Elaine glanced down at her son, heart racing even as she realized everything was okay, there was nothing to panic about, her precious baby hadn’t been plucked from existence like the rest of them.

  “Why are you sleeping on the floor?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm.

  Howie didn’t say, “Because Tommy’s demon-possessed teddy bear tried to get into my room last night.” What he said was, “I don’t know. Why did you break into my room like the house was on fire?”

  Elaine Schmidt couldn’t say, “Because I thought the bogeyman took you and I would never see you again.” Instead, she said, “I thought you told me to come in.”

  Howie eyed her with suspicion.

  “Anyway, up and at ‘em.”

  “I’m sick.”

  “You’re sick. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t feel good.” Howie sat up, clutched his stomach. “I feel pukey and hot.”

  Elaine touched his forehead. “Hmm. You feel a little warm. This is what you get for sleeping on the floor.”

  “I don’t think I can go to school.”

  His mother didn’t argue. She had other things on her mind.

  “Okay. Stay home and rest. But you’ll have to fend for yourself. Think you can do that?”

  Howie nodded. “Where are you going?”

  “Today’s my first day at my new job.”

  “You got the job?”

  “You’re just like your father,” she said. “You never listen. Might as well keep me in the corner like the vacuum cleaner.”

  “Good luck, Mom.”

  “Thanks. You sure you can soldier on on your own?”

  “Positive.”

  She went downstairs. He heard her rummaging around in kitchen for a few minutes, and then he heard the front door open and close. He was surprised by his luck. He had expected his mother to be home, figured he would have to exercise caution as he put his plan into action. Maybe the planets were aligning. Maybe the stars were granting him good fortune.

  He was tired. His stomach really did feel the slightest bit queasy. Probably nerves. He wouldn’t have minded going back to sleep for a few hours, but time was wasting.

  Howie shuffled into the bathroom, peed, went to the sink and turned on the cold water. Since Howie was a kid, his father had conducted the morning ritual of splashing water on his face. Always cold water. According to his dad, it was the jolt of the icy cold water that really got you going in the morning.

  Howie leaned over the sink, cupped his hands under the stream of water, and proceeded to splash water on his face. The water coming from the faucet might as well have been pumped straight from the plumbing of a water facility in Antarctica. It numbed his face. But it did the trick. He felt wide awake.

  After he dressed, he went downstairs, double-checked that the coast was clear. Outside, it was only twenty-five degrees, but the sun was shining. He started the station wagon. While he waited for it to warm up, he went back inside and upstairs to his parent’s room. He rarely went into his parent’s room. These days, entering it was a quasi-religious experience. There was an aura that permeated from the room, and if Howie had been tasked with interpreting what that aura meant, the phrase that came to mind was OFF LIMITS. It felt wrong being in there. But, today, it couldn’t be avoided. He went to his mother’s dresser, to the hinged wooden box that sat on top of it. He opened the lid of the box. His mother’s bible was in the box. It was a massive tome. At least five inches thick, with a white leather cover and gilt-edged pages. On the front, staring out from an oval-shaped opening, there was a representation of Jesus Christ. It was a headshot of Jesus wearing a crown of thorns. The box with the bible had been on his mother’s dresser since he was in diapers. He had never seen his mother take it out of the box. The thought of removing it now made him think of the sword in the stone, like maybe only someone suitably worthy would be able to remove the bible from its box. But when he took hold of it and lifted upward, it came right out. It was a little heavy, sure, but he had expected that. He held it in both hands and stared at it. The book itself felt powerful. Probably due to its heft. Or maybe because of what he planned to use it for.

  Howie closed the box, carried the bible to the car, and placed the it on the passenger side of the front seat.

  On his way to the library, he passed Holy Name. Briefly, he considered the idea of doubling back and seeing if he could procure some holy water, but as far as he was concerned the bible was already a stretch, holy water would have been expecting miracles. What were the chances that blessed tap water would do any good? Slim to none, was the first thing that came to mind.

