The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  And when she tried to sort it out, to make sense of it, all she got was confused. She’d tried to settle in with her soaps that afternoon while Ryan was still in school and Mother Soames was napping, but she couldn’t seem to concentrate. Couldn’t sit still. The TV was too loud or too soft and the pictures were too bright, too hard on her eyes. She looked, but none of it made sense. The storylines were as incomprehensible as hieroglyphics.

  It was a hot day, but not so hot that even in the cool of the living room she should have sweated, felt dizzy, felt the need to vomit, been on her knees before the toilet some four times in one hour. Not that anything came of it: just wracking dry heaves that left her breathless and frightened, her head spinning and her temples pounding, her throat tight as braided rope and feeling as if it was coated in a fine, scratchy fuzz.

  Kathleen had even taken Steve’s advice and stretched out in bed.

  But all she did was toss and turn. There was no position that was comfortable. Her pillow felt warm and damp like some breathing, dormant thing that was waiting to wake. And the one time she’d almost drifted off, she thought she’d heard a voice from inside that pillow say, “Now, Kathleen. Do it now.” She’d come out of that sitting up, not remembering doing so. Sitting up with her knees drawn up to her breasts, her arms wrapped around her legs, sweat dripping from her brow, making her eyes sting.

  No, she would not sleep.

  Despite Steve’s protests she went right back to it, organizing cupboards already fastidiously organized; cleaning out drawers; wiping down shelves; sweeping and dusting and mopping because she dared not sit still, afraid that voice would speak to her again or she’d start thinking bad things. She had to keep busy, she had to keep moving, she had to beat it out of herself, wrench it from her mind and the only way to do that was with hard work. Thing was, she had become some mindless automaton, just repeating the same tasks over and over again until Steve had demanded to know what the hell was going on.

  He’d come back from the garage that day complaining about the heat and the three rings jobs he’d had to perform and goddamn automatic transmissions and vacuum lines and his boss who was just pissing him off, pissing him off so much, he’d admitted, that he’d almost picked up a torque wrench and knocked his brains out.

  Steve was calm and easy by nature, but not this day.

  He was wired and irritable and he drank his beer and tried to watch CNN and all the time, Kathleen couldn’t stop cleaning. She vacuumed right past him, picked lint from under the couch cushions and straightened pictures and washed walls and emptied plastic fruit from the same bowl five times and polished the bowl, chased every speck of dust from every vinyl grape leaf and plum stem. Steve drank and smoked his cigarettes and every time he flicked his ash in the ashtray, she was right there, emptying it and wiping it clean. Finally as she reached over to do it again, he grabbed her arm like he wanted to break it.

  “ Listen to me, Kathy,” he said, sweat beaded on his upper lip. “If you don’t sit down and fucking relax, I’m going to tie you to a goddamn chair. You’re getting under my skin, you hear me? Knock it off.”

  “ I…can’t seem to stop,” she admitted. “I feel so wound up. Like I’m one of those toys with a key you turn, you know? Just wound tight.”

  Steve pulled off his cigarette. “Okay, sure. Now I’m pulling the key out and throwing it away. So stop it, all right? I’m not up to this. You don’t stop and God help me, but I’ll…I’ll…just stop it. Please, just stop it.”

  “ I’ll go check on Mom.”

  “ Piss on her,” Steve said. “Goddamn parasite sucking the life out of us, that’s what she is.”

  “ Steve…Steve, she’s your mother.”

  But he didn’t seem to care.

  All he cared about was CNN and the bad news everywhere: murders and beatings, fires and mob violence. Crazy things. Awful things. But he could not stop watching it all; he was transfixed.

  There were things going on in his head, Kathleen knew, just as there were things going on in hers. He could pretend as she pretended, but they were there. Things that did not belong and had no reason for being, malefic shadows reaching out and enveloping, making them into people they were not, demanding that they be everything but what they were.

