The Devil Next Door

Something bit his ankle.

He jerked and a rodent went scampering away. A rat? Must have been. Too big to be anything else. He looked around the cellar. Had he been an anthropologist he might have appreciated the primordial squalor of prehumanity. But he certainly did not appreciate it. Bones and hides, human remains, bodies and parts of them hanging from the rafters. A sack-which must have been a human stomach stuffed with something and stitched closed-was hanging from over the fire from a tripod.

Vile, was the only word for it.

But honestly, with all the boxes and bags and crap piled everywhere, Maddie Sinclair’s basement had been a pigsty to begin with.

Imagine that. Uppity, snobby, Little Miss Perfect Maddie Sinclair’s basement was a rat’s nest. Ah, the secrets we hide from our neighbors.

He heard a sound and started. He was expecting them to come back, those white-painted wraiths with their necklaces of human scalps and fingers. He expected them to return to their kills…and their captive. And maybe this time, it would be no simple dry-hump from an overeager teenage savage.

Maybe it would be the real thing.

He thought that if Macy was truly dead and he was the last civilized person in Greenlawn then maybe it would be better off if he just cashed in his chips here and now.

But to die like that, to be peeled and quartered…

His senses were very alert these past hours. So he listened. Processed it all. Outside he could screams of terror or perhaps pure unbridled joy in the distance. Crickets chirping. Nothing else. A calm night. Warm, pleasant.

You better find a way out of this.

You don’t have much time left.

He could feel the numerous gashes and bruises on his body, each one a separate catalog of pain. It would have been unlivable a few days before, but now it only served to reinforce his waning will to live. He was alive. He was a man. Men like him would be needed to straighten this out if such a thing ever became possible.

He had to live.

He squirmed across the floor, smelling the piss in the dirt, the shit that Maddie and her daughters buried in the sand. Jesus.

Footsteps.

Shit.

The three of them came padding down the stairs-and padding seemed appropriate here, because they no longer walked like women, like human beings, they shuffled along like apes or cantered like hunting wolves-and crowded the doorway.

Maddie came over and squatted about four feet from him. She had a bone in her hand that looked roughly about the size and shape of a human femur. It was stained brown and one end was sharpened for stabbing. She said something, a series of guttural barking sounds that he could not begin to decipher. She grunted and then stared at him for response.

When he didn’t respond, she pounded the floor with her bone.

He just shook his head.

She pounded her bone with authority now.

As dangerous as the situation was, it reminded Louis of that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He could have laughed at the absurdity of it had he not been so close to tears at that point.

There was something she wanted him to understand. She kept pounding the bone, offering him the toothy grin of baboon.

Maddie Sinclair had been an attractive woman before this happened to her. Yes, elitist and pompous, but also the sort of women men watched, the penis having no true shame. She was not thin and willowy like some TV spokesmodel, but shorter, hips and ass well-rounded, breasts quite large, long hair just this side of bronze and large liquid black eyes. Sexy. That was the word for it. She had it and she carried it well and that’s all there was to it.

But now…good God.

Naked and painted white, that brilliant red war paint at her face and breasts and loins, the streaks of dried blood and filth mottling her. Her hair hung in her face like strands of wet straw, her mouth hooked into a contorted, evil funhouse sort of leer. And those eyes-could you really call them eyes?-wicked crevices peering into a pestilent sewer blackness.

She edged in closer, slapped the ball joint of the bone in her palm.

The way she smiled was not the way human beings smiled. It was the lurid, carven grin of a crocodile. A smile of teeth and bone-crushing appetite. She glided forward on hands and knees, the stench of her enough to put Louis’ stomach in his throat. Her breath was sharp smelling like rat poison.

She had him and there was no way out.

Despite the crawling beast she was, the craven leer in her eyes was unmistakable. She did not want to make love, hell no, she wanted to screw, to fuck. And even that was far too dignified for a rodent like her. She wanted to rut like hogs in the mud and breed like wolves in the brush and apes in the trees. Rutting season. She was in heat and she wanted what he had.

And if he didn’t give it?

He knew the answer to that. The ones that had refused were hanging from the rafters, salted, boiled, tanned, or bubbling away in pots.