The Boy Who Killed Demons: A Novel

by Dave Zeltserman

  “No. I haven’t been in any contact with Gibson or any of his co-conspirators.”

  “What do you mean co-conspirators? What makes you think others were involved?”

  “It’s something I know. Just like I know that they sewed those children’s eyes shut and their mouths almost completely shut, and that they carved symbols into the children’s torsos and skulls.”

  “Uh uh, kid. I’m not playing this game. You give me your name now. And a phone number for something that’s not a disposable cell.”

  “I’m not doing that, but I can meet you in New York tomorrow.”

  There was a long moment of silence from Thomase, then, “Where?”

  “Somewhere near Penn Station. I need to take the train to New York, so I won’t be able to get there until one.”

  There was another long hesitation before he said okay, and gave me an address for a diner near Penn Station, along with his private cell phone number.

  “You’ll be there at one thirty?”

  “I’ll try. As long as the train’s not late.”

  “You know the names of any of Gibson’s co-conspirators?” he asked, not quite believing me, but not totally discounting me either.

  “No, but there had to be others involved.”

  “Had to be, huh? You know that for a fact? How do you know that?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. But I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  I hung up and also turned off the disposable phone. I had ridden my bike several miles away from my home before I called up that second time. I didn’t know whether the police could trace someone’s location from a disposable phone, but I didn’t want to take the chance that they could.

  Last night I told my dad I would be leaving early in the morning to go to the Boston Public Library to do research for school. Even though I was suspended, I was still supposed to be keeping up with my school work. Telling him that short-circuited any grief my parents might’ve otherwise given me when I left the house this morning at seven. Buried in my backpack was a folder I planned to give to Detective Joe Thomase that I had spent hours preparing last night. My hopes were that that folder would keep me from getting arrested, but I ended up miscalculating badly.

  I had a difficult time during those three and a half hours while I rode the Acela train from South Station in Boston to New York. I had brought along some Manga graphic novels to keep me occupied, but I couldn’t concentrate on them as my mind kept drifting to what was going to happen later. I knew I was walking right into the lion’s den. If Joe Thomase arrested me, I was done. The demons would find out about it, and they’d know my reason for looking into Clifton Gibson; because I’m the one who had been trading messages with Vincent Gilman, aka Virgil. There was a chance Thomase would want to arrest me, and as it turned out, a better chance than I had thought. It would all come down to whether he believed me or whether he thought I knew what I did because I was somehow connected to Gibson. Worrying about that made it difficult to sit still. Every noise had me jumping in my seat, and by the time the train arrived at Penn Station, my neck and shoulders were hurting from all the tension that had built up inside them.

  I found the diner where Thomase wanted to meet me without any problem. He was sitting facing the front door. He looked older than he did from the pictures I had seen of him; his hair speckled with gray and thick lines now carved into his face. The Clifton Gibson case must have aged him. As soon as I stepped into the diner, he knew I was the one he was waiting for, and he crooked his index finger at me to signal me over. My heart leapt into my throat as I thought again about the consequences, and for a moment I almost turned and ran, but instead I forced myself to continue to his table, and took the empty seat across from him. He gave me a long hard stare, frowning as he sized me up.

  “Kid,” he said in that hoarse smoker’s voice, “you could be in a lot of trouble. You better tell me right now how you knew the things you did.”

  “From a book.”

  “From a book?” Thomase arched his right eyebrow quizzically and his lips twisted into a what-kind-of-bullshit-is-this grimace. “What do you mean from a book? Are you telling me that Gibson put something out? Where, on the Internet?”

  “No, nothing like that. The book I’m talking about was written in the seventeenth century. Let me show you.”

  I took out of my backpack the folder that I had prepared for him. It was thick, stuffed with hundreds of sheets of paper—copies of all of the pages of L’Occulto Illuminato, as well as a printout of my translation so far and the information I had compiled on Ginny Cataldo, Trey Wilkerson, and the other missing children. Thomase frowned as he thumbed through the stack of paper.

