The Devil Next Door

Earl smiled at that as if he was amused by it. “Of course it is, Louis. The whole world. One race trapped in this disquieting moment in time when the shadows of antiquity are crowding in upon them.” Earl nodded. “Do want to know why this is happening, son? Why the human race is descending into savagery? Why our psychological evolution is being thrown clear back to the Paleolithic? Well, I tell you, I’ll tell you. But first ask yourself this: Why do locusts swarm? Why do lemmings purge themselves? Why, indeed? When their populations reach critical mass, some biological imperative is activated in order to cull said populations. Hence, locusts swarm, lemmings purge. Locusts take to the skies in a swarm, descending on fields and stripping them, going into an eating frenzy. And they do this to cull their populations, for inevitably only a fraction of the population will survive the swarming. And lemmings? They do not consciously purge themselves as some think. They overpopulate, that unknown imperative switches on, and they migrate en masse. Again, only a fraction survive the migration. Most starve. Again, population culled.”

Louis just stared at him, pretty certain now that Earl was mad, too. They had all gone mad, each in their own way. And this was certainly Earl’s way. “That’s very interesting, Earl.”

“Isn’t it?” Earl stabbed a finger at him. “But what does this have to do with human populations? I think you’ve already made the connection. Our population has reached dangerous, critical proportions. We are destroying the environment to accommodate this massive population explosion. Nature has thrown every conceivable stumbling block at us to slow it down…disease, famine, natural disaster. But we’ve beaten them off one by one. And now? Yes, the ace in the hole. That same biological imperative that exists in locusts, lemmings, even rats. We are, essentially, swarming. We are purging ourselves. We are cleansing the stock, so to speak. There was a very intelligent man name of Hutson. Roger Hutson. Hutson was an ethnologist from Oxford, over in jolly old England. He wrote a marvelous book called Swarm Mechanics many years ago where he warned of just such a species-threatening event. He claimed that in each of us, as in the aforementioned animals, there was a rogue recessive gene that would become activated if our population reached hazardous levels. That it would bring about unprecedented savagery, that we would literally exterminate ourselves until our population stabilized. And it has come to pass, has it not? This gene is activated, Louis. God help us, but it is. All of them out there…animals, they are regressing to animals, throwing off the yoke of intelligence and civilization, returning to the jungle and survival of the fittest…”

Earl went on and on, unable to stop himself. He cited studies with rats. How when they were overcrowded as humans were now in their towns and cities they began participating in degenerate, self-destructive behavior just like people. Murder, incest, homosexuality, cannibalism. Anything to weaken the overburdened population, to burn it out at its roots. To poison it out, cull the weak, preserve the identity and genetic purity of the breeding pool.

“The human garden will now be weeded,” he said.

“But, Earl-”

“Oh, how arrogant we were!” Earl raged. “To think we were the masters of this planet! To think we could rape the environment and subvert natural law! And all the time, it was not nuclear war or some deadly pathogen waiting to undo us, but ourselves! We are the instruments of our own destruction! Inside each and every one 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!”

“Listen, Earl,” Louis said. “I need to get going, I have to?”

“who’re you talking to out there, Earl?”

It was Maureen, Earl’s wife. She was hard of hearing and shouted everything. Even if you were in the same room with her. But Louis was glad for the intrusion.

Earl shook his head. “I’m talking to Louis! Louis Shears from next door!”

“Who?” Maureen shouted through the kitchen window.

“Louis! Louis from next door!”

“Louis? Is Michelle out there?” she cried. “I said, is Michelle out there?”

“No, she’s not!” Earl looked apologetically at Louis and shrugged his shoulders.

“WHAT?”

“I said she’s not out here!”

“Well, what are the two of you doing?”

“We’re not doing anything! We’re just talking!”

“Well, if you won’t answer, I better come and see myself!”