Devilish

by Maureen Johnson

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Jane, that’s really serious. You made a bet? What is it?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Yes, it is. What is it?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said dismissively.

  “What is it?” It was upsetting to see how seriously she took this stuff.

  “She bet me to kiss Elton at the Poodle Prom,” I said offhandedly. “Or, actually, that I have to get him to kiss me. Because we’re twelve, right?”

  She stared into her coffee.

  “This is my fault,” she said. “All of this.”

  “Ally …” I took her hand from across the table. “I know it seemed real, but it’s not. And I’m going to prove it. You’re safe. There’s nothing Lanalee can do to you.”

  She shook her head, revealing some very unflattering brownish roots under the glowing red sheen.

  “I need to get out of here,” she said, pushing away her breakfast. “I need air.”

  Before I could stop her, she had staggered away from the table. I followed right after her. She was walking fast, then suddenly turned into someone’s driveway. She went thermometer-headed. She held out her arms, holding me off. She staggered, holding her stomach. At the very last moment, she spun away from me. And then, out it came.

  Paper. Ball after ball of paper. It was like that trick some clowns can do, where they appear to have many small balls or eggs that keep popping out of their mouths. Except this was a lot less amusing. This involved a lot of gagging and stumbling around. When she was through, Allison slumped down to the ground and spread her hands over the pile, like a model on a game show presenting the new washer and dryer that could be mine if I won this round.

  I stared at the many crumpled pages on the ground. There had to be at least twenty. I don’t normally like to collect other people’s vomit, but this seemed like a good time to make an exception to that rule. I picked up one of the closest pieces. It was cool, just ever so slightly damp—but not nearly as damp as it should have been. I uncrumpled it to find myself looking at something that seemed very familiar, some poetry. It took me a minute to realize that it was part of my least favorite thing in all of English literature—Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”—a three-million-page-long ode to a dead friend.

  “You threw up a poem,” I said.

  I collected a few more of the papers. It was more of the same poem—but what struck me was the fact that the text itself looked familiar. And then I saw on one of the pages, a small drawing of a fanged sheep—a little cartoon I used to make a lot in freshman year, especially in my English textbook.

  I passed this over to her silently. She examined it.

  “It’s your English book,” she said quietly.

  “No, it isn’t. I destroyed that book, I hated it so much. I threw it in the Providence River on the way home after the last day of school. You were there.”

  I looked at the pages again. It looked like one of my sheep. But still. That book was tossed into the river, where it sank. It slept with the fishes.

  “That’s not my book,” I said again. “What is this? What kind of game are you playing?”

  “I’m not playing a game,” she said weakly.

  “Yes, you are,” I said. “Ally, stop it.”

  But inside, deep inside, there was a tiny, uncurling sprout of something terrible. Looking at Ally, looking at the paper on the ground, I suddenly felt my stomach drop out from under me.

  Lanalee had a hold on Allison that I couldn’t penetrate. She had somehow taught her how to do very strange things. And from the dream I’d had, it was clear that she’d gotten to me as well. There was only one course of action I could take now, one that went against my every instinct—I had to go to the authorities. I had to tell someone at the school what was happening. Brother Frank, I decided. He would believe the story. He would get a psychologist involved. He would fix this. I should have gone to him from the beginning.

  “Don’t go to school today,” I said. “Go home and don’t answer the phone until I call, okay? I don’t want you going anywhere near Lanalee until I get some help.”

  “You can’t stop it, Jane,” she said. “You shouldn’t have gotten involved.”

  “Of course I can stop it, Al,” I said. “Leave it to me.”

  twenty-three

  There was an unpleasant surprise waiting for me at school. Small red sparkly envelopes had been taped to many lockers. I walked past locker after locker and watched various people reacting to these mysterious notes. From their ecstatic reactions, I knew immediately what they were. The Poodle Club had made its choices.

  Lanalee was waiting by my locker.

  “Well?” she said. “Satisfied?”

  “Just stay away from her,” I said. I went to push her away from my locker, but she stepped aside easily and smiled.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Lanalee said. “I will. It’s you I’m interested in.”

  “Very spooky. I’m scared.”

  “You know,” she said, “I think you are.”

  “I think I’m going to end this now,” I said. “Your driveway won’t save you.”

  “Oh! Jane’s going to tell on me! Now you’ve got me shaking. I wonder what they’ll do to me? Gosh, Jane!”

  She cocked her head dramatically and made a sad face.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” I said. “They’ll probably just send your sad ass back to the home for rich freaks.”

  “No,” she said. “I like it here. I don’t think you’ll tell on me. You like me too much. You really want us to be friends. And it would be such a shame if any unfortunate little fires broke out, wouldn’t it? Fires can do so much damage, Jane.”

  “Fires?” I said. “You really are insane.”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Not insane. Ask your friend Owen about fires. He knows firsthand.”

  But this was enough to make me stop. I needed to work this one through, to figure out exactly how serious Lanalee’s threats were. She knew she had me, and she left it at that. I banged my locker shut and tried to walk away dramatically but instead walked right into Sister Rose Marie, who gave me a demerit for inappropriate care of school property.

