by James Newman
“Agh, God…”
The porch tilted vertically beneath my feet. I held both hands to my leaking scalp, fell to one knee.
“Take that, Short Eyes!” Floyd Beecham’s voice came at me from somewhere beyond my veil of pain.
I stood, faltered, nearly fell again as more bottles flew my way in a brutal barrage of colored glass.
A liquor bottle bounced off my chest with a hollow thonk. Another exploded at my feet. An antique Coca-Cola bottle zipped past my left ear, busted against the house.
“Dance, boy, dance!” cackled Sal Friedman from within that tornado of hatred seething on my lawn.
A few seconds later, a hail of heavy gray stones joined their storm of bottles, pelting my flesh from every direction.
I felt one thud into my crotch, but I barely had time to react before another lanced across my right temple. I shielded my face with both hands, but that did not help at all. Another rock struck my shin… my stomach… my collarbone… like furious, rapid-fire stings from a swarm of giant wasps.
A fat red chunk of brick missed my head by only an inch or two. It shattered the glass of my storm door, and the crowd cheered as if whoever had thrown it had accomplished some monumental feat.
“Jesus!” I cried as another brick slammed into my stomach.
I whirled around, staggered for the door, jerked it open as more bottles, rocks, and bricks pounded against my spine and buttocks.
Finally, I dragged myself inside. Slammed the door. Locked it.
Hot blood gushed into my eyes. I wiped it away with the back of one hand, but immediately a fresh river of gore trickled down from the gash on my forehead like crimson saliva from a drooling demon’s mouth.
“Jesus…”
I knew I needed stitches. But that was not an option for me at the moment.
All over my body, a million cuts and bruises sang out for medical attention as I limped into the kitchen.
My heart sank. The pieces of my shattered cell lay in front of the refrigerator, where I had hurled the phone earlier that evening. It was destroyed.
“Fuck!” I shouted. Then my voice cracked as I recalled, “There’s still the land-line.”
Gripped with panic, I ran into the bedroom. Fell to my knees in front of the old rotary phone on the nightstand.
As I brought the receiver to my ear, a prayer fell from my lips. The dial tone was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.
But a second later, it ceased. Like the pulse of a murder victim abruptly cut short.
“No. No!”
My neighbors were a step ahead of me. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
They had cut the phone line.
A second later, the lights went out.
I was trapped. A prisoner in my own home.
Outside, more bottles and rocks and God-knew-what-else thundered against the house’s façade… the sound of my sanity crumbling bit by bit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A pounding at the front door, shortly after midnight. Faces at every window.
“We see you in there, Short Eyes!” Floyd Beecham shouted. “You’re only prolonging the inevitable!”
A smattering of applause and cheers of agreement echoed through the night.
“We’re comin’ for you, pervert!” That sounded like Valerie Pearson.
Their pounding grew louder. They no longer pummeled the house with rocks and bricks; from the sound of it, my neighbors were now beating at the doors and windows with their fists and palms, in an almost tribal sort of rhythm. It started at the front door now, moved to the side of the house, then around to the back.
They were tireless. It continued for hours. Never letting up.
***
“Fuck this,” I heard a male voice exclaim shortly after two in the morning.
It was their pet cop. Keith Whitmire.
“What are you gonna do?” another man asked him.
“I’m tired of waiting. I’m going in.”
A woman squealed, “Woohoo!”
“Save some for me, Keith!”
“Sorry, Ned. Can’t make no promises.”
Drunken laughter. Cheers.
A new cacophony of thuds, thumps, crashes and booms reverberated all around me then, louder than ever. Like the sounds of war, right here on a once-quiet suburban street in middle America. It made me think of a crowd at some intense sporting event, a multitude riled-up to the point of no return, stomping their feet and making as much noise as humanly possible.
I had to protect myself. They were coming for me. I had to do something now…
I ran into the kitchen, turned on the stove, the MagLite leading my way.
