I've been dreading this moment, but it's about time I come clean and tell the truth about THE BOY WHO KILLED DEMONS.
Two and a half years ago I was doing a book reading for Monster
at a Newton, Massachusetts bookstore, and a kid who had sat in rapt attendance
approached me afterwards. The kid had
his hair dyed bright green, and his all-black Goth attire made his pale face
look almost ghostly. His name turned out to be Curt Tucker. He was 14, had
aspirations to be a writer, and shared my love of H.P. Lovecraft’s weird tales.
For four months following the reading, Curt and I traded emails where I
attempted to do the mentoring thing and offer encouragement to a very young and
fledgling author, and as often happens in situations like this the emails from
Curt tailed off. Then 9 months later he surprised me by showing up at my door
to hand me a package. He seemed scared and didn’t much want to talk, only
asking me to read what was inside the package and to see if I could get it
published, telling me that it was important that I do so. Before I could ask him anything else, he was
on his bike, peddling away. It was all very odd. While I was curious about this
encounter, I was in the middle of writing a new horror novel that I was deeply
into, and so all I did was give the contents of the package a quick cursory
look, saw that it was some sort of journal, and stuck it in a pile of things to
read. It wasn’t until five months later that I picked it up again and gave it a
thorough reading. At that time the name on the journal, Henry Dudlow, seemed
familiar to me, but I couldn’t place where I’d heard it before. As I read more
of the journal, I remembered. About a month or so before Curt had delivered the
package, a story had broken about a grisly murder outside of Boston that a 15
year-old Newton kid named Henry Dudlow was suspected of committing. The story,
though, quickly died after that one day with no follow up stories, and like a
lot of other people I’d forgotten about it. Here’s the strange thing about it: I
could swear that this is all true—that I saw the story on at least two Boston
newspaper websites—but when I tried searching these newspaper websites, there
was nothing. The story has been scrubbed clean, unless I was somehow imagining
it.
Here’s where the story gets odder. Any record of Henry
Dudlow also appeared to be scrubbed clean. I tracked down his parents, and they
insisted they never had a child named Henry or otherwise, but there was
something very off in their expressions when they made their claims. After my
short and bizarre meeting with them, I tracked Curt down again, and he was now insisting
he never gave me anything, but he also seemed badly frightened as he did so.
At this point I wasn’t sure what to believe. I had
this journal written by Henry Dudlow, except Henry supposedly never existed,
and the kid who delivered the journal to me seemed almost desperate in his
claims of not having done so. Was this a hoax or something else? I knew the
journal physically existed—my wife and others verified it—so I wasn’t
delusional about its existence. All in all I felt uneasy about the whole thing,
and I had to keep digging into it. For several weeks I came up empty, and I
started questioning my own sanity. If Henry Dudlow truly never existed, yet I
vividly remembered that murder story breaking and now had in my possession what
was supposed to be his journal, was it possible that I wrote the journal myself
without ever realizing it, and fantasized all the rest of it? I wasn’t quite
sure what to think until I found Sally Freeman. When I asked her about Henry I
could see for a brief moment that she was going to deny his existence like
everyone else had, but then tears welled up in her eyes, and rather grim-faced
and defiantly she told me that Henry was real. “His journal is real,” she
insisted, “don’t believe what they’re telling you.” I hadn’t told Sally about
the journal, and fortunately I recorded her conversation, which allowed my wife
to verify it, so at least I proved I wasn’t insane. At least I knew that much. But
I was still left with the question whether the journal was real or a hoax.
Shortly after meeting with Sally, something happened to tilt this answer more
toward the former. While the same people (or demons??) who cleansed any record
of Henry ever existing attempted to do the same with Henry’s neighbor, Mr.
Hanley, they made one mistake. They forgot about the same newspaper photo that
freaked Henry out so much—the one with Hanley in the background carrying a
large bulky package wrapped in white butcher’s paper—and I now have it!
I still couldn’t claim the journal was legit—even if
Henry Dudlow wrote it, it could still be a hoax or delusional fantasies—but I
couldn’t shake the thought that it could be real and for the sake of the world
it needed to be out there. For that reason I took it to my publisher and begged
them to publish it. I wanted them to attribute the novel to Henry, but since
they couldn’t find any record of him ever existing, for legal reasons they’d
only publish it as a fictional novel with me as the author. While I felt a bit
funny about those terms, getting Henry’s journal out into the world seemed too
important not to agree. I just have to pray that this all turns out to be an
elaborate hoax. I think we all have to pray for that.
(Note. This shameful confession was earlier published on Tony Black's Pulp Pusher website)
