Accidental Evil (39 page)

“And… it’s back!” Ricky said. He held up the watch for everyone to see.
 

George clapped.
 

His father nodded.
 

His mother narrowed her eyes.

“What?” Ricky asked.

“The trick is really, really good,” his mother said. “For the life of me, I have no idea where that watch went to or how you got it back.”

Ricky handed the watch back to his father and took a seat.

“I wanted you to tell me how you liked the
presentation
,” Ricky said. He knew that the illusion was good. He had practiced it over and over. His hands were smooth. Nobody ever knew how he hid the watch.

“I thought it was darn good,” his father said. He was barely paying attention. His father kept looking at his phone—he was waiting on news from his boss.

Ricky looked at his mom. She was holding something back.

“Do
you
believe it, Ricky?”

“What?”

“All that mumbo jumbo about old wizards and stuff.”

“Of course not,” Ricky said. “That’s just the stuff I say to keep people looking at the trick.”

His mother shook her head. “You have to believe it.”

“It’s not really part of the illusion.”

“If you want people to pay attention to your trick, then you have to make your story interesting. Nobody is going to want to listen and pay attention if you don’t believe your own story.”

“But it’s made up,” Ricky said. He shook his head. “I
know
how the trick is done. I’m the one doing it. How am I supposed to believe in something that I made up?”

“You’ve heard of these people, I think they’re called actors?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “You think they believe everything written on their scripts.”

Ricky took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He had read April’s book twice. It was a good book, filled with page after page of interesting nonsense. Later that night, flipping through for the third time, Ricky tried to understand what made the book so fascinating. He started to see some of the wisdom in what his mother had said. Regardless of how outlandish the story, the author had really invested themselves in the legend they were describing. It was almost like the author was saying, “I don’t know why, but here’s something that was once true.”

Ricky wondered if he could somehow find a way to hold his skepticism at bay and really believe in the story. Maybe then he could grab the audience.

Ricky read again about the Ceremony of the King’s Flame.

His father passed by his doorway.

“Hey, Dad?”

“Yeah?” his father asked. He stopped, but he was still staring at something on his phone.

“Where can I find a place with big windows that face west?” Ricky asked. He held his finger on the description of the Ceremony. He would need some candles, room for a ten-foot circle, and windows through which he could see the setting moon touch the horizon.

“Easy,” his father said. “Go out and earn a few million dollars and then buy one of those big houses on the right side of the lake. They have big windows.”

Ricky frowned as his father moved on down the hall.

[ Ceremony ]

Eight Months Before the Monster

It turned out to be easier than his father described. Ricky walked quickly across the lawn. They might get snow later that night. Everyone was talking about it. Ricky wanted to be out of the place before it began to fall. When he got to the door of the A-frame, he dug the key out of his pocket. Sarah’s brother, Jeff, had lent it to him. Jeff was responsible for lots of houses on the road. He visited each of them once a week in the winter to make sure everything was okay and do the occasional chore.
 

Ricky pulled out the key and the list of chores for that evening.

The house was dark inside.

He keyed in the code for the alarm system. It flashed green and the overhead lights came on. Ricky jumped.

The empty house was creepy as hell. It seemed like maybe there were people there but they were all asleep in the basement or something. Ricky imagined cold, dead eyes springing open at the sound of him walking to the steps.

He shook away the thought. Jeff came in here every single week. Nothing ever happened to him. Ricky walked down the big staircase to the living room. The room was lit up only by the moonlight coming through the windows. Ricky set his backpack down on the couch and found the door that led to the stairs. One flight down was bedrooms. That’s where he found the door to the basement. When he flicked on those lights, a lot of his fear was chased away with the shadows. The basement of the place was as clean as his own kitchen. The floor was painted shiny gray. The walls were bright white, like the whole thing had been coated with plastic. Ricky found the bucket next to the furnace and performed his first chore—he had to back-flush the heat exchanger.

