“You’re a bitch, Whitney.”
“Thanks. You’re an asshole.”
“I know.”
“What am I?” Doug asked, feeling left out.
Crank said “prude” and Whitney said “creepy” at the same time. Doug drank the rest of the beer and tossed the can into the fire.
“I think I will have one of those cigarettes.”
Crank tossed the pack to him. They each took one. Doug didn’t really have any idea how to smoke it but he played it as cool as he could and managed not to cough.
“There. Is that less... prudish?”
“Sure, man, I guess. I didn’t mean anything by it. You’ve just always been that way. I blame your mom... and Jesus.”
“It’s all been a personal decision.”
“Whatever. If you hadn’t had your mom there shoving it down your throat every day, you wouldn’t be any more religious than me.”
“But aren’t you the one who expressed interest in coming to church with me?” Saying this in front of Whitney would probably embarrass him. Doug waited for him to make some kind of stupid excuse but he didn’t.
“Well, yeah, I never believed in any of that shit before but I saw something that really scared me.” He described his encounter with Chloe and Daniel in overly lurid detail, as crudely as possible. Doug felt like even Whitney was probably blushing. When he finished he said, “So that’s it. I figure if there are evil supernatural kinds of things that can happen, then there must be something good, too.”
Whitney said, “So you think you saw the Devil and now you want to go to church?”
“That’s about right.”
“And you think that’s going to help you how?”
“It’s going to make me righteous.”
Doug laughed, opened another beer. “I think maybe you need to go into rehab.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.” Whitney took another cigarette and lit it.
“You’re taking his side?”
“I’m not taking anybody’s side. But I think he’s right. I think he saw the Devil.”
But Doug thought she was taking Crank’s side. He didn’t know what was going on. Anger flashed up through his cheeks. Something had happened. He didn’t know what. Maybe Whitney had gone into the station today and found Crank there and they’d spent an hour or so talking. Talking about him. Planning this prank or whatever it was. He stood up.
“Okay, yep, it’s really funny that I go to church. It’s really funny that I’ve tried to live a clean life and all that. It’s all hilarious that I believe anything because you both obviously believe nothing. Well, I’m leaving. When you grow up and decide to treat me like a friend then you should give me a call or something.”
He walked away.
“Doug, don’t go!” Whitney called. He kept walking. “I still need to talk to you.” But that was probably all just part of the joke. Something they’d spent a lot of time planning and now that he wasn’t buying into it, they would do anything to see it through, even though neither one of them did anything but waste time anyway.
Thirty-four
Doug went deeper into the woods, Crank’s and Whitney’s calls for him like pitiful music. He couldn’t go back home yet. His mom would still be awake and having just drank a beer and smoked a cigarette, he knew she would smell it on him. Maybe not the cigarette smoke, but definitely the beer. She had a remarkable sense of smell for a smoker. Maybe he should just go back to Crank and Whitney. He knew he’d overreacted. He didn’t know what was wrong with him.
Only that wasn’t exactly true. He was growing up. That was the problem. And he was tired of everyone still treating him like a kid. There were plenty of adults in the Church, so he didn’t know why he should feel his belief was somehow childish, like God was someone like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. And he definitely didn’t think it was any reason for Whitney and Crank to gang up on him. But that was what had happened. The beauty of democracy, he thought. If two out of three people think a certain way, then that must be truth, law.
It wasn’t like he had a lot of other options. Crank had been his friend forever. And even though he’d only recently re-met Whitney, he thought there could be something there. Not necessarily a boyfriend-girlfriend something, but she seemed as weird and withdrawn as he felt most of the time and he was always under the assumption those people seemed to be more interesting than the loud and obnoxious types of people—at least for anything other than being a spectacle.
Their plaintive cries grew farther away. Doug wiped a cobweb from his face and stopped, listening.
Now he couldn’t hear anything. That made him feel even worse.
How quickly they forget, he thought.
He wasn’t just angry at Crank and Whitney. He was angrier with himself. The way he’d been acting over the past few days made him feel like he was mocking his religion even more than they were. Maybe it had started with the drinking. It had clouded his judgment. The drinking and the turning eighteen and the driving lessons and Mindy. Mindy. Mindy. Mindy. He still wasn’t sure he wouldn’t do anything she asked him to do. It was more than just being beautiful. She was older. She was part of the Church, practically a nun. In short, she was almost as close to being a role model as Pastor Don. Maybe even more so because she was closer to his age.
Maybe Crank was the reason he had done the things he had done. Maybe he just needed to avoid Crank. They were, in a way, the closest of friends, but they didn’t really have anything in common anymore except for memories. Doug was adult enough to know that memories couldn’t sustain a friendship. It was like a married couple who couldn’t talk about anything except for their kids. Doomed.
Why did everything have to be so difficult? Maybe things would change when he went to college in the fall. This was Kentucky, after all, so he was sure there would be some kind of campus organization for students of faith. He would need it. From what he had heard, the temptations of college life would surely test that faith in ways it had never been tested before.
