I gasped for breath, the words coming faster than I could breathe. I was so angry my hands were shaking, and the smile on Harvey’s face just made me even madder still.
“Side effects of the mark I gave you, kiddo. Dreams, delusions, drawings—I manifest in many different ways, from person to person, especially with young ones like you. It’ll go away when you get older, though. You’ll be haunted by different demons by then.” He paused, frowning. “Don’t look at me like that, Toddy. I can be your friend when I have to be. You needed me that day when those two boys locked you up in that dog kennel. Who else would’ve let you out?”
He waited. I wanted to say something, but no words came. I just stood there, shaking and glaring at him as if that might make a difference. “See? You needed me, and I was there for you. And now I’m here again, but not for you.”
“What do you mean?”
He took out a cigarette and lit the tip with a snap of his fingers. He took a long drag and exhaled a cloud of smoke.
“I think you know,” he said. “You’re a bright one. I’m sure you can figure it out.”
My heart sank. He’d warned me months ago. The monkey’s silent words were forever etched in my brain. How could I forget? Comin’ for your Granny, kiddo. Coming to get her and there’s nothing you can do about it.
“Bingo,” he said.
“But you can’t!” I took three steps forward and glared up at him. Tears lingered in the corners of my eyes, but I wouldn’t let him see me cry. I had to be strong for Granny. “I won’t let you, Harvey.”
“Come on, kiddo.” He reached down and tousled my hair, just like Pastor Thurmond used to do. “You think that’s your Granny in there? She’s a shell of a person. Whatever years she has left will be spent in a wheelchair, in a nursing home. I’m doing her a favor by taking her now. You think she wants to spend the rest of her life as a vegetable?”
His words made sense. I didn’t want to grow up watching Granny grow older and slowly lose her identity. I didn’t want to watch the embers in her eyes die one day at a time until there was no light left to shine. But I remembered what Granny told me about the Devil that Sunday morning, and I did the only thing I felt I could do: I pushed him.
My palms burned when I pushed against his stomach. I cried out in pain, freeing the tears in my eyes. I looked down at my hands. Blisters formed on the tips of my fingers.
“You should put some ice on that,” he said. “Looks painful.”
“Shut up,” I grunted. “You’re not taking Granny, and that’s that. Now go away!”
Harvey J. Winterbell leaned back and let loose a wild cackle that shook the world. The air stirred in a warm, bitter wind that flattened the grass and swayed the trees. Branches tore from their trunks and clattered to the ground. When he spoke again, he did not sound like the man I knew. His voice was gruff and guttural, a voice of inhuman nature loosed from the heavens and given dominion over the kingdom of man.
Harvey’s eyes bled thin trickles of blue down his cheeks, and when he opened his mouth to speak, I glimpsed crackling flames of hellfire in his throat.
“I will take what I wish, child. Now be gone.”
Only I didn’t listen. The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them, and at the time they seemed like the only words worth speaking. The only words that mattered. Sometimes words are all a kid really has, and if I’d ever said anything worthwhile in my life up to that point, this was it.
I looked Harvey in the eye and said, “I’ll do anything to keep you from taking her.”
And then, like a switch, Harvey’s demeanor changed. He was his old, magically jovial self again. He’d heard exactly what he wanted to hear.
“Anything?”
I nodded, feeling a sudden weight in my stomach. My Sunday School lessons came racing back to me. The Devil made deals all the time, and his only currency was human souls.
Reluctant, yet scared for Granny’s life, I looked the Devil in the eye and nodded.
“Anything,” I said.
“I don’t know,” Harvey said, rubbing absently at his goatee. “What could you possibly have that I would want?”
I shrugged. “My soul?”
“Oh, there’s that, but what’s the soul of a child worth these days?” He clapped his hands. “I’ve got it. Instead of your soul, I think I’d rather have your life.”
I took a step backward in fear. “You’re going to kill me?”
