The Devil's Demeanor (5 page)

Grandma and
Grandpa had tagged along, though they were tired after that day’s excitement.
Don was afraid for them, afraid the werewolf would get them if they returned to
their home.

Dad pulled into
the driveway and Don saw Uncle Nate standing in his front yard, waiting for
them. He had on a gray T-shirt, green shorts and flip-flops. He was holding a
glass of what Don thought was soda.

“So what
happened?” Don heard him ask Dad as they piled out of the van. Nina and Candice
had ridden with their parents.

“Hilda was
bitten by a dog,” Dad told his brother as he walked up to him to shake his
hand.

“That’s what I
thought you said on the phone, but I wasn’t sure,” said Uncle Nate. “Mom, Dad.”

Grandpa and
Grandma came shuffling from the van and hugged their youngest son. Uncles Nate
and Billy were the only Scott children to stay in Destin; the others scattered
about the country after graduating high school.

“You drinkin’
whiskey, boy?” Grandma asked him with a scowl.

“No,” said
Uncle Nate. “This is—this is diet soda, Ma.”

She headed for
the one-story house, its windows lit up. “I don’t want no damn diet soda, I
want whiskey.”

Everyone
laughed as they followed Grandma inside. Mom was limping but laughing as well.
Don could smell fried fish cooking in the kitchen. In the living room were his
Aunt Mimi and cousins Jabari and Quinton, watching TV. His other aunts and
uncles were all packed in the kitchen, laughing loudly about something. There
was definitely excitement in the air. Don guessed it was just having family
together for the summer. He was slowly starting to feel better, the fear about
what happened to Mom deflating.

“Hey!” Aunt
Mimi screamed as the family walked through the door. She was wearing a floral
shirt and black skirt with a pearl necklace Don never saw her without. She
jumped up off the couch and hugged his dad. “Hey, Big Brother. It’s been so
long.”

After she
hugged Don, he sat down on the couch next to his cousins. They waved
halfheartedly at him. Don stared at the TV while the adults caught up and
laughed and drank their liquor.

“We could head
to the beach house tonight,” Aunt Mimi said. “We might as well; there’s not
enough room here for all of us to sleep. Oh, Patrick, you should see this
place. It’s nicer than last year’s.”

Don had trouble
believing that. Last year’s was awesome. The beach houses weren’t too far from
where they were now. The family could easily go there tonight. Don hoped they would.

He could see
from the couch all the adults sitting at the dining table in the kitchen. He
was hungry but wasn’t sure he wanted to eat the fried fish—he always wound up
accidentally swallowing the bones.

Aunt Mimi was
still gushing over the beach house they were able to get, and everyone was
looking at her. Everyone except Don’s mom. She was looking straight at him, her
eyes glazed and wide. He stared at her for a whole minute, and in that minute,
she never blinked. Then she suddenly snapped out of her trance.

“What happened
to Auntie Hilda?” Jabari suddenly asked Don.

He looked over
to him. Jabari was also five, with round cheeks and curly black hair. “She got
bit,” Don told him.

“What did she
get bit by?”

“A...dog.”

Jabari’s eyes
grew wide in terror. He wasn’t fond of dogs, and Don knew at that moment his
cousin would have nightmares that night. He hoped he wouldn’t have to share a
bed with Jabari at the beach house—he was always wetting himself.

As Don sat
there, his excitement for the beach house grew. He wanted to go
now
, but
everyone was still sitting around and talking loudly. His hunger was also
growing, so he got up from the couch and headed to the tiny kitchen. As soon as
he did, he saw Uncle Billy near the refrigerator.

Don could
practically smell the alcohol on him as he stood there, glass in hand. He
stared at Don, and the boy could tell his uncle was remembering what he did to
him last year. Drinking and hugging didn’t mix. Don was only five years old and
even he knew that. He’d seen his dad drink enough times to know there were a
lot of things you couldn’t do while drunk.

