Chapter 6

Most Saturday mornings, Joe slept late and rolled out of bed around elven, and only from his mother banging on his door or yanking his covers away. This morning, however, he woke before seven, exhausted and still shook up. He hadn't slept well, nodding off a few short minutes before the dreams came, dreams of Stanley Gruber scratching at his window.

His mother normally stirred around eight. He knew if he left his room that early, he’d wake her and she’d know something was wrong. He had no desire to deal with the repercussions so he grabbed a book and read in bed until around ten. About then, he couldn't take it any longer and kicked off the covers, took a quick shower, and had some toast. His mother stood at the stove, scrambling eggs in a frying pan, tossing in ham cubes and cheddar cheese. He had no appetite this morning. It took all he had to choke down the toast, despite the stomach growls.

"No thanks, Mom," he said.

She half-jokingly felt his forehead for signs of fever and gave him her typical concerned mother look. "Are you a clone of my son? Anything wrong with you?"

"I'm just not all that hungry."

"Wow. The end is nigh." She shrugged it off but it was all for show. Her concern played through every movement, every nuance. She leaned on the refrigerator. "How do you feel this morning? I mean, do you want to talk about the nightmare?"

Yeah, she was a great mother. Since they left Iowa, she'd been constantly concerned with his mental health. Why wouldn't she be? Traumatic experiences have a way of slowly warping their subjects, especially ones as traumatic as suicide. But she would never be prepared for the truth of the situation. He imagined telling her, how ridiculous it would all sound.

Sure, mom, I feel great, but it's hard to say, you know, with Dad's ghost visiting me and all, and the Devonshire killer coming after me to burn me alive and pop the eyes out of my head. Other than that, I think everything's great. I think I might be slipping a little in English class too, by the way. How are you?

Better to keep quiet and deal with it on his own. Bringing his mother into it would do more harm than good. She'd go off the deep end, or think he'd gone off it, and one of them would end up committed.

Besides, he wasn’t alone. He had Lisa and Burt. Also, he had come to a decision. He would tell them about his father. After long consideration, he felt it was the only way to go. Good thing Lisa had come with them last night. She added a new perspective to things, some depth to it all. If it had been only Burt, Joe might have come to a different conclusion but Lisa would be logical enough to consider the truth, and kind enough to listen the whole way through. Burt would just laugh and punch him in the arm. They'd swapped "father" stories in the past, but nothing like this. There were never any ghosts in their stories, only bruises and belts and black eyes. Joe even told Burt once about how he found his father dangling in the basement, but that was too much for Burt to handle. He never wanted the reality of it, at least not that much of it. He stopped Joe before he finished the story with a crude remark about a girl walking by. It broke them from the subject, and Joe understood. He never got back to finishing that particular story. Joe didn't mind.

Things were different now. He had to tell Burt and Lisa everything, and accept whatever they had to say, good or bad. It was too much for him to handle alone, and there was no one else to tell, at least no one who would listen without immediately coming to the conclusion that he had gone clinically bonkers.

Later that morning Joe called Burt, who was still asleep, and then called Lisa, who sounded wide-awake but standoffish, and asked them to meet him in the park at noon. Burt convinced them that twelve-thirty was better and they all agreed. Joe's stomach felt like it was trying to digest a rubber tire.

Come on, he thought. These are my friends! But his nerves still jangled.

He met them at the stump that had become Joe’s second home. Burt sported some nasty looking sleepers in his eyes and his hair was only half-combed. Lisa didn't talk much. It was obvious she was still upset. He didn't blame her. Too bad he was about to make things worse.

"Did you guys hear there was another murder last night?" Joe asked.

They nodded. "Yeah, and right around the time Stanley Gruber was out for a little stroll or whatever the heck he was doing," Lisa said. "It's only a little suspicious."

"There's more. I had a visitor last night." They froze, the oxygen sucked out of the air. Lisa's eyes glassed over like wet marbles. Even Burt grew nervous.

"Don’t even say who." Burt thrust his fingers into his hair and gave a thrashing pull.

"Stanley Gruber," Joe said.

“I said don’t say who!”

Lisa fell to the ground. "Oh my God."

"No kidding," Joe said. "I guess he knew who the shoe belonged to."

The color drained from Lisa’s face. "If he knows the shoe is yours, then he probably knows who I am. My name was on that note, too."

"Probably," Joe said. "Who knows?"

"Aww, man," Burt said. "This sucks. I mean it really sucks."

