The Devil's Demeanor

by Hart, Jerry

  It flew a few feet away, but Mom wasn’t finished. She ran to the dog and started stomping on its head, over and over. Don saw its eyes pop out of his sockets as its skull caved in. Blood and brain matter covered Mom’s slippers and dress.

  She stood there a moment, looking down at the dead dog as she breathed heavily, then she turned and picked up a crying Ethan. He clung to her, his eyes shiny with tears.

  As she carried him to the house, those eyes of his never left Don.

  * * *

  That night, Don lay awake in his bed, staring at his wall. He never liked the design of his wallpaper: The repeating pattern had a boathouse on a dock, with a sailboat going past it. The boathouse had darkened windows, and the front door was open revealing total blackness within. He couldn’t help but always imagine a creature of unspeakable horror living in the shack, staring out at him. The wallpaper scared him more than the opening credits of Tales From the Darkside.

  At that moment, though, he imagined the dog that attacked his mother at his grandparents’ house all those years ago. He didn’t know exactly what that dog had looked like, but after having one nightmare about the cute bulldog ripping the head off a rabbit, he used it as a placeholder.

  As he lay there, staring at the wallpaper, he thought about what had happened hours earlier; about how he let the German Shepard attack his little brother, secretly hoping the dog would kill him. He knew he should be disgusted about feeling that way, but he didn’t.

  Mom had taken Ethan to the hospital while Adrian got rid of the dog.

  Don was at the age where he was afraid to sleep with the door closed, but would soon be afraid to sleep with it open. Now it was open, and he could see the bathroom directly across the hall. His mom’s room was on the right and Ethan’s room on the left.

  Poor, poor Ethan. He had cried for what seemed like hours at the hospital. The doctor said he was fine, but Ethan didn’t sound fine. His crying seemed to come from fear rather than pain, and the look he had given Don as his mother was carrying him away....

  Don couldn’t get the look out of his mind. Through those watery eyes, Don could see the words Why didn’t you protect me, Big Brother? It was as if the real Ethan had come to the surface. He’d seemed like a real child for the first time in his life.

  The sound of a door slowly opening drew Don out of his troubling thoughts. He already knew whose door it was. He knew if he looked out his own open door, he would see his brother standing there. He wanted to jump from his bed and close the door, but he felt he would never make it in time. If anything, Ethan was probably already in the room, hiding in the shadows.

  He didn’t care. He leapt from the bed and darted into the hallway, past Mom’s room. He didn’t look to see if Ethan was there, on the left, standing in front of his own door. He didn’t have to look. He could sense his younger brother’s presence, his eyes no longer leaking tears.

  Don ran down the impossibly long hallway, into the playroom. He wanted to hide in the toy box in the corner, but it seemed like such an obvious place. Instead, he chose a couch on the left of the room and hid under it.

  Hide and seek.

  Don tried not to breathe hard as he hid under the couch. A few toys had migrated from the box and into his hiding place at some point. There was a ViewMaster, a baseball, and a pair of gray plastic handcuffs. A few ViewMaster reels were littered all over the tile floor, and he focused on them to calm his racing heart.

  Ethan was mad. He wanted revenge, or rather, the thing sharing Ethan’s body did. Don knew in his heart that was what this was about.

  It was about fear. It was about helplessness. Ethan wanted Don to be afraid. Boy, it was working.

  Don didn’t know how long he’d been under the couch, but his knees and elbows were cramping. He wanted to move, but he heard a raspy noise coming from the dark dining room.

  It sounded like breathing.

  Ethan was in there, and he knew Don was in the playroom. Don waited a few more minutes, then the breathing stopped. He didn’t know if that was good or bad. He quickly looked out one of the large windows on the other side of the room and saw the moon, full and bright in the sky. Suddenly the werewolf theory came back to him.

  Had Mom been bitten by a werewolf or a demon in a dog’s body? Couldn’t a werewolf and a demon dog be the same thing? Don thought so.

  Soon he fell asleep staring at the moon.

