Feral Youth

by Shaun David Hutchinson

“How?”

  “I don’t know!”

  I went for the opening. “See! That’s just it. You don’t even know what you’re looking for, which means you won’t find it and you won’t disprove it, and that means you’ll just keep—”

  “Shut up!” Hollis stopped to seethe in my direction. “I already know you don’t fucking believe me. You’ve made that pretty goddamn clear.”

  “It’s not that. . . .”

  He walked toward me then. His hands were curled into fists. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want your opinion. I never wanted it, C. J. It’s worthless to me because you don’t know shit about anything. So just shut your mouth. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Hollis sneered. “You’re pathetic.”

  I didn’t argue with him on that point. Instead, I shut my mouth and stood there, staring at the floor, waiting until Hollis had grabbed his coat and his whiskey bottle and stormed from the room.

  Slammed the door behind him.

  * * *

  I stayed like that for a while, unsure of what to do or how to do it or if I should even do anything at all. But in the end I couldn’t do nothing. So after a few minutes, I left Hollis’s room, winding my way back through heaven and down the staircase into hell, where I found the party had grown more crowded, more out of control. Iron Butterfly’s seventeen-minute psychedelic dirge droned on while someone lined up shots of Fireball on the dining room table. I couldn’t see Hollis anywhere, but I did spot Zoe, the girl from the truck who’d given me my halo. She was leaning against the wall, still in her Giants cap and devil horns, and I couldn’t help myself. I went to her.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She smiled. “It’s the safety escort.”

  “My name’s C. J.”

  “How ’bout a drink, C. J.?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “You know, I still think it’s weird,” she said.

  “What’s weird?”

  “That I’ve never seen you before. You don’t look familiar at all.”

  “It’s a big campus,” I said.

  “It’s really not.”

  My cheeks warmed. “Yeah, well, it’s pretty easy to be invisible when everyone wants to pretend you don’t exist.”

  Her brow furrowed. “Why would anyone want to pretend that?”

  I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything else, the music cut off. The overhead lights came on, too.

  “Oh shit,” Zoe whispered, and pointed behind me.

  I turned and groaned. Hollis English was standing on a coffee table in the middle of the living room. He looked more disheveled than ever: his hair a greasy mess, his eyes wild and bloodshot, his oxfords somehow missing. In one hand he still held on to that damn whiskey bottle, but in the other he gripped what appeared to be a large hunting knife, the kind with a long jagged-edge blade. He definitely hadn’t had that before. I held my breath, watching in horror as Hollis staggered, almost fell, then raised the knife high above his head with a roar of fury.

  “One of you here,” he screeched, “is a killer! You’re worse than that, even. You’re a monster. I know what you’re planning, so you can quit hiding behind whatever mask you’re wearing. Show yourself! Come after me this time and stop being such a goddamn coward!”

  In response, the crowd around him began hooting and laughing, as if this were a performance they’d seen before.

  “Maybe it’s me tonight!” someone called out.

  “Or me!” yelled another.

  “Maybe we all want you dead!”

  “Or undead!”

  “No . . . definitely dead!”

  “Should I do something?” I whispered to Zoe. “This is bad.”

  She shook her head. “The best thing to do is ignore him. He won’t remember any of this tomorrow.”

  That seemed a reasonable tactic, except a guy who I recognized from earlier as the driver of the silver pickup, elbowed his way through the crowd right then and swaggered up to Hollis. The expression on his face was one of pure disgust.

  “Let’s do this, English,” he said. “I’m sick of your paranoid shit. If it weren’t for your dad, I would’ve kicked your ass out of this house by now. So yeah, tonight, I’m all for doing whatever the hell it is you want. If one of us is looking to kill you, let’s just be done with it. Okay?”

  Hollis shrugged. “Okay.”

  The guy snapped his fingers.

  And the lights went out.

  For the first ten seconds there was silence. Zoe reached for my hand, and I held hers. Then I heard a thud, like bodies colliding. Followed by what sounded like a piece of furniture tipping over. Someone screamed and glass shattered, and that was when panic set in because everyone was shouting and moving, and someone shoved me from behind. I wrapped my arms around Zoe, to keep her from being run into, and more screaming started and—

  The lights came back on.

  Hollis was nowhere to be found.

  “Hey, where is he?” a voice shouted.

  “What the hell?” The truck driver guy lay on the floor, rubbing his cheek. “That asshole sucker punched me.”

  “Look!” A girl with feathery angel wings pointed at the carpet next to the now-tipped-over coffee table. A dark stain covered the gray shag. It hadn’t been there before.

  “Oh shit.” Everyone closed in.

  “Is it blood?” someone whispered.

  The first girl crept closer, her face ghost white. She put her fingers in the stain and sniffed them.

  “It’s just wine,” she announced loudly. “Red wine.”

  “Fucking Hollis.” The crowd stepped back. Turned away. The party quickly picked up where it had left off. Iron Butterfly crooned once more about walking the land, and the bottle of Fireball returned to the table, along with the shot glasses.

  “Where do you think he went?” Zoe asked me.

  “No idea. You know him better than I do.”

