The Devil Crept In

by Ania Ahlborn

  The search team continued walking in their ambling, cockeyed way, regardless of the fact that, had there been a body out there, it would have taken all of two seconds to find it among a few downed branches and lone ferns. They lumbered forward, a couple of the guys randomly chuckling every so often. Someone pulled a flask out of their back pocket, took a swig, let out a belch, got a few laughs.

  “Bring enough for everyone?” A guy in a trucker’s cap had made the inquiry—the hat so neon orange it set Stevie’s retinas aflame. Another round of snirks ensued. Yep, just looking for a dead kid. Good times!

  If this was the only search party Deer Valley was able to scrounge up, Jude was royally screwed.

  One of the men finally noticed Stevie looming on the outskirts. As soon as they made eye contact, Stevie’s entire body went electric with dread. The guy was decked out in his hunting gear—camouflage accented by strips of reflective safety tape. Deer Valley wasn’t one of those ironically named places like Ocean, Arizona, or Buckets-O-Rain, Nevada. It was, in fact, exactly what it implied. Most of Deer Valley’s dads took their boys hunting every weekend once the season started up. Except for Terry Marks, and that was for the best. Stevie didn’t like the idea of being around his stepdad while in the presence of a loaded gun. It made him imagine bad things, like Terry getting mad and blowing Stevie’s head off. Or Stevie finally finding his courage and blasting a hole straight through his stepdad’s middle—a perfectly round porthole, like on a ship, except meaty and through a dead man’s chest. Yo ho ho.

  “Hey. Kid.” The man in camo regarded Stevie with an aggravated look—What the hell are you doing here?—then broke ranks to stalk toward him. Stevie recognized him almost immediately, having seen him at a couple of basketball games and wrestling matches; school stuff Stevie wasn’t into but attended anyway, because anything was better than sitting around the house with The Tyrant only inches away. The guy was somebody’s dad, probably the patriarch of one of the bullies who called Stevie names and gave him hell during lunch.

  “Kid.” The man again. “Hey.” He snapped his fingers, his big working hands clicking with an odd, papery crackle. Stevie would never be able to snap like that—not his right hand, anyway. “You can’t be here.”

  Never one to challenge authority, this time Stevie somehow managed to resist his urge to bolt. “I—I—I . . .” Stop. Breathe. “I want to help.” He squeaked out the words, his mouth dry. Chest constricted. Suddenly sweaty, despite the lingering coolness of morning.

  “Yeah, well . . . Hey, Marv!” The man motioned for one of the other guys to come over. Stevie watched Marv break the line—a guy even bigger than the bully dad who was regarding him. Marv didn’t look the least bit amused.

  Stevie pulled in a breath and steadied his nerves, then blurted a line he had practiced in his head during his trek from the house. “My name is Stevie Clark, Clark, Cl—” He winced. Stop it. “I’m Jude’s cousin.” Family, he had decided, trumped friendship. At least that was the case in the movies and TV shows, so that’s where he was placing his bets. “Please, let me help.” He bit his tongue, desperate to hold back the ticks and rhymes that were trying to leap from between his lips like a colony of jack jumper ants.

  Bully Dad blinked at Stevie’s request while Marv completed his approach. “What’s this?” Marv asked, nodding to Stevie as though he were a yard sale toaster rather than a real boy.

  “Stevie Clark,” Bully Dad said. “The Brighton boy’s cousin.” He gave Marv a look, as though Jude couldn’t have possibly had family. A wild kid like him? Everyone knew Jude was feral, raised by wolves.

  “Awh, Christ, kid.” Marv steadied his gaze on Stevie. “You can’t be out here, you know that? This is an investigation.” He annunciated the word—in-ves-tuh-gay-shun—sure that Stevie hadn’t heard such an impressive bit of vocabulary in all his ten years. Twenty-five cents, fair and square. “A possible crime scene,” he added, as if to hammer home the point.

  “Where are your folks?” Bully Dad asked. Stevie stared at a Remington rifle patch crookedly sewn onto his jacket. Couldn’t he have at least tried to place it straight?

  “At the house,” Stevie told them. “The house. I just . . . I want to help.”

  “Yeah, we got that,” Marv said, “but you can’t be out here. You want to help? Go home.”

  “Who are your folks?” asked Bully Dad. “Clark, huh? Are you Nicki’s kid?”

  “Isn’t that Mandy’s sister?” Marv asked.

