The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  “ What the hell’s going on here?” Mr. Chalmers said. “Why’re you boys chasing this girl? That you, Macy?”

  “ Yes,” she panted. “They’ve gone nuts! They’re pegging me with rocks!”

  “ They are, eh?” Mr. Chalmers tucked his reading glasses in his shirt pocket and set his paper aside. “What the hell’s got into you boys?”

  “ We were throwing rocks at her,” Mike said.

  “ Yeah, we were going to kill her,” Matt added.

  Macy felt all the spit in her mouth suddenly evaporate.

  There were no words to adequately describe what went through her head at that moment. Fear and shock and horror, too many other things. It all left her feeling weak and hopeless.

  Mr. Chalmers stood there, hands on hips, appraising the situation. Though he was in his sixties, he was still a large, well-muscled man with broad shoulders and a thick chest, the result of his twenty years in the Army as a paratrooper with both the 82 ^nd and 101 ^st Airborne Division. He still had the requisite thick neck and bristly crewcut, though now gone white.

  “ Mr. Chalmers,” she said. “There’s something happening here. I don’t know what. But some kids at school went crazy like this and attacked a teacher and the janitor. They killed them.”

  But Mr. Chalmers was not interested in that. “You boys want to kill this girl, don’t do it in my yard, you hear? This is my territory! My territory! I marked it with my scent and you better not cross my scent, you understand?”

  Macy was shaking her head from side to side.

  Mr. Chalmers, too.

  It was in his eyes like it was in the eyes of the Hack twins: that seething, primal emptiness. That blankness that was without bottom.

  “ How’d you mark your territory?” Mike asked. “We want to mark ours, too!”

  Mr. Chalmers laughed. “Like this, boys. Just like this.”

  And as Macy watched, he unzipped his pants and pulled his penis out. Still smiling, he proceeded to urinate on the steps, washing them down so all would know the boundaries of his territory.

  When he was done, the boys sniffed it, recognizing his smell and remembering it.

  Macy let out a scream.

  “ Get her, boys!” Mr. Chalmers said. “Run her down! Whichever one takes her down first gets her! ”

  Macy took off running, the twins in hot pursuit.

  She darted down the sidewalk and then cut between two houses, ducked behind a garage. The twins came running, looking around, and then jogged away down the alley. Macy hid there, panting and sweating, something broken loose now in the back of her mind.

  She saw the twins in the distance.

  They had stripped off all their clothes now.

  They were pissing on trees like dogs.

  Macy tried to catch her breath, tried to hold her world together before it flew apart.

  It was some kind of mass insanity, she decided, that’s what it was. That’s what had made those kids go crazy in Biolab and attack Mr. Cummings and Sully and that was what had made her go after Chelsea Paris. It was like some kind of insanity bug.

  And now it had the Hack twins and Mr. Chalmers.

  I have to get out of here, Macy found herself thinking. They could be everywhere. The whole town could be crazy…

  And that was a possibility, she supposed.

  She calmed herself the best she could and crossed the alley, slipped through a couple yards and thankfully saw no one. She didn’t know what was going on. But what she kept thinking was that if she had snapped out of it, maybe the others would, too. What amount of damage would be done by then she could not know and did not want to guess at “ Hey, Macy,” a voice said. “How’s my favorite girl?”

  Macy turned, flooded with fear, and then for maybe two or three seconds she relaxed. She breathed. Why, it was only Mr. Kenning who lived up the block. Mr. Kenning was a Boy Scout troop leader, he announced football games for the Greenlawn High Wildcats, and he sold cars for a living. A nice man who loved sports and kids and his Irish Setter, Libby. He always had a few kind words for Macy.

  Except…this was not that Mr. Kenning.

  This Mr. Kenning was standing in the back yard, completely naked and covered with blood. Neither of which seemed to bother him in the least. He was smiling, hacking on something with a knife. Blood ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow.

  “ Come here, Macy. I have a secret I want to share with you.”

  Macy just stood there, the instinctual need to flee very overpowering. She stepped around the hedges, knowing she shouldn’t, but needing to see just how bad this situation was.

