Dweller

by Jeff Strand

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Do you think you deserve to be?”

  “Don’t treat me like I’m a kid.”

  Dormin leaned across the table. “Do you know what I hate most in the world, Toby? Liars. I hate liars more than I hate murderers and rapists. It’s a little quirk in my personality, I guess. So I’m not that fond of you. The fact that you cooked your clothes, that’s suspicious to me. Why does a man burn his clothes? It’s just peculiar. Now, I’ll be honest with you, my wife has threatened on several occasions to burn my favorite pair of socks, the ones I still wear even though they’ve got holes in them, but you’re not married, are you? You don’t even have a girlfriend anymore. Unfortunately for me, my hunch that you burned your clothes to hide evidence because you wore them when you were murdering Melissa Tomlinson isn’t enough to arrest you. But it’s enough for me to ensure that you have some long, uncomfortable days. So why did you kill her?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yep. Some long, uncomfortable days.”

  “In local news, Hector Smith, age seventy-eight, was found deceased in his backyard by his grandchildren last night. Smith had reportedly gone out to investigate a disturbance, and awoke several neighbors, who called 911 to report screaming. Smith was apparently savaged as if by some sort of large animal. Chief of Police Martin Rundberg had this to say: ‘At this time we do not know exactly what kind of animal attacked Hector Smith. We urge local residents to use extreme caution when venturing outdoors, until this thing is captured. Though we had men on the scene minutes after the call was made, Hector Smith’s head was torn from his body, so obviously we’re very alarmed and concerned about the situation…‘”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Toby trudged through the snow, miserably cold and—he had to admit—more than a little scared. There was a reason he rarely ventured out into the woods at night. The flashlight provided no real feeling of security, nor did the newly loaded gun in his pocket.

  He had no plan of action. He didn’t know if he was going to shoot Owen, given the chance, or just plead with him not to murder anybody else.

  Kill anybody else. It wasn’t murder when an animal did it.

  He knew it was a terrible risk to go out into the woods when that detective could be watching his every move, but he had to talk with Owen. He couldn’t sit at home, watching TV, and let the monster kill people.

  It was unbearably cold. He didn’t remember it ever being this cold, or snowing this hard.

  Melissa’s body was out here. Frozen solid. He wondered how she would have looked at him if she’d been told that someday he’d leave her mutilated corpse out in a pile of snow. He tried to picture the look of betrayal and hurt but couldn’t.

  Then again, was it worse than a mortuary keeping a body in a freezer?

  Uh…yeah.

  By the time he reached the cave, his face felt like it was completely frostbitten. There were no tracks. No imprints where the falling snow might have covered them up. It didn’t look as if Owen were here.

  Instead of calling out or tossing a rock, he walked into the cave unannounced.

  Empty.

  He shone the flashlight around, searching for traces of blood that would indicate that Owen had been inside. There was nothing. Owen had abandoned his home.

  Toby sat on the icy ground and waited for him to return.

  Owen didn’t come back, of course. It was ridiculous to think that he would have. There was no magical connection between the two of them, where Owen would just happen to sense Toby’s presence in the cave and hurry back there to reunite with his friend. He’d probably gutted another human being while Toby sat there for hours, staring at the empty cave exit.

  Toby’s joints ached and he really just wanted to curl up and go to sleep, but he forced himself to get up and begin the long, cold trek home.

  Toby wandered the streets all night, as he’d done for the past seven nights. Mr. Zack had given him paid leave “until things got sorted out,” and he’d taken this opportunity to become nocturnal.

  He didn’t know what he was expecting to find. In a town of 25,000 people, he wasn’t likely to just stumble upon Owen, hanging out in somebody’s backyard. But it gave him a sense of purpose, feeble as it was.

  Gave him something to do before Detective Dormin threw his ass in jail.

  The next victim was a jogger, a young woman who’d just turned eighteen. Her parents had begged her not to go jogging alone, but she’d laughed them off, insisting that she’d be perfectly fine.

  They didn’t find much of her. Just enough to identify her by three of her fingerprints.

  “I need to start drinking,” Toby said, staring into the nearly empty refrigerator. That sounded like a fine idea. Guzzle some booze, get good and plastered, and forget his problems. Become the town drunk. And if he started babbling to complete strangers about his monster buddy in the woods, hey, nobody would believe him.

  It was the best plan he’d concocted in his life. First thing tomorrow morning he’d go stock up on beer, or maybe whiskey, and get right into it. Drinking alone was supposedly a depressing activity, but it couldn’t be more depressing than anything else in his life.

  Something slammed against the kitchen window.

  Toby quickly glanced over there. Total darkness outside. He shut the refrigerator door, then went over to the switch and turned on the light to illuminate the backyard.

  Through the kitchen window, he saw Owen standing outside his house.

  He immediately shut off the light, in case anybody was watching. He paced back and forth for a moment, trying to figure out if he should bring the gun, and decided not to. He threw on his bathrobe, opened the back door, and walked outside.

