The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  He came to 4 ^ th Avenue and collapsed under a row of spreading oak trees, just panting and gasping. He knew these trees. As a kid he’d climbed them. You could shimmy out onto the branches that overhung Providence and watch cars and trucks pass beneath you. He knew his initials and those of his friends were still carved up there on the tree above him. Just down the block was the Sloden Mortuary, a looming gray concrete edifice flanking the town cemetery, and across the street from that there was a creamery on the corner-Fretzen Brothers – and lots of old houses pressed in tightly together.

  Sure, it hadn’t really changed much.

  Except they weren’t really houses anymore, just block upon block of cages. Each one filled with one or more slavering things that used to be human. In fact?

  They were coming.

  It didn’t seem possible, but they were. He started to wonder if they were not only a pack in appearance, but in reality. If maybe, somehow, they had his scent or were going to run him to ground. He’d taken a pretty circuitous route and still they’d found him, casting around for his scent like true dogs.

  Louis didn’t think he could run anymore.

  They were still a long way off. He looked up at the moonlight dappled tree above him. It rose a good thirty feet above Providence, if not forty. Looking around, he checked the trunk which was so wide that two men could not have put their arms around it. Some of the old footholds had been broken off by storms or children. But there was enough there. He reached up and grabbed a limb above his head, getting his foot on one of the old knobs. He started up, straining and cursing under his breath. Definitely feeling his age. His foot slipped once and he dangled there by the limb, but finally he pulled himself up, breaking spiderwebs with his face. Stout limbs came out from the trunk like spokes. He ducked under some and climbed up others until he was a good fifteen feet up. He sat on a branch and hugged the trunk and just waited, sweat dripping off the end of his nose.

  He could hear them.

  When he caught his breath, he climbed higher like a frightened monkey.

  They were getting closer…

  62

  When Macy came to, maybe an hour or two later, she was suspended in midair about three feet off the blackened carpet of the altar. Her wrists were noosed with hemp ropes that were tied off above. She was hanging there, the ropes cutting into her flesh like hot wires, seeming to wind tighter and tighter, cutting off her circulation. Her arms felt numb, but her shoulders-which were bearing the brunt of her weight-were burning with a dull, constant throbbing.

  But the pain seemed distant.

  She was in a den of them.

  They were everywhere, huddled in the smoky darkness, moving about like primordial shadows in the tenebrous haze. The only lights burning were from candles that threw a flickering, uneven illumination that reflected off clouds of slow-moving smoke in the air. They had built a fire using sticks and pews shattered to kindling. About a dozen of them were huddled around it, men, women, a couple dirty naked children. An old woman, also naked, with terrible pendulous breasts pocked with sores was tossing leaves or herbs into the fire, chanting something beneath her breath.

  Macy could not hear what it was.

  But the others answered her with harsh, throaty groans that did not sound human at all, more like the low rumbling growl of wolves or dogs. Now and again, one of the children would make a yipping sound that reminded her of hyenas fighting over a carcass.

  The smoke burned her eyes, a greasy film lay over her bare flesh. She could just make out things scattered over the floor that looked like bones and hides, maybe a few jawless skulls lying about. She could not see them clearly, but she could smell them. Smell the death on them, smell the tallow and blood of the skins.

  Her first instinct was to shout, to twist and fight against the ropes, to scream for help. But she’d already done that and knew very well the futility of such things. Sometimes, sometimes when you were laid out as meat in the cave of a bear it was better not to draw attention to yourself.

  She saw that three other women and one man were roped together at the foot of the altar. One of the women was looking up at her with shocked, fearful eyes. And that meant she was not like them, not an animal. Normal. Macy felt pity for her, but there was nothing to be done.

  This was no longer a church, Macy saw. It was no sanctified place but the rotting, filthy den of depraved things like troglodytes, cave-dwellars and man-eaters, walking pestilence from a forgotten age.

  And realizing this, realizing that these people were not just crazy, not just a bunch of lunatics out on a binge, but primeval and animalistic things, a flesh and blood regression of the species, she was terrified. For a darkness had taken the world and those that hunted it did not seek the light, they were content to scratch in the shadows of reason. The church was a cave, a warren, a lair now. Those things out there were not men and women any longer, they were just…animals. God was not here. This was not his house. This was a place of pagan evils now. The corpse-woman on the cross was evidence of that. And Macy did not doubt that with regression, with the reaffirmation of race memory, that this place was thick with primordial spirits, with long forgotten dark gods of fertility and sacrifice. And maybe, just maybe, if she shut her mind down and let it hum along at its lowest level she might see them: creeping, shaggy things from the misty past that demanded burnt offerings, demanded the flesh and blood of the faithful, expiation in its purest form: Give unto me your firstborn for I would find the child pleasing.

