The Demon Road Trilogy: The Complete Collection: Demon Road; Desolation; American Monsters. Derek Landy
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Teddy said. “I haven’t seen them fully because I honestly don’t think I’m able. But I’ve seen enough to know that whatever path you’re on, it’s something I can’t help you with.”
“I understand.”
“You get back to bed now, Amber. And you have good dreams, you hear me? The world’s just about full up of the other kind.”
SHERIFF ROOSEVELT HAD ALREADY left for work when Amber got up the next morning. She joined Milo and Glen at the table and Ella-May served them breakfast, but didn’t eat with them. Amber ate in silence and Milo didn’t say a word. Even Glen seemed subdued.
They threw their bags in the Charger and went back inside to pay. Ella-May gave Milo a handwritten receipt and walked them to the door and they stood there, waiting for someone to say something.
Ella-May was the one to puncture the quiet. “I’m not going to ask about your business,” she said. “I’m not going to ask why you’re interested in a man who has killed so many people, or how you know what you know. There’s a dark underbelly to this country and I am well aware that there are people who have to walk through it – oftentimes through no fault of their own. If you’re on that path … well, I’d pray for you if I prayed.”
Amber gave her a small, pained smile.
Ella-May nodded brusquely. “I’ve called Heather. I told her to speak to you if she’s in the mood. That’s no guarantee that she will, mind you. My daughter is her own woman. The library opens late today, so she’ll be at work at two. You could call in then, see if she’s feeling talkative. Good day to you, now.”
She closed the door.
At ten minutes past two, they walked into the library and found Heather Medina restocking shelves in the Self-help section. Up close, she was an attractive woman with plump, soft lips but hard eyes. There was a thin scar on her neck that disappeared behind the collar of her blouse. Everything about her, from her manner to the shoes that she wore – practical, like she was ready to run or fight at any given moment – screamed survivor. Amber liked her instantly.
“Your mother sent us,” Milo said.
Heather nodded, and kept sliding books on to the shelves. “She told me you’re a curious bunch, with a particular interest in our town’s recent history. I told her I’d already been speaking to you. I told her you’re not exactly subtle.”
“She said you’d talk to us if you were in a talkative mood,” Amber said.
“And you’re wondering what kind of mood I’m currently in?” asked Heather. “It’s Amber, right? And Glen? I used to have a boyfriend called Glen. Really good guy. I guess he was my first love. My high-school sweetheart. Dacre Shanks came back from the dead and killed him when I was sixteen.”
She said it so matter-of-factly that Amber didn’t notice the words sliding down her spine until they made her shiver. “It’s true, then? Everything we’ve heard?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Heather. “It all depends on what you’ve heard, doesn’t it?”
The elderly librarian passed, gave them all a suspicious look, and Heather smiled, keeping her eyes locked on her until she’d moved out of earshot.
“When I was a kid, we all knew who Dacre Shanks was,” said Heather. “I grew up hearing about the things he’d done and how my mother had been the one to figure it all out. In the playground, my friends used to re-enact the night he died. They’d take turns to be my dad and the other deputies, and they’d go in, guns blazing, and whoever was playing Shanks would howl and scream and whirl around and around as the bullets hit him. It was town history that quickly became town legend. My sister, Christina, she was older than me, looked just like my mom, so, even though my mother wasn’t actually there the night Shanks died, the kids decided it’d be neater, more satisfying, if she were. Christina was in great demand during recess.”
Heather smiled sadly, then shook the smile away.
“Christina went missing when she was sixteen,” she continued. “The ten-year anniversary of Shanks’s death, to the hour. She vanished, right out of her bedroom. Over the next few weeks, four others disappeared too – a man, a woman, a fourteen-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl.”
“I’m sorry,” Amber said quietly.
“It tore us apart for a while, my family. But my parents … I don’t know. They’re stronger than most, maybe. Then, exactly a year later, another five people went missing. Man, woman and three kids. Year after that, another five … They wouldn’t be related, the five people, but they would all look vaguely alike in some way. It’s what Shanks used to do. He’d make his grotesque little families.”
“And everyone thought it was a copycat killer,” said Milo.
“Everyone but me,” said Heather. She rolled the cart of books to the Cooking section, started transferring them to the shelves. “Even my mom couldn’t see what was happening. She has an amazing mind, but believing that a killer had returned from the dead was a stretch too far for her. I was sixteen years old and Shanks came after me – chased me through the old theatre where we used to hold our recitals. I ran straight into the janitor and we went flying, but, when I looked up, Shanks was gone. Me and a few friends broke into his old store and found a secret room that my dad and the other cops hadn’t even looked for. There were all these dollhouses. They were fully furnished, but only half of them had any figures in them. These little people, like porcelain or something, sitting at the table or watching TV or playing with tiny, tiny toys on the carpet. I recognised my sister immediately. She was sitting on a bed upstairs, reading a book with a big smile on her face.”
“Figurines of his victims,” Glen said. “Creepy.”
Heather shook her head. “You’re not getting it. Shanks made the house, the furniture, all that stuff. But he didn’t make the figures. He caught them.”
Milo frowned. “Sorry?”
Heather made sure the elderly librarian wasn’t within range, and she leaned in. “The figures were his victims. That was my sister sitting on the toy bed. My actual sister. He’d got her smile wrong, though. Christina always had this lopsided smile. He got that wrong.”
“But you said the figures were made of porcelain,” said Amber.
“That’s what it looked like,” Heather replied. “But I saw what he did to their bodies, when they were dead. He embalmed them. The cellar of his toyshop was one big embalming room. Then he dressed them and … and posed them. He’d stitch expressions on to their faces and arrange their arms this way or that … When he had them the way he wanted, he’d cover them with a kind of resin to hold them in place, and put them in the dollhouse.”
“Yeah, no, still not getting it,” said Glen. “Because the figures in dollhouses are tiny. It sounds like what you’re telling us is that he killed them, embalmed them, and then shrank them, but you’re a normal, sane lady so that can’t be what you’re actually saying.”
“He didn’t shrink them,” said Heather. “Not really. Shanks called it doorway magic. He had this key, this special key, which acted as a tunnel, I guess, from one door to any other, whichever one he wanted. That’s how he took people. That’s how they vanished.
“When he took Glen – my boyfriend – he told him about it. Glen wrote it all down. I found it when I went looking for him, a scrap of paper soaked in his blood. Shanks was linking a normal door to the dollhouse doors – when you passed through, you became smaller. Shanks would work on the bodies here, get them into the proper poses, and then put them through into the dollhouse, where they’d be the