The door above us opened, and light flooded in from the kitchen. Forman’s silhouette came in, slowly coalescing into a real body as my eyes adjusted to the light.
‘You’re awake,’ he said. ‘Excellent.’ He came down towards me quickly, neither menacing nor cautious. I was too weak to attack him, even if I wanted to - too groggy from the drugs and my two days of hunger. ‘There’s something I think you should know,’ he said, dropping down on one knee to reach my handcuffs. ‘You’re now officially wanted for the murder of Radha Behar.’
‘I didn’t touch her,’ I said.
‘Early forensic evidence suggests that you did,’ said Forman, ‘including your hair mixed with hers, and your shoes found nearby. But don’t worry - I’m practically in charge of the investigation, and it would be very easy for me to steer it in another direction. Assuming, of course, that you meet with my requirements.’
‘You want to know about Mkhai.’
‘I’ve given you two chances,’ he said, undoing my handcuffs, ‘and you’ve thrown them away. This is your third. Up we go.’
I rubbed my wrist and struggled to my feet. ‘What two chances?’
‘Two chances to be yourself. To live the life you deserve. You’re not one of them,’ he said, gesturing at the four terrified women. ‘You’re not a toy; you’re not a victim cowering in a corner. You’re a warrior, like the legends of old. You killed a god, John. Don’t you want to take his place?’
He took me by the arm and pulled me towards the stairs. I followed unsteadily, trying not to lean on him for balance. My legs didn’t want to respond, and my head felt light.
‘I’m not like you,’ I mumbled.
‘No one is,’ said Forman, shoving me forward onto the stairs. I grabbed the handrail and tried to climb. ‘There was no one like Mkhai, either,’ he said, ‘and there’s no one like you. You’re a very special boy. Now hurry the hell up.’
I climbed the stairs and paused in the kitchen, willing my legs to wake up while Forman locked the door behind us. I was free, but I was too weak to do anything; even when he was completely incapacitated, he’d been able to feel my intentions and protect himself. Did that mean I could only attack him unintentionally? Could I plan some kind of accident?
A cellphone rang, and Forman reached into his pocket. He glanced at the number, smiled, and answered. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘how nice of you to call.’ Pause. ‘No, still nothing. We’re about to find out though.’ He looked at me. ‘He’s stronger than we thought, and weaker. I can’t wait for you to meet him.’ Pause. ‘Yes, I told you, I’ll call you as soon as I know. Be patient.’ Pause. ‘Bye.’ He put the phone away and pointed towards the hall. ‘After you.’
I started down the hall, keeping a hand on the wall to steady myself. I wondered if there were any more people in the walls, buried and sealed off for ever.
‘You had Radha in chains, and I gave you my knife - but you refused to hurt her. She liked it, you know - being hurt. She always had a sense of satisfaction when we finished.’
‘That’s because she’d survived,’ I said.
‘And you mortals appreciate the chance to survive,’ he went on. ‘Your life is defined by death, and each time you face it you grow stronger. You learn more, and feel more. It sounds stupid to say it like this, but not dying makes you more alive.’
‘What defines you demons?’ I asked.
‘The things we lack.’
We passed his bedroom, on our way to the torture room. My legs were growing firmer again; blood was flowing more strongly and my balance was better.
I wondered who was in the room - it had to be someone I knew. Who would he force me to torture? My mother? My sister? Brooke?
‘Your second chance came when she was in the pit,’ said Forman, ‘and that should have been an easy one: you didn’t have to hurt her directly or even see her face, just touch the wires to the chain. It would have been a kindness, in fact, because it would have saved her life. But still you did nothing.’
‘I don’t want to hurt people,’ I insisted.
‘That’s what you keep saying,’ said Forman, ‘but it didn’t stop you from hurting Mkhai, and it didn’t stop you from attacking me in the basement. We all have our tastes, of course, and I just had to learn that I wasn’t addressing yours properly. You didn’t hurt Radha because she was innocent, and you only hurt the wicked. So, I brought you somebody wicked.’
We turned into the torture room and there he was: Curt, my sister’s attacker, bound and gagged and completely at my mercy.
He was awake; his eyes were wide, and his mouth was sealed tight with a thick wrap of duct tape. His feet were securely fastened to the floor by thick lengths of chain run through the heavy floor supports. His hands were bound at the wrists by ropes that ran up and into the holes in the ceiling, but where Stephanie had been hanging loosely, Curt had somehow been pulled tight. He was spreadeagled, held firmly in place.
Curt stared at me with a scared expression that said he didn’t know what to think. I’d been missing for almost two days, and he was sure to have heard about it, and I definitely looked like a prisoner - I was covered in dried muck from the pit, with burn marks on my shirt and vomit crusted on my clothes, and I could barely walk. It wasn’t hard to guess that I was a prisoner and a victim. And yet I was here, unbound, and Forman was treating me so graciously. Like an equal. If Curt had heard any of what Forman had said in the hall, he’d be even more confused.
And more terrified.