  He reached the library at 7:55. It didn’t open until eight, but he tried his luck anyway, and found the door unlocked already. Inside, he made a beeline for the nonfiction section. He knew his way now, knew the exact shelves he was looking for, the exact books, too. On his first research expedition, he had taken plenty of notes, but this time he was looking for something more specific. His eyes skimmed the titles, and when he found what he was looking for he snatched it off the shelf, began leafing through the pages. There were no step-by-step instructions, no examples of passages to recite, but that was what the bible was for anyway.

  The librarian’s name was Ms. Diment. Howie didn’t know how old she was; somewhere between sixty-five and a thousand, he guessed. She had gray hair with a purplish tint to it, thick glasses, bulging Bette Davis eyes. A red silk scarf was wrapped around her neck. When Howie brought the book up to the front desk, she was sorting returned books into separate stacks. She didn’t acknowledge his existence. He cleared his throat. Without a word, her hand shot out, palm up, hovered there until Howie placed the book in it. She plucked the card out of the front, looked at it, said, “You didn’t sign it.” She slid it back to him, placed a pen next to it. Howie signed, and slid it back to her. Ms. Diment stamped the card and then the pocketed card glued to the book’s frontmost page. “Two weeks. After that, the fine is ten cents a day.”

  “Got it,” Howie said, smiled, waited for the gesture to be reciprocated, but left disappointed.

  The next item on his list he could have gotten at the grocery store, but since he was scheduled to work that evening and had no intention of doing so. He chose the hardware store instead. He parked a block away, hoofed it on foot, entered the hardware store and waved at Mr. Curtis, the store’s owner. What he needed was candles. Not the small ones you’d put on birthday cakes, but the larger ones you’d use if you were planning a romantic dinner. Normally, when a person needed candles, they didn’t think of the hardware store as the place to find them, but this was a small town, and Mr. Curtis knew that, which was why he carried a little bit of everything.

  Howie walked up and down the aisles until he came to the candles. They weren’t the ones he was looking for. In his mind, he had pictured candles that were long, white, and slender. Too tall and too thin to stand on their own, they would require a holder, usually decorative and fashioned out of either metal or glass. The store didn’t carry candles that matched the image in his mind. They also didn’t seem to carry candle holders of any kind. What he found instead was a variety of scented candles in glass jars of differing sizes. Vanilla, cinnamon, lilac, lavender, and orange blossom were all standard fare, but there were also more exotic scents with names like toasted marshmallow, pineapple mango, crème brulee, and coconut dreams. Another thing: they weren’t cheap. Not by a long shot. Howie had money, he’d been saving his income from the store for a good while, but candles weren’t high on his list of things to blow his nest egg on.

  He searched the shelves for alternatives. Like Burt’s Foods, Mr. Curtis stocked birthday candles as well, but as far as Howie was concerned those would be utterly useless. His eyes continued to peruse the shelves until he spotted the packages of tea light candles. They weren’t tall, but they could stand on their own, and, more importantly, they were cheap. They only came in hundred-count packages. Overkill by at least ninety candles, Howie figured. Still, a package of a hundred only cost ten bucks, and that alone helped him make the decision.

  On his way up to the check-out counter, Howie grabbed lighter fluid and a box of wooden matches.

  Howie hauled the package of candles onto the counter, placed the lighter fluid and matches next to it. Mr. Curtis stared at the items and said, “That’s a lot of candles, young man. Planning on holding a séance?” And then Mr. Curtis winked at him, like the two of them shared a secret.

  Howie knew what a séance was, had read about them recently on his first trip to the library. No, he wasn’t planning a séance, but, surprisingly, Mr. Curtis wasn’t all that far off the mark. The fact that that was the first idea that popped into the old man’s head made Howie like him more, although he was still confused by what the surreptitious wink meant.

  “No, nothing that crazy,” Howie said, pulling out his wallet as Mr. Curtis rang him up on the register.

