Running With the Demon Page 5

  “Derry’s just upset,” said a man sitting next to him. Old Bob hadn’t noticed the fellow before. He had blue eyes that were so pale they seemed washed of color. “His job’s on the line, and the company doesn’t even know he’s alive. You can understand how he feels. No need for us to be angry with each other. We’re all friends here.”

  “Yeah, Derry don’t mean nothing,” Junior Elway agreed.

  “What do you think we ought to do?” Mike Michaelson asked Robert Roosevelt Freemark suddenly, trying to turn the conversation another way.

  Old Bob was still looking at the man next to Howe, trying to place him. The bland, smooth features were as familiar to him as his own, but for some reason he couldn’t think of his name. It was right on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t get a handle on it. Nor could he remember exactly what it was the fellow did. He was a mill man, all right. Too young to be retired, so he must be one of the strikers. But where did he know him from? The others seemed to know him, so why couldn’t he place him?

  His gaze shifted to Michaelson, a tall, gaunt, even-tempered millwright who had retired about the same time Old Bob had. Old Bob had known Mike all his life, and he recognized at once that Mike was trying to give Derry Howe a chance to cool down.

  “Well, I think we need a stronger presence from the national office,” he said. “Derry’s right about that much.” He folded his big hands on the table before him and looked down at them. “I think we need some of the government people to do more—maybe a senator or two to intervene so we can get things back on track with the negotiations.”

  “More talk!” Derry Howe barely hid a sneer.

  “Talk is the best way to go,” Old Bob advised, giving him a look.

  “Yeah? Well, it ain’t like it was in your time, Bob Freemark. We ain’t got local owners anymore, people with a stake in the community, people with families that live here like the rest of us. We got a bunch of New York bloodsuckers draining all the money out of Hopewell, and they don’t care about us.” Derry Howe slouched in his chair, eyes downcast. “We got to do something if we expect to survive this. We can’t just sit around hoping for someone to help us. It ain’t going to happen.”

  “There was a fellow out East somewhere, one of the major cities, Philadelphia, I think,” said the man sitting next to him, his strange pale eyes quizzical, his mouth quirked slightly, as if his words amused him. “His wife died, leaving him with a five-year-old daughter who was mildly retarded. He kept her in a closet off the living room for almost three years before someone discovered what he was doing and called the police. When they questioned the man, he said he was just trying to protect the girl from a hostile world.” The man cocked his head slightly. “When they asked the girl why she hadn’t tried to escape, she said she was afraid to run, that all she could do was wait for someone to help her.”

  “Well, they ain’t shutting me up in no closet!” Derry Howe snapped angrily. “I can help myself just fine!”

  “Sometimes,” the man said, looking at no one in particular, his voice low and compelling, “the locks get turned before you even realize that the door’s been closed.”

  “I think Bob’s right,” Mike Michaelson said. “I think we have to give the negotiation process a fair chance. These things take time.”

  “Time that costs us money and gives them a better chance to break us!” Derry Howe shoved back his chair and came to his feet. “I’m outta here. I got better things to do than sit around here all day. I’m sick of talking and doing nothing. Maybe you don’t care if the company takes away your job, but I ain’t having none of it!”

  He stalked away, weaving angrily through the crowded tables, and slammed the door behind him. At the counter, Josie Jackson grimaced. A moment later, Junior Elway left as well. The men still seated at the table shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.

  “I swear, if that boy wasn’t my sister’s son, I wouldn’t waste another moment on him,” Melvin Riorden muttered.

  “He’s right about one thing,” Old Bob sighed. “Things aren’t the way they used to be. The world’s changed from when we were his age, and a lot of it’s gotten pretty ugly. People don’t want to work things out anymore like they used to.”

  “People just want a pound of flesh,” Al Garcia agreed. His blocky head pivoted on his bull neck. “It’s all about money and getting your foot on the other guy’s neck. That’s why the company and the union can’t settle anything. Makes you wonder if the government hasn’t put something in the water after all.”

