The Devil's Demeanor

by Hart, Jerry

  The quiet tent was closest, and the flaps were slightly open, but he passed it by in favor of the one with the activity. He started toward it, his hands and loins itching for the girl—and maybe even the boy—he’d seen venturing into the woods earlier. He had a feeling they were the ones that occupied this tent.

  Before Leper could get to the noisy tent, he was seized by the back of the neck and dragged away.

  The grip was so tight he thought his neck would snap at any moment. He couldn’t even yell as he watched the campsite grow farther away. He couldn’t see what had him, but he felt like he was in the jaws of a wild animal.

  No. It couldn’t be. He was the Texas Devil, the crazy murderer who stashed his victims in these woods. What had seized him now couldn’t be....

  Leper tried to look at his assailant but the grip on his neck prevented that. He reached back, expecting to feel a muzzle, a jaw, but found what felt like a hand. A cold, clammy hand. Was this thing like Bigfoot or something? Despite all these thoughts going through his head, Leper was more terrified than he’d ever been. He now knew what his own victims must have felt just before they died.

  Deep down, Leper knew he would not survive this night.

  The pressure on the back of his neck suddenly vanished. The old man was given the briefest glimpse of his attacker before he found himself plunging headfirst into a hole in the ground, a hole he normally would have dug himself, but he hadn’t dug this one. Dirt was thrown in to fill the gaps, preventing Leper from moving an inch. All he could do, while he waited to die from suffocation, was marvel at the impossibility of what he’d seen. And as he sat there on his head, the blood rushing to his brain, he laughed at the fact that he’d been buried upside down in a hole. It was his own modus operandi.

  Before he died, he thanked whatever god that the attacker hadn’t ripped his genitals off of him first.

  * * *

  Jordan woke to sunlight in his eyes. He was in the den, sitting on the comfy gray couch. Rays of light were filtering through the blinds at an angle, warming his face as he leaned his head back over the cushion. He noticed he had a blanket draped over him. He felt nice and comfortable there, though something nagged at the back of his mind.

  Then it hit him. He was supposed to be in a tent, in the woods behind his house.

  He threw the blanket off and looked through the blinds. What time was it? He looked at his watch and saw that it was a little after six in the morning. Why was he inside?

  He tried to remember.

  He’d been really cold last night, so he came back to the house to grab the blanket. He could remember nothing after that. He must have sat down for a moment and fallen asleep.

  He grinned and shook his head in embarrassment. He had some serious apologizing to do to the others when he returned to camp.

  * * *

  When he got there, he found Conner and Travis standing in front of their respective tents. “Where the fuck have you been?” Conner asked his cousin.

  “I went back to the house to get a blanket and fell asleep on the couch.”

  Conner grinned. “You little bitch. We slept out here in this cold forest while you lived it up at the house.”

  “It was your idea to camp out here and hunt for something that probably doesn’t exist.”

  For a moment, Conner said nothing. Then he laughed. “Touché,” he said.

  Jordan looked around the woods. “Where’s Erin?”

  Conner and Travis looked at each other, both suddenly nervous. Jordan was about to ask what was wrong when a scream pierced the air. The three boys followed the direction of the scream to the little stream they’d found yesterday. There they found Erin, staring at something. She had her hands to her mouth, as if trying to stifle any more screams.

  Travis ran up and held her as he too found what had frightened her.

  And then Conner saw it.

  Finally, Jordan saw the feet sticking out of the ground.

  * * *

  Police surrounded the area nearly an hour later. They questioned the kids about why they had been out here in the first place, whether they knew the victim (Mr. Leper) and if they had seen or heard anything strange last night. Jordan couldn’t tell if he and his friends were considered suspects, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they had been.

  Jordan told the police that he had slept at his house. He listened in on the others’ interrogations as well: Conner and Travis had slept in their tents; Erin, however, said she’d slept in Travis’s car. Jordan couldn’t help but find that curious. Erin went on to explain that she and her boyfriend had a fight and that she went to Jordan’s house, but no one was home.

