by Dan Wells
“Did they assign a topic?” she asked.
I kept my face impassive. “Major figures of American history.”
“So . . . George Washington? Or maybe Lincoln.”
“I already wrote it.”
“That’s great,” she said, not really meaning it. She paused a moment longer, then dropped her pretense. “Do I have to guess, or are you going to tell me which of your psychopaths you wrote it on?”
“They’re not ‘my’ psychopaths.”
“John . . .”
“Dennis Rader,” I said, looking out at the street. “They just caught him a few years ago, so I thought it had a nice ‘current events’ angle.”
“John, Dennis Rader is the BTK killer. He’s a murderer. They asked for a great figure, not a—”
“The teacher asked for a major figure, not a great one, so bad guys count,” I said. “He even suggested John Wilkes Booth as one of the options.”
“There’s a big difference between a political assassin and a serial killer.”
“I know,” I said, looking back at her. “That’s why I wrote it.”
“You’re a really smart kid,” said Margaret, “and I mean that. You’re probably the only student that’s already finished with the essay. But you can’t . . . it’s not normal, John. I was really hoping you’d grow out of this obsession with murderers.”
“Not murderers,” I said, “serial killers.”
“That’s the difference between you and the rest of the world, John. We don’t see a difference.” She went back inside to start work on the body cavity—sucking out all the bile and poison until the body was purified and clean. Staying outside in the dark, I stared up at the sky and waited.
I don’t know what I was waiting for.
2
We didn’t get Jeb Jolley’s body that night, or even soon after, and I spent the next week in breathless anticipation, running home from school every afternoon to see if it had arrived yet. It felt like Christmas. The coroner was keeping the body much longer than usual in order to perform a full autopsy. The Clayton Daily had articles on the death every day, finally confirming on Tuesday that the police suspected murder. Their first impression had been that Jeb was killed by a wild animal, but there were apparently several clues that pointed to something more deliberate. The nature of those clues was not, of course, revealed. It was the most sensational thing to happen in Clayton County in my whole life.
On Thursday we got our history essays back. I got full points, and “Interesting choice!” written in the margin. The kid I hung out with, Maxwell, missed two points for length and two more for spelling; he’d written half a page about Albert Einstein, and spelled Einstein a different way every time.
“It’s not like there’s a whole lot to say about Einstein,” said Max, as we sat at a corner table of the school cafeteria. “He discovered e=mc2, and nuclear bombs, and that’s it. I’m lucky I got a half page at all.”
I didn’t really like Max, which was one of the most socially normal things about me—nobody really liked Max. He was short, and kind of fat, with glasses and an inhaler and a closet full of secondhand clothes. More than that, he had a brash, grating attitude, and he would speak too loudly and too authoritatively on subjects that he really knew very little about. In other words, he acted like the bullies, but without any of the strength or charisma to back it up. This all suited me fine, because he had the one quality I most desired in a school acquaintance—he liked to talk, and didn’t much care if I paid attention to him or not. It was part of my plan to remain inconspicuous: Alone we were just one weird kid who talked to himself and one weird kid who never talked to anyone; together we were two weird kids having a semblance of a conversation. It wasn’t much, but it made us look a little more normal. Two wrongs made a right.
Clayton High School was old and falling apart, like everything else in town. Kids bused here from all over the county, and I guessed a good third of the students came from farms and townships outside the city limits. There were a couple of kids I didn’t know—some of the outlying families home-schooled their kids up until high school—but for the most part the kids here were the same old crowd I’d grown up with since kindergarten. Nobody new ever came to Clayton, they just drove through on the interstate and barely glanced as they passed by. The city lay on the side of the highway and decayed, like a dead animal.
“Who did you write about?” said Max.
“What?” I hadn’t been paying attention.
“I asked who you wrote about for your essay,” said Max. “I’m guessing John Wayne.”
“Why would I do John Wayne?”
“Because you’re named after him.”