‘There he is,’ said Forman. ‘You learn a lot of things working in a police station - like how a certain Mrs Cleaver calls every fifteen minutes to rant about her daughter’s abusive boyfriend: “Arrest him. Lock him up. Kill him”. But there’s not a lot the law can do in a case like this, is there?’ He walked over to the dresser and began sifting through the tools. ‘Women in abusive relationships are, by nature, accepting of abuse, and poor little Lauren was too browbeaten to accuse her browbeater formally. She actually told the paramedics she’d fallen out of bed, if you can you believe it.’ He held up a flathead screwdriver, examined the tip, and put it back down. ‘They didn’t believe it either, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it. If the victim says there was no abuse, the law says there was no abuse. The law is helpless.’ He turned and held up an old, dirty scalpel. ‘But you’re not.’
He stepped towards me and offered the scalpel. ‘This is what you want, right? You’re a punishing angel. You won’t hurt anyone, for any reason, unless they deserve it - and who deserves it more than Curt? You saw what he did to your sister. And don’t think he stopped there - he got away with it, after all, so what’s to prevent him from doing it again? He can slap her and punch her and beat her until she falls unconscious, and he’ll always get away with it. Nothing can stop him.’
He placed the scalpel in my hand. ‘Nothing but you.’
Curt was shaking his head wildly, tears filling his eyes, but I didn’t see him as a victim; all I saw was Lauren’s face, red and purple and black. She had a cut on her cheekbone, right where I did; I reached up and touched my face, feeling the scab. I deserved mine, but Lauren had been completely innocent. Curt had beaten her in cold blood.
I stepped towards him. Wasn’t this the same decision I’d made with Mr Crowley? To stop a bad man from hurting the innocent? I’d tried to tell the cops, and they’d ended up dead. Crowley had been a situation the law couldn’t deal with; it was me or nobody. I’d stopped him because nobody else could, and now that was true again. The law was helpless - the only plan the police had was to sit and wait while he beat her more, again and again, until at last she finally decided to accuse him. Could I, in good conscience, allow that to happen? Not when I could stop it, for ever, right here and now.
I stepped forward.
But no, this was different. Crowley was a killer - a supernatural killer - and killing him was the only way to stop him. He was killing more than once a week by the end - how many more people would be dead now,
six months later, if I hadn’t stepped in? But Curt was not a killer, and his punishment could not be death. It was too much. I couldn’t do it.
I stepped back.
But . . . I could hurt him. It didn’t need to end in death. I’d hurt Mrs Crowley, after all, and she was far more innocent than Curt was. I took two more steps forward, close enough to smell his sweat and hear his ragged breathing. He had caused pain, so his punishment should be pain. It made sense. It was fair. A bruise for a bruise.
But then what?
I turned suddenly and walked to the window; it was evening, and the sky through the thick pine trees was a deep, royal blue. What would happen after I hurt Curt? We couldn’t just let him go, or he’d tell people what I’d done. We could keep him here, chained in the dungeon; he deserved prison, and we could give it to him. But for ever?
I looked back at Curt. His eyes were closed; maybe he was praying, or maybe he was simply too afraid to look. He was a rude, arrogant monster; he bullied everyone he met, he insulted the woman who loved him, and when things came to a head he beat her powerfully and mercilessly. He ruined lives, as surely as Crowley did; was I a hypocrite to stop Crowley and not Curt? But if Curt was fair game, why stop there? Where could I draw the line? And if no line made sense, why draw a line at all?
And below it all, behind every other reason, lurked the inescapable truth that I wanted to do it. I wanted to hurt him, to make him bleed, to make him scream, to make him lie still in the perfect peace of death.
I turned towards Curt again, but something caught my eye - a tiny movement on the far edge of the room, no bigger than the wings of a moth. I looked and saw two eyes staring back at me, trapped and mute. Nobody knew who she was, maybe not even Forman. She blinked - the only form of communication she had.
Where was she from? What did she like, and what did she dislike? What did she love and hate? Who was she?
Who was I?
My name is John Cleaver. I live in Clayton County, in a mortuary on the edge of town. I have a mother and a sister and an aunt. I’m sixteen years old. I like reading, cooking, and a girl named Brooke. I want to do what’s right, no matter what. I want to be a good person.
But that was only half of me.
My name is Mr Monster. I show dozens of warning signs for serial-killer behaviour, and I fantasise about violence and death. I’m more comfortable around corpses than people. I killed a demon, and every day I feel the need to kill again, like a bottomless pit in the centre of my soul.
Each half of me was a contradiction of the other, but each half was true. If I chose one I would be denying the other, and in doing so I would be denying myself. Was there a real me, somewhere in the middle?
There was another me - a me that I’d never seen for myself, only glimpsed through the eyes of others. It wasn’t John the loser, or John the creep, or John the psycho. It was John the hero. Talking to Brooke and her friends, walking around at the bonfire, looking at the eyes of the people I passed and seeing them look back with respect - I’d really felt like a hero. I wanted to feel that way again.