  The cops then returned to Jordan, who told them that he may have been asleep when she showed up. The police didn’t like the inconsistencies in what should have been a simple explanation. Jordan thought of telling them that it may have been the Texas Devil, but he held his tongue. He’d already withheld telling them about the figure he’d seen while taking a leak last night. That may have been Mr. Leper himself, and Jordan didn’t think it wise to admit he’d seen the victim shortly before his death.

  * * *

  Dad came home later that night, cutting his trip short. When it came to gauging his reaction to the news, Jordan was clueless. Judging by his words alone, Dad clearly wasn’t happy about the kids camping in the woods. However, there was no telling tone in his voice to go by; he almost seemed indifferent. He merely chastised the boys about the danger of going into those woods at night.

  The news of Mr. Leper’s death drew some spark that played across Dad’s face. He tried to hide the emotions, but Jordan saw flickers: horror, revulsion, confusion. It was bizarre to witness.

  Dad couldn’t possibly feel bad about the old man’s death, could he? Or maybe it was because of the fact that Mr. Leper died so close to where Jordan and Conner had been. The thought must have been nauseating.

  Or maybe it was something else entirely.

  * * *

  Jordan had become a celebrity at school. News had spread that he had found his neighbor’s body behind his house. His classmates kept asking him if the Texas Devil had killed Mr. Leper. Jordan didn’t hate the attention and didn’t want to tell them that he had spent the night in the safety of his own house, so he merely said it was possible.

  He worried, however, about that nosy reporter Diedre Marshall. He had hoped she would lose interest in his father, but there was no chance of that now.

  When he got to English class, he found Erin waiting for him by his desk. Her lovely eyebrows were turned upward and she looked worried. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I’m just really sorry about last weekend.”

  “Why? You didn’t do anything. Did you?” He grinned.

  “I can tell you didn’t want to go camping,” she replied. “I can’t help but feel like you only did it for me.”

  Jordan chuckled. “Don’t flatter yourself, honey. I did it because it sounded like fun.”

  She laughed, looking relieved.

  “There’s something I want to ask you, though,” Jordan said.

  “You want to know why I spent the night in the car,” she guessed. “Travis and I had a fight and I just didn’t want to be anywhere near his ass.”

  “Oh. I, uh, heard you two making out in your tent.” He blushed.

  “You wouldn’t think that would lead to a fight, huh?”

  “Was he...trying to get you to do something you didn’t want to do?” Jordan asked.

  “Sort of.” She seemed apprehensive now. “I’ve never done...it.”

  “You mean the sex?” He cocked an eyebrow.

  Erin burst into laughter. Several classmates glanced at her. Jordan marveled at the beauty of her laugh. He wanted to tell her to dump her rapist boyfriend. He wanted to tell that he would treat her better than Travis ever could. Why couldn’t he just tell her these things? What was he afraid of?

  * * *

  Jordan saw a few reporters parked in front of
Mr. Leper’s house as he walked from the bus stop to his own home. If not for the nature of the death, he doubted it would have been enough on its own to warrant this much media attention.

  The kids had been left out of any official news stories, but it wouldn’t be long before the press found out. After all, it hadn’t taken long for the school to find out.

  Jordan kept his head down as he walked toward his house. He stared intently at the street, his heart suddenly racing the closer he got. He could hear the reporters recording their segments.

  One voice, in particular, made him look up.

  Diedre Marshall.

  He gave her a passing glance as he strode by. She was facing him but looking at her cameraman as she read her script. Her eyes shot to Jordan quickly, though she never faltered in her words.

  “Mr. Scott?” she called a moment later.

  Jordan had just reached his driveway when she called to him. He stopped and turned around.

