Tim Curran - The Devil Next Door

Please, please, please, Louis, please don’t let them, don’t let them, don’t let them do this to me, don’t let them destroy me like this But there was only the clan, clutching and feeling and holding her, gripping her with dirty fingers until her flesh bruised, kissing her and sucking on her and nibbling her with the serrated edges of their teeth. She was buried alive in their bodies which stank of blood, excrement, and peeled hides as the man on top of her, the one chosen by the Huntress, pushed in and out of her, bringing pain, riding her, grunting like a hog, drool hanging from his mouth in fetid ribbons.

When his seed flowed into her, his body stiff and jerking, she let out a final rending screaming that tore her open inside, ripped her soul wide open in a vicious, bleeding chasm that swallowed everything she had been, ever was, or could be into the black seething nothingness of prehistory…

Louis watched the darkness outside the window. He knew he should have run as far away as he could before they came back. But he just didn’t seem to care. Everything was collapsing, both within and without, and he had lost focus. In his mind he could see Earl that afternoon, out by the hedges:

We are the instruments of our own destruction! Inside each and everyone 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!

It sounded crazy then; now it simply sounded practical.

“You still sticking to the gene theory?”

Earl buried his face in his hands. “Yes, absolutely. Let me indulge in some Darwinism here, Louis. For if the survival of the fittest is a true thing, then what we have locked up inside each and everyone of us is a genetic propensity towards hunting and killing, taking down prey and destroying our human rivals. I’m talking about the beast inside. The beast that is the very core of who and what we are. That’s what’s causing all this: the beast. The primal, ravenous other inside us all, the dawn-child, the shadow-hunter, the savagery and cruelty that forms the framework of the human animal.”

“The beast,” Louis said. “I’ve seen it. I’ve looked in its eyes.”

Earl nodded. “Yes, and what a disturbing sight it is, eh? At our roots, animals, nothing but animals. Beasts. We crawled from the immortal slime of creation with the will to kill and that will is still upon us. Upright animals with savage instincts and an inheritance of acquired, barbaric characteristics. We can write poetry and make music, build cities and microcomputers and send probes to Mars, but in our hearts, our black beating little hearts, still Miocene apes and pithecanthropoid hunters. Love, hate, greed, want, violence, war. Love is a romanticized adaptation of the breeding/brooding impulse. Materialism is simply an expression of the animal instinct to covet. Nationalism, our flag-waving patriotism, nothing more than the ancient animal drive to maintain and defend a territory and war…yes, even war, nothing but an overblown, exaggeration of the territorial impulse to raid, to kill, to take what belongs to another and make it our own.”

What Louis wanted to know was: what activated this monstrous gene? What set this regression, this primordial memory-or whatever you wanted to call it-into action? “What was the mechanism, Earl? What was the machine or influence that set it all free and on such a massive scale? Just overpopulation? Stress?”

“We’ll never really know, Louis. Anymore than any other herd animal will know. It’s inside us, though, my friend. These impulses, this sadism, it’s inborn and inbred. We’re the product of our ancestors. No more, no less. Why do people murder each other? Why do they kill their own children? Their neighbors? Their wives? Why do they allow genocide to happen? Why do they lynch people of a different skin color? Why do they hate those with more or with less than them or with different religious affiliations? The beast, Louis, the beast inside. The imperatives to descend into our prehistory, into our savage past, are locked up in all of us.

“How many times have you read that somebody killed another and they really weren’t sure why? The Devil made me do it…except, we all carry the devil inside of us. Our animal past is why. We all have terrible buried impulses, but most of us don’t act upon them. But now and again, a select few or even a mob does. It’s a combination of our brutal heredity acting in accordance with deep-seated, repressed wants and desires. That’s what you’re seeing here: all the awful, dirty, hateful, and twisted things growing in the underbelly of this world, this town, in its collective mind, have been unleashed. All the terrible things festering inside these people have been released. It was genetically preordained, I suppose. The conditions were right and it just happened. That’s no answer. Not really. But the potential was there and has been in every human population since we evolved from a lesser primate. God help us, but the world is now a great living laboratory of the human condition and the mechanics of violence, primal instinct, purge and atavism. The evil is here, Louis, and the evil is us. We made the Devil in our own image.”

“But what about the animals, Earl?”

“Animals?”

Louis swallowed thickly as he told Earl about the police station. The dogs there. How they had died fighting men or fighting with them.

“Hmm, interesting.” Earl considered it. “Well, there’s only one logical explanation. Hormones.”

“Hormones?”

Earl nodded. “Yes, hormones, pheromones. It was long thought that pheromones were the province of insects. Not so. Recent biochemical studies tell a different story. All species have them. Most are species-specific, but certain kinds can be read by other species. There are aggregation pheromones which function to herd species in defense against predators or for mating purposes. Primer pheromones which trigger behavioral changes in reaction to environment. Releaser or attractant pheromones which attract mates for miles. Territorial pheromones which are carried in the urine to mark territorial boundaries or lairs or to warn off intruders. Sex pheromones which indicate the female is ready for breeding. All sorts of chemical signatures. And then there are alarm pheromones which alert a species when one of their own is under attack. Studies have shown that these pheromones, in mammals, trigger the fight or flee instinct. They make animals quite aggressive. A harmless tomcat becomes a beast. Prey animals will tend to flee, predators will generally fight. Those primitives out there-that’s a kind word for them-must be letting off alarm pheromones of absolute aggression and the dogs are responding in kind. It’s a chemical thing. The dogs cannot help themselves. They fight. If directed against a common enemy, they fight with our primitives. Lacking the same, they fight against them.”

Louis hated Earl at that moment. He was reducing man to a laboratory rat. Maybe that’s all any species was, a victim of their own chemistry, but he still hated it. It was so…dehumanizing.

“The regression, Earl. Can it be stopped?”

Earl didn’t even attempt to answer that one. “Have you ever heard of a man named Raymond Dart?”

Louis told him he hadn’t.

“Raymond Dart was an Australian anthropologist and comparative anatomist. A true giant in the field. In 1924 he discovered the fossil remains of Australopithecus in a South African limestone quarry. In time, he also discovered more fossils of this extinct hominid, along with great heaps of fossilized bones that were the prey of the Australopithecine. He also discovered crude weapons such as clubs made from antelope bones and knives fashioned from jawbones, as well as heaps of animal bones and baboon skulls which bore the marks of death blows from these very weapons. As did the skulls of other Australopithecines. Evidence that was supported by forensic experts who examined the remains. The dawn of organized murder, Louis! A quarter of a million years before man! From this Dart theorized that we evolved not from a gentle vegetarian ape as established paleoanthropology would have it, but from a savage, predatory ape with a lust for killing. It was called the “Killer Ape” theory. He perpetuated it in his paper, ‘The Predatory Transition from Man to Ape.’ In the paper he said and I quote verbatim: ‘The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices or their substitutes in formalized religions and with world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophiliac practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator-this predacious habit, this mark of Cain-that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora.’ Well, don’t you see, Louis? Don’t you grasp it?”