The demon stood watching for several moments more before turning away to continue down the road. He read later that if the boy’s body hadn’t been found in front of his house, the authorities would have needed dental records to identify him. His family couldn’t recognize him from what was left of his face. The dog, which one of the neighbors described as the boy’s best friend, was quarantined for the mandatory ten days to determine if it had rabies and then put down.
Junior Elway pulled the Jeep Cherokee against the curb in front of the dilapidated apartment complex situated on Avenue L and West Third where Derry Howe rented a small, one-bedroom unit. They talked for a moment while the demon listened, agreeing to meet at Scrubby’s for pizza and beer that evening. Both were divorced, on the downside of forty, and convinced that a lot of women were missing a good bet. Derry Howe climbed out of the Jeep, and the demon climbed out with him. Together they went up the walk as Junior Elway drove off.
Inside the apartment, the window fan was rattling and buzzing as it fought to withstand the heat. It was not adequate to the task, and the air in the apartment was close and warm. Derry Howe walked to the refrigerator, pulled out a can of Bud, walked back to the living room, and flopped down on the sofa. He was supposed to be on picket duty at the number-three plant, but he had begged off the night before by claiming that his back was acting up. His union supervisor had probably known he was lying, but had chosen to let it slide. Derry was encouraged. Already he was wondering if he could pull the same scam for Sunday’s shift.
The demon sat in the rocker that had belonged to Derry Howe’s grandmother before she died, the one his mother had inherited and in turn passed on to him when he was married and she still had hopes for him. Now no one had any hopes for Derry Howe. Two tours in Vietnam followed by his failed marriage to a girl some thought would change him, a dozen arrests on various charges, some jail time served at the county lockup, and twenty years at MidCon with only one promotion and a jacket full of reprimands had pretty much settled the matter. The road that marked the course of his life had straightened and narrowed, and all that remained to be determined was how far it would run and how many more breakdowns he would suffer along the way.
It had not proved difficult for the demon to find Derry Howe. Really, there were so many like him that it scarcely took any effort at all. The demon had found him on the second day of his arrival in Hopewell, just by visiting the coffee shops and bars, just by listening to what the people of the town had to say. He had moved in with Howe right away, making himself an indispensable presence in the other’s life, insinuating himself into the other’s thoughts, twisting Derry’s mind until he had begun to think and talk in the ways that were necessary. Hardly a challenge, but definitely a requirement if the demon’s plans were to succeed. He was Derry Howe’s shadow now, his conscience, his sounding board, his devil’s advocate. His own, personal demon. And Derry Howe, in turn, was his creature.
The demon watched Howe finish his beer, struggle up in the stale air of the apartment, walk to the kitchen, and fish through the cluttered refrigerator for another. The demon waited patiently. The demon’s life was wedded to his cause, and his cause required great patience. He had sacrificed everything to become what he was, but he knew from his transformation at the hands of the Void that sacrifice was required. After he had embraced the Void he had concealed himself until his conscience had rotted and fallen away and left him free. His name had been lost. His history had faded. His humanity had dissipated and turned to dust. All that he had been had disappeared with the change, so that now he was reborn into his present life and made over into his higher form. It had been hard in the beginning, and once, in a moment of great weakness and despair, he had even thought to reject what he had so readily embraced. But in the end reason had prevailed, and he had forsaken all.
Now it was the cause that drove him, that fed him, that gave him his purpose in life. The cause was everything, and the Void defined the cause as need required. For now, for this brief moment in time, the cause was the destruction of this town and its inhabitants. It was the release of the feeders that lurked in the caves beneath Sinnissippi Park. It was the subversion of Derry Howe. It was the infusion of chaos and madness into the sheltered world of Hopewell.
And it was one thing more, the thing that mattered most.
Derry Howe returned to the sofa and seated himself with a grunt, sipping at his beer. He looked at the demon, seeing him clearly for the first time because the demon was ready now to talk.
“We got to do something, bud,” Derry Howe intoned solemnly, nodding to emphasize the importance of his pronouncement. “We got to stop those suckers before they break us.”
The demon nodded in response. “If union men cross the picket line and return to work, the strike is finished.”
“Can’t let them do that.” Howe worked his big hands around the beer bottle, twisting slowly. “Damn traitors, anyway! What the hell they think they’re doing, selling out the rest of us!”
“What to do?” mused the demon.
“Shoot a few, by God! That’ll show them we mean business!”
The demon considered the prospect. “But that might not stop the others from going back to work. And you would go to jail. You wouldn’t be of any use then, would you?”
Derry Howe frowned. He took a long drink out of the bottle. “So what’s the answer, bud? We have to do something.”
“Think about it like this,” suggested the demon, having already done so long ago. “The company plans to reopen the fourteen-inch using company men to fill the skill jobs and scabs to fill the gaps. If they can open one plant and bring back a few of the union men, they can work at opening the others as well. It will snowball on you, if they can just get one mill up and running.”
Howe nodded, his face flushed and intense. “Yeah, so?”
The demon smiled, drawing him in. “So, what happens if the company can’t open the number-three plant? What happens if they can’t get the fourteen-inch up and running?”
