by Dan Wells
‘John’s a vegetarian,’ said Mom.
I didn’t really think of it in those terms; ‘vegetarian’ seems so much more zealous than ‘doesn’t eat meat’. I didn’t think meat was murder or anything, I just . . . well, actually I guess I did. For me, anyway. But how many other vegetarians fantasised about murdering their own meat?
‘A vegetarian!’ cried Curt. ‘What on earth would possess a sane man to do that?’
It’s so I don’t hurt idiots like you, I thought.
‘He bakes the desserts and I do most of the meals,’ said Mom, serving chicken breasts from a baking pan one by one onto plates at the counter. ‘I barely eat meat any more these days, either, just because it’s easier than making two meals, but I still like it for special occasions.’ She gave each plate a scoop of rice and placed them two-by-two on the table; the last to come was mine, the meat replaced by a lentil soup I’d really started to like.
‘Dude,’ said Curt, leaning seriously over the table. He was staring at me intently. ‘That’s not even food. That’s what food eats.’ He burst into laughter at his own joke, and Lauren laughed along. Margaret smiled politely, and I could see now from the way she smiled - curling the edges of her lips, but without moving a muscle around her eyes - that her close attention was all an act, and she really didn’t care about anything Curt said. I ate a piece of broccoli.
‘Seriously though,’ said Curt, glancing at Lauren. ‘Maybe you ought to be eating the same as him; you’re never going to fit your skinny jeans if you keep stuffing yourself like this.’
‘Honestly!’ said Mom, slamming down her fork again. ‘Who talks like that?’
‘It’s true,’ said Lauren, ‘I haven’t fit my skinny jeans in months. Curt’s never even seen me in them.’
‘That’s no excuse for talking to you that way,’ said Mom.
‘I don’t need an excuse when it’s true,’ said Curt. I could see from the way he was grinning that he thought he’d said something funny; a joke to cut the tension. Amazing - even I knew that was a stupid thing to say.
‘She’s sitting right here,’ said Mom, gesturing to Lauren. ‘Show a little courtesy, for crying out loud!’
‘I knew this was going to happen,’ said Lauren, closing her eyes. ‘Dammit, Mom, why can’t you be civil for one meal? For even half a meal? We’ve only been here twenty minutes.’
‘I’m the one who’s not being civil?’ said Mom. ‘He hasn’t stopped insulting you since you got here.’
‘Oh come on,’ said Lauren, throwing down her napkin and standing up. ‘He’s trying to liven this place up! The rest of you are dead in here - John hasn’t said one word the entire time!’
That’s not because I’m dead, it’s because I’m smart.
‘She told me you two didn’t get along,’ said Curt, glaring at Mom, ‘but I had no idea how bad she had it.’
‘Amazing,’ said Mom, folding her arms and staring at Lauren. ‘He’s the most sensitive man in the world. Where did you find such a catch?’
‘Don’t you dare talk to me about choosing men,’ said Lauren, jabbing her finger at Mom. ‘Don’t you dare tell me you’re some kind of expert at the dumbest thing you ever did!’
‘I don’t have to take this,’ said Curt, standing, ‘and neither do you.’ He took Lauren by the elbow and herded her to the door.
‘Don’t you walk away from me!’ cried out Mom.
‘Why on earth would I stay?’ shouted Lauren. She broke away from Curt’s grip and stomped back to the table. ‘You have been cutting me down my entire life, like I’m some kind of . . . what do you even think of me? Can I make any good decisions at all? Am I just a . . . mistake machine that spits out stupid all day?’
Mom folded her arms. ‘How am I supposed to talk to you when you take that attitude?’
‘You talking to me is the last thing I need,’ said Lauren. Curt took her elbow again and guided her to the door, ominously quiet now that the two women were fighting. This time Lauren didn’t break away, and he led her outside and closed the door behind him.
‘Come back here!’ shouted Mom, then whirled around and slammed the palm of her hand as hard as she could into the door of a cupboard. ‘Not again,’ she sobbed. ‘I’ve lost her again.’ She hid her face in her hands, leaning against the cupboard, and cried.
Chapter 5
It was nearly six hours later when Mom finally went to bed and I slipped out of the house, pedalling my bike in a beeline for the old warehouse. She’d spent the afternoon sobbing and talking to Margaret, going over the situation a thousand times: Lauren was right, Lauren was wrong, Lauren was making a huge mistake, Mom had made a huge mistake, and on and on and on. I hid in my room and pulled my ski-mask down to cover my ears and muffle the noise.
It was just like the old days, when everyone fought and everyone cried and everyone walked out of our lives as fast as they could go. Just like the old days but worse - I had Forman trying to get inside my head, and Mr Monster desperate to claw his way out. I didn’t know how far I could stretch before I snapped. Plans seemed to form themselves in my mind: how to find out where Curt lived; how to incapacitate him; how to cut him, slowly and carefully, in order to cause the most pain I could possibly cause. I started pacing the room and singing snatches of whatever music I could remember - old songs my dad used to listen to, new stuff Brooke played on the radio in the mornings - anything to fill my mind and keep my thoughts as far from death as possible. Nothing worked.
