The Demon Road Trilogy: The Complete Collection: Demon Road; Desolation; American Monsters

At ten minutes past two, they walked into the library and found Heather Medina restocking shelves in the Self-help section. Up close, she was an attractive woman with plump, soft lips but hard eyes. There was a thin scar on her neck that disappeared behind the collar of her blouse. Everything about her, from her manner to the shoes that she wore – practical, like she was ready to run or fight at any given moment – screamed survivor. Amber liked her instantly.

“Your mother sent us,” Milo said.

Heather nodded, and kept sliding books on to the shelves. “She told me you’re a curious bunch, with a particular interest in our town’s recent history. I told her I’d already been speaking to you. I told her you’re not exactly subtle.”

“She said you’d talk to us if you were in a talkative mood,” Amber said.

“And you’re wondering what kind of mood I’m currently in?” asked Heather. “It’s Amber, right? And Glen? I used to have a boyfriend called Glen. Really good guy. I guess he was my first love. My high-school sweetheart. Dacre Shanks came back from the dead and killed him when I was sixteen.”

She said it so matter-of-factly that Amber didn’t notice the words sliding down her spine until they made her shiver. “It’s true, then? Everything we’ve heard?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Heather. “It all depends on what you’ve heard, doesn’t it?”

The elderly librarian passed, gave them all a suspicious look, and Heather smiled, keeping her eyes locked on her until she’d moved out of earshot.

“When I was a kid, we all knew who Dacre Shanks was,” said Heather. “I grew up hearing about the things he’d done and how my mother had been the one to figure it all out. In the playground, my friends used to re-enact the night he died. They’d take turns to be my dad and the other deputies, and they’d go in, guns blazing, and whoever was playing Shanks would howl and scream and whirl around and around as the bullets hit him. It was town history that quickly became town legend. My sister, Christina, she was older than me, looked just like my mom, so, even though my mother wasn’t actually there the night Shanks died, the kids decided it’d be neater, more satisfying, if she were. Christina was in great demand during recess.”

Heather smiled sadly, then shook the smile away.

“Christina went missing when she was sixteen,” she continued. “The ten-year anniversary of Shanks’s death, to the hour. She vanished, right out of her bedroom. Over the next few weeks, four others disappeared too – a man, a woman, a fourteen-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl.”

“I’m sorry,” Amber said quietly.

“It tore us apart for a while, my family. But my parents … I don’t know. They’re stronger than most, maybe. Then, exactly a year later, another five people went missing. Man, woman and three kids. Year after that, another five … They wouldn’t be related, the five people, but they would all look vaguely alike in some way. It’s what Shanks used to do. He’d make his grotesque little families.”

“And everyone thought it was a copycat killer,” said Milo.

“Everyone but me,” said Heather. She rolled the cart of books to the Cooking section, started transferring them to the shelves. “Even my mom couldn’t see what was happening. She has an amazing mind, but believing that a killer had returned from the dead was a stretch too far for her. I was sixteen years old and Shanks came after me – chased me through the old theatre where we used to hold our recitals. I ran straight into the janitor and we went flying, but, when I looked up, Shanks was gone. Me and a few friends broke into his old store and found a secret room that my dad and the other cops hadn’t even looked for. There were all these dollhouses. They were fully furnished, but only half of them had any figures in them. These little people, like porcelain or something, sitting at the table or watching TV or playing with tiny, tiny toys on the carpet. I recognised my sister immediately. She was sitting on a bed upstairs, reading a book with a big smile on her face.”

“Figurines of his victims,” Glen said. “Creepy.”

Heather shook her head. “You’re not getting it. Shanks made the house, the furniture, all that stuff. But he didn’t make the figures. He caught them.”

Milo frowned. “Sorry?”

Heather made sure the elderly librarian wasn’t within range, and she leaned in. “The figures were his victims. That was my sister sitting on the toy bed. My actual sister. He’d got her smile wrong, though. Christina always had this lopsided smile. He got that wrong.”

