by Dan Wells
My mom was smart enough to leave me alone. I threw my pee-soaked clothes in the laundry when I got home and took a shower. I suppose she saw the clothes, or smelled them, and assumed I’d had one of my accidents. It’s rare for bed wetters to lose control while awake, but all of the reasons it might happen—intense anxiety, sadness, or fear—were sensitive enough that she avoided the subject that night and took out her frustration on the laundry instead of on me.
When I got out of the shower, I locked myself in my room and stayed there until almost noon the next day, though I was tempted to stay longer. It was Thanksgiving, and Lauren had refused to come; the tension in the house would be overwhelming. After what I’d just been through, however, a tense dinner was nothing. I got dressed and went into the living room.
“Hi, John,” said Margaret. She was sitting on the couch and watching the end of the Macy’s parade.
Mom looked up from the counter in the kitchen. “Good morning, honey.” She never called me honey unless she was trying to make up for something. I grunted a vague response and poured a bowl of cereal.
“You must be starving,” said Mom. “We’re going to eat in just a couple of hours, but go ahead—you haven’t eaten since lunch yesterday.”
I hated it when she was nice to me, because it seemed like she only did it in emergencies. It was like an open acknowledgement that something was wrong; I preferred to let things fester in silence.
I chewed my food slowly, wondering what Mom and Margaret would do if they knew the truth—that I had not been hiding because of fear or emotional turmoil, but because I was fascinated by the possibilities of a supernatural killer. I’d spent the night piecing together bits of the puzzle and the criminal profile, and I was delighted by how well it all worked. The killer was stealing body parts to replace ones that no longer worked—Crowley had bad lungs, so he got new ones, and it made sense that he’d killed the other victims for the same reason. His leg used to be so painful, but yesterday he had walked without limping or straining—he had replaced his bad leg with the one he stole from Rask. The black sludge found by each victim came from the old, degenerated parts he discarded. The victims were old, large men because Crowley was an old, large man, and needed body parts that fit him. The dual nature of the violent killings and the methodical aftermath came from Crowley’s own dual nature—a demon in a man’s body.
Or, more correctly, a demon in a body made up of other men. The forty-year-old story Ted Rask had found in Arizona was probably the same thing—probably the same demon. Were there more demons like him? Had Crowley been in Arizona forty years ago? Rask, despite being a showboating jerk, was on to something, and he died because of it.
But throughout my thinking, I kept going back to the killing itself, and the blood, and the sounds, and the screams of a dying man. I knew, academically, that it should bother me more—that I should be throwing up, or crying, or blocking the memories out. Instead I simply ate a bowl of cereal, and thought about what to do next. I could send the police to his house, but what evidence would they find? The last death had been a drifter that no one would even remember, let alone miss, and Crowley had sunk the body and all the evidence into the lake; he was getting smarter. Would they dredge a lake on an anonymous tip? Would they search a respected man’s house on the word of a fifteen-year-old? I couldn’t imagine that they would. If I wanted the police to believe me, I had to get them there at the scene of a murder—they had to catch him demon-handed. But how?
“John, can you help me with this stuffing?” Mom was standing by the table chopping celery, watching the parade in the other room.
“Sure,” I said, and got up. She handed me the knife and a couple of onions from the fridge. The knife was almost identical to the one the drifter had tried to kill Crowley with. I hefted it a bit, then chopped down through layers of onion.
“Time for the juice,” she said, and pulled the turkey out of the oven. She picked up a large syringe, poked it into the turkey, and squeezed the plunger. “I saw this on TV yesterday,” she said. “It’s chicken broth, salt, basil, and rosemary. It’s supposed to be really good.” By force of habit she’d poked in the syringe just above the turkey’s collarbone, right where she would have inserted a pump tube into a corpse. I watched her inject the broth and imagined it swirling through the turkey, embalming it with salt and seasonings, filling it with an artifical perfection while a thick stream of blood and horror dripped out the bottom and fled underground. I peeled off the skin of the second onion, dry and papery, and chopped the bulb in half.