  “If I remember right,” Bully Dad said with a shrug. “She wasn’t in my class. Older by a year or two, I think.”

  “Amanda Brighton is my Aunt Mandy. She’s my aunt.” If he clarified exactly how he was related to Jude, they’d have to let him participate. But his conviction seemed to sour both their expressions even more.

  “Goddamnit, okay, I’m callin’ Terry.”

  Stevie suddenly felt sick. Terry? These guys knew his stepdad? Of course they did. They probably frequented The Antler, and The Tyrant had told them how worthless of a kid he thought Jude was. That’s why their noble quest of finding a missing boy was lackadaisical. All because of Terry’s stupid, worthless, no-good opinion. And now these guys were going to rat Stevie out?

  Marv fished a cell phone out of his pants pocket.

  “W-wait, wait, wait, wait!” The word came tumbling out of him, desperate, on repeat. “No, you can’t . . . he, he, he, he . . .” He’ll kill me, he wanted to say, but he got stuck, that single-syllable word making him sound like a robot trying to laugh.

  “He doesn’t know you’re here, does he . . . ?” Marv sighed, squinted. “Kid, you’re going to get yourself in a shit-ton of trouble.”

  “You can’t be here,” Bully Dad repeated while Marv messed with his phone. Stevie couldn’t look away from that old flip design. It was the kind you couldn’t even play games on; probably ancient, bought from the customer service desk at the Safeway on Main. Stevie coiled his fingers up tight, sure that at any moment he’d reach over and grab that cheapo phone out of Marv’s hand, toss it to the ground, and stomp it beneath his sneakers as hard as he could. He’d demand they allow him to be there. How dare they try to run him off? Jude was Stevie’s best friend. Who were these guys to him? They probably didn’t care whether they found Jude or not. Heck, they probably hoped they wouldn’t.

  But all he could manage was “Please don’t call Terry.” Scary extraordinary cemetery. The plea came out as a dry whisper. Weak. Afraid. Yellow like chicken shit, Jude would have moaned. He wanted to beg some more, but those words—the rhyming and clanging—all of it was itching to get out, eager to make him look nuts, and nuts would buy him a one-way ticket back home for sure.

  But Marv had already connected the call. Turning away from Stevie and Bully Dad, he murmured a “Hello, Missus Clark?” beneath his breath. Stevie’s body went rigid. He shot Bully Dad a desperate look, one that pleaded for him to intervene, to suggest to Marv that Hey, it’s not that big of a deal, just let the kid be on his way. You know as well as anyone that Terry is a sick dick prick. But Bully Dad wasn’t paying attention, and Marv didn’t get a chance to explain the reason for his call. Rather, both men were distracted by a sudden yell from a good way down that crooked line of men.

  “Hey!” It was the guy with the flask who had let out that lip-curling Homer Simpson belch. He was standing knee-deep in a big thatch of coastal wood fern—not big enough to hide a body, but definitely big enough to hold a clue. “Hey!” His yell was more adamant the second time, accentuated by a mélange of surprise and realization; the kind of sound Stevie made every time the toilet seemed like it was going to flush but backed up and overflowed, all because Terry was too busy to fix it, just like the stupid dishwasher. “I think I got something over here!”

  The entire line buzzed with murmurs as soon as Flask made the claim. They broke formation, fanning out like disorganized geese, trudging quick and determined toward the man who had made a find. Bully Dad booked it back to his brethren. Marv
snapped his phone shut and shot Stevie a stern glare, barking a demand.

  “Don’t move.”

  But before Marv could make his way over to the rest of the group, Flask held something up with the tip of a stick, something that, despite Stevie’s resolve, forced a bleated whimper from his throat. Because he recognized it right away.

  It was a hooded black sweatshirt. The faded white screen print on the back was one that Stevie knew by heart. It was an outline of a giant fist with white top and bottom rockers reading GRIP IT AND RIP IT. A BMXer design in the vein of a biker insignia. A young person’s safer version of what you’d see on the back of a Hells Angels or Bandidos cut.

  Jude’s sweatshirt.

  Which brought only one detail to light.

  This was real.

  June Brighton was really gone.

  4

  * * *

  STEVIE SPRINTED OUT of the trees and bolted down Main Street so fast he nearly tripped over Mrs. Lovejoy’s yappy Pekingese, its retractable leash pulled tight enough to be a trip wire. He leapt over it, lost his footing, and knocked into six-year-old Bobby Benton, who was on his way out of the general store with a cellophane bag of gummy worms in one hand, a Slim Jim in the other, and his big brother, Sam, bringing up the rear. Sam just so happened to be Jude’s nemesis—a kid Stevie remembered vividly from years before. He was the kind of kid who smashed your lunch tray against your T-shirt and said, Oh, gee, you should probably look where you’re going next time.