  She looked around, squinting. The main doors were open, the night breeze sucking out the smoke. She could see them, the savages, coming in out of the night, dragging things behind them (one man had a naked girl on a rope). A couple were screwing atop a heap of bloody hides. An old woman picked things from the scalps of children, often eating what she found. A man sharpened a bone into an awl. A teenage girl cut designs into her skin with a razor blade while another girl painted her face with the blood from a carcass of a dog while a boy sawed the pelt free with a knife. Others crawled over the floor, picking at bones and refuse, scratching symbols into the stones, gnawing on meat and offal, licking their fingers and groping themselves and snorting in the shadows.

  Jesus.

  Is this what men had evolved from?

  Is this why the species fought so hard for civilization, for order, why they adopted a church that was brutal in its dealings with paganism and adapted strict laws to punish any who acted… uncivilized? She thought so. This was why people were so offended by cannibalism, by headhunting, by ritual murder-yes, it was a cultural thing, of course, a taboo and it was taboo because this was the sort of thing that was skulking in man’s past, the very thing man had finally risen up from, stamped out, was horrified at his core of. For every sadistic murder, every cannibalistic act, was a reminder of our past, what we had evolved from and what we were afraid to backslide into.

  But how had it happened?

  How had the darkness of the past returned? How had grim racial memory swallowed the civilized world and plunged it back to this degeneracy?

  Maybe this regression into primitivism is natural. Maybe like the Dark Ages of Europe that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire and thrust things like culture and learning into the pit until the Renaissance, this was pre-ordained somehow. Maybe the beast within was always more active than anyone ever guessed, much closer to the surface, teeth bared and claws out, ready to pounce. For there was a simplicity to it, wasn’t there? The beast with his rudimentary wants and needs, feeding and fucking, hunting and breeding, living only from one day to the next to satisfy the simple drives of aggression, procreation, and instinctual craving. The world had gone native, it had gone savage and tribal. A new Dark Ages had been heralded in. Like maybe the race was fed up with the burden of civilization, with progress and culture and law, greed and envy, religious intolerance and political corruption, it wanted to return to a time when all men were truly considered equal, when you were only as successful as your
last hunt, your innate cunning, the children you bore, the weapons you fashioned with your own two hands. Yes, the call of the wild, an atavistic longing in every man, woman, and child to return to an age of basal simplicity wherein the fire that roasted your meat and warmed your cave also lit your world.

  The law of the jungle.

  Survival of the fittest.

  Darwinism rendered to its simplest form.

  These were the things Macy was thinking. She had always had an intellectual bent and prided herself upon it. Any thick-headed idiot could score on the field and any bimbo could jump up and down and cheer, but thinking, real thinking, that was a gift, that took mental power, discipline, and drive. And realizing this, realizing that she was still an intellectual, she knew she was absolutely fucked.

  There would be no place for thinkers in this new world of darkness.

  She stared out, watching them. There wasn’t much else to do. Some of the smoke had cleared and she now wished it hadn’t. Things were revealed now that she did not want to look upon. For suspended over the fire from a tripod of what looked like aluminum tent poles secured at their apex with electrical tape, was the body of a boy. He was being smoked and from the smell-that sickening odor of blackened meat-he had been cooking for some time.

  Macy squirmed now.

  There were horrors and there were horrors. She had seen things, witnessed things, been humiliated, beaten, and abused, but this she could not look upon…a child cooked over a fire.

  But what came next was infinitely worse.

  A man and woman came to the fire. The man had a knife and the woman had a metal pail. He prodded the boy’s corpse with his knife, making it swing back and forth with a slow grisly motion. The boy’s flesh was blackened in places, his belly was bloated pink-yellow and shiny like that of a roasted pig. The man jabbed the knife into him and hot juice ran into the fire, sizzling. Using the knife, the man began slicing slabs of meat, sawing them free. He tossed these to the crowd. He hacked off the boy’s genitals and dropped them in the pail. Then he peeled the flesh from his belly and chest, carefully carving it until it came off in a single sheet he yanked free.

  The savages around him, their faces oily and flickering with impure light, could barely contain themselves.

  With a forceful plunge, he buried the knife just below the navel and slit the boy gut to throat. He cut free the stomach, liver, kidneys and intestines. It took some time. As he did so, the others were eating, chewing on the flesh, their faces smeared with blood and fat. The internals went into the pail. Using the haft of the knife, he broke through the boy’s ribs, pounding and pounding until the bones gave. Using his hands, his snapped the ribs free and tossed them aside. He cut through the lungs, peeled them back, and sliced the muscled mass of the heart free. It, too, went into the bucket.

  The crowd of savages were roaring and squealing with delight.

  Macy did not want to look, but she could not help herself. She looked over at the roped-up man and the three women. The one woman looked up at her as before. She was gagged like the others so she did not scream. But judging from her wide, tear-filled eyes, she wanted to.

  The boy’s corpse was cut free.

  The man dumped it on the floor. Using a hatchet, he chopped off both legs, then the arms. The crowd took charge of these, fighting over them, biting and scratching. The head he did not share. He chopped at it until the cranium was smashed and then he peeled the scalp and shards of bone free, snapping them like crab’s legs. He slit the membrane and exposed the brain. Several women had gathered around him now and he happily shared with them. They sat in a crude circle, dipping their scabby fingers into the skull and scooping out hunks of brain that they chewed almost delicately, sucking them between their lips and pulping them with their teeth.