“No, no, no. In exchange for not taking your Granny, your life will belong to me until the day she dies. From now until then, you are mine.”
“You mean I won’t go to Hell?”
“That’s not for me to say. That’s up to you. But you will be bound to me from this day forth until she leaves this earth. This is my price. Pay it, and I will leave your Granny be.”
He stuck out his hand. I’d like to say I hesitated, maybe contemplated just what I was agreeing to, but being only nine at the time, I didn’t do anything like that. I did what Granny would’ve told me not to. I did what I felt I had to do, what my heart told me was right.
I looked him in the eye, reached out, and shook the Devil’s hand.
***
I’d like to say Granny recovered after that, but I can’t, and she didn’t. Granny’s condition grew increasingly worse. The day I saved Granny from the Devil, I lost a piece of myself that I knew I would never get back, and for a long time I lived in fear that I was damned to spend my afterlife in eternal agony, burning forever in the fires of Hell. Even if my heart was in the right place, even if I’d sold my most prized spiritual possession to God’s greatest enemy to keep Granny alive, I knew I would suffer for it. Even the purest act of love couldn’t outweigh the laws of a cruel, jealous god.
I paid for my sin by watching Granny lose herself one day at a time. She deteriorated to a point that she couldn’t take care of herself, and without Mom and I there, my dad’s family decided to have Granny put in a rest home. She spent the rest of her days there, in a hospital-like building with lifeless white walls and a stench of ammonia, bleach, and urine.
Visiting her was always awkward. There were other old people there, forgotten and left to rot by families who either didn’t care or simply couldn’t handle the stress. Most of them sat in a commons area, dressed in sweat suits and gowns, their hair unkempt, lethargically staring at a TV tuned to a channel of never-ending game shows. I hated the smells and the sounds. I hated the apathy of the nurses and doctors.
I tried to visit her as often as I could, but as I grew older my life took on its own schedule. I was busy with school and friends, busy with other things. I realize now I told myself these things to justify not going to see her. Because I was afraid. Because looking at her was a reminder of the price I’d paid. Even then I knew how selfish I was.
My nightmares continued, but instead of being chased by a dead dog or a silent monkey, I always found myself in an observation room of some kind, with a pane of one-way glass separating me from the cell beyond. In the middle of that blank room was a chair, and sitting in that chair was Granny, her wrists and ankles tied down. She was always struggling, always trying to free herself, crying out to God to save her. “Water,” she’d rasp, and I’d bang on the glass, screaming for someone to please, please give my granny some water.
No one ever came, and I’d wake up shivering and covered in sweat, Granny’s cries still echoing in my head.
I was twelve when I stopped going to see her at the nursing home. Mom and I rode the elevator up to her floor, wandered our way through a series of hallways filled with the lost souls of generations past, and found Granny sitting up in her bed, staring vacantly at the television.
“Hey there,” Mom said, pulling up a chair beside the bed. “How are you today?”
Granny didn’t respond. I shuffled my weight from one foot to the other and sighed. Mom knew I didn’t want to be there, knew how uncomfortable I was in that place, but she’d mandated I come along. I hadn’t seen Grann
y in several months, and the last time Mom visited she said Granny had asked about me.
Except when Granny took her eyes off the TV and looked at me, she didn’t react like she used to. Her eyes didn’t beam like they used to. She didn’t smile. Instead, she looked at me with that same accusing stare from years before. Her eyes narrowed, and she drove her gaze away from me, focusing on my mother.
“He wanted to come see you,” Mom lied. “He sure is growing, isn’t he?”
But Granny shook her head. “I don’t know this boy. Who is he?”
Those words pierced me like bullets. My breath caught in my throat, and even though I’d built myself up to believe that I resented her, I still felt as though I’d been cut down on a distant battlefield. I stepped backward, blinked away my tears, and walked out of the room. I never returned.
