by Dan Wells
I went to my door and climbed into the car.
‘It’s going to be odd, seeing a big fire that you didn’t start,’ said Brooke.
I froze. What did she know? What had she seen? Her voice had sounded so casual, but maybe there was some hidden cue underneath that I hadn’t picked up on. Was she accusing me? Was she threatening me?
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, staring ahead.
‘Oh, you know, like the big fires the Crowleys used to have in their backyard, like for neighbourhood parties and stuff. You’re always the one who tends those.’
I sighed in relief - literally a sigh, as if I’d been holding my breath without knowing it. She doesn’t know anything, I told myself. She’s just making small talk.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
I started the car and smiled. ‘I’m great.’ I needed an excuse quick. What would a normal person say in this situation? Normal people have empathy; they would react to the people in the story, not the fire. ‘I was just thinking about the Crowleys,’ I told her. ‘I wonder if Mrs Crowley’s still going to have those parties.’ I pulled away from the kerb and drove towards town.
‘Oh!’ said Brooke. ‘I am so sorry - I didn’t mean to bring that up like that. I know you were really close to Mr Crowley.’
‘It’s okay,’ I said. I had to force myself to continue; talking to her had been against my rules for so long, it was hard to just speak freely. ‘Now that he’s gone, I look back and think I didn’t really know him at all.’ Nobody did. Not even his wife.
‘I feel the same way,’ agreed Brooke. ‘I’ve lived here for most of my life, and he lived right there, across the street, and I didn’t really know him at all. We’d see him at those parties, of course, and trick-or-treating and stuff, but I feel like I should have . . . I don’t know, talked to him more. You know? Asked where was he from, and what was he like as a kid, and stuff like that.’
‘I would love to know where he came from,’ I said. And if there are more like him.
‘I enjoy talking to people and hearing their stories,’ said Brooke. ‘Everyone’s got their own story to tell, and when you sit down with someone and really talk to them, you can learn so much.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but that’s really kind of strange too.’ I was starting to fall into a rhythm, where words came more easily.
‘Strange?’
‘Well, it’s strange to look at people and think that they have a past,’ I said. How could I explain what I was trying to say? ‘I mean, obviously everybody comes from somewhere, but . . .’ I pointed to a guy on the side of the street as we passed. ‘Look at him. He’s just some guy, and we see him once, and then he’s gone.’
‘Oh, that’s Jake Symons,’ said Brooke. ‘He works with my dad at the woodmill.’
‘That’s what I’m talking about,’ I said. ‘To us he’s like . . . like scenery, in the background of our lives, but for him, he’s the main character. He has a life and a job and a whole story. He’s a real person. And to him, we’re the background scenery. And that guy,’ I pointed at another person on the street, ‘he’s not even looking. He might not notice us at all. We’re the centre of our own universes, but we don’t even exist in his.’
‘That’s Bryce Parker,’ said Brooke, ‘from the library.’
‘Do you know everybody in Clayton,’ I asked, ‘or am I just picking bad examples?’
Brooke chuckled. ‘I go to the library every week, so of course I’m going to know him.’
‘So how about that guy?’ I gestured at a man mowing his lawn about a hundred feet ahead.
‘No, I don’t know him,’ said Brooke, staring closely. We drove past him and he turned at the last minute, giving us a clear view of his face, and Brooke laughed out loud. ‘Okay, okay, I do know him. He’s the guy from Graumman’s Hardware . . . Lance!’
‘Lance what?’
‘Lance Graumman, I assume,’ said Brooke. ‘It’s a family business.’
‘You know a lot more about the hardware store than I would have guessed,’ I said.
Brooke laughed again. ‘We remodelled our upstairs bathroom last summer, and I don’t think we ever bought the right-size stuff on the first try. I was in there a lot.’
‘That would explain it.’ It felt odd talking to her, chatting so freely about nothing. I’d fantasised about her for so long, and forbidden myself to communicate with her in any depth, that even this simple small talk felt powerfully intimate. Intimate and empty at the same time. How could such meaningless drivel feel as if it meant so much?
I turned out of town, on the road towards the lake, and fell into line behind a couple of other cars full of high-school kids. I studied the backs of their heads, hoping I could recognise them and show Brooke that I knew other people too, but even though I knew I’d seen them before, I couldn’t think of their names. They were a few years older than us, so I’d never really interacted with them.
‘Hey,’ said Brooke ‘that’s Jessie Beesley. That’s not her boyfriend though, I wonder what happened there?’
The sun was still high, and I adjusted my shade-flap thingy to block it. ‘You know every single person in town,’ I said, ‘and I don’t even know what this thing is called.’
‘It’s the . . .’ Brooke grimaced. ‘The thing that blocks the sun?’ She bit her lip. ‘What is that thing called! It’s a shade. It’s a blocker. It’s a very small awning.’
‘It’s a flat umbrella.’
‘You could put lace on it and call it a parasol,’ she said. ‘It would be precious.’
