Madisonville Murder: Part 11
On the Horns of a Dilemma
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The next day, I was relieved to see Gavin, who’d said he wasn’t going to be able to join us.
“Practice was cancelled,” he said. “I’d usually be upset by that this close to the beginning of the season, but I’d rather be with you guys for this.”
Needless to say, I was delighted. I no longer entirely trusted Virginia, and having someone else helping me keep an eye on her made me feel more confident that we might actually end up with a good result.
Virginia used magic to make us invisible and inaudible so that we could follow Curtis’s kid without being noticed. Since we were with her, she didn’t need to let us see through her eyes or hear through her ears this time. Given how I had somehow hijacked the connection last time to make her hear me, I doubted she’d be offering me that kind of access again.
However, she did enable both Gavin and me to see magic. That ability would help us determine if the boy was somehow using magic, which would have suggested he wasn’t just a reward for Dr. Curtis but also an active agent of evil.
That was the stated purpose, anyway. I couldn’t help wondering if Virginia also wanted us to see the kid as an animated corpse so that she could dehumanize him in our minds and make us ready to accept his death.
I’d be the first to admit that watching him, corpse-pale and dead-eyed, as he walked down the street made me afraid of him. But even though he no longer looked human, he moved and spoke exactly like the teenager the world saw when they looked at him.
He was also dressed like a regular teenager—jeans, a dark T-shirt with lighter images celebrating some band I’d never heard of, and tennis shoes. He wore his backpack slung over one shoulder. He shuffled along with his eyes glued to his cellphone, as teenagers often do. But aside from the fact that he managed that trick without tripping over his own feet, he showed no sign of being anything other than he appeared to be—except for the signs of death that only someone with magical vision could see.
Luckily for us, it was the first day of school at Madisonville High School, about a week before classes started at UC Merced. I don’t know what we would have done if the kid had been at home all day. This way, we could see what he was up to and not miss classes ourselves. I tried not to think about the fact that if we didn’t find some way to resolve this problem soon, Gavin and I would both be in a bind logistically.
As the kid approached Madisonville High School, I watched carefully how he interacted with peers. Everything seemed perfectly normal. He gave some a head nod, others a somewhat more heartfelt greeting, but all of them seemed to like him. Ben—I’d picked up the name from his friend’s greetings—even tried awkwardly flirting with a girl who seemed well out of his league. I should know—most girls had been out of mine in high school. I could recognize the signs, such as the way the girl looked through him rather than at him, her face carefully neutral, waiting for an opportunity to slip away from him.
“You can’t really expect someone who still wears Star Trek jammies at his age to have all that much game,” said Gavin.
“Live long and prosper,” I replied, giving him a Vulcan salute. “We nerds have to own it!”
Gavin and I both smiled—until Virginia cleared her throat, reminding us of why we were here. But it was nice to have been able to feel like a regular guy for a second or two.
Though we were invisible and inaudible, we weren’t intangible—which meant maneuvering the crowded school hallways was more difficult than I’d anticipated. We had to stick really close to Ben. People who avoided walking into him might miss us that way. Even so, we missed a couple of collisions by less than an inch.
Sliding along as flush to the wall as we could get would have been a good option—except that most of the walls were lined with lockers, and we never knew when we’d end up standing in the way of a student trying to reach his or hers.
Just getting to first period made me feel as nervous as a cat next to a rocking chair. The fact that we made it after a few light scrapes against someone was almost enough to make me reconsider my agnosticism.
Being in the classroom was going to be tough. There were no empty seats, and the aisle at the back of the room was pretty narrow. But since it was the first day, I didn’t think the teacher would need to move around back there, so the three of us lined up against the back wall.
The class was English, and the teacher was the very same Mrs. McCready whose absence I’d found most notable the day I started investigating Cynthia’s murder. She’d evidently come back to do her usual classroom cleaning after that. The desks were in neat rows and the tops all sparkled as if she’d waxed them.
Evidently, she was teaching freshman English this year, but otherwise, her opening day presentation was pretty much the same as what Gavin and I had seen in the years we’d had her. Ben was paying enough attention to make sure his cell phone was off and away, but otherwise, he didn’t seem that engaged in what she was saying. However, that was more like typical teenage behavior than the symptom of some diabolical tendency. Toward the end of class he doodled a bit on a small piece of paper, but he wasn’t drawing pentagrams or anything else that might be interpreted as satanic or demonic. As far as I could tell, he was just moving his pencil more or less at random.
