The Devil Crept In Read online

  “Hey, Sack,” Jude said, the hard edge of his tone softened, if not altogether gone. Stevie stopped just shy of cornering the house when he spoke up. “We should go to the fort soon. Finish it up.”

  Stevie could only stare at the cat before him—dirty and injured, like it had been in a street fight. And while he wanted to be happy about Jude’s offer, all that seized his heart was stammering fear. This time, it was his turn to be silent. He didn’t respond, only walked a little faster toward his own house. Because something was wrong with Jude. Really really wrong.

  · · ·

  When Stevie stepped back into his own home, it was quiet, empty. The TV was off because Terry was at work. Dunk was sleeping or screwing around on his computer, and his mom was somewhere—perhaps next door, or in the shower. He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

  The way Jude’s mood had shifted from mute to amused to aggressive within the span of seconds had left Stevie dizzy, vulnerable, angry at Jude’s inability to balance himself out. Stevie was supposed to be the weird one, unable to control his speech patterns, sure of evils that lurked in shadows that no one else could see.

  Across the house, a spoon clanged against the inside of a bowl. Stevie blinked out of his daze and turned his attention to the kitchen where, for the past week, his mother seemed to be baking funeral casseroles on an everlasting loop. He sucked in a breath, pushed himself away from the front door, moved past Terry’s ugly armchair, and slowly made his way to the heart of the house. But rather than finding his mom in her usual spot over the stove, there was his stupid older brother, eating cold breakfast cereal at half past noon, his phone glowing in his hand. Stevie loomed in the kitchen’s threshold, wondering if he should ignore the oaf he called a sibling and just go to his room. But annoyance was scratching at the walls of his chest, offering up a wooly itch for a fight. Letting Dunk have it would make Stevie feel better, and feeling better sounded good. Because so far, he’d had a pretty shitty day.

  But Dunk beat him to the punch. He looked up from his phone and smirked. “What’s wrong with you?” A single brow arched high above his right eye, which made him look like a curious idiot; nothing but a waste-of-space high school kid who nobody would go looking for if he went missing; a guy nobody would cry about if he were eaten by whatever it was that was looming out there in that forest. Heck, Stevie bet even Annie would be relieved. God, that stupid haircut!

  “Nothing.” Stevie’s response was clipped. On second thought, fighting with Dunk wasn’t worth the effort. He had bigger fish to fry. “Where’s Mom?”

  Dunk looked back to his phone. “Grocery store, probably. Picking up more shit for Aunt Mandy.”

  Stevie frowned at that. It seemed to him that Aunt Amanda should have been back to cooking her own stuff; seemed to him like everything in the Brighton house should have gone back to the way it had once been. But it hadn’t. And for whatever reason, that thought made him want to rage.

  “H-how come you didn’t wake me up?” Stevie asked, but Duncan wasn’t paying attention. Less than two seconds since he had spoken, and there he was, already absorbed in whatever game he was playing, or article he was reading, or whatever it was that he did on that thing in the first place. Facebooking, his mom liked to stay. Stop Facebooking for just one second, would you please? There’s life beyond that stuff. Real live people, Duncan . . .

  “DUNK.” Stupid punk.

  Duncan glanced up, albeit with a nasty What the hell do you want? look.

  “W-why didn’t you wake me up?” he asked again, adamant. “I left you a note. It was in red marker right under your door. Did you read it?”

  Dunk shoveled a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. His expression said it all: he hadn’t woken Stevie up because he didn’t give a shit. Stevie clenched his teeth as he watched his brother crunch a mouthful of Frosted Flakes. The seed of anger that was nestled into the center of his heart grew with every cowlike chew. Suddenly, all he wanted to do was rush his sibling and shove that bowl into Dunk’s lap.

  “J-Jude came home,” Stevie told him, his eyes not once leaving his brother’s face, waiting for some sort of reaction, some proof that his brother was a living, breathing human being. “Last night, all right?”

  “So I huh-huh-heard,” Dunk responded. “Cuh-cuh-congratulations to him on finding himself. Like an elf on a shelf. Now, if you don’t muh-mind, I was enjoying alone time with myself.”