  * * *

  “Found him!” a voice shouted. Don snapped awake and started screaming. He thought it was Ethan. He was so caught up in fear he didn’t realize the sun was up.

  The playroom was bright and safe-looking.

  Once he saw this, he realized someone was kneeling in front of him. It wasn’t Ethan, nor was it his mother. It was Adrian, and he was smiling.

  “What are you doing down here, little man?” he asked.

  Don didn’t know how to answer, so he didn’t. He crawled from under the couch, knowing it wouldn’t make for a very good hiding place anymore. Mom ran into the playroom, still wearing her nightgown. She looked relieved as she hugged Don and kissed his cheek.

  “What were you doing in here?” she asked him. “Do you have any idea how scared I was when I went into your room and you weren’t there?”

  Don almost had trouble believing she actually cared. Would the evil spirit inside her allow her to care about anyone or anything? Was it lying dormant inside her? Was it in her at all?

  Perhaps Don was wrong about the curse altogether. Maybe a regular dog had bitten Mom after all. Thinking of that made him feel foolish and relieved at the same time.

  Those feelings went away instantly when he saw Ethan curled up under the dining table. He’d slept there all night!

  Mom followed Don’s gaze and said, “You and your brother will be the death of me. We found him just before we found you. Were you two playing a game or something?”

  Or something, Don thought.

  * * *

  Don wanted to spend as much time away from his brother as he could over the weekend, so he and Nick walked through their neighborhood, which consisted of very long streets and very steep hills.

  School was almost over for the summer. Mom told Don not only would he spend his vacation with Dad, but also with Uncle Roland. Don was excited about this news; he liked his uncle and cousin, and he loved running around their big house and yard.

  Don decided to stay out of the basement this time, though.

  Stay away from the big white pipes, he added in his head.

  He was so wrapped up in his thoughts he didn’t realize he and Nick were close to their destination: Clark’s house.

  Clark Greg was Don and Nick’s home-schooled friend who lived in the middle of their cozy neighborhood, where the hills were abundant. As they approached Clark’s home, Don marveled at the blue, two-story house resting at the bottom of one such hill. Across the street was a dirt wall the kids in the neighborhood liked to climb on occasion. Don had never climbed it himself and figured he probably should try it before heading to Connecticut to prepare for the rock wall in front of Dad’s apartment.

  “Hey, guys!” said Clark from his bedroom window on the second floor. “I’ll be right down. Barbara will let you in.”

  Barbara was Clark’s nanny and was very nice. She opened the front door for Don and Nick and offered her kind smile. Nick often joked she was the Gregs’ slave because she was black and did all the cooking and cleaning. When Don asked his mom about it, she said Nick was being silly and slavery didn’t exist anymore.

  As Don and Nick entered the house, Clark came running down the stairs between the kitchen and a parlor right next to the foyer. Clark had short brown hair that was bowl-cut and goofy, with thick-rimmed glasses. His face was covered in brown freckles.

  “Ready to get your asses kicked at Rampage?” he asked, his voice squeaky.

  “Watch your mouth, little mister,” said Barbara, though she had long since grown used to Clark’s potty mouth. Don felt sorry for her, having
to put up with the little brat.

  Don and Nick only hung out with him because he had a Nintendo. Clark was nine, same as them, but he sometimes acted much younger. Hanging out with him beat staying at home with Ethan, though.

  Barbara and the kids went down into the low-lit parlor where the TV and Nintendo were hooked up. Barbara settled into a recliner and started knitting. Don, Clark and Nick took to destroying buildings with their monstrous avatars. After a while, they switched to a fighting game. Clark beat Don without much effort, but when Nick took the controls, Clark found a challenge.

  It was around that time that Don got a strange feeling. His skin started tingling.

  Nick proceeded to beat Clark’s ass five times in a row, and it was pretty clear Clark didn’t like that one bit. His face turned red. After one particularly brutal match, he jumped to his feet and threw the controller down.

  “You cheating son of a bitch!” he shouted.

