Out to Get You

by Josh Allen

  This new feeling wasn’t…awesome.

  Daunte shook himself. Stay focused, he told himself. Keep it together.

  He couldn’t get distracted. He was with the devil. The actual devil. And he had one question left, one question before he’d have to leave the devil behind, so it needed to be a good one. It needed to be perfect. Daunte blinked hard, and he swallowed the new scratchy feeling down.

  In front of him, the devil twirled his pitchfork. He swished it slowly back and forth. Its flaming tips smoked, and the devil let the smoke trickle up to Daunte’s face.

  The smoke smelled old…ancient. And it gave Daunte an idea.

  “Question number three,” Daunte said slowly. He felt a little dizzy, maybe from the smoke, but he pointed at the devil’s pitchfork. “Can I hold that? For just a second?”

  Now that would be truly awesome, Daunte told himself. Wouldn’t it? Touching the pitchfork of the Monster of All Horrors?

  The devil straightened but didn’t answer.

  Yes, Daunte thought. That would be totally, completely, endlessly awesome.

  “So?” Daunte said. “Will you let me?”

  The devil looked at Daunte and let out a small, quiet laugh.

  “You’ve got nerve, kid,” the devil said. “Did anyone ever tell you that? You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

  Daunte extended a hand. He opened his palm and waited. The uneasy feeling—the scratchy heat—boiled in his throat a second time. That feeling, Daunte knew, had something to do with what the devil had said before. I know your name. I know everything about you, Daunte Frederick Coleman. Everything. The devil extended the pitchfork. It was just three inches from Daunte’s open hand, and the scratchy feeling spread from Daunte’s throat to his whole body.

  Daunte froze.

  Something was wrong. Maybe it had been wrong this whole time.

  Something wasn’t adding up. Daunte was certain of it. It had something to do with the devil knowing his name. But it was more than that. It was the devil waving his pitchfork around, looking eternally bored, flashing his flaming teeth, leaning against the street sign’s pole…It was the devil showing up on Gilbert Drive in the first place.

  What was the Deceiver of Innocents doing here?

  Why had he come?

  And then it hit Daunte.

  This was the devil. The actual devil.

  Daunte had seen the movies. He’d listened to the songs. The devil always had a plan. Always. He didn’t do things for no reason. And he never got bored.

  Daunte moved to pull his hand back, to get it away from the devil, but it was too late. The devil moved like a thunderclap and slapped the pitchfork into Daunte’s open palm.

  Daunte gasped, feeling the hot steel in his hand.

  “Oh, Daunte Frederick Coleman,” the devil said. “Remember that you asked for this. You asked for all of this, kid.”

  Daunte’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out.

  Something was happening. In his mouth.

  There was heat on his gums and tongue. Bad heat. It was like that time he’d eaten a ghost pepper on a dare. He coughed and blew out short puffs of air, his lips forming a tight O.

  It didn’t help. The burning on his tongue and gums grew worse. The devil started to laugh—high and quiet.

  Daunte fanned a hand in front of his mouth.

  Still, the heat rose, and it wasn’t just heat now. It was pain. Daunte jumped up and down. He beat at his mouth with his hands. It felt like he was holding hot coals in his cheeks.

  What’s happening? he tried to ask the devil, but the sounds that came out were nothing like words.

  He fell to his knees. He rolled from side to side, and the devil’s laugh swelled. The insides of Daunte’s lips and cheeks began to char and bleed. His tongue blistered.

  The pitchfork, he realized. This has something to do with the pitchfork. He needed to get rid of it. He tried to throw it away. He flailed. But the pitchfork stayed in his hand. He tried to fling it, to pry it out of his palm, but it was stuck, as if welded permanently to his skin.

  A hissing, popping sound filled the air. In his mouth, Daunte’s spit began to boil.

  And he knew.

  His teeth had turned…to flames.

  To tiny, pointed flames.

  He curled up and writhed.