I was experiencing the need - the desperate urge that builds up inside of a serial killer and drives him to kill. What was it? Where did it come from? I had always been able to control my dark side before, keeping it locked up for years, but it was stronger now. I’d killed the demon, and Mr Monster had gotten his first taste of death - and now he wanted more. Could I still control it? How strong would it get? How intense would the Need get before it exploded and killed somebody else - my mom, or Margaret, or Brooke?
I paced back and forth in my bedroom, feeling caged; the slats of my blinds were like bars, and looking out between them I could see Mr Crowley’s house, large and dark. How many nights had I spent creeping around his walls, peeking in his windows, studying my prey? I missed that part of my life - I physically missed it, like a severed limb that still itched. Couldn’t I do it again? But Crowley had been a demon, not a person; it was okay to stalk him because it was all for the greater good. I had weighed the implications carefully and I had made my decision, and now couldn’t justify that kind of behaviour for anything less.
But what if there was a new demon?
It was foolish to assume that Crowley was the only one, but it was also foolish to assume that they all worked in the same way. The new body didn’t have any pieces missing, but it did have dozens of minor wounds and a single huge wound on its foot. Was there some kind of new supernatural menace that needed to electrocute people to stay alive? And did the fact that the victim was a woman suggest, somehow, that the demon was also a woman?
But no, just as I was misleading myself by assuming that the demons’ methods would all be the same, I couldn’t assume that their motives would be the same. Mr Crowley had killed men who matched his own physique because he needed to replace pieces of his own body. It was about survival. The new demon might be killing for food, for sport, for personal expression; there were any number of reasons. Just like me, the demon would have a Need - some kind of emotional hole that cried out to be filled.
How could I discover the demon’s Need if I didn’t even know my own?
I thought about Curt again, and how satisfying it would be to electrocute him, as the dead woman had been electrocuted - watching him scream and writhe until the charge had burned a massive crater in his flesh. I shook my head to clear the thought. I couldn’t go on like this. I needed to set fire to something.
It was time to visit the warehouse again.
On my way out of the house I grabbed some chicken from the fridge - no one had finished their dinne
r, after all - sealed it in a plastic bag and shoved it into my coat pocket. That cat wouldn’t stop me this time.
It was just after midnight, and dark enough to make my bike a bad idea, but the car would make noise; it might wake up Mom, and it would definitely make me easier to trace if the arson was investigated. So I rode my bike through the unlit streets for nearly a mile, then got down and walked along the uneven trail through the trees, feeling my way through the gloomy patches where the moon couldn’t penetrate. The tank of gas sloshed in my hand.
The fire was calling to me.
The warehouse reflected bright grey moonlight from its cinder-block walls, shining dully in the clearing. I was grinning now. This was the time when the lines inside of me blurred, and Mr Monster became simply John Cleaver: not a killer but a boy, not a monster but a human being. Fire was my great catharsis, but this prelude moment was one of purest freedom - the one brief respite when I didn’t have to worry about what Mr Monster wanted to do, because he and I wanted the same thing. Once I’d made my decision to light a fire, I wasn’t at war with myself any more; I was just me, and everything made sense.
The cat greeted me with a silent stare, perched on the sill of a shattered window that granted him a lordly view of his entire domain, both inside, and out. Dropping my bike by the trees, I walked forward quietly, pulling out the chicken and tearing off a small piece. The fibres separated cleanly, layers of cooked muscle peeling away from each other in easy strips. I reached up to the window and waved the chicken as close to the cat as I could, letting him smell the meat, then threw the torn-off piece on the ground and tossed the rest several feet away. The cat’s eyes tracked the meat as it arced through the air, focusing on it like a laser. I slipped into the warehouse through the empty doorway.
When I glanced up at the window again, the cat was still there, and it turned to look at me as I came through the door. It watched me for a moment, then turned back to stare at the meat outside. That’s right, I thought. Go and get it.
I pulled the old mattress out from behind the stack of pallets. It was thick and musty, covered with dirt and animal tracks, and the bottom was damp; the smell when I flipped it over was a slow, mouldy cloud. I flipped it back, dry side up, then thought better of it and flipped it back over again. I could use some of these other pieces, like the wooden pallets, to prop up the mattress and create an oven underneath it; the dry bottom side would catch quickly and help dry out the top, and the smoke from the wet patches would escape into the air without suffocating the flames below.
The cat was still perched in the window, watching me. I stopped moving, trying to make myself as uninteresting as possible, and stared back at it. It didn’t move.
I waited a moment longer, but the cat stayed still. I started gathering material for my oven; the cat had to move sooner or later.
