The Devil Next Door

He was going to the Soderberg’s. Mike Soderberg had guns. Back outside then, hammer gripped tightly, waiting for death to come for him. He slipped past the Merchant house, moving quietly down the sidewalk to the Soderberg’s. It was dark. He crouched by the rose bushes, his head rioting with their perfume. He could see no outward damage. Maybe the savages had overlooked it.

Cautiously, his heart in his throat, he crept up to the house…

64

Macy, the rope still binding her wrists, was dragged over to the foot of the altar where the other captives were herded. Here was the man, the other three women she had seen. All roped-up like swine ready for the spit. There were others in the shadows, she knew. She could hear them sobbing and crying out, but could not see them.

The man who had brought her over had left her.

She had thought for sure he would rape her, but the old woman at the fire called out to him in some coarse tongue and he went over to her. Macy was forgotten. At least for the time being. The stench in the church was indescribable. Just filthy and low. Blood and meat and carrion. A high, hot stink of absolute dark corruption like the den of buzzards or vultures must smell. And these things that held her captive were no more human than that. Just beasts. Crawling, flesh-eating beasts. Many of them were still at the fire, feeding on the corpse of the roasted boy. He had been sheared down to bone in many places. His ribs were standing out, shining and well-plucked. She could see the vertebrae at his throat.

How long?

How long before it’s me they cook like that?

The stink of the burning flesh and meat was probably the most offensive thing she’d ever smelled. It revolted her and…intrigued her at the same time. She did not know exactly why. Only that somehow, some way, it was almost… familiar. Like she had smelled it long ago in a dream. And realizing this, she wondered if it was not some warped race memory kicking to life in her, remembering the smell of roasted boy from some dim, bone-heaped cave of prehistory.

God.

The old woman with the pendulous breasts came over with two boys. They were naked, their bodies blackened with ash. The old woman wore nothing but a sort of shawl made of canvas or maybe skin. She pointed at the captives with dirty fingers, mumbling something under her breath that was absolutely unintelligible. The boys seemed excited. Down on their knees, they crawled past the captives, poking them with their fingers. The tied man was oblivious to it. The woman who’d looked up at Macy with shocked eyes just sobbed. The other two women gasped.

The old woman stomped her feet twice.

The boys untied one of the women who’d gasped. Macy recognized her from somewhere. She was maybe thirty with long red hair. Rough-looking like the sort that might have chummed around with her mother out at the Hair of the Dog on the highway. When they untied her, careful not to free her wrists, she came to life fighting and kicking at them. A man came over with a length of iron pipe and hit her three or four times until the fight drained from her.

“Please,” she moaned, spitting out blood. “Please…please just let me go…”

She might as well have tried to talk a snake out of biting her, it had as much effect on them. They dragged her away by the ankles, pulling her up onto the altar and depositing her at the feet of that gruesome straw hag nailed to the cross. The burning candles stuffed in the hag’s eyes and mouth guttered and dripped wax. Macy saw something she had not seen before: the hag was like a pincushion. There were things stuck into the flesh. Knives, needles, screwdrivers. It only made that gutted, stuffed corpse look that much more perverse, that much more pagan.

The old woman barked something.

One of the boys gripped a steak knife thrust in the hag’s thigh and pulled it free. He studied the blade with the rapt fascination all boys seemed to have for weapons, save this was infinitely worse. Not curiosity, really, but an almost religious awe. He pressed the blade to his lips, then went down on his knees, yanked the woman’s head up and quickly slit her throat. The woman flopped and gagged, drowning in her own blood. It did not take too long. That’s all the ceremony there was to it…though Macy knew they had not slit her throat at the hag’s feet for no reason.

It was ritualistic.

It was an offering.

They had sacrificed her to the hag.

The boy slid the knife back in the thigh and then he and the others began painting their bodies with the pooling blood. And when their faces and chests were gleaming red, they both painted a weird little symbol on the stitched belly of the hag.