The Devouring (12 page)

“How are we supposed to do that?”

“That’s the big question — and I don’t know the answer yet.”

“You don’t know? That’s not much of a second point, Aaron.”

“It’s still a developing plan, okay? Listen, the reason I mentioned point number two is that it leads up to point number three. If and when we get that psychic connection with the Vour, I think it’s a pretty good bet it’ll throw everything it’s got at us. Now, what do you think is its greatest weapon?”

“Fear,” Reggie said. “They’re drawn to it. They feed on it. They attack us with it.”

“That’s what I think, too. Which means we’ve got to get a whole lot braver ... and quickly.” Aaron chuckled bitterly.

Reggie heard voices through the vent in the wall. Dad was in Henry’s room, tucking him in for the night.

“Fear is poison,” she said.

“What?”

“Fear. It’s like poison,” she said, “or a disease. You just need to build up immunity, little by little, or get an inoculation. You have to face it, and beat it, if you ever want to be able to keep it out for good.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve read more horror novels and seen more monster movies than anyone I know, except maybe you. And all this still scares the shit out of me. This is real.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I’ve got to go. Let’s talk more to-morrow.”

“Hey, Reg?”

“Yeah?”

Aaron was silent for a moment before he asked, “Where do you think they come from? And why do they want to do this to us?”

“I’m not sure I even want to know. I just want Henry back.” She clicked off the phone.

Dad’s muffled voice drifted through the vent, speaking to the thing that pretended to be Henry in the room next door. She knew what it was. It was a Vour. She knew the horror of what it could do to her, and to the people she loved. It wasn’t fear she felt now — it was rage.

“I tell the tale that I heard told,”
she said through gritted teeth,
“Mithridates, he died old.”

Reggie climbed onto her desk chair and pressed her ear to the vent. Voices wafted in on the warm caress of central heating.

“You feeling okay?” Dad asked.

“Sorta, yeah, I guess,” said Henry.

“Sorta, yeah, I guess,” echoed Dad. “What does that mean?”

“Well,” Henry said, “it’s Reggie.”

“What about Reggie?”

“I’m not tattling, but I love Reggie. And she’s different.”

Reggie’s brow rose. The monster was really good. Right down to the little catch in his throat when he said, “I love Reggie.”

“Different how?”

“I think maybe she’s getting
high,
Dad,” Henry said. “Maybe Aaron, too.”

Reggie would have laughed at the thought of Aaron Cole riding around on his ten-speed with a big joint hanging out his mouth, if the Vour hadn’t been playing to Dad so well. He was better than really good. He was brilliant.

“Why would you think that?” Dad asked.

“They talked about it in school, and I saw those commercials — but, well, she’s been getting weirder, and that’s what they say to look for. We could make a whole list of stuff about her — right?”

Reggie heard Dad’s weary sigh, and knew Henry had sunk the hook in nicely.

“Thanks for caring, Henry,” Dad said. “Your sister’s lucky to have you. Go to sleep now.”

“Okay.”

The vent’s warm air bathed Reggie’s cheek with a faint
whoosh.
What was Dad doing now? Kissing Henry goodnight? Pulling the covers up? Going down the hall to make a phone call to some tough-love intervention group?
Hello. My name is Thom Halloway. I have a fifteen-year-old daughter named Regina who appears to be in some sort of crisis and may be using drugs, but her mother walked out on us and I am totally incapable of functioning as a father on any meaningful, emotional level. Can you people do it for me?

The air from the vent stopped blowing.

A whisper crept into her ear from just behind the vent. Deep. Sonorous. Frigid.

“Regina . . .”

It was Henry. Gone was the naive, eight-year-old voice he’d just used with her father. The thin metal bars of the vent seemed an appropriate mouth for this voice: heartless, cold, and cruel.

“You’re a very curious girl,” said Henry.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, Regina. What’s the old saying? Ah, I remember now. ‘Curiosity flayed the cat alive, ripped it apart limb from limb, and listened to it scream before it killed it.’ That’s the one.”

“Yeah.” Reggie ground her teeth. “One of my favorites.”