  “ Come here, Macy. I won’t bite you.”

  I have a secret I want to share with you.

  But Macy could see his secret quite plainly: there was a carcass hanging from the limb of Mr. Kenning’s apple tree and he was in the process of dressing it out. It was skinned, fleshy, bleeding. There was no doubt what it was. Even if she hadn’t seen the ragged pelt of lustrous orange fur at his feet, she would’ve recognized the dog. It was hung by the throat.

  Mr. Kenning stabbed his knife into the torso, slitting it upwards. Libby’s viscera spilled out in a coiled, bloody mass. Mr. Kenning studied his dripping red fist that held the dripping red knife. He sniffed it, then licked the back of it.

  “ Oh no,” Macy said, the world beginning to spin around her. “Oh no…oh no…oh no…”

  Her whole body was shaking, tears rolling down her face, nausea rolling in her belly with the hot, rank stink of slaughtered dog.

  Mr. Kenning kept smiling. That grin was depraved and obscene, filled with a raw unflinching appetite. He would rape her if he could, Macy knew, then he would feed on her.

  “ Come here, Macy,” he said, his blood-spattered penis standing erect. “I’ll share my kill with you…if you share what you have with me.”

  Macy screamed and ran and, thankfully, he did not follow. He called out to her to bring her mother over, the whole time hacking and chopping at the dog. Macy threw up in the Maub’s hedges, cut through the Sinclair’s side yard, then ran across the street to her own porch.

  She stopped right there, catching her breath, trying to make sense of it all. Everything looked so positively normal that what she had just gone through seemed ridiculous. She heard a siren in the distance, but that didn’t really mean much. Not by itself.

  Behind her, there was movement, feet coming through the grass.

  She whirled around, eyes wide and mouth open, ready for just about anything. She saw Mr. Shears standing there. He lived next door. But this was not the Mr. Shears she knew. His eyes were glassy, his hair wild. His shirt was torn and hanging open, bloodstains all over it.

  In his hands was a golf club and he looked ready to use it.

  “ Please,” Macy said. “Oh, please, just stay away from me…”

  But Mr. Shears kept coming…

  15

  Mr. Chalmers wasn’t real happy with them for losing the girl. In fact, when they got back and told him that Macy Merchant had slipped away, he came right off the porch. He tossed his newspaper and came right at them. His eyes were filled with a simmering blackness. They were shiny like those of a mad dog.

  “Simple goddamn job I give you two,” he said, pulling his belt out of its loops and snapping it in his fists, “and you fuck it up.”

  Mike and Matt Hack stood there, knowing they were going to be punished, but not even thinking of running off. They had this coming and they knew it. So they stood there when the belt came at them, lashing them in the faces, the pain sharp and cutting. They cried out and fell to their knees, curling up in balls as the belt laid open their backs in hurting welts.

  “You feel that, you little shits? That’s pain and nothing teaches, nothing instructs quite like pain,” Mr. Chalmers told them, studying the belt in his hands. He was grinning now, satisfied, his eyes mocking and filled with venom. “You two gotta quit acting like fucking little boys. This is war. This is survival. When I send y
ou out to get something, you don’t come back without it. Those other neighborhoods, they’re gonna try and take what we got, so we got to hit them first. We gotta take what they got. Their women, their food, their weapons. Do you see? Do you see? DO YOU FUCKING SEE, BOYS?”

  Both boys were naked, their faces caked with dirt and sweat. But their eyes were wide and bright and somehow primal. Mr. Chalmers had hurt them and they seemed to like it. The pain had unlocked something in them and it was something they wanted more of.

  In the distance there was a sudden chorus of howling. It rose up high and shrieking and then faded away. It was hard to say whether it was from animals or people. At the sound of it, Mr. Chalmers nodded his head as if he understood the need to howl all too well.

  “Don’t make me school you again,” Mr. Chalmers said. “Now go out there and bring back a woman. Don’t come back empty handed. Bring me some gee-gee, some nice young gee-gee and don’t come back without it. Go!”