He continued walking. He figured he would go down to the creek and find a big rock to sit down on and watch the moon and collect his thoughts.
Sort some things out.
He heard twigs snap behind him and... was that panting?
He felt a moment of panic. What if it was a wild dog? He didn’t have anything to fight it off with. He wasn’t sure he could outrun a dog. He knew it was dumb to turn around but he would have felt even dumber if he just took off running through the woods and it turned out he wasn’t running from anything other than his imagination.
He turned around.
It wasn’t a dog.
It was so much larger. And terrifying.
He thought he’d found what he’d nearly run into the other day.
Thirty-five
After walking into the woods far enough to lose sight of the fire, Crank said, “Just let him go.”
“Let him go?” Whitney said. “After what we were getting ready to talk about you want us to just let him go? Why? So we can read about him in the paper after his mutilated body is found?”
“He’s not going to stop. He’s pissed. You don’t know Doug like I do. He’d say he never gets mad and if you didn’t know him very well, you’d probably think that. But here’s what happens: He does get mad. It doesn’t take much to set him off, you just have to know what that is. One thing is that church shit. The other thing is his mother. He doesn’t yell or anything but he’s real stubborn. If I don’t call him and tell him how sorry and shit I am, he would never call me. And I don’t mean it would just take him a while. I mean that I would be completely dead to him. See, we’re both dead to him right now. He’s already making plans for the future that don’t involve us. I guarantee it. I know him. Better than anyone.”
“Okay then.” She threw her hands up into the air. “We’ll just... let him go and hope nothing happens to him.”
“He’s probably already home by now anyway. It’s not like he has any place e
lse to go.”
“Maybe we should go there, then.”
“Anything we could say to him is only going to make it worse.”
“That still doesn’t solve my problem, does it?”
“Are you really serious about this shit?”
“Aren’t you? I thought that was the whole reason we were going to talk to him.”
“I know I saw something crazy at Chloe’s and I know it wasn’t drug-inspired but I still don’t know if I buy into your whole crazy conspiracy theory.”
“It’s not a theory.”
“It’s still way out there.”
“Is it? You want to go in and ask my mom? You know that’s why she doesn’t leave the house, don’t you? Because she would talk. Everyone else in this town, everyone who goes to the Church anyway, knows the truth, and if you asked any of them what that truth was, they’d talk around it. That’s how I got out of Brentwood House. I told Mom I’d go along with it. I went there in the first place because I refused to go along with it. When I asked her to come and get me out, the only thing she asked was, ‘Are you still a virgin?’”
“And you are?”
“Yes. And that makes things dangerous for me. I don’t know what I can do to make you believe me. Something big is going to happen and it’s going to be horrible and the two people who are currently in the most danger are me and Doug. And he knows absolutely nothing about what’s going on.”
“Well, I can help you with your problem.”
“Jesus.” Whitney put a hand on her forehead, almost surprised it had taken Crank this long to come on to her. Definitely surprised at what her answer was going to be.
“I didn’t think Jesus was your problem.”
“I’m going to need a lot more beer.”
“It’s waiting. Besides, maybe Doug will change his mind and come back before we do anything. Maybe you can con him into it.”
“A girl shouldn’t have to do that, though, should she? Con a guy into fucking her?”
Crank shrugged. “Some guys are weird.”
They went back to the slightly dwindled fire. As Whitney drank, she thought of the photos and drawings her mother had shown her on the day she freaked out. The day they took her away.
“You are his daughter,” she had said. “And you will enroll in the Tabernacle so you may offer yourself to him like a good daughter should. And if you’re the best, which you will be, then he will choose you as his bride. But if he smells any taint on you...” It took Whitney a while to pull the red photo into focus, to make out the flayed skin, the bones peeking through, the organs glistening within.
Before they were finished with their first beer, she had moved close to Crank, leaned into him, whispered into his ear. Anything would be better than offering herself to that man, that beast, that thing that called itself the Devil.
Thirty-six
Doug wanted to bolt as soon as he saw the thing but there was something keeping him rooted to the ground. Part of it was fear, sure. But another part of it was that he was looking at something he had never seen before. It kind of looked like a werewolf only it had large horns.
I’m looking at the Devil, he thought.
And he thought this thing appearing at this exact moment was the first true sign he’d ever had that Good and Evil, God and Satan actually existed.
But that wasn’t enough to keep him there. And while he had a moment where he didn’t think he would be able to move, the way it always happened in dreams, that wasn’t the case and he watched the thing take a great sniff in the air and as soon as Doug took off, he heard the thing behind him, covering twice as much ground as he was.
Now he really wished he hadn’t drunk that one beer as fast as he did and it was probably the cigarette making his heart jump around in his chest and his lungs burn. Worse than watching out for the trees was trying not to trip over everything on the ground. He ran in a diagonal pattern, toward what he thought was his house. If he were closer to the Church, he would have tried to go there. But he thought his house might be the safest reachable thing. Once he was inside, his mom wouldn’t care that maybe he smelled like beer because he would have such great news for her. And they could rejoice that he was safe and their beliefs were justified and they were both now aware of the awesome fight that lay before them.
