The Demonologist (25 page)

“Seems like there’s more and more of those out there. Always thought it was just the freak show-ization of the Internet.”

“Maybe. Or maybe there
are
more and more of them out there.”

O’Brien reads aloud some recent news stories she’s pulled up from the east coast of central Florida, a good number of them amusingly bizarre. A cat that found its way home after being dumped at the side of the road ten miles away (“We’re absolutely keeping her now,” the owner was quoted as promising). A man who won two multimillion-dollar lottery jackpots in back-to-back weeks (“First thing? I’m paying off my damn truck!”). A shark that munched the foot off a visiting Australian tourist (“I knew something was wrong when I hopped out of the water and people started screaming.”). But nothing that seems to bear the stamp of the Unnamed.

“We’ll just have to sniff around once we get there,” I say. But O’Brien’s not listening to me. Absorbed by whatever she’s now reading on the phone’s screen. “Found something?”

O’Brien finishes reading the story as I wave the waitress over for more coffee.

“It happened just two days ago.”

“That’s when I was in Wichita,” I say. “The day I got the
O sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
clue.”

“Which means this was happening at the same time you were being drawn to it. A simultaneous connection.”

“Are you going to give me the summary or do I have to read it myself?”

O’Brien picks up her glass of orange juice but, scowling at the pulp on its surface, lowers it again before it reaches her lips.

“By all accounts they were good kids,” she begins. “Which only makes it more unbelievable. Only makes it worse.”

An elementary school on the western edge of Jupiter known for community involvement, high standardized test results, as well as its close affiliation with local church groups. Kids who mostly knew each other since preschool. Upper-middle-class sons and daughters from “the heart of God-likes-us-best America,” as O’Brien puts it.

Third grade. Eight years old. Goofing around in the playground behind the school before dinner, after the teachers had gone home, the older kids off to wherever they spent their twilight hours. Nothing remarkable about the afternoon in any respect. But sometime between 3:40 and 4:10 when the first adult arrived on the scene, all of the kids—all seven of them—attacked one of their playmates. A boy whose name has been withheld by the police. Someone that the school’s parents and teachers and the attackers themselves attested that they liked, a boy without any racial or religious or demographic differentiation who grew up in Jupiter just like all of them. But using rocks and sycamore branches and their own fists and feet his friends spontaneously beat him into a coma.

Animals. This word comes up a lot in the reports. “They acted like animals,” said this neighbor or that town councilor. But as a mother of one of the accused corrected, “Animals don’t do that to each other without reason.”

Investigators have looked into the possibilities of drug use,
bullying, gangs. But they have been forced to conclude that the violence was unprovoked. At least one local crank has raised the specter of toxic poisoning of some kind, a cloud of gas that visited temporary insanity on a single playground, though there is, unsurprisingly, no evidence to support such a claim. The school board psychologist attests the event is outside her experience. It’s an observation O’Brien agrees with.

“Eight-year-olds don’t do that to other eight-year-olds,” she says, now making herself gulp down some juice to fight off the cough that scratches at her throat.

“What about those two boys in England? The ones who murdered that toddler they lured out of a mall?”

“That was a dynamic between two kids. And the victim was a stranger, one they viewed as the subject of their experiment. We’re talking about
seven
kids here—three boys and four girls—
all
in on it. And the victim was a friend.”

“What are the kids saying about it?”

“Nobody remembers much except the doing of it. As to the why, they all offer the same explanation.”

“Which is?”

“ ‘Toby told me to do it.’ ”

The room spins. A greasy-spoon carousel of plasticky oranges and yellows.

Toby. The one who came to visit Tess from the Other Place. The one who has a message for me.

A boy who is no longer a boy.

“Who’s Toby?” I manage after pretending to cough away something stuck in my throat.

“Good question. Nobody knows.”

“What
do
they know about him?”

“All the kids say he was someone new in town, someone who didn’t go to their school but who showed up that afternoon and talked to them. And within ten minutes, Toby had them all convinced they ought to rip their friend apart.”