  “You see where that man went into a grocery store out on Long Island somewhere and walked up and down the aisles stabbing people?” asked Penny Williamson. “Had two carving knives with him, one in each hand. He never said a word, just walked in and began stabbing people. He stabbed ten of them before someone stopped him. Killed two. The police say he was angry and depressed. Well, hell, who ain’t?”

  “The world’s full of angry, depressed people,” said Mike Michaelson, rearranging his coffee cup and silver, staring down at his sun-browned, wrinkled hands fixedly. “Look what people are doing to each other. Parents beating and torturing their children. Young boys and girls killing each other. Teachers and priests taking advantage of their position to do awful things. Serial killers wandering the countryside. Churches and schools being vandalized and burned. It’s a travesty.”

  “Some of those people you talk about live right here in Hopewell.” Penny Williamson grunted. “That Topp kid who killed his common-law wife with a butcher knife and cut her up in pieces a few years back? I grew up with that kid. Old man Peters killed all those horses two weeks back, said they were the spawn of Satan. Tilda Mason, tried to kill herself three times over the past six months—twice in the mental hospital. Tried to kill a couple of the people working there as well. That fellow Riley Crisp, the one they call ‘rabbit’ lives down on Wallace? He stood out on the First Avenue Bridge and shot at people until the police came, then shot at them, and then jumped off the bridge and drowned himself. When was that? Last month?” He shook his head. “Where’s it all going to end, I wonder?”

  Old Bob smoothed back his white hair. None of them had the answer to that one. It made him wonder suddenly about Evelyn and her feeders. Might just as easily be feeders out there as something the government had put in the water.

  He noticed suddenly that the man who had been sitting with Derry Howe was gone. His brow furrowed and his wide mouth tightened. When had the man left? He tried again to think of his name and failed.

  “I got me some more work to do out at Preston’s,” Richie Stoudt advised solemnly. “You can laugh, but it keeps bread on the table.”

  The conversation returned to the strike and the intractable position of the company, and the stories started up again, and a moment later Old Bob had forgotten the man completely.

  CHAPTER 4

  The demon stepped out into the midday heat in front of Josie’s and felt right at home. Perhaps it was his madness that made him so comfortable with the sun’s brilliant white light and suffocating swelter, for it was true that it burned as implacably hot. Or perhaps it was his deep and abiding satisfaction at knowing that this community and its inhabitants were his to do with as he chose.

  He followed Derry Howe and Junior Elway to the latter’s Jeep Cherokee and climbed into the cab with them, sitting comfortably in the backseat, neither one of them quite aware that he was there. It was one of the skills he had acquired—to blend in so thoroughly with his surroundings that he seemed to be a part of them, to make himself appear so familiar that even those sitting right beside him felt no need to question his presence. He supposed there was still just enough of them in him that he was able to accomplish this. He had been human once himself, but that was long ago and all but forgotten. What remained of his humanity was just a shadow of a memory of what these creatures were, so that he could appear and act like them to the extent that his duplicity required it. His gradual transformation from human to demon had driven out
the rest. He had found, after a time, that he did not miss it.

  Junior turned over the Jeep’s engine and switched on the air, blowing a thick wash of heat through the vents and into the closed interior. Junior and Derry rolled down their windows to let the heat escape as the Jeep pulled away from the curb, but the demon just breathed in contentedly and smiled. He had been in Hopewell a little more than a week, not wanting to come any sooner because John Ross still tracked him relentlessly and had displayed a disturbing ability to locate him even when there was no possible way he should have been able to do so. But a week had gone by, the Fourth of July approached, and it seemed possible that this time Ross might prove a step too slow. It was important that Ross not interfere, for the demon had sown his destructive seed deep and waited long for it to grow. Now the seed’s harvest was at hand, and the demon did not want any interference. Everything was in place, everything that he had worked so long and hard to achieve—a clever subterfuge, an apocalyptic ruin, and an irreversible transformation that would hasten the coming of the Void and the banishment of the Word.

