Animosity

by James Newman

  “HA!”

  When I thought about that I began to laugh at the insanity of it all. It was a high-pitched, frantic laugh—the mad cackle of a lunatic locked inside his rubber room.

  I thought about Robert Neville, the protagonist in Richard Matheson’s seminal tale of the last man on Earth, I Am Legend. It had always been one of my favorite horror stories, and now I felt as if I were living within its fictional world. I remembered how Neville spent his every waking hour sharpening dowel rods into stakes, fortifying his house against legions of the undead by draping his doors and windows with cloves of garlic.

  I wished it were so easy.

  I wished I could repel the monsters at my door with garlic. Or holy water. Silver.

  But this was not fiction.

  The horrors lurking outside my house were real, and they were driven by something much more powerful than a satanic lust for human flesh or a desire to rule the world.

  Gossip fueled their fury. Rumors, lies, and misinformation. A deluded desire for vengeance that had escalated into nothing less than a textbook case of mass hysteria…

  The irony was enough to make me never stop laughing until I dropped to the ground, asphyxiated.

  This was every book, every movie, I had cherished since my childhood. It was every macabre tale that had made me a writer within this genre which had ultimately betrayed me…

  This was Night of the Living Dead. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. This was The Wicker Man and Straw Dogs and The Hills Have Eyes and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, right here in Middle America. My detractors were the villagers in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, brandishing their torches and pitchforks as they screamed for the monster’s blood…

  My blood.

  Unlike the tales of terror I once adored, however, this nightmare could not be so neatly resolved once the book was closed, when the credits began to roll.

  “Dear God,” I moaned, covering my ears, holding my head in my hands.

  Outside, something heavy and wet struck the house behind me, and the sickening splat it made when it hit the other side of the living room wall reminded me of the sound those nails had made as they plunged into my ex-wife’s brain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  By noon the next day, approximately seventeen hours after they killed her, I knew where my neighbors had stashed Karen’s body.

  In the torrid heat of summer, the proof loomed all around me…

  Like a noxious gas my captors pumped into my home in an attempt to drive me out, it seeped through the floorboards. It wafted up through the central air vents in every room. It sent me staggering into the bathroom, where I dry-heaved into the toilet until my throat was raw…

  The unmistakable, sickly-sweet stench of death.

  With a glance outside, through the kitchen window, I knew what they had done. The spot where I had buried Norman’s body had been disturbed. Now, instead of the neat, tramped-down earth that had marked his grave for the last six days, I saw a larger, fresh mound of dirt in the middle of my backyard. A shovel with a broken, splintered handle stuck up from the mound, like an insincere monument to everything my best friend had meant to me.

  The stained blue tarp in which I had wrapped his body lay a few feet away, discarded in a wrinkled heap against my privacy fence.

  They could have buried them together, but that would have been too easy. That would have been sane.

  No… their intentions were immediately clear.

  My neighbors were taunting me. Adding insult to injury. They could have busted into my home at any time, overtaken me with little effort. But they were enjoying this. Getting off on it. If I would not give myself up to them, they wanted me to suffer.

  They had exhumed Norman.

  They had hidden Karen’s body in his grave.

  Then, they had stashed the dog’s rotting corpse beneath me. In the crawlspace under my house.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  That pungent stink of hot decay permeated the whole house as another long afternoon passed. It crawled inside my nostrils like a parasite infesting my sinuses. It thickened the air around me with its foul taint, seemed to coat my flesh and all of my belongings like a slimy yet invisible film.

  I covered my mouth and nose with a washcloth soaked in my most expensive brand of cologne, but that barely helped at all.

  The smell of Norman was everywhere. I could even taste it.

  I wondered what Karen looked like, out there under the earth. I envisioned the bacteria and insects devouring the pretty flesh I had once loved to kiss and caress…

  I prayed for this all to be a nightmare. Pleaded with a God I wasn’t even sure if I believed in to wake me now, for my life to return to normal.

  And, eventually, I went to work.

  ***

  Sweat dripped down my neck, darkening my T-shirt in sticky gray patches, and before long every muscle in my body burned with exertion as I frantically tore apart my furniture. I worked without a break for several hours, cracking and ripping and busting and chopping like a man obsessed. I paused only to wipe my brow every few minutes, or to spray air freshener throughout the house for the umpteenth time, or to gag beneath the stench of my poor Norman rotting underfoot. “More wood,” I mumbled to myself while I purposefully demolished my belongings, and more than once I giggled beneath my breath as if privy to a joke no one else in the world had ever heard, “I’ll need more wood. More wood. That’s not enough. Still not enough! No… gotta have more!”

  The clamor inside my home now echoed the chaos outside.

  First, I disassembled my computer desk. Then the two bookshelves beside it. My entertainment center. Then the kitchen table. The coffee table, in the living room. An old knick-knack shelf. The stereo cabinet in my office. My bed.

  “What else is there? What else…? Think, dammit, think! Oh, yeah… yeah, that’s perfect…”

  I drew the line at Sam’s room. More than once I found myself pacing back and forth outside her door, thinking of all the wonderful wood that waited for me inside there. I knew that the frame of my daughter’s bed, her dresser, her closet doors, and the massive toy-box her Uncle Toby had built for her seventh birthday were exactly what I needed to complete my project.

