Deviant (34 page)

Danny shrugged. “Sorry, what were you saying?”

“I was saying poor Tom, his life is empty now.”

“Don't worry about Tom. He'll find something else, you'll see,” Danny said.

“He's going to give us that awful hot chocolate,” Tony said.

“Don't you like it?”

“I like this,” Tony replied, and kissed him. He kissed her back. Her lips were soft, salty.

A thought occurred to him. “Hey, you ever been to the ocean?”

“No, I haven't.”

“Next time I go there with Mom and Dad, you wanna come? I've got cousins in L.A.,” Danny said.

“I'd like to meet them,” Tony said.

“You will,” Danny replied, and rang the bell again.

A sunrise. A gag of gray light through the webs of haze. I can smell the forest. I can see birds, planes, clouds on the mountaintop. But I am in the city. The pavement pushes up coins and paper and the rings from plastic bottles. My coat is heavy, my ski pants thick.

I am lonely.

People disappear as they pass behind me. It's all darkness back there. I don't turn to make sure. I just know.

I walk through the north wind. Through the empty streets.

The school is deserted at this time of the morning.

The science lab bulldozed. The police tape gone.

It's as if the whole planet has been evacuated, with only one person left behind.

Me.

I sigh and leave the school and walk home.

A long walk. I miss Lebkuchen. It was almost as if we shared one mind, so similar were our thoughts. The two of us, together. And now I am here by myself. Stuck here. On this scratch of land. Alone. I walk through Colorado Springs to Hill Street, to my house, and up three flights to my room.

I think about the FBI.

I think about them with contempt.

They've solved nothing. They are idiots.

Of course, how could they know? They couldn't know. It didn't match their profiles. Serial killers worked alone. They didn't take apprentices. Or disciples. One case in a hundred was like that. They worked by themselves, enjoying their personal fetish. A world of their own making that they didn't want to share.

But Lebkuchen had shared.

I had been in on every kill, including that last one in the rock canyon.

Yes, the FBI were wrong about a lot of things. They made a big deal about the report from Lebkuchen's doctor that his hands were covered with lesions from his Alexander disease. That's why he made
everyone
wear gloves, they said. It wasn't true. He really believed the gloves were a good idea and would promote discipline within the school. And they were wrong about the trophies, too. The missing
cats' hearts. They weren't trophies. I only wanted the cat hearts to grind into my hot chocolate like the ancient Maya had done.

My secret recipe!

They never did explain how Lebkuchen got through spaces only a child could fit through. And they never figured out the Tesla connection either. Tesla, like Newton, was a scientist who believed in the paranormal, and he'd picked Colorado Springs as a place to do his experiments because of the supposed “flux energy” of Pikes Peak.

They'd only scratched the surface of this case. They were lazy. Everyone was lazy.

Still, what did it matter? Lebkuchen was dead. The cat-killer case was closed. They had nipped it/him in the bud. A serial killer grown in youth, reformed in adulthood, grown again, but caught in the early stages. Before he had a chance to move up that phylogenetic scale.

Of course, it was exciting news for a small place. They'd splashed it on the front page of the
Cobalt Daily News
, the front page of the
Colorado Springs Gazette
, and the second lede of the
Denver Post
. It was silly. What was the big deal about a man who killed cats? The Colorado Springs municipality kills twenty or thirty cats a week and nobody kicks up a fuss about that.

Poor Lebkuchen. I'd directed him so well. Controlled him. Gave him the drugs to tranquilize the cats, told him about those falconer gloves he'd loved so much. He'd been
so easy to manipulate. Sharing his secret and me sharing mine.

The gnosis.

The secret.

In retrospect, it would have been better to keep him out of it. He was a sad, deluded man, driven forward by his ambition and his fear. I'd peeled him like the layers of an onion; first when he was my private tutor and then when I suggested he reopen the Tesla school.

And of course when I told him about the Other World and that I could save him from his disease, that I was the Chosen One and that cats were a familiar for him and a sign for me …

Poor Lebkuchen. How his head had been turned with my stories of magic and sorcery.

He really must have been crazy.

Anyway, all that was in the past. Finished. Over and done with.

The page-one story had become a page-two story had become a page-six story. It wasn't picked up in the national press or the TV news. Now even the school was open again with many of the same teachers, almost all the same students. The events of January were like a bad dream.

It was all so neat and pretty.

Danny and Tony together. Danny and his dad reaching a new understanding. My own dear father due back in a few weeks. Lebkuchen and his father united in death. Of course,
if Lebkuchen hadn't botched that whole operation in the rock canyon, I was going to use the postcard I stole from Bob's cell to set him up. Bob would have been the perfect victim instead of a hero!

Oh well …

At least I'm safe up here. I can see the whole town from up here.

“The whole world,” I mutter sarcastically, and turn the periscope viewer through 360 degrees, looking at Pikes Peak, the US Olympic Training Center, Goose Gossage Field, Colorado College, the Air Force Academy, Fort Carson, the entrance to NORAD over at Cheyenne Mountain …

I look for a while and then, bored, put the lens cover on the device. I flick through my DVDs, briefly consider
The Invisible Man
or
A Matter of Life and Death
, aka
Stairway to Heaven
, but finally decide on nothing.

I lean back in my chair and wonder if the only thing this whole episode has taught me is the value of patience. Lebkuchen's problem was that he was impulsive, quicktempered. He didn't see that life was counted in years and decades, not weeks and days. Even with his condition he could have waited a little longer.

I certainly will not be carrying out any acts of violence for a long time now.

I'll probably wait until I join the army.

I'll be a pacifist until then. (Except of course for the rodent hearts I now put in my hot chocolate.)

Perhaps, though, it is time for a new letter to Tony?

I begin scratching on a piece of paper:
I, Indrid Cold, the Grinning Man, the Seeker, the Believer, wish you to know that I have only the greatest respect for you and that I wish you no harm
…

The doorbell rings.

I crumple up the paper and throw it in the trash can.

“Mother!” I yell, but then I remember that she's visiting the graveyard today. This is the anniversary of the accident. My poor brother, John, killed on the way to his job at the animal shelter. A random accident on I-25. A job he'd only taken so it would look good on his Harvard application, and possibly because our own dear kitty was accidentally poisoned.

Cleaning and inoculating all those stray cats and dogs—what a bore.

Poor John.

John, who really raised me when Dad was off with the Army or lobbying in Washington DC, leaving his family on that awful ranch that no one liked. Least of all me.

It was after John's death that I had run away, been expelled from Colorado Academy, had run away again and got private tuition.

That, I suppose, was when it all began.

The doorbell rings a second time.

“I suppose I'll have to get it myself,” I mutter to the unseen listeners. To those Watchers who control everything in this wicked, fallen sim that we call the earth.

I get up from my chair and walk down those three flights.

I open the door. It's Danny standing there with beautiful Tony.

Smiles on both their faces.

“Hiya, Tom,” Tony says.

“Come in,” I reply, and grin so hard that it actually hurts.

“We will,” Danny says.

“So,” I ask with more forced cheerfulness, “who would like some of my famous hot chocolate?”

Adrian McKinty is an award-winning crime novelist, and his Lighthouse Trilogy series of young adult novels was published by Amulet. He was born and raised in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied philosophy at Oxford University, and in the early 1990s he immigrated to New York City, where he found work as a construction worker, barman, and bookstore clerk. In 2000, Adrian relocated to Denver, Colorado, where he taught high school English for nine years until moving with his family to Melbourne, Australia.