I Am Not a Serial Killer

by Dan Wells

  Brooke was there with her family, of course, and without making it obvious, I watched her and her brother as they skewered a pair of hot dogs and approached the pit; Brooke smiled as she crouched down next to me with her brother on the other side. They held their sticks out over the center of the blaze, where the flames still danced, and I wrestled with myself for almost thirty seconds before daring to talk to her.

  “Try down here,” I said, pointing with my tongs to one of the beds of coals. “They’ll cook better.”

  “Thanks,” said Brooke, and she eagerly pointed the spot out to Ethan. They moved their hot dogs, which immediately began to darken and cook. “Wow,” she said, “that’s great. You know a lot about fire.”

  “Four years of Cub Scouts,” I said. “It’s the only organization I know that actually teaches little boys how to light things on fire.”

  Brooke laughed. “You must have done great on your arson merit badge.”

  I wanted to keep talking, but I didn’t know what to say—I’d said way too much at the Halloween party. I probably terrified her, and I didn’t want to do that again. On the other hand, I loved her laugh, and I wanted to hear it again. Anyway, I figured, if she made an arson joke, I could probably make one too without looking too creepy.

  “They said I was the best student they’d ever had,” I said. “Most Scouts only burn down a cabin, but I burned down three cabins and an abandoned warehouse.”

  “Not bad,” she said, smiling.

  “They sent me to compete at the national level,” I added. “You remember that big forest fire in California last summer?”

  Brooke smiled. “Oh that was you? Nice work.”

  “Yeah, I won a prize for that one. It’s a statue, like an Oscar, but it’s shaped like Smokey the Bear and filled with gasoline. My mom thought it was a honey bottle and tried to make a sandwich.”

  Brooke laughed out loud, almost dropped her hot dog skewer, and then laughed again at her own mistake.

  “Are they done yet?” asked Ethan, examining his hot dog. It was the fifth time he’d pulled it out, and it had barely had time to brown.

  “Looks like it,” said Brooke, looking at her own hot dog, and standing up. “Thanks John!”

  I nodded, and watched as they ran back to the card table for buns and mustard. I saw her smile, and accept a ketchup bottle from Mr. Crowley, and the monster in my mind reared up and bared its fangs, growling angrily. How dare he touch her? It looked like I needed to keep an eye on Brooke, to keep her safe. I felt myself starting to snarl, and forced my mouth into a smile instead. I turned back to the fire and saw my mom smile at me mischievously from the other side. I growled inside—I didn’t want to deal with whatever stupid comment she was sure to make about Brooke when we got home. I decided to stay at the party as late as possible.

  Brooke and Ethan didn’t come back to the fire to eat, and I didn’t get another chance to talk to her that night; I saw her handing out Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate, and hoped she would bring one to me, but Mrs. Crowley beat her to it. I drank the chocolate, and threw the cup in the fire, watching the dregs blacken on the wood and the Styrofoam curl and bubble and disappear into the coals. Brooke’s family left soon after.

  Soon the hot dogs were all roasted, and as people began to drift away, I fed the fire several large logs, stoking it into a column of roaring flame. It was beautiful—so hot that the reds and oranges accelerated into blinding yellows and whites, so hot that the crowd drew back and I shed my coat. It was as bright and warm as a summer day next to that fire, though it was nighttime in late December everywhere else. I walked around the edges, poking it, talking to it, laughing with it as it devastated the wood, and annihilated the paper plates. Most fires crackle and pop, but that’s not really the fire talking, it’s the wood. To hear the fire itself you need a huge blaze like this one, a furnace so powerful it roars with its own wind. I crouched as close as I dared and listened to its voice, a whispered howl of joy and rage.

  In my biology class, we’d talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don’t; trees do, plastic doesn’t. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are—brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn’t settle; fire doesn’t tolerate; fire doesn’t “get by.” Fire does.

  Fire is.

  “On what wings dare he aspire?” said a voice. I spun around and saw Mr. Crowley, sitting a few feet behind me in a camp chair, staring deeply into the fire. Everyone else had left, and I’d been too absorbed in the fire to notice.

  Mr. Crowley seemed distant and preoccupied; he was not talking to me, as I assumed at first, but to himself. Or maybe to the fire. Never shifting his gaze, he spoke again. “What the hand dare seize the fire?”

  “What?” I asked.

  “What?” he said, as if shaken from a dream. “Oh, John, you’re still here. It was nothing, just a poem.”

  “Never heard it,” I said, turning back to the fire. It was smaller now, still strong, but no longer raging. I should have been terrified, alone in the night with a demon—I thought immediately that he must have found me out somehow, must have known that I knew his secrets and left him the note. But it was obvious that his mind was somewhere else—something had obviously disturbed him to put him into such a melancholy frame of mind. He was thinking about the note, perhaps, but he was not thinking about me.

  More than that, his thoughts were absorbed in the fire, drawn to it and soaked into it like water in a sponge. Watching the way he watched the fire, I knew that he loved it like I did. That’s why he spoke—not because he suspected me, but because we were both connected to the fire, and so, in a way, to each other.

