The New Kid by Temple Mathews Page B

and closed the door, taking refuge in the tiny cabinet while the fire raged. His ears were ringing and his throat was sore and his head throbbed.
    Safe for the moment, he started to cry thinking of what had just happened to his father, the person he loved more than anything else on earth, and prayed that this wasn’t real, that it was all just a bad dream, a horrific nightmare from which he’d soon awaken. But he knew it was real. And that realization crept through him like a virus. His stomach churned and he sweat buckets. Finally, he fell into unconsciousness. An indeterminate amount of time later Will opened his eyes. The ringing in his ears had stopped and he heard the blessed sound of near-silence. He peeked at the crack under the secret cabinet door, no longer a slit of burning orange, now just dark.
    Will opened the door gingerly and as he crawled out he saw that the basement had flooded, the overhead sprinklers his father had installed still showering the entire area with water. He called out, his voice weak with his utter lack of hope.

    “Dad? Daddy?”
    He was met with stone cold silence; the house was empty. Will sat for the next twenty-four hours, until his mother returned, rocking and holding the book and praying for a miracle. A simple miracle, really: Just bring my father back to me , prayed Will. But even though he was only eight years old he knew this one incontrovertible fact: If he was ever to see his father again he would have to bring him back himself. Hell had come to get Will’s father, and Will might very well have to go to Hell to get him back.
    When his mother returned and the dust from the incident settled, it was decided by those parties concerned—Will’s mother, the child psychologists, the minister, teachers, and other relatives—that Will’s version of what had transpired the night of the storm and subsequent fire was not, in fact, an accurate account of a young boy’s father being abducted by a demon, but rather an emotional defense mechanism, a tall tale conjured up by a boy in terrible pain. They all believed that Will had made the story up to deal with the supposed “fact” that his father had left him and his mother, most likely to run off with a woman. They also believed that it was Will, and not some rampaging demon, who had set the house on fire, a young boy abandoned by his father acting out his pain. After a while Will stopped trying to convince them that he was telling the truth and retreated. He went about his business like any other kid, going to school and doing his homework, watching TV and hanging out with his friends. But he did all these things in order to appear normal, in order to bide the time necessary. Inside he was waiting—for one minute past midnight on his thirteenth birthday.
    Will knew he was different; the demon had left a mark on him in more ways than one. There was a hole in his heart where his father had once been, but there was also the matter of his eyes, which were now two different colors. While one of his eyes was the same normal blue it had always been, the other one, the one he’d witnessed the abduction with, had faded into a lighter crystal blue with gold
specks. He wondered if he looked like a freak or some kind of pubescent god-like warrior. He chose the latter.
    Halloween, long Will’s favorite holiday, was a day of the year he now shunned. He had once loved to make himself appear ghoulish, to wear colored contact lenses and scar tattoos and bite down on fake blood capsules to scare his mom and dad silly. But no more. Now that he knew there were actual ghouls and demons roaming the earth he’d lost his taste for pretending.
    Mostly, Will kept his eyes and his ears open. He watched over his mother, like his father had asked, as she endured the loss of her husband. It was not a pretty sight. Before, April had been gregarious and loved to paint and play the piano and sing. After, April changed dramatically. She suffered from depression