Chapter 2

Five years later.

Excerpt from “Demons Among Us” by former Devonshire Police Deputy Bucky Fasbinder, with Bernard Ronstein, Introduction –

“The purpose of this book is simple: to present to you the facts and evidence surrounding the destruction of Devonshire, Illinois. Over the years, I have been subjected to a number of harsh criticisms, as well as accused of concocting the majority of the details presented within this book, but I assure you the information contained herein is true to life, and not a single word has been manufactured to sell books, further my career, or any other reason.

What some believe to be merely a series of damaging fires that swept through Devonshire on that fateful Halloween night, I will show you, were actually the result of the coming of Armageddon. I am not a religious freak, and I do not pretend to have been a regular churchgoer before these events took place, although now I attend church daily. But they are significant events nonetheless, and shall afford you fair warning.

Some of us may have been saved, but for how long? And when will it begin again…”

##

Joe Madsen didn't mind Devonshire so much the first couple of years, but lately things were getting crazy. He didn't like it. Two weeks after his father hanged himself, he and his mother picked up and moved, winding up in dinky Devonshire where they'd been the past four years. His mother wanted a small town where she could keep an eye on Joe, something cozier, less stressful, only it backfired. She was always stressed now. Joe felt it.

“I’d rather we deal with nosey neighbors than have you wind up dead in a gutter somewhere,” she said to him more than once.

Joe didn’t feel the same. He would rather face a gutter death than what he was forced to face now.

He lay in bed on the first floor, staring out the window that overlooked the rickety porch of their rented home. His mother hung a row of ivy plants that swayed in the night breeze from jade-colored screw-hooks. Across the street stood a squat yellow house where Old Ms. Bergin lived, a woman as short and squat as her house. She’d been there about a year and a half and Joe felt sorry for her, having to move around so late in life. The former owner was a different old lady with saggy jowls that reminded him of a bulldog. He supposed that house was meant for an old lady...it just didn’t matter which old lady it was.

He had grown familiar with his view over the past four years as he lay awake most nights, unable to sleep. It was the voices, and the dreams.

The first two years after his father's death were uneventful. He lived with his grief, and simultaneously his new freedom, doing his best to move on with his mother and adjust to the weary town. He lived in the section of town everyone called "Renter's Alley." There were three or four streets on the southwestern edge of the map owned by an investment real estate agency called Shiny Valley Commercial and rented out to families who couldn't afford to buy their own home. Joe figured they must have made a ton of money considering the rent they charged for such run-down places, but it was good enough for him and his mother once they got past all the weird prejudices in town against renters.

Things turned strange for Joe the end of the third year in Devonshire. Life had just begun to feel normal again for the Madsens, but then Joe began to hear things. They were nothing more than whispers at first, silent voices in the periphery of his hearing, like distant echoes that weren't meant for him but someone nearby. When he began to hear his own name spoken in those whispers, he started to worry.

It's finally happened, he thought. I've gone bat guano crazy. All this crap that's happened to me has made me a nut ball. I suppose it's not so bad, as long as the voices don't tell me to climb on top of a church somewhere with a high-powered rifle and start picking off nuns.

But soon the voices became more distinct and he realized they were not a number of voices but a single voice attempting to communicate with him.

Joe. The voice was like a buzzing in his ear. I'm sorry…

That was all he usually heard or understood. The first time he realized who it was, he broke down in tears. He was reading alone in his room and he buried his face in his pillow.

It was his father’s voice. I'm sorry…

After the tears, Joe burst out laughing at the irony of it all. He figured his madness had gotten to him and he’d gone off the deep end. It wouldn't be long before he started playing with his feces and smearing it all over the rubber room where they were sure to toss him.

"How long are you going to screw with my life?" He flung his pillow across the room. When he shouted, the voices disappeared for a while, but they inevitably returned.

Deep down, though, Joe knew he wasn’t crazy. He had no choice but to accept the alternative. Point in fact: his father was dead, yet somehow trying to communicate with him from the great beyond for reasons unknown.

