by Dan Wells
It felt strange to be talking to Marci—partly because of the way she was dressed, but mostly because of the simple fact that we didn’t know each other well. Just like the people in the car ahead of us, Marci was someone that I “knew,” in theory, but in practice we had never really talked or interacted. I glanced around quickly at the mass of teenagers, all people I had grown up with, but with whom I’d had virtually no direct contact—no shared experience. It seemed unbelievable that we could have been born and raised in the same small town, going to the same schools in the same grade year after year, and yet we’d never really had a conversation. Max would have been delighted to talk to Marci—and to ogle her—but I was more bothered than anything else. My life had been just fine without all of these extra people in it.
“Can you smell other colors?” asked Marci, folding her arms for a mock interrogation of Brooke and Rachel.
“It’s not the color,” said Brooke, “it’s the trees. Green’s just a good word to describe what a tree smells like when it turns green.”
“It’s like spring,” said Rachel, “except ‘springy’ sounds dumb.”
“And ‘green’ sounds totally normal,” said Marci. “Uh huh.”
The breeze off the lake was cool, and I could see goose bumps on Marci’s arms. Before I could stop them, my eyes wandered to Brooke’s legs; they had goose bumps too.
“Why don’t we head toward the fire?” I asked. Brooke nodded, and Marci and Rachel followed us through the loose crowd of people. The bonfire itself was visible through the trees ahead, a rough parabola of orange flame, though the sky was still too light for the fire to really stand out. The forest here was sparse and patchy, with more scrub than trees, and the fire itself had been made in a large, round clearing just a few dozen feet off the road. As we drew near I could see that the party organizers, whoever they were, had spared no expense on the fire—there were huge logs in its heart, and stacks of cordwood and split logs waited in the background, piled high against the trees. In the fire wood cracked and split, sap popping and hissing at the center, and behind it all was the dull static roar of oxygen being sucked into the center of the greedy flames. It was talking to me.
“Hello,” I whispered, answering back. I stepped closer, holding out my hands to probe the heat. Just right in some places, but too cool in others and too hot at the peak. The structure at the base was more open than it needed to be; the fire would be hot and powerful, but it would burn itself out too quickly. Logs like that could last all night if you set them carefully and tended them just so with the other pieces of wood.
There didn’t seem to be anybody in particular in charge of the fire. There was a five-foot branch with a blackened tip laying just to the side, which I assumed had been used to poke and position the wood, so I picked it up and adjusted the blaze; knock this piece down, stand that piece up. A fire could tell you what it needed, if you knew how to listen. I felt the heat; I listened to the growl of the air; I watched the lines of brilliant white heat on the surface of the wood, shining out as if something radiant and perfect were stretching out from within, ready to be born into a dull and lifeless world. Another tweak, another push.
Perfect.
A split log sailed past me in a tight arc, crashing into the fire and making it flare up with a roar.
“Yeah!” Someone screamed beside me, a thick senior with close-cropped hair and a meaty red face. “Let’s get this fire going!”
“You’ll get a better flame if you . . .” I tried to talk to him, but he turned and shouted to someone.
“Clayton Crusaders!”
Several voices hollered back, and he shook his fists triumphantly in the sky before heading back for more wood.
“It works better if you plan it out,” I said, mostly to myself. I turned back to the fire and poked it again, trying to repair some of the damage, when a second log crashed into the middle, then a third.
“Clayton Crusaders!”
“You know,” said Marci, standing next to me, “some things you just can’t plan.” I looked at her quickly, surprised, and she smiled. “You know?”
Where had she come from? I’d been so caught up in the fire I’d lost track of the girls completely.
“No hot dogs yet,” said Brooke, walking over from somewhere. “They’re not breaking out the food til around 6:30. Wanna hit the lake?”
“Well I’m definitely not going in,” said Marci, “but I wouldn’t mind taking a look.” The three girls started walking away, then stopped and looked back.
