The Devil Next Door

by Curran, Tim

  “Clyde,” she said. “Clyde Chenier.”

  “Okay, we’ll track him down.”

  “And if he’s nuts?”

  “We’ll deal with that then.”

  But she was not reassured in the least. She was a tough kid. Louis fully realized that now, if he hadn’t before. She was tough as nails. She was shaking in her seat, wanting to come apart, wanting to cry and scream and whimper, but she wasn’t. And she wasn’t because she was literally holding herself together.

  “Macy,” he said to her, touching her hand. “I’m going to get you out of this, okay?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know what this is about, but we’ll figure it out.”

  She turned and looked at him. “But it’s not just here, Louis. It’s everywhere.”

  He turned on the radio. Very few stations were even on the air and those that were, were not broadcasting live. Just taped stuff.

  The local station was WDND, Cozy 102. It was the butt of endless jokes by the locals. But it was the only one broadcasting out of Greenlawn. Macy punched up the AM band and found 102 quickly enough. Louis didn’t have it programmed in. An old school thrasher of the Black Sabbath/Deep Purple ilk, he just couldn’t handle that tirade of elevator music. Give him some Zeppelin or Nazareth, but go easy on Bobby Vinton and The Kingston Trio.

  “Here it is,” Macy said, turning up the volume.

  For a moment or two, there was only a building static that made them both tense up. Then the announcer came on, the same morbid-voiced guy who did the Daily Obituary Report at noon every day. He droned on in his usual monotone: “Well, that was ‘April in Paris’ by Count Basie and his Orchestra. And before that, we had ‘See Saw’ by the Moonglows. Boy, I remember that one like it was yesterday. Yes, it’s another lovely day in downtown Greenlawn. The sun is shining and the birds are singing and allll is right with world. Now don’t go away, we got more mellow sounds for a mellow evening…Bobby Darin and the immortal Patsy Cline singing, ‘Crazy.’

  “You gotta love that. Craaazeeee. It really fits, don’t it? I don’t even know if anyone’s listening by this point. In case any of you are, there’s been no news out of continental Europe for six hours now. Same for Australia. In the Middle East, Tehran is burning. CNN reports that London is completely blacked-out. Satellite images confirm that the only light in London town is from burning buildings. God help us. And here at home…here at home, New York has fallen. There’s a firestorm sweeping through LA. Chicago is a warzone. Don’t know about anything else…internet is down now. Lost my AP feed an hour ago. I’m going to sign off now. Nothing left to say. Cozy 102 won’t be broadcasting tomorrow. There won’t be anyone left by then who even knows what a radio is. And, really, there won’t be a tomorrow, will there? Only darkness. Bonfires and stone knives by this time next week, animals hunting in the streets…most of them of the two-legged variety. Now comes the time of the primal fall…

  “Behold, darkness will cover the earth…and night cover the nations of man…

  “May God help us…”

  Louis reached out and killed the radio.

  Maybe the dead immensity of what was happening to the world did not hit him until that very moment. He heard Macy make a moaning sound next to him, but she was light years away. The realization of it all was like a storm of dust and debris and spinning shit inside his head. A sweat that was neither cold nor hot broke out on his face and his teeth locked together so hard that his molars ached. Everything canted this way, then that, and he knew he was going to pass out. Prickly heat swam up his belly to his chest.

  That kid and those cops and the mailman and Macy’s mother hanging in the cellar and Dick Starling had only been appetizers. Just the beginning.

  Louis was going to black out. God help him, but he was going to black out. He swung the wheel and hit the brakes, popping the curb. Then slowly, the world stopped spinning and he was just sitting there behind the wheel with Macy.

  She looked at him and her eyes misted with tears.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”

  But he wasn’t. A person with a tumor chewing a hole in their belly could say they were okay, too, but it didn’t make it so. Something had settled into this world and you didn’t need eyes to see it, you could feel whatever it was. It had settled into every stick of wood and every brick, every roofing tile and every leaf of every tree. It had consumed and polluted. And what it had done to the flesh and blood things of that town was hideous beyond imagining.