  Something tripped over itself in Stevie’s chest. Dunk had made fun of him before, but all at once he found himself breathless, his bottom lip trembling as though his brother had said the most hurtful, infuriating thing he’d ever heard. He swallowed hard, looked down at his feet, tried to hold it together as best he could, all the while wondering why his urge to scream had suddenly morphed into the need to cry.

  Memory of Jude’s threat washed over him. His best friend’s own hurtful insult: Dr. Seuss. The way he had stared blankly into the TV camera, swaying ever so slightly, like a reed in the wind. It pushed Stevie over the edge, and all at once, tears were stinging the backs of his eyes.

  “What’s wrong with you?” He couldn’t keep his tone from wavering. “H-how can you not care that he was gone for so long? What if he hadn’t come back and the things that happened . . . the things, that thing . . . they were awful when he was missing and now he’s back but still gone even though he’s back because of the bad stuff?” He paused mid tirade, gulped a breath. “What if he’s got drama?”

  Duncan snorted. “You mean trauma?”

  “Trauma!” Yes. That’s what Stevie meant, and Dunk knew it.

  Dunk looked back to his phone, pretending that he was somewhere other than in the kitchen being asked such heavy questions, being scolded and yelled at by his delicate flower of a kid brother. But Dunk’s lack of response only reminded Stevie of Jude’s blank TV face. He narrowed his eyes, looked for something to throw. When he found nothing, he kicked the doorjamb instead.

  “You suck,” Stevie said, shoulders squared, unabashed. “Next thing you know, you’re gonna be just like terrible Tyrant Terry. A no-good loser, a snoozer, that’s what you are! A snoozer who doesn’t care about anything except stupid basketball. And you’re not even good, so you better go practice!”

  That did the trick. Dunk snapped to attention. His face twisted as though he’d been genuinely insulted. He opened his mouth, ready to slam Stevie with some witty locker room comeback. Fag. Moron. Dipshit. But rather than giving him the chance, Stevie stomped out of the kitchen and moved down the hall to his room. Because no matter the situation, the last thing he wanted was for stupid Dunk to see him cry.

  He slammed his door and crawled onto his bed. He shouldn’t have said that basketball thing to Dunk. That hadn’t been fair. He’d have to apologize, and the sooner he did it the better. But just as he gathered himself up to march back into the kitchen and deliver an embittered reparation, he paused at the sight of Jude—not in the backyard, where Stevie had left him, but now in the side yard between Stevie’s house and his own. He was just standing there, facing Stevie’s bedroom window, his hands resting atop the crooked fence that cut the two properties in half. That faraway look was back, like the lights were on but nobody was home. Knock knock. Stevie slowly pressed his hand against the glass of his window, offering his best friend a mute hello. Jude lifted his hand, too, but not to mimic Stevie’s greeting. Rather than waving, he scratched at that spot on his left arm. His expression as vacant as a freshly cleaned chalkboard. As though Stevie were invisible. Just like the cats, that surrounded him now, but Jude didn’t seem to notice—four of them in total, with one rubbing up against his leg.

  19

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Stevie found his mother in the tiny laundry room just shy of the kitchen pantry. She was squeezed between the wall and the dryer like a fly between a window and a screen, tossing clothes into a plastic basket sitting on top of the washer.

  “Mom?” Stevie shifted his weight from foot to foot as he st
ood in the doorway, watching his mom pile laundry into the bin while the back of her jeans polished the wall behind her clean.

  “Hey, baby,” she said. “What’s up?”

  “D-do you have time to talkity-talk?” He paused, whispered to himself, as if to check his words. “Tockity-tock . . .”

  The question made her falter. She paused, her right hand held aloft, one of Dunk’s basketball jerseys crumpled in her fist. “Talkity-talk?” she asked, her smile shifting to concern.

  “Talk,” Stevie corrected himself, looking down at his feet. What ten-year-old asked his mother to talkity-talk? Only him. “D-do you have time to talk for a minute,” he asked again. “Talk for a minute.”

