The Devil Crept In

by Ania Ahlborn

  But the town did have its share of drunks—guys who spent every night getting hammered at The Antler. Every so often, Terry was one of those guys, bumbling and loud and driving after a six-pack too many. It was possible for one of Terry’s drunky friends to have stumbled over and gotten lost in Terry’s hoard. Hell, The Tyrant coveted that useless crap so much, it wouldn’t have been surprising if he talked those piles up as being worth their weight in gold. One of his pals was probably hard up for money, and a night of intoxicated stealing was right up his alley. But drunks were about as stealthy as half-starved dogs. If it was one of the guys from The Antler, he’d be falling over stacks of bicycle parts and broken kitchen appliances by now, not hiding in the dark.

  “I—I know you’re there, you know . . . ,” Stevie said. He wanted to yell it, but didn’t want to rouse The Tyrant from his La-Z-Boy in front of the TV. But he couldn’t act like a chicken standing right next to his own house, either. Because what if it really was a burglar? What if it was some creepy guy peeking at Aunt Mandy through her windows as she waited for Jude to come home? “You better get lost before I call the cops, Pops.” Scripted TV lines rolled off his tongue. It was instinctual, a security blanket. If it worked for people on television shows, it was bound to work now . . . right?

  And yet, he was still apprehensive, not wanting to venture farther into the dark. But he steeled his nerves and somehow forced another handful of forward steps from his feet, refusing to succumb to his own fear, to be the crazy chicken-shit fingerless kid Dunk and Jude and the whole school thought him to be. He gritted his teeth, coiled his hands into fists, and continued to move ahead. But he made it only a few feet before he stopped, startled by the sideways tumbling fender, the thing falling against the house with a crash.

  The noise gave Stevie’s heart an electric jolt, like a jumper cable sparking against a corroded battery bolt. He careened backward in self-preservation, his left foot jamming between the bent spokes of a tubeless bicycle wheel. His hands shot out behind him as he tipped over, scrambling to regain his footing amid a sea of scrap metal—all of it sharp edges and tetanus. There was a flash of shadow. A dark shape bolting away from the house, deeper into the junked-up backyard. A twisted figure, hunched and lumbering on all fours.

  Sasquatch! The word screamed through his head as he fell. He’d seen people hunt those things on TV. This was Oregon. Bigfoot territory. Except this thing wasn’t hairy. It looked almost pale in the moonlight as it scaled the back fence, quick and fluid, contrary to the gracelessness in which it had shot away from the house. And then, just as quickly as Stevie had spotted it, it was gone.

  It all happened within a span of two, maybe three, seconds. All the while, Stevie was trying not to break an ankle or snap a wrist. Darkness paired with distraction, he was left sitting on his ass, one leg jutting through the disembodied wheel of a ten-speed, the palms of his hands buried in tufts of white clover and dried-up dandelion stems. His heart was a butterfly trapped in a mason jar, beating fast enough to fill the sky with shooting stars. And the crash of the fender against an array of other detritus? Loud enough to wake the dead. Definitely loud enough to get The Tyrant out of his seat.

  For half a second, Stevie’s mind wheeled around the possibility that what he’d seen had been real. How else had the fender gotten pushed over? Something had been behind it, something had made it fall down. But, no. It couldn’t be. He’d just imagined it, right? Like toads crawling out of the sink drain and snakes in the toilet; entire trees covered in green-winged bats instead of leaves.

  The muscles in his legs twitched as he sat there, ready to spring into action, to lunge toward the fence. It could have still been out there, if it existed at all. It had ducked into the thicket of trees that turned into Deer Valley Woods. What if it was waiting to see if Stevie would follow? Or Stevie could have been having another freak-out, losing his—

  “What the fucking hell was that?!” Out on the front porch, The Tyrant was pissed. Stevie struggled to get to his feet before he was spotted, tangled up in his stepdad’s precious trash. He tried to shove the wheel past his ankle, but his sneaker was caught.

  “What the shit do you think you’re doing?” Too late to escape. Terry was already off the porch, giving his stepkid a scathing scowl. “What the fuck did I tell you about screwing around out here?”

