Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

“ I guess…I mean, I didn’t know you smoked.”

“ Lots of things you don’t know, isn’t there?” Angie told her. “But trust me, Brandi, in time you’ll get to know all about me.”

Brandi swallowed. She recognized the implied threat and the tension was so thick on her you could have sliced it like cake. “What kind? What kind of cigarettes?”

“ What kind do you have?”

Brandi sighed. “Listen, do we have to go through this every time?”

“ Through what?”

“ You know damn well what I’m talking about.”

“ I only know that you’re being very rude to a customer.”

Danny, damn him, came running up and tossed two Almond Joys on the counter, breaking up the fun which had all the earmarks of being exceptional.

“Is there anything else?” Brandi asked her, a thin smile on her lips.

Angie, pissed-off, cheated, and trembling with barely-concealed rage, dug through her purse, clawed through it really, found her wallet…and it was at that precise moment that the little headache blooming in her skull like a corpse-orchid suddenly flowered and its petals filled her head and its fragrance consumed all that she was.

With moonstruck eyes, she looked from the purse to Brandi, recognizing neither or their place in the scheme of things. She made a guttural grunting sort of sound deep in her throat. Her fingers continued to dig in the purse, finding a wallet, a cosmetic bag, a cellphone, a box of crayons for Danny…things she no longer recognized or understood.

Then they found something else.

A box-cutter with a curving steel blade like that of a scimitar.

Angie had no memory of throwing it in there when she’d sliced open boxes for the recycling. She only knew that it felt good in her hand. It conformed to her palm and begged to be put to use.

“Um…are you all right?” Brandi asked, caught somewhere between confusion and fear.

Angie looked up at her, drool running from her mouth. Her eyes were fixed, staring, almost reptilian. She brought out the box cutter and slashed Brandi across the throat. Brandi stumbled back, shocked, stunned, overwhelmed. Blood bubbled from her torn voice box and she tried madly to stem it with her fingers. It squirted between them like a flow of rich red wine, catching Angie in the face.

The hot spray of blood was not unpleasant.

It was pleasing.

Angie came right over the counter. She slashed Brandi’s outstretched fingers to ribbons, she took the tip of her nose off, she opened one breast, and then she ripped the box-cutter across Brandi’s lovely dark liquid eyes, the hooked blade catching in the left pupil and yanking the bloody, glistening orb out by a section of optic nerve.

People fled the store.

But more disturbing, others did not.

When Angie came around the counter from the hacked, bleeding thing on the floor, two men and one woman stood there, smiling at her, staring at her with dark troglodyte eyes. Eyes that understood. One of the men, middle-aged and balding, stepped up behind her and slid his hands up her shirt, gripping her breasts roughly.

Angie liked it.

Her blue eyes were like crystal drowning pools, lips pulled away from teeth. The front of her pink tee was soaked with blood, crazy whorls of it had splashed over her face. She enjoyed the smell of it. It excited her, stirred primal memories of the hunt. She licked it off her lips.

The others following, she went back behind the counter. She dipped her finger’s into Brandi’s gored throat, swished them around in the wound, then, her fingers dripping with blood, she went over to the wall. She knocked a display of Hostess cakes out of the way, kicked aside a cardboard standee of Dale Earnhardt hawking Budweiser…and proceeded to draw on the wall in blood. Elaborate looping symbols, complex intersecting linear marks, bloody handprints and stick figures, repeating them again and again.

Using Brandi Welch’s corpse as their palette, the others joined her, covering the walls in ritualistic hieroglyphics that looked oddly like the cave paintings of Paleolithic man.

They instinctively knew what she was drawing and they followed suit until the wall was crowded with primitive art.

When Angie walked out of the store, the others followed in her rich, savage blood-wake. It was her scent now and it drew them to her.

And behind in the store, forgotten but unconcerned, Danny reached into the meat case and found a moist, well-marbled slab of sirloin. It dripped with blood. He brought it to his mouth.

Humming, he began to suck the juice from it…

After Louis was long gone, Officers Warren and Shaw and Kojozian stood around staring at the dead boy on the sidewalk, each happily reminiscing about other stiffs they’d been called in on. How they looked, how they smelled, what happened when they tried to bag them up. Warren was an old hand, just like Louis thought, and he seemed to have the best stories by far. But the other two kept trying to outdo him like a couple guys reliving their high school glories on the gridiron.

Kojozian, who’d only been a cop five years by that point, kept trying to come up with something that would impress Warren. “I tell you about that nut over on Birch Street a couple years back? Some old guy, retired railroad man, he took to the bottle and took to it hard.”

Warren nodded, as if he’d heard it too many times. “The sauce gets ‘em every time. Take my word for it. I could tell you some stories, boy. The old Sweet Lucy, they get a taste for it, look out, brother.”

“ Sure,” Kojozian said, “sure. This guy’s got it so bad that his wife decides he’s going cold turkey so she up and locks him in the coal bin down in the basement. Keeps him there like a week. You believe that shit? He’s in there, living in the straw, shitting and pissing himself. She slides food under the door for him, but no booze. She wouldn’t have called us, but she broke the key off in the lock. Well, let me tell you, we broke the door down and the smell that came out…oh boy, not nice. The old man was out of his tree with the D.T. s. He’d torn up his nose, clawed it right to hamburger because he thought there were bugs crawling in and out of it. We took him out and it was no easy bit, he bled all over my uniform shirt, just screaming about the bugs living inside him.”

Warren just kept nodding, watching the flies gathering on the kid’s corpse. Right then, they were investigating the crater at the top of the head. Warren finished his cigarette and flicked it at them. It scattered them, but the butt lodged right there in the sticky goo coming out of the skull.

It sizzled and went out.

Kojozian said, “Hot out today.”

He yanked his tie off and threw it. Then he unbuttoned his uniform shirt, took it off, and pulled off his T-shirt beneath. He threw it in the grass. He put his uniform shirt back on, but did not button it back up. The sun felt good on his bare chest.

Shaw mopped sweat from his face, just shaking his head. “Sure, goddamn booze. You remember old Father Brown over at St. Luke? Oh, now that was long before your time, Kojozian. Father Brown was a hell of a guy, let me tell you. That old sonofabitch ran the church, St. Luke’s school, the whole nine yards. Christ, he’d been over there since the forties.”

“ Forties?” Warren said. “Try the thirties.”

“ Yeah, well, Father Brown he had quite an operation going over there. Everyone loved him right to death. The church picnic in the summer, the fall carnival, the Halloween spookhouse, the Christmas programs…hell, what a guy. Every old lady in town worshipped that man.”

“ He used to have supper at our house twice a month when I was a kid,” Warren said.

“ Sure. He was like that. But what very few in this town knew was that he had an awful thirst. Once a week, usually Thursdays, old Father Brown would just get pissed three sheets to the wind. His housekeeper would always call down to the station and we’d go off looking for him. One time, there he is on Main, leaning up against a parking meter, pissing on the sidewalk.” Shaw was grinning now and couldn’t help himself. “Well, we get out of the squad car and he sees us right away, tells us to go get fucked and when we’re done with that to go fuck our mothers. That’s the truth, Kojozian. He was one mean sonofabitch when he got a bellyful.”