“Are you coming?” asked Brooke.
But . . . there’s a fire.
I looked back at the bonfire, still strong and powerful despite the chaos from the new logs. I didn’t need the fire; I was here for Brooke.
“Sure,” I said. “We’ll be back at 6:30 anyway, right?” I put down the branch and walked toward them.
“Thanks,” said Rachel. “We need our brave protector.”
“No kidding,” said Marci. “With all these dead women they’re finding, even a huge group like this gives me the creeps.”
There it is again: John the brave. How many people see me as some kind of hero? And how did I go so long without noticing?
“We used to come out here to go fishing,” said Brooke, watching the clear line of water emerge through the thinning trees. The sky was still light, but muted, and the lake reflected the clear blue of the sky like the bottom half of a giant, lacquered shell. We stopped on a low ridge where the trees parted and the ground turned down sharply to the glassy lake beyond. Brooke stepped up onto a sharp rock to get a better view, teetered for a moment, then put her hand on my shoulder for stability. It felt electric, like a sudden surge of energy flowing in at the point of contact. I pretended to stare out at the water, but my whole being seemed focused on Brooke’s hand.
“It’s beautiful,” said Rachel.
A couple of guys splashed by in wet shorts and T-shirts, hip-deep in the water.
“Come on in!” they shouted at us, though I had a feeling they were thinking more about the girls than about me. The girls ignored them, so I did the same. The guys saw another group up the shore and slogged toward them through the reeds, leaving us alone again.
Brooke sighed. “What are you guys gonna do?”
“Just hang around, I guess,” said Marci. “See who shows up; see who’s with who.”
“Did you see Jessie Beesley?” asked Rachel. “I wonder what happened to Mark.”
“Not that,” said Brooke, “I mean, what are you gonna do with your lives? With the future?”
Marci laughed. “You’re very cute when you’re deep, Brooke.”
“What, you don’t have dreams?” asked Brooke.
“Oh, I’ve got dreams,” said Marci, “believe me. And they have nothing to do with Clayton County.”
“I’m getting out of here so fast,” said Rachel. “A town with only one movie theater barely counts as civilization.”
I stared at the lake, remembering the dead body the demon had sunk below the ice in November.
“Are you going anywhere specific?” I asked. “Or just running away from here?”
“College,” said Brooke. “Travel. The world.”
“Nobody wants to stay here,” said Rachel.
“I don’t mind the summers,” said Marci. “But sometimes I wonder how we got here in the first place.”
“The logging industry,” I said.
“Yeah, but why us?” asked Marci. “Why are we here and not somewhere else?”
“It’s not that bad,” said Brooke.
“It’s worse,” said Rachel.
“Who were the first ones?” asked Marci, staring at the lake. “Are we all just children of children of mill workers, who grew up and lost their dreams and got stuck forever? Somebody came here first, when there was nothing else, and they built a city in the middle of nowhere and made money out of nothing and they did it.” She looked up at the sky. “I guess I just don’t understand, if tha
t’s the kind of people we come from, why we all just sit here doing nothing.”
Rachel opened her mouth to answer, but a shriek cut her off—loud and piercing, and just up the shore. We spun around to look, Brooke tightening her grip on my shoulder, and saw the two guys from before splashing frantically out of the water. The group of girls they’d been flirting with was backing up in terror, and now all of them were screaming. Brooke jumped down and ran toward them, and I followed close behind.
“She’s dead!” someone shouted. “She’s dead!”
More people were coming now, from all around through the trees. It looked like the group by the shore was backing away from a wild animal, like they were afraid of being bitten, but as we drew closer I could see what they’d been screaming about—there was a rotted log half in and half out of the water, surrounded with reeds, and poking out from beneath it was a human arm and hand.
“Call the police!”
“She’s dead!”
“I’m going to be sick!”