For an hour, he moved around the house, doing Jeff’s chores for him while Jeff was at the concert. The money was good, but that’s not why Ricky had agreed to take over for the night. Ricky was still thinking about what his father had said. A house on the right side of the lake would be the perfect place to perform the Ceremony of the King’s Flame.

Back in the living room, Ricky glanced around to make sure there were no cameras. Satisfied, he moved the coffee table away from the couch. He took a vial of pure spring water from his bag and a small paintbrush. He had string cut to just the right length. With that, he would be able to draw a perfect circle on the floor. It was just water—it would dry up and nobody would be the wiser.
 

Ricky got to work.

It felt good setting up the pentagram for the Ceremony of the King’s Flame. It was just a stupid old ritual, connected to a long-dead religion, but he honored every step with the best intentions. His mother was right—to make people believe his story, he had to believe it himself. What better way than to actually commit the time and effort to reproduce the old ritual?

Ricky smiled and hummed as he worked.

With the circle finished, he started on the lines of the pentagram. That part was more difficult. He had to use another piece of string to trace around the circumference and mark off the corners. Ricky glanced at the moon through the windows. He was running out of time. He had to finish before the moon dropped below the trees. Besides, he had a curfew.
 

He finished quickly and then set up the candles and the laptop. The book from Ms. Yettin’s collection hadn’t actually listed any of the incantations, but it gave Ricky enough clues that he was able to find them. He still didn’t believe in any of that stuff, of course. It was still a little creepy. The house seemed to crouch around him, watching what he would do next. Ricky waited to find out what strange feelings the Ceremony of the King’s Flame would invoke.

The writings of the great wizard Abil-Ili had been stolen from his sepulcher, fifty years after his death. Scholars at the time had tried to reproduce his great magic, but they had only managed to call forth horrible demons. Ricky needed to feel what they had felt. He needed to experience the fear and wonder of the Ceremony so he could tap those emotions during his own performance.
 

Ricky lit the candles and began to read the words.

The text wasn’t even translated. It was just written out phonetically. Ricky had no idea if he was pronouncing anything correctly, but he spoke with great respect to give the Ceremony the gravity that it demanded.

The candles flickered and Ricky’s laptop screen began to dim.
 

He reached forward to nudge the cursor before the laptop went to sleep.

Ricky jerked his finger back and smiled at himself. April’s book said that if he chained a goat inside the pentagon, the demon would come forward in the form of a goat. Performed around a tree, the Ceremony would raise a wicked abomination of evil branches and bark. The book warned against the practitioner entering the pentagon for any reason. To do so would be to invite the demon to take possession of a human form.

He rushed through the end of the Ceremony and sat back. He was supposed to witness a gathering purple flame—the King’s Flame. As he sat there, the moon began to touch the trees on the distant hill. Ricky sighed. For a moment, he had felt something. Maybe it was a childish superstition, but it had been something. He hoped that it had affected him enough that the reverence would come out in his act. At least he had tried. Ricky put everything back where it was supposed to be and waited for the wax of his candles to cool.
 

The moon finally dropped below the hill. Ricky still saw its glow on the clouds. He tried to internalize the quiet menace of the place. If he could somehow embody the same potential energy of the fall sky, he knew that he could captivate people. He needed the audience to feel the same way that he did in that moment. They needed to fear him just a little.
 

He whispered one of the passages that he remembered from Ceremony. The words sounded silly at first. Ricky repeated the syllables again. He rejected his skepticism and refused to hear the sounds as silly. He closed his eyes and let his voice boom as he repeated the passage a third time. Their power filled him and warmed his core.
 

Ricky smiled.

[ Walk ]

S
EVEN
M
ONTHS
B
EFORE
THE
Monster

As far as Chelsea Hilliard was concerned, people could take the rest of the seasons and stick them on a rocket ship bound for Mars. If possible, she would live the rest of her days in a perpetual state of late autumn. It was perfect. The air was chilly and so crisp that it seemed to shimmer in her wake. The leaves were gone, taking all the pesky Leaf Peepers with them. The sun was warm, but low in the sky and unthreatening. She didn’t even have to worry about sunscreen.
 