  “What am I looking at?” he demanded, his grimace turning into a scowl. “It looks like some kind of foreign language.”

  “The book I was talking about. It’s called L’Occulto Illuminato. Probably only a few dozen people alive have ever heard of it, and most of those believe it’s only a myth. I thought so too until a few weeks ago when someone emailed me photographed images of the book cover and all the pages you’re looking at. The book is written in Italian, an archaic form of it. I’ve also included what I’ve been able to translate so far. If you look at the last ten pages of my translation, you can see what I’ve circled in red.”

  Thomase was thumbing through the pages, his grimace growing more severe. He still hadn’t gotten to my translation and was looking at the pages photographed from L’Occulto Illuminato.

  “Who emailed you this?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It was done anonymously.”

  Thomase gave me a look as if he knew I was full of shit, but then was back to thumbing through what I had given him.

  “Why would someone email you this?” he asked.

  “Because of private chat rooms where I talked with other occult historians about how much I wanted to track down this book.”

  From the dubious look on Thomase’s face, I doubted he believed me, but he kept thumbing through the pages in the folder until he reached my translation.

  “You know Italian?” he asked.

  “I took a crash course in it once I had those pages emailed to me. And a lot of the language used is archaic. For a good number of the words, I had to search for the Latin roots and still had to guess at their meaning.”

  Thomase grunted in response to that. He skimmed through the first two pages of my translation, his expression growing more dubious, then he skipped to the last ten pages so he could see what I had circled in red ink. As he read about the rituals these demons perform on the abducted children, his skin color grayed. After that he went back and more carefully read my translation from start to finish. When he was done he put the pages down on the table. He looked spooked.

  “So he had accomplices,” Thomase murmured. He wasn’t really looking at me, at least not directly. I think at that moment he had forgotten I was there, and had murmured that to himself.

  “That’s right,” I said. “According to L’Occulto Illuminato nine of them are needed to perform their rituals so that they can open the gates to hell. Clifton Gibson wouldn’t have been doing it alone.”

  That snapped Thomase’s attention back to me. His expression hardened as he stared at me. “Kid.” he said, “there’s no more joking around on this. I need your name and address now.”

  That stunned me. “Why?” I asked.

  “Why?” He shook his head. “A hoax is being perpetrated on you, kid. That book is a fake. Whoever put it together knew what Gibson did to those children. I don’t know why they’d go to all the trouble they did faking this so-called Occulto book and emailing you what they did, but that’s what happened, and we need to have our computer forensics people examine your email.”

  Again, this stunned me. I hadn’t anticipated this response from him, and found myself stammering as I told him that’s not what it was.

  “I lied before,” I told him, desperately. “The book’s real. I didn’t want t
o admit I have a copy. I didn’t want to have to bring it here. It’s too rare and important to risk losing it by bringing it with me, but it’s real. And what’s in those pages I gave you are real.”

  “Kid—”

  “No, it is. I know it is. And it’s not a cult, if that’s what you’re thinking. They’re demons. They really are. Clifton Gibson is a demon, and there are other demons involved. Take a DNA sample from him. You’ll see.”

  Thomase wasn’t buying it. I could tell he believed I was sincere in what I was saying, but from the humoring look he gave me he wasn’t buying one word of what I was telling him.

  “I see demons,” I went on, talking fast and furiously as I tried to get out the whole story before he arrested me. “I do, I really do. They look exactly the way they’re described early on in L’Occulto Illuminato, and there are some illustrations that show them. I came to New York when Clifton Gibson’s trial was going on and I was able to get into the courtroom. He’s a demon. And there were other demons in the courtroom, too. Two others who must’ve been part of Gibson’s demon coven, or whatever a group of demons is called.”

  Thomase was losing patience with me. He felt sorry for me—I could tell—but he was probably convinced I was mentally unstable, and he was losing patience fast.