  “Sure, honey.” He didn’t need to look at her to know that she was worried. He could hear the strain in her voice. Every time he slipped up, he imagined her replaying the yelling, his dad muttering about how Stevie would eventually lose it, how he’d end up going on a rampage. It was part of the reason why he wasn’t able to meet his mother’s gaze, afraid that what he was about to say would make him seem even crazier than his constant verbal ticks.

  “It’s about Jude,” he finally said. “I really th-think there’s something wrong with him, I think. I know, I think, I know it sounds weird, b-but . . .” His words tapered off. He gave her a wary glance, unsure of himself.

  “Tell me what’s wrong.” She offered a reassuring nod. Go on.

  “It’s h-hard to explain,” he said.

  “Well, give it a shot.”

  He chewed on his bottom lip, trying to figure out how to put the words together so that they made sense. “He’s just acting really weird . . . ,” he said. “Not like himself. Like, yesterday I saw him in the backyard, in the back . . .”

  “Well, that’s good, right?” she asked. “At least he was out of his room. That’s an improvement.”

  “Except that when I went over, when I went . . . I went over, red rover, he was looking at the fence. Just staring at it. The fence. Staring-contest staring. Like he didn’t even know I was there,” Stevie recalled. “I said Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey—”

  “Okay, Stevie.” She placed a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Take a second.”

  He paused. Squeezed his eyes shut. Gave his brain a minute to recalibrate.

  “A-and he didn’t hear me for a while, like he’d gone deaf or something.”

  “Maybe he was just zoned out,” his mom offered. “Don’t be so critical, sweetheart. You zone out all the time.” Fair point, but zoning out in front of the TV was a heck of a lot different from what Jude had been doing—staring at the punched-out knot in the fence slat like he wanted to crawl through it and to the other side; like he knew something was out there, just beyond it. Zoned out wasn’t strong enough a modifier. Jude hadn’t just been zoned out. He’d been gone.

  “Okay,” Stevie said. “But then he got really really weird.”

  “Weird how?” Stevie’s mom blindly jutted her arm into the dryer and felt around, searching for clothes she couldn’t see. She wasn’t able to fully open the door in those cramped quarters. Laundry day was a contortionist’s act.

  “L-like, mean. I was just joking around—”

  She gave him a look.

  “I was just saying, just playing, I swear . . .”

  “I told you not to give him a hard time,” she reminded.

  “I wanted him to feel better, but he got so mad, so Mad Hatter with the cats that he threatened to punch my teeth in, throwing rocks and everything.”

  Stevie’s mom stiffened. She knew just as well as anyone that Jude had a penchant for drama, but threats weren’t something she was about to tolerate. And rock throwing? “That’s unacceptable.” Her words were clipped. She shoved a handful of clothes into the laundry basket and slammed the small metal door closed with a bang.

  “That’s unacceptable,” Stevie whispered to himself.

  “I’m going to talk to your aunt Mandy about that when I go over there.”

  Stevie frowned. He hadn’t meant to get Jude into trouble, and yet there he was, ratting him out. “B-but, Mom . . .”

  “No, Stevie,” she said, giving him a stern look. “We aren’t okay with that kind of thing.”

  “I know that . . .”

  “I mean, I understand that he’s got issues,” she murmured.

  “Mom . . .” He was getting impatient.

  “But threatening my kid . . .”

  “M-mom?” She wasn’t listening again. Why he was surprised, he wasn’t sure.

  “I swear, if—”

  “Mom!” Stevie hadn’t meant to yell, but it had come out that way, regardless. She started, nearly dropping the basket she’d gathered off the top of the washer, and stared at him with wide eyes. “A second later he was fine, Frankenstein,” he explained. Another pause. Another regroup. “He was fine, Mom, like he didn’t even know he had said what he said, what he had said. And then I asked him if he wanted to go to the fort. I asked him, You want to go to the fort? And he acted like it was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard, like he’d never been to the fort before at all. So I left him alone to go home alone and, and, and, and when I . . . when I . . . when I started walking he said that maybe we should go work on the fort since we need to finish it before school gets back in.” For half a second, he was distracted by the fact that he’d been able to say so much all at once. He actually felt proud until he caught sight of his mother’s face.

