The Devil Next Door

“ Quit calling me Mr. Shears. You make me feel like I should be walking with a cane. Call me Louis or I’ll start calling you Miss Merchant.”

Macy reddened. “Oh God, not that! Mr. Hamm at school calls me Little Miss Merchant all the time. It’s embarrassing, you know?”

Louis just smiled. “Hamm is still there?”

“ Yes, and just as weird as ever.”

Mr. Hamm…dear God. Mr. Hamm had been there when Louis was in high school and he’d graduated twenty years before. Mr. Hamm was this large, very obese man who stood around in the hallways drumming his fingers on his impressive belly. Back then, Mr. Hamm had been partial to medieval forms of punishment if you acted up in his class. He’d make you stretch out your arms and balance a stack of textbooks in each hand until you thought you were going to drop or stand on one foot with your nose touching the blackboard. It was never anything violent like a ruler across your knuckles?that was Mr. Hengish?but it was just as painful after you were doing it for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Macy went and checked out the downstairs bedroom and bathroom while Louis took a turn through the dining room. Nothing, nothing.

“ You know,” Macy said when she came back, “I feel really stupid. You don’t have to stay here, you can go home. I can handle this. I’ll just lock myself in.”

But Louis shook his head. “No, let’s stay together.”

“ I was hoping you’d say that…Louis.” Macy looked around. “I have to clean this place up. What a dump. Well, I suppose we should look in the basement in case she fell down or something.”

Louis got a funny feeling when she said that. For reasons he did not understand properly and never would, he said, “I’ll check the basement. You go check upstairs. If she’s anywhere, she’s probably up there. I don’t think Jillian would like me just bursting into her bedroom.”

“ Oh no, she’d hate that,” Macy said with all due sarcasm.

He watched her pad up the stairs and he went down the hallway to the cellar door. He opened it and started down the steps. He was worried about more than Jillian; Michelle should have been home by now. He’d looked out the upstairs windows twice and her car was not in the driveway. He pulled his cellphone out and dialed next door. No answer. Nothing but the answering machine kicking in. He called Michelle’s cell, but there was no answer there either. He wasn’t liking any of that a bit.

“ Jillian?” he called out. “Are you around?”

He hadn’t been down the Merchant’s basement since the summer before. The pilot light had gone out on Jillian’s water heater and she had been waiting for him to get home from work, sitting out on the porch. He got it lit, all right, Jillian hanging over him the whole time, her tits bursting out of a halter top. He barely got out of there with his virtue intact. Jillian had cornered him at the dryer, on the stairs. He thought she was going to have her way with him on the washer. When he got home, of course, Michelle was waiting for him. He told her Jillian’s pilot light had gone out and Michelle had said, Oh, I’ll just bet. Did you get it lit for her, dear? Get everything burning high and hot again? You’re such a good little neighbor.

She had hounded him for weeks about that.

Louis went into the utility room where the washer and dryer, furnace and hot water heater were. No Jillian. There was a junk room and a furnished bar room, but she wasn’t there either. He called out for her a few times and just stood there, feeling…well, he wasn’t sure what he was feeling. Only that he did not like it. He did not like it at all. He was feeling what he’d felt when he’d first walked into the house, that something bad was building around him. Standing there, his guts twisting up, he felt like a kid standing in a deserted house on a dare. Waiting for the boogeys to come sliding out of the walls. It was like that. He did not know what to expect, but it was there, all around him, gathering strength and thickening in the air like poison.

“ Jillian?” he said, his voice sounding very dry and very old.

There was one last room to check, a spare bedroom at the back.

It was where he had to go and exactly where he did not want to go. But he had to. Just go in there and get it done, get back upstairs to Macy, because honestly, he just did not like the idea of leaving the girl alone. Not with how things were. He walked over past the bar and to the doorway leading to the bedroom. There was no door, just a set of old plastic hippie beads hanging down. The kind of thing Greg Brady had in his bedroom…or had it been Davy Jones on The Monkees? Louis brushed them aside, smiling, remembering similar beads his sister had strung in her room. Ah, the seventies.

As soon as he got in there, he stopped smiling. It did not seem to be a conscious effort on his part.

“ Jillian?” he said.