by Dan Wells
Marci looked astonished. “Is that seriously how you think of yourself? Is that seriously how you think of me?”
“As beautiful?”
“As above you. As … too good for you. Listen, John, how should I put this?…” She licked her lips. “Girls aren’t stupid, okay? We know when guys like us, and we usually know why. Yes, we know we’re attractive, and yes, we notice when guys check us out. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had in just the last month where I have to look at a guy’s forehead the whole time because he’s staring at my boobs. And yes, I admit that sometimes I use them on purpose to get attention. I’ve done it with you. But you’re the first straight boy since sixth grade that it hasn’t worked on. The first one who doesn’t just stare.” She shrugged, and looked out at the street. “You’re the first boy in years who’s more interested in talking to me than checking out my rack.”
“But I’m just…” How could I explain this? “I’m just following my rules. I’m trying to treat you like a person. With respect.” The alternative is to treat you like the bodies in the mortuary, like a doll to play with, and I don’t dare allow myself to think like that.
“‘With respect,’” she repeated. “One of the best things about you, John, is that you have no idea how rare that is.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. We sat for a moment while the sky turned bright orange as the sun set. After a moment I spoke up, hesitantly.
“So … does this mean we’re dating?”
Marci laughed out loud. “Holy crap, you are such a geek!”
“Well how am I supposed to know these things if you don’t tell me?”
“Even my dad called you my boyfriend, just now when he drove away. Everyone thinks we’re dating; I have no idea how you missed it.”
“Well,” I said. “Boyfriend, huh?”
She pulled up her knees and rested her head on them, looking at me sideways. “Yup.”
“And that would make you my girlfriend.”
“It would.”
I paused a moment. “Then I should give you a mushy nickname, like ‘Sweetums’ or ‘Cupcake.’”
“I don’t think we have to go that far.”
“How about ‘Sugar Booger’?”
“Call me that again,” she said, laughing, “and I’ll find another date for homecoming so fast your head will spin. Five guys I turned down—remember that. Five.”
“Five,” I repeated. Why did you choose the only one who’s dreamed about killing you?
* * *
I let Marci make our homecoming plans, and busied myself with plans for trapping Nobody. I drove to William Astrup’s house and scoped it out—he hadn’t been released by the police yet, and the news hadn’t broken, so his house was empty and I could wander through his yard at will. There was a large hedge by the front door, and the back door that faced the forest was surrounded by plenty of good hiding places. Which one would be best? Assuming that Nobody wasn’t completely invisible—which might actually make sense, given her name—she was liable to show up under some kind of harmless pretense. Delivering a pizza? A package? “Hi, my car broke down and my phone won’t work—can I use yours?” Whatever it was, it would almost certainly happen at the front door. That’s where I needed to watch.
I scoped out the front hedge: I could hide behind it for hours if I had to, completely obscured. If I had a gun, I could just sit there and shoot the first person to show up with a big duffel bag—assuming that a gun would even work on Nobody. They hadn’t worked on Crowley, but Crowley had been much more physical, more brutal. Nobody was a finesse killer who used tools and took her time. She might not be able to shape shift or regenerate at all—obviously Forman couldn’t.
A gun might actually work, especially if it had a silencer. I could shoot her before she even rang the bell, and be gone just as quickly, and the evidence would melt away to nothing. An ashy smear on the front porch. I could do this, as long as the police didn’t get in the way. Had Officer Jensen really believed us? Had he really taken us seriously?
The whole point was moot if the Handyman didn’t hear about Astrup’s arrest and choose him as the next victim. I drove back downtown and used the pay phone to call in an anonymous tip to the newspaper. It was on the news Monday night, and by Tuesday everyone in town had heard about it; the bait was set. All I needed was the gun. I thought about stealing one from Marci’s house, because I knew Officer Jensen had some, but I discarded the idea immediately. I’m not dumb enough to steal a gun from a cop. Max, on the other hand, was another story—his dad had a huge gun collection, and now that he was dead nobody ever used them. They’d never even know it was missing.
