by Dan Wells
quietly—leaned them against the shed. A black shadow passed across the headlights, filling the fence, and the shed, and the yard behind me with the massive shape of the demon—a bulbous head and ten scythe-like claws, with his heavy coat and pants hanging loosely over his thin, inhuman lirnbs. I wondered if he'd even had a chance to change back to human form, or if he'd been forced to help Kay like this. He must be very close to death. I took one delicate step forward, placing my foot carefully, and peeked around the edge of the shed. The demon struggled to stay on his feet, and staggered around the car, claws scrabbling across the paint as he leaned on the hood for support. He worked his way slowly to the passenger's side, paused for a moment, nearly doubled over, and reached for the handle. As his hand left the car, he lost his balance and fell sideways into the snow, landing heavily. My breath caught in my throat, and my heart, already straining, sped up even further. Was this it? Was it dead? With a pathetic groan, the demon rose to its knees, clutched at its chest, and howled inhumanly. It was not dead yet, but it was very close, and it knew it. The demon ripped off its heavy coat, and lunged forward, falling against the car. Its huge white claws seemed to glow, and it dug them into the metal, with terrifying strength, to lift itself back upright. A clawed hand reached for the door handle, then stopped in midair. It stared at the car, unmoving. It had seen the empty seat. It knew its only hope was gone. The demon fell to its knees and cried—not a roar or a growl, but a keening, high-pitched cry. It was the sound I would ever after associate with the word despair. The demon's cry turned to a shout—of rage or frustration, I couldn't say—and it struggled back to its feet. I watched it take a step back up the driveway, then a step toward the street, too confused to choose, then collapse once again to its knees. It edged forward, using its claws to crawl, and finally fell flat to the ground. I felt like I hung in that moment for hours, waiting for a twitch, or a lunge, or a shout—but nothing came. The entire world was frozen and motionless. I waited another moment, long and desperate, before daring to take a step out. The demon was inert on the driveway, lifeless as the cement it was lying on. I crept out of my hiding place and inched forward, never taking my eyes off the body. Faint wisps of steam drifted up in the night air. I walked slowly toward it, squinting against the brilliant onslaught of the headlights, and stared at it. The feeling was peculiar, like a visceral thrill building rapidly to transcendence—this was not just a body, it was my body, my own dead body, lying perfectly still. It was like a piece of art, something that I had done with my own hands. I was filled with a powerful sense of pride, and I understood why so many serial killers left their bodies to be discovered:
when you created something so beautiful, you wanted everyone to see it. It was finally dead. But why wasn't it falling apart, I wondered, as the spent organs had always done before? If the energy that kept it together was gone, why was it still. . . together? A flash of light caught my eye, and my head jerked up. The light had come on in my front-room window. A second later, the curtains were pulled aside. It was my Mom—she must have heard the demon's roar, and now she was looking for an explanation. I ducked down next to the car, out of the headlights, and just feet away from the dead demon. She stayed in the window a long time before moving away, and letting the curtain fall back into place. I waited for the light to go off, but it stayed lit. A moment later, the bathroom light came on, and I shook my head. She hadn't seen anything. The demon twitched. Instantly my full attention snapped back to the fallen demon, so close I could practically touch it. Its head rolled to one side, and its left arm jerked wildly. I rose up from my crouch and stepped back. The demon flailed its arm again before planting it firmly on the ground and pushing up. It raised its shoulders, head still drooping, then kicked its leg shakily to the side. It wrestled with the leg a moment before giving up and reaching out with its other arm. It was crawling forward. I looked up just in time to see another light go on—this time in my room. Mom had gone in to check on me, and now she knew I wasn't there. Do something! I shouted at myself. The demon pulled itself forward the full length of its spindly arm, then reached out with the other. Somehow it had managed to revive itself, just like it had when it killed Max's dad. Only this time it didn't have a fresh body lying a few feet away—the nearest source of organs was me, and apparently it didn't know I was there. Instead it was crawling . . . Toward my house. Its claws dug into the asphalt just beyond the gutter, and it started to pull itself forward again. Its movements were slow, but deliberate and powerful. Every move it made seemed just a little stronger, just a little faster. Another patch of light, and a burst of movement—my mom had opened the side door, and she stood in its light like a beacon, her heavy overcoat draped over her nightgown. Her feet were shoved into her high-top snow boots. “John?” Her voice was clear and loud, and had the raw edge I'd learned to recognize as worry. She'd come out to look for me. The demon stretched another arm forward, emitting an unearthly growl as it pulled itself closer to my house—faster now than before, and more eager. It was leaving black gobs of itself stuck to the asphalt, sizzling with unnatural heat as they