Somewhere toward the front of the house, glass shattered.
I grabbed a pan out of the cabinet, slammed it down on the stove.
“I’ll show you,” I mumbled as I worked. “I’ll fucking show you!”
I found a box of matches. Lit the gas stove with hands that shook like those of a man twice my age. My scalp throbbed, but it was a dull ache now. The least of my worries.
I flung open a cabinet door, found a fat bottle of vegetable oil. There wasn’t much left in the bottle, but I poured it all into the pan.
“What’s he doing in there?” I heard Mona Purfield ask from the back step. It sounded as if she were right there in the room with me.
Another crash from the front of the house. More breaking glass.
“Fuck!” I cursed, running to see what had caused it.
Like some dark creature stepping out of a nightmare into the real world, Keith Whitmire was making his way into my home through the shattered living room window. He moved slowly, so as not to cut himself on the broken glass, but he was inside. Almost.
I just stood there staring at him in disbelief for a moment. Then I snapped out of it.
Behind me, the oil on the stove cracked and popped.
I ran to the kitchen, grabbed the pan. Rushed back down the hallway with it.
“What’s going on in there?” Floyd Beecham called to Keith. “Talk to us, man!”
“I’ve got him!” Whitmire yelled back at Floyd. When he spotted me standing a few feet away, he pointed a finger at me and growled, “End of the line, Holland. Nowhere to run.” His eyes were wild, his teeth bared like those of a wild animal.
His hand went to the gun on his hip.
I took two steps forward, shined my flashlight’s beam into his face, and swung the pan of hot oil at him.
It made a grotesque sizzling sound as it splashed across his flesh.
He fell back out of the window, onto the porch, and his screams filled the night.
“What happened?” Donna Dunaway cried. “Oh, my God, what happened?”
“Burned me! Gaaa! Son of a bitch burned me!”
“Holland!” Donna shrieked at me through the shattered window. “You monster!”
“Jesus, it hurts! It hurts!”
“Bastard got the drop on Keith,” said Floyd Beecham. “Shit! I think there might be somebody else in there with him!”
I smiled evilly, and quickly backed out of the living room, into the shadows of the hallway.
“What do we do now?” I heard Gabe Pearson ask. “Keith needs medical attention.”
“Should I drive him to the emergency room?” asked Sal Friedman.
Ben Souther’s voice: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Then what do we do?”
“Lorne, Freddy, you two help him over to McFarland’s place. Phil should be able to fix him up.”
“Where is the doc?”
“Last time I saw him, he was watching the street. Let’s put Ernie on that for now. Tell the doc to head home for a few hours, and take good care of our man.”
Floyd Beecham interjected: “But, Ben… McFarland’s not that kind of doctor. Don’t he work on lady parts for a livin’?”
“You got a better idea, Floyd? He’ll have to do for now.”
“Gotcha.”
“It
’s not a problem, my friend. We’re merely forced to improvise. ‘The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing.' ”
“Okay.”
“Well, I say Holland’s gone too far,” said Joe Tuttle. “He’s taunting us now. Laughing at us! We oughta wrap this shit up for good.”
Floyd said, “I’m with Joe. We should storm the place. Bring him out in pieces, if we have to. He can’t hold off every one of us.”
“No,” said Ben. “We’re not gonna do that. For now, we wait. Who knows what else he’s got up his sleeve? We don’t want anyone else getting hurt. He has to come out eventually. And when he does, we’ll be here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Night turned into morning.
Nothing changed.
As the hours ticked by, my mind reeled with so many conflicting emotions—a torrent of wrath, sorrow, loss, regret, pain, terror, and everything in between. I felt smothered beneath an overwhelming sense of restlessness, an urgent desire to do something—anything—to get myself out of this. I wondered if I should just make a run for it, tried to calculate how hard it would be for my captors to hit a moving target. At least a million times over the next twelve hours, I asked myself why I had never owned a gun. How did I ever expect to wade through the sea of malevolence that engulfed my property, to fight my way to freedom armed with nothing but my own bruised and bloody fists?
