I Live Among You Read online

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “Where do I find them?” I asked impatiently. “Look, Mr. Lictor, just answer my questions and everything will go more smoothly. I realize you’re tempted to dissemble on everything you say—you are a demon, after all—but really, I don’t have time for that.”

  Lictor stared at me, and I felt the temperature drop still more. I couldn’t help but ask, “Why is it you have the reputation of coming from somewhere hot when you seem to be so cold?”

  “Depends on where you start, doesn’t it?” Lictor said. “Very well, Mr. Grandy, I will try to answer your questions truthfully. I’ll try to do the opposite of my natural inclination.” He smiled ruefully.

  “So where do I find these…Old Gods, and how come you know about them in the first place?”

  “We have other agents, Mr. Grandy. You are not the only one we have approached.”

  “So what do you need me for?” I asked again.

  Lictor looked away, and there was a slight flush to his pale face. I shivered, not from the cold but from a premonition.

  “The others didn’t survive, did they?” I asked.

  Lictor lifted his pointed chin. “Why do you think we came to you? You are much more likely to succeed, I assure you.”

  I closed my laptop. I stood up. I went to the door and opened it. I stood there, waiting.

  Lictor didn’t move. “We have a file of your activities, Mr. Grandy. We will not hesitate to hand it over to the authorities, along with proof of your crimes. I’m afraid you have no choice but to help us.”

  There was a loud thump down the hallway, as if a door had slammed. My only neighbor on this floor was out of town. (Well, in jail for six months for fraud, but still out of town.)

  “Jerry?” I called out. It was more than possible that the scammer had been let out of jail early. His were nonviolent crimes, and no matter how many times he repeated his offenses, he always seemed to be able to charm his way out of anything too serious.

  “Close the door, Mr. Grandy,” Lictor said. He was standing, looming in the center of the room. It looked as if he’d grown a foot or more, and his long arms seemed to reach the floor.

  I closed the door instantly, as if compelled, and only moments later, the door bent inward with a huge bang.

  “They can’t come in unless you invite them,” Lictor said.

  The whole room shook, as if a giant had plucked it out of the building and given it a shake. It tilted to one side and then the other, as if the giant was trying to guess the contents.

  I fell to my knees and slid along the floor, watching the dust bunnies tumble with me. A long-lost book slid out from under the desk and followed me. Lictor had thrust out his uncanny arms and legs and taken hold of opposite walls.

  The room was set down with a thump, and I felt pressure flattening me against the floor.

  Then there were few moments of silence.

  “What the…” I started to say.

  Something squiggled out of the wall in front of me. A wormy thing, twisting and questing, pointing directly at me. I got to my feet and scurried backward. I heard a small squee behind me, as if wooden boards were being pried apart. I turned to see another tentacle emerging from the wall, but this one was as big as a snake and had a pointy claw on the end of it.

  Then all the walls were sprouting these nasty things, and all of them were reaching for me.

  “I thought they couldn’t come in uninvited,” I shouted.

  “Apparently, their appendages are under no such restriction,” Lictor said. “I’ve been trying to tell you, we need your services because, believe it not, we know so little about these things.”

  “Well, I hope you know something.”

  “No time to teach you the subtleties,” Lictor said. “Reach inside you, Mr. Grandy. Feel the fire.”

  Feel the fire? I wondered. Strange that he should say that. In my dreams, I often felt as if I was on fire. Once I had even woken up with the sheets on fire. I was still a smoker in those days and attributed it to that, though I had no memory of lighting up.

  Then there had been that time camping with Flora Mathews. It had been a cold and rainy night, and when I couldn’t get a fire lit, I’d become more and more frustrated until, suddenly, it seemed as if I simply thrust out my hand and flames leapt from my fingers, creating a bonfire in moments.

  Flora had stared at me as if I was some kind of monster, and I had disposed of her then and there instead of waiting until morning as I had intended. Then I tried to forget all about what I’d done.

