The Boy Who Killed Demons: A Novel Read online

  Why did I suddenly become so interested in probability theory and topology? Because I realized that I needed to better understand how many of these demons there are out there, and where more of them might be showing up. I had to try to predict these numbers from different sample sizes, and to do that, I needed to understand things like Poisson distributions, and other such esoteric concepts I’d never heard of previously. My interest in German was also based on need. At the beginning of the summer, I’d gotten my hands on a copy of Daemonologie, by the eighteenth century German occultist Claus Schweikert. At first I thought I’d use one of the online translation services, but they turned out to be too expensive—and anyway, I’d lose important nuances. Next, I had the bright idea of finding someone who knew German at a local nursing home and convince this total stranger to read me the book in English. I did find an eighty-seven year-old who seemed to have his mental faculties and also seemed interested, but when I showed him the book he waved his liver-spotted hand in a gesture of disgust and asked why a nice boy like me would like something like that read to him. After that I decided it would be best if I just taught myself German, so that’s what I’ve been doing. I’m about a third of the way through translating Daemonologie—so far the book is proving to be a disappointment. I suspect Schweikert was either a quack or mentally unbalanced, but I’ll give it some more time.

  Between bites of Lamb Vindaloo, my dad tried to give me a pep talk.

  “Henry,” he said, his eyebrows severely knotted to impress on me how serious he was, “your mom and I are very pleased with some of the initiatives you’ve been taking of late. The way you bounced back in math last year was impressive, as is the continued interest that you’ve been showing in it. We’re also very impressed with how you decided on your own to learn a foreign language.”

  “Thank you for these kind words, Sir.”

  He was annoyed by that, I could tell, since he wasn’t completely sure if I was being sarcastic or genuine, but it didn’t deter him. I wasn’t being flippant, at least not entirely. Over the last year and a half I’d gotten into the habit of addressing him as Sir and my mom as Ma’am. I’m not sure exactly why I started doing it, but it’s become a way to distance myself from them. Maybe it’s my way of making it easier for them to deal with what happens if the demons ever discover me.

  My dad’s eyes narrowed as he stared at me, which made his carefully groomed eyebrows bunch up even more. It looked to me that they could use some additional trimming, but I kept that to myself. He took another bite of his dinner and chewed it slowly before continuing with his pep talk.

  “You’re going to be starting tenth grade in a couple of weeks,” he said, as he pointed his fork at me for emphasis. “I know you hit a, um, rough patch, a couple of years ago, but this new interest in math is good, as well taking the initiative to teach yourself German, which has really paid off in more ways than simply learning another language. I’ve noticed over the last few months the improvement in your overall vocabulary, and your mom has also. We’d like to see this recovery of yours continue. This is important, Henry. Tenth grade is when things really start mattering, and you can make up for the last two years by making a real effort this year. You need to do this so that you can get into the right college, and you need to show this same interest in all of your subjects. And your social skills also. Sports, too. You showed a lot of promise when you played little league. Your coach agreed with me. I think it would be a good idea if you tried out for the junior varsity team. What do you say?”

  I nodded subserviently. I wouldn’t have time to play baseball, or for any other high school activity. Not with having to focus my energies on demons. But baseball was a Spring sport and a long way off. It wasn’t worth disappointing him now. That could wait.

  His eyes stayed narrowed as he tried to read my expression for my true intentions, but in the end he decided to give me the benefit of the doubt. “Good,” he said, nodding slowly. “We really are happy with the improvements you’ve made. I’d still like to know the reason for your earlier setback, and maybe someday you’ll be willing to tell us what triggered it, but we want you to focus on the future, so we’ve decided to pay you a weekly allowance again. Fifty dollars, which should be enough for you to stop your snow shoveling and lawn maintenance business, which was certainly admirable in its own right. But this is an important time in your life and you need to concentrate your efforts on your school work and other social activities.”

  I nodded affirmatively, though I knew I wasn’t about to quit my businesses. I couldn’t allow myself to be reliant on my parents and their money. What I was doing was too important.

  A look of relief softened my dad’s chiseled features, and he smiled in a relaxed sort of way. “So Henry, why the sudden interest in German?”

  “I’m thinking of majoring in psychology in college, and thought it would be good to be able to read Freud in his original writings.”

  Of course this was an outright lie, but I wasn’t about to tell him that I was studying German because I needed to be able to translate an eighteenth-century book on demonology. Nor was I going to inform him that I had no plans to go to college. How could I, with what I was going to have to do? Fortunately, he mostly accepted my lie, though out of the corner of my eye I could see my mom making a sour face, at least as much as the Botox injections allowed her to. But she wasn’t about to accuse me right then of having other motives for teaching myself German, and she caught herself before my dad could look at her.

  “Sir,” I said, “given all of my improvements of late, can we reconsider having a dog?”

