Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant (33 page)

Then the subprime crisis came along and the bank I was working for went under, and I lost my job and most of our savings in the same month. We’d invested heavily in rock-solid shares built on shaky foundations, and when the tremors began it all came crashing down. We were surviving, barely keeping our heads above water, holding on to our home with the tips of our fingers.

Felicity and I started arguing. A little at first, a cross word or a snapped comment, and those icy silences that grew into cold nights. We kept the edge from our voices when the kids were around, or at least we thought we did. I guess kids notice a lot more than we want them to.

Then, in February of the next year, my brother called, told me our dad had died. This odd kind of numbness crept over me as I talked to him, as I listened to his voice, leaden with grief, and when the call was done I put down the phone and sat in my study, surrounded by bills and notices and demands for payment, and cried.

We packed our bags and drove home. I did most of the driving. I thought about my dad a lot, of course, but also my childhood, my old friends. I thought about Tyler and Benny and the girl, the pretty one, what was her name? Chrissy, that was it. Chrissy Brennan. Man, I had such a crush on her. It was all coming back to me, like the miles were bricks in a wall that blocked me from my memories, and each mile we ticked off was one less brick.

I remembered Pete Green, too, my earliest childhood friend. I’d lost touch with him. Couldn’t really remember why.

The town had grown since I was there last. Bits and pieces were the same, but mostly it looked like a large alien city had been superimposed over it. The old cinema was gone, but around the next corner there was a giant sprawling mall that had a multi-screen cinema of its very own. Chapters Second-hand Bookstore, a store that had once been like a church to me, was now a tanning salon. They did nails, too, announced the sign in the window. My eleven-year-old self would have been horrified. I mentioned this to my kids in the back seat. My son grunted. My daughter ignored me.

We arrived at my old house. Mom started fussing over us immediately. She didn’t know about the problems Felicity and I were having, but I think she suspected. My brother was there. He said Mom had been trying to keep busy, like she was determined to work so hard that the sadness never had a chance to settle. We let her. Everyone grieves in their own way.

I was tired after the long drive, but that evening I went with my brother to a local bar, and we sat and talked. He told me about his life and I gave him an edited version of mine. I hadn’t seen him in over seven years. He’d put on weight and he’d lost some more hair. He looked like a real grown-up now. I told him this and he laughed ruefully, and went to get us another drink.

When he was gone, a pretty girl at the table beside me gave me a smile. She couldn’t have been much more than seventeen, but I smiled back, anyway, out of politeness more than anything. A woman approached my table. She was a few years older than me, pretty but strained, with grey in her hair, and a little too thin to be healthy.

“I was sorry to hear about your father,” she said.

I looked at her and fished for a name, but it wouldn’t come. Not at first. Someone laughed at the bar and she glanced over, and I caught an angle and the realisation hit me like a wrecking ball.

“Chrissy Brennan,” I said, like I had no breath in my lungs.

She smiled, sat opposite me, setting her glass neatly on a coaster. I remembered the smile. It used to be such a beautiful smile. It still had echoes of that beauty, but now it threw up all those lines around her mouth. She looked old. She was my age, but she looked old. “Didn’t think you’d recognise me,” she said, brushing a strand of hair back over her ear, the way she used to.

“You’re looking well,” I said.

She smiled again. “How long are you here for?”

“Funeral’s tomorrow. We’ll stick around for a few days after that, to keep my mom busy. It’s good to see you. I was just thinking about you, actually, on the drive over.”

“I’ve been thinking about you, too,” she said, in a way that nagged at me slightly.

My brother caught my eye, gestured over his shoulder to a few friends of his, and I nodded as he left me and Chrissy alone.

“So what have you been up to?” I asked. “How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been better,” she said, and then laughed. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be a buzzkill quite so early on in the conversation. I saw you half an hour ago and I was sitting over there, debating whether or not to come and talk to you. Now I’m here and suddenly the mood goes way down.”

She was blushing, and I leaned forward. “Hey, don’t worry about it. Things have been better for me, too. My marriage, for one. I lost my job a few months ago. Before we see the summer, we’ll probably lose the house as well.” I hadn’t even told my brother that part. “And that’s not even mentioning my dad, OK? So don’t feel bad about bringing down the mood. The mood is pretty low to begin with.”