“Terrified of little spiders. Poor girl. You don’t stand a chance against us.”

“We’ll destroy you.”

“No. You’ll go mad,” it said. “Your fear will consume you, blurring what is real and what is dream.” The voice was changing, deepening by almost imperceptible degrees of pitch — but changing just the same. “The spiders in your room? That was just a
taste,
Regina. A
coming attraction.
You don’t need your scary stories and your horror movies anymore. We’re going to give you the
real thing
every day of your miserable life until you lose your mind, or until your heart gives out, like that hag you left to watch over me. But I do hope you live a long, long time. Give us years to devour you from the inside out.”

“I’ll stuff you back into the hole you crawled out of. I’m going to bring Henry back.”

“Don’t you get it yet? I
am
Henry. The only one this world will ever know.”

A laugh echoed through the vent, shrill and ugly.

Reggie felt murderous. And worse, she felt helpless.

The thing that used to be her brother yawned.

“Nighty night, Reg.”

But Reggie did not sleep.

You know where you need to go. What you need to do.

The clock read 2:17 when she climbed out of bed. She grabbed some supplies and a set of keys and then sneaked out of the house. She took the beat-up pickup Dad used for construction work and was soon on the road back to Fredericks.

A learner’s permit didn’t technically mean she could be on the road on her own, but if she told Eben about her plan, he’d stop her. And if she told Aaron, he’d demand to come with her. Fear had overpowered him once too often and she couldn’t chance it this time.

As she drove, Reggie recalled one of Macie’s journal entries:
I know a secret now. A secret about humanity. Who has a soul and who is a monster?

Lost in her thoughts, she didn’t see the semi in her rearview mirror until it was almost on her rear bumper. Its roaring engine made her car tremble.

“Come on, man, give me a break.”

As if it had heard her, the semi pulled into the left lane and sped up to pass. But when the high-mounted cab was even with her, it slowed and kept pace.

Displaced air shoved the smaller truck left and right. Reggie gripped the wheel until her knuckles turned white.

“What are you waiting for? Pass me!” The old pickup was like a boat on rough seas. “Okay, jerkoff! Fine!”

She eased her foot off the gas and fell back until she was behind the semi ... then it slowed and fell back, too. The cab came even with her again. The semi thundered, and the small pickup truck shimmied closer to the icy roadside.

They had found her.

The semi’s passenger window lowered, and smoke poured out. Blood pounded in Reggie’s temples.

An old, grizzled man in a Red Sox cap and flannel coat sat behind the wheel. His eyes locked with hers and his lips stretched into a thin smile. He blew out a long stream of smoke.

“Hey,” the man hollered, “one of your taillights is out!” He gestured toward the back of the pickup, a smoldering cigarette pinched between his fingers. “Hear me? You got a busted taillight! Drive safe now!”

He rolled up the window, shifted gears, and pulled ahead.

Just a truck driver. A shepherd of the highway. Caring, thoughtful. Watching out for his fellow man. Reggie remembered something else Macie had written.

I know a secret, and secrets breed paranoia.

Once off the main road, Reggie made two wrong turns before she found the lane into the woods again. She pulled up to the house, her heartbeat thumping in her ears. Sitting there in the pickup, the little girl in her wished it all away and tried to believe it was a dream — to convince herself that if she closed her eyes she would wake up to a world where all the monsters were make-believe, and
The Devouring
was nothing more than a strange fantasy she had found in a cardboard box.

She grabbed Dad’s old army duffel and a flashlight from the truck bed and approached the house.

Whatever the creatures were, they weren’t invincible. They couldn’t be. They had needs and aversions. They craved heat. They hated the cold. The Vours could interact with an or-ganism and change its biology, enabling it to inflict horrible hallucinations but making it vulnerable to cold. This meant, according to Aaron, that they were organic, or at least physical to some degree. And if so, then theoretically the process might work in reverse: something could interact with a Vour and change
it.
She was fuzzy on the science, if science had anything to do with it, but that didn’t matter. Either Aaron was right, or she was carrying this bag for nothing, and she was dead meat.

