Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

“ She’s a cocktail waitress over at the Hair of the Dog,” Macy told him. “Do you know the Hair of the Dog, Mr. Shears?”

The way she said it, Louis just bet that she knew all about the Hair, as it was called locally. The Hair of the Dog was a sleezy bump-and-grind joint out on the highway that catered mostly to truckers and bikers and tough working class types from the mills and factories. Nice place. Louis had only been in there once with a couple guys for a bachelor party and they’d left pretty quick. They were worried the women there might kick their asses, let alone the men. As he recalled, the waitresses were all topless.

“ Sure, nice place,” he lied.

Macy grunted. “You’re either a bad liar or you don’t get out much, Mr. Shears,” she told him. “No offense, but there’s nothing nice about a place like that.”

“ I’m sorry, Macy.”

She shrugged. “Why? I gave up trying to babysit my mom years ago.”

There were things Louis could have said, but it was absolutely none of his business so he kept his mouth shut. Poor Macy. Such a good, sweet kid. She deserved better than Jillian. That was for sure.

They made a quick search of the main floor and Jillian was nowhere to be found. There were a couple overflowing ashtrays and empty beer cans on the kitchen counter, a sink filled with dirty dishes, the remains of a frozen pizza on the table with a couple flies mating on it, but that was about it. In the living room there was a basket of washing that had spilled over onto the floor, scattered magazines and newspapers with rings on them like they’d been used for coasters.

But no Jillian.

“ This place is a dump, isn’t it?” Macy said, obviously embarrassed.

“ No…I wouldn’t say that.”

“ It is, too, Mr. Shears. Quit being nice about things. It’s not necessary. I know what everyone thinks about us. It’s no big deal. My mom is a lazy, drunken slob and a…a…well, I know what people say.”

“ Who cares what they say?” Louis told her. “It’s nobody’s goddamn business but your own.”

“ Thanks, Mr. Shears,” Macy said. “That was nice.”

“ Quit calling me Mr. Shears. You make me feel like I should be walking with a cane. Call me Louis or I’ll start calling you Miss Merchant.”

Macy reddened. “Oh God, not that! Mr. Hamm at school calls me Little Miss Merchant all the time. It’s embarrassing, you know?”

Louis just smiled. “Hamm is still there?”

“ Yes, and just as weird as ever.”

Mr. Hamm…dear God. Mr. Hamm had been there when Louis was in high school and he’d graduated twenty years before. Mr. Hamm was this large, very obese man who stood around in the hallways drumming his fingers on his impressive belly. Back then, Mr. Hamm had been partial to medieval forms of punishment if you acted up in his class. He’d make you stretch out your arms and balance a stack of textbooks in each hand until you thought you were going to drop or stand on one foot with your nose touching the blackboard. It was never anything violent like a ruler across your knuckles?that was Mr. Hengish?but it was just as painful after you were doing it for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Macy went and checked out the downstairs bedroom and bathroom while Louis took a turn through the dining room. Nothing, nothing.

“ You know,” Macy said when she came back, “I feel really stupid. You don’t have to stay here, you can go home. I can handle this. I’ll just lock myself in.”

But Louis shook his head. “No, let’s stay together.”

“ I was hoping you’d say that…Louis.” Macy looked around. “I have to clean this place up. What a dump. Well, I suppose we should look in the basement in case she fell down or something.”

Louis got a funny feeling when she said that. For reasons he did not understand properly and never would, he said, “I’ll check the basement. You go check upstairs. If she’s anywhere, she’s probably up there. I don’t think Jillian would like me just bursting into her bedroom.”

“ Oh no, she’d hate that,” Macy said with all due sarcasm.

He watched her pad up the stairs and he went down the hallway to the cellar door. He opened it and started down the steps. He was worried about more than Jillian; Michelle should have been home by now. He’d looked out the upstairs windows twice and her car was not in the driveway. He pulled his cellphone out and dialed next door. No answer. Nothing but the answering machine kicking in. He called Michelle’s cell, but there was no answer there either. He wasn’t liking any of that a bit.

“ Jillian?” he called out. “Are you around?”

He hadn’t been down the Merchant’s basement since the summer before. The pilot light had gone out on Jillian’s water heater and she had been waiting for him to get home from work, sitting out on the porch. He got it lit, all right, Jillian hanging over him the whole time, her tits bursting out of a halter top. He barely got out of there with his virtue intact. Jillian had cornered him at the dryer, on the stairs. He thought she was going to have her way with him on the washer. When he got home, of course, Michelle was waiting for him. He told her Jillian’s pilot light had gone out and Michelle had said, Oh, I’ll just bet. Did you get it lit for her, dear? Get everything burning high and hot again? You’re such a good little neighbor.

She had hounded him for weeks about that.

Louis went into the utility room where the washer and dryer, furnace and hot water heater were. No Jillian. There was a junk room and a furnished bar room, but she wasn’t there either. He called out for her a few times and just stood there, feeling…well, he wasn’t sure what he was feeling. Only that he did not like it. He did not like it at all. He was feeling what he’d felt when he’d first walked into the house, that something bad was building around him. Standing there, his guts twisting up, he felt like a kid standing in a deserted house on a dare. Waiting for the boogeys to come sliding out of the walls. It was like that. He did not know what to expect, but it was there, all around him, gathering strength and thickening in the air like poison.

“ Jillian?” he said, his voice sounding very dry and very old.

There was one last room to check, a spare bedroom at the back.

It was where he had to go and exactly where he did not want to go. But he had to. Just go in there and get it done, get back upstairs to Macy, because honestly, he just did not like the idea of leaving the girl alone. Not with how things were. He walked over past the bar and to the doorway leading to the bedroom. There was no door, just a set of old plastic hippie beads hanging down. The kind of thing Greg Brady had in his bedroom…or had it been Davy Jones on The Monkees? Louis brushed them aside, smiling, remembering similar beads his sister had strung in her room. Ah, the seventies.

As soon as he got in there, he stopped smiling. It did not seem to be a conscious effort on his part.

“ Jillian?” he said.

The bedroom was long and narrow and ran the length of the back of the basement. It wasn’t a bedroom really, but more of storeroom where everything went that didn’t seem to have a place anywhere else. There were cardboard boxes stacked right up to the bare rafters overhead, stray pieces of furniture, racks of clothes with aisles in-between. It was dim in there, no window to the outside. Louis felt blindly along the walls until he found a switch. A single bank of fluorescent lights buzzed on overhead. Only one tube worked, the other dirty and flickering. It cast an uneven, surreal illumination, shadows jumping all around him.

Louis walked down the aisles of clothes that were hung from rods connected to the beams overhead. Lots of the clothes were Jillian’s and Macy’s, old coats and snowsuits and you name it, but much of it was men’s suits and jackets, a couple dusty overcoats. This must have been Macy’s father’s stuff. Jillian had never thrown any of it out, just relegated it to this rummage sale, this morgue of cast-offs.