As soon as we saw the hand Brooke stopped, hanging back, but I kept moving forward. When I reached the line of retreating students I paused, wary, then made up my mind and broke through to the inner circle. It was just me and the hand.
It was a woman’s hand, her body floating just below the surface and hidden in the reeds. Somehow they’d jostled the log and dislodged her, and the arm had popped out into the air. Her hand was poking up, twisted like a claw; her chipped, broken nails were painted bright red.
It’s the new killer, I thought.
There was a voice behind me, deep—a man’s voice. It seemed to echo through a vast, empty room.
“What do we do?”
I had to see it; I had to know if it was covered with the same little wounds as the others. “She might be alive,” I said, splashing into the lake. “We’ve got to check.” The exposed hand was soggy and covered with flecks of mud and rotten wood; there was no way she was alive. “We’ve got to pull her out.”
There was another splash behind me, faint and distant. It was hard to hear with my own heartbeat suddenly roaring in my ears.
I grabbed the arm and pulled; it shifted, but it was heavier than I expected. Another pair of hands, rough and old, reached in next to me and we pulled again. The body shifted and the arm rose further out of the water, stiff and pale.
“It’s been weighted down,” I said.
“She’s pinned under the tree.”
“No,” I said, “the body slides too easily to be pinned. Don’t try to pull up, just drag it sideways toward the shore.” We pulled together, dragging the body into shallow water where it could float closer to the surface. It was indeed a woman’s body, stark white and naked except for a few bright nylon cords. The nakedness didn’t bother me—dead bodies never did. I pulled on one of the cords, lightly at first, then harder as I tested the resistance. It was very heavy. With two hands I heaved it up and found a cinder block tied to the other end.
I looked at the person helping me. It was Mr. Verner, the social studies teacher.
“Someone weighted it down,” I said again. The shore behind him was lined with students and other teachers, many of them turned away from the dead woman bobbing in the water. Beyond them I could see the bonfire raging, distant and bright.
“What do we do?” asked Mr. Verner again. Of course he was asking me; I knew more about this situation than anyone here. Did they know that? Was I revealing something secret?
“Call the police,” I said. “Call Agent Forman of the FBI; he has an office in the police department.”
I looked again at the body, twisted like a sculpture. Her limbs were stiff and crooked. “This is rigor mortis,” I said. “It means it’s only been dead a few hours, maybe a couple of days at the most.” There were red marks on the wrists, and cuts and blisters on the chest and back, just like what we’d heard about the other bodies. “Did you call Agent Forman?”
Mr. Verner shouted to the shore. “Who has a phone?”
Rachel waved her hand and pointed at Marci, standing next to her with her cell phone to her ear. “She’s on the phone with her dad,” said Rachel. Marci’s dad was a policeman. I looked at them, more directly now than I had all night, then looked back at the dead body, bobbing obscenely in the wavelets coming off the lake. It shouldn’t be easier to look at it than at the girls, but it was.
In my peripheral vision teachers were herding the students away, and someone was bringing a blanket. Mr. Verner waded over to get it, then brought it back and draped it over the body.
“Come in to shore,” he said, putting a hand on my arm.
I stumbled in, leaving the body in the water. The party had become a loose web of chaos, with some students pulling back, others dumbstruck and motionless, and still others crowding forward for a better view. Teachers were trying uncertainly to herd them in a knot of different directions.
Brooke met me at the top of the ridge, white as a corpse. “Who is it?” she asked.
“Do you have your phone?”
She nodded mutely and fished it out of her pocket. I dialed Agent Forman’s cell number and sat stiffly on the ground, breathing slowly.
“This is Forman,” said the voice on the other end, crisp and direct. There were sirens in the background.
“You’re already on your way,” I said.
“Dammit John, are you tied up in this?”
“Rigor mortis,” I told him, “fully rigid. That means at least twelve hours, maybe more. The lake’s pretty cool and that might have slowed it down.”
