The Devil Next Door

26

Kathleen Soames was not surprised when she saw the crowd.

She had felt them coming for some time as she dismembered her husband on the kitchen floor and decorated the walls with his blood. She had willed them to her. She wanted them to come and marvel over what was hers. She wanted them to try and take it so she could fight them, roll in the dirt with them.

But when she saw them, she knew they had not come to raid.

They had come for other reasons.

So she looked at them and they looked at her, each recognizing one another for what they now were, grateful that they had found each other at long last.

The crowd.

Dear God, yes, the crowd.

Men, women, and children tagging behind three cops in filthy untucked uniforms. The big one in front was bare-chested and painted for battle. He was pushing a wheelbarrow and in it was what Kathleen expected to see. Something broken and bloody and tangled. Something that made her heart split open momentarily, made her remember things, remember a swollen belly and a kicking, a chubby pink thing pressed to her breast, a growing and hungry thing, blue-eyed and wheat-haired. A smiling face and a boy’s laughter and a world drowning in love and joy. But it vanished so quickly maybe it never existed at all. The heat of the memory became a frost that settled deep into her, a killing frost that withered roots and closed blossoms and then there was just a winter deadness inside her that no spring thaw would ever melt again.

The crowd.

They came up to the porch and stayed there, watching her, smelling her scent and recognizing it as their own. She had marked the porch with her urine and now they smelled it. They would not cross her scent unless she allowed it. Not unless they wanted to fight.

They pushed in, compressed into a single mass, a single breathing machine, something with eyes that did not see and hearts that barely beat and minds that were flat and metallic and cutting. They waited at the edge of the porch.

The white-haired cop who had no hat on looked up at her and said, “Ma’am, I’m Sergeant Warren. This is Officers Shaw and Kojozian. We brought this back to you because we knew you’d want it.”

Kathleen just stared.

She could feel her breasts rising and falling, the blood drying on her arms, taste the sweat on her lips. Smell the darkness oozing from her, content that they, the crowd, smelled as she did now. A stink of things dead and things horribly alive, things pulsing with a morbid vitality. She stared at Warren and at the thing in the wheelbarrow. Her mind was a hollow oblong that filled with blackness drop by drop.

Wary as any animal with others intruding so close to its warren, she hopped down the steps to inspect the offering they had brought. She examined the tangled corpse in the wheelbarrow. She sniffed it carefully. Bending her head down, she licked the skin of a stiffened arm.

“Yes,” she heard herself say. “Yes. It’s mine.”

“We bring this to you,” Warren said, indicating the corpse of her son. “Have you something for us?”

“Yes. Inside. Upstairs.” She was breathing hard. “Would you like to see my husband?”

“Yes.”

Then they filed past her and she heard them in there, heard them laughing, heard them snarling and fighting over things. She would share. Of course she would share. She’d always been a good neighbor. The crowd filled the house with motion and voices, claws and teeth and intent. Kathleen watched them file from the living room. She touched the dirt and blood ground into her skin, fingered the filth in her hair. The crowd was in awe of her. They stood in silence, faces like yellow wax and dead moons, mouths painted red and fingers still redder.

“Well,” Warren said, wiping blood from his cheek “What do you offer?”

Kathleen grinned and her teeth locked tightly together. They felt long and sharp and ready. “Upstairs,” she told them. “Upstairs is the one you want.”

The crowd moved up the stairs, leaving a blood-smell and a meat-smell in their wake. They smelled as she did, only more so. Just dirty and rank and repulsive. A bouquet of death lilies and graveyard roses and mortuary orchids pressed into cold, waxen fingers. A good smell, a fine smell, a real and true smell.

As they filed up the stairs, Kathleen grinned.

The sun outside was so hot, so very hot, burning and blinding. She wanted sunset and shadows and steaming darkness, the feel of cooling pavement under her hands and feet, night-smells and night-tastes. The pure and atavistic joy of running wild and free and hungry with the pack.

Upstairs there was the pathetic, broken scream of an old woman.

Kathleen grinned.

Hurry sundown.

Hurry…