I glanced over and saw she was smirking. I’m pretty good at reading people, for a sociopath, but sarcasm is so hard to identify.
Looking at her, my mind drifted back to her dad’s words, and the trust he had placed in me to take care of her. He’d called me a hero - me, the crazy, death-obsessed sociopath who worked in a mortuary and wrote all his class papers on serial killers. A hero. It stirred up thoughts I’d almost forgotten. I’d been so focused on how to kill the demon, and on the psychological aftermath of actually doing it, that I’d almost forgotten why. I had focused so much on ‘killing the bad guy’ that ‘saving the good guys’ had been pushed aside and forgotten.
But nobody knew I’d killed a demon. Even Mom did her best to forget what little she understood about the real story behind that night in January. All Mr Watson knew was that I had been outside that snowy evening, that I’d moved Dr Neblin’s body, and that I’d called the police. Was that enough?
‘I wonder what food they’ve got,’ said Brooke, and I realised suddenly that my thoughts had left a void of silence in the car. ‘I assume it’ll be hot dogs; I don’t know what else you’d eat at a bonfire.’
Crap. It hadn’t occurred to me that the food would probably be meat. What was I going to eat?
Just say something, I told myself. ‘They might have S’mores.’ It was all I could think of. ‘Those are good bonfire food. And squirrels with very poor senses of direction or self-preservation. ’
Brooke snorted. ‘That would have to be a really mixed-up squirrel to just wander into a bonfire.’
‘Or a really cold one.’
‘They could just build the fire on top of a gopher hole,’ Brooke went on, ‘and then they could pop out pre-cooked, like a vending machine.’
Wow. Did she really just make that joke?
‘Sorry,’ said Brooke, ‘that was kind of gross.’
I looked at her with new eyes, watching her as she talked. Did she think I was a hero? Did she think I was good?
We pulled off the road at the end of a long line of cars. There was a field up ahead, of sorts, where big groups could park for parties by the lake, but the annual bonfire party always drew a massive crowd, and the sparse parking was overflowing by nearly half a mile. As we walked towards the party, I looked at each person we passed - other students that I’d known for years - as if seeing them for the first time. Did this one think I was a hero? Did that one? It was the first time i
n my life that I’d assumed people were thinking good things about me, rather than bad ones, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it.
But I liked it.
‘I love this smell,’ said Brooke, walking with her hands in her jacket pockets. ‘That cool breeze off the lake, mixed with the smoke from the fire and the green from the trees.’
‘The green?’ I asked.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I love that green smell.’
‘Green isn’t a smell,’ I said. ‘It’s a colour.’
‘Well, yeah, but don’t you know that smell? Trees and reeds and grass sometimes just smell . . . green.’
‘I can’t say that I’m familiar with the smell of green,’ I told her.
‘There’s Marci,’ she said. ‘Let’s ask her.’
I glanced where Brooke was pointing and immediately looked away. Marci Jensen was wearing a low cut tank-top that practically screamed, ‘Look at these!’ I watched Brooke’s feet as she hurried to meet her, keeping my gaze down. Just because I was breaking a few of my rules to be with Brooke didn’t mean I was going to throw caution to the wind and break them all. Looking at a girl’s chest was strictly prohibited.
‘Brooke!’ shouted Marci. ‘Lookin’ hot! I love the shirt.’
Man, I really wanted to know what her shirt looked like.
‘Good to see you,’ said Brooke.
‘And John,’ said Marci. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here, that’s awesome.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, staring at her feet. Then, because I didn’t want to seem like a freak, I glanced up - first at Brooke’s face, then at Marci’ s. Her line of cleavage was prominent in my peripheral vision, and I quickly looked out across the lake. ‘Nice night.’
‘You gotta answer this question,’ said Brooke. ‘Do trees smell green?’
‘What?’ asked Marci, laughing.
‘Green!’ said Brooke. ‘The trees here smell green.’
‘You are insane,’ Marcy told her.
‘Who’s insane?’ asked Rachel Morris, joining the group. I smiled at her politely, gratified that she was dressed more modestly than her friend.
‘Brooke says the trees smell green,’ said Marci, struggling not to laugh out loud.
‘Totally,’ said Rachel, nodding her head. ‘This whole place smells green - and a little brown, because of the smoke.’
‘Exactly!’ cried Brooke.
‘Can you believe these two?’ asked Marci, looking at me. I focused on her ear, trying not to see anything else.
‘Must be a shared delusion,’ I said, then stopped myself before getting any deeper into a psychological hypothesis. That was probably not the kind of small talk that would go over well in this crowd.
