The Boy Who Killed Demons: A Novel Read online

  I’ve been able to identify and discover addresses for eighteen of the twenty-three demons I’ve spotted, not counting this latest one. So far, all of them live alone. That’s another argument in favor of the fact that I’m not mentally ill—that these are real demons. Statistically, it would’ve been impossible to pick eighteen people out at random and have them all living alone. But with these demons, there’s not even a pretense of marriage or family. Maybe they led a celibate life, but somehow I doubted it. Seeing that demon leave the strip club made me doubt it even more.

  It was making me sick thinking of this, so I forced myself to stop. I started thinking instead about how to make contact with this Virgil, who claimed to see demons, but that was also too frustrating to think about. A woman sitting nearby was staring at me, and when I caught her eye she asked me if I was okay. I gave a bleak nod. I guess I was about as okay as any fifteen-year-old who saw demons could be.

  It was easy identifying the demon from Wednesday. A piece of cake, really. And all it cost me was ten dollars.

  I went to the building on Harrison Avenue where I’d tracked him to and found it open, and showed the security guard manning the front desk the photo I had snapped of the cleft-chinned demon. I told him I’d seen the guy drop ten dollars outside on the sidewalk, and that I wanted to return it. The security guard gave me a suspicious look, which all but told me that the demon hadn’t come in that day, so how could I have seen him drop ten dollars?

  “When was this?” he asked.

  “Yesterday.” I gave the guard a guilty smile. “It fell out of his pocket when he pulled his wallet out. It happened right after he left this building. I should’ve told him then, but I guess I was going to keep it. I don’t know. All night I’ve been feeling bad about it and I guess I need to return it. Do you know who he is?”

  The guard made a face. He didn’t want to tell me, but he did. The demon’s name was Scott Weston. I then gave the guard my most innocent look and asked if he had an envelope. “I’m thinking I could seal the ten dollars in it and you could give it to him,” I added.

  That got the guy moving fast, and when he handed me an envelope he tried hard to keep the larcenous glint out of his eyes. I put a ten-dollar bill inside the envelope and then acted as if I had a change of heart.

  “Maybe you could give me his address,” I said. “I probably should mail it to him.”

  “Why would you want to do that?” he asked. “It’d be easier if I gave it to him.”

  “Forget it.” I put the envelope in my pocket and headed for the door. “I’ll find it out myself.”

  “Hold on, hold on.” He made a disgusted face as he pulled out a directory and started searching through it. “Here it is,” he said. He pointed out the address for Scott Weston. I wrote it slowly on the envelope while at the same time memorizing it. While I did this he was watching on with kind of a hopeless expression. “Kid,” he said without much enthusiasm. “If you leave it with me, he’ll get it faster. Why risk it in the mail? Someone in the post office opens it up and Mr. Weston never gets his ten dollars back.”

  Of course, I was planning to leave the ten dollars with him the whole time. That would guarantee he’d never mention anything about me coming to the building to the demon Weston. So I pretended to give the matter some thought, then handed the envelope to the security guard. He had to fight hard to keep the smirk off his face as he took it.

  “You’ll be sure Mr. Weston gets this?”

  “Don’t worry about it, kid.”

  I hesitated for a moment. “What does Mr. Weston do?”

  “He’s a lawyer.”

  Why didn’t that surprise me? Other demons I’d discovered were lawyers also. I turned and left without looking back, and I was sure that within three seconds of my exiting the building the envelope was ripped open and the ten dollar bill shoved deep into the security guard’s pocket. Regardless, it was money well spent. In the past I had paid far more than ten dollars to identify and locate the address for a demon. As far as I was concerned, I got off cheap.

  Cornwall’s Used Books is not a store you’re going to stumble on by accident. Unless you know exactly where you’re going it’s doubtful you’ll find it. It wasn’t far from that office building on Harrison Avenue where the demon Weston worked. Walk up Harrison, take a left on Kneeland, then turn down Knapp Street. From there it’s a maze of narrow unmarked alleyways before you reach Cornwall’s. Even if you get the maze right it would be easy to miss the store, since it’s tucked away in the basement of this old dilapidated-looking red brick building, something that must’ve been at least a couple of hundred years old. If you’re not careful you’d walk right past Cornwall’s without ever noticing the little sign they have below street-level tucked in a window. As far as I know they don’t advertise, and the only reason I found out about the store was that another used bookstore recommended them to me for any books I might be looking for on the arcane arts and the occult, and gave me their phone number. After I called Cornwall’s and talked to the owner about the types of books I wanted, he gave me careful directions to the store. I wondered how they stayed in business. I doubted that they got any foot traffic. They must have a very loyal clientele.

