But no, the sludge was just sludge—some physical remnant of a body that had never truly been his in the first place. The life behind it, the mind or the soul or whatever it was that made a live body live, had disappeared. It was a fire, and we were its fuel.
Remember me when I am gone.
“What was that?”
I looked up and saw my mom; I became aware of her hands clutching me tightly by the shoulders, of her body just slightly in front of mine. She’d placed herself between me and the monster. When had she done that? My mind felt tired and dark, like a storm cloud heavy with rain.
“It was a demon,” I said, pulling away from her and walking to the vacuum switch. I turned it off and the white-noise whir died away, abandoning us to silence. The vacuum tube was twisted grotesquely, melted into a smoking pile of noxious plastic curls. It looked like the intestines of a mechanical beast. The blade of the trocar was smeared with sludge, and I pulled it carefully, with two fingers, from the mass on the floor.
“A demon?” asked Mom, stepping back. “What . . . why? Why a demon? Why is it here?”
“It wanted to eat us,” I said, “sort of. It’s the Clayton Killer, Mom, the thing that’s been stealing body parts. It needed them to survive.”
“Is it dead?”
I frowned at the mess on the floor. It looked more like an old campfire than a body. “I think so. I don’t really know how it works.”
“How do you know any of this?” she asked, turning to look at me. Her eyes peered up at my face, searching for something. “Why were you outside?”
“The same reason you were,” I lied. “I heard a noise and went outside. It was in the Crowleys’ house, doing something—killing them, I guess. I heard screaming. Dr. Neblin was in the Crowleys’ car, dead, so I dragged him away where the demon couldn’t find him. That’s when you came out, and it came over here.”
She stared at my face, my blood-soaked coat, my clothes drenched in melted snow and freezing sweat. I watched as her gaze left me to travel around the room, taking in my bloody handprints on walls and counters, and the steaming, muddy ash on the floor. I could almost watch her thoughts as they played across her face—I knew this woman better than I knew anyone in the world, and I could read her almost more easily than I could read myself. She was thinking about my sociopathy and my obsession with serial killers. She was thinking about the time I threatened her with a knife, and about the way I looked at corpses, and about all the things she’d read and heard and feared ever since she’d first discovered, years ago, that I was not like other children. Perhaps she was thinking about my father, with violent tendencies of his own, and wondered how far I was going—or how far I’d already gone—down the same path. She ran through it all in her mind, over and over, sorting through the scenarios, and trying to figure out what to believe. And then she did something that proved, without question, that I didn’t really understand her at all.
She hugged me.
She spread her arms wide and pulled me close, holding my back with one hand and my head with another and crying—not in sadness, but in acceptance. She cried in relief, turning softly back and forth, back and forth, covering herself in the blood from my coat and gloves and not caring at all. I put my arms around her as well, knowing she would like it.
“You’re a good boy,” she said, pressing me tighter. “You’re a good boy. You’ve done a good thing.” I wondered how much she’d guessed, but I didn’t dare to ask. I simply hugged her until she was ready to stop.
“We need to call the police,” she said, stepping back and rubbing her nose. She closed the back door and locked it. “And we need to call an ambulance, in case he hurt the Crowleys, too, like you said. They could still be alive.” She opened the side closet and pulled out the mop and bucket, then shook her head and pushed them back in. “They’ll want to see it just as it is.” She skirted the edge of the sludge carefully, and headed for the hallway.
“Are you sure we should call?” I asked, following her closely. “Will they even believe us?” I followed her down the hall to the front office, walking almost on her heels, as I tried to talk her out of it. “We can just take Mrs. Crowley to the hospital ourselves—but we’ll have to change first, I’m covered with blood. Won’t they be suspicious?” I saw myself in jail, in court, in an institution, in an electric chair. “What if they arrest me? What if they think I killed Neblin, and all the others? What if they read Neblin’s files and think I’m a psycho and throw me in jail?”
Mom stopped, turned around, and stared directly into my eyes. “Did you kill Neblin?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course not,” she said. “And you didn’t kill anyone else.” She stepped back and pulled open her coat, showing me the blood on the sides and on her nightgown. “We’re both bloody,” she said, “and we’re both innocent. The cops will understand that we were trying to help, and trying to stay alive.” She let go of her coat and stepped back toward me, grabbing my arms tightly and stooping down just slightly to bring our faces mere inches apart. “But the most important thing is that we’re in this together. I will not let them take you anywhere, and I will not leave you, ever. We are a family. I will always be here for you.”
Something clicked into place, deep inside of me, and I realized that I had been waiting to hear those words for my entire life. They crushed me and freed me at the same time, fitting into my soul like a long-lost puzzle piece. The tension of the night, of the whole day, of the last five months, flowed out of me like blood from an opened vein, and I saw myself for the first time as my mother saw me—not a psycho, not a stalker, not a killer, but as a sad, lonely boy. I fell against her and realized, for the first time in years, that I was capable of crying.
