by Simon Holt
Reggie wrenched her arm free and headed down the stairs. She stepped out onto the sidewalk and focused on putting one foot in front of the other. She didn’t want to think. Her mind was like some medieval castle, with her hope locked up inside and Aaron’s words laying siege to it. I don’t think he’s your brother anymore … I don’t think he’s Henry…
A red Mustang slowed to a growling crawl beside her. The window rolled down, and Quinn called to her from behind the wheel.
“Hey, Halloway!” His smile quickly fell. “Whoa, what happened to your nose?”
Reggie’s hand flew to her face. She’d forgotten she looked like a punching bag. “Sledding accident,” she said.
Oh, fantastic. What fifteen-year-old still went sledding?
“Was it contact sledding? Let me give you a ride home.”
Reggie smiled gratefully and reached for the passenger side door just as her father’s pickup pulled up behind Quinn’s car. He rolled down his window, and Reggie could smell his anger.
“Get in.”
9
Dad barely talked on the ride home, except to ask what on earth Reggie had done to her face. She said she had slipped on some ice.
As they drove, Reggie realized she had no love for the season anymore. Her mom was gone, her dad no longer trusted her, and her brother … well, Aaron thought her brother was a Vour. All the cheesy lights, recycled carols, and plastic reindeer around Cutter’s Wedge just reinforced her faithlessness in anything redemptive about the holidays.
“If I didn’t think it would ruin Christmas for the family, I’d ground you through New Year’s,” Dad finally said.
“The family. Right.”
“Don’t push it, Regina.”
“Ground me. What’ve I got to celebrate? More laundry?”
They pulled into the driveway and Dad cut the engine. Reggie opened the door and stepped out.
“Drop the attitude, Reggie. This is tough for all of us. Doesn’t help the situation if you —”
“Sorry, Dad. I’ve got pants to iron.” She slammed the car door and marched into the house.
Upstairs, Reggie noticed hot steam escaping beneath the bathroom door. Henry was in the bathtub singing “Deck the Halls.” For a moment she thought about confronting him, but then remembered what Aaron had told her.
Stay away from him tonight.
So she went straight to her room and closed the door. Lying in bed, she felt the blood thumping in her bruised face. She heard Henry’s bare feet running down the hallway, followed by Dad’s heavy footsteps. Through the heating vent in the wall, Reggie heard their bedtime chat.
“You get some sleep now, little man,” Dad said.
“I know.” Henry sighed. “Santa won’t come until I’m asleep.”
“Funny to hear you say that. Last year you told me you didn’t believe in Santa Claus.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Well, just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“That’s exactly right. Goodnight, Henry.”
Reggie heard Dad leave the room. She lay with her eyes closed, the wind tapping against her window. An image of the mangled hamster lying in the shoebox came to her.
“Reggie…” Her brother’s voice was a whisper. “Reggie, I’m sorry about today.”
She opened her eyes and turned her head. A short silhouette stood in her doorway. The pitiful Kappy dangled from his hand.
“How could you do that to Aaron?”
“I said I was sorry, didn’t I?”
“How could you do that?”
She could hear him breathing. She thought she saw him smile.
“He started it.”
“Henry, what’s happened to you? Is something going on at school? Are you getting picked on?”
“I do the picking now.” His voice was gravelly, and cold surged through Reggie at his words.
“What do you mean?” she asked slowly. Henry just swung Kappy back and forth. A piece of stuffing fluttered to the floor.
“I got some presents for you, Reggie. I think you’ll like them.”
The silhouette disappeared back down the dark hall, and Reggie heard Henry’s door close. She rose and shut her own door.
Ever since Sorry Night, life had gone from difficult to dismal. When she first had borrowed The Devouring, it seemed twisted and fun. Now, she recalled its pages as emanations of darkness and madness. She regretted ever picking it up.
