Nothing remained of him. Even his blood, including the half that had been splattered all over Quentin, was gone.
Quentin waved his hand over where the body had been. “I, uh, can explain that, too.”
No he couldn’t.
I didn’t waste another word. I just ran, and ran, and ran.
8
I arrived home in a daze, trying to figure out what to do.
Mom wasn’t going to be any help in this situation. I passed her in the kitchen without a word. That little slight would probably snowball into a future screaming match between us at a time yet to be determined.
I climbed the stairs to my room. Once I got there I sank into my desk chair, my head in my hands.
Taptaptap.
I could have tried to call the cops again on our landline, but what was I going to say? That my classmate fought with some kind of runaway circus experiment, killed him in cold blood, and that I helped? That I had no evidence any of this happened, because the victim self-liquefied somehow?
Taptaptaptap.
The bigger problem was Quentin. I didn’t know if I was next on his list of people to murder, or if he had a list, or if he was trying to initiate me into his gang. I mean, if he’d just stop knocking on my window for one second, I could think straight—
Taptaptaptaptaptap.
I fell out of my chair. Quentin hovered outside the glass with a pleading look on his face. The worst part was that in my current state I couldn’t even remember if we had a tree there for him to stand on.
He slid the window up and clambered inside. “Silence,” he said.
“Mom!” I shouted, crawling backward on my butt. “Help!”
“This isn’t what you think! Let me explain.” He got down on his knees to look at me on my level. It was more terrifying than reassuring.
“Mom!” She was just downstairs. Why wasn’t she answering?
Quentin began kowtowing in submission, knocking his skull against the floor. It only added to the commotion in my room.
“Please,” he said. “I’m not a danger to you, and I can prove it. Give me a chance. If you don’t like what you hear, you can do as you will. You can even take my head if you wish.”
“I don’t want your head!” I said. “What is it with you and murder? You killed a man back there!”
“That wasn’t a human being. That was a demon. A yaoguai. If the two of us weren’t there to stop him, he could have slain this entire town!”
I was going to tell him that was stupid, but remembering the man in black’s hulking form and monstrous visage made me seize up in post-traumatic fear. He could very well have been right on that point.
Quentin sensed my hesitation. “And I didn’t kill him in the sense you’re thinking of. I only sent his evil spirit back to Diyu, where it belonged.”
“Diyu? You mean Chinese Hell? That doesn’t make any sense!”
“It will once I tell you my real name!”
So he’d been operating under a false identity this whole time to boot? Wonderful. I couldn’t wait to see how much deeper he was going to dig this hole.
“Go ahead,” I said, groping behind me for any heavy, hard object I could find to clock him with. “Tell me your real name and we’ll see if that makes it all better.”
Quentin took a deep breath.
“My true name,” he said, “ . . . is SUN WUKONG.”