  From my peripheral vision I could see my mom preparing herself to complain about what a dog would do to her carpeting, but she closed her mouth and let my dad handle the dirty business. He frowned in an apologetic sort of way, saying, “Henry, it just wouldn’t make sense for us to get a dog right now. Not with you going off to college in three years. Your mom and I would be stuck with it.”

  “I could take the dog to college with me.”

  He started to dismiss the idea, but instead left it open, telling me that we could revisit the subject during Christmas break, which was kind of a dirty trick to get more leverage on me. I guess I’ve always wanted a dog, and they’ve always had their excuses for why we couldn’t get one, but now I had new reasons.

  I had promised in my last entry to talk about dogs and demons, and also about Clifton Gibson, but it’s late now and I’m tired. After dinner I put another four hours into my translating of Daemonologie, which convinced me even further that the book was worthless, although I haven’t quite reached the point where I’m willing to toss it. Close, but not quite there. After I quit for the night I felt like I needed to watch Spider-Man, which is what I always watch when I’m feeling like my situation is hopeless. I think I’ve watched it over 100 times ASD. I know it’s corny, but I can relate to the whole thing about how ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’ Watching that movie helps keep me going.

  It’s almost three o’clock. I’m yawning and having trouble keeping my eyes open, and I have a busy day ahead tomorrow. When I write my next entry, I’ll talk about dogs and Clifton Gibson. Promise.

  Wednesday, August 24th 10:22 AM

  MY PARENTS MUST’VE LEFT FOR WORK AT LEAST THREE HOURS AGO, and thank God they didn’t feel the need to give me a parting lecture about staying up late to watch movies, probably because they knew I’d spent a good part of last night with my German self-studies. Right now I’m writing this journal entry sitting in my bathrobe at the table in their top-of-the-line stainless steel chef’s kitchen while drinking a triple espresso made with their eight hundred dollar Italian espresso machine. One of the perks of living in a McMansion in the middle of Waban, Massachusetts. Eight-hundred-dollar espresso machines. It doesn’t quite make up for my lot in life being fated to deal with demons but at least it’s something.

  Even after seven hours of sleep and a triple espresso, my head’s still too wonky to
think straight, kind of like my brain’s wrapped in a wool sock. I shouldn’t have gone to bed so late, not with all the stuff I have to do today. Hopefully a couple of chocolate crullers from Dunkin’ Donuts will help knock some of the fuzziness off. I should have time to ride my bike there later.

  I promised last night to write about dogs and demons. The short answer: dogs don’t like demons very much or at least they don’t like Mr. Hanley. And when I say they don’t like him, I mean they’re terrified of him. I haven’t been able to witness him crossing paths with a dog, though one day I will. But I have seen the way they act when they get near his house. They’re too terrified to growl or snarl or even show their teeth instead they just want to get as far away from his house as fast as they can. I have my theories on why this is. A big part of it has to be that they must sense something about him, or they can pick up an odor that freaks them out. If I had a dog I could perform some tests on him, like blindfolding him or overloading his olfactory senses with another odor to see if he still behaved the same. But I have other reasons.

  I didn’t make the dog-demon connection right away. It really didn’t happen until six months ASD. Before then I was a wreck. I avoided any further Mr. Hanley sightings, afraid of what I might see, and was well along the way to convincing myself that something was seriously wrong with me, and the only thing that kept me from doing that was I couldn’t find any disorder that looked like a good enough match. What helped me finally accept that Mr. Hanley was an actual demon was when I saw his picture in the local paper. I doubt he even knew his picture had been taken. He was in the background carrying an odd-looking package wrapped in white paper, like he had gotten it from the butcher’s shop, except it looked too big and cumbersome to be steaks, more like it would have to be a small side of beef. When I saw him in the photo it was as a heavyset square-faced balding man and not as a demon. That made me want to see him again, badly, so I camped out and hid in some bushes across the street where he wouldn’t be able to see me. I couldn’t camp out like that all the time, only an hour here and there so my parents and nobody else would know what I was up to, and because of that it took me three days before I saw him again. When I did he was still a demon, but this time I brought my iPhone with me, and guess what? Through the viewfinder he was the same chunky and balding Mr. Hanley that I used to see BSD. Somehow this didn’t surprise me. I took several pictures and they all showed him as a human and not as a demon.

  So where do dogs and demons come into all this? While I was camped out, I saw how every time a dog approached Mr. Hanley’s house, they acted the same. They’d start shaking like crazy, their tails going straight between their hind legs, and they’d dig in and fight against the leash with everything they had to keep from being led past that house. Some owners would give in and turn around and their dogs would make these awful wheezing strangled noises as they fought against their leashes trying to race away in a blind panic. Others, especially those owners with smaller dogs, would just about pull their dogs past the house, but once they were beyond Hanley’s property they’d also struggle to put some serious distance between themselves and that house. In none of these cases was Hanley actually outside, so I knew that these dogs weren’t reacting to the sight of him, but rather to a smell or something else that they sensed. Whatever it was, it left them terrified.