Derry Howe stared at him wordlessly, thinking it through.
The demon gave him a hand. “What happens if it becomes clear to everyone that it’s dangerous to cross the picket line and work in the mills? What happens, Derry?”
“Yeah, right.” A light came on somewhere behind Derry Howe’s flat eyes. “No one crosses the line and the strike continues and the company has to give in. Yeah, I get it. But why wouldn’t they start up the fourteen-inch? All they need’s the workers. Unless …”
The demon spoke the words for him, in his own voice, almost as if in his own mind. “Unless there is an accident.”
“An accident,” breathed Derry Howe. Excitement lit his rawboned features. “A really bad accident.”
“It happens sometimes,” said the demon.
“Yeah, it does, doesn’t it? An accident. Maybe someone even gets killed. Yeah.”
“Think about it,” said the demon. “Something will come to you.”
Derry Howe was smiling, his mind racing. He drank his beer and mulled over the possibilities the demon’s words had suggested to him. It would take little effort from here. A few more nudges. One good push in the right direction. Howe had been a demolitions man in Vietnam. It wouldn’t take much for him to figure out how to use that knowledge here. It wouldn’t even take courage. It required stupidity and blind conviction, and Derry Howe had plenty of both. That was why the demon had picked him.
The demon leaned back in the rocker and looked away, suddenly bored. What happened with Derry Howe was of such little importance. He was just another match waiting to be struck. Perhaps he would catch fire. You never knew. The demon had learned a long time ago that an explosion resulted most often from an accumulation of sparks. It was a lesson that had served him well. Derry Howe was one of several sparks the demon would strike over the next three days. Some were bound to catch fire; some might even explode. But, in the final analysis, they were all just diversions intended to draw attention aw
ay from the demon’s real purpose in coming to this tiny, insignificant Midwestern town. If things went the way he intended—and he had every reason to think they would—he would be gone before anyone had any idea at all of his interest in the girl.
And by then, of course, it would be too late to save her.
CHAPTER 5
Nest Freemark went down the back steps two at a time, letting the screen door slam shut behind her. She winced at the sound, belatedly remembering how much it irritated Gran. She always forgot to catch the door. She didn’t know why, she just did. She skipped off the gravel walk and onto the lawn, heading across the yard for the park. Mr. Scratch lay stretched out in the shade beneath the closest oak, a white and orange tom, his fluffy sides rising and falling with each labored breath. He was thirteen or fourteen, and he slept most of the time now, dreaming his cat dreams. He didn’t even look up at her as she passed, his eyes closed, his ragged ears and scarred face a worn mask of contentment. He had long ago forfeited his mouser duties to the younger and sprier Miss Minx, who, as usual, was nowhere to be seen. Nest smiled at the old cat as she passed. Not for him the trials and tribulations of dealing with the feeders of Sinnissippi Park.
Nest had always known about the feeders. Or at least for as long as she could remember. Even when she hadn’t known what they were, she had known they were there. She would catch glimpses of them sometimes, small movements seen out of the corner of one eye, bits and pieces of shadow that didn’t quite fit in with their surroundings. She was very small then and not allowed out of the house alone, so she would stand at the windows at twilight, when the feeders were most likely to reveal themselves, and keep watch.
Sometimes her grandmother would take her for walks in the stroller in the cool of the evening, following the dark ribbon of the roadway as it wound through the park, and she would see them then as well. She would point, her eyes shifting to find her grandmother, her child’s face solemn and inquisitive, and her grandmother would nod and say, “Yes, I see them. But you don’t have to worry, Nest. They won’t bother you.”
Nor had they, although Nest had never really worried about it much back then. Not knowing what the feeders were, she simply assumed they were like the other creatures that lived in the park—the birds, squirrels, mice, chipmunks, deer, and what have you. Her grandmother never said anything about the feeders, never offered any explanation for them, never even seemed to pay them much attention. When Nest would point, she would always say the same thing and then let the matter drop. Several times Nest mentioned the feeders to her grandfather, but he just stared at her, glanced at her grandmother, and then smiled his most indulgent smile.
“He can’t see them,” her grandmother told her finally. “There’s no point talking about it with him, Nest. He just doesn’t see them.”
“Why doesn’t he?” she had asked, mystified.
“Because most people don’t. Most people don’t even know they exist. Only a lucky few can see them.” She leaned close and touched the tip of Nest’s small nose. “You and me, we can. But not Robert. Not your grandfather. He can’t see them at all.”
She hadn’t said why that was. Her explanations were always like that, spare and laconic. She hadn’t time for a lot of words, except when she was reading, which she did a lot. On her feet she was all movement and little talk, losing herself in her household tasks or her gardening or her walks in the park. That was then, of course. It wasn’t the same anymore, because now Gran was older and drank more and didn’t move around much at all. Small, gnarled, and gray, she sat at the kitchen table smoking her cigarettes and drinking her vodka and orange juice until noon and, afterward, her bourbon on the rocks until dusk. She still didn’t say much, even when she could have, keeping what she knew to herself, keeping her explanations and her secrets carefully tucked away somewhere deep inside.
