by J. S. Bailey
Bobby made some quick calculations. Upon arriving he’d counted four other cars in the lot. Undoubtedly one belonged to Vern, one to the man sitting at the counter, and two to the other people he’d glimpsed sitting in booths. Unless one or more of them had carpooled with someone, there shouldn’t have been anyone else in the building, so the actions he was about to take should go unnoticed.
Bobby opened the first door on the left and poked his head into a kitchen smelling strongly of grease. Stainless steel counters and appliances stared back at him, and a skinny guy in a flannel shirt stood at the grill flipping a solitary burger patty—someone had carpooled after all.
Strike one.
The second door on the left led into a dark storage room. He flicked on a light and saw shelves of cleaning supplies, boxes of napkins, unopened boxes of dishes, and dishcloths. A card table and metal folding chair sat against one wall. Above them hung a poster of a well-muscled nude woman riding a Harley.
Blushing like the ten-year-old that Vern had taken him to be, Bobby quietly switched off the light and backed out of the room.
He hurried into the men’s room and did his business, then returned to the counter. “Do you have Sprite?” he asked.
“A teetotaler in a bar,” said the man still nursing his pretzels. “Now I’ve seen everything.”
When Bobby had his Sprite in hand and his own plate of pretzels and cheese dip a minute later (he was pleased to note that his drink was free of burnt matches), he gravitated toward one of the booths, where a man in his mid-twenties sat by himself with his head in his hands. The beer glass sitting in front of him had made a pool of condensation on the cardboard coaster, yet the man had only consumed half of it.
The black aura intensified as he drew closer to him, and though Bobby wanted to get out of there before he fainted or soiled himself from fright, a strange compulsion made him stay.
“Um, excuse me,” he said to the man in a voice that shook too much. “Do you mind if I sit here?”
The man jerked his head up. He had a narrow face and pointed chin, hair so blond it looked white, and eyes a milky shade of blue. “What? No, I don’t mind. I was just sitting here thinking.”
Gingerly, Bobby slid into the opposite side of the booth. He would have to play this cool.
He held up Mystery Woman’s picture. “Have you ever seen this woman before?”
Pale eyes moved back and forth as they scanned the image. “Yes.”
“Here?”
“Where else?”
“Who’s the man who was with her? You?”
A soft laugh. “No, but I watched them.”
Bobby’s heart beat faster. “What were they doing?”
“Drinking. Talking. Not much else to do here, is there?” A wicked glint shined in the man’s eyes, but it vanished as soon as it had appeared.
“Can you tell me exactly what the guy looked like?”
“He smiled a lot. Average build. His shoulders slouched a bit. He comes here all the time but I don’t know his name.”
Before Bobby could formulate another question, his surroundings vanished and he was instantly transported to the hallway at his old high school, four years earlier.
He was inside a memory—one he had no desire to remember.
Greg Yates, a classmate he despised, had covered the combination lock on Bobby’s locker with Vaseline not for the first time that week, and now Bobby was waiting for him with some tricks of his own in mind.
Greg appeared around the corner, swaggering like he owned the hallway. He’d popped the collar on his polo shirt. Bobby thought he looked like an idiot.
Bobby was taller than Greg, but since Greg participated in several school sports his bulk greatly exceeded Bobby’s.
“Well if it isn’t Knobby Bobby,” Greg said, coming to a stop. “How’s your day been, buddy?”
Without preamble, Bobby removed his hand from behind his back and smeared a thick glob of Vaseline right down Greg’s face.
The vision ended, and Bobby was back in the booth sitting across from the blond man, who was staring at him with something like fear in his eyes.
Get out of here, a cruel voice hissed in Bobby’s ear. You’re not good enough to do what you think you can.
“Is there anything else you’d like to ask?” the possessed man asked, his tone oddly polite.