  I only saw seven different owners try to walk their dogs past that house, which wasn’t a lot, given that I was camped out for over eight hours during my three-day surveillance mission. None of these people were from the neighborhood—I’m guessing that anyone living nearby with a dog must’ve learned long ago to avoid Hanley’s house. Watching this play out also made me think about the dogs that have gone missing in our neighborhood over the years. The Goldsteins’ black lab that disappeared from their fenced-in backyard. The Michelsons’ old Saint Bernard that used to lay like a lump on their front doorstep. The Andersons’ overstuffed English Bulldog. And there were others too. There was talk for a while how there must be coyotes living on a nearby wooded golf course, but nobody ever saw or heard any coyotes, and if it was coyotes then the neighborhood cats would’ve been disappearing also. The other thing is that all the dogs that disappeared were big dogs. None of the yapping little terriers in the neighborhood ever went missing. When I thought of that, I immediately thought of the large package wrapped in white paper that Mr. Hanley was carrying in that photo.

  So yeah, I want a dog. Worrying about how to protect the world from demons is a lonely life, and it would be nice to have some companionship. More than that, I want to be able to do the experiments I mentioned earlier, but also I want to see how a dog would react when brought face to face with Mr. Hanley and other demons. It couldn’t be just any dog, it would have to be a special one. Maybe a bull terrier. I’ve read about them, and I think that breed would be perfect. Strong, fearless, probably even able to hold its own against a demon. Somehow I don’t think that breed would act the same way as these other dogs did. I think a bull terrier would be able to look a demon in the eye, and instead of wanting to run away would want to rip its ugly flaming red throat out. At least I hope so.

  So that’s the scoop between dogs and demons. I need to do more experiments and tests, but I’ve seen enough to be convinced that dogs aren’t fooled by these demons. They either sense or smell what they are, and one of these days I’ll know whether they also see them for what they are.

  I also promised to write about Clifton Gibson, and yeah, he’s the same Clifton Gibson you’ve been reading about the last two years. The one who was found in a warehouse in Brooklyn with dozens of cages filled with little kids, none of them older than four. The papers didn’t give much in the way of detail, but the charges were lengthy, with kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, torture, mutilations, performing depraved acts on children: the list goes on and on. The pictures they showed of Gibson in the papers and on TV had him as this creepy-looking guy. Tall, bald, with these dead eyes. Kind of like a human snake. The story broke seven months ASD and when I first saw his photo on TV I felt this certainty about him that I couldn’t explain. After that I became obsessed with reading everything I could about him, and I searched every website and message board that mentioned him. There were a lot of rumors about nearby missing children and what he must’ve done to them, and there were other rumors about the children they found.

  Nobody in the police or DA’s office would talk about what was done to the children they rescued. It was a privacy issue. But you had the charges filed against Gibson, and you had all the rumors, and you knew the reality had to be bad. The one rumor I couldn’t shake was that he had sewn their eyelids and lips closed.

  When the trial started I took a train to New York so I could get into the courtroom. My parents had no idea. I just left the house early that morning and left them a note about how I had a heavy day of mowing lawns ahead of me, and that I’d be eating dinner at Wesley Neuberger’s house and would be home late. Wesley is one of the handful of friends I still stay in contact with to keep my parents off my back, and I’d worked it out with him ahead of time to cover for me. After I was out of the house, I rode my bike to a neighboring town, Needham, took the train to South Station, and from there got on the Acela train to New York and made it to Penn Station by eleven o’clock. It took me another hour to get to the Kings County Courthouse in Brooklyn where the trial was being held, and as you know if you caught any of the news clips a year ago, it was a complete circus with the media and mobs of angry local residents fighting to get in and lines of police keeping all of us at bay.

  I squeezed my way through this mob and one of the police officers gave me a stony stare and told me to beat it. I lied to him and told him that a four-year-old cousin of mine was one of Gibson’s victims. ASD I’d gotten very good at lying—I had to in order to keep my parents in the dark as to what I was doing, and I must’ve lied convincingly enough to this police officer, because instead of dismissing me for being full of shit, like he probably wanted to, his
eyes wavered a bit, and although he now had a hard smirk on his face, he asked me the name of my cousin.

  This is where I got lucky. Most of the stuff I read online about Gibson seemed like total BS, but there was one blog that felt more reliable, and I threw out one of the names I’d seen listed there.

  “I need to see him,” I said. “After what he did to my cousin, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sleep again at night if I don’t.”

  That did it. Again, I’d learned with a lot of practice with my parents how to be a convincing liar, but I hit the jackpot with the name I gave him. I could see it in that police officer’s eyes after he checked the name against a list he had.

  “You’ll behave yourself?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I promise. I just need to see him. Even if it’s just for one minute.”

  He studied me carefully for a long ten-count, then nodded. “You wait here,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  He left, another cop took his place, and the crowd pushed hard behind me making it difficult to breathe. The world started to grow red on me, and I had a moment where I thought I was going to pass out, but eventually the cop came back and led me through the police line.