Boy Who Could See Demons Read online

  Praise for The Boy Who Could See Demons

  “A psychologically complex thriller, told with compassion in a marvelously suspenseful narrative that keeps you engaged from the first page to the last. This book has it all: a dark and dangerous setting, characters full of depth, rich emotions, and a clever plot. You’ll fall in love with Alex—and his demons.”

  —CHEVY STEVENS, author of Still Missing

  “Top-notch psychological suspense. From her descriptions of a struggling young family to a recovering Northern Ireland, Jess-Cooke effortlessly draws you into one woman’s fight to save a troubled boy. Beware what you think you know. It might be only the demons talking.…”

  —LISA GARDNER, author of Touch & Go

  “Brilliant! Rich with fully formed characters, this heart-gripping novel will keep you riveted from first page to last.”

  —JEFFERY DEAVER, author of XO

  “Utterly captivating, this is a book I adored and savored from the first to the very last magical page.”

  —TESS GERRITSEN, author of Ice Cold

  “An absolute chiller, deep, moving, and utterly gripping … I was riveted from the unsettling beginning to the mind-bender of an ending. This is a stellar read that will stay with me for a good long while.”

  —LISA UNGER, author of Heartbroken

  “It’s a stunning story; a well-researched, authoritative delve into psychosis, guilt, and damage. Not only does it look at the case of an individual, but it also examines how national events can shape the personality of a whole people. The book is beautifully written, with compassion and insight.… Thrilling, wholly plausible, and utterly satisfying.”

  —JULIA CROUCH, author of Every Vow You Break

  “Gripping from the opening paragraph to its final revelations, this is a brilliant exploration of the point where imagination, psychology, art, politics, and the supernatural meet and merge in a young boy’s mind. Touching and painfully funny.”

  —CHRISTOPHER FOWLER, author of The Memory of Blood

  “A rare and intriguing book, both emotionally and intellectually challenging. The cerebral challenge is the puzzle at the heart of the novel: Whose truth is real?”

  —HELEN GRANT, author of The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

  The Boy Who Could See Demons is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DELACORTE PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in the United Kingdom in paperback by Piatkus, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, London, in 2012.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Wake Forest University Press for permission to reprint “Belfast Confetti” from Belfast Confetti by Ciaran Carson, copyright © 1989 by Ciaran Carson. Reprinted by permission of Wake Forest University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jess-Cooke, Carolyn

  The boy who could see demons: a novel/Carolyn Jess-Cooke.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53654-9

  1. Women psychiatrists—Fiction. 2. Children—Death—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction. 4. Delusions—Fiction. 5. Northern Ireland—Fiction. 6. Psychological fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6110.E78B69 2013

  823′92—dc23 2012038953

  www.bantamdell.com

  Jacket design, illustrations, and lettering: Victoria Allen

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  1: Ruen

  2: Wakeful Dream

  3: The Feeling

  4: “Who Gave You that Scar?”

  5: “Tell Her Who I Am”

  6: The Silent Toll

  7: The Ghost

  8: Demon Hunting

  9: Invisibility

  10: The Thin Edge of Belief

  11: Strawberry Picking

  12: The Paintings

  13: The Unbested Friend

  14: Mists of the Mind

  15: The Greatest Dream of All Time

  16: The Bitter Side of Freedom

  17: “Remember Me”

  18: Ruin’s Questions

  19: Escape

  20: A Love Song for Anya

  21: Hell

  22: The Composer

  23: The Things That Are Real

  24: The Newspapers

  25: Swapping Cards

  26: The Call

  27: Waking Up

  28: The Answers

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  THE GREATEST TRICK THE DEVIL EVER PULLED WAS TO CONVINCE US ALL THAT HE DOES NOT EXIST.

  —CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

  1

  RUEN

  ALEX

  People look at me funny when I tell them I have a demon.

  “Don’t you mean, you have demons?” they ask. “Like a drug problem or an urge to stab your dad?” I tell them no. My demon is called Ruen, he’s about five foot three, and his favorite things are Mozart, table tennis, and rice pudding.

  I met Ruen and his friends five years, five months, and six days ago. It was the morning that Mum said Dad had gone, and I was at school. A bunch of very strange creatures appeared in the corner of the room beside the canvas we’d made of the Titanic. Some of them looked like people, though I knew they weren’t teachers or anyone’s parents because some of them looked like wolves, but with human arms and legs. One of the females had arms, legs, and ears that were all different, as if they had belonged to different people and were pieced together like Frankenstein. One of her arms was hairy and muscly, the other was thin like a girl’s. They frightened me, and I started to cry because I was only five.

  Miss White came over to my desk and asked what was wrong. I told her about the monsters in the corner. She took off her glasses very slowly and pushed them into her hair, then asked if I was feeling all right.