  “Not really. I mean, we went to school together growing up, but he was always such a snob. He changed after what happened with his sister, of course, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”

  “What happened with his sister?”

  Zoe touched her horns. “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “She died. It happened a few years back. Up here, actually. She hung herself in the woods down by the quarry. It was around this time of year, and from everything I heard, it was definitely a suicide, but Hollis always thought otherwise.”

  “She hung herself?”

  She nodded.

  “He had a knife, Zoe.”

  “I know.”

  “Have you seen him with it before?”

  “No.”

  I fretted. “This isn’t good. His sister dying like she did, it’s—”

  “It’s what?” she pressed.

  “Well, one of the risk factors for suicide is a family history of it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do.”

  “So you think he might hurt himself?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m worried. I should go find him.”

  Zoe bit her lip. “You want me to come with you?”

  I did want that, of course, but knew better than to say so. “I’ll be fine. I can take care of it on my own.”

  A hint of relief sparked in her eyes. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” I told her. “I’ll need it.”

  * * *

  Then I was in the fog again, running, moving, as fast as I could. I fled the frat house, tearing down the porch steps and sprinting for the trees, away from the noise and the party. Once on the main footpath, my shoes pounded the earth, as fast I dared to go. My flashlight was useless in the soup, and it was only my studied knowledge of the winding circuit of trails that carried me across the far edges of campus. Toward my destination.

  I kept going, navigating on pure faith and desperation, crossing over no less than two clattering bridges in the process. The Dover Rive
r churned beneath me, and the deeper I ran into the creeping tendrils of fog and clinging haze, the greater my sense of déjà vu grew. I’d made this breathless journey before, it seemed—perhaps in some other lifetime or some other world, but I’d been filled with this exact same swell of fatalism.

  I knew how this story ended.

  Didn’t I?

  Reaching the quarry at last—the spot where Hollis’s sister had lost her life—I stumbled my way around the perimeter. The air reeked of moss and stone, and with the way mist had gathered on the water’s surface, the entire area resembled a frothing cauldron.

  I cupped my hands together. Called out: “Hollis! Hollis, where are you?”

  No answer.

  I kept stumbling, kept calling his name. Until there, finally, on the far edge of the water, perched high on a boulder and hidden beneath the swaying branches of a large willow tree, I found him. Air slipped from my lungs, and I hurried forward on grateful legs, only to have my gratitude veer toward panic as I realized just how close he was to tumbling into the frigid water.

  “Hey, C. J.,” Hollis said as I approached, although he didn’t bother lifting his head. His words were slurring worse than ever. “You look like a goddamn angel.”

  The halo. He meant my halo. “Why’d you run away like that?”

  “I had to, man. I had no fucking choice.”

  “You do have a choice, Hollis. I promise you.”

  “I really don’t.” His voice cracked, taking on a plaintive tone.

  “Hey, hey, why don’t you give me those.” Climbing up, reaching him at last, I gently plucked both the hunting knife and whiskey bottle from his hands. Hollis absolutely did not need either.

  “I puked,” he told me, gesturing at the ground. “A lot.”

  My nose wrinkled. “That’s okay. But maybe you should come in a little closer from the edge. You don’t want to fall in. You’ll drown.”

  “I know you don’t believe me,” he said sullenly. “No one does. Everyone thinks I’m crazy.”

  I sighed. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Hollis. Just sad. Zoe told me about your sister.”

  His eyes brimmed with sorrow. “They killed her. I know they did. She didn’t fucking kill herself.”

  “Maybe someone did kill her. I don’t know. I really don’t. But I do know it wasn’t a coven that did it. Or a witch. Or anything at all like that.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Because evil is a man-made commodity. One hundred percent. Do you remember what I said earlier? The most frightening thing is the knowledge that true evil lays within. Not in magic or the supernatural. But in ourselves.”

  Hollis waved at the cross I wore around my neck. The one that had been my father’s. “You really believe that?”

  “I’m not saying there aren’t things in this world we don’t understand. But those doctors you were talking about? The Lunacy Commission? They were just men. Bad men, who died many, many years ago, the way that all men do. Yes, they used their wealth and status to profit off the suffering of others, and yes, when that hospital burned down and killed those nineteen patients, it was a tragedy. But a human tragedy. Of the most unjust and unfair sort. But you want to know what else I believe?”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “That while man doesn’t endure, the evil he creates does. There are men alive today with different faces, who wield different power, but that old Lunacy Commission still exists. It never went anywhere. It may take on different forms, but its function is always the same. So the pattern you should be looking for is one of exploitation, not magic. Because those deaths you’re so interested in aren’t the reason. They’re the reaction.”

  “But a reaction to what? Why would any of this happen?”

  I crawled closer to sit beside him on the rock. “Maybe I can explain it this way: you and I, we both grew up here in Dover, but our lives, the way we see the world, couldn’t be more different.”

  Hollis let his head loll in my direction. “You think?”

  “I know. And see, first off, the Dover Phantom, this killer you’re so obsessed with, well, when I was a kid, I wasn’t taught that he was a monster. Or anything to fear. In part, of course, because people like me didn’t come to places like this. We were never the ones in harm’s way.”

