"What was that?"
I looked up and saw my mom; I became aware of her hands clutching me tightly by the shoulders, of her body just slightly in front of mine. She'd placed herself between me and the monster. When had she done that? My mind felt tired and dark, like a storm cloud heavy with rain.
"It was a demon," I said, pulling away from her and walking to the vacuum switch. I turned it off and the white-noise whir died away, abandoning us to silence. The vacuum tube was twisted grotesquely, melted into a smoking pile of noxious plastic curls. It looked like the intestines of a mechanical beast. The blade of the trocar was smeared with sludge, and I pulled it carefully, with two fingers, from the mass on the floor.
"A demon?" asked Mom, stepping back. ""What. .. why? Why a demon? Why is it here?"
"It wanted to eat us," I said, "sort of. It's the Clayton Killer, Mom, the thing that's been stealing body parts. It needed them to survive."
"Is it dead?"
I frowned at the mess on the floor. It looked more like an old campfire than a body. "I think so. I don't really know how it works."
"How do you know any of this?" she asked, turning to look at me. Her eyes peered up at my face, searching for something.
"Why were you outside?"
"The same reason you were," I lied. "I heard a noise and went outside. It was in the Crowleys' house, doing something— killing them, I guess. I heard screaming. Dr. Neblin was in the Crowleys' car, dead, so I dragged him away where the demon couldn't find him. That's when you came out, and it came over here."
She stared at my face, my blood-soaked coat, my clothes drenched in melted snow and freezing sweat. I watched as her gaze left me to travel around the room, taking in my bloody handprints on walls and counters, and the steaming, muddy ash on the floor. I could almost watch her thoughts as they played across her face—I knew this woman better than I knew anyone in the world, and I could read her almost more easily than I could read myself. She was thinking about my sociopathy and my obsession with serial killers. She was thinking about the time I threatened her with a knife, and about the way I looked at corpses, and about all the things she'd read and heard and feared ever since she'd first discovered, years ago, that I was not like other children. Perhaps she was thinking about my father, with violent tendencies of his own, and wondered how far I was going—or how far I'd already gone— down the same path. She ran through it all in her mind, over and over, sorting through the scenarios, and trying to figure out what to believe. And then she did something that proved, without question, that I didn't really understand her at all.
She hugged me.
She spread her arms wide and pulled me close, holding my back with one hand and my head with another and crying— not in sadness, but in acceptance. She cried in relief, turning softly back and forth, back and forth, covering herself in the blood from my coat and gloves and not caring at all. I put my arms around her as well, knowing she would like it.
"You're a good boy," she said, pressing me tighter. "You're a good boy. You've done a good thing." I wondered how much she'd guessed, but I didn't dare to ask. I simply hugged her until she was ready to stop.
"We need to call the police," she said, stepping back and rubbing her nose. She closed the back door and locked it. "And we need to call an ambulance, in case he hurt the Crowleys, too, like you said. They could still be alive." She opened the side closet and pulled out the mop and bucket, then shook her head and pushed them back in. "They'll want to see it just as it is." She skirted the edge of the sludge carefully, and headed for the hallway.
"Are you sure we should call?" I asked, following her closely. "Will they even believe us?" I followed her down the hall to the front office, walking almost on her heels, as I tried to talk her out of it. "We can just take Mrs. Crowley to the hospital ourselves—but we'll have to change first, I'm covered with blood. Won't they be suspicious?" I saw myself in jail, in court, in an institution, in an electric chair. "What if they arrest me? What if they think I killed Neblin, and all the others?
What if they read Neblin's files and think I'm a psycho and throw me in jail?"
Mom stopped, turned around, and stared directly into my eyes. "Did you kill Neblin?"
"Of course not."
"Of course not," she said. "And you didn't kill anyone else." She stepped back and pulled open her coat, showing me the blood on the sides and on her nightgown. "We're both bloody," she said, "and we're both innocent. The cops will understand that we were trying to help, and trying to stay alive."