The Devil Crept In Page 30

He clenched his hands into fists while Jude’s fingers remained ensnared in Aunt Mandy’s hair. “Stevie . . . just run,” she wept. “Just run away.” But Stevie didn’t move. Not until Jude gave his mother’s hair another unsparing pull. It was then—with Jude’s attention at half-mast—that he sucked in a breath and charged.

  He rammed his shoulder into his cousin’s chest the way he’d seen football players do it a bazillion times during Terry’s games. Jude stumbled backward, but he didn’t fall. His reflexes were too quick. He grabbed Stevie by the front of his rain-soaked shirt, spun him around, and launched him toward the nearest wall.

  Stevie flew forward, crashed into the kitchen counter, the cutlery inside the silverware drawer rattling with the impact. Glasses shuddered inside the overhead cabinet. Spice bottles shook from atop the stove’s back ledge, tumbling onto the steel top, crashing and rolling across the kitchen floor. He grabbed one, lobbed it at Jude’s head as hard as he could. Stevie Clark, quarterback, gonna let it fly, here it goes! It zinged just past Jude’s ear, glass and brown powder exploding against the wall. The kitchen filled with the scent of cinnamon, tamping the raw, metallic fetor of death.

  Jude spun around, glanced at the starburst of cinnamon against Aunt Mandy’s peach-colored wall, and for half a second he looked as if he was about to laugh the way he used to—a little manic, a lot amused, totally enamored by the chaos unfolding before him. But he only readjusted his grip on his mother’s hair and dragged her across the hardwood toward the door, far more interested in getting Aunt Mandy out of the house than wrestling Stevie to the floor.

  His escape was blocked when Stevie’s mom came flying around the side of the house. She was yelling “Mandy? Mandy!” and coming in too fast to keep herself from bolting up the back steps. At the last second, she caught herself on the jamb, her eyes wide with fright. Jude hesitated, caught off guard by this new visitor, debating whether to plow through Stevie’s mom or drag Aunt Mandy clear across the house and out the front door.

  If Stevie had learned anything from all of those cop shows, it was to use any distraction to his advantage. Jude’s momentary stall had Stevie twisting where he stood. He yanked open the drawer behind him and grabbed the first thing that fell into his hand: a giant two-pronged grilling fork, the kind he and Jude used for roasting marshmallows over the stove’s gas burner on cold winter days. He didn’t give himself time to think, knowing that if he hesitated, he wouldn’t go through with the deed. Chicken. Like yanking off a Band-Aid or jumping off a high dive, he launched forward without considering the consequences. Well, do you got a pair or what?

  Aunt Mandy continued to yowl. Stevie’s mom screamed. Terry appeared behind her shoulder, looking bewildered as a low and threatening growl slithered from deep within Jude’s throat.

  Stevie ran for his once-best friend, pulled his arm back for added leverage, and buried the fork deep between Jude’s shoulder blades. “Jude-not-Jude!” he wailed. “Not Jude, not Jude!”

  Jude gave a high-pitched, doglike whine—a howl tinged with frenzy and pain. Aunt Mandy and Stevie’s mom joined in the chorus as the hammer tumbled from Jude’s left hand, thumping to the ground. His right hand tore from the tangle of Aunt Mandy’s hair, taking a fistful of blond with it. He fell into a frantic high-step, both arms desperately trying to catch hold of whatever had stung him, his movements made all the more gruesome by hysterical dismay. He spun like a top, reaching so far backward he verged on dislocating his arms. Knocking into the table, he sent kitchen chairs flying, kicked fallen spice containers across the floor like tiny missiles, stumbled when his feet snared on the upturned rug. His right shoulder rolled out of its socket with an audible pop—a contortionist putting on an impromptu in-house show. Stevie had to think fast. In a second, possibly two, Jude would reach that giant fork, yank it out of his back, magically heal himself, and embed that utensil right through Stevie’s heart.

  Stevie crashed to his knees, his hands slapping the floor. If he could just get to that hammer, he could scare Jude off, chase him out the door and into the darkness, where he was sure the hunched creature-thing was awaiting his return. Because that was why Jude was so desperate to take Aunt Mandy with him, wasn’t it? She was a sacrifice; another meal. Or had the dead lady in the basement been an accident? Jude had called her “Mother.” Maybe he’d done so because the lady had been that thing’s mom, and now that she was dead, a replacement was due.