It felt strange to be talking to Marci - partly because of the way she was dressed, but mostly because of the simple fact that we didn’t know each other well. Just like the people in the car ahead of us, Marci was someone that I ‘knew’ in theory, but in practice we had never really talked or interacted. I glanced around quickly at the mass of teenagers, all people I had grown up with, but with whom I’d had virtually no direct contact - no shared experience. It seemed unbelievable that we could have been born and raised in the same small town, going to the same schools in the same grade year after year, and yet we’d never really had a conversation. Max would have been delighted to talk to Marci - and to ogle her - but I was more bothered than anything else. My life had been just fine without all of these extra people in it.
‘Can you smell other colours?’ asked Marci, folding her arms for a mock interrogation of Brooke and Rachel.
‘It’s not the colour,’ said Brooke, ‘it’s the trees. Green’s just a good word to describe what a tree smells like when it turns green.’
‘It’s like spring,’ said Rachel, ‘except “springy” sounds dumb.’
‘And “green” sounds totally normal,’ said Marci. ‘Uh huh.’
The breeze off the lake was cool, and I could see goose bumps on Marci’s arms. Before I could stop them, my eyes wandered to Brooke’s legs; they had goose bumps too.
‘Why don’t we head towards the fire?’ I asked. Brooke nodded, and Marci and Rachel followed us through the loose crowd of people.
The bonfire itself was visible through the trees ahead, a rough parabola of orange flame, though the sky was still too light for the fire to really stand out. The forest here was sparse and patchy, with more scrub than trees, and the fire itself had been made in a large, round clearing just a few dozen feet off the road.
As we drew near I could see that the party organisers, whoever they were, had spared no expense on the fire; there were huge logs in its heart, and stacks of cordwood and split logs waited in the background, piled high against the trees. In the fire, wood cracked and split, sap popping and hissing at the centre, and behind it all was the dull static roar of oxygen being sucked into the heart of the greedy flames. It was talking to me.
‘Hello,’ I whispered, answering back. I stepped closer, holding out my hands to probe the heat. Just right in some places, but too cool in others and too hot at the peak. The structure at the base was more open than it needed to be; the fire would be hot and powerful, but it would burn itself out too quickly. Logs like that could last all night if you set them carefully and tended them just so with the other pieces of wood.
There didn’t seem to be anybody in particular in charge of the fire. There was a five-foot branch with a blackened tip lying just to the side, which I assumed had been used to poke and position the wood, so I picked it up and adjusted the blaze; knocked this piece down, stood that piece up. A fire could tell you what it needed, if you knew how to listen. I felt the heat; I listened to the growl of the air; I watched the lines of brilliant white heat on the surface of the wood, shimmering as if something radiant and perfect were stretching out from within, ready to be born into a dull and lifeless world. Another tweak, another push.
Perfect.
Then a split log sailed past me in a tight arc, crashing into the fire and making it flare up with a roar.
‘Yeah!’ someone screamed beside me, a thick Senior with close-cropped hair and a meaty red face. ‘Let’s get this fire going!’
‘You’ll get a better flame if you—’ I tried to talk to him, but he turned and shouted to someone.
‘Clayton Crusaders!’
Several voices hollered back, and he shook his fists triumphantly in the sky before heading back for more wood.
‘It works better if you plan it out,’ I said, mostly to myself. I turned back to the fire and poked it again, trying to repair some of the damage, when a second log crashed into the middle, then a third.
‘Clayton Crusaders!’
‘You know,’ said Marci, standing next to me, ‘some things you just can’t plan.’ I looked at her quickly, surprised, and she smiled. ‘You know?’
Where had she come from? I’d been so caught up in the fire I’d lost track of the girls completely.
‘No hot dogs yet,’ said Brooke, walking over from somewhere. ‘They’re not breaking out the food til around six-thirty. Wanna hit the lake?’
‘Well, I’m definitely not going in,’ said Marci, ‘but I wouldn’t mind taking a look.’ The three girls started walking away, then stopped and looked back.
‘Are you coming?’ asked Brooke.
But . . . there’s a fire.
I looked at the bonfire, still strong and powerful despite the chaos from the new logs. I didn’t need the fire; I was here for Brooke.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘We’ll be back by then anyway, right?’ I put down the branch and walked towards them.
‘Thanks,’ said Rachel. ‘We need our brave protector.’
‘No kidding,’ said Marci. ‘With all these dead women they’re finding, even a huge group like this gives me the creeps.’
There it is again: John the brave. How many people see me as some kind of hero? And how did I go so long without noticing?
‘We used to come out here to go
fishing,’ said Brooke, watching the clear line of water emerge through the thinning trees. The day was still light, but muted, and the lake reflected the clear blue of the sky like the bottom half of a giant, lacquered shell. We stopped on a low ridge where the trees parted and the ground turned down sharply to the glassy lake beyond. Brooke stepped up onto a sharp rock to get a better view, teetered for a moment, then put her hand on my shoulder for stability. It felt electric, like a sudden surge of energy flowing in at the point of contact. I pretended to stare out at the water, but my whole being was focused on Brooke’s hand.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Rachel.
A couple of guys splashed by in wet shorts and T-shirts, hip-deep in the water.
