The Boy Who Could See Demons: A Novel Read online

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-748-11847-2

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 Carolyn Jess-Cooke

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Phoenix

  my precious son

  Contents

  Copyright

  Also by Carolyn Jess-Cooke

  Chapter 1 Ruen

  Chapter 2 Wakeful Dream

  Chapter 3 The Feeling

  Chapter 4 ‘Who Gave You That Scar?’

  Chapter 5 ‘Tell Her Who I Am’

  Chapter 6 The Silent Toll

  Chapter 7 The Ghost

  Chapter 8 Demon Hunting

  Chapter 9 Invisibility

  Chapter 10 The Thin Edge of Belief

  Chapter 11 Strawberry Picking

  Chapter 12 The Paintings

  Chapter 13 The Unbested Friend

  Chapter 14 Mists of the Mind

  Chapter 15 The Greatest Dream of All Time

  Chapter 16 The Bitter Side of Freedom

  Chapter 17 ‘Remember me’

  Chapter 18 Ruen’s Questions

  Chapter 19 Escape

  Chapter 20 A Love Song For Anya

  Chapter 21 Hell

  Chapter 22 The Composer

  Chapter 23 The Things That Are Real

  Chapter 24 The Newspapers

  Chapter 25 Swapping Cards

  Chapter 26 The Call

  Chapter 27 The Pit

  Chapter 28 The Answers

  Chapter 29 A Friend

  Acknowledgements

  Letter From the Author

  The Boy Who Could See Demons

  Reading Group Discussion Points

  Author Q&A

  The Guardian Angel’s Journal

  A Celestial Pen

  Ciaran Carson’s poem ‘Belfast Confetti’ from Collected Poems (2008) is reproduced with kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press. www.gallerypress.com.

  Demons do not exist any more than gods do, being

  only the products of the psychic activity of man.

  – Sigmund Freud

  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 favourite things are Mozart, table tennis, and bread and butter 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’s monster. 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 Holland 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 drew a finger to 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 Holland 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 Holland and said I was fine, and she smiled and said OK and walked back to her desk, but she kept glancing back at me with her face all worried.

  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 Holland would send me to talk to someone called A Psychiatrist. And that, Ruen told me, would not involve anything fun, like acting or telling jokes or drawing pictures of skeletons.

  Ruen knew my favourite hobbies so I knew there was something strange going on here. Miss Holland 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.

  ‘OK,’ the boy’s dad says. ‘Away off to the DIY store, pick me up some tartan paint.’

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

  ‘OK, OK, 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 threw the fiver back in his dad’s face.

  ‘Here, what’s all that about?’ the dad yelled.

  ‘You can’t fool me,’ the boy shouted 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 ‘contemporar
y retelling of twenty-first century Belfast, with rap, street gangs, and kamikaze nuns’, and apparently William Shakespeare is OK with that. Mum says my getting into the theatre company is a really big deal but not to tell anyone in 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 counsellor 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 the 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 bench 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 any more, 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 may 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 jumper 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 St 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 which was filled with lots of clothes. The person who left them was probably just lazy but it’s worked out OK 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 blether on at 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 than 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 shadow boxing 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 made my stomach feel funny.

  ‘It’s not your fault your mum gave birth to you,’ he said, and started doing star jumps. 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 bin.

  ‘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 towards 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 sportscar 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 and 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.

  Mum never sees Ruen, and I haven’t told her about him or about any of the demons who come into our house. Some of them are a bit strange, but I just i
gnore them. It’s like having loads of grumpy relatives tramping through the place, thinking they can order me about. Ruen’s OK, though. He ignores Mum and likes poking around our house. He loves Granddad’s old piano that sits in the hallway. He’ll stand beside it for ages, leaning down to have a closer look at the wood as if there’s a miniature village living in the grain. Then he lowers down to press his ear against the bottom half, as if there’s someone inside trying to talk to him. He tells me this was a stupendous make of piano, once upon a time, but he’s very irritated by the way Mum keeps it pressed up against a radiator and doesn’t get it tuned. Sounds like an old dog, he says, rapping it with his knuckles like a door. I just shrug and say, Big deal. Then he gets so cross that he vanishes.

  Ruen sometimes turns into the Old Man when he gets cross. If I look like him when I get older, I’ll honestly kill myself. When he’s the Old Man he’s so skinny and withered he looks like a cactus with eyes and ears. His face is long as a spade with lots of wrinkles grooved so deep he looks sort of scrunched up, like tin foil that’s been reused. He’s got a long hooked nose and his mouth reminds me of a piranha’s. His head is shiny as a silver doorknob and is covered in wispy tufts of fine white hair. His face is grey like a pencil but the bags under his eyes are bright pink, as if someone’s ripped the skin off. He’s really ugly.

  But this isn’t as bad as what he looks like when he’s Monster. Monster is like a dead body that’s been underwater for weeks and is dragged up by the police on to a small boat and everyone pukes because the skin is the colour of an aubergine and the head is three times’ the size of a normal person’s head. And that’s not all: when he’s Monster, Ruen’s face isn’t a face. His mouth looks like someone blew a hole there with a shotgun and his eyes are tiny like a lizard’s.

  Here’s another thing: he says he’s nine thousand human years old. Yeah, right, I said when he first told me, but he just tilted his chin and spent the next hour telling me how he could speak more than six thousand languages, even the ones that no one spoke any more. He went on and on about how humans don’t even know their own language, not really, and don’t even have proper words for big things like guilt and evil, that it was idiotic that a country with so many different kinds of rain should only have one word for it, blah blah blah, until I yawned for about five minutes solid and he took the hint and left. But the next day, it rained, and I thought, Maybe Ruen isn’t such an eejit after all. Maybe he actually has a point. Some rain is like little fish, some is like big globby chunks of spit, and some is like ball bearings. So I started to borrow books from the library to learn some words in lots of cool languages, like Turkish and Icelandic and Maori.