  He rushed across the floor on hands and knees while Jude danced above him—the devil jigging to a phantom fiddle. Stevie’s blood-smeared palm hit the Stanley’s rubber grip. He rolled back on his heels, ready to bound up and save the day. But his ascent was stalled when, looking up, he found Jude standing over him with a pitiless glare. His left arm was suddenly seized, his free hand yanked forward. Jude opened his mouth wide and crammed Stevie’s good hand past those darkening teeth. And then he bit down.

  The pain was a firework, a replay of the InSinkErator—a burst of white hot sparks exploding inside his brain. He tried to scream, gasped for air, instinctively jerked his hand away from Jude’s lipless mouth. That was a bad idea. With Jude’s teeth ferociously clamped against his fingers, Stevie’s pain was intensified tenfold by attempted retreat. The moms screamed as Jude gnashed his teeth harder, blood oozing down his chin. Stevie heard someone yelling Terry, Terry! as he searched for breath, unable to look away from his best friend’s face, from those terrible shadows beneath his eyes, from the snarl that now struck him as a nightmarish smirk. Finally, it said, we’re having some fun in the sun, son.

  Stevie’s inability to holler was supplanted by another cry. “Terry, stop them!”

  A cacophony of voices. Indiscernible. All of them at a fevered pitch, punctuated by a masculine yell. Terry pushed through the women, spitting out open-ended questions that were speckled by swears. “The fuck . . . ?” If Terry said anything beyond that, Stevie didn’t hear it. Something kicked on inside his brain, and suddenly his own inability to speak was replaced by shrieks. Another frantic yank away from Jude’s mouth was enough to expose a flash of bare bone. Jude was gloving the pointer and middle finger of Stevie’s left hand, as if gifting him a set of digits that would match his right. He gnashed harder, as if trying to take them off completely. Stevie continued to scream, the world starting to darken around the edges. A photographic vignette. He’d black out soon. Hit the ground. Wake up to a room full of blood. His mother dead. Aunt Mandy abducted. Terry, gone. Dunk . . . Dunk . . .

  “Holy shit!” Dunk squealed somewhere within the confines of the kitchen, sounding completely unlike himself.

  “Get the fuck offa my kid!” Terry’s voice boomed in Stevie’s ears. The world’s edges momentarily brightened, overexposed, hyperreal. “Get the fuck off you fucking freak!” Even at the height of calamity, the irony wasn’t lost on Stevie. The Tyrant to the rescue. Who would have thought?

  But if anyone hated Terry more than him, it was Jude, and he was reminded of that fact when Jude’s eyes snapped away from his screaming face. It zeroed in on the hulking man just beyond Stevie’s shoulder. Before Stevie knew what was happening, his hand was free. He staggered backward, falling into someone—his mom? Aunt Mandy?—then crashed to the ground. For what felt like a century, he could do nothing but stare at the exposed bones of his hand. If there was a doctor out there who could save his fingers, his mother certainly wouldn’t be able to afford it. He would lose them, just like the others. His fingers were gone. Wee, wee, wee, all the way to the hospital incinerator.

  Duncan crashed to his knees in front of Stevie, his eyes wide and disbelieving. “Holy shit, Stevie, are you—” He was cut off, his attention snapped sideways along with Stevie’s own. Above them, Terry reeled back and slammed his fist into the side of Jude’s face.

  Jude shook it off as though the impact were nothing, then lunged, jaws gaping wide—far wider than his mouth should have been able to open—catching Terry off guard. Stevie watched his big bad stepfather lumber backward, arms against hi
s chest, as though protecting his hands from the fate that Stevie’s fingers had suffered. But, as strange as it was, Jude backed off. The Tyrant meant nothing. He wasn’t what Jude had come for.

  Jude pivoted on the balls of his feet and darted across the room, straight for Stevie and Dunk. Stevie cried out, tried to crabwalk away. Dunk shifted his weight, as if to shield his little brother from whatever was to come. He grabbed for Jude’s arm, but came up empty-handed. Jude lunged for his mother, still determined to steal her away, his eyes wild, his mouth smeared with Stevie’s blood. It was then that Stevie did the only thing he could think to do. He lifted his right hand, his fingers still wrapped around that hammer’s handle, took a half second to search Jude’s face for signs of his once-best friend, and when he didn’t find what he was looking for, he swung.