  “Clark!” Barbara scolded, setting her knitting down on her lap. “Watch your language.”

  “Shut up, you stupid bitch!”

  From her shocked expression, it was obvious she had never seen him this angry. He rounded on Nick and Don again.

  “Get out of my fucking house!”

  “Gladly,” Nick said calmly and stood up.

  “I’m sorry about him,” Barbara said as she walked them to the front door. She seemed embarrassed by the event that had just taken place.

  Clark stormed up the stairs to his room, swearing out loud. Once Nick and Don walked up to the street, Clark started screaming at them again from his window.

  “You’re a cheating sack of shit!”

  “Whatever!” Nick shouted back, but not angrily. Then he said to Don, “Home-schooled kids are the craziest.”

  Don nodded, figuring Clark could give Ethan a run for his money. As they walked away, Don noticed the strange feeling was fading. He wasn’t sure why it occurred in the first place, but he was glad it was over.

  * * *

  In an unseasonably chilly May, Mrs. Harris told Mom that Don could come over after school to play with Monica. Mom said that would be fine. Don had had a nasty run-in with the grumpy bus driver again one day when he failed to get off the bus quickly enough. It hadn’t been Don’s fault, though. He had been sitting in the back, and when the bus stopped at his street, he got up immediately but couldn’t make it past the kids who had been standing in the aisle.

  When he finally did get to the front, the driver had closed the door and started driving off. Don asked him to stop, prompting the old man to go into a tirade, angrily telling Don to be faster next time, asking him if he was too stupid to recognize his own stop.

  Don walked down the street to the Harris’ home in tears. Along the way, Monica tried to console him. When he got to the house, he sat in front of the fireplace, staring at the flames. He thought about how some people were so mean. What caused them to go into such terrible moods? Were they cursed, too? First Clark, then the bus driver. Don’s skin had tingled again just before the bus driver started yelling.

  Don didn’t know what was normal behavior anymore. Should he be mean, too? It seemed only fair to yell at people who yelled at him.

  He was so lost in his thoughts and the flickering flames of the fireplace he didn’t realize his mom was at the front door.

  “He’s been sitting in front of the fireplace for hours,” he heard Mrs. Harris tell her. “He hasn’t said a word or moved since he got here.”

  She sounded more amused than worried.

  “He likes staring at bright things,” Mom replied. Don didn’t believe that to be true, but didn’t argue. He was lost in the flickering flames again.

  He liked looking at fire. The flames looked like they were reaching out toward him.

  * * *

  Mom and Adrian drove the kids to Uncle Roland’s house during the first week of June, where they were to spend the whole month. Dad was going to pick them up in July, where they would spend the rest of the summer in Connecticut. Don should have known the visit would be bad.

  The first bad thing to happen occurred when he, Adrian, Ryan and Uncle Roland were playing Frisbee in the backyard. Adrian accidentally hit Don in the nose with the Frisbee, causing a massive nosebleed.

  The next thing happened a day later when Don was feeding his uncle’s Saint Bernard, Belvedere. Some of the food had spilled onto the floor of the garage, next to the bowl, and when Don tried to scoop it back in, Belvedere turned and nipped the boy’s right cheek with his teeth.

  Don stood there for a moment in stunned disbelief, and then started crying. Uncle Roland came running into the garage to see the boy’s face bleeding. The dog had gone back to eating as if nothing had happened. During both incidents, Don was certain Ethan had been nearby.

  The curse.

  Did Ethan have some ability to make bad things happen? The boy was fast approaching four years of age. There was no telling what he would be capable of as he matured.

  Don was grateful when Dad showed up to take them to Connecticut, but their time up there hadn’t been very eventful. The boys spent half of their days alone while Dad and Yvonne worked. All there was to do for the whole month was watch TV.

  Don wanted to go home.

  * * *

  Fall of ’91 would be the Scott family’s last in Don’s childhood home. Don spent it playing with fire.

