Personal Demons Read online

  Personal

  Demons

  by

  Donald Hanley

  Copyright © Donald Hanley 2018

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art by Donald Hanley

  The Random Encounters Series

  Personal Demons

  Other Books by Donald Hanley

  The Simulated Crime Series

  Simulated Murder

  Simulated Assault

  Simulated Conspiracy

  Simulated Assassination

  Simulated Blackmail

  Simulated Abduction

  Simulated Sabotage

  The Order of the Shamrock Series

  Lucky

  Faithful

  Hopeful

  Beloved

  The Knights of Excalibur Series

  Gawain

  1

  If you draw a line from Fort Worth to San Antonio and another one from Abilene to Nacogdoches, the point where they cross falls smack on top of Hellburn, Texas, population 9,451.

  In 1865, a cattle rancher named Henry Milton bought 10,000 acres of land just south of the Brazos River. Two years later, he suddenly left it all behind and moved north to Tulsa, Oklahoma, proclaiming to anyone who would listen, “I’d rather burn in Hell than spend another summer’s day in that God-forsaken hole.” The town that eventually grew up around Milton’s abandoned ranch was named Hellburn in his honor.

  Every year, Texas Leisure magazine sends out a survey to all the small towns in Texas asking them to list all the Fun Things To Do there, for the benefit of anyone who might happen to find themselves in that particular location with an hour or two to kill. This year, somebody misplaced the paperwork for Hellburn so its entry had nothing listed, thereby officially making us the most boring place in Texas. I can’t bring myself to disagree with that assessment. Nothing ever happens in Hellburn.

  Nothing, that is, until the eve of my 18th birthday.

  It was exactly eighteen hundred and forty steps from the bus stop on the corner of Main and Maple to our front door. I knew this because I made that particular trek every Wednesday through Saturday after my shift at the Dairy Queen. The distance never varied but the time it took me to traverse it did, depending on the weather, the day of the week, and how much soda and ice cream I had to mop off the restaurant floor before heading out the door.

  Today was an average Saturday in May, so I reached the gate of our white picket fence just sixteen minutes after stepping off the #20 bus. I grabbed the mail from the mailbox and bumped the gate open with my hip, sorting through the envelopes as I navigated the walkway neatly dividing our front lawn into two identical squares of verdant fescue. We had the greenest grass in the entire neighborhood, lovingly pampered by Mom and mowed and edged weekly by yours truly. I envied the benign neglect everyone else bestowed upon their yards, especially now that summer loomed on the horizon.

  The only piece of mail not addressed to Mom and Dad or the ubiquitous Resident was a blue envelope with my name written across it in a spidery scrawl, postmarked from Tucson. If previous history was any guide, this was a birthday card featuring puppies and/or balloons along with a crisp five-dollar bill. I thought about informing Grandma Marjorie that her thoughtful gift barely covered the cost of a cheeseburger, sides and drink not included, but I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. At least she remembered and that had to count for something.

  I slipped my finger under the flap to open it and nearly planted my face into the front door when my toe caught on something. As it was, I jammed my fingers trying to catch my balance and dropped the mail, stifling the choice four-letter words I wanted to utter to express my dissatisfaction with current events. Instead, I shook out my throbbing hand as I looked around for the cause of my mishap.

  A small box lay on the welcome mat, surrounded by the scattered bills and flyers. It was roughly eight inches on a side, wrapped securely in brown paper and packing tape, and surprisingly heavy when I picked it up. I shook it cautiously, hoping I hadn’t broken anything, but whatever was inside barely shifted.

  I flipped it over, looking for the addressee. My fleeting hope that it was a birthday gift from some distant relative was dashed when I saw the name on the shipping label: Susan Collins. I didn’t recognize the company – BB Imports in New York – but that didn’t mean much. Susie was always ordering junk from all over creation. “Probably a fresh supply of eye of newt,” I grumbled. I gathered up the mail and went inside. “Mom, I’m home!”

  I was greeted with silence. That wasn’t terribly unusual for a late Saturday afternoon in the Collins household but Mom generally told us if she was volunteering at the library or the retirement home or the garden society or any of the hundred other charities and causes she was involved with. She hadn’t mentioned anything when I headed out to work but then I tended to tune her out out of self-defense. She often mistook attention for interest so the best way to avoid getting dragged along with her was to pretend she hadn’t said anything at all.

  I went into the kitchen to check the calendar on the fridge. Most of the days were crammed with cryptic annotations in black, blue, and green ink, but Saturday, May 12th, was unusually empty, with just a single note: HLWC 9AM. The Hellburn Ladies Walking Club had a weekly gossipfest disguised as a four-mile stroll around the town center but that had ended hours ago.

  A hastily scribbled note on the kitchen table solved the mystery:

  Jack, Peter, and Susie,

  Mrs. Gifford asked me if I could help out with the pet adoption event going on at Granbury’s this evening. How could I say no to that? It runs until 8 so make yourselves dinner. There’s plenty of leftover meatloaf in the fridge.

