The New Neighbor

Chapter 14

The Stranger's Story

The man picked Robby up at the Shell station on the corner of Mistletoe and Hilltop. He said his name was Ronald Prosky and although Robby tried to conceal his nervousness – actually, it was more like fear – and to avoid looking at Ron's face, he knew it was obvious because Prosky tried immediately to put Robby at ease.

They went to the International House of Pancakes just a couple of blocks away and got a booth in the back, where they each had a cup of coffee.

"Please don't be nervous, Robby," Prosky said quietly. "I know that my appearance is off – putting and I'm a stranger to you, but if we can just talk a while, I think you'll feel better. "

Robby fidgeted, wondering if he'd made a mistake – maybe this guy was just a streetwalking lunatic who ate out of trash bins and lived in his clothes.

"Okay," Robby said hesitantly, "so what do you want to talk about?"

"Your new neighbor."

"What about her? I mean, yesterday, you seemed to think you knew everything about her, so what do you want me to tell you?"

"What has she done?"

"She hasn't done anything."

Prosky stared into his coffee for a moment, then took a deep breath. "Okay. Maybe it'll be easier if I tell you what I know about her. Then you can talk." He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Five years ago, I was a reasonably successful investigative journalist. I had a wife and a sixteen-year-old son. We lived in a suburb of Chicago, a nice friendly neighborhood. A lot like your neighborhood, Robby. Then Lily moved in. At least, that's the name she was using then." He took a long sip of coffee before continuing. "She was a beautiful woman. Very nice. Friendly. Generous. It was the kind of neighborhood that welcomed new neighbors, so everyone started to get to know her. I really got to know her.

“My wife and I had been married for nearly nineteen years by then. It wasn't a bad marriage, but… well… " He looked away from Robby and winced, as if someone had stuck him with a needle. "I guess I'd gotten… bored. And I didn't even know it at the time. At least, not until Lily let me know that I was -" he cleared his throat abruptly, " – welcome in, uh, her bed any time. She was… god, she was gorgeous. Women like that do not proposition men like me every day. So I took her up on it. She assured me it would be discreet and just between us.

"So, I was having an affair. And what an affair it was. I mean, she was the kind of lover men only dream of having. But as the months passed, something happened. I began to change. I noticed I wasn't as coordinated as usual, I wasn't as strong. I was always tired, couldn't get enough sleep. And when I did sleep, I had these dreams. Incredibly vivid. I dreamed that Lily came to my room and we made love on the bedroom floor or on the bed beside Marie while she slept, and she never woke, no matter how noisy we got. I didn't think much of it, until it got worse – the fatigue and the dreams – and then I woke one night and she was there. On top of me. In my bed. It wasn't a dream, she was really there, and I didn't know how she got in. I didn't know how she got out, either, because I lost consciousness at the end. I always did with her. I asked later, but of course she wouldn't tell me."

The inside of Robby's mouth had turned to soggy felt and he gulped his ice water down quickly, then sucked on some crushed ice. The glass clattered against the tabletop when he set it down because his hand was trembling. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear any more.

"Then I noticed something,” Prosky continued. “It had been happening gradually, right in front of me, I just hadn't noticed. I wasn't the only one not feeling well. My son and wife were tired all the time, pale and sickly. They didn't talk much. None of us did. And if we did, it was bad, you know, we… we fought, said hurtful things to each other. That just wasn't like us. Things had changed, and they were changing still.

"I tried not to see Lily much anymore, but she would come to me. One night, I decided to stay up, find out how she got in, so I drank a bucket or so of coffee and took some little white pills. It was still tough staying awake. I felt so… drained all the time. I sat in the living room, in the dark, waiting. When I heard a noise outside, I looked out the window and saw my son climbing down a tree outside his second-story bedroom window. He walked over to Lily's house. I realized that I wasn't the only one being neighborly.