  But I refused to destroy anything that belonged to Samantha. Because doing so felt like sacrilege. A desecration of our relationship. My daughter’s perfect, untouched room was the only thing in my life that had maintained a state of sameness after every terrible thing that had transpired these last few weeks. It was the only part of my miserable life that remained wholly intact when everything else had been shattered. I refused to ruin that, even as a last resort.

  Finally, by the time a new day arrived, I had removed every door inside the house from its hinges (with the exception of Samantha’s). Bedroom doors. Closet doors. Even the smaller cabinet doors from the kitchen and under the bathroom sink.

  When I was done, my hands were bloody and raw.

  A miniature mountain of wood lay piled in the middle of my kitchen, jagged and splintered, heaped halfway to the ceiling like the makings of a bonfire waiting to be lit.

  As I stared at the rubble, nodding victoriously over what I had wrought, I felt like Richard Dreyfuss at the height of his madness in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  The thought made a crazy chuckle slip out of me. Then another.

  Finally, I slammed a hand over my mouth, stifling the laughter.

  Back to work…

  I had put this off for far too long, I decided. It was time to barricade my home, to board up the doors and windows Night of the Living Dead-style. Time to secure my domain, once and for all…

  My neighbors had proven themselves capable of cold-blooded murder. I knew they would soon grow bored with tormenting me. When Norman’s stink did not drive me out to face their wrath, their next step would undoubtedly be coming inside to drag me out.

  God only knew why they hadn’t already.

  They had tasted blood. Soon they would wan
t more.

  Before long they would seek new ways to entertain themselves. It was only a matter of time.

  I did not want to think about what the good people of Poinsettia Lane might do to me next.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I started at the rear of the house, with the back door.

  But I never got a chance to finish the job.

  Because, at the exact moment I was preparing to slam home that first nail… I heard another car pull up outside.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I tried not to get too excited. Remembered what had happened the last time “help” arrived.

  I knew this would end badly once again.

  Still, I crawled across the living room floor on my hands and knees, pulled back the curtain and peered outside.

  Rolling to a jerky stop in my driveway was a dark blue Jeep Liberty. I recognized the vehicle right away because of the tag on its front bumper: two plump purple valentines joined together by an arrow, beneath the airbrushed slogan J + K.

  “Jason!” My voice was little more than a pitiful squeak.

  I stood, yanked open the front door without thinking about what I was doing, and stumbled out into the pinkish light of dawn, still clutching the hammer in one hand. Too late, I realized I had should have retrieved my homemade spear before coming outside.

  Instantly, the crowd turned toward me.

  “Hey!” someone shouted. “There he is!”

  “Lookie here! It shows itself!”

  “Holland, you sick fucker!”

  “Jason!” I shouted across the yard, ignoring them all. “Thank God… Jason!”

  A flash of movement in my peripheral vision. I flinched.

  To my right, less than a dozen feet from me, Floyd Beecham stood urinating in one corner of my porch. I noticed it was a small pile of my mail—mail that had obviously been intercepted over the last few days by our own resident postman, Freddy Morgan—that he drenched with his pungent yellow stream. When he spotted me standing there, Floyd quickly tucked himself inside his dirty pajama bottoms, retrieved his leather strop off the railing behind him, and growled, “You’ve got a lot of nerve, fuck.”

  And then the smell hit me. I realized he hadn’t been pissing at all.

  No, I had gotten that all wrong…

  When I came out of the house, Floyd had quickly replaced the cap on something that now sat abandoned in the corner behind him.

  A plastic can. Small. Square. Red.

  CAUTION: GASOLINE, read the logo on its side.

  Beecham glanced over at his companions on the lawn, then back at me. He took several steps in my direction, his boots clunking heavily on the hardwood floor of the porch. He tensed to make his move if I dared try to escape. But for now he came no closer.

  In the driveway, the man who had stolen my wife from me climbed out of his Liberty. He rounded the front of the vehicle, his brow furrowed. There was a deep crimson flush to his normally sun-browned face. He wore jeans and a maroon turtleneck beneath a brown suit-coat with beige elbow patches.

  “Jason!” I called out, over the heads of my neighbors. “Jason, up here!”

  For several seconds, the man I had once loathed more than anyone else on Earth stood there staring at the crowd upon my lawn, as if they were some complicated trigonometry problem he was desperately trying to decipher.

  Never in my life had I been so happy to see anyone.

  “What in the world—?” said Jason Burke. Although the commotion on my lawn drowned out the sound of his voice, I could read his lips.

  “Jason, you gotta help me,” I cried. “Please—”

  “What’s going on here?” he yelled back. “What is this, Holland?”

  “They… they killed her… p-please…”

  “You should leave, fella,” Floyd Beecham shouted Burke’s way. “This doesn’t concern you.”

  “Yeah!” said Donna Dunaway. “Get the fuck outta here, blondie!”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Jason Burke.

