“No matter,” said Margaret, “lay it on us.”
“You’re really going to hate it,” I said.
“Get on with it,” said Lauren.
“As long as it’s clean,” said Mom.
“That’s funny,” I said, “because it’s about cleaning.”
“I’m intrigued,” said Margaret, leaning on the table.
“What do you do when your dishwasher stops working?” Nobody offered an answer. I took a deep breath. “You slap her.”
“You’re right,” said Mom with a frown, “I hate it. But the good news is, you just volunteered to clear the table. Let’s head into the living room, ladies.”
“I say I won,” said Margaret, standing up. “My joke was funniest.”
“I think I won,” said Lauren, “because I got away without telling one.”
They shuffled into the other room and I gathered up the dishes. Usually I hated clearing the table, but I didn’t mind today—everyone was happy and no one was fighting. We might last longer than three hours after all.
When I finished stacking dishes in the sink, I joined them in the living room, and we handed out presents. I had gotten hand lotion for everyone. Mom gave me a reading lamp.
“You spend so much time reading,” she said, “and sometimes so late at night, I figured you could use it.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said. Thanks for believing my lies.
Margaret got me a new backpack—one of those big mountaineer packs with a water bottle and a drinking tube built into it. I always laughed at the kids who wore them.
“The pack you’ve got is falling apart,” said Margaret, “I’m amazed those straps are still attached.”
“There’s a couple of threads still hanging on,” I said.
“This one will carry all your books without breaking.”
“Thanks, Margaret.” I put it to the side with a resolve to try to remove that dopey water tube later.
“I’ve never read this, so it might suck,” said Lauren, handing me a book-shaped present. “But I know there was a movie, and the title seemed kind of appropriate, if nothing else.”
I opened it up and found a thick comic book—a graphic novel, or whatever the big ones are called. The title was Hellboy. I held it up and pointed at the title, and Lauren grinned.
“It’s two presents in one,” she laughed, “a comic book, and a nickname.”
“Yay,” I said flatly.
“The first person to call him ‘Hellboy’ has to open her presents outside,” said Mom, shaking her head.
“Thanks, though,” I said to Lauren, and she smiled.
“Time to open your father’s,” said Mom, and Lauren and I each took our boxes. They were simple brown shipping boxes—we’d left them that way just in case the gift inside wasn’t wrapped. You never knew with Dad. Mine was small, about the size of a textbook, but considerably lighter. I used my house key to cut open the packing tape. Inside was a card and an iPod. I tore open the card, slowly and deliberately, trying not to look excited. It had a goofy cartoon cat and one of those horrible poems about what a great son I was. Dad had written a note at the bottom, and I read it silently.
Hey Tiger—Merry Christmas! Hope you had a great year. Enjoy ninth grade while you can, because next year is High School and it’s a whole new ballgame. The girls are going to be all over you! You’re gonna love this iPod—I filled it up with all of my favorite music, all the stuff we used to sing together. It’s like having your Dad in your pocket! See you around!
—Sam Cleaver
I’d already started high school, so he was a year off, but I was too intrigued by the music thing to care. I didn’t even know where Dad was living—he hadn’t put a return address on the package—but I could remember riding in the car and singing along to his favorite bands: The Eagles, Journey, Fleetwood Mac, and others. It surprised me, for some reason, that he remembered that, too. Now I could pull out my iPod, pick a song, and be closer to my father than I’d been in five years.
The iPod box was still in shrink-wrap. I tore the plastic off, confused, and ripped open the box; the iPod was untouched, and the library was completely empty. He’d forgotten.
“Dammit, Sam,” said Mom. I turned and saw that she had read the card—she’d seen the screwed-up school year and the broken promise, and she was hanging her head wearily, rubbing her temples. “I’m so sorry, John.”
“That looks cool,” said Lauren, glancing over. “I got a portable DVD player and a DVD of the Apple Dumpling Gang—apparently we used to watch it together, and he thought it was special or something. I don’t remember it.”
“He makes me so mad,” said Mom, standing up and walking into the kitchen. “He can’t even buy your love without screwing it up.”
“An iPod seems pretty cool to me, too,” said Margaret. “Is there something wrong with it?” She read the card and sighed. “I’m sure he just forgot, John.”
“That’s the whole problem!” shouted Mom from the kitchen. She was banging dishes around noisily, venting her anger on them, as she clattered them through the sink and into the dishwasher.
“Still, though,” said Margaret, “it’s better to have an empty one anyway—you can fill it with whatever you want. Can I look at it?”
“Go ahead,” I said, standing up. “I’m going out.”
“Wait, John,” said Mom, rushing in from the kitchen, “let’s have dessert now—I bought two different pies, and some whip cream, and—”
I ignored her, grabbing my coat from the hall closet and walking to the door. She called me again, but I slammed the door shut, stomping down the stairs and slamming the outside door as well. I got on my bike and rode away, never looking back to see if they had followed me out, never looking up to see if they were watching through the window. I didn’t look at Mr. Crowley’s house, I didn’t look at Brooke’s house, I just pedaled my bike and watched the lines in the sidewalk fly by and hoped to God on every street I crossed that a truck would slam into me and wipe me across the pavement.
