The Devil Next Door

She saw that three other women and one man were roped together at the foot of the altar. One of the women was looking up at her with shocked, fearful eyes. And that meant she was not like them, not an animal. Normal. Macy felt pity for her, but there was nothing to be done.

This was no longer a church, Macy saw. It was no sanctified place but the rotting, filthy den of depraved things like troglodytes, cave-dwellars and man-eaters, walking pestilence from a forgotten age.

And realizing this, realizing that these people were not just crazy, not just a bunch of lunatics out on a binge, but primeval and animalistic things, a flesh and blood regression of the species, she was terrified. For a darkness had taken the world and those that hunted it did not seek the light, they were content to scratch in the shadows of reason. The church was a cave, a warren, a lair now. Those things out there were not men and women any longer, they were just…animals. God was not here. This was not his house. This was a place of pagan evils now. The corpse-woman on the cross was evidence of that. And Macy did not doubt that with regression, with the reaffirmation of race memory, that this place was thick with primordial spirits, with long forgotten dark gods of fertility and sacrifice. And maybe, just maybe, if she shut her mind down and let it hum along at its lowest level she might see them: creeping, shaggy things from the misty past that demanded burnt offerings, demanded the flesh and blood of the faithful, expiation in its purest form: Give unto me your firstborn for I would find the child pleasing.

She looked around, squinting. The main doors were open, the night breeze sucking out the smoke. She could see them, the savages, coming in out of the night, dragging things behind them (one man had a naked girl on a rope). A couple were screwing atop a heap of bloody hides. An old woman picked things from the scalps of children, often eating what she found. A man sharpened a bone into an awl. A teenage girl cut designs into her skin with a razor blade while another girl painted her face with the blood from a carcass of a dog while a boy sawed the pelt free with a knife. Others crawled over the floor, picking at bones and refuse, scratching symbols into the stones, gnawing on meat and offal, licking their fingers and groping themselves and snorting in the shadows.

Jesus.

Is this what men had evolved from?

Is this why the species fought so hard for civilization, for order, why they adopted a church that was brutal in its dealings with paganism and adapted strict laws to punish any who acted… uncivilized? She thought so. This was why people were so offended by cannibalism, by headhunting, by ritual murder-yes, it was a cultural thing, of course, a taboo and it was taboo because this was the sort of thing that was skulking in man’s past, the very thing man had finally risen up from, stamped out, was horrified at his core of. For every sadistic murder, every cannibalistic act, was a reminder of our past, what we had evolved from and what we were afraid to backslide into.

But how had it happened?

How had the darkness of the past returned? How had grim racial memory swallowed the civilized world and plunged it back to this degeneracy?

Maybe this regression into primitivism is natural. Maybe like the Dark Ages of Europe that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire and thrust things like culture and learning into the pit until the Renaissance, this was pre-ordained somehow. Maybe the beast within was always more active than anyone ever guessed, much closer to the surface, teeth bared and claws out, ready to pounce. For there was a simplicity to it, wasn’t there? The beast with his rudimentary wants and needs, feeding and fucking, hunting and breeding, living only from one day to the next to satisfy the simple drives of aggression, procreation, and instinctual craving. The world had gone native, it had gone savage and tribal. A new Dark Ages had been heralded in. Like maybe the race was fed up with the burden of civilization, with progress and culture and law, greed and envy, religious intolerance and political corruption, it wanted to return to a time when all men were truly considered equal, when you were only as successful as your last hunt, your innate cunning, the children you bore, the weapons you fashioned with your own two hands. Yes, the call of the wild, an atavistic longing in every man, woman, and child to return to an age of basal simplicity wherein the fire that roasted your meat and warmed your cave also lit your world.

The law of the jungle.

Survival of the fittest.

Darwinism rendered to its simplest form.