***
My teenage years were a tumultuous time, and although I don’t think I was a bad kid by any stretch, I had my share of transgressions. High school brought its own troubles to accompany the storm raging inside me, fueling the anger in my heart that had been threatening to bubble up and explode since that day I shook the Devil’s hand.
The longer I spent away from Granny, the longer I resented her for everything that had happened. After all, I never would’ve had to make my deal if she hadn’t had her strokes. Everything had been fine until she collapsed into Mom’s arms. My resentment was fueled by a deeper loathing that I didn’t understand at the time, but that I now know was my own selfishness. I wanted to keep her around and was willing to sell my soul to do it, but all I got in return was a husk of a great-grandmother, her spark faded, dimming, dying—and a lingering shadow that followed me everywhere.
I had friends in school, but none of them were as close to me as Granny had been, and the innocent eyes through which I’d once viewed that sacred pact of friendship were tarnished by the harsh realities of adolescence. Children may be cruel, but teenagers are sadistic.
I was quiet. I wore black T-shirts. I carried with me a persona of mystery, and as I blossomed into a young man I began to grow a goatee just like Harvey. I figured that if I were damned, I might as well fit the part and walk that walk. My teenage arrogance was palpable. I suppose it was only a matter of time before I accumulated a rogues’ gallery of enemies within the walls of Corbin High.
A rumor began floating around during my freshman year that I was a Satanist. A fitting rumor, to be honest, but at the time I was troubled with my convictions and struggling to find a place in the greater Christian scheme. I was anything but a Satanist, but trying to explain that to a group of teenage boys who hated my guts was out of the question. I weathered that storm for a while, ignoring their snide comments in class and the notes they passed around school. I tried to ignore the pentagrams I’d find drawn on my locker—and I did, for the most part, until one day I reached my limit.
I’d never been in trouble at school before. Teachers always had good things to say about me and my work. But one day, while standing in line at the cafeteria, one of the boys who perpetrated that rumor of Satanism made one smartass quip too many. I was suddenly eight years old again, locked away in that dog kennel by two bullies who were bigger than me, stronger than me.
This time I had the Devil on my side.
I was a tall kid for my age, and this punk who’d spent weeks sniping at me was a little on the heavy side. I spun on my heels, planted my foot behind his, took him by the throat, and shifted my entire weight against him. He teetered backward, falling flat on his back, and I went with him, a victim of my own gravity. I held him by the throat as students called out for a teacher. He stared at me, stunned, afraid, and I remember feeling alive with electricity, a powerful surge of vindication. I felt his fear.
“You will leave me alone or I’ll tear out your goddamn throat.” I squeezed his neck, digging my fingers into his reddening flesh. Two teachers had to pull me off him, dragging me out of the cafeteria toward the principal’s office while the kid curled up on the floor, gasping for air. He never bothered me again.
The principal called my mom, and she came down to the school to get me. This was before the days of shootings and bomb threats. I faced in-school suspension—the first reprimand I’d ever had, for that matter—and during the entire car ride home, Mom alternated between yelling at me and crying. I remember feeling remorse to an extent. Not for the kid, of course—he deserved what I’d done—but remorse for how I made my mother feel.
I stormed off to my room when we got home, wanting nothing more than to be alone from the world to shut out everything I’d done. Mom wasn’t having any of that, and she followed after me.
“We’re not finished here, young man.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But you’re going to talk about it,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with you anymore. You never talk to me. You come home and shut us out of your life. You never go to church with us anymore. And now you’re wearing these dark clothes and the music you’re listening to honestly scares me. Is it any wonder those kids think you’re a Satanist?”
“I don’t care what they think.”
“That’s bullshit. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have nearly choked a boy to death.”
Mom sat down at my desk, planted her elbows on her knees, and buried her face in her hands. She sobbed for a few minutes, and I just stared at her, not really feeling anything. How could I expect her to understand? I could barely communicate what I felt with my drawings. Giving voice to what was going on inside my heart was beyond my ability. Instead, I sat there with a ball of cotton in my throat, watching my mother cry with the same grief she had when Granny collapsed that day.
