The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  Then, Kathleen Soames leading the way with a decaying head on a broomstick, they faded into the night, glutted and pleased at the offerings of the mother high above…

  67

  Don’t you touch me. Don’t you dare touch me.

  One of them had taken notice of Macy now. He was a hulking creature, stinking of excrement, his oblong face and body thick with a crust of something that must have been mud, dried blood, and congealed fat. In the flickering firelight she could only really see the gleam of his bared teeth, his eyes like two bloody holes.

  He was standing there, watching her, his feet placed right in the pool of blood that was pretty much all that was left of the screaming woman after they’d dragged her remains away. Macy knew it couldn’t go on. They simply wouldn’t ignore her forever. She tried to be quiet, not to draw attention to herself, but now that just wasn’t enough. At best, she would be raped. At worst, they would make her suffer unimaginable agonies before putting her on the spit.

  He went down on one knee, arms outstretched, fingers splayed in the pool of blood. He looked like a runner waiting for the start of a race. He was grinning. He knew she was frightened, probably could smell the fear on her as she could smell the filth on him. And the really awful part was that he was enjoying it. She could see that. He was actually enjoying her discomfort, getting off on it, copping a sadistic thrill.

  He laughed beneath his breath with a hoarse, grating sound.

  Macy was getting angry.

  That this inbred, barbaric piece of shit would enjoy her suffering was just too much. Yes, she wanted to run as fast and far away from him as she could. But part of her wanted to stand and fight. To smash his head open with something, wipe that mocking, vicious grin off his face.

  He inched forward; she recoiled.

  He pulled back, laughing.

  A game. That’s all this was. She did not doubt that it would end in something terrible for her, but for now it was just a game. Macy’s wrists were still tied behind her back, but the knots were sloppy and loose. If she only had a few seconds unobserved, she knew she could squirm free.

  He was creeping closer, smelling like he’d been eating dead things and garbage.

  Macy waited. She would not flinch.

  He reached out to grab her ankle and she moved quickly, instinctively. She lashed out with her right foot and cracked him in the face with her heel. He let out a barking sound and fell away.

  Macy moved.

  She’d spent the past three years in gymnastics and it paid off now. She rolled onto her back and brought her roped wrists down to her ass, wriggling, squirming until she got them around the mounds of her buttocks. Straining every muscle and ligament, she got her wrists to the back of her knees and slipped her legs out.

  The man was staring at her. Not quite recovered from the kick in the face, but very much ready to pay Macy back in kind.

  Do it now or just forget it.

  Macy leaped to her feet and as that caveman sonofabitch tried to grab her ankle, she jumped away and kicked him in the ribs. He grunted and fell. Then she ran, knowing the chances of escape were futile. A boy stood in her way and she knocked him aside, knocked aside another woman and darted around a man with an axe in his hands. And then something hit her from behind, bowling her over to the stone floor and scraping the skin from her knees. It was him. The filth-covered man. He held onto her and she kicked him, hit him, felt her raw knees bounce off his chin. She was almost free Then a fist collided with the back of her head.

  She saw stars and was thrown into the grip of her adversary once again. This time it was not games. He smashed her in the face, clouted her upside the head. Punched her in the belly and grabbed her hair and kneed her in the ribs. She went down and he reached for her.

  Those scabby, filth-covered hands groped her.

  Macy came up fighting and even she didn’t know where the strength came from. He was huge, savage, bristling with muscle and fat. He easily outweighed her by a hundred pounds. She clawed his face, gouged his eyes, tried to get her knee into his groin and he hit her again, this time her lower lips split open and a tooth came loose. She went down, spitting it out along with a tangle of blood and saliva.

  Breathless, dazed, she waited for retribution.

  A ring of savages closed them in, waiting for it, too. Like hyenas surrounding the fresh kill of a lion, they were excited, yammering and snarling and squealing. They wanted a taste, but they wouldn’t touch Macy, not until the apex predator had had his fun first and the apex predator in this case was a tall, heavy man covered in mud, blood, and animal fat that had dried, cracked open in jagged crevices, making him look hideously mummified, something feral and embalmed come to life here in the gutted bowls of a desecrated church.

