The Devil Next Door (17 page)

Surprise, surprise. “Anybody else?”

“Um…well, there’s Uncle Clyde. He lives here. Way on the other side of town, but him and mom never talk. I haven’t even seen him in two or three years.”

Louis figured that this Uncle Clyde was family anyway. That was something. Worse came to worse, he could farm Macy off on him. But that was later.

“I got an idea,” Louis said. “Let’s take a ride.”

“A ride?” She brightened a bit.

“Sure. Beats sitting around here staring at each other. Let’s see if we can find Michelle and we’ll keep an eye out for your mom, too.” He shrugged. “Michelle will probably pull in the driveway five minutes after we leave, but at least we’ll be doing something besides twiddling our thumbs.”

“Yeah,” Macy said. “Okay. I just thought of something, though. Mrs. Brackenbury down the street. Sometimes mom goes over there.”

Mrs. Brackenbury was an old lady who lived alone with about twenty cats. She had to be pushing eighty. Her husband had been dead for years. Just her and the cats. Louis had heard about Jillian going over there, not to visit, but to borrow money from the old lady. It was rumored she had quite a pile.

Louis tossed Macy his cell. “Why don’t you give the old gal a ring? I’ll go write Michelle a note.”

Macy pulled back her hair and tightened her pony tail ring, then started punching up Mrs. Brackenbury’s number.

Louis walked into the kitchen, glad to be away from her for a moment.

God, she was a sweet kid, but he felt so responsible for her. He didn’t like that. And mainly because he did not know if he was up to it. Up to watching over anyone in a crisis. He quickly scratched a note to Michelle and hung it on the fridge.

They’d take a drive and at least they’d be able to see what was going on. Something had to be done and quick. He had to tell someone about Jillian’s body over there and then he was going to have to break it to Macy.

But first things first.

He jogged down into the basement and grabbed his tackle box. He took a Schrade lockblade knife out. The blade was six-inches long and razor sharp. He stuck the knife in his pocket. Maybe there would be no trouble out there at all, but you just never knew. If things continued like they had been, Greenlawn was going to be like the deep dark woods come nightfall and you just never knew when the wolves might show when you were on your way to grandmother’s house…

25

Across the street, Dick Starling covered himself in mud.

After roasting his wife’s corpse in the kitchen and feeding on it, he went out into the backyard, feeling the sun on him. It warmed him. He stripped off his filthy clothes which were crusty with bloodstains and danced around, arms upraised, soaking in that sun and feeling its wonder.

The sprinkler was going.

Down on his haunches, tensed, ready to spring, he watched it shooting gouts of water into the air. He was fascinated by it. He honestly had no cognitive recall of setting out the sprinkler that morning to water the flowerbeds. In fact, by that point, he really did not know what a sprinkler was. There was some gray area in his brain associated with it, but he shook it away.

He crept over there on all fours.

The water splashed against him. He liked it. He seized the sprinkler head and brought it to his mouth. As the water pulsed into his face, he licked and gulped at the flow until he was sated. Then he tossed it aside. Blades of grass were stuck to his belly and legs. He liked the way they smelled. He went over to the flowerbeds. The bright colors of the blooms were nice. He snatched an azalea, chewed it, spat out it back out, disgusted by the sweet taste. Then he tore all the flowers up and cast them about.

He did not want flowers.

He wanted mud.

With the sun beating on it, the dark earth of the flowerbeds was warm and mucky. He scooped up handfuls, sniffing each one, and smearing it all over his chest and legs and arms and genitalia. Especially his genitalia. It was warm, thick, and comforting like primordial ooze. He greased his wet hair back with it and painted black bands across his face.

He felt safer then; camouflaged, stealthy.

He grabbed up his bloody axe where he’d left it by the back door. It felt good in his hands. A hunter needed a weapon and this one had already been blooded. On his hands and knees, he crept around the side of the house. He was full now, his belly stuffed with meat. His needs were quite simple: food, shelter, weapons. But there was another desire as well:
sex.
Since his daughters had not returned, he knew he had to go hunt a woman.

Peering from the hedges that flanked the front of his house, he watched the home of Louis Shears across the way…

26

Kathleen Soames was not surprised when she saw the crowd.

She had felt them coming for some time as she dismembered her husband on the kitchen floor and decorated the walls with his blood. She had
willed
them to her. She wanted them to come and marvel over what was hers. She wanted them to try and take it so she could fight them, roll in the dirt with them.

But when she saw them, she knew they had not come to raid.

They had come for other reasons.

So she looked at them and they looked at her, each recognizing one another for what they now were, grateful that they had found each other at long last.

The crowd.

Dear God, yes, the crowd.

Men, women, and children tagging behind three cops in filthy untucked uniforms. The big one in front was bare-chested and painted for battle. He was pushing a wheelbarrow and in it was what Kathleen expected to see. Something broken and bloody and tangled. Something that made her heart split open momentarily, made her remember things, remember a swollen belly and a kicking, a chubby pink thing pressed to her breast, a growing and hungry thing, blue-eyed and wheat-haired. A smiling face and a boy’s laughter and a world drowning in love and joy. But it vanished so quickly maybe it never existed at all. The heat of the memory became a frost that settled deep into her, a killing frost that withered roots and closed blossoms and then there was just a winter deadness inside her that no spring thaw would ever melt again.

The crowd.