So far, my neighbors had merely played a sick game of intimidation with me. They had destroyed my property, shattered my spirit. But after my attack with the hot oil they had shown no second effort to break inside. It was as if they were biding their time, toying with me. Or maybe… had I actually frightened them? They couldn’t be afraid of one man, could they? Then again, I wouldn’t have thought it possible that they would take things this far to begin with. When they were ready to end this, I knew they would win. I would fight for as long as I could, but I knew I would be helpless to stop them when they at last decided to finish their sick game. What did have? Nothing. I was out of oil. And although it saved me at the time, I feared that my attack with the oil—especially on a man like Keith Whitmire—had only served to throw gasoline on a fire that was already raging out of control. Now I had only my stupid spear. I was so tired, my brain so fried with a cocktail of panic and depression that I barely remembered making it. At some point I had apparently gotten creative, constructing the weapon out of a big butcher knife duct-taped to the end of a broken mop-handle. Now it looked silly in my hands. Like a child’s toy that would barely make a dent in someone if put to the test. But I held on to it harder than I had ever held on to anything in my life.
When, I wondered, would I be forced—like the victims in the horror films that were my lifelong addiction—to board up my doors and windows in order to keep the beasts at bay? How long until a tangled mass of sweaty, moon-pale arms burst through, ripping at my clothes and hair like reanimated corpses clambering for fresh brains? How long until they tore me limb from limb?
It would have been so easy to just give up. To throw open my front door and surrender to their murderous embrace. I envisioned my broken body passing over that sea of scowling faces like a crowd surfer at a heavy metal concert, imagined what they would do with my head if I finally let them have it…
It was so damn tempting. At least then this would all be over…
At some point early in the morning, eight or nine hours after they had first surrounded my home, I succumbed to my fatigue despite fighting sleep with every trace of energy left in me. Shortly after changing the dressing on my lacerated scalp one last time, gulping down a handful of Tylenol, I nodded off for a minute or two right there on the bathroom floor, and I dreamed that my neighbors had busted inside my home at last… they filled the house to capacity, and I lay crushed amongst them like a helpless minnow surrounded by a thousand ravenous sharks. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Their teeth were made of shiny silver nails in my nightmare, and the unified alien war-cry that issued from their mouths as they descended upon me was not unlike the hoarse, dying whine of my best friend on the day they took his life.
After that, I did not allow myself to fall asleep again. Sleep was not an option. Sleep could be the death of me.
Every second of the night and into the following morning, I could still hear them outside. Even when their racket tapered off a bit, the thumping and banging fading to sporadic bursts of malicious laughter, it never died completely. Wood cracked, splintered, popped and whined as they vandalized my front porch, as if they planned to tear the house to the ground one piece at a time. Glass shattered in my driveway every few minutes. Constant profanities were hurled my way, vehement curses far more offensive than any I had ever used in my books the bastards rushed to condemn. Once I was sure I heard Dr. Tom McFarland’s normally cultured, effeminate voice boasting from atop my house, “I’m going to bounce this hammer off his goddamn skull, I get half a chance… just you wait and see”; I assumed he was all done tending to Whitmire’s injuries, and had returned to the game thirsty for blood, ready to make up for lost time. An awful metallic clatter echoed up and down the street, the resounding din of the mob finishing off my already destroyed Explorer with their crowbars, baseball bats, and jagged two-by-fours. On more than one occasion I attempted to drown out my neighbors’ fury by cranking up the stereo in my office, blasting my old Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and Blue Oyster Cult CDs at maximum volume. But none of it did any good.
On and on, it went. On and on…
My property had become nothing less than a battlefield. Suburban apocalypse. These were the sounds of war all around me. But in this war, every one of the participants loved what he was doing. They reveled in it.