“The next day, I had a private talk with him, told him I knew, and that it had to stop. Some father, huh? It's okay for me to fuck her, son, as long as your mom doesn't find out, but you can't. Anyway, when I told him to stop, I saw such… hatred in his eyes. Hatred like I'd never seen in anyone, and he was my own son. And he said – no, no, he spat – 'Why? Are you fucking her too?' I told him to stop, he said he'd stop when he was ready. So, the next day I hired someone to cut down the tree in front of his window and had a new lock put on his bedroom door, one that could be locked from the outside. See what I mean when I say I changed? I was jealous of my own son, so I locked him up. Like a prisoner. Marie wanted to know what was going on, so I told her. She went to his room. They talked. That's what she said, anyway. They talked -" He chuckled icily. " – for nearly three hours.

"All of this began to affect my work. My editor – whose position I was supposed to take over later that year, because he was leaving – noticed a drop in my quality, said I was irritable and preoccupied, and suspected I was drinking or doing drugs. I told him I'd take care of it, problems at home, all that shit. But I couldn't, I just couldn't. Not long after that, he informed me I wouldn't be promoted. The position was going to someone else. Someone… more responsible. More reliable.

"That very day, I went home and found my son and wife in bed together. Fucking. Everything exploded. We hated one another. I don't know how we stayed in the same house. It was like… drinking. I had developed a bad drinking problem in college, see, so I know what it's like. You're not yourself, you don't even know yourself. The bottle does something to you, makes you do and say and think things you wouldn't even consider under normal circumstances. That's the way I was then, I hated them for what they'd done. And they kept doing it. I hated them so much I didn't stop to think why they'd done it or what was happening to us. Instead, I decided to go on seeing Lily, to see her even more. Fuck 'em, I figured.

"About that time, the man down the street killed his family and himself. A couple of weeks later, a woman at the other end of the street ran over her own son with her car. Not accidentally. And somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that everyone in the neighborhood – or nearly everyone – looked sick, weak, like they had the flu, which is what everybody said they had. Except the flu goes away. This didn't. It got worse. After a while, some of them even stopped bathing. They wore dirty clothes. I remember seeing Mrs. Denny – about fifty, normally a real cow – walking naked out to her mailbox, scratching her crotch and hacking, and I realized she'd lost about sixty, maybe seventy pounds. She looked like a corpse.

“And again, I realized – almost subconsciously – that something was wrong. It was like a little voice inside me that couldn't get above a whisper, trying to tell me that I had to do something because things were going really bad. But I didn't listen to it, because there was another voice, a louder one, talking over it, telling me that my wife was a cunt and my son was a spoiled little shit and the only person I had to think about was myself and what made me happy, and what made me happy was fucking Lily. So I kept it up while everything crumbled down around me.”

Prosky stopped, tugged at his collar as if he were choking, and stared silently out the window for a moment. "I haven't talked about this in a while," he whispered. "It's… hard."

Robby didn't know what to say. He couldn't feel pity for the man because he was too busy fearing for himself… for his family.

"My wife and son fought," he continued with a broken voice. "Like lovers. More passionately than she ever fought with me. And other times, I could hear them somewhere in the house. Moaning obscenities to one another. I got fired. I didn't know what to do. My wife didn't work and I was afraid of how she would react if I told her. So I got drunk. First time in years. I went on a real skull-grinder, spent my last dime at the nearest bar and walked home – staggered, really – talking to myself like some wino, even singing, for Christ's sake. But after I turned onto my street, I saw something that sobered me up. Fast.

"At first, it looked like smoke and I thought something was burning, because it was the middle of summer and I knew no one was using their fireplace. But it wasn't smoke. Smoke drifts. This was moving. It was white as a summer cloud and… liquidy. And… maybe it was because it was floating by a streetlight, I'm not sure, but… it seemed to glow. Just a little. It moved through a tree in front of Lily's house and over the street, formless, but moving with purpose. And it went straight to my house. I stood there with my mouth hanging open and watched it hover outside my bedroom window. The curtains were drawn, but the window was half open. Then, like milk being sucked through a straw, it flowed into the window and was gone.

