Christmas morning arrived and Reggie tried to be gracious about the clothes and gift certificates she received, but her eyes kept returning to Henry. He gleefully ripped the wrapping paper from his presents, shouting about how much he loved everything. Dad smiled at his exuberance; Reggie hadn’t seen her father that pleased in a long while.
She was dreading the annual Halloway trip into Boston for a lobster lunch at Faneuil Hall. Minus one mother this year. Reggie would’ve rather had her fingernails pulled out with pliers. Especially when she saw that Dad had put on the ugly Christmas sweater with the velvet reindeer on it.
“I’m not going,” she told her father.
“It’s Christmas, Regina. You’re going.”
Reggie walked defiantly to the stairs. “’Bye,” she said, not looking back at him. The yelling she expected to follow her upstairs never came. Dad didn’t say a thing. He just slammed the door behind him.
“Merry Christmas, Reggie!” called Henry.
Reggie went to the window. She watched them get in the car and back out of the driveway. Henry gazed up at her and waved.
Back in the hallway she found shreds of paper on the carpet. She picked up a few scraps of a torn photograph, the picture of their family at the Bottle Hill carnival.
Henry had ripped it up and left the pieces for her.
Her eyes filled with tears. She was losing him. She felt him slipping from her, and the loss was worse than the abandonment by their mother. Mom had packed a bag and left, gone of her own free will. But Henry ... Henry was being taken from her, a little more day by day, like someone with a terminal disease.
She got dressed and was out of the house three minutes later.
Soon after, Reggie and Aaron were knocking on Eben’s door. He answered it a few moments later, his eyes squinting at them through the morning sun.
“Sorry,” Reggie said. “I know it’s Christmas, but we —”
“Come on in. Coffee’s almost ready.”
Aaron’s 1940s leather aviator hat with long earflaps made him look like a bloodhound. He eyed Eben’s ancient bathrobe. “Nice duds.”
“Thank you. Nice hat.”
“Hanukkah present. Told the folks I was wearing it to Reggie’s annual Christmas morning breakfast. I sort of lied, but I figured we’d be getting breakfast here, right?”
“You’re lucky to get a bad cup of coffee.”
They all sat at the kitchen table and Aaron poured himself a huge mug of coffee. He drank more caffeine than anyone Reggie had ever met. It explained why he was rail thin, jumpy, and usually pretty sweaty. Even in winter. But she figured with a brain that ran as hot as his did, constant fuel was a necessity more than a habit.
“All right. You all can start talking any time you like.”
“Spiders,” said Reggie. “I was ambushed.”
“Spiders?” asked Eben.
“Not real ones,” said Aaron. “The psychic kind, courtesy of Henry. Like when he made me think I was drowning.”
“My room was dripping with them. Thousands of them.”
Eben listened without expression.
“So now you believe your brother is a Vour?”
Reggie shook her head.
“I don’t know what to believe, Eben. It’s preposterous, but — I don’t know the kid sleeping in the room next to mine anymore.”
Eben frowned and rubbed his unshaven chin. A coughing fit seized him, and he put a hand on the table to steady himself.
“Jeez, Eben.”
“It sounds worse than it is,” Eben assured her. “Now, let’s take a look at the facts of this situation for a moment —”
Aaron pulled a thick three-ring binder from his backpack and thumped it onto the end table.
“What do you have there?” Eben asked.
With a flourish, Aaron flipped the binder open to reveal a computer-printed copy of the handwritten title page: The Devouring.
“You made a copy of it?” Reggie whispered. “When?”
“I scanned it into my laptop the night I borrowed it. Thought maybe I could research the symbols and stuff —”
“You two just couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?” Eben said in a sharp voice.
“Don’t blame Reggie. She didn’t know. Be pissed at me if you want, but we’ve got to find out where this came from,” Aaron said.
“And how do you plan to do that?” asked Eben. “It’s only a journal. No publishing data, no Library of Congress number, no copyright . . .”
Aaron paged through the binder.