“Sorry about
last year, little man,” Uncle Billy said to him as he bowed his head. If Don
had known his uncle would be dead twenty years from that moment, he would have
accepted the apology.

Instead Don
turned around in the cramped kitchen and looked at Mom. She was still sitting
in the chair by the wall, staring at him again. She’d probably been watching
him the whole time, seeing how he’d react around Uncle Billy.

“Are you okay,
Mommy?” Don asked, looking at her bandaged leg.

“I’m okay,
baby.” She reached out her arms to him and he let her pick him up and place him
on her lap.

Grandpa was
sitting right next to them, and he smiled at Don. “Your mom is tough, boy. She
ain’t gonna let a little old dog get the best of her.”

“It wasn’t that
little,” Mom said.

“I suppose not.
I didn’t get a good look at it.”

“Was it a
werewolf?” Don asked.

Grandpa didn’t
answer right away. He only stared at the boy. Then he laughed. “No, grandson, I
don’t think it was a werewolf. Though I don’t think it was a regular dog,
either.”

“What kind of
dog was it?” Don asked.

“A demon dog.”

Mom drew the
boy closer. “Bill, that’s enough. You’re going to scare him.”

“He’d be right
to be scared. It’s an old legend, but that don’t make it untrue.” Grandpa
looked at Don. “There’s an old cave out in the woods near our house that’s said
to be a place of evil. In that cave lies a spirit that can infect anything that
enters.”

“Like dogs?”
Don asked.

“Exactly.
Though I hear it has infected people from time to time. No one knows for sure.”

“And this was
on the news?” Mom asked sarcastically.

“There was some
rumblings of a boy that got attacked by something from that cave and then had
an episode when he tried to step into a church in Pensacola. Nothin’
newsworthy, but it caused a ruckus.”

“Does it make
you evil, too?” Don asked.

Grandpa drew
closer and said, “Now there’s the strange thing. I hear it doesn’t make you
evil. It may give you evil thoughts but it doesn’t make you do evil things.
Instead, it waits.”

Grandpa paused.
Mom sighed and said, “For what?”

He looked
directly into her eyes and said, “It waits for you to do something evil on your
own. Then your soul belongs to it completely.”

They stared at
each other for a long time while the smell of food burned Don’s nose and made
his belly rumble.

“So what does
that mean for me?” Mom asked Grandpa. “Am I going to turn evil because I was
bitten by this demon dog?”

“Not unless you
do
evil first, honey.”

Mom laughed.
Grandpa laughed, too. Mom got up and Don took her seat. “I’m going to get you a
plate, baby,” she said to him.

“Hope I didn’t
scare you with my story,” Grandpa said to Don. “Your mom will be all right.
She’s good people.”

“So the story’s
not real?” Don asked.

“I didn’t say
that,” Grandpa Bill replied.

*
 
*
 
*

After dinner,
everyone piled into a couple of cars and drove to the beach house. Don couldn’t
see anything out the windows of the van but the occasional restaurants and
hotels, and “For the Longest Time” played on the radio. He hadn’t heard the
song before then, and would scarcely hear it much in the future, but whenever
he did he would think of this ride to the beach house in 1987.

He fell asleep
on the floor after a few minutes on the road, but when Dad woke him to tell him
they were there, Don jumped out of the van to get a better look. Though he
couldn’t get a good view of the place in the night, it was still the most
beautiful place he’d ever seen. He could hear the ocean waves roaring from
across the street behind him, but he didn’t care about that.

If anything, he
dreaded going there because it meant he would have to take off his shirt.

Aunt Mimi
unlocked the front door and everyone rushed into the house at once. The first
thing Don noticed was the hardwood floor. He wasn’t used to houses without
carpets, so he just stood there for a moment.

Then he noticed
his cousins running up the stairs around the corner, so he joined them. The top
floor had four bedrooms, each huge. The walls were almost nothing but large
windows with light-yellow curtains.

