The thought went away when I caught sight of the man standing behind the mall cop. He looked straight at us and smiled. To his left stood a woman, also with her eyes fixed on us. Another man walked by, nodded good-naturedly to the mall cop, who nodded back, and then he smiled at us and lifted his shirt slightly. We saw the knife in his waistband, and backed off.
At the very centre of the Green Fields Mall there was an area of recessed seating. Chrissy and I sat there for an hour, huddled together but not speaking. A neighbour of Chrissy’s passed, saw us sitting there and made a teasing comment about me being Chrissy’s new boyfriend. Despite everything, I blushed. Chrissy’s neighbour asked her if she’d like a lift home. Chrissy looked at me, desperate to say yes, but reluctant to leave me. I told her to go on, I’d be fine.
And I was fine. I walked home quickly, leaving the mall amid a mass exodus of shoppers. I didn’t see any of the people who’d been chasing us. Nobody followed me – at least that I was aware of. I got home and everything was normal, and my dad got back from work and we had dinner and I watched Airwolf and then Knight Rider, and I didn’t say a single word about what had happened.
The threat was clear. You talk to the mall cop, and he dies. And it hadn’t just been a threat to mall cops. Somehow I knew it was a threat to anyone I might go to for help.
I didn’t sleep that night. Chrissy told me later that she didn’t, either.
I spent the weekend in my house, refusing to leave my bedroom for the most part. I tried doing my homework, I tried reading. I dreaded Monday morning. What if Pete was back in school? What if I walked into class and he was there, sitting in his usual seat, with the flickering image of that man looming over him?
Monday came, though, and Pete’s seat remained empty. It was empty for the rest of that week, and the week after. Then came the news that Pete’s folks had pulled him out of school. Everyone came to me and asked what had happened, what was wrong with my friend, but I just shrugged and told them I hadn’t been speaking to him. Eventually, they stopped asking.
Four months after that, I woke up one night to my name being called outside my window. I got out of bed, parted the curtains. There was a sliver of moon in the cloudy sky that barely lit anything in my backyard, but I could see Pete’s face, pale and smiling up at me.
He called my name softly, and I heard him giggle. Then the clouds covered the moon, and when the moon came back Pete was gone.
I went back to bed and I didn’t sleep that night, either.
left home when I was eighteen, glad to see the back of the place, glad to leave all those bad memories behind. By then, of course, my selective memory had long since sorted through it all and thrown out the more outlandish elements of what had happened. The version of the truth it left me with was a lot more palatable to a reasonable mind such as mine.
In this new version, elegant in its simplicity and carefully censored to protect the innocent, me and my friends had broken into this creepy old house when we were kids and we’d scared each other witless. A few days later, I went for a walk with a pretty girl to see my sick buddy, then ended up getting chased over fences by irate neighbours after we trampled some flowers. This revised version of events didn’t feature the flickering figure or the subtle threats and it made absolutely no mention of Bubba Moon, and that was OK by me.
I went to college in NYU and studied hard. I guess I knew that dropping out or failing would mean an inevitable return to my hometown, and I had no intention of going back there any time soon.
In my second year in New York, I met a girl in the library. She was surrounded by coursework and weighty tomes, and I glimpsed the lurid cover of a Gordon Edgley paperback peeking out from behind a textbook. I sat opposite, threatened to expose her for the fraud she was if she didn’t agree to have a coffee with me. I’d never been that forward before, but there was something about her, something about the way her attention was completely and utterly focused on the horror story in her hands, that made her irresistible to a bookworm like me.
She gave me a smile that only hinted at her mischievous nature, and five years later we were married. Two years after that we had our first kid. Three years after that, our second. I got a good job in a bank and Felicity stayed at home and took care of the kids, and for a nice long while life was sweet.
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 use
d 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 basemen
t, 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…”