“Um, yeah.” Bobby shivered. “How do you feel right now?” He threw a glance behind him and was pleased to see that both Vern and the pretzel eater had returned their attention to the baseball game and resumed their commentary on the players involved. The only other patron in the bar sat in a booth on the other side of the room flipping through a magazine.
With luck, the music blaring from the speakers in the ceiling would mask everything he planned on saying.
The blond man’s attitude shifted faster than Bobby could count to zero. His lip curled, and his hands tightened into fists. “What does it matter?” he snarled. “I can do whatever I like and I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.”
Bobby considered leaving before he accidentally caused a scene but his rear had welded itself to the vinyl bench. “I—I know you’ve been going through some kind of trouble. I know some people who might be able to help you.”
A spark of interest lit up the man’s face. “What do you—”
The bar vanished again.
This time Bobby found himself standing at the edge of the fishing pond at Smithfield Park back in his Ohio hometown, minding his own business as he skipped rocks across the surface of the water to see how far they would go before sinking into the murk. The park was only a few blocks from his house, so he’d come here alone, as he often did.
He was twelve years old.
As he picked up another flat rock and positioned it in his hand so it would hit the water at just the right angle, footsteps came up behind him and stopped a few feet away.
He knew who it was without turning to look. “What do you want?” he asked as he gripped the rock tighter in his hand.
Eleven-year-old Rory Wells’s voice consisted of a high-pitched whine that always made Bobby want to smash something, preferably Rory Wells. “I heard that you and Joel Fontenot are a couple of queers.”
Bobby whirled around and glowered at the kid, who was four inches shorter than him and weighed about as much as a bag of potatoes. “Says who?”
“Says everyone. You two go everywhere together. I betcha want to get married someday and adopt a bunch of queer babies, too.”
Joel’s family had recently moved to the area from New Orleans. He and Bobby had discovered a mutual interest in music and scary stories, which Joel was happy to supply to him even though Bobby didn’t believe a single one.
“It takes one to know one,” Bobby said.
Rory crossed his arms. “What’s that mean?”
“If you think Joel and I are queer, then you must be, too.”
The kid’s face became the color of a beet. “Am not!”
“Are you sure? Because you look like a little queer. You probably still wet the bed, too.”
Rory’s small hands tightened into fists. “If you keep up like that I’m going to go tell my—”
Bobby didn’t let him finish. He lifted the rock and brought it down on Rory’s head.
Rory crumpled to the ground wailing like a dying cat, but Bobby wasn’t about to stop. He threw the rock aside, planted himself on Rory’s chest, and pounded him in the face until his eye turned purple and began to swell.
Bobby gave a sudden halt, his heart racing so fast he felt dizzy. What had he just done?
Rory was sobbing, and Bobby got off of him. “If you tell anyone about this,” Bobby said, hearing his voice tremble, “I’ll kill you. You hear that? My dad’s got a gun. Nothing’s going to stop me from putting it against your stupid head and pulling the trigger.”
In reality, he would never do such a thing—especially considering the fact that his father did not own a firearm of any kind.
He just knew he’d be in some serious crap if anyone found out he’d nearly beaten Rory into a pulp.
Blood flowed from Rory’s bottom lip as he nodded wordlessly. With a whimper, he got up and ran back in the direction of his house.
“—mean?” the blond man asked from the other side of the booth in The Pink Rooster.
Bobby returned to the present feeling ill at the memories the man’s tormentor forced him to recall.
He had never told another person about that day at the park. Bobby had often wondered what lies Rory imparted to his parents in order to explain his injuries, but he would never find out. The following year a drunk driver slammed into Rory’s side of the car when Mrs. Wells was taking him home from school. The driver got fourteen years in prison, Mrs. Wells got a coma, and Rory got a coffin and a nice headstone down in the graveyard at Holy Trinity Church.
Bobby stood, grabbing the wax paper that his pretzels nested in and twisting it into a parcel around them. “Never mind,” he said. “I think I should go.”