  After that little exchange, Kathleen tried working outside, but, dear God, that sun was hot. It burned the skin from her muscles and bleached her eyes white and evaporated the blood from her veins. And she sweated, God, how she sweated, but not the good sweat of hard work but an acidic-smelling poison that was gray and pungent like the run-off from a sewer. That sun…that burning sun.

  She prayed for darkness.

  Finally, her head aching and her teeth chattering, she went inside and splashed water in her face, but that stink was still on her. She took a shower, trying to get that smell off with body wash and Camay and Steve’s Irish Spring, but the more she scrubbed and deodorized, the more that stink came off her in hot, rancid waves.

  God, what was that smell?

  She stood under the cool spray, gagging on the stench that reminded her of hospital waste and the juice dripping from infected abscesses. Her skin was rubbed pink, rubbed red, just raw and hurting and she kept thinking that it was inside her, that whatever it was, she had to cut it out, she had to slice it free like a tumor before it spread.

  And then there she was, standing in the shower with her razor, slicing the blade down her arms and over her wrists and the blood ran and flowed and the smell of it…Christ, the black and putrescent smell of what was inside her.

  With a cry, she tossed aside the razor and stepped out of the shower, seeing herself in the mirror, naked and wet and smeared with blood. But her mind was beyond shock by that point. She had to get back to work. She had to get outside and get some fresh air before her head flew apart.

  So she did that.

  And on her way to the stairs, she paused by the door to Mother Soames room, standing there and listening to the old woman breathe and thinking what it would be like to stop that breathing. For she hated the sound of it. Some nights she lay awake listening to it, that ragged and wheezing respiration. It came through the walls and got in her head and she waited, waited for the breathing to stop in the dead of night as they said it often did with old people. Yes, she waited, tensing, wanting it to stop. She hated herself for it, but deep down she wanted that old bitch to die in her sleep. That breathing, that perpetual hollow breathing, it was like…yes, it was like that story she’d read in school by Poe where that heart would not stop beating even after the old man was dead.

  Kathleen actually reached for the tarnished brass doorknob of Mother Soames’ room…but she stopped herself. Made herself stop, even though that same whispering voice said, “Do it, Kathleen. Do it now.”

  She yanked her hand away, eyes filled with tears, knowing that if she opened that door there would be no going back. For when that door was opened, something, whatever was whispering to her, it would take her, it would possess her and she would like it, she would surrender herself completely to the sweet violation of that other. She would smell the hot, sour perspiration of the old woman, the urine-smell, the age-smell, the medicine-smell, and it would sicken her. Then she would hear that rasping breathing and she would really have no choice but to squeeze the life out of that old, repellent slug.

  Squeeze until the breathing stopped and those blanched eyes rolled shut and the foul juice ran from her mouth and ears.

  Placing hands to her ears, Kathleen ran downstairs, unaware that she was naked or why such a thing would matter. She grabbed up rugs as she went, two and three and four, wrestling them out the door and standing on the porch, naked and bleeding and mad, beating dust out of them that had already been beaten out five or six times.

  She stopped and sniffed herself.

  She smelled like Camay and body wash. The fresh, clean scent of it made nausea roll in her belly. That was the problem. Chemicals. All those chemicals and preservatives, dyes and fragrances an
d artificial things they put in everything these days. It was all making her rot from the inside out.

  She wanted that other smell back, the dark poison smell of what was inside her.

  There was a garbage bag on the porch. Steve hadn’t brought it out to the cans yet.

  She could smell the trash in it boiling, stewing.

  It made her mouth water.

  That’s what you need, Kathy. You need rotten and foul things, dirty things.

  Yes, that was it. Going down on her hands and knees, she tore open the bag and scattered trash everywhere. Panting, drooling, sweating profusely…she grabbed up egg shells and banana peels, tuna tins and used tampons, stinking hamburger cartons with raw, graying meat still clinging to them, anything that stank or had gone over, and began rubbing it all over her skin. She scented herself between the legs with banana peels, loving the greasy sensation. She rubbed old meat and smelling juice over her breasts until her nipples stood erect. She greased her hair with fish oil and rubbed tampons under her arms and down her legs.

