The Gift of the Demons Read online

  I stared at him for a long moment. “You’re not going to make another bargain with someone, are you?”

  He let out a breath. “No fear of that. I think I’m cured of bargains, lotteries, gambling, and just about anything that offers something for nothing.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then I’ll keep it until I see the janitor again.” And then I’d have a long list of questions for him. Like how he’d known that the woman he’d thrown a knife at wasn’t a human who’d end up in the ER, gasping out a description of him with her last breath so he could go on trial for murder.

  “It might be a good idea to keep this quiet,” said Georgia.

  “You think?” I said.

  We walked away from the gym. We were going to have to walk over to Georgia’s house and wait for her mom to get home and drive me. Or for me to call my parents and ask one of them to pick me up on the way. The buses were long gone by now.

  Chapter 2

  “How was school today?” asked Dad.

  “Fine,” I said, my standard teenage answer. What was I supposed to tell him? I saw a woman pop like a balloon when someone stuck a knife in her? Or there was this kid who made a bargain of some kind and it looked like he was about to become a quadrapalegic, but somehow he got saved by magic?

  “You and Georgia still friends?”

  “Uh, yes, Dad. Of course.”

  “Just checking.”

  What Dad meant was that he had noticed I had one friend and it bothered him. If he could have legislated that every high school student had five friends, he would have done it. Dad was a State Senator and had been for twelve years. It wasn’t that he thought government could fix everything, only that he thought it could fix a lot more than it had done before. He was a fierce fiscal conservative, which was how he’d gotten elected here, but he used any chance he had to stand on the bully pulpit and say what he thought. That meant he wasn’t always home when other dads were.

  “No one bothered you today, did they?”

  “No, Dad,” I said. Harrassment at school was one of Dad’s current pet projects. Eliminating it, that is. But what is legally harassment and what feels like being frozen out are two different things.

  “You’re not going to tell me anything that really happened, are you?” he said, as he passed me the bottle of pickles that we were eating for dinner tonight. We’d also had chips and salsa and a cantaloupe that had still been in the fridge from last weekend.

  “Dad, I’m fine. There’s nothing you need to know about.”

  “And you know how terrifying that is?” Dad said. “That you think I don’t need to know about your life?”

  “Get over it, Dad. I’m just a normal teenager. I don’t like to share details.” Dad actually loved it when he believed I was a normal teenager.

  “Track going well?” asked Dad.

  “Yeah, I think I’m headed to the Olympics this summer.”

  “What?” Dad nearly choked on a pickle.

  “Well, maybe next summer,” I added.

  “You could go to the Olympics,” he said. “You know, if that’s your dream, your mom and I will make it happen.”

  “Dad, I don’t want to go to the Olympics.” More attention from strangers wasn’t what I needed. I just wanted to keep going to school, getting good grades, and hopefully not see any more weird stuff for a long, long time.

  “Are you sure?”

  I groaned. I should never have brought that up. “Harvard first, then the Olympics,” I said.

  Dad laughed at that. He had gone to Harvard and he knew that I knew he wanted me to follow in his footsteps, even though he never said it out loud. “You’re an amazing person, Fallin,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “Right,” I said. Dad could go over the top sometimes. A lot of the time. It wasn’t just about me. It was the way Dad was about any of his causes. When he was passionate about something, he used all his Harvard vocabulary and all his time of TV to promote it. Disaster relief in third world countries, amnesty for illegal immigrants, federal loans for the urban poor, and on and on.

  “Someday some nice young man is going to see how awesome you are and then what will I do on a Friday night?” he said.

  “Make me sit here with you anyway. I think the only reason I don’t go on dates that often is because the guys at school are afraid of you,” I said. “They know you’d give them a survey to fill out before you let them take me out of the house.”

  “A survey? I’d do a background check, and then need to see a resume, a list of all grades from Kindergarten to the present, and three letters of recommendation,” said Dad.

  “So we’re both safe until I’m in college. Then I’ll date like crazy and you’ll never know about it until you see me on youtube and one of your political enemies makes an ad out of it.”

  Dad laughed at that. He didn’t really have political enemies. Everyone liked him, which was why he’d been re-elected without challengers since he started at the State Senate.

  “You don’t really think that I’m the reason guys aren’t lining up to ask you out, do you?” asked Dad.

  Now I was the one laughing. Dad could be insanely certain of his politics and insanely uncertain of his fathering. “No, Dad.” I didn’t mention the part about my skin color. We both knew that.

  “I’d try to be nice if you brought someone home to meet me,” he said.

  “Try being the operative word here,” I said.

  “Well, as long as he wasn’t a criminal or a pedophile,” he added.

  “So criminals and pedophiles have no rights?” I asked.

  “Not when it comes to dating my one and only daughter,” said Dad. He held up the remote control. “You mind?” he asked.

  “Go ahead,” I said. It was practically a family tradition, Dad turning on the news after dinner on Friday night. On the rare occasions Mom was home, he’d wait until Saturday to fuel his news junkie habit.

