(POV Shift: Third Person)
The drive back from the university was the longest, most silent of the Warrens' lives. The car glided along Connecticut roads under a twilight sky, but inside the vehicle, the darkness was absolute. Ed drove, hands clenched on the wheel, knuckles white, a silent, humiliated fury radiating from him. Lorraine stared out the passenger window, not seeing the landscape, but the images projected onto the large auditorium screen: the boy, Alex, making faces behind a prince of hell, posing like a cheap Hercules beside a vengeful witch.
Their reputation, so carefully built over decades of dangerous work, of unwavering faith, and of personal risk, had been torpedoed. Not by a skeptic, not by a hostile journalist, but by their own anomalous "associate." The laughter of the students still echoed in Ed's ears. They had become a joke. The brave, intrepid Warrens, reduced to the hosts of a surreal horror comedy.
"I don't understand it, Lorraine," Ed finally said, his voice a low growl. "The disrespect. The arrogance. After everything we did for him, what we went through... to turn our work, our suffering, into a joke?"
"I don't think his intention was to mock us, Ed," Lorraine replied softly, though her own mortification was palpable. "There's something in his method, in his madness, that we fail to grasp. He acts as if he has no fear."
"Not having fear is one thing!" Ed snapped. "Giving a demonic entity bunny ears is quite another! It's sacrilege! It's madness!"
They arrived home, the sanctuary that now felt like the scene of an inexplicable crime. The normalcy of the repaired house, the mowed lawn, seemed a sham. They entered in silence, each lost in their own thoughts. Ed went straight to his office, the room where he kept his files, his recordings, his evidence. He needed to find something, anything, that made sense. Something he could present to the world that wasn't tainted by Alex's buffoonery.
He reviewed the Polaroids one by one, spreading them across his desk. They were all the same. All humiliating. He swept them aside with a gesture of frustration. They were useless, corrupted.
And then, he paused. His gaze fell on the video camera he had been using in Enfield, the old tape model. Alex didn't have one of those. His camera was... different. It was fused to his hand. A digital camera. And it recorded constantly. He was a streamer.
The realization hit him like a slap. The evidence wasn't in the Polaroids. The photos were just trophies, selfies of his ridiculous conquest. The true evidence, the complete, raw, unedited record of what had happened, wouldn't be on a physical object. It would be online.
With a sense of dread, he sat down in front of his sturdy desktop computer. He opened the browser, a tool he primarily used for research and email. And with clumsy fingers, he typed the name he had seen on the boy's invisible HUD, the name Alex himself had mentioned. "ZeroCool_x."
The results were instantaneous. Channels, forums, fan sites, all dedicated to their problematic personal poltergeist. He found the main platform, a website called Twitch, and there, under the "Past Videos" tab, he saw a series of thumbnails. "THE HARRISVILLE FARMHOUSE - GHOSTLY STROLL." "ENFIELD - UNFRIENDLY NUN." And the last one, the one that chilled him to the bone. "ANNABELLE COMES HOME (AND GETS EVICTED)."
He called Lorraine. She entered the office, her face filled with apprehension.
"I found something," Ed said, his voice strained. "I found his recordings. The full ones."
He pointed to the last video. Lorraine leaned closer, and together, they clicked.
(POV Shift: Third Person - The Recording)
The computer screen sprang to life. The image quality was astonishingly sharp. They saw Alex in their own house, in Judy's room, right after the final battle with Annabelle. The scene was familiar. But the video continued. They watched Alex talk to a terrified Judy, saw their strange but tender interaction as they cleaned. They saw the unconscious babysitter. Then, the video fast-forwarded. Alex was alone, walking through the now-silent house.
"Okay, chat, looks like we've cleaned out the main minions," Alex's voice said from the speakers, calm and professional. "But the residual energy meter is still showing high levels. There are echoes. Leftovers from the infestation."
The camera panned down the stairs to the artifact room. It was then the samurai armor, which the Warrens believed neutralized, moved. It slowly rose, its metal pieces creaking, and unsheathed its katana. The evil animating it wasn't the main one, but it was a stubborn echo, a last soldier refusing to surrender.
Ed and Lorraine leaned into the screen, expecting the inevitable blast from the "Exorcist." But it didn't happen.
On screen, Alex looked at the armor. Then he turned to look directly into his own camera-hand. A slow, mischievous grin spread across his face.
"You know what, folks?" he said. "Shooting it would be too easy. Too boring. I think this gentleman deserves a little... art."