  His mind spun with the possibilities as the Jeep turned off Second Avenue onto Fourth Street and headed west out of town. On his left the long, dark, corrugated-metal roofs of MidCon Steel could be glimpsed through gaps in the rows of the once-elegant old homes that ran the length of West Third coming in toward town from several blocks above Avenue G. The air-conditioning had kicked in, and with the windows rolled up again the demon took comfort instead from his inner heat. His passion enveloped him, a cocoon into which he could retreat and from which he could feed, a red haze of intolerance and hate and greed for power.

  “Those old boys don’t know nothing,” Derry Howe was saying, slouched back in his bucket seat, his bullet head shining in the sun. “I don’t plan to listen to them no more. All they do is sit around and talk about sitting around some more. Old farts.”

  “Yeah, they ain’t seeing it like it is,” Junior agreed.

  No, not like you, thought the demon contentedly. Not with the bright, clear knowledge I have given to you.

  “We got to do something if we want to keep our jobs,” Derry said. “We got to stop the company from breaking the union, and we got to stop them right now.”

  “Yeah, but how we gonna do that?” Junior asked, glancing over uncertainly, then gunning the Jeep through a yellow light turning red.

  “Oh, there’s ways. There’s ways, buddy.”

  Yes, there are lots and lots of ways.

  Derry Howe looked over at Junior, smiling. “You know what they say? Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Well, I’ve got me a will that won’t quit. I just need me a way. I’m gonna find it, too, and you can take that to the bank! Old Bob and those others can go shove their patience where the sun don’t shine.”

  They crossed Avenue G past the tire center, gas station, and west-end grocery and rode farther toward the cornfields. The buildings of the mill were still visible down the cross streets and between the old homes, plant three giving way to plant four, plant five still out ahead, back of the old speedway, the whole of MidCon spread out along the north bank of the Rock River. The demon studied the residences and the people they sped past, his for the taking, his to own, dismissing them almost as quickly as they were considered. This was a breeding ground for him and nothing more. On July fourth, all of it and all of them would pass into the hands of the feeders, and he would be on his way to another place. It was his world, too, but he felt no attachment to it. His work was what drove him, what gave him purpose, and his servitude to the dark, chaotic vision of the Void would allow for nothing else. There were in his life only need and compulsion, those to be satisfied through a venting of his madness, and nothing of his physical surroundings or of the creatures that inhabited them had any meaning for him.

  The Jeep passed a junkyard of rusting automobile carcasses piled high behind a chain-link fence bordering a trailer park that looked to be the last stop of transients on their way to homelessness or the grave, and from behind the fence a pair of lean, black-faced Dobermans peered out with savage eyes. Bred to attack anything that intruded, the demon thought. Bred to destroy. He liked that.

  His mind drifted in the haze of the midday summer heat, the voices of Derry and Junior a comfortable buzz that did not intrude. He had come to Hopewell afoot, walking out of the swelter of the cornfields and the blacktop roadways with the inexorable certainty of nightfall. He had chosen to appear in that manner, wanting to smell and taste the town, wanting it to give something of itself to him, something it could not give if he arrived by car or bus, if he were to be closed away. He had materialized in the manner of a mirage, given shape and form out of delusion and desperation, given life out of false hope. He had walked into a poor neighborhood on the fringe of the town, into a collection of dilapidated homes patched with tar paper and oilcloth, their painted wooden sides peeling, their shingled roofs cracked and blistered, their yards rutted and littered with ruined toys, discarded appliances, and rusting vehicles. Within the close, airless confines of the homes huddled the leavings of despair and endless disappointment. Children played beneath the shade of the trees, dust-covered, desultory, and joyless. Already they knew what the future would bring. Already their childhood was ending. The demon passed them with a smile.

