That night I got an email from Professor Burkett. I did a little research with interesting results, it said. I thought you also might be interested. There were three attachments, all three reviews of Regis Thomas’s last book. The professor had highlighted the lines he had found interesting, leaving me to draw my own conclusions. Which I did.
From the Sunday Times Book Review: “Regis Thomas’s swan song is the usual farrago of sex and swamp-tromping adventure, but the prose is sharper than usual; here and there one finds glimmers of actual writing.”
From the Guardian: “Although the long-bruited Mystery of Roanoke won’t be much of a surprise to readers of the series (who surely saw it coming), Thomas’s narrative voice is livelier than one might expect from the previous volumes, where turgid exposition alternated with fervid and sometimes comical sexual encounters.”
From the Miami Herald: “The dialogue snaps, the pacing is crisp, and for once the lesbian liaison between Laura Goodhugh and Purity Betancourt feels real and touching, rather than like a prurient joke or a stroke fantasy. It’s a great wind-up.”
I couldn’t show those reviews to my mother—they would have raised too many questions—but I was pretty sure she must have seen them herself, and I guessed they had made her as happy as they made me. Not only had she gotten away with it, she had put a shine on Regis Thomas’s sadly tarnished reputation.
There were many nights in the weeks and months following my first encounter with Kenneth Therriault when I went to bed feeling unhappy and afraid. That night wasn’t one of them.
41
I’m not sure how many times I saw him the rest of that summer, which should tell you something. If it doesn’t, here it is in plain English: I was getting used to him. I never would have believed it on the day when I turned around and saw him standing by the trunk of Liz Dutton’s car, close enough to touch me. I never would have believed it on the day when the elevator opened and he was in there, telling me my mother had cancer and grinning like it was the happiest news ever. But familiarity breeds contempt, so they say, and in this case the saying was true.
It no doubt helped that he never did show up in my closet or under my bed (which would have been worse, because when I was little I was sure that was where the monster was waiting to grab a dangling foot or arm). That summer I read Dracula—okay, not the actual book, but a kick-ass graphic novel I bought at Forbidden Planet—and in it Van Helsing said that a vampire couldn’t come in unless you invited him. If it was true of vampires, it stood to reason (at least to thirteen-year-old me it did) that it was true of other supernatural beings. Like the one inside of Therriault, keeping him from disappearing after a few days like all the other dead people. I checked Wikipedia to see if Mr. Stoker just made that up, but he didn’t. It was in lots of the vampire legends. Now (later!) I can see it makes symbolic sense. If we have free will, then you have to invite evil in.
Here’s something else. He had mostly stopped crooking that finger at me. For most of that summer he just stood at a distance, staring. The only time I did see him beckoning was kind of funny. If, that is, you can say anything about that undead motherfucker was funny.
Mom got us tickets to see the Mets play the Tigers on the last Sunday in August. The Mets lost big, but I didn’t care, because Mom bagged a pair of awesome seats from one of her publisher friends (contrary to popular belief, literary agents do have friends). They were on the third base side, just two rows up from the field. It was during the seventh inning stretch, while the Mets were still keeping it close, that I saw Therriault. I looked around for the hotdog man, and when I looked back, my pal Thumper was standing near the third base coach’s box. Same khaki pants. Same shirt with blood all down the left side and spattering the suicide note. Head blown open like somebody lit off a cherry bomb in there. Grinning. And yes, beckoning.
The Tigers infield was throwing the ball around, and just after I saw Therriault, a chuck from the shortstop to the third basemen went way wild. The crowd whooped and jeered the usual stuff—nice throw busher, my grandmother can do better than that—but I just sat there with my hands clamped so tight the nails were biting into my palms. The shortstop hadn’t seen Therriault (he would have run into the outfield screaming if he had), but he felt him. I know he did.
And here’s something else: the third base coach went to retrieve the ball, then backed off and let it roll into the dugout. Shagging it would have brought him right next to the thing only I could see. Did the guy feel a cold spot, like in a ghost movie? I don’t think so. I think he felt, just for a second or two, that the world was trembling around him. Vibrating like a guitar string. I have reasons to think that.
Mom said, “Okay, Jamie? You’re not getting sunstroke on me, are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said, and clenched hands or not, I mostly was. “Do you see the hotdog man?”
She craned around and waved to the nearest vendor. Which gave me a chance to give Kenneth Therriault the finger. His grin turned into a snarl that showed all his teeth. Then he walked into the visitors’ dugout, where the players who weren’t on the field no doubt shuffled around on the bench to give him room, without any idea why they were doing it.
I sat back with a smile. I wasn’t ready to think that I’d vanquished him—not with a cross or holy water but by flipping him the bird—but the idea did kind of tiptoe in.
People started to leave in the top of the ninth, after the Tigers scored seven and put the game out of reach. Mom asked me if I wanted to stay and watch the Mr. Met Dash and I shook my head. The Dash was strictly for little kids. I had done it once, back before Liz, back before that fucker James Mackenzie stole our money in his Ponzi scheme, even before the day Mona Burkett told me turkeys weren’t green. Back when I was a little kid and the world was my oyster.
That seemed so long ago.
42
You may be asking yourself a question I never asked myself back then: Why me? Why Jamie Conklin? I have asked myself since, and I don’t know. I can only guess. I think it was because I was different, and it—the it inside the shell of Therriault—hated me for it and wanted to hurt me, even destroy me if it could. I think, call me crazy if you want, I offended it somehow. And maybe there was something else. I think maybe—just maybe—the Ritual of Chüd had already begun.
I think that once it started fucking with me it couldn’t stop.
As I said, just guessing here. Its reasons might have been something else entirely, as unknowable as it was to me. And as monstrous. As I said, this is a horror story.
43
I was still scared of Therriault, but I no longer thought that I might chicken out if an opportunity came to put Professor Burkett’s ritual into practice. I only needed to be ready. For Therriault to get close, in other words, not just be across the street or standing near third base at Citi Field.
My chance came on a Saturday in October. I was going down to Grover Park to play touch football with a bunch of kids from my school. Mom left me a note that said she’d stayed up late reading Philippa Stephens’s latest opus and was going to sleep in. I was to get my breakfast quietly, and no more than half a cup of coffee. I was to have a good time with my friends and not come home with a concussion or a broken arm. I was to be back by two at the very latest. She left me lunch money, which I folded carefully into my pocket. There was a PS: Would it be a waste of time to ask you to eat something green, even a scrap of lettuce on a hamburger?