  Bobby, on the other hand, was a cry-baby pip-squeak, and he proved it by eliciting a nerve-fraying whine as soon as his bag of worms hit the sidewalk. “Heeeeey!”

  Stevie careened onto the street, partly because he wasn’t in control of his own two feet, and partly because he wanted to get as far away as he could before Sam grabbed him by the back of the neck and showed him what was what. Who did Stevie think he was, knocking into his kid brother like that? And while Stevie stumbling into the road may have given Sam the Jerk a wide berth, it nearly got Stevie creamed by a minivan. The van simultaneously slammed on its brakes and blared its horn while Sam yelled, “Sack, you creep!” Mrs. Lovejoy gathered her shivering dog against her heaving breast, as though witnessing a felony or something equally dramatic. Hooligans, the lot of them. Stevie was sure that, had Mrs. Lovejoy not been standing on that street corner, Sam would have replaced creep with a far more colorful insult.

  Stevie continued to run—his legs pumping like twin pistons, his heart thudding inside his skull like the crashing cymbal of an offbeat marching band. Sam’s antagonistic yell did something weird to Stevie’s insides. It twisted up his guts, resonating more than it ever would have if Jude had been right beside him. If Jude never came back, Stevie would be nothing more than a punching bag for kids like Sam. He’d be the boy everyone loved to trip, to insult, to spit on because he was weird.

  More than a block away from the scene of his near-death minivan experience and still running as hard as he could, Stevie came to the realization that part of why he couldn’t catch his breath wasn’t because he’d been sprinting for a solid two minutes straight; it was because he was bawling. He couldn’t get the image of Jude’s sweatshirt out of his head; how that guy, Flask, had held it out on the tip of a branch as though it had been crawling with maggots. Or maybe he had held it out that way because it had been covered in blood.

  The mere idea of it brought him to a sudden standstill.

  He stood on the sun-dappled sidewalk, staring down the pine-lined road that would take him home, and he imagined it: black cotton soaked in something thick and viscous, something that should have been red but blended into the background the way the camouflage the search party was wearing blended into the shrubs and trees. He tried to picture Jude running away from something just as disguised as that search crew. A shadow thing, twisted and lumbering, yet somehow unspeakably fast. The thing Stevie had seen in the side yard; the one he’d dreamed about—or had he really seen it?—that had come to his window and watched him through a thin sheet of glass.

  Stevie threw himself forward and, as if stuck in a perpetual stumble, ran at the street sign that would point him toward home. He cut across the intersection as abruptly as he had jumped into the road, and a guy sitting in his car at the stop sign yelled something out his open window. Something like Watch where you’re going or I bet your cousin is already dead. Stevie hardly heard him as he continued his sprint.

  He buzzed the trees that flanked the road, but hesitated when Aunt Mandy’s house came clear. There were police cruisers parked out there; one by the curb, another blocking in Aunt Mandy’s old Civic, as if to keep a missing boy’s mother from bounding out of the house and trying to flee from her own growing horror.

  Seeing those cruisers was a blow to the gut. Stevie gulped air, his sprint slowing as he continued his approach, ignoring the pang of nausea that squeezed his stomach tight, threatening to make him heave his breakfast all over the sidewalk for everyone to see.

  And a lot of people would see. They were there in their houses, standing at their front windows, the curtains rustling just enough to erase any doubt they were spying on what was transpiring down the street. And who could blame them? Jude’s disappearance was the first big thing to happen in Deer Valley in years. The last time there was any real buzz in town was when a farmer had reported a couple of his cows being mutilated overnight. There was the usual talk of aliens. Stevie had been five or six, and all that summer he and Jude pretended to be little green men shooting imaginary ray guns at anything that moved. They tried to eat nothing but hamburgers, because honestly, why would aliens target cows unless it was for the delicious beef? Their plan didn’t fly, though. Both Stevie’s mom and Aunt Mandy continued to force-feed them stuff like boiled carrots and broccoli.