  Louis sat there, hearing old Mr. Morbid on the radio, again and again: And, really, there won’t be a tomorrow, will there? Only darkness. Bonfires and stone knives by this time next week, animals hunting in the streets…most of them of the two-legged variety. Now comes the time of the primal fall…Behold, darkness will cover the earth…and night cover the nations of man…

  Oh God in heaven, what was happening here and what would happen tonight when the shadows were thick as sin in the mind of an evil man and the moon rose high over the rooftops?

  As he thought these things, he could see only Michelle.

  Michelle with her big dark eyes that always seemed to look not just at him, but into him, and that sweep of chestnut hair that fell to her shoulders. He could see her when they’d met years ago and he could see her now, the way her dark beauty always made his knees weak and his heart seize up. He did not even know if she was still alive, some mindless kill-happy animal stalking the streets. He needed her, needed her like never before, because he knew very well then and there that she was his strength. It sounded corny and cliché, but it was true. He wasn’t much without her. He fed off her strength and confidence, that unflappable sense she had to always do the right thing, the practical thing. He needed her hand to hold, he needed her voice to hear, and not just because he loved her, but because he was almost certain that everything he had done and would now do were the wrong things.

  Macy wiped her eyes. “You heard what he said. You heard what he said, Louis. It’s everywhere. There’s nowhere to run.”

  “Yeah, I heard it all right. I heard it just fine.”

  “I’m scared,” she admitted to him. “I mean, I’m really scared.”

  “So am I…”

  38

  In the Shore household on Tessler Avenue, Aunt Una woke from her nap and felt the crushing loneliness of her eighty plus years well up and fall back over her, crushing her flat with its permanence. Its weight was a physical thing like a graveyard slab pressing her flat, holding her down and letting her feel the ages eating her away, withering her to dust.

  Oh God, oh God…

  She opened her eyes and realized that, yes, she was alone and had been alone for many, many years. Sure, there was her niece Phyllis and her husband Benny, the kids…but that seemed precious scant consolation. Because her life, her own life, had been empty and wanting for years and it was only now, in that thin confused veneer of waking, that she realized the truth of her empty, cast-aside life. She went through the motions and put on a smile and urged a laugh now and again from her bosom, but it was all false.

  Synthetic.

  What she had now was a yellowed photograph in a scrapbook, something cocooned in dirty silk. Her life was not real, just an insect carapace on a sidewalk, dry and flaking, waiting for a boot to crush it or a good wind to blow it into a gutter.

  The reality of it was gone and had been for very long now.

  Charles had passed some sixteen years ago now and her own children, Barbara and Lucy, were far away and rarely did they call and Una could not blame them. Why call a mummy at a museum? Why remind it of its slow dissolution in its glass case greasy with the fingerprints of the living things that watched it decay?

  No, all of it was gone and she’d been pretending for far too long.

  She sat up in bed, the minty odors of liniment and camphor rising up around her. She began to shake and gasp, clinging to the damp sheets beneath her. Oh dear Christ, what have I been doing? Why di
d I allow this to happen? Oh, you silly, deluded, crazy old hag! Forcing yourself into their lives, making Phyllis take you in when you had nowhere else to go! You’re nothing but a great sucking parasite that bleeds them of their life and vitality…don’t you see that? Oh, you should be out at the town cemetery, right next to Charles, going to earth and feeding the worms and making the grass sprout green under those big, wind-creaky elms! That’s what, that’s what!

  At least you’d be accomplishing something!

  Una, tears streaming down her face, age threading through her like cracks in the foundation of an ancient house, made herself stand. She did not know why she thought these things, but it was amazing she had never thought them before. The truth was a mirror that did not lie. Not about age or circumstance or exactly what you had become or let yourself become.

  She stepped over to the window and saw Greenlawn laid out before her…the rooftops and spreading trees, flagpoles and church spires. Yes, all of it built and compacted into this space. It was designed for living things, not mummified old broomstick-limbed hags like her. She caught a reflection of herself in the glass and it was like a ghost hovering over the town itself. She could feel the creeping dryness of age, the dampness of the grave knitting her bones. And the horror of what she was and would never be again.

