The Devil Next Door

Maybe the dead immensity of what was happening to the world did not hit him until that very moment. He heard Macy make a moaning sound next to him, but she was light years away. The realization of it all was like a storm of dust and debris and spinning shit inside his head. A sweat that was neither cold nor hot broke out on his face and his teeth locked together so hard that his molars ached. Everything canted this way, then that, and he knew he was going to pass out. Prickly heat swam up his belly to his chest.

That kid and those cops and the mailman and Macy’s mother hanging in the cellar and Dick Starling had only been appetizers. Just the beginning.

Louis was going to black out. God help him, but he was going to black out. He swung the wheel and hit the brakes, popping the curb. Then slowly, the world stopped spinning and he was just sitting there behind the wheel with Macy.

She looked at him and her eyes misted with tears.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.”

But he wasn’t. A person with a tumor chewing a hole in their belly could say they were okay, too, but it didn’t make it so. Something had settled into this world and you didn’t need eyes to see it, you could feel whatever it was. It had settled into every stick of wood and every brick, every roofing tile and every leaf of every tree. It had consumed and polluted. And what it had done to the flesh and blood things of that town was hideous beyond imagining.

Louis sat there, hearing old Mr. Morbid on the radio, again and again: And, really, there won’t be a tomorrow, will there? Only darkness. Bonfires and stone knives by this time next week, animals hunting in the streets…most of them of the two-legged variety. Now comes the time of the primal fall…Behold, darkness will cover the earth…and night cover the nations of man…

Oh God in heaven, what was happening here and what would happen tonight when the shadows were thick as sin in the mind of an evil man and the moon rose high over the rooftops?

As he thought these things, he could see only Michelle.

Michelle with her big dark eyes that always seemed to look not just at him, but into him, and that sweep of chestnut hair that fell to her shoulders. He could see her when they’d met years ago and he could see her now, the way her dark beauty always made his knees weak and his heart seize up. He did not even know if she was still alive, some mindless kill-happy animal stalking the streets. He needed her, needed her like never before, because he knew very well then and there that she was his strength. It sounded corny and cliche, but it was true. He wasn’t much without her. He fed off her strength and confidence, that unflappable sense she had to always do the right thing, the practical thing. He needed her hand to hold, he needed her voice to hear, and not just because he loved her, but because he was almost certain that everything he had done and would now do were the wrong things.

Macy wiped her eyes. “You heard what he said. You heard what he said, Louis. It’s everywhere. There’s nowhere to run.”

“Yeah, I heard it all right. I heard it just fine.”

“I’m scared,” she admitted to him. “I mean, I’m really scared.”

“So am I…”

38

In the Shore household on Tessler Avenue, Aunt Una woke from her nap and felt the crushing loneliness of her eighty plus years well up and fall back over her, crushing her flat with its permanence. Its weight was a physical thing like a graveyard slab pressing her flat, holding her down and letting her feel the ages eating her away, withering her to dust.

Oh God, oh God…

She opened her eyes and realized that, yes, she was alone and had been alone for many, many years. Sure, there was her niece Phyllis and her husband Benny, the kids…but that seemed precious scant consolation. Because her life, her own life, had been empty and wanting for years and it was only now, in that thin confused veneer of waking, that she realized the truth of her empty, cast-aside life. She went through the motions and put on a smile and urged a laugh now and again from her bosom, but it was all false.

Synthetic.

What she had now was a yellowed photograph in a scrapbook, something cocooned in dirty silk. Her life was not real, just an insect carapace on a sidewalk, dry and flaking, waiting for a boot to crush it or a good wind to blow it into a gutter.

The reality of it was gone and had been for very long now.

Charles had passed some sixteen years ago now and her own children, Barbara and Lucy, were far away and rarely did they call and Una could not blame them. Why call a mummy at a museum? Why remind it of its slow dissolution in its glass case greasy with the fingerprints of the living things that watched it decay?

No, all of it was gone and she’d been pretending for far too long.