The Devil's Demeanor Page 5

  Luckily Don did not have to share a bed with Jabari.

  Aunt Mimi may have suggested going to bed, but Don could hear all the adults downstairs, talking and yelling and laughing. It sounded like fun being an adult. He would find out later it was anything but.

  He tried to go to sleep, but had a hard time of it. His insomnia had nothing to do with the noisy adults but with the story Grandpa told him. When he finally did fall asleep, he dreamt of a cute dog going into a cave at the bottom of a hill, and when it came back out, it ran up to a rabbit and ripped its head off.

  Don remembered the cave distinctively because it made him sick just looking at it. He was both in the dream and watching it at the same time. The dog didn’t seem to notice the part of Don that was there, thankfully, but that didn’t stop the evil from enveloping him, squeezing his guts.

  Something was in that cave, something that didn’t want to be found.

  He woke up to see the sun outside the windows. The curtains did very little to mask it. His cousins were already up and getting ready for the beach. Don hated thinking he was the last person to wake up. It made him feel so lazy.

  He went to the bathroom and put on his swimming trunks, then went downstairs and met up with everyone else. Mom was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit that did nothing to hide her pregnant belly. She also had on a wide-rimmed hat and sunglasses, and said she wasn’t getting in the water anyway.

  Everyone crossed the street carefully and made their way onto the hot white sand. Don was barefoot and regretting it as his feet burned. He asked Dad to carry him but he refused because he was carrying a cooler filled with ice and soda.

  Don gritted his teeth and bared it.

  The family claimed a table with a canopy and set everything down. Then Don’s cousins ran straight for the water. Don sat at the table and watched them. He didn’t know why he was so shy; he was with family.

  After a while, he finally took off his shirt and made his way to the roaring waves. Dad eventually joined and pretended to be a sea monster, grabbing the kids one at a time and throwing them about.

  Overall, Don’s time at the beach hadn’t been as bad as he thought it would be.

  * * *

  As soon as they got back to the beach house a few hours later, Don went straight to the vent. Mom eventually got him to take a bath to get the sand and saltwater off, but the vent was his after that.

  He lay there, thinking about the dog that had bitten Mom. He wondered if it was the same one from his dream. Well, of course it couldn’t be. But, at five years old, Don was capable of believing anything.

  Chapter 5

  It seemed cruel to Don that his favorite movie would be closely associated with the birth of his baby brother. Mom went into labor while the family was watching The Unstoppable Titans, her water breaking in her seat. Had Don been older at the time, he would’ve been embarrassed but, luckily, his mom had been discreet when the pain hit, so they all quietly left the auditorium and went to the hospital.

  They had only been a quarter into the movie, but Don had seen enough to love it and would wind up seeing it many more times in the future. Unfortunately, every time he did see it he was reminded of his brother. And that wasn’t a good thing.

  Ethan Scott was born in Eisenhower Hospital on July 27th, 1987, and weighed ten pounds, ten ounces. He and Don had been born in the same hospital, a place Ethan would visit often over the years for little reasons like headaches and stomach problems—ailments not caused by natural reasons.

  Don didn’t know what to think of Ethan when his parents brought him home from the hospital. He was Don’s only sibling and Don knew from the start there was something wrong with his little brother. For one thing, the baby never cried. Dad even told Don the doctors thought Ethan was dead when they delivered him—they slapped his bottom to get a reaction, but the baby only looked around, “quiet as a mouse.”

  For another, Ethan was always staring at things. Dad told him babies were supposed to be curious when he brought this up, but Don felt there was more to it. Ethan didn’t seem curious; he seemed to know what he was looking at, no matter what it was.

  Mom started acting weird a month after Ethan was born. Don could hear her screaming and crying in her and Dad’s room, which was right next to his, but he tried to ignore it. Why was it she cried and Ethan didn’t?

