The Devil Next Door

by Tim Curran

  Louis was way too tired for thinking, for anything this heavy. “We evolved from a killer ape, I guess. Not that I’m really surprised.”

  “ Yes, basically,” Earl said, very excited to be lecturing once again. “The innate depravity of our species comes directly from the killer ape. Civilization is only an attractive cloak, for beneath we are murderous beasts. We are territorial, aggressive, and murderous. To our species and every other, this is why we wage war, this is the foundation of mass murder, serial killings, genocide, and our instinctive cruelty. We are killers. Listen to me, Louis. Dart further suggested that we did not evolve intelligence and then turn to killing, we evolved intelligence because we turned to killing. At some point, our ancestors branched off from their non-aggressive cousins. These early hominids became predatory probably because of the scarcity of food and probably by imitating other predators as primitives will do. We learned to stand erect to hunt, to give chase to our prey. Hands free to grip and tear, but lacking teeth or claws, we developed weapons. Crude imitations from bone, rock, wood. Ah, now the use of weapons entails great coordination, thus our nervous systems were challenged and our brains enlarged. The development of hunting tactics enlarged our brains still further. We are men today, Louis, because our ancestors were killers. As Robert Ardrey said in African Genesis, man had not fathered the weapon, the weapon fathered man.”

  Earl said the “Killer Ape” theory was controversial as hell. Many anthropologists dismissed it and probably because it pretty much swept their conservative, bloodless little theories into the wastebasket where they belonged. But there was no need to doubt it now. Because out there, in the streets, the killer apes were running wild.

  “The devil, as it were, has risen up from our chromosomes, Louis. Like certain diseases, cancers that are hereditary in nature, the genetic impulse to regress is irresistible. Fighting against it will be like fighting against the color of your eyes. It’s preset, preprogrammed, and absolutely immutable.”

  Louis sighed. “But why did Macy regress and come out of it again? Why did you? Why haven’t I gone native yet?”

  “Who can say, Louis? The gene may have been bred out of your family line at some point. There may be thousands like you or only a handful. As to me and the girl…I fear that the reassertion of reason is only temporary. A remission of sorts, if you will.”

  There was nothing Louis could say to that. It was wild and impossible, but it was probably also true. And that was the most disturbing thing of all. For man was a beast at heart and civilization, at best, was an illusion. As Earl said, a fancy cloak you could drape over the ugly monster within…and you could hide those claws and those teeth and that bloodthirsty appetite in its folds, but it was still there. Waiting to get out. As Earl also said, it got out pretty commonly on an individual basis and now and again on a communal level. But this, what was happening here, was probably one of the first times it had reached such a proportion, had infected and degenerated so many in such a short span of time, gone global. But it had always been coming, right from the beginning. Now and then the gene was activated-accidentally, no doubt-and you had a serious body count. But the big one, the Big Bang, the Doomsday Effect, of the human race had not come until now.

  To think that all man had strived for and accomplished was now being destroyed by a primitive gene, by biochemical reactions deep in microscopic cells. That was scary.

  “I’m frightened for the race, Louis. Terribly, deeply frightened. For what if this regression continues?” Earl pondered. “What will a year bring? Will we continue to devolve? Those people out there, they still have language skills and reasoning powers. But I’d say they’re rapidly devolving from Homo sapiens to Homo erectus. That’s just a guess, of course. But what will we be like in five or ten years? Will our culture completely have been forgotten? Will we have degraded into Australopithecine hunting groups, forging tools from animal bones, roaming the veldt, forest, and grassland with our ancestral bloodlust intact while our cities slowly turn to rubble and memory?”

  “I don’t know, Earl. I can’t think anymore.”

  Earl shook his head. “This is what the Greeks call hubris, Louis.”

  “Hubris?”

  “Yes, hubris. If man lifts his head too high or raises his achievements and ambitions to a godlike level, the gods will be threatened. And threatened, will react in kind by destroying him. And we’ve-all of us-have certainly acted like gods, haven’t we? Killing one another, waging wars, raping the planet, exterminating other species, crushing any that stand in our way…yes, certainly the province of gods not men. And now nature or God or what have you is putting us in our place. If that’s not karma, I don’t know what is.”

  Louis felt like crying as he waited here on the threshold of doomsday. He wanted to weep at the sullen marble grave of civilization and mankind. Jesus, the absolute horror of it all.

  Earl sighed. “My head hurts. Dear Christ, but my head hurts. I need to use your bathroom, Louis. I have to wash my face. And piss. Yes, piss in a toilet like a man and not against a tree to mark my trail.” He got up, started walking out of the living room and then turned back. “You’ve been a good neighbor, Louis. The very best. I always thought you were special and now I know that you are.”

  But Louis shook his head. “I’m not. I’m nothing special.”