Twenty minutes later, I was downtown, and I realized that I’d ridden almost directly to Dr. Neblin’s office. It was closed, naturally, locked and hollow and dark. I stopped pedaling and just sat there, maybe for ten minutes, watching the wind whip curls of snow into the air, twirl them around and fling them into brick walls. I didn’t have anything to do, anywhere to go, or anyone to talk to. I didn’t have one single reason to exist.
All I had was Mr. Crowley.
There was a pay phone at the end of the street; the same one I’d used to call 911 a month before. Without knowing why, I propped my bike against it, dropped in a quarter, and dialed Mr. Crowley’s cell phone. While it rang, I pulled up the tail of my T-shirt and wrapped it over the end of the phone to hide my voice, praying that would actually work. After three rings, he answered.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” I said. I didn’t know what to say.
“Who is this?”
I paused. “I’m the one who’s been sending you notes.”
He hung up.
I swore, pulled out another quarter, and dialed again.
“Hello?”
“Don’t hang up.”
Click.
I only had two quarters left. I dialed again.
“Leave me alone,” he said. “If you know so much about me, then you know what I’ll do if I find you.” Click.
I had to think of something to keep him on the line; I needed to talk to someone, to anyone, demon or not. I dropped in my last quarter and dialed again.
“I said—!”
“Does it hurt?” I asked, interrupting him. I could hear him breathing heavily, hot and angry, but he didn’t hang up. “You ripped off your own arm,” I said, “and cut open your own belly. I just want to know if it hurts.”
He waited, saying nothing.
“Nothing you do makes sense,” I said. “You hide some bodies and you don’t hide others. You smile at a guy one minute and rip his heart o
ut the next. I don’t even know what you—”
“It hurts like hell.” He stayed silent a moment. “It hurts every time.”
He answered me. There was something in his voice—some emotion I couldn’t identify. Not quite happiness, not quite fatigue. It was something in the middle.
Relief?
Months of curiosity poured out in a flood. “Do you have to wait for something to break down before you replace it?” I asked. “Do you have to steal parts from people? And what about that guy in Arizona—Emmett Openshaw? What did you steal from him?”
Silence.
“I stole his life.”
“You killed him,” I said.
“I didn’t just kill him,” said Crowley, “I stole his life. He would have had a long one, I think. As long as this, at least. He would have gotten married and had kids.”
That didn’t sound right.
“How old was he?” I asked.
“Thirty, I think. I tell people I’m seventy-two.”
I had assumed Openshaw was older, like the recent victims. “You hid his body—well enough that no one ever found it—so why didn’t you hide Jeb Jolley’s? Or the two after that?”
Silence. A door closed.
“You still don’t know, do you?”
“You’re acting like a first-time killer,” I said, trying to puzzle through it. “You’ve gotten better with each one, and you’ve started hiding the bodies, which makes sense if you’ve never done this before, but you have. Is it all an act? But why would you pretend to be inexperienced if you could just keep it completely quiet instead?”
“Hang on,” he said, and coughed. He muffled the phone, but I could still hear loud coughs. Fake coughs, it sounded like, and something else behind them. A rumble. He unmuffled the phone, but it was harder to hear than before—there was static on the line, or white noise.
What was he doing?
“I acted inexperienced because I was,” he said. “I’ve taken more lives than you can guess, but Jeb was the first one I . . . didn’t keep.”
“You didn’t keep? But—” Could he keep souls? Could he absorb lives as well as body parts?
Or could he take lives instead of body parts?
“You took Emmett’s whole body,” I said, “and his shape. And you took someone else’s body before that, and someone else’s before that. It makes sense. You never had to hide the bodies before because you took everything, and left your old body behind. That’s why there was so much sludge in Emmett’s house—you discarded an entire body there, not just a part, and you—”
Ding . . . ding . . . ding . . ..
“What’s that?” I asked.
“What’s what?” he said.
“That noise. It sounded like a . . .” I slammed down the phone and grabbed my bike, looking wildly down the road.
It was a turn signal. Crowley was in his car, and he was looking for me.
There was no one on Main Street. I jumped on my bike and shot down to the corner, swerving around it too quickly and sliding on the ice. He wasn’t on this street either. I righted myself and pedaled as hard as I could to the next corner and spun around that as well, in the other direction, away from his house and the route he was probably following.
That’s why he said so much. Mr. Crowley was on a cell phone, and he had caller ID—he must have figured out I was on a pay phone, so he kept me talking while he went outside, started his car, and went to look for me. There were only two or three pay phones in town, and he was probably checking them all—the Flying J, the gas station by the wood plant, and the gas station where I’d been on Main. It had been closed for Christmas, thank goodness—there would be no clerks to describe me when kindly old Mr. Crowley showed up asking questions. But Christmas was also a problem—every building downtown was closed, every door locked, and every store empty. There was nowhere for me to hide.