Chelsea closed her eyes as she walked, simply enjoying the perfect morning.

“Hey, neighbor!” a woman’s voice called.
 

Chelsea opened her eyes reluctantly. She recognized the voice at roughly the same time that she spotted the woman. It was Peg something-or-other. She was a relative newcomer to the town and she had a ridiculous last name that Chelsea hadn’t bothered to memorize.
 

Chelsea raised her hand and hoped that would be the last of the encounter.

It wasn’t. Peg crossed the country road and fell in alongside her. She matched Chelsea’s fast stride. The woman was older, but pretty well put together. Chelsea figured she was in decent shape, or else she wouldn’t have kept up so easily. Not many could keep up with Chelsea when she was really moving.

“I thought I would head down to Springbucks’,” Peg said. “I’ve heard they acquired an O’Keeffe.”

Chelsea offered a smile and nothing more. She hoped that her silence would be contagious.
 

“How’s the family?” Peg asked.

“They’re fine,” Chelsea said. She hadn’t meant to respond, but the question had tickled her intuition. Peg was older than Kirk’s typical prey, but maybe… Chelsea frowned at the thought. Someone had told her that Peg was a switch hitter. She wasn’t sure she believed it, but the notion was enough to cast doubt on the idea that Peg was sleeping with her husband.

“That’s good. I hear it’s going to be a long and cold winter.”

“We can hope,” Chelsea said.

Peg chuckled even though she couldn’t have known the reason for the comment. Kirk didn’t make it public that he had a stake in a couple of the local heating oil distributors. People hated the idea that someone was profiting from the sale of heating oil. They seemed to consider heat to be a basic human right or something.

“I heard that Claire Dawn is going to hold an auction from her attic after New Year’s,” Peg said.

As far as Chelsea was concerned, this was the first interesting thing that Peg had ever said in her life. There were a million swirling rumors about the things stored in that attic. Claire was as old as time, and supposedly her grandfather had collected some amazing pieces down in Boston in the late nineteenth century. If the rumors were true, an auction would be an incredible opportunity to find some legitimate treasures.
 

“Is she holding it herself?” Chelsea asked. She was practically salivating.

Peg stopped.

“Did you hear that?”

“What?”

Peg was already starting to walk up the driveway of the A-frame. Chelsea looked up towards her own house. Her phone was just up the road. With that, she could track down this rumor of the auction and figure out her game plan. But she had to wonder what the hell Peg thought she was doing.

“Excuse me,” Chelsea said. Peg was already halfway to the house. There was nobody living there, of course. The owners barely showed up for summer anymore. Most of the time, the grand house stood empty. Its beautiful views were enjoyed by nobody.

Chelsea started up the driveway as Peg knocked on the door.

“There’s nobody home,” Chelsea called.

As Peg knocked, the door swung inwards. Chelsea trotted to catch up as Peg stepped inside.

“There shouldn’t be anyone home,” Chelsea called.

Chelsea advanced to the doorway and saw Peg leaning over the balcony, looking down at the floor below. Chelsea was filled with nervous excitement, but she wanted to get out of there. Kirk always said that nobody had a house like that unless they were crooked.

Crooked people had security systems and cameras. Crooked people didn’t like intruders.

“What are you doing?” she asked Peg. “Get out of there.” She took a step forward and realized that she didn’t have any responsibility for Peg What’s-her-name. She could just leave the woman there. Chelsea turned back towards the door and was startled to see that it was swinging shut.

[ Memory ]

Chelsea was practically panting. She never got that tired from walking. Maybe walking alongside Peg was good. Maybe she had pushed herself.

“Isn’t this you?” Peg asked.

Chelsea looked up and realized that she had nearly walked right by her own house.