The Devil's Only Friend (John Cleaver, #4)
Dan Wells
This, this the doom must be
Of all who’ve loved, and lived to see
The few bright things they thought would stay
For ever near them, die away.
—THOMAS MOORE, “ALONE IN CROWDS TO WANDER ON”
1
I’m good now. I promise.
My name is John Wayne Cleaver and I was born in a little town in the middle of nowhere called Clayton. You know those little towns on the side of the road, the ones where you drive through and you don’t notice them, or maybe you stop for gas and think, “what a dump, who would ever live here?” Well, I did, for sixteen years. And I wish I could say that it was boring, and that nothing ever happened, and that we lived in a sleepy haze of naive innocence far from the troubles of the modern world, but I can’t. I killed people. Not as many as other people, I’ll grant you, but that’s not much consolation, is it? If someone sat next to you on a bus, held out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m John, I’ve only killed a couple of people,” that wouldn’t exactly put your mind at ease. But yes, I’ve killed, and some of them were demons, true, but some of them were people. That I didn’t kill the people personally is beside the point; they are dead because of me. That changes you. You start to look at things differently, at lives and their fragility. It’s like we’re all Humpty Dumpty, held together by tiny, cracking shells, perched up on a wall like it’s no big deal. We think we’re invincible, and then one little crack and boom, out comes more blood and guts and screams than you’d ever thought could be inside a single body. And when that blood goes, everything else goes with it—breath, thought, movement. Existence. One minute you’re alive and then suddenly you’re not.
I used to wonder if it went somewhere. If the thing that used to be your “life” actually left your body and physically went somewhere else. Conservation of matter and energy and all that. But I’ve seen death, and life doesn’t go anywhere, and I think that’s because life doesn’t exist, not really. Life isn’t a thing, it’s a condition; we switch it on and we switch it off. For all we talk about taking a life, there’s nothing there to take.
But I’m good now. I promise. I’ve killed, and whatever bloodlust I used to have is sated. I wake up in the morning and I go to my tutor and I go to my counseling and I go to my job with the FBI, helping to track down other killers, and I say the right things and I do the right things and nobody’s afraid of me and everything is good. I watch travel shows. I cook. I do logic puzzles to keep myself occupied. And then sometimes at night I go to the butcher shop and I buy the biggest roast they have and I bring it home and I cover the room in plastic and I hack the meat to pieces with a kitchen knife, slashing and ripping and chopping and grunting until there’s nothing left but scraps. Then I roll up the plastic, meat and blood and all, and I throw it away and everything is clean and calm again.
Because I’m good now.
I promise.
*
“I love you, John.”
I used to think I would have loved to hear Brooke Watson say those words. Now they broke my heart every time. I never thought I had a heart until it was broken. It’s hard to see the point of something that only ever causes pain.
“You don’t love me,” I said, shifting my weight in the uncomfortable hospital chair. We were sitting in the dementia wing of a rest home in a dirty little Midwestern city called Fort Bruce. It was bigger than Clayton, the town where Brooke and I grew up, but that’s not saying much. We’d left Clayton almost a year ago, when Brooke was just starting to lose her mind. She’d been getting worse and worse ever since. “Your name is Brooke Watson,” I told her, “and you’re my friend.”
She shook her head. “My name is Nobody.”
“Nobody was a demon,” I said. “You called her a ‘Withered.’”
Her expression grew dark. “The Withered are evil.”
I looked out the barred window, seeing the slate-gray sky over the week-old January snow that covered the city like a layer of ash. New snow is clean; old snow is black and coarse and full of dirt and garbage.