  Owen turned toward him, head hung. Through the indoor light, Toby could see the blood caked on his arm. His left eye was also closed, the lid swollen.

  “We both really screwed up, didn’t we?” Toby asked. “I’ve already got gigantic skeletons in my closet, but that wasn’t enough, I had to go and hang a few more in there.”

  Owen signed: Friend hurt.

  “I know, I know. Your arm looks awful. I wonder if that’s gangrene? Wouldn’t surprise me. How did you know where I live?” He pointed to his house. “How did you know?”

  Follow.

  “When?”

  Owen didn’t answer. It didn’t matter. Toby had walked the path from his house to Owen’s cave hundreds of times, and though he always made Owen stop walking with him as soon as they were a mile away, it wasn’t a stretch that Owen would have followed the path the rest of the way and figured out where he lived. He hoped to God that Owen hadn’t pounded on anybody else’s kitchen window first.

  Owen tapped his eye.

  “There’s nothing I can do for you, Owen. You need to run away. People are hunting for you, and they’re going to kill you. You need to run as far away as you possibly can. Never come back.”

  “Toby.”

  “Go. If you come back here, I’ll shoot you myself. You’re lucky I’m even giving you a warning. I never want to see you again.”

  Owen signed: I’m sorry.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry, too.”

  Owen tapped his eye again.

  “I know you’re in pain. I already said there’s nothing I can do about it. This is your fault, too. You took Melissa away from me. Did you know that I was going to ask her to marry me? Did you?”

  Owen hung his head even lower.

  “Okay, that’s not true—I don’t know why I said that. But it was great to have somebody, you know what I mean? You’re my best friend, but it’s not like we can go to the movies or go get some french fries or anything like that, right? I needed to have part of a normal life, and you ruined that. And now you’re killing people.”

  No.

  “Bullshit. Don’t lie to me. Why are you doing it?”

  Owen rubbed his belly. Hungry.

  “Then you can eat deer and squirrels and everything else you’ve been eat
ing your whole life. You don’t need to eat people. Those people had families, Owen. They had friends. The old man had grandchildren. What does that make you?”

  No response.

  “It makes you a monster, Owen. It makes you an awful, horrible monster. It makes you the goddamn boogeyman. So you need to go back into the woods, run away, run to another state, and live like an animal instead of a nightmare.”

  Hurt.

  “Stop saying that. I don’t care.”

  Miss you.

  “So what?”

  Scared.

  “Me, too.”

  Toby sighed. He couldn’t just send Owen away. If nothing else, he might go out and kill somebody else. There were only so many deaths he could have on his conscience before he went completely, genuinely insane and started seeing spiders crawling around on the inside of his eyelids.

  “Okay, I’ll help you. I’ll try to make the hurt go away. We can’t do it here, though. You need to go home.” He signed: Home.

  Owen signed home back.

  “You go there. I’ll be there in a bit.”

  No.

  “In a bit. I promise. It won’t be long.”

  No.

  Toby stood there for a long moment. Then he sighed again. “Okay, let me go get some things, and then I’ll walk back with you.”

  They walked through the woods, not speaking. Owen looked beaten, almost ashamed. He should, Toby thought.

  The thing is, best friend or not, Owen wasn’t human. He was an animal. And when he got hurt, he was going to react like an animal. If Toby got a fingernail in his eye, he’d probably go berserk, too. He just didn’t happen to have claws and sharp teeth.

  Melissa was gone forever. Why did Owen have to be?

  Because he was a killer.

  So was Toby.

  But Toby had killed a couple of worthless bullies. Owen had killed two innocent victims and a girl who meant a lot to Toby. You couldn’t compare them.

  Owen’s killings were based on hunger. On fear. On confusion. Toby’s killings were based on rage.

  What kind of friends was he going to make after this blew over? All of his life he was a social outcast. Did he really think that he’d start forging healthy new relationships after burying his girlfriend in the snow? Was banishing Owen from his life going to make things better, or create a gap that he had no chance of filling?

  “You know,” Toby said as they walked. “All friends have fights now and then. Usually there aren’t dead bodies involved, but this isn’t exactly a normal friendship, is it?”

  He couldn’t believe he was going to forgive Owen. Maybe the spiders were already squirming around, spinning webs in his eyeballs and he just couldn’t see them.

  “You have to promise me something. If anybody comes out here and it’s not me, you need to run. Find a new place to live for a while. You’re in a lot of danger if they find you. Do you understand?”

  Owen didn’t seem to get what he was saying, but by the time they reached the cave, Toby thought he’d made his message clear. Then he took the antiseptic and bandages out of his backpack, hoping that the process wasn’t too ugly. If Owen were to go on another pain-related killing spree, having the alcohol rubbed on his wounds would be the thing to induce it.

  Owen’s howl of agony seemed to echo through the forest, loud enough to awaken the entire world.

  Toby was no doctor, or anything even close, but he thought he’d done a pretty good job of cleaning out Owen’s wounds. It hadn’t been an especially precise process—he mostly just splashed on the antiseptic and then ran for cover, but though the pain was clearly excruciating, Owen had made no attempt to attack him.

