The FBI agent I'd seen on the news, Agent Fornian, interviewed Mom and me in the mortuary for most of that night— first together, then one at a time, while the other cleaned up.
I told him, and everyone else who asked, the same story I'd told Mom—that I'd heard a noise, gone outside, to check on it, and watched the killer go into the Crowleys' house. They asked if I knew where Mr. Crowley was, and told them I didn't know; they asked why I had decided to move Neblin's body, and I couldn't think of a reason that didn't sound crazy, so I just said that it seemed like a good idea at the time. The sludge in our back room we pretty much ignored: we said that we had no idea how it got there. I couldn't tell if they believed us or not, but eventually everyone seemed satisfied.
Before they left, they asked if I needed to see a grief counselor to help me deal with the simultaneous disappearance of two men I knew relatively well, but I said that seeing a second therapist to talk about my first therapist seemed land of unfaithful. Nobody laughed. Dr. Neblin would have.
By morning, the story had spread and mutated: the Clayton Killer had killed Bill Crowley while he was out driving late, and then killed Ben Neblin on his way back to Crowley's house. There, the killer had started to beat and torture Kay until her neighbors—Mom and me—noticed something was wrong and interrupted him. The killer came after us, but ran away when we resisted, leaving behind nothing but the mysterious black sludge recognizable from the previous attacks. No one would believe that the attacker was some kind of disintegrating monster, so we didn't bother to explain it that way.
There were just enough loose ends in the story, of course, that rumors began to fly—there were no bodies for the killer or for Crowley, so of course they might still be alive somewhere— but I knew that the long ordeal was finally over. For the first time in months, I felt peace.
I imagine that more suspicion might have fallen on me if Kay hadn't been my staunchest defender—she swore to the police that I was a good boy, and a good neighbor, and that we loved each other like family. When they found my eyelash in her bedroom, she told them how I'd helped Mr. Crowley with the door hinges; when they found my fingerprints on the windows of her car, she told them how I'd helped to check the oil and the tire pressure. Every question they had could be answered by the fact that I'd spent almost every day at their house for two straight months. The only truly damning evidence was on the cell phones, but so far, no one had found them.
Besides all of that, I was just a kid—I don't think they ever really took me seriously as a suspect. If I'd tried to cover up what had happened that night I'm sure I would have seemed more suspicious, but by going straight to the police with everything, we seemed to have earned a bit of trust. After a while, it was almost like it had never happened.
I expected the demon's death to bother me more—to haunt my dreams, or something—but instead I found myself focusing over and over on the demon's last words: "Remember me."
I wasn't sure that I wanted to—he was a vicious, evil killer, and I never wanted to think about some of those things again.
The thing was, there were a lot of things that I didn't want to think about—things that I'd spent years not thinking about—and ignoring them had never really gotten me anywhere.
I think it was time to follow Crowley's advice, and remember.
"When the police finally left her alone, I went to visit Kay Crowley.
She hugged me when she answered the door. No words, no greeting, just a hug. I didn't deserve it, but I hugged her back.
The monster growled, but I stared it down; it remembered this frail woman, and knew how easy she'd be to kill, but I focused all of my energy on self-control. This was far harder than I wanted to admit.
"Thank you for coming," she said, her eyes streaming with tears. Her right eye was bruised black, and I felt sick.
"I'm so sorry."
"Don't be sorry, dear," she said, pulling me into the house. "You didn't do anything but help."
I stared at her closely, studying her face, her eyes, everything. This was the angel that tamed a demon; the soul that trapped him and held him with a power he'd never felt before.
Love. She saw the intensity of my stare, and peered back.
"What's wrong, John?"
"Tell me about him," I said.
"About Bill?"
"Bill Crowley," I said. "I've lived across the street my whole life, but I don't think I really knew him at all. Please tell me."
It was her turn to study me—eyes as deep as wells, watching me from a time long past.
"I met Bill in 1968," she said, leading me to the living room and sitting on the sofa. "We got married two years after that—next May would have been our forty-year anniversary."
I sat across from her and listened.
"We were both in our thirties," she said, "and in those days, in this town, being single and thirty made me an old maid, I'd resigned myself to it, I guess, but then one day, Bill came in looking for a job. I was the secretary in the water office at the time. He was very handsome, and he had an 'old soul'—he wasn't into that hippie stuff like so many people were back then. He was polite, and well-mannered, and he reminded me a little of my grandfather, in the way he always wore a hat, and opened doors for the ladies, and stood up when one walked into a room. He got the job, of course, and I'd see him every morning when he came in—he was always very gracious.
He was the one who started to call me Kay, you know— my real name is Katherine, and everyone called me Katie, or Miss Wood, but he said that even Katie took too long to say, and shortened it to Kay. He was always moving—always doing something new and running from one place to the next. He had a lust for life. I set my sights on him after just a couple of weeks." She laughed softly, and I smiled.
Mr. Crowley's past unfolded before me like a painting, rich in color and texture, and deep with understanding of its subject.
He was not a perfect man, but for a time—for a very long time—he had been a good one.
"We dated for a year before he proposed," Mrs. Crowley continued. "Then one Sunday, we were eating dinner at my parents' house, with all my brothers and sisters and their families, and we were all laughing and talking, and he got up and left the room." She had a faraway look in her eyes. "I followed him out and found him crying in the kitchen. He told me that he'd never 'got it' before; I remember it so clearly, the way he said it: 'I never got it before, Kay. I never got it until now.' He told me he loved me more than anything in heaven or hell— he was very romantic with his words—and asked me rightthere to marry him."
