by Dan Wells
There was always the fear angle—he didn’t want to be discovered and now he had been, irrefutably, and in demon form. He knew now that whoever sent him those notes wasn’t bluffing.
But watching him that night revealed more than his fear—it had revealed something about how the demon worked, biologically. I’d already guessed that his body was falling apart, but I hadn’t realized how fragile he was. If he could get that close to death just by waiting too long, then I didn’t need to kill him, just prevent him from regenerating, and let him die on his own. A gash through his stomach, a bullet in his shoulder—these were wounds he could heal, perhaps in seconds. But his internal organs were different for some reason. When they stopped working, he stopped working. All I needed was a way to make sure that they stopped working permanently.
Using a photo, Mom and I finished rebuilding Mr. Bowen’s face, and then started on the actual embalming. The body was too damaged to embalm normally, which made our job harder and easier at the same time. On the plus side, we only had to prepare half of the body for the viewing—the upper half would be dressed and displayed, while the bottom half and the organs were tucked neatly into a pair of large plastic bags, to be shoved down into the lower half of the coffin, out of sight. No matter how someone dies, it’s never a good idea to look into the lower half of the coffin. Even though morticians prepare the whole body for burial, they only need to make part of it presentable. If there’s any of it you can’t see already, the odds are you don’t want to see it at all.
The hard part, of course, was that we had to inject the embalming chemicals in three different places: one injection in his right shoulder, and one in each of his legs. We did our best to seal the major blood vessels before pumping in a coagulant to close up the smaller ones, and then Mom began mixing the careful cocktail of dyes and fragrances that would accompany the formaldehyde. I hooked up a drain tube, and we watched as the old blood and bile drained safely away.
Margaret looked up at the ventilator fan spinning doggedly above us. “I hope the motor doesn’t give out.”
“Let’s step outside just in case,” said Mom. “We deserve a break anyway.” It was late afternoon, and already below freezing, so we retreated to the mortuary chapel instead of the parking lot, and relaxed on thinly upholstered benches while the body slowly pickled in the other room.
“Nice job, John,” said Mom. “You’re doing great.”
“You are,” said Margaret, closing her eyes and massaging her temples. “We all are. Cases like these make me want to break down and buy a Jacuzzi.”
Mom and Margaret stretched and sighed; they were tired and relieved to be finished, but I was eager to do another one. This kind of work still fascinated me—the meticulous attention to detail, the finely honed skills, the precision required for each step. It was Dad who first taught me what to do, first pulled me in when I was just seven years old, and showed me the tools, recited their names, taught me to be reverent in the presence of the dead. It was that reverence that brought my parents together in the first place, so the story went—two morticians, desperate for living company and impressed by their mutual respect for the deceased. They treated their job like a calling. If either of them had been half as good with live people as they were with dead ones, they’d probably still be together.
I took off my apron and went out to the front office. Lauren was there, obviously bored—there was barely anything to do, and she was playing Minesweeper on the computer while she waited for five o’clock. It was 4:54.
“They let you help,” said Lauren, not looking up from the monitor. The screen turned her face pale and ghostly. “I never could get into that stuff. It’s much better out here.”
“It’s a lot less lively out here, ironically,” I said.
“That’s right, rub it in,” said Lauren. “You think I want to spend my whole day in here doing nothing?”
“You’re twenty-three years old,” I told her. “You can do anything you want. You don’t have to hang around here.”
She clicked on the squares in her little minefield, marking spots with flags, and testing the area around them carefully. She clicked wrong, and the screen exploded.
“You don’t realize what you have here,” she said at last. “Mom can be a hag sometimes, but . . . she loves us, you know? She loves you. Don’t forget that.”
I stared out the window. The street outside was growing dark already, and Mr. Crowley’s house squatted menacingly in the snow.
“Love’s not the point,” I said at last. “We just do what we always do, and we get by.”
Lauren turned to face me. “Love is the only point,” she said. “I can barely stand to be around her, but that’s just because she’s just trying too hard to love us, and keep us together, and pick up the slack. It took me a long time to figure that out.”
A gust of wind blew past the window, pressing on the glass and howling heavily through the gaps in the front door.
“What about Dad?” I asked.
She paused a moment. “Mom loves you enough to cover for him, I think.” She paused. “So do I.” It was five o’clock, and she stood up. I wondered what time it was wherever Dad was. “Listen, John—why don’t you come over sometime? We can play cards or watch a movie or something, huh? Sound like fun?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Sometime.”
“I’ll see you, John.” She turned off the computer, pulled on her parka, and walked out into the wind. Icy air blasted through the door, and she had to fight to close it behind her.
I went upstairs thinking about what she had said—love might be a strength, but it was also a weakness. It was the demon’s weakness.
And I knew how to use it.
I grabbed my iPod from my room, still unused since I’d tossed it aside at Christmas, and got on my bike and started riding to Radio Shack. Dad’s stupid present was going to come in handy after all.
When I first started stalking Mr. Crowley, I’d been looking for a weakness. Now I had three, and together they formed an opportunity. I thought about it carefully while I rode, pedaling cautiously through the afternoon’s thin dusting of snow.