I woke up Wednesday morning ready to visit Max and steal a gun, and turned on the morning news while I ate breakfast. The story hit me like a kick to the stomach: the killer had struck early. William Astrup was fine. Instead Sheriff Meier was dead, his hands and tongue removed, his body pinned to the grass with two long poles rising up like wings.
13
“Hold still,” said Mom, fussing with my bow tie. “This would be a lot easier if you didn’t fight me the whole time.”
“Imagine how easy it would be if you just left me alone,” I said, pulling away for the fifth time. “It looks fine.”
“It’s crooked,” she said. “For goodness sake, let me fix it for just twenty seconds so I can take a picture, and then you can mess it up as much as you want.”
I stalked down the hall to the fridge, where Mom had stashed the corsage she bought me. “I don’t want a picture.”
“But you have to get a picture!” she said, following me through the house. “This is my baby’s first dance!” I glared at her. “I mean my handsome young man’s first dance! Of course I need a picture.”
“So you can never look at it and accidentally delete the memory card?”
“That only happened once,” she said sternly. “And no, it’s so I can show everyone.”
“‘Everyone’? Who’s ‘everyone’? All the friends we don’t have, or all the family that aren’t here? Lauren left work an hour ago without even coming upstairs, and Margaret didn’t come in at all, so I can’t imagine they care about seeing a picture of it. And if Dad wanted to see my first dance, he gave up his shot a few years ago.” There was a knock on the door, which gave me the perfect opportunity to look away from my mother’s stunned face. “That’s probably my ride.”
I opened the door and saw Brad Nielson, Rachel’s date, standing out on the landing. “Oh, good,” he said, “I wasn’t sure if I had the right door. I was half afraid I’d open this up and find a bunch of dead bodies or something.”
“The mortuary’s downstairs,” I said. “And nobody’s dead right now.”
“Well that’s good to know,” he said, and waved politely at my mom. “Hello Mrs. Cleaver, how are you?”
How could anyone not know if someone in town is recently dead or not? I thought. It’s the only interesting thing that ever happens around here.
“Hello Bradley,” said Mom. She’d regained her composure after my outburst, and now raised her camera. “Stand close.”
“No, Mom,” I said, “no pictures.”
“But your friend’s here now,” she said, waving us together. “Smile!”
“I don’t need a picture with…” The flash snapped. “… another guy. That’s great, Mom, thank you. Send that one to Dad and tell him we’re going steady.”
“Sweet!” said Brad. “Don’t worry, man, they take photos at the dance; we’ll get some of those. How is your dad, anyway?”
“He’s awesome,” I said. “He’s currently my favorite parent.” I pushed Brad back onto the landing and shut the door behind me, then led him down the stairs to the side door and out into the night air. It was the last week of September and already the evenings were darker and cooler. We got into Brad’s car—he had the best car out of the four of us—and drove off to pick up the girls.
“It’s been a long
time, hasn’t it?” said Brad. I looked over at him.
“A long time since what?”
“Since we did anything,” he said. “We used to hang out all the time in elementary school. What happened to all that?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was that game we used to play, on that thing in the playground? The big wooden thing?”
“I don’t remember.”
“No, it was a game you made up, with that ramp thing made out of tires, and we had to call the pockets, like in pool, and then try to jump into the right one.” He laughed, and the memory came back—fuzzy and distant, like a memory of someone else’s life. Kids at recess, laughing and shouting and jumping and falling, playing all day without a care in the world.
“That barely seems like us anymore,” I said, watching the cars and houses and people drift by outside. It’s a different world now, and darker. It’s full of demons—real, live demons that want to kill us all. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could ever be that carefree again.
“I know what you mean,” said Brad. “It’s like, we used to pretend to do things, but now we’re actually doing them—we have jobs, we play sports, we go to school. I mean, of course we did those things before, but now they mean something—now it’s not just football in the street, it’s football on the big field with lights and announcers and the whole town watching.”
