“Have a seat,” said Forman, gesturing at the kitchen table. I sat down and he went to the fridge, opening it up to reveal not a collection of heads and arms but the mundane spread of a poorly-stocked bachelor: grapefruit juice, a bottle of mustard, half a loaf of bread, and a Styrofoam box of restaurant leftovers. In the back there was a jar half-full of pickle juice. I looked longingly at the restaurant box, but Forman pulled out the bread bag and tossed it onto the table.
“I don’t eat in a lot,” he said. “I prefer to enjoy my meals, instead of feeling how sad the toys are the whole time.”
I opened the bag and pulled out a piece of hard brown bread, forcing myself to eat it slowly; I didn’t want to eat too fast and get sick. It tasted delicious, but I was sure that was mostly a result of my hunger.
Forman leaned against the counter with his arms folded, watching me eat. After a few bites he spoke again.
“So I guess you know a lot more about Mkhai than you let on,” he said. He was acting odd, like he should have been angry but wasn’t, but then I remembered that he wouldn’t be angry unless I was. Right now we were calm, and cautious, and ready.
He was a blank page, and it was time to write on him. I wanted him to trust me, so I focused on trusting him—not pretending to, since that was sure not to work, but trying instead to actually trust him, to rely on him, to feel like we were in this together. I found that if I focused on him it didn’t work; I understood how he thought, but I couldn’t identify with him. I couldn’t empathize. Instead I focused on my own reaction to him and to the situation, trying to feel comfortable with the strictures that Forman had placed on our relationship. I put myself at ease and tried to treat him the way I treated my mom, or my friend Max.
“You told me in the car,” I said, “that you thought Mkhai might have taken Mr. Crowley’s body right before he died, which makes a lot of sense because Crowley was never found. If Crowley had died on his own, there would have been a corpse, but if Crowley died after Mkhai had his body, it would have dissolved into sludge and disappeared.”
Forman nodded. “It seems you’re familiar with his methods.”
“What you didn’t figure out,” I continued, “is that Mkhai had been Crowley for the entire forty years when you couldn’t find him.”
Forman smiled snidely. “For love.”
“Yes,” I said, “for love. Forty years ago Mkhai came here in a brand-new body, ready to start a brand-new life just like he always did. How long did he usually stay in a body before moving on?”
“A year at the most,” said Forman. “When you can go anywhere, and be anyone, there’s rarely any reason to stay longer.”
“He found a reason here,” I said. “Her name is Kay.”
Forman laughed, an abrupt, derisive snort. “Kay Crowley? Mkhai is a being thousands of years old. He’s had queens and empresses at his command; he’s had slaves and fanatics, priestesses and worshippers. What did Kay have that an entire history of beautiful women couldn’t offer?”
“Love.”
“He’s had love!”
“Not real love,” I said, leaning forward. “You don’t even know what real love is. If someone loved you, Forman, you’d love them back, and when they stopped, you’d stop. There’s no commitment to anything, so it never really matters. It isn’t real. But real love is pain. Real love is sacrifice. Real love is what Mkhai felt when he realized that Kay would never accept him as he was—only if he became something better. So he gave up the bad stuff and made himself better.”
Forman stared at me intently. “How could a sociopath possibly know anything about love?”
“Because I have a mother who gives her entire life to help children who don’t notice it, don’t appreciate it, and can’t possibly return it. That is love.”
We watched each other, studying each other, thinking. This was the key moment, when I needed him to move from trust to longing. I needed him to feel there was a piece of him missing, because I knew exactly what he would do: the same thing he always did. He’d go out and find the missing piece and bring it back here to beat it into submission. It was his only way of dealing with the world. While he was gone, I would put the next phase of the plan into motion.
I thought about the people I missed.
“Humans aren’t defined by death,” I said, “and they’re not defined by what they lack. They’re defined by their connections.”
I thought about my mother, and everything she did for me. I thought about the way she’d protected me six months ago when I killed the demon, and neither of us knew what to do. I thought about the way she’d turned her life upside down to accommodate me, to be the person she thought I needed. I hated it, but I knew she was trying to help.
