The Devil Next Door

Michelle stepped from behind the clan. She was still wearing her skirted business suit, though her nylons were torn and her usually carefully coifed long dark hair was matted and there were leaves stuck in it, what looked like flowers and sticks braided into it. There was blood all over her shirt from the killing she’d done. Even with the suit, she was unbearably tribal, vicious. This was her clan, her pack, Louis knew then with a yawning emptiness opening inside him. She was their warrior queen. They were all ritualistically painted with snaking bands, symbols, and tiger-stripes. But their faces… yes…they all bore the individual insignia of the tribe, the ceremonial sacraments of the wild hunt: the likenesses of skulls. Every face was painted the same. A flat marble-white base that covered face, ears, and throat, black upturned crescents around the eyes, a black oval around the mouth, and an elongated black triangle down the bridge of the nose.

The effect was chilling.

Michelle was painted the same, the dark glittering jewels of her eyes staring out from that grim death mask. She was no longer human; she was an animal now.

“Michelle…baby, come over here with me,” Louis said to her, everything breaking loose inside him, tears welling in his eyes. Her glare was fierce, hungry, lethal…yet, he wasn’t afraid, not really. Just the sight of her, painted up and bloody or not, crushed him, made him want to weep at her feet. He pitied her, he pitied himself. That their love should be shattered like this, torn asunder by some primordial horror from the dawn of the race. It was an obscenity. “Please, Michelle, please…”

She just looked at him. There was no recognition in her eyes…and yet, there was… something. She seemed almost hypnotized as she stared at him, unblinking. Inside, deep inside, she knew him and the knowledge made her blood run and her heart beat and her chemistry long to be joined with his.

“They’re…they’re all crazy, Michelle. Come with me. I don’t know what the hell got a hold of you and the rest of them, but we can figure it out. Come on, baby. I love you and you know I love you. Don’t do this.” He felt the tears well up in his eyes and overflow onto his cheeks, felt his throat constrict until his voice sounded like that of a whiny little boy. But the emotions he was feeling were almost too much. They paraded through his head with the memories and each one laid him open. He held out a shaking hand. “Come over here, Michelle. I’m your husband. I love you. I won’t let them hurt you.”

She just stared. Maybe her mind was a little more intact than the others, but something essential in her was burned away. There was no love in those eyes. There was manipulation, madness, a means to an end, but certainly not warmth. They were the eyes of a spider as it hunts down its prey, prepares to suck the blood from a fly in its web…a favored fly the spider is drawn to, but a fly nonetheless.

She grinned then and for the first time he saw her teeth…Michelle always had very long teeth, perfectly straight and perfectly white…and now he saw that they had been filed to deadly points, those beautiful teeth. So when she grinned at him, it was the lewd grin of a snarling wolf, a grin of fangs…fangs that were stained pink from what she had been feeding on.

He almost went out cold at that.

She was gone. Not only had she killed, but she had torn and rent her prey with her teeth, filling herself with bloody meat.

Oh, Michelle, oh baby…oh dear God…

The primal fall.

He could hear the guy on the radio and he fully understood it as he hadn’t before. You had to see someone you love regress into a beast to appreciate those words:

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…

He made a gagging, whimpering sound in his throat that was partly repulsion and partly deep-hewn pain.

It stopped Michelle for a moment. She seemed to understand inarticulate noises better than words. Inside she felt them and understood. She cocked her head to the side, softened, but it didn’t last. She closed her mouth, pursed her lips, then shook her head frantically like a dog trying to throw off bothersome flies. “Come with…us,” she managed. “Walk with…us…the night, the night… the night…” she said to him, her words breaking off into a coarse barking sound.

Oh, it would have been easy, but he did not want to be one of them. “No,” he said very loudly.

Bands of shadow fell over her face, making her already skullish appearance unpleasantly cadaverous. Her eyes were seething with a fathomless darkness. She brought up her hand and pointed one long, bloodstained finger at him. And then she said it. Said it without remorse: “Kill him!”

She was their queen and they just mindless drones and soldiers. The stupor that had consumed the mob broke like the snapping of fingers and they vaulted forward. Some coming around the car, but most scrambling right over the top of it.