It’s not possible…
Something moved to her left. A spider was crawling down the wall. It might have been the one Aaron had released from the jar on Sorry Night, mottled brown and fat, but it seemed larger. Bumpy skin stretched tight over the meaty bulk of its abdomen. Thick fang-tipped appendages, moist with venom, twitched in the center of its face. Its segmented legs, bristling with hair, rose and fell with sickening undulation as it crept closer. Eight tiny black eyes gleamed at her through the darkness. Reggie knew it couldn’t be possible, but she thought she heard it breathing. Terror bloomed inside her, freezing her, clogging her throat.
Something scratched and rattled behind the vent near the ceiling. Her gaze snapped up to the sound, and she saw the tips of innumerable spider legs poking through the grate. The vent creaked and shifted in its moorings. The spider on the wall hissed, and a creature beyond the vent replied, and then another, and another, multiplying the sound until a horrid rasping chorus filled the room. The vent’s cover burst open and clattered to the floor.
A mass of scrambling legs and dripping fangs poured down the wall and flooded onto the floor like a dark boiling slime.
Reggie scrambled to the door, only to find that the knob would not turn. She yanked it desperately until a hairy brown spider crawled through the keyhole and made for her fingers. Flailing and stumbling, she headed for the window, but dozens of spiders dropped from the sill and crept around the curtains.
Helpless, Reggie tried to dive under her covers, but spiders flooded into her bed from all sides, spinning down from the ceiling on sticky white threads or crawling out of the pillowcases. She realized she was screaming, but the shrieks were so piercing and uncontrollable that they seemed to be coming from someplace else, somewhere that had been hidden deep inside of her … until now. She yanked the blanket from her bed, sending spiders scattering in all directions, then pulled it over her head. The world darkened around her. Amid the crawling chaos, she heard someone calling for her.
“Reggie!”
A firm grip snatched the blanket and pulled it from her head and shoulders. She looked up to see a man-sized spider rearing up before her; it stood on four of its thick arachnid legs. The other four wrapped around her arms, grasping her at the wrists and elbows. Cold spiny hair bristled against her skin. The spider’s fangs clacked and oozed. Deafened by shock, she saw her silently screaming face reflected in each of the spider’s glinting black eyes. It raised its head to strike…
“REGINA!”
Reggie blinked and saw her father’s reddened face as she struggled in his grasp. She leaped away from him and ripped the sheets off her bed. She gibbered incoherently as she shook her pillows and checked under the mattress, but there was nothing there. Sweat-soaked and trembling, she turned to face her father.
“There were spiders everywhere.” Her whisper was dry and brittle. “Dad, you have to believe me! The vent cover popped off, and Dad, I swear, so many of them just swarmed in. I felt them on me!”
He looked up to the vent. It was intact.
“I don’t see anything, Reggie. You were just dreaming. But it’s all right — you’re awake now.”
Reggie clutched her head. Henry walked into the room, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“Keep away from me!” Reggie shouted.
Dad put a hand on her shoulder.
“Reggie, it’s just Henry.”
“He made the spiders! He made the spiders com
e after me!” Even in her terror, she knew it sounded childish — or totally insane.
“Is she okay, Dad?”
“GET OUT!” she shrieked.
“Henry,” Dad said softly. “Go back to bed, okay?”
The boy shrugged and walked out. Reggie felt hot stinging tears begin to flow, and soft sobs trembled out of her lips.
Her father patted her awkwardly on the back.
“It will be okay, Reggie. We’re going to be okay.”
She stared at the empty doorway. Aaron’s words seeped into her mind: Henry looked in my eyes and he knew what I was afraid of. I can’t explain it, but he knew — and he made it real in my mind.
“You’re right,” she said, wiping away her tears. “I’m fine. It was a dream.”
Reggie climbed back into bed, and her father kissed her forehead. But hours after he’d gone, Reggie still lay awake, her rational mind battling the terrible seeds of a growing obsession.
10
Christmas morning arrived and Reggie tried to be gracious about the clothes and gift certificates she received, but her eyes kept returning to Henry. He gleefully ripped the wrapping paper from his presents, shouting about how much he loved everything. Dad smiled at his exuberance; Reggie hadn’t seen her father that pleased in a long while.