  The owner is the only person I’ve ever seen inside the shop, and he isn’t what you’d expect for this type of eclectic and odd bookstore. From what I’d been told about Cornwall’s, I had my preconceived notions already built up and imagined the owner being a thin bookish man, maybe with long thinning red hair and an aloof look about him. Someone who’d wear a tweed jacket and have trouble looking at you directly. That’s not this guy. His last name is Dorthop, and I have no idea about his first name. He’s maybe ten years older than my dad. Not that tall, about my height, but with this thick wide body and Popeye-like thick forearms. His face is shaped like a jack-o-lantern, complete with missing teeth. Once when he was staring open-mouthed at me, I was able to count four yellowed and rotting teeth, and that was it. While he’s mostly bald, he’s far from hairless, with his thick caterpillar eyebrows (and not just any caterpillar, but like the Woolly Bear variety—I know that’s an odd association, but I was really into caterpillars when I was ten) and black matted hair that covers his arms and pushes past his shirt collar. He reminds me more of a butcher than a bookstore owner, and his disposition is also more like a butcher’s. But he knows his books—if I press him, he talks to me about them, so I’ve learned a lot from him, including the histories of certain books that most people—really, most bookstore owners—have never heard of.

  When I walked into the store, it had the same dank, musty smell it always has. Dorthop was sitting behind the cash register with his face buried in a book. He was wearing what looked like the same T-shirt and khaki pants that he has on every time I go there. Maybe he just has a lot of the same T-shirts and khaki pants, or maybe he never changes them. From the stale muskiness that came off him, it was probably the latter. He looked up briefly to give me a disinterested stare, and then was back to his book.

  “Nothing new’s been added to the collection since last time you were here,” he grunted at me in a thick Boston accent.

  “You haven’t found a copy of L’Occulto Illuminato yet?”

  That brought a grim, closed-mouthed smile to his lips. Dorthop never smiled with his mouth open. Probably because of all his missing teeth. L’Occulto Illuminato, written in the seventeenth century by Lazzarro Galeotti, is supposedly the most reliable text on the arcane arts, although few know about it. I doubted whether any used bookstore owner in Boston other than Dorthop even had a clue about the book. I’d certainly never heard of it until Dorthop mentioned it to me. After that I was able to find a half-dozen obscure references to it on the Internet. Supposedly the book provides explicit details on the dark beings that have crept into our world, and explains their purpose for doing so. Some of these references claim the book is a myth, others claim that a few dozen copies survived through the centuries. It has basically become my holy grai
l, and Dorthop knows how badly I want a copy.

  “Why don’t you leave your phone number and I’ll call you if I ever track it down?”

  I wasn’t about to do that. Call me paranoid, but Dorthop didn’t know my name or how to contact me, and I was going to keep it that way. One of these days these demons were going to get smart and start thinking that people like me might try learning more about them through bookstores like Cornwall’s. I ignored Dorthop’s question the way kids my age are so good at doing, and asked him if it was okay if I checked out the books anyway.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  And then he was back to his book as if I wasn’t there.

  The interior of Cornwall’s was even more of a maze inside than the jumble of alleys you had to walk through to get there. Shelves and stacks of books were everywhere—all of them either history or philosophy, though there was a lot more history. And a good chunk of that was made up of books about wars.

  I went through the maze until I came to the wall of books about ancient Egypt. If you pushed on the right side of this wall, it went in and the left side swung out, and inside was a small alcove where Dorthop kept his occult book collection. I don’t know exactly why he kept his collection hidden like this, but I had the feeling it was so a demon wouldn’t be able to stumble on it.

  I pushed on the wall to open it, then once I was inside the alcove, pushed it closed again. It was a small space, but Dorthop kept the area lit, and it probably had more ventilation than the rest of his shop.

  All the books were at least fifty years old, and many of them were from the nineteenth century or older. A few were cloth bound, many others leather bound. With some of them, I had my questions about what type of animal was used to provide the leather. Some were in English, but others, like Daemonologie, were in foreign languages. These types of books tended not to be translated, and were usually only found in their native languages. Through my research I was always learning about different books that might be of interest, and I carefully went through all the titles that Dorthop had. There were a few that I wanted, but they were too expensive and in languages that I would have to learn, so I decided they could wait until I was through with my translation of Daemonologie. I did pick up a couple of the English language books and thumbed through them for a while until I decided I’d had enough. After that I pushed the wall open so I could get out, then closed it after me. I navigated back to the front door and still found no one else in the shop besides Dorthop. He didn’t bother looking up from his book, instead murmured out of the side of his mouth to me that he knew I was wasting my time.

  “I told you I had nothing new,” he grumbled.

  “I still would’ve picked up Mystere Des Esprits Noirs if it wasn’t so expensive. How about giving me fifty percent off for all the business I’ve given you?”

  “Jean-Francois Berjon. 1857,” Dorthop said without any hesitation. He had all of it memorized. Probably every book in that alcove, maybe the whole store. He looked up from his book to give me a quizzical look. “You know French?” he asked.

  “One year of high school French. If I buy the book, I’ll learn what I need to, just like I’m doing with German now so I can translate Daemonologie. No big deal.”