Mom covered the turkey and put it back into the oven.
“Don’t we need to put the stuffing in?” I asked.
“You don’t actually cook stuffing inside the turkey,” she said, rooting through the cupboard. “That’s a case of food poisoning waiting to happen.” She pulled out a small glass bottle with a tiny pool of brown at the bottom. “Oh no, we’re practically out. John, honey?”
There was that word again. “Yeah.”
“Can you run over to the Watsons and borrow some vanilla? Peg’s sure to have some; at least someone on this street has her head on straight.”
That was Brooke’s house. I hadn’t allowed myself to think about her since Dr. Neblin had asked me about her—I could feel myself fixating on her, thinking about her too much, so my rules stepped in to stop me. I wanted to say no, but I didn’t want to have to explain why. “Sure.”
“Take a coat, it snowed again.”
I pulled on my jacket and went down the stairs to the mortuary. It was dark and silent; I loved it like this. I’d have to come back later, if I could do it without making Mom suspicious. I went out through the side door and looked across the street at Mr. Crowley’s house. Snow had covered everything with a two-inch blanket of white. Nothing was dirty after it snowed, at least not that you could see; the surface of every car and house and sewer grate was white and calm. I plodded through the snow to the Watsons’, two houses over, and rang the doorbell.
A muffled shout drifted through the door. “I got it.” I heard footsteps, and soon Brooke Watson opened the door. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, with her blond hair curled into a knot and held in place by a pencil. I’d avoided her since the dance, when she’d backed away so warily. Now she smiled—she actually smiled—when she saw me. “Hey, John.”
“Hey. My mom needs some vanilla or something. Do you guys have any?”
“Like, ice cream?”
“No, it’s brown, it’s for cooking.”
“Mom,” she called, “do we have any vanilla?” Brooke’s mom stepped into the hall, wiping her hands on a towel, and waved me inside.
“Come in, come in—don’t leave him standing out there, Brooke, you’ll freeze him to death.” She smiled as she said it, and Brooke laughed.
“You better come in,” she said with a smile. I kicked the snow off my shoes and stepped inside, and Brooke closed the door.
“It’s your turn, Brooke, come on!” shouted a high voice, and I saw Brooke’s little brother and father lying on the floor with a sprawling Monopoly game laid out in front of them. Brooke flopped down on the floor and rolled the dice, then counted out her move and groaned. Her little brother, Ethan, cackled with glee as she counted out a stack of play money.
“Pretty cold out there?” asked Brooke’s father. He was still in his pajamas, with thick wool socks on his feet to keep warm.
“It’s your turn, Dad, go,” said Ethan.
“It’s not bad,” I said, remembering last night. “The wind’s gone, at least.” And I’m not hiding in the trees while my neighbor rips a man’s lungs out, so that’s good, too.
Brooke’s mom bustled back into the room with a tiny Tupperware of vanilla. “This should be enough to get you through,” she said. “Would you like a cup of hot chocolate?”
“I would!” shouted Ethan, and jumped up and raced into the kitchen.
“No thanks,” I said, “Mom needs this for something, and I’d better ge
t back with it soon.”
“If you need anything else just let me know,” she said with a smile. “Happy Thanksgiving!”
“Happy Thanksgiving, John,” said Brooke. I opened the door and she stood up to follow me. She looked as if she were about to say something, then shook her head and laughed. “See you at school,” she said, and I nodded.
“See you at school.”
She waved as I walked down the steps, flashing her braces in a wide smile. It was achingly beautiful, and I forced myself to look away. My rules were too ingrained. She was safer this way.
I trudged back home, the vanilla shoved deep into my pocket and my hands curled into fists for warmth. Every house looked the same in the snow—a white lawn, a white driveway, a white roof, the corners rounded and the features dulled. No one would ever guess, driving by, that one home contained a joyful family, another contained a wretched half family, and yet another hid the lair of a demon.
