The Devil Next Door

Earl was talking about critical mass and catalysts and all the rest, well here it was for him. Critical mass had been reached and things were about to explode out of control. Race memory descended. He was a fine, gentle old man, but that all changed in an instant. He took two steps right over to Maureen and hit her in the face with everything he had. She went right down, blood splashing from her mouth right up to the bridge of her nose. Her dentures were hanging out like a set of wind-up chattery teeth.

It happened that quick.

Louis actually looked across the street toward the Maub’s house, the Soderbergs, to see if anyone had seen what he’d just seen.

But there was no one around.

“Earl!” he said. “ Jesus Christ, what do you think you’re doing?”

But Earl did not hear him or care what he said.

He walked right over to his wife and gave her a good kick in the side and she howled with pain, gagging and gasping and spitting drool and blood into the grass.

Louis was about to intervene, but he heard Macy calling out to him. “Louis! Louis! Mr. Shears!”

Louis suddenly forgot about what he had just witnessed. He turned on his heel and ran to the house. He could hear Macy crying out and whatever was going on, it was bad. Real bad. He jogged up the steps and went right through the front door and it wasn’t hard to follow her voice.

She was in the kitchen, but she wasn’t alone.

She was behind the kitchen table and facing her was Dick Starling from across the street. But not the Dick Louis knew. Not the same Dick that had taken a picture of him with Jillian Merchant over his shoulder, that same funny and wisecracking man that had helped Louis lay the slab for his garage out back or threw Sunday afternoon backyard barbecues during football season.

No, this was not that Dick Starling.

This Dick Starling was covered in mud and dirt, hair wild and matted, completely naked, his penis standing erect. And his eyes…God, cold and dark like undersea caves. A rank stench of blood, death, and moist black earth blew off him. And he had a bloody axe in his hands.

“Hey, Louis,” he said in a clotted, dirty voice. “I’m gonna get me that little cunt and when I’m done, you can have what’s left. It’s only fair that I have some, don’t you think?”

Dick Starling was a monster…

31

Inside Benny Shore’s head, there was a mirror maze like the kind you could find at a carnival. You looked into this one and you were a compressed little dwarf, into that one and you were a tall skeleton man. You looked here, there were ten of you, over there and there were fifty Benny Shores. Sometimes they were the principal of Greenlawn High School and sometimes they were little boys with frightened faces lost in the expressionistic tangle of their own jagged thoughts.

Careful, careful, Benny, those thoughts will kill you.

See how they glisten?

See how the lights catch their razored edge?

Yes, yes, easy now, because those thoughts will slit you right open, spill all your goodies out in coils of red, slopping things.

After he ran over Billy Swanson, Shore drove home taking a most leisurely route to his house over on Tessler Avenue near the river. He was in absolutely no hurry. When that headache had finally found him, delivered him from the here and the now into some distant and possibly primeval place deep in the core of his being, it had done things to him. It had changed his needs and wants and ambitions.

What had mattered before was now rendered meaningless.

Everything was different.

In his own way, perhaps he was still a scurrying insect, but the nature of the colony had certainly changed. It was like a shade had been drawn and the light was finally, thankfully shining in.

For some time, Benny Shore felt in touch with the world at large, with the community, with nature itself. No, none of that silly nonsense of budgets and meetings and planning boards…what the hell was that about anyway? No, what he felt was deeper, bigger, more fluid. Like some psychic channel to his fellow man had been opened and he was tuning in. With what they were and had always been and what they all soon would be. It was marvelous. So marvelous, in fact, that Shore was almost offended by the vehicle he drove. He wanted nothing better than to strip his clothes off and run mad through the streets.

At least, that’s how it was for a time.

Then, suddenly as it had come upon him, it began to desert him.