"What did he do?" Lisa asked.

"He woke me up in the middle of the night, tapping at my window. I don't know if he was trying to get in or just scare me."

"Are you kidding?" Burt said. "He could have busted a window out no problem. He was probably just trying to mess with you."

"Yeah, but maybe he was trying to get in quietly, slit my throat and slip out before anyone knew what he was up to."

"Oh. Yeah, maybe." Burt stared off into the trees, considering that.

Lisa ripped a handful of grass near her feet and threw it. "What are we going to do?"

"I don't know," Joe said, "but that's not all."

“How the heck can there be more?” Lisa said.

“Seriously,” Burt added. “No more bad news, please.”

Joe took a long breath and forced himself to continue.

"If I tell you something, do you promise you won't think I'm totally screwed in the head?"

Burt snorted. "We already think you're seriously deranged…"

"Of course we promise." Lisa shot Burt a spiteful glare. He shrugged it off.

Joe sighed. He didn’t know how to start, so he just did. "I've been having other…visits. Not like the one from Stanley Gruber."

“Uh, like what?” Burt’s face went slack with confusion.

Lisa cocked her head. “Visits? That’s a funny word.”

"What I mean to say is that I've been…visited by my father."

Burt’s jaw creased. He looked like someone punched him in the face and he didn’t know how to react. "You’re father’s dead, dude. Quit jerking around.”

Lisa didn’t phase. "How many times?"

"About three. Actually, exactly three. Three times."

"That's not possible." Burt’s hands formed into fists.

"I know, but I saw him."

"Maybe it was Stanley Gruber," Burt countered, "trying to scare you, or some other whack-job trying to get inside your head."

Joe steadied himself and shook his head. "That's possible, yes, but I don't think so. I know how it sounds, and I admit it seems totally crazy, but I'm telling you, it happened."

"You said you were visited." Lisa remained as objective as she could be. "What exactly do you mean by 'visited'?"

"I mean visited. He came to visit me, as in the spirit of my father, the ghost of a man who once was and all that stuff."

"Did he talk to you?" Lisa asked. Her eyes were emotionless. Joe couldn't tell if there was humor in her face or plain curiosity.

Burt sat in stony silence. It worried Joe.

"Yeah," Joe said.

"What did he say to you?" she asked.

"He said there was an evil in Devonshire. An old evil. He said it was hungry and we should get away from it because it's getting hungrier every day."

"This is so interesting," Burt said. "Was he levitating when he said it?"

"Come on." Lisa’s voice deepened. Joe liked it. She had a way of handling Burt he never had. "Let's hear what he has to say."

Burt shoved his hands under his arms and waited.

"That was all he said, I swear." Joe took another calming breath. Relief and embarrassment swelled in him simultaneously. His wiped the sweat from his forehead.

"How did he appear?" Lisa asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean how did he manifest himself?" Lisa continued to probe, purely clinical. “Did he fade in from nowhere? Leap out from a shadow? Fly through a window?”

Joe watched her eyes for any sign of perturbation. Was she serious? Was she humoring him?

"He just sort of appeared," he said. "Like one minute he wasn't there, and the next minute he was. It was strange. Just like you’d think a ghost would be."

"Was he pale, like a vampire? Or was he see-through, like a lucid spirit?" Lisa continued.

"What are you talking about?" Joe found himself growing perturbed. "He looked normal!" As he said that, he realized it was a lie. In truth, when he saw his father, he saw the chafe marks around his neck where the leather belt suffocated him.

Lisa caught the expression and leaned forward. "What are you thinking? You just thought of something, didn’t you?"

"It was nothing."

"Bull," she said. "You just thought of something important. You have to tell us now. We saw it in your face."

He leaned against the stump, helplessness swarming him. "It was his neck. He had marks on his neck…"

He let the sentence dangle there.

Lisa glared, confusion etched in her eyes. Burt surely realized what he meant, though he tried to conceal it. Lisa didn't miss a trick. She side-glanced Burt and noticed the squirming.

"Come on, guys." Her voice had a clear, intimidating strength about it. "You both know something I don’t, and I don't like it. If I'm supposed to help you, I have to know it all. Everything. That includes the hard stuff. In case you didn't realize, I'm involved in this all the way up to my neck now that Stanley Gruber knows it was Joe. It won't take him long to figure out it was me with him, and you too, Burt."

Burt opened his mouth to protest, thought better of it, and stopped himself with a sputter. He knew she was right.

