The Devil Crept In

by Ania Ahlborn

And then the child ran into the wood. To find his friend where the devil stood. —Anonymous

When the coyote had found them, Uncle Scott hadn’t been gone for more than a year. Jude had been ten, but his rage was big enough to fill a man twice his size.

Stevie stared through the forest toward an altogether different destination, their other secret: the house. Did he dare? No. He turned tail and booked it back home, because that

house was a place neither one of them went by themselves. Not ever. No way.

“The police will find him,” she said. “He’ll be back by dinner.” Except Stevie didn’t believe that for a second. Jude Brighton was gone, like he’d never existed; vanished, as though he and Stevie hadn’t spent their entire lives stomping the pavement of Main Street and living their summers in those woods.

A kid goes into the forest and never comes out. Two weeks later, his body is discovered. Mangled. Half-eaten. Swelling up like a balloon. The cops called it an animal attack, but everyone knew it was the work of a madman. A psychopath as bad as Albert Fish, maybe worse. A cannibal who loved the taste of kids.

WEDNESDAY. DAY THREE. The thing returned. It had come in the night, peered through Stevie’s window, and watched him sleep with a pair of clouded, bulbous eyes. Its twisted fingers smeared blood down the glass—blood that wasn’t there in the morning, but that Stevie was convinced had been there just the same. Jude had sent it, lonely out there somewhere, wanting nothing more than his best friend back.

What had been weird about those instances was that they had come out of nowhere. One minute, he and Jude were having a good time collecting scrap lumber or wandering around in the woods. The next, Jude had that look. Like he didn’t want to live his life not knowing what it felt like to hurt someone. Like he didn’t give a damn if he ended up in juvie if it meant being able to vent his rage. Like, how for an inkling of a moment, the devil himself had crawled right into him and was itching to get out.

He saw shadow people every day. Sometimes, he was able to talk himself through his own episodes, ignore them altogether; like the haze that had slithered out of the oven behind his mother earlier that day; like the time when, standing in the shower, octopus tentacles had come up out of the drain and whipped around as if searching for his feet. Or when, as he bowed over his morning bowl of cereal, his Cheerios turned into tiny serpents eating their own tails, their eyes blankly staring up at him as they bobbed in a man-made lake of milk. Like how he’d seen a weird creature bound over their back fence. Except, there was that fallen-over fender.

And then, the muffled beauty of the evening was shattered by a wail. A soul being torn from a body. Tragedy shaped into sound waves.

And in their overwhelming excitement, neither one of them stopped to notice that Jude wasn’t moving. He just stood there, rigid, while they celebrated. Like a corpse brought back from the dead.

lived. Sometimes, Stevie remembered her saying, good news just needs to be good news. Sometimes, asking questions only dulls the shine.

Suddenly, Stevie could no longer feel the cold of his ice cream biting at his palms, making the missing tips of his fingers ache like ghosts.

That wasn’t Jude on the TV. It looked like him, but it wasn’t his cousin at all. That blank stare—he’d seen it in the past. Blank, like just before Jude had threatened to push Stevie out of the fort, when he had held that piece of rusty metal to Stevie’s throat.

Her first instinct was to hide, pretend she wasn’t home. Hearing the police thump on her door, Rosie couldn’t help but hope that, if she ignored them, bad news wouldn’t exist. Schrödinger’s cat was, after all, one of Ansel’s favorite theories. If patients don’t want to hear the truth, he’d once joked, they shouldn’t listen.

But rather than opening his own window, Jude slowly canted his head to the side—an animal with its curiosity piqued. And while Stevie couldn’t see his expression through the darkness, Jude’s stillness made it clear. The doppelgänger was laughing at him. A sharp-toothed bogeyman, grinning from ear to ear.

Because it’s never the way you want it, she thought. The universe doesn’t care.

The general store had been boarded up, and was now a motorcycle shop with a bike in the window and a few hostel rooms upstairs. The guy who owned the place called it The Redwood. He didn’t know Mr. Greenwood, or anything about Stevie Clark. Coincidentally, the shop owner had also purchased the deed to the old place Stevie said was where the monster lived.