  The first really strange incident occurred when he turned a year old and he and Don were in the living room by themselves while Dad was at work and Mom was cooking in the kitchen down the hall. Don was watching Looney Tunes on TV, his leg draped over the armrest. Ethan was playing with lettered blocks on the floor.

  The window-mounted air conditioner was humming just next to the TV, freezing the living room. Don didn’t mind—it reminded him of his vent at the beach house. Ethan, who still hadn’t cried, occasionally looked at the air conditioner, and then to Don, before going back to his alphabet blocks.

  Don figured the boy was cold, but he didn’t care. He was comfortable, and that was all that mattered to him.

  At some point, Ethan looked at him for so long Don thought he was going to speak. But then the baby sighed and went back to his blocks.

  “You’re a weird little fucker,” Don said to him.

  Ethan suddenly paused with an H block inches from the top of a pyramid he’d built. He stared at the letter for a while, and Don held his breath, waiting for him to move. He got the impression Ethan was watching him from the corner of his eye. Then he resumed his building. Don went back to the show, spooked.

  A few minutes later, Mom came in, looked down at Ethan, and then shrieked. “Don,” she said, “I don’t want you using these blocks to spell dirty words again! Where did you even learn that word?” Then she picked up Ethan and left the room.

  When Don looked down at the blocks, he saw they spelled the word fucker.

  * * *

  Ethan seemed like a normal child in almost every other way: He learned to walk and talk like children are supposed to, but he still never cried. Watching him learn to walk was startling, considering he seemed to try at an extremely early age and grew frustrated at his inability to do so. Mom and Dad took him to doctors, but none of them knew what was wrong with the baby.

  Don wondered, not for the first time, if the dog bite had anything to do with his brother’s behavior. Was there really a curse, like Grandpa said? When they visited Florida in the summer of ’88 to show off the new baby, Don asked Grandpa about the curse again, but he told the boy there was nothing more to tell.

  However, he did tell Don to keep an eye on Mom and Ethan. That, Don did reluctantly and valued any chance to get out of it. That’s where school came in.

  Woodcrest Baptist Church School, the private school Don attended, was a godsend. The school served orange soda at lunch, put on plays and puppet shows in the church at the front of the school, and taught cool things. Don learned how to make bubble-bath mix in the first grade.

  He even kissed a girl for the first time on Woodcrest’s older-kid playground. (There was another playground for the kindergarteners that consisted of a long sand-pit-like area that ran alongside part of the building.) She giggled after the kiss, and then ran away. Don had been so embarrassed, later saying he had no idea what came over him.

  Later that year, he noticed Mom and Dad fighting a lot, though he didn’t know why. They constantly yelled at each other about things he didn’t understand at the age of six, but would become clearer to him later on.

  The reason for the arguments was a woman named Agatha.

  One day, in December of 1988, Mom put Ethan and Don into her little yellow car and took them to the grocery store, but they didn’t go there for groceries. Mom parked in the lot and immediately approached a woman walking out of the store who was younger than her.

  Don watched through the back windshield as the two women started yelling at each other.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, sleeping with a married man?” Mom asked Agatha.

/>   “Listen, bitch,” Agatha replied, “don’t you come up to my job like this. Don’t you dare!”

  “Why the fuck not, heifer? What do I owe you, you fucking whore?”

  “Don’t call me a whore! If you want to yell at somebody, make it your husband. He came to me, not the other way around!”

  “Fuck you both! He just wanted himself a stupid young bitch. What are you—sixteen?”

  “I’m twenty-two, bitch, and the reason he came to me is because you’re fucking crazy!”

  That shut Mom up for a moment, so Agatha continued.

  “He said ever since you had your second baby, you’ve become some kind of freak, and he can’t stand it anymore. He even called you a demon. A demon, bitch!”

  Suddenly, Mom slapped Agatha so hard she left a red handprint on her cheek, and they started fighting right there in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly. There were other people around, and they stared, but Don was too young and confused to care.

