The Neighbors

by Ahlborn, Ania

  Mickey had driven off into the sunset without a word. Harlow had kicked Red out—and unless Red was up for an Academy Award, the resentment Drew saw in his eyes had been real. The rage that boiled beneath the surface of Red’s skin was undeniably sincere—as genuine as Harlow’s tears when she confessed she was unhappy; as heartfelt as her laughter had been as they drove toward the drive-in for burgers and shakes.

  If it had all been an act, Harlow had known exactly how to claw her way into his heart.

  Dread bloomed beneath his diaphragm, creeping up his throat, threatening to suffocate him with awareness. He was an idiot—accepting job offers from strangers, messing around with a married woman, an older woman. He should have run the moment Harlow had danced in the kitchen, shooting him a look over her shoulder; he should have run like hell until he was too far to reach.

  But instead, he had run in the wrong direction—right into her arms.

  “Fuck.” He hissed the word into the silence of the room. “Fuck!”

  On the brink of a meltdown, he blinked against an idea—a last grasp at escape: He’d go to Red for help. Drew would tell him everything; that his wife was crazy, a fucking loon. He’d tell Red that Harlow was moving him in against his will, that Andrew wanted nothing to do with it, wanted nothing to do with her, that this was all a huge mistake, that what Red had seen in the kitchen—the slow dancing—it had all been her idea. He didn’t even know how to dance. And Red would fix it, because he’d literally run Drew out of town. Red was the answer. The guy had to come back sooner or later, at least to grab a couple of shirts or a suitcase for the final move.

  “He’ll come back,” Drew whispered. “And when he does he’ll end this whole thing.”

  Determined to stay up and watch the street for signs of Mickey or Red, exhaustion pulled at Drew’s eyelashes. He fought against sleep by walking around, doing his damnedest to stay alert. But he’d hardly slept the night before, and despite his attempt, fatigue was a powerful thing. Sitting on the windowsill, he let his head loll forward enough to press his forehead against the cool glass. He shut his eyes, assuring himself that it would only be for five minutes—just five, to give himself a boost of energy.

  He saw himself at the foot of the front steps, the old house on Cedar towering over him like a monolith. It was twice as big as he remembered, its windows slightly off center, the door skewed, inducing vertigo. Each step up to the wraparound porch groaned under his weight. The front door swung open, unassisted, inviting him inside. He hesitated, stopping just beyond the door, inspecting the house he’d left behind. It was all the same—peeling wallpaper, wooden floors scuffed and dirty.

  He approached the living room.

  The television flickered in a smoky haze, blue light casting garish shadows across the walls. The mess Andrew had made before he left stood silent, illuminated. He stared at it, knowing his mother had cleaned up, but there it was again, haunting him, reminding him of a reaction he had grown to regret. Toeing one of her empty bottles with the tip of his sneaker, he drew near the table, ready to set it upright in its original position.

  But his attention was jarred in a different direction. A picture frame slid off the far wall and crashed to the floor. Glass exploded. It tipped forward, falling onto its face, hiding the photograph of his mother, smiling and pretty before his father had left.

  Stepping across the room, he squatted next to the frame. A silver key winked at him, taped to its back like a secret. He pulled it away from the frame’s backing, held it in the palm of his hand. It shone in the murk, shimmering like a speck of gold in dark water. A creak echoed in the silence—an old kitchen door swinging open, revealing an outline of sunshine: irresistible, beautiful.

  In the diffused light of the kitchen, flecks of dust hung suspended like stars. A vase of white daisies sat on a kitchen table, smiling toward the sun. His eyes locked on a woman standing at the counter, a basket of fruit at her elbow, a butcher knife hitting a cutting board with a metronome-like whack. She wore a polka-dotted red dress; the same dress his mother wore to church when he was a boy; the dress that reminded him of cherry sours and trips to the candy shop. She lifted her arm—a slow-motion movement that streaked the air—then brought the knife down, each chop more jarring than the last.