  At the corner of Avenue J and Twelfth Street, at a confluence of crumbling sheds, pastureland, and a few scattered residences, a boy had stood at the edge of the roadway with a massive dog. At well over a hundred pounds, all bristling hair and wicked dark markings, the dog was neither one identifiable breed nor another, but some freakish combination. It stood next to the boy, hooked on one end of a chain, the other end of which the boy held. Its eyes were deep-set and baleful, and its stance suggested a barely restrained fury. It disliked the demon instinctively, as all animals did, but it was frightened of him, too. The boy was in his early teens, wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and high-top tennis shoes, all of them worn and stained with dirt. The boy’s stance, like the dog’s, was at once strained and cocky. He was tall and heavyset, and there was no mistaking the bully in him. Most of what he had gotten in life he had acquired through intimidation or theft. When he smiled, as he did now, there was no warmth.

  “Hey, you,” the boy said.

  The demon’s bland face showed nothing. Just another stupid, worthless creature, the demon thought as he approached. Just another failed effort in somebody’s failed life. He would leave his mark here, with this boy, to signal his coming, to lay claim to what was now his. He would do so in blood.

  “You want to go through here, you got to pay me a dollar,” the boy called out to the demon.

  The demon stopped where he was, right in the middle of the road, the sun beating down on him. “A dollar?”

  “Yeah, that’s the toll. Else you got to go around the other way.”

  The demon looked up the street the way he had come, then back at the boy. “This is a public street.”

  “Not in front of my house it ain’t. In front of my house, it’s a toll road and it costs a dollar to pass.”

  “Only if you’re traveling on foot, I guess. Not if you’re in a car. I don’t suppose that even a dog as mean as yours could stop a car.” The boy stared at him, uncomprehending. The demon shrugged. “So, does the dog collect the dollar for you?”

  “The dog collects a piece of your ass if you don’t pay!” the boy snapped irritably. “You want to see what that feels like?”

  The demon studied the boy silently for a moment. “What’s the dog’s name?”

  “It don’t matter what his name is! Just pay me the dollar!” The boy’s face was flushed and angry.

  “Well, if I don’t know his name,” said the demon softly, “how can I call him off if he attacks someone?”

  The dog sensed the boy’s anger, and his hackles rose along the back of his neck and he bared his teeth with a low growl. “You just better give me the dollar, buddy,” said the boy, a thin smile twisting his lips
as he looked down at the dog and jiggled the chain meaningfully.

  “Oh, I don’t think I could do that,” said the demon. “I don’t carry any money. I don’t have any need for it. People just give me what I want. I don’t even need a dog like this one to make them do it.” He smiled, his bland features crinkling warmly, his strange eyes fixing the boy. “That’s not very good news for you, is it?”

  The boy was staring at him. “You better pay me fast, butt-head, or I might just let go of this chain!”

  The demon shook his head reprovingly. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you. I’d keep a tight hold on that chain until I’m well down the road from here.” He slipped his hands in his pockets and cocked his head at the boy. “Tell you what. I’m a fair man. You just made a big mistake, but I’m willing to let it pass. I’ll forget all about it if you apologize. Just say you’re sorry and that will be the end of it.”

  The boy’s mouth dropped. “What? What did you say?”

  The demon smiled some more. “You heard me.”

  For an instant the boy froze, the disbelief on his face apparent. Then he mouthed a string of obscenities, dropped to his knee, and released the chain on the dog’s collar. “Oops!” he snarled at the demon, flinging the chain away disdainfully, eyes hot and furious.

  But the demon had already invoked his skill, a small, spare movement of one hand that looked something like the blessing of a minister at the close of a service. Outwardly, nothing seemed to change. The demon still stood there in the sweltering heat, head cocked in seeming contemplation, bland face expressionless. The boy lurched to his feet as he released the dog, urging him to the attack with an angry shout. But something profound had changed in the boy. His look and smell and movement had become those of a frightened rabbit, flushed from cover and desperately trying to scurry to safety. The dog reacted on instinct. It wheeled on the boy instantly, lunging for his throat. The boy gave a cry of shock and fear as the dog slammed into him, knocking him from his feet. The boy’s hands came up as he tumbled into the dirt of his yard, and he tried desperately to shield his face. The dog tore at the boy, and the boy’s cries turned to screams. Drops of blood flew through the air. Scarlet threads laced the dusty earth.