Crush

by Stefan Petrucha

  “Cade,” Jonathan said. “Are you sure it was a guy?”

  But the phone line was already dead.

  “Just don’t push me, Jonathan.”

  The rest of the weekend passed in a blur. Jonathan didn’t sleep for more than thirty minutes at a time. Late Saturday night, he went to his room and pushed a wad of dirty clothes against the bottom of his door, imagining far too clearly a Reaper slipping through the crack and coming for him. This small accommodation to his fear did little. Whenever he closed his eyes, he pictured dark forms swarming over his small apartment, flitting through the living room and down the halls. Sliding like oil over the roof shingles and along the carpet. He thought about David and his friend’s words. He knew it was a threat, but he didn’t want to believe David was suggesting Jonathan might follow Mr. Weaver or Toby or…Then he pictured Ox again, smothered by one of the phantoms and being dragged through the air. Jonathan would wake with a start, look around the room quickly for any sign of movement, then get out of bed and pace the floor. He’d check the window, check the pile of clothes at the foot of his door.

  Once he was back in bed, it started all over again.

  He walked through Sunday like a zombie, barely able to keep a coherent thought, though he tried. He struggled to make sense of what he knew, but his sleep-deprived brain punked out on him. Just as he would latch onto a thread of logic, a Reaper would flit through his mind and snatch it away.

  David didn’t call him, and he was afraid to call David.

  Jonathan watched the news. Ox was considered missing. So was Cade Cason, but there was a difference. The police were searching for Ox because the boy’s parents were frantic—he hadn’t come home Friday night. The police searched for Cade because they wanted to question him about his friend’s disappearance.

  “We have reason to believe Cason has left the area,” an old guy in a police uniform said during a press conference. “If you have any information about his whereabouts, contact authorities at…”

  Cade had split town. Bailed. Jonathan figured that wasn’t such a bad idea.

  But they’d find him. Cade wasn’t smart enough to stay on the run long. The police would catch up to him. In a few days, a week at most, Cade would be sitting in an interrogation room, babbling about that night by the lake.

  Jonathan didn’t have a clue what he’d say to the police when they came for him. It was just something else to worry about, something else to keep sleep away.

  Sunday night was no better than Saturday, and when he came out of his final nightmare Monday morning, Jonathan felt like his body had been beaten by a hundred sticks. His head ached and felt packed with cotton. His limbs weighed too much, and he struggled to get out of bed.

  He had to go to school, he thought. If any place was safe, it would be school.

  His completely weary mind forgot that it hadn’t been safe for Emma.

  12

  The morning sun was too bright. Jonathan’s eyes stung from the glare as he trudged along the sidewalk. When he passed the mall, he paused, looked at Perky’s, wondered why he wanted to look at the place, and then continued on. His head throbbed. His stomach churned with acid. It would have been a good day to stay home. It wasn’t like he could pay attention to anything his teachers said for more than a second or two anyway. Except he didn’t want to stay home. He couldn’t take another minute in the apartment or in his room, which was thick with his fear.

  Someone called his name, and Jonathan ignored it because he figured it was just one of the many voices in his head, taunting him with some new nightmare he had yet to imagine.

  “Jonathan!” the voice came again. “Jonathan, please wait.”

  The voice was high, hitting his eardrums with a sharp edge. He stopped walking and shook his head to clear it of the voice—a girl’s voice. Emma?

  “Jonathan!”

  He turned, and his throat closed tight, seeing Kirsty Sabine running down the sidewalk toward him. He blinked in an attempt to clear the cottony haze falling over the girl. In doing this, he saw how scared she looked.

  “Hey!” Jonathan said, searching Kirsty’s face and finding himself intrigued by the expression of dread she wore. “What are you doing?”

  “You can’t go to school,” she said rapidly. “Neither of us can. He’ll look for us there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “David,” she said, her voice cracking horribly as if she might cry. “He’s so angry. I don’t know what he might do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He tried to kill me,” she said. “Last night. God, it was a nightmare. He just freaked out. He seemed so sweet. But…but…”

  David? Tried to kill her?