  “Hello again,” she said with a smile as she briskly approached him. “Quite an exciting week, isn’t it? I heard it through the grapevine that you were the one to discover the body. Is that true?”

  Jordan wanted to tell her that it wasn’t true, but he also didn’t want to put Erin on this vulture’s dinner plate. “Maybe,” he compromised.

  Her smile vanished only to be replaced with a sympathetic expression. “That must’ve been very frightening, discovering the body of your beloved neighbor practically in your backyard.”

  “He wasn’t very beloved.”

  The reporter arched an eyebrow. “Really? He had enemies?”

  Jordan scolded himself for saying that. “The whole neighborhood hated him for a bunch of reasons.”

  “Did your father have a reason?”

  Jordan didn’t want to say any more. He’d already said too much. He wished he’d just kept walking. To remedy that, he turned on his heel and walked to the front door. It may have looked suspicious, but there was nothing else he could do.

  Diedre followed.

  The moment he stepped onto the front porch, the reporter said, “You can see why I find this story so interesting, can’t you?” She sounded like she was pleading.

  Before Jordan could touch the doorknob, the door flew open. Standing just inside the house was Dad. His eyes were hard as he stared at Ms. Marshall.

  “Hello, Mr. Scott,” she said to him.

  He didn’t respond.

  “I was just asking your son a few questions about Mr. Leper,” she continued, unfazed. “Such a terrible tragedy.”

  “You don’t want to talk to my son,” Dad said. “You want to talk to me. And that’s not going to happen. Good day, Ms. Marshall.”

  Dad ushered Jordan inside and closed the door in the bewildered woman’s face.

  Chapter 7

  The excitement over Mr. Leper’s murder started to die down a week after it occurred. Despite its bizarre nature, no one seemed to really care about the death of a mean old man who was socially inept. The most interesting aspect of the case was that it happened behind the house of a well-known author, in the very same woods where other deaths had occurred.

  Investigators were having difficulty solving the supposed murder; no fingerprints were found on the body, according to the news reports. Jordan shuddered to think he may have seen Mr. Leper (or the murderer) in the woods that night. Surprisingly, he felt absolutely no guilt. It’s not like he could have saved the old man.

  Or could he have?

  If the murderer had been the Texas Devil, then no. The Devil was a monster, one that didn’t kill like an animal. It killed like a homicidal maniac. Jordan wasn’t even sure where the idea of the monster came from, but once the notion was out there, it spread like wildfire.

  He was constantly on alert while at school, fearful that he would run into Diedre again. After her awkward encounter with Dad a week ago, Jordan was worried the reporter would try to get answers through him once again. He decided he would refrain from speaking to her, even if it made his family look suspicious.

  He wasn’t sure why they would look guilty, however. None of the Scotts had killed Mr. Leper. Jordan had been asleep in the house; Conner had been passed out in their tent; Dad had been out of town. That only left Erin and Travis. Erin said she’d gone back to Travis’s car, so there was no one to account for the bad boyfriend’s whereabouts at the time.

  Though Jordan didn’t like him, he couldn’t see Travis killing anyone.

  Thinking of that brought something to Jordan’s mind. Why didn’t the murderer kill Conner and Travis? They had been only yards away from the stream. And what had that hole been for? Jordan wondered if someone had planned on burying something in it. He did get a strange feeling when he first saw it, something familiar, but he couldn’t remember what. The answer was just at the tip of his brain, teasing him. It became infuriating.

  * * *

  Diedre sat at her desk in her bedroom, poring over her research. She didn’t have much. Before Don Scott became a popular author, his life had seemed anything but normal. There wasn’t much, but what was there proved significant.

  His mother, Hilda, died in Georgia, shot to death by her husband Patrick. Hilda, however, had not been entirely innocent. She had supposedly killed her boyfriend, Adrian, and buried his body at the very spot where she lost her own life.

  That definitely raised an eyebrow.

  Don’s father died of a heart attack here in Texas.

  Don had been at the scene.

