chalkboard. They loved riddles and mysteries, so she put up a riddle each day on the chalkboard from the Anglo-Saxon Book of Exeter for them to puzzle over. They drew maps of England, studied the Danish sagas that had inspired Beowulf, histories featuring men with names like Ivar the Boneless and Ragnar Shaggy-pants, who was executed by being lowered into a pit of vipers. It was all a little corny maybe, but she had found a way to make this ancient story come alive. They needed her, a PhD washout who hadn’t been able to finish her dissertation, a pregnant woman with all sorts of fears and hang-ups of her own, but someone who knew the world and could talk to them about it on their own level. She learned how desperate many of them were to get out of this town, how eager for news of life in the outside world, for what awaited them—a few of them—at college.
Even so, she made plenty of mistakes, pried when she shouldn’t have. During a classroom discussion about Grendel descending from Cain, about original sin and monsters, Kelan Gunderson had raised his hand. His black hair was trimmed in a neat crew cut around his square face, and he wore a letterman’s jacket in the school colors, scarlet and gold. Kelan, Seth, and Leah had been an inseparable trio in the hallways.
“Mrs. Warren,” Kelan asked, “do you believe in the devil?”
Caught off guard, Clara laughed nervously at first, thinking of Dana Carvey’s Church Lady impressions on Saturday Night Live. But Kelan wasn’t smiling, and the rest of the class seemed to await an honest answer. Did she? Was it necessary to believe in the devil if you believed in God? Clara had always considered the devil just an ancient bogeyman, as mythic as Grendel, an excuse for the darker aspects of humanity, but she couldn’t say that here, not as the pastor’s wife. She was not used to being in a position of authority.
“You heard what happened over in Amroy?” Kelan went on when she hesitated. “Some Satanists killed a farmer’s pig for one of their rituals. Cut off its head; gutted the body.” This announcement sparked a host of side discussions throughout the class, rumors of rituals back in the woods or on isolated farms that involved molested children, animal dismemberment, secret graves.
“Did any of you see this with your own eyes?” Clara said, trying to get control of the conversation once more.
“My dad’s the sheriff,” Kelan continued. “He could tell you stories about what goes on in this town.” The other students in the room quieted. She felt a collective leaning toward Kelan. Seth they feared for his size and violence, but Kelan held sway with personality. Being the son of the sheriff made every story he told matter that much more. Worse, Clara felt somehow that they needed to believe that these things were happening nearby out in the woods. Such stories offered the delicious shiver that comes from walking in a nightmare and returning safe to your ordinary world.
“Look,” said Clara, “if you read the accounts of serial killers, it’s not the devil they report giving them marching orders. It’s not the devil’s voice they claim to hear up in their heads.”
It’s God who they say told them to kill, she was about to say. But Kelan cut her off. “Do you believe in him, Mrs. Warren? You didn’t answer my question.”
She wasn’t going to lie. These kids had grown up with lies. Adults telling lies to children to keep them afraid or to keep them safe. If Clara held sway here in this room, it was as a truth teller. She hadn’t lied, and she wasn’t going to start. “What do you think?” she said, turning the question back on him.
“The devil is a roaring lion in this world,” he said, his gray eyes shining, and his words flit about the hushed room like bats.
Clara had not meant to think of Kelan now. In truth there was something smug and condescending about the boy that got under her skin. She was trying to remember Seth, the last time she saw him. Clara had been concentrating so she could finish grading a batch of five-paragraph essays from the sophomores on the definition of a hero. She needed to finish them and then get home and start dinner for Logan. It was late in the day, and most of her fellow teachers had gone home, an unnatural quiet spreading