  “I bet he didn’t have fingerprints,” I said.

  That struck a minor chord with Thomase. “You somehow found out about that, huh?” he said. “Look, kid, it doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes they use acid to get rid of their fingerprints. Gibson isn’t the first pervert to wipe off his prints with a chemical agent.” He glanced at his watch and let out an impatient sigh. “About time we get going, okay, kid?”

  “Don’t you understand why I’m doing this? It’s not just so you can find the others involved with Gibson, but because they’re doing it all over again in Boston! Look at the other pages I included in the folder, the ones about the almost four-year-old children who’ve been abducted. By the time they’re done there are going to be thirty-nine abducted, and these demons are going to be doing the same horrible things to these children as the ones you found in Brooklyn. If you send police to my home, the demons are going to know that I know about them. And nobody will be left to stop them.”

  Thomase gave me this sad, almost exhausted look and started to push himself to his feet.

  “I know you believe all this, son, probably why they chose you to send this bullshit to—“

  “What about dogs? Were you able to see the way dogs react to Gibson?”

  That slowed Thomase down. He must’ve seen something. Maybe they brought police dogs to that warehouse in Brooklyn. Whatever he saw, this slowed him down.

  A waitress at that moment was walking past Thomase carrying a full tray of food. I wasn’t going to let Thomase bring me to his precinct and send cops to my home. I’d be dead if either of those happened, especially with Hanley watching my house, so I used the opportunity that presented itself to me. I pushed this white-haired grandmotherly-looking waitress into Thomase. The tray of food went all over him, and the waitress knocked him into another table, then the two of them fell onto the floor. The whole thing made quite a racket and drowned out most of Thomase’s swearing. I didn’t stick around to hear too much of it as I ran out of there as fast as I could. If anyone ran after me, I had no idea. I kept running and didn’t stop until I was six blocks away.

  Even though I had bought a round-trip train ticket, I didn’t want to risk going back to Penn Station. Thomase knew I had taken the train to New York, and I couldn’t take the chance of him sending cops there to look for me. So I threw away the return ticket and made my way to Kennedy Airport in Queens. It would be risky enough flying home since I just about told him I had come up from Boston and he could be sending cops to Kennedy, too, but I didn’t see what choice I had other than trying to hitchhike home.

  If Thomase had sent cops to the airport, I didn’t see them. I only had to wait fifteen minutes from the time I bought my ticket for the three o’clock shuttle to when I was allowed to board—and I did this while standing near the gate for a flight heading for Miami—but I was still sweating like crazy. After I got on the plane, my heart pounded like a drum as I waited for cops to come after me, but none did. Even after the plane took off, I was still waiting for someone to arrest me, at least for the first five minutes or so. I was lucky all the way around, especially that I had brought enough money to buy the plane ticket, since I wasn’t expecting to have to. I was home well before my parents, so even that worked out.

  Now for the second significant event. When I got home I checked the message board where I’d earlier traded messages with Virgil. I don’t know why I did that—just something nagging at me to check it once more—and sure enough, there was a new message from Virgil. Except it wasn’t from Virgil since Vincent Gilman was dead; instead, it came from a demon trying to smoke me out. The message had this fake Virgil telling me that he was able to verify the demon I had sent him, and he gave me a name and an address for a demon for me to verify in return. It was a trap. If I went anywhere near that address, I’d be dead. But it showed that the demons forced Gilman to tell them about the message board before they killed him. It also showed that they were getting anxious to hunt down whoever Gilman had been corresponding with—namely, me. Something big was happening soon; something like opening the gates to hell, and they didn’t want to risk some unknown demon spotter screwing things up for them.

