by Dan Wells
“I’m not a racer or anything,” she said, “but I love to ride. And hike. Sometimes I can’t believe how lucky we are to live here.”
I almost laughed. “You’re kidding. Clayton?”
“I love Clayton,” she said. “We’ve got a lake, a forest, miles of trails and roads; if we could do something about the life expectancy we’d be in paradise.”
“I suppose you’ve got a point,” I said, following as she turned toward the lake road. We rode casually, barely pedaling, and I lifted up my head to look at the sky. The sun was bright and warm, and the air smelled like cut grass. I usually just used my bike to go places—to school, or to the library, or to the burned-out warehouse outside of town. I never just rode it for fun.
We reached the main lake road, which led out past a mechanic shop toward the wooded lakefront beyond. Marci pulled ahead, flipping into high gear and standing on the pedals to build up speed. I pushed hard to catch up, and the wind brushed past my face like a cool curtain. Marci was very fast, and watching her legs pump up and down I realized she was probably in much better shape than I was. It also convinced me that being a few bike lengths behind wasn’t really that bad of a place to be.
I used to have rules about watching girls: I simply never allowed myself to do it. I’ve lived half of my life in constant fear of my own thoughts—of my own darker nature that lurked inside, eager to snap up any lead I gave it and overpower me completely. I had dreams about killing my friends and family; I had fantasies, day and night, about catching and binding and torturing the people I met on the street. I’d even fantasized about embalming Marci. There was something inside of me that longed for blood and pain, not because it liked them but because it couldn’t be satisfied by anything less. I didn’t feel normal emotions in the same way as normal people; things like love and kindness were foreign to me, while harsher feelings like hate and fear and envy were all too close to the surface. If I wanted a vibrant, powerful emotional experience, violence was pretty much the only way I could have it—so allowing myself to become attached to a girl was, rather obviously, a bad idea.
Brooke had gotten a glimpse of that side of me, locked away in Forman’s house a few months ago. I didn’t hurt her, but she knew. We hadn’t spoken since.
But the thing was, now that I was a real demon hunter, everything was different. My dark side had a safe outlet, and my dreams at night were heroic tales of John the Conqueror, slaying all the dark things of the world—and if I enjoyed the slaying a little more than necessary, well, that was my right. It didn’t hurt anyone but the demons, and hurting them was the whole point. Along with that change I’d let go of many of my rules, allowing myself for the first time to enjoy my life—to talk to people, to hunt the demon, to look at girls. I was free.
Slowly, carefully, I let go of the handlebars and spread my arms wide. Marci glanced back, saw me, and did the same, whooping with exhilaration as we hurtled down the road. I closed my eyes and felt the wind on my face, sharp with danger and excitement. The town disappeared behind us, the wilderness rose up before us, and the road carried us headlong to nowhere.
5
“How’d your date go?”
“Fine.”
It was the next morning, and I was trying to eat my breakfast in peace. Mom, on the other hand, was being a mom.
“What’d you guys do?”
“We just went out,” I said. “It was nothing.” Which was true—it really was nothing. We’d ridden around on our bikes for a while, which was fun enough, I guess, but it’s hard to carry on much of a conversation while you’re twenty feet apart on a bike trail. That was fine with me, because I’m horrible at talking to people, but Marci had probably been bored out of her mind.
“Well it’s not nothing,” said Mom. She was standing in the hall, holding a curling iron to her hair while I ate a bowl of cereal in the kitchen. “You’ve never gone out with her before, that’s got to be something.”
“I’ve barely ever gone out with anybody before,” I said.
“So it’s even more of a something. You took your bike instead of the car; did you go bike riding somewhere?”
“I actually didn’t ride it at all. I walked it all the way to her house, and then left it on her porch.”
“Don’t be a smart aleck.”
“And then,” I continued, “since I didn’t have a car, I had to carry her everywhere we went.”
Mom smiled. “Well, at least it wasn’t a total loss.”
“What?”
“What do you mean, ‘what?’ I know a hot babe when I see one.”
“I really don’t need to hear that kind of comment from my mom.”
She ducked back around the corner to the bathroom, and I sighed in relief and ate a bite of cereal. A moment later she re-emerged, the curling iron wrapped up in a different lock of hair.
I rolled my eyes. “Seriously, Mom, how long is that cord? I thought the kitchen would be a safe place to eat breakfast this morning.”
“I plugged it in here in the hall,” she said. “It’s just long enough to reach the kitchen and the bathroom if I walk back and forth.”
“Well that’s wonderful.”
“So you went bike riding, then,” she said. “Just around town? Out on the forest trails somewhere?”
“Yes,” I said, “we went out to Forman’s place.”
Her face twisted, eyes widening, eyebrows curling, nostrils flaring. It was her “shocked” face, with a dash of “confused.” “Really?”
“Of course not,” I said, “but the face you just made almost makes this conversation worth it.”
“John…”
“It’s still not worth it, but it almost was.”
“To the lake then,” she said, plunging onward. She was tenacious this morning. “It’s wonderful weather for the lake. Did you go swimming?”