  She was so excited by it all, feeling so free and so vital, that she slid a filthy finger into herself and brought herself to orgasm right there on the porch. Her body blazed with heat and her fingers vented it, let it all come flowing out.

  Some kid was watching her.

  Some teenage boy from down the street, watching her with his mouth hanging open. Kathleen knew he was there. She liked him watching. She wanted him to sense her heat, to recognize her scent by sniffing all her parts. She gasped and cried out and then it was over.

  The silly boy looked terrified.

  On her hands and knees, Kathy pulled her lips back from her teeth and hissed at him.

  He ran.

  Little worthless shit! He should have taken the bait! He should have come up on the porch and rutted with her! Then she would have had him! Then she would have sank her teeth in his throat and tasted what came splashing out, filling herself.

  Kathy leaped down into the yard and crawled through the flowerbeds, tearing out azaleas and mums in handfuls. She ripped out hollyhocks and zinnias, decapitated bluebells and buttercups with her teeth. She flattened them all, rolling through the sweet, gagging, flowery wreckage she had created.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  She yanked flowers out by their roots until she reached the cool, moist black soil beneath and then she rubbed it on herself, digging through it, swimming in it, loving the earthy dank smell of dirt.

  A worm had been disturbed and she snatched it up, threw it in her mouth and chewed it to a pulp.

  She was feeling better than she had felt in weeks now.

  If only that damn sun would go down.

  Because when it did, when it did…the night would be like no night this miserable, stagnant, shit-grubbing town had ever seen before.

  And Kathy knew it.

  “ What the hell are you doing?”

  It was Steve. Silly man, he’d missed her show on the porch, but now he saw her…dirty and bloody and stinking. He looked afraid. He looked confused. Kathleen ran up the porch steps on all fours and dove through the screen door. Steve fell over and she jumped on him, rubbed herself all over him as he fought against her…hitting her, scratching her, bringing delicious waves of pain. But then she had his head and she banged it off the floor until he went limp beneath her.

  Panting and sexually aroused, Kathleen took his hand in her mouth, licking it and swooning with the taste of man-sweat. She bit down as hard as she could on his fingers until the flesh crushed and the bones snapped beneath. She worried and chewed until she got some good meat free to eat.

  Then dragged him into the kitchen.

  She used the carving knife.

  She slit his throat, slashed open the carotid until hot, dark blood splashed over her breasts. She cut his clothes off, chewed at his throat and belly, leaving bloody punctures all the way down until she found what she was looking for between his legs.

  God, how good it tasted in her mouth.

  How delightful it felt smashing to a pulp between her teeth.

  Sometime later, Kathleen took his blood and painted the walls in loops and whorls and scraggly hex signs she remembered from a book long ago. When she was done the kitchen was hers. It smelled of raw meat and blood. This was her place, her warren and she had to keep others out.

  Squatting by the kitchen door, she pissed to mark her territory…

  18

  When the door to her office opened, Michelle Shears almost came right out of her skin. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but it was only Carol, her boss. Usually she knocked, but today she burst right in. Stood there with a glassy look in her eyes.

  “Have you heard?” she said.

  Michelle felt butterflies winging in her belly. “What now?”

  “It’s all over the radio.”

  “I…no. I’ve just been trying to finish up some things. I want to get out of here.”

  Carol just stared with those dead eyes. “It’s everywhere now.”

  “What is?”

  “What’s happening in this town. It’s happening everywhere. There’s rioting in LA. People are setting fires in Chicago. There’s been some kind of mass suicide in New York. Things are going crazy.”

  Michelle tried to swallow but couldn’t.