“Are the police looking for him?”

“Of course. But they have no leads. And do you think they will?”

“No.”

“Because—”

“Because there is no Toby. Or at least no Toby anymore.”

O’Brien and I stare at each other over the table, a silent recognition passing between us. If one of us was crazy before, we both are now.

“Did the kids offer any descriptions of Toby?” I ask, tossing down cash to cover the bill.

“Another odd thing. None could give sufficiently precise physical details, so the sketch artist has been unable to come up with a composite. But they were all quite sure about his voice. Coming from a kid but using grown-up words.
Sounding
like a grown-up.”

“The kind of voice you can’t say no to,” I say. “Yeah, I’ve heard that one.”

W
E DRIVE ACROSS THE STATE ON
I-10
TO
J
ACKSONVILLE, FOUR LANES
plumped up on piled gravel that keeps us from sinking into the swamp or tangled forest that rolls out on either side. Then south on I-95, past the countless exits to resort towns and retirement “opportunities” and Early Bird buffet deals.

We don’t stop until Jupiter. Drive right through town until we’re stopped by the ocean, a much-advertised but long-doubted fact folding brown waves onto the sand. We park and O’Brien wordlessly steps out of the Mustang, kicks her shoes off next to the car, and starts down toward the water in a stiff gait that I watch as I sit up on the hood. The air carries a savory cologne of saltwater and seaweed and, ever present, the distant whiff of fried food.

O’Brien starts into the water without taking off any of her clothes, without rolling up her pant legs. She just limps in like someone who has no intention of coming out. It occurs to me that I should go to her just in case she gets into trouble, snagged by the undertow or simply slipping beneath the surface. But then she stops, standing chest deep, each new wave picking her up and placing her feet back down on the bottom, the froth massaging around and past her.

It takes her some time to make her way back to the car. Soggy in the clothes that now hang off her, so that she appears like someone who’d just swum ashore after days of clinging to a piece of wreckage.

“That’s the last time I’ll ever feel the sea,” she says once she sits next to me.

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m not being dramatic. I just listened to the water, and that’s what it told me. It was comforting, actually. A farewell between old friends.”

I want to deny this—that this is what is happening to her as we sun ourselves after a long drive, that she is dying even now in this very moment of almost forgotten pleasure—but she is right, and now is not the time for empty comfort. And then, just as I’m about to go around to the trunk to fish out a towel stolen following the hasty, incomplete wipe-up in the previous night’s motel, O’Brien grabs hold of my wrist.

“Chances are we’re going to fail. You know that, don’t you?”

“It’s never far from my mind.”

“What I’m saying is, what we’re up against—it’s stronger than us, David. It is pre-ancient, near-omniscient. And what are we?”

“A pair of bookworms.”

“Perfect for squashing.”

“Is this supposed to be a pep talk? Because if it is, it’s not really working.”

In place of laughing, O’Brien squeezes my wrist even harder.

“I’ve been hearing a voice, too,” she says. “It started after you came back from Venice, but over the last few days on the road with you—even the last twenty-four hours—it’s become more clear.”

“Is it—?”

“Not the Unnamed. It’s something
good
, despite everything. And though I’m calling it a voice, it doesn’t speak to me. It
enlightens
me. That sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s the only way to put it.”

“So what’s it telling you?”

“That anything can be endured if you’re not alone.”

She kisses me on the cheek. Wipes away the wet marks she leaves on my skin.

“The Devil—the one we’re talking to, anyway—doesn’t understand what you feel for Tess,” O’Brien says, barely more than a whisper. “It
thinks
it comprehends love. It’s learned all the lines, read all the poets. But it’s only mimicry. That’s our one—and very slight—advantage.”

“That what that voice of yours told you?”

“More or less.”

“Did it happen to mention how we might use this one, very slight advantage?”

“No,” O’Brien says as she slides off the front of the car to shiver in the blazing heat. “So far it hasn’t said a fucking peep about that.”

