by Dan Wells
“Come back here!” shouted Mom, then whirled around and slammed the palm of her hand as hard as she could into the door of a cupboard. “Not again,” she sobbed. “I’ve lost her again.” She hid her face in her hands, leaning against the cupboard, and cried.
5
It was nearly six hours later when Mom finally went to bed and I slipped out of the house, pedaling my bike in a beeline for the old warehouse. She’d spent the afternoon sobbing and talking to Margaret, going over the situation a thousand times: Lauren was right, Lauren was wrong, Lauren was making a huge mistake, Mom had made a huge mistake, and on and on and on. I hid in my room and pulled my ski mask down to cover my ears and muffle the noise.
It was just like the old days, when everyone fought and everyone cried and everyone walked out of our lives as fast as they could go. Just like the old days but worse—I had Forman trying to get inside my head, and Mr. Monster desperate to claw his way out. I didn’t know how far I could stretch before I snapped. Plans seemed to form themselves in my mind: how to find out where Curt lived; how to incapacitate him; how to cut him, slowly and carefully, in order to cause the most pain I could possibly cause. I started pacing the room and singing snatches of whatever music I could remember—old songs my dad used to listen to, new stuff Brooke played on the radio in the mornings—anything to fill my mind and keep my thoughts as far from death as possible. Nothing worked.
It was the need—the desperate urge that built up inside of a serial killer and drove him to kill. What was it? Where did it come from? I had always been able to control my dark side before, keeping it locked up for years, but it was stronger now. I’d killed the demon, and Mr. Monster had gotten his first taste of death, and now he wanted more. Could I still control it? How strong would it get? How intense would the need get before it exploded and killed somebody else—my mom, or Margaret, or Brooke?
I paced back and forth in my bedroom, feeling caged; the slats of my blinds were like bars, and looking out between them I could see Mr. Crowley’s house, large and dark. How many nights had I spent creeping around the walls, peeking in the windows, studying my prey? I missed that part of my life—I physically missed it, like a severed limb that still itched intrusively. Couldn’t I do it again? But Crowley had been a demon, not a person; it was okay to stalk him because it was all for the greater good. I had weighed the implications carefully, and I had made my decision, and now I couldn’t justify that kind of behavior for anything less.
But what if there was a new demon?
It was foolish to assume that Crowley was the only one, but it was also foolish to assume that they all worked in the same way. The new body didn’t have any pieces missing, but it did have dozens of minor wounds and a single huge wound on its foot. Was there some kind of new supernatural menace that needed to electrocute people to stay alive? And did the fact that the victim was a woman suggest, somehow, that the demon was also a woman?
But no—just as I was misleading myself by assuming that the demons’ methods would all be the same, I couldn’t assume that their motives would be the same. Mr. Crowley had killed men who matched his own physique because he needed to replace pieces of his own body. It was about survival. The new demon might be killing for food, for sport, for personal expression; there were any number of reasons. Just like me, the demon would have a need—some kind of emotional hole that needed to be filled.
How could I discover the demon’s need if I didn’t even know my own?
I thought about Curt again, and how satisfying it would be to electrocute him, like the dead woman had been electrocuted—watching him scream and writhe until the charge had burned a massive crater in his flesh. I shook my head to clear the thought. I couldn’t go on like this. I needed to burn something.
It was time to visit the warehouse again.
On my way out of the house I grabbed some chicken from the fridge—no one had finished their dinner, after all—and sealed it in a plastic bag and shoved it into my coat pocket. That cat wouldn’t stop me this time.
It was just after midnight, and dark enough to make my bike a bad idea, but the car would make noise; it might wake up Mom, and it would definitely make me easier to trace if the arson was investigated. I rode my bike through the darkened streets for nearly a mile, then got down and walked along the uneven trail through the trees, feeling my way through the dark patches where the moon couldn’t penetrate. The tank of gas sloshed in my hand.
The fire was calling to me.
The warehouse reflected bright gray moonlight from its cinder block walls, shining dully in the clearing. I was grinning now. This was the time when the lines inside of me blurred, and Mr. Monster became simply John Cleaver: not a killer but a boy; not a monster but a human being. Fire was my great catharsis, but this prelude moment was my purest freedom—the one brief respite when I didn’t have to worry about what Mr. Monster wanted to do, because he and I wanted the same thing. Once I’d made my decision to light a fire, I wasn’t at war with myself anymore; I was just me, and everything made sense.
The cat greeted me with a silent stare, perched in the sill of a shattered window that granted him a lordly view of his entire domain, both inside and out. I dropped my bike by the trees and walked forward quietly, pulling out the chicken and tearing off a small piece. The fibers separated cleanly, layers of cooked muscle peeling away from each other in easy strips. I reached up to the window and waved the chicken as close to the cat as I could, letting him smell the meat, then dropped the torn-off piece on the ground and tossed the rest several feet away. The cat’s eyes tracked the meat as it arced through the air. He focused on it like a laser. I slipped into the warehouse through the empty doorway.