  “You know, Sister,” I said. “I don’t think I’m feeling so good.”

  I must have looked pretty bad because she agreed.

  As I schlepped my way home, feet dragging, it became clear to me that I was truly ill. Undoubtedly, I had caught one of the hundreds of bugs that go around Providence every fall.

  The day didn’t seem so nice anymore. The streets of Providence are steep, like I said, and the wind runs sharp along them. My skin was raw almost immediately. Everything reeked of dead leaves. I went right to my room as soon as I got home and dumped my textbooks onto my desk. My American history book fell open.

  All of it—every page—had thick black lines where the words were supposed to be. The pictures were gone completely and were replaced with squares that were so dark that they were almost impossible to make out but looked like they had images of leering, squirrelly things with big tongues. Their eyes seemed to be following me.

  I ignored that and kept flipping through quickly. Then I finally hit chapter 24, the one I was supposed to be doing for homework. There, where the picture of the Hoover Dam and the three related comprehension questions were supposed to be, were the following words:

  You, Jane Jarvis, have entered into an official contract with a representative of the Satanic High Command, Hearth of the Cold and All-Consuming Fire, Destroyer of Worlds, Consumer of Souls, Taker of the Life Breath, Guardian of the Bottomless Ocean of Sorrow, Bearer of the Lance of Endless Pain, Lanalee Tremone, 10B.

  The thing that really caught my attention was the fact that they were written in fire.

  As soon as I read them, the fire flashed up, and the whole book was consumed. And in the next moment, it coughed itself out in a tiny wisp of smoke, and then there was nothing left but a few flecks of history in the air.

  twenty-four />
  In the next second, my door flew open, and Joan was standing there.

  “Are you burning candles?” she asked.

  “No.” I stepped in front of the charred remains of my book.

  “I smell candles. Do you have a lighter? Can I borrow it?”

  “Go away, Joan.”

  She noticed the smoke and remains behind me, and her eyebrows shot up.

  “You burned your book?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth to say no, I hadn’t, it had exploded in flames all by itself and then put itself out. But even Joan knows that things don’t happen quite that way. In an hour or so, she would have figured out something was wrong with that story.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I burned it.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought the way they represented modern political history was crap.”

  “So you torched it?”

  I have never seen my sister look so impressed.

  “Would you burn my English book?” she asked.

  “No. Why are you home?”

  “I don’t have a first period. I’m going in a minute. Why are you home?”

  “I’m sick,” I said.

  “With what?”

  “Sickness.”

  “Should I call Mom?”

  “No,” I said, climbing under my blankets, coat, shoes, and all. “I just need a little sleep.”

  I huddled in my bed and tried to realign my world. I could make sense of this. I could. I would. One thing at a time. That’s how you break a problem apart.

  One, I had just seen fiery words leap from my book. Lanalee had promised me a fire.

  “Okay,” I said aloud, “there are things that cause flames like that. Chemicals … ones that react to air and start to burn.”

  Difficult, but far from impossible. Owen said Lanalee had lots of friends. Maybe she knew people from somewhere like MIT—people who thrive on figuring out how to pull off little science tricks like that. Clearly, Lanalee was not only smart, but also a little unhinged. I was dealing with someone who took the risk of setting me or my whole house on fire. Who knew what else she was capable of to stage her little demon show?

  Two, the dream I had about Mr. Fields … I’d had that right after visiting Lanalee. Most likely the result of fever. However, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Lanalee had slipped me something the night before. But how? I hadn’t eaten anything there. I hadn’t been jabbed with a needle. What contact had there been?

  I looked at the mark on my arm. Ink. Of course. Drugs can be absorbed through skin. The thing that was causing me all these problems was on my arm. I was riding the crests and dips of a drug reaction. Whatever drug I’d gotten was probably in my bloodstream by now, but it couldn’t hurt to try to get it off me.

  I spent the next half hour in the shower, scrubbing mercilessly at my arm, to no avail. The mark barely smudged. I stood wrapped in a towel in front of the steamy mirror and tried to rub it off with alcohol, peroxide, nail polish remover. Nothing.

  I went back to my room and got back into bed in my wet towel. Owen had warned me, and I had ignored him. The only good thing to come out of this, besides the fact that I had gotten Allison out of Lanalee’s clutches, was a good reason for not completing those three questions on the Hoover Dam.

  The phone rang. It was Owen.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Home,” I said, touching the ash. “I’m not feeling good.”

  “I was worried. I thought you might have—” He cut himself off. “Listen, I have to show you something. It’s really important. Meet me at the front gate of school tonight, eight o’clock, right after it gets dark. I’ll explain everything. Wear dark clothes. Come alone.”

  He hung up.

  At least my stalker still loved me.

  twenty-five

  Here is a question you might be asking: “Why, Jane? Why, after the day you had, did you meet your stalker under cover of darkness at the gates of your school, dressed in dark clothes and carrying a flashlight? Have you always had these Scooby impulses?”

  Well, yes. Yes, I have. I don’t deny it. And after the day I’d had, anyone who wanted to offer up any explanations was more than welcome. So really, I don’t know why you’re surprised, if you are.

