‘Check this out,’ he said, standing up and opening a thick cardboard folder. Inside were several comic books, carefully sealed in plastic, and he gingerly took one out and handed it to me. ‘This is a limited edition,’ he said. ‘Conventiononly Green Lantern, issue number zero - it’s even got a foil stamp in the corner. It’s numbered.’
‘Why do you bring these to school?’ I asked, but I knew the answer. Bragging about his expensive comics was the whole reason Max brought them. They weren’ t any good to him if they stayed at home in a locked drawer where no one could see how cool he was for owning them.
‘What this?’ asked Rob Anders, stopping next to us. I sighed. Here we go again. This happened almost every day: Rob would mock Max, I’d mock Rob, he’d threaten me, and we’d go to class. Sometimes I wondered if I bugged him on purpose just to feel the thrill of danger again - to feel just a taste of the driving terror I’d felt over the winter. But Rob was not a killer, and he was definitely not a demon - his threats were thin and hollow. He was sixteen years old, for crying out loud. What was he going to do?
‘Good morning, Rob,’ I said. ‘It’s always great to see you.’
Mr Monster desperately wanted to stab him.
‘I wasn’t talking to you, freak,’ said Rob. ‘I was talking to your boyfriend.’
‘It’s a comic book worth more than anything you own,’ said Max, taking it back protectively. Max always knew exactly what not to say.
‘Let me see,’ said Rob, and shot out his hand to grab the comic book. Max was at least smart enough not to fight over it, and let go immediately.
‘Hold it carefully,’ said Max. ‘Don’t crease it.’
‘The Green Lantern,’ said Rob, holding it up in front of him. His voice was different now - more deliberate than normal, and a little more dramatic. I’d learned through experience that a voice like that meant the speaker was mocking something. ‘Is this who you dream about at night, Max? The big, dreamy Green Lantern swooping down into your bedroom?’
‘Is homosexuality really all you talk about?’ I asked. I knew I shouldn’t antagonise him, but Rob never did anything to me, just to Max. I think he was still scared of me after the Halloween incident.
‘I only talk about gays around gaywads like you,’ he said, flexing the comic and its cardboard support.
‘Please don’t bend it,’ said Max.
‘Or what?’ asked Rob with a smile. ‘Your Commando Dad’s gonna beat me up?’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Did you actually just make fun of his dead father?’
‘Shut up,’ said Rob.
‘So you’re tough because somebody else killed his dad,’ I said. ‘That is a gutsy claim, Rob.’
‘And you’re a fag,’ he said, slapping the comic into my chest.
‘You do realise that highly vocal homophobes are far more likely to be gay?’
Rob sneered. ‘And you realise that you’re asking me, in very plain terms, to beat your face in - right here? You’re handing me a signed request form.’
Jus then, Chad Walker, one of Rob’s friends, walked up behind him.
‘It’s the freaks,’ said Chad. ‘How are you today, freaks?’
‘I’m wonderful, Chad,’ I said, not taking my eyes off of Rob. ‘Nice shirt, by the way.’
Rob stared back at me a moment, then dropped the comic book into my hands. ‘Take a good look, Chad,’ he said. ‘Living proof of how messed-up fatherless children can get. Two dysfunctional families in action.’
‘Having a father has obviously done wonders for you,’ I said.
Something finally snapped in Rob’s mind, and he shoved me in the chest. ‘You want to talk about dysfunctional, freak? You want to talk about cutting people open? They bring you into the police station almost once a week, John. When are they finally gonna arrest you for the psycho you are?’ He was shouting now, and other kids stopped to watch.
This was new - I’d never pushed him this far before.
‘You’re very observant,’ I said, struggling to find some kind of compliment. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, but Mr Monster was whispering something in my ear and it slipped out before I could stop it. ‘But think about it this way, Rob. You’re either wrong, in which case all these people staring at you think you’re an idiot, or you’re right, in which case you’re physically threatening a dangerous killer. It doesn’t seem very smart either way.’
‘Are you threatening me, freak?’
‘Listen, Rob,’ I said. ‘You’re not scary. I’ve been scared before - really, legitimately scared - and you’re just nowhere in the same league. Why do we have to go through this every day?’
‘You’re scared of getting caught,’ Rob sneered.
‘We’ve got to get to class,’ said Chad, pulling Rob away. His eyes said that he was worried - that Rob had gone too far, or that I had. Rob took a step back, flipped me off, then walked towards the school with Chad. I handed Max his comic book, and he studied it carefully for damage.
‘One of these days he’s going to hurt one,’ said Max, ‘and then I’m going to sue him for damages. My dad said these things are worth, like, hundreds of dollars.’
‘One of these days you’re going to leave your hundred-dollar comic books at home where he can’t hurt them,’ I said, angry at him for attracting Rob’s attention. I shouldn’t break any of my rules - not even the simple ones like this. A year ago, I would never have provoked Rob like that. Mr Monster was getting too strong.