In the few minutes before the police arrived, while Mom went in to the Crowleys’ house to check on them, I took Mr. Crowley’s cell phone from his discarded coat. Just in case, I looked through Neblin’s pockets and took his as well. I didn’t have time to dispose of them properly, so I hurled them—and Kay’s phone—over the Crowley’s back fence and into the forest beyond. There were no footprints back there, just acres of unbroken snow, so I hoped they’d stay safe until I could find and get rid of them more permanently. At the last moment, just in time, I remembered my GPS set, and pulled the second unit out from where I’d hidden it in the Crowleys’ car. I hurled them into the forest as well, just as the first siren grew close enough to hear.
Soon screaming sirens were followed by flashing lights and a long line of squad cars, ambulances, a hazmat team, and even a fire truck. The neighbors watched from porches and windows, shivering in their coats and slippers, as an army of uniforms spread throughout the street and secured the entire area. Neblin’s body was found and photographed; Kay, still unconscious, was treated and rushed to the hospital; Mom and I were interviewed; and the mess in our mortuary was carefully studied and catalogued.
The FBI agent I’d seen on the news, Agent Forman, interviewed Mom and me in the mortuary for most of that night—first together, then one at a time, while the other cleaned up. I told him, and everyone else who asked, the same story I’d told Mom—that I’d heard a noise, gone outside to check on it, and watched the killer go into the Crowleys’ house. They asked if I knew where Mr. Crowley was, and told them I didn’t know; they asked why I had decided to move Neblin’s body, and I couldn’t think of a reason that didn’t sound crazy, so I just said that it seemed like a good idea at the time. The sludge in our back room we pretty much ignored: we said that we had no idea how it got there. I couldn’t tell if they believed us or not, but eventually everyone seemed satisfied.
Before they left, they asked if I needed to see a grief counselor to help me deal with the simultaneous disappearance of two men I knew relatively well, but I said that seeing a second therapist to talk about my first therapist seemed kind of unfaithful. Nobody laughed. Dr. Neblin would have.
By morning, the story had spread and mutated: the Clayton Killer had killed
Bill Crowley while he was out driving late, and then killed Ben Neblin on his way back to Crowley’s house. There, the killer had started to beat and torture Kay until her neighbors—Mom and me—noticed something was wrong and interrupted him. The killer came after us, but ran away when we resisted, leaving behind nothing but the mysterious black sludge recognizable from the previous attacks. No one would believe that the attacker was some kind of disintegrating monster, so we didn’t bother to explain it that way.
There were just enough loose ends in the story, of course, that rumors began to fly—there were no bodies for the killer or for Crowley, so of course they might still be alive somewhere—but I knew that the long ordeal was finally over. For the first time in months, I felt peace.
I imagine that more suspicion might have fallen on me if Kay hadn’t been my staunchest defender—she swore to the police that I was a good boy, and a good neighbor, and that we loved each other like family. When they found my eyelash in her bedroom, she told them how I’d helped Mr. Crowley with the door hinges; when they found my fingerprints on the windows of her car, she told them how I’d helped to check the oil and the tire pressure. Every question they had could be answered by the fact that I’d spent almost every day at their house for two straight months. The only truly damning evidence was on the cell phones, but so far, no one had found them.
Besides all of that, I was just a kid—I don’t think they ever really took me seriously as a suspect. If I’d tried to cover up what had happened that night I’m sure I would have seemed more suspicious, but by going straight to the police with everything, we seemed to have earned a bit of trust. After a while, it was almost like it had never happened.
I expected the demon’s death to bother me more—to haunt my dreams, or something—but instead I found myself focusing over and over on the demon’s last words: “Remember me.” I wasn’t sure that I wanted to—he was a vicious, evil killer, and I never wanted to think about some of those things again.
The thing was, there were a lot of things that I didn’t want to think about—things that I’d spent years not thinking about—and ignoring them had never really gotten me anywhere. I think it was time to follow Crowley’s advice, and remember. When the police finally left her alone, I went to visit Kay Crowley.
She hugged me when she answered the door. No words, no greeting, just a hug. I didn’t deserve it, but I hugged her back. The monster growled, but I stared it down; it remembered this frail woman, and knew how easy she’d be to kill, but I focused all of my energy on self-control. This was far harder than I wanted to admit.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, her eyes streaming with tears. Her right eye was bruised black, and I felt sick.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, dear,” she said, pulling me into the house. “You didn’t do anything but help.”
I stared at her closely, studying her face, her eyes, everything. This was the angel that tamed a demon; the soul that trapped him and held him with a power he’d never felt before. Love. She saw the intensity of my stare, and peered back.
“What’s wrong, John?”
“Tell me about him,” I said.
“About Bill?”
“Bill Crowley,” I said. “I’ve lived across the street my whole life, but I don’t think I really knew him at all. Please tell me.”
It was her turn to study me—eyes as deep as wells, watching me from a time long past.
“I met Bill in 1968,” she said, leading me to the living room and sitting on the sofa. “We got married two years after that—next May would have been our forty-year anniversary.”
I sat across from her and listened.
