Death and Douglas Read online

  Douglas laughed. “Lowell’s not a big fan of Ferris wheels.”

  “Are you scared of rides?”

  “I’m not scared of rides,” explained Lowell through clenched teeth. “I’ll go shoulder-to-shoulder with you on any roller coaster. But I don’t trust Ferris wheels. They creak and jerk and sway and go so slow they feel like they’re breaking down every second. They’re dumb.”

  “You sound scared. There’s a carousel over there we can jump on. You can have first pick of the horsies.”

  “Are you guys getting on or what?” one of the teen girls asked impatiently. The Ghastlies found themselves at the front of the line. The Ferris wheel attendant had the gate open, but apparently didn’t care whether anybody went through or not.

  “Yes, in fact, we are,” said Audrey as she strolled through the gate. Douglas followed, and Lowell reluctantly brought up the rear.

  Douglas found himself in the middle of the car as the attendant fastened the metal safety bar across them with an awful creak. He looked at Lowell as the wheel jerked to life. He was holding onto the bar tight enough that it looked like he was trying to snap it in two.

  “So what’s going on?” asked Audrey.

  “By tomorrow, the entire town will know about the serial killer,” said Douglas.

  “What?”

  Douglas relayed the whole story of Jill the pumpkin and PH the policeman. By the time he’d finished, the three friends were swaying at the top of the Ferris wheel. Lowell hadn’t said a word the entire time. The slight green tinge of his face clashed with the bright yellow of his hair. Below them, the entirety of the Cowlmouth Fall Carnival stretched like an autumn-colored utopia.

  “So you think that the police will draw the same conclusion you are. And will have to tell everyone that there’s a serial killer hunting on the streets of Cowlmouth.”

  “Right,” said Lowell, jumping a bit as the car rocked gently in a breeze.

  “If they sit on this warning and somebody dies tomorrow, well, that’s bad,” said Douglas.

  “I wonder what that’ll be like,” said Audrey. “The entire town knowing what we’ve known for weeks.”

  “It’s going to be weird,” agreed Douglas, “But I think I’m going to like it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll feel safer once everybody knows the danger. We won’t be alone in this.” He paused for a few seconds, thinking. “Although, it’s funny. That’ll be the opposite reaction of everybody else. They’ll all be freaking out.”

  “The good news is it won’t change things too much for us, since our parents already know about it,” said Lowell, finishing the observation with a series of muttered curses as the car dipped down to the bottom and then kept going.

  “I think there might be bad news in this, though,” said Audrey. “Obviously, the pumpkin was mutilated very close to when you arrived at the tent. It means you were near enough to the psycho. That’s concerning for you, Doug, because that’s twice now. Seems a strange coincidence.”

  Douglas looked out over the carnival like all the answers could be found among the tents, the rides, and the games if he could just stay up in the air long enough to see them. “Yeah. There is that.”

  The Ferris wheel continued its revolutions.

  OCTOBER 3

  MONDAY

  Cowlmouth Library was erected to save the souls of men. Now it shaded their thoughts. The three hundred-year-old building had started its life as a church and was currently an official historical landmark. However, it needed some other purpose beyond being a field trip stop, so the town stuffed it to the holy rafters with books.

  Nevertheless, it retained its imposing ecclesiastical qualities. It was incredibly tall at its tallest point, squat at its squattest, and wide at its widest. It was made of thick slabs of rough-hewn rain-gray granite the size of small cars and sported a white steeple that stretched into the sky above like it was being pulled thin by unseen fingers. It even had gargoyles. According to Moss and Feaster, these ugly, bat-winged hunks of masonry regularly turned to flesh and flew around the night skies of Cowlmouth, picking off stragglers caught out too late at night. Only a book in one’s hand could ward off the flinty fiends.

  “This feels weird.” Lowell looked up at the stone monsters glaring down from their niches. “Like we’re going back to school after just leaving it. Can’t we ask your mom to drop us off at the movies instead?”