In one room
there were two beds lined right next to each other, like a hotel. Jabari and
Quinton began jumping on one bed while Nina and Candice sat down on the other.
As for Don, he went straight to the floor and stared at a white vent sticking
up from it. The air conditioner was on and was blowing cold air into his face.
It felt so good, he stayed there for a while.

Eventually his
cousins noticed. Jabari and Quinton joined Don on the floor and hogged his
vent. He stayed close to it, though, and got some of the freezing air.

He was
exhausted and wanted to sleep there, on the floor, by his vent, but his mom
came in and told him to get away from it before he got sick.

“You know,” she
said to him, “that wasn’t very nice of you not accepting your uncle Billy’s
apology. You hurt his feelings.”

“I don’t care.”

She lightly
swatted his bottom and said, “Don’t talk like that. These are your family, the
only family you have. One day you
will
care, but it will be too late.”

Don had no idea
what she was talking about, so he didn’t argue. Instead he worked up enough
energy to explore the rest of the beach house with his cousins. It was the
nicest house he remembered ever being in at the time. The walls were white, and
where there were no walls there were large windows. A vase filled with yellow
and white flowers sat on a table behind the couch.

“Anybody want
to rent some movies?” Uncle Billy asked, drink in hand.

“It’s too
late,” said Aunt Mimi. “Besides, we should get to bed so we can get up early
and hit that beach.”

Don sulked in
misery while his cousins jumped for joy. Eventually he and his cousins went to
their rooms upstairs. He shared the “vent room” with Jabari and Quinton while
Candice and Nina took one of the other rooms.

Luckily Don did
not have to share a bed with Jabari.

Aunt Mimi may
have suggested going to bed, but Don could hear all the adults downstairs,
talking and yelling and laughing. It sounded like fun being an adult. He would
find out later it was anything but.

He tried to go
to sleep, but had a hard time of it. His insomnia had nothing to do with the
noisy adults but with the story Grandpa told him. When he finally did fall
asleep, he dreamt of a cute dog going into a cave at the bottom of a hill, and
when it came back out, it ran up to a rabbit and ripped its head off.

Don remembered
the cave distinctively because it made him sick just looking at it. He was both
in the dream and watching it at the same time. The dog didn’t seem to notice
the part of Don that was there, thankfully, but that didn’t stop the evil from
enveloping him, squeezing his guts.

Something was
in that cave, something that didn’t want to be found.

He woke up to
see the sun outside the windows. The curtains did very little to mask it. His
cousins were already up and getting ready for the beach. Don hated thinking he
was the last person to wake up. It made him feel so lazy.

He went to the
bathroom and put on his swimming trunks, then went downstairs and met up with
everyone else. Mom was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit that did nothing
to hide her pregnant belly. She also had on a wide-rimmed hat and sunglasses,
and said she wasn’t getting in the water anyway.

Everyone
crossed the street carefully and made their way onto the hot white sand. Don
was barefoot and regretting it as his feet burned. He asked Dad to carry him
but he refused because he was carrying a cooler filled with ice and soda.

Don gritted his
teeth and bared it.

The family
claimed a table with a canopy and set everything down. Then Don’s cousins ran
straight for the water. Don sat at the table and watched them. He didn’t know
why he was so shy; he was with family.

After a while,
he finally took off his shirt and made his way to the roaring waves. Dad
eventually joined and pretended to be a sea monster, grabbing the kids one at a
time and throwing them about.

Overall, Don’s
time at the beach hadn’t been as bad as he thought it would be.

*
 
*
 
*

As soon as they
got back to the beach house a few hours later, Don went straight to the vent.
Mom eventually got him to take a bath to get the sand and saltwater off, but
the vent was his after that.

He lay there,
thinking about the dog that had bitten Mom. He wondered if it was the same one
from his dream. Well, of course it couldn’t be. But, at five years old, Don was
capable of believing anything.