He was right; my name is John Wayne Cleaver. My sister’s name is Lauren Bacall Cleaver. My dad was a big fan of old movies.
“Being named after someone doesn’t mean they’re interesting,” I said, still watching the crowd. “Why didn’t you write about Maxwell House?”
“Is that a guy?” asked Max. “I thought it was a coffee company.”
“I wrote about Dennis Rader,” I told him. “He was BTK.”
“What’s BTK?”
“Bind, Torture, Kill,” I said. “BTK was how Dennis Rader signed his name in all the letters he wrote to the media.”
“That’s sick, man,” said Max. “How many people did he kill?” He obviously wasn’t too disturbed by it.
“Maybe ten,” I said. “The police aren’t sure yet.”
“Only ten?” said Max. “That’s nothing. You could kill more than that robbing a bank. That guy in your project last year was way better at it than that.”
“It doesn’t matter how many they kill,” I told him. “And it’s not awesome—it’s wrong.”
“Then why do you talk about them all the time?” asked Max.
“Because wrong is interesting.” I was only partially engaged in the conversation; mostly I was thinking about how cool it would be to see a body that was all taken apart after an autopsy.
“You’re weird, man,” said Max, taking another bite of his sandwich. “That’s all there is to say. Someday you’re going to kill a whole bunch of people—probably more than ten, because you’re such an overachiever—and then they’re going to have me on TV and ask if I saw this coming, and I’m going to say, ‘Hell yes, that guy was seriously screwed up.’ ”
“Then I guess I have to kill you first,” I said.
“Nice try,” said Max, laughing and pulling out his inhaler. “I’m, like, you’re only friend in the world—you wouldn’t kill me.” He took a puff from his inhaler and tucked it back into his pocket. “Besides, my dad was in the army, and you’re a skinny emo. I’d like to see you try.”
“Jeffrey Dahmer,” I said, only half listening to Max.
“What?”
“The project I did last year was on Jeffrey Dahmer,” I said. “He was a cannibal who kept severed heads in his freezer.”
“I remember now,” said Max, his eyes darkening. “Your posters gave me nightmares. That was boss.”
“Nightmares are nothing,” I said. “Those posters gave me a therapist.”
I’d been fascinated—I tried not to use the word “obsessed”—with serial killers for a long time, but it wasn’t until my Jeffrey Dahmer report in the last week of middle school that Mom and my teachers got worried enough to put me into therapy. My therapist’s name was Dr. Ben Neblin, and over the summer I’d had an appointment with him every Wednesday morning. We talked about a lot of things—like my father being gone, and what a dead body looked like, and how pretty fire was—but mostly we talked about serial killers. He told me that he didn’t like the subject, and that it made him uncomfortable, but that didn’t stop me. My mom paid for the sessions, and I didn’t really have anyone else to talk to, so Neblin got to hear it all.
After school started for the fall, our appointments were moved to Thursday afternoons, so when my last class ended I loaded up my backpack with its way-too-many books and p
edaled the six blocks over to Neblin’s office. Halfway there, I turned at the corner by the old theater and took a detour—the Wash-n-Dry was only two blocks down, and I wanted to ride by the place where Jeb got killed.
The police tape was down now, finally, and the Laundromat was open, but empty. The back wall only had one window, a small, barred, yellow one that I assumed belonged to the restroom. The back lot was almost completely isolated, which the newspaper said was making the police investigation pretty hard—no one had seen or heard the attack, even though they guessed it had happened around ten o’clock at night, when most of the bars were still open. Jeb had probably been coming home from one when he died.
I half expected to find some big chalk outlines on the asphalt—one for the body, with another for the infamous pile of innards nearby. Instead, the whole area had been scoured with a high-pressure hose, and all the blood and gravel were washed away.