  “Oh, but you are,” the old man said. “You haven’t lost it like the rest of us. Not even for a moment. It hasn’t been able to get its claws in you and that makes you special, Louis. Very special. You may be the last of the reasonable men. A species nearing extinction. The last man to study other men rather than simply killing them. What a waste. The nature of man is to study the nature of man, I always thought. But I was wrong. The nature of man is to kill. The territorial imperative, Louis.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Earl. I don’t understand.”

  “Learned response, cultural instinct, my friend. These things make up the basis of any creature’s behavior. You have to be taught how to make a paper airplane, but no one has to teach you how to make a weapon. You know. It’s instinctive. Just like the desire to kill.”

  “They are making weapons, Earl…spears, clubs, you name it. And you know what? They work. I would think making a spear that could be thrown and actually hit its target might be an art form of sorts. There’s engineering involved. You wouldn’t think those savages could figure it out so quickly.”

  “They didn’t have to, Louis. They knew instinctively.”

  Earl gave him a quick example. In France, in the Rhone valley, beavers made their dams and lodges for centuries, right back to-and before-antiquity same as beavers did everywhere. But then with the coming of the European fur trade, the beavers were hunted to near-extinction. Only a few remained. For several hundred years, no dams, no lodges. Then the French government extended protection to the small beaver population in the Rhone valley. Their numbers swelled over a period of decades. Then, for the first time in several hundred years, the beavers began building dams and lodges in the tributaries of the Rhone River. Building dams and lodges is a very complex, communal effort…yet, no one had to teach the beavers how to do it, they knew. And those dams in the Rhone were perfectly identical to those built by American and Canadian beavers. Cultural instinct at work.

  “And our friends out there, Louis. Nobody has to teach them what their ancestors knew. It’s race memory. They know how to survive. How to kill, how to make weapons, how to dress a carcass and peel a hide. Cultural instinct.”

  While Earl was gone, Louis found Mike Soderberg’s gun cabinet. He broke the glass with his hammer and sorted around in the moonlight. He wasn’t much of a shooter himself, so he grabbed a weapon that he was familiar with: A bolt-action Winchester Featherweight. 30-06. His father had had one. He’d shot it plenty of times as a boy. He loaded the magazine with Springfield cartridges, stuffed more in his pockets.

  “We better get the hell out of here, Earl,” he said when the older man came back.
r />   “Where to?”

  “Just out of here for now.”

  They stepped out on the porch together. The streets were quiet. But right away Louis got a bad feeling in his stomach and it did not answer to such trifling things as reason or logic. This was an ancient sense. A sense of impending doom.

  “I don’t think we’re alone out here,” Earl said.

  Something moved in the hedges and Louis did not even hesitate: he brought up the rifle, worked the bolt, and fired. There was nothing but the echo of his shot. No movement.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  Holding the rifle high, he led Earl away out to the sidewalk. He knew it wasn’t safe to stay in the house and it was no more safe out here. They were near and he could smell them: the stink of oily hides and wet dogs. Something moved across the street. Louis hesitated. Something moved behind a parked car. He fired, taking out the windshield. Earl turned to him, mouth opened to say something…but then he grunted and stumbled forward. There was a sharpened spear shaft jutting from his lower back. Blood filled his mouth and he made a gurgling sound and went to his knees.

  Louis fired a shot.

  He heard a whooshing sound.

  He turned, made ready to fire again and his head exploded with stars. The rifle fell from his hands. When he opened his eyes he was flat on his back on the sidewalk. He could hear Earl gasping. But he paid no attention to that. Because somebody was standing over him. They smelled of urine, meat, and shit.

  At first he thought it was a monster. Some horrible, walking cadaver that had forced its way out of a muddy grave. But it wasn’t that. It was a woman…or something like one with huge breasts and an axe in her hands. Her flesh was clotted, lumpy, white as bone, glistening. That’s when he knew that she had covered herself in slimy white clay or maybe ash. She had coated herself with it and slicked back her hair, giving her the appearance of a bloodless wraith. Bright red diagonal bands at the mouth and eyes contrasted this. He could see the yellow of her teeth which had been filed sharp, the shining orbs of her eyes. She wore a necklace of fur which he soon realized were maybe a dozen human scalps sewn into a garment.

  The stench of her.

  The absolute obscenity.

  He tried to move, but his head was spinning. Two other women-younger, thinner, breasts like small cones-stepped out of the gloom. They were smeared with ghostly white ash, too. One carried a sling which had propelled the rock into Louis’ head. The other stepped over to Earl, planted her foot in the center of his back and yanked out the spear. Earl screamed and she stabbed him three times in the throat.

  I’m next…they’re gonna kill me next.

  This is what Louis thought as he hovered at the edge of unconsciousness. They gathered around him for the killing. The older woman crouched down by him, running her hands over him. When one of the younger girls groped at his crotch, she slapped her hand away and hissed at her like a snake.

  “Mine,” she said. “Mine…”

  73

  The Baron was scalping his prey.