  Eventually Mom jumped back in the car and took off, but not before Agatha managed to throw a soda can at the back windshield. Mom kept on driving, though, and Don could feel her rage filling the car.

  “I’m going to kill that bitch!” she shouted to no one in particular, though Don automatically looked over at Ethan sitting in his car seat.

  Ethan only watched her.

  When he finally looked at Don, the older boy turned away. “Mom?” Don called.

  “What!” she shouted, making him jump in his seat. She had turned back, driving blindly. Her face didn’t look remotely human.

  “Never mind,” he said. He didn’t even know what he was going to say in the first place, and he felt like he was riding in a car with two monsters posing as his family.

  * * *

  Don’s parents divorced in early 1989, and Dad moved back to Florida. Don had wondered if Agatha had gone with him, though he didn’t have to wonder for long. One day, Mom was late picking him up from Woodcrest. She didn’t say anything on the ride home, but he knew something was wrong. Ethan sat in his car seat, quiet as usual, though this time he was grinning.

  Dad called Don one day in April to tell him he was living in Connecticut now and he wanted to come down and get him and Ethan and take them back up for the summer. Mom said no, that they were visiting her brother, Roland, in June. Maybe next year.

  Uncle Roland had a huge, two-story house in a beautiful neighborhood, and his backyard was big, though not as big as Don’s in Georgia. Uncle Roland had a large wooden fence, and his yard sloped upward where a swing set resided at the top of that little hill. Don avoided the set because it was always crawling with caterpillars.

  This was the house in which Don would find out what it was like to dance with death.

  His uncle Roland was tall, with blond hair and rugged features and his son, Ryan, was just a shorter version of him. Ryan was a year younger than Don, and he took him and Ethan down into the basement, which was huge and littered with junk.

  It was awesome.

  There were paths carved into the junk so people could get around easily. Down there was a TV where Don saw his first episode of Batman with Adam West. He loved it immediately—it was a Penguin-heavy episode. The kids sat on folding chairs and watched while Mom talked with her brother and his wife upstairs.

  After the show, the kids found a way to entertain themselves. There were large white pipes on the other side of the basement. Near those pipes was a discarded mattress on the floor. Don came up with the brilliant idea of setting the mattress at an angle under a pipe. They would then climb onto the pipe and then tumble down the mattress as if it was a hill.

  It worked like a charm. At first.

  The three of them took turns. Don even helped Ethan get on the pipe, since he was only two and very small. For some reason, however, when it was Don’s turn again, the mattress was pushed out of the way just as he was leaning forward to do his tumble. He fell five feet to the concrete floor.

  He woke up in the hospital. He had all kinds of tests done on him, and was told he’d be fine. It had been a close call, though. When asked what happened, Ryan told his dad that Ethan had pushed the mattress out of the way just as Don was falling onto it.

  That night they slept at Uncle Roland’s house. Don couldn’t sleep because he was too busy thinking about what had happened earlier. Why did Ethan move the mattress when it was his turn to tumble down it? Did he hurt him on purpose? If so, why? Did Ethan hate him? Could he hate at that age?

  Had he tried to kill his older brother?

  Don found himself worrying a lot at the tender age of seven, and all that worrying would eventually lead to an ulcer in his teenage years, but he had to worry. Something was wrong with his family, and he was the only one who saw it.

  Well, him and Grandpa, but he wasn’t around to see what Don saw. That’s why Grandpa made him his little spy. He’d told Don to call him if anything really weird happened with his brother. Don wasn’t really used to calling people on the phone at that age, but he vowed to do so if it ever became necessary.

  Suddenly he heard a creaking noise and looked toward the bedroom door. It was opening slowly. At first all Don could see was the dark hallway and part of the staircase across from Ryan’s room.

  Then he saw the guestroom next to the stairs, where Mom and Ethan slept. That door was wide open.

  Something slowly materialized to block Don’s view of the room across the hall. It had shiny, hateful eyes. It watched Don for a moment and then closed the door. Don stayed awake the entire night after that.