It seemed cruel
to Don that his favorite movie would be closely associated with the birth of
his baby brother. Mom went into labor while the family was watching
The
Unstoppable Titans
, her water breaking in her seat. Had Don been older at
the time, he would’ve been embarrassed but, luckily, his mom had been discreet
when the pain hit, so they all quietly left the auditorium and went to the
hospital.

They had only
been a quarter into the movie, but Don had seen enough to love it and would
wind up seeing it many more times in the future. Unfortunately, every time he
did see it he was reminded of his brother. And that wasn’t a good thing.

Ethan Scott was
born in Eisenhower Hospital on July 27th, 1987, and weighed ten pounds, ten
ounces. He and Don had been born in the same hospital, a place Ethan would
visit often over the years for little reasons like headaches and stomach
problems—ailments not caused by natural reasons.

Don didn’t know
what to think of Ethan when his parents brought him home from the hospital. He
was Don’s only sibling and Don knew from the start there was something wrong
with his little brother. For one thing, the baby never cried. Dad even told Don
the doctors thought Ethan was dead when they delivered him—they slapped his
bottom to get a reaction, but the baby only looked around, “quiet as a mouse.”

For another,
Ethan was always staring at things. Dad told him babies were supposed to be
curious when he brought this up, but Don felt there was more to it. Ethan
didn’t seem
curious
; he seemed to
know
what he was looking at, no
matter what it was.

Mom started
acting weird a month after Ethan was born. Don could hear her screaming and
crying in her and Dad’s room, which was right next to his, but he tried to
ignore it. Why was it she cried and Ethan didn’t?

The first
really strange incident occurred when he turned a year old and he and Don were
in the living room by themselves while Dad was at work and Mom was cooking in the
kitchen down the hall. Don was watching
Looney Tunes
on TV, his leg
draped over the armrest. Ethan was playing with lettered blocks on the floor.

The
window-mounted air conditioner was humming just next to the TV, freezing the
living room. Don didn’t mind—it reminded him of his vent at the beach house.
Ethan, who still hadn’t cried, occasionally looked at the air conditioner, and
then to Don, before going back to his alphabet blocks.

Don figured the
boy was cold, but he didn’t care.
He
was comfortable, and that was all
that mattered to him.

At some point,
Ethan looked at him for so long Don thought he was going to speak. But then the
baby sighed and went back to his blocks.

“You’re a weird
little fucker,” Don said to him.

Ethan suddenly
paused with an
H
block inches from the top of a pyramid he’d built. He
stared at the letter for a while, and Don held his breath, waiting for him to
move. He got the impression Ethan was watching him from the corner of his eye.
Then he resumed his building. Don went back to the show, spooked.

A few minutes
later, Mom came in, looked down at Ethan, and then shrieked. “Don,” she said,
“I don’t want you using these blocks to spell dirty words again! Where did you
even learn that word?” Then she picked up Ethan and left the room.

When Don looked
down at the blocks, he saw they spelled the word
fucker
.

*
 
*
 
*

Ethan seemed
like a normal child in
almost
every other way: He learned to walk and
talk like children are supposed to, but he still never cried. Watching him
learn to walk was startling, considering he seemed to try at an extremely early
age and grew frustrated at his inability to do so. Mom and Dad took him to
doctors, but none of them knew what was wrong with the baby.

Don wondered,
not for the first time, if the dog bite had anything to do with his brother’s
behavior. Was there really a curse, like Grandpa said? When they visited
Florida in the summer of ’88 to show off the new baby, Don asked Grandpa about
the curse again, but he told the boy there was nothing more to tell.

However, he did
tell Don to keep an eye on Mom and Ethan. That, Don did reluctantly and valued
any chance to get out of it. That’s where school came in.

Woodcrest
Baptist Church School, the private school Don attended, was a godsend. The
school served orange soda at lunch, put on plays and puppet shows in the church
at the front of the school, and taught cool things. Don learned how to make
bubble-bath mix in the first grade.