Thinking of his father made Joe ill. The image of his swaying corpse overtook everything. Everyone expected him to be strong for his mother, including him. He imagined himself that night, asking her to sit down, mom, “because I’ve got something important to tell you.” When she came through the door later that horrible night, eyes red and puffy from crying, Joe broke down instead. He could barely form words.

She stroked his hair back, knelt down before him, not asking what was wrong because she thought she knew, but she would have no idea what was to come.

Joe motioned toward the basement door, still crying, still unable to speak. Without another word, she rose and descended into the basement, and within moments her muffled yelp escaped through the rafters. She rushed back and gripped Joe so hard he couldn’t breathe, rocking him and muttering, “I’m sorry, Joey, my God, my little baby, I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

The reality of it hit him like a crowbar upside the head and four years later he wasn’t over it. He supposed he never would be. He’d heard of people spending years in therapy because their father yelled at them too much or because he didn’t give them some ridiculous level of approval. Garbage. He was sure finding his father, suicide dead, qualified as something that might stick with him a while. Joe never considered himself one of those wimpy weirdoes who couldn’t deal with the lemons life threw at them. Hey, maybe he couldn’t make lemonade, but he could sure throw a few back.

But now, with the whispery voice of his dead father in his head, he wasn’t so sure.

Joe…Joe…

“Shut the hell up,” he breathed, and the voice dissipated.

It had been this way for months. When would it go away?

He crept out of his bed, threw on a pair of sweats, an old t-shirt and gym shoes and snuck out to the porch. It was close to midnight and the air was still thick and humid. He shut the door discreetly behind him, careful not to make noise. His mother would kill him if she caught him sneaking out this late. She didn’t know that, for Joe, it was a regular event, slipping out to grab some fresh air, and sometimes a smoke. He knew smoking was stupid, but he was willing to try anything.

Devonshire’s population barely tipped the scales of 5,000, a small enough town, but in the last four years there had been five murders, two of them in the last year alone. And those were just the ones Joe knew of. Everyone talked about it. Not just the murders, but how they died. Gruesome.

People on the street said the horrible trend started five years ago when they found Benjamin Hartwig, the hardware store owner, dead in his home. He was burned alive. Freaky. The killings were accelerating in frequency.

Other than that, Devonshire was a quiet town when people weren’t dying. Take away all the murders and what are you left with? A dinky, sad, quiet little place. Joe hated it. Half the streets didn’t have curbs and the cops were the kind that waved to folks as they drove by like they were your best buds. It wasn’t like where he used to live where you always had to watch your back. At least not until now.

Joe fished out a cigarette from the pack he hid underneath the porch and fired one up. He wound his way into the backyard, drew in a lungful and let the smoke snake its way around his face. It tasted horrible but he welcomed the distraction.

Through the yard he eyed Stanley Gruber’s house. The guy was a freak. He lived a street over, a strange man in a strange shack of a house, the smallest one on the block. The home sat on an impossibly tiny lot choked with weeds. It was a haven for mosquitoes and disease-infested insects and God-knew-what-else.

The house itself used to be white, but the years of neglect made it the color and texture of a crumbly Oreo cookie. It made Joe think that Gruber’s place was what a house would look like about fifty years after a nuclear holocaust. Only there was someone still living in it.

Stanley Gruber was the middle school janitor. Joe knew him from there. Stanley was a dark, brooding little man slithering through the hallways, his eyes serpent like, watching all the time. Other students would mock him as they passed, calling him names like “grease ball” and “slick.” It shocked Joe that kids could be so bold toward an adult, freak or not. In time, he began to understand that adults don’t necessarily earn respect simply by being an adult, but it also didn’t take him long to gain a nondescript sense of fear of Stanley Gruber.

Often times, not long after Joe arrived in Devonshire, while he ambled through the school hallways, he would feel a nagging uncertainty following him, like the heat of the sun grazing his shoulder and lingering there. It was a queasy feeling, and when he felt it, he would turn his head just enough to glance over and there would be Stanley Gruber, slicked into a corner, peering out over the considerable bump on his beak-like nose at the students.

It got so Joe couldn’t understand how so many kids could treat Stanley Gruber with such contempt. Couldn’t they sense the danger in the man? Couldn’t they feel his menacing presence looming over them as they taunted him? Or was Joe unique in the way he felt?