  “No, I didn’t think so. Just pulling your leg. You don’t want to be messing with things like that,” Mr. Curtis said with all seriousness. “Séances and Ouija boards – you steer clear of those. I messed with a spirit board once.” He shuddered visibly, if not a little dramatically. “Bad news, all the way around.”

  Howie stared at Mr. Curtis, wondering if it was true. He couldn’t picture the old man with his fingers on a planchette or holding hands with several others at a table while trying to make phone calls with the dead.

  “Will that be all?” Mr. Curtis asked. After Howie nodded, he added, “Fourteen ninety-five. Big spender today!”

  Howie paid with a ten and a five. Mr. Curtis handed him a nickel back, bagged the items, pushed the bag toward Howie. And winked again.

  Again, Howie didn’t know what the wink meant. He nodded, smiled, said thanks, went out the door, walked back to the car. He shoved the bag over on the passenger seat, next to the bible. He stared at the strange assortment of items for a moment. The bible, the library book, and now matches, lighter fluid, and a 100-count package of tea light candles. This was his arsenal. It was almost complete.

  2

  He was finished running errands by nine-thirty.

  The house was empty. Both his parents were at work. He carried the bag and the bible up to his room, tossed them on the bed. He moved over to the window, parted the curtains, stared out on a sunny day. The streets were wet with melted snow. Gazing out the window, eyes moving from house to house (but always finding their way back to the Wilkins house), the shadow of doubt crossed over his mind. He started to second-guess himself. What if he was wrong? About all of it? What if Tommy wasn’t controlling his childhood teddy bear? What if Quint wasn’t alive at all?

  No. He wiped those thoughts from his mind. He knew. Had seen. Now wasn’t the time to falter or lose conviction.

  He sat down on his bed and opened the library book. It was titled Battling the Supernatural: A Guide to Fighting Demons and Malevolent Spirits. The author’s name was T.H. Brown, making it impossible to know if it was written by a man or a woman. There was no author photo or bio at the back of the book. T.H. Brown was as mysterious as the subject he/she wrote about. The book had been published in 1954.

  He flipped through the pages. The book was 234 pages long. Glancing at the table of contents, there wasn’t a chapter that specifically mentioned exorcisms, but one of the later chapters (chapter 10 as a matter of fact) was called “Eliminating Demonic Forces.” Howie figured that was as good a place to start as any and flipped to Chapter 10. After reading the first three pages, he decided that T.H. Brown was not the type of author to get straight to the point. It was, in fact, a slog to get through, and it wasn’t long before Howie started skimming rather than reading. On the twelfth page of Chapter 10, the word “exorcist” caught his attention. He began reading more carefully.

  According to T.H. Brown, only someone appointed by the Catholic church could perform an exorcism, and even then, permission was first needed from the Vatican. Not only that, but the possessed person was required to be evaluated by a health care professional to eliminate the possibility of mental illness or an underlying medical condition. Brown was particularly long-winded when it came to the history of exorcisms, and it was several pages before the author got to the signs and symptoms of possession, but none of those meant squat to Howie since he wasn’t interested in possessed people. (In fact, T.H. Brown would avoid the subject of possessed objects altogether, save for a brief mention that such a phenomenon was possible.)

  If he couldn’t get a step-by-step guide, Howie at least hoped to learn the nuts and bolts, but Battling the Supernatural wasn’t forthcoming. He had to settle for vague details, such as the priest going around reciting passages from the bible (though it didn’t say which ones); sprinkling holy water on the afflicted person (Howie moaned inwardly on that one, regretting having not stopped at Holy Name to pick up holy water); demanding the demon divulge its name (apparently, all of a demon’s power came from keeping its name secret, and once that was out of the bag it was pretty much a pussycat).

  Howie closed the book and tossed it away. Mumbo jumbo. That’s all it was. Total crap. He already knew the monster’s name: Quint. A poorly made stuffed animal that had been created in a factory in some third world country, likely with an unpronounceable name. If Quint had come with packaging (Howie highly doubted it), instead of Powered by Duracell written in the bottom of corner, it would have said Powered by Tommy.