  Macy looked up at him in the flickering light of the fire, a thing of shadows and primal appetites. He was breathing very hard, grinding his teeth, flexing his muscles so that the crust covering him continued to crack and flake away. His eyes were shiny, wild.

  She hated him. She lived only to see him suffer. If a knife were placed in her hand, she would have slit his throat.

  Standing there, he seemed to know it, and it excited him.

  Staring down at Macy, he gripped his penis. He squeezed it. He was already hard. With a bloody hand, grunting like a pig, he masturbated with firm, sure strokes. He looked into her eyes the entire time, his gaze black, bestial, and deranged. He made sure she watched. He let out a cry and came, his semen striking Macy’s cheek in a hot gush than ran down her face.

  A day ago, a week ago, she would have screamed.

  She would have gotten sick.

  But now she did not even flinch. Debased, humiliated, there was nothing left now to flinch with. She did not feel exactly human anymore. Because it was happening now and she knew it and she wanted it to happen: the regression. A civilized, reasonable, intelligent person could not hope to survive with them or against them. You could not reason with them. They did not understand logic. They were territorial. They were animals. They were shaggy, psychotic, shit-smelling, crawling horrors straight out of the Pleistocene. They knew only the politics of the tribe, the mechanics of the hunt, the anatomy of murder and survival and blood sport. It was their liver and lights and soul. Regression was taking Macy with a hot surge of genetic impulse, sinking her slowly, steadily into the black pit of prehistory, down into the primal earth cheek by jowl where she could feel the cool moist soil of atavism and smell the secret animal musk of the race and taste the sweet blood of the primordial void.

  She was one with it now.

  And as the savage with the flaccid penis glared down at her with an appetite barely slaked, she felt herself falling into a shattering metallic silence.

  But sometimes it took a snake to kill another snake…

  68

  She watched the man by the fire.

  He was tall, well-muscled, lean. In the moonlight, a bloodied hammer in one hand and gore-dripping knife in the other, he looked every inch the dawn man that could be at once feared, understood, and desired.

  Kylie Sinclair trembled.

  In the darkness of the bushes, she was just touched by moonlight. She was wearing a crown of sticks and leaves that was not decorative, but meant to break up her silhouette in the night. It was an ancient technique of the hunt. Her sister and mother waited nearby.

  The man just stood there.

  She was smelling the pig roasted on the fire, the bubbling seams of fat and well-marbled slabs of meat that dripped a tantalizing hot juice into the flames. She was waiting for the man to pluck the carcass free and begin eating. Perhaps he would render it to bone and pack the meat off with him.

  No.

  He did neither.

  He went down on his knees in the grass, shaking. Kylie was confused. For surely this was his kill, slit and spitted, he had drawn first blood and would be the first to taste the sweet bounty of the hunt. But he did not seize it and claim it as his own.

  Kylie wai
ted.

  She could smell the pungent odors wafting up from her body…leaves and loam and black earth, a telltale stink of musk and animal oils that just barely masked her own ripe body odor. Good earthy smells. Smells that did not confuse, but invigorated and gave confidence. She ran fingers over the ceremonial welts and upraised scars of citricization that mottled her flesh. Like the paint made of blood and marrow fat that she decorated her body with, these were the symbols of who she was, what she was, her tribal affiliation.

  She sniffed her fingers, tasted them, intrigued by her own odors and flavors.

  She touched fingers to her armpits, her vagina, her rectum. Each smell and flavor was more heady and organic, each one making her more giddy.

  The man moved.

  He had heard something. Kylie was certain of it for the smell coming from him across the yard had changed. This was sharper: fear. Yes, he heard something. A voice. Weapons in hand, he was going to investigate.

  Kylie, peering through the bushes with eyes like glittering black stones, tensed in the dappled moonlight. Her muscles were drawn tight. She could smell violence coming from the man. It made her loins tremble.