“Mkhai knew it,” I said. “He finally realized that there was more to life than running from one body to the next, from one life to the next, always escaping from everything without ever getting anywhere.”
I thought about my sister, who wanted to watch out for me but didn’t even know how to watch out for herself. I thought of her bruised and scared, and I thought about how she’d be even more scared tonight when she realized Curt was gone. She was an idiot, but she cared about people.
“Mkhai left your little community of demons because he didn’t need it anymore,” I said. “Thousands of years of meaningless existence, of existing without living, and finally he was free. He moved on, and the power he gained made him so much more than you will ever be. You called him a god, but he was more than that in the end. He was human.”
I thought about Kay Crowley, the little old lady across the street, who smiled and helped and loved so unconditionally that she brought a demon in from the cold and made him a man—and I thought about that man, the old neighbor I’d grown up with, the demon who’d been more of an example to me than my father. What were his last words?
Remember me when I am gone. I remembered him, and I missed him.
Loss and longing.
“Stop it!” yelled Forman, standing up and pacing across the room—not toward me, but toward nothing; it was a nervous twitch.
My plan was working.
“You’re not here for this,” he said, waving his arms while he walked. “You’re not here for sadness—this boring emotion.” He walked into the living room, and his voice fluttered back in. “I don’t need to miss things!” He barged back into the room and grabbed the sides of the table, leaning down to shout in my face. “You think I haven’t felt this before? You think you can just shock me with some new emotion and I’ll bow down and . . .” He stood up and turned around, then scratched his forehead, took a step toward the sink, then turned around again.
“I don’t need this,” he said. “I’m leaving.” He came toward me around the table, and I backed up instinctively. “I’m not . . . just sit down. I’m locking you up so you don’t do anything stupid. I’ll be back.” There was a thick length of chain under the table, with a manacle welded to the end, and Forman locked this securely around my ankle. “I’ll be back,” he said again, “and you’d better be feeling something more interesting when I get here.”
He turned and walked out, going straight to the living room and out the door, locking it carefully behind him. The car roared to life and drove away. I was alone.
Time for phase two.
Forman acted like he’d stormed off to escape my sadness, but I knew better—the last time we’d forced him to feel sad he’d come downstairs and attacked us. If all he’d wanted was a new emotion, he could have just attacked us again. No, Forman had left to kidnap someone, just like I thought he would—probably Kay Crowley, or maybe my mom. Once I understood him, he was easy to predict; I’d told him he was missing something, and now he’d gone to get it.
I had an hour, maybe less, assuming he went straight to Kay and brought her straight back. I needed to be ready when he returned, but I couldn’t just attack him because he’d feel it coming—even when he was completely overwhelmed, as he had been in the basement, he could snap out of it in an instant. The only way to hurt him was to do it indirectly, by laying a trap. I stood up and tested the chain—it held fast, but it gave me about twenty feet of movement. I hoped it would be enough.
The kitchen was a good place for a trap because it had the strongest electrical outlet in the house: the oven’s. All I needed to do was rig something to shock him when he came back, but what? I dragged my chain over to the cupboards, starting at the farthest edge where I had to stretch the chain to its fullest and reach out with my arm. Most of the cupboards were bare—what few dishes he had were mostly in the sink, waiting to be washed. One cupboard had a stack of paper plates and a box of plastic forks; another held a single ceramic mug, dusty with disuse. The cupboards below the counter were more fruitful, holding a number of rusted pots and pans, a coffeemaker, and, for some reason, a cardboard box full of old newspaper.
The counter itself held a number of items I might be able to use: a knife block, half-full; a toaster; a microwave. I opened the drawers and rooted through piles of mismatched silverware, old packs of batteries, and a random assortment of tools and wooden pencils. There were two screwdrivers; I might be able to take something apart . . .
There was blood on the screwdriver.
I looked closer; there was blood on all the tools. This wasn’t just a utility drawer, it was another torture station. I pulled a knife from the block and examined it carefully. It had been washed, but not well; the serrations on the blade held brown remnants of old blood.