I stared blankly out the window—different houses than I’d seen a minute ago, and different cars, and different people, but still somehow the same. Blocks and blocks and miles and miles, all the same. Lights and announcers. Is that really as far as your ambitions reach?
“And the girls!” said Brad, slapping the steering wheel. “You think we’ve changed, holy cow. I remember when Rachel had pigtails and skinned knees and screamed at the PE teacher every time we played soccer. And Marci was like a total hippie or something, like a feral child, until one day—bam! The girls disappeared and these gorgeous women appeared out of nowhere.”
Everyone grows up. I thought about Marci’s little sister, Kendra, fours years old with frizzy hair, growing up to be a young woman: filling out, becoming beautiful. Somebody’s girlfriend; somebody’s obsession; somebody’s victim. All grown up and sexy and dead.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s just the way things go sometimes.”
“Rachel’s right up here,” he said, turning down a street and pointing ahead. He parked and ran to her front door while I shuffled into the back seat. A few minutes later Brad led Rachel to the car, opened her door, helped her in, and closed it after her. I watched carefully, preparing to do the same thing.
“Hi, John,” she said, turning slightly to wave from the front seat. “Lookin’ good!”
“Hi,” I said. I was starting to remember how much I hated spending time with people; the bigger the group, the worse it got. This dance was going to kill me.
We drove to Marci’s house, and I walked up to the door with my corsage in a plastic box. The front door was open, as always, and I knocked on the screen. Instantly there was a crash and rumble as her siblings jumped off the couch and ran to see me. The house filled with shouts of “Marci! John’s here!” and the hallway filled with kids.
“My sister looks beautiful,” said Kendra. “You’re going to love her, but Mom says she’s immodest.”
“Back! Back inside!” said Marci, coming down the hall. She was wearing a long, dark green dress, lifting the hem carefully off the floor as the kids charged past her and back into the TV room. The bottom of the dress was flowing, shimmering softly in the faint light of the hallway, while the top was an elegant, embroidered corset. Her shoulders and collarbone were bare, with more cleavage than I’d expected after her speech to me the other night. She opened the door and beckoned me in. “You’d better come inside—Mom wants pictures.”
“Everyone’s going to want pictures,” I said. “You look incredible.”
“Thank you.”
“I thought you were going with me because you didn’t have to show off the…” I gestured vaguely. “You know.”
“I’d already bought the dress over the summer—how was I to know I’d end up dating an actual gentleman? Plus there was a really good sale online.”
I held up the corsage. “That’s great for you, but there’s literally nowhere for me to pin this. Plus I think your dad would shoot me if he saw me trying.”
“I’ll do it,” she said, taking the box as we walked into the kitchen. “But this means you have to do your own boutonniere.” She pulled a little flower box of her own from the fridge, handed it to me, and we pinned on our flowers while her mom laughed and took pictures. We posed, we held hands, I did my best to smile, and finally we escaped back out to the car. Brad threw it into gear, and we were off.
* * *
We ate dinner at the nicest restaurant in town—a steak place that, precisely because it was the nicest restaurant in town, was crammed full of high school kids in rented tuxedos and an explosion of multicolored satin. Marci had planned ahead and made reservations early, probably the same time she’d bought the dress.
I’d spent several months as a vegetarian, trying to keep myself from thinking about dead meat in general, and dead humans in particular. Once I’d found my purpose and focused on killing demons, I’d been able to let some of those rules slip, and I figured it was okay to have a little meat for a special occasion. I looked over the menu and ordered a porterhouse steak—my favorite cut. Brad got the same, and Marci and Rachel ordered salads.
“I absolutely love your dress,” said Rachel, reaching toward Marci. She stopped just shy of touching her. “So much better than this boring thing I’ve got on.”
“I love your dress!” said Brad. “You look great.”
