by Dan Wells
Her suicide, in early July, came as a shock to everyone. She didn’t leave a note—she just went to bed one night, apparently a little more melancholy than usual, and the next morning her mom found her on the floor of her bathroom with her wrists slit wide open. And the thing is, I’ve seen a lot of death. Over the past year I’ve watched my next door neighbor sprout claws and gut three people; I dragged my nearly headless therapist from a car (oh, the irony); and I spent three days chained in a psycho’s basement while he tortured and killed a parade of helpless women. I’ve seen a lot of sick, gory stuff, and I’ve even done some of it myself. I’ve been through a lot, to put it simply, but Jenny Zeller’s death was different. I’ve witnessed half a dozen brutal killings, but somehow this one simple suicide—that I didn’t even witness—was the hardest to deal with.
You see, I didn’t want to kill those people. I did it to save my town from a pair of vicious killers, but in doing so I had to break every rule I’d ever set for myself. In some ways I risked my life for Jenny Zeller, though I didn’t know her personally.
But what’s the point of saving someone’s life if she’s just going to kill herself anyway?
1
The phone rang four times before someone picked up. “Hello?” A woman. Perfect.
“Hello,” I said, speaking clearly. I’d muffled the receiver with a sweater to mask my voice, and I wanted to make sure she could understand me. “Is this Mrs. Julie Andelin?”
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
I smiled. Right to the point. Some of them babbled on forever, and I could barely get a word in edgewise. So many mothers were like that, I’d learned: home alone all day, eager to talk, desperate for a conversation with anyone over the age of three. The last one I’d called had thought I was from the PTA and talked to me for nearly a minute until I had to shout something shocking just to get her attention. This one was playing along.
Of course, what I had to say was pretty shocking regardless.
“I saw your son today.” I paused. “He’s always such a happy kid.”
Silence.
How will she react?
“What do you want?”
Once again, right to the point. Almost too practical, perhaps. Is she scared? Is she taking this too calmly? I need to say more.
“You’ll be pleased to know little Jordan walked straight home from day care—past the drugstore, down the street to the old red house, then around the corner and past the apartments and straight home to you. He looked both ways at every street, and he never talked to strangers.”
“Who are you?” Her breathing was heavier now; more scared, more angry. I couldn’t read people very well over the phone, but Mrs. Andelin had been kind enough to answer the phone in the living room, and I could see her through the window. She looked out now, wide eyes peering into the darkness, then quickly wrenched the curtains closed. I smiled. I listened to the air go in and out of her nose, in and out, in and out. “Who are you?” she demanded.
Her fear was real. She wasn’t faking—she was legitimately terrified for her son. Does that mean she’s innocent? Or just a really good liar?
Julie Andelin had worked in the bank for nearly fifteen years, her entire adult life, and last week she had quit. That wasn’t suspicious in itself—people quit jobs all the time, and it didn’t mean anything except that they wanted a new job—but I couldn’t afford to ignore even the smallest lead. I didn’t know what the demons could do, but I’d seen at least one who could kill a person and take its place. Who was to say that this one couldn’t do the same? Maybe Julie Andelin was bored with the bank, but maybe—maybe—she was dead and gone and replaced by something that couldn’t keep up the same routines. A sudden change of lifestyle might be, from a certain point of view, the most suspicious thing in the world.
“What do you want with my son?”
She seemed genuine, just like every other mother I’d talked to over the last two months. Sixty-three days, and nothing. I knew a demon was coming because I’d called her myself—I’d literally called her, on a cell phone. Her name was Nobody. I’d told her I’d killed her friends, that they’d terrorized my town long enough, and now I was taking the fight to the rest of them. My plan was to take all the demons like that, one by one, until finally we would all be safe. No one would have to live in fear.
“Leave us alone!” Julie screamed.
I lowered my voice a bit. “I have a key to your house.” It wasn’t true, but it sounded great on the phone. “I love what you’ve done with Jordan’s room.”