  His brother, Ethan, had been shot to death in an alleged robbery in his girlfriend Ivy’s home, which was in the same neighborhood where his mother died. Not only that, but the same house would host another murder, that of Ivy’s last boyfriend ten years ago. Very interesting.

  Ethan’s murderer was never caught, and Don’s whereabouts for that night were still unknown.

  * * *

  Don stood at the kitchen counter, marinating chicken for dinner. He stared out the window directly in front of him, which gave him a view of the side of Mr. Leper’s house.

  Just thinking about what happened to that man filled him with terrible dread. Don knew the Texas Devil had nothing do with the murder. He also knew he didn’t kill his neighbor; he would’ve remembered that. Besides, he had been far away from here at the time. Not in New York with his agent, like he’d told the boys.

  He may not have been where he said he was, but he knew for a fact he didn’t kill his neighbor. The curse hadn’t taken hold again.

  Don suspected, from the deepest level of his being, that Mr. Leper had been killed by one of the boys.

  * * *

  The Scott family sat down to dinner later that day. The house was so quiet without Samantha running her mouth and blaring her pop music. Jordan almost missed her simply because he couldn’t stand this new silence.

  Dad sat across from him, with Conner next to Jordan. The boys stared at Dad, and he stared back.

  Jordan grew nervous. So far, Dad hadn’t said much about the boys camping in the woods without his permission. Dad didn’t look angry, though; he looked worried.

  “I’m sorry you boys have to go through all this,” Dad finally said, breaking that terrible silence. “It must have been scary, seeing a dead body like that.”

  “It wasn’t that bad,” Conner said casually as he chewed his chicken.

  Dad ignored him and said, “You boys know you shouldn’t have been in those woods to begin with.”

  “We know, Dad,” Jordan replied.

  “Why did you do it, then?”

  Jordan looked at his cousin. It had all been Conner’s idea, after all; he should be the one to explain.

  Conner noticed his cousin eyeballing him, swallowed his food audibly, and then told Dad, “It seemed like a cool idea.”

  The house grew silent once again, as Dad processed that response. Jordan held his breath. Conner had always been a thorn in Dad’s side, constantly getting into trouble. Jordan wondered if the breaking point had fina
lly been reached.

  Dad’s face contorted, like he was holding something in.

  And then, suddenly, he laughed.

  Conner began laughing as well. Jordan couldn’t understand what was happening. He wasn’t in the laughing mood himself, so he simply sat there with his foolish family.

  * * *

  Monica Scott was exhausted when she walked into her empty house. Her nurse scrubs hung loosely on her dwindling frame as she walked into her kitchen and began heating up the lasagna Terry had made her last night. Terry, that poor lovely man, was a fool for putting up with her. He gave his heart to her ceaselessly but she only managed to accept it with reluctance. In truth, she missed Donovan. She missed her son, as well.

  She missed her world.

  Not a day went by that she didn’t think of Don and Jordan, and she spent equal amounts of time regretting her horrible decision to leave them. She’d let her fear of the unknown break up her family. That wasn’t like her. She had been a strong woman, and yet, Don’s terrible secret had filled her with an unbearable dread. That dread had haunted her dreams and her waking thoughts, had consumed her. She’d felt the only escape was to distance herself from the source: Don.

  Just knowing that the...curse had been imprinted onto her son as well only fueled her fear. But she couldn’t stay away from her baby. She saw him every summer, and she sensed something in him, just beneath the skin. Whatever it was never managed to surface, however, and for that she was grateful.

  As she ate the lasagna at the table, she remembered Don as he had been. That cute little boy with the undeniable crush on her in grade school.

  Monica missed him terribly at that moment. She’d read all of his books over the years—disposable thrillers only decently written—and she watched the few interviews he’d ever done. Time hadn’t been kind to him; he now seemed like a mere shadow of his former self. She wished things could go back to the way they were, but....