I’d wanted to make her feel better, but it hadn’t even raised a sympathetic smile.

“I got married,” she said. “I have a son, Scott, who’ll be fourteen in May. I’m not with my husband any more. He’s not a very nice man. I have two jobs, neither of which pays me enough to give up the other. And I’m scared.”

I nodded. “These are scary times.”

She looked up at me, frowning. “No. I’m scared of
him
.”

I answered her frown with one of my own. “Your husband?”

Now it was her turn to lean forward. “
Pete,
” she said in a whisper.

“Pete Green?”

“Who else? What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m sorry, Chrissy, I’m not really sure what you’re talking about.”

She stared at me.

She stared at me for so long I thought something brittle had snapped off in her mind.

“Don’t do this,” she said. “Don’t you dare do this to me. You’re the only other one who was there. You’re the only other one who knows what happened.”

“What happened when? I’m really not—”

“Bubba Moon,” she said sharply, and the edge of a migraine stabbed at me behind my eyes.

“Bubba Moon,” I repeated. “Yeah, OK. The town bogeyman. We broke into his house when we were kids. But we weren’t the only ones there. Tyler McCormick and Benny Alverez were with us, and Pete.”

Chrissy nodded. “And then a few days later we went to see if Pete was all right. We went to his house, you and me. Do you remember that?”

I smiled. “I remember us running from some particularly angry neighbours. I do remember that much.”

“Angry neighbours? What are you talking about? They weren’t angry neighbours. They were his followers.”

“Whose followers? Pete’s? Pete was an eleven-year-old boy.”

“
Bubba Moon’s
followers,” Chrissy said, with a vehemence that made me sit back warily. “They were outside his house. Remember? You told me later it reminded you of a movie. That one with Donald Sutherland and Jeff Goldblum.”

“
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
,” I said automatically, and something loosened in my mind. More bricks fell, enough to let an old feeling seep out. Fear.

I shifted in my seat. “Chrissy, it was a long time ago. Obviously I remember it differently than you do.”

“You left,” she said, like she was accusing me of treason. “Looks like you blocked it out. You didn’t want to think of it any more. But I stayed. I remember everything, exactly the way it happened. You know those people who chased us into the Green Fields Mall? I see them practically every day. They haven’t changed. They have not aged one little bit since that time we saw them. And there are more of them now. Over a dozen, I think, all living on the same street as Pete.”

“I don’t remember their faces, Chrissy, so I wouldn’t be able to tell if they’d aged or not. But before we go any further, I want you to take a moment and think about the things you’re saying.”

She chewed her lip and nodded, then she looked down at the table, and I let out a breath. My hands were clenched, though I didn’t know why. I drained the last dregs from my beer and was about to cut our encounter short by standing up, when she raised her eyes. She was calmer.

“I understand that it sounds insane,” she said. “And I apologise for that. I also apologise for all this… anger. I suppose… I suppose I’ve been angry with you for leaving, and angry with you for the way our friendship ended, but neither of those things are your fault.”

I didn’t remember how our friendship ended, but I wanted this conversation to be over so I didn’t ask.

“Here are the facts as I know them,” Chrissy said. “Please bear with me. Some of them might jog some memories. A lot won’t. Please don’t walk out until I’m done.”

I hesitated, but there was still enough of the beautiful girl I had once known in her face that I couldn’t deny her this one request. “OK. Say what you have to.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Bubba Moon was a serial killer. Just because he was never called one by the police or the papers doesn’t make this simple fact any less true. He was a serial killer, and he had his followers. As far as I know, they called themselves the People. They were a black magic cult. Maybe Satanists or devil worshippers.”

“Satanists,” I repeated, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s not uncommon. Or it wasn’t, anyway. People like Bubba Moon and Charles Manson, they attract people who live on the fringes of society – Satanists, fascists, convicted felons.”

“OK,” I said. “Go on.”

“Moon’s People would meet every month here in town, at his house. They’d take it in turns to bring an offering.”

“What kind of offering?”