  “We need to be here. Well, I need to be here. You can go to the movies, I guess.”

  “Shut up, man.”

  The two walked toward the front door of the library. It was large and red with black three-pronged hinges that looked like pitchforks. It had never been open since Douglas could remember. Beside the massive portal was a smaller modern glass entrance that automatically hissed aside as they approached.

  News of the serial killer had hit hard Saturday evening. Lowell’s father held a press conference to explain that there was a murderer in town, that he’d left behind clues in the form of letters on victims’ cheeks, and why the community should be especially cautious the next day. He didn’t mentioned Jill the Giant specifically, but insisted that there was “reason to believe” the killer might strike on Sunday. All the news stations and local Internet sites had flared with warnings of a killer stalking the town of Cowlmouth.

  On Sunday, Cowlmouth was a ghost town. Douglas, like almost everyone else, stayed home all day. He spent the time playing video games and watching TV and instant messaging with Lowell and Audrey about the news.

  There probably wasn’t a dark window in all of Cowlmouth that night as residents stayed up late to hear if anything had happened. Douglas made it until about 1 A.M.

  The next day, Douglas kept waiting to hear that some unlucky person had been found with an S carved into their cheek, just like Jill the Giant had prophesied. But it never came. Douglas wasn’t sure what that meant.

  He was sure, though, that he needed to know more about serial killers. More about murder. He needed to know why someone would chase a kid up the side of a house and carve letters into the faces of people. He needed to know why death could be unnatural. If all death was unnatural. If his family’s business was a sham. If the entire business was based on pretending that everything about death was more okay than it was.

  First, though, he needed to know more about serial killers. That’s why he was dragging Lowell to the library.

  Inside, Douglas felt the usual awe and confusion over its whispering paper innards. He didn’t know how a library could keep track of so many books, even with those random-seeming numbers and letters taped to their spines. He was pretty sure that on past visits, he’d found entire catacombs of dusty tomes that hadn’t been seen by library staff in years.

  The pair passed by a large table near the entrance. It was always covered with books that were seasonally rotated. This month, the covers bore ominous houses and lurid monsters above names like Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Washington Irving, Bram Stoker, and Edith Wharton. He flipped through a couple of the books and wondered whether any of the stories were about serial killers.

  “Hey … isn’t that the woman from Marvin’s funeral?”

  Douglas looked up to see the tall woman with glasses across the room, walking in their direction. She was wearing a long, blue dress covered with little brown starlings that looked like they were trying to fly away. Her head was turned to look down the rows of shelves, as if she was searching for something other than books.

  “What? Is she following me?” Douglas ducked down a nearby aisle, with Lowell close behind. Douglas hid at the far end, while Lowell stood brazenly in the middle of the row, casually pulling a book off the shelf and perusing it. “Hmm … ” He looked up and scanned the rest of the shelves. “Health and Medicine. Ever seen what a naked woman looks like?”

  Douglas remained silent. He thought he could feel a cold wind as the woman passed by. “Can women be serial killers, do you think?” he asked
the book spines in front of him.

  After waiting a few minutes, Lowell poked his head out of the row, looked around, and motioned to Douglas. “Don’t see her. Let’s go.”

  “All right, but I really don’t want to run into her again. Keep your eyes open.”

  They continued cautiously through the library like it was a museum full of exhibits untouchable behind glass. Soon they found themselves in the room full of computers. In this old building full of books, the two had headed right to the Internet to find answers.

  The large chamber was lined with books on all four walls, and at its center were rows of long tables, each with two terminals. Between each computer was a brass lamp with a yellow shade and a printer with a sign taped to it listing the charges for printing.

  Audrey was there, sitting at a table in the front corner. She was wearing a brown cardigan that caught her hair as it fell loosely to her shoulders. She was so engrossed in the screen that Douglas was half-tempted to sneak up and frighten her.

  “Man, she beat us here. Your hearse needs a tune-up.”

  Douglas shrugged and dropped his backpack on the floor behind Audrey. She didn’t turn around.