  Terry hadn’t told Stevie much of anything. What he had done—having caught Stevie poking around the junk piles the summer before—was shove him into an old chest freezer and hold the lid shut. Stevie had wailed despite himself. He’d beaten his fist so hard against the inside of the lid, trying to get out, that the bones in his hands had ached for days. He didn’t know how long The Tyrant had kept him captive in there—maybe a minute, probably less—but it had felt like hours. When Terry had finally thrown the lid open, Stevie crawled out of the decrepit unit like a solider out of a foxhole. Terrified. Deafened by his own frantic screams.

  Terry would lock him in there again. This time, he’d stack an old engine block on top of the freezer and let Stevie die in there rather than letting him out. And when Stevie’s mom would weep about her lost son, Terry would shrug and tell her it was for the better. Probably ran off after his no-good pain-in-the-ass stupid fucking cousin. But there Stevie would be, feet from his own bedroom window, rotting inside a kitchen appliance while his mother mourned.

  “I—I—I thought I saw . . . I saw . . . seesaw something,” Stevie explained, hoping to ply his stepfather with a lame excuse. “There was someone out here.” Before the words ever left him, Stevie knew Terry wouldn’t buy it. Whether there had been someone in the yard or not was, at this point, way beyond The Tyrant’s concern. He was a man who believed what he saw, and right now his disobedient little shit of a stepson was doing exactly what he’d clearly been told not to do.

  “Get over here!” Terry’s words snapped like the thick leather of a belt.

  Stevie continued to struggle. He stood, hastily shoving the bike wheel down toward his foot. One of the broken spokes caught the bone of his ankle and left a jagged, bloody gash. Stevie bit his lip, kept himself from crying out, and tried to hurry, in order to keep his stepdad from becoming angrier than he already was. But his sneaker refused to come free.

  “I’m coming, coming, coming . . .” He hated himself for the breathless, mindless echo that chased after his words like a tattered kite tail. It was times like these that he wished he were more like Jude. Furious. Defensive. Ready to rage at a moment’s notice rather than ducking his head and murmuring P-please and Th-th-thank you and rhyming his way through an apology that the man he loathed didn’t deserve. He wanted to spit in The Tyrant’s face and tell him to go to hell. Sit and spin. Kiss my ass. Heck, if Jude had been in Stevie’s shoes, he would have told the man and his idiotic mullet to fuck right off, regardless of the inevitable beating to follow. But Stevie didn’t have those kinds of guts. Even Dunk avoided their stepdad when things got heated. It was easier that way. Safer, for sure.

  The bike wheel finally came free of Stevie’s foot. He shoved it away and floundered, nearly tripping over an old standing kitchen mixer that was missing more parts than it had left. His bloodied ankle hit the steel body of the mixer hard, sending a twinge of pain up his leg like a lightning bolt, straight up to his crotch. He wanted to stop, to cry out because it hurt so much, but he continued to hobble forward. When he finally reached the porch steps where his stepdad was waiting, Terry’s blocky fingers seized his upper arm. He dug his nails into Stevie’s biceps so hard, it felt like he was ready to rip muscle from bone. Stevie whimpered against the grip, but his show of weakness only seemed to incense The Tyrant more. Rather than letting him go, Terry marched him to the open front door of the house and shoved the upper half of Stevie’s body into the jamb.

  “You ruin that wheel?” Terry asked, as though the bent-up bike wheel had been in perfect condition before Stevie had stuck his leg through it and not something Terry had picked up off the side of the road.
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br />   “N-no. No. No, sir. No.”

  “Bull-fucking-shit.” Terry pushed Stevie across the living room and toward the hall that fed into all the bedrooms. “I saw those bent spokes,” he said. “What do you think, I’m blind, or just plain stupid?”

  How about just stupid? Stevie wanted to ask, but his rebellious thought was derailed by Terry throwing open Stevie’s bedroom door and thrusting him inside. Stevie lurched forward. The familiar jangle of The Tyrant’s belt buckle rang like a funeral toll. Nausea did a full bloom in the pit of Stevie’s stomach; a night flower efflorescing at high speed. He wanted to scream, to bolt out of the room. He wanted to set the house on fire. Set Terry on fire. Watch him burn while he danced around his scorched and smoldering body, howling at the moon.

  Despite the thousands of fleeting thoughts he’d had about calling the police, or stopping into the precinct and showing them his bruised-up back, or just murdering his stepdad in his sleep, Stevie kneeled in front of his bed as if to pray.