Thanksgiving dinner passed as well as could be expected at my house. Every channel was running either a family movie or a football game, and Mom and Margaret watched blandly as they ate. I arranged my chair to get a good view of the Crowleys’ house, and stared out the window all through the meal.
Mom flipped through the channels restlessly. Before Dad left, Thanksgiving was a football day, from start to finish, and Mom complained about it every year. Now she flipped through the games aggressively, pausing longer on the non-game channels, as if to give them a higher status. They didn’t remind her of Dad, so they were better than the rest.
My parents never got along super well, but it had grown worse in the last year before he left. Eventually he moved to an apartment on the other side of town, where he stayed for almost five months while the divorce wound its way through the intestinal tract of the county courts. I stayed with him every other week, but even the brief contact they made while making the switch was too much for my parents, and eventually they just stayed on opposite sides of the supermarket parking lot, late at night when it was empty, and I carried my pillow and backpack from one car to the other in the dark. I was seven years old. One night, halfway to my mom’s car, I heard my dad’s engine roar; he turned on his headlights and pulled out onto the road, turning at the corner and disappearing in an angry rush of sound. It was the last time I ever saw him. He sent presents on Christmas, and sometimes on my birthday, but there was never a return address. He was as good as dead.
Our meal ended with a store-bought pumpkin pie and a can of spray-on whipped cream. The turkey carcass crouched in the center of the table like a bony spider; I thought about the dead man at the lake, and reached out and snapped a turkey rib with my fingers. The TV droned in the background. There was a marked absence of conflict; this was as close as my house got to happy.
“Good evening, and welcome to Five Live News. I’m Walt Daines.”
“And I’m Sarah Bello. Many people are choosing to celebrate their Thanksgiving holiday with deep-fried turkey, but the deep fryers can be dangerous. More on that in a minute, but first an update on the Clayton County killer who has thus far claimed three lives, including Five Live News reporter Ted Rask. Here’s Carrie Walsh with a report.”
All three of us sat up straight, eyes glued to the TV.
“The town of Clayton is afraid,” said a young reporter standing by the Wash-n-Dry; she’d probably been stuck with this job because she was too junior to pass it on to anybody else. It was much brighter on TV than it was outside at the moment and I guessed that she’d probably filmed this segment around two in the afternoon. “Police patrol the streets at all hours of the day, and even now, in full daylight, I am accompanied by an armed escort of police officers.” The camera pulled back to show that she was flanked by an officer on each side. “What is everyone so afraid of?” she said. “Three unsolved murders, in the space of just three months. The police have very few leads, but investigative reporter Ted Rask uncovered evidence so sensitive, the murderer killed him for it.” Her voice was even, but her eyes were bloodshot and her knuckles gripping the microphone were white as bone. She was terrified. “Today, assisted by Agent Forman of the FBI, we bring that evidence to you, to help catch a killer.”
The scene cut away to some kind of records facility, and the FBI agent explained in voice-over the story of Emmett T. Openshaw, an Arizona man who disappeared from his home forty-two years ago. They showed a picture: he was an adult, but not a very old one—forty, maybe? I’m no good at guessing ages. He looked vaguely familiar, in the way that old photos tend to—that niggling impression in the back of your head that if the person had a modern haircut and modern clothes, it would be someone you saw every day. The police found blood and signs of violence, but no body. Most importantly, and the reason the story was related to Clayton County, they also found a puddle of black sludge in the middle of the man’s kitchen floor. The police had a few theories of their own, which the reporter nervously explained, but none of them matched what I had seen—how could they?
I stared at the TV screen and imagined Mr. Crowley in Arizona. He knocked on a door, this man opened it, and Crowley gave him some story about a broken car or a lost map. He asked to come in, the man let him, and when his back was turned, Crowley ripped the man’s throat out and stole his . . . what? The police never found the body, so they never knew that the killer had stolen a piece of it.