  I looked back at the monsters. I couldn’t stop looking at the one who had no face but just a huge red horn, like a rhino’s horn, only red, in his forehead. He had a man’s body but it was covered in fur and his black trousers were held up with braces that were made out of barbed wire and dripping with blood. He was holding a long pole with a round metal ball on top with spikes sticking out of it like a hedgehog. He put a finger where his lips would be, if he had any, and then a voice appeared in my head. It sounded very soft and yet gruff, just like my Dad’s:

  “I’m your friend, Alex.”

  And then all the fear left me because what I wanted more than anything in the whole world was a friend.

  I found out later that Ruen has different ways of appearing and this was the one I call the Horn Head, which is very scary, especially when you see it for the first time. Luckily he doesn’t appear like that very often.

  Miss White asked what I was staring at, because I was still looking at the monsters and wondering if they were ghosts, because some of them were like shadows. The thought of it made me start to open my mouth and I felt a noise start to come out, but before it grew too big I heard my Dad’s voice, again in my head:

  “Be calm, Alex. We’re not monsters. We’re your friends. Don’t you want us to be your friends?”

  I looked at
Miss White and said I was fine, and she smiled and said okay and walked back to her desk, but she kept glancing back at me with her face all worried.

  About a second later, without crossing the room, the monster who had spoken to me appeared beside me and told me his name was Ruen. He said I’d better sit down otherwise Miss White would send me to talk to someone called A Psychiatrist. And that, Ruen assured me, would not involve anything fun, like acting or telling jokes or drawing pictures of skeletons.

  Ruen knew my favorite hobbies so I knew there was something strange going on here. Miss White kept looking at me like she was very worried as she continued her lesson on how to stick a needle through a frozen balloon and why this was an important scientific experiment. I sat down and said nothing about the monsters.

  Ruen has explained many things to me about who he is and what he does, but never about why I can see him when no one else can. I think we’re friends. Only, what Ruen has asked me to do makes me think he’s not my friend at all. He wants me to do something very bad.

  He wants me to kill someone.

  2

  WAKEFUL DREAM

  ALEX

  Dear Diary,

  A ten-year-old boy walks into a fishmonger’s and asks for a leg of salmon. The wise fishmonger raises his eyebrows and says, “salmon don’t have any legs!” The boy goes home and tells his Dad what the fishmonger said, and his Dad starts to laugh.

  “Okay,” the boy’s Dad says. “Off to the hardware store, pick me up some tartan paint.”

  So the boy goes off to the hardware store. When he returns, he is feeling very humiliated.

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” the Dad says, though he’s laughing so hard he almost pees himself. “Here’s a fiver. Go get us all fish fingers and use the change for some chips for you.”

  The boy throws the fiver back in his Dad’s face.

  “Here, what’s all that about?” the Dad yells.

  “You can’t fool me,” the boy shouts back. “Fish don’t have any fingers!”

  • • •

  This is a new diary that Mum bought me for my last birthday when I was ten. I want to start every entry with a new joke so I can keep in character. That means I can remember what it feels like to be the person I’m playing, which is a boy called Horatio. My acting teacher Jojo said she’s rewritten a famous play called Hamlet as a “contemporary retelling of twenty-first-century Belfast, with rap, street gangs, and kamikaze nuns” and apparently William Shakespeare is okay with that. Mum says my getting into the theater company is a really big deal but not to tell anyone on our street as I might get beaten up.

  We’re performing the play at the Grand Opera House in Belfast city, which is cool ’cos it’s like a ten-minute walk from my house so I can make rehearsals every Thursday and Friday after school. Jojo said I can even make up my own jokes. I think this joke is funnier than my last one about the old woman and the orangutan. I told it to Mum but she didn’t laugh. She is sad again. I have started to ask her why she gets sad, and each time the reason is different. Yesterday it was because the postman was late, and she was waiting for a Really Important Letter from social services. Today, it’s because we’ve run out of eggs.

  I can’t think of a more stupid reason to be sad. I wonder whether she’s lying to me, or if she actually thinks that it’s fine to burst into tears every five seconds. I think I’ll ask her more questions about what the sadness is like. Is it because of my dad, I wanted to ask this morning, but then I had what the bald counselor called a Wakeful Dream and remembered my dad the time he made Mum cry. Usually she was really really happy when he came to visit, which wasn’t very often, and she’d make her lips red and her hair would look like ice cream piled up on her head and she’d sometimes wear her dark green dress. But there was this time that he came and all she did was cry. I remember I was sitting so close to him that I could see the tattoo on his left forearm of a man who Dad said starved himself to death on purpose. He was saying to Mum, Don’t give me that guilt trip, leaning across the kitchen sink to tap his cigarette into the sink. Always three taps. Tap tap tap.

  Aren’t you always going on about how you want a better house than this? This is your chance, love.

  And just as I reached out to touch his jeans, the left knee almost worn through from where he’d always bend down to tie my shoelaces, the Wakeful Dream faded and it was just me, Mum, and the sound of her crying.