She sat quiedy for a moment, eyes closed, remembering.
"He promised to stay by my side forever, in sickness and in health. . . . In his last days, he was more sickness than health— you saw the way he was—but he told me again, every day. Til stay by your side forever.'"
I don't think my mom realized that a new person moved in with us that day, but it's been with us ever since. My monster was out for good now, and I couldn't put it away. I tried to— every day I tried to—but it doesn't work that way. If it were that easy to get rid of, it wouldn't be a monster.
Once the demon was dead, I tried to rebuild the wall and put my rules back in place, but my own darker nature fought back at every turn. I told myself I wasn't allowed to think about hurting people anymore, but in every unguarded moment, my thoughts turned automatically toward violence. It was like my brain had a screen saver full of blood and screaming, and if I ever left it idle for too long, those thoughts would pop up and take over. I started acquiring hobbies that kept my mind busy—reading, cooking, logic puzzles—anything to stop that mental screen saver from coming back on. It worked for a while, but sooner or later, I'd have to put the hobbies down and go to bed, and then I'd lie there alone in the dark and wrestle with my thoughts, until I bit my tongue and pounded my mattress and begged for mercy.
When I finally gave up on trying to change my thoughts, I decided that actions were the next best thing. I made myself st
art complimenting people again, and forced myself to stay far away from other people's yards—I practically gave myself a pathological fear of windows, just from forcing myself not to look in them. The dark thoughts were still there, underneath, but my actions stayed clean. In other words, I was really good at pretending to be normal. If you met me on the street, you'd never guess how much I wanted to kill you.
There was one rule that I never reinstated; the monster and I both chose to ignore it for different reasons. Barely a week had gone by before Mom forced me to confront it. We were eating dinner and watching The Simpsons again—times like that were virtually the only times we talked.
"How's Brooke?" Mom asked, muting the TV. I kept my eyes focused on the screen.
She's great, I thought. She has a birthday coming up, and I found the complete guest list for her slumber party crumpled up in her family's garbage can. She likes horses, manga, and eighties music, and she s always just late enough for the school bus that she has to run to catch up.I know her class schedule, her GPA, her social-security number, and the password to her Cmail account.
"I don't know," I said. "She's fine, I guess. I don't see her all that often." I knew I shouldn't be following her, but. . . well, I wanted to. I didn't want to give her up.
"You should ask her out," said Mom.
"Ask her out?"
"You're fifteen," said Mom, "almost sixteen. It's normal.
She doesn't have cooties."
Yeah, but I probably do. "Did you forget the whole sociopath thing?" I asked. Mom frowned at me. "I have no empathy—how am I supposed to form a relationship with anybody?"
It was the great paradox of my rule system: if I forced myself not to think about the people I most tended to think about, I'd avoid any bad relationships, but I'd avoid any good ones just as strongly.
"Who said anything about a relationship?" said Mom. "You can wait 'til you're thirty to have a relationship if you want— it would be a lot easier on me. I'm just saying that you're a teenager, and you should be out having fun."
I looked up at the wall. "I'm not good with people, Mom,"
I said. "You of all people should know that."
Mom was silent for a moment, and I tried to imagine what she was doing—frowning, sighing, closing her eyes, thinking about the night I threatened her with a knife.
"You've been so much better," she said at last, "It's been a rough year, and you haven't been yourself."
I'd been more myself in the past few months than I'd ever been in my life, actually, but I wasn't about to tell her that.
"The thing you need to remember, John," said Mom, "is that everything comes with practice. You say you're not very good with people—well, the only way to get good is to go out and do it. Talk. Interact. You won't develop any social skills sitting here with me."
I thought about Brooke, and about the thoughts of her that filled so much of my mind—some good, some very dangerous.
I didn't want to give her up, but I didn't trust myself around her either. It was safer this way.
Mom did have a point, though. I glanced at her quickly—the tired face, the worn clothes—and thought about how much she looked like Lauren. How much she looked like me. She understood what I was going through, not from experience, but from pure, uncluttered empathy. She was my mom, and she knew me, but I barely knew her at all.
"Why don't we start with something easier," I said, picking at my pizza. "I'll, you know, get to know you, and then move up from there." I looked at her again, expecting some kind of derisive comment about how talking to other people was "moving up" from her, but instead I saw surprise. Her eyes were wide, her mouth was tight, and there was something in the corner of her eye. I watched as it developed into a tear.
She wasn't sad. I knew my mom's moods well enough to tell that. This kind of tear was something I'd never seen before.
Shock? Pain?
Joy?
"That's not fair," I said, pointing at the tear. "Getting emotional with me is cheating."
Mom stifled a laugh, and grabbed me in a big hug. I hugged her back, awkwardly, feeling stupid but kind of content. The monster looked down at her neck, slim and unprotected, and imagined what it would be like to snap it in half. I glowered at myself and pulled out of the hug.
"Thanks for the pizza tonight," I said. "It's good." It was the only compliment I could think of.
"Why do you say that?" she asked.
"No reason."
As the weeks turned into months, the investigation continued, but eventually they realized that the killings had stopped for good, and Clayton County slowly crept back toward a semblance of normality.
Still, speculation was common, and the theories grew wilder with time: maybe it was a drifter or a thrill killer; maybe it was a hit man harvesting organs for the black market; maybe it was a devilish cult that used the victims in unspeakable rituals.
People wanted the explanation to be as big and flashy as the killings themselves, but the truth was far more terrifying: true terror doesn't come from giant monsters but from small, innocent-looking people. People like Mr. Crowley.
People like me.
You'll never see us coming.
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