by Dan Wells
“Excuse me,” said Carrie, “can you tell us what’s going on here?”
“Susan Olson is being placed in protective custody, for her own safety and for that of her child.” The man spoke quickly, as if he’d prepared the statement before leaving the house. “At this time, we do not know if Mr. Greg Olson is a suspect or a victim, but he is certainly a person of interest in this case, and we are working around the clock to find him. Thank you.” Agent Forman got into the car and it drove away, leaving several police behind to quell the mob and restore order.
Carrie looked as if she wanted to stay as close to the police as possible, and her hands were shaking, but she found a member of the mob and started to interview him—with shock, I realized that it was Mr. Layton, my principal.
“Excuse me sir, may I ask you a few questions?”
Mr. Layton was not ranting like many in the crowd, and looked embarrassed to be suddenly on camera; I imagined he’d get a good talking-to from the school board the next morning. “Um, sure,” he said, squinting into the camera light.
“What can you tell us about the feelings in your town today?”
“Well, look around you,” he said. “People are angry—they’re very angry. People are getting carried away. Mobs are always stupid, I know, except for that brief moment where you’re in one, and they make perfect sense. I already feel stupid just for being here,” he said, glancing up at the camera again.
“Do you feel that this kind of thing will happen again with the next death?”
“It could happen again tomorrow,” said Mr. Layton, throwing up his hands. “It could happen again whenever something gets the people riled up. Clayton is a very small community—probably everyone in town knew one of the victims, or lived in one of their neighborhoods. This killer, whoever it is, is not killing strangers—he’s killing us; he’s killing people with faces and names and families. I honestly don’t know how long this community can contain that kind of violence without exploding.” He squinted into the camera again, and the image cut away.
Around them the mob was dispersing, but for how long?
It only took a few days for new DNA evidence to come through, all but exonerating Greg Olson, and the police plastered it across the news in an attempt to give Mrs. Olson and her child a bit of their life back. The police had, of course, cleared away the snow at the scene of the attack and found the sidewalk covered with blood, much of it almost certainly from Olson himself, in quantities that made him almost certainly another victim. Rumors started to spread about a third set of tire tracks, phantom bullets that had been fired but not found, and, most telling of all, a DNA signature that matched the mysterious black substance—only this time the DNA hadn’t come from the sludge, but from a bloody smear inside the police car. This meant that there were four people at the scene of the killings, not three, and FBI forensic people were sure that the fourth, not Greg Olson, was the murderer.
Of course, some people began to suspect there was a fifth.
“You seem different today,” said Dr. Neblin at our weekly Thursday session. I’d been tearing down my system of rules for five days now.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’re just . . . different,” he said. “Anything new?”
“You always ask that right after somebody dies,” I said.
“You’re always a little different after somebody dies,” said Neblin. “What did you think of it this time?”
“I try not to,” I said. “You know, rules and all. What did you think of it?”
Neblin paused only a moment before responding.
“Your rules have never stopped you from thinking about the killings before,” he said. “We’ve talked about them quite a bit.”
That was a stupid mistake. I was trying to act as if I were still following my rules, but apparently I wasn’t very good at it. “I know, I just . . . it seems different now, don’t you think?”
“It certainly does,” said Dr. Neblin. He waited for me to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound suspicious. I’d never tried to hide anything from Neblin before—it was hard.
“How’s school?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. “Everyone’s afraid, but that’s pretty normal I guess.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Not really,” I said, although I was more afraid than I’d ever been, just not for any reason he knew about. “Fear is a . . . it’s a weird thing, when you think about it. People are only afraid of other things, they’re never afraid of themselves.”
“Should people be afraid of themselves?”
“Fear is about things that you can’t control,” I said, “the future, or the dark, or someone trying to kill you. You don’t get scared of yourself because you always know what you’re going to do.”
“Are you afraid of yourself?”
I looked out the window and saw a woman on the sidewalk, standing in a beaten snowdrift and watching the traffic. “It’s like that woman,” I said, pointing at her. “She could be afraid that a car might hit her, or that the ice might make her slip, or that the other side of the street won’t have anywhere to stand, but she’s not afraid of crossing the street—crossing is her own decision, and she’s already made it, and she knows how to do it, and it should be pretty easy. She’s going to wait until there are no cars, and step carefully on the ice, and do everything within her control to keep herself safe. But it’s the things she can’t control that scare her. Things that could happen to her, not things that she does. She doesn’t lie in bed in the morning and say ‘I hope I don’t come to any streets today, because I’m afraid I might try to cross them.’ Here she goes.”
The woman saw a break in traffic and hurried across the street. Nothing happened.
“Safe,” I said. “Nothing happened at all. Now she’s going back to work, where she’s going to think about other things she’s afraid of—‘I hope my boss doesn’t fire me; I hope the letter makes it there on time; I hope the check doesn’t bounce.’ ”
“You know her?” asked Neblin.