“We were both in our thirties,” she said, “and in those days, in this town, being single and thirty made me an old maid. I’d resigned myself to it, I guess, but then one day, Bill came in looking for a job. I was the secretary in the water office at the time. He was very handsome, and he had an ‘old soul’—he wasn’t into that hippie stuff like so many people were back then. He was polite, and well-mannered, and he reminded me a little of my grandfather, in the way he always wore a hat, and opened doors for the ladies, and stood up when one walked into a room. He got the job, of course, and I’d see him every morning when he came in—he was always very gracious. He was the one who started to call me Kay, you know—my real name is Katherine, and everyone called me Katie, or Miss Wood, but he said that even Katie took too long to say, and shortened it to Kay. He was always moving—always doing something new and running from one place to the next. He had a lust for life. I set my sights on him after just a couple of weeks.” She laughed softly, and I smiled.
Mr. Crowley’s past unfolded before me like a painting, rich in color and texture, and deep with understanding of its subject. He was not a perfect man, but for a time—for a very long time—he had been a good one.
“We dated for a year before he proposed,” Mrs. Crowley continued. “Then one Sunday, we were eating dinner at my parents’ house, with all my brothers and sisters and their families, and we were all laughing and talking, and he got up and left the room.” She had a faraway look in her eyes. “I followed him out and found him crying in the kitchen. He told me that he’d never ‘got it’ before; I remember it so clearly, the way he said it: ‘I never got it before, Kay. I never got it until now.’ He told me he loved me more than anything in heaven or hell—he was very romantic with his words—and asked me right there to marry him.”
She sat quietly for a moment, eyes closed, remembering.
“He promised to stay by my side forever, in sickness and in health. . . . In his last days, he was more sickness than health—you saw the way he was—but he told me again, every day. ‘I’ll stay by your side forever.’ ”
I don’t think my mom realized that a new person moved in with us that day, but it’s been with us ever since. My monster was out for good now, and I couldn’t put it away. I tried to—every day I tried to—but it doesn’t work that way. If it were that easy to get rid of, it wouldn’t be a monster.
Once the demon was dead, I tried to rebuild the wall and put my rules back in place, but my own darker nature fought back at every turn. I told myself I wasn’t allowed to think about hurting people anymore, but in every unguarded moment, my thoughts turned automatically toward violence. It was like my brain had a screen saver full of blood and screaming, and if I ever left it idle for too long, those thoughts would pop up and take over. I started acquiring hobbies that kept my mind busy—reading, cooking, logic puzzles—anything to stop that mental screen saver from coming back on. It worked for a while, but sooner or later, I’d have to put the hobbies down and go to bed, and then I’d lie there alone in the dark and wrestle with my thoughts, until I bit my tongue and pounded my mattress and begged for mercy.
When I finally gave up on trying to change my thoughts, I decided that actions were the next best thing. I made myself start complimenting people again, and forced myself to stay far away from other people’s yards—I practically gave myself a pathological fear of windows, just from forcing myself not to look in them. The dark thoughts were still there, underneath, but my actions stayed clean. In other words, I was really good at pretending to be normal. If you met me on the street, you’d never guess how much I wanted to kill you.
There was one rule that I never reinstated; the monster and I both chose to ignore it for different reasons. Barely a week had gone by before Mom forced me to confront it. We were eating dinner and watching The Simpsons again—times like that were virtually the only times we talked.
“How’s Brooke?” Mom asked, muting the TV. I kept my eyes focused on the screen.
She’s great, I thought. She has a birthday coming up, and I found the complete guest list for her slumber party crumpled up in her family’s garbage can. She likes horses, manga, and eighties music, and she’s always just late enough for the school bus that she has to run to catch up. I know her class schedule, her GPA, her social-security numb
er, and the password to her Gmail account.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s fine, I guess. I don’t see her all that often.” I knew I shouldn’t be following her, but . . . well, I wanted to. I didn’t want to give her up.
“You should ask her out,” said Mom.
“Ask her out?”
“You’re fifteen,” said Mom, “almost sixteen. It’s normal. She doesn’t have cooties.”
Yeah, but I probably do. “Did you forget the whole sociopath thing?” I asked. Mom frowned at me. “I have no empathy—how am I supposed to form a relationship with anybody?”
It was the great paradox of my rule system: if I forced myself not to think about the people I most tended to think about, I’d avoid any bad relationships, but I’d avoid any good ones just as strongly.
“Who said anything about a relationship?” said Mom. “You can wait ’til you’re thirty to have a relationship if you want—it would be a lot easier on me. I’m just saying that you’re a teenager, and you should be out having fun.”
I looked up at the wall. “I’m not good with people, Mom,” I said. “You of all people should know that.”
Mom was silent for a moment, and I tried to imagine what she was doing—frowning, sighing, closing her eyes, thinking about the night I threatened her with a knife.
“You’ve been so much better,” she said at last, “It’s been a rough year, and you haven’t been yourself.”
I’d been more myself in the past few months than I’d ever been in my life, actually, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.
“The thing you need to remember, John,” said Mom, “is that everything comes with practice. You say you’re not very good with people—well, the only way to get good is to go out and do it. Talk. Interact. You won’t develop any social skills sitting here with me.”
I thought about Brooke, and about the thoughts of her that filled so much of my mind—some good, some very dangerous. I didn’t want to give her up, but I didn’t trust myself around her either. It was safer this way.