  Beyond aliens, murmurs surfaced of satanic worship. It was, in fact, the first time Stevie had heard of a creature named Satan at all. This was care of Duncan, always quick to tell his baby brother a story that would make him squirm. But the Satan stuff was quickly squelched by Deer Valley police, and the blame for the farmer’s livestock was placed on the predators that roamed the woods. Dead deer were a pretty common occurrence around these parts, and cougars weren’t exactly the type to discriminate between species. A meal was a meal. Gruesome, but not nearly as cool as burger-loving spacemen.

  Stevie hoped that Jude’s story could be just as stupidly fantastic: aliens beaming him up into a crazy spacecraft, stuffing him into a human-sized pod, threatening to harvest his organs and dissect his brain if he couldn’t eat a five-pound bacon double cheeseburger in ten minutes flat.

  But there was the sweatshirt. The two cops outside Jude’s house with their roof lights whirling in soundless sweeps of red and blue. And there was the squirming, wormy ball of dread ever-growing in Stevie’s chest, filling him up so entirely that it was suddenly hard to breathe. His heart found a new home in his throat. Pins and needles bit at his hands and feet.

  Finally reaching the front porch of his own house, he nearly tripped over the steps as he blindly lunged for the door, desperate to put walls and glass between himself and Aunt Mandy’s place, if only to fend off the inevitable news.

  Inside, the house was empty. Terry was at work, sitting on top of a bulldozer or backhoe loader hours outside of town. Dunk was either sleeping or out with Annie, and Stevie’s mom was undoubtedly next door. But rather than panicking at the silence, he was thankful for the isolation. He didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to hear anything anyone had to say about what was going on. He knew the direction those conversations would take.

  They found Jude’s sweatshirt.

  It doesn’t look good.

  He stumbled past the couch and coffee table and lumbered to his room, slamming his door behind him. He threw himself onto his bed and buried his face in his pillow. Considered screaming but didn’t, because Jude wouldn’t have. Screaming was for sissies and scared girls running from crazed, ax-wielding killers. Not for tough guys who built f
orts with hammers and nails.

  He had to suck it up, keep his head on straight. He had to figure out what the hell to do, not doom his best friend because of mindless hysterics.

  He continued to lie there, trying to calm himself, making a genuine attempt to gather his wits and control the rhymes—rude unvalued Jude, blued and discontinued—that were spiraling through his head. He tried to will himself to stop being a baby and start acting like an adult. It took a while to gather his wits.

  By the time he looked up from having shoved his face into his pillow, the light had turned soft and purple outside. There was the sound of shuffling out in the front room. For a moment, Stevie considered that he may have been alone with Terry, which was never a good thing. But his mother’s stifled sobs assured him that The Tyrant had yet to return.

  Weary, Stevie sat up, swatted at his hot and tear-swollen face, and eventually crept to his bedroom door. He cracked it open an inch, put an ear to the jamb, and echo-located his mother in the kitchen by the sound of plates scraping against the bottom of their stained porcelain sink. Her crying drew him out of his room and into the hall. Suddenly, all he wanted was to wrap his arms around her and tell her it was going to be okay, it would all work out. Jude was smart. He was strong. They couldn’t give up hope. All bullshit, but sometimes lies felt better than the truth.

  But he stalled when he finally saw her. With her back to him, Nicole Clark’s reflection appeared pale and ghostly in the window above the sink. It was strange to see her so fragile. Stevie’s mom was the one who kept things together. Aunt Amanda had always been the weaker of the two. When Uncle Scott had died, Stevie’s mom had stepped up and taken charge, arranging everything: the funeral, the flowers, the wake, the food. The most vivid memory he had of that awful day wasn’t the dozens of sniffling mourners shuffling past the church pulpit to place a hand on Uncle Scott’s closed casket lid. Nor the small tear in the bottom hem of Aunt Mandy’s dress. It wasn’t even the way Jude had sat in the front pew, uncomfortable in a too-small Goodwill suit, staring at his hands as if trying to summon the power of reanimation. Stevie’s clearest memory was that of his mother, standing stoic and blank-faced in Aunt Amanda’s kitchen, surrounded by a wailing wall of women, all of them blotting at their eyes with tissues and handkerchiefs. Some of them wore sad smiles. Others—like Aunt Mandy—wept openly while men scooped grocery-store spinach dip onto plastic plates and fussed with lukewarm cocktail shrimp. Stevie remembered that moment because, amid all of those crying ladies, his own mother looked like she was made of stone; a mom of marble holding a tray of cheese and crackers, ready to feed the anguished as soon as they caught their breaths.