  His look turned sour as his eyes sort of glazed over. “What’s your interest in these books?” he asked.

  “I figure I’ll become an expert in something no one else knows,” I said. Over the last two years I’d learned how to lie very convincingly. I had to, given the work I was doing. “This way after college I can write books, appear on talk shows, and find a nice cushy job in some university.”

  “You have it all figured out, huh?” His mouth closed into a tight line, and for a moment I thought he was going to add something, maybe warn me about the dangers of what I’ve been delving into. That my interest in the black arts could be putting me in mortal danger, or that at the very least, I was contaminating my soul with such readings. But whatever interest he might’ve had in doing this faded, and instead he stuck his face back in the book he was reading. As far as he was concerned I wasn’t even there. I left his shop and headed back to lower Washington Street.

  Later I was back across the street from those two strip clubs to do another count, standing in the same spot I was at a few days ago. It was quieter than it was when I was there with Wesley—a lot less foot traffic. After only forty minutes of standing there and minding my own business, a police officer approached me. Up to that point I’d had no demon sightings and only counted eighty-seven people. Six men had entered the strips clubs, four men and one woman had exited them. The rest of my count were people walking by the area. The police officer asked me for my name.

  “Why?” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”

  “Yeah? What are you doing here for over an hour?”

  “I haven’t been here an hour. I’ve only been here forty minutes.”

  He gave me this fed up look like he was just itching to hit me. His piggish eyes narrowed to slits and he moved a step closer to me. He was a big blubbery-looking man with a thick red neck and light reddish hair that was shaved close to his scalp.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded, his voice meaner now. He was close enough to me that I could smell his sour breath. Kind of like cat food that had gone bad.

  “I’m waiting for someone. Why? Is there a law against that?”

  He didn’t like my questioning him. A nasty glint sparked in his eyes. “If you’re hanging out here looking for trouble then yeah, it’s against my law. Boy, you better give me your name now.”

  His hand moved toward his nightstick, and I didn’t wait. I took off running, and fuck, he ran after me. I didn’t expect that. For some reason I thought he’d let me go, that all he wanted was for me to leave. He looked too fat to want to chase after me, so I didn’t think he would, but there he was only a few yards behind me yelling at me, the sound of his footsteps loud and heavy as they pounded the pavement. I risked a glance behind me and saw that he had his nightstick out so he could hit me if given the chance. I was both scared and furious as I ran down Washington Street. I started crying because of how furious I was. Here I was sacrificing my life to do what I had to to protect us from these demons, and this fascist cop had to interfere with me and terrorize me.

  With how weak I still was from being sick and my legs so rubbery, I didn’t think there was any chance I’d escape him, and I knew deep in the pit of my stomach that he was going to do more than arrest me, probably work me over with that nightstick for making him chase after me.

  I could barely breathe I was crying so hard. I was scared, but my crying was only out of fury. By the time I reached Stuart Street I was so exhausted that I was going to give up when I noticed I was no longer hearing footsteps pounding out behind me. I turned to see that the cop had given up and was standing hunched over with hands on his knees, red-faced and breathing hard. I turned down Stuart Street and forced myself to keep running.

  I was near choking with rage that that cop would treat me the way he had. I had moments where I thought of just saying fuck it and living my life without worrying about these demons. It just didn’t seem fair for a fifteen-year-old to have to worry about something like that, and on top of it having to be chased by some asshole cop?

  I continued up Stuart Street to Tremont and cut through three different alleys until I reached Boylston. At times I’d stumble to a stop, too tired and choking in rage to continue, tears and snot streaming down my face. Then I’d force myself to keep going, afraid that that cop might be close behind, or if not him, someone he radioed. The people on the sidewalk that I passed gave me a wide berth. Not one person tried stopping me to see what was wrong—not that I would’ve let anyone stop me.

  It wasn’t until I reached Copley Square, which was a good mile and a half from where the cop accosted me, that I was able to stop crying. Instead of getting on the subway, I kept going until I reached the Prudential Center mall. I wanted a chance to use a bath
room so I could clean up, and I was wiped out by the time I got there.

  I was a mess. My eyes were red and puffy, my face drawn and pale. I stood frozen for at least a good minute staring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror before bending by the sink and splashing cold water onto my face. I did that for several minutes until I felt calmer, and then moved away from the sink and dried off my face. I had to use toilet paper since the bathroom only had air dryers instead of paper towels. I was still angry, but now it was more at myself than that cop. I guess all the emotional stress of what I’ve been dealing with ASD must’ve been building up, because the way I reacted to that cop hassling me was pathetic. I’d actually considered tossing my responsibilities because of one idiotic incident? Pathetic! I must’ve been on edge for a while, and I’m sure my recent encounter with the demon Hanley didn’t help matters. I realized then that I needed to be more aware of the stress I was feeling, and that I needed to manage it better. Maybe start doing some meditation or yoga or something.