The Devil Next Door (28 page)

It was unlocked and whispered in without so much as a creak.

He stepped inside, into the chill air conditioning which made goosebumps break out along his arms. Quiet. It was dead quiet in there, but he felt that it was not unoccupied. Somebody had been here. Somebody who had left a vague trace of something dark, something evil.

The receptionist’s desk was empty, as was the first office. Both were neat, undisturbed. There was more blood smeared along the walls and several handprints of varying sizes that must have belonged to several different people. Whatever had happened, it had been a group effort.

“I think we should leave,” Macy said.

“In a minute.”

The next office was Michelle’s and as he rounded the doorway, he thought his heart would explode in his chest it was beating so hard. Because he was expecting to see her in there, slit open and covered in flies.

But this room was empty, too.

Her papers were neatly organized, a few potted plants on the desk, pictures from their wedding and others from Cancun last year that made him want to weep openly. File cabinet, computer, coat rack, impressionist painting on the wall…but nothing to indicate violence or anything out of the ordinary.

But something had happened here.

And as he got out into the corridor, Macy so close behind him that she bumped into him every time he so much as paused, he was certain of it. Even without the bloody handprints on the walls, he could smell the badness here. This place was infected like a sore and you could smell the evil oozing from the walls in a stark miasma.

“Louis…”

“Just another minute,” he said.

Macy was right, of course. What they needed to do was get out of here before whoever or
what
ever that made those grisly prints returned. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave. Something was pulling him forward down that corridor and demanding that he look at what was waiting down there. Because there was an aura of menace here and he had to know what it was coming from, had to understand it and look it in the eye. At the end of the corridor there was another door, blood streaked all over it.

Louis could feel Macy tense up behind him.

He took hold of the door and threw it in. This was the office of Dave Winkowski, an adjuster. Louis stepped in there and the smell of blood was so strong he wanted to retch.

“Oh God,” Macy said, turning away.

A woman’s naked body was sprawled over the desk, drying blood splashed all over it. Louis knew who it was. It was Carol, the same woman he’d spoke to on the phone and not that long ago.

Her throat had been slit, blood splattered around everywhere. But worse, her skirt was pulled up around her waist and it looked like somebody had used a knife on her, flaying open her vulva and carving up her thighs with grisly abandon. It was not a crude hacking, but something almost surgical that had taken time.

Macy had only seen the body. Thank God she had not looked too close.

Louis grabbed her by the arm and pulled her down the corridor. “Let’s go.”

They left quite a bit faster than they’d come in. Out in the parking lot, the sun felt nice. The coolness of the insurance building left them and for a few minutes they just stood in the parking lot, at a loss for words.

“We better go,” Macy said.

“Yes.”

“I mean, somebody did
that,
Louis. Somebody who was insane. I don’t want to be here when they show.”

Louis followed her back to the car and just sat behind the wheel, not knowing what to do or what to say for the longest time. Most people went through their lives without having to find a corpse. But today, he had found two. Carol’s butchered body and Jillian, of course. As he sat there he found the words leaping into his mouth, the words he knew he would have to say to Macy sooner or later:
sorry, kid, but your mother’s dead. She’s hanging in your basement. Tough luck.
And they almost came out, but he swallowed them back down in the nick of time.

“What?” Macy said, picking up on it. “Were you going to say something?”

But he just shook his head. “No, nothing.”

“What now?”

He shook his head again. He pulled out his cellphone and called home in case Michelle was there. He let it ring until the machine kicked in. Then he broke the connection and tried again. Nothing. She wasn’t home. She wasn’t at work. Where in the hell was she?

“Who are you calling?” Macy asked.

“The police. This is fucking ridiculous.”

He dialed the station house and then dialed it again because he thought he’d punched in the wrong number. But there was no answer. That was not a good sign at all.

“Nothing?”

“No.”

“Try 911.”

Breathing deeply, Louis did. The number rang. There was a clicking on the other end. He could hear someone breathing over the line and it made gooseflesh swarm over his forearms.

“Is somebody there?” he said.

“Hey, looks like I got a live one,” a man’s voice said.

“Who is this?” Louis demanded.

“Who do you want it to be?”

Louis swallowed. His throat was dry as ash. “Listen to me. I’m calling from Greenlawn. We have an emergency here. We need help, okay.”

“Where are you?”

Louis almost told him, then he thought better of it.

“Where are you?” the voice wanted to know. “You tell me…I’ll send somebody to get you.”

Louis broke the connection. He was pale and sweating.

“There, too,” Macy said, fighting back a sob. “There’s no way out of this.”

“We’re going to the police station,” he said, trying to sound confident.

But even then he knew he was making an awful mistake…

41

The Huntress waited behind the dusty glass of a second hand store.

She watched the man and the girl get into the car.