He even kissed
a girl for the first time on Woodcrest’s older-kid playground. (There was
another playground for the kindergarteners that consisted of a long
sand-pit-like area that ran alongside part of the building.) She giggled after
the kiss, and then ran away. Don had been so embarrassed, later saying he had
no idea what came over him.

Later that
year, he noticed Mom and Dad fighting a lot, though he didn’t know why. They
constantly yelled at each other about things he didn’t understand at the age of
six, but would become clearer to him later on.

The reason for
the arguments was a woman named Agatha.

One day, in
December of 1988, Mom put Ethan and Don into her little yellow car and took
them to the grocery store, but they didn’t go there for groceries. Mom parked
in the lot and immediately approached a woman walking out of the store who was
younger than her.

Don watched
through the back windshield as the two women started yelling at each other.

“Who the fuck
do you think you are, sleeping with a married man?” Mom asked Agatha.

“Listen,
bitch,” Agatha replied, “don’t you come up to my job like this. Don’t you
dare!”

“Why the fuck
not, heifer? What do I owe you, you fucking whore?”

“Don’t call me
a whore! If you want to yell at somebody, make it your husband. He came to me,
not the other way around!”

“Fuck you both!
He just wanted himself a stupid young bitch. What are you—sixteen?”

“I’m
twenty-two, bitch, and the reason he came to me is because you’re fucking
crazy!”

That shut Mom
up for a moment, so Agatha continued.

“He said ever
since you had your second baby, you’ve become some kind of freak, and he can’t
stand it anymore. He even called you a demon. A
demon
, bitch!”

Suddenly, Mom
slapped Agatha so hard she left a red handprint on her cheek, and they started
fighting right there in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. There were other
people around, and they stared, but Don was too young and confused to care.

Eventually Mom
jumped back in the car and took off, but not before Agatha managed to throw a
soda can at the back windshield. Mom kept on driving, though, and Don could
feel her rage filling the car.

“I’m going to
kill that bitch!” she shouted to no one in particular, though Don automatically
looked over at Ethan sitting in his car seat.

Ethan only
watched her.

When he finally
looked at Don, the older boy turned away. “Mom?” Don called.

“What!” she
shouted, making him jump in his seat. She had turned back, driving blindly. Her
face didn’t look remotely human.

“Never mind,”
he said. He didn’t even know what he was going to say in the first place, and
he felt like he was riding in a car with two monsters posing as his family.

*
 
*
 
*

Don’s parents
divorced in early 1989, and Dad moved back to Florida. Don had wondered if
Agatha had gone with him, though he didn’t have to wonder for long. One day,
Mom was late picking him up from Woodcrest. She didn’t say anything on the ride
home, but he knew something was wrong. Ethan sat in his car seat, quiet as
usual, though this time he was grinning.

Dad called Don one
day in April to tell him he was living in Connecticut now and he wanted to come
down and get him and Ethan and take them back up for the summer. Mom said no,
that they were visiting her brother, Roland, in June. Maybe next year.

Uncle Roland
had a huge, two-story house in a beautiful neighborhood, and his backyard was
big, though not as big as Don’s in Georgia. Uncle Roland had a large wooden
fence, and his yard sloped upward where a swing set resided at the top of that
little hill. Don avoided the set because it was always crawling with
caterpillars.

This was the
house in which Don would find out what it was like to dance with death.

His uncle
Roland was tall, with blond hair and rugged features and his son, Ryan, was
just a shorter version of him. Ryan was a year younger than Don, and he took
him and Ethan down into the basement, which was huge and littered with junk.

It was awesome.

There were
paths carved into the junk so people could get around easily. Down there was a
TV where Don saw his first episode of
Batman
with Adam West. He loved it
immediately—it was a Penguin-heavy episode. The kids sat on folding chairs and
watched while Mom talked with her brother and his wife upstairs.