“Thanks, said Rachel, flashing him a smile. “You’re so sweet.” Her smile was quick, and her face turned toward him, but I caught a glimpse of something … off. There and gone in a flash. Did Brad say something wrong? I wondered. Even compliments are hard to give right in a situation like this. I hate social politics.
“Did you guys hear about the sheriff?” asked Brad. Marci and I looked at each other silently; we hadn’t had much chance to talk about it yet, though I’d been working on my own theories all week. The demon had broken her pattern again, in ways we hadn’t anticipated, and that scared me—it meant I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and that was a very dangerous situation to be in. I was desperate to learn more, and elated that Brad had brought it up.
“Let’s not talk about that,” said Marci, shooting me a warning look. I leaned back and sighed, listening as the conversation turned to gossip about the other kids in the restaurant.
Brooke was there, on the far side of the room, in a light blue dress and a matching satin jacket. Her hair was in a pile of curls on top of her head, and she looked radiant. She was sitting next to Mike Larsen, and I found myself hating him passionately.
A troupe of waiters brought out our plates, and my three companions dug into their food. I stared at mine, suddenly queasy. The meat was red and juicy—medium rare, just like I’d ordered—and staring out starkly from the center was a sawed-off cross section of bone. It was a piece of the vertebra, perfectly trimmed and perfectly normal, but all I could see—all I could think of—was the parade of severed wrists that had come and gone through the mortuary. Red, juicy meat around a neat central column of bone.
It’s okay, I told myself, just eat. I pressed my fork into it, watching the juices run out from the holes, and I raised up my knife, and suddenly it was Mike Larsen on the plate, dead and bleeding: meaningless food to be chewed up and swallowed. I felt no wave of nausea, no rise of bile in the back of my throat. I knew that those thoughts were wrong, but they didn’t feel wrong. It was just another thing. It was the way I’d used to think, in the times before I’d gained control.
My old thoughts and habits were all creeping back, one by one; my dark side, the part of me I called Mr. Monster, was stirring. My angry fight w
ith my mother, my paranoid suspicions of Marci, my urge to kill her that night in her room. It was all coming back. Why? Wasn’t it enough that I was hunting a demon? Wasn’t it enough that I was planning to kill?
Of course not, I whispered, deep in the caverns of my mind. I don’t want to think about killing, I want to really kill. I’m a creature of action. Thinking about it will never be enough.
The room grew dark, and I felt my skin grow hot. I shouldn’t be here. I have a demon to catch, and here I am wasting my time—and everyone else’s lives—at a stupid dinner before some stupid dance. I’m an idiot. I’m a fool. I’m sitting idly by while Nobody teaches her vicious lesson with a trail of death. I have to act. I have to find her, and I have to kill her. It’s the only way to stop her.
But what then? Who’ll be next after Nobody, and how many people will die before I find him?
I pushed my plate away.
“Something wrong?” asked Marci.
“I don’t think I can eat it,” I said. I don’t think I can even have it on the table. I flagged down a waiter. “Can you take this back?”
“Is there a problem with it, sir?”
If I blame them, I can dodge the embarrassing questions. “Yes,” I said. “I ordered it medium rare, and this is barely medium.”
“Of course, sir, I’ll have the chef prepare a new one immediately.”
“Actually,” I said, looking over at Marci, “that salad looks really good. Could I just get one of those instead?”
“Of course, sir. Would you like it with grilled chicken?”
“No thanks,” I said. “No meat at all.”
14
The homecoming dance was held in city hall, in a large, open room with a marble floor circled by rows of ornate wooden pillars. It was probably too small for a crowd this size, but it was really the only choice—whenever the city needed a bigger venue than city hall they used the gym at Clayton High, and nobody wanted to hold the dance there. Instead the students crammed into this small space, jumping and pulsing in time to the music, and retreating to the cool shadows outside whenever the room grew too full, too noisy, or too hot.