  He wished he could be surprised. As the miserable weekend passed, he had grown more and more certain of David’s guilt. It was awful but unavoidable. He didn’t want to believe his best friend was capable of such horrible actions, so he clung to the idea that Kirsty was the bringer of evil. But he couldn’t believe it anymore. Not after David’s threat. Not after Cade’s phone call.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked. She grabbed Jonathan’s jacket tightly and pulled him close. “Where are we going to go?”

  “Just calm down,” Jonathan said, unable to take his own advice. His nerves were lit. They flickered and flared like tiny fires throughout his body. “Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”

  “We have to get inside,” Kirsty said. “We can’t stay out here.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Just calm down.”

  They couldn’t go to his house yet. His mother was home for at least another hour, and the last thing he needed was a scene with her. She didn’t care if he went to school or not; he was pretty sure about that. But she’d see his truancy as an excuse to ride his ass, and it might get ugly. Could they go somewhere public? Like the mall or Perky’s? He wasn’t sure. A cop might hassle them. Whenever he’d ditched class before, he had gone over to David’s to play Resident Evil or Tomb Raider. That was not an option.

  “I don’t know where to go,” Jonathan said.

  “We can go to my house,” Kirsty said.

  Jonathan had never been in a home like Kirsty’s before. David’s family had money and a high-tech approach to decoration. Everything was chrome and steel and glass and stone. Every room in David’s house had an electronic gadget, either an LCD television or an expensive sound system or a computer; some rooms had all three. It was like a showroom for Sony and Bose. Kirsty’s house was just as large, and the stuff inside probably cost just as much, but it was a totally different kind of house. The walls were painted deep shades of brown and green with swirls of lighter colors to give the surfaces an odd sense of motion. The furniture was big with dark wooden frames and intricately patterned cushions. On either side of the raw brick fireplace, wrought-iron stands held thick cream-colored candles. More candleholders, these of some other metal, lined the mantel. No pictures decorated the walls, no posters, no paintings. Instead, broad tapestries, their images faded with time, ran across the walls.

  “It’s modern goth,” Kirsty said, noticing Jonathan’s reaction to the place. “My mom always wanted to live in a castle. Weird, right?”

  “It’s cool,” Jonathan said, and he really thought it was. Despite being on the edge of creepy, the living room looked warm and inviting. Still, he wasn’t comfortable, considering the reason he was brought here. “Can you tell me what happened with David?”

  Kirsty looked sadly at the floor. She nodded her head slowly as if agreeing to take medicine she despised.

  “We went out together, just grabbed some dinner at Pan Pacific, you know? We were talking about school, and he wanted to know all about where I used to live and about my family and stuff. And it was really nice. He’s totally funny and smart. After dinner we took a walk. We were going to Perky’s for a coffee and some dessert, and while we were walking he started asking me all of this off-the-wall stuff, like ‘Is anyone at school bot
hering you?’ ‘Are your teachers cool?’ And I told him everything was fine. Then he said, ‘Well if anyone’s giving you a hard time, just let me know. I’m an expert at taking care of assholes.’

  “I didn’t think much about it. I figured he was just being protective, and it was kind of sweet, but there was something in his voice that was creepy, so I changed the subject. At Perky’s I asked him about the stuff he likes, and he got real defensive. He didn’t really want to talk about himself at all. Then, out of nowhere, he starts saying how jealous you were of us. He said some terrible things about you, and I got really skeeved out about it. He said you just used him because he has money, and no one else would waste their time on you. It was just so mean. And his eyes were all weird and dark, and he was smiling, but it wasn’t a real smile. You know? It wasn’t a happy smile at all.”

  The words sickened Jonathan.