  Deep inside the dark chest of her mind, biochemical signals had been activated and Kylie knew instinctively that the zenith of the cycle was fast approaching. She could smell it on herself. Taste it on her skin. Tomorrow, perhaps, she would be in estrus-heat-and already she was aching for the filling and the release. She hoped the dam would give her the man. She would bait him with the scent of her womanhood, draw him in, let him spill his milk into her. Then the cycle would be complete.

  A voice had spoken to the man.

  Kylie did not like the voice. She could tell by its tone that its speaker was not like she, not a hunter but prey. Something to harvest with the rest. The breeze brought her his smell and it was perfume and soap and synthetic fibers, only a ghost of sweat and animal purity.

  It was time.

  Kylie went back to join her sister and the dam. They had found a bucket filled with white fireplace ashes. They had dumped water into it, mixed it into a smooth white paint. She watched them cover themselves in it. She did the same. The three of them looked like marble-white ghosts. When it was dry, the dam took red lipstick and painted her daughters. She colored both ears red and then drew a wide red band from ear to ear and filled it in so that their eyes were looking out from a belt of bright scarlet. She painted similar bands over their mouths stretching to both jawlines.

  When they were done, it was time.

  Clutching her spear, Kylie led them on the hunt…

  69

  “Nice job, Louis,” the voice said to him. “Very nice, scaring off those little savages. Commendable. One might think you were a savage yourself.”

  Earl Gould.

  Louis went over to him in the grass. “What the hell are you doing here, Earl?”

  “I was kidnapped by the little horrors.”

  He was tied-up in the grass. Louis cut him loose, wondering if it was such a good idea or not. “I’m telling you right now, Earl. I’ve been through the shit, okay? You try and attack me and I swear to God I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

  Rubbing his wrists, Earl managed a laugh. “I’m okay, Louis. How about you?”

  Louis didn’t bother answering that. What could he say? He had a bloody hammer and a bloody knife in his hand.

  “Thanks for getting me out of this…jam,” Earl said. “I was next on the barbi. Nice show of aggression, by the way. You scared the hell out of them.”

  “I thought they’d stand and fight.”

  Earl shook his head. “Most animals rarely do. When faced with life-threatening show of aggression even a grizzly bear will think twice.”

  “We’re in a hell of a situation here, Earl.”

  “Yes, we are, Louis. We are in the jungle,” Earl said. “This is where seventy million years of primate development has led us: right back to the beginning.”

  Louis led him into the house and made him sit in a recliner in the living room. He did not turn on any lights. He went into the bathroom and washed his face, drank a few handfuls of water. When he came out, he grabbed a poker from the fireplace and sat on the couch. He could see Earl just fine in the moonlight filtering in through the picture window. He was grinning, but it was an awful sort of grin. A mad grin, but hardly dangerous. Just the grin of a man who had parted the black velour curtains of reality and peered deep into the fires of Hell, maybe saw something looking back at him. Something he recognized.

  An ex college prof, Earl dressed very neatly, was always well-groomed and on the ball. But today, all that was gone. His white hair was mussed, his clothes dirty and unkempt. There were bruises on his face and a smear of blood at one cheek. He kept taking off his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt. Putting then back on and repeating the process.

  “Okay, Earl,” Louis said, his voice very weary. “Tell me about it. Tell me what you did.”

  Earl just kept grinning. His eyes were wet in the darkness. “I…I killed, Louis. I killed Maureen.”

  There should have been some shock, but there was nothing. Had he told Louis that he bought a new Weed-Eater, the reaction would have been about the same. “Are you sure?”

  “I hit her.”

  “I saw that.”

  “But you ran off, Louis! You ran off!”

  “I had to, Earl.”

  Although Louis could not see his eyes, he could just about gauge the pain in them. But he figured there was more than pain. Probably recrimination.

  “But you let me hit her, Louis.”