  * * *

  Mom pulled Don out of Woodcrest that fall and threw him into a public school called Windsor Meadow Elementary, which was right down the street from his house. The change came because Mom could no longer afford the private school.

  He missed Woodcrest, but Windsor Meadow wasn’t too bad. The only thing he didn’t like was they served milk at lunch instead of orange soda, but he adjusted eventually. The school also had a huge field up on a steep hill, where the kids played for recess. The ground was red clay instead of regular dirt, which Don thought was cool, though it got stuck in his shoes every day, which Mom did not think was cool.

  This part of his life was the calm before the storm. It lasted for a whole year, and Don spent most of his time in his playroom. This room consisted of three walls, all lined with big windows, and was built over the back porch. Dad had it built shortly before he left. The floor was white tile, and at some point a large cardboard box adorned the far left corner where Don kept almost all of his toys. The box was only two inches shorter than him, and he managed to fill it all the way to the top.

  At some point, Mom convinced him to make friends with a boy across the street named Nick Platt. Nick was a gangly boy with blue eyes and blond hair. At first he and Don didn’t get along very well—Nick seemed well aware they were being forced by their parents to be friends—but after a while, the boys became the best of buds. It was nice having a guy friend who was the same age.

  It was also nice having a friend Ethan didn’t cling to.

  Nick and Don became inseparable after a month, with Don spending most of his time at the Platt house. Nick had no siblings, so he often looked at Ethan the way one would probably look at an alien.

  Don wondered if his new friend could see something else when he looked at his brother. Don clung to that thought, desperate to have someone else feel what he himself felt when he was near Ethan. He had to know he was not just imagining things.

  * * *

  Nick and Don shared several classes at Windsor Meadow. The school had a neat covered loading area where the school buses would line up. Don memorized his bus number—13—as he and Nick made their way to homeroom, which was separate from the main building.

  Homeroom was little more than a little manufactured shack on the other side of the parking lot. As Don took his assigned seat next to Nick, he noticed a girl across the room, staring at him. She was wearing a purple sweater over a white T-shi
rt. Her short black hair was done up in braids with purple burettes.

  Don knew who she was because he paid attention to roll call in the mornings. Her name was Monica Harris, and he suddenly realized she was the girl who lived behind his house. Well, not in the backyard, but their backyards connected.

  As the homeroom teacher called the roll, Don repeated the bus number over and over. The last thing he wanted was to forget which bus would take him home. The driver, a bitter old man whose name Don didn’t know, was always yelling at the kids.

  Don didn’t want to get on the man’s bad side.

  As the day wore on, Don found himself watching the clock, eagerly anticipating returning home so he could play with his toys and watch cartoons. He and Nick weren’t allowed to play too much during the week because it interfered with homework, and Nick’s mom was pretty strict.

  Besides, Don was grateful for the brief time he had to himself after school. Ethan was in daycare and Mom didn’t get off of work until five. Maybe Don could even sneak a soda from the fridge. His mom had forbidden him from drinking more than one a day, but he doubted she knew how many they had, so one wouldn’t be missed.

  When school finally let out, Don ran out into the bus area, looking for his transportation. What was the number? As he quickly made his way along the row of yellow buses, he located one numbered “31” and quickly got on. He was breathing hard as he took a seat close to the front, wondering why he felt uneasy. He didn’t recognize a single person, and the driver was a woman. After nearly five minutes, he realized he was on the wrong bus.

  He jumped from his seat just as the driver began closing the door. He made it out onto the sidewalk and ran to the front of the row, knowing none of the buses behind him were 13. The buses near the front started taking off, and he panicked.

  Finally, he located his bus and pounded on the door just as it started to move. The bus quickly halted and for a moment, the driver stared at him with a look that could melt ice. Then, he opened the door. Don walked up the steps and stared back at the driver, who had dark wrinkled skin and bad teeth. White beard stubble stuck out on his cheeks.