  Meanwhile, the woman with the pail divided up the intestines which were quickly spitted on sticks and roasted in the flames. Blood and fat dropped from them, sputtering on the coals.

  Macy saw the heart get pierced with a stick and looked away.

  She needed to throw up and not so much from the sight but from the smell. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of the woman licking the inside of the boy’s skull clean while the bloody man with the knife violently fucked one of her friends.

  Oh God, that stink.

  Then Macy realized someone was behind her. Her bra was cut free, then her panties. Callused fingers gripped the globes of her ass, slapped them, poked them with stubby fat fingers. A man. It was a man. He was pressed up against her and she could feel his hardness spearing between her legs. He licked her neck and breathed into her ear. His breath stank like a gangrenous wound.

  He reached up and cut the ropes holding her wrists. She hit the altar and prepared to fight him. She had no doubt she was going to be raped. But she would not make it easy. He grinned down at her, his eyes like open infected sores.

  He reached for her with crusty, bleeding hands…

  63

  Getting down out of the tree was not quite as simple as getting up it, Louis found out. After the clan had gone away and he had a chance to breathe, he waited a time and then began his descent. He went slowly because he was no kid anymore and a drop out of a tree might mean a broken limb. And something like that tonight in Greenlawn was deadly. So he climbed down slowly. Then about eight feet from the ground his foot slipped off a limb and he nearly fell right onto the pavement. A lucky grab saved his bacon. His hand hooked around a limb and he lowered himself to safety.

  And then he ran.

  Like a hunted animal he ran home.

  When he finally made it to his house on Rush Street, he was panting and sore and drenched with sweat. He collapsed in his front yard and just breathed. He looked up at the stars through the tree branches and was amazed that they were still the same. Shouldn’t they have changed, too?

  Finally, he sat up.

  It wasn’t safe to be lounging around like this and he knew it.

  His brain kept telling him he needed a plan, a mode of survival…but there was nothing. What could he do? Where could he hide? The world had fallen to barbarism and the wild things were everywhere.

  He looked down Rush Street.

  The streetlights were still on, moths and insects circling them. All the houses were dark as tombs. The Merchant’s next door. The Maub’s, the Soderberg’s, the Loveman’s. Even the Gould’s. There was only a dead silence coming from the Starling’s and Kenning’s across the street. Nothing but shadows, the breeze stirring tree limbs. Usually at night like this you could hear a few cars in the distance, the distant rumble of trucks out on the highway. But tonight…nothing.

  He heard a dog howl in the distance.

  A shouting voice from several streets away.

  He smelled smoke on the breeze from burning neighborhoods and firepits.

  Nothing else.

  Just the steady sighing respiration of the night world. Probably, he imagined, exactly how summer nights had sounded during the Pleistocene after the retreat of the glaciers.

  He got to his feet and walked across the yard and there, stopped dead. Two of his windows had been shattered. The front door was standing wide open. Within was the blackness of plundered crypts. There. Now what? Did he run off or did he dare go in there and face what had done this, what might still be waiting inside?

  A weapon.

  He would need a weapon. He still had his lockblade knife in his pocket, but he wanted something bigger that he could strike from a distance with.

  His mind frantically searched for something. There were plenty of things in the garage. But his keys were still in the Dodge on Main. He remembered there was a rake in the backyard. Better than nothing. Carefully, staying in the shadows, he scouted his way back there, expecting long-armed, hollow-eyed slavering things to leap out at him at any moment.

  There was the rake right where he’d left it two weeks before after cleaning up the weeds in the garden. He could hear Michelle’s voice bitching at him to put it i
n the garage before it rusted.

  Michelle, Michelle, Michelle…Good God.

  But he couldn’t think about that, he couldn’t The door to the garage was wide open.

  Dick Starling had escaped.

  Now the night seemed more dangerous than ever. But he knew he had to look, to find out. He crept over there. It looked like the door had been kicked in. Dick Starling had been rescued by one of them. It was quiet inside. Raising the rake with one hand, Louis groped in the darkness, found the switch, clicked it on. The light would be like a beacon to them, but he had to take the chance.

  Dick Starling was gone, of course.

  Louis had a crazy, demented hope that one of them slipped in here and killed him…but no. He was just gone. The duct tape had been cut free of his wrists. It was all over the floor like shed snakeskin. The chain and Masterlock were nowhere to be seen.

  Get moving.

  He set aside the rake and grabbed a hammer. Then he shut off the light and tip-toed across the yard. He went in the back. Creeping up the back stairs into the kitchen. Silence. He waited, waited some more. He moved down the hallway, sweat running down his face. His heart was pounding so hard he was certain someone would hear if they were there.

  He smelled blood.

  In the living room, he clicked on the light. There was a body sprawled on the carpet. A woman. Naked, pale. Blood was splattered up the walls, soaking into the carpet. She had been gutted like a steer, her entrails stretched across the room like dead snakes.