Whatever the case, he didn’t like it.

When Joe finally entered high school, he was relieved to find he didn’t see as much of Stanley, but every now and then the guy would be there. Considering the size of Devonshire, the town developers found it more economical to build the high school and middle school together, as one building, joining them by a single hallway the students endearingly dubbed “Kiddie Hall.”

Once, during Joe’s first week of his freshman year, he sat at the lunch tables where the students waited before classes started, and he felt the same odd feeling wash over him, one he hadn’t felt all summer long, despite the fact that Stanley lived only a single block over. He knew immediately Stanley loomed nearby, gaping somewhere in the shadows formed by a dark hallway crevice where no one looked or even noticed even when looked directly at it.

Joe turned just enough to confirm his suspicion, for there was Stanley, all nervous and ominous, bundled up into one dark little man, a living contradiction. Somehow, Joe knew that Stanley was afraid of the high schoolers. He saw it in Stanley’s demeanor, the way he wrapped his arms about his chest as if protecting himself from flying verbal abuses or even fists, but there was something much more than fear in him. There was knowing.

Joe didn’t like the way the man looked over the crowd and he turned away, though he could never shake the weird vibes about the guy. Especially with all the murders in town lately.

There was that, and there was the odd behavior Joe noticed outside of the school. One night, while Joe had been out for a smoke, he noticed Stanley sneaking out of his own place like a night burglar. Joe had chosen the alley for his sojourn because it was just out of the line of sight of his own place, and at night he was fairly well hidden there. A few nights later he decided on the same spot, partially for its safety but mostly because of its view of the Gruber place. He wanted to satisfy his curiosity. At the same time as the previous night, he witnessed Stanley Gruber sneaking out of his house. Joe was tempted to follow but decided against it. One, he didn’t want to get busted by his mother for sneaking around town like a fool with a smoke in his hand, and two, he didn’t know what Gruber would do if he caught Joe following him. Curiosity gnawed at him. What could the nut bag be doing? He wondered like hell if he was the killer.

He knew Stanley Gruber was a strange little man, but capable of murder? Joe knew he wasn’t thinking clearly the last few months, but the idea wouldn’t leave him alone. He dwelled on it, welcoming anything to distract thoughts of his father.

Stanley Gruber had a menacing quality about him, and after a while Joe had it all figured out in his head. The murders, they had to be the doing of Stanley Gruber. It just fit, all this sneaking around, the bizarre behavior, the sheer oddity of the guy. Now all he had to do was prove it. And that was something he decided to do soon, but he needed help. He knew exactly who he could count on.

Tomorrow.

##

Joe

As if a thousand voices sprung up in his head. He stood in a forest of sorts, deep in the dark jungle of somewhere, obviously a dream. But it didn’t feel like a dream.

Joe

“Stop it! Leave me alone!”

His own voice hung in the air like fog, falling finally along the ground in a wispy mist, dissipating away. He smelled sulfur, or something like it. It burned the inside of his nose, as if someone lit a match and he inhaled the smoke. He could barely see through the muted darkness, except for a density of green looming, a beast in its own right. For a moment he thought he could reach a hand out and swat the foliage away, clearing a path for himself, but then...

Joe

“Leave me alone!”

He ran ahead through the trees, thick branches slashing at his shins and thighs. Thorny fingers grabbed at his arms, alive almost, attempting to drag him down into their digestive soil.

“Please, please, please...”

Joe, wait...

The voices approached, intensified, thousands of streaming sounds merging into one, one that he began to recognize again, his father’s voice.

Joe

“God, please help me!”

The voices were at his back...

##

Joe shot up in bed so hard he fell off the edge and slammed the side of his head on the floorboard, jolting him back to reality. He welcomed the pain. Anything but that damned dream. He remembered vaguely last month his mother suggesting he place a throw rug beside the bed so his feet wouldn’t get cold in the morning when he lumbered up in the morning chill, but he had declined, saying throw rugs were for girls and old ladies. Sitting there now, rubbing the lump starting to form, he wished he had the rug.