  Mass insanity…all over the country? Right away, like everyone else, she started looking for reasons, connections. She started thinking about terrorists letting lose some bioweapon, some kind of germ. She saw a show once where they said that if such a germ were let loose in a major airport, commuters would spread it from one end of the country to the other in a matter of hours.

  Was that it?

  No, it didn’t make sense. She could see it hitting Chicago and New York and LA, all the major arteries of the airlines. But Greenlawn? Unless someone just happen to have been infected on a flight and come back here, spread it around real fast…no, it didn’t make sense.

  “What the hell’s going on, Carol?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s all over the place. They said on the news some guy in Fort Wayne murdered a family with an axe. They were his next door neighbors for godsake.”

  Michelle felt something beginning to fragment inside her.

  She’d been entertaining some fantasy all afternoon of getting home and getting out of town with Louis until the madness blew over. But if it was everywhere…where could you run to?

  “The governor of Texas has declared a state of emergency, Michelle. It’s all over CNN. People are killing each other. Like animals.”

  “Good God.”

  Carol just stood there a moment, hugging herself. Then she looked over at Michelle with dark, simmering eyes. “Animals,” she said. “Animals. I wonder what that’s like…”

  She left the room.

  Michelle looked out her window.

  She saw the sunny streets of Greenlawn. Everything looked perfectly fine. In the distance, there was the whine of an ambulance. All over the country. Good God. All over the country. But she knew she couldn’t worry about that. Not now. She had to worry about this place.

  About Greenlawn.

  Suddenly, she could see nothing else, know nothing else. Tunnel vision. One place. Her town. Her territory. Everything else faded as something important and vital inside her went with a warm, wet snapping noise. There was purity then. There was joy. She could smell her own skin and taste the salt on her lips and feel the heat between her legs.

  She rummaged through her desk drawers.

  Found something she could use.

  A letter opener with a six-inch blade…

  19

  Dick Starling stood watch over his wife’s corpse.

  This was the love of his life, his happiness, his heart, his everything. That’s why he had to kill Megan because she just hadn’t understood. When it had come over him as it was now coming over everyone, she had fought against it. And even though he could no longer really remember what he had been like before,
he knew that this was better and Megan was an alien entity, a disease germ in the midst of a healthy body. So he had taken his axe and split her head open.

  That had been several hours ago and now he had her strung up in the kitchen by the feet, had dressed her out as he dressed out his deer in November. He’d taken her head off and gutted her, placing her organs and entrails in neat piles in the sink on the drain board.

  There was blood all over the floor.

  There was blood all over him.

  He sat in a sticky, drying pool of it, the blood-stench up his nose and down his throat, permeating every pore and every cell and the joyous, pleasing smell of it made him swoon, made him hard, connected him to the simple rhythms of life in a way he had never known before. He sat there, studying the blade of his axe. It was stained with blood. There with clots of hair and bits of tissue stuck to it.

  Cocking his head, he listened.

  For intruders.

  They had already tried to take his kill once. A woman and two ratty-looking girls with kitchen knives. Some near-submerged, misty portion of his brain told him that they were once Maddie Sinclair and her two daughters, Kylie and Elissa. But that meant nothing to him. They were scavengers, predators. He had chased them off. He had wanted the woman. He wanted to fuck her on the bloody floor, maybe the girls, too. But they had run off.

  He wondered where his own daughters were.

  He studied the walls of the kitchen. They were splattered with blood and decorated with bloody handprints. When Dick had been dressing Megan out, he had been amazed at his bloody hands so he pressed them against the walls and made prints. He liked the way it looked so he kept dipping his hands into his wife’s torso and painting the walls with red handprints. Those who came here would know this was his lair. That he would defend it.

  He heard voices in the distance.

  Crawling across the floor with his axe, he pulled himself up by the sink. The smell of organ-meats and intestines made his mouth water, his belly growl. He peered out the window. He saw a man out there, across the street. A man and a girl. It took him a moment, but then he remembered that the man was Louis Shears and the girl was Macy Merchant.