  The first squiggly worm was now as big around as my arm and reaching for my neck.

  “The fire is inside you,” Lictor cried out. “Unleash it!”

  The tentacle touched my neck. It felt soft and squishy as it attached itself. When I pulled it away, some of my skin went with it. From behind, I felt something sharp enter my left shoulder. It brought pain such as I’d never felt, more than from just the talon itself, as if I was being injected with poison.

  The fires rose then, bursting from my fingers, then my hands. I looked down and saw that my feet were in flames, and I smelled burning leather and cotton. My dark jacket, white shirt, and skinny black tie all erupted in flames.

  The fires filled the room, swirling about, somehow contained by the walls. The tentacles were trying to withdraw, but it was too late. They were sizzling in the heat, blackening, falling to the floor.

  Lictor was grinning at me triumphantly. He alone was untouched by my fires, the illusion as strong as ever. My desk was burning, and my damn laptop was glowing with a strange phosphorescence, the Apple logo a dark red, the keyboard melting and merging beneath a green cloud.

  Shit.

  I tasted the toxic fumes in the air, but somehow, they didn’t enter my lungs. Indeed, I realized I hadn’t taken a breath through the entire encounter.

  There was a loud bang, and something slapped against my back. A bullet creased my leg and slammed into the floor, sending splinters into the air. I hastily removed my gun from its holster and threw it across the room. Bullets went flying in a circle around me, exploding in the heat, but all of them missed me.

  The fires still filled the room, but now it was as if they were contained inside an invisible flask. The temperature, I sensed, was as high as ever, but everything that could burn had burned already. Even the metal parts of the computer and the gun were gone, as if they had never existed. I was naked but unharmed. I put my hands to my hair and my goatee, and they were still there.

  Why isn’t it burning the walls? As I wondered this, the flames vanished. I was in the center of a bare room with white walls and wooden floors. I walked, naked, to the door and looked out. The hallway looked untouched, as if nothing had happened.

  “Very good,” Lictor said. “It appears I don’t have much to teach you. Apparently, you just needed the proper motivation.”

  “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  “Why, our enemy, of course. They probably followed me here.”

  I stared at him. He looked the same as when he’d first come through the door.

  I looked down at my unscathed naked body.

  “Would you mind getting me some clothes?” I asked.

  Chapter 3

  Lictor laughed at my request for clothing, showing no sign that he was going to help me out. I poked my head out the door and looked up and down the hallway. Then I moved quickly to my neighbor Jerry’s door, leaving my guest behind me. My lockpicks had been in the top drawer of my desk and were gone. There was a metal doorstop set against the wall outside, and I picked it up and threw it into the glass of the door, shattering it. Then I let myself in.

  All I could find inside was a raincoat hanging on the wall behind the door. I put it on and laughed. I looked like a flasher.

  I searched the room for anything else of immediate use and found a grand total of $2.45 in change in the top drawer of Jerry’s desk. There was a knife in a side drawer,
and I dropped that into the pocket of my new raincoat. There wasn’t much else in the office. It was pretty sad. But then, my own office hadn’t been much better. Not much to show for my life.

  I frowned. I’d never thought of that before, because it had never mattered. I lived for the hunt, and my surroundings didn’t mean anything to me. Now, Lictor had tarnished the whole thing. Fourth or fifth on the list? How disappointing.

  I went back to my own office.

  “Get out,” I said to the demon. “I want nothing to do with your plans.” Why should I? He didn’t scare me—as he’d said, I was going to hell no matter what I did. I didn’t trust that he could change anything about that.

  As Lictor had also pointed out, I was filthy rich. I only pretended to work for a living; it was a cover, an excuse to have a place to go. Why else but for money would I help him? I didn’t care what happened to mankind. I was a fucking serial killer—you couldn’t get much more uncaring than that.