  “Mom will be home about 6 a.m.,” Dad said. “So no lawn mowing until after noon at least.”

  “I know, Dad, I know,” I said. Mom worked crazy nurse hours at the hospital, multiple twelve hour shifts. Mom could have asked for fewer hours, but she was always taking on extra shifts because she figured it was a matter of life and death, having a good nurse on duty.

  People always think it’s doctors who save the lives, and they do, in surgery. But it’s the nurses who keep people going after they’ve been sewn up. It’s the nurses who make sure they don’t get the wrong medication and they are checked properly for infection. The nurses make sure that the small things are caught and stay small enough to deal with. I think my mom saves more people in one shift than any surgeon saves in a week. She could probably have gone to medical school and made a lot more money than she makes. She still gets offered managerial positions for more money all over the country. But she feels like she needs to be hands on.

  I’ve never asked if Mom and Dad tried to have their own kids before they adopted me. It doesn’t really matter, does it? We don’t exactly think that we were meant to be a family, or anything mystical like that. It’s just that they wanted to be parents and I needed parents, and we love each other because we’re together now.

  “Hey, this is interesting,” said Dad, pointing to the screen.

  There was a series of photos of missing people in Hooper (pronounced Hupper) and the surrounding areas. Normally, you just sort of assumed in these cases that they had run away or decided they didn’t want to deal with problems in their lives. But in this case, there were people who seemed to have everything going for them, a prominent businessman who had just made millions on a deal, a teen girl who had gotten a full-ride scholarship to Harvard, a woman who had given birth to a baby she’d waited years to conceive, and more.

  One of them was a kid from my high school, a couple of grades younger than me. His parents claimed he had called them several times a week since he had gone missing last month, so they knew he was still alive. The police didn�
��t think he was part of the other group who had disappeared and were never seen from again, but the reporter wasn’t so sure. They showed a photo of him and his name, but I didn’t really recognize him. He had one of those faces that are pretty forgettable, average sized nose, thin cheeks and lips, blue eyes that weren’t particularly big or bright.

  “Wait a minute. I think he was in one my classes last year.” I thought about it for a moment. “U.S. History. Yeah. He sat right behind me.” His name had been Nick, but I honestly couldn’t remember anything else about him, whether he’d been a good student or bad, whether he’d been funny or loud or annoying or cute.

  “Who?” said Dad, because they were now onto photos of another missing person.

  “Oh, just—never mind.” I ought to remember someone who was gone. I felt horribly guilty about that. He’d been in my school, in my class, and I hadn’t even known he wasn’t there this year. Or this month, or however long he’d been missing. Did anyone at school remember him? I thought he’d had a girlfriend or something, but I might have been wrong. I never connected with him.

  If someone goes missing, it should be this big loss. It should leave a hole, don’t you think? His parents missed him, I guess.

  I wondered if he really was alive. Had he run away so he could go to Hollywood and become a movie star? Or had he just gotten tired of life in Utah? But then why would he call his parents? And if he was in the same situation as everyone else, then why hadn’t they called their loved ones to tell them that they were still alive.

  The only commonality the police had been able to find so far between all the missing people were pieces of paper with the same poem written in German. Including Nick, whose parents had found it crumpled in a garbage can—after the police had asked them to search for it.

  “That’s really weird,” I said. Had Nick been in any German classes at school?

  “German, huh?” said Dad. “Maybe you could translate it for them.”

  “I’m sure they’ve got other people who could do a translation better than I could,” I said. It was true I’d been Mr. Barry’s German student of the year three years running, but we were talking about high school, after all.

  “Then Mr. Barry, maybe?”

  “Yeah.” Mr. Barry was a retired spy, or so he always said. He lived in Germany for years, working in the embassy as a translator. His accent was nearly perfect and he was known to have such an extensive collection of books in German that his whole house was a maze of them. His classroom at school had bookshelves all the way around, mostly older German books written in Fraktur, the script that was used hundreds or years ago.

  “I wonder what it says,” said Dad. “And how in the world that would connect them all.”

  A policeman appeared on camera and the reporter asked him precisely that. “We don’t want to give out too much information. We’re hoping the poem will lead us to some resolution. But if there is anyone who knows about the poem and how it was passed between these people, we would be interested in the information.”

  “Isn’t there anything you can tell us about this mysterious poem?” asked the reporter.

  “It appears to have something to do with the occult. Possibly old German legends about demons and bargains,” said the policeman.

  I felt a chill run through me at that. Demons? Was that what the woman had been in the gym with Carter? I couldn’t think of any other word that I’d use for her that would fit better. She’d certainly been evil and she and Carter had both talked about bargains.

  Was it possible that these other people had all gone missing because of magical bargains with demons? I thought back to last year, when Carter hadn’t been anything special on the football field. And then suddenly he had. We all thought it was because he’d grown up. Sometimes guys take longer to go through puberty than girls and they just hit their height and start putting on muscle and it seems sudden. But it’s just biology and timing.

  Or not.