  Drew’s heart accompanied its repetitive thud.

  He took a backward step.

  The woman jerked her head up.

  Andrew exhaled a gasp.

  Her skin was a sickly blue-gray, her eyes and cheeks sunken, her lips peeled away from her gums. She looked as though she had been buried for months, rotting six feet beneath the earth, but he recognized her just the same. And she recognized him too.

  His mother canted her head to the side, that knife held upright in her hand, looking at him like a dog inspecting an unfamiliar face, ready to strike.

  Her voice came—but those rotten lips did not move. “Andrew. My darling...”

  She turned to face him in a series of stops and jerks. Hobbling on invisible strings, she dragged her feet, the knife glinting in her grasp.

  “You left me,” she wept, mouth still unmoving. “You left me here to die.”

  Drew backed up, his heart knocking against his ribs. Backed against a wall, he couldn’t run, but she continued to drag herself forward, knife held high. He shot a look toward the door. All he had to do was run through it. Run out of the house. Run into the street. Run as fast as he could. Run hard, until his lungs threatened to explode.

  She saw his eyes shift, and before he knew it she was sprinting toward him, a ragged, putrescent mouth gaping wide, greasy black hair flying around her skeletal face. Andrew tried to scream, struggled to find his breath.

  But it didn’t matter.

  That knife plunged deep into his chest.

  His eyes went wide. He fought for air, gasping like a waterless fish.

  “You left me,” she said, her eyes wide, her mouth hanging open. “You left me here to die.”

  He couldn’t breathe. Anxiety clutched at his throat. He clawed at his neck, desperate to pull in a breath, screaming inside his head, flailing like a kid being held underwater.

  Air finally came with consciousness. His lungs burned; his heart throbbed. Scrambling to his feet, he was determined to get out of there. But the shadow that lurked just beneath the closed bedroom door assured him that Harlow was in the hall, guarding it, playing sentry. He twisted back toward the window instead. Screw waiting; he’d crawl down the side of the house if he had to. But when he threw the curtains aside, he was hit by another fit of panic. The window didn’t have a latch. Someone had sealed it up—as though whoever had lived in this room at one point in time had been a prisoner as well.

  That was when he lost his grip.

  He broke down and wept. He wept for his mother, wept for the past, wept for the fact that somehow, under this roof, nightmares weren’t something you could wake up from.

  Here, under this roof, the nightmares were real.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Red stood over Mickey’s body like a mourner over the dead. A flower of gore had blossomed around Mickey’s head, growing like a virus despite his stillness. Mickey Fitch had bitten through his tongue, and if Red hadn’t shoved him off the autopsy table, he would have choked on his own blood. Red was as motionless as the body at his feet, unable to tear his eyes away from the damage inflicted at his own hands.

  He had done this—but it had been an accident.

  He approached the third freezer along the wall, shoved the door open, and stared at the bag inside. Jabbing his arm into the swirling cold, he gave it a yank, momentarily stumbling, surprised at how heavy it was. For all he knew, there was an entire person beneath that plastic sheeting—an entire human being chopped into perfect cubes.

  Giving it a stern pull, the bag cleared the lip of the freezer and fell to his feet with a rock-solid thump. He pulled it across the room toward the door that led to Harlow’s bunker—the one that connected both properties ben
eath the tranquility of Magnolia Lane.

  He had never been in the tunnel before. At one point, he’d convinced himself that it hadn’t actually been built, that the construction workers were building something else—anything but a passageway that would allow his wife to kill with ultimate ease. That illusion was shattered the first time he watched Mickey drag a sheet-wrapped body through their kitchen and down the basement stairs.

  Fumbling with the latch on the door with cold fingers, he eventually got it open, only to stare into the darkness that swallowed what lay beyond it. Patting down each cinder-block wall in search of a light switch, he came to a sickening realization: the construction workers had built the tunnel, but they hadn’t wired it. But Mickey certainly didn’t stumble through the darkness with dead bodies tossed over his shoulder. There had to be a way.

