Armageddon Outta Here - The World of Skulduggery Pleasant (34 page)

“Must have been hard.”

She shrugged. “People do it every day. But I did my best to live my life, to put the past behind me.”

“Where it belongs,” I said.

A thin smile. “If only we were that lucky. A few years ago, I started searching, just out of pure curiosity.”

“Searching for what?”

“Disappearances,” she said. “Fourteen-year-old kids going missing. I figured, if it was still happening, it’d be easy to spot. All of Moon’s People are living in the same town now, after all. Their victims wouldn’t be spread out halfway across America like last time.”

“And… and did you find anything? Were they doing it again?”

Chrissy held her glass, but didn’t raise it to her lips. She just smiled, a smile that was the furthest thing from peaceful I had ever seen. “They’d never stopped,” she said. “Every month, a fourteen-year-old goes missing. People go missing all the time, of course they do, everyone knows that, but these kids get lost in the statistics. They’re classed as
lost teenagers
instead of
lost fourteen-year-olds
. No one has made the connection. And they’re local, but this town isn’t as small as it used to be. Neither are the towns around us. Moon’s People are choosing targets close to home.”

“OK… OK, if that’s true—”

“I’ve got the numbers, I can show you—”

“I don’t want to see them,” I said, a little more sharply than I’d intended. “Sorry. I mean I don’t need to see them. I believe you that there does seem to be a… trend. But let’s say you’re right… I still don’t know what this has to do with Pete Green.”

“Yes, you do,” said Chrissy.

“No, I don’t.”

“You saw the flickering man. That wasn’t a hallucination. We both saw it.”

“Yeah. I admit it. I saw it. It was real. But what
was
it?”

That strand of hair had come loose again. Chrissy tucked it behind her ear with her left hand. There was a band of lighter skin around her ring finger. “You know what it was,” she said. “I told you, Moon was a psychic.”

“I don’t believe in psychics.”

“You don’t believe in the fakes and the frauds and the shysters who con grieving widows out of their life savings… But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Bubba Moon was a psychic. He died in that circle doing black magic. Pete lay down in the same circle, and when he got up we started seeing a figure hunched over him.”

“You think… you think the figure was Bubba Moon?”

“Yes.”

“And… what do you think Moon was doing with Pete?”

“Controlling him. That’s what it looked like, right?”

I nodded. “You think he’s still controlling him, even now?”

“More than that,” said Chrissy. “I think Bubba Moon is possessing him.”

“This is crazy.”

“I know. And I’ve been living with it for most of my life, too afraid to talk about it, or tell anyone, or do anything… But now you’re back. I’m not alone any more.”

Her eyes were filled with such hope that it killed a little part of me. “Chrissy,” I said slowly, “what do think is going to happen now? If this is all true and Moon is that powerful and there are that many of them… what can the two of us do about it?”

She smiled, a sweet, trusting smile. “We can stop them.”

“No, we can’t,” I said. “These are dangerous people. They’re killers. What good would we be against a bunch of murderers?”

The smile faltered. “I… we’d come up with a plan.”

“What kind of plan? Have you ever had to come up with any kind of plan like this before? Would you even know where to begin? I wouldn’t. Here’s our plan, Chrissy. We go to the police. They won’t believe us, but we tell them everything we know. We have a responsibility to do that, but that’s as far as it goes.”

She shook her head. “The police can’t stop them.”

“We don’t know that.”

“They’ll kill the police.”

“Back when we were kids, sure,” I said. “Back when they were a handful of small-town cops. But this isn’t a small town any more. The cops are better trained and better equipped. We’ll tell them Moon’s People are planning a mass shooting. They’ll get a SWAT team in, they’ll get helicopters…”

“That won’t work.”

“We have to try.”

“If we try and it doesn’t work, it’ll make things worse.”

“What do you mean worse?”

Chrissy took a drink, drained her glass. “His People know me. When I see them in the street, they look at me. They smile. A few of them have tapped their watches.”

“I don’t get it.”

Tears brimmed. “Scott is turning fourteen next month. They’re going to take my son. I know they are.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, so she continued. “I was going to move. A few weeks ago, I was all set to quit my jobs, take Scott out of school, and just run. I’d made some calls, managed to get an interview for a job in Utah, of all places. And then I get a postcard. A big bright ‘Welcome to Utah’ postcard, and on the back someone had written ‘Can’t wait for you to get here!’ They knew. He knew. Moon knew I was planning to run. He was telling me there’s nowhere I can go where Scott will be safe.”

“Chrissy, I—”

“Please,” she said, tears welling. “I can’t lose my son. Please, help me.”

he cemetery was on Bredon’s southernmost hill. When I was a kid, we used to cycle up there on a summer’s day and have picnics of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and Dr Peppers. Back then, you could see practically the whole town from up here. Not any more. Now the town’s sprawl was too wide and the buildings too high. Whole neighbourhoods were hidden from view and locked away, like old secrets.

Benny Alverez came to the funeral. When it was done, he walked up to me and we shook hands.

“I always liked your dad,” Benny said. “He’d make those stupid jokes, then act surprised when we laughed
at
him rather than w
ith
him.”

“That was no act,” I said, feigning a lighter kind of sadness. “You’re looking well. Middle age must agree with you.”

He blanched. “Is that what we are now? Middle-aged? I thought being in your fifties was middle-aged. I read that somewhere. In a science magazine.”