  “I’m sorry, but he was just so mean, and he totally seemed to like being mean. I wanted to go home, but he just kept on, saying how much he’d done for you and that you were totally ungrateful for it. Said you wanted to split him and me up, because you didn’t want him to be happy. And it’s not like David and I were a couple or anything. I mean…not really. We went out a couple of times, but he was all ‘No way that loser is going to break us up. We’re too special.’ I was too scared to say anything. But then he said something like, ‘I know you’ll be grateful for what I can do. Nobody else is going to treat you the way I can. You’re not that hot.’ And that was totally it. My dad used to make fun of the way I looked. He used to call me names, and after he left, I swore no one was going to do that to me again.

  “So I told David I didn’t want to see him anymore. I tried to be nice about it, but I was really pissed at him. He tried to talk me out of it, started acting sweet again, but no way was I going to fall for that.”

  “You said he tried to kill you?”

  “Yes,” Kirsty said distantly. “At least I think so. I don’t know. It’s really crazy.”

  “You saw them,” Jonathan said. “You saw those shadow ghosts.”

  Kirsty straightened up as if startled. Her eyes lit as she stared at him. “You’ve seen them? My God, I thought I was going crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy,” Jonathan assured. “I’ve seen them a couple of times. I call them Reapers. I watched one murder Ox.”

  “Ox is dead?” Kirsty asked.

  “It’s been all over the news that he’s missing.”

  “I haven’t been watching,” Kirsty said, her voice high with panic. “Oh no. No. No. Then David is doing this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He followed me out of Perky’s, still trying to get me to stay with him, right? He apologized a bunch of times and grabbed my arm and swore he’d be cool, and I was just so upset, I kept saying, ‘Leave me alone.’

  “He got really angry then. He said I should know better than to piss him off. Bad things happened to people that pissed him off. And he said if I didn’t believe him, I should ask Ox. It was a total threat. I didn’t get it because I didn’t know about Ox.”

  Jonathan left his place at the doorjamb and crossed the room. He put his arm around Kirsty, who was now very near tears. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  Kirsty pushed in close to Jonathan, resting her head on his chest. “I was so scared,” she whispered. She sniffed quietly and snuggled her cheek against him. “I walked home. I was on Dalrymple about to turn onto Remington, when I heard this weird sound, like a flag snapping in the wind. I looked up and saw these shadows, but they weren’t really shadows because there was nothing in the sky to cause them. They were just dark smears in the night, and the only reason I could see them at all was because the stars weren’t as bright behind them.

  “Then I saw that one of them had a face. A terrible face. It looked like it was in so much pain. And it looked angry. I screamed. I totally screamed my head off and started running. I knew I wouldn’t make it home, though. So I ran to the closest house, and one of those things slid up my back. It felt cold and moist, like a slug or something, and I totally freaked out. I fainted and woke up on the sofa of a family named Myers. They called my mom, and she came to pick me up.”

  “God, you were so lucky,” Jonathan said, wondering if fainting had saved Kirsty’s life or if something else had spared her the suffocating embrace of the Reapers. “You shouldn’t have even left the house today,” he said.

  “I know, but when I came out of it, and that family was staring at me, I figured I’d just scared myself. I thought it was all some kind of hallucination, or maybe a nightmare I had after fainting. I was so confused; I just didn’t know what to think.

  “I woke up this morning thinking it was all just a mind screw, but as soon as I got outside, I started getting scared. I started to think about Mr. Weaver and Toby and I wondered if what David said was real. I mean, can he really control these things? I thought if anyone knew, you would.”

  “I didn’t know he could do this,” Jonathan said. “Killing people? I mean even if I thought he could work magic, I’d never have thought he could actually kill someone.”

  It was impossible, a tiny voice in the back of his mind whispered. This is David you’re talking about.

  “Well, maybe it isn’t him,” Kirsty said, pulling away from Jonathan. “Maybe he was just trying to scare me because I hurt his feelings. Boys do weird stuff. Like when they’re being rejected, their egos get all crazy. It might not be him at all.”