“No,” I said, “but she’s on foot in this part of town at four in the afternoon, so there’s only a couple of things she could be doing—probably not picking something up, because she wasn’t carrying anything but a purse, so the bank or the post office seem like the most obvious guesses.” I stopped suddenly, and looked back at Neblin. I’d never theorized about people in front of him before—my rules had never let me think that much about a random stranger. I wanted to accuse him of tricking me, but he hadn’t done anything, just let me talk. I watched his eyes, looking for some sign that he knew the significance of what I’d been doing. He was staring straight back, thinking. Analyzing.
“Good guesses,” said Neblin. “I don’t know her either, but I’d bet you’re right about most of those things.” He was waiting for something—for me to admit what I’d done, maybe, or tell him why my rules were so different today. I said nothing.
“The latest news on the killing last weekend was about a 911 call,” he said.
Uh oh.
“Apparently somebody called in from a pay phone—one just up on Main Street—and reported an attack by the Clayton Killer. The theory right now is that the killer got Greg Olson, some witness called it in, and when the dispatcher sent the police, the killer got them, too.”
“I hadn’t heard about that,” I said. “Makes sense, though. Do they know who the caller was?”
“He wouldn’t identify himself,” said Neblin, “or she wouldn’t, maybe. The voice was kind of high, so they think it was either a woman or a child.”
“I hope it was a woman,” I said.
Neblin raised an eyebrow.
“Whatever happened that night,” I said, “I’m sure it’s not the kind of thing a child should ever have to see. It could really mess him up.”
11
Mr. Crowley woke up every morning around six-thirty. He didn’t use an alarm, he just woke up—decades o
f working at the same job, day after day, had conditioned him until it was second nature, and now, long after retirement, he couldn’t help himself. I knew this because I watched from my window across the street for a few days, seeing which lights turned on when, and once I knew where to go I crouched and listened outside of his house. Normally I couldn’t have done that without leaving incriminating footprints in the snow, but, as luck would have it, someone kept Mr. Crowley’s walks remarkably clean. I could come and go as I pleased.
At six-thirty in the morning Mr. Crowley woke up and swore. It was like clockwork—he was an old, vulgar cuckoo you could practically set your watch to. It was the only time he swore all day, as far as I could tell; I suppose it helped him cleanse his mind and start the day fresh, gathering the night’s dark thoughts into a plug of mental mucus and spitting it out in a single word. His bedroom was in the back right corner of the house, and after his daily cuss, he walked in the dark to the bathroom and washed, I guess his face, in the sink. The light came on, the toilet flushed, and he ran himself a hot shower that steamed the outer window. By seven, he was dressed and in the kitchen.
His breakfast I determined primarily by smell—he had a small ventilator in the hood above the stove, and whenever he turned it on the scents poured out in a cloud. It began with the bland heat of boiling water, then the faint tang of instant coffee, and at last the rich aroma of cracked wheat and maple sugar, which made me hungry every time. From my spot by the kitchen window, I could climb onto the narrow ledge of the house’s foundation, invisible from the street, and look through a gap in the curtains to watch his arm as he ate. It moved up and down slowly and rhythmically, bringing the spoon to his mouth and then dropping back to wait while he chewed. I could move farther if I wanted, to see more of him as he ate, but only at the risk of being discovered. I was content to stay out of sight and fill in the gaps with my mind. After he finished eating he scraped his chair across the floor, took six steps to the sink, and rinsed out his bowl with a burst of water that sounded like popping static on a radio. That’s usually when Kay woke up and wandered in, and he kissed her good morning.
I spied on him like that for a week, once even skipping school to find out what he did during the day. What I was looking for, and couldn’t find, was fear—if I could find out what, if anything, he was afraid of, I’d be able to use it to stop him. I knew I wasn’t heading for a straight fight; the only way I could beat this demon was to outthink it, get it into a position of weakness, and crush it like a bug. That was easy for most serial killers, because they attacked people weaker than themselves. I was attacking something far stronger, so I knew there was no chance he’d be afraid of me—I had to find something else he was afraid of. Once I’d found it, I could poke him with it and see how he reacted. If he reacted strongly enough, I might even be able to trick him into a stupid mistake, and give myself an opening.
I couldn’t find any indications of fear in his behavior, so I decided to go back to basics—to the psychological profile I’d started building back when I first suspected it was a serial killer. I dug out my notebook late one night and read through my list: “He approaches his victims in person and attacks them up close.” I used to think that said something important about his psychology and why he did what he did, but now I knew better—he did what he did because he needed new organs, and he attacked them in person because his demon claws were simply the best weapon he had.
The next item on the list was exactly what I was looking for: “He doesn’t want anyone to know who he is.” Max had made me write that down, but I had thought it was too obvious—the trouble was, it was so obvious I hadn’t really considered it. It was the perfect fear: he didn’t want anyone to know what he really was. I smiled to myself.
“Not a werewolf, Max, but pretty close.”
Mr. Crowley was a demon, and he didn’t want anyone to know it. Even a normal killer wouldn’t want anyone to know his secrets. What Mr. Crowley feared—the first bit of pressure I could start exerting on him—was discovery. It was time to send him a note.