  She stumbled over to the doorway.

  She could smell things cooking downstairs, hear Phyllis humming and the kids chattering and laughing. Real, rich, living sounds. Those were not her sounds. Her sounds were rain on concrete vaults and autumn leaves blown over crypt doors, spiders spinning silent webs in night-black tombs, dead flowers and black soil and nitrous boxes held tight in the rotting belly of the good earth.

  Una moved down the hallway to the stairs, standing there, feeling a silence within her that would never be disturbed by noise again. It was all she had, that coveting and enclosing silence, windy and longing and hollow. The sound of graveyards and empty places, listening churchyards.

  Down the steps, then, one, two, three, four…

  She could smell supper.

  She’d always had a good appetite, but now that was gone. Skeletons were never hungry and scarecrows needed no bread. She could feel the aches and pains and stiffness of a life that had long since ceased to be productive.

  She made it downstairs and suddenly, the children were quiet and Phyllis stopped humming. They were holding their breath, waiting, playing games on an old woman who had no more sunshine in her heart for games.

  Una moved through the living room towards the kitchen. The smells from the kitchen were meaty and thick and spicy.

  Still, no sounds.

  No sounds at all.

  She came into the kitchen, saw them sitting in the dining room beyond.

  Phyllis. Stevie. Melody.

  They were all naked of all things.

  And bald.

  They had shaven their heads. All of them were grinning, their chins shiny with grease. A strand of meat hung from Melody’s mouth and she sucked it in. On the table was what they were eating, what Phyliss had been cooking. What she had chopped and sliced, stewed and boiled and baked and the smell of it was sickening. And the sight of it…no, no, no, you old woman, you’ve lost your mind, you can’t be seeing this! You can’t be looking at this!

  “Sit down, Auntie,” Phyllis said.

  “And eat,” said Melody.

  “It’s yummy,” said little Stevie, jabbing something pale on his plate with a fork.

  Una shook her head from side to side as a scream loosed itself from her throat. What was left of Benny Shore was spread over the table. The provider of this household who was even now providing. His limbs had been roasted and his viscera stewed, his blood was a soup and his entrails stuffed with jelly. And there on the platter, surrounded by browned potatoes and carrots, garnished with dill, was his head, glazed like a ham, his screaming mouth stuffed with an apple.

  “Sit…down,” Phyllis said, drool running from her mouth, her eyes glistening stones, staring with a fixed madness.

  Una, screaming and mad, sat down.

  Then the children were there, pressing themselves in, stuffing fat and pale meat into her mouth, pushing it down her throat with their greasy hands, filling her with the flesh and blood of their father while Phyllis held her. They emptied tureens and platters and serving dishes, dumping them all over Una, ladling soup over her head and shoving undercooked meat into her mouth until she could not breathe, not swallow, not do anything but fall from her seat, retching and retching, as they stood above her, grinning.

  Then they fell on her with knives and teeth…

  39

  The boy’s meat was sweet and rich.

  The thing that had once been known as Maddie Sinclair slept off her repast of boy, bloated, gassy, and satisfied. She snored. Her limbs trembled. Naked and crusted with dried blood, fat, and marrow, she lay in a corner of the cellar where she had scooped an earthen nest out of the dirt floor, filling it with dry leaves. A section of the boy’s entrails, half-gnawed, encircled her like garland. She lay there with her arms around her eldest daughter, Kylie, who nestled to her mother’s pendulant breasts as she had done as an infant. They slept on, bathed in their rising stench, happily as any animals fattened from the kill.

  The air was smoky, ripe with an odor of meat, blood, and urine.

  Maddie’s limbs shuddered as a dream ran through her simple mind. A primordial dream of the chase, the hunt, bringing down shaggy beasts with spears and arrows, bathing in the blood of immense carcasses.

  She chattered her teeth, winced as gas rumbled from her backside, and went back to sleep.