The first weakness was his fear of discovery, and with it his determination to wait so long between killings. He would wait and wait, putting it off until the last possible moment—
I’d seen it happen, and I’d watched “the last possible moment” grow more and more precarious. I think this went beyond fear—he avoided killing as if he hated it, as if he couldn’t bear to do it until biological necessity forced his hand. The next time he killed, I was confident, he would be on the edge of death, ready to fall right in. I didn’t even have to push him over the edge, just stop him from crawling back out.
That was where his second weakness came in: his body was degenerating faster than he could fix it. The night he killed Max’s dad, he’d almost died, and if he hadn’t had a freshly killed victim right in front of him, he probably wouldn’t have survived. If I were able to distract him from his hunt, and lure him away before he had a chance to kill anybody, he wouldn’t be able to regenerate at all. I imagined him desperate, unable to reach a victim in time, sweating and cursing and, in the end, melting away into a boiling puddle of inky black sludge.
I pulled up at Radio Shack, propped my bike against the wall, and went in.
“I got this for Christmas, but I already have one,” I said, pulling out the opened iPod box and setting it in front of the clerk. I didn’t already have one, but for some reason I figured it would sound better if I did. I really needed this to work. “Can I exchange it for store credit?”
The clerk picked it up and opened the side. “It’s already been opened,” he said.
“My mom did that,” I said, piling on the lies. “She didn’t know about your policy. But it’s completely unused—she turned it on once, for ten seconds, and that was it. Can I still exchange it?”
“Do you have a receipt?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said, “it w
as a gift.” I stood still and watched him, willing him to say yes. Finally he scanned it at his register and looked at the display.
“I’ll give you partial credit for it,” he said. “Do you want a gift card?”
“That’s okay,” I said quickly, “I’ll just grab something now and bring it up.”
The clerk nodded, and I drifted back toward the GPS systems. This was going to work. I was positive I could kill Crowley this way—just distract him long enough to stop him from regenerating, and he’d die. I’d already watched his body almost fail him once, and I was certain it could happen again. And I knew the perfect way to distract him: his third weakness. Love. He’d do anything for his wife—I’d even seen him answer the phone in the middle of an attack to talk to her. If he got another call, and something on that phone convinced him his wife was in immediate danger, he’d drop whatever he was doing and run.
And with the right preparation, I could send him some very convincing evidence.
Finally I found what I was looking for: a GPS tracker, paired with a handset to tell you exactly where the tracker was at all times. I checked the price, took it to the front, and set it on the counter.
The clerk looked at it oddly, perhaps wondering why a teenage boy would trade a cool iPod for a boring GPS set, but shrugged and rang it up.
“Thanks,” I said, and walked back outside. I felt disturbingly eager now that I had a plan. I wanted to rush back right then and start my attack, but I knew I had to wait. I needed some way of hiding the evidence of everything I was going to do, so the police would never link it back to me. And when the time came, I had to make the threat to his wife flawlessly believable. It would be hard to pull off.
But if it worked, the demon would be dead.
17
Sunday morning I approached the demon directly, in the guise of kind-hearted John Wayne Cleaver, and asked if there were any chores I could do. It hadn’t snowed in a while, though the banks were still piled high on the sides of the road, and so my usual snow shoveling had ceased. I told him I was working on my home-repair merit badge, and showed him the list of repairs I needed to work on, and we spent the day roving through his house, fixing leaky faucets and touching up the paint on his walls. I made sure to oil the hinges of his bedroom door—that would come in handy. He was jovial the whole time, but I watched him carefully, and I could tell he was sick. His lungs again, maybe, or his heart. It had barely been a week, but he was dying again. He’d kill again soon.
There were a handful of car-related items on the merit badge list, and though his car wasn’t having any problems, he was delighted to let me change the oil and practice putting on the spare tire. It was too cold for him to stay out with me long, however, and eventually he retreated inside to sit in a warm chair and clutch his chest. I took the opportunity to hide my GPS tracker under one of the seats, tightly taped to keep it from rattling around. The batteries were supposed to last nearly a month, but I guessed he might go hunting that very night. I tested it when I got home, pulling out my handset and zeroing in on the car’s signal. The map wasn’t incredibly detailed, but it was enough to get by. His car showed up as an arrow. Kay made a trip to the pharmacy that afternoon, and I watched the flashing arrow pull into the street, drive to the center of town, and enter the pharmacy parking lot. I saw every turn, and watched as it waited for each traffic light and paused at each stop sign. It was awesome.
Before she came back, I sneaked into their backyard and climbed up the rear wall, clinging carefully to the bricks. This was the time for the demon’s nap, and I listened to ensure that he was asleep. His breathing was regular, but punctuated by gasps and wheezes. He was getting worse. I taped a note to his window, and climbed down, disappearing via the carefully shoveled walks without leaving a single footprint.
NOT LONG NOW
I collected several items for my backpack, so I’d be ready to go at a moment’s notice. I needed some rope or strips of cloth for Kay, and found what I needed in the demon’s own garbage can: a set of old curtains, replaced at Christmas, and thrown out when the new ones were finally hung. I took one quietly and sneaked it into my backyard, where I tore it into long, sturdy strips and stashed them in my pack. I don’t know if you can lift a fingerprint from a curtain, but I wore gloves just in case.