Max slipped his comic back into his folder, and then into his bag.
‘See you at lunch,’ I said.
‘Shut up,’ said Max.
Chapter 3
School was, as predicted, uninteresting, and I spent my time thinking about Agent Forman. He was the FBI investigator assigned to the Clayton Killer case, and he’d been living in town since around Thanksgiving. Even after the rest of the FBI team left in March, Forman had hung around. He’d made us his pet case; he was one of the first people on the scene when we called to report finding Neblin’s body, and since that time he’d interviewed me half a dozen times at least. It had been a while since the last one though, and I’d assumed we were done. What did he want now?
I’d already told him everything I could possibly tell him, all except for three important things. First, there was the unspoken secret between Mom and me: that a demon had attacked us, that I had stabbed it, and that it had melted away into sludge right there in the back room of the house. We figured no one sane would believe us, and we didn’t want to be ‘the weirdos who say they saw a monster’, so we just cleaned it up and kept it quiet.
The second secret was something that Mom didn’t even know: the demon who attacked us was actually our elderly neighbour, Mr Bob Crowley. He’d been killing people and stealing their body parts to replenish his own body, which was falling apart. I’d stalked him for weeks trying to find a way to stop him, though when I finally did it I was minutes too late - maybe just seconds too late - to save Dr Neblin. Being partially to blame for your own therapist’s death is a tough thing to deal with, especially because you don’t have a therapist any more to help you through it. Sometimes irony just kicks you in the teeth like that.
The third secret was good old Mr Monster himself. Sure, Mr Monster had come in very handy when I’d needed to kill a demon, and when I’d needed to lure the demon by threatening its wife - but how do you explain that to the cops? ‘I stopped a supernatural force you don’t believe in, and of which I have no evidence, by calling on the power of my inner serial killer and beating an old lady until she passed out. You can thank me later.’ I may have some big mental problems, but I’m not crazy enough to tell that story to anybody.
So yes, I was keeping a lot of secrets from Agent Forman, but the story I did tell him made perfect sense without those secrets, and there was absolutely no evidence to link me to anything else. Crowley’s remains had never been found, so they couldn’t even prove he was dead, let alone that I had killed him. I
’d even destroyed the cellphones the victims and I had used that night, just in case. What did I possibly have to worry about?
After school I drove Brooke home - stealing three good looks at her face - and then I drove alone to the police station downtown, where Forman had set up an increasingly permanent office. The front receptionist, a blonde woman named Stephanie, greeted me with a smile.
‘Hello, John,’ she said as I came in. She looked about my sister’s age, in her early twenties, but my sister, Lauren, was usually more sombre and preoccupied. Stephanie was like a bubbling pot of cheerful.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Forman wanted to see me again?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at her list. ‘You’re right on time. Sign in and I’ll tell him you’re here.’
She handed me a clipboard with a piece of paper, and I wrote down my name and the time on the first empty line. The metal chain on the pen was broken, so I clamped it into the clipboard and set it back on the counter.
The Clayton County police station was small and sparse, really only designed to handle the occasional DUI (Driving Under the Influence) or domestic abuse call. Behind Stephanie was the large glass window of the Sheriff’s office, and inside I could see Sheriff Meier - a stern, weary man with a long, grey moustache - talking on the phone. The pane of glass was woven through with metal wires, like a chainlink fence, and there was a bullet-hole in the lower right section of it. I could never get anyone to tell me the story of how it got there.
‘Hello, John, thanks for coming in.’ Agent Clark Forman was a short man, balding, with glasses and a thin moustache. He reached out his hand and I shook it dully.
‘What is it this time?’ I asked, following him into the side room where he’d installed his makeshift office. His ‘desk’ was oversized and thick, and I assumed it had started life as a conference table. Under Forman’s care it had become covered with loose sheets, bulging folders, piles of photographs, and more. A map of the county hung on one wall, with each of the Clayton Killer’s probable crime scenes marked with a pin. It always pleased me to see that there was no pin out by the lake - that was one of Crowley’s victims I knew about that they hadn’t found yet. I couldn’t tell them about it without incriminating myself, of course, but it’s not like I was impeding an important investigation, or risking other lives. The killer they were looking for was already dead.
‘Have a seat,’ said Forman, pointing at one of the conference-room chairs shoved into the corner. He smiled as I pulled up the chair and sat, and gestured to his window. ‘Pretty nice weather out there today. Is your mother waiting outside?’
‘I drove myself.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘You’ve got a learner’s permit now. You turn sixteen in . . . two more months?’
‘One more.’
‘Right around the corner then,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry - you’ll have a real licence soon enough, and then you’ll be out there terrorising the streets.’
