The Complete John Wayne Cleaver Series: I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, I Don't Want to Kill You, Devil's Only Friend, Over Your Dead Body, Nothing Left to Lose

by Dan Wells

  But . . . I could hurt him. It didn’t need to end in death. I’d hurt Mrs. Crowley, after all, and she was far more innocent than Curt was. I took two more steps forward, close enough to smell his sweat and hear his ragged breathing. He had caused pain, so his punishment should be pain. It made sense. It was fair. A bruise for a bruise.

  But then what?

  I turned suddenly and walked to the window; it was evening, and the sky through the thick pine trees was a deep, royal blue. What would happen after I hurt Curt—we couldn’t just let him go, or he’d tell people what I’d done. We could keep him here, chained in the dungeon; he deserved prison, and we could give it to him. But forever?

  I looked back at Curt. His eyes were closed; maybe he was praying, or maybe he was simply too afraid to look. He was a rude, arrogant monster; he bullied everyone he met, he insulted the woman who loved him, and when things came to a head he beat her—powerfully and mercilessly. He ruined lives, as surely as Crowley did; was I a hypocrite to stop Crowley and not Curt? But if Curt was fair game, why stop there? Where could I draw the line? And if no line made sense, why draw a line at all?

  And below it all, behind every other reason, lurked the inescapable truth that I wanted to do it—I wanted to hurt him, to make him bleed, to make him scream, to make him lie still in the perfect peace of death.

  I stepped toward Curt again, but something caught my eye—a tiny movement on the far edge of the room, no bigger than the wing of a moth. I looked and saw two eyes staring back at me, trapped and mute, watching. I stared back. Nobody knew who she was, maybe not even Forman. She blinked—the only form of communication she had.

  Where was she from? What did she like, and what did she dislike? What did she love and hate? Who was she?

  Who was I?

  My name is John Cleaver. I live in Clayton County, in a mortuary on the edge of town. I have a mother and a sister and an aunt. I’m sixteen years old. I like reading, cooking, and a girl named Brooke. I want to do what’s right, no matter what. I want to be a good person.

  But that was only half of me.

  My name is Mr. Monster. I show dozens of warning signs for serial killer behavior, and I fantasize about violence and death. I’m more comfortable around corpses than people. I killed a demon, and every day I feel the need to kill again, like a bottomless pit in the center of my soul.

  Each half of me was a contradiction of the other, but each half was true. If I chose one I would be denying the other, and in doing so I would be denying myself. Was there a real me, somewhere in the middle?

  There was another me—a me that I’d never seen for myself, only glimpsed through the eyes of others. It wasn’t John the loser, or John the creep, or John the psycho. It was John the hero. Talking to Brooke and her friends, walking around at the Bonfire, looking at the eyes of the people I passed and seeing them look back with respect—I’d really felt like a hero. I wanted to feel that again.

  And being a hero meant saving Curt, no matter how much I hated him. It meant saving all of the prisoners, no matter how hard it became. It meant stopping the villain—Forman—even if I had to break my rules to do it. Even if I had to hurt him, and even if I had to kill him.

  But how could I kill him when I didn’t know how he worked? What did he say about himself, and about the other demons? They define themselves by the things they lack.

  So what did he lack?

  He lacked emotions: he didn’t have any of his own, so he stole them from others. He was a blank; a giant hole with nothing to fill it. Just like a serial killer, he had a need that demanded to be fed, and he had built his life around feeding it at the expense of everything else.

  Mkhai was also defined by what he didn’t have. He lacked an identity of his own, so he stole the bodies of others, over and over, moving from place to place and identity to identity until . . . until he stopped. Until one day he became Mr. Crowley, and he never switched bodies again. Something had changed in him, something profound, and on that day he ceased to be Mkhai. He stopped defining himself by what he lacked, and started defining himself by what he had. So what did he have? He had Mrs. Crowley.

  He had love.