  Turning away from the mouth of the passageway—a damp, earthy smell wafting up from it like a scourge—his gaze fell on the orange plastic of a lightbulb safety cage. It hung from beneath one of the counters, a snake of black cord coiled beneath it. There was no way it ran the length of the entire tunnel, but Red was out of options. Unhooking it from its holder, he flipped the thing on, grabbed hold of the plastic bag, and stepped through the door.

  Andrew rubbed at his eyes as the soft tones of Rosemary Clooney drifted up the staircase and beneath the door. For half a second he couldn’t remember how he had gotten into the Wards’ guest bedroom; he completely forgot the panic that had seized him the night before. The trumpets, the Cuban vibe, the butter-smooth tone of Clooney’s voice—he pictured Harlow downstairs, swaying her hips around the kitchen, twirling across the tile, the skirt of her dress fanning out like the petals of a flower.

  In that fleeting moment, he swore that nothing strange had happened here. Everything was fine. Perfect as always.

  And then he looked out the window and noticed the sky, thick with clouds, black with rain. The tornado hadn’t come, and neither had the answers Drew was desperate for. There was no bolt of inspiration, no affirmation or understanding. He remained lost, and while there wasn’t a lock on the outside of the bedroom door, he felt as trapped as ever.

  But he had to move. Urged forward by his nerves, he didn’t care where that movement took him. He had to get the hell out of there, and he’d bowl Harlow over to do it if he had to.

  Still wearing his clothes from the day before, he shoved his bare feet into his sneakers and escaped the room. He took the stairs two by two, but rather than bolting for the door the way he had planned, he hesitated at the base of the staircase.

  His gaze immediately moved to the kitchen, Harlow’s usual haunt. But the kitchen was empty. Music played—but Harlow wasn’t there.

  The emptiness was so unexpected that it drew him forward, as if he needed to make sure that his isolation was real.

  He turned away, blinking, confused by his sense of disappointment despite his desire to run. He wanted to believe that the hours they had spent apart had brought her to her senses, that she’d come to the realization that what they were doing was insane. He yearned to see apologetic embarrassment drift across the delicate curves of her still-youthful face, longed to hear her confess that she had been wrong, that this was all a silly mistake. He wanted to see the morning sun shine through her hair.

  “This is nuts,” he whispered. Just a minute ago all he wanted was to find his keys, for his Chevy to rumble to life, but there he was searching for his captor, wondering where she was, worried about where she’d gone.

  The light shifted in the living room, as though someone had moved.

  Red was sitting in his old recliner.

  “Red.” The name came out as a croak. “Thank God.”

  Raising an eyebrow at Andrew’s greeting, Red crossed his legs, nudging a black plastic bag behind the far side of his chair with his heel.

  “I need your help,” Drew told him, each word cracking with dryness. “I...Harlow, she’s...”

  “Crazy?”

  A slow smile spread across Red’s mouth, a smile that confirmed that Harlow’s insanity wasn’t anything new to her husband.

  And yet that smile failed to reassure him. Andrew felt a dull throb of dread pulse at the base of his throat.

  “She’s making me move in. She’s having guys come by.” His tone was desperate, nearly pleading for Red to save him.

  “She’s making you?” Red smirked, unconvinced. “Like she made you dance with her?”

  Drew opened his mouth to protest.

  “Like she made you sleep with her? Like she made you tie her up?”

  He snapped it closed with a sickening chomp of teeth.

  Red squared his shoulders, pushing himself out of his recliner.

  “You think I’m stupid? That I haven’t noticed the way she stands next to you?” He exhaled an emotionless laugh. “Fat fucking chance, my friend.”

  “I swear, Red...” The panic was crawling up Drew’s throat. “You’ve got to believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Red replied. “She’s a mystery, isn’t she? A heartbreakingly beautiful mystery. But guess what?”