J
UPITER
E
LEMENTARY IS LOW-RISE, YELLOW-BRICKED, WITH THE
Stars and Stripes wetly hanging from its pole in the drop-off zone
(“5 MIN
.
LIMIT. VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED”)
. The very picture of American normalcy. Also, increasingly, the backdrop to TV reporters’ breathless accounts of unaccountable horror. The loner with the duffel bag. The bully victim good-bye note. The walk home abduction.

Here, something a little different. Something that makes even less sense.

There are a couple of local news vans parked on the street, though at first, as we pull to the curb, the cameras can’t be seen. But then the bell sounds. At the same time the doors open and children scuff out, drained by a day full of grief counselors and somber gym assemblies, the competing TV crews appear from out of nowhere, slipping past parents anxiously waiting to collect their children and wagging microphones in front of faces.

What is the mood inside the school today?

How are you handling what happened?

Did you know the kids who did this?

And the half-stricken, half-overacted replies.

“It’s like a movie.”

“There’s a lot of people really
hurting
.”

“They were just normal kids.”

As we cross the street and join the milling crowd, I start toward a girl who looks to be around eight or nine. I bend down in the baseball catcher’s crouch that’s meant to signal a friendly grown-up, the posture of the understanding cop. And she responds as if trained to. Walks right up to me like I’ve flashed a badge.

“My name’s Officer Ullman,” I say. “Just wanted to ask you a question or two.”

She glances up at O’Brien, who smiles down at her.

“Okay,” she says.

“Did you know those kids who beat up on that classmate of theirs?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you remind me of the name of the injured child?”

“Remind you?”

“Yes,” I say, slapping at my pockets in a pantomime of a misplaced notepad. “My memory’s not what it used to be.”

“Kevin.”

“Kevin
what
, sweetheart?”

“Lilley.”

“Right! Now, do you remember those kids in your class who hurt Kevin? Do you recall them talking about a boy named Toby?”

The girl links her hands together and holds them over her waist. A gesture of shame. “
Everybody
talked to Toby,” she says.

“What was he like?”

“The same as us. But different.”

“Different how?”

“He didn’t belong to anybody. He didn’t go to school. He did what he wanted.”

“Anything else?”

She thinks about this. “He smelled a little funny.”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

“Like something in the ground.”

Her nostrils flare at the odor’s recollection.

“Did he tell you things?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Bad things?”

She squints. “No. But they made you
feel
bad.”

“Can you remember one thing he would say to you?”

“Not really,” she answers, her arms rigid with the effort to summon specific words to mind. “It’s like he didn’t talk. Or like it was you talking to yourself.”

The girl looks up at O’Brien again. Starts to cry.

“Hey now. It’s all right,” I say, reaching out to the girl to hold her up. “It isn’t—”

“Don’t
touch
her!”

I turn to see a man striding across the school’s lawn. A big, pissed-off guy in an XXXL Miami Dolphins shirt. The turquoise fabric billowing under his swinging arms.

“There’s no need—” O’Brien starts, but leaves the sentence unfinished. How could it end?
There’s no need to kick my friend’s jaw off.

The girl runs to her father. When he stops to pick her up, he looms over me. By now, some of the other parents and kids are looking our way, even inching closer to get a better look.

“Who are you?” he asks me.

“Reporters.”

“With who?”

“The
Herald
,” O’Brien offers.

The father turns to her, then back to me. “I already spoke to the guy from the
Herald
,” he says. “Which makes you two a pair of dirty liars.”

We don’t argue with him on that. O’Brien is in no condition to prevent what’s about to happen next, and I can think of no way of getting to my feet and out of range of his feet or fists fast enough to avoid their blows. The three of us paused in mutual acceptance of the inevitable.

And it’s in this moment that I see I was wrong about the point of the man’s rage. He’s not angry at us for speaking to his kid. He’s not, in fact, angry at all. He’s scared shitless by what his daughter told
him about Toby, the boy who doesn’t exist. The boy who told her and her classmates to dream up the most awful thing they could do and then do it for real.