Here Be Demons

by David Wesley Hill

  This time Sam was so excited that he got down on all fours and started chasing rats. As small as Sam is, he was still much larger than the rodents and soon his groin was messy with blood and fur.

  The squealing got on my nerves and I went upstairs. Courtney remained behind until her favorite television program came on.

  Sam wired Brad’s and Mary Beth’s rooms so we could record their conversations. Brad wanted to tell their parents about the pregnancy but Mary Beth didn’t. She was a big girl and she was sure that if she wore loose clothing no one would guess her condition. Brad was less certain. Neither had much idea what to do with the baby after Mary Beth gave birth.

  Dad was sitting on the couch in his boxer shorts like he does every evening after work. He was finishing his third glass of the vodka he keeps in the freezer until it becomes as thick as syrup.

  Brad was visiting Mary Beth. We had coupled the microphones in their rooms to our home entertainment center and their voices came clearly through the stereo speakers. Brad was saying:

  “Of course, I love you, Mary Beth. How could you think I don’t?”

  “But you want to ruin my life.”

  “I’m only saying it might be better if we got help.”

  “My mother will kill me. She’ll really kill me. You don’t know her.”

  “Let’s think about it.” Brad didn’t sound convinced.

  Dad scratched absently at the thigh of his thin leg and took a swallow of vodka. “The boy’s scared,” he observed.

  “They’re both scared.”

  “He needs to be able to justify keeping the pregnancy secret,” Dad went on. "Otherwise he'll tell his parents."

  "I think you're right," I agreed.

  So the next afternoon I met Brad after school and we went to his house and slipped a game into the computer.

  “You ever notice—“ I began.

  “Notice what, Frank?”

  “Well, all the heroes, all the real heroes in the good games, I mean, there’s always something mysterious about how they’re born. Either some god was screwing around with their mother. Or else they’re foundlings. You know, left on a doorstep by their parents, who can’t keep them for one reason or another. Maybe there’s a rule about it. Like, you can’t be a true hero with an ordinary mother and father.”

  Brad’s eyes became distant. They held so much innocence that I wanted to steal them from their sockets and cradle them in my palm.

  “You really think so, Frank?” he asked. “There’s a rule?”

  “I’d bet on it.”

  Mary Beth called Brad when she felt the first contractions. The motel they’d picked out lay a couple miles down the state road beyond the town limits. Sam had wired the entire place since we couldn’t know what room they’d be given. We switched channels until we tuned in on them. It was not an easy labor but they were left alone since it was the kind of establishment where unusual noises are attributed to energetic sexual activity.

  “Push,” Brad said. “One more time.”

  “I’m pushing.”

  The groan Mary Beth made mingled pain and effort and deep satisfaction. After this we heard the wail of a newborn. Mary Beth said, “Let me hold him.”

  “Just for a little while, Ok?”

  “He’s so small, isn’t he, Brad? Oh, I wish we could keep him.”

  “Come on, Mary Beth. You know we can’t. We’ve gone over this a thousand times. Look, I’ll get the bassinet ready.”

  I stood up and said, "I'd better leave now."

  "Can I come, too?" Courtney asked.

  I shrugged and pulled on a jacket. Twilight had faded to night and a chill November wind snapped sheets of rain against the pavement. A walk of ten minutes brought us to St. Luke's Church. We waited around the corner against the overgrown hedge that framed the rectory. The shrubbery screened us from observation while allowing a good view of the front steps. Just past nine an old Civic pulled up before the church. Brad got out of the car. He didn't notice us. He leaned inside in order to take out the cradle with his son in it.

  For a moment he stared into the cradle. It was easy to guess what he was thinking. For Brad giving up the child had mystical significance. He was ensuring the boy an extraordinary future. Like in computer games.

  Brad placed the bassinet in front of the entrance under the overhang and out of the rain. Then he hurried down the steps and gunned the car away from there. I immediately went to the church and took the bassinet and brought it to Courtney in the shadow of the hedge. Together we peered at the baby.

  His eyes were so blue as to seem black. He looked at us fearlessly. There was such wonder and delight in his regard that for the briefest instant I almost felt like a real human being.

  "Isn't he the cutest thing," Courtney said. She blew a huge bubble.

  "Sure is," I replied.

  I reached into the cradle and strangled him. Then I cut off his left ear and tucked it in my pocket.

  I replaced the bassinet with the dead body before the church door and Courtney and I returned home.

  "I want to report a crime," Sam said in a woman's voice. "Yes, well, I think there was a crime, but I'm not one hundred percent sure. I could be wrong. What? What does my name have to do with anything? I'm simply a good citizen, is that so hard to believe? Anyway, my point is, I was visiting a friend at the Seven Oaks Lodge, out on the state road, and I couldn't help but hear all sorts of funny noises coming from a couple doors down. Number seventeen, I think it was. What? Oh, I don't know, like crying and maybe like someone was being slapped around a little. I didn't make too much of it, that's how the Seven Oaks is. Only I started wondering if maybe I heard a child in there. Now that surely isn’t any place for a child. There’s all sorts of goings on.”