  “Guys, look at this.” She swiveled the screen a few degrees so that all three could see it. Douglas glanced nervously around the room before focusing his attention on the display, while Lowell grabbed an empty chair from the adjacent computer and sat down.

  “What, you want ice cream?” asked Douglas.

  “No, what are you … Oh.” Audrey looked back at the screen and minimized the pop-up ad for Sweeney’s Ice Cream Shoppe that had overtaken the page.

  Framed in a mass of more advertisements below the header for the local paper, Douglas saw five words in a bold typeface large enough to be its own sound effect:

  DAY KILLER PROWLS COWLMOUTH

  “Day Killer?” asked Douglas.

  “They’ve given him a name,” said Audrey.

  “Whoooooooa.” Lowell elongated the syllable until his lungs ran out of air.

  Douglas looked around and saw the computer screen one table over. It was displaying the same news story that they were looking at. An older woman in thick glasses, balancing an oversized white purse decorated in black cow spots on her lap, hunched in front of it. She bent over the purse until her face was only about an inch from the screen, an inch from the giant black letters that gave a name to the monster that was terrorizing Cowlmouth.

  Douglas wondered how many of the people using computers in the room were reading this same news story and feeling the same horror, like stagnant water in their stomachs.

  Douglas looked back at the screen and quickly scanned the article. Lowell’s lips moved silently as he did the same. Other than the serial killer’s nickname, it didn’t tell him anything about the murders that they didn’t already know.

  “So everybody in Cowlmouth survived yesterday,” said Lowell.

  “Seems that way,” Audrey said.

  “Why are you guys talking like that’s bad news?” asked Douglas, finally sitting down beside Audrey.

  “It’s great news, but …” Audrey pivoted in her seat and looked at Douglas. “It could come with its own bad news. I mean, we were all wrong about the pumpkin.”

  “Because nobody died? That just means the town took the warning seriously.”

  “Maybe. But I hardly believe that the … Day Killer … would’ve warned the town if he thought there was the slightest chance he could be stopped.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t even him. Maybe it was a prank.”

  “And it’s just a coincidence that the prank matched the signature evidence of the secret town serial killer?” Lowell asked. Douglas shrugged. But Audrey continued on.

  “I’m sure the police are pursuing both those ideas. But they don’t have the other thing.”

  “What other thing … Oh.” His thing. Douglas Mortimer’s thing. The being-chased-by-the killer thing.

  “Right. If the S on the pumpkin didn’t stand for Sunday and the Day Killer chased Doug on a day he already had a victim, then the calendar theory could be wrong.”

  Douglas smoothed the strands of hair angled across his forehead as the three sat in a silence broken only by the occasional library cough or click of a mouse. Audrey looked down at the keyboard, her finger trailing an invisible line between the M and S keys. She grabbed the mouse and selected a random link on the website. “So why are we here?”

  “Man, I totally forgot about that,” said Douglas. “I want to learn more about serial killers, even more after this conversation, and I don’t want my parents to know that I’m researching this stuff.” At home, it had taken a single grisly image popping up on the screen and almost being interrupted by his father to convince him that using his home computer for this type of research might not be in his best interests.

  “So you’re looking for privacy at a public library,” said Lowell. “Got it.”

  Douglas scooted over to the other computer on the table and hit a key. The Cowlmouth Library mascot, a flying gargoyle with a book in its hands, froze briefly mid-flight before being replaced by the library Intranet Welcome screen. Douglas pulled the keyboard closer, called up a search engine, and paused before admitting, “I have no idea where to begin.”

  “Type in murder. That’s how this whole thing started in the first place.” Audrey looked around the book-lined walls until her gaze fell on the stairs at the back of the room. “You guys go ahead and look online. I’m going to see if I can find any books about serial killers.”

  Douglas watched her disappear up the stairs.

  “Hope she doesn’t get any paper cuts,” said Lowell.