She hung up, and I clicked off the phone. I wasn’t sure whose it was; it’s amazing the kind of stuff people drop in a movie theater. I’d used this one for five calls now, so it was probably time to get rid of it. I walked away, cutting through an apartment parking lot, popping open the phone and taking out the batteries and the SIM card. I dropped each piece into a separate metal garbage can, wiped my gloves clean, and slipped through a gap in the back fence. My bike was half a block away, stashed behind a Dumpster. I scrolled though my mental list while I walked, checking off Julie Andelin’s name. She was definitely the real mother, and not a demonic impostor; it had been a long shot anyway. At least I hadn’t spent much time on this one; I’d “stalked” her son for barely five minutes, but that’s all it took if you knew the right things to say. Tell a mother something creepy like “your daughter looks good in blue” and the maternal instinct will kick in instantly—she’ll believe the worst without any extra work on your part. It doesn’t matter if her daughter has ever worn blue in her life. As soon as you get that intense, honest, fear reaction, you’ve got your answer and you move on to the next woman with a secret.
I was starting to realize that everyone had a secret. But in sixty-three days I still hadn’t found the secret I was looking for.
I pulled out my bike, shoved my gloves into my pocket, and pushed off into the street. It was late, but it was August and the night air was warm. School would start again soon, and I was starting to get almost unbearably nervous. Where was Nobody? Why hadn’t she done anything yet? Finding a killer is easy—aside from all the physical evidence you leave behind, like fingerprints and footprints and DNA, there’s a mountain of psychological evidence as well. Why did you kill this person instead of that one? Why did you do it here instead of there, and why now instead of earlier or later? What weapon did you use, if any, and how did you use it? Piece it all together and you have a psychological profile, like an impressionist portrait, that can lead you straight to the killer. If Nobody would just kill someone, I’d finally be able to track her down.
Yes, finding a killer is easy. Finding someone before they kill is almost impossible. And the worst part about that was the way it made me so much easier to find than the demon. I’d already killed two people—Bill Crowley and Clark Forman, both demons in human form—so if she knew where to look and took her time, she could find me so much more easily than I could find her. Every day I grew more tense, more desperate. She could be around any corner.
I had to find her first.
I pedaled toward home, silently noting the houses I had already “cleared.” That one’s having an affair. That one’s an alcoholic. That one turned out to have a massive gambling debt—Internet poker. As far as I know she still hasn’t told her family their savings are gone. I’d starting watching people, going through their trash, seeing who was out late and who was meeting who and who had something to hide. I was shocked to find that it was almost everybody. It was like the whole town was festering in corruption, tearing itself apart before the demons had a chance to do it for them. Do people like that deserve to be saved? Do they even want to be saved? If they were really that self-destructive, then the demon was helping them more than I was, speeding them along in their goal of complete annihilation. An entire town, an entire world, slitting its vast communal wrist and bleeding out while the universe ignored us.
No. I shook my head. I can’t think like that. I have to keep going.
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I have to find the demon, and I have to stop it.
The trouble is, that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Sherlock Holmes summed up the essence of investigation in a simple sound bite: when you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Great advice, Sherlock, but you never had to track down a demon. I’ve seen two and talked to a third, and everything they did was impossible. I’ve watched them rip out their own organs, jump up after a dozen gunshot wounds, assimilate other people’s limbs, and even feel other people’s emotions. I’ve watched them steal identities and faces and entire lives. For all I knew they could do literally anything; how was I supposed to figure them out? If Nobody would just freaking kill someone already, then I’d have something to go on.