  Mum hasn’t talked about Dad in about a million years, so I think she might be sad because of Granny, because Granny always looked after us and was tough with nosy social workers and when Mum got sad Granny would slam her hand on the kitchen counter and say things like “if you don’t stand up to life it’ll knock you down,” and then Mum seemed to snap out of it. But Granny doesn’t say that anymore, and Mum just gets worse all the time.

  So, I do what I always do, which is ignore Mum as she walks around our house with her face all dripping wet, and I hunt through the fridge and kitchen cupboards and under the stairs for something to eat, until finally I find what I’m looking for: an onion and some frozen bread. Unfortunately I don’t find any eggs, which is a pity because it might have made Mum stop crying.

  I stand on a stool and chop up the onion underwater in the sink—like Granny taught me, so the juices don’t make my eyes flood—and then fry it up with some oil. Then I put it all between two slices of toasted bread. Trust me, it is the best thing in the world.

  The second best thing in the world is my bedroom. I was going to say drawing skeletons, or balancing on the back legs of my chair, but I think they’re third best, because my bedroom is so high at the top of our house that I don’t hear Mum crying when I come up here, and because it’s where I go to think and to draw, and also to write jokes for my part as Horatio. It’s freezing up here. You could probably store dead bodies. The windowpane is cracked and there’s no carpet and all the radiator does is make a big yellow puddle on the bare floor. Most of the time I put on an extra sweater and sometimes a coat, a hat, woolly socks, and gloves when I get up there, though I’ve cut the fingertips off my gloves so I can hold my pencils. It’s so cold that Dad never even bothered to rip all the old wallpaper off the walls, which he said has been up since Saint Patrick kicked all the snakes out of Ireland. It’s silver with lots of white leaves all over it, though I think they look like an angel’s feathers. The last person who lived here left all their stuff, like a bed with only three legs, a wardrobe, and a tall white chest of drawers that was filled with lots of clothes. The person who left them was probably just lazy but it’s worked out okay as Mum never has any money to get me any new clothes.

  But that’s just the best thing about my room. You know what the best best thing about my room is?

  When Ruen comes, I can talk to him for ages. And no one else can hear.

  So when I found out that Ruen is a demon I wasn’t scared because I didn’t know a demon was a thing. I thought it was just the name of the shop near my school that sold motorbikes.

  “What’s a demon, then?” I asked Ruen.

  He was Ghost Boy then. Ruen has four appearances: Horn Head, Monster, Ghost Boy, and Old Man. Ghost Boy is when he looks like me, only in a funny kind of way: He has my exact same brown hair and is as tall as me and even has the same knobbly fingers and fat nose and sticky-out ears, but he has eyes that are completely black and sometimes his whole body is see-through like a balloon. His clothes are different from mine, too. He wears trousers that are puffy and gather in at the knees and a white shirt with no collar, and his feet are bare and dirty.

  When I asked what a demon was Ruen jumped up and started shadowboxing in front of the mirror on the back of my bedroom door.

  “Demons are like superheroes,” he said between jabs. “Humans are like maggots.”

  I was still sitting on the floor. I’d lost our game of chess. Ruen had let me take all his pawns and bishops and then checkmated me with just his king and queen.

  “Why are humans like maggots?” I
asked.

  He stopped boxing and turned to me. I could see the mirror through him so I kept my gaze on that rather than look him in the face, because his black eyes make my stomach feel funny.

  “It’s not your fault your mum gave birth to you,” he said, and started doing jumping jacks. Because he’s like a ghost his jumps looked like scribbles in the air.

  “But why are humans like maggots?” I asked. Unlike humans, maggots look like crawling fingernails and they live at the bottom of our wheelie garbage can.

  “Because they’re stupid,” he said, still jumping.

  “How are humans stupid, then?” I said, standing up.

  He stopped jumping and looked at me. His face was angry.

  “Look,” he said, and held out his hand toward me. “Now put yours on top of mine.”

  I did. You couldn’t see the floor through mine.

  “You have a body,” he said. “But you’ll probably waste it, everything you can do with it. Just like free will. It’s like giving a Lamborghini to an infant.”

  “So you’re jealous, then?” I asked, because a Lamborghini is a really cool car that everyone wants.

  “A baby driving a sports car would be a bad idea, wouldn’t it? Somebody needs to step in, stop the kid from doing more damage than it needs to.”

  “So demons look after babies, then?” I said.

  He looked disgusted. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “What do they do then?”

  And then he gave me his Alex Is Stupid look. It’s when he smiles with only half his mouth and his eyes are small and hard and he shakes his head as if I’m a disappointment. It’s the look that makes my stomach knot and my heart beat faster because deep down I know I am stupid.

  “We try and help you see past the lie.”

  I blinked. “What lie?”

  “You all think you’re so important, so special. It’s a fallacy, Alex. You’re nothing.”

  Now I’m ten I’m much older so I kind of know more about demons but Ruen’s not like that. I think everyone’s got it wrong about demons, just like they did about rottweilers. Everyone says rottweilers eat children but Granny had one called Milo and he always just licked my face and let me ride him like a pony.