  “Well, you’re here now.”

  I smiled. “But I’m really not. Just because I was offered a scholarship doesn’t mean I took it. Like you told me, this school’s not as safe as it appears. For example, last night, it wasn’t hard for me to break into one of your admin buildings and steal this vest. Or to sit on the beach and wait for the school drunk to find me.”

  His face clouded with confusion. “Huh?”

  “Look,” I said soothingly. “I know you’ve thought a lot about this. But sometimes, to see the whole truth, you have to step back from what’s personal in order to take in the bigger picture.”

  “What picture is that?”

  “What does your father do, Hollis?”

  “He works for a pharmaceutical company. TriGen. He’s the CFO. But what does that have to—”

  “Did you know my dad worked for that same company? In one of the manufacturing plants. And when he got injured on the job, TriGen wouldn’t pay his workers’ comp claim. Not only that, but they fired him and countersued in order to set an example for their other workers. My dad stood up to them—I told you he was brave—but between his medical bills and legal fees, he never had a chance. He lost everything in a matter of months. So when he drove to the beach on a clear night when the stars were shining and shot himself, it was his gift to us. TriGen dropped the suit and paid his bills. Not because they cared, obviously, but even they knew better than to bring a grieving widow into the courtroom.”

  “Jesus. Fuck. I’m sorry, man. That’s terrible. I had no idea.”

  I kept smiling. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of terrible in this world. Because there are a lot of things people like you don’t want to see. Or change. It’s what you’ve been taught, but it doesn’t have to be your destiny.”

  Hollis shot me a dark look. “What do you mean, people like me?”

  “I mean, people who refuse to accept that a force they’ve always seen as monstrous is actually something different altogether.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like a hero. A human one, but a hero nonetheless.”

  His eyes bulged. “What are you talking about? I don’t fucking believe that.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes! I’m absolutely sure!”

  “Then I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. And I was sorry. I’d done what I could. Like so many heroes before me, I’d looked to the equinox and strived to bring balance to an unbalanced world. But balance was more fleeting than I’d realized. If Hollis had already gone so far as to create his own mythology in order to avoid having to point the finger anywhere but at his own values, there wasn’t much I could’ve done to persuade him in the first place. He didn’t want logic; he preferred tilting at windmills.

  So maybe I really did know the ending to this story.

  “You know those nineteen people who died here? In that fire?” I asked softly.

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “Well, they weren’t the only ones who suffered. Their loved ones did too. Maybe their suffering was even greater—having to live in the aftermath and watch those killers profit and get away with murder.”

  “Yeah, maybe. What does that have to do with anything?”

  I leaned close to whisper in his ear. “It has to do with the fact that you were right, Hollis. The Phantom isn’t a he. Or a who. The Phantom is all of us who haven’t forgotten or forgiven that one moment of agony and injustice. Who are still called, every generation, in the name of equity, to try to meet our counterpart from the other side halfway. But when justice isn’t given—and it never is—that’s when we’re forced to take something else.”

  “What’s that?” he demanded.


  “Retribution.”

  Disbelief became terror when Hollis saw me raise the knife and understood what I planned to do with it. He recoiled, scrambling back to get away from me, but with the steep drop and the water behind him, there was nowhere to go.

  “C. J.!” he cried out, holding his hands up. “Why? Why are you doing this? What did I do?”

  I moved in swiftly then. Gripping the hunting knife, pinning him down with my knee, I felt no anger in my heart, no wrath or vengeance, just the cool breeze of certitude. Hadn’t I known this was how it would be? Monsters never understood they were the ones in need of slaying.

  “Cautionary tales aren’t meant to be told,” I whispered before I brought the knife down. Before the blood began to spray. “They’re meant to be heard. So we’ll keep telling this one, over and over, for as long as we have to. Until someday, somehow, you finally begin to listen.”

  No one said much after Tino finished his story, but I think we were all glad Jaila had the knife and not him.

  Water was running pretty low, so we looked for somewhere to refill our canteens, which took us an hour out of our way. The stream we found was barely a gurgle of a thing, but it was enough.

  Everyone had broken down into their little cliques again. Except Tino. He was by himself, leaning against a tree when I noticed Jenna approach him.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Yeah you are.”

  “We’ve all been through . . . stuff.” Jenna’s shoulders were rolled forward, and she wasn’t looking Tino in the eyes. “Just, if you want to talk, I’ll listen.”

  Tino laughed. “You think I’d want to talk to you?”

  I’m pretty sure if he’d spoken like that to Lucinda, she would have cut off his balls, but Jenna just offered him a shrug. “Maybe. And if you don’t, that’s fine too.”

  Then she walked off again. I was expecting him to keep laughing, but the moment Jenna was out of sight, Tino’s bravado fled. It was like the iron in his spine melted, and the tree was the only thing holding him up anymore.

  “You think he killed someone?” Cody was asking Sunday and Georgia when I wandered back to where they were sitting on the ground.

  Sunday shook her head. “No way. He’s full of it.”

  “But all that stuff he was saying about Lucinda and me being rich?” Georgia said. “I mean, my parents have money, but we’re not like that. We give to our church, and I volunteer and—”