She told Nest early on not to talk about the feeders. She was quite emphatic about it. She did so about the same time she told the little girl that only the two of them could see the feeders, so there wasn’t any point in discussing them with her grandfather. Or with anybody else, she amended soon after, apparently concerned that the increasingly talkative child might think to do so.
“It will just make people wonder about you,” she declared. “It will make them think you are a bit strange. Because you can see the feeders and they can’t. Think of the feeders as a secret that only you and I know about. Can you do that, Nest?”
Pretty much, she found she could. But the lack of a more thorough explanation on the matter was troubling and frustrating, and eventually Nest tested her grandmother’s theory about other people’s attitudes on a couple of her friends. The results were exactly as her grandmother had predicted. Her friends first teased her and then ran to their parents with the tale. Their parents called her grandmother, and her grandmother was forced to allay their concerns with an overly convoluted explanation centered around the effects of fairy tales and make-believe on a child’s imagination. Nest was very thoroughly dressed down. She was made to go back to her friends and their parents and to apologize for scaring them. She was five years old when that happened. It was the last time she told anyone about the feeders.
Of course, that was just the first of a number of secrets she learned to conceal about the creatures who lived in the park. Don’t talk about the feeders, her grandmother had warned, and in the end she did not. But there were a lot of other things she couldn’t talk about either, and for a while it seemed there was something new every time she turned around.
“Do you think the feeders would ever hurt me, Gran?” she asked once, disturbed by something she had seen in one of her picture books that reminded her of the furtiveness of their movements in the shadows of summer twilight and the dismal gloom of midday winter. “If they had the chance, I mean?”
They were alone, sitting at the kitchen table playing dominoes on a cold midwinter Sunday, her grandfather ensconced in his den, listening to a debate over foreign aid.
Her grandmother looked up at her, her bright, darkly luminescent bird’s eyes fixed and staring. “If they had the chance, yes. But that will never happen.”
Nest frowned. “Why not?”
“Because you are my granddaughter.”
Nest frowned some more. “What difference does that make?”
“All the difference” was the reply. “You and I have magic, Nest. Didn’t you know?”
“Magic?” Nest had breathed the word in disbelief. “Why? Why do we have magic, Gran?”
Her grandmother smiled secretively. “We just do, child. But you can’t tell anyone. You have to keep it to yourself.”
“Why?”
“You know why. Now, go on, it’s your turn, make your play. Don’t talk about it anymore.”
That was the end of the matter as far as her grandmother was concerned, and she didn’t mention it again. Nest tried to bring it up once or twice, but her grandmother always made light of the matter, as if having magic was nothing, as if it were the same as being brown-eyed or right-handed. She never explained what she meant by it, and she never provided any evidence that it was so. Nest thought she was making it up, the same way she made up fairy tales now and then to amuse the little girl. She was doing it to keep Nest from worrying about the feeders. Magic, indeed, Nest would think, then point her fingers at the wall and try unsuccessfully to make something happen.
But then she discovered Wraith, and the subject of magic suddenly took on a whole new meaning. It was when she was still five, shortly after her attempt at telling her friends about the feeders and almost a year before she met Pick. She was playing in her backyard on the swing set, pretending at flying as she rose and fell at the end of the creaking chains, comfortably settled in the cradle of the broad canvas strap. It was a late-spring day, the air cool yet with winter’s fading breath, the grass new and dappled with jack-in-the-pulpit and bleeding heart, the leaves on the oaks and elms beginning to bud. Heavy clouds scudded across the Midwest skies, bringin
g rain out of the western plains, and the sunlight was pale and thin. Her grandparents were busy inside, and since she was forbidden to leave the yard without them and had never done so before, there was no reason for them to believe she would do so now.
But she did. She got down out of the swing and walked to the end of the yard where the hedgerow was still thin with new growth, slipped through a gap in the intertwined limbs, and stepped onto forbidden ground. She didn’t know exactly what it was that prompted her to do so. It had something to do with thinking about the feeders, with picturing them as they appeared and faded in shadowy patches along the fringes of her yard. She wondered about them constantly, and on this day she simply decided to have a look. Did they conceal themselves on the other side of the hedge, just beyond her view? Did they burrow into the ground like moles? What did they do back there where she couldn’t see? Why, her inquisitive five-year-old mind demanded, shouldn’t she try to find out?
So there she was, standing at the edge of the park, staring out across the broad, flat, grassy expanse of ball diamonds and picnic grounds to where the bluffs rose south and the wooded stretches began east, a pioneer set to explore a wondrous new world. Not that day, perhaps, for she knew she would not be going far on her first try. But soon, she promised herself. Soon.
Her eyes shifted then, and she became aware of the feeders. They were crouched within a copse of heavy brush that screened the Peterson backyard some fifty feet away, watching her. She saw them as you would a gathering of shadows on a gray day, indistinct and nebulous. She caught a glimpse of their flat, yellow eyes shining out of the darkness like a cat’s. She stood where she was, looking back, trying to see them more clearly, trying to determine better what they were. She stared intently, losing track of time as she did so, forgetting where she was and what she was about, mesmerized.