  “You’ve never heard it?” he asked. “What do they teach you in school these days? That’s William Blake!” I shrugged, and after a moment he spoke again. “I memorized it once.” He drifted into reverie again. “ ‘Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, in the forests of the night, what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?’ ”

  “It sounds kind of familiar,” I said. I never paid much attention in English, but I figured I’d remember a poem about fire.

  “The poet is asking the tiger who made him, and how,” said Crowley, his chin buried deep under his collar. “ ‘What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?’ ” Only his eyes were visible, black pits reflecting the dancing fire. “He wrote two poems like that, you know—‘The Lamb’ and ‘The Tiger.’ One was made of sweetness and love, and one was forged from terror and death.” Crowley looked at me, his eyes dark and heavy. “ ‘When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears—did he smile, his work to see? Did he who made the lamb make thee?’ ”

  The fire rustled and cracked. Our shadows danced on the wall of the house behind us. Mr. Crowley turned back to the fire.

  “I’d like to think the same one made them both,” he said. “I’d like to think it.”

  The trees beyond the fire glowed white, and the trees beyond those were lost in blackness. The air was still and dark, and smoke hung like fog. Firelight caught the haze and lit it up, overpowering the streetlamps and blotting out the stars.

  “It’s late,” said Mr. Crowley, still unmoving. “You run on home. I’ll sit up with the fire ’til the coals die out.”

  I stood and reached in with the poker, preparing to spread the coals around, but he put out a shaky hand to stop me.

  “Let it be,” he said. “I never like to kill a fire. Just let it be.”

  I set
down the poker and walked across the street to my house. When I reached my room, I looked back and saw him, still sitting, still staring.

  I’d watched that man kill four people. I’d watched him tear out organs, rip off his own arm, and transform before my eyes into something grotesquely inhuman. Somehow, despite all of that, his words by the fire that night disturbed me more than anything he had ever done.

  I wondered again if he knew about me—and if he did, how long I had before he silenced me the way he silenced Ted Rask. I was safe at the party, and afterward, because there were too many witnesses. If I’d disappeared from his yard, after fifty or more people had seen me there, it would raise too much suspicion. I decided there was nothing I could do. If he didn’t know, I needed to keep going with my plan, and if he did, then there wasn’t much I could do to stop him. Either way, I knew that my plan was working—my note had bothered him, maybe very deeply. I had to keep up the pressure, building more and more fear until he was terrified, because that’s when I could control him.

  The next day I sent another note, another way, to make my intentions clear:

  I AM GOING TO KILL YOU

  12

  Brooke woke up every morning around seven; her dad got up at six-thirty, showered and dressed, and then woke up the kids while their mom made breakfast. He went into Ethan’s room and flipped on the lights, sometimes yanking the covers away playfully, sometimes singing loudly, and once actually tossing a bag of frozen broccoli into his bed when he refused to get up. Brooke, on the other hand, was more privileged—her dad simply knocked on her door and told her to wake up, leaving only when he heard her answer. She was a young woman, after all, both more responsible than her brother and more deserving of privacy. Nobody barged in, nobody peeked in, nobody saw her at all until she wanted them to.

  Nobody but me.

  Brooke’s room was on the second floor of their house, in the back-left corner, which meant that she had two windows—one on the side, facing the Petermans’ house, which she always kept tightly curtained, and one on the back, facing the woods, which she kept uncovered. We lived on the edge of town, so we had no rear neighbors, no other houses behind us, and no people at all for miles in that direction. Brooke thought no one could see her. I thought she was beautiful.

  I watched her sit up into view, pushing aside the bedspread and stretching luxuriously before combing out her hair with her fingers. She slept in thick, gray sweats, which seemed like an oddly dull color for her. Sometimes she scratched her armpits or her butt—something no girl would ever do if she knew she were being watched. She made faces in her mirror; sometimes she danced a little. After a minute or two, she gathered up her clothes and left the room, headed for the shower.

  I wondered if I could offer to shovel their snow, like I did with Mr. Crowley, so I could put it where I wanted it and grant myself more access to the yard. It would probably be suspicious, though, unless I did the whole street, and I didn’t have time for that. I was far too busy as it was.

  Each day I found a way to give Mr. Crowley a new note—some on his car, like before, others taped to his windows or shoved into doorways, higher than Kay could reach. After the second one, none of the notes were direct threats. Instead I sent him evidence that I knew what he was doing:

  JEB JOLLEY-KIDNEY

  DAVE BIRD-ARM

  As I left him notes about the victims, I made sure to leave out the drifter he’d killed by the lake—partly because I didn’t know his name, and partly because I was still afraid he’d seen my bike tracks in the snow, and I didn’t want him to put two and two together.

  On the last day of school I sent him a note that said:

  GREG OLSON-STOMACH

  This was the biggie, because Greg Olson’s body hadn’t been found yet—as far as Crowley knew, nobody knew about the stomach. After he read it, he locked himself in the house, brooding. The next morning he went to the hardware store and bought a couple of padlocks, adding extra security to his shed and cellar door. I was a little worried that he’d become too paranoid and I’d start to lose track of him, but no sooner was he finished locking up than he came to our house and gave me a new key to the shed.

