I pulled out my bike, shoved my gloves into my pocket, and pushed off into the street. It was late, but it was August, and the night air was warm. It was almost time for school to start again, and I was beginning to get almost unbearably nervous. Where was Nobody? Why hadn’t she done anything yet?
Finding a killer was easy; aside from all the physical evidence he or she left behind, like fingerprints and footprints and DNA, there was a mountain of psychological evidence as well. Why did they kill this person instead of that one? Why did they do it here instead of there – and why now instead of earlier or later? What weapon did they use, if any, and
how
did they use it? Piece it all together and you had a psychological profile, like an Impressionist portrait, that could lead you straight to the killer. And if only Nobody would just come out and kill someone, I’d finally be able to track her down.
Yes, finding a killer was easy. Finding someone
before
they killed was almost impossible. And the worst part about that was the way it made me, John Wayne Cleaver, so much easier to find than the demon herself. I’d already killed two people – Bill Crowley and Clark Forman, both demons in human form – so if she knew where to look and took her time, Nobody could find me so much more easily than I could find her. Every day I grew more tense, more desperate. She could be around any corner.
I had to find her first.
I pedalled towards home, silently noting the houses I had already ‘cleared’.
That one’s having an affair. That one’s an alcoholic. That one turned out to have a massive gambling debt – Internet poker. As far as I know, she still hasn’t told her family that their savings are gone . . .
I’d started watching people, going through their trash, seeing who was out late and who was meeting whom and who had something to hide. I was shocked to find that it was almost everybody. It was like the whole town was festering in corruption, tearing itself apart before the demons had a chance to do it for them. Did people like that deserve to be saved? Did they even
want
to be saved? If they were really that self-destructive, then the demon was helping them more than I was, speeding them along in their goal of complete self-annihilation. An entire town, an entire world, slitting its vast communal wrist and bleeding out while the universe ignored us.
No.
I shook my head.
I can’t think like that. I have to keep going.
I have to find the demon, and I have to stop it.
The trouble is, that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Sherlock Holmes summed up the essence of investigation in a simple soundbite:
when you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
. Great advice, Sherlock, but you never had to track down a demon. I’ve seen two and talked to a third, and everything they did was impossible; I’ve watched them rip out their own organs, jump up after a dozen gunshot wounds, assimilate other people’s limbs, and even feel other people’s emotions. I’ve watched them steal identities and faces and entire lives. For all I knew, they could do literally anything: how was I supposed to figure them out? If Nobody would just freaking kill someone already, then I’d have something to go on.
I was almost home, but I stopped halfway down my block to stare up at a tall beige house. Brooke’s house. We’d gone on two dates, both cut short by the discovery of a dead body, and I’d really started to . . . like her? I didn’t know if that was even possible. I’d been diagnosed with sociopathy, a psychological disorder that meant, among other things, that I couldn’t feel empathy. I couldn’t connect to Brooke, not really. Did I enjoy her company? Yes. Did I dream about her at night? Yes again. But the dreams were not good, and my company was worse. All the better, then, that she’d started to avoid me. It wasn’t a break-up, because we’d never been ‘together’, but it was the platonic analogue of a break-up, whatever that’s called. There’s really no way to misinterpret ‘you scare me and I don’t want to see you any more’.
I suppose I could see her side of it. I came at her with a knife, after all, and that’s a hard thing to get over, even if I did have a good reason. Save a girl’s life by threatening it and she’ll have just enough time to say ‘thank you’ before she says ‘goodbye’.
Still, that didn’t stop me from slowing down when I passed her house, or from stopping – like tonight – and wondering what she was doing. So she’d left me; big deal. Everyone else had. The only person I really cared about was Nobody, and I was going to kill her.
Yay me.
I pushed off the kerb and rode two doors down, to the mortuary at the end of the street. It was a biggish building, with a chapel and some offices and an embalming room in the back. I lived upstairs with my mom in a little apartment; the mortuary was our family business, though we kept the part about me embalming people a secret. Bad for business. Would you let a sixteen year old embalm your grandmother? No? Neither would anyone else.
I tossed my bike against the wall in the parking lot and opened the side door. Inside was a little stairwell with two exits: a door at the bottom that led to the mortuary, and a door at the top that led into our apartment. The light bulb was burned out, and I trudged upstairs in the dark. The TV was on; that meant Mom was still up. I closed my eyes and rubbed them tiredly; I really didn’t want to talk to her. I stood in silence a moment, bracing myself, and then a phrase from the TV caught my ear:
‘
. . . found dead . . .
’
I smiled and threw open the door. There’d been another death. Nobody had finally killed someone! After sixty-three days, it was finally starting.
Day 1.
Chapter 2
The demon had killed a priest.
It was right there on the news – a pastor had been found dead on the lawn of the Throne of God Presbyterian Church. I closed the door and walked to the couch, sitting down next to Mom as we watched in silence. It was too good to be true. A reporter was interviewing Sheriff Meier as he described the scene: the pastor was sprawled flat on his face with two long poles sticking out of his back – a mop with the head broken off, and a flagpole stripped of its flag. They had been stabbed between his ribs just inside of his shoulderblades, one on each side. I leaned forward to get a better look at the TV, too surprised to hide my eagerness.