Chrissy looked me in the eye and said, in that same calm tone, “Kids. Fourteen-year-old kids. Girls or boys, it didn’t matter, they just had to be fourteen years old. I don’t know why. From what I’ve worked out, they were brought down to the basement and ritually murdered while the People chanted around them.”

“Uh-huh. And what proof do you have of this?”

“No proof. Just stories.”

“Right.”

“Can I continue?”

I sighed. “Sure.”

“Bubba Moon was also a psychic. He didn’t read palms or tell fortunes, but he was clairvoyant. I’ve spoken to police officers who swear that he knew things about them during interrogations that he couldn’t possibly have known.”

“And the officers in question admitted this to you, did they?”

“Some of them did, yes. Though of course they’d never admit it in public.”

“Oh, of course,” I said.

“They’d been bringing him in for questioning for years, all related to various murders. They could get nothing to stick, until one of his People slipped up and got himself arrested. He told the cops everything. He told them more than everything. He told them about stuff so bizarre and insane that he had to be making it up, but within all that craziness he knew enough details about open murder cases that they were forced to take him seriously.”

“So did they have enough to arrest Moon?”

Chrissy took a moment to sip her drink. “It didn’t make any difference. Their key witness, who had agreed to testify and name Moon as the one who’d done all the killing, died in his cell the same night they went to search Moon’s house. He hanged himself with a sheet.”

“How inconvenient,” I said, but Chrissy ignored me and continued.

“You should know this part,” she said. “The cops have their warrant, knock on the door, don’t get an answer, and they break the door down. They find Bubba Moon’s body in the basement, lying in the middle of a circle, surrounded by occult symbols.”

The circle. I remembered it now.

“They put him in a body bag, take him away, and search the house. They find a lot of old bloodstains, but tests are inconclusive. They dig up the back yard, looking for bodies. They don’t find any. They find no evidence at all, actually. Bubba Moon is buried in some crappy little grave, his house is boarded up and never sold, and that’s the end of the story.”

“OK, then.”

“Until a bunch of stupid kids break into that old house eighteen years later, and one of them, showing off to the others, jumps into that circle, and lies down where Bubba Moon had been lying down when they found him.”

I needed another drink. My mouth was dry. “Pete,” I said.

“That’s right. Pete. He was perfectly fine for a couple of days, and then he didn’t turn up at school. That Thursday afternoon, you and me paid him a visit. We wanted to see if he was OK. We walked there.”

“There were people looking at us,” I said softly.

Chrissy nodded. “We knocked on his door, then went round the back of the house. We saw Pete sitting on the floor and there was someone standing over him, only we couldn’t see him properly because he kept flickering—”

“Like a heat haze,” I said.

“Yes. Just like that. We tried to run, but Pete’s mom called us in. Do you remember she went right back to the couch?”

“And fell asleep,” I said. “Then Pete came out. There was something weird about the way he moved sometimes. He had a drink or something…”

“A juice box,” said Chrissy.

“A juice box, yeah. It was like he wanted to open it, but it took a while for the message to reach his hands. Then… then something happened to me.”

“He looked at you and all of a sudden you were falling asleep,” said Chrissy. “He was doing the same thing to you as he’d done to his parents.”

“But you saved me,” I said. “We ran. They chased us. Into the mall. The security guard…”

“They were going to kill him,” said Chrissy. “I’m certain of it. If we’d even tried to alert him, they’d have killed him there and then. They’d have killed anyone we told. Our parents. Teachers. Cops. Anyone.”

“My God. I remember.”

“Pete was taken out of school. We didn’t really see him much after that. I’d come across him occasionally on the street, but I’d always hide until he was gone. His People were around him at all times. It should have been funny seeing all these grown-ups trailing after a kid, obeying his every command… but it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny one little bit.”

Chrissy took another drink. “We stopped talking. You and me. We were too scared to talk, to be honest. We were too scared to remain friends. It was my fault as much as it was yours, but I blamed you for as long as I could. So you went away, all the way to New York City. And I met Toby, and I fell in what I thought was love, and I got a fantastic kid out of it, and then I realised Toby wasn’t worth much as a human being, and I kicked him out. I took on another job, raised Scott myself.”