decomposed in seconds. Mom must have heard it, for she turned to look at it. It was nearly halfway to her now. “Get inside!” I shouted, and bolted toward her. The demon's head jerked up, and it reached out wildly with its long arms as I went past. I ran to the side, giving it wide berth, but it heaved itself up to its feet and lunged for me. I stumbled to the side, and the demon fell, missing me by inches. It slammed back to the street, howling in pain. “John, what's going on?” my mom shouted, still staring in horror at the demon in the street. She couldn't see it clearly from where she stood, but she saw enough to be terrified. “Get inside!” I shouted again, dashing past her and pulling her into the doorway. My gloves left dark red stains on her coat. “What is that?” she asked. “It killed Neblin,” I said, yanking her back into the house. “Come on!” The demon was back on track, crawling straight toward us with its brutal mouth of luminescent, needlelike fangs. Mom started to slam the door, but I grabbed it and forced it back open. “What are you doing?” “We have to let it in,” I said, trying to shove her back to- ward the mortuary. She wouldn't budge. “We have to make it easy, or it might go next door.” “We're not letting it in here!” she shrieked. It had reached our sidewalk. “It's the only way,” I said, and shoved her back. She lost her grip on the door, and tumbled against the wall, staring at me with the same horror she had given the demon. It was the first time she'd taken her eyes off the demon, and her eyes moved across the blood that smeared my chest and arms. The monster inside of me reared up, remembering the knife in the kitchen, eager to dominate her again with fear, but I soothed it and unlocked the door to the mortuary. You'll kill soon enough. “Where are we going?” Mom asked. “To the back room.” “The embalming room?” “I just hope it can find the way.” I pulled her with me into the mortuary lobby, flicking on the lights, and hurrying toward the back room. The door banged behind us, but we didn't dare look. Mom screamed, and we ran for the back hall. “Do you have the keys?” I asked, shoving Mom against the door. She fumbled in her coat pocket and pulled out a key ring. The demon bellowed from the lobby and I bellowed back, screaming out my tension in a primal roar. It staggered around the corner just as Mom opened the lock. It was practically dripping now as its body fell apart. We burst through the door into the room beyond. Mom ran to the back, fumbling again with her keys, but I turned on the lights and went straight to the
side of the room. Coiled in a neat pile lay our only hope—the bladed trocar, perched like a snake head on the tip of its long vacuum hose. I flipped the switch to start it, and looked up at the ventilator fan slowly sputtering to life. “Let's hope the fan doesn't give out on us,” I said, and threw myself against the wall, right next to the open door. Across the room Mom opened the lock and flung the outside door wide, looking back at me in abject terror. “John, it's here!” The demon burst into the room, reaching out for her with claws like bright razors. I swung th
e humming trocar with all my might straight into the demon's chest. It staggered back, eyes wider than I'd ever thought possible. I heard the wet slurp as something—its blood, maybe, or its whole heart—tore loose from its half-decayed body, and slid down the vacuum tube. The demon fell to its knees as more fluids and organs were sucked away, and I heard the familiar, sickening hiss of flesh degenerating into sludge. The vacuum tube curled and smoked with the heat. I backed away and watched as the demon's body began to devour itself, drawing strength and vitality from every extremity to help regenerate the tissues it was losing. The demon seemed to decompose before my eyes, slow waves of disintegration traveling in from its fingers and toes, up its arms and legs, then creeping darkly across the torso. I didn't notice Mom come to my side, but through a haze I became aware of her clutching me tightly as we watched in horror. I didn't hold her at all—I just stood and stared. Soon the demon was barely there at all—a sagging chest and a gnarled head stared up at me from a man-shaped puddle of smoking tar. It gasped for air, though I couldn't imagine its lungs were whole enough to draw breath. I slowly pulled off my ski mask and stepped forward, presenting a perfect view of my face. I expected it to thrash out, driven mad by rage and pain, and desperate to harvest my life to save itself. But instead, the demon calmed. It watched me approach, yellow eyes following me until I stood above it. I stared back. The demon took a deep breath, its ragged lungs flapping with the exertion. “Tiger, tiger. . .,” it said. Its voice was a raspy whisper. “Burning bright.” It coughed harshly, agony tearing out of every sound. “I'm sorry,” I said. It was all I could think of to say. It drew another ragged breath, choking on its own decaying matter. “I didn't want to hurt you,” I said, almost pleading with it. “I didn't want to hurt anybody.” Its fangs hung limp in its mouth, like wilted grass. “Don't. . .,” it said, then stopped in fit of horrible coughing, and struggled to compose itself. “Don't tell them.” “Don't tell who?” asked Mom. The hideous face contorted a final time, in rage or exertion or fear, and that excruciating voice rasped out a final sentence:
“Remember me when I am gone.” I nodded. The demon looked up at the ceiling, closed its eyes, and caved in on itself, crumbling and dissolving, flowing away into a shapeless mound of sizzling black. The demon was dead. Outside, snow began to fall. 19 I stared at the black mess on the floor, trying to understand everything that had happened. Just a minute ago, that sludge had been a demon—and just an hour before that it had been my neighbor, a kind old man who loved his wife, and gave me hot chocolate. But no, the sludge was just sludge—some physical remnant of a body that had never truly been his in the first place. The life behind it, the mind or the soul or whatever it was that made a live body live, had disappeared. It was a fire, and we were its fuel. Remember me when I am gone. “What was that?” I looked up and saw my mom; I became aware of her hands clutching me tightly by the shoulders, of her body just slightly in front of mine. She'd placed herself between me and the monster. When had she done that? My mind felt tired and dark, like a storm cloud heavy with rain. “It was a demon,” I said, pulling away from her and walking to the vacuum switch. I turned it off and the white-noise whir died away, abandoning us to silence. The vacuum tube was twisted grotesquely, melted into a smoking pile of noxious plastic curls. It looked like the intestines of a mechanical beast. The blade of the trocar was smeared with sludge, and I pulled it carefully, with two fingers, from the mass on the floor. “A demon?” asked Mom, stepping back. “”What. .. why? Why a demon? Why is it here?“ ”It wanted to eat us,“ I said, ”sort of. It's the Clayton Killer, Mom, the thing that's been stealing body parts. It needed them to survive.“ ”Is it dead?" I frowned at the mess on the floor. It looked more like an
old campfire than a body. “I think so. I don't really know how it works.” “How do you know any of this?” she asked, turning to look at me. Her eyes peered up at my face, searching for something. “Why were you outside?” “The same reason you were,” I lied. “I heard a noise and went outside. It was in the Crowleys' house, doing something— killing them, I guess. I heard screaming. Dr. Neblin was in the Crowleys' car, dead, so I dragged him away where the demon couldn't find him. That's when you came out, and it came over here.” She stared at my face, my blood-soaked coat, my clothes drenched in melted snow and freezing sweat. I watched as her gaze left me to travel around the room, taking in my bloody handprints on walls and counters, and the steaming, muddy ash on the floor. I could almost watch her thoughts as they played across her face—I knew this woman better than I knew anyone in the world, and I could read her almost more easily than I could read myself. She was thinking about my sociopathy and my obsession with serial killers. She was thinking about the time I threatened her with a knife, and about the way I looked at corpses, and about all the things she'd read and heard and feared ever since she'd first discovered, years ago, that I was not like other children. Perhaps she was thinking about my father, with violent tendencies of his own, and wondered how far I was going—or how far I'd already gone— down the same path. She ran through it all in her mind, over and over, sorting through the scenarios, and trying to figure out what to believe. And then she did something that proved, without question, that I didn't really understand her at all. She hugged me. She spread her arms wide and pulled me close, holding my back with one hand and my head with another and crying— not in sadness, but in acceptance. She cried in relief, turning softly back and forth, back and forth, covering herself in the blood from my coat and gloves and not caring at all. I put my arms around her as well, knowing she would like it. “You're a good boy,” she said, pressing me tighter. “You're a good boy. You've done a good thing.” I wondered how much she'd guessed, but I didn't dare to ask. I simply hugged her until she was ready to stop. “We need to call the police,” she said, stepping back and rubbing her nose. She closed the back door and locked it. “And we need to call an ambulance, in case he hurt the Crowleys, too, like you said. They could still be alive.” She opened the side closet and pulled out the mop and bucket, then shook her head and pushed them back in. “They'll want to see it just as it is.” She skirted the edge of the sludge carefully, and headed for the hallway. “Are you sure we should call?” I asked, following her closely. “Will they even believe us?” I followed her down the hall to
