The Boy Who Killed Demons: A Novel Page 23

  I thought about whether to call the police now about the warehouse, or to wait. If I called them now, these demons could very well scatter before I had a chance to kill them, or maybe something even worse would happen—if the police tried raiding that warehouse while the demons were gathered there, it could be a slaughter. I decided to wait until later. I didn’t want to be responsible for sending any police officers to their deaths, and I didn’t want to lose my chance to kill more of these demons.

  When the demon came home, it was the same as with Robohoe. He must’ve smelled me from outside. He was shorter and broader, and he was roaring his threats the second he came charging through his front door, running at me like a bull. As he came within maybe five feet of me, his knees buckled, and he pitched forward. His front door was open, so I planted the blade several inches into his neck, then left him to close the door. When I returned I crouched next to him and pulled the blade out so that he could talk. I asked him what happened to demons when they died, whether they went back to hell or simply ceased to exist. He grunted out in his demon hisses and snarls that I’d be finding out soon. Another week at most.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I know about your warehouse in East Boston. The one where you have all your stolen children. I’ll be sending the police there soon.”

  Panic exploded in his eyes, and he strained desperately to get up, but the knife had him immobilized. I didn’t see any point in prolonging this. There wasn’t any chance he’d answer my questions. And even if he did, I didn’t know what I’d ask him anymore, now that I knew where they had those children. Without wasting any more time, I plunged the blade into his neck and proceeded to cut off his head. After I finished, I used my phone to see what he looked like in human form, and he reminded me of some dull-looking accountant, bald and shapeless.

  This demon was carrying a briefcase when he entered his house. I opened it and saw that I had hit the jackpot. He’d been carrying around in the briefcase a file with addresses for all the demons that he was responsible for. Forty-seven of them. There would’ve been forty-eight but Hanley’s address had been scratched out. Interestingly, Robohoe’s was still intact. Somehow they hadn’t found out about him yet.

  I had put on leather racing gloves before I’d broken into the house, so I didn’t have to worry about fingerprints and didn’t have to wipe anything off. I was going to leave through the back, but something made me open the front door a crack, and when I looked outside I noticed the late model Toyota parked in this demon’s driveway. I closed the door and thought things out. If I went about my plan and used public transportation to get to each demon’s address, maybe I’d be able to kill five or six of them that night, but if I used the Toyota I’d have a chance to kill many more. My dad would let me at times pull his car into the driveway and also back it onto the street, so I wasn’t completely clueless about driving, but the idea of taking that Toyota out into the streets scared me more than killing demons. I thought about it and realized I needed to do it. If it was possible to get rid of more of them that night, I had to try.

  I went through those forty-seven addresses and started connecting the dots—first finding the one closest to this demon’s address in Lynn, then the one closest to that address, and so on, until I had them all mapped out. When I looked it over, I realized I could maybe get rid of as many as twenty of them. If things went smoothly, there could be twenty fewer demons by morning.

  I searched the dead demon’s pockets and found a set of car keys. With those in hand I left through the front door and moved quickly to the car. When I first got inside I started gagging. That sickeningly sweet demon smell of onion and sulfur had saturated the cloth seats, and it made me both nauseous and dizzy. I would’ve opened all the windows but I didn’t want to draw the attention of any passing police cars—it would’ve looked funny to any cop if they saw someone driving around on a cold October night with the windows down. I quickly found that if I breathed in only through my mouth I could stomach it, but still, I put the air conditioner on full blast hoping that that would help alleviate the odor. Even if it didn’t do anything with the smell, blasting cold air into my face helped clear my head and get rid of the dizziness.

  As I mentioned before, the house was isolated from others on the street. It was set back from the road and the front was kept dark, so there was little chance anyone would see me, or at least see me well enough to be able to identify me. But I still knew I couldn’t risk sitting there for long, and after figuring out the controls for the Toyota, I backed it out onto the street and drove off.

  My knuckles were pinched white as I gripped the wheel, and my shoulders were tense and stiff. I was terrified—partly because I had never driven in traffic before, but mostly due to what would happen if a cop pulled me over. First, they’d find the dagger; second, they’d get the address of the owner of this car, and they’d find what they thought was a dead man with his head cut off. Maybe I’d be able to get them to check the warehouse, but maybe not. It was possible that by the time I got anyone to listen to me, the other demons would realize what had happened to their brother demon in Lynn and they’d move the stolen children to another location. It was also possible that I’d be locked away in a psychiatric unit and so loaded up with drugs that I wouldn’t even have a chance to tell anyone about the warehouse filled with stolen children. So yeah, being on the road terrified me. I pulled the car into a nearby strip mall and took deep breaths until I could calm myself down. I knew if I continued to drive around in this terrified state, I’d be begging for a cop to pull me over. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Once I was feeling a little more under control, I spent about ten minutes driving the car around the strip mall parking lot and getting used to it. One huge break was that the car had a GPS navigational system, and I plugged in the next address on the list, selected that I wanted to stay off of highways, and was able to find it easily by following the voice instructions.