  The cellar was dim, moist, and smelled of black earth. Rather like a cave. It was this more than anything that had drawn Maddie here. Guided by untold ages of racial memory and primate instinct, she selected her lair as her ancestors had. The gutted remains of her husband were scattered across the floor along with some of his picked bones and drying flesh, garbage from several plastic bags. A wiry, muscular man, he had not been good eating. That’s why the trap was laid that snared in Matt Hack.

  He had been most delicious.

  A pit had been dug in the center of the floor and a low fire burned, smoke rising and filling the cellar with a dirty haze. The limbs of the boy, carefully dressed-out and salted, were hanging from the cobwebby beams above on ropes fashioned from his tendons and gut. Over the fire, suspended by a tripod was the boy’s stomach. It had been stuffed with organ meats and fat, sewn-up and now slowly smoked. His torso was dumped in the corner along with his head which had been broken open, brains scooped out.

  Maddie’s youngest daughter, Elissa, was still awake.

  She squatted by the boy’s head, running fingers along the inside of his skull, getting the last bits of buttery-soft gray matter that had been missed. Staring at what smoked over the fire with vacant eyes, she sucked her fingers clean. Like her sister, she was naked, streaked with grime and filth from head to toe, her flesh intricately cicatrized in patterns of welts and rising scars. Maddie was now similarly decorated. Elissa belched, ran dirty fingers through her fat-greased hair, dug a hole with her fingers and, squatting, shit into it. When she was done, she wiped her ass with a handful of leaves, then crouched down to sniff what she had produced. Satisfied, she buried it, flinging dirt over it like a cat.

  Hopping on all fours, she crossed the room, intrigued by the smell of garbage on the floor. A heap of rotting vegetable matter stopped her. She sniffed it, chewed some, decided it was good. She rubbed herself with decomposing lettuce, pulpy tomatoes, bits of onion.

  Then she went over to the nest.

  Circling it three times, she wedged herself in next to her sister who reflexively encircled her with her arms. Then together the brood slept, dam and offspring, a knot of foul things, trembling with atavistic dreams, waiting for the night and the good hunting it would bring beneath the eye of the sacred moon…

  40

  Louis knew that the smart thing to d
o was to turn the car around and head right out of town. He was guessing there were only about a thousand voices in his head screaming for him to do this very thing…voices of instinct, survival, and self-continuation. But these voices knew nothing of love and devotion and duty. These were vague concepts to the voices, bigger and civilized things and they could not have cared less. All they cared about was living, was continuance, about saving the bacon of one Louis Shears who was preparing to jump right into the frying pan, fat side down.

  So Louis ignored them.

  He pulled over a little hill and entered Main Street from its far eastern edge, seeing all the familiar sights and familiar places that should have been calming, but now filled him with a mounting anxiety. He took it all in, trying to swallow and finding that he simply could not.

  “We’ll…we’ll go over to Michelle’s work, see if she’s around. Then we’ll go over to the police station,” he told Macy and he thought it sounded pretty good, pretty reasonable considering the situation.

  Macy was tense next to him. “Okay,” she said.

  Unlike many towns where the main drag was perfectly linear or seemed that way, Main Street in Greenlawn was a winding, serpentine affair and you could never reach a point where you could see more than a block ahead or behind you. They passed blank storefronts and little cafes, gas stations and bowling alleys, hardware stores and banks. It all looked perfectly fine. All except for one thing.

  “Where is everyone?” Macy said. “There should be people around on a Friday night.”

  “Just take it easy, honey.”

  “C’mon, Mr. She—Louis. Look around, there’s nothing. There’s not even somebody walking a frigging dog,” she said, alarm bells chiming just beneath her words. “It looks like a ghost town and it feels like one, too. Where are they?”

  Louis tried to swallow.

  She had a very good point, of course. They had seen life in other parts of town—along with a great deal of wreckage—but here it was simply dead. His window was unrolled and he no longer heard sirens or anything else, just the sound of the Dodge’s engine, its wheels rolling on the pavement, a slight breeze in the trees overhead. But not a damn thing else. It was like in the last five or ten minutes, somebody had thrown a switch, shut everything off.