  Jude fell back.

  Stevie swung again.

  “Don’t touch her!” he screamed. Swung a third time. “Don’t touch her, don’t you dare, you don’t!”

  Aunt Mandy. “Stevie, stop!”

  “You aren’t my friend, not my friend, not anymore, no!”

  “Stevie!” His mother.

  “Holy shit!” Dunk, grabbing his arm.

  But Stevie swung again.

  The sound was a wet thud, like porcelain caving in on itself.

  Again. And again. Until the hammer, blood-slick, slipped from his hands.

  “Oh my God.” He couldn’t tell if it was his mom or Aunt Mandy anymore. The voices were running together. The walls were trembling. Any moment now, they would crack wide open and spill a deluge of blood across the kitchen floor. “Oh my God!” There was too much screaming behind him, too much commotion.

  “Call the—”

  “Jude? Jude?!”

  “I am! I did!”

  Not-Jude lay on Aunt Mandy’s kitchen floor, Aunt Amanda huddled over the body the same way the beast had loomed over the dead lady in the basement. Dunk kept Stevie back, his raspy breaths reverberating in Stevie’s ears.

  Jude’s old Stanley was left abandoned in the soft tissue and splintered bone of his skull.

  “Jude.” The name eked out of Stevie’s throat in a breathless, nearly inaudible whisper. “It wasn’t him.”

  “. . . Stevie?” Dunk, pale-faced and terrified.

  “It’s gonna come back,” Stevie murmured to his brother. The monster was still alive out there somewhere. “We gotta find it.” His legs were wobbly with adrenaline. His left hand, an open spigot of blood. “Jude.” He looked back toward the body. “Hey, Jude,” he said, and then began to cry.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Laurie Lewis to hear the stories from her classmates. Urban legends, the kind of stuff you recited around campfires and on Halloween; tales that warned children to stay close to home, to listen to their parents, to not venture too far because you never knew what may be hiding in the forest.

  But Laurie was hardly a child, and the stories? She loved them. Perfect fodder for her horror blog, which, admittedly, had become more of an obsession than a hobby after the move. She hadn’t wanted to uproot herself in her sophomore year of high school, but rare was the day when anyone listened to the wishes of a fifteen-year-old girl, especially when her legal guardians were her grandparents and Grandpa Jim wanted nothing more than to “retire in goddamn paradise.” Paradise, as it turned out, was a small town with a two-screen movie house and not a damn thing else to do. Except, of course, wander the woods.

  Within the first few weeks of Laurie living in Deer Valley, she typed up an exposé on the death of six-year-old Maxwell Larsen. It was complete with quotes from newspaper articles—dug up at the local library—and photos of all the locations mentioned in the police reports—care of her grandfather’s Buick Skylark and Laurie paying for gas. Grandpa Jim had begrudgingly pulled onto the shoulder of the highway when Laurie pointed to the spot where the Larsen boy’s body had been found. When she hopped back into the car, he couldn’t help but grumble, not understanding her fascination with such morbid, awful stuff. Grandma Marcy was more understanding. She simply smiled and gave Grandpa Jim a pat on the knee, and then—with Laurie’s phone full of murder scene photographs—they proceeded to Cannon Beach, where they had a picnic and fed the seagulls bits of sourdough bread.

  When Laurie reached the end of her Maxwell Larsen investigation, she moved on to another case. The murder of Jude Brighton was as bizarre as it was tragic. Bludgeoned to death by his disturbed younger cousin, Jude had died in his own home, in front of his mother, who was cradling him when the police had arrived. Ten-year-old Stephen Aaron Clark was rumored to have been an undiagnosed schizophrenic, but his age made the pronouncement difficult to swallow. Of all the articles Laurie could find online, it seemed that schizophrenia in children was almost unheard of. But whaling on a family member with the claw end of a hammer? Surely there was something wrong with his mind.

  Regardless of whether or not the analysis of Stevie’s mental state was correct, he was relegated to a facility somewhere out in Tillamook, a place Grandpa Jim outright refused to take her, despite the possibility of an interview. “Sometimes,” he’d said, “bad things happen to writers when they go one-on-one with the crazies.” Like Grandma Marcy’s favorite true-crime writer, who had nearly met a grisly fate at the hands of a cult devotee, getting a little too personal with his subject matter. That had happened just a hundred miles north of Deer Valley, in Washington State. “Too close for comfort,” said Grandpa Jim. So, instead of arguing, Laurie wrote to Stevie about the three-year-old crime instead.