  I thought of him again, not as a demon but as the kind old man across the street. Love had pulled Mkhai away from his life of death and deception and into a life of near normality—a life that held so much less, but meant so much more. Forman didn’t understand it; I didn’t know if he could. And yet that’s what this entire thing was all about: Forman wanted to know what happened to Mkhai. He didn’t really want me to hurt Curt, he was just trying to turn me to his side and earn my trust. He wanted me to join him, at which point I would presumably tell him the secret he’d come to Clayton to discover.

  He’d said before that love was weak and useless. Would he even understand when I told him? The demon Mkhai had almost beaten me because I didn’t understand love; now Forman had the same weakness, and I might be able to use it against him. A plan started to form in my mind, but I had to do it carefully. Even the slightest emotional warble could give me away.

  “You came to Clayton County searching for your friend,” I said, turning to face Forman. “You said he’d disappeared forty years ago, and you didn’t know why. Well I do. He did it for love.”

  “Don’t play with me,” said Forman, shaking his head.

  “Trust me,” I said, “from one sociopath to another: if you don’t understand the reason for something, it’s always love.”

  He considered me for a moment. What was he feeling from me? Did he know I had a plan? I wasn’t lying to him—everything I planned to tell him was true. Could he still sense a trick? Could he detect my nervousness through the miasma of nervous fear that already filled the house? I watched him, trying to feel as honest and helpful as possible.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Try me.”

  “Food first,” I said. “I haven’t eaten in two days.”

  He glanced at Curt, his wild eyes watching us over his duct tape gag. I set the knife down on the dresser.

  “There’ll be time for him later,” I said.

  Forman nodded, and gestured behind him to the hallway. “In the kitchen, then. Let’s hear what you have to say.”

  20

  “Have a seat,” said Forman, gesturing at the kitchen table. I sat down and he went to the fridge, opening it up to reveal not a collection of heads and arms but the mundane spread of a poorly-stocked bachelor: grapefruit juice, a bottle of mustard, half a loaf of bread, and a Styrofoam box of restaurant leftovers. In the back there was a jar half-full of pickle juice. I looked longingly at the restaurant box, but Forman pulled out the bread bag and tossed it onto the table.

  “I don’t eat in a lot,” he said. “I prefer to enjoy my meals, instead of feeling how sad the toys are the whole time.”

  I opened the bag and pulled out a piece of hard brown bread, forcing myself to eat it slowly; I didn’t want to eat too fast and get sick. It tasted delicious, but I was sure that was mostly a result of my hunger.

  Forman leaned against the counter with his arms folded, watching me eat. After a few bites he spoke again.

  “So I guess you know a lot more about Mkhai than you let on,” he said. He was acting odd, like he should have been angry but wasn’t, but then I remembered that he wouldn’t be angry unless I was. Right now we were calm, and cautious, and ready.

  He was a blank page, and it was time to write on him. I wanted him to trust me, so I focused on trusting him—not pretending to, since that was sure not to work, but trying instead to actually trust him, to rely on him, to feel like we were in this together. I found that if I focused on him it didn’t work; I understood how he thought, but I couldn’t identify with him. I couldn’t empathize. Instead I focused on my own reaction to him and to the situation, trying to feel comfortable with the strictures that Forman had placed on our relationship. I put myself at ease and tried to treat him the way I treated my mom, or my friend Max.

  “You told
me in the car,” I said, “that you thought Mkhai might have taken Mr. Crowley’s body right before he died, which makes a lot of sense because Crowley was never found. If Crowley had died on his own, there would have been a corpse, but if Crowley died after Mkhai had his body, it would have dissolved into sludge and disappeared.”

  Forman nodded. “It seems you’re familiar with his methods.”

  “What you didn’t figure out,” I continued, “is that Mkhai had been Crowley for the entire forty years when you couldn’t find him.”

  Forman smiled snidely. “For love.”

  “Yes,” I said, “for love. Forty years ago Mkhai came here in a brand-new body, ready to start a brand-new life just like he always did. How long did he usually stay in a body before moving on?”

  “A year at the most,” said Forman. “When you can go anywhere, and be anyone, there’s rarely any reason to stay longer.”