“We went skinny-dipping.”
“Can you please just answer a simple question without the attitude?” She stepped back around the corner again. I thought I’d get a moment of respite, but she kept talking, shouting from the bathroom. “It may surprise you to know this, but there are children—some of them teenage boys, just like you—who actually carry on open, honest conversations with their mothers.”
“I find it very hard to believe that there are other teenage boys just like me.” I finished my cereal and stood up. “I also find it a little terrifying.”
She came back around the corner, having readjusted the curler again. Her face was no longer playful. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to talk about anything uncomfortable.”
I walked past her into the living room. “Finally something we agree on. Let’s stop talking right now.” I turned on the TV. I could probably still catch most of the morning news.
“Come on, John,” she said. “I’m just asking how things went on your date. I want to be involved in your life.” I ignored her and flipped through the channels. “The cord reaches in here even better than the kitchen,” she said. “We can keep talking.”
“We can,” I said, “but we can also stop. That’s called ‘freedom of choice.’”
“You know, I was really getting to like the fact that we didn’t watch the news during every single meal anymore—” She stopped abruptly, caught by the news footage. It had caught me at the same moment, and we stared at it. “That’s city hall.”
“Yeah.”
There was a reporter at Clayton’s city hall, talking intently to the camera while several policemen milled around behind her, armed and edgy. In the background, parked right in front of the steps, was an ambulance with flashing lights, and near it a swarm of paramedics clustered around something on the ground. I caught a glimpse of Ron, the coroner, standing with them. Someone was dead.
“Turn it up,” she said softly.
“We have Sheriff Meier with us,” the reporter said, and the camera zoomed out and panned over to reveal the sheriff standing stiffly on the reporter’s left. “Sheriff Meier, what can you tell us
about this attack on the mayor?”
Mom gasped. “The mayor…”
“It appears to have happened late last night,” said the sheriff. He looked tired, and I guessed that he’d been up for several hours already. “The mayor and one of his aides were the only ones in the building at the time, and both were attacked; the aide received a blow to the head but was otherwise unharmed. He’s on his way to the hospital now.”
“The Handyman typically attacks his victims in their homes,” said the reporter. “Do you have any idea why he might have attacked the mayor here, in his office?”
The sheriff bristled at that, putting on his “annoyed” face that he used so often with the press. “This case bears remarkable similarity to the Handyman killings, yes, but we want to stress that the connection is still conjecture. We are investigating any and all evidence, and if it turns out that this is the real Handyman and not a copycat, we will proceed from there.”
“Besides,” I added, talking to the screen, “the Handyman kills people at home and at work—he killed a police officer in his car once. This reporter doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
Mom shook her head. “I can’t believe this is happening. The mayor.”
I whistled. “She’s mad, all right.”
“The reporter?”
“No,” I said, “the demon.”
“Then God help us all.” Mom stood up and walked back to the bathroom.
The reporter nodded solemnly. “Thank you very much for your time.”
“You’re welcome,” said the sheriff, looking a bit impatient, and he turned to walk back toward the crime scene. The reporter turned back to the camera, which zoomed in until she filled the screen.
“We also want to mention that city hall and the adjoining courthouse will be closed throughout the day while police and other investigators look for evidence,” she said. “Some county employees have been given the day off, others are being questioned, but there are still no solid leads as to the evidence of Clayton County’s newest killer. This is Carrie Walsh, Five Live News.”
“City hall is closed?” asked Mom. She was standing behind me, curling a new part of her hair. “We have a meeting there today.”
“Not anymore,” I said.
“Then why am I curling my hair?”
“Because if you stop halfway through you’ll look like an idiot.”
“That was a rhetorical question, John.” She walked back to the bathroom and shouted, “What is wrong with our town?”
“We’re being hunted by—”
“I know!” she shouted, coming back into the room. “I know it’s a demon, okay! I know it, and I admit it, and it scares the living hell out of me. But what are we supposed to do? How can we just carry on? How can we stay here and … do this job, for the love of … I feel like a war profiteer, getting rich while everyone dies.”
“We’re not supposed to just carry on,” I said. “We’re supposed to stop it.”
“No we’re not!” she said, her voice rising. “The police are supposed to stop it, and you are not the police—you’re not trained, you’re not armed, you’re not even … old enough to vote.”
“Young or old I am the only one who knows anything about this.”
“There has to be someone else,” she said, rushing forward to grab my arm. “If they’re really real, and really out there, there have to be other people that know about them. Maybe we can talk to them.”
“What, like some kind of conspiracy freaks off the Internet?”
“No,” she said, staring at the floor and rubbing her mouth with her hand. Her other hand kept a vise grip on my arm. “Not other civilians, but trained people. Government people. They’ve got to know, right? There’s probably a branch of the government designed just for this, some secret group that nobody knows about—”
“And if nobody knows about them,” I said, “how are we ever possibly going to find them? What are we going to say? What if we call the police right now and tell them we want to speak with the special Demon Unit. No one would believe us.”