And being a hero meant saving Curt, no matter how much I hated him. It meant saving all of the prisoners, no matter how hard it became. It meant stopping the villain - Forman - even if I had to break my rules to do it. Even if I had to hurt him, and even if I had to kill him.
But how could I kill him when I didn’t know how he worked? What was it he had said about himself, and about the other demons? ‘They define themselves by the things they lack.’
So what did he lack?
He lacked emotions: he didn’t have any of his own, so he stole them from others. He was a blank; a giant hole with nothing to fill it. Just like a serial killer, he had a need that demanded to be fed, and he had built his life around feeding it at the expense of everything else.
Mkhai was also defined by what he didn’t have. He lacked an identity of his own, so he stole the bodies of others, over and over, moving from place to place and identity to identity until . . . until he stopped. Until one day he became Mr Crowley, and he never switched bodies again. Something had changed in him, something profound, and on that day he ceased to be Mkhai. He stopped defining himself by what he lacked, and started defining himself by what he had.
So what did he have?
He had Mrs Crowley.
He had love.
I thought of him again, not as a demon but as the kind old man across the street. Love had pulled Mkhai away from his life of death and deception and into a life of near normality - a life that held so much less, but meant so much more. Forman didn’t understand it; I didn’t know if he could. And yet that’s what this entire thing was all about: Forman wanted to know what had happened to Mkhai. He didn’t really want me to hurt Curt, he was just trying to turn me onto his side and earn my trust. He wanted me to join him, at which point I would presumably tell him the secret he’d come to Clayton to discover.
He’d said before that love was weak and useless. Would he even understand when I told him? The demon Mkhai had almost beaten me because I didn’t understand love; now Forman had the same weakness, and I might be able to use it against him. A plan started to form in my mind, but I had to do it carefully. Even the slightest emotional warble could give me away.
‘You came to Clayton County searching for your friend,’ I said, turning to face Forman. ‘You said he’d disappeared forty years ago, and you didn’t know why. Well, I do. He did it for love.’
‘Don’t play with me,’ warned Forman.
‘Trust me,’ I said. ‘From one sociopath to another: if you don’t understand the reason for something, it’s always love.’
He considered me for a moment. What was he feeling from me? Did he know I had a plan? I wasn’t lying to him: everything I planned to tell him was true. Could he still sense a trick? Could he detect my nervousness through the miasma of nervous fear that already filled the house? I watched him, trying to feel as honest and helpful as possible.
‘All right then,’ he said. ‘Try me.’
‘Food first,’ I said. ‘I haven’t eaten in two days.’
He glanced at Curt, whose wild eyes were watching us over his duct-tape gag. I set the knife down on the dresser.
‘There’ll be time for him later,’ I said.
Forman nodded, and gestured behind him to the hallway. ‘In the kitchen, then. Let’s hear what you have to say.’
Chapter 20
‘Have a seat,’ said Forman, pointing at the kitchen table, I sat down and he went to the fridge, opening it up to reveal not a collection of heads and arms but the mundane spread of a poorly-stocked bachelor: grapefruit juice, a bottle of mustard, half a loaf of bread, and a Styrofoam box of restaurant leftovers. In the back there was half-full jar of Pickle Juice. I looked longingly at the restaurant box, but Forman pulled out the bread bag and tossed it onto the table.
‘I don’t eat in a lot,’ he said. ‘I prefer to enjoy my meals, instead of feeling how sad the toys are the whole time.’
I opened the bag and pulled out a piece of hard brown bread, forcing myself to eat it slowly; I didn’t want to gobble too fast and get sick. It tasted delicious, but I was sure that was mostly a result of my hunger.
Forman leaned against the counter with his arms folded, watching me eat. After a few bites he spoke again.
‘So I guess you know a lot more about Mkhai than you let on,’ he said. He was acting odd, like he should have been angry but wasn’t, but then I remembered that he wouldn’t be angry unless I was. Right now we were calm, and cautious, and ready.
He was a blank page, and it was time to write on him. I wanted him to trust me, so I concentrated on trusting him - not pretending to, since that was sure not to work, but trying instead to actually trust him, to rely on him, to feel like we were in this together. I found that if I focused on him it didn’t work; I understood how he thought, but I couldn’t identify with him. I couldn’t empathise. Instead I focused on my own reaction to him and to the sit
uation, trying to feel comfortable with the strictures that Forman had placed on our relationship. I put myself at ease and tried to treat him the way I treated my mom, or my friend Max.
‘You told me in the car,’ I said, ‘that you thought Mkhai might have taken Mr Crowley’s body right before he died, which makes a lot of sense because Crowley was never found. If Crowley had died on his own, there would have been a corpse, but if Crowley died after Mkhai had his body, it would have dissolved into sludge and disappeared.’
Forman nodded. ‘It seems you’re familiar with his methods.’
‘What you didn’t figure out,’ I continued, ‘is that Mkhai had been Crowley for the entire forty years when you couldn’t find him.’