  I stayed in bed for the rest of the afternoon. I have very little memory of it. My head was pounding, and my mom was in and out of my room checking on me. I woke up and looked around in confusion. I was still in my towel, my head right on the edge of the mattress.

  I sat up sharply and looked immediately at my desk, hoping to see my book sitting there. It wasn’t. Instead, there were charred remains. I slipped out of bed and brushed some of the ash aside. The flames hadn’t touched my desk. It was completely unscathed. I got my trash can and scraped the desk clear until every last speck of soot was gone. I went downstairs and got furniture spray and came back and rubbed the spot raw.

  My mother was at work, but my father was downstairs, grading papers. There was no way that he’d let me out of the house in the condition I was in, glassy-eyed and feverish, dressed all in black. I went downstairs in my pajamas and made a big show of telling him that I was just coming down for some water before going to sleep for the night.

  Joan and I had long ago mastered the system of jimmying the locks on our bedroom doors, mostly by breaking them apart over the course of several years. I locked my door in anticipation of my parents coming to check on me during the night. I would just crack it open when I got home. The rest was just a matter of slipping out the back door, which proved to be no problem at all. In a moment, I was out.

  As I walked to school, the sky seemed to be made of black marble. Just a hard surface. Cold. About to drop down on my head and crush me or box me in, like a sarcophagus. And at the same time, the chill sobered me up a bit and took away some of the dullness and pain.

  We met and said nothing. With a nod, Owen jumped the gate, and I followed. We walked up the path slowly with our flashlights. The path, which is so nice and woody in the daytime, is the blackest, most twisty and scary stretch in the world as soon as the sun goes down. You can see nothing, but you can hear things rustling around you.

  Sebastian’s looked huge in the moonlight. Its golden bricks and white stone steps glowed, and there were still lights in some of the long, multi-paned windows. I felt very small standing in front of it. We weren’t supposed to go over there except on supervised, official business, but it wasn’t like I was committing a crime.

  Well, I felt that way until Owen led me around through some of the bushes on the side, to a low window that was propped open. He went in first, and I followed and found myself standing on top of a display cabinet full of plastic models of the human ear and heart. It was some kind of lab, and even in the dark, I could see it was a lot nicer than anything we had. They had proper lab stations, not cast-off tables with random equipment on the side.

  We moved into a hallway, which was heavily paneled in dark wood, past classrooms with doors paneled in smoked antique glass.

  “This place smells like a sandwich,” I whispered. It was true. It smelled like a big, cheap meat sandwich. Generic bologna or something. That, with a little bit of shoe.

  “And a little bit of shoe,” I added.

  “I know.”

  It just made me more annoyed. Give a nice building to guys and what do they do? They stink it up. It is an absolute truth that guys smell. Even Elton smelled a little.

  We stopped at one of the smoked-glass doors, one chiseled with the words NO ADMITTANCE. Owen produced a plastic pouch, which he unrolled to reveal a set of very tiny screwdrivers. He ran a finger along these in what seemed like a very deliberate fashion, like he was showing off his spy skills. I have to admit that I was impressed with what he did next. He carefully inserted the screwdriver into the keyhole, then leaned in and listened, making minute turns. A moment later, the door sprang open.

  If I thought the path was dark, it was nothing compared to the
ink-dark nothingness through that doorway. A pyramid comparison seemed apt. I had always wondered what it was like when explorers found the doorway into something that had been sealed and sunless for three thousand years.

  Probably a lot like this. There was more dust and mold than breathable air and not one single photon of natural light. Once the door was closed behind us, Owen went into his bag and produced a much higher-powered light, which helped a little.

  We were in a basement, with a bunch of sagging boxes filled with old vestments, ancient issues of National Geographic, two broken bicycles.

  “Wow,” I said. “This is great.”

  “Just wait a minute.”

  He led me right up to the wall and then passed me the light. He started pressing on the wall, testing it, then had me focus the beam on a tiny spot.

  “There’s a door here,” he said.

  There was a small hole there, which he worked at with his small screwdriver. A minute later, we were entering another room. I couldn’t see much at first, but I could feel from the chill in the air and the echoing of our steps that we were in a large room. Owen went into his bag again and this time produced a few candles, which he lit and set down along the floor.

  The room had a low ceiling and silvery walls. The floor was a mosaic of white, black, and red tile, and the ceiling was one huge painting of … impish things. Fire. Blood. In the center of the room was an enormous bathtub—similar to our own claw-foot tub but twice the size. It sat up on a slightly raised bit of the floor.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “The guy who built this place, his name was Lazarus Fields,” Owen explained. “He was a Satan worshiper, a student of Lanalee’s. When she was alive, Lanalee was a grand high priestess of the largest Satanic order in the United States.”

  “Fields?” I repeated. “That was the name of the guy in my dream…. He was a creepy guy I met in front of my mom’s restaurant. He drove a little silver car….”

  He went over to the tub and gave it a good, solid bang.

  “See this? Ritual bathing. Satanists like to get naked and do things with messy stuff like blood and entrails.”