  “Wait,” he whimpered. “I’m bleeding, I’m needing . . . uh, uh, a Band-Aid . . .” He glanced at his sock, mired with red from where his ankle seeped crimson, praying that this time The Tyrant would show some mercy. Perhaps today would be the day he sighed, shook his head, and abandoned Stevie in his room. But Terry continued to fumble with his belt, and Stevie pressed his face into his mattress, conceding, pushing his thoughts to Jude, to where he may have been, to not being sure how he would get through the hell that was his life without his best friend next to him.

  He’s taking pictures of a dumb old shark, he thought. A shark in the park.

  Jude was at Universal Studios. He was having a good time. He’d come back. He had to be okay.

  3

  * * *

  WEDNESDAY. DAY THREE. The thing returned.

  It had come in the night, peered through Stevie’s window, and watched him sleep with a pair of clouded, bulbous eyes. Its twisted fingers smeared blood down the glass—blood that wasn’t there in the morning, but that Stevie was convinced had been there just the same. Jude had sent it, lonely out there somewhere, wanting nothing more than his best friend back.

  Stevie woke up screaming.

  Not that long ago, his mother would have played twenty questions, sure that talking it out would help her kid come to grips with whatever demons were grappling around inside his head. But that morning, she didn’t ask about his bad dream and Stevie matched her silence. He didn’t tell her about what he’d seen lurking amid Terry’s junk the night before, and he certainly didn’t mention how it had returned to haunt his sleep. But he didn’t have to say a word to know she was more worried than usual. He could tell by the way she kept looking at him from the corner of her eye.

  Ever since Stevie’s dad had ditched them, Nicole Clark had worn an expression of perpetual dismay, and this morning her nerves practically rattled when she walked. She was likely thinking about how the nightmares were getting worse rather than better, probably scared of what would happen to Stevie if Jude never came home. And that was a legitmate fear, because today was officially beyond what the TV detectives referred to as that all-important forty-eight-hour window. That was precisely why today, Stevie would start looking for Jude, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop him.

  After breakfast, he walked into town and found himself standing at the edge of the wood. Men in safety vests and hunting gear combed the trees. They looked ridiculous as they trekked across an open expanse of forest in a loose and crooked line, disorderly, as if hunting for a lost set of truck keys rather than a kid’s body. Their heads were bowed. Their boots kicked at dead leaves and pine needles, as though somewhere in that open space they’d happen upon a boy so tiny, so well concealed, that even the dogs that accompanied them hadn’t noticed the slightest bump in the dirt or the smell of human decay.

  With his nerves steeled, Stevie stepped forward to approach the team. But his determination was suddenly weakened, watered down with all sorts of other stuff: guilt for lying to his mom about where he was going—Gonna go pick up some gummy gummies at the general store; grief that he had to be in those woods at all; a lurid, subdued excitement that he was about to participate in his first-ever official investigation; terror of what he might find once he really started to look. Because what if the worst came to pass? What if Jude really was gone and Stevie, having joined the search party, was the one who stumbled across his corpse? It was one thing to see an actor pretend to be dead on his dad’s old Unsolved Mysteries episodes, but the possibility of a dead body in real life, let alone that of someone he knew so well . . . He wasn’t sure he’d be okay after something like that. And if Stevie wasn’t okay now, where would that leave him? In the mental hospital, probably; hell, he was almost already there. Tossing and turning at night. Recollecting Dunk’s Max Larsen story. Replaying the time when Jude had gone scary with the malevolence Stevie had seen in his eyes.

  It had been earlier that very summer, only a few days after school had let out. Jude had waited in Stevie’s backyard, eyeballing Terry’s shit piles when Stevie had come flying out of the house. He ran past his cousin in a frenzy, into the trees behind both their houses, until he hit the trail that led out to Cedar Creek. Jude followed, and when they were good and far enough into the copse, Stevie started to cry. He held his arms rigid against his sides. Hands balled, teeth clamped, eyes squeezed tight. The metallic zing of blood dribbled from his freshly split lip, snail-trailing down his chin. Jude struggled for something to say as Stevie wept, because Jude wasn’t what you’d call a sensitive guy. Even after Uncle Scott died, Stevie hadn’t seen Jude cry. He just seemed mad all the time, ready to rip apart the world.

