The Sheriff's Alpha Son Is My True Mate: Demi Lawson on the Paranormal Mystery She Keeps Drawing

What is The Sheriff's Alpha Son Is My True Mate about?

Reagan moves to Ashwick, Oregon after her mother's death. Her first night ends with something enormous in the road and her father's car wrapped around a tree, and she wakes to a hum with no source and a Sheriff filing it as a deer accident. The paranormal mystery starts there.

If you came looking for shows like The Vampire Diaries — a small town mystery where the official cause of death is reliably the same two words — The Sheriff's Alpha Son Is My True Mate is your next paranormal mystery.

How long have you been drawing those eyes?

InterviewerYou picked the seat under the bulletin board. Why that one?

DemiThe light is bad everywhere in this building, but here it at least flickers in a rhythm. And nobody stands under a missing-person flyer if they can help it, so I get the whole bench to myself. All it costs me is eating my lunch under a stranger's face.

InterviewerHow long have you been drawing those eyes?

DemiLonger than I have been able to hold a pencil properly. They come out identical every time — same set, same spacing, same flat shine, like something is holding still to be looked at. I stopped counting pages around the third sketchbook. I don't decide what the hand draws. I just clean the charcoal off after.

InterviewerThen Reagan Mercer transfers in and recognises them.

DemiShe went the colour of the hallway. That is the part I keep going back to. Everyone else who has flipped through that book called it goth stuff and handed it back, politely, the way you hand back somebody's baby photos. Reagan looked at a drawing I made before she ever got on the plane and knew exactly where she had seen it. \[pause\] I have wanted somebody to do that for years. Now that it has happened I would quite like to take it back.

Why didn't you show anyone the sketchbook?

InterviewerYou have had that book for years, and you have never shown a teacher, a parent, or the Sheriff's office. Why not?

DemiWhat exactly am I bringing in? Drawings. A girl in a beanie walks into a county station with a page of eyes and says she thinks the tree line is paying attention. That is not a report, that is a referral. And Ashwick keeps a very short list of things it is willing to write down. Ask anyone who has tried to add to it.

InterviewerThat sounds like a reason. It also sounds like a decision.

DemiIt was a decision, and I would rather own it than be brave about it retroactively. Here is the honest version. The first time I understood that the drawings were not coming from me, the thing I felt was not fear. It was relief, because it meant I was not making it up. And you do not hand over the only proof you have that you are not making it up. So I have been drawing the thing and keeping it in a bag, which is exactly as useful as it sounds. If anyone gets hurt between now and the day I say it out loud, that is mine to carry. Not the town's, not the school's, not Reagan's. Mine.

Demi Lawson on the paranormal mystery only she can feel

She turns the sketchbook face down before this one.

InterviewerWhat does it actually feel like?

DemiIt isn't a sound, which is the part nobody gets. Reagan calls it a hum because Reagan gets the loud version — hers has a volume knob and somebody else is turning it. Mine sits lower down. It is a pressure behind the sternum that arrives about four seconds before I want to look at the tree line, and by the time I have looked, my hand is already moving. Four seconds is not enough time to warn anybody and it is far too much time to spend not knowing what you are being warned about. It isn't dramatic. It is just being tired in a very specific way, in a town where being tired is the normal condition.

InterviewerDoes anything switch it off?

DemiCharcoal. \[laughs\] Not a joke — if I fill a page properly it goes quiet for about an hour. Which is why I have ruined every sweater I own, why nothing in my house is properly clean, and why there is a permanent grey handprint on the inside of my bedroom door. Ashwick's other great unsolved case is where the rain gets in. I gave up on that one.

What happens when Reagan goes into the woods?

InterviewerShe walks home past the tree line most days. Would you tell her not to?

DemiI have tried the soft version. "Take the road." She takes the road while I am standing there and I have no idea what she does once I am not. Reagan came here to be somewhere quiet after her mother died, and Ashwick let her believe it was quiet until the end of her first night. I am not going to be the one who tells her the town she just moved to is wrong about itself.

InterviewerWhat happens if she goes in anyway?

DemiI have drawn what is in there more times than I want to say out loud — and I am not going to sit in a hallway and turn a sketchbook into a forecast. Ask her. She is the one who keeps walking.

InterviewerThen ask you a different way. If it were you, would you go in?

DemiI have thought about it more or less every day, and the answer keeps changing depending on how much sleep I have had. On a good day, no, because whatever is out there has been left alone by an entire town for a very long time and that arrangement is presumably holding for a reason. On a bad day I think the arrangement is the problem. Reagan has been in this town a fraction of the time I have and she is already further into it than I have ever got, which tells you something about her and something considerably less flattering about me.

InterviewerLast one. Anything you would say to the people about to watch all of this happen?

DemiWatch the adults. Everyone is going to be looking at Reagan, and at Ambrose, and I understand why. But the interesting thing about this town is not that somebody is hiding something. Anybody can hide a thing. It is how many people have quietly agreed not to ask about it, year after year, and stayed agreed. That takes organising. Somebody organised it. \[pause\] Also, if you ever find a sketchbook, don't flip to the back.