After the show,
the kids found a way to entertain themselves. There were large white pipes on
the other side of the basement. Near those pipes was a discarded mattress on
the floor. Don came up with the brilliant idea of setting the mattress at an
angle under a pipe. They would then climb onto the pipe and then tumble down
the mattress as if it was a hill.

It worked like
a charm. At first.

The three of them
took turns. Don even helped Ethan get on the pipe, since he was only two and
very small. For some reason, however, when it was Don’s turn again, the
mattress was pushed out of the way just as he was leaning forward to do his
tumble. He fell five feet to the concrete floor.

He woke up in
the hospital. He had all kinds of tests done on him, and was told he’d be fine.
It had been a close call, though. When asked what happened, Ryan told his dad
that Ethan had pushed the mattress out of the way just as Don was falling onto
it.

That night they
slept at Uncle Roland’s house. Don couldn’t sleep because he was too busy
thinking about what had happened earlier. Why did Ethan move the mattress when
it was his turn to tumble down it? Did he hurt him on purpose? If so, why? Did
Ethan hate him? Could he hate at that age?

Had he tried to
kill his older brother?

Don found
himself worrying a lot at the tender age of seven, and all that worrying would
eventually lead to an ulcer in his teenage years, but he had to worry. Something
was wrong with his family, and he was the only one who saw it.

Well, him and
Grandpa, but he wasn’t around to see what Don saw. That’s why Grandpa made him
his little spy. He’d told Don to call him if anything really weird happened
with his brother. Don wasn’t really used to calling people on the phone at that
age, but he vowed to do so if it ever became necessary.

Suddenly he
heard a creaking noise and looked toward the bedroom door. It was opening
slowly. At first all Don could see was the dark hallway and part of the
staircase across from Ryan’s room.

Then he saw the
guestroom next to the stairs, where Mom and Ethan slept. That door was wide
open.

Something
slowly materialized to block Don’s view of the room across the hall. It had
shiny, hateful eyes. It watched Don for a moment and then closed the door. Don
stayed awake the entire night after that.

*
 
*
 
*

Mom pulled Don
out of Woodcrest that fall and threw him into a public school called Windsor
Meadow Elementary, which was right down the street from his house. The change
came because Mom could no longer afford the private school.

He missed
Woodcrest, but Windsor Meadow wasn’t too bad. The only thing he didn’t like was
they served milk at lunch instead of orange soda, but he adjusted eventually.
The school also had a huge field up on a steep hill, where the kids played for
recess. The ground was red clay instead of regular dirt, which Don thought was
cool, though it got stuck in his shoes every day, which Mom did
not
think was cool.

This part of
his life was the calm before the storm. It lasted for a whole year, and Don
spent most of his time in his playroom. This room consisted of three walls, all
lined with big windows, and was built over the back porch. Dad had it built
shortly before he left. The floor was white tile, and at some point a large
cardboard box adorned the far left corner where Don kept almost
all
of
his toys. The box was only two inches shorter than him, and he managed to fill
it all the way to the top.

At some point,
Mom convinced him to make friends with a boy across the street named Nick
Platt. Nick was a gangly boy with blue eyes and blond hair. At first he and Don
didn’t get along very well—Nick seemed well aware they were being forced by
their parents to be friends—but after a while, the boys became the best of
buds. It was nice having a guy friend who was the same age.

It was also
nice having a friend Ethan didn’t cling to.

Nick and Don
became inseparable after a month, with Don spending most of his time at the
Platt house. Nick had no siblings, so he often looked at Ethan the way one
would probably look at an alien.

Don wondered if
his new friend could see something else when he looked at his brother. Don
clung to that thought, desperate to have someone else feel what he himself felt
when he was near Ethan. He had to know he was not just imagining things.

*
 
*
 
*

Nick and Don
shared several classes at Windsor Meadow. The school had a neat covered loading
area where the school buses would line up. Don memorized his bus number—13—as
he and Nick made their way to homeroom, which was separate from the main
building.