His mother was already gone for the day. She drove a school bus for the sixth through eighth graders and rose at 5:15 a.m. Ouch. Talk about early. Too many duties, checking the bus in and out, pick up the kids for zero hour. Zero hour. What a crappy concept. Some overpaid school administrator came up with the brilliant idea of zero hour, a scheduled class before the first hour, particularly for those students needing to make up credits or wanting to get out early.

If Joe had any scholarly ambition he might have volunteered for a zero hour subject, maybe graduate a semester ahead of the rest of the class, but screw that. That extra fifty minutes of sleep made a huge of difference to his demeanor. It was certainly worth a semester of high school.

Whatever. For now, it was off to the showers because Burt Smith was going to be here soon and he needed to get moving because Burt was a handful.

##

“Hey!”

Burt’s voice stung through like fingers on a chalkboard. Joe flung the front door open.

“Jeez, Burt. I’m standing right here.”

Burt gave a cheesy wink, the way he always did when he knew he’s pissed somebody off. “Oh yeah? I guess so. Hey, let’s get moving, all right?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Joe stepped out and looked up at Burt who stood nearly a foot above him.

“Let’s go, you crazy man.”

Burt was crazy, true, but Joe counted him as his best friend. No one else thought of Burt that way, though. He was by far the biggest guy in school, towering over the largest of the football players, and built like one. If it was muscle it wouldn’t have been so bad, but for this particular 16-year-old, he was more husky and wide than anything. Not precisely fat, but big boned. Dense.

Because of his size, but mostly because of his upbringing, Burt Smith was the class bully. Even the seniors left him alone, and there were some big seniors. He wasn’t the type of bully that went around beating up on people smaller than himself, which was pretty much everyone, but the kind of bully who was so boisterous and loud that he intimidated everyone, even the majority of the teachers.

They were only friends by an unfortunate association – they both had terrible fathers. It came out in a ridiculous conversation years ago not long after Joe moved into town.

“My father locked me in a closet for two days.”

“Oh yeah, well my father punched me so hard he broke a rib.”

“Yeah, well my father hit me so hard I pissed blood for a week.”

“Well my father…”

Joe and boisterous bully Burt found respect for one another and hung out together from then on. If Joe was going to do anything about Stanley Gruber he was going to need Burt. It was such an off chance, but on that remote off chance he was right and Gruber was the psycho murderer, Joe didn’t want to get caught alone in a dark place with the guy.

He waited until they were halfway to school. “Hey, Burt, I’ve got something to tell you.”

##

Joe’s story intrigued Burt. Nothing much exciting ever happened to Burt, if you didn’t count the beatings his father used to dole out. But his father hadn’t been around for years. Burt said he wished his father would have died like Joe’s father, but he couldn’t be so lucky. His own father simply left town, not to mention Burt and his mother, and hadn’t been back since. It had been strangely quiet since, almost to the point of boredom.

This was something interesting to Burt. Joe saw the piqued interest. Burt knew about the murders. Who didn’t? Burt knew how the police found the victims burned and left to rot in their homes. Was it the work of a psycho truck driver passing through Interstate 90, stopping in for a bit of bloodletting and burning, like everyone said? That was the prevailing theory. Joe didn’t believe it.

“So you really think it’s him?” Burt said, his fists clenching in expectancy, hoping everything Joe told him were true.

Joe peered off toward the road, away from his friend. He hadn’t told Burt everything he wanted to tell. He wanted to tell him about the visits from his dead father, the man’s voice growing louder and more distinct in his dreams, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He needed to talk about it, to tell someone, anyone, but as much as he liked Burt, Burt wasn’t the most sensitive person he knew. Burt might go off on one of his famous ripping sessions. That would put the whole Stanley Gruber thing in a new perspective and he didn’t want that to happen. Joe decided to keep his mouth shut on that front, at least for now.

“I don’t know if it’s him, but I do know he’s doing something screwy in his house,” Joe said. “Maybe it’s him and maybe it isn’t, but I’m telling you there’s something wrong with the guy. But look, we can’t be sure until we find out.”

“Find out?” The edges of Burt’s lips curled into a curious grin. “What do you mean, find out?”