  “He found a reason here,” I said. “Her name is Kay.”

  Forman laughed, an abrupt, derisive snort. “Kay Crowley? Mkhai is a being thousands of years old. He’s had queens and empresses at his command; he’s had slaves and fanatics, priestesses and worshippers. What did Kay have that an entire history of beautiful women couldn’t offer?”

  “Love.”

  “He’s had love!”

  “Not real love,” I said, leaning forward. “You don’t even know what real love is. If someone loved you, Forman, you’d love them back, and when they stopped, you’d stop. There’s no commitment to anything, so it never really matters. It isn’t real. But real love is pain. Real love is sacrifice. Real love is what Mkhai felt when he realized that Kay would never accept him as he was—only if he became something better. So he gave up the bad stuff and made himself better.”

  Forman stared at me intently. “How could a sociopath possibly know anything about love?”

  “Because I have a mother who gives her entire life to help children who don’t notice it, don’t appreciate it, and can’t possibly return it. That is love.”

  We watched each other, studying each other, thinking. This was the key moment, when I needed him to move from trust to longing. I needed him to feel there was a piece of him missing, because I knew exactly what he would do: the same thing he always did. He’d go out and find the missing piece and bring it back here to beat it into submission. It was his only way of dealing with the world. While he was gone, I would put the next phase of the plan into motion.

  I thought about the people I missed.

  “Humans aren’t defined by death,” I said, “and they’re not defined by what they lack. They’re defined by their connections.”

  I thought about my mother, and everything she did for me. I thought about the way she’d protected me six months ago when I killed the demon, and neither of us knew what to do. I thought about the way she’d turned her life upside down to accommodate me, to be the person she thought I needed. I hated it, but I knew she was trying to help.

  “Mkhai knew it,” I said. “He finally realized that there was more to life than running from one body to the next, from one life to the next, always escaping from everything without ever getting anywhere.”

  I thought about my sister, who wanted to watch out for me but didn’t even know how to watch out for herself. I thought of her bruised and scared, and I thought about how she’d be even more scared tonight when she realized Curt was gone. She was an idiot, but she cared about people.

  “Mkhai left your little community of demons because he didn’t need it anymore,” I said. “Thousands of years of meaningless existence, of existing without living, and finally he was free. He moved on, and the power he gained made him so much more than you will ever be. You called him a god, but he was more than that in the end. He was human.”

  I thought about Kay Crowley, the little old lady across the street, who smiled and helped and loved so unconditionally that she brought a demon in from the cold and made him a man—and I thought about that man, the old neighbor I’d grown up with, the demon who’d been more of an example to me than my father. What were his last words?

  Remember me when I am gone. I remembered him, and I missed him.

  Loss and longing.

  “Stop it!” yelled Forman, standing up and pacing across the room—not toward me, but toward nothing; it was a nervous twitch.

  My plan was working.

  “You’re not here for this,” he said, waving his arms while he walked. “You’re not here for sadness—this boring emotion.” He walked into the living room, and his voice fluttered back in. “I don’t need to miss things!” He barged back into the room and grabbed the sides of the table, leaning down to shout in my face. “You think I haven’t felt this before? You think you can just shock me with some new emotion and I’ll bow down and . . .” He stood up and turned around, then scratched his forehead, took a step toward the sink, then turned around again.

  “I don’t need this,” he said. “I’m leaving.” He came toward me around the table, and I backed up instinctively. “I’m not . . . just sit down. I’m locking you up so you don’t do anything stupid. I’ll be back.” There was a thick length of chain under the table, with a manacle welded to the end, and Forman locked this securely around my ankle. “I’ll be back,” he said again, “and you’d better be feeling something more interesting when I get here.”

  He turned and walked out, going straight to the living room and out the door, locking it carefully behind him. The car roared to life and drove away. I was alone.

  Time for phase two.