  He closed his eyes. He tried to stand but couldn’t. Above him, the laughing devil spoke.

  “I wouldn’t feel too bad about this, kid,” he said. Daunte forced himself to look up. Where the devil had stood before, there was now a small old man in a gray suit. He had deeply creased cheeks and gray hair, and even through the searing pain in his mouth, Daunte heard something familiar in the man’s high voice and his New England accent. “I made the same mistake myself, more years ago than I can count.”

  Daunte gagged.

  “And I really do remember how this feels,” the old man said calmly. Daunte tried to scream for help but couldn’t. “What I said before is true, kid. You do get used to it. And someday, if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll track down someone who’ll take it all away from you—just like you took it from me.”

  The gray man winked. Daunte reached out a hand, but the old man turned and walked away, and black, tarry tears welled up in Daunte’s eyes.

  Daunte’s skin seemed to be hardening, turning to thick leather. Every second, he found it harder to breathe, harder to move, harder to think. A tearing pain spiked on either side of his head, and sharp horns pierced through his skin and grew and curled.

  Half a block up, the gray man turned and smiled a bright smile full of, not flames, but teeth. Finally the old devil walked on, leaving Daunte to writhe and squirm, to adjust to a life of burning and flame, and to learn to walk on hooves.

  Daunte screamed then, primal and long.

  The scream echoed with the Doom of Eternities.

  IVY found the marker under her desk.

  She’d felt something with her foot while Mr. Jameson had been reviewing that day’s homework assignment—a long worksheet on prepositions—so she’d peered down to check what was there.

  The marker was thin and glittery and greenish black, and she’d never seen anything quite like it. She bent and picked it up.

  It was warm, as if it had been out in the sun. She removed the cap, and its dark tip glistened. Bringing it to her nose, she smelled its ink. It was sweet, like honey.

  I wish this were mine, Ivy thought. If it were, she knew exactly what she’d draw—a dark, enchanted forest, with lots of hanging vines. It was the perfect color.

  She considered stuffing the marker into her backpack quietly. Instead, she tapped Kiara’s shoulder in front of her.

  “Is this yours?” she whispered, holding up the marker. “Did you drop it?”

  Kiara shook her head and went back to the prepositions worksheet. Ivy waved the marker slightly, showing it to the other students sitting around her. Each one shrugged. “Not mine,” said Malcolm. No, mouthed Kirk. Ivy set the marker on her notebook. It must have been dropped by a student from an earlier class. It looked new and fancy and was probably part of a set. Ivy imagined it lined up neatly in a plastic case with other glittering colors.

  She squinted at a sign that hung in the front of every classroom, beside the clock.

  PLEASE RETURN ALL LOST OR STOLEN ITEMS TO THE MAIN OFFICE.

  She fingered the marker and rolled it back and forth on her notebook. Its color was like moss on an old brick wall. Ivy liked that. She picked it up and drummed it on the edge of her desk.

  It really is the perfect color, she thought.

  It was the color of ivy, she realized—her color.

  The color of Ivy.

  She smiled.

  She popped the cap off and flattened her left hand on her prepositions worksheet,
spreading her fingers. Since the marker was, after all, her color, she decided to try it out on her own skin.

  I did look for the owner, she thought. Besides, it’s just a marker.

  Still, the marker’s glittery color and perfumed scent told her the marker was different. Special.

  On the back of her hand, she drew a strand of ivy. She started by making a curving, twisting vine just under her knuckles. The ink came out warm, the exact same glittery greenish black as the marker’s cap.

  She drew three leaves on her strand of ivy—one leaf for each letter in her name. One for the I, one for the V, and one for the Y. When she had finished, she blew on her hand softly. She touched the vine with a finger, testing to see if the ink would smudge. It didn’t. Then she twisted her hand under the classroom lights and let the greenish glittery ink shimmer.

