The Devil Next Door (26 page)

Seeing it, unable to understand any of it, left him feeling confused and reeling. A chill went up his spine. It was just too much. A few crazy people was scary…but an entire town?

A country?

A world?

This is nothing, Louis,
a voice coldly informed him.
This is absolutely nothing. You just wait until tonight. It’ll be dark soon and then you’ll see some shit. Oh yes, you certainly will.

But he had no intention on being around by then.

Macy had had an episode herself, but it had been temporary. Was he hoping for too much in thinking that maybe it would only be temporary with the others, too? Was that even possible now? He didn’t and couldn’t know. But, the fact remained that he had not gone crazy. He had no wild urges or black thoughts. Absolutely nothing.

Not yet.

But if Earl Gould’s theories were true—and Louis was beginning to think they were—then it was only a matter of time.

Regardless, if he was still normal, there had to be others. Maybe those quiet neighborhoods were full of normal people. People that had decided to lock their doors and wait things out. But what happened when the crazies were the majority? What happened tonight when they took the town and started kicking in doors and diving through windows, slaughtering the last of the rational ones?

Louis felt more afraid than he’d ever been in his life.

He wanted to drive out of town before such a thing became impossible, but he couldn’t abandon Macy and he sure as hell could not just leave Michelle. And just where could he drive
to?
Another town filled with savages?

His hands were white-knuckled on the steering wheel, his teeth chattering. He had to do something, say something. Macy was just beside herself.

“Listen to me, Macy,” he finally said, trying to sound cool and collected and probably failing miserably. “I need to get down town, I need to find Michelle. When we do, we’re going to find that uncle of yours. What’s his name?”

“Clyde,” she said. “Clyde Chenier.”

“Okay, we’ll track him down.”

“And if he’s nuts?”

“We’ll deal with that then.”

But she was not reassured in the least. She was a tough kid. Louis fully realized that now, if he hadn’t before. She was tough as nails. She was shaking in her seat, wanting to come apart, wanting to cry and scream and whimper, but she wasn’t. And she wasn’t because she was literally holding herself together.

“Macy,” he said to her, touching her hand. “I’m going to get you out of this, okay?”

She nodded.

“I don’t know what this is about, but we’ll figure it out.”

She turned and looked at him. “But it’s not just here, Louis. It’s everywhere.”

He turned on the radio. Very few stations were even on the air and those that were, were not broadcasting live. Just taped stuff.

The local station was WDND, Cozy 102. It was the butt of endless jokes by the locals. But it was the only one broadcasting out of Greenlawn. Macy punched up the AM band and found 102 quickly enough. Louis didn’t have it programmed in. An old school thrasher of the Black Sabbath/Deep Purple ilk, he just couldn’t handle that tirade of elevator music. Give him some Zeppelin or Nazareth, but go easy on Bobby Vinton and The Kingston Trio.

“Here it is,” Macy said, turning up the volume.

For a moment or two, there was only a building static that made them both tense up. Then the announcer came on, the same morbid-voiced guy who did the Daily Obituary Report at noon every day. He droned on in his usual monotone:
“Well, that was ‘April in Paris’ by Count Basie and his Orchestra. And before that, we had ‘See Saw’ by the Moonglows. Boy, I remember that one like it was yesterday. Yes, it’s another lovely day in downtown Greenlawn. The sun is shining and the birds are singing and allll is right with world. Now don’t go away, we got more mellow sounds for a mellow evening…Bobby Darin and the immortal Patsy Cline singing, ‘Crazy.’

“
You gotta love that. Craaazeeee. It really fits, don’t it? I don’t even know if anyone’s listening by this point. In case any of you are, there’s been no news out of continental Europe for six hours now. Same for Australia. In the Middle East, Tehran is burning. CNN reports that London is completely blacked-out. Satellite images confirm that the only light in London town is from burning buildings. God help us. And here at home…here at home, New York has fallen. There’s a firestorm sweeping through LA. Chicago is a warzone. Don’t know about anything else…internet is down now. Lost my AP feed an hour ago. I’m going to sign off now. Nothing left to say. Cozy 102 won’t be broadcasting tomorrow. There won’t be anyone left by then who even knows what a radio is. And, really, there won’t be a tomorrow, will there? Only darkness. Bonfires and stone knives by this time next week, animals hunting in the streets…most of them of the two-legged variety. Now comes the time of the primal fall…

“
Behold, darkness will cover the earth…and night cover the nations of man…

“
May God help us…”

Louis reached out and killed the radio.

Maybe the dead immensity of what was happening to the world did not hit him until that very moment. He heard Macy make a moaning sound next to him, but she was light years away. The realization of it all was like a storm of dust and debris and spinning shit inside his head. A sweat that was neither cold nor hot broke out on his face and his teeth locked together so hard that his molars ached. Everything canted this way, then that, and he knew he was going to pass out. Prickly heat swam up his belly to his chest.

That kid and those cops and the mailman and Macy’s mother hanging in the cellar and Dick Starling had only been appetizers. Just the beginning.