  Forman acted like he’d stormed off to escape my sadness, but I knew better—the last time we’d forced him to feel sad he’d come downstairs and attacked us. If all he’d wanted was a new emotion, he could have just attacked us again. No, Forman had left to kidnap someone, just like I thought he would—probably Kay Crowley, or maybe my mom. Once I understood him, he was easy to predict; I’d told him he was missing something, and now he’d gone to get it.

  I had an hour, maybe less, assuming he went straight to Kay and brought her straight back. I needed to be ready when he returned, but I couldn’t just attack him because he’d feel it coming—even when he was completely overwhelmed, as he had been in the basement, he could snap out of it in an instant. The only way to hurt him was to do it indirectly, by laying a trap. I stood up and tested the chain—it held fast, but it gave me about twenty feet of movement. I hoped it would be enough.

  The kitchen was a good place for a trap because it had the strongest electrical outlet in the house: the oven’s. All I needed to do was rig something to shock him when he came back, but what? I dragged my chain over to the cupboards, starting at the farthest edge where I had to stretch the chain to its fullest and reach out with my arm. Most of the cupboards were bare—what few dishes he had were mostly in the sink, waiting to be washed. One cupboard had a stack of paper plates and a box of plastic forks; another held a single ceramic mug, dusty with disuse. The cupboards below the counter were more fruitful, holding a number of rusted pots and pans, a coffeemaker, and, for some reason, a cardboard box full of old newspaper.

  The counter itself held a number of items I might be able to use: a knife block, half-full; a toaster; a microwave. I opened the drawers and rooted through piles of mismatched silverware, old packs of batteries, and a random assortment of tools and wooden pencils. There were two screwdrivers; I might be able to take something apart . . .

  There was blood on the screwdriver.

  I looked closer; there was blood on all the tools. This wasn’t just a utility drawer, it was another torture station. I pulled a knife from the block and examined it carefully. It had been washed, but not well; the serrations on the blade held brown remnants of old blood.

  Of course I knew that he would try to torture whomever he brought back, but I considered now the possibility that he would do it here, in the kitchen. His basement was full, and his torture room was occupied; if he did it here he could force me to watch or even to h
elp without even having to unchain me. And he had a full suite of tools—knives and screwdrivers, icepicks and pliers, even a hammer. All I needed to do, then, was electrify a tool I knew he would reach for, and then sit as still and emotionless as possible until he touched it—I couldn’t let him know, through excitement or anxiety, that I was waiting for something. I had to be completely dead.

  But what tool to electrify, and how?

  I might be able to tie a wire to a tool in the drawer and run it out and back, into the oven outlet, but there was no way to guarantee which tool he’d reach for first. I looked around for a clock, but there wasn’t anything; I had no idea how long he’d been gone, or how long before he came back. I had to move quickly, and I couldn’t think of anything else, so the tool drawer it was.

  I got the coffeemaker out of the cupboard and pulled a knife from the block. The coffeemaker cord was at least three feet long, maybe four; I hoped it was long enough to reach from the open drawer to the outlet behind the oven. I used the knife to cut the cord, right at the base of the coffeemaker, and started shaving away the plastic coating around the wires. While I was doing that, I noticed that the metal from the knife blade extended back into the handle—it was a long, single piece of metal, flanked on the end by pieces of wood riveted around it. A current at the tip of the knife would carry straight through to whomever touched the handle. I jumped up and looked at the wood block—there was a hole in the bottom where the tip of the biggest blade, a large butcher knife, peeked through. This could work so much better than the drawer—it was easier to rig, and easier to make sure he touched the right thing. I pulled out the huge knife, dumped the rest into the sink with the dirty dishes, and sat down to work.

  First I needed a way to secure the wire to the knife. Bracing the butcher knife against the floor, back in the corner where any floor damage would be hidden by the coils of my chain, I lined up the icepick right at the tip and hit it with the hammer. Nothing. I hit it again, over and over, trading out the icepick for a Phillips screwdriver and still accomplishing nothing; the blade was too strong to puncture. I picked up the knife and chopped it against the heavy iron rim of a frying pan, again and again until it finally began to dent. When the dent looked deep enough to hold it, I looped the exposed wire around it and tied it off.