  Jude eventually opened his mouth to say something, like What’s the matter with you? or Your lip is bleeding, or maybe even Stop blubbering like a stupid baby, but Stevie cut him off with a garbled scream of such fury it made his cousin lurch back a few steps.

  “I h-h-hate him!” Stevie roared. “I hate him! Hate, fate, elimi . . . limi . . . limi . . .”—liminate.

  Jude stood silent as Stevie wound down, taking rough boxer’s swipes at tears and blood with the back of his hand. They hadn’t talked about it, but Jude wasn’t dumb. He knew why Stevie loathed his stepdad. Even Aunt Amanda hated him, and she liked practically everyone. Stevie had heard her crying in his mom’s kitchen once, murmuring about how she didn’t understand . . . couldn’t comprehend how my own big sister won’t stand up to that monster, how you just sit there and take it, Nicki. For the boys, sure, but look what he’s doing to your family.

  For the boys. Yeah, right. Maybe for the money, but for him and Dunk? No way.

  “If that were my dad,” Jude spoke after a moment of frazzled silence, “I’d slit that guy’s throat from ear to ear, and I wouldn’t even feel bad about it. You know, eliminate him.”

  Was that why Stevie had said the word, why it had tumbled out of him in a moment of involuntary clanging? Eliminate. As in murder. Eliminate. Exterminate. For Stevie, it was just a passing thought. Jude, though? He had a darkness to him, a kind of animus that Stevie didn’t possess, no matter how much he wished it upon himself. Jude’s kind of talk was for bad guys, for villains and highwaymen and jerks just like Terry Marks. But Stevie couldn’t say that, not to his cousin. He’d be marked as a coward. A chicken. A kid who didn’t have the balls to stand up for himself, let alone for anyone else.

  And though he wouldn’t admit to it in a million years, sometimes Jude scared him.

  Like when he had waved that piece of nailed-up wood at the cat in the tree and had gotten busted for it. Or when, searching for plywood behind one of the Main Street shops, he had found a jagged piece of metal and had jokingly held it against Stevie’s throat, like he was going to slash him up and leave him there to die. Or the time when, while they were both inside the fort, Jude had threatened to shove Stevie down the open square in the floorboards that served as a hatch, acting as if he was ready to push him straight out of the tree and fifteen f
eet down to an inevitable broken arm or leg, or worse.

  What had been weird about those instances was that they had come out of nowhere. One minute, he and Jude were having a good time collecting scrap lumber or wandering around in the woods. The next, Jude had that look. Like he didn’t want to live his life not knowing what it felt like to hurt someone. Like he didn’t give a damn if he ended up in juvie if it meant being able to vent his rage. Like, how for an inkling of a moment, the devil himself had crawled right into him and was itching to get out.

  It was times like those that made Stevie question who Jude really was, how well he knew him. Which was why, now, as he shuffled his way through the trees toward the bumbling search party, a queasy pit-of-the-guts feeling robbed him of his equilibrium. Doubt hit him all over again. What if Jude had been planning to run away all along, had kept it from Stevie all this time, scheming his escape from this stupid no-horse town with its dumb outdated movies and lame stores and nothing to do?

  No, he thought. No, that’s not right. Stevie may have been able to persuade himself that Jude had escaped if this were four or five years into the future. But Jude was a month shy of his thirteenth birthday. What kind of kids run away to live it up in a bigger and better place when they are twelve? Hollywood kids—they smoke cigs when they’re, like, eight. They go to cocktail parties and stuff. Yeah, they’d talked about kids living as adults, discussed how cool it would be to do whatever the hell they wanted without any consequences, without stupid adults watching their every move. Jude had a pretty big ego and some pretty crazy ideas. In that same conversation, he had convinced himself he was suave enough to find a sugar mama to buy him video games, feed him junk food, and let him drink beer out of a can. Maybe even let him touch her boobs every now and again. Her bare boobs, he had specified. With my bare hands. That had cracked Stevie up big time. He had laughed so hard, Jude had actually gotten mad. But Jude had been joking about all that . . . right? He wasn’t idiotic enough to think he could really make it out there on his own. Not yet, anyway.