  Like Robohoe’s and the last demon’s house, this one was kept dark and was set back from the road. I parked a block away and broke into a jog to get back there. I didn’t bother breaking in through the back. With this one, I just rang the doorbell. When the demon answered, I stepped towards him with my dagger and he immediately stumbled backwards as if his legs had given out on him. He collapsed on the floor, and I buried the dagger into his throat—then, after closing the door, I returned back to him. He was squirming a little, but not enough to keep me from cutting off his head. I didn’t bother questioning him, because there no longer seemed to be any point, and I was out of the house in less than three minutes. Then I was driving to the next address on the list, even though it was for Robohoe’s house in Revere.

  I wasn’t even that surprised when I made out movement from behind a curtain at Robohoe’s address, and I did exactly the same as I did with that last demon.

  A demon about the same size as Robohoe answered the door. He didn’t really resemble Robohoe—he had different markings and a more pushed in snout. After I cut off his head I looked at him through my iPhone’s viewfinder, and wasn’t surprised by what I found. He had the same human disguise that Robohoe had. That was why there hadn’t been anything in the papers about Robohoe’s death—the demons discovered it first, disposed of Robohoe’s body, and put another demon in Robohoe’s place. It didn’t matter. I spent no more than five minutes with Robohoe’s replacement, and then I was on the road to the next demon on the list.

  It went on like this until eleven thirty. By that point I’d managed to kill six demons, none of them taking more than five minutes, with most of my time spent driving to the different locations. In each case, the dagger cut through their necks as easily as if their demon hide were made of warm ice cream. None of them was capable of putting up any fight as the dagger robbed them of their strength before they realized what was happening.

  Of those six demons, I knew three of them from my own hunting—the other three were courtesy of the list that the big cheese demon f
rom Lynn had provided. When I got to the address for number seven, I found the house empty. At first this concerned me, as I was worried that the demons might’ve discovered what I was up to and were fleeing, but then I realized that this demon was probably participating in the midnight rituals that they were doing to open up hell, and so I decided to camp out inside and wait.

  Nine demons were needed for their midnight rituals. If any of those nine were among the ones I killed, the remaining demons would soon suspect that something was wrong. So what would they do if any of their brethren were missing tonight? First, they’d call up other demons so that they could carry on with their rituals. But, what would they do after that? They’d obviously try to call the missing demons to find out what happened, and when they couldn’t get in touch with them they’d start worrying. I started panicking as I realized they might move the stolen children then. Fuck. I should’ve thought about that ahead of time. I almost left to drive to the warehouse, but I forced myself to stay where I was. If they spotted me near the warehouse, that would cause even more problems.

  I sat waiting at the demon’s kitchen table so I could watch the front door. I guess I had gotten sloppy, expecting the same thing to happen that had happened with the other demons—for this demon to smell me from outside and to charge through the house without any consideration that he was in danger. At a quarter past three in the morning, something else happened. A loud crash made me jump in my seat. This demon had smelled me out and knew that I was in the kitchen, and since he’d been warned that something was up, was more cautious. Instead of coming through the front door he had crashed through a kitchen window, his claw raised to slice me in half. It scared the hell out of me, but as I turned with the dagger held out in front, his arm fell limp before he could do any damage, and he collapsed to the floor. Even though the house was isolated, I needed to get out of there fast because a neighbor still could’ve heard the window breaking. But I also needed to know whether they’d moved those children. I stuck the dagger’s blade into the wooden floor less than an inch from this demon’s ear, and I told him how he was going to be the seventh demon I killed that night. He grunted out a few obscenities, his demon voice coarse and weak, but didn’t say anything else.

  “That’s all you’re going to say? You’re not even going to try to convince me that I’m crazy?”

  His yellow eyes blazed hotly. “You’ll be ours soon enough,” he gasped out, his voice now little more than a series of wheezes.

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. I know about your warehouse in East Boston, the one where you have the stolen children, and I’ll be sending the police there.”

  His reaction gave it away. Panic set in as he struggled to get off the floor. They hadn’t moved the children. If they had, I would’ve seen only contempt in his eyes. Since I didn’t need anything more from him, I pulled the blade from the floor and cut off his head like I did the others. And then it was on to number eight.