Joe knew she was right, too. "I never told you how my father died."

"No,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”

"I told you he died five years ago," Joe said, "but I didn't say how he died. He hanged himself. I found him in the basement swinging from the ceiling."

Lisa lost some of her composure. Her hand flew to her mouth and she gasped.

"That's where the chafe marks came from," Joe said. "Does that tell you anything?"

"I'm sorry. I didn't know. That's so sad, but yes, it tells me a lot. Tons. Don’t you get it? It was a horrible death.”

“Oh, please,” Burt said. “Please don’t say his father’s ghost is coming back to see him because he was violently murdered and can’t rest until they find the killer. I’m sorry, Joe, but that’s hard to swallow.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Lisa grew defensive now and so did Burt. They were going at each other. “What I’m saying is if he died, you know, unfavorably,” she glanced at Joe with embarrassment, “that he wouldn’t be allowed into heaven or wherever it is we go after this place. What else could he do? He’d have to wander the earth alone, right? And if you had to do that, what else would you do? You’d visit your son...to protect him.”

Joe didn’t say anything. Strangely, it made sense, but the more he considered it, it didn’t sit quite right. But what other explanation could there be? His stomach soured. Did he want his father watching over him? Not really. It wasn't like he had earned the right to.

"We have to tell Chief MacGreggor about Stanley Gruber," Lisa said.

Burt's eyes bugged out. "Are you insane? He'll throw us in jail for sure!"

"No he won’t," Lisa said. "We don't have to tell him about last night. All we have to tell him is we think he has something to do with the murders. The Chief will have to check it out. It's his job."

"We're just a bunch of trouble to him," Joe said. "Why would he believe us?"

Burt folded his arms and grumbled.

Lisa shrugged. "Because it's the truth, isn’t it? And don't worry. We don't have to tell him about, you know, your father either."

Joe sagged, though relief washed over him. He didn't think she'd want to say anything about that, but it was good to hear.

"Good. Let's go."

##

"Are you sure you want to be making that kind of an accusation?" Harry MacGreggor’s enormous face loomed behind his heavy oak desk, looking uncannily like a fat old moon floating through a tiny sky. Joe glanced at the cop’s hands just lying there on the desk like two slabs of beef. He couldn’t help but be intimidated by the guy and he wondered how easily those hands could squash a person. Even Burt, he thought.

"We think so." Joe’s voice quivered. "I mean, we're pretty sure. We're sure."

Harry eyed him with his trained gaze, searching for any hint of a lie.

"Aren't you Connie Madsen's boy?" That stare continued to scrutinize. "She drives one of the school buses, right?"

Joe felt naked. Such a mundane question, but so pointed it made him think. Was he asking to let Joe know he knew something specific? Or was he jockeying himself into a position of power by insinuating he knew his mother?

"Yes, sir," Joe said. "She drives for the middle school, and sometimes the high school."

"Have you told her about all this?"

Joe shook his head. "No sir."

"Why not?"

"I don't know. I didn't think she'd believe me."

Harry grunted. "What about you two? Same story?"

They nodded in unison. Even Burt looked intimidated, though Joe was sure he'd be as big as Chief MacGreggor in a few years.

Harry leaned back in his chair, which protested with a grinding squeak, and folded his hands across his barrel chest. "So you all believe your school janitor is the Devonshire killer. What makes you so sure about all this? It sounds more like a bad movie."

Joe’s mouth gummed up. Burt squirmed in his chair but thankfully Lisa had the guts to speak up.

"We've seen some weird things with Mr. Gruber, sir, like the way he looks at everyone in the halls. But that's not all. We all saw him leave his house last night around eight and he didn't come back until nine. And he didn't look very innocent."

"Innocent of what?" Harry passed his gaze between them.

"Wasn't there another murder last night?" she asked.

"Yes, there was." He finally broke his scrutinizing glare. "Are you sure there isn't anything you are leaving out of this?"

"No, sir." They spoke it together, which confirmed for Harry that, yes, there was something else. No matter. He'd find out about it sooner or later. He always did.

"You know what I think? I think you're not telling me the whole story, but I'm going to check it out because I don't want to miss a thing. I want you to head home and stop following this guy Gruber around, you got me? If there's something up with him, he's not someone you want to mess with. And if there isn’t, I don't want you bothering an innocent citizen."

"Yes, sir," they said.

"Go on." Harry waved his hand, shooing them out of his office. "Get a move on."

The three of them shuffled out single file, like military cadets, and headed out of the building.