‘Can you believe this?’ asked Mom. ‘I thought we were through with all this!’
‘I know this killer,’ I said softly. Recognition was dawning slowly, but it was definitely there.
‘What?’
‘This is a real killer.’
‘Of course it’s a real killer, John – the pastor is really dead.’
‘No, I mean, this isn’t just a local guy – I read about this exact crime scene a few years ago. Did he take the hands too?’
The news anchor looked grim. ‘In addition to the poles in the back,’ he said, ‘the killer also cut off the pastor’s hands and removed his tongue.’
‘Ha!’ I said, half-laughing.
‘John!’ said my mom sternly. ‘What kind of reaction is that?’
‘It’s the Handyman,’ I told her. ‘He always does this to his victims: he cuts off their hands and tongue, and leaves them outside with sticks in their backs.’ I stared at the blurred crime-scene photo, shaking my head in wonder. ‘I had no idea he was a demon.’
‘He might not be,’ said Mom, standing up and carrying her dinner-plate into the kitchen. She’d seen the first demon, and she knew about the second, but she was still very uncomfortable discussing them.
‘Of course he’s a demon,’ I said. ‘Crowley was a demon, Forman was another demon who came looking for him, and now another demon has come looking for
him
.’
Mom was silent for a moment.
‘You have no way of knowing that,’ she said at last. I still hadn’t told her about my phone call to Nobody; she’d only get in the way by trying to protect me.
‘Do you have any idea of the odds against three unrelated serial killers in a town this size?’ I asked, following her into the living room. ‘And why on earth would the Handyman, whose attacks have all been in Georgia, show up in Clayton County North Dakota for no reason at all just two months after the last demon disappeared?’
‘Because this town is
cursed
,’ she said adamantly.
‘I thought you didn’t believe in supernatural stuff?’
‘I don’t mean literally cursed,’ she said, turning back to me. ‘I mean . . . oh, I don’t know what I mean. They’re demons, John! Or something just as bad. I don’t know how much longer we can stay.’
‘We can’t leave,’ I said quickly. Too quickly. Mom stared at me a second, then pointed at me angrily.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘No no no no no. You are
not
going to chase after this one like you did with Bill Crowley. You are
not
going to play Superhero and risk your life like an idiot.’
‘I’m not an idiot, Mom.’
‘Well, you do some awfully stupid stuff for a genius,’ she said. ‘Crowley tried to kill you. Forman almost succeeded,
and
he almost got Brooke too. And Curt. This is not a game.’
‘I didn’t realise you were so worried about Curt’s life.
‘I don’t want him dead,’ she shouted. ‘I just want him out of our lives! He’s an arrogant jerk, yes, but you can’t just kill him.’
‘Then it’s a good thing I didn’t,’ I said, growing angry myself.
‘No, but because of your obsession with these . . . whatever they are . . . somebody else almost did. How many people have to die before you back down?’
‘How many more people will die if I
do
back down?’ I countered.
‘That’s what police are for.’
‘The Handyman’s been killing for five years at least – probably centuries more, now that we know he’s a demon. If the police are so awesome why haven’t they stopped him yet?’
‘You are
not
going after him,’ Mom repeated.
‘The police have no idea how to fight a demon,’ I said, struggling to keep my voice calm. ‘They have no idea what they’re up against. I do. I’ve already stopped two of them, and if I can stop this one, I can save . . . I don’t know, maybe hundreds of lives. Maybe thousands. Do you think it’s just going to kill a couple of people and then go away forever? This is how these things live, Mom. It’s going to kill and kill and kill until it doesn’t have any victims left.’
‘He,’ said Mom firmly, locking my eyes with her gaze.
‘What?’
‘You called him “it”,’ she said, exerting all her authority. ‘You know that you are not allowed to say “it”. Say “he”.’
I closed my eyes and took a breath. One of the hallmarks of a sociopath, particularly a serial killer, is that they stop thinking about people as people, and see them only as objects. When I wasn’t thinking, or when I got excited, I started calling people ‘it’. This was against my rules.
But the rules were designed for humans.
‘It’s a demon,’ I said. ‘It’s not a person, it’s not human. I can’t dehumanise it if it’s not human.’
‘
He
is a living, thinking creature,’ said Mom, ‘human or demon or whatever. You don’t know what he is, but you know who you are, and you will follow your rules.’
My rules. She was right. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, calmer now. ‘He – or she,’ I added quickly. ‘This might turn out to be a woman.’
‘What makes you say that?’
Because the voice on the phone was female
, I thought.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’m just saying that we don’t know.’ I put on a face of mock indignation. ‘Are you implying that all psychopaths are men? Or that all men are psychopaths?’
‘I’m not in the mood for jokes,’ Mom said, turning off the TV. ‘I’m going to bed. No more news, no more killers; we’ll talk about this in the morning.’
I walked sullenly back to the kitchen and poured a bowl of cereal while Mom got ready for bed; I rarely went to sleep before 2 a.m., so there was still plenty of time to study the situation.