“What are you doing, John?” Forman asked. “You’re not a cop; you’re not an investigator.” He paused. “And yet you’re always the one who finds the bodies first.”
“Someone else found it,” I said, closing my eyes. I could see the contorted body in my mind, stippled with angry red blisters. Had she been burned? “I’m just here by coincidence, Forman. The entire school is here, and everyone in town has known for weeks that we would be. If he left the body here recently, right here by the bonfire, he knew we’d find it. I think he wanted us to find it.”
“Who’s ‘he’?” asked Forman.
“The guy who killed it,” I said. Was it a man or a demon? “There’s no missing body parts,” I said, staggering to my feet, “and no major lacerations that I could see. I’m going to look again.”
“No, John, leave it—”
Before he could finish something hit me from behind, slamming me between the shoulders, and I tumbled to the ground. I rolled onto my back and looked up: it was Rob Anders.
“What is wrong with you?” he said. “You dive in there like it’s Christmas morning, you haul her right out where everyone can see her, you know the damn FBI agent’s phone number by memory—”
“What?” I asked, shaking my head.
“Nobody innocent acts the way you act,” he said. “Nobody normal knows the things you know. What’s all that crap about rigor mortis?”
He was shouting, red-faced, waving his arms. He was far angrier than I would have expected. Why is he so upset? Think, John, think like a person with empathy. Maybe he has a connection to the victim.
“Did you know her?” I asked.
“What kind of a sick question is that, you freak?”
“Leave him alone, Rob,” said Brooke, stepping in to help me to my feet. Rob shoved her away, knocking her to the ground—
—and I snapped.
I leapt up at Rob, taking him by surprise and knocking him down, pinning him under me. I’d never been in a fight—not with anyone who could fight back, at least—but I’d knocked the wind out of him, which gave me a moment to raise my fists and slam them clumsily into the top of his head. He swung a punch that hit me right in the eye and knocked me off the side. I staggered to my feet, ready for another swing, but Mr. Verner and another teacher were already there, pulling us apart.
“It’s okay,” said Brooke, pulling me back, “he’s just a jerk, just ignore him.”
I turned to face her, realizing what I’d done: she’d been threatened, and instead of trying to help her I had attacked the assailant. Just like I did with the demon. I didn’t even help her stand up.
What’s the right answer? I thought. When do you help the good guys, and when do you stop the bad guys? I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know which one I am.
I felt light-headed and sat down, finding Brooke’s phone on the ground where it had been knocked out of my hand.
“He’s a part of this,” Rob was saying, arguing with Mr. Verner as he pulled him away. “He’s a sick freak. He might even be the killer!”
I held the phone to my ear; Forman had already hung up.
“Call your dad,” I said, handing Brooke the phone. “Tell him you’ll be home late. This is going to take a while.”
10
I spent all night trying to talk to Forman, but instead we were shuttled from cop to cop, giving our testimony over again for each one. At last I was given a sheaf of carbon copy papers and asked to fill out an official witness report. I spread it flat on the trunk of a police car and filled it out as thoroughly as I could, being sure to include the times and locations of my own actions as far back as school that day. Any more would have looked like I was trying too hard to look innocent. When I was done I turned it in and sat down by the dying bonfire, waiting to be excused. It was 11:30.
They wouldn’t let us anywhere near the body, so I studied my memory of it as closely as I could. The wrists had been scratched and red—more ropes, maybe? But the ropes around its body hadn’t left the same marks, so the ropes on its wrists must have been there longer, probably before it died. Someone—the killer, I assumed—had kept it bound. How long?
And the rest of the marks: red welts and blisters on pale white skin. There may have been deeper cuts as well, slices and stab wounds, though the water had long since washed the blood away. There were none of the huge, feral gashes that marked the Clayton Killer’s victims. Could it be a new demon? One whose fingers turned to flame instead of claws, who left its victims scarred and mutilated but whole? Did demons work that way? Did they follow any rules at all?