  “You may not care about your fellow man,” Lictor said, doing that annoying reading-my-mind thing again. “But you still need them, unless you intend to hunt for your own food and make your own clothing and shelter and every other necessity—not to mention all the luxuries you modern humans take for granted.

  “Besides, the Old Gods are coming for you too, Grandy. Every living thing in this dimension is food to them.”

  “Yeah, well, I figure it will take awhile for them to get around to me,” I said.

  Lictor stared at me thoughtfully. Then he shrugged. “It’s a moot point, Grandy. The Great Old Ones know about you now. You are a threat to them. You are in this now whether you want to be or not.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Now get out.”

  He turned and went to the door, then halted, chuckling. “Sometimes I forget what I am,” he said. His image shimmered, and his human form fell away. He still had two arms and two legs and a trunk and a head, but they were all the wrong proportions, and all a sickly yellow color. His eyes were all red now, and he had the horns of a devil. I looked for a tail but saw only a skinny butt.

  “When you’re ready, I will return,” Lictor said, then he disappeared in a flash of fire and brimstone.

  Well, not really. He just sort of blinked out of sight—though there was a peculiar odor after he left, like charred hot dogs or something.

  I was left alone in an empty office, with not so much as a book to read. To hell with this, I thought, and returned to Jerry’s office, lay on his couch, and started thinking.

  I need to get home, get a change of clothing. Figure out where to go from here.

  Did I want to refurnish my office? Did I even want to keep it? Maybe it was time to move on, find a new town, a new state, start the hunt anew. I’d found it was a good idea to change locations on a regular basis, just in case the authorities noticed a pattern.

  Lictor was right about one thing. They—and he—had found me. Maybe it was time for one of my little disappearing acts. I was always preparing for my next identity, making sure I had a new birth certificate, a driver’s license, and other indicators of a normal life. Thankfully, they were hidden at my home, not my office.

  I was ready to go.

  The only clock in Jerry’s office was stopped, his phone was disconnected, and his computer wouldn’t boot up, so I had no idea what time it was. I sensed it was still midafternoon. I would wait until dark and then dart home. It was a few miles of alleys and back roads, and not too many people would see me, or if they did, they wouldn’t want anything to do with me.

  It’d be so much easier if I could call someone, a friend, but I hadn’t had one of those for years. I’d given up trying.

  People are so distrusting these days, I thought. It made it impossible to make any friends—and made it hard for the poor serial killer, too. The thing people didn’t seem to understand, though, was that relationships all start the same; it is only the result that is different. Without a certain amount of trust, there is no beginning. But at the beginning, at least in my experience, there is no real way to tell if a friendly person is friendly because they want to be friends or because they want something else.

  Oh, there always comes a time when that changes, but you have to have invested in the friendship to get to that point, and by then it might be too late to change.

  People are terribly smug about what happens to others. I would never fall for that, they think, but of course, it is people just like them who fall for it. Still, parents teach their children not to trust strangers. And if someone smiles at them, people automatically assume that that person wants something from them. It makes for a very uncivil society, I tell you.

  I closed my eyes, and as I drifted off to sleep, behind my closed eyelids, I saw tentacles coiling, whipping toward me, and felt my fires respond.

  I woke up. The couch was melting underneath me; the raincoat was scorched. I went to Jerry’s bathroom and thankfully, his water was still running. I held my head under the faucet until the memory of the Old Gods faded.

  I turned out the lights and lay back down on the couch. This time, as I fell asleep, I was only human.

  ***

  When I awoke, I sensed that it was the early hours of morning. There was silence in the air, as if the world was asleep. The steady background thrumming of everyday life was quiet.

  It’s now or never, I thought, cinching the belt of the raincoat. There was a small scorched hole about where my buttocks were, but I’d just have to hope I didn’t run into anyone. I moved quickly down the hallway and the stairs and poked my head out the door.