  Finally, the most significant event. It’s got to be a whopper to top those two, right? Well, it’s more subtle, and anyone reading this might disagree with me on how significant it is, but to me, it is. When I was at Kennedy Airport, before I headed to my gate, I used a payphone to call the number that Chaske had given me. A demon answered. It wasn’t Devin but a different one. Even though their voices are all guttural hisses and snarls, I can still tell demons apart by their voices. I disguised my voice as best I could and mumbled something about a wrong number before hanging up. Even though I knew there had to be a network of these demons, this confirmed it for me. I also knew in my gut that this was the central point for this demon network; that through this demon I could find all the others in the Boston area. And I had the address. After I’d gotten the number from Chaske, I was able to perform a reverse phone number lookup through the Internet and get the address. It was for a single family home in Lynn. These demons might be clever, but they’re not very tech savvy—at least they don’t realize the kinds of things you can find on the Internet.

  Right now I’m both excited and really antsy. Logically, I know there’s no way for Thomase to track me down to Newton—maybe he knows I took the train from Boston, but it’s a large area here. I don’t think he took a picture of me, so worst case, he might be able to commission a police sketch. And would he really go through all this trouble to hunt me down over a closed case? Still, even though it’s crazy to worry about Thomase, I can’t help it. If he shows up at my home, it’s over. But then again, maybe he won’t even try looking for me. I think something clicked with him when I brought up the dogs. He must’ve seen something. Maybe he’s looking at the pages from L’Occulto Illuminato in a different light—maybe he’ll try to get a DNA sample from Gibson. The demons might be able to disguise themselves so that only a few like me can recognize them, but how could they disguise the way their DNA is analyzed?

  But as I said, I’m also excited, and that’s because I know that demon in Lynn will lead me to all the others. I have enough proof now that L’Occulto Illuminato is on the level—it has been right so far about everything regarding these demons, even the rituals that they perform to open up hell. Now I have to hope it shows me how to kill them. I need to start killing demons.

  Wednesday, October 12th 2:30 PM

  I KNOW HOW TO KILL THEM. AT LEAST I DO IF L’OCCULTO Illuminato is right. Late Monday night I got to the section where Galeotti describes how to kill demons, and I’ve been translating like a fiend ever since. The good news: it’s not
as hard as I thought. The bad news: there’s one serious gotcha that I’m not sure how I’m going to get around. But before I get into the details, I have some other stuff to cover. One item in particular that could be a nuisance. Maybe much worse than that.

  First item. No sign of Thomase or any other cop looking for me. I’m pretty sure I’m in the clear. For the last two days I’ve been worried that a police sketch of me would show up on the news, but it hasn’t happened yet, and at this point I can’t see it happening. I’m sure it would be an uphill battle for Thomase to spend any of his department’s money hunting me down, and I’m also hoping that he’s now thinking L’Occulto Illuminato might be genuine and not some bizarre and elaborate hoax concocted by associates of Gibson, like he first thought. Maybe he’s even researching it and learning more about it. Worst case, he sends a police sketch of me to police departments in the Boston area, and that’s not going to do him any good. I look like too many other fifteen-year-olds, and there’s no picture of me on file at any police station. Any fingerprints he pulls from the folder I gave him aren’t going to do him any good either. Mine aren’t on file anywhere. When they booked me for possession of those psilocybin mushrooms, they didn’t fingerprint me. I don’t why they didn’t, but they didn’t. Maybe because I was a juvenile, or maybe because of my dad, but for whatever reason, they didn’t bother doing it. If they had, I’d be sweating bullets right now, because as careful as I might’ve been in handling that folder and all its pages, I still could’ve left prints.

  Second item. My dad has a hearing set with the school on Monday. He’s probably going to have me reinstated immediately afterwards since the school’s investigators haven’t been able to find any corroborating evidence that I’ve been dealing drugs. Also, he’s probably going to get the police charges dropped, since there’s no way they could prove the drugs weren’t planted in my locker. This is all unfortunate, because it means that my available time is quickly coming to an end. Now that I’m finally learning how to kill these demons, I wish this suspension would go on longer.