Alex disappeared from the screen and returned moments later with an object that made Lorraine gasp. It was her own gaudy, red chenille bedspread from her guest room.
With a dramatic flourish, he draped it over one arm. He planted himself in the middle of the living room, striking an arrogant, elegant pose. He turned to face the samurai armor, which was now clanking up the stairs towards him, katana raised.
"Hey, toro!" Alex yelled in the recording, his voice full of defiant glee. "Come on, toro! Hey!"
The armor, like a mindless golem, charged at him. Its movement was heavy yet swift, and the katana whistled through the air, aimed directly at his chest.
At the very last second, Alex whipped the red bedspread like a matador's cape. The armor, drawn by the movement and color, adjusted its trajectory and cut through the air where the fabric had been. Alex, thanks to his unnatural reflexes, spun on his heels, dodging the blade by millimeters.
"OLÉ!" he shouted at the top of his lungs, as the armor lumbered past, stumbling clumsily.
Ed and Lorraine stared, utterly dumbfounded. This wasn't in the photos. This was a whole new level of madness.
The "corrida" continued. Alex, with the red bedspread in one hand and a floor lamp he had ripped out to use as an improvised "muleta" in the other, toyed with the samurai spirit throughout the living room. It was a dance of death and ridicule. The samurai attacked with lethal fury, its katana slicing sofa cushions, scoring the coffee table, shattering a potted plant. And Alex, with a grace he shouldn't possess, dodged, spun, made dramatic passes with the red fabric, yelling "OLÉ!" with every successful evade.
"Come on, my dear! Such art you have!" Alex taunted, using a terrible Spanish accent. "Move with more grace! You look like a refrigerator with a sword!"
The chat playing on the side of the screen was a madhouse. People donated money without him even asking, simply for the sheer spectacle.
(POV Shift: Third Person)
Ed Warren didn't know what to feel. He was watching a boy use his mother-in-law's bedspread to bullfight a murderous spirit in his own living room. The anger he had felt was dissolving into pure, unadulterated perplexity.
Lorraine, however, began to understand. She observed not just the madness, but the strategy behind it. Alex wasn't simply playing. He was exhausting her. He was humiliating her. He was denying her the one thing a violent spirit craves: its victim's fear. By turning the confrontation into a farce, he was disarming the ghost on a fundamental level. He was stripping away its dignity, its power, its terror.
On screen, the "corrida" came to an end. Alex, in an ingenious move, positioned himself in front of a solid oak door. When the armor charged one last time, he stepped aside at the last instant. The katana plunged deeply into the door's wood, and the armor, by its own momentum, became stuck, struggling to free its weapon.
Alex calmly approached the immobilized armor. He pulled out the "Exorcist."
"A cowardly thrust, I know," he said to his audience. "But this bull has put on enough of a show."
He pressed the pistol's barrel against the samurai's helmet and fired. The bang made the Warrens jump in their seats. The energy animating the armor dissipated with a final whimper, and it collapsed to the floor in a heap of inert, silent metal.
Alex turned to the camera. He took a deep, dramatic bow, like a matador after a triumphant bullfight. Then, the recording ended, and the video transitioned to the part they had already seen, with Alex waiting for their arrival on the porch.
Ed leaned back in his chair, letting out a breath he didn't realize he was holding. He looked at Lorraine. The humiliation from the lecture was still there, but now it was tinged with a new understanding.
"He wasn't mocking us," Ed said quietly, the revelation finally settling in. "He was mocking them."
"He always has," Lorraine replied, her eyes fixed on the blank screen. "It's his weapon. A weapon we've never seen before. Ed... evil feeds on fear. It's its power source, its connection to our world. And this boy... this crazy, reckless, sacrilegious boy... he refuses to give it that satisfaction. He starves it. He ridicules it into submission."
Ed thought of the photos. Of Alex goofing around behind demons. It wasn't just a prank. It was a psychological warfare tactic. He was degrading his enemies, denying them their terrifying majesty. He was fighting a war the Warrens had waged with crosses and prayers, but he was fighting it with disdain and a smirk.
For the first time, Ed felt no anger towards Alex. He felt a strange, deeply conflicting pang of professional respect. He didn't like the kid. He disapproved of his methods. And the kiss to his wife was still an open wound. But he couldn't deny the truth.
The kid was an idiot. A blasphemer. A clown.
But, God forgive them, he was the best ghost hunter they had ever seen.