  In August Mom told the boys she was selling the house. Don didn’t know what to say to that, but he knew he wasn’t happy. In September, he discovered the gas can in the shed in the backyard; the can they used to fill the lawnmower.

  He started simple, filling a plastic garbage-can lid with gasoline and lighting it on fire. This was done behind a sloping four-foot brick wall that connected to the front porch. There was a tiny court between this wall and the front of the house, where he did his experiments, and soon Nick and Monica started coming over to watch.

  Don eventually got bored with the lid and started burning his toys, including his Batman action figures, and even Ethan’s tricycle, which Don had the good sense to dig a pit for before lighting it up.

  His “fire phase” came to an abrupt halt when, one day, Adrian came over unexpectedly and caught the children playing with what they shouldn’t be playing with. Instead of getting mad, Adrian simply spoke with Don, telling him fire was dangerous and he shouldn’t be playing with it. Don agreed to stop. He liked Adrian.

  He did not, however, care for Yvonne, who had been a total bitch to him and Ethan during their stay in Connecticut that July. She’d constantly yelled at them, telling them to do this and that.

  No, Don Scott didn’t care for her one bit, and his skin hadn’t tingled before her tirades. She seemed naturally angry.

  * * *

  Don tried to get as much out of his current house as he could before the family moved by having get-togethers in the bright, happy playroom. It was depressing knowing he was going to be leaving all of this behind soon, but Mom assured him they wouldn’t be moving far.

  She had been looking for a cheaper house in the area and promised Don he and Nick would still be able to hang out every week. Don was grateful, and decided one day in October to tell Nick about Ethan.

  They were hanging out in Nick’s room, reading comic books.

  “I think my brother is evil,” Don admitted. “I mean really evil.”

  He waited for Nick to respond. Nick only looked at him over the top of his Superman comic.

  “While my mom was still pregnant with Ethan, she was bitten by a dog at my grandparents’ house. Grandpa said the dog was probably possessed by an evil spirit, and the spirit could have been passed on to her...and Ethan.”

  Nick only stared at him, not saying anything. Then, finally, he said, “That’s weird,” and then went back to his comic book.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Nick sighed before setting the comic down on his bed. “I think I do. Your brother gives me the creeps. I feel weird whenever he
’s around.”

  Don nodded; he completely understood what his friend was talking about.

  “You know,” Nick went on, “he told me he remembers his own birth. Did he ever tell you that?”

  Don’s eyes grew wide. “No. Did he really say that?”

  “Yep. Nobody remembers being born. Right?”

  “Right.” But Don didn’t doubt Ethan remembered. “He didn’t cry when he was born,” he told Nick. “And he always seems like he’s older than he is.”

  “Maybe it’s the evil spirit,” Nick offered. He almost sounded bored with the conversation now.

  Don told him about the tingling skin.

  “Do you think you can sense when someone gets mad?” Nick asked.

  “I don’t know,” Don admitted. “I almost feel like I’m the one causing them to get mad. I mean, really mad.”

  “What are you going to do about it?”

  Don didn’t know if there was anything he could do. At least, not actively.

  * * *

  Don also played with Monica as much as he could before the move because he wasn’t sure how often he would see afterward. The two had grown to like each other very much, often building Lego hospitals in the playroom after school.

  The following year was definitely going to be one of change.

  Unlike Nick, Monica was allowed to play during the week. One day, while hanging on the Harris’ porch, a freak thunderstorm materialized, working its way from the end of the street to the other. Don couldn’t believe his eyes as he watched the rain racing toward them.

  It literally slammed them against the front of the house. The children screamed in half terror, half delight, until Mrs. Harris came out and angrily shouted at them to get into the house. Clearly, screaming like you’re being murdered was not something she wanted to hear.

  On days when the weather wasn’t awful, all of the kids on the street played Steal the Bacon in the court. One time, Don got kicked in the mouth after tripping as he tried to tag Monica, who had “stolen the bacon.” Though it hurt, and his lip had bled, he didn’t cry or complain. It took every ounce of his endurance to keep it together; he wanted to look tough in front of her.