Just before dawn I heard the puttering growl of a chainsaw start up in my backyard. My heart pounded painfully in my chest as I gripped my trusty Maglite in one hand and my makeshift spear in the other—I barely recognized my own reflection in the butcher knife’s blade, a twitchy, wild-eyed stranger with an ugly smear of crusty brown gore at his hairline—and I lay prone in the middle of the hallway waiting to see the saw’s vicious razor-teeth come chewing through the back door. Although that never happened, I could hear them cutting up something back there. Raucous laughter ripped apart the night, louder even than the grating buzz of the saw. I strongly suspected it might have been Norman’s doghouse which fell prey to their lunacy—a terrible thought that sent tears of both overwhelming sadness and murderous rage streaming down my face—but I did not dare peek out the window above the kitchen sink to be sure.
I did not want to see.
I did not want to know what they were doing out there.
“God help me,” I wept.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A few minutes after eight a.m., twelve hours into my captivity, help finally arrived.
At least for a little while.
I thought I was hearing things at first. Chalked it up to nothing more than an auditory hallucination induced by chronic wishful thinking. The drug-like funk of sleep deprivation married with my throbbing head wound filled my skull with a grating buzz louder even than the destruction outside.
During the first few hours of my ordeal, I had hoped Detectives Norton and Hembry might come visiting. I assumed they would want a word with me soon, about that second child’s body. By mid-morning, if I could only hold out that long, surely I would hear car doors slamming, would hear the detectives chasing the mob off my lawn. I longed to see Norton’s smug, condescending face in my doorway. I would gladly hand over his damned DNA sample, would even provide it for him while he watched, if he would only come save me…
But I knew that it would not happen. They had no doubt I was innocent. The investigators knew their time was better spent elsewhere, chasing down real leads that had nothing to do with me.
Unfortunately, the only thing that mattered here… was what my neighbors believed.
I was alone. No one was coming
to rescue me.
Or so I had thought…
Now, a hush fell over the crowd gathered on my lawn. I heard the assholes reacting to some unforeseen hitch in their plans—whispered questions and an aura of confusion rippled through the tides of scorn that had ebbed and flowed upon my property for days—and I knew I had not imagined it.
It was real: the purr of an engine. A soft whine of brakes. Tires on asphalt, rolling to a stop.
My heart raced. Chills of elation—of delicious hope—spread over my entire body.
A flurry of footsteps clunked upon my porch, receded down the steps, as whoever had been standing watch by the door marched across the lawn to confront my visitor.
Who could it be? I wondered, almost forgetting to breathe.
I ducked across the living room to the window, pulled back the curtain. Bright sunlight splashed into my home, temporarily blinding me.
Squinting, I peered through that ocean of bodies to steal a glimpse of my savior.
At the curb, beside the decapitated pole that had once been my mailbox, a shiny green Volvo idled in the street. Beads of water stippled its roof and hood, as if it had emerged from a carwash minutes ago.
My jaw dropped as the driver-side door opened.
And she stepped out.
***
“Karen!” I called to her from behind the spider-web pattern of shattered glass in my storm door. I knew it was a risky move, showing my face again to those who wished me dead, but somehow I fooled myself into believing that the screen between us kept me safe. For now.
Instantly, all eyes were upon me. My neighbors turned to glare my way, but for the next minute or so rampant disbelief replaced the murderous rage on their faces. They glanced at one another worriedly, as if they did not know what to do now that the enemy had reappeared.
Their numbers had doubled since the previous evening. That seething congregation of hate filled my yard, spilling out into the street where there was no more room left upon my property. How many were out there? Two dozen? Three? I had never realized so many people lived on Poinsettia Lane! Each of them still carried his or her makeshift weapon—bicycle chains, baseball bats, metal pipes, crowbars, sledgehammers, tire irons—and at their feet lay the evidence of all the fun they were having at my expense. Crushed beer cans, flattened Dixie cups, soggy cigarette butts, and broken liquor bottles littered the trampled grass everywhere I looked.
