The Devil Next Door

The man walked to a tree and pissed on it, scenting his trail. The boy hopped over there and started to do the same, but the man hit him, clopped him upside the head, knocking him down. The boy did not seem angry. Better to be hit than put on the spit.

They moved on.

The girl gave the noose a jerk and Macy stumbled forward. The boy kept watching her. He couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven, but every time he looked at her with those dead amethyst eyes, a leering depravity came over his face that was elfin, carnal, unspeakable. And when it did, he groped himself.

Whenever the woman saw him do it, she kicked him.

The man trudged along. He had a black plastic Hefty bag tossed over one shoulder that was bulging from what it carried. Now and again what was in there shifted with a moist, slopping noise.

The remains of the woman they’d butchered.

Macy had tasted her blood, her meat. There hadn’t been a choice and still, she could feel its texture on her tongue, its flavor that was rich and sweet and nauseating. Yet…yet, part of her almost liked it. That dark part that kept trying to insinuate itself. Macy did not want it, but she really didn’t have the strength to fight it and why fight it anyway? Inch by inch, it was taking her over. Something had shut down in her and something else was waking up.

But she wouldn’t be like them.

Never.

Ever.

She refused.

But part of her, maybe instinct, was much sharper than before. For she was hearing everything, feeling everything. Never had a night been like this, never did the breeze seem to be overloaded with the scents of night blooms and dark earth and green grass. The odors were so pungent, each almost seemed to have a flavor. And despite the shadows shrouding the streets, she was seeing exceptionally well…everything vibrant, vivid. Like a cat.

It all scared her…and intrigued her.

The girl yanked her lead and Macy moved forward. They were taking her to their lair and she could not even conceive of what sort of place that might be. Down alleys, through vacant lots thick with hay-smelling weeds. She thought they were down by the city park. They moved along until they reached a high, whitewashed building with a steeple above brushing the stars. Macy knew where they were now. Yes, by the park, 8 ^ th Street and Holly Avenue: the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church.

This place? This was where they were taking her?

She was led up the stairs, pushed through the doors. It was a narrow edifice, the walls pressing in from either side, rough-hewn beams overhead. A crowded aisle, pews to either side. Like some goddamn frontier church in Dodge City or one of those places, she thought.

Claustrophobic.

Cave-like.

Yes, the den of animals, the warren of beasts.

She smelled the stench of death right away. There were shadows clustering amongst the pews, many of them. The shadows came out to greet them, becoming people or something like people. They rushed in towards her. Dirty, oily hands fondled her. Moonstruck faces. Grinning sawtoothed mouths. All those people were taking hold of her and the smell that came off of them…sweat and body odor, blood and meat and filth.

She was pushed up towards the altar.

It smelled like urine and bloody viscera.

Bodies were dumped there, three or four of them, all slit open like salmon, what was inside carefully cleaned out and dumped into buckets. And high above, where Christ had spent so many years nailed to the cross, there was another effigy now. Christ was gone.

There was a corpse nailed up there.

The corpse of an obese woman that was dark with dried blood. Her breasts were immense and flabby, her stomach swollen, her thighs pale and meaty. She was open in places and Macy could plainly see the crude black stitchwork that held her together. But the suturing had burst in places and it was evident that she had been stuffed with dry leaves, hay, cane straw.

Yes, gutted…then stuffed.

A totemic effigy.

A straw hag.

Macy stared up at the abomination speechless. It was profane, grotesque. Candles had been thrust into the corpse-woman’s mouth and the hollows of her eyes. They were lit, burning, guttering, casting eldritch shadows over the blood-drenched obscenity the altar had become.

The girl yanked Macy’s lead and tossed her to the altar, into the dirty straw and bloody carpet, there amongst the slaughterhouse of human husks, limbs, and snaking entrails. Macy squirmed in the bile and slime, staring up horrified and awestruck at the plucked, stuffed, and slit goddess of the new church…

61

Louis was running.

Maybe from the town and maybe from himself, but mostly from the clan coming after him. He was running and running, trying not to think of what had just happened back there. Trying not to think of anything else but the clan hunting him down. Trying not to see Michelle and that look in her eyes or to remember that it was her, really, that had put the clan on him.

He couldn’t think about that.