  “It’s him,” Jonathan said, the sickness in his stomach turning hard and cold. David had hurt Emma and killed at least three people. It didn’t seem real, but it was. “Now we just have to figure out how to stop him.”

  13

  “We have to check the doors and the windows,” Kirsty said. “If one of those things got in here, we’d never even see it.”

  Jonathan looked around the room and had to agree with her. The walls were too dark; the textured paint on them would provide excellent camouflage for those things. He followed her through the house, checking windows and doors, making sure the house was sealed tight from basement to roof.

  “When’s your mom get home?” Jonathan asked.

  They stood outside a door on the second floor of the house. Kirsty paused with her hand on the knob. “My room’s a mess, okay?” she said, not answering his question. “Can you wait here?”

  “Sure,” Jonathan said.

  Kirsty slipped through the door and closed it quickly behind her. He leaned against the wall and looked at the door. The knob was made of iron, more of a handle than a doorknob. The door itself looked heavy, not one of those cheap plywood things he had at home. That was good. If those things got in, they couldn’t just break the door in. But Jonathan looked along the frame and down, and he didn’t like what he saw. A wide gap, nearly half an inch, separated the bottom of the door from the floor. These things, the Reapers, were flat. Could they slip through a hole that size? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t want to take any chances.

  When Kirsty emerged from her room, Jonathan said, “We’re going to need a few things.”

  They sat on the sofa in the living room. Jonathan stared at the fireplace. He’d made sure the flue was closed, but the hole in the wall made him nervous. On the cushion next to him, Kirsty spun a roll of duct tape on two fingers. Next to her was a bag that held towels, two flashlights, a hammer, some nails, and Kirsty’s cell phone. It was an emergency kit. Jonathan figured they could use these things, and he didn’t want to have to search the house if they needed them fast.

  “You never told me when your mother would be home,” Jonathan said.

  “Well, that’s the other thing,” Kirsty said. “She’s gone for a few days on business. I couldn’t tell her about those…those things. God, I didn’t want her to go, but I didn’t know what to say to make her stay. So I’m alone.”

  “You’re not alone,” Jonathan said.

  “I would be, without you,” she replied. “What are we g
oing to do, Jonathan? We can’t hide in here forever.”

  “I know,” he said. But he honestly didn’t know what they could do. It wasn’t like they could just kill David.

  “Why don’t we run away?” Kirsty suggested. “I’ve got my car and enough money in the bank. We could just run away. David would never find us.”

  “We can’t do that,” Jonathan said, though the idea was appealing. There wasn’t anything keeping him here, especially now that his best friend had gone psycho. “David will just hurt other people. We have to stop him.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not exactly Harry Potter. I don’t know anything about magic or the supernatural, except for crap I’ve seen in movies.”

  “Did you ever see anything like this in a movie?”

  “No,” he admitted. In movies he’d seen vampires, werewolves, mummies, witches, slashers, and a thousand creatures without names, but he’d never come across anything like the Reapers.

  “And you have no idea what they are?” she asked.

  “Hell no,” he said. “Why would I?”

  “It’s just that you two were such good friends. I thought he might have said something to you, maybe mentioned a book of spells or something.”

  “A book of spells?” He remembered The History of the Occult, remembered David explaining his belief that magic was the first science, the first religion.

  “God, I don’t know,” Kirsty said, her tone angry. “I’m just scared, okay?”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m scared too.”

  They sat quietly for a few minutes. Jonathan’s thoughts raced as he tried to figure out what to do. He could try talking to David again, but if he was freaking out before Kirsty dumped him, Jonathan couldn’t imagine what David felt now. Besides, if Jonathan admitted what he knew to David, he might become a target himself. Though who was to say he wasn’t already? David had snapped. He’d blown a gasket and spun out of control. Three people were dead, and he’d tried to kill Kirsty, and those were only the crimes Jonathan knew about. They couldn’t go to the police. What would they say?