“We read the whole thing, word by word. There’s got to be something in here that gets us somewhere.” Aaron turned to the first page and shook his empty coffee mug. “I’ll need more joe.”
Aaron was over halfway through the journal and had lost track of how many cups of coffee he’d drunk. Eben was reading one of his psychology textbooks on delusional dementia while Reggie slept in a tall wingback chair, a thin strand of spittle hanging from the corner of her mouth.
Aaron’s eyes slid back and forth over the handwritten text.
“Listen to this,” he said. “They know I know, and they torment me. They force in the nightmares. One moment I’m at the market, the next I’m sinking in quicksand, screaming, struggling. And the humans — all they do is stare. Stare and whisper at crazy Macie. Macie. That’s the author. And what happened to her is just like what happened to us. Vours sense your fears, then they play them out for you in your head, like waking nightmares.”
“Or you subconsciously remember reading this passage, and it’s affecting your ability to judge reality from fantasy,” said Eben.
“I don’t know, Eben, it felt pretty real,” said Reggie, rubbing her eyes and wiping her lips. Aaron continued flipping through the book.
“Here’s something ... maybe.” He jabbed a finger at the page.
“May twelve, nineteen seventy-two. Went to see Ma and Pa. Brought Ma a bunch of daisies and told them Jeremiah was getting real sick.”
“Okay. She visits her folks ... and Vour-possessed people can get sick. So?”
“There’s more.” Aaron read on. “They got a new neighbor. I knew the boy from school years ago. A bad seed. He went to prison for burning down St. Luke’s with Father Moore and those kids inside back in ’54. I always thought he was a Vour.”
Aaron flipped back to the account of Jeremiah in the corn-field.
“Right here on page one, the night the Vours got Jeremiah,” he said, and read aloud again. “He never used to have a mean bone in his body. I think that after Ma died, some part of him did, too.” Aaron stood up. “Their mother was dead before the journal even existed! You get it now?”
“Get to the point,” said Reggie. She shot a look at Eben, who seemed deep in thought.
Aaron paced. “She brought Ma a bunch of daisies. She’s talking about a cemetery. She went to visit their graves!”
“So?” asked Reggie, but Eben nodded to himself.
“We have a date,” he said. “May twelfth, nineteen seventy-two. We have a singular event — the church burning — that happened about twenty years before. And we can almost certainly find the story, the killer’s name, and his hometown, at the library or on the Web.”
“And he’s buried next to Jeremiah’s parents,” said Reggie.
Aaron sat before Eben’s computer.
“Their tombstones will give us the author’s last name. That might get us an address!”
Aaron hammered away at the keyboard.
“Slow down, Aaron,” said Eben. “Even if you find an address, it doesn’t mean the sister’s there now.”
“But it’s a start,” said Aaron. “And I’m guessing it isn’t far away, either.”
“Probably true,” Eben replied. “But I don’t know what you hope to find. You don’t even know if she’s still alive, or if the passing years have only added to her insanity.”
“‘Madness in great ones must not unwatched go,’” said Aaron, typing like a demon.
“Don’t quote Shakespeare at me, young man,” Eben said. “You’re talking about hunting monsters.”
Reggie had remained silent for a long while. Now she spoke.
“I don’t know if I believe in monsters, Eben. But I know something is very wrong with Henry. And I’m scared for him. I’ll be glad to prove that Vours don’t exist, and this is some crazy stage my brother is going through. But if it’s not a stage —”
“You want to visit a murderer’s grave on Christmas?”
Both Reggie and Aaron looked expectantly at Eben.
“No. I know what you’re thinking.” Eben shook his head and coughed. “Absolutely not.”
“I could ask Quinn,” Reggie said. “Kind of a weird first date, but he said he wants to spend some more time with me. Or I could just hitchhike . . .”
Reggie glared at Eben, and he sighed.
“Fine, Regina.” He grabbed his coat. “But I’ve got a game hen to roast this evening, so let’s make this foolish quest a quick one.”