The Devil Next Door

47

When Macy opened her eyes, her first sensory experience was not the plate of spiderwebbed glass that lay over her lap from the shattered window. It was the stink. The stink of those that had ringed in the car in the fading light. Monsters. That’s what she thought. Monsters. These were monsters… ogres, trolls, bogarts from a storybook that had slipped out of the dark and secret wood to feast on children by moonlight. She seemed to recall something like them from a storybook as a child, but maybe, just maybe, the memory was much older: atavistic recall. For the tales of ogres and trolls and child-eating witches were just ancient memories of primal horrors re-channeled into harmless fable. The truth behind them was dark indeed.

They just stood there, looking at her.

Men, women, children. A couple kids she knew from school.

They were yellow-skinned, dirty, half-naked, faces painted up like skulls, hair greased or tied-up with sticks and tiny bones like those of rodents.

A man standing in front of the car had a huge butcher knife in his hands that was almost as long as his forearm. He motioned with it. He made a low barking sound.

Then filthy, scabby hands were reaching into the car, taking hold of her and she just didn’t seem to have the strength to fight. Oh, she reflexively kicked and hit at them, but they yanked her through the window and bounced her head off the roof to take the fight out of her. She cried out, but it was a choked, pathetic sound.

They threw her to the ground.

She looked up at their deathmask faces carved with shadow. Their eyes were empty, shiny, vulpine. She opened her mouth to say something and they rained kicks down on her until she rolled into a heap, barely conscious. When her mouth did open to scream, something was stuffed in it: a foul-tasting, salty scrap. A piece of a shirt soaked with their sweat.

Louis, Louis, Louis… please help me…

Help me…

But he was nowhere to be seen. And as Macy fell trembling behind some black wall of terror in her mind, she felt hands grip her ankles, dragging her through the street…