But why would he hide his bodies back then, and not hide his first three now? It didn’t make sense. Thinking back to the FBI classifications, it was as if he used to be an organized killer, and had become a disorganized one. And now his attack on the drifter had moved back to the organized side of the spectrum again. Why?
The news footage switched to show the FBI agent, sitting in a bland office for an interview that must have been filmed earlier. “DNA testing has continued in the Clayton case,” said Agent Forman, “and the sludge found next to the three Clayton victims is consistent—the FBI can’t identify whose DNA it is, but we do know that it is definitely all from the same person.”
The same person? That didn’t make any sense either. If the sludge comes from the discarded organs, and each organ comes from a different body, wouldn’t the DNA be different each time? That kind of science was a little beyond the tenth-grade level, unfortunately, so I couldn’t figure it out myself, and since I was basing my theories on information the FBI agent didn’t have, he didn’t offer any further explanation either.
“Emmett T. Openshaw died so long ago, unfortunately, that no DNA testing was possible,” said Agent Forman, “and none of the sludge found in his home was saved as evidence. Quite frankly, we don’t know why or even if this information is significant—only that the killer wanted to keep it quiet. If this information means anything to you, or if you have any leads at all, please talk to the police. Your identity will be kept confidential. Thank you.”
The screen switched back to the live reporter, who nodded curtly and looked at the camera. “This is Carrie Walsh with Five Live News. Back to you, Sarah.”
Any leads at all? Even preposterous ones?
It was obvious that the demon was more than the sum of his parts. He could turn his hands—one of which belonged to a farmer just two months ago—into demon claws. He needed body parts from humans, that much seemed certain, but when he absorbed them they became a part of him. They took on his properties and strengths and, apparently, his DNA signature.
But if that were true, why was the DNA recognizably human? Did demons even have DNA?
Preposterous or not, I needed to go to the police. The only other choice was to try to stop him myself, and I didn’t even know where to begin. Shoot him? Stab him? He could heal back from some pretty serious wounds, so I doubted either of those would do any good. Besides that, I knew it would be wrong. I’d spent too much time protecting myself from thoughts of violence to stumble into it now. The monster behind the wall strained and growled, awake and anxious to be set free. I didn’t dare let it out—who knows what it would do?
The only way I could do that was to study him, and follow him, and call them when he made his move. I had to become Mr. Crowley’s shadow.
9
The hardest part was the first step: out my door, across the street, and up Mr. Crowley’s walk to his front porch. I hesitated before I knocked. If he had seen me at the lake—if he had any suspicion that I knew his secret—he might just kill me on sight. I knocked. It was several degrees below zero, but I kept my hands out of my pockets, ready to balance if I had to run.
Mrs. Crowley opened the door. Was she a demon, too?
“Hello, John, how are you today?”
“I’m fine, Mrs. Crowley, how are you?” I heard a creak in the house behind her—Mr. Crowley moving slowly from one room to another. Did she know what he was?
“I’m fine, dear, what brings you out here on such a cold evening?” Mrs. Crowley was old and small, the most stereotypical “little old lady” I’d ever seen. She wore glasses, and it occurred to me that Mr. Crowley didn’t—did he steal new eyes every time his old ones wore out?
“It snowed last night,” I said. “I want to shovel your walks.”
“On Thanksgiving?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not really doing anything else.”
Mrs. Crowley smiled slyly. “I know why you’re really here,” she said. “You want some hot chocolate.”
I smiled—a careful, practiced smile designed to look exactly like a twelve-year-old boy caught in an innocent trap. I’d worked on it all night. Mrs. Crowley gave me hot chocolate every time I shoveled their snow; it was the only time I was ever invited inside. I was here today because I needed to be invited inside—I needed to see if Mr. Crowley was healthy or sick, and how bad he was. Eventually he’d have to kill again, and if I wanted to send the police to catch him in the act, I needed to know exactly when it happened.