WOMAN 1: She was always nice to me!
WOMAN 2: That is a nice lady. This can’t be right.
MAN: There’s no way. People are saying she cut up those guys and sacrificed them or something. There’s no way.
WOMAN 2: She’s just a teacher!
WOMAN 1: I don’t believe it.
MAN: Somebody was saying she did it right there on the beach. In the middle of the night, they were saying. It sounds so awful but there’s no way.
WOMAN 2: There’s no way.
WOMAN 1: She tracked blood all the way down the hall, I heard. Bloody footsteps. I don’t believe it, but here we all are.
MAN: What kind of person does that?
WOMAN 1: This is a safe place! What kind of person?
WOMAN 2: I don’t know. They say it was her, but I don’t know.
WOMAN 1: And she was always so nice.
WOMAN 2: I know! And it’s safe here, like you say. I don’t believe it. I just don’t.
3
Devil House
1.
KNIGHTS REALM
Derrick didn’t have a regular shift at Monster Adult X. His arrangement with the store was informal but reliable: he showed up when he could and helped out where needed. Anthony Hawley wanted to help Derrick out, because Derrick’s presence haunting the racks had lent an agreeable energy to the often otherwise empty store back when it sold comic books. Then he’d persuaded Hawley to let him do busywork for store credit now and again—straightening up the racks, or running a vacuum over the dingy carpet. Hawley could still remember the frustration, in his younger days, of getting turned down for easy jobs on the grounds that he lacked experience; before he made the shift to dirty movies and magazines, he told Derrick he’d be welcome to stay on if he wasn’t bothered by the new stock. “You’re eighteen, though, right?” he asked feebly when he’d made the offer. Derrick laughed and said something about September birthdays, though he wouldn’t actually turn eighteen for several months. But vice economies avoid the radar. Anthony Hawley wasn’t going to demand to see his ID.
He felt confident about Derrick, who showed promise, with his canvas backpack smartly slung over his arm everywhere he went. In Hawley’s day, wearing your backpack around town after school would have been a kind of social suicide, but Derrick made it work; once, when business was slow, Anthony’d caught him cleaning it with a fresh toothbrush, the way you might with a pair of shoes you wanted to keep new. It left an impression: Derrick didn’t idle. When he ran out of tasks, he sought out more to do, and when there were no more tasks to be found, he tended quietly to his own affairs.
The arrival of the new stock didn’t seem to faze him. One day, half of it arrived all at once on a pallet from Encino: several hundred pounds of pornography, tightly shrink-wrapped in plastic and vacuum-sealed. In the supply closet there was a giant stack of comics Hawley had paid cash for and couldn’t return; the supply closet claimed more of Derrick’s interest than the store could. Plenty of teenage boys would have been willing to risk a shoplifting charge to get their hands on the torrid stuff now glistening under fluorescent lights inside the revamped Valley News, but Derrick couldn’t see himself as one of those guys who openly ogled Playboy at the barbershop. All this harder stuff seemed a little gross. Any reading he did behind the counter consisted of comics dead stock.
Anthony felt largely the same way about his new inventory, but business was business. For the first few weeks after the big changeover, as shipments of fresh tapes and magazines arrived every other day, he’d found some of it a little exciting—in plenty of places, you’d had to go to ratty movie theaters if you wanted to see this kind of stuff. But being surrounded by porn all day numbs you up in a hurry. After you’ve seen the people who can’t seem to live without it, shuffling in through the door every day, struggling to make eye contact as you change out their bills for tokens, your attitude shifts; even sadder are the ones who don’t struggle at all, who hang around the counter trying to make conversation. They were all friendly enough; he tried not to judge them. But it’s easy to get jaded.
Derrick saw Hawley’s gentle manner with his new customers as worth emulating. There was something desperate in how the people coming in always kept their heads down until the door shut all the way behind them. Everybody needs something. Sometimes a customer, mid-conversation and without any evident provocation, would start regaling Derrick with itineraries of perversions, disgusting things—acts they’d either seen or heard about, unnatural things that sounded like unpolished fantasies half the time—and then his sympathy felt more like pity. But unless they left more mess in the booths than they had to, he bore them no ill will. He couldn’t understand the ones who didn’t clean up after themselves, though. Didn’t they know somebody else was going to have to do it?