He rushed out of the bar without looking back.
Outside in his car, he leaned his head against the steering wheel. Tears ran down his cheeks, and every cell in his body burned with shame.
He’d often heard that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings could alter the air just enough to start a hurricane on the other side of the world. Time and time again over the years he wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t touched Rory, or if he’d simply stayed home from the park that day. If Rory hadn’t been hurt, life might have gone on differently enough that he and his mother would have altogether avoided the accident that killed him.
Which was probably a crazy thing to think, but Bobby hadn’t been able to help it.
It had taken Bobby ages to forget about Rory. In fact, he didn’t think Rory had crossed his mind at all since Bobby left Eleanor, Ohio behind and shaken the dust from his feet.
Until now. The thing afflicting the man in the bar had read Bobby’s mind like a book and held up a mirror to reflect the pages back at him.
“I’m not that person anymore,” Bobby said aloud. Then, “Rory, I’m sorry. If you can hear me, I’m sorry.”
Bobby fed himself a pretzel, started the car, and pulled out of the lot. He glanced in the mirror a few times to observe The Pink Rooster receding into the distance, wondering if he should have stayed with the possessed man and seen if there was anything he could do to help.
As he got back onto Interstate 5, he shivered. If just being near a demon could provoke such a reaction in him, what was going to happen the day he attempted to exorcise one?
He bumped up the radio to drown out his thoughts, but instead of getting lost in the melody blaring from the speakers, the faces of both Greg Yates and Rory Wells swam in the forefront of his mind as if demanding justice.
JACK DROVE through Hillsdale and then Autumn Ridge, trying to formulate a plan. Driving helped him think better than pacing back and forth across a room did. It let Jack see things he wouldn’t otherwise: buildings, streets, parks, people. He would form connections and come up with new ideas, but so far determining how he would arrange for the capture of so many people in the next week was proving even harder than he’d expected.
Troy wanted him to get five.
Where in the world would he find them?
And when did Troy become so demanding?
One problem with communities like Hillsdale and Autumn Ridge was that neither was large enough for a man in his position to fully blend in with the crowd. Luckily for him, Jack had been born with an ordinary face and grew into a man with an ordinary build, and he wasn’t into flashy attire, tattoos, or piercings that would proclaim who he was like a neon sign in a window. He guessed this was part of the reason he had yet to be apprehended for his part in Randy Bellison’s attempted murder: he was just too plain for people to remember him.
Yet arranging for five human beings to be abducted would draw attention to the most boring-looking man on the planet.
On the plus side, these towns weren’t the type of place where law enforcement would expect such an illicit industry to take root. The longer their network stayed below the radar, the better.
When Jack had finally tracked down Graham, he’d been delighted to learn that the two of them had more in common than some measly strands of DNA and a penchant for the illegal. Graham had gained people’s trust before murdering them, and Jack gained their trust before having one of his colleagues snatch them away. (On certain occasions Jack himself took care of said snatching. It all depended on the circumstances.)
But the central question remained: where would he find five easily-missed people during the next week? He would have to work quickly, but fast work tended to be sloppy. He couldn’t afford to be caught.
If only Trish were still here to help out.
Trish Gunson, his late colleague, had been a reluctant recruit. She’d desperately needed the money and had resorted to finding vulnerable people at her college to send the traffickers’ way.
Then she found out she had some lethal heart defect, and when Graham mentioned how much it would hurt Randy if a victim died during an exorcism, Jack happily donated Trish to his grandfather’s cause. She’d always annoyed him, anyway, even though she did help get things done.
Jack had no desire to hang out at the college Trish attended. For one, he wasn’t a student; and secondly, few people would be in class this time of year.
Back to square one.
He supposed he could drive into one of the seedier sections of town to see if any troubled girls—or boys—were looking for work. He might be able to get one or two that way.
But not five, and not so soon. Because someone in that seedy part of town would notice if five of their neighbors disappeared all at once, and if they were feeling extra ambitious, they might report it to the police.