  Love, Mom

  “Pizza it is, then,” I declared. I tossed the mail onto the table, extracted my five dollars from Grandma’s card, and carried Susie’s package down the hall. Her bedroom door was closed as usual so I knocked and waited. I liked to tell myself that I was being respectful of her privacy but in reality I’d learned that barging in unannounced was just asking for trouble.

  Nothing happened for a slow count to five and I wondered if Susie had her headphones on or something. I was about to knock again when her door opened just enough to reveal a two-inch slice of her face, centered on her left eye. It was narrowed in suspicion.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You got something in the mail.” I held up the box and her eye focused on it.

  “Finally.” Her bare arm snaked out to take the package from my hand, almost dropping it when its weight surprised her. She was briefly stymied when it wouldn’t fit through the gap and she reluctantly opened the door enough for it to pass through. I glimpsed enough of her to see she was going skyclad again but I pretended not to notice. Susie had a unique perspective on what constituted proper attire but after all these years we were used to it, more or less.

  “So what is it?” I asked. Her door paused in the act of shutting me and the rest of the world out.

  “Stuff,” she allowed. “Important stuff.” The door closed with a firm clunk, accompanied by the click of the latch, and I heard the unmistakable clack of the lock being turned.

  “I’m going to order pizza!” I called through the door. “Do you want some?”

  There was a pause and then her lock clacked again and her eye reappeared. “Double cheese.”

  “Okay. I’ll call you when it’s here.”

  “Thanks.” The gap shrank to nothing. Clunk-click-clack.

  “You’re welcome,” I told the door and then I went across the hall to my room.

  Our house nearly qualified for the senior discount at
IHOP, so none of the rooms were particularly roomy and my bedroom was no exception. It had a bed, a dresser, a tiny desk keeping my laptop off the floor, a bookshelf holding my manga and graphic novel collections, and a closet stuffed with shirts and slacks I rarely had occasion to wear. It was too small to swing a cat by its tail, as Grandma Marjorie observed during her last visit, although that raised a few questions in my mind about what she did in her spare time back in Tucson. Nonetheless, it was one hundred and twenty square feet of relative privacy.

  I doffed my red-and-blue DQ shirt, gave it a cautious sniff, and tossed it on the laundry pile in the corner. I replaced it with a t-shirt bearing a slogan that neatly summarized the drive and ambitions of my entire generation – Hellburn High Class of Whenever – and plopped down on my creaky wooden chair, tapping the power button on my laptop.

  The login screen stymied me for a minute. It was getting harder to come up with passwords easy enough remember without having to write them down and obscure enough to keep Susie out. She cracked the last one in only two days. Mom was unsympathetic when I complained about it and she wondered why I needed a password at all, since I shouldn’t have been doing anything that needed to be kept a secret. My counter-argument that it was just the principle of the thing had been insufficiently compelling for her to take action.

  I looked up at the poster of Asuna Kagurazaka on the wall above my desk. She was tall and slender with bright orange hair tied into a pair of pony tails that flowed down to her knees. She wore a red jacket that strained across her chest and a plaid skirt that barely reached the top of her legs. Her sword, as long as she was tall, rested on her shoulder as she gazed out of the poster with her head tilted to one side. Her eyes, one blue and one green, looked straight at me and she almost seemed to be smiling. I heaved a sigh. If only ...

  Although Asuna’s name was boldly splashed across the bottom of the poster, I wasn’t stupid enough to use it as my password. However, I happened to know – and with any luck Susie didn’t – that Asuna’s real name was Asuna Vesperina Theotanasia Entheofushia. So, start with A, take every third letter after that, change the E’s to 3’s and the O’s to 0’s, add an exclamation mark ... An33nhtaat0sa! The laptop beeped its acceptance and fired up.

  The first thing I did was check the browser history, which was suspiciously blank. I didn’t bother clearing the history for regular school work so the obvious conclusion was that Susie was learning to cover her tracks. On the other hand, I might have been doing some – ahem – extracurricular research last night, so maybe it was me. It was hard to keep track sometimes.

  I let it slide for now and pulled up Pizza King’s delivery menu. They had a two-for-one deal going but Susie wouldn’t eat more than a couple of slices and Dad probably wouldn’t get home in time to join us, so I went for the single medium, half double cheese and half carnivore: pepperoni, bacon, ham, and sausage. Three more clicks and they promised it would arrive at our door within 30 minutes or my money back, guaranteed. Pizza King didn’t always start their timer at the same time I did but my friend Justin did most of their deliveries on the weekends so I generally cut him some slack.

  With the dinner plans taken care of, I looked around for something to keep myself occupied until it showed up. The backpack on my bed reminded me that Mr. Carver’s Civil War quiz was on Monday but I had all day tomorrow to study for that. Of course, tomorrow was my birthday, so the odds of me actually opening the textbook this weekend were pretty slim. I could always skim it on the bus Monday morning, though, and American History wasn’t until after lunch anyway, so I still had plenty of time.

  I’d read every book in my collection at least three times and watched every DVD at least twice and it was far too early to do any research, not while Susie was still up. Locked doors and Do Not Disturb signs didn’t slow her down at all.

  I toyed with the idea of jumping into one of my MMOs but I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of a raid when the pizza arrived. Dropping out before the final boss, even for pizza, was grounds for shunning, a fate far worse than death in the online community.