Harry leaned forward and considered their story. Could be something, he supposed, though he doubted it. He'd had some problems with Stanley Gruber in the past. Eight years ago, accusations of molestation flew around him, though they didn't pan out. Harry felt in his bones the accusations were true but he couldn't do anything about it when the victim’s family suddenly moved out of town. There were other allegations over the years, odd behavior, public masturbation, drunk and disorderly, a shoplifting charge that actually stuck, but nothing he could use to drive the guy out of town. Then one day it all stopped. It was as if the guy finally grew up.

Despite all this, he didn’t think Stanley Gruber had it in him to kill, but he’d check it out. He’d do it on the off chance that Gruber did have something to do with the murders, because he’d kill himself if it turned out to be true.

He rolled up his sleeves and dug into his paperwork. There was a ton of work to do before the FBI clan arrived to further investigate Garrett’s murder, and he didn’t want to look like a hokey hick town sheriff waiting with his thumb up his butt.

He figured he'd check with Gruber later tonight.

##

Lord, protect me in these darkest hours and I beg you for the strength to fight the evil that has come among us.

Rose Lanham clutched her silver cross in her meaty fists and drew it taut against her considerable bosom. She didn’t know any real prayers by heart, except for the Lord’s Prayer which she had already repeated several hundred times, so she made up what she thought God might want to hear.

She bided time in the living room corner, having moved from the dampness of the basement only hours ago, her grip on the cross not loosening one bit. She had time to ponder last night’s events across the street and held no doubts of what she witnessed.

What could it mean? She knew what this vision meant. It meant the world was coming to an end. Armageddon was here. There could be no other explanation. And for some reason, the Lord had given her the ability to see its coming. That was why no one, not even Chief MacGreggor, had yet discovered who it was murdering all the people in Devonshire. They hadn't been given this special gift from God like Rose had been given. Was it truly a gift? It was more of a curse to know the beginning of the end of the world was launching here. In Devonshire, of all places. If the world were going to end, would it start better in Israel or the Vatican, somewhere more religious? Not in podunk Devonshire.

The more she dwelled on it, the more it made sense. Of course! What better place to land a worldly onslaught than this quiet town, where neighbors were as unsuspecting as lab rats set loose in a field of hungry snakes? In the Middle East they might have been able to stop such an evil manifestation, but here, where naiveté runs amuck, as rampant as teenage sex and booze and immoral behavior, not a single person would suspect the creature Rose Lanham had seen.

Lord, how hideous it was! And how frightening. Since she witnessed it peering out over the street toward Garrett Tucker's place, she had time to think and consider the detail of what she saw. She had time to mull the image over in her mind and form more concrete ideas. And no, she swore up and down to herself, it wasn't her imagination getting the best of her! How could anyone think that? She even began to pity the aliens invading the earth and snatching up unsuspecting humans for lab analysis. They were going to hell, too, and they probably didn't even know it.

She knew what she saw. The night Garrett Tucker died she saw the thing, in the yard. The evil creature turned and gawked in her direction, its terrible eyes ablaze with a devastating darkness, a cold worse than dry ice and as enveloping as a black hole. The moment its gaze fell upon her, a chill wracked her bones as if she had been plunked into the cold December lake.

She knew what it was immediately. It was the devil.

Maybe not "the" devil, but a devil nonetheless. It didn't have big ivory horns or pale red hues to its skin or a forked tail dangling out beneath its legs. It wasn't the stereotypical devil she had read about or remembered from Halloween costumes. This one didn't look anything like those traditional devils but like something worse.

This thing looked like pure and simple evil.

A dark veil clung it, like alternating wrinkled folds of blackness and coldness, each playing against the other. It was mostly in the eyes, those gluttonous eyes, the fear they generated in her, and the grin, the grin that knew she had seen it but didn't care. It knew she knew and it liked it. Rose could tell. That was how she knew this thing was not going to end its killing anytime soon. In fact, it was only just beginning. Now the creature had a taste of her fear, and it would want more. It wouldn’t be content to feed on the fear of single victims any longer. It wanted to usher in a new era of horror to Devonshire, and then? Who knew? Move onto the next town? Hillsboro wasn't far away. Maybe they would be just as tasty.

Poor Rose. Such knowledge, and no one to tell. When Mrs. Tucker returned from the hospital with her children, she would tell her everything she knew, and whether she believed her or not didn't matter. She would make her believe, just like she would make the rest of the town believe.