  She had never been much of an artist, but Ivy had to admit it: the strand of ivy on her hand looked good—almost real.

  It was nearly perfect—this thing she was named for on her skin in the best color ever.

  Just then, the bell rang, jarring Ivy back to class.

  “Before you leave,” Mr. Jameson called out over the noise of students gathering folders and stuffing backpacks, “make sure your names are on your prepositions worksheets, and turn them in at the basket.”

  Ivy peered down at her homework. She’d forgotten to fill in the blank space at the top of her page for her name.

  She gripped the marker. Then she had an idea.

  Instead of filling in her name, she could draw a strand of ivy with her perfect new marker. Mr. Jameson would see the twisting vine on the line where her name usually went, and he’d figure out whose assignment it was, wouldn’t he?

  She decided to go for it. She started with the twisting stalk and then added three leaves. One for the I, one for the V, and one for the Y. Again, her vine—her “name-vine,” she decided to call it—looked perfect. Almost real. The greenish-black ink glittered.

  She stood and dropped her assignment in the basket. By the time she got back to her desk, most of the other students had filed out of the classroom.

  Peering around, she zipped the marker into the front pocket of her backpack, which she slung quickly over one shoulder.

  * * *

  When she got home, she plopped her backpack onto her unmade bed and pulled out the marker. She wanted to label her stuff—to write her name-vine on lots of things.

  She started by scrawling across the top of her journal. The journal’s cover was light orange, and the name-vine looked perfect stretching across the top. Then she pulled out her school notebooks and binders and labeled them with her name-vine, too. She drew the vine on the softballs in her closet and on her bat, and she even doodled it on the small tags of her stuffed animals.

  Where else can I put it? she thought.

  She knew some people wrote their names on the inside covers of their books in case they ever got lost or borrowed, so she went to her bookshelf and started sliding books out. Inside the cover of each one, she drew her twisting vine.

  As she drew the leaves, she mouthed the letters of her name. I-V-Y.

  It took her nearly half an hour to label everything in her room, and when she finished, she zipped the marker back into the front pocket of her backpack. She looked once more at the name-vine on her hand. She made a fist, twisted it, and the drawing, complete with four leaves, seemed to ripple.

  Four leaves? she thought. She counted them again.

  Yes, there were definitely four—one leaf under each of her four knuckles.

  She was certain she’d drawn just three leaves when she’d found the marker—one leaf for her I, one leaf for her V, and one leaf for her Y. Since then she’d drawn the same thing maybe fifty times.

  There had been three leaves. Just three. Each time.

  She pulled a book from her shelf and opened it. There, on the inside of the front cover, was a four-leafed vine.

  She checked the cover of her journal. Four leaves. She checked her school notebooks and binders and her softballs and her bat. She checked the tags on her stuffed animals.

  They all had four leaves.

  I messed up, Ivy thought. I got distracted, and I drew an extra leaf.

  But how could she have made that same mistake over and over?

  She shook her hand and flexed her fingers, and the vine below her knuckles seemed to twist and stretch.

  * * *

  The next morning, she showered, but she tried to keep her left hand out of the streaming water. Even though she’d messed up her name-vine by adding an extra leaf, she still liked it and wanted to keep it from washing off. So she held her left hand toward the back of the shower and soaped and shampooed with her right. Still, the vine got a little wet from steam and splashes.

  Stepping out of the shower, Ivy slipped into her bathrobe and dabbed her hand lightly with a towel, careful not to wipe or smear.

  She lifted the towel and gasped.

  The inky vine now curled down her hand and around her wrist. It had more leaves. Lots more leaves—Ivy counted quickly—nine of them in all. Most were small, as if they’d just sprouted.

  She ran to her room and pulled her journal from her desk drawer.

  The vine across the top now twisted and sprawled down the journal’s cover. It had nine leaves. She checked her binders and books. Nine leaves. She checked her stuffed animal tags, her softballs, and her bat.

  The vines all had nine leaves.