There was that phrase: ‘terrorising the streets’. I’d never heard that phrase in my whole life until I started taking Driver’s Ed, and now I’d heard it four times in the past month. It was one of those filler phrases, like ‘hot enough for ya?’ that don’t mean anything - they just spill out of people when they don’t take the time to think. I wondered how much of this conversation was going to be real thought, and how much was going to be parroted filler.
‘What do you need me for this time?’ I asked.
‘Just a routine follow-up,’ he said, then paused for a moment before reaching for a folder and pulling out a photograph. ‘Let me get your opinion on something first though, as long as you’re here. This will be on the news in a few hours, so it’s not proprietary information.’ He slid the photo across the table, and I could see even from a distance that it was the face of a corpse. The eyes were open, but cloudy and lifeless.
Another corpse. And that meant there was another killer. I felt a rush of excitement boiling in my chest and making me feel lightheaded. Another killer.
I looked up at Forman. ‘Here in Clayton?’
‘She’s not from here, no, but we did find her here. Just this morning.’
I leaned forward to look more closely, noting the pale skin, the slack jaw, the stringy hair. There was a fleck of something black on her cheek, and another on her forehead. Pieces of bark, perhaps.
‘She was underwater,’ I said, peering at the photo. ‘There’s sediment all over. You pulled her out of the lake.’
‘An irrigation canal,’ said Forman.
‘Do you know who she is?’
‘Not yet,’ said Forman, glancing down at the photo and then back up at me. ‘We really don’t know much at all, except that the body’s covered with small wounds: burns, abrasions, punctures - that kind of thing.’
‘Are there any pieces missing?’ I asked. The Clayton Killer had always taken something - a limb or an organ - from each of his victims. The police just thought he was a serial killer saving mementos of his victims, but in reality the demon was dying, and used the pieces of other people’ s bodies to replace his own failing organs. Mr Crowley was supposed to be dead - I had seen him die - but maybe he could regenerate his body even better than I thought.
Or maybe it was another demon?
‘Would you believe that missing organs were the first thing we looked for too?’ asked Forman, ‘The victim was nothing like the Clayton Killer’ s victims - the scene was different, the methods appeared to be different, but still . . .’ He shook his head, then showed me another photo of a blackened foot. ‘Same victim. That crater in the sole we think is an electrical wound, and probably the cause of death. So no, there’s really no similarities at all, but I think maybe we want this to be him, because that would mean there’s only one killer to deal with. But in the end, no - there was nothing missing. There’s no evidence to link this killing to any of this winter’s.’
I studied the photo, analysing the situation in my mind. After a moment I looked up at him. ‘You told me you wanted my opinion,’ I said. ‘If this is unrelated to the other killings, what does my opinion have to do with it?’
‘Just grasping at straws, really,’ said Forman, picking up the photo. ‘You’re the only witness who got a good look at the Clayton Killer and lived. You’ve already stated that you didn’t see a weapon, but in light of this new corpse I’m wondering if maybe you can remember seeing any tools - maybe a work belt.’
‘What kind of tools?’
‘Well,’ he said, putting the photo back down and pointing to the corpse’s shoulder, ‘for example, we think this wound was made by a screwdriver.’
I looked closely; the wound was small, barely a blip on the skin, but if they suspected a screwdriver it was probably a deep puncture. An image flashed through my head, more visceral than visual, and I imagined myself stabbing someone with a screwdriver, feeling it sink into the muscle and jar against the bone. Mr Monster smiled, but I kept my face blank and pushed the thought away.
Agent Forman was looking at me, waiting.
‘Nothing I can remember,’ I said. I knew for a fact that it wasn’t the same killer, but I had to play this carefully so I didn’t give myself away. ‘There was certainly nothing like a tool belt, but it was cold, and he had a big coat, like I said. He could have had anything in those pockets.’
‘Think hard,’ said Forman, watching me intently. ‘Try to remember everything, even things you might not think of as weapons: a box cutter, a pair of pliers, a cigarette lighter.’
I breathed deeply. Had this body really been wounded by all of those things? What kind of damage would they do, and how would you use them? Would they work in an attack, or would the victim have to be restrained first?
Forman was still watching me.
‘I don’t remember seeing anything like that,’ I said. ‘He was just a man in a coat; I didn’t even see the blade that he used to kill Dr Neblin.’
‘I understand,’ said Forman, taking back the photo
and sliding it into the folder. ‘It was a long shot, but I figured as long as I had you here I might as well ask.’
I wanted - I needed - to see this body up close. And even as open as Forman was being, there was no way he’d take me in to see it - but when they were done with their forensic autopsy, they’d probably send it to the mortuary for embalming. If they did, I could see it then.
What if the autopsy found a missing organ? Would that mean this was a new demon? Mr Crowley had killed because he was dying, and stealing organs helped keep him alive, but what if the new demon killed for other reasons? What if he just enjoyed it? My skin went cold at the thought.
But then, if he didn’t kill to stay alive, there would be no reason to steal organs at all. So it might be a demon even if nothing was missing.