I dropped my bike by the wall and walked around slowly to see what, if anything, I could see. The asphalt was shaded and cool. Part of the wall had been scrubbed as well, almost to the roof, and it wasn’t hard to figure out where the body had been. I knelt down and peered closely at the ground, spotting here and there a purple smudge in the texture of the asphalt where dried blood had clung and resisted the water.
After a minute, I found a darker stain on the ground nearby—a hand-sized splotch of something blacker and thicker than blood. I picked at it with my fingernail and bits of it came up like greasy ash, as if someone had cleaned out a charcoal barbecue. I wiped my finger off on my pants and stood up.
It was strange, standing in a place where somebody had died. Cars buzzed slowly by on the street, muted by walls and distance. I tried to imagine what had happened here—where Jeb had been coming from, where he was going, why he cut through a back lot, and where he had been standing when the killer attacked. Perhaps he had been late for something and rushed through to save time, or maybe he was drunk and weaving dangerously, uncertain where he was. In my mind I saw him red-faced and grinning, oblivious to the death that stalked him.
I pictured the attacker, too, thinking—only for a moment—where I would hide if I were going to kill someone here. There were shadows all over the lot—odd angles of fence and wall and ground. Perhaps the killer had lain in wait behind an old car, or crouched behind a telephone pole. I imagined him lurking in the dark, calculating eyes peering out as Jeb stumbled past, boozy and defenseless.
Was he angry? Was he hungry? The shifting theories of the police were ominous and tantalizing—what could attack so brutally, yet so carefully, that the evidence pointed to both man and beast? I imagined swift claws and bright teeth slashing through moonlight and flesh, sending arcs of blood high onto the wall behind.
I lingered a moment longer, guiltily taking it all in. Dr. Neblin would wonder why I was late, and would chastise me when I told him where I had gone, but that’s not what bothered me. In coming here, I was digging at the foundations of something larger and deeper, scratching tiny lines in a wall I dare not breach. There was a monster behind that wall, and I had built it strong to keep the monster at bay; now it stirred and stretched, restless in its dreaming. There was a new monster in town, it seemed—would its presence awaken the one I kept hidden?
It was time to go. I got back on my bike and rode the last few blocks to Neblin’s office.
“I broke one of my rules today,” I said, looking down through the blinds over Dr. Neblin’s office window to the street below. Bright cars rolled past in an uneven parade. I could feel Neblin’s eyes on the back of my head, studying.
“One of your rules?” he asked. His voice was even and steady. He was one of the calmest people I knew, but then again, I spent most of my time with Mom and Margaret and Lauren. His calmness was one of the reasons I came here so willingly.
“I have rules,” I said, “to keep myself from doing anything . . . wrong.”
“What kind of things?”
“What kind of wrong things?” I asked, “Or what kind of rules?”
“I’d like to hear about both, but you can start with whatever you want.”
“Then we’d better start with the things I’m trying to avoid,” I said. “The rules won’t make any sense to you if you don’t know those.”
“That’s fine,” he said, and I turned back to face him. He was a short man, mostly bald on top and wearing small round glasses with thin black frames. He always carried a pad of paper, and occasionally made notes while we talked. That used to make me nervous, but he offered to let me see his notes anytime I asked. He never wrote things like “what a freak,” or “this kid is insane,” just simple notes to help him remember what we talked about. I’m sure he had a “what a freak” book somewhere, but he kept it hidden.
And if he didn’t have one yet, he was going to make one after this.
“I think,” I said, watching his face for a reaction, “that fate wants me to become a serial killer.”
He raised an eyebrow, nothing more. I told you he was calm.
“Well,” he said, “you’re obviously fascinated by them—you’ve read more on the subject than probably anyone in town, including me. Do you want to become a serial killer?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I specifically want to avoid becoming a serial killer. I just don’t know how much chance I have.”