  Not a soul to be seen. I moved to the nearest alley and made my way home, sticking to the shadows, hiding when I saw headlights, crossing the street when I saw someone walking. It probably took twice as long as normal, but eventually I made it home.

  I had a small house, which had been outrageously expensive since I’d bought it at the height of the housing boom. My alter ego, Peter Abrams, was underwater on the mortgage. I could walk away without regret. My new identity, Peter Solara, would have a fresh start. (I always kept my first name, figuring the danger of being predictable was outweighed by my genuine response to the use of my real name.) As far as the real world knew, Peter Grandy had died decades ago, his body found in a car wreck; my first victim, disfigured and provided with my I.D. No one had bothered to check the dental records. No one had cared enough.

  I got dressed in my most nondescript clothing, blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a hoodie. I filled a single suitcase, grabbed my new I.D. and the money from under the floorboards, left the house that Peter Abrams had abided in for the last three years and disappeared into the still, dark morning.

  ***

  Three days later, I was in Oregon. I’d always wanted to visit it. It seemed like a nice state, and Portland looked like the kind of place where I could blend in. But within a few weeks, I realized it wasn’t for me. I preferred smaller towns: big enough to be cosmopolitan, but not so big as to be impersonal.

  I drove over the Cascades and found the town of Bend. The rents were high, but I was still flush with funds. I’d carefully transferred most of my online accounts to Peter Solara.

  By now, I was feeling the impulse to kill, but not as strongly as usual. I wondered if my confrontation with the Old Gods had expended some of that urge. I sensed my urge wouldn’t build to a fever pitch for a few more days yet, but when the opportunity arose, I wouldn’t be able to resist.

  ***

  I was shopping at a small grocery near my rented house.

  The old woman was hunched over a spilled shopping bag, laboriously picking up apples one by one. She was overdressed for a shopping trip, wearing a powder blue pantsuit, a pearl necklace, and pearl earrings.

  “Let me help you with that,” I said.

  I dropped to my knees, getting mud on my brand-new trousers, scooped up the remaining food items, and reached for her bag. She handed it over without a qualm.

  So easy. It is always so easy.

 
Either she hadn’t even felt the small push in the small of her back or she’d already forgotten it in the shock of the moment. I’d almost given myself away by laughing. As she was falling, she’d put both hands out and, impressively, rolled to save herself. She probably woke up every morning fearing she’d break her hip or something. She’d probably practiced that movement in her mind.

  All for nothing.

  “Where’s your car?” I asked, looking around. I’d already spied an old Buick three rows over and was betting it was hers. “I’ll carry this for you.”

  Sure enough, she led me to the Buick and unlocked the trunk.

  “Thank you so much,” she said, smiling.

  I’d been casually surveying our surroundings during that short walk. Amazing how often we are alone, even in public. It was so easy to stick to the shadows, to those places just to the side of where people were looking. I had a sixth sense about that. I always seemed to know if anyone was watching.

  There was a can of green beans near the top of the shopping bag. I grabbed it, dropped the bag, and swung the can as hard as I could against the old woman’s face. She didn’t let out a sound as she fell backward, her back slamming against the lip of the trunk with a bone-crushing sound. I caught her before she could fall to the pavement and pushed her all the way into the trunk. I pulled off one of her pearl earrings and slammed down the lid.

  I snatched up her keys. There was no sense looking around now. If anyone had seen me, my casual demeanor might make them doubt their senses for a few moments, and besides, the best thing I could do was to drive away.

  I got into the wide front seat, spent a few moments trying to figure out how to adjust it, then started the car. The Buick swayed going over the curb, its suspension shot.

  The old lady had probably been living from Social Security check to Social Security check. There was a grand total of five dollars in her purse.

  I wound through the streets in a haphazard way, feeling the joy of the kill rise in me. The satisfying crunch of the can against her head, the dimming of her eyes…but, most deliciously, that little moment of disappointment just before she blinked out. That little moment when she realized it was over.