“We don’t have to find them. We just make an official report and they’ll find us.”
“We already reported it when Crowley died, remember?” I said. “That put us in touch with the FBI, which put us in touch with Forman, who turned out be another demon. Last time I trusted the FBI I ended up drinking my own urine in a hole under some guy’s house. We’re on our own for this.”
She shook her head. “You can’t say that. I will not let you do this.”
“So you’re just going to ignore it while everybody dies around you?”
“What do you think you’re going to do, John?” she demanded, putting her hands on her hips. “What? Help me understand.”
“That’s what I want,” I said, “I want to understand.”
“You want to kill them.”
“If it comes to that, yes,” I said. “But first we have to understand them. Doesn’t it make you curious at all? Even a little bit? Don’t you want to know who they are, and why they’re here, and why they’re killing everybody? Why does everyone insist on shutting their eyes to this?”
“Life is too short,” she said, folding her arms and leaning against the wall. “It’s too precious. We have to live in this world, but we don’t have to wallow in it. We don’t have to fill our lives with all of this darkness.”
“But somebody has to,” I said. “Somebody has to take the hit and deal with the darkness or it will never go away.”
A fierce look came into her eyes. “But that somebody does not have to be my son.” She stared at me a moment, her eyes wet with tears. “You’re all I have left.”
She turned and went back into the bathroom, and for a moment I watched the empty space where she had been. I wasn’t really all she had left—I was the only one left at home, sure, with Dad eight years gone and my sister Lauren barely on speaking terms with Mom. But she had Margaret, and she had … Well, she had to have somebody else. Right? And things with Lauren were better than they’d been in years, so that was something.
Right?
I turned back to the TV. The news was cutting to a commercial, but the sign-out footage was a quick shot of the courthouse lawn, probably taken earlier that morning when the mayor’s body was first found. There was an indistinct shape on the grass, presumably the body, and rising up from its back were two long poles, just like with the pastor. Caught on the poles, or perhaps hung there, were two wide sheets of ripped plastic, flowing in the breeze and splashed with dirty, red blood. They flapped in the wind like artificial wings, and then the screen went black.
* * *
Brooke’s house was just two doors down from mine, a two-story tract home that followed the same basic layout as every other house in the neighborhood—except mine, of course, which was just an apartment over the mortuary. I sat in my car, parked innocuously by the curb, and catalogued Brooke’s house in my head. There was the front porch, with the door right in the center; this opened to a long hallway that stretched to the rear of the house. On the left was the living room, small but cozy, with a large picture window, and on the right was a dining room that turned into a kitchen at the back; this had a large sliding glass door that led out to their backyard. The back corner on the left side was a bathroom and a large pantry.
The second floor I didn’t know nearly as well, having never been up there, but I’d been in the Crowleys’ house, so I could guess where everything was. The long central hallway had a staircase leading up, with a master bedroom—presumably her parents’—at the top on the front right corner. I could see the windows from my seat in the car: white lace curtains and a couple of cutesy knickknacks. Across the hall, closer to me, was a smaller bedroom which was probably her brother Ethan’s. The back left corner was Brooke’s room, with a wide view of the woods beyond—this I knew for certain, because I used to sit in the darkness of that wood and watch her through the back window. But I was better than that now.
Well, obviously not much better.
I don’t know why I was watching her house. It’s not like I needed the companionship—if I wanted to do something I could just call my friend Max. I wasn’t peeping into Brooke’s windows, and I wasn’t stalking her. I was just … thinking about her. I wondered if she ever thought about me.
It was late August, with just enough breeze to keep the heat from being oppressive. My windows were rolled down, and I hung my arm out the side, feeling it bake in the sun. Somewhere a lawn mower droned. I watched Brooke’s house with a blank mind. The world was hollow, like a bell.
A few minutes later the lawn mower shut off, and a minute or two after that, Brooke herself came into view, walking out from the backyard pushing a lawn mower. She lined it up on a corner of the front lawn and leaned down to grab the starter cord, ripping it up and back. The mower roared to life and she pushed it forward, carving a long, straight swath into the grass. She was so different from Marci—taller, thinner, less curvy and more … willowy? That was a stupid word. Brooke was elegant, long and slender. Her hair was golden, and today she had pulled it back into a ponytail that hung past her shoulders. She moved simply and gracefully.
She reached the edge of the lawn and turned around, coming back toward me as she cut the second row. I slumped down in the car so she wouldn’t see me, but her eyes were on the grass. When she turned again to go back the other way, I got out of my car and walked slowly toward her, coming to a stop in her driveway. She reached the far edge and pulled the mower around again for another pass. She saw me now and paused. She turned off the mower and pulled a headphone out of her ear.
“Hey, John.”
“Hey.”
We stood there, silent. There was so much I wanted to say, but … really nothing that I actually could say. Not because the words weren’t there, they just weren’t in any kind of order. Anything I said would be a string of random words: food shoes house, my not floor holding. Everywhere. Sky. Language fell apart, not just for me but for the entire world, from now until the dawn of time.