“I mean we have to...investigate.”

“You mean like catch him in the act of killing somebody, right?” Burt’s voice heightened. To Joe, he sounded like a 6-year-old finding out he was going for ice cream. Joe knew he had him hooked.

“I think it would be hard to figure out if he’s killing people and who he might kill next,” Joe said, “but I had something else in mind, anyway.”

“Like what?”

“Like we take a look and see what he’s doing in there.”

A moment on, it dawned on Burt what Joe really meant, and his smile grew. “You mean break into his house?”

“Come on. I mean, yeah, we’ll be breaking in,” Joe said, trying to quell Burt’s irrational excitement. “But if we can find anything important that will help prove what we’re thinking, then it will be worth it. It will be okay.”

“Yeah, man. Sweet.” Burt’s eyes rolled up into his head as he thought about what they were going to do. “You’re thinking maybe we can find something incriminating, like gasoline and matches, or a bloody glove. Catch the psycho in the act.”

“Or whatever, yeah” Joe said. “If he’s the one, and I have a strong feeling he is, there’s bound to be something in his house we can use to bust him. It’s our duty to find it, don’t you think?”

Burt clapped Joe on the shoulder and it nearly toppled him. “You’re right. Let’s do it. Tonight!”

“Hold on now,” Joe said. “We can’t get too excited about this. We have to use our heads and think about the best time to do it.”

“I think tonight is the best time,” Burt pushed, and Joe suspected his friend would have marched straight over to Stanley Gruber’s junk heap of a house that very moment.

Joe was used to handling Burt, though.

“I’ve got a better idea, and I’ll tell you why,” Joe said. “I think Friday is the best day for us to go. Stanley Gruber lives pretty close to me, so it’s been easy for me to spy. I’ve been watching a couple of weeks now and he leaves his house a lot, but for two Fridays in a row he’s left at exactly 7:30 each night and he doesn’t come back until after 9. At least I think it is 9. It’s hard to be sure, because when I check to see if he’s home, I don’t see any lights on in there until around 9.”

Burt chewed on that for a minute and finally said, “Yeah, Friday is probably the best. Let’s do it Friday.”

“Good, cool.” Joe had already thought things through. “Here’s the plan. Come to my house on Friday, about 7:15. My mom has a bowling date with Kevin so we won’t have to worry about her. About 8, we’ll head to Stanley’s and sneak into his basement through the window well. I didn’t get a good look at it, but I think we’ll be able to pick the lock and sneak in that way. If not, we’ll jimmy the back door. We’ll have our look around and make sure we’re out of there in forty five minutes or less.”

Burt took a long hard look at his friend, his face twisting up, like thinking was painful. “Man, sounds like you’ve got it all worked out. How long you been thinking about this?”

Joe smirked. “Long enough. Let’s just make sure we’re careful about this. Let’s not get goofy and blow it.”

Burt smacked him on the arm. “Relax, bro. We’ll get what we’re looking for. We’re going to nail this psycho freak show.”

Joe rubbed his arm and tried to smile, but feared Burt might be a bit more right than he hoped.

##

Along the lines of darkness, where the shadows of the trees and homes separated the moonlit streets, a figure moved with stealthy purpose. It slipped along Red Burger’s deuce-and-a-half that Chief MacGreggor had warned him several times about parking too far out onto the street.

The figure crept past it and away, casting nary a shadow.

It slipped past Marge Reynolds’ place where Marge and her husband Gil and their seven kids languished lazy and fat in front of the television, not a one of them moving except to scratch themselves or gawk at the moving pictures.

The figure stole a glance through the window but moved on, uninterested.

It slowed along Oak Street across from Charlie Kazlausky’s raised ranch. Charlie was a successful accountant in town, a well-respected member of the chamber of commerce, and a regular volunteer at the local Jaycees. He also cheated regularly on his wife with the neighbor’s daughter across the street, slipping her fifty bucks a pop every chance he could.

The figure moved on.

It arrived at Garrett Tucker’s place and stopped. How perfect. Mr. Tucker happened to be looking out the window at the moment, peering into the sky. Maybe he was admiring the constellations. The dark figure turned to see what the man might be looking at. It was the moon. It was bright and full tonight, perhaps beautiful to him. It washed out the sky, its corona seeping into the clouds like milk on a black cloth.