  The rest of the night went pretty much the same. These demons were more cautious now. They had been warned that something was wrong, but either through denseness or arrogance they hadn’t figured out that they should be leaving their houses. They didn’t know about L’Occulto Illuminato or how a specially prepared dagger could leave them collapsing helpless to the floor. So I was no longer ringing doorbells—instead I used my burglary picks to break into their houses. Some of them would try hiding so they could attack when I got close without realizing that once I got close enough they’d fall to the floor helpless. A few tried running away when they saw me, but in those cases I was able to throw the dagger and either hit them or hit close enough to them to also leave them helpless. By six o’clock in the morning I had killed fourteen of them, and while I was physically intact I had saved up enough nightmarish memories to last me a lifetime. Soon the remaining demons would be heading off to their jobs, or maybe scattering once they realized their brethren demons were being killed. I only had time for one more. I hadn’t run across Devin yet, but I had a good idea which address was his. One of the houses on the list was in Belmont, and it made the most sense for Devin since that was the only address within a reasonable commuting distance of the high school. As I drove there I started worrying whether or not this was really where Devin was living. I needed to kill him, not only for my satisfaction, but for Sally’s sake.

  The address in Belmont was like all the other demon houses. A small, isolated ranch-style home, kind of a dump. I felt groggy as I broke in, and maybe that was why what happened happened. After killing all those demons last night without even working up a sweat, I guess I had started taking things for granted. After I stepped into the living room I caught something whizzing at me out of the corner of my eye. Before I had a chance to react, something hard hit me in the right hand, sending the dagger flying out of my grasp and clattering across the floor. I dropped to my knees and seized my injured hand, the pain immobilizing me. Red stars flashed for a moment, I swear to God, and I almost blacked out from the pain, but I fought to stay conscious, and the moment passed. I saw then that a baseball-sized rock had been thrown at me. And then I saw Devin from across the room grinning viciously.

  I fucked up. I should’ve called the police before then. All I could think at that moment was how because of me fucking up they’d never find those stolen children in East Boston and that Devin and the remaining demons would continue with their rituals. That because of my fuckup, they were going to succeed in opening up hell.

  Devin was enjoying how things had turned out, but he fucked up even worse than I did. He should’ve just killed me, but instead he decided he was going to have fun with it. Growling out in his demon hisses and snarls, he told me how he was going to make me eat that knife. And then he went to retrieve it. That was it. I could see his legs weakening as he approached the dagger, and it was only after he collapsed to the floor that he realized that it was the dagger that stole his strength away.

  I fought against the pain throbbing throughout my hand and seemingly my whole arm, and I pushed myself to my feet. I knew I had several broken bones, but I was able to use my left hand to cut off Devin’s head. As soon as I did so, though, the pain must have finally succeeded in making me pass out, because when I woke up I had no idea where I was. All I knew was that my right hand hurt terribly. I still had my racing gloves on, and I touched my forehead with my left forearm and felt how clammy and sweaty my skin was. I knew I was in rough shape.

  Then I saw Devin’s severed head and I remembered about last night and all the demons I had killed. It took me a while before I could stand up. The first few times I tried, the room would start swimming on me and I’d have to sit down again. When I could finally get to my feet, I used Devin’s phone to call the Boston police and tell them about that East Boston warehouse. I also told them about that demon in Lynn (although I didn’t tell them he was a demon) and how if they searched his house they’d find evidence that he was behind the abductions. After that I left the house and just about staggered to where I had left the Toyota. Fortunately it was still there, and I drove to Curt’s house so I could retrieve my journal and copy of L’Occulto Illuminato. Nobody was home, so I used my burglar picks to break in. After rummaging through his parents’ medicine cabinet I found a half-used bottle of Vicodin and took several. When I made my way to Curt’s room, all I felt like I could do was lie down. The next time I opened my eyes I saw that two hours had passed. I took some more Vicodin, and decided Curt’s room was as good as any to write my journal entries.

  Fuck, I’m so damn tired right now. I need to lie down and close my eyes. Only for a few minutes. Right after I pop a couple more Vicodins.

  Wednesday, October 19th 4:50 PM

  OH HELL. IT TURNS OUT I WAS OUT FOR MORE THAN A FEW minutes. Curt woke me up a little while ago. He looked both startled and worried to find me asleep in his room. For a minute or so I was too groggy and out of it to explain that I needed to get my things back.

  “How’d you get in the house?”


  “No one was home.” My vision was all blurry and I rubbed at my eyes with my left hand so I’d have a chance of being able to focus on him. My right hand was throbbing like crazy and I rested my arm on my stomach so my hand wasn’t touching anything. “I let myself in. I guess I needed to take a nap. I hope you don’t mind that I used your bed.”

  He didn’t answer me at first. He was too upset or something. I couldn’t quite read him, but something was going on in his head, like he was struggling over something.

  He told me that I had to leave. He contorted his face as if he’d been punched in the stomach and added that the police were after me.

  “What do you mean?”

  There was more of that punched-in-the-stomach face from Curt, then he told me he’d show me. I pushed myself off his bed, my legs weak and wobbly, and I followed him to his computer. He brought up the Boston Globe’s website and was going to click on a story about a suspect for a grisly murder, but I stopped and asked him to instead click on the breaking story about children being rescued from a warehouse in East Boston. Curt did as I asked.