She was dreading the annual Halloway trip into Boston for a lobster lunch at Faneuil Hall. Minus one mother this year. Reggie would’ve rather had her fingernails pulled out with pliers. Especially when she saw that Dad had put on the ugly Christmas sweater with the velvet reindeer on it.
“I’m not going,” she told her father.
“It’s Christmas, Regina. You’re going.”
Reggie walked defiantly to the stairs. “’Bye,” she said, not looking back at him. The yelling she expected to follow her upstairs never came. Dad didn’t say a thing. He just slammed the door behind him.
“Merry Christmas, Reggie!” called Henry.
Reggie went to the window. She watched them get in the car and back out of the driveway. Henry gazed up at her and waved.
Back in the hallway she found shreds of paper on the carpet. She picked up a few scraps of a torn photograph, the picture of their family at the Bottle Hill carnival.
Henry had ripped it up and left the pieces for her.
Her eyes filled with tears. She was losing him. She felt him slipping from her, and the loss was worse than the abandonment by their mother. Mom had packed a bag and left, gone of her own free will. But Henry … Henry was being taken from her, a little more day by day, like someone with a terminal disease.
She got dressed and was out of the house three minutes later.
Soon after, Reggie and Aaron were knocking on Eben’s door. He answered it a few moments later, his eyes squinting at them through the morning sun.
“Sorry,” Reggie said. “I know it’s Christmas, but we —”
“Come on in. Coffee’s almost ready.”
Aaron’s 1940s leather aviator hat with long earflaps made him look like a bloodhound. He eyed Eben’s ancient bathrobe. “Nice duds.”
“Thank you. Nice hat.”
“Hanukkah present. Told the folks I was wearing it to Reggie’s annual Christmas morning breakfast. I sort of lied, but I figured we’d be getting breakfast here, right?”
“You’re lucky to get a bad cup of coffee.”
They all sat at the kitchen table and Aaron poured himself a huge mug of coffee. He drank more caffeine than anyone Reggie had ever met. It explained why he was rail thin, jumpy, and usually pretty sweaty. Even in winter. But she figured with a brain that ran as hot as his did, constant fuel was a necessity more than a habit.
“All right. You all can start talking any time you like.”
“Spiders,” said Reggie. “I was ambushed.”
“Spiders?” asked Eben.
“Not real ones,” said Aaron. “The psychic kind, courtesy of Henry. Like when he made me think I was drowning.”
“My room was dripping with them. Thousands of them.”
Eben listened without expression.
“So now you believe your brother is a Vour?”
Reggie shook her head.
“I don’t know what to believe, Eben. It’s preposterous, but — I don’t know the kid sleeping in the room next to mine anymore.”
Eben frowned and rubbed his unshaven chin. A coughing fit seized him, and he put a hand on the table to steady himself.
“Jeez, Eben.”
“It sounds worse than it is,” Eben assured her. “Now, let’s take a look at the facts of this situation for a moment —”
Aaron pulled a thick three-ring binder from his backpack and thumped it onto the end table.
“What do you have there?” Eben asked.
With a flourish, Aaron flipped the binder open to reveal a computer-printed copy of the handwritten title page: The Devouring.
“You made a copy of it?” Reggie whispered. “When?”
“I scanned it into my laptop the night I borrowed it. Thought maybe I could research the symbols and stuff —”
“You two just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?” Eben said in a sharp voice.
“Don’t blame Reggie. She didn’t know. Be pissed at me if you want, but we’ve got to find out where this came from,” Aaron said.
“And how do you plan to do that?” asked Eben. “It’s only a journal. No publishing data, no Library of Congress number, no copyright…”
Aaron paged through the binder.
“We read the whole thing, word by word. There’s got to be something in here that gets us somewhere.” Aaron turned to the first page and shook his empty coffee mug. “I’ll need more joe.”