Mr. Tucker was a happy family man, married to a young woman named Sheila who was pregnant with their third child. She was nearly seven months along now and still bustling with energy.

Mr. Tucker would be perfect, the dark figure considered. Absolutely perfect. It waited for several minutes, relishing the thought of Mr. Tucker, how he might taste, resisting all temptation to smash through the window and take him now. It was hungry. So deeply hungry. But the dark figure felt something. It spun with a rush of wind and caught the stir of the drapes in Mrs. Lanham’s window. Damned nosy woman. She had been watching. Had she seen anything? No matter. The dark figure wasn’t worried. Soon it would be a time to feed.

With a rush it sped off through the streets, clinging to the shadows and the trees along the road, its new victim chosen. It was hungry, so hungry, so hungry…but soon it would gorge itself and Devonshire would know.

The figure couldn’t contain its eagerness as it glided through the streets of the city.

##

Rose Lanham’s heart pounded through her rib cage. Adrenaline. She knew all about how the body released adrenaline through the bloodstream to quicken the heart and pulse to help deal with stressful and potentially life-threatening situations.

This was one of those ugly situations, or a hell of a lot like one. A hell of a lot. She wrapped her kimono about her legs and tiptoed into the kitchen to collapse into her favorite chair. She chewed her nails. Had she really seen what she thought she saw? In her entire sixty nine years, all of them in Devonshire, she had never seen anything like this.

“Lord forgive me, for I have sinned.” She crossed herself and leaned her considerable weight forward onto the kitchen table to rest her bosom. Her slippers shuffled against the linoleum.

Rose Lanham was sixty nine years old, by God, but her mind was as sharp as a tack. Her husband had been gone near twelve years now, an early heart attack, and she had grown a bit crotchety in those years, but certainly not senile. She would freely admit she had turned into one of those grumpy old ladies she hated as a child, but no way would she admit her brain was taking an early vacation.

She had seen it, and “it” was an impossibility. For the majority of her working life, Mr. Rose Lanham had been a nurse in the Elgin County Hospital, a woman who firmly believed in scientific principles. If somebody had a pain, there was a real and definite source of that pain. And if there was no source, then it was all in their mind, and in that case, they needed to see a shrink.

Mrs. Lanham didn’t need a shrink. She never needed one before and she wasn’t going to start needing one now. No way. Still, she couldn’t explain to herself what she has just seen? How could she make it make sense? She did her best to shake it off but could not.

She heaved out of her chair and paced in her slippers. She yanked a Pepsi from the fridge and poured it into a glass. “Of course, I should call the police,” she mumbled to herself, always mumbling to herself. “I should tell Chief MacGreggor what I’ve seen.”

But he would never believe her. Nobody would. They didn’t believe her when she reported her abduction by the alien spacecraft seven years before, despite the fact that she had scientific proof! The proof sat just beneath her skin in the form of a tiny implant they used to monitor her position on earth. It wasn’t her fault they didn't have the technology developed yet to detect the object. That didn’t change the fact it was there.

They didn’t believe her when she told them the government was employing new ways to covertly control the American public with technology they did have, a technology allowing them to communicate and send signals through the root systems of trees and plants and weeds.

They didn’t laugh at her, no. They wouldn’t dare. She was a pillar of the community and commanded respect. Instead, they respectfully took down Mrs. Lanham’s statement and politely told her they would investigate everything she had to say.

But of course nothing ever came of it. If she had been anyone else, she might have become the laughing stock of the town. But she wasn’t anyone else. She was Rose Lanham, Geoff Lanham’s widow, and despite everything she had done for the town, they still didn’t believe a word she said.

So how were they going to believe she had seen a demon peeking into Garrett Tucker’s house tonight?

##

Morning.

Stanley Gruber sat motionless in his worn, brown felt chair before work, running his fingers over the tattered arms, worn down by the years of his ritualistic rubbing fingers. His right eye twitched spasmodically. Anyone looking at him through the window might have thought he was watching television, but the television in front of him hadn’t been turned on in months. Television didn’t matter to him anymore.

