The Devil Next Door

69

“Nice job, Louis,” the voice said to him. “Very nice, scaring off those little savages. Commendable. One might think you were a savage yourself.”

Earl Gould.

Louis went over to him in the grass. “What the hell are you doing here, Earl?”

“I was kidnapped by the little horrors.”

He was tied-up in the grass. Louis cut him loose, wondering if it was such a good idea or not. “I’m telling you right now, Earl. I’ve been through the shit, okay? You try and attack me and I swear to God I’ll kick your fucking ass.”

Rubbing his wrists, Earl managed a laugh. “I’m okay, Louis. How about you?”

Louis didn’t bother answering that. What could he say? He had a bloody hammer and a bloody knife in his hand.

“Thanks for getting me out of this… jam,” Earl said. “I was next on the barbi. Nice show of aggression, by the way. You scared the hell out of them.”

“I thought they’d stand and fight.”

Earl shook his head. “Most animals rarely do. When faced with life-threatening show of aggression even a grizzly bear will think twice.”

“We’re in a hell of a situation here, Earl.”

“Yes, we are, Louis. We are in the jungle,” Earl said. “This is where seventy million years of primate development has led us: right back to the beginning.”

Louis led him into the house and made him sit in a recliner in the living room. He did not turn on any lights. He went into the bathroom and washed his face, drank a few handfuls of water. When he came out, he grabbed a poker from the fireplace and sat on the couch. He could see Earl just fine in the moonlight filtering in through the picture window. He was grinning, but it was an awful sort of grin. A mad grin, but hardly dangerous. Just the grin of a man who had parted the black velour curtains of reality and peered deep into the fires of Hell, maybe saw something looking back at him. Something he recognized.

An ex college prof, Earl dressed very neatly, was always well-groomed and on the ball. But today, all that was gone. His white hair was mussed, his clothes dirty and unkempt. There were bruises on his face and a smear of blood at one cheek. He kept taking off his glasses, cleaning them on his shirt. Putting then back on and repeating the process.

“Okay, Earl,” Louis said, his voice very weary. “Tell me about it. Tell me what you did.”

Earl just kept grinning. His eyes were wet in the darkness. “I… I killed, Louis. I killed Maureen.”

There should have been some shock, but there was nothing. Had he told Louis that he bought a new Weed-Eater, the reaction would have been about the same. “Are you sure?”

“I hit her.”

“I saw that.”

“But you ran off, Louis! You ran off!”

“I had to, Earl.”

Although Louis could not see his eyes, he could just about gauge the pain in them. But he figured there was more than pain. Probably recrimination.

“But you let me hit her, Louis.”

“No, Earl, I didn’t let you do anything. I didn’t have time to stop you. Somebody was attacking Macy. I couldn’t help you.” Louis sat there, looking at him. “You hit her, Earl. You hurt her. Not me. You. You’re the one that let that fucking madness take you over.”

Earl sat right up and walked over to Louis like he was going to attack him. “I didn’t have a choice!” He grabbed Louis by the shirt, shook him. “I couldn’t fight against it! You can’t fight against it! It just takes you and you belong to it and there’s not a fucking thing you can do about it! Do you see? That’s why I hit her and that’s why I kept hitting her!”

Louis slapped him across the face. Slapped him hard enough to snap his head back and he wanted to keep slapping him. He was just sick of it all. Sick of the shit his neighbors had been doing to each other, to themselves, to the whole goddamn town. He didn’t know why the madness had not gotten to him, but he was starting to think that everyone who was infected was weak. Goddamn fucking weak. So he slapped the old man and he wanted to keep slapping until his hand was red and numb and Earl was on the floor, bleeding and sobbing and pissing himself. To Louis, the old man was the embodiment of all of them. Their weakness. Their inhumanity.

Earl was down on one knee, still grinning, though his eyes were filled with tears.

“Tell me what you did, Earl. Tell me what the fuck you did to your wife and how it felt when you were doing it,” Louis said, needing to rub the old man’s face in the stink he had created. “C’mon, tell me all about it.”

Earl was blubbering now. Just beside himself with guilt and anguish and Louis actually found satisfaction in that because he wanted to see them all like that, down on their knees feeling the pain of their actions. And particularly Michelle. The woman he loved. The woman who had betrayed him now in ways Louis himself could not even begin to catalog.