Of course I knew that he would try to torture whomever he brought back, but I considered now the possibility that he would do it here, in the kitchen. His basement was full, and his torture room was occupied; if he did it here he could force me to watch or even to help without even having to unchain me. And he had a full suite of tools—knives and screwdrivers, icepicks and pliers, even a hammer. All I needed to do, then, was electrify a tool I knew he would reach for, and then sit as still and emotionless as possible until he touched it—I couldn’t let him know, through excitement or anxiety, that I was waiting for something. I had to be completely dead.
But what tool to electrify, and how?
I might be able to tie a wire to a tool in the drawer and run it out and back, into the oven outlet, but there was no way to guarantee which tool he’d reach for first. I looked around for a clock, but there wasn’t anything; I had no idea how long he’d been gone, or how long before he came back. I had to move quickly, and I couldn’t think of anything else, so the tool drawer it was.
I got the coffeemaker out of the cupboard and pulled a knife from the block. The coffeemaker cord was at least three feet long, maybe four; I hoped it was long enough to reach from the open drawer to the outlet behind the oven. I used the knife to cut the cord, right at the base of the coffeemaker, and started shaving away the plastic coating around the wires. While I was doing that, I noticed that the metal from the knife blade extended back into the handle—it was a long, single piece of metal, flanked on the end by pieces of wood riveted around it. A current at the tip of the knife would carry straight through to whomever touched the handle. I jumped up and looked at the wood block—there was a hole in the bottom where the tip of the biggest blade, a large butcher knife, peeked through. This could work so much better than the drawer—it was easier to rig, and easier to make sure he touched the right thing. I pulled out the huge knife, dumped the rest into the sink with the dirty dishes, and sat down to work.
First I needed a way to secure the wire to the knife. Bracing the butcher knife against the floor, back in the corner where any floor damage would be hidden by the coils of my chain, I lined up the icepick right at the tip and hit it with the hammer. Nothing. I hit it again, over and over, trading out the icepick for a Phillips screwdriver and still accomplishing nothing; the blade was too strong to puncture. I picked up the knife and chopped it against the heavy iron rim of a frying pan, again and again until it finally began to dent. When the dent looked deep enough to hold it, I looped the exposed wire around it and tied it off.
Using a smaller knife I cut the plug from the other end of the cord, and slipped the whole thing through the knife block. The cord came out the bottom just fine, and I shaved away about four inches of plastic coating from the end. I placed the block on the counter, passing the cord hanging off the side behind the oven, and looked out the window.
Nothing yet.
I pulled the oven away from the wall, unplugged the power cord, and wrapped my newly-exposed wire around one tine of the plug. Assuring myself that everything was ready, I plugged the oven into the wall, connecting a straight line of current from the wall outlet to the handle of the knife. I pushed the oven back against the wall and examined the scene. Everything looked normal—except for a few inches of cord running out from the bottom of the knife block to the gap by the stove.
I looked around for something to hide it with, and found a half-damp rag in the sink. I brought it up to the counter and set it on top of the cord; I just had to hope he wouldn’t notice it was out of place.
I glanced out the window again and saw the car on the road, just coming around the nearest bend. Don’t panic, I told myself. Stay calm, but not too calm. He’ll feel fear from the women, just like he always does when he gets here. Just blend in. I allowed myself a touch of fear, but no nervousness, no desperation; I forced myself to walk slowly around the room, gathering the tools I had used, putting them back into their drawers with calm, measured precision. Just enough fear to look normal, but not enough to stand out.
I closed the drawers and walked to the fridge, pulling out the grapefruit juice and taking it back to the table—if I tried to look too innocent he’d get suspicious. I opened the juice and took a drink straight from the bottle; it was acidic and strong, and I grimaced at the shock. I heard the car park outside, and the engine went off. I took another drink and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. The front door opened, though I couldn’t see it from my seat at the table.
“Thank you again for coming,” Forman said as he opened the door. “I’m sure you can appreciate the need for secrecy, and we normally wouldn’t do this at all, but he did request you specifically.”
“And you’re sure he’s okay?”
No. No! I knew that voice, and it wasn’t Kay or Mom.
Forman stepped into the kitchen, grinning like the devil. “Hello John,” he said. “I brought us a new toy.”
The woman came around the corner. It was Brooke.