Ray Garton - The New Neighbor

"I tried not to see Lily much anymore, but she would come to me . One night, I decided to stay up, find out how she got in, so I drank a bucket or so of coffee and took some little white pills. It was still tough staying awake. I felt so… drained all the time. I sat in the living room, in the dark, waiting. When I heard a noise outside, I looked out the window and saw my son climbing down a tree outside his second-story bedroom window. He walked over to Lily's house. I realized that I wasn't the only one being neighborly.

“The next day, I had a private talk with him, told him I knew, and that it had to stop. Some father, huh? It's okay for me to fuck her, son, as long as your mom doesn't find out, but you can't. Anyway, when I told him to stop, I saw such… hatred in his eyes. Hatred like I'd never seen in anyone, and he was my own son . And he said – no, no, he spat – 'Why? Are you fucking her too ?' I told him to stop, he said he'd stop when he was ready. So, the next day I hired someone to cut down the tree in front of his window and had a new lock put on his bedroom door, one that could be locked from the outside . See what I mean when I say I changed? I was jealous of my own son, so I locked him up. Like a prisoner. Marie wanted to know what was going on, so I told her. She went to his room. They talked. That's what she said, anyway. They talked -" He chuckled icily. " – for nearly three hours.

"All of this began to affect my work. My editor – whose position I was supposed to take over later that year, because he was leaving – noticed a drop in my quality, said I was irritable and preoccupied, and suspected I was drinking or doing drugs. I told him I'd take care of it, problems at home, all that shit. But I couldn't, I just couldn't. Not long after that, he informed me I wouldn't be promoted. The position was going to someone else. Someone… more responsible. More reliable.

"That very day, I went home and found my son and wife in bed together. Fucking. Everything exploded. We hated one another. I don't know how we stayed in the same house. It was like… drinking. I had developed a bad drinking problem in college, see, so I know what it's like. You're not yourself, you don't even know yourself. The bottle does something to you, makes you do and say and think things you wouldn't even consider under normal circumstances. That's the way I was then, I hated them for what they'd done. And they kept doing it. I hated them so much I didn't stop to think why they'd done it or what was happening to us. Instead, I decided to go on seeing Lily, to see her even more. Fuck 'em, I figured.

"About that time, the man down the street killed his family and himself. A couple of weeks later, a woman at the other end of the street ran over her own son with her car. Not accidentally. And somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that everyone in the neighborhood – or nearly everyone – looked sick, weak, like they had the flu, which is what everybody said they had. Except the flu goes away. This didn't. It got worse. After a while, some of them even stopped bathing. They wore dirty clothes. I remember seeing Mrs. Denny – about fifty, normally a real cow – walking naked out to her mailbox, scratching her crotch and hacking, and I realized she'd lost about sixty, maybe seventy pounds. She looked like a corpse.

“And again, I realized – almost subconsciously – that something was wrong. It was like a little voice inside me that couldn't get above a whisper, trying to tell me that I had to do something because things were going really bad . But I didn't listen to it, because there was another voice, a louder one, talking over it, telling me that my wife was a cunt and my son was a spoiled little shit and the only person I had to think about was myself and what made me happy, and what made me happy was fucking Lily. So I kept it up while everything crumbled down around me.”

Prosky stopped, tugged at his collar as if he were choking, and stared silently out the window for a moment. "I haven't talked about this in a while," he whispered. "It's… hard."

Robby didn't know what to say. He couldn't feel pity for the man because he was too busy fearing for himself… for his family.

"My wife and son fought," he continued with a broken voice. "Like lovers. More passionately than she ever fought with me . And other times, I could hear them somewhere in the house. Moaning obscenities to one another. I got fired. I didn't know what to do. My wife didn't work and I was afraid of how she would react if I told her. So I got drunk. First time in years. I went on a real skull-grinder, spent my last dime at the nearest bar and walked home – staggered , really – talking to myself like some wino, even singing, for Christ's sake. But after I turned onto my street, I saw something that sobered me up. Fast.

"At first, it looked like smoke and I thought something was burning, because it was the middle of summer and I knew no one was using their fireplace. But it wasn't smoke. Smoke drifts. This was moving . It was white as a summer cloud and… liquidy. And… maybe it was because it was floating by a streetlight, I'm not sure, but… it seemed to glow. Just a little. It moved through a tree in front of Lily's house and over the street, formless, but moving with purpose. And it went straight to my house. I stood there with my mouth hanging open and watched it hover outside my bedroom window. The curtains were drawn, but the window was half open. Then, like milk being sucked through a straw, it flowed into the window and was gone.

"Whatever it was, it was in my house ! I practically forgot I was drunk, ran down the street, let myself in and went upstairs. Halfway up the stairs something hit me, I don't know, something like… a drug. Yes, it was like I'd been drugged. My feet weighed a ton and I could hardly keep my eyes open. It wasn't the booze, I was pretty sure at the time – and I'm certain it wasn't, now. It was an effort, but I made it down the hall, fighting to remain conscious. I fell into the room and… and I… I saw… " He shook his head. "She was there. Naked. Pulling the bedcovers back as Marie sat up reaching for her. When Lily turned to me, my knees gave out and I fell as she slapped her hand to Marie's forehead. Marie dropped back like a rock, unconscious, and I was losing it, too, just on the edge, but fighting, scared shitless. Then there was this… this rush , like all the air in the room was being sucked to the center of it, and she was gone. Replaced by this-this-this writhing cloud that blew back out the window. Then I passed out.

"I woke up a few hours later, I think. Went to bed. Marie never mentioned it the next day, but she didn't talk to me anyway. I tried to tell myself it was the booze, or a dream, but I couldn't deny it anymore. Something horrible was happening. Something horrible was wrong with Lily. But what ? I didn't know what to do, where to start. Then I remembered something.

"She had this sculpture. Black onyx. It was -"

"Lilith," Robby interrupted, surprising himself.

Prosky nodded slowly. "That's the one. I'm not sure what made me think of it at the time. I guess what I'd seen the night before shook me up. I started thinking more clearly – I started thinking , period – and I remembered the first time I went to her house. I'd never heard of Lilith, didn't know who she was, and when I admired the sculpture she told me the story of Lilith. What I remembered was the way she told me the story; so passionately, lovingly, and all the while sort of watching me out of the corner of her eye, as if she were waiting for some reaction, some specific response."