I was almost home, but I stopped halfway down my block to stare up at a tall beige house. Brooke’s house. We’d gone on two dates, both cut short by a dead body, and I’d really started to … like her? I didn’t know if that was even possible. I’d been diagnosed with sociopathy, a psychological disorder that meant, among other things, that I couldn’t feel empathy. I couldn’t connect to Brooke, not really. Did I enjoy her company? Yes. Did I dream about her at night? Yes again. But the dreams were not good, and my company was worse. All the better, then, that she’d started to avoid me. It wasn’t a breakup, because we’d never been “together,” but it was the platonic analogue of a breakup, whatever that’s called. There’s really no way to misinterpret “you scare me and I don’t want to see you anymore.”
I suppose I could see her side of it. I came at her with a knife, after all—that’s a hard thing to get over, even if I did have a good reason. Save a girl’s life by threatening it and she’ll have just enough time to say thank you before she says good-bye.
Still, that didn’t stop me from slowing down when I passed her house, or from stopping—like tonight—and wondering what she was doing. So she’d left me; big deal. Everyone else had. The only person I really cared about, really, was Nobody, and I was going to kill her.
Yay me.
I pushed off the curb and rode two doors down, to the mortuary at the end of the street. It was a biggish building, with a chapel and some offices and an embalming room in the back. I lived upstairs with my mom in a little apartment; the mortuary was our family business, though we kept the part about me embalming people a secret. Bad for business. Would you let a sixteen-year-old embalm your grandmother? Neither would anyone else.
I tossed my bike against the wall in the parking lot and opened the side door. Inside was a little stairwell with two exits: a door at the bottom that led to the mortuary, and a door at the top that led into our apartment. The light was burned out, and I trudged upstairs in the dark. The TV was on; that meant Mom was still up. I closed my eyes and rubbed them tiredly. I really didn’t want to talk to her. I stood in silence a moment, bracing myself, and then a phrase from the TV caught my ear:
“… found dead…”
I smiled and threw open the door. There’d been another death—Nobody had finally killed someone. After sixty-three days, it was finally starting.
Day one.
2
The demon killed a priest.
It was right there on the news—a pastor found dead on the lawn of the Throne of God Presbyterian church. I closed the door and walked to the couch, sitting down next to Mom as we watched in silence. It was too good to be true. A reporter was interviewing Sheriff Meier as he described the scene: The pastor was sprawled flat on his face with two long poles sticking out of his back—a mop with the head broken off, and a flagpole stripped of its flag. They had been stabbed between his ribs just inside his shoulder blades, one on each side. I leaned forward to get a better look at the TV, too surprised to hide my eagerness.
“Can you believe this?” asked Mom. “I thought we were through with all this!”
“I know this killer,” I said softly. Recognition was dawning slowly, but it was definitely there.
“What?”
“This is a real killer.”
“Of course it’s a real killer, John, the pastor is really dead.”
“No, I mean, this isn’t just a local guy—I read about this exact crime scene a few years ago. Did he take the hands too?”
The news anchor looked grim. “In addition to the poles in the back,” he said, “the killer also cut off the pastor’s hands, and removed his tongue.”
“Ha!” I said, half laughing.
“John!” said my mom sternly, “what kind of reaction is that?”
“It’s the Handyman!” I said. “He always does this to his victims. He cuts off their hands and tongue, and leaves them outside with sticks in their backs.” I stared at the blurred crime-scene photo, shaking my head in wonder. “I had no idea he was a demon.”
“He might not be,” said Mom, standing up and carrying her dinner plate into the kitchen. She’d seen the first demon, and she knew about the second, but she was still very uncomfortable discussing them.
“Of course he’s a demon,” I said. “Crowley was a demon, Forman was another demon who came looking for him, and now another demon has come looking for him.”
Mom was silent for a moment.
“You have no way of knowing that,” she said at last. I still hadn’t told her about my phone call to Nobody; she’d only get in the way by trying to protect me.
“Do you have any idea of the odds against three unrelated serial killers in a town this size?” I asked, following her into the living room. “And why on earth would the Handyman, whose attacks have all been in Georgia, show up in Clayton County, North Dakota, for no reason at all just two months after the last demon disappeared?”
“Because this town is cursed,” she said adamantly, moving back into the living room.