The demon woke up soon after Kay returned, and grew more agitated almost by the hour. I could see him pacing back and forth past his windows, hobbling slowly, stopping now and then to grab his chest. He gripped the couch with his other hand for balance, grimacing. He wouldn’t last long.
Clouds grew black and ominous in the sky, and when night fell, it came as a shroud of purest darkness that blotted out the stars. Just a few hours later, when the demon could take it no longer, he went shakily to his car and drove away, looking for another victim.
It was time for me to meet mine.
I was already dressed—warm black clothes, the ski mask to hide my face, and gloves to hide my fingerprints. I pulled on my backpack, and slipped quietly outside. Mom was already asleep, and I hoped everyone else on the street was asleep as well. I wanted to sneak into the demon’s yard through the back, out of sight, but that way would leave footprints in the unmelted snow. It was better to run across the plowed street and up the shoveled walk, where I would leave no trace. I had always been leery of being seen or identified while sneaking around, but tonight my paranoia was multiplied a million times. There was no turning back from this; I wouldn’t be able to talk my way out of the things I was planning to do. I checked the street a final time when I reached the outside door, reassured myself that it was completely empty, and dashed across the street. At least we didn’t have streetlights.
I reached the Crowleys’ house and ran around the side to the cellar door, pulling out my key. It was pitch black inside, and when I stepped in and closed the door behind me, I was completely blind. I pulled a small penlight from my pocket, and found my way through the boxes and shelves to the base of the stairs. Rows of glass jars winked back the glow from my tiny light, and though I knew they were only canned beets and peaches, I imagined them full of pickled organs—kidneys and hearts and bladders and brains, displayed like specials on a grocery store shelf. When I reached the stairs, I slowed down, counting each step—I had learned earlier that the sixth step squeaked loudly on the right side, and the seventh softly on the left. I avoided those spots carefully and went upstairs.
The stairs let out into the kitchen, which appeared stark and colorless in the moonlight. I checked the GPS unit and saw that the demon was still driving, somewhere downtown. Cruising for victims, I supposed—maybe on his way to the highway to find hitchhikers or other travelers. Whatever he wanted, as long as he kept moving.
I walked carefully down the hallway, my penlight extinguished. I was moving half by memory now, thinking back to the repair work I had done here on Saturday. The demon had given me a full tour of the house, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I recognized where I was and where I needed to go. The hall from the kitchen stretched backward into the house and, near the back door, the main staircase rose and snaked back toward the front, up to the second floor.
The house was completely silent. I checked the GPS again—the demon was still driving. I went up.
At the top of the stairs I counted the doors, and approached the second one on the right. The master bedroom. I opened the door slowly, wary of a squeak, but the hinges made no noise at all; I smiled, pleased with my foresight in oiling it. The room beyond was dark, lit only by a clock radio on an antique dresser. Mrs. Crowley was asleep, small and fragile. Even with a heavy comforter to bulk out her form, she looked tiny, as if her life force had retreated for the night, and her body had folded in on itself. The bed seemed to swallow her. If not for the visible rise and fall of her breathing, I’d have doubted she was even alive.
This tiny woman was what the demon loved, so much that he was willing to do anything to stay with her. I set down my backpack, held my breath, and
turned on a lamp.
She didn’t wake up.
I picked over the dresser, nudging aside glasses and jewelry boxes until I found what I needed: Mrs. Crowley’s cell phone. I opened it, walked back to the door, faced the bed, and began taking pictures with the phone—click, save, step, click, save, step, click, save, step, closer every time. It would have a nice dramatic effect when I sent them. I bent in close for the last photo, holding the phone just above her face for an extreme close-up. The picture was ugly and invasive; it was perfect. On to phase two.
I set down the phone, its creepy photos safely stored in memory, and walked slowly to the far side of the bed. I stopped and stood over her, thinking. I couldn’t do this—there was no way I could ever do this. My monster had already broken loose once, threatening my Mom and drinking in her fear like a life-saving elixir. If I took this last step, and went through with my plan, the monster would come out again—I’d be holding the door open and inviting it out. I would relinquish all control to my darkest instincts, and there would be nothing left to stop it from going berserk and burning down the world. I didn’t dare do it.
But I had to. I knew that I had to. I’d come too far to turn back, and if I stopped now I’d be sentencing a man to death—whoever Crowley was hunting, he’d kill, because I wouldn’t be there to pull him away. And if I didn’t go through with it tonight, I’d never go through with it at all, and Crowley would kill again, then again, then again, and again, and again, until there was no one left. I had to take a stand, and I had to take it now.
I took a deep breath and slipped the case off of Mr. Crowley’s pillow, holding it over Kay’s head. I hesitated, just a fraction of a moment, while the monster raged inside and pleaded with me, begged me, swore at me to do it. This was what the monster was for, right? This was why I’d let it out in the first place—to do the things I couldn’t. I stared at Kay a moment longer, apologized silently, and let the monster go. My hands opened the bag and pulled it over the old woman’s head.