Reggie flicked on the flashlight and stepped onto the creaky porch. Above her, the bird feeders hung motionless in the still air. She turned the knob on the front door and stepped into the dark house. The room was cold and she wanted to run.

She was going to do this — and not just for Henry. Her own fear was always awake inside her now, changing her, ruling her,
lessening
her. The Vours had more than one kind of victim. Macie was proof of that. If you
knew,
you were cursed, too. Your doubt and fear would grow, obsession would take hold. She had to act now, while she still had some control. She walked across the brittle bones toward the basement hatch, her warm breath turning to mist in the freezing air. The thick darkness seemed to swallow the flashlight’s narrow beam.

“Let me out . . .”

She threw open the trapdoor and descended.

It knew she was here. She took one of Dad’s Sheetrock nails from her coat pocket and clenched it, feeling the sting of the steel point.

“Let me out . . .”

Reggie hung one of Dad’s battery-powered construction lights on the back of the chair and flipped it on. The room lit up, and through the hole Aaron had made in the wall, she could see a smoky face against the glass. The Vour had proven that it could sense her fears and send her into an alternate reality; she had to show it strength and nerve, even if it was mostly bravado.

“I knew you’d come back.”

The voice was sly, icy, taunting.

“You did, huh?”

“Yes.”

She took off her coat and put it on the chair.

“How’d you know that?”

“You all are drawn to us, as we are to you,”
it said.
“For so long, I have been alone. No light, no heat . . .”

“You had a rotting corpse. If you ask me, you got the better cell mate.”

“The last girl taunted me as well.
I drove her mad.”

Macie.

“Mad, afraid, alone. You will share her fate. But I can help you. I can eat your fear. I can end your tears forever.”

“I don’t want your help.”

“Lie. You want my secrets. But if you give nothing to me, you shall take nothing from me.”

“What do you want?”

“Come closer.”
A malevolent smile twisted the melting lips.
“Put your hand on the glass.”

Reggie stepped closer and placed her fingertips on the window. The glass was so cold it burned, and its silvery etchings seemed to quiver beneath her palm.

“Someone’s here to see you, Regina.”

The Vour churned like boiling, muddy water, morphing into someone young and beautiful.

Her mother.

Reggie could smell the lilac lotion she dabbed on her earlobes and under her chin every morning after her shower.

They were in the bathroom. Reggie sat in a chair at the sink, looking at her mother’s reflection in the cabinet mirror. Mom stood behind her, scissors in hand, giving Reggie’s freshly shampooed tresses a trim.

“God, I love your hair,” Mom said. She said that every time she trimmed Reggie’s hair.

“Of course you do. It’s yours.”

“Regina,” Mom said, “would you hate me if I just disappeared from your life?”

“Why would you disappear?”

“Would you rather think that I was abducted and brutally murdered, or that I just walked out because I didn’t love you?”

Snip.

“The first one,” said Reggie. “Murdered.”

“Really?” Mom said.

Snip, snip.

“I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking my mother didn’t love me. That would really suck.”

“I see,” said Mom, and she stopped snipping. “So rather than finding a joyful life elsewhere, you’d prefer my life just ended. Violently.”

Snip.

“Well, I didn’t mean —”

“If I found love somewhere else, you’d want me murdered before you’d let me have it. Isn’t that right?”

Snip. Snip.

“No, that’s not what —”

“It’s always about
you,
isn’t it?”

“Huh?”

“I brought you into the world, gave you everything I could ... but it wasn’t enough.”

She snipped again. Faster.

“Mom?”

“It’s
never
enough — you suck the life out of me until I’m an empty shell.”

The scissor blades snapped open and shut, open and shut, and more and more of Reggie’s beautiful hair fell to the floor.

“Mom, my hair! Don’t —”

She tried to stand but her mother shoved her back down. The hand on Reggie’s shoulder wrinkled, the fingernails split and yellowed. Her mother grew haggard and filthy.

“Look what you’ve done to me! Leech! Parasite!” her mother shrieked. “What more do you want from me?”

The scissors were ravenous now, chopping off big chunks right down to the scalp, leaving mean, bare patches of skin across Reggie’s skull. Mom’s face knotted with anger.