the front office, walking almost on her heels, as I tried to talk her out of it. “We can just take Mrs. Crowley to the hospital ourselves—but we'll have to change first, I'm covered with blood. Won't they be suspicious?” I saw myself in jail, in court, in an institution, in an electric chair. “What if they arrest me? What if they think I killed Neblin, and all the others? What if they read Neblin's files and think I'm a psycho and throw me in jail?” Mom stopped, turned around, and stared directly into my eyes. “Did you kill Neblin?” “Of course not.” “Of course not,” she said. “And you didn't kill anyone else.” She stepped back and pulled open her coat, showing me the blood on the sides and on her nightgown. “We're both bloody,” she said, “and we're both innocent. The cops will understand that we were trying to help, and trying to stay alive.” She let go of her coat and stepped back toward me, grabbing my arms tightly and stooping down just slightly to bring our faces mere inches apart. “But the most important thing is that we're in this together. I will not let them take you anywhere, and I will not leave you, ever. We are a family. I will always be here for you.” Something clicked into place, deep inside of me, and I realized that I had been waiting to hear those words for my entire life. They crushed me and freed me at the same time, fitting into my soul like a long-lost puzzle piece. The tension of the night, of the whole day, of the last five months, flowed out of me like blood from an opened vein, and I saw myself for the first time as my mother saw me—not a psycho, not a stalker, not a killer, but as a sad, lonely boy. I fell against her and realized, for the first time in years, that I was capable of crying. In the few minutes before the police arrived, while Mom went in to the Crowleys' house to check on them, I t
ook Mr. Crowley's cell phone from his discarded coat. Just in case, I looked through Neblin's pockets and took his as well. I didn't have time to dispose of them properly, so I hurled them—and Kay's phone—over the Crowley's back fence and into the forest beyond. There were no footprints back there, just acres of unbroken snow, so I hoped they'd stay safe until I could find and get rid of them more permanently. At the last moment, just in time, I remembered my GPS set, and pulled the second unit out from where I'd hidden it in the Crowleys' car. I hurled them into the forest as well, just as the first siren grew close enough to hear. Soon screaming sirens were followed by flashing lights and a long line of squad cars, ambulances, a hazmat team, and even a fire truck. The neighbors watched from porches and windows, shivering in their coats and slippers, as an army of
uniforms spread throughout the street and secured the entire area. Neblin's body was found and photographed; Kay, still unconscious, was treated and rushed to the hospital; Mom and I were interviewed; and the mess in our mortuary was carefully studied and catalogued. The FBI agent I'd seen on the news, Agent Fornian, interviewed Mom and me in the mortuary for most of that night— first together, then one at a time, while the other cleaned up. I told him, and everyone else who asked, the same story I'd told Mom—that I'd heard a noise, gone outside, to check on it, and watched the killer go into the Crowleys' house. They asked if I knew where Mr. Crowley was, and told them I didn't know; they asked why I had decided to move Neblin's body, and I couldn't think of a reason that didn't sound crazy, so I just said that it seemed like a good idea at the time. The sludge in our back room we pretty much ignored: we said that we had no idea how it got there. I couldn't tell if they believed us or not, but eventually everyone seemed satisfied. Before they left, they asked if I needed to see a grief counselor to help me deal with the simultaneous disappearance of two men I knew relatively well, but I said that seeing a second therapist to talk about my first therapist seemed land of unfaithful. Nobody laughed. Dr. Neblin would have. By morning, the story had spread and mutated: the Clayton Killer had killed Bill Crowley while he was out driving late, and then killed Ben Neblin on his way back to Crowley's house. There, the killer had started to beat and torture Kay until her neighbors—Mom and me—noticed something was wrong and interrupted him. The killer came after us, but ran away when we resisted, leaving behind nothing but the mysterious black sludge recognizable from the previous attacks. No one would believe that the attacker was some kind of disintegrating monster, so we didn't bother to explain it that way. There were just enough loose ends in the story, of course, that rumors began to fly—there were no bodies for the killer or for Crowley, so of course they might still be alive somewhere— but I knew that the long ordeal was finally over. For the first time in months, I felt peace. I imagine that more suspicion might have fallen on me if Kay hadn't been my staunchest defender—she swore to the police that I was a good boy, and a good neighbor, and that we loved each other like family. When they found my eyelash in her bedroom, she told them how I'd helped Mr. Crowley with the door hinges; when they found my fingerprints on the windows of her car, she told them how I'd helped to check the oil and the tire pressure. Every question they had could be answered by the fact that I'd spent almost every day at their house for two straight months. The only truly damning evidence was on the cell phones, but so far, no one had found them. Besides all of that, I was just a kid—I don't think they ever