“But you said the figures were made of porcelain,” said Amber.

“That’s what it looked like,” Heather replied. “But I saw what he did to their bodies, when they were dead. He embalmed them. The cellar of his toyshop was one big embalming room. Then he dressed them and … and posed them. He’d stitch expressions on to their faces and arrange their arms this way or that … When he had them the way he wanted, he’d cover them with a kind of resin to hold them in place, and put them in the dollhouse.”

“Yeah, no, still not getting it,” said Glen. “Because the figures in dollhouses are tiny. It sounds like what you’re telling us is that he killed them, embalmed them, and then shrank them, but you’re a normal, sane lady so that can’t be what you’re actually saying.”

“He didn’t shrink them,” said Heather. “Not really. Shanks called it doorway magic. He had this key, this special key, which acted as a tunnel, I guess, from one door to any other, whichever one he wanted. That’s how he took people. That’s how they vanished.

“When he took Glen – my boyfriend – he told him about it. Glen wrote it all down. I found it when I went looking for him, a scrap of paper soaked in his blood. Shanks was linking a normal door to the dollhouse doors – when you passed through, you became smaller. Shanks would work on the bodies here, get them into the proper poses, and then put them through into the dollhouse, where they’d be the size of figurines.”

“I really don’t mean any offence by this,” Amber said, “but I hope you realise how nuts that sounds.”

Heather smiled sadly. “I know.”

“Because it really sounds nuts.”

“And it is,” Heather said. “But it’s also what happened. People know it, too. Well – everyone of my generation. They’ve all heard the stories. They were there when Shanks started coming after me and my friends. They might not believe the story anymore, they may have come up with more rational explanations or dismissed the whole thing as nonsense, but a part of them still believes.”

“That’s why they beat up those kids last year,” said Milo.

“Poor little Walter,” Heather said, nodding. “I’ve heard his theory, that this is all some plot to get kids to behave themselves. If I were him, I’d probably think the same. But keeping the dollhouses at the school was our way of honouring Shanks’s victims – remembering them even if we couldn’t come right out and tell everyone what had really happened. The people who beat up those kids probably didn’t even understand why they were so angry – not consciously, at least. But this entire town has been scarred by Dacre Shanks, and he still haunts us.”

“How did you stop him?” Amber asked.

“First thing I did was steal his key. Then I trapped him. I managed to fool him into trapping himself, actually, in the fourth dollhouse. I was the only one of my friends to survive, and I barely did that.”

She lifted her top to show them a jagged scar across her belly.

“Cool,” breathed Glen.

Amber watched as Heather cast a furtive glance at Milo and then, almost like she’d just realised what she’d done, she blushed, and busied herself with tucking in her shirt.

“Where’s the dollhouse now?” Amber asked.

“Why?”

“We … we need to talk to Dacre Shanks.”

Heather stopped what she was doing. Thirty seconds passed in which nothing was said. Even Glen stayed quiet.

“Who are you?” Heather finally asked.

“We just need to ask him something,” Amber said. “Just one thing and then we’ll be gone.”

“Who are you?”

Amber tried figuring out the best way to say what she had to say. “Some people want to kill me. They’re monsters, I guess. Like Shanks. They won’t stop until I’m dead. My only hope is to find this guy we’re looking for and Shanks is the only one who knows his name.”

“They’re like Shanks?”

Amber nodded. “And there’s five of them. Please, Heather, all I want is to ask him this guy’s name.”

“I’d like to help,” Heather said. “I really would. But no one talks to Shanks. No one. Any opportunity to get free, he’ll take it.”

“We won’t do anything to risk—”

“I’m sorry,” said Heather. “He’s killed too many people already. I’ve kept him trapped by not letting anyone know he’s there, and certainly not letting anyone talk to him. You’re just going to have to find another way to get what you need.”

“There is no other way,” said Milo.

“Then I’m sorry. I truly am. But if Shanks gets free it won’t be you he goes after. It’ll be me. It’ll be people from this town. Springton will go back to being his hunting ground.”