asked the absent professor as he rummaged about the cluttered office. More strangeness abounded. Jonny looked about and saw strange symbols scrawled on the walls of the darkened room. He didn’t know what they were, but they looked old. They looked magical.

A sudden breeze blew through the room, and Jonny jumped. He saw the source of the air. An old wooden door in the corner of the room had blown open, and Jonny could see stairs leading up from that door, presumably to the roof. “The plot thickens,” Jonny said as he headed for the stairs. The tiny hairs on the back of Leah’s neck stood up. Her pulse quickened. Sweat rolled down her head. “I definitely picked the right meat suit,” Jonny mused to himself as he slowly ascended the dark stairwell. Each step brought a creek from the old wooden stairs. As Jonny climbed slowly and as quietly as he could, more wild writing and symbols could be seen. “Get out of me!” commanded one big of script. “Body . . . MINE!” read another.

Jonny reached the top of the steps and another old wooden door. “Here goes nothing,” he said as he kicked the door and it flew open with a loud crack. Jonny stepped quickly on to the gravel-strewn roof of the building. This building was fairly tall, and so the wind blew fairly strongly up here. Leah’s hair blew about in the breeze. Over toward the edge of the roof, Jonny beheld a second figure, who quickly spun around in surprise.

This figure was male, and he seemed to be in his early sixties. He had very thick glasses adorning his face, and he was small of stature, probably no taller than five feet five inches. That said, he probably weighed some three hundred pounds, and a gigantic belly jiggled as he moved, peeking over the top of his pants and barely contained by an old, winkled dress shirt that seemed destined to soon lose the last of its original buttons. His trousers were tasked with containing the remainder of his gut, having been pulled up so far as to house rolls of belly fat acquired over decades of sedentary work. The man had a mass of thick grey hair that seemed not to have seen a comb since some time early in the Clinton Administration, and his wild eyes darted about at the surprise occasioned by his new guest.

“Who are you?!” the man called out as if to an intruder. “That’s a bit complicated,” Jonny said, “why don’t you just call me Leah?” he introduced his stolen body, “and I presume you’re Dr. Chubworth?” The man seemed to relax ever so slightly. “It’s—it’s ah, well it’s Arnie. F—fr—friends, they call me Arnie,” he stuttered. “Hi, Arnie,” Jonny said as he stepped a bit closer, “so what is it you’re doing up here?” he said in a quiet soothing voice that he was thankful this body just seemed to naturally have.

Arnie paused, and tears started to stream down his face as he ran his hand through his crazy hair. “You’re not going to believe me lady,” he cried, “no—nobody’s gonna believe me at all!” he said. “I’ve got a pretty good imagination, Arnie. Why don’t you just try me?” Jonny said. Arnie paused, seeming to ponder the proposal as he wiped his nose with the ruffled sleeve of his shirt. Without saying anything, Arnie slowly waddled (as a man of his build must) over to a metal air conditioning unit and plopped his considerable girth down upon it. Jonny very slowly made his way over there two, and sat Leah’s beautiful backside upon the same surface a few feet away. He looked over at Arnie, who wiped tears from his face as he collected his thoughts.

“Few years ago . . . I found this book that says it’s got all these rituals for talking to people on other planes of existence. Creatures. The dead. Demons, whatever I suppose,” Arnie started. “I had read some articles about this sort of thing before, so I thought it was interesting, and one night I went into my attic at home and, and ah, ‘an I did what the book said to do, you know? I drew a few symbols, and I lit a few candles and stuff, and I read the script in the book while I sat in the middle of this big circle,” he explained. Jonny nodded, interested. “I sat up there for what turned out to be hours and listened into the void, sort of the space between worlds the book said, and I didn’t hear anything at all. I thought it was a all made-up, maybe somethin’ get a conference talk or an article out of, but nothing real,” Arnie said.

“Then, as I was about to go to bed and give up, I heard this faint voice,” he explained, “this woman . . . seemed far away or like a voice you hear only a little bit through a strong wind. The voice asked me my name, so I told her . . . said she needed my help,” said Chubworth. “Your help?” Jonny asked, “help with what?” “I wasn’t sure at first, but we just talked. She said she was somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be . . . been marooned somewhere and couldn’t get home, so I felt bad. She asked if we could be friends, and I said yes,” he said with a slight smile. “She told me she had to go and I should come back the next night, so I left that attic, and it turned out I had been up there most of the night, which I didn’t know. It was getting light out already . . . I went and taught class all day, but I couldn’t think about anything other than this voice. I couldn’t tell anyone . . . she told me not to,” Arnie said.

“So you didn’t tell anybody at all?” Jonny asked. Arnie shook his head vigorously. “No, never, ahh, I, um, well, I—so I just went right home after class and, in the evening, after my wife was asleep, I went back up to attic and did the ritual again, and there she was again, the woman—the voice,” Arnie said.

As the minutes passed by, Arnie explained that this ritual—go to class in the morning, come home, talk to the voice alone at night—went on for a couple weeks. Arnie said the woman was always nice to him and wanted to learn about him. The woman explained that she had been banished long ago and was stuck in a world that was her prison. She said she wanted to come back to our world, but that she couldn’t just come all the way back yet—she needed a body. She wanted to get her body back, and that would take time. She began to ask Arnie to get things and to do certain magical spells for her—things that would prepare for her return. Arnie always dutifully did as he was asked. Jonny thought that Arnie truly enjoyed the companionship of this absent woman, who really seemed interested in him and seemed genuinely kind to him. Eventually, the woman’s requests of Arnie went to another level.

“She, um, she said she could maybe start to come back if I would help her,” Arnie explained. “I thought I’d already been helping her, so I didn’t understand. I was doing all the stuff she wanted me to do to reconstitute her body. Then she told me that would take too long and she wanted to try to come back now, at least for a bit . . . said that she didn’t have to use her body, that she could use mine instead . . . temporarily,” Arnie said. Jonny looked Arnie up and down—his was certainly not the sort of body Jonny would pick, but to each his or her own. “She—she asked if she could posses your body?” Jonny asked. Arnie nodded. “Yes . . . said I had to go mix this concoction to let his posses me, so I did, and then I drank it like she told me to do. I looked in the mirror after I did it, and I didn’t look or feel any different except for this little bit of a purple glow in my eyes,” Arnie said.

Jonny immediately took notice. He’d seen the purple glow before.