I think they Know, the next one starts. There’s a picture of an eyeball underneath these words. It’s not identical to any of the eyes on the penis-monster in the first solo booth, but the harshness of its line—the way the rounded curves darken as they progress toward their meeting point; the reinforced thickness—seems sufficient. Ang saw people snooping around and warned me. Everybody worried now. Feel like shit. Ang says I shouldn’t feel bad it’s nobody’s fault. Knew this couldn’t last forever but oh well.
“Knew this couldn’t last forever but oh well.” If the true crime goblins cruising the web for rare finds had actually known what this unassuming-looking binder actually was, I’d never have even learned it existed. But I did, and its contents awakened my first suspicions that Devil House, and in particular the story of Derrick Hall, was something wholly apart from any old news stories Ashton might have run across on his lunch hour: the reality of it was something different from the story told by the local press and, eventually, by the national news media. It would be a disservice to the living and the dead alike to rehash these stories; it would be beneath me, I thought, which was saying something. I haunt dreadful places and try to coax ghosts from the walls, and then I sell pictures of the ghosts for money. I’m not ashamed of my work—I think it’s good, when it’s good. I won’t apologize for that. But I also can’t argue too strenuously against several cases that might be made against it; and this notebook made me pause, in the stillness of a summer evening in this ridiculous house, where nothing much ever happened save occasional knocks on the door from speculative realtors. I wondered how much of the story I’d come to tell was something I’d brought with me, more outline awaiting shades than a blank page seeking figures who lived in three dimensions.
It was a moment. I made note of it. Then I reflected that I’d already claimed half my advance against royalties, and returned to my work.
2.
YELLOW MOLD
It took ten minutes from his doorstep to school if he rode his bike: he’d timed it. Most days it took a little longer, but the direct route—north, then west, then north again—could be done in ten flat if he set out at a clip and didn’t let up.
The other way from his house to school cut south through Cardoza Park, crossing under the cloverleaf before riding up Escuela Parkway. There was no good reason to take this route; it cost a few extra minutes, risked more stoplights, and didn’t boast better scenery than the quicker path. But he left early for school and rode south from his door all the same, both because the empty streets in the early morning felt free and peaceful in a way that had always appealed to him, and because the longer way around would take him past Monster Adult X. He was curious to see if anything had happened to it yet.
It didn’t look any different. Gates hadn’t even gotten around to putting up a sign. The grass in the useless little side yard was uncut and ragged, and there were beer cans and empty potato chip bags in the entryway. Freeway detritus, eternal. Out of habit, Derrick picked some of it up and carried it around back to the Dumpster. And then, leaning into a different habit, he took the key he still had on his key ring and opened the back door.
It felt weird; Milpitas was a sleepy town, but police sometimes parked under the on-ramp. He punched in the alarm code, which still worked—maybe nothing would have happened if he hadn’t, since he knew Hawley wouldn’t have paid the security company a dime past September, but he didn’t want to chance it. Inside, things were unchanged. If there’d been any prospective buyers stopping by to survey the property, they’d left no trace of their visits.
He sat down in his old seat behind the front counter; it was dark inside, but a little morning light seeped in through the painted-over windows, just enough to sketch by. He got out a notebook, and he spent fifteen minutes working on his coat of arms. It was an idea he’d been sporadically refining ever since first hearing about shields and crests in the fourth grade: trying to squeeze a true representation of himself into a single image appealed to him on an almost basic level. It was a task whose culmination both beckoned and threatened; every new iteration of his crest gave both the satisfaction of having arrived somewhere new and the possibility of greater refinements down the line.
Derrick’s crest as it presently stood had four quadrants, up from three in childhood. The balance appealed to him. The concepts he hoped to depict had grown denser and more abstract over the years, and would have been hard to explain to outsiders, but he didn’t talk about them to anybody but Seth, who, of course, had dozens of crests of his own, each wilder than the last: The Shield of Unbreakable Perfection. The Great Flag of Blood Warfare. Death’s Herald.