Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

Macy looked up at him in the flickering light of the fire, a thing of shadows and primal appetites. He was breathing very hard, grinding his teeth, flexing his muscles so that the crust covering him continued to crack and flake away. His eyes were shiny, wild.

She hated him. She lived only to see him suffer. If a knife were placed in her hand, she would have slit his throat.

Standing there, he seemed to know it, and it excited him.

Staring down at Macy, he gripped his penis. He squeezed it. He was already hard. With a bloody hand, grunting like a pig, he masturbated with firm, sure strokes. He looked into her eyes the entire time, his gaze black, bestial, and deranged. He made sure she watched. He let out a cry and came, his semen striking Macy’s cheek in a hot gush than ran down her face.

A day ago, a week ago, she would have screamed.

She would have gotten sick.

But now she did not even flinch. Debased, humiliated, there was nothing left now to flinch with. She did not feel exactly human anymore. Because it was happening now and she knew it and she wanted it to happen: the regression. A civilized, reasonable, intelligent person could not hope to survive with them or against them. You could not reason with them. They did not understand logic. They were territorial. They were animals. They were shaggy, psychotic, shit-smelling, crawling horrors straight out of the Pleistocene. They knew only the politics of the tribe, the mechanics of the hunt, the anatomy of murder and survival and blood sport. It was their liver and lights and soul. Regression was taking Macy with a hot surge of genetic impulse, sinking her slowly, steadily into the black pit of prehistory, down into the primal earth cheek by jowl where she could feel the cool moist soil of atavism and smell the secret animal musk of the race and taste the sweet blood of the primordial void.

She was one with it now.

And as the savage with the flaccid penis glared down at her with an appetite barely slaked, she felt herself falling into a shattering metallic silence.

But sometimes it took a snake to kill another snake…

She watched the man by the fire.

He was tall, well-muscled, lean. In the moonlight, a bloodied hammer in one hand and gore-dripping knife in the other, he looked every inch the dawn man that could be at once feared, understood, and desired.

Kylie Sinclair trembled.

In the darkness of the bushes, she was just touched by moonlight. She was wearing a crown of sticks and leaves that was not decorative, but meant to break up her silhouette in the night. It was an ancient technique of the hunt. Her sister and mother waited nearby.

The man just stood there.

She was smelling the pig roasted on the fire, the bubbling seams of fat and well-marbled slabs of meat that dripped a tantalizing hot juice into the flames. She was waiting for the man to pluck the carcass free and begin eating. Perhaps he would render it to bone and pack the meat off with him.

No.

He did neither.

He went down on his knees in the grass, shaking. Kylie was confused. For surely this was his kill, slit and spitted, he had drawn first blood and would be the first to taste the sweet bounty of the hunt. But he did not seize it and claim it as his own.

Kylie waited.

She could smell the pungent odors wafting up from her body…leaves and loam and black earth, a telltale stink of musk and animal oils that just barely masked her own ripe body odor. Good earthy smells. Smells that did not confuse, but invigorated and gave confidence. She ran fingers over the ceremonial welts and upraised scars of citricization that mottled her flesh. Like the paint made of blood and marrow fat that she decorated her body with, these were the symbols of who she was, what she was, her tribal affiliation.

She sniffed her fingers, tasted them, intrigued by her own odors and flavors.

She touched fingers to her armpits, her vagina, her rectum. Each smell and flavor was more heady and organic, each one making her more giddy.

The man moved.

He had heard something. Kylie was certain of it for the smell coming from him across the yard had changed. This was sharper: fear. Yes, he heard something. A voice. Weapons in hand, he was going to investigate.

Kylie, peering through the bushes with eyes like glittering black stones, tensed in the dappled moonlight. Her muscles were drawn tight. She could smell violence coming from the man. It made her loins tremble.

Deep inside the dark chest of her mind, biochemical signals had been activated and Kylie knew instinctively that the zenith of the cycle was fast approaching. She could smell it on herself. Taste it on her skin. Tomorrow, perhaps, she would be in estrus-heat-and already she was aching for the filling and the release. She hoped the dam would give her the man. She would bait him with the scent of her womanhood, draw him in, let him spill his milk into her. Then the cycle would be complete.

A voice had spoken to the man.

Kylie did not like the voice. She could tell by its tone that its speaker was not like she, not a hunter but prey. Something to harvest with the rest. The breeze brought her his smell and it was perfume and soap and synthetic fibers, only a ghost of sweat and animal purity.

It was time.

Kylie went back to join her sister and the dam. They had found a bucket filled with white fireplace ashes. They had dumped water into it, mixed it into a smooth white paint. She watched them cover themselves in it. She did the same. The three of them looked like marble-white ghosts. When it was dry, the dam took red lipstick and painted her daughters. She colored both ears red and then drew a wide red band from ear to ear and filled it in so that their eyes were looking out from a belt of bright scarlet. She painted similar bands over their mouths stretching to both jawlines.

When they were done, it was time.

Clutching her spear, Kylie led them on the hunt…

“Nice job, Louis,” the voice said to him. “Very nice, scaring off those little savages. Commendable. One might think you were a savage yourself.”

Earl Gould.

Louis went over to him in the grass. “What the hell are you doing here, Earl?”

“I was kidnapped by the little horrors.”

He was tied-up in the grass. Louis cut him loose, wondering if it was such a good idea or not. “I’m telling you right now, Earl. I’ve been through the shit, okay? You try and attack me and I swear to God I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

Rubbing his wrists, Earl managed a laugh. “I’m okay, Louis. How about you?”

Louis didn’t bother answering that. What could he say? He had a bloody hammer and a bloody knife in his hand.

“Thanks for getting me out of this…jam,” Earl said. “I was next on the barbi. Nice show of aggression, by the way. You scared the hell out of them.”

“I thought they’d stand and fight.”

Earl shook his head. “Most animals rarely do. When faced with life-threatening show of aggression even a grizzly bear will think twice.”

“We’re in a hell of a situation here, Earl.”

“Yes, we are, Louis. We are in the jungle,” Earl said. “This is where seventy million years of primate development has led us: right back to the beginning.”

Louis led him into the house and made him sit in a recliner in the living room. He did not turn on any lights. He went into the bathroom and washed his face, drank a few handfuls of water. When he came out, he grabbed a poker from the fireplace and sat on the couch. He could see Earl just fine in the moonlight filtering in through the picture window. He was grinning, but it was an awful sort of grin. A mad grin, but hardly dangerous. Just the grin of a man who had parted the black velour curtains of reality and peered deep into the fires of Hell, maybe saw something looking back at him. Something he recognized.