Writing the note was more complicated than I’d expected. Just like with the 911 call, I didn’t want anyone to be able to trace it back to me. I couldn’t use my own handwriting, obviously, so I needed a computer to print it out on. Even that had a hitch—I’d read about a murder case once where they called in an expert to prove which typewriter the fake suicide letter was written on, and for all I knew you could do the same with printers. I was better safe than sorry, which meant I couldn’t use our printer at home. The printer at school was a possibility, but we had to log in to use those, which would leave a clear electronic record of exactly who had written the note. I decided to use the printer at the library, during the busiest time of day there, when no one had the time to pay attention to a fifteen-year-old kid. I could slip in, write it up, print it out, and be gone without a trace. Since the weather was still ice cold, I could even wear gloves without making anyone suspicious, and thus avoid any fingerprints. I buried the note in the middle of lines of meaningless text, just in case someone got to the printer first and read what I was writing. When I got it home, I cut out the phrase I wanted and pasted it to a clean sheet.
My first note was simple:
I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE
Delivering the note was just as difficult as making it. It had to be somewhere Kay wouldn’t find it, because she’d probably go right to the police, or, at the very least, tell a neighbor. Any normal person would. Mr. Crowley, on the other hand, would certainly keep it to himself; he wouldn’t want to reveal anything that might cast suspicion on him. If he took the note to the police, they’d want to know more about him—enemies he might have, things he might have done, anything that might make someone want revenge. Those were questions he didn’t want the police to even ask, let alone learn the answers to. He would keep it quiet, yes—but only if he was the only one who knew about it.
The other problem was finding a way to deliver the note without making it obvious that I had done it. It would be easy to hide it in the shed, for example, because Kay would never find it there, but I was in the shed all the time. I’d be the first person who came to mind when he tried to guess who’d left it. I also didn’t want to hide it somewhere that would cast future suspicion on my various watching spots around the house. If I slipped it through, say, the kitchen window, I’d never be able to hide outside and watch him eat breakfast again. I had to choose my delivery method very carefully.
Eventually I settled on his car. Crowley and his wife each drove it about half the time, but there were specific instances when one would drive without the other—Kay buying groceries, for example, which she did every Wednesday morning, and always alone. For Mr. Crowley, it was football games, which he watched about half the time at the bar downtown. I began studying his evening schedule and comparing it to the TV Guide, and discovered that he went to the bar every time there was a Seattle Seahawks game on ESPN; I guess he didn’t get that channel at home. The next time there was a Seahawks game, I sneaked to the car before he left and placed the folded note under the windshield wiper.
I watched his driveway from my window, peering out through a crack in the shades so small that he could never have known I was there. He left his house, smiling cheerfully about something, and noticed the note while he was unlocking the car door. He picked it up, unfolded it, and surveyed the street with dark eyes. His cheer was gone. I pulled back, vanishing into the darkness of my room. I could barely see Mr. Crowley as he got into his car and drove away.
A few nights later we had a neighborhood-watch party, which is where everyone on the street gets together in the Crowleys’ yard and talks and laughs and pretends that nothing is wrong, and meanwhile all our empty houses are ripe for burglary. This particular party was not about burglary, however, but serial killing—we were all gathered in a large, “safe” group, watching out for each other. There was even a little speech about safety, and locking your doors, and that kind of thing. I wanted t
o tell them that the safest thing they could do was to not bring everyone into Mr. Crowley’s back yard, but he seemed tame enough that night. If he was capable of flipping out and murdering fifty people at once, he was at least not inclined to do it right then. I wasn’t ready to attack him yet, either—I was still trying to learn more about him. How could I kill something that had already regenerated from a hail of bullets? This kind of thing takes planning, and planning takes time.
More than to talk about safety, the real purpose of the party was to convince ourselves that we hadn’t been beaten—that even with a killer in town, we weren’t afraid, and we weren’t going to collapse into a mob. Whatever. More important than any hollow declaration of bravery was the fact that we were roasting hot dogs, which meant I got to stoke a fire in the Crowleys’ fire pit.
I started with a massive blaze, burning huge blocks of wood from a dead tree the Watsons had cut out of their backyard over the summer. The fire was bright and warm, perfect for starting the party, and then as the safety talk dragged on, I went to work with the poker and a long pair of tongs, shaping and cultivating the fire to produce thick beds of bright-red coals. Cooking fires are different from normal fires, because you’re looking for steady, even heat instead of simple light and warmth. Flames give way to low flares, and the brilliant red glow of wood burning from the inside out. I arranged the fire carefully, routing oxygen through miniature chimneys to create wide roasting ovens. Just in time, the meeting ended and the crowd turned to begin cooking.
Brooke was there with her family, of course, and without making it obvious, I watched her and her brother as they skewered a pair of hot dogs and approached the pit; Brooke smiled as she crouched down next to me with her brother on the other side. They held their sticks out over the center of the blaze, where the flames still danced, and I wrestled with myself for almost thirty seconds before daring to talk to her.