When I glanced up at the window again the cat was still there, and it turned to look at me as I came through the door. It watched me for a moment, then turned back to stare at the meat outside. That’s right, I thought, go and get it.
I pulled the old mattress out from behind the stack of pallets. It was thick and musty, covered with dirt and animal tracks, and the bottom was damp; the smell when I flipped it over was a slow, moldy cloud. I flipped it back, dry side up, then thought better of it and flipped it back over again. I could use some of these other pieces, like the wooden pallets, to prop up the mattress and create an oven underneath it. The dry bottom side would catch quickly and help dry out the top, and the smoke from the wet patches would escape into the air without suffocating the flames below.
The cat was still perched in the window, watching me with interest. I stopped moving, trying to make myself as uninteresting as possible, and stared back at it. It didn’t move.
I waited a moment longer, but the cat stayed still. I started gathering material for my oven; the cat had to move sooner or later.
Along one wall of the warehouse there was a row of metal barrels, though as near as I could tell they were all empty. They weren’t flammable, and they didn’t contain any flammable chemicals, so I ignored them and moved on. The far corner held a pile of paint cans, and more were placed around the rest of the room seemingly at random. On previous visits I’d managed to catalog them all: most were latex paint, which wouldn’t burn, but there was a nice stack of white enamel paints that would go up like rocket fuel. I used my keys to lever one can open, and smiled at the acrid puff of alcohol that rose up from inside. The paint was old—several decades, probably—and the pigment had settled out and congealed on the bottom, leaving a thick alcoholic soup on top. I hauled the cans over to the center of the room, two at a time, dreaming about the massive blaze I would create.
The cat was still in the window, watching me. I frowned. I went outside and found the chicken breast, untouched in the scrub and gravel. The little piece I’d torn off was untouched as well. I picked it up and held it out to the cat.
“Don’t you want it?”
It stared at me.
“It’s food, cat, don’t you eat food?” I had to stop myself from calling it a name—any abuse, even verbal
, was against the rules. I tossed the food up in front of it, letting it arc right in front of the cat’s face and then fall back to the ground. “Get out of the window.”
My chest felt tighter, and I took a deep breath. Don’t freak out, I told myself, it’s still okay. You can still have your fire. The cat will go away and everything will be fine. I was breathing more heavily now, and squinted my eyes harshly against . . . I don’t know what. I just needed to squint them, two, three, four times in a row. I walked back inside quickly, casting around for something to do. Wood! There was some wood in the center; I could stack it up.
The construction company that used to own this place had left behind several boards and planks, two by fours and one by eights, and over twenty-something years of seasonal cycles the wood had grown warped. Some were slightly curved, other were bloated, and some had cracked and split. Past visitors had moved some of them around, restacking them or simply knocking them over, but most were still stacked in their original piles. To build my oven I grabbed three of the one by eights and propped them up on six open cans of enamel paint—the paint wouldn’t do much until the fire got really big, but when the flame finally reached them they’d flare up spectacularly. I arranged these in neat rows and laid the mattress over the top, working so quickly that I knocked all the boards off the cans the first time I tried to lift it. The cat, still sitting in the window, was making me too nervous. I needed to calm down. I reset the boards and then raised the mattress more carefully, dry side down, before setting it on top of the boards. The mattress was wetter than I thought, soaked through, and I ran my hand through my hair uneasily. After a moment I simply picked up my gas can and poured some over the top of the mattress. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was probably the simplest.
The cat was still there. I dropped the gas can and kicked a stack of two by fours. “Get out!” The noise echoed through the empty room, and the cat hissed and arched its back aggressively.
I squeezed my eyes shut again, feeling sick. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I took a few steps, then turned and stepped back, pacing erratic patterns in the dirty floor. I turned back to the cat and looked it straight in the eyes. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “I’m not going to let anything hurt you.” I paused. “Maybe I can help—maybe you just don’t know what to do.”
I could climb up and carry the cat out myself—gently—but I’d need something to stand on. I ran to the metal barrels and grabbed one by the top rim; even empty it was still heavy, and I braced myself against the wall to tip it over. It hit the floor with a hollow clang, and I rolled it impatiently to the other side of the room, navigating carefully around the piles of wood and cans and garbage that filled the warehouse.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I repeated, rolling the barrel, “I’m just going to help you. I’m going to take you somewhere safe.”
I pushed away a couple of pallets leaning against the wall under the window, and maneuvered the barrel into place. It seemed nearly impossible to stand it back up, but I steadied it against the wall and got my hands under it, heaving it up into place. The cat watched everything impassively.
I carefully climbed on top of the barrel, standing up slowly from a crouch. When I drew close to the cat it hissed again, baring its fangs and staring me down. I paused, trying to reassure it.
“Don’t be scared. I’m just going to pick you up, very gently, and take you outside.” I stood up straighter and it hissed a third time, louder. “Listen, this whole place is about to be on fire, and you don’t want to be here. You don’t understand fire, but it’s very scary. It’s very bad.”
