The Devil Next Door

Prologue

Somebody had painted the walls with their own feces.

The naked man sat there on the floor, his body a map of bruises and contusions, and smiled at this. His skin was crusty with blood. Some of it was his own and some of it belonged to others. He could tell by the taste. He stared at the walls, licking the salt off his fingertips, trying to make sense of the elaborate graffiti of fingerpainted shit on the wallpaper around him.

Somebody marked this place with their own filth so they could smell it, find it even in the dark.

He wondered what all the childish scrawls might mean, sensing there was important ritualistic symbolism behind them. They seemed familiar. Like maybe once, perhaps as a child, he’d painted a room like this, smeared shit on the walls to marks it as his lair.

What if whoever did this came back?

There was a knife. He looked at it, marveled at the dark stains on it. Sniffing them, he remembered each one.

He put the knife away and went to the window.

The sun was up, all the night things retreated back into their holes. There were wrecked cars in the streets. Several bodies were sprawled on the pavement. One of them didn’t have a head. Two others, a man and woman, had been arranged so it looked as if they were copulating. Whoever did that had a sense of humor.

He sat back on the floor, running fingers through his grimy hair.

There was a corpse in the corner and a collection of knives. A fine nest of leaves and sticks and boughs. The scent on them was female and familiar.

He smelled the shit on the walls. It was a fine, earthy smell. The sort of smell that made one comfortable, relaxed, grounded to nature. Not fighting against it, but part of it. There was serenity to be had in a lair decorated with feces. He thought about the girl and wondered where she was. If he found her again he would claim her. For it was his right and he had fought for that right.

There was grit on his teeth. A bit of something tasty wedged in his molar. Licking and sucking, he worked it free, sucking the juice from whatever it was, and swallowing it. He sat there, hugging himself, humming a low melody under his breath. The stench of his own sweat and pungent body odor made him feel strong. Later, he would piss on the walls, the chairs, so all that came here would know this place was now his.

The ripe stink of a man’s bodily excretions was all he really had in this world. His true fingerprint and it was important to spread them around, mark territory and conquests. Others would smell them and know him.

There was something under a rocking chair.

He crawled over there and seized it.

Meat.

He sniffed it and licked it, not knowing where it came from or how it had come to be there. It was salty and gamy smelling.

He put it in his mouth, chewing.

And waited for the girl…