  If the bullet was lodged in his arm, it was just going to have to stay there. Trying to dig it out with a knife couldn’t end happily, even if Toby thought he had the surgical skill to do such a thing.

  Owen gave him a hug.

  Sorry.

  “I can’t believe we let this happen,” said Toby. “We’re friends forever, right? It’s almost like we let a woman come between us. That stuff, it’s all temporary. This“—he patted his chest, and then Owen’s—”is the real thing. They can’t break our bond. They might think we’re the most fucked-up friendship of the twentieth century, but they’re not going to drive us apart. No matter what, we’re together forever.”

  Yes.

  “But you can never leave the forest again. Never. Not for anything. Promise me you’ll never walk out of these woods for any reason.”

  Promise.

  “And, also, don’t kill anybody else, okay, buddy?”

  “There’s something I hate worse than a liar,” said Detective Dormin, lighting up a cigarette. “We found your girlfriend, but I’m sure my coworkers told you that when they were driving you here. Her body looked bad. I bet you can envision what I’m talking about, can’t you?”

  Toby remained silent.

  “We don’t see a lot of murders in Orange Leaf. Last one was, oh, about six years ago. Nothing fancy, just a good old-fashioned robbery. Wild-animal attacks are something brand-new. If you exclude dogs, I don’t think we’ve got any on record. So you can understand that there’s a lot of pressure to find the thing that’s out there killing folks. Not so much pressure on me personally, it’s more of an animal-control issue, but I tend to take a lot of responsibility that isn’t necessarily mine.”

  “What’s your point?” Toby asked.

  “Sorry, I do tend to ramble on, don’t I? My point, Mr. Floren, is that we know that the animal that chewed up Hector Smith and Janine McDouglas is the same one that chewed up your Melissa. I think you were there for it. I think you saw the whole thing. I think you watched that animal kill your girlfriend, and you couldn’t save her, so you lied about the whole thing. Now why would you do that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It’s not something people lie about unless they’ve got something to hide. Just like people don’t burn their clothes unless they’re trying to hide something, like bloodstains. I have a pretty vivid imagination, so I can see it clear as day. Out walking in the woods with your girlfriend. Everything’s nice and romantic. Maybe you’re thinking you’re going to get some, against a tree. Then something attacks her. You’re close enough that you get her blood on your clothes. But you don’t try to save her. If you tried to save her, you’d tell everybody what happened, wouldn’t you? No, you left her there. Before you knew she was dead you left her there, and you ran to save your own skin. Now how far am I from the truth?”

  Toby tried to summon some tears. He thought of Melissa, screaming on the ground while Owen bit into her, and the tears arrived with little effort.

  “Do you know what I hate worse than a liar? A coward.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.”

  “Get out of my sight. And try to live with what you’ve done. I hope it’s a happy life.”

  Toby saw on the news that they’d found the cave.

  It was empty. One of the men in the group caught a glimpse of something hiding in the bushes nearby, but it ran off before he could get a good look. His quick glimpse did match the description Toby had given to the police.

  He hadn’t described Owen in detail (“It was so dark, I could barely see anything!”) but he’d offered up a general sketch of what their culprit might look like. At this point, why lie? What was somebody going to say? “Look! There’s a giant hairy humanoid beast roaming around the neighborhood! But, no, wait, it doesn’t match the description Toby Floren gave. Must be a different monster. Let this one go.”

  The mob—well, technically not a mob, but that’s how Toby chose to think of it—gave pursuit for a while. It was hard to run in the deep snow, though, and they finally gave up.

  The chief of police, not hiding his annoyance at the reporters’ questions, explained that they couldn’t search the entire forest for one animal, but that cops would be working double shifts to protect their citizens.

  “We’re out there, doing our best, but just
be aware of the risk until this situation is resolved.”

  Toby gave it a long, excruciatingly slow week before he went out to the woods to look for Owen. He called out his name. So what if somebody heard him? It wasn’t like Owen wore a name tag.

  Nothing.

  Owen had followed his instructions, which was a good thing, but Toby wondered if he’d ever come back.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  1975. Age 30.

  “Thirty. I’m old.”

  “Thirty is not old,” Mr. Zack assured him. “Do you know how many sins I’d commit to be thirty again?”

  “Wouldn’t the whole point of being thirty again be to have the energy to commit more sins?”

  “Well, different sins, anyway.”

  Toby sat outside the cave, running his fingers through the melting snow.

  “You were supposed to come back.”

  “I can’t do this anymore.”

  “I understand. The problem is, you’re a great employee, probably my best, but not everybody is cut out to be a manager.”

  Toby nodded. “I know. We’ve talked about it lots of times. For that kind of thing, you need social skills.”

  “I’m not saying that you don’t have social skills, I’m saying—”

  “You can say that I don’t have social skills. It’s all right.”

  “You don’t have the skill set that would make you a good manager. How about that?”

  “I understand. That’s why I need to leave.”

  “I’m not going to hold you back. You’re getting a gold-plated reference from me.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate it.”