  Mike and Matt raced away, less human than they’d been even an hour before. They ran through yards and down alleys, crawled through vacant lots where the grass was yellow and crisp and dusty. This was the high, hot end of green summer and they smelled it, tasted it, knew it like they had never known it before. They rubbed their sweaty naked bodies with dirt, with crackling brown leaves, with chaff and loam until they smelled of summer, of rich earth and low wild things.

  They were supposed to get some gee-gee, some nice young gee-gee for Mr. Chalmers, which was pussy and they understood the need and want of fine pussy, but fuck Mr. Chalmers because they were young and free and lost in the heady bouquet of absolute atavism.

  So many houses.

  So many places to raid.

  And behind so many of those doors, the owners had already tasted the new primeval blood of Greenlawn which was the blood of the world now. They were drunk with it as Mike and Matt were drunk with it. Many were already gathering their weapons and stockpiling their food, herding their women and children together, living out their sweet, secret animal joys, just waiting for the night when they would run wild, killing and raping and plundering and tasting the hot blood of their prey upon their slavering tongues.

  Many were like that.

  And those that weren’t, were quickly becoming the minority. But even in that dim, shocked, confused minority, there were stirrings of ancient drives, the need to run on all fours and fill their senses with the savage delight of simple regression.

  The first place Mike and Matt stopped was a trim white ranch house with pink shutters. The yard was immaculate. The flowerbeds bursting with color. They rolled in the grass like dogs, then dove into the flowerbeds and smashed all those vibrant blooms beneath them. They grabbed up bunches of zinnias and marigolds, sweet pea and snapdragon, rubbing the crushed flowers and fragrant petals against their bodies. There was a goldfish pond out back. They caught every fish and smashed them with rocks. Then they went inside the house.

  They knew whose house it was.

  It belonged to Mrs. Cannon, a retired schoolteacher. If you trespassed on her lawn she would call the police. If you kicked your ball into her yard by accident she would seize it and never give it back. That’s the sort of person she was. A woman who spent her life teaching children, but secretly despised them and their youth. If the parents on the block thought she was a miserable old bitch, the children were sure she was a broom-riding witch.

  When Mike and Matt came through the door, Mrs. Cannon, a widow of seventeen years, dearly wished that her husband was still alive because even though she had dealt with some real bad boys in her time, she knew that she had finally met the very worst.

  Mike and Matt Hack.

  Naked and dirty, leaves and sticks in their hair, their bodies scratched and bruised and plastered with bits of flowers, they were about the most horrible things she had ever seen.

  “Hello, Mrs. Cannon,” said Mike.

  “Hello, Mrs. Cannon,” said Matt. “We were supposed to get some young gee-gee but we came to see you first.”

  Mrs. Cannon, well past eighty, was thin and weak and did not move so good anymore. But her ire was up and she directed it with vehemence: “Get out of my house! You filthy little monsters! Get out of my house!”

  And bare seconds after she had said this, she knew it was the wrong thing to do. Because you didn’t try and intimidate rabid dogs. And that’s what these two were. She could see it in their eyes: that blank, glaring animal hatred. They had parted company with civilization. They stared at her with eyes that were shiny, intensely loathsome. Just the sight of those eyes and what was behind them made her bladder let go. She shook. She trembled. But tried not to move because didn’t they say that if you did not move, made no aggressive posturing, that a mad dog would not attack?

  But it was too late because they smelled the fear on her.

  Matt leaped forward and Mrs. Cannon swatted him in the face, but that just enraged him, made him let go with a coarse growling sound that filled her with more terror than she’d ever known in her life. He grabbed her by the wrist and threw her to the floor and with such force her left arm snapped upon impact. She was old, her bones fragile and reedy. She cried out and he stomped down on her side with his foot. Three ribs gave like dry twigs.

  Mrs. Cannon screamed, cried, sobbed, just beyond herself with agony.