  Rias Gremory smiled at me from the wall behind my bed, her wild crimson hair framing her bright blue eyes and doing absolutely nothing to hide her spectacular figure. Mom questioned my choice of artwork at least once a month, wondering why anyone would want pictures of cartoon schoolgirls with disproportionately large eyes and even larger breasts hanging from their walls. I thought the answer was obvious myself but I just kept assuring her I would eventually outgrow my obsession.

  Dad just rolled his eyes whenever the topic came up. I’m not sure if he bought into the whole boys-will-be-boys thing but at least he let me keep the posters. I think he was hoping I’d get a real girlfriend soon and put all this behind me. So was I but I wasn’t holding my breath.

  In any event, Rias, Asuna, and the other ladies of my animated imagination had no time-killing suggestions for me. Justin and a few other members of the Death Ravens guild were going to join me online tomorrow to finally take down Belphegorus, Scourge of the Burning Deep, so I decided to do a bit of prep to save some time before we headed back into the dungeon. I fired up Legends of Lorecraft and selected my main character, a level 25 human elemental mage named Coronox. Most of my characters were female – if I’m going to follow a computer-generated character’s butt around the countryside for hours on end, it might as well be an attractive butt – but Coronox was my best damage-dealer and we were going to need everything we could bring to bear to take down Belphegorus. We’d already had three straight team wipes and the novelty had definitely worn off.

  I’d designed Coronox to look exactly like me, except taller, brawnier, older, and bearded. His current outfit was a hodge-podge of colors and styles – I couldn’t be bothered to craft a matching set, even though the set bonuses would be handy – but at least he was easy to spot in a crowd.

  I’d left him parked outside the dungeon entrance after the last wipe but I summoned a teleportal and popped back to Renford, the nearest town. I was studying the selection of scrolls in the adventurer’s shop and lamenting my meager supply of coins when the doorbell rang. I locked my computer and headed for the door.

  “Hey, Pete.” Justin stood a good head taller than me, although he’d disappear if he turned sideways. He thrust the cardboard box sporting Pizza King’s crown logo at me and I grabbed it reflexively. “We still on for tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, we should be back from church around noon. Mom and Dad are taking us out to dinner for my birthday, so we’ll have to be done by 5.” I snuck a peek inside the box. Justin wasn’t above stealing a slice on occasion if he got hungry but the contents were unscathed.

  “Shouldn’t be a problem. I figure if we start with those pyroliches we might get through that first level faster.”

  “It’s worth a shot.” Justin held his palm out and it took me a second to realize why. I set the pizza on the side table by the door and dug out my wallet. All I had was a twenty and Grandma’s gift. “Do you have change for a five?”

  “Nope.” Justin plucked the bill from my fingers and headed back towards his car, a ratty little Corolla with a plastic Pizza King sign suction-cupped to its roof. “See you tomorrow,” he said over his shoulder, waving the five in farewell. He folded himself into the driver’s seat and rocketed off down the street with an asthmatic beep of the horn.

  I wasn’t too ticked off about the tip – Justin usually loaned me lunch money when I ran short and didn’t always remember to ask for it back – so I just shut the door and brought the pizza into the kitchen. “Susie! Pizza’s here!” I dropped it on the table and grabbed a couple of plates from the cupboard.

  She appeared in the kitchen while I was rooting in the back of the fridge for a Coke, wrapped in a pink-and-white silk robe that used to belong to Mom. It was way too large for her – she had to wrap the belt around her waist twice just to keep it secured – but at least everything above her knees was covered up. She inspected the pizza and, as predic
ted, shifted two of the cheese slices onto her plate before retreating to her room in silence.

  “You’re welcome.” I claimed two meat and one cheese for myself and carried everything back to my room to complete my arcane shopping expedition. By the time my plate held nothing but grease and sausage crumbles, I’d acquired all the revive scrolls the trader had on hand, plus a nifty lightning ball spell that might come in handy.

  “Peter!” Susie nearly hit me with the door when she sailed into the room without knocking. “Open this for me.”

  “Open what?” She shoved her fist right at my face and I ducked back out of the way to avoid getting my nose broken. The thing in her hand looked like a softball covered in dried mud. “What is that?”

  “It’s a geode.” She dropped it into my hands and it nearly ended up on the floor. It was a lot heavier than it looked, maybe two or three pounds. “Open it. I need the crystals inside.” Her other hand clutched one of Dad’s hammers and the object sported several round scars.

  “What makes you think there are crystals inside?”

  “It’s a geode. They have crystals.” She gave it another whack with the hammer, barely missing my fingers and nearly knocking the thing from my grip. I grabbed the hammer from her before she could try again.

  “You need to use a sledgehammer,” I told her testily, “and safety glasses. Go do it in the garage.” I tried to give the geode back to her but she pushed it back firmly.

  “You do it,” she insisted. “You’re stronger than me. But don’t break it.”

  “How am I supposed to get inside without breaking it?”

  She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Just do it carefully so you don’t damage the crystals. Use one of those cutting things with the edge, maybe.” She made a stabbing gesture but it took me a moment to interpret what she meant.