“I thought you didn’t believe in supernatural stuff?” I asked.
“I don’t mean literally cursed,” she said, turning back to me, “I mean … I don’t know what I mean. They’re demons, John! Or something just as bad! I don’t … I don’t know how much longer we can stay.”
“We can’t leave,” I said quickly. Too quickly. Mom stared at me a second, then pointed at me angrily.
“Oh no,” she said. “No no no no no. You are not going to chase after this one like you did with Bill Crowley. You are not going to play superhero and risk your life like an idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot, Mom.”
“Well you do some awfully stupid stuff for a genius,” she said. “Crowley tried to kill you. Forman almost succeeded, and he almost got Brooke too. And Curt. This is not a game.”
“I didn’t realize you were so worried about Curt’s life.”
“I don’t want him dead,” she shouted, “I just want him out of our lives. He’s an arrogant jerk, yes, but you can’t just kill him.”
“Then it’s a good thing I didn’t,” I said, growing angry.
“No, but because of your obsession with these … whatever they are … somebody else almost did. How many people have to die before you back down?”
“How many more people will die if I do back down?” I asked.
“That’s what police are for.”
“The Handyman’s been killing for five years at least—probably centuries more, now that we know he’s a demon. If the police are so awesome, why haven’t they stopped him yet?”
“You are not going after him,” Mom said firmly.
“The police have no idea how to fight a demon,” I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. “They have no idea what they’re up against. I do. I’ve already stopped two of them, and if I can stop this one I can save … I don’t know, maybe hundreds of lives. Maybe thousands. Do you think it’s just going to kill a couple of people and then go away forever? This is how these things live, Mom—it’s going to kill and kill and kill until it doesn’t have any victims left.”
“He,” said Mom firmly, locking my eyes with her gaze.
“What?”
“You called him
‘it,’” she said, exerting all her authority. “You know that you are not allowed to say ‘it.’ Say ‘he.’”
I closed my eyes and took a breath. One of the hallmarks of a sociopath, particularly a serial killer, was that they stopped thinking about people as people, and saw them only as objects. When I wasn’t thinking, or when I got excited, I started calling people “it.” This was against my rules.
But the rules were designed for humans.
“It’s a demon,” I said. “It’s not a person, it’s not human—I can’t dehumanize it if it’s not human.”
“He is a living, thinking creature,” said Mom, “human or demon or whatever. You don’t know what he is, but you know who you are, and you will follow your rules.”
My rules. She was right. “I’m sorry,” I said, calmer now. “He. Or she,” I added quickly. “This might turn out to be a woman.”
“What makes you say that?”
Because the voice on the phone was female. “Nothing,” I said, “I’m just saying that we don’t know.” I put on a face of mock indignation. “Are you implying that all psychopaths are men? Or that all men are psychopaths?”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes,” she said, turning off the TV. “I’m going to bed. No more news, no more killers; we’ll talk about this in the morning.”
I walked sullenly back to the kitchen and poured a bowl of cereal while Mom got ready for bed; I rarely went to sleep before 2:00 A.M., so there was still plenty of time to study the situation.
I’d read about the Handyman before. He was an unorthodox killer from Macon, Georgia—or at least that’s where his first and third known victims were found. He traveled all over Georgia, killing every nine months or so, and every crime scene matched our new situation: the victims were killed inside, usually in their place of business or at home alone, and there the body’s hands and tongue were removed. Then the body was carried outside, the poles were stuck into its back, and the killer disappeared. They had yet to find any real evidence of who the killer might be, though they could guess some things just by analyzing the crimes themselves. First of all, everyone assumed it was a man, based on two things: the sheer physical strength involved in hacking off the hands, carrying the bodies outside, and driving the wooden poles into their backs, and the simple fact that almost all serial killers are men anyway. Neither of these were especially strong evidence, but psychological profiling is more of an art than a science. They took the information they had and went with the answers that made the most sense.