Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

God, how good it tasted in her mouth.

How delightful it felt smashing to a pulp between her teeth.

Sometime later, Kathleen took his blood and painted the walls in loops and whorls and scraggly hex signs she remembered from a book long ago. When she was done the kitchen was hers. It smelled of raw meat and blood. This was her place, her warren and she had to keep others out.

Squatting by the kitchen door, she pissed to mark her territory…

When the door to her office opened, Michelle Shears almost came right out of her skin. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but it was only Carol, her boss. Usually she knocked, but today she burst right in. Stood there with a glassy look in her eyes.

“Have you heard?” she said.

Michelle felt butterflies winging in her belly. “What now?”

“It’s all over the radio.”

“I…no. I’ve just been trying to finish up some things. I want to get out of here.”

Carol just stared with those dead eyes. “It’s everywhere now.”

“What is?”

“What’s happening in this town. It’s happening everywhere. There’s rioting in LA. People are setting fires in Chicago. There’s been some kind of mass suicide in New York. Things are going crazy.”

Michelle tried to swallow but couldn’t.

Mass insanity…all over the country? Right away, like everyone else, she started looking for reasons, connections. She started thinking about terrorists letting lose some bioweapon, some kind of germ. She saw a show once where they said that if such a germ were let loose in a major airport, commuters would spread it from one end of the country to the other in a matter of hours.

Was that it?

No, it didn’t make sense. She could see it hitting Chicago and New York and LA, all the major arteries of the airlines. But Greenlawn? Unless someone just happen to have been infected on a flight and come back here, spread it around real fast…no, it didn’t make sense.

“What the hell’s going on, Carol?”

“I don’t know. But it’s all over the place. They said on the news some guy in Fort Wayne murdered a family with an axe. They were his next door neighbors for godsake.”

Michelle felt something beginning to fragment inside her.

She’d been entertaining some fantasy all afternoon of getting home and getting out of town with Louis until the madness blew over. But if it was everywhere…where could you run to?

“The governor of Texas has declared a state of emergency, Michelle. It’s all over CNN. People are killing each other. Like animals.”

“Good God.”

Carol just stood there a moment, hugging herself. Then she looked over at Michelle with dark, simmering eyes. “Animals,” she said. “Animals. I wonder what that’s like…”

She left the room.

Michelle looked out her window.

She saw the sunny streets of Greenlawn. Everything looked perfectly fine. In the distance, there was the whine of an ambulance. All over the country. Good God. All over the country. But she knew she couldn’t worry about that. Not now. She had to worry about this place.

About Greenlawn.

Suddenly, she could see nothing else, know nothing else. Tunnel vision. One place. Her town. Her territory. Everything else faded as something important and vital inside her went with a warm, wet snapping noise. There was purity then. There was joy. She could smell her own skin and taste the salt on her lips and feel the heat between her legs.

She rummaged through her desk drawers.

Found something she could use.

A letter opener with a six-inch blade…

Dick Starling stood watch over his wife’s corpse.

This was the love of his life, his happiness, his heart, his everything. That’s why he had to kill Megan because she just hadn’t understood. When it had come over him as it was now coming over everyone, she had fought against it. And even though he could no longer really remember what he had been like before, he knew that this was better and Megan was an alien entity, a disease germ in the midst of a healthy body. So he had taken his axe and split her head open.

That had been several hours ago and now he had her strung up in the kitchen by the feet, had dressed her out as he dressed out his deer in November. He’d taken her head off and gutted her, placing her organs and entrails in neat piles in the sink on the drain board.

There was blood all over the floor.

There was blood all over him.

He sat in a sticky, drying pool of it, the blood-stench up his nose and down his throat, permeating every pore and every cell and the joyous, pleasing smell of it made him swoon, made him hard, connected him to the simple rhythms of life in a way he had never known before. He sat there, studying the blade of his axe. It was stained with blood. There with clots of hair and bits of tissue stuck to it.

Cocking his head, he listened.

For intruders.

They had already tried to take his kill once. A woman and two ratty-looking girls with kitchen knives. Some near-submerged, misty portion of his brain told him that they were once Maddie Sinclair and her two daughters, Kylie and Elissa. But that meant nothing to him. They were scavengers, predators. He had chased them off. He had wanted the woman. He wanted to fuck her on the bloody floor, maybe the girls, too. But they had run off.

He wondered where his own daughters were.

He studied the walls of the kitchen. They were splattered with blood and decorated with bloody handprints. When Dick had been dressing Megan out, he had been amazed at his bloody hands so he pressed them against the walls and made prints. He liked the way it looked so he kept dipping his hands into his wife’s torso and painting the walls with red handprints. Those who came here would know this was his lair. That he would defend it.

He heard voices in the distance.

Crawling across the floor with his axe, he pulled himself up by the sink. The smell of organ-meats and intestines made his mouth water, his belly growl. He peered out the window. He saw a man out there, across the street. A man and a girl. It took him a moment, but then he remembered that the man was Louis Shears and the girl was Macy Merchant.

Dick wondered if Louis would give him the girl.

Maybe he would trade her for meat.

Dick slid down to the floor and studied his handprints on the wall and contemplated his wonderful new world. He would need to go out soon. Go out and hunt. But first there were other considerations.

He needed to eat.

Breaking apart several kitchen chairs, he built a fire on the kitchen floor.

Soon, the smell of roasting meat filled the room…

Louis stood there with Macy by his side, listening to the empty house.

They called out a few times and listened to their voices echo and die out. Louis had been in a lot of houses and it was funny how something as subtle and abstract as an echo could tell you things. Maybe it had something to do with sound waves and maybe it had something to do with some buried sixth sense we all carry within us. Regardless, he could tell that the Merchant house was empty…though that wasn’t exactly the word that was bouncing around in his head at that moment: unoccupied. As in, Louis, this house isn’t so much empty as unoccupied, if you can dig the subtle nuances of that.

He stood there, swallowing down a sour taste in his mouth. “Maybe she stepped out or something,” he suggested and wondered why he did not believe that anymore than Macy seemed to.

“ No,” she said. “She’s always home now. She has a job, Mr. Shears, but she doesn’t go on until eight tonight.”

Louis was almost afraid to ask what that job was. The way Macy said it, not going on until eight, made it sound like Jillian had found a job stripping on stage. Thing was, his mind drew a blank when he tried to make small talk, so he just asked. “Oh yeah? Where’s your mom working these days?”