“So the things you want to avoid doing are, what—killing people?” He peered at me crookedly, a sign I had come to know meant he was joking. He always said something a little sarcastic when we started getting into the really heavy stuff. I think it was his way of coping with anxiety. When I told him about the time I dissected a live gopher, layer by layer, he cracked three jokes in a row and almost giggled. “If you’ve broken a rule that big,” he continued, “I am obligated to go to the police, confidentiality or no.”
I learned the laws about patient confidentiality in one of our very first sessions, when I first talked about starting fires. If he thought that I had committed a crime, or that I was intending to, or if he thought that I was a legitimate danger to anyone, the law required him to tell the right authorities. He was also free under the law to discuss anything I said with my mother, whether he had a good reason or not. The two of them had held plenty of discussions over the summer, and she’d made my life hell because of them.
“The things I want to avoid are much lower on the ladder than killing,” I said. “Serial killers are usually—virtually always, in fact—slaves to their own compulsions. They kill because they have to, and they can’t stop themselves. I don’t want to get to that point, so I set up rules about smaller things—like how I like to watch people, but I don’t let myself watch one person for too long. If I do, I force myself to ignore that person for a whole week, and not even think about it.”
“So you have rules to stop yourself from small serial killer behaviors,” said Neblin, “in order to stay as far away from the big stuff as you can.”
“Exactly.”
“I think it’s interesting,” he said, “that you used the word ‘compulsions.’ That kind of removes the issue of responsibility.”
“But I’m taking responsibility,” I said. “I’m trying to stop it.”
“You are,” he said, “and that’s very admirable, but you started this whole conversation by saying that ‘fate’ wants you to be a serial killer. If you tell yourself that it’s your destiny to become a serial killer, then aren’t you really just dodging responsibility by passing the blame to fate?”
“I say ‘fate,’ ” I explained, “because this goes way beyond some simple behavioral quirks. There are some aspects of my life that I can’t control, and they can only be explained by fate.”
“Such as?”
“I’m named after a serial killer,” I said. “John Wayne Gacy killed thirty-three people in Chicago and buried most of them in the crawl space under his house.”
“Your parents didn’t name you after John Wayne Gacy,” said Neblin. “Believe it o
r not, I specifically asked your mom about it.”
“You did?”
“I’m smarter than I look,” he said. “But you need to remember that one coincidental link to a serial killer is a not a destiny.”
“My dad’s name is Sam,” I said. “That makes me the Son of Sam—a serial killer in New York who said his dog told him to kill.”
“So you have coincidental links to two serial killers,” he said. “That’s a little odd, I admit, but I’m still not seeing a cosmic conspiracy against you.”
“My last name is ‘Cleaver,’ ” I said. “How many people do you know who are named after two serial killers and a murder weapon?”
Dr. Neblin shifted in his chair, tapping his pen against his paper. This, I knew, meant that he was trying to think. “John,” he said after a moment, “I’d like to know what kinds of things scare you, specifically, so let’s pull back and look at what you said earlier. What are some of your rules?”
“I told you about watching people,” I said. “That’s a big one. I love watching people, but I know that if I watch one person for too long, I’ll start to get too interested in them—I’ll want to follow them, watch where they go, see who they talk to, and find out what makes them tick. A few years ago, I realized that I was actually stalking a girl at school—literally following her around everywhere. That kind of thing can go too far in a hurry, so I made a rule: If I watch one person for too long, I then ignore them for a whole week.”
Neblin nodded, but didn’t interrupt. I was glad he didn’t ask me the girl’s name, because even talking about her like this felt like breaking my rule again.
“Then I have a rule about animals,” I said. “You remember what I did to the gopher.”
Neblin smiled nervously. “The gopher certainly doesn’t.” His nervous jokes were getting lamer.
“That wasn’t the only time,” I said. “My dad used to set traps in our garden for gophers and moles and stuff, and my job every morning was to go out and check them and bash anything that wasn’t dead yet with a shovel. When I was seven I started to cut them open, to see what they looked like on the inside, but after I started studying serial killers I stopped doing that. Have you heard about the MacDonald triad?”