  “I’ve locked up the shed, John; can’t be too careful these days.” He handed me the key. “You know where the tools are, so just keep it clean like you always do, and thanks again for all your help.”

  “Thanks,” I said. He still trusted me—I felt like whooping for joy. I gave him my best “surrogate grandson” smile. “I’ll keep the snow shoveled.”

  My mom came down the stairs behind me. “Hello Mr. Crowley, is everything okay?”

  “I’ve added some new locks,” he said. “I’d recommend you do the same. That killer’s still out there.”

  “We keep the mortuary locked up pretty tightly,” said Mom, “and there’s a good alarm system in the back where we keep the chemicals. I think we’re okay.”

  “You got a good boy,” he said, smiling. Then trouble clouded his face, and he glanced down the street suspiciously. “This town’s not as safe as it used to be. I’m not trying to scare you, I just . . .” He looked back at us. “Just be careful.” He turned and trudged back across the street, his shoulders heavy. I closed the door and smiled.

  I’d tricked him.

  “Doing anything fun today?” asked Mom. I looked at her suspiciously, and she put up her hands innocently. “Just asking.”

  I brushed past her and climbed the stairs. “I’m going to read for a while.” It was my standard excuse for spending hours at a time in my room, watching the Crowleys’ house from my window. This time of day I couldn’t get up close, so watching through the window was all I had.

  “You’ve been spending too much time in your room,” she said, following me up the stairs. “It’s the first day of Christmas vacation—you should go out and do something fun.”

  This was new—what was she up to? I’d been out of the house almost as much as I was in it, creeping around outside Mr. Crowley’s house, and Brooke’s. Mom didn’t know where I went or what I was doing, but she couldn’t possibly think that I was spending too much time in my room. She had something else on her mind.

  “There’s that movie we keep seeing ads for,” she said. “It finally made it to town yesterday. You could go see that.”

  I turned and stared at her again. What was she doing?

  “I’m just saying it might be fun,” she said, ducking into the kitchen to avoid my gaze. She was nervous. “If you want to go,” she called out, “I’ve got some money for tickets.”

  “Tickets” is plural—was that her game? There’s no way I was seeing a movie with my mom. “You can see it if you want,” I said. “I want to finish this book.”

  “Oh, I’m too busy right now,” she said, emerging from the kitchen with a handful of bills. She held them out with an anxious smile. “You can go with Max. Or Brooke.”

  Aha. This was about Brooke. I felt my face turn red, and turned and stalked into my room. “I said no!” I slammed the door and closed my eyes. I was angry, but I didn’t know why. “Stupid Mom trying to send me to a stupid movie with stupid . . .” I couldn’t say her name out loud. No one was supposed to know about Brooke—Brooke didn’t even know about Brooke. I kicked my backpack and it slumped over, too full of books to fly across the room like I wanted it to.

  Sitting in the dark with Brooke wouldn’t be so bad, I thought, no matter what movie it was. I heard her laugh in my head, and thought about witty things I could say to make her laugh again. “This movie sucks—the director should be strangled with his own film.” Brooke didn’t laugh at that; her eyes went wide and she backed away, just like at the Halloween dance.

  “You’re a freak,” she said. “You’re a sick, psycho freak.”

  “No I’m not—you know me! You know me better than anyone in the world, because I know you better than anyone in the world. I see things nobody else does. We’ve done homework together, we’ve watched TV together, we’ve talked on t
he phone to—”

  Stupid phone—who was she talking to on the phone? I’d find out and I’d kill him.

  I cursed at the window and—

  I was in my room, breathing heavily. Brooke didn’t know me because we hadn’t shared anything, because everything we’d ever done together was really only stuff she’d done alone, while I watched through her window. I’d watched her do her homework a few nights ago, and knew that we had the same assignment, but that didn’t count as doing it together because she didn’t even know I was there. And then, when the phone rang and she picked it up and said hello to someone else, it was like a wedge between us. She smiled at the invader and not at me, and I wanted to scream, but I knew that no one was interrupting anything because I was the only one in the world who knew that anything was going on.

  I pressed my palms into my eyes. “I’m stalking her,” I muttered. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; I was supposed to be watching Mr. Crowley, not Brooke. I broke my rules for him, not for anyone else, but the monster had shattered the wall and taken over before I even knew what it was doing. I barely even thought of the monster anymore, because we’d merged so completely into one. I looked up and paced across my room to the window, staring out at Mr. Crowley’s house. “I can’t do this.” I paced back to my bed and kicked my backpack harder this time, skidding it across the floor. “I need to see Max.”

  I grabbed my coat and rushed out without saying anything to Mom. She’d left the money on the edge of the kitchen counter and I grabbed it as I passed, shoving it into my pocket and slamming the door behind me.

  Max’s house was just a few miles away, and I could get there pretty quickly on my bike. I looked away as I passed Brooke’s house, and flew down the road too fast, not caring about ice or watching for cars. I saw myself putting my hands around Brooke’s neck, first caressing it, then squeezing it until she screamed and kicked and choked and every thought in her entire head was focused on me, and nothing but me, and I was her whole world and—