They came up to the porch and stayed there, watching her, smelling her scent and recognizing it as their own. She had marked the porch with her urine and now they smelled it. They would not cross her scent unless she allowed it. Not unless they wanted to fight.

They pushed in, compressed into a single mass, a single breathing machine, something with eyes that did not see and hearts that barely beat and minds that were flat and metallic and cutting. They waited at the edge of the porch.

The white-haired cop who had no hat on looked up at her and said, “Ma’am, I’m Sergeant Warren. This is Officers Shaw and Kojozian. We brought this back to you because we knew you’d want it.”

Kathleen just stared.

She could feel her breasts rising and falling, the blood drying on her arms, taste the sweat on her lips. Smell the darkness oozing from her, content that they, the crowd, smelled as she did now. A stink of things dead and things horribly alive, things pulsing with a morbid vitality. She stared at Warren and at the thing in the wheelbarrow. Her mind was a hollow oblong that filled with blackness drop by drop.

Wary as any animal with others intruding so close to its warren, she hopped down the steps to inspect the offering they had brought. She examined the tangled corpse in the wheelbarrow. She sniffed it carefully. Bending her head down, she licked the skin of a stiffened arm.

“
Yes,” she heard herself say. “Yes. It’s mine.”

“
We bring this to you,” Warren said, indicating the corpse of her son. “Have you something for us?”

“
Yes. Inside. Upstairs.” She was breathing hard. “Would you like to see my husband?”

“
Yes.”

Then they filed past her and she heard them in there, heard them laughing, heard them snarling and fighting over things. She would share. Of course she would share. She’d always been a good neighbor. The crowd filled the house with motion and voices, claws and teeth and intent. Kathleen watched them file from the living room. She touched the dirt and blood ground into her skin, fingered the filth in her hair. The crowd was in awe of her. They stood in silence, faces like yellow wax and dead moons, mouths painted red and fingers still redder.

“
Well,” Warren said, wiping blood from his cheek “What do you offer?”

Kathleen grinned and her teeth locked tightly together. They felt long and sharp and ready. “Upstairs,” she told them. “Upstairs is the one you want.”

The crowd moved up the stairs, leaving a blood-smell and a meat-smell in their wake. They smelled as she did, only more so. Just dirty and rank and repulsive. A bouquet of death lilies and graveyard roses and mortuary orchids pressed into cold, waxen fingers. A good smell, a fine smell, a real and true smell.

As they filed up the stairs, Kathleen grinned.

The sun outside was so hot, so very hot, burning and blinding. She wanted sunset and shadows and steaming darkness, the feel of cooling pavement under her hands and feet, night-smells and night-tastes. The pure and atavistic joy of running wild and free and hungry with the pack.

Upstairs there was the pathetic, broken scream of an old woman.

Kathleen grinned.

Hurry sundown.

Hurry…

27

Well, that’s how it ends. That’s how it all crashes down around you.

This is what Benny Shore, Principal of Greenlawn High School, was thinking as he left school that day, just amazed at all of it. Yes, beside himself with the horror of it, surely, but more than that, just amazed. Like they said, what a difference a day could make. He’d come to work that morning, chipper and happy, whistling some silly tune…and now he was leaving, depressed and hopeless, wanting to slit his wrists.

Yes, one day could make all the difference in the world.

There was little to do now but wait and see what came next.

The school board were beside themselves, the city and state and county cops just scratching their heads. Shore’s phone had been pretty much ringing off the hook ever since it all happened and then, for the last hour or so…it had been oddly quiet. He was expecting to be besieged by parents once their workday had ground to a halt, but it had been quiet.

The calm before the storm?

Or a sign of something worse?

The sign of a world going into the shitter, that’s what. It’s breaking out everywhere now…random violence, bloodshed, savagery. And, for once, old boy, you don’t need to turn on CNN to see it: because it’s HERE. It’s in the STREETS…

Shore hopped into his Jeep and buried his head in his hands.

He sat there like that for maybe ten minutes and then just stared out into the deserted parking lot. There were a few police vehicles there, but that was about it. He was thinking about what Ray Hansel had been telling him as the State Police CSI unit combed through the wreckage, about the violence not only at the school but in the town as well. So much of it in one day that it made even the most skeptical onlooker more than a bit nervous. Was there an underlying cause to it all as Hansel had suggested? Was there a pattern very much evident, but one they could not see because it did not fit the usual parameters? And probably the worst and most unthinkable thing of all, was it possible, as Hansel had hinted at, that this was only the beginning of something much larger?

Would this infection of violence gut the world?

Shore shook his head.

Too much, too much. His head was beginning to hurt from it all. There had been a nasty headache threatening all day and now it was coming, landing hard in his head with reinforcements.

He dug a bottle of Ibuprofen from the glove compartment and chewed a few tablets up, washed it all down with a swig of coffee from this morning that had been sitting in the Jeep all day. It was awful tasting, but he did not notice. He fumbled a cigarette into his mouth, lit it, and blew smoke out through his nostrils.

He felt so…helpless.

So utterly helpless.

He’d been principal at Greenlawn High for nearly eleven years, before that assistant principal and guidance counselor. This school was
his
school and he did not like the idea that he could do absolutely nothing. That this was all in the hands of others, most of them with no true personal interest in the school, the kids, their combined impact on the community at large. He felt like he was giving up without a fight.