Just that momentary thought, that second’s lack of concentration on his surroundings, was enough to trip him up and send him sprawling.
The beast was on him as soon as he hit the ground.
Doug smelled something rotting and something wild. The beast was damp and humid. Doug closed his eyes against the pain he knew was inevitable but then he thought that if this thing, the Devil, was going to kill him, kill him and eat his soul, then he should look it in the eye. If he made eye contact with it, then the Devil could look inside him and see that his soul was pure and that, even if it killed him, there was nothing else it would get from him.
Doug opened his eyes and was not surprised to see the thing staring deeply into his eyes. Whatever this thing was, it was more man than beast. He had his massive mouth open, ready to clamp down on Doug’s throat, but then he paused. He began sniffing Doug, keeping him held down with his massive hands. He sniffed down Doug’s chest. Sniffed down to his crotch and spent a lot of time there, making it even more uncomfortable for Doug.
Then an amazing thing happened.
The man, Doug was now convinced he was the Devil, stood up, growled, and went loping off into the forest.
The moon was fat overhead. Doug’s heart hammered in his chest. A smile spread itself across his face. Jesus had saved him. He was sure of it.
But what about Crank? Had Jesus saved him too?
Of course he had. Jesus saves everyone he can. Maybe Crank hadn’t been lying. Maybe he and Whitney hadn’t been trying to play some horrible joke on Doug. Really, that wouldn’t be like Crank at all. He was dumb and insensitive but he was probably about the least mean-spirited person Doug knew. He didn’t treat girls in a way that was exactly nice but that was probably more his hormones than any kind of mean intent.
Maybe he’d overreacted.
Or maybe he just felt jubilant and relieved he had escaped.
Well, he hadn’t exactly escaped yet. He wasn’t sure the Devil wouldn’t come back for him but, in a way, he was. He felt protected. He probably still shouldn’t go back home. His mom was probably already suspicious of him. He didn’t want her lording over him for the rest of the summer. Besides, he wanted to share this experience with someone and thought it would be more meaningful if he shared it with Crank and Whitney.
He took a deep breath and stood up.
He didn’t want to go back the way he had come so he continued in a circular pattern, winding up a few houses down from his own and then cutting along the edge of the woods, just far enough under cover so no one in their back yard or looking out their windows would notice him and grow suspicious. Blood continued to pound in his ears and when he reached the area behind his own house, he paused and looked at it. He’d never really seen it from this angle and he had one of those moments where looking at something that should have been really familiar seemed really foreign. From here he could see the fire crackling behind Chloe’s house. It had grown so small, he wondered if they were still there. He knew they had come after him but figured both of them would have gotten tired of looking for him fairly quickly. Maybe Crank had just left after that.
Or maybe something terrible had happened to them.
Maybe the Devil had come back that way.
Maybe he had killed both of them.
Only the Devil didn’t just kill. He sacrificed. The blood and skin of humans was used as something like currency. Something to make him even stronger.
He shook his head. Where did that train of thought come from?
He walked toward the fire. Mostly smoke now, he could smell it almost as much as see it. The moon overhead afforded more light than the fire.
He heard Whitney making a
sound and had a horrible vision of the Devil mawing her. He sped his pace, standing nearly on top of the fire after a couple of seconds.
Not the Devil.
Crank.
Whitney was on her back on the ground. Crank pumped away between her legs, his pale buttocks practically glowing in the night. Doug thought about shouting, stopping them. But what did it matter? Isn’t this what he knew would happen? He felt stupid for ever doubting his thoughts about them. He turned and walked back to his house. By this time his mom would probably be asleep in front of the TV anyway. He’d probably be able to sneak past her and go up to his room. He didn’t think about playing Redemption. The excitement he’d felt only moments before had dissipated entirely. Replaced with... what?
Nothing.
He knew his faith had waned over the past week. Maybe it had been happening longer than that.
He’d renew it. He’d throw himself into the Church even moreso. He’d begin school in the fall. If there wasn’t already a campus program, he’d start one. He’d meet other people like himself. People who didn’t lie to their best friends. People who wanted to do something besides drink and rut. People who were not Crank.
Thirty-seven
Whitney didn’t think it would take as long as it did. Crank kept thrusting and thrusting. He would pull out, position her how he wanted, jerk himself off a little bit, and then enter her again. He tried to put it in her ass at one point and she hissed, “No.” Most of her clothes were still on and they were soaked with sweat. There had been a fleeting moment of pleasure but that had given way to pain. She was pretty sure he was rubbing her raw. The pain blossomed and then became a less stinging dullness. After what felt like two hours, Crank pulled out, yanked the condom off, and grabbed her by the back of her head.
Did he want her to put him in her mouth? She shook her head. Kept her mouth closed. He began jerking himself off, the other hand keeping her head held in place. He quickly exploded onto her face. She had never even seen a porno before so this took her by surprise. She lurched away, almost went into the fire and wiped her sleeve across her face.
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