I nodded. “Oh, that’s right, I read that, too. Middle age is always the decade ahead of the one you’re in now.”

“That’s it,” he said, grinning. “Yeah, I’m doing OK. Married a woman ten years younger than me, had our first kid last year.”

“You dog.”

He shrugged. “It is what it is.” He nodded to my kids. “They yours?”

“They are,” I said, my eyes on my wife for a moment. She looked tired. Even Chrissy Brennan hadn’t looked so tired. “Wait till your bouncing baby becomes a temperamental teen,” I said. “That’ll put some grey hairs on your chest.”

“Looking forward to it,” Benny said, smiling. “So how’s life in the big city?”

I looked away, pretending to scan the crowd. “Chaotic. Uncertain. All the words you don’t want to hear with a family to support.” I looked back at him. “This place has changed a lot.”

“Hasn’t it?”

“I could barely recognise some of the streets,” I said. “The Palladium is gone.”

“Replaced with a twenty-screen behemoth on the next block over. Which, to be honest, is so much better than the Palladium ever was. Remember the sticky floors and the tattered seats and the dreadful sound system? Most of the movies we saw there started off as silent films before the projectionist heard the booing.”

I laughed. “I’d forgotten that. Rose-tinted glasses, I suppose.”

Benny’s smile faded. “Yeah. Nostalgia’s a killer. In town for long?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “After this, we’ll be taking it day by day. All depends on what Mom needs.”

“Tell her I was asking after her. I’d offer her my condolences, but she wouldn’t know who the hell I was. Last time she saw me I was, what, twelve?”

“Eleven or twelve, yeah. You and Tyler, pulling wheelies on the street outside, showing off. Ever hear anything about him?”

Benny looked at me, his eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”

“After he ran away. Did he ever come back?”

“Man, Tyler didn’t run away. He was snatched.”

I frowned. “What?”

“He disappeared one afternoon on his way home from school. I can’t believe you don’t remember this.”

“I remember him running away.”

“Why do you keep saying that? They said he ran away for the first few days he was gone, then they found his bike and his bag and evidence of a struggle. It was all anyone talked about in school for months.”

“So what happened to him?”

“He was murdered, most likely. His remains are probably still lying in some shallow grave in the woods even now. You seriously don’t remember that?”

“It… it’s coming back to me…”

“Last day of April, it was. I remember it vividly.” Benny put his hands in his pockets and turned slightly, looking out over the town. “Poor kid. He was only fourteen.”

“I can’t believe I missed it,” Chrissy said on the phone later. “I suppose… I suppose when it happened I didn’t know what was going on, and when I started to look back a few years ago it was a cursory glance. Just enough to convince myself the murders were still taking place. I’d never even considered that Tyler’s disappearance had anything to do with Bubba Moon.”

“Well, don’t feel too bad,” I said, speaking softly as I stood in the back yard behind my old house. “All I’d remembered about it was those first few days when everyone said he’d run away because of his dad. I’d convinced myself that’s what happened, even though I was here when the cops decided he’d been murdered. What the hell is wrong with me?”

“You wanted to leave it all behind, and I can’t blame you,” Chrissy said. “But do you believe me? If Moon went after Tyler, one of Pete’s best friends, then he won’t think twice about going after the kids of Pete’s other friends now.”

“But why Tyler?” I asked. “Why just him? We all turned fourteen the same year. If Moon kills one kid every month, why didn’t he snatch all four of us?”

“That would have been way too suspicious,” Chrissy said. “The cops would be investigating everyone we’d ever spoken to, and that would have led straight to Pete Green’s door.”

“So Moon just took one of us,” I said, my voice dull. “Snatched him away like he was playing a game.”

“I think that’s exactly what this is,” Chrissy said. “With all the People smiling at me, tapping their watches… it’s a game. He wants to scare me. He has to be stopped.”

“How? If Pete’s possessed… what do we do? Call an exorcist? Hold a prayer meeting? I don’t even know what the first step is. The best thing we can do, and I know you’ve already objected to this, is go to the police. At the very least they’ll put Scott into protective custody or something.”

“Are you sure about that? Are you absolutely, one hundred per cent sure about that? Because if we tell the police, and the police don’t believe us, or they can’t do anything, then Bubba Moon will make us pay. I know he will, and so do you. He’ll make us pay for ruining this game of his, and that means Scott or someone or…”

“What? Chrissy, what?”

“How… how old is your son?”

I looked at the phone like it was an odd thing, like it was a foreign object that did not belong in my hand. On stiff legs, I walked back inside. I hadn’t seen my son all evening. He’d been in my old bedroom. That’s where he was now. Probably sitting in my old room, watching TV on his laptop or something. Not bothering to come up for air, or say hi, and definitely not feeling the urge to communicate. I knew this behaviour well. It had started last year. It had started when he turned thirteen.

I knocked on the bedroom door and opened it. My daughter passed me. “Where is he?” I asked.

She knew who I meant. She just shrugged, walked on.

On stiff legs, with a dry mouth, I went to the living room, where Felicity was sitting with Mom and my aunt. “Anyone seen Sammy?” I asked.

Shaking of heads all round. I nodded. My keys were in my pocket. I walked out the front door, closed it gently behind me, and bolted to my car. I jumped in, slid the key into the ignition. The engine came to life and I snapped it into gear and the passenger-side doors opened, two of them at the same time. A slender black man in a good suit slid in beside me. On the back seat, a girl in black.