As Jack turned down another street, he caught sight of colorful, fluttering banners announcing a summer festival that would take place in a couple of days. He tapped lightly on the brake and leaned over to peer out the passenger side window so he could see them better.
10th ANNUAL AUTUMN RIDGE SUMMERPALOOZA!!! one banner proclaimed in glaring red and orange letters. RIDES! GAMES! FOOD! LIVE MUSIC! FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY! FREE ADMISSION!
Hmm.
Jack checked his mirrors and threw the car into reverse when he saw the coast was clear, then pulled into the park.
The parking lot was empty save for some overflowing recycling bins. The park occupied maybe twelve acres of land, half of which was wooded. A patchy field containing a baseball diamond sat between the woods and the parking lot. No rides or booths had been set up yet.
He placed his chin on his hand. He’d been to enough fairs and town festivals to know that the promise of free entertainment often brought the dregs of society crawling out of the woodwork like a bunch of hungry roaches. Could he really pull off what Troy wanted him to do at an event like this? There would probably be security on hand.
And lots and lots of eyewitnesses.
Jack got out of the car and slammed the door, hearing its lonely echo against the adjacent houses and trees. He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes.
A husky voice spoke inside his mind. You’re never going to be able to do what Troy wants. You know that, right?
There was the truth, plain as day. Jack could see it now. Troy wanted him gone, and instead of saying it outright, he’d heaped this impossible task upon him that was guaranteed to fail. It took time to become acquainted with someone well enough to know whether or not he or she would be missed, and it took time to gain trust—even Graham had known that when he found people on whom he would later conduct his twisted experiments.
Or maybe Troy really was offering Jack a promotion. It was too hard to read the man’s mind.
Having nothing better to do, Jack walked toward the baseball diamond. Shiny bleachers sat beside it and Jack planted himself on the bottom row to brood.
He could a
lways quit the business, go on the run from Troy, and find work elsewhere, but where would the fun in that be? Jack grew bored easily. He’d been that way for as long as he could remember. As a child his mother was often away at work, leaving Jack to fend for himself. Books, television, toys, and his sister had held little appeal for him, so he would hang out with the other children on their street. Jack had no emotional attachment to them. They’d simply been a means to an end.
One day when he was about ten, he and a younger neighbor boy named Tim had been walking down to a local ice cream shop when an unexpected voice in Jack’s head plainly said, “Make him eat dirt.”
An ordinary child would have been alarmed, but Jack welcomed the voice. He didn’t know why it wanted Tim to do such a thing, but it suddenly seemed like the best idea in the world.
“Hey Tim,” Jack said. “Have you ever eaten dirt?”
Tim halted on the sidewalk and turned. “Dirt?”
“You know, that brown stuff all over the ground.”
Tim’s cheeks had flushed. “Why would I do that?”
“The question is,” Jack said, “why wouldn’t you? It can’t hurt you. All it is is dead plants and stuff.” He grinned.
Tim looked uncertain. “It really can’t hurt me?”
“Nope. And let me tell you a little secret.” Jack leaned closer to Tim’s ear and whispered, “We can’t even grow up if we don’t eat dirt. We’ll just stay little kids forever and ever.”
“Are you sure?” Now Tim’s face had gone white, and the sight of it filled Jack with glee.
“I’m sure.”
“Have you ever eaten dirt, Jack?”
“Lots of times. It’s actually not that bad.” Jack pointed at a bare patch of earth next to the sidewalk. “Go ahead. Try some.”
“Okay.” Tim bent over, picked up a small clod, and held it tentatively in his fingers. “What if there’s bugs in it?”
“Who cares if there are? They add extra nutrition.” Nutrition was something Jack’s mother was always going on about, which probably meant it was supposed to be important.
Tim stared at the clod a moment longer, scrunched his eyes shut, and said, “Here goes!”