‘You’re a hero,’ Mom repeated, squeezing my hand and kissing my forehead. ‘You saved six lives in that house! Six! Sure, one of them was a creep,’ she looked at Lauren, ‘but that’s what makes it so good. “Love thine enemies”.’
Lauren smiled at me. ‘And don’t worry about Curt,’ she said. ‘We are so broken up.’
‘Six lives,’ Mom repeated.
But I had been trying to save seven.
I gave my statement several times, leaving out the part about Forman being a demon. Instead I told them everything I knew about Forman’s history of torture, focusing specifically on the house - the chains in the basement, the pit in the floor, the torture room upstairs, and even the reinforced walls in the closet. The other prisoners gave corroborating statements, and as the police cross-referenced our testimonies - and as they discovered the identities of the other women Forman had killed - they began to piece together a strong sense of where and how he worked. They ended up linking him, in the end, to several dozen missing persons cases, all women, and postulated that he had kept it all hidden thanks to his position in the FBI. If they had known what I knew - that Forman was thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years old - they would have realised that the few dozen crimes they’d linked him to were only a fraction of his life’s work. He’d been torturing and killing for centuries.
But now he was gone.
I was released the next day, from both the hospital and from police custody. Curt’s accusations that I was Forman’s accomplice were thrown out almost immediately, based on a lack of proof. Even more redeeming were the eye-witness accounts from the women in the basement, who explained very convincingly that not only did Forman kill Radha, but that I had nearly been killed as well, trying to stop him. It all added up to a very heroic depiction of John the Brave, the dragonslayer, who ventured into the foul beast’s darkest dungeon and rescued not one but five princesses.
A story like that would normally make the news - it would probably make national news - but I was lucky. Jess and Carly’s story about being held in another house, where a different person had come to feed them, made the police concerned that Forman’s true accomplice, whoever he was, would come looking for revenge. They kept my name out of the story almost completely, and since I’d only been gone for forty-eight hours, very few people knew I’d been missing at all.
I was a hero, but nobody knew about it.
‘Why can’t normal things ever happen here?’ asked Max, gazing out over the freeway. We were on the Route 12 bridge, leaning on the railing while cars sped past beneath us on the highway. He was tossing bits of gravel onto the tops of the semis.
‘Plenty of normal things happen here,’ I said. ‘We get up, we eat breakfast, we have school, we have jobs. We watch TV.’
‘No, I don’t mean normal boring things, I mean normal cool things.’
‘How can they be normal and cool at the same time?’ I asked.
‘Because cool things happen all the time,’ he said. ‘Cool is normal everywhere but here. Maybe someone could film a movie here, or open up a new comic shop, or we could finally get a good restaurant in town. I don’t know, maybe a movie star could visit or something.’
‘They’re probably at the Shoe Museum all the time,’ I said. ‘You just never hang out in the kinds of places movie stars visit, unless you’re expecting Bruce Willis to come throw rocks off the bridge with us.’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ said Max, ‘you’re missing the point. All I’m saying is that everything here is either boring or somebody dies. There’s either nothing going on, or there’s a dead body in the lake. Neither one is cool. I just want something to be excited about, for once.’
There was a gap in the traffic below us, and I tossed a rock onto the road. A moment later a truck zoomed by and clipped it with a tyre, shooting the rock into the dead grass off the side of the highway. The truck, never even noticing, continued down the road.
‘I held Brooke’s hand,’ I said.
‘Shut up.’
‘No, really.’
Max looked at me, his face unreadable.
‘Dude,’ he said. ‘You kissed her yet?’
‘I think I would have led with that if I had.’
‘So kiss her already,’ said Max. ‘Are you an idiot? And then cop a feel while you’re at it, because wow. She has got a butt I would love to get my hands on.’
I shook my head. ‘How is it possible that an upstanding guy like you doesn’t have a girlfriend?’
‘The ladies love Max,’ said Max, turning back to the railing. ‘They just . . . you know.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know.’
Two days after I left the hospital, Brooke met me outside when I was walking to my car. It was nearly nine o’clock at night, and dark. It was the first time I’d seen her since Forman’s house.
‘Hey,’ she said. She was holding something in her hands.
‘Hey.’
And then she said nothing, for a long time, and I wasn’t sure what to do. She was watching me, her mouth crooked, her eyes narrow and set. Her jaw kept moving, as if she was about to talk, and after nearly a minute she did.
‘I don’t know what happened in that house,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why he took me, or why he took you, or why that guy burned it down, or anything. I know there’s reasons, because there’s got to be reasons, but I just don’t think I want to know what they are. I think that maybe you . . .’ She stopped again. She looked away.
There were a lot of things I couldn’t read from people, emotionally speaking, but ‘I’m leaving you,’ was one I knew pretty well.
‘You’re a really brave guy,’ she said. ‘And you’re really nice.’ She paused. ‘I just don’t want to remember what happened in there. I don’t want it to be a part of my life.’
It was just like my mom and the demon - she knew it had happened, but she didn’t want to confront it. Brooke was the one person in the world I could share this with, and she was walking away from it. And from me.
I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t. Sometimes you can’t talk because there’s nothing to say, and sometimes there’s just too much.
‘Here,’ she said, holding out something small and black. I took it, being careful our fingers didn’t touch. It was a cellphone. ‘It’s Agent Forman’s,’ she said. ‘I forgot I even had it until I found it in my jacket pocket this afternoon. The police are going to want it, I guess, but I don’t want to deal with it any more. Can you give it to them?’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
‘Thanks. And thanks again for getting me out of there alive. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t . . .’ Pause. ‘Well, I’ll see you around.’
‘Yeah.’
And then she walked away.
I was John the Brave, the dragonslayer, who saved the kingdom and didn’t get any glory; who braved the dungeon and didn’t get any treasure; who rescued five princesses and ended up alone. I was John the Brave.
I knew who I was.
The phone in my hands was better than treasure - it was a map of the underworld. I flipped it open and scanned through the contact list, seeing name after name - people from the FBI, and from Forman’s research network; doctors, psychologists, criminologists, and more. And interspersed throughout, buried in the middle under fake names I could only guess at, were the others. Demons. Crowley had been cut off, but Forman knew them all. If I could find the right numbers, then I could find them, too.
I stopped suddenly, scrolling through the list, my eyes catching on a name. There in the N’s, between NMHA and Norfolk Office was a single word: Nobody. In one of the phone calls I’d overheard, Forman had called one of the demons ‘Nobody’, but I hadn’t understood why. Apparently it was an actual name.
I dialled it.
A woman’s voice answered, small and weak. ‘Hello, Kanta,’ she said. Kanta must have been Forman’s other name, just like Crowley was Mkhai. ‘They’re saying interesting things about you on the news
,’ she said. ‘I wondered if you’d survived.’
‘He didn’t,’ I said. ‘I killed him.’
Silence.
‘I killed Mkhai, too,’ I said. ‘Tens of thousands of years, gone in the blink of an eye.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked the voice.
‘Because you’re next,’ I said. ‘I’m the demonslayer. Come and get me.’
Mr Monster
DAN WELLS
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Dan Wells, Mr. Monster
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