Jesus Christ, you idiot! She’s sick! They’re all sick! You can’t blame them for it any more than you can blame an alcoholic for hitting the bottle or a junkie for sticking a needle in his arm! Sick! Sick! Sick!

Louis knew it. He knew it was true, but it wasn’t buying beans with him now. Not after what he’d seen. Not after what he’d experienced. Not after what his own goddamn wife had done to him. Finally he sighed. “I’m sorry, Earl. Really I am. Tell me what happened. Take your time.”

It took some time, all right, but Earl did. He opened the flue and all the heat and smoke and suffering blew out of his soul. It had been itching in the back of his skull for hours, the insanity, the need to run free like an animal, the dire compulsion to act out his most debased fantasies and urges. He refused to tell Louis what these were, but Louis could just imagine. There’s nothing more sordid and filled with crawly things as the human subconscious mind, that pit of fears and desires, wants and needs, repressed feelings and anxieties that the rational, conscious mind will simply not allow to be expressed. Louis understood what Earl was saying, because it was much the same thing Macy had told him. Earl said it was caused by a gene. Regardless, it first infected the subconscious, releasing images and ideas and primal wants, flooding the mind with them, and by that point, such things as inhibition and restraint no longer existed. The infected became, essentially, an animal with a human brain, though highly degraded, primitive. It had taken complete charge of Earl as he talked to Louis over the hedges. Maureen’s shouting had acted like some sort of trigger and there was no turning back. He hit Maureen, put her down. Kicked her and kept kicking. She was old, she was frail. She should have been dead, but she wasn’t.

“So I kept hitting her,” Earl said, his eyes wide in the moonlight coming through the window. Like mirrors reflecting the awfulness inside his head. “But she wouldn’t die, Louis. She just wouldn’t.”

“Take it easy, Earl.”

He uttered a cold and sterile laugh. “Oh yes, take it easy. How can I take it easy, Louis? How can I possibly take it easy? She wouldn’t die! She wouldn’t die so I went into the garage and got a hammer. You know what? I remember doing it, I remember wanting to do it. Can you understand that? No, you can’t. You can’t understand or know what it was like, Louis! I went and got that fucking hammer and I was whistling the whole time! Whistling! Like I was going to fix the back door! When I got back there, when I got back to her—”

“You don’t have to do this, Earl.”

“Oh yes, I do! I got back there and… and she was gone! She had dragged herself around the side of the house! I followed the blood trail and when I found her, found her curled up and bleeding, I bashed her goddamn brains in! I kept swinging and swinging and I never wanted to stop! I liked it! I loved it!”

Louis was feeling sick to his stomach now. Yes, he’d seen his share, but this was so much worse. So intimate. A peak into the mind of a lunatic. He thought if he looked deep enough, he might see something in Earl’s eyes that would validate what was in his head. Something looking back at him and grinning.

Earl was kneeling on the floor, rocking back and forth, just devastated by what he had done. “But you don’t know the rest, Louis, you don’t know what it was like.”

“Please, Earl. Stop this.”

But Earl shook his head. “It got her too, Louis. It got in her head and she was just as loony as I was. When I found her there, around the side of the house, she laughed at me! She fucking laughed at me! Started saying all the terrible things she’d always wanted to say to me! And then, and then she…”

Earl broke down into tears and Louis went to him, tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but the old man just batted it away.

“I killed her because I had to! And because she wanted it!”

Louis sat back down. “What do you mean?”

Earl uttered that awful, bitter laugh again that maybe wasn’t insane, but was living right next door. “I mean she wanted me to! After she said those things, something snapped in her, Louis! Just snapped! It was a violation of everything that dear woman was! She couldn’t live with it! So… I killed her! I killed her because she begged me to do it! Begged me to smash her head in!”

Louis could say nothing to that.

He was speechless and simply worn out by all of this. Earl sobbed and shook and eventually the tears just went away and he was silent, just silent. Not even moving. Not doing anything but dying inside.

“When did you come out of it?” Louis finally asked.

“Before… earlier… I don’t know. It just fades away a little at a time. And now I’m sane, I’m perfectly fine, aren’t I?”

“It wasn’t your fault, Earl. Not really.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Louis. Please don’t do that.” He pulled himself up and sat back on the recliner. “Anything but that. I’m like the others now. A killer. I’m nothing but a killer…”