The Devil Next Door

36

Night was coming fast now and Mr. Chalmers, content now for perhaps the first time in his life with who and what he was, smelled it on the breeze. Dogs howled in the distance and he listened, judging from the sounds just how far away they were and if they presented any danger to his clan.

He was watching his hunters by the fire.

In what had once been his backyard, they were hard at work applying what he had taught them. Using the limbs of straight saplings, they were fashioning spears. After the limbs were peeled, the ends were split so the blade of a knife could be inserted and lashed into place. Now they were fire-hardening the points as he had also showed them. Chalmers himself had learned this technique in survival school while he was in the Army. And though much of his former life was now misty, indistinct, or absolutely incomprehensible, he remembered this.

Somewhere, a few streets away probably, there rose a chorus of blood-curdling screams. They came and went, rising and falling with a rhythmic cadence. These were not the screams of agony or fear, but of joy. The night was coming and the clans were getting excited for the barbarity and promise that only darkness could bring.

Chalmers had once been married. Many, many years ago. His wife had passed on and he had never remarried, remained childless to this day. But he had always wanted children, felt the paternal pangs for a brood of his own. And then, as he entered his sixth decade, the pangs for grandchildren.

Now he was satisfied.

Now he had children.

They were his hunters: a ragged, disparate group with naked, oiled bodies, dirty faces and grubby bodies painted up with earthen browns, electric blues, and blood reds. As he watched them by the fire, he saw that they had threaded and knotted beads, feathers, and tiny bones into their hair. With their naked, lithe bodies and the ritual painting, it made them look fierce.

There were a dozen of them. The youngest was six and the oldest was twelve.

Their parents had abandoned them—heeding the call of the wild that had been activated within them to run free—and Mr. Chalmers had brought them together into a cohesive whole. And tonight, he would lead them against the other clans.

Mr. Chalmers still wore his favorite khaki pants, though very dirty now, and boots, but he had torn off his shirt and took to wearing his dead wife’s fox coat that had been stored in mothballs in the spare bedroom. He had cut off the sleeves so that all could see the many tattoos sleeving his arms from his days in the Army. Although for many years he had kept them covered, grim reminders of his days in the Vietnam War when he led reconnaissance patrols and hunter/killer teams deep into enemy territory, he now revealed them. They were badges of honor, symbols of military blood rites, of combat and life-taking.

The children, his clan, respected him and knew he was their leader.

Those that dared question that, he had beaten. And one particularly arrogant fifteen-year old boy, he had murdered, slitting his throat using the same knife had carried during the war: a K-Bar fighting knife with a ten-inch carbon steel blade. He now wore the boy’s ears on a necklace around his throat along with his scalp.

The screams rose up again.

His clan jumped around the fire, imitating the sounds, bristling with excitement for the hunt that would begin soon, the raiding against other neighborhoods.

His blood running hot and sweet, Chalmers felt more like a man than he had since his days laying ambushes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail many years before. He had a plastic tube of eyeliner in his hands. Breaking it open with his K-Bar, he covered his fingertips in the black make-up. Carefully, just as he had in the war, he painted black tiger-striped bands across his face, darkening his chest and arms.

Tonight, after so long, he was returning to the jungle…