“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.”
“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 with 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 temperame
ntal 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.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” the man said.
“Where’s my son?” I screamed, making a grab for him. My hands were pushed down with unsettling ease and the man reached over and smacked my head painfully against the steering wheel.
“We don’t know,” he said, “but I’m sure we’ll figure it out easily enough. How’s your nose? Sorry about that, but we can’t afford to let you drive to Pete Green’s house and get yourself killed.”
“Where is my son?” I repeated, through gritted teeth.
“He could be in one of three places,” the man said, “or he could be in a fourth that we don’t yet know about. We didn’t take him, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“That’s what he’s thinking,” said the girl in the back seat.
“That’s what I thought,” said the man. “But we didn’t. Take him, that is.”
I looked at the man in the seat beside me. He was well-groomed. Clean-shaven. He wore gloves and had a hat sitting on his lap. He didn’t strike me as a Satanist. I turned to peer at the girl. I’d seen her before. She smiled at me and I recognised her from the bar the previous night – she’d been sitting at the next table when Chrissy came over.
“You’re Moon’s People,” I said.
“We’re not,” she told me.
“You’ve been spying on me.”
“Only a little.” She gave another smile. “And we’ve been listening to your phone calls slightly.”
They both spoke with an accent. Irish, though his was a little less distinct that hers. Maybe he travelled a lot.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“We’re here to help,” the man said. “We’re your exorcists.”
“My name’s Valkyrie,” said the girl.
“And you can call me Mr Pleasant,” said the man.
hey made me drive to the bottom of King Hill, and left me in the car with the engine still running. I could have driven away right there and then. Instead, I turned the engine off, killed the lights, and got out.
Mr Pleasant stood looking up at Bubba Moon’s old house on the top of the hill. He had his hat on now, which made him look like an old-time private eye, the kind I used to
watch on TV when I was a kid. A black Humphrey Bogart. The girl sat on the bonnet of my car and swung her legs.
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked.
Pleasant looked round. “We didn’t,” he said. “You drove us.”
“You made me drive you.”
“We asked you to and you did. We didn’t force you to do anything.”
Valkyrie looked at me. “I heard what your friend said last night about Bubba Moon. She got it right. Well, most of it. Moon isn’t a Satanist, though.”
“That’s right,” Pleasant murmured. “He’s just sick.”
He started walking up the hill. Valkyrie hopped off the bonnet and followed. I didn’t know what was expected of me, so I followed, too.
“Where’s my son?” I asked, for what felt like the hundredth time.
“I should have thought it was obvious,” said Pleasant. “The People have him.”
“Then we call the police. We have to call the police.”
“We don’t know where he is,” Valkyrie interjected, and it struck me that she was playing the good cop role in this partnership. He was allowed to be as rude as he liked, as long as she was there to smooth things over.
“If you call the police, they’ll rush in and whoever’s holding Sammy will kill him immediately and dump the body. He’s not in any danger right now. They do their killings on the fourteenth of each month. That’s tomorrow night. He’s safe for now.”
“Is he here?” I asked, my eyes flicking ahead of us. The house loomed, a dark thing in the darkness, its faded paint peeling like burst blisters, its windows blanked out by rotten wood, its roof patchy with old tiles.
“This is the most obvious place,” Pleasant said, “so I doubt it. But before we go charging in to the rescue, first we eliminate all the places we shouldn’t be charging.”
I frowned. “Rescue? You’re going to rescue Sammy? You’re going to help me?”
“Of course,” said Pleasant. “You’re only just getting that? We announced ourselves as the exorcists. How much clearer can we make it?”
“Don’t mind him,” said Valkyrie, patting my arm. “He’s just cranky. He didn’t even want to come here in the first place.”