  “No, Earl, I didn’t let you do anything. I didn’t have time to stop you. Somebody was attacking Macy. I couldn’t help you.” Louis sat there, looking at him. “You hit her, Earl. You hurt her. Not me. You. You’re the one that let that fucking madness take you over.”

  Earl sat right up and walked over to Louis like he was going to attack him. “I didn’t have a choice!” He grabbed Louis by the shirt, shook him. “I couldn’t fight against it! You can’t fight against it! It just takes you and you belong to it and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it! Do you see? That’s why I hit her and that’s why I kept hitting her!”

  Louis slapped him across the face. Slapped him hard enough to snap his head back and he wanted to keep slapping him. He was just sick of it all. Sick of the shit his neighbors had been doing to each other, to themselves, to the whole goddamn town. He didn’t know why the madness had not gotten to him, but he was starting to think that everyone who was infected was weak. Goddamn fucking weak. So he slapped the old man and he wanted to keep slapping until his hand was red and numb and Earl was on the floor, bleeding and sobbing and pissing himself. To Louis, the old man was the embodiment of all of them. Their weakness. Their inhumanity.

  Earl was down on one knee, still grinning, though his eyes were filled with tears.

  “Tell me what you did, Earl. Tell me what the fuck you did to your wife and how it felt when you were doing it,” Louis said, needing to rub the old man’s face in the stink he had created. “C’mon, tell me all about it.”

  Earl was blubbering now. Just beside himself with guilt and anguish and Louis actually found satisfaction in that because he wanted to see them all like that, down on their knees feeling the pain of their actions. And particularly Michelle. The woman he loved. The woman who had betrayed him now in ways Louis himself could not even begin to catalog.

  Jesus Christ, you idiot! She’s sick! They’re all sick! You can’t blame them for it any more than you can blame an alcoholic for hitting the bottle or a junkie for sticking a needle in his arm! Sick! Sick! Sick!

  Louis knew it. He knew it was true, but it wasn’t buying beans with him now. Not after what he’d seen. Not after what he’d experienced. Not after what his own goddamn wife had done to him. Finally he sighed. “I’m sorry, Earl. Really I am. Tell me what happened. Take your time.”

  It took some time, all right, but Earl did. He opened t
he flue and all the heat and smoke and suffering blew out of his soul. It had been itching in the back of his skull for hours, the insanity, the need to run free like an animal, the dire compulsion to act out his most debased fantasies and urges. He refused to tell Louis what these were, but Louis could just imagine. There’s nothing more sordid and filled with crawly things as the human subconscious mind, that pit of fears and desires, wants and needs, repressed feelings and anxieties that the rational, conscious mind will simply not allow to be expressed. Louis understood what Earl was saying, because it was much the same thing Macy had told him. Earl said it was caused by a gene. Regardless, it first infected the subconscious, releasing images and ideas and primal wants, flooding the mind with them, and by that point, such things as inhibition and restraint no longer existed. The infected became, essentially, an animal with a human brain, though highly degraded, primitive. It had taken complete charge of Earl as he talked to Louis over the hedges. Maureen’s shouting had acted like some sort of trigger and there was no turning back. He hit Maureen, put her down. Kicked her and kept kicking. She was old, she was frail. She should have been dead, but she wasn’t.

  “So I kept hitting her,” Earl said, his eyes wide in the moonlight coming through the window. Like mirrors reflecting the awfulness inside his head. “But she wouldn’t die, Louis. She just wouldn’t.”

  “Take it easy, Earl.”

  He uttered a cold and sterile laugh. “Oh yes, take it easy. How can I take it easy, Louis? How can I possibly take it easy? She wouldn’t die! She wouldn’t die so I went into the garage and got a hammer. You know what? I remember doing it, I remember wanting to do it. Can you understand that? No, you can’t. You can’t understand or know what it was like, Louis! I went and got that fucking hammer and I was whistling the whole time! Whistling! Like I was going to fix the back door! When I got back there, when I got back to her-”

  “You don’t have to do this, Earl.”