I straightened further and the cat arched its back, hair standing on end. Standing this close I could see the familiar lines of a housecat in its face, but there was something deeper; traces of leopard and tiger burned through from inside, reawakened remnants of the cat’s primal ancestry. Wherever the cat had come from, whatever civilization it may once have had, it was all gone now. The creature threatening me was a wild, dangerous animal.
I held myself motionless, peering into its face like a well of memory. It hissed again, crouching on its forelegs in preparation to pounce.
I backed away.
I shouldn’t be doing this. I allowed myself to break one rule—to burn things when I needed the release—but this was going too far. I couldn’t break any of my other rules, and if I touched this cat it would attack me, and I’d fight back, and by hurting it I’d be breaking my biggest rule of all. I couldn’t do it, and I was going to stop.
I jumped down from the barrel, edgy and drained. I felt light-headed, and sat down on a stack of boards to catch my breath. I wasn’t going to hurt anything.
I wasn’t going to burn anything.
My tension was still there—my rage, my fear, my desperation—but I couldn’t let it out. Not like this. This was too loose and uncontrolled; I think somewhere, deep down, I’d wanted to provoke the cat to attack so I’d have an excuse to hurt it. But I would not allow myself to hurt it.
Trying to release my tension in safe, little doses like this was becoming too dangerous; there had to be a better way. But bottling it up, never to be released at all, wasn’t working either, and I definitely couldn’t just pull out the stops and let it run uncontrolled. There had to be a middle ground.
What I needed was another demon.
I’d never been as comfortable as I had been over the winter, hunting the demon that stalked my town. I’d had focus and direction; I’d had a purpose that gave everything meaning. I’d been able to let Mr. Monster out, and because of that, I’d been able to live at peace with myself for the first time in years. Now that the demon was gone, my psychological outlet was gone, too.
I walked out of the warehouse slowly, breathing in a controlled, steady rhythm. We had another victim, but no killer to hunt; it was not a demon, it was not a serial killer, it was just a drunk husband or a jealous boyfriend . . .
A jealous boyfriend. Forman had said that the body was covered in small wounds—stabs and scrapes and burns and blisters and who knew what else. An angry, jealous boyfriend could have done that easily; an angry, jealous boyfriend who had no respect for women and, as such, treated them like dirt. A man like that would have no qualms about inflicting that kind of pain on a woman.
And I knew exactly where to find a man like that.
It was a long shot, I knew, but it was something. It was a clear, attainable goal: to follow a man who might be the killer to determine if he really was. I could live the way I had before; I could serve Mr. Monster’s needs without endangering my own.
It was time to get to know Curt much, much better.
6
The victim was eventually identified as Victoria Chatham. Since she hadn’t come to us for embalming, there was no chance to examine the body or study the wounds. That left me no direct way of learning more about the man who had inflicted those wounds, so my study of the killer would have to begin elsewhere.
And since I was stuck in school for a few more weeks, “elsewhere” meant a lopsided conversation with Max in the lunch room.
“The central question of criminal profiling,” I said, “is ‘what does the killer do that he doesn’t have to do?’ ”
“Oh please, not again,” said Max, rolling his eyes.
“This really works,” I insisted. “And it works better to have someone else to bounce ideas off of. You were really helpful last time.”
“If I was so helpful, why didn’t you catch the bad guy?”
Actually, I did.
“The FBI agent at the police station called me in and showed me the crime scene photos before they went public,” I said. “He asked for my help.”
“Shut up.”
“No, seriously.”
“John, we are two tables away from three incredibly hot girls in incredibly short shorts, and I so don’t have time for another analytical conversation with you.”
I closed my eyes. Brooke was sitting
just two tables down with two of her friends, Marci and Rachel, but I’d already used up my one allowed lunchtime conversation and my two allowed lunchtime looks. Brooke had her hair up in a ponytail, tied with some kind of pink ribbon or elastic. She was wearing a pink T-shirt with white stripes, and a pair of jean shorts that showed off her long, slender legs. I wasn’t even allowed to think about her anymore, which was the whole point of analyzing the killer instead.
My fingers itched to burn something.
“The body was covered with wounds,” I said. “They said it on the news and I saw it in the photo. The killer hurt her before he killed her; he tortured her. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Max, “you’re the scary weirdo. Why would you do that?”
“That’s insulting, but yes, putting ourselves into his place is more or less what we’re doing here.”
“I’m serious,” said Max. “If you were going to kill someone that way, which I’m not entirely ruling out, why would you do it?”
This is better than nothing. “Because I want something,” I said, “and killing her, in that manner, would help me get it.”
“So what do you want?”
“I don’t know what I want,” I said. “That’s the whole thing we’re trying to figure out. We have to work backward.”
“Okay,” said Max, looking at the ceiling and waving his hands slowly. “What do you . . . get, when you . . . kill someone in a way that . . . gets you whatever it is that you want?”
“What do I gain by killing someone in this way,” I said.
“That’s what I said.”
“I gain . . . satisfaction.”
“That’s really sick,” said Max.
“It’s not really me. The killer gains satisfaction.”