Aaron was over halfway through the journal and had lost track of how many cups of coffee he’d drunk. Eben was reading one of his psychology textbooks on delusional dementia while Reggie slept in a tall wingback chair, a thin strand of spittle hanging from the corner of her mouth.
Aaron’s eyes slid back and forth over the handwritten text.
“Listen to this,” he said. “They know I know, and they torment me. They force in the nightmares. One moment I’m at the market, the next I’m sinking in quicksand, screaming, struggling. And the humans — all they do is stare. Stare and whisper at crazy Macie. Macie. That’s the author. And what happened to her is just like what happened to us. Vours sense your fears, then they play them out for you in your head, like waking nightmares.”
“Or you subconsciously remember reading this passage, and it’s affecting your ability to judge reality from fantasy,” said Eben.
“I don’t know, Eben, it felt pretty real,” said Reggie, rubbing her eyes and wiping her lips. Aaron continued flipping through the book.
“Here’s something … maybe.” He jabbed a finger at the page.
“May twelve, nineteen seventy-two. Went to see Ma and Pa. Brought Ma a bunch of daisies and told them Jeremiah was getting real sick.”
“Okay. She visits her folks … and Vour-possessed people can get sick. So?”
“There’s more.” Aaron read on. “They got a new neighbor. I knew the boy from school years ago. A bad seed. He went to prison for burning down St. Luke’s with Father Moore and those kids inside back in ’54. I always thought he was a Vour.”
Aaron flipped back to the account of Jeremiah in the corn-field.
“Right here on page one, the night the Vours got Jeremiah,” he said, and read aloud again. “He never used to have a mean bone in his body. I think that after Ma died, some part of him did, too.” Aaron stood up. “Their mother was dead before the journal even existed! You get it now?”
“Get to the point,” said Reggie. She shot a look at Eben, who seemed deep in thought.
Aaron paced. “She brought Ma a bunch of daisies. She’s talking about a cemetery. She went to visit their graves!”
“So?” asked Reggie, but Eben nodded to himself.
“We have a date,” he said. “May twelfth, nineteen
seventy-two. We have a singular event — the church burning — that happened about twenty years before. And we can almost certainly find the story, the killer’s name, and his hometown, at the library or on the Web.”
“And he’s buried next to Jeremiah’s parents,” said Reggie.
Aaron sat before Eben’s computer.
“Their tombstones will give us the author’s last name. That might get us an address!”
Aaron hammered away at the keyboard.
“Slow down, Aaron,” said Eben. “Even if you find an address, it doesn’t mean the sister’s there now.”
“But it’s a start,” said Aaron. “And I’m guessing it isn’t far away, either.”
“Probably true,” Eben replied. “But I don’t know what you hope to find. You don’t even know if she’s still alive, or if the passing years have only added to her insanity.”
“‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go,’” said Aaron, typing like a demon.
“Don’t quote Shakespeare at me, young man,” Eben said. “You’re talking about hunting monsters.”
Reggie had remained silent for a long while. Now she spoke.
“I don’t know if I believe in monsters, Eben. But I know something is very wrong with Henry. And I’m scared for him. I’ll be glad to prove that Vours don’t exist, and this is some crazy stage my brother is going through. But if it’s not a stage —”
“You want to visit a murderer’s grave on Christmas?”
Both Reggie and Aaron looked expectantly at Eben.
“No. I know what you’re thinking.” Eben shook his head and coughed. “Absolutely not.”
“I could ask Quinn,” Reggie said. “Kind of a weird first date, but he said he wants to spend some more time with me. Or I could just hitchhike…”
Reggie glared at Eben, and he sighed.
“Fine, Regina.” He grabbed his coat. “But I’ve got a game hen to roast this evening, so let’s make this foolish quest a quick one.”
11
The drive in Eben’s old Cadillac took just under an hour. Aaron had found a treasure trove of information about the Garney incident online, and Reggie studied the printouts as they trav-eled.
