The Devil Next Door

When Macy opened her eyes, her first sensory experience was not the plate of spiderwebbed glass that lay over her lap from the shattered window. It was the stink. The stink of those that had ringed in the car in the fading light. Monsters. That’s what she thought. Monsters. These were monsters…ogres, trolls, bogarts from a storybook that had slipped out of the dark and secret wood to feast on children by moonlight. She seemed to recall something like them from a storybook as a child, but maybe, just maybe, the memory was much older: atavistic recall. For the tales of ogres and trolls and child-eating witches were just ancient memories of primal horrors re-channeled into harmless fable. The truth behind them was dark indeed.

They just stood there, looking at her.

Men, women, children. A couple kids she knew from school.

They were yellow-skinned, dirty, half-naked, faces painted up like skulls, hair greased or tied-up with sticks and tiny bones like those of rodents.

A man standing in front of the car had a huge butcher knife in his hands that was almost as long as his forearm. He motioned with it. He made a low barking sound.

Then filthy, scabby hands were reaching into the car, taking hold of her and she just didn’t seem to have the strength to fight. Oh, she reflexively kicked and hit at them, but they yanked her through the window and bounced her head off the roof to take the fight out of her. She cried out, but it was a choked, pathetic sound.

They threw her to the ground.

She looked up at their deathmask faces carved with shadow. Their eyes were empty, shiny, vulpine. She opened her mouth to say something and they rained kicks down on her until she rolled into a heap, barely conscious. When her mouth did open to scream, something was stuffed in it: a foul-tasting, salty scrap. A piece of a shirt soaked with their sweat.

Louis, Louis, Louis…please help me…

Help me…

But he was nowhere to be seen. And as Macy fell trembling behind some black wall of terror in her mind, she felt hands grip her ankles, dragging her through the street…

48

Warren was standing there in the fading light with a cigarette in his mouth, ruminating on his life as a cop upholding the law, when the arrow punched into Shaw. Caught him right in the throat with a solid thunk! and punched out the other side, the arrow tip shining bright red, a hunk of meat caught on it. Shaw’s eyes glazed like a pot fired in a kiln and he pitched straight over.

Warren just stood there, watching him squirming on the ground. Shaw looked positively ridiculous with an arrow through his throat. Sighing, Warren ground out his cigarette and pulled his knife. “Guess we’ll be having company soon,” he told the writhing, bleeding man.

He was right.

In the fading light, he could not see much out there. Cars at the curb. Alleys. Trees. Houses. Hedges. Nets of shadow overlaying them all and making for a fine killing ground with himself as the prey. He started backing away from Shaw’s body. He turned this way. Then that. Yes, they were all around him. Goddamn. He could smell the urine and musk they were scented with, the wild animal stink of them.

A shadow moved behind a car.

The sound of padding bare feet from behind him.

He turned, ready to fight, heard a curious whooshing sound and another arrow caught him right in the belly. It didn’t go all the way through. The impact put him on his ass, knocked the wind from him. His knife clattered to the concrete. Then the pain came: sharp, cutting waves of it as what seemed oceans of blood welled from the entrance wound of the arrow. Sweating, straining, his heart pounding in his chest, Warren let out a strangled cry and pulled the arrow from his belly. Blood gushed from the hole. He felt dizzy, confused.

The bloody arrow in his hand had a triple-barbed, four-bladed tip on it, a broad head used for bear hunting. It fell from his fingers. He tried crawl down the sidewalk, but he just didn’t have anything left to crawl with.

Clutching his bleeding belly, he opened his eyes.

They had ringed him in: the hunters.

There were a dozen of them with clubs and broom handles sharpened to lethal points. They were all dirty and streaked with blood and paint. A high-breasted, green-eyed young woman with a bow in her hands stepped forward. She made a hissing sound and another woman stepped up. She was older than the first, but well-muscled, sleek, her face painted with red and green bands as was her naked body. Things like beads and sticks and tiny bones were braided in her hair. She had a slat of bone thrust through her nose and had peeled her lips away with a razor so her teeth and gums were on display. She carried an axe in one hand and a sharpened broomstick in the other with a human head, that of a teenage boy, impaled on the tip.

Warren blinked at her through his pain. He recognized her. They’d brought the body of the boy to her in the wheelbarrow. She had given the crowd an offering of the old woman upstairs.