Along one wall of the warehouse there was a row of metal barrels, though as near as I could tell, they were all empty. They weren’t flammable, and they didn’t contain any flammable chemicals, so I ignored them and moved on. The far corner held a pile of paint cans, and more were placed around the rest of the room seemingly at random. On previous visits I’d managed to catalogue them all: most were latex paint, which wouldn’t burn, but there was a nice stack of white enamel paints that would go up like rocket fuel. Using my keys to lever one can open, I smiled at the acrid puff of alcohol that rose up from inside. The paint was old - several decades, probably - and the pigment had settled out and congealed on the bottom, leaving a thick alcoholic soup on top. I hauled the cans over to the centre of the room, two at a time, dreaming about the massive blaze I would create.
The cat was still in the window, watching me. I frowned. I went outside and found the chicken breast, untouched in the scrub and gravel. The little piece I’d torn off was untouched as well. I picked it up and held it out to the cat.
‘Don’t you want it?’
It stared at me.
‘It’s food, cat - don’t you eat food?’ I had to stop myself from calling it a name, since any abuse, even verbal, was against the rules. I tossed the food up, letting it arc right in front of the cat’s face and then fall back to the ground.
‘Get out of the window,’ I said.
My chest felt tighter, and I took a deep breath. Don’t freak out, I told myself, it’s still okay. You can still have your fire. The cat will go away and everything will be fine. I was breathing more heavily now, and squinted my eyes harshly against . . . I don’t know what. I just needed to squint them, two, three, four times in a row. I walked back inside quickly, casting around for something to do. Wood! There was some wood in the centre; I could stack it up.
The construction company that used to own this place had left behind several boards and planks, two by fours and one by eights, and over twenty-something years of seasonal cycles the wood had grown warped. Some pieces were slightly curved, other were bloated, and some had cracked and split. Past visitors had moved some of them around, restacking them or simply knocking them over, but most remained in their original piles. To build my oven I chose three of the one by eights and propped them across six open cans of enamel paint. The paint wouldn’t do much until the fire got really big, but when the flames finally reached them, the pots would flare up spectacularly.
I arranged the planks in neat rows and laid the mattress over the top of them, working so quickly that I knocked all the boards off the cans the first time I tried to do it. The cat, still sitting in the window, was making me too nervous; I needed to calm down. I replaced the boards and then raised the mattress more carefully, dry side down, before setting it on top of the boards. The mattress was wetter than I thought, soaked through, and I ran my hand through my hair uneasily. After a moment I simply picked up my gas can and poured some over the top of the mattress. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was probably the simplest.
The cat was still there. To frighten it away, I dropped the gas can and kicked a stack of two by fours shouting, ‘Get out!’ The noise echoed through the empty room, and the cat hissed and arched its back aggressively.
I squeezed my eyes shut again, feeling sick and mumbling, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ I took a few steps, pacing erratic patterns in the dirty floor, then I turned back to the cat and looked it straight in the eyes. ‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to let anything hurt you.’ I paused. ‘Maybe I can help - maybe you just don’t know what to do.’
I could climb up and carry the cat out myself, gently, but I’d need something to stand on. I ran to the metal barrels and grabbed one by the top rim; even empty it was still heavy, and I braced myself against the wall to tip it over. It hit the floor with a hollow clang, and I rolled it impatiently to the other side of the room, navigating carefully around the piles of wood and cans and garbage that filled the warehouse.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ I repeated, rolling the barrel. ‘I’m just going to help you. I’m going to take you somewhere safe.’
I pushed away a couple of pallets leaning against the wall under the window, and manoeuvred the barrel into place. It seemed nearly impossible to stand it back up, but I steadied it against the wall and got my hands under it, heaving it up into place. The cat watched everything impassively.
I carefully climbed on top of the barrel, standing up slowly from a crouch. When I drew close to the cat it hissed again, baring its fangs and staring me down. I paused, trying to reassure it.
‘Don’t be scared. I’m just going to pick you up, very gently, and take you outside.’ I stood up straighter and it hissed a third time, louder. ‘Listen, this whole place is about to be on fire, and you don’t want to be here. You don’t understand fire, but it’s very scary. It’s very bad.’
I straightened further and the cat arched its back, hair standing on end. Standing this close I could see the familiar lines of a housecat in its face, but there was something deeper; traces of leopard and tiger burned through from inside, reawakened rem
nants of the cat’s primal ancestry. Wherever the cat had come from, whatever civilisation it may once have had, it was all gone now. The creature threatening me was a wild, dangerous animal.
I held myself motionless, peering into its face like a well of memory. It hissed again, crouching on its forelegs in preparation to pounce.
I backed away.
I shouldn’t be doing this. I allowed myself to break one rule - to burn things when I needed the release - but this was going too far. I couldn’t break any of my other rules, and if I touched this cat it would attack me, and I’d fight back, and by hurting it I’d be breaking my biggest rule of all. I couldn’t do it, and I was going to stop.
I jumped down from the barrel, feeling edgy and drained, and sat on a stack of boards to catch my breath.
I wasn’t going to hurt anything.