  He was suddenly angry. Angry that T.H. Brown had skipped all the good stuff, angry at himself for believing in such a foolish plan, angry it was all he had to cling to at this point.

  He pulled the bible into his lap, opened it. Where to start? There were over a thousand pages, each with three columns of fine print. He had to squint just to make out the words. He wasn’t going through the entire book, huh uh, no way. Howie grabbed a yellow highlighter from the pencil holder on his desk, turned through the bible’s pages, highlighted passages he thought might be pertinent, and then dogeared the marked pages so he could find them later. It was tedious work, boring, but right now boring was good, it had a soothing affect and focused his mind.

  At 11:30, he closed the bible and rubbed his sore eyes. His stomach growled. He went downstairs to make an early lunch. The fridge was mostly empty. Before she had joined the ranks of the gainfully employed, Elaine Schmidt usually went grocery shopping in the mornings. She hadn’t gone yesterday, and today she had started her new job. Howie was surprised at the sense of betrayal he felt over his mother’s failure to stock groceries. He knew it was the thought of a selfish child, but he couldn’t help it. As an only child, he had been spoiled.

  After careful thought, Howie pulled out the jar of mayo, a package of bologna, and a slice of cheese. He made himself a sandwich. It wasn’t until after he had smeared the mayo on the bread, added the bologna and the cheese, placed the other slice of bread on top and was about to cut the sandwich in half that he considered the knife in his hand. It was a simple butter knife, but that got him thinking, and his eyes went to the wooden block in the corner that held all the sharp knives. His sandwich forgotten, he went over to the wooden block and pulled out the chef’s knife. Light from the kitchen window glinted off the 8-inch blade. It was an instrument that, by appearance alone, screamed danger, the way the unique sound of a rattlesnake’s tail warned you to watch your step.

  Take it, you might need it.

  It was hard to argue with that logic. His disappointment with the content of T.H. Brown’s book had thrown doubt on his plan. Having a physical weapon as back-up seemed like a good idea.

  Howie removed a hand towel from the drawer, carefully wrapped it around the knife. Confident it was safe for transport, he tucked it under his arm, grabbed his sandwich off the counter, and headed back to his room. He put the towel down on his bed and unwrapped it. His stomach did a tiny somersault. He took a bite of his sandwich. It tasted bland, but he ate it anyway. There was something mesmerizing about the knife. The thoughts it caused in his brain were dark and ugly, but more than the book or the bible, the knife made him feel better. He could visualize himself killing Quint with it, slicing open nappy fur, stabbing down into the cottony entrails. Perhaps the stuffing that composed Quint’s insides had once been white, but in Howie’s imagination they were stained black as midnight as he hacked at them and they billowed out, dancing on the air like raven feathers.

  He took another bite of his sandwich and stared at the knife.

  3

  Charles Schmidt arrived home early. He came through the door at four-thirty, an hour or two earlier than usual. Howie, who hadn’t expected either of his parents home before five, came running down the stairs, forgetting that his ruse to get out of school had hinged on him being sick.

  Sounding like a herd of buffalo as he came downstairs, he didn’t give off the impression of being unwell, and the first thing his father said was, “You must be feeling better?”

  Howie didn’t know if it was meant to be a question or not, but he answered with, “You’re home early.”

  “Busted.” His father shrugged off his coat, hung it on one of the pegs. “I thought I’d surprise your mother. Her first day of work and all, I figured I’d take her out to dinner.”

  “I’m sure she’ll like that.”

  “You’re welcome to join.”

  “I would, but…”

  “Big plans?”

  That’s an understatement, Howie thought. “Kinda. Studying over at Tommy’s house.”

  “Studying?” Then: “Aren’t you supposed to work tonight?”

  Howie made his best attempt at appearing sheepish. “I called in sick.”

 

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