  "Very good," I told Sam. "Now this time you're a man." I dialed the police again. In a masculine voice he said:

  "There's been a murder. No, I didn't see it myself. Let me tell you what happened. I was walking by St. Luke's Church over on Montgomery, and I saw an old Honda pull up. A kid got out. He was carrying a box or something and he left it on the church steps. I didn't think nothing of it, but there was something odd about the kid, you know how it is, and after he left, I opened the box. Only it wasn't a box. It was a cradle. There was a dead baby in it, the son of a bitch dropped off a dead baby like a God damned bundle of used clothes. Sure, I got the license plate. Let me tell you what it was."

  Brad and Mary Beth were arrested for murder. The news made the national papers because the district attorney decided to press for the death penalty even though they were juveniles. But the charges were bargained down to manslaughter. I visited Brad while he was out on bail before sentencing.

  "Mary Beth is sure I did it," he told me. We were sitting on the edge of his bed in his room in front of the computer but the machine was off. "She hates me. She won't talk to me."

  "Well, you did plead guilty."

  "Only because no one believed my story. They told me if I said I was innocent, and was convicted anyway, I might get the chair or a lethal injection or something. So I had to say I did it. What other choice was there?"

  "I don't know, Brad.”

  "That baby was alive when I left him at the church. I swear it. Why would I kill my son? Why would anyone kill a baby? And steal his little ear?"

  "Maybe someone had it in for you," I said. "Maybe it was all a set up, Brad. They were keeping you and Mary Beth under observation. Watching you all the time, just waiting for the right opportunity to frame you both. Probably you were followed from the motel. They killed the baby as soon as you left him at the church. And after that they let the police know where you were."

  Brad looked at me like I was crazy.

  "Now why would anyone go to all that trouble?" he asked.

  "Maybe they wanted to see you suffer for something you didn't do."

  Brad shook his head slowly. "You've been playing too many computer games, Frank. The real world doesn't work like that. I’ve learn
ed the truth now. Probably what happened is some sick bastard, some psychopath, was passing by. That's all. It was chance. Bad luck. Nothing more."

  "If that's what you believe, Brad," I said, "who am I to argue?"

  Mom's a terrible cook and never gets any better. I doubt she'd get any better even if she tried for another thousand years. The frozen green beans were still cold in the middle and the turkey was dry on the outside while at the same time being underdone. Sam crawled onto the table and stuck his head into the cavity and munched happily at the raw meat. Dad carved around him. Courtney blew a bubble and said:

  "Mary Beth got two years since they said she was only an accessory. But Brad was sentenced to four."

  "I spoke with him last week," I said. "I told him what happened. Only he thought I was making it up."

  "Never underestimate the human capacity for rationalization," Dad observed.

  "Even now Brad doubts evil exists," I continued. "He thinks life is all just circumstance."

  "An existentialist, is he?" Dad asked.

  "He considers himself a cynic.”

  Mom was chewing deliberately at the turkey. She dislikes her own cooking as much as we do. "So how will you change his mind?" she asked.

  "Well, first I'm going to wait about four years. Until just before he's served his sentence."

  "And then, Frank? And then?" Sam popped his head from the turkey and wiped grease from his eyes.

  "I'll send him the tapes we made of him and Mary Beth."

  "And the ear, too, Frank," Sam said. "Don’t forget the ear. That'll really do it."

  I took the tiny scrap of flesh from my pocket and rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger. For a fleeting instant I was reminded of that fragile second when I had felt alive. But it didn't last. I was bored again.

  "And the ear, too," I said.

  ###

  About the Author

  David Wesley Hill is an award-winning fiction writer with more than thirty stories published in the U.S. and internationally. In 1997 he was presented with the Golden Bridge award at the International Conference on Science Fiction in Beijing, and in 1999 he placed second in the Writers of the Future contest. In 2007, 2009, and 2011 Mr. Hill was awarded residencies at the Blue Mountain Center, a writers and artists retreat in the Adirondacks. He studied under Joseph Heller and Jack Cady and received a Masters in creative writing from the City University of New York.

  Castaway on Temurlone

  It is indeed a Universe of Miracles!

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  Suddenly they are castaways on the primitive planet Temurlone. Separated from his beloved by the Marvelous Flying Bicycle Men and doomed to hard labor in the Temurlone meat mines, Pim knows that nothing can keep him from the woman who is his destiny. He will brave any trial an uncaring God puts before him—escaping the sensuous seductions of the Man Mother, surviving the culinary horrors of the cannibal innkeeper Harmony Repute, courageously facing the threat of eternal toil in the sweatshops of Charming Corners—in the name of love.

  With the original and satiric Castaway on Temurlone, author David Wesley Hill has boldly reconfigured the venerable space opera into an action-packed parable for our times.

  "Castaway on Temurlone is a delicious blend of the galactic everyday and the truly exotic."—James Gunn, author of Station in Space and The Immortals

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