  The body of a man was facedown in the grass. The Baron-or Mr. Chalmers as he had once been known-was kneeling on his shoulders. He pressed the lethal, razored edge of his K-Bar knife just behind the man’s left ear and slit along the back of his skull, above the right ear and along the forehead/scalp line and back to his original incision. Then he peeled the scalp free from the skull with no little exertion, holding it up for all to see.

  The pack howled like animals.

  They screeched.

  They bayed at the moon high above.

  The Baron wiped his bloody fingers on his sleeveless fox coat, then he tossed the scalp to the pack. They fought wildly over it. And as they did so, the Baron cut off the man’s ears and then, punching holes in the cartilage with the tip of his knife, threaded them onto his necklace.

  He had six sets on there thus far.

  He told them he would fill the necklace by morning and the greatest hunter among them would be awarded the necklace of ears as a symbol of their stealth and ferocity. For amongst the pack, these were the things admired the most.

  A pair of young boys came running back into the yard. The Baron had sent them scouting for new prey. They were breathless, filthy things who wore only pants and both carried long-bladed hunting knifes on makeshift slings around their necks. The Baron heard them out, his black-striped face grim, impassive. It would be his decision.

  “Lead us,” he told them.

  The pack howled in honor of the blood sport to come. Then, maintaining the pack discipline that the Baron had told them was so very important, they quieted down and there was only the sound of a summer night. Crickets. A light breeze in the high boughs of the oaks. And in the distance, the screams and war cries of other packs as they raided from neighborhood to neighborhood.

  The Baron’s pack moved out in single file with flank guards to either side and the two boys taking point far ahead. Soon there would be scalps for all…

  74

  The girl was broken.

  The ritual began.

  The Huntress watched the clan seize the girl, take hold of her and drag her from the shadows where she cowered. She did not fight at first. She was becoming of the clan, but she still acted stupid and helpless like prey. Her brain was not yet the brain of a hunter.

  But soon.

  Soon she would hunt with them.

  The Huntress was certain of it. Because just as she could smell fear or the telltale scent trail of other hunters, she could smell what was going on inside the girl. The more like them the girl became, the more her blood ran hot and bright.

  At my side. When you have proven yourself, you will hunt at my side.

  Then she could wear the paint of the skull, but not before. Only the ones the Huntress selected were given this privilege. Her inner circle.

  The men wanted to have the girl, of course. Many of them. They could smell her ripeness and hers was a fruit they wished to pluck so very sweet and juicy was it. But she had been broken by the one the Huntress chose. That was enough. For now. The others would not have her nor the women who wished her for sport. This one was special and she belonged to the Huntress and none dared violate that taboo. The Huntress had other reasons for wanting the girl. She was somehow connected to the man and the Huntress desired to have the man.

  But he was sly.

  He was cunning.

  She would use the girl as bait.

  Even now, the Huntress could hear his strange, mystical words:

  Come over here, Michelle. I’m your husband. I love you. I won’t let them hurt you.

  The Huntress did not understand what he said exactly, but she knew there was a special meaning to those words. The pain and depth of emotion in the man had been all too apparent. And his voice, what he said and how he said it…it had touched something in her, made her feel warm, weak, and soft. And so she had set the clan upon him before they smelled her uncertainty.

  The girl cried out in pain.

  The clanswomen had thrown a rope over the naked beams above and, tying the girl’s wrists, were hoisting her up by them. The girl was crying out. Her wrists were raw from the other ropes she had been tied with, the skin scraped red. A trickle of blood ran down her left forearm.

  “ Let it begin,” the Huntress told them.

  This was the ritual. The Huntress remembered it from another time and that time seemed to be long ago. When she tried to recall it, everything was dim and misty and what faces she could see were not faces she recognized, yet she was certain that she knew them. And well. No matter. The ritual was ancient and correct. It was a test for a true warrior maiden. If the girl did not cry and whimper like an infant, if she withstood the ordeal, then she would hunt with them.

  If not, there were the men.

  Then the women and their skinning knives.

  It started with sticks from the fire. Once the ends were blazing hot, the women withdrew them and, chanting archaic words under their tongue
s, they spun the girl so that she twisted on the rope and as she rotated, they jabbed her with the hot sticks. The blazing ends hissed as they sank into her pale white skin. She would forever be marked and forever remembered for this. None that looked upon her would doubt her courage or importance.

  The Huntress knew that some died during the ritual.

  It was unfortunate, but necessary. If this one died, her ghost would be released from the shell of her body and would be angry. It would seek vengeance as ghosts often did. Young ghosts were always angry.

  The girl did not beg for mercy or even whimper during the burning. She just twisted on her rope from bloody wrists, her eyes glazed over and staring. The women were angered by their inability to break her. They took up branches and whipped her mercilessly, drawing blood, tearing open the burned pink flesh until red creeks ran down the girl’s belly and legs.

  The Huntress raised her hand and she was cut free.

  The women now knotted her hair and tied it tight with the rope. Again, the girl was hoisted above. The man had sticks in their hands. As they passed, they swatted her with them. And when they were finished, they urinated on her.

  She was left to hang like that.

  Maybe for hours…