  Drew shook his head without reply.

  “She’s mine. Till death do us part.”

  Red took a step forward as if to make a move. Andrew lifted his hands in surrender.

  “Hey,” he said, trying to keep Red at a distance. “I don’t want to take her from you, I swear. I want to get out of here. Hell, I was going to go look for you. To help me.”

  “To help you,” Red repeated, bemused. “You want to get out of here?” He motioned to the door. “Leave.”

  Drew stared at the door, unable to help the questions that were clawing at the inside of his skull: Where was Harlow? Was she hurt? Had he tied her up somewhere?

  “But you won’t,” Red said, snapping Drew back to the present. “Because you like it here. Let me guess...” He looked around the living room as if seeing it for the first time—the crisp curtains, the pristine carpeting, the dustless furniture. “It fills some sort of void, right?”

  Drew swallowed. His mouth was dry.

  “I get it,” Red murmured. “I do; seen it a hundred times.”

  “But I don’t want to be—”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Red took another step forward, his fingers sliding into the pocket of his pants.

  “What matters is that she wants you here. And that’s the problem.”

  “I’ll just leave,” Drew told him. “Seriously, I’ll just go. Right now.”

  “But will that take her desire for you away?”

  “She was just upset.” The words tumbled from Drew’s mouth. He struggled for something to say, something to interject some hope into their conversation. “She loves you.”

  “Does she?”

  “She does,” he insisted. “She told me so.”

  Red cracked a smile—and Andrew knew right then that he’d been caught. “That was nice,” he said. “I appreciate your attempt to spare my feelings, but it makes me feel a little guilty.”

  Again, Andrew shook his head as if to say he didn’t understand.

  “Guilty because I’m not going to spare yours.”

  Another forward step.

  “I don’t...really know what—”

  “I don’t expect you to understand,” Red told him. “It’s complicated. And it would be pointless anyway.”

  “Pointless,” Drew echoed.

  Red’s fingers curled around something in his pocket while Andrew stared back at him, wide-eyed.

  Time stood still as the blood drained from Drew’s face. He could feel it happening—heavy with gravity, failing to travel upward because his heart ceased to beat. The room went horrifyingly silent. The music faded. The wail of the wind fell away. There was nothing but the sound of his own breathing in his ears. He was an astronaut. This wasn’t Earth.

  He saw the muscles in Red’s arm twitch. Somewhere, in the distance, he heard a siren wail. At first, he was sure it was all in
his mind—a figment of his imagination, conjured up by his fear—but it was too familiar. It was a sound he’d grown up with, a warning that danger was ahead. Somewhere in Creekside, the clouds had swirled into a cyclone. The tornado had arrived. It was time to take cover.

  His gaze snagged on the safety scalpel in Red’s hand.

  He blinked as Red slid the blade out of its plastic cover, unable to process what he was seeing. This wasn’t real. He was dreaming again, asleep on the windowsill. That was why Harlow wasn’t here.

  “What is that?” he asked, knowing full well what it was—a weapon, something Red was going to use to do something unspeakable to his wife.

  “What, this?” Red lifted the scalpel as if to inspect it for himself. “Just something I found next door.”

  Andrew shook his head. What the hell would Mickey do with a scalpel, and how would Red have been inside Mick’s place anyway? Red must have meant another neighbor. Maybe that was where he’d been staying, getting up the courage to come back and get his stuff—or to do what he was doing now, which Drew still couldn’t put together. His mind was rebelling against what it knew was true.

  “I don’t know where Harlow is,” Drew confessed. “But you can’t do this.”

  Red canted his head to the side, apparently listening to Drew try to reason his way out of the situation.

  “She didn’t mean anything,” he continued. “Just...don’t hurt her.”

  Red stared ahead blankly. And then he burst into laughter.

  Andrew blanched with realization.

  That scalpel wasn’t meant for Harlow. It was meant for him.

  His nerves hissed and snapped. He made his move.