Each hour after that was much the same—a harrowing attempt to get through the halls without being trampled or even discovered by students who couldn’t see us or hear us, following by a routine opening day in each of Ben’s other classes. By the time we finally reached lunch, I found myself yawning.
“Perhaps tomorrow, we should go watch paint dry to see if Satan is somehow involved,” said Gavin.
“This is serious!” snapped Virginia, whose patience seemed to be wearing thin. I had to admit that I had been out of high school for only a short time, Gavin for only a year. I supposed being here like this was making us regress a little.
But high school, at least until my junior year, had been so much simpler than the life I led now. In some ways, I longed to go back to being a high school sophomore with no knowledge of the supernatural.
We followed Ben to the cafeteria and had the thrill of watching him eat. I couldn’t tell what he was doing with the food. It seemed unlikely that he still had any way of digesting it, but somehow, it disappeared. After all, Satan had to have made him at least look like a human kid leading a human life. The Devil couldn’t have fooled his father otherwise.
“As far as I can tell, regardless of the condition of Ben’s body, his soul is still in it,” I said. “His actions have been totally normal the whole day, without even a hint of evil,”
“It’s possible that Satan has replicated his original personality with magic,” said Virginia. “Since none of us can read minds, we don’t know what—or even if—he’s thinking.”
“Then what’s the point of observing him if what we see might mean nothing?” asked Gavin. Virginia glared at him but said nothing but didn’t respond.
“As far as we can tell, Ben still has his soul and is unaware that anything’s wrong,” I said. “I’m not going to be responsible for killing a kid—even if he isn’t technically alive.”
“We might be able to test how much he knows,” said Virginia. “But be prepared to run when we do. Satan might not notice us tracking Curtis’s son, but he’s bound to notice if I interfere with the magic on Ben.”
“When you say ‘interfere,’ I assume you don’t intend to do something that will kill him,” I said.
“No, what I propose is much less drastic than that.”
That was all that Virginia would say when I pressed for more details. I should probably have insisted that she not do anything unless she told us in advance what she had planned—but she would likely have done what she wanted to, regardless of what I said.
We followed Ben about halfway home without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Ben was browsing on his cellphone most of the time, but as we passed through the tiny area referred to as downtown Madisonville, where the diner and a few other businesses were, Ben did a little window shopping. He lingered for a moment in front of a gift store, perhaps thinking about what he could buy his out-of-his-league crush. That was when Virginia struck.
Making herself audible, she whispered in Ben’s ear, “You’re dead,” and with a wave of her hand, she adjusted the illusion of humanity around him so that he could see through it.
His eyes widened as he looked at his reflection in the window—no doubt amplified by a little of Virginia’s magic. Dead eyes stared back at him out of a face that looked as if it had been in the ground for at least a few days.
He did what any normal person would do when confronted with a sight like that. He backed away whispering, “No,” and shaking his head as he did so.
This was not the reaction of someone who already knew he was dead. I felt vindicated—for a second or two.
Ben looked down at his hands and screamed.
“Put back the illusion!” I yelled. Virginia ignored me, her eyes tracking Ben’s every move.
He might have talked himself into the idea that the reflection in the window was some kind of trick of the light, but he couldn’t so easily dismiss the sight of his own hands, much paler and bonier than they should have been. Still screaming, he turned and ran down the street as fast as he could. He didn’t seem to notice when his backpack slid off his should her and hit the ground.
‘This proves his soul is there, doesn’t it?” I asked, my voice deliberately harsh.
Before Virginia could answer, Gavin took off at his top speed, chasing Ben as if the kid’s life depended on it.
Ben had run out into the street, oblivious to the oncoming traffic. Gavin was trying to grab him and pull him back, but even a three-sport athlete like Gavin couldn’t move that fast.
I heard the squeal of brakes applied too late. My stomach couldn’t decide whether to flip-flop or tie itself in knots.
I knew Ben was dead. But I rejected the idea of letting him get smashed by a car. Every instinct I had screamed at me to do something. But what could I possibly do?
Madisonville Murder is related to the Soul Salvager trilogy. (The action falls between the prologue and chapter one of the first book.)
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