What mattered was the fact that she hadn’t come to see him in the longest time. How long had it been? Weeks? Months? The days ran together, bleeding into one another as blurry gaps between her visits.

It never used to be like this. He remembered being a normal man, a man of some minor purpose. He had goals, real feelings other than those he had for her now and those few other physical needs that remained in him, like the desire for food, water, and sex. Dull as those remaining feelings were, they were still there. Barely.

At one point in his life, he had been prone to smile at others, perhaps even strike up a conversation with someone out of the blue for no reason at all, simply to discuss the weather, a baseball game, anything. He’d never been the friendliest man in town, but far from the brooding, desperate looking man he now was. He remembered his mother - was she alive still? - and a sister somewhere in Colorado - Dead? Alive? - but they, too, floated in and out of his head like drunken memories. The years had done this to him.

She had done this to him.

Her name…

Uhnnn…it stunned his brain to think of her name. She forbade him to think or speak her name…

Damn her! He hated her. He needed her.

She came to him years ago, perhaps a decade, perhaps more. He had just been hired as the school’s head bus mechanic, a trade he learned in the Army. The job was meant to be one rung on a tall ladder. He thought his skills would take him further, but then she came to his door one night soon after and invited herself in.

She wasn’t anything at all like he knew her in person. She was more like a breath of air floating around him, then like napalm sticking to his skin, congealing, burning into his flesh. Her eyes were dark, like smoldering coal, enticing, enchanting. They spoke to him, demanded of him, and he obeyed like a helpless child.

Those eyes. Those dark, dark eyes.

She stood before him that night and said nothing, and then a voice came into his head, clenching his mind like a vice, and he winced. It commanded him to go to the bedroom, to lie down on the bed, to remove all of his clothing. It commanded him to shut up. Shut up, you idiot fool, the voice told him and he obeyed. His body went limp.

And then she kneeled over his rumpled frame and she fed.

The voice in his head, her pinching, sweet voice, told him he would be her sustenance for a long time to come, forever if she decided. She would feed on him as she fed on him now and if he wanted to live he wouldn’t tell anyone, he must never tell anyone, not anyone ever. If he spoke of this in any way, he would experience something more than death, something more akin to hell, and her eyes showed him such hellish pain that he finally cried out into the bedroom in sheer agony, his voice booming against the walls, the moaning wail of the damned.

But if you’re a good boy, she told him, I will give you pleasure…

At once the hellish pain gave way to such heavenly bliss that Stanley stiffened like a board and clutched his head with both hands. In sheer pleasure, his fingernails dug deep into his own flesh and he felt none of it. Only pleasure, like a thousand moments of ecstasy balled into a single instant and spreading like waves through his veins. He felt etherized, a ghost in his own body. And he would never want to go back again.

The instant addiction was worse than cocaine, worse than any drug he could have put into his body. He wanted more, had to have more of it, more, more, more.

When she pulled away from him that first time, done with her feeding, he felt a sense of profound loss. He regarded himself and wept. His body lay intact, but she had swallowed up a part of his soul. He knew that. But mostly he wept for the lost pleasure he so desperately wanted again, pleasure only she could provide.

He reached out a weak hand to her, still crying. “More…”

She slapped his arm away. “Don’t touch me,” she growled in her real voice, and he obeyed.

She rose to leave and he watched her go, pitiful and helpless. He stumbled into the living room after her, weak, naked, wet with tears. She laughed and headed for the door.

“When will you come back?” he asked her.

Her dark, brooding eyes only glared. After, she left into the night.

For so long after the first encounter, she visited him several times a month, often once a week, but never more than that. She always came at night when the darkness was at its thickest. He never heard a car come and go, but he knew how she got there. It was if she were a part of the darkness, stepping in and out of it like a wraith.

Once, in the beginning, he woke to the need for her, like a junkie slamming into sudden withdrawal. He stumbled out into the night and drove to her house. She invited him in with a warm smile and when the door closed, he begged her for more. He needed her to take him like before. He begged. His hands formed fists and he gripped her long skirt and he wept with agonizing need, but when he looked up at her, he saw the dark eyes forming in her and he knew he should be afraid.