  Her mouth was open, like she was ready to say something. She looked bewildered, disturbed. Finally, he thought, an appropriate response.

  “I really think there’s really something really wrong,” he reiterated. “I think he n-needs to go to the doctor to make sure nothing happened to his brain.” Like a lobotomy, or that electroshock stuff. “I thought about telling Aunt Mandy, but I don’t want to scare her about the monster and maybe there isn’t anything wrong, maybe I’m the one who’s being weird, but that thing, that thing, that . . .” He bit his lip. Crap.

  Silence.

  Stevie and his mother stared at each other for a long while. Finally, she spoke.

  “Stevie?” She slowly raised an eyebrow at him. He hated when she did that. It made him feel stupid and small. “The monster?”

  He swallowed, not sure whether he should fess up and tell her about it, or whether he should pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  No. Better not.

  When Stevie held firm in his silence, she sighed. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll talk to your aunt about it.”

  “About w-what?” The monster? No, she couldn’t . . .

  “About Jude— Stevie, are you feeling okay?” Her gaze was unfaltering. She wanted a solid answer to ease her nerves, even if it was a lie. Reaching out, she pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. He took a step back, out of her reach.

  “Sure, yeah, fine, great, thanks. J-just don’t let Jude hear you, okay? Don’t let him hear you.” Jude wasn’t big on relying on adults for anything. He thought adults were just as fake as the kids at school, and most of the time Stevie agreed. And yet there he was, asking his mom—the woman who had grounded him rather than listening to what he had to say—for help. He’d betrayed his friend by squealing, but he was desperate.

  “I’ll be quiet about it,” she promised, then gave him a little smile of reassurance. “But I want you staying inside for the rest of the day, all right?”

  “How come?”

  “It’s hot,” she said. “Just watch some TV.”

  Stevie didn’t completely trust his mom with the information he’d given her, but he took a step away from the laundry room door. He really did hope she didn’t blab, because if Jude did overhear her, Stevie knew their friendship would be over.

  · · ·

  Two hours and three episodes of Unsolved Mysteries later, Stevie found Jude standing on the welcome mat of his front porch. He was the last person Stevie had expected to see. But rather than questioning what his cousin was doing there, Stev
ie simply smiled at his peeling, lobster-red friend and offered his typical “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself,” Jude replied.

  “Jeez, doesn’t that hurt?” Stevie asked, wincing at Jude’s killer sunburn. The chapped bits of skin on Jude’s cheeks were spreading like some sort of flesh-eating disease. The only time Stevie had seen a burn that bad was on his dad. They had gone to Indian Beach, camped out, climbed rocks, built a bonfire and everything. The next thing Stevie knew, his dad was moving around like a robot in need of oil, hissing through his teeth and holding his arms out as though they were made of fire.

  Jude, however, didn’t seem to be bothered by his sizzled skin. He shrugged, as though the burn looked worse than it was—and it looked awful; like a boiled tomato shedding its casing.

  “Wanna go to the fort?” Jude asked.

  Stevie couldn’t help it; he faltered. His heart felt as if it were swelling to ten times its size, crowding out every other organ with a concurrent sense of optimism and doubt. Jude could have been having a bad day yesterday; cranky, annoyed by all those cats. Perhaps Stevie had just caught him during an off moment and all Jude had needed was a whole lot of sleep. But now he was good to go. A-OK. Ready to rumble and feeling fine.

  Unless it was a trick.

  A warning voice whispered at the back of Stevie’s mind, setting his teeth on edge with a nefarious purr. Don’t believe it. It’s too good to be true.

  And yet, Stevie caught himself nodding. Yes, he wanted to go to the fort. Sure, he’d venture into the woods with a kid he was no longer sure he could trust. Why not? What could possibly go wrong?

  He pleaded his case to his mother.

  “I can’t just tell him no.” And in a way, that was true. Stevie’s mom may have been worried about the stuttering and word salad, but Jude was the priority here, at least in Stevie’s mind. If Jude wanted to wander around in the forest, if that was something that was going to help him get back to his old self, it was Stevie’s duty as his best friend to comply.