  The library system had a content blocker on their network, but it wasn’t too sensitive. He immediately realized, though, that he was at the wrong computer for calling up the horrible images of serial murder that slipped through the filter. Even with Lowell’s gangly form at his shoulder, being at the front of the room made his screen visible to everybody behind him. He really needed his own laptop, he realized, putting it at the very top of the never-ending Christmas list in his head.

  There were a lot of websites focused on serial killers. He could spend weeks looking through them all. He found lists of serial killers, most of them with violent and attention-grabbing nicknames just like the Day Killer. There were lengthy biographies of some of the more infamous ones, including pictures of their families and of them as children. He even stumbled onto crime scene photos, which he quickly closed after a quick peek.

  He was so intent on his searching that when Lowell interrupted him with a “Hey, we done here yet?” Douglas jumped, his soul diving into the toes of his shoes. Lowell laughed loud enough to make the rest of the people in the room glance up from their computers. Douglas looked over at his friend—Lowell was playing a game on the adjacent computer.

  “Yeah, I guess. Not making much progress.” On Douglas’s monitor was a map of the U.S. showing a disconcertingly consistent spread of serial killer activity over the past hundred years.

  “I’m telling you, man. The only way to figure this whole thing out is to get out in the town. Walk the streets he walks. Creep in the shadows he creeps. Stalk the victims he stalks.”

  “Here comes Audrey,” said Douglas.

  “You guys find anything?”

  “A little,” replied Douglas. “Did you know that one of the first modern American serial killers was from New England?”

  “H.H. Holmes.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Read it in this.” She heaved a large book onto the computer desk with a thud that made the keyboard rattle. The title, The Serial Killer Grimpendium, was underlined by a knife and spelled out in big red letters that dripped blood. Below the knife was the subtitle From Albert Fish to the Zodiac Killer in similar bloody letters, with the whole arranged on a background of black-and-white mug shots, tiled like old yearbook photos.

  “Cool,” was Lowell’s response.

  To Douglas, th
e large, lurid book cover was almost as embarrassing as the questionable images on the Internet. “We should probably go look at this somewhere less … exposed.”

  “You afraid somebody’s going to catch you reading an actual book?” asked Audrey.

  “No. I’m worried about that woman over there.” He pointed at a window in one of the doors at the front of the room, where he could see the head and shoulders of the tall woman he kept running into. She was talking to somebody on the other side and apparently about to enter. “Let’s go to the Belfry.”

  The part of the steeple that once held the bell when the building was a church wasn’t accessible to library patrons. However, people still referred to the large, third-floor room directly under the empty steeple as the Belfry. Foot-high, Styrofoam letters spray-painted gold spelled out the name above the entrance.

  The Belfry was basically the reading room, with soft couches and upholstered chairs and large beanbags scattered around for people to sit in. A small counter in the corner carried snacks and drinks for sale at allowance-level prices, while shelves were arranged to divide the room into private nooks. Naturally, with Halloween only weeks away, the walls of the Belfry were covered with black construction paper bats.

  The three friends picked out a couch in the corner that was hidden from the rest of the room by a pair of shelves. After a quick explanation to Audrey about the woman—quick because there wasn’t much to say other than that she was spooky and always around—they sat down on the couch. Audrey found herself in the middle, so she took charge of flipping through the book. It was big enough that it covered her entire lap.

  The inside of the book turned out to be more lurid than the cover. Every page had mug shots, victim pictures, crime scene photos, and images of evidence, the latter usually stained with dark splotches.

  And the words were no less revolting.

  People killed people throughout history, but it wasn’t until the late 1800s when Jack the Ripper redefined the word infamous that the idea of an anonymous stalker-killer became a boogeyman in modern society. What Douglas found more interesting than the history, though, were the personalities of these murderers. Most serial killers hid their lives of crime behind everyday faces and everyday lives. They were neighbors, friends, parents, children, siblings. They held down jobs and went to church and shopped at grocery stores. Serial killers could be anybody. And yet, they were … different … broken … evil. He could see why his dad had such trouble talking to him about murder.