  From his place in the center of the mob, Ben Souther urged more calmly, “Be on your way, sir. Please? We’ve got a lot to discuss with your buddy here.”

  “I wouldn’t say he’s my buddy,” said Burke.

  His worried gaze returned to me. Sweat glistened on his tanned forehead.

  “Karen didn’t come home last night, Andrew. I’ve been looking all over for her. Did she stay here with you? Just tell me the truth, man. That’s all I ask.”

  “She… what? No. It’s not… she… listen, Jason—”

  Whispers rolled through the mob between us, like static on a weak radio. Murmurs of impatience.

  “Jason, you’ve got to—”

  “Where is she? I’m serious, Andrew—if she’s inside, just tell me she’s with you and I’ll walk away right now. I won’t get in your way.” His eyes scanned the crowd on my lawn again, taking in the chaos before him. “I don’t have to know what’s going on here. I don’t want to know.”

  “The cunt is dead!” Mitzi Pastorek shouted, from somewhere within the mob. “Get over it!”

  The others laughed.

  Francine Beecham yelled, “And good riddance, I’d say!”

  Jason Burke stared up at me. His lips quivered as he waited for me to confirm what he had just been told. “D-dead? Andrew, what are they—”

  I shot a hateful glance over at Floyd Beecham, then stared down at my shoes. I swallowed a massive lump in my throat, shuddered when it went down.

  “What are they talking about?” Burke shouted up at me, his hands balled into tight red fists. “You’d better tell me what’s going on right now!”

  His voice sounded whiny. Like a spoiled child about to cry. And I could not blame him in the least.

  I glanced across the yard, grimaced at the sight of Karen’s brains dried in a crusty red-black swath upon the street.

  “It’s true,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No…”

  “Karen’s dead.”

  “Oh my God.” He swayed back and forth where he stood. Reached out for something to hold on to, but grasped only air. “Oh, dear God… no…”

  “They killed her, Jason.”

  “It was his fault!” Sal Friedman bellowed. He pointed one of his prized nine-irons at me, shook it as if wringing my neck from afar. I noticed it was crooked, bent, a side effect of the vandalism he had helped inflict upon my property.

  “You’ve got to get help, Jason,” I said. “Call the police!”

  “You couldn’t let us be happy, could you?” he screamed up at me. “If you can’t have her, no one will—is that it?”

  The crowd watched me, as if they wanted to know the answer to that question as much as Jason Burke.

  “I… what? No… it wasn’t anything like that, Jason. They did it. They all think… they think I—”

  Then, before I could say anything else, something in my peripheral vision demanded my attention.

  I spotted a flash of gold inside Jason’s SUV…

  A glimpse of blond hair and pink barrettes.

  The earth seemed to drop out from under me as the passenger-side door fell open, and I heard: “Daddy…?”

  “Oh, Jesus!” I gasped. “Samantha!”

  My daughter slid out of the SUV to stand behind Jason in the driveway.

  The crowd turned toward her as one.

  “Get back in the car, baby,” Jason told her.

  But she did not listen. She eyed my neighbors and the weapons in their hands with a mixture of curiosity and naïve suspicion.

  “Daddy?” she said. “Are you okay? What’s going on? Where’s Mom?”

  “I told you he likes ’em young,” someone mumbled at the foot of my steps.

  “J-just… do as Jason says, sweetheart,” I told Sam. “Get back in the car. Now.”

  Sam singled out Ben Souther in the crowd, tilted her head to one side as she made eye contact with my next-door neighbor.

  “Mr. Souther?” she said. “Are you
mad at my daddy for something? What did he do?”

  “Your father is a bad man,” Ben replied.

  “Samantha, get back in the car,” Jason told her again.

  “I’m scared, Jason. Where’s Mom?”

  “Enough of this horseshit,” Floyd Beecham said, turning to rouse the crowd. “We’ve got business with Holland!”

  “Damn straight!” shouted Joe Tuttle. “Let’s get that bastard, Floyd!”

  The mob surged forward, their weapons clanking against one another, their shouts of derision sounding like little more than wild animal grunts.

  Floyd raised his leather strop in the air as he stepped toward me on the porch.

  I saw it in his eyes, then, in that last second or two before he went to work on me, and it sent an icy chill down my spine: to Floyd Beecham, I was the man who had stolen his daughter away from him so many years ago. This wasn’t about Rebecca Lanning, or the child who was murdered behind the bookstore. To Floyd and his wife, this was personal. I was the one who had murdered their little girl, long before Rebecca Faye Lanning was even born. The faceless killer from their past was faceless no more… now, to Floyd and Francine Beecham, he looked just like me.

  At last, they had their shot at vengeance. It had been a long time coming.

  They all needed someone to blame. And I was their sacrificial lamb.

  “Court is in session, fucker,” Floyd snarled at me through clenched yellow teeth. A wiry mess of unshaven whiskers crawled across his chin like silver kudzu. His eyes were bloodshot, crusty-looking, and rimmed with dark blue bags, as if he had not slept since this all began. He smelled like a walking bottle of 190-proof vodka.