  They had a couple of people on the TV who’d known the missing people. One was the sister of the woman who’d just had a baby.

  “The last five years, she spent every dime she had trying to get pregnant. She had given up normal treatments with a doctor. None of them had worked. Her husband had tried to get her to stop focusing on that and think about adoption instead. But she was convinced there was some alternative treatment that would work. She wouldn’t tell me what it was, but the next I heard from her, she was pregnant.”

  The reporter asked, “Is there any chance that she was involved in something suspicious, something that might have resulted in her being taken against her will?”

  “My sister would never have done anything against the law,” the woman insisted.

  And then a man who had been an acquaintance of the businessman. “He never did care who he hurt when he had his eye on money. He’d been cheated more than once himself and I heard him say that he was going to succeed this time, no matter what it cost. I’m afraid that he must have gotten involved with some of the wrong people.”

  “People always get fooled into thinking they can get something for nothing,” said Dad. “It’s why Utah is the scam capital of the world.”

  I could see that Dad was already starting to think about this problem in terms of legislation, which was fine with me. I didn’t want him focusing on me, because I had a feeling that whatever the problem was, laws were not going to keep people from going missing. I wondered if the Nick guy had disappeared after he’d had an experience like Carter. Maybe he figured he wasn’t safe anymore. I wasn’t sure Carter was safe either, even though the woman—or whatever she was—had died. What if Carter still had that German poem and used it again?

  I needed to talk to Mr. Barry, I decided, and I needed to talk to him before Monday when school was in session.

  Chapter 3

  Mr. Barry was the kind of teacher you thought of as a friend. He turned the classroom into a circle of chairs every morning (because the janitors put them back in rows every night when they cleaned up the school). He was always bringing snacks in, and he never had a problem if we texted messages in class or checked facebook or something. His goal seemed to be more along the lines of making us so interested in his class that we didn’t want to do anything else. But he did it with respect. Not very many teachers treated students like we were on the same level as they were, but Mr. Barry did.

  That was why I had his telephone number. He gave it out to us, asking us to use it wisely, not to call him as a prank, but to feel free to call if we really needed homework help, or in case of any emergency. He spent some time every year talking about suicide, about hopelessness among teens, and about being gay, transgender, and leaving the Mormon church. He said that if there were times when we felt like there was no point in living, we should call him and talk to him about it. He’d been there. He was an ex-Mormon who was gay and he said there was a way through to the other side.

  I waited until Dad went to bed, then checked the time. It was nearly midnight, which was pretty late. Mr. Barry was most likely in bed, but he’d said to wake him up. He said that sleep wasn’t that important to him. So I called him in my bedroom with the door closed, and tried to talk softly enough Dad wouldn’t hear me.

  “Hello?” said Mr. Barry.

  “Mr. Barry? This is Fallin.”

  There was a long sigh. “Fallin, I’m so glad to hear from you. I worry about you, you know.”

  “This isn’t about me,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “Mr. Barry, I’m calling about Carter. He’s one of the football players. Do you know him?”

  “Carter Crusher?” he said. “Yes, I know him. He’s in one of my first year German classes. Fourth period, I think. What is wrong with him?”

  “I saw him with a strange woman in the gym. She said something about a bargain she’d made with him. He was pretty scared of her.”

  “You saw this?” Mr. Barry’s voice sounded strangely high-pitched suddenly, lik
e Carter’s had been when he’d faced this woman.

  “She made his arm go boneless somehow and said he was going to be a quadriplegic.”

  “Did you see him after she finished with him? Fallin, have you talked to anyone else about this? You need to see someone, maybe a therapist. Do your parents have good health insurance?”

  “Mr. Barry, the woman died. Or—she got punctured. I don’t know exactly what happened, but someone threw a knife at her and then Carter’s arm came back to normal. But I’m worried someone else might come for him.” That was one of the things I was worried about.

  “Someone else? No, that won’t happen. Fallin, were you the one who threw the knife at her? That was very brave of you, but I have to warn you that it’s not a good idea for you to attack people you see threatening others.”

  “She wasn’t a person, as far as I can tell,” I pointed.

  “No, not in this case. That’s true,” said Mr. Barry. “But what if you made a mistake?”

  “Mr. Barry, I didn’t throw the knife at her. I told you, it was someone else. The janitor, I guess. But he saved Carter. I think.” This was very confusing to talk about.

  “But you saw it all and you have some questions,” said Mr. Barry.

  “Yes,” I said. That was an understatement. “My friend Georgia was there, too. She probably has the same questions. And when I came home tonight I saw a news story about other people who have been disappearing in the area. One of them was a kid named Nick from our school who was a freshman last year” I tried to think of some other way to describe him and couldn’t. “Do you remember anyone named Nick in one of your classes who suddenly disappeared?”

  “Nick? No,” said Mr. Barry. “I’d remember if one of my students went missing under mysterious circumstances, Fallin. He must not have been taking German from me.”

  “Well, on the news they said something about a German poem that was found at a lot of their houses. Nick’s, too. They think the poem might be related, though I don’t know how.”