Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

“Yeah, you’re probably right, Earl.”

“Oh, I am. You can bank on that. I’m not a native. We only retired here because my wife spent her childhood in this very town. But that gives me an advantage, doesn’t it? No rose-colored glasses or troublesome blinders on this old man’s eyes, eh? I can see the mechanics of this town, where decay has set in and where new growth may yet bloom. The very anatomy of Greenlawn is mine to view.” He chuckled at the idea, but there was a sharpness to his laughter, a darkness welling just behind his eyes. “I think, deep down, Louis, that the good citizens of our fair city of Greenlawn are not surprised at any of this. I think they’ve been expecting it. In the primal blackness of their souls, I think they’ve been waiting for something like this, something terrible to happen for a long time. And now the cork has been popped from the bottle and all that fermented juice is leaking out, spoiling everything and everyone it touches. I think, Louis, some will welcome this, what today has brought and tonight might still bring. They’ll see it as an inevitability, won’t they? All those tensions and frustrations building all these years, needing to vent themselves. Oh yes, Louis, they’ve been running hot and rancid like bad blood for too long now. Something that’s needed purging, a sore that’s needed lancing. Yes, my friend, things have been approaching critical mass for some time and I’ve been watching it happen. Critical mass has been reached and now comes savage fruition. All it took was a catalyst and do you know what that catalyst was?”

“It isn’t just this town, Earl. It’s the whole damn world.”

Earl smiled at that as if he was amused by it. “Of course it is, Louis. The whole world. One race trapped in this disquieting moment in time when the shadows of antiquity are crowding in upon them.” Earl nodded. “Do want to know why this is happening, son? Why the human race is descending into savagery? Why our psychological evolution is being thrown clear back to the Paleolithic? Well, I tell you, I’ll tell you. But first ask yourself this: Why do locusts swarm? Why do lemmings purge themselves? Why, indeed? When their populations reach critical mass, some biological imperative is activated in order to cull said populations. Hence, locusts swarm, lemmings purge. Locusts take to the skies in a swarm, descending on fields and stripping them, going into an eating frenzy. And they do this to cull their populations, for inevitably only a fraction of the population will survive the swarming. And lemmings? They do not consciously purge themselves as some think. They overpopulate, that unknown imperative switches on, and they migrate en masse. Again, only a fraction survive the migration. Most starve. Again, population culled.”

Louis just stared at him, pretty certain now that Earl was mad, too. They had all gone mad, each in their own way. And this was certainly Earl’s way. “That’s very interesting, Earl.”

“Isn’t it?” Earl stabbed a finger at him. “But what does this have to do with human populations? I think you’ve already made the connection. Our population has reached dangerous, critical proportions. We are destroying the environment to accommodate this massive population explosion. Nature has thrown every conceivable stumbling block at us to slow it down…disease, famine, natural disaster. But we’ve beaten them off one by one. And now? Yes, the ace in the hole. That same biological imperative that exists in locusts, lemmings, even rats. We are, essentially, swarming. We are purging ourselves. We are cleansing the stock, so to speak. There was a very intelligent man name of Hutson. Roger Hutson. Hutson was an ethnologist from Oxford, over in jolly old England. He wrote a marvelous book called Swarm Mechanics many years ago where he warned of just such a species-threatening event. He claimed that in each of us, as in the aforementioned animals, there was a rogue recessive gene that would become activated if our population reached hazardous levels. That it would bring about unprecedented savagery, that we would literally exterminate ourselves until our population stabilized. And it has come to pass, has it not? This gene is activated, Louis. God help us, but it is. All of them out there…animals, they are regressing to animals, throwing off the yoke of intelligence and civilization, returning to the jungle and survival of the fittest…”

Earl went on and on, unable to stop himself. He cited studies with rats. How when they were overcrowded as humans were now in their towns and cities they began participating in degenerate, self-destructive behavior just like people. Murder, incest, homosexuality, cannibalism. Anything to weaken the overburdened population, to burn it out at its roots. To poison it out, cull the weak, preserve the identity and genetic purity of the breeding pool.

“The human garden will now be weeded,” he said.

“But, Earl-”

“Oh, how arrogant we were!” Earl raged. “To think we were the masters of this planet! To think we could rape the environment and subvert natural law! And all the time, it was not nuclear war or some deadly pathogen waiting to undo us, but ourselves! We are the instruments of our own destruction! Inside each and every one of us there is a loaded gun and radical population explosion has pulled the trigger! God help us, Louis, but we will exterminate ourselves! Beasts of the jungle! Killing, slaughtering, raping, pillaging! An unconscious genetic urge will unmake all we have made, gut civilization, and harvest the race like cattle as we are overwhelmed by primitive urges and race memory run wild!”

“Listen, Earl,” Louis said. “I need to get going, I have to?”

“who’re you talking to out there, Earl?”

It was Maureen, Earl’s wife. She was hard of hearing and shouted everything. Even if you were in the same room with her. But Louis was glad for the intrusion.

Earl shook his head. “I’m talking to Louis! Louis Shears from next door!”

“Who?” Maureen shouted through the kitchen window.

“Louis! Louis from next door!”

“Louis? Is Michelle out there?” she cried. “I said, is Michelle out there?”

“No, she’s not!” Earl looked apologetically at Louis and shrugged his shoulders.

“WHAT?”

“I said she’s not out here!”

“Well, what are the two of you doing?”

“We’re not doing anything! We’re just talking!”

“Well, if you won’t answer, I better come and see myself!”

Earl sighed. “Christ, but she’s getting bad, Louis. Real bad. All day long she asks me what I’m doing. I’m taking out the trash and she wants to know what I’m doing. I’m cutting the grass and she wants to know what I’m doing. What the hell does she think I’m doing? You take out the trash because it’s full and you cut the grass because it’s getting long just like you take down the Christmas tree or throw the Halloween pumpkins in the can, because it’s time! Because it’s time!”

The screen door creaked open and out came Maureen with her cane, looking suspicious as she always did that something was going on and she had not been informed about it.

Louis looked over his shoulder, wondering what was taking Macy so damn long.

“What is going on out here? That’s what I’d like to know!”

“See?” Earl said. “It’s like this all day. How would you like to deal with what I deal with?”

Louis sighed. They were a nice old couple, but now was not the time for this shit. But he knew he wasn’t leaving. Not yet. Not until Maureen came over and got her two cents in. She always had to know what was going on even when nothing was.

“Louis! Did you hear all them damn sirens?” Maureen shouted. She was a little woman with a bent back, bad knees, and glasses that made her eyes look about the size of golf balls. She looked frail and she probably was, but her lungs were working fine, despite the two packs she smoked every day. “I said…did you hear those damn sirens?”