There was something about the man she remembered, as if perhaps they’d been joined at one time. The more she watched him, the more she was certain of it. Just the sight of him made her blood run hot, made her heart beat in a delicious new rhythm. She licked her lips. She clutched the hunting knife in her hand very tightly.

The Huntress could no longer remember who she was.

She could no longer remember
why
she was.

It seemed that the way she’d been living these many hours was the way things had always been. Flooded with the primal memory and instinctive recall that had swallowed all that she was or ever had been with a simple plunge into the ancient black waters of prehistory, she was content. Content with the hunt, content with the kill. What more was there?

The car moved slowly up the street.

Hiding in the store, the others of her clan waited breathlessly. They wanted to hunt. They wanted to bring down prey with claws, teeth, and gleaming blades. She could smell the raw animal stink of them and it excited her. She led them because she was cunning. They were brutal, bloodthirsty, but almost idiotic in their simplicity. They understood only savagery, the law of the beast, kill or be killed, and they raided in such a fashion: with berserk, screaming mania. She, however, understood tactics, ambush, stealth. They were in awe of her.

One of them made a grunting, slobbering sound.

“Wait,” she told them.
“Not just yet.”

She was tall and raven-haired, lean with rippling muscle, her eyes just as dark as the animal inheritance that misted her brain. Intrigued by the man, she trembled. Everything inside her—from heart to liver to lights—was pulsing, thrumming, anxious.

The Huntress had a vague recollection of the girl.

But that was unimportant.

She would have the man to satisfy her curiosity about him. And the girl? She would be killed or enslaved to amuse the sexual appetites of the clan…

42

Ray Hansel was alive.

He staggered down Main to where his patrol car was parked. The streets were silent now, deathly silent. There were bodies strewn about, the carcasses of dogs. Blood and entrails everywhere, a reeking fly-specked stew in the streets and spread over the walks. He was dazed and hurting and half out of his mind. As he walked—staggered, really—the sinking sun still hot on his neck, he tried to put it all together and make sense of something that was utterly senseless. He remembered the insane woman coming in, making for Bob Moreland’s office, how they overpowered her. Moreland said it was his wife and then, and then…

And then you heard the screaming,
he reminded himself.
The awful torturous screaming and you rushed downstairs right behind Moreland and every other cop that was up there. Remember? Remember how it looked? Men, women, children, and…dogs. Dozens and dozens of people and twice that many dogs.

He seized up right there on the walk, a dead man at his feet, sprawled over the concrete. He had died in battle with a Doberman. The Doberman’s jaws were locked on his throat, the knife in his hand still buried in the animal’s guts. They were both tangled in the dog’s viscera; it was knotted over them in fleshy ropes. Mangled and gutted, a surreal sculpture of human and canine locked in a fearsome and appalling death. Like two wax figures that had melted into one another. They both looked like they’d been dipped in red ink.

Choking on his own bile, Hansel moved past them, past the carnage spread everywhere.

All that blood, all those mutilated bodies.

He wanted to vomit, but there was absolutely nothing left in his stomach. His uniform was in rags. He was cut and bitten and scratched and generally banged-up. There was blood all over him, human blood and dog blood mixed in with his own.

He saw his patrol car and shuffled his way over, only stopping when he was a few feet away.

He looked around, his eyes glazed and his face scratched to the bone.

Are they all dead? Is the entire town dead now?

Logic told him it could not be, yet he’d never felt so terribly alone and terrible vulnerable. He wondered vaguely where his partner was. Where the hell was Paul Mackabee? Dead? Was he dead, too?

Standing there, he was wondering why the dogs had attacked.

Because at first, when they’d first flooded into the police station with that mob of wild-eyed people, they had attacked
together,
dogs and people. In
unison.
All shrieking and howling and foaming at the mouth. It had been a slaughter, an absolute slaughter. The cops overwhelmed and buried alive beneath people and dogs.

Those weren’t people, Ray,
he told himself.
You saw them…many of them were naked like animals, painted up like jungle savages, their hair wild and matted, their faces set, eyes shining with a moist blackness, just staring and staring. There was nothing human about that mob. Savages. Just savages out to rend and kill, bite and slash.

Same as the dogs that ran at their sides.

Yes, that’s how it had been. He remembered pulling his gun as Moreland and the others in front of him had gone down under claws and teeth and fingers and paws. He kept shooting until he’d emptied the clip. He’d brained two women with the butt of his pistol and then ran back upstairs, the pack howling at his heels. He’d been bitten and scratched and nearly taken down by a pair of bird dogs, but he’d escaped.

Barely.

What he remembered most, what he would always see, was not just the blood and bodies, the dogs and crazies dismembering people and biting into throats and tearing open bellies, not just that or the violent, repellent stink or the mist of red that settled over the squad room…no, what he would always remember was that people, human beings, had been running on all fours with the dogs, biting like them, tearing like them, bringing down their prey in packs just like them. And the scariest part was that he honestly couldn’t tell after a few moments which were the dogs and which were the people.