Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

Louis felt a headache building at his temples. “Yeah, I heard ‘em.”

“What?”

“He said he heard ‘em for chrissake!” Earl interpreted.

Maureen nodded and pulled a Benson amp; Hedges 120 from her pack and lit it. But her eyes were bad and it took some doing. She held the lighter with both hands and as she brought the flame to it, she kept backing away from it as if she was afraid she was going to light her nose on fire. It took some doing, but soon the old chimney was stoked and clouds of smoke were blowing from it.

“Whole town’s going to Hell, Louis! From root to rosebud, just a madhouse! A madhouse, I said!”

“She said it’s a madhouse, Louis.”

But Louis had heard just fine and wondered as always why Earl felt the need to repeat a woman who was on the same decibel level as a Metallica concert. Already his ears were ringing.

“Where’s Michelle?” Maureen wanted to know.

Louis swallowed, wondering the same thing. “She’s at work,” he said, refusing to shout. He just wasn’t up to it. “I have to go pick her up.”

“What?”

Earl tossed his hedge clippers aside. “He said she’s at work! He has to go pick her up!”

“Why in the Hell are you whispering, Earl?” she wanted to know. “When I ask a question have the decency to answer it!”

“I did answer it!”

“Not that I could hear!”

“Well you can’t hear a damn thing anyway!”

Louis stepped back from the hedges, trying to get a look at his house. Macy had been gone too long. He was starting to get a funny feeling about that. What if she’d decided to dart over to her house to write Jillian a letter…and then gone downstairs?

“Where did Louis go?” Maureen asked.

“He’s right here!”

“He didn’t even say goodbye! how do you like that?” Maureen just shook her head, staring right at Louis but not seeing him. A few feet out of the direct line of sight and she lost you. She pulled off her cigarette. “Well, it’s a wonder Michelle puts up with him! How long have they been married and still no children! Don’t tell me there’s not something funny about that, Earl!”

Louis reddened, but was not surprised. You could pretty much hear Maureen up and down the block when the windows were open in the summer and she routinely gossiped about the neighbors.

“Jesus Christ!” Earl said to her. “Louis is right here! Are you blind?”

“What?”

“I said, Louis is right here!”

Maureen pulled off her cigarette and squinted. “Oh! Well he can’t hear me way over there!”

“I need to get going, Earl. I have some things to take care of.”

“Okay, Louis. Sorry about Maureen.” He tapped a finger to his head. “She means well, but her eyes are shot, her hearing’s no good, and she’s getting soft upstairs.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Louis told him.

“Think about what I said, Louis.”

“Is Louis leaving?”

“Yes!”

“Where’s he going?”

“He’s got errands to run, goddammit!”

“Earl gould, you quit that damn whispering and speak up like a man! You know I can’t hear so good!”

“Shut up!”

“What?”

Louis saw it coming just as he’d seen it coming when Earl started talking about the inevitability of the town going insane, of rogue gene expression sacking civilization as we knew it. The darkness was there. Hiding in the cracks and crevices of his mind and now it was bleeding out like shadows when the sun went down.

He turned to his wife. “I told you to shut the fuck up!”

“What did you say?Quit whispering like a little girl for Godsake!”

And that was it.

Earl was talking about critical mass and catalysts and all the rest, well here it was for him. Critical mass had been reached and things were about to explode out of control. Race memory descended. He was a fine, gentle old man, but that all changed in an instant. He took two steps right over to Maureen and hit her in the face with everything he had. She went right down, blood splashing from her mouth right up to the bridge of her nose. Her dentures were hanging out like a set of wind-up chattery teeth.

It happened that quick.

Louis actually looked across the street toward the Maub’s house, the Soderbergs, to see if anyone had seen what he’d just seen.

But there was no one around.

“Earl!” he said. “ Jesus Christ, what do you think you’re doing?”

But Earl did not hear him or care what he said.

He walked right over to his wife and gave her a good kick in the side and she howled with pain, gagging and gasping and spitting drool and blood into the grass.

Louis was about to intervene, but he heard Macy calling out to him. “Louis! Louis! Mr. Shears!”

Louis suddenly forgot about what he had just witnessed. He turned on his heel and ran to the house. He could hear Macy crying out and whatever was going on, it was bad. Real bad. He jogged up the steps and went right through the front door and it wasn’t hard to follow her voice.

She was in the kitchen, but she wasn’t alone.

She was behind the kitchen table and facing her was Dick Starling from across the street. But not the Dick Louis knew. Not the same Dick that had taken a picture of him with Jillian Merchant over his shoulder, that same funny and wisecracking man that had helped Louis lay the slab for his garage out back or threw Sunday afternoon backyard barbecues during football season.

No, this was not that Dick Starling.

This Dick Starling was covered in mud and dirt, hair wild and matted, completely naked, his penis standing erect. And his eyes…God, cold and dark like undersea caves. A rank stench of blood, death, and moist black earth blew off him. And he had a bloody axe in his hands.

“Hey, Louis,” he said in a clotted, dirty voice. “I’m gonna get me that little cunt and when I’m done, you can have what’s left. It’s only fair that I have some, don’t you think?”

Dick Starling was a monster…

Inside Benny Shore’s head, there was a mirror maze like the kind you could find at a carnival. You looked into this one and you were a compressed little dwarf, into that one and you were a tall skeleton man. You looked here, there were ten of you, over there and there were fifty Benny Shores. Sometimes they were the principal of Greenlawn High School and sometimes they were little boys with frightened faces lost in the expressionistic tangle of their own jagged thoughts.

Careful, careful, Benny, those thoughts will kill you.

See how they glisten?

See how the lights catch their razored edge?

Yes, yes, easy now, because those thoughts will slit you right open, spill all your goodies out in coils of red, slopping things.

After he ran over Billy Swanson, Shore drove home taking a most leisurely route to his house over on Tessler Avenue near the river. He was in absolutely no hurry. When that headache had finally found him, delivered him from the here and the now into some distant and possibly primeval place deep in the core of his being, it had done things to him. It had changed his needs and wants and ambitions.

What had mattered before was now rendered meaningless.

Everything was different.

In his own way, perhaps he was still a scurrying insect, but the nature of the colony had certainly changed. It was like a shade had been drawn and the light was finally, thankfully shining in.

For some time, Benny Shore felt in touch with the world at large, with the community, with nature itself. No, none of that silly nonsense of budgets and meetings and planning boards…what the hell was that about anyway? No, what he felt was deeper, bigger, more fluid. Like some psychic channel to his fellow man had been opened and he was tuning in. With what they were and had always been and what they all soon would be. It was marvelous. So marvelous, in fact, that Shore was almost offended by the vehicle he drove. He wanted nothing better than to strip his clothes off and run mad through the streets.