  In his rambling letters, Stevie spoke of a monster living in the woods; a grotesque and hunched, pale-skinned creature with an enormous head and a vestigial tail. That monster had “possessed” Jude, taken over his cousin somehow, and it was still out there. But nobody believed him. Maybe, he said, if Laurie could prove it, she could be the key to Stevie’s freedom. And when he got out, he’d return to Deer Valley, where the both of them would finally kill the thing that had murdered his best friend. There was no mention of Stevie’s entire family bearing witness to the crime he had unquestionably committed. No hint of regret for what he had done. No suggestion that he remembered doing it at all.

  They were the meandering thoughts of a twisted mind. Stevie’s stories didn’t match up with any of the Deer Valley police reports. Jude’s mother never claimed that she’d been attacked by her son, and maybe that could be chalked up to denial. But the dead woman that Stevie insisted had been the caretaker of the beast, at least according to the reports filed, didn’t exist. No body had been discovered, and no dismemberment of a random, outlying woman had been announced. When Laurie explained this in her own correspondence, Stevie’s reply was exactly what she had expected: either the police had covered it up, or the monster had taken care of things itself. Ask Mr. Greenwood, he’d written. He knows. But Greenwood had packed up and moved weeks after Stevie had gone off the rails. The general store had been boarded up, and was now a motorcycle shop with a bike in the window and a few hostel rooms upstairs. The guy who owned the place called it The Redwood. He didn’t know Mr. Greenwood, or anything about Stevie Clark.

  Coincidentally, the shop owner had also purchased the deed to the old place Stevie said was where the monster lived.

  Armed with the vague directions Stevie had relayed, she started at what had once been the Clark residence—now a shell of an empty house with a FOR SALE sign out front—and began to walk. She followed the overgrown trail into the woods, snapping photos both for her blog and her Instagram. After about three miles of nothing but ferns, trees, and moss, she came across an abandoned dirt road. A house was poised alongside its washboard surface, winking at her from a distance, just as Stevie had described.

  She didn’t hesitate to step over the fallen picket fence and climb up the porch stairs to cup her hands against a grimy window. It was empty but clean, as though someone had swept up the cobwebs in the hopes of living there. A few buckets of pa
int were stacked beside the front door. A rusty red pickup rambled up the road before she had a chance to retreat, and the guy from The Redwood sidled out of the truck—not angry, just smiling, so she wasn’t completely busted for trespassing. He was carrying a few Walmart shopping bags, probably full of renovation supplies.

  “It’s a damn wreck, don’t you think?” the man asked, looking up at the place as if seeing it for the first time. “Not sure why I bought it . . . but I couldn’t resist. It’s got good bones.”

  She almost asked him whether he was scared to live there, only to reconsider. Scared of what? A nonexistent monster? “It’s . . . pretty,” she said. “Just needs a fresh coat of paint.”

  “Oh, I think it needs a bit more than that.” The white-haired man turned his attention back to the house, crossed his arms over a faded Grateful Dead shirt, and laughed. “But that’s fine by me. I’ve got the time. Much better place for a retreat than above the shop, though, don’t you think?”

  Laurie nodded, then idly stepped off the porch.

  “Going already?” he asked.

  Yeah, going already. The sky was growing gray overhead. Another rainstorm was rolling in off the Pacific. That, and she had ton of photos to sort through and edit.

  Back at home, she scrolled through the shots and thumbed through the letters Stevie had sent, almost disappointed that she hadn’t seen the blood-covered floor or some proof of the dead woman he’d described. Stevie Clark may have been nuts, but he told a damn good story.

  As she sat there, sifting through photos on an obsessive loop, she stopped on one in particular. It was a simple shot—nothing but trees, a single trunk in the foreground, gently bending to the right. And there, in the fuzzy out-of-focus distance, was a shadow. Was that someone crouching, or just a half-hidden fern? “It’s the monster.” She chuckled, offering her golden retriever, Joey, a half smile from her desk. But it had been pretty out there, and that house deserved some professional shots with her SLR. The owner had seemed nice enough. She was sure he’d let her take a few more photos before he got to his renovations. She’d put a lot of time into this article, and a picture of that creepy house—just after sunset—would be the perfect finishing touch.