  She looked back to the vine on her hand.

  The water from the shower, she thought. I watered the ivy and it grew.

  And the other vines had, too. Whatever happened to the vine on her hand, it seemed, happened to the rest of them.

  What if they keep growing? she thought. She started breathing quickly. What if the vine on her hand spread up her arm and onto her face?

  What if it covered her whole body?

  How would she look with glittery vines covering her from head to toe, spiraling around her eyes, wrapping around her neck?

  She brought a hand to her throat.

  The color of Ivy, she thought.

  Suddenly her name-vine didn’t seem so cool. Ivy’s heart thudded. She had to get rid of it. Whatever this thing was, it was spreading. She wanted it gone.

  She bolted back to the bathroom, turned on the tap, and grabbed a bar of soap, but before she plunged her hand under the water, she stopped.

  Would the vine even wash off?

  She turned the faucet down to a trickle and let a few drops drip onto her hand. The ivy glittered, and then the vine twined and grew, sprouting leaves and circling a few inches higher up her arm.

  No, she thought. She grabbed a dry washcloth and scrubbed till her skin hurt, but the vine kept growing. It swirled to her elbow. It sprouted more leaves.

  She grabbed her hair dryer and blasted it on high. She pointed it at the vine and held it steady. Her skin turned red and burned. But it didn’t help. The vine may have changed color slightly, taking on the faintest hint of brown. But it was still there, shiny and glittering.

  She ran to her room. The vines were everywhere. They circled her softballs and spiraled around her bat. They covered her journal and bled out from the inside covers of her books. They wrapped around her stuffed animals’ legs and arms and stomachs.

  What is this? she thought. What have I done?

  * * *

  She wore a long-sleeved sweater to school that day, and when no one was looking, she pushed up the sleeve and checked the vine. It hadn’t grown any more, but it hadn’t shrunk or shriveled either. It just stayed there, twisted around her arm.

  All day, she avoided water.

  When she used the bathroom after second-period Math, she left without washing her hands. And during lunch, when it started raining, her friends Madison and Carrie ran out
side to splash, but she moved away from the doors, deeper into the safety of the dry school. And whenever she was thirsty, she filled her water bottle, one-handed, in one of the school’s drinking fountains, careful not to splash, and she sipped the water through a tall, thin straw. Just in case.

  In English, Mr. Jameson held up her prepositions worksheet from the day before.

  “Someone,” he said, “forgot to put their name on this.” The margins of the worksheet were completely covered in greenish-black vines. “But that same someone did take the time to draw a jungle.”

  Ivy didn’t speak.

  “No one’s claiming it?” Mr. Jameson said. Ivy pulled her sweater down over her knuckles, far enough to cover the vine on her hand.

  “Very well,” Mr. Jameson said. “Someone will be getting a zero.”

  * * *

  She didn’t sleep well that night, not with all the vines in her room. It was like she was camping in a rain forest. The next morning, she sat on the edge of the bathtub, studying the vine on her arm. It had lost some of its glitter. She was sure of it. A few leaves even seemed to be drooping, and she thought that maybe the occasional crease and crinkle were showing up in the twisting stalk.

  The vine hadn’t yet reached her shoulder. Even better, it hadn’t grown at all since she’d kept away from water. Neither had any of the other vines in her room. She wasn’t sure, but the vines, she thought, were starting to look a little thirsty.

  She backed away from the bathtub. Instead of washing and drying and curling her hair, she pulled her hair back into a simple ponytail.

  After breakfast, she checked the weather forecast. No rain, so she headed to school.

  That night, her mother leaned in close, squinted at her hair, and said, “Ivy, did you remember to use shampoo today?”

  Ivy shrugged.

  “Your hair looks a little greasy.”

  Ivy shrugged again.

  “Well, don’t forget tomorrow.”

  Ivy ran her vine-free hand through her hair. Her fingers picked up the slightest oily film.