For nearly two hours, she gave him the hellfire she had given him before. It was like a burning at the core of his mind, steaming him into a pile of quivering jelly. When she released him and the pain finally dissipated, he came to in the center of her living room, dripping with sweat. Blood ran from his mouth from where he had bitten off the tip of his tongue.

“Don’t ever come here again,” she told him with a blank face. “Don’t ever look at me again. Don’t ever speak my name to anyone or you will have the pain forever.”

That was the last time he ever went to her, but not the last time she came to him. He fled that night in fear that she would never come again, but two weeks later, she appeared. She slipped through his bedroom door and ripped off his covers. She slammed him to the floor. She fed on him for over an hour and the pleasure came in great spasms, splashing through him like a blasting fire hose. When she was done, she left him again in silence, another piece of him gone forever. And he didn’t care.

Each time was the same. She fed, then left quietly. She never spoke. She took part of him away with her.

Each tiny part she took away compounded into something larger, something crucial, and he slowly felt his happiness drifting from him. Then his pleasures, then his desires, then his will. He lived only for her visits. It didn’t take long for him to lose his job. The buses continued to break down and his incompetence kept him from being able to fix them. She had slowly taken his mind away, and she had also taken away his ability to care about it, about anything else but her. But she wouldn’t let him leave. He wouldn’t have left anyway, but he needed a job. He begged the administration to give him work so they offered him out of pity a janitorial position which he’d had for so long now, so long he could barely remember anything else. It didn’t matter what you did when your days ran together like they did for Stanley.

But he had been nearly six months without her now. His mind cried out for her. Why? Why? Why? Where are you? Please!

So many times he started to go to her again, but stopped himself before getting there. Once he got all the way to her street, but fear overtook him and he turned around and drove home again. No matter what, two thoughts muscled through his head, over and over: If I go there, she’ll kill me and I’ll never feel that pleasure again. And maybe she’ll still come back to me.

In the last six months, Stanley felt his mind slipping further and further away. Not like it had been with her, but different now, more toward anger, more toward madness. He didn’t like the fact that other desires were coming back to him, either. For years he’d had no sexual desire, at least nothing substantial. Now it seeped back into him, against his will, like water through cracks in a dam. He did what he could to satisfy the urges, but the last month and a half were growing worse and his efforts weren’t enough. One night he had to get out, had to get away from the house and the madness of his own thoughts and headed to Smokey’s bar, thinking, hoping, praying she might be there, though he knew she wouldn’t be, and he ran into Mick VanAcre.

Mick and Stanley got to talking over a few shots and they struck up a deal Stanley couldn’t refuse. It was the best thing he could get and he knew it, so he jumped at it. For twenty bucks a pop, he could peep in on Mick’s wife, Ruthie. Ruthie didn’t care. In fact, it was her idea. She liked the idea of another man watching her, evenly ugly old Stanley. It was peeping, sure, but to Stanley it was better than staring at Internet porn. The way he was now, he knew he wouldn’t get a woman for real anyway.

But even that did nothing to quell the rage of what he really needed. He needed her. And he knew when the time came for her to return, he would do anything to get her back. At least tonight, he would be able to take another look at Ruthie.

Another thought jabbed his mind like a hot poker, stealing away the remote pleasure of distant hope he felt. The murders in town were her doing and he knew it. He’d known it all along and the knowledge flared an intense jealousy. She fed on him at least twice a month, sometimes three or four times. And when she fed, she never killed him. The others had been burned up like bacon in their shoes. It came from her feeding. He knew this from the way he felt as she fed, as if his body might burst into flame and wither away to nothing. What was that all about? Jealousy piqued again. Did she give them the pleasure she had given him? Had she fed on them all these years like she fed on him? His mind reeled with this. Will she ever come back? And if so, will she swallow him up and leave him a burned out husk like the others? Will he die? Maybe that would be the best thing for him…

As he sat there in his living room, staring blankly at the television screen, a final thought ran through his mind. Dear God, it’s been so long. She must be hungry by now.