After a few awkward minutes, Mom wiped her eyes and stared at me. She shook her head.
“What happened to you? You aren’t the same child I raised.”
The Devil happened to me. The words were on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t bring myself to speak them. I might have said the Devil made me do it. Except he didn’t. He didn’t make me do any of it. All of this was my own doing—the regret, the anger, the resentment. Everything I felt, everything that happened to me, including the Devil’s shadow that followed me every step of the way and the dreams that haunted my sleep, was all a result of my own behavior.
I had chosen my path by shaking the Devil’s hand. My actions were my own, pieces of a greater whole. Sitting there, looking at my mom’s mascara-streaked face, I realized the picture I was drawing of myself was bleak: a sketch of scratchy lines and incomplete shadows.
I still couldn’t bring myself to answer her, though. She grounded me for a month from TV and video games. All I had left were books and my drawings. I didn’t understand it at the time, but Mom grounding me was one of the best things she ever did.
***
Harvey J. Winterbell was right: the mark went away as I got older, and I was haunted by different demons. Harvey was still with me, of course—not in physical appearance, mind you, but in the metaphysical sense. The creative sense. He was always there in my drawings, somewhere, even if I didn’t give him shape or form. His demons were now mine, and I took to the page with my pencils and pens, scribbling away, trying to free myself of them. But they were still there—dark shapes lurking in the background, between the lines, always watching. Accusing me. Mocking me.
My drawings became more erratic in that month-long purgatory. Every face looked evil. Every eye was blue, every chin covered in a closely-groomed goatee. Any outsider would’ve assumed these drawings were a series of self-portraits—after all, I had fashioned myself to look just like my tormentor in a sick form of Stockholm Syndrome. No matter how hard I tried to break free of that cycle, every time I put pencil to paper, Harvey and his demons were there.
Frustrated to the point of tears, I ripped up that last drawing and threw the pieces into the air. I’d hit a wall, questioning my sanity in the process. Was it normal for a teenager to lose his mind? I can’t say. I heard my mot
her discussing the possibility of taking me to see a “professional,” much in the same way as she’d done with Granny when I was a child.
My therapy came in a different form. I’m not sure if the books or the writing came first, but halfway through that month of confinement to my room, I started using a pencil to draw letters instead of pictures. I had a small library of books, mostly leftovers from my younger years—books by R.L. Stine and Ray Bradbury and John Bellairs—but my mom also had a cache of grown-up novels by Stephen King and Dean Koontz. I procured a copy of Intensity from her bookshelf one afternoon after school when she wasn’t home and hid it in my room.
I read the story at night, long after my parents expected me to be asleep, devouring its pages and living through the author’s words. I found a strange sort of peace within my own head while reading that book. More importantly, the demons weren’t there. The nagging, mocking weight that sat upon my shoulders was lifted for a brief time, leaving me with nothing more than the magic of mere words. I’d found a way to escape my demons. To run from them.
But to chase them? That was something infinitely more difficult—yet I had to try.
So late one night after my parents went to bed, I crept out from under the blankets, turned on my desk lamp, and began writing a story. Harvey wasn’t in it, and neither were our demons, and for the first time since I’d given myself to him in order to save Granny, I found some semblance of peace within myself.
I kept writing. I kept chasing my demons. And Harvey didn’t follow.
***
Life went on for me even after serving my month-long sentence. I grew up. I finished high school and enrolled in college. I wrote stories about bad things happening to even worse people. I became defiant, determined to go against my family’s wishes. We argued and we fought. We turned our backs on one another, and by the time I finished college, I’d had enough of the small town in which I’d spent most of my life.
I packed up my things and moved almost a thousand miles: far enough to get away from my past so it couldn’t haunt me anymore. Far enough that no one could touch me. I left everyone behind, including my granny.
Ugly Little Things Page 9