Louis was going to black out. God help him, but he was going to black out. He swung the wheel and hit the brakes, popping the curb. Then slowly, the world stopped spinning and he was just sitting there behind the wheel with Macy.

She looked at him and her eyes misted with tears.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”

But he wasn’t. A person with a tumor chewing a hole in their belly could say they were okay, too, but it didn’t make it so. Something had settled into this world and you didn’t need eyes to see it, you could
feel
whatever it was. It had settled into every stick of wood and every brick, every roofing tile and every leaf of every tree. It had consumed and polluted. And what it had done to the flesh and blood things of that town was hideous beyond imagining.

Louis sat there, hearing old Mr. Morbid on the radio, again and again:
And, really, there won’t be a tomorrow, will there? Only darkness. Bonfires and stone knives by this time next week, animals hunting in the streets…most of them of the two-legged variety. Now comes the time of the primal fall…Behold, darkness will cover the earth…and night cover the nations of man…

Oh God in heaven, what was happening here and what would happen tonight when the shadows were thick as sin in the mind of an evil man and the moon rose high over the rooftops?

As he thought these things, he could see only Michelle.

Michelle with her big dark eyes that always seemed to look not just at him, but into him, and that sweep of chestnut hair that fell to her shoulders. He could see her when they’d met years ago and he could see her now, the way her dark beauty always made his knees weak and his heart seize up. He did not even know if she was still alive, some mindless kill-happy animal stalking the streets. He needed her, needed her like never before, because he knew very well then and there that she was his strength. It sounded corny and cliché, but it was true. He wasn’t much without her. He fed off her strength and confidence, that unflappable sense she had to always do the right thing, the practical thing. He needed her hand to hold, he needed her voice to hear, and not just because he loved her, but because he was almost certain that everything he had done and would now do were the wrong things.

Macy wiped her eyes. “You heard what he said. You heard what he said, Louis. It’s everywhere. There’s nowhere to run.”

“Yeah, I heard it all right. I heard it just fine.”

“I’m scared,” she admitted to him. “I mean, I’m really scared.”

“So am I…”

38

In the Shore household on Tessler Avenue, Aunt Una woke from her nap and felt the crushing loneliness of her eighty plus years well up and fall back over her, crushing her flat with its permanence. Its weight was a physical thing like a graveyard slab pressing her flat, holding her down and letting her feel the ages eating her away, withering her to dust.

Oh God, oh God…

She opened her eyes and realized that,
yes,
she was alone and had been alone for many, many years. Sure, there was her niece Phyllis and her husband Benny, the kids…but that seemed precious scant consolation. Because her life, her
own
life, had been empty and wanting for years and it was only now, in that thin confused veneer of waking, that she realized the truth of her empty, cast-aside life. She went through the motions and put on a smile and urged a laugh now and again from her bosom, but it was all false.

Synthetic.

What she had now was a yellowed photograph in a scrapbook, something cocooned in dirty silk. Her life was not real, just an insect carapace on a sidewalk, dry and flaking, waiting for a boot to crush it or a good wind to blow it into a gutter.

The reality of it was gone and had been for very long now.

Charles had passed some sixteen years ago now and her own children, Barbara and Lucy, were far away and rarely did they call and Una could not blame them. Why call a mummy at a museum? Why remind it of its slow dissolution in its glass case greasy with the fingerprints of the living things that watched it decay?

No, all of it was gone and she’d been pretending for far too long.

She sat up in bed, the minty odors of liniment and camphor rising up around her. She began to shake and gasp, clinging to the damp sheets beneath her.
Oh dear Christ, what have I been doing? Why did I allow this to happen? Oh, you silly, deluded, crazy old hag! Forcing yourself into their lives, making Phyllis take you in when you had nowhere else to go! You’re nothing but a great sucking parasite that bleeds them of their life and vitality…don’t you see that? Oh, you should be out at the town cemetery, right next to Charles, going to earth and feeding the worms and making the grass sprout green under those big, wind-creaky elms! That’s what, that’s what!

At least you’d be accomplishing something!

Una, tears streaming down her face, age threading through her like cracks in the foundation of an ancient house, made herself stand. She did not know why she thought these things, but it was amazing she had never thought them before. The truth was a mirror that did not lie. Not about age or circumstance or exactly what you had become or
let
yourself become.

She stepped over to the window and saw Greenlawn laid out before her…the rooftops and spreading trees, flagpoles and church spires. Yes, all of it built and compacted into this space. It was designed for living things, not mummified old broomstick-limbed hags like her. She caught a reflection of herself in the glass and it was like a ghost hovering over the town itself. She could feel the creeping dryness of age, the dampness of the grave knitting her bones. And the horror of what she was and would never be again.

She stumbled over to the doorway.

She could smell things cooking downstairs, hear Phyllis humming and the kids chattering and laughing. Real, rich, living sounds. Those were not
her
sounds. Her sounds were rain on concrete vaults and autumn leaves blown over crypt doors, spiders spinning silent webs in night-black tombs, dead flowers and black soil and nitrous boxes held tight in the rotting belly of the good earth.