The Devil Next Door

73

The Baron was scalping his prey.

The body of a man was facedown in the grass. The Baron—or Mr. Chalmers as he had once been known—was kneeling on his shoulders. He pressed the lethal, razored edge of his K-Bar knife just behind the man’s left ear and slit along the back of his skull, above the right ear and along the forehead/scalp line and back to his original incision. Then he peeled the scalp free from the skull with no little exertion, holding it up for all to see.

The pack howled like animals.

They screeched.

They bayed at the moon high above.

The Baron wiped his bloody fingers on his sleeveless fox coat, then he tossed the scalp to the pack. They fought wildly over it. And as they did so, the Baron cut off the man’s ears and then, punching holes in the cartilage with the tip of his knife, threaded them onto his necklace.

He had six sets on there thus far.

He told them he would fill the necklace by morning and the greatest hunter among them would be awarded the necklace of ears as a symbol of their stealth and ferocity. For amongst the pack, these were the things admired the most.

A pair of young boys came running back into the yard. The Baron had sent them scouting for new prey. They were breathless, filthy things who wore only pants and both carried long-bladed hunting knifes on makeshift slings around their necks. The Baron heard them out, his black-striped face grim, impassive. It would be his decision.

“Lead us,” he told them.

The pack howled in honor of the blood sport to come. Then, maintaining the pack discipline that the Baron had told them was so very important, they quieted down and there was only the sound of a summer night. Crickets. A light breeze in the high boughs of the oaks. And in the distance, the screams and war cries of other packs as they raided from neighborhood to neighborhood.

The Baron’s pack moved out in single file with flank guards to either side and the two boys taking point far ahead. Soon there would be scalps for all…