The Devil Next Door

He was tall and filthy, hair hanging to his shoulders in greasy curls. His face was painted like a skull as all those of the inner circle. His body was likewise painted with white and blacks streaks, though smeared with ground-in blood, dirt, and animal fat.

He held a scalp in his hands, still bleeding from its owner.

The hair was lustrous gold, beautiful, like something spun on a spinning wheel. The moonlight caught it, held it, made the golden mane glow.

Macy recognized it.

The scalp of the girl she’d killed in the blood-rite.

Yes, she remembered it as she remembered the man who held it out to her. It was an offering. The scalp belonged to Macy. Golden, beautiful, any warrior would be pleased to have it hanging upon their scalp pole. He made sure it was brought to her.

Laid it at her feet.

Like burnt offerings.

Macy just stared at him with something leagues beyond hate. A mania that was all-consuming and burned bright.

She remembered him, too.

The wet dog stink of him as the others held her down and he mounted her. She remembered the pain between her legs and the oily feel of his skin against her own.

Having set the scalp at her feet, believing them to be conjoined now like fetal twins because of the rite, he looked up at her and smiled.

Macy slashed her knife against his throat.

He stumbled away, gagging on his own blood, shocked, mortified, beyond himself by what had just transpired. How could she do this, how, how, how, how Macy stepped over to him with her knife and smiled with a blood-stained mouth at the huge slaughter moon high above…

85

As the hatchet was embedded in the girl’s skull with a wet thudding noise and she pitched over on top of him, eyes glazed in death, Louis saw the barbarian hordes rushing in from all directions.

People screamed.

Howled.

Bayed like animals.

Spears were thrown. Axes cleaved off limbs and shattered bone and arrows punched through chests and bellies.

And there he was, barely conscious, his mind reeling in every imaginable direction as the warfare broke out in every quarter. He was confused…but happy. For just as the children brought hell and death down upon Maddie Sinclair and her slinking, animal daughters, now hell and death was coming down upon the children and their leader which had once been a fellow named Frank Chalmers, though only God knew what he was now.

Children dropped all around him, screaming with spears stuck in them. A boy with an arrow in one eye stumbled about, his face red and shining, then fell over. Louis looked for Chalmers because he knew he was out there somewhere delighting in this. A sixty-year old man who could fight better than any two twenty-year olds.

The other girl Louis had seen when he first opened his eyes was leaping around, trying to avoid the blades of older women who were cutting and hacking their way through Chalmer’s perverse pack of hunters and killers. She made a good show of it and then a woman with a sharpened stake in her hand-like something you went to slay a vampire with-took her by the hair, broke her over one knee and pierced her in the throat with it. Then she proceeded to decapitate her.

And look at how much she loves it! Chopping the head off a little kid! Have you ever, ever in your life, Louis, seen such genuine unadulterated pleasure on someone’s face? Such concentration, such conviction in the rightness of what they were doing?

And honestly he had not. And if there was anything left that could frighten him and maybe even unhinge him it was this: they were not human anymore, these people, not even remotely. Men, women, and, yes, children were just game.

Game for sport.

And game for meat.

On the slaughter went and he had a front row seat and never, not since the dawn of what men referred to as civilization, had there been a contest this bloody, this savage, this unrelentingly grisly.

The children, he soon saw, were really no match for this new army of butchers who seemed come sliding out of every shadow like snakes, leaping from every bush and even dropping from the trees. Primeval, obscene, anti-human-that was exactly the word that flashed through Louis’ crowded mind-and somehow reptilian, they prowled in for the kill, meat-hungry pythons and slinking human pit vipers and deadly rattlesnakes and fang-toothed mambas. The fact that they were covered in not just old blood and dirt, but a crazy warpaint/camouflage of red-and-green bands only heightened the effect.

They were human reptiles.

Many of them had bows and arrows and Louis had not seen that up to this point. They had axes and pikes, homemade spears and knives and you name it. And they were very good at what they were doing. The children went down beneath the slashing of blades and when they went down, they were instantly harvested. Trophies were slit free: ears, fingers, scalps, even genitals.

Louis had not been noticed yet, so he decided now was a good time to slip away.

Two women held a boy down, slit his mouth open into a bleeding, clownish grin and proceeded to cut his tongue out.