Dash was strictly for little kids. I had done it once, back before Liz, back before that fucker James Mackenzie stole our money in his Ponzi scheme, even before the day Mona Burkett told me turkeys weren’t green. Back when I was a little kid and the world was my oyster.
That seemed so long ago.
42
You may be asking yourself a question I never asked myself back then: Why me? Why Jamie Conklin? I have asked myself since, and I don’t know. I can only guess. I think it was because I was different, and it—the it inside the shell of Therriault—hated me for it and wanted to hurt me, even destroy me if it could. I think, call me crazy if you want, I offended it somehow. And maybe there was something else. I think maybe—just maybe—the Ritual of Chüd had already begun.
I think that once it started fucking with me it couldn’t stop.
As I said, just guessing here. Its reasons might have been something else entirely, as unknowable as it was to me. And as monstrous. As I said, this is a horror story.
43
I was still scared of Therriault, but I no longer thought that I might chicken out if an opportunity came to put Professor Burkett’s ritual into practice. I only needed to be ready. For Therriault to get close, in other words, not just be across the street or standing near third base at Citi Field.
My chance came on a Saturday in October. I was going down to Grover Park to play touch football with a bunch of kids from my school. Mom left me a note that said she’d stayed up late reading Philippa Stephens’s latest opus and was going to sleep in. I was to get my breakfast quietly, and no more than half a cup of coffee. I was to have a good time with my friends and not come home with a concussion or a broken arm. I was to be back by two at the very latest. She left me lunch money, which I folded carefully into my pocket. There was a PS: Would it be a waste of time to ask you to eat something green, even a scrap of lettuce on a hamburger?
Probably, Mom, probably, I thought as I poured myself a bowl of Cheerios and ate them (quietly).
When I left the apartment, Therriault wasn’t on my mind. He spent less and less time there, and I used some of the newly available space to think about other things, mostly girls. I was dwelling on Valeria Gomez in particular as I walked down the hall to the elevator. Did Therriault decide to get close that day because he had a kind of window into my head, and knew he was far from my thoughts? Sort of a low-grade telepathy? I don’t know that either.
I pushed the call button, wondering if Valeria would come to the game. It was quite possible because her brother Pablo played. I was deep in a daydream of how I caught a pass, evaded all would-be touchers, and sped into the end zone with the ball held high, but I still stepped back when the elevator arrived—that had become second nature to me. It was empty. I pushed for the lobby. The elevator went down and the door opened. There was a short stub of hallway, and then a door, locked from the inside, which gave on a little foyer. The door to the outside wasn’t locked, so the mailman could come in and put the mail in the boxes. If Therriault had been out there, in the foyer, I couldn’t have done what I did. But he wasn’t in the foyer. He was inside, at the end of the hall, grinning away like doing so was going to be outlawed the day after tomorrow.
He started to say something, maybe one of his bullshit prophecies, and if I’d been thinking of him instead of Valeria, I probably would have either frozen in place or stumbled back into the elevator car, whamming on the DOOR CLOSE button for all I was worth. But I was being pissed at him for intruding on my fantasy and all I remember thinking was what Professor Burkett told me on the day I brought him the casserole.
“The tongue-biting in the Ritual of Chüd is only one ceremony before meeting an enemy,” he said. “There are many. The Maoris do a war-cry dance as they face their opponents. Kamikaze pilots toasted each