  She looked up at Matt Hack and knew that what she was dealing with here was not a boy, it was something else. Something evil and cunning and inhuman. There was no boy left inside that dirty husk, all of the culture and learning and civilization that had been hammered into his head for the past ten years had been stripped away, peeled back, revealing this primordial monster.

  While she squirmed on the floor, Mike rushed in and helped his brother. They stripped Mrs. Cannon, revealing the shriveled used-up body she hid even from herself. Skin and bones, not much more. Mike took up her unbroken arm, studied it, sniffing his way up the forearm and, deciding that the flabby bicep was by far the meatiest part, bit down on it with everything he had while Mrs. Cannon screamed and flopped and he drew blood. He did not particularly care for the taste of old lady flesh, so he promptly spat it back in her face.

  She didn’t last long after that.

  The boys jumped up and down on her, shattering her bones until shards of white erupted through her skin. When they were done, Mrs. Cannon was not moving anymore. She was just a bloody, loose-limbed heap and they soon lost interest in her.

  They ravaged the house.

  They emptied closets and dressers, shredding clothes and bedding with steak knives from the kitchen. They broke mirrors and emptied cupboards, pulverizing dishes and crockery on the floor. They urinated on the sofa and chairs and on the corpse of Mrs. Cannon. Mike took a shit in her bed. Matt did the same on the living room carpet. Like an animal, he was amazed and excited by the raw stench of his own feces. He played with it. He sniffed it. He held it in his hands. He threw it at his brother. Then he knocked the pictures off the walls and wrote his name again and again in brown looping whorls of excrement.

  And by that point, his name meant very little to him.

  But he enjoyed how it looked on the walls…

  16

  Louis Shears stood there with the golf club in hand, looking at Macy Merchant. She was standing by the porch steps of her house, battered and terrified, her forehead gashed open. She was wearing baggy cargo shorts and an oversized T-shirt that she practically swam in. Both were streaked with dirt.

  “ Macy,” he said. “Macy…it’s okay, it’s me, Louis.”

  But Macy was not buying his line. She looked around, wondering maybe if she could get away from him before that golf club came down. “Please,” she said. “Just go away…”

  Louis lowered the golf club. She seemed all right. After his experience with the beaten kid, those cops, and then Lem Karnigan…well, he was a little on edge. He’d been standing there by the door, peering outside, waiting for he did not know what, that awful paranoia brewing i
nside him. When he saw Macy come running across the street, he knew he had to go to her. She was either crazy or just scared. And he had to prove to himself which it was for his own state of mind.

  Thing was, she was looking at him as if maybe he was the crazy one.

  “ Macy, it’s okay, really it is. I’m not nuts.”

  She sighed, but didn’t look convinced. She just kept staring.

  Then Louis remembered the blood on him, how he must look. “I had a run in with a…with a crazy man,” he explained. “I haven’t changed my shirt yet.”

  She sighed again and lowered herself to the steps. She buried her face in her hands and wept.

  “ Macy…what happened? Did somebody do something to you?”

  Macy looked up at him, her face streaked with tears. Her shirt was torn, her arms and face bruised, crusted blood smeared on her forehead. She nodded, sniffed. “The Hack twins…I babysit them. They were throwing rocks at a car. I told them to stop and they pelted me…”

  She told him it all, including what Mr. Chalmers had said. How they were not to kill her on his territory. Louis could just about imagine what was going through her mind. The unreality and disbelief of her own experience. He’d felt that way telling his story to the cops and then to Michelle on the phone.

  When she was done, he just shook his head. He knew Mr. Chalmers and you couldn’t hope to meet a nicer guy. The image of him whipping out his business and showing the kids how to piss to mark your territory was not only ridiculous and disturbing, it was actually kind of funny in a mad sort of way. Had anyone told him this yesterday or even this morning, he supposed he would have laughed.

  But he wasn’t laughing now.

  And certainly not when Macy told him about Mr. Kenning and Libby.

  Shit.

  “ There’s been weird things happening all over town, honey. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “ At the school, too. A bunch of kids went nuts and killed a teacher. At least, that’s what I heard.”