What would be open on Christmas in a tiny town like Clayton? The hospital—but no, there was probably a pay phone there as well, and Crowley might drop by to check it. I heard a car and turned straight off the sidewalk onto a snow-covered lawn, forcing my way along the side of an apartment building. There was a gap between two buildings, and halfway down a gas meter; I squeezed around it and crouched down on the other side, eyeing the street at the end of a long, brick canyon. The car I heard didn’t pass by—I didn’t know who it had been, or where it had been going, only that I needed to hide.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening there, shivering in the snow. I could feel my body reacting, shutting down from cold, but I didn’t dare move. I imagined a fire-eyed Mr. Crowley driving back and forth across the town, weaving a net tighter and tighter around me. When it had been dark nearly an hour, I dragged my bike back out, my limbs stiff and my hands and feet burning with cold. I made my way home, saw that Crowley’s car was parked neatly in his driveway, and went upstairs.
The house was empty and quiet; everyone had left.
14
My phone conversation with Mr. Crowley ran through my head over and over for the next three days, to the exclusion of all else. Mom came home Christmas night crying and shouting that they’d spent the whole day looking for me, and where had I gone, and she was so glad I was safe, and a thousand other things that I didn’t listen to because I was too busy thinking about Mr. Crowley. The day after Christmas, Margaret came back and the three of us went out to a steakhouse, but I ignored them and my food, deep in thought. I’m sure they thought I was despondent because of Dad’s Christmas present, but I’d practically forgotten about that—all I could think about were Mr. Crowley’s hints and confessions, and there was no room in my head for anything else. By Wednesday, Mom had stopped trying to cheer me up, though I sometimes caught her staring at me from across the room. I was grateful to finally have some peace and quiet.
Mr. Crowley had all but admitted to me that he used to steal entire bodies, but that now he was only stealing pieces. It made sense in some ways—it explained why the DNA from the sludge kept showing up as the same person, because the whole body had come from Emmett Openshaw. It also explained why he was so good at killing, but so poor at hiding the evidence. He probably killed Jeb Jolley out of desperation, dying for lack of a good kidney, and simply didn’t think ahead about what to do with the body—he’d never had to do anything with it before. As the year went on and he killed more people, he got better at it, and even started looking for anonymous victims, like the lone drifter he took to Freak Lake. Even now, a month later, nobody knew that man was missing, and that the Clayton Killer had claimed another victim just before Thanksgiving. Nobody knew about the one he’d killed just before Christmas, either—the one I’d missed—so I assumed that was a drifter as well. There could be others that even I didn’t know about.
It also gave me a pretty good idea of why he never took more than one piece of each victim. If taking the whole body also gave him that body’s appearance, he was probably worried that taking too many pieces from one corpse would start to overwhelm the appearance he was trying to maintain. His body could deal with an arm here and a kidney there, but if too much of that victim started to creep in, he might lose the Bill Crowley identity he was fighting so hard to keep.
So yes, he was getting better at killing this way, instead of the old way, but the question remained: why had he changed? And why was there a forty-year gap with no killing at all? I tried to put myself into his place—a demon, wandering the Earth, killing someone and stealing his body and starting a new life. If I could do anything I wanted, why would I be here in Clayton County? If I could be as young and as strong as I wanted, why would I be old—so old I was falling apart? If I could kill one person and disappear without a trace, why would I hang around, killing a dozen people, and leaving more and more evidence that the cops could use to find me?
I tried to build another psychological profile, starting with the same key question: what did the killer do that he didn’t have to do? He stayed in one place. He maintained one i
dentity. He got old. And he killed, over and over—that had to mean something. Did he enjoy it? He didn’t seem to. But if I’d managed to figure out how he worked, then killing this many people was definitely something he didn’t have to do. He had another option. So why was he doing it?
If he didn’t have to do something, that meant he wanted to do it. Why did he want to get old? Why did he want to stay in this godforsaken town in the middle of this icy nowhere? What did Clayton have that the demon couldn’t find anywhere else? I couldn’t figure it out on my own; I needed Dr. Neblin. I had an appointment with him on Thursday, which gave me one day to plan my strategy—how to get the answers I needed without giving anything away.
Mom reminded me about my appointment over breakfast the next morning, and seemed genuinely surprised that afternoon when I actually left without prompting and rode my bike downtown. I suppose, from her point of view, it was the first active thing I’d done since running out on Christmas day; for me, it was just a chance to talk to someone I trusted.
“How was Christmas?” asked Neblin, cocking his head to the side. He did that when he was trying to hide something—probably the fact that he’d already heard all about Christmas from Mom. Dr. Neblin was a terrible liar; someday I’d have to play poker with him.
“I have a scenario for you,” I said. “I want your opinion.”
“What kind of scenario?”
“A fake psych profile,” I said. “I’ve been doing them for fun over Christmas break, and I’ve got one that I’m kind of hung up on.”
“Okay,” he said. “Fire away.”
“Let’s say you’re a shape-shifter,” I said. “You can change your face, and go anywhere you want, and be anyone you want to be. You can be any age, any size, any nationality, and do anything you want. Now imagine that you’re in a bad situation, forced to do things you don’t like. If you had this kind of freedom, why would you choose to stay?”
“So it’s question of risk and reward,” he said. “I stay me and live with hardship, or I escape the hardship at the cost of losing myself.”