"Whatever it was, it was in my house! I practically forgot I was drunk, ran down the street, let myself in and went upstairs. Halfway up the stairs something hit me, I don't know, something like… a drug. Yes, it was like I'd been drugged. My feet weighed a ton and I could hardly keep my eyes open. It wasn't the booze, I was pretty sure at the time – and I'm certain it wasn't, now. It was an effort, but I made it down the hall, fighting to remain conscious. I fell into the room and… and I… I saw… " He shook his head. "She was there. Naked. Pulling the bedcovers back as Marie sat up reaching for her. When Lily turned to me, my knees gave out and I fell as she slapped her hand to Marie's forehead. Marie dropped back like a rock, unconscious, and I was losing it, too, just on the edge, but fighting, scared shitless. Then there was this… this rush, like all the air in the room was being sucked to the center of it, and she was gone. Replaced by this-this-this writhing cloud that blew back out the window. Then I passed out.

"I woke up a few hours later, I think. Went to bed. Marie never mentioned it the next day, but she didn't talk to me anyway. I tried to tell myself it was the booze, or a dream, but I couldn't deny it anymore. Something horrible was happening. Something horrible was wrong with Lily. But what? I didn't know what to do, where to start. Then I remembered something.

"She had this sculpture. Black onyx. It was -"

"Lilith," Robby interrupted, surprising himself.

Prosky nodded slowly. "That's the one. I'm not sure what made me think of it at the time. I guess what I'd seen the night before shook me up. I started thinking more clearly – I started thinking, period – and I remembered the first time I went to her house. I'd never heard of Lilith, didn't know who she was, and when I admired the sculpture she told me the story of Lilith. What I remembered was the way she told me the story; so passionately, lovingly, and all the while sort of watching me out of the corner of her eye, as if she were waiting for some reaction, some specific response."

"She did the same thing with me," Robby said.

"And what did you think?"

"Well… " Robby shrugged. "I guess I wondered why she was making such a big deal out of the story. You know, being so dramatic about it. I wondered if maybe it, you know, meant something."

"Exactly. That's what I thought. And after seeing her in the bedroom with Marie that night, going up in smoke in front of me like that, I started thinking about it again. And her name… Lily. It was a hunch. So the next day, I went online and looked up this Lilith woman. I learned a lot. I didn't believe any of it at first. Didn't want to believe it. But I knew, deep down inside, I knew it was true.

"One of the things I learned was how to keep Lily out of my house. I followed the instructions in one of the books. Then I waited. I didn't sleep, I didn't eat. I tried not to drink, but didn't try hard enough, I guess. She didn't come back.

"But during the next week, I noticed a change in the house. Things got worse. I'd have these flashes of violent and uncontrollable anger. But I tried to keep my mind off my anger by burying myself research. I read everything I could find about Lilith, learned about her, tried to figure her out. And I slowly realized exactly what she'd been doing." He leaned back in the booth, rubbed the back of his neck a moment, then leaned forward again. "Are you religious, Robby?"

"Funny. She asked me the same thing."

"Really? Well, I guess religious is the wrong word. Maybe spiritual is more accurate. Do you believe in a god?"

"I guess so. We go to church once in a while, and I -"

"No, I mean, do you really believe in a higher power? A force of goodness?"

"Well… “

”You're undecided. So was I. In fact, I didn't believe in anything. I went to AA before I got married, and they teach alcoholics to depend on a higher power, but I never really believed it. I used it, but I never believed it. But when I began to realize what Lily was and what she was doing to us, that changed. I mean, you won't see me in church, and I sure as hell don't send checks to the fucking 700 Club. But I definitely changed."

Robby was growing more and more tense and impatient and didn't want to wait any longer. "What is she?"

"I'm sorry, I got sidetracked. I'll get to that in a minute. Things got worse at home for all of us. I'd get these violent urges and I'd have to break something. I broke most of the breakable things in my office, I think, and a few dishes in the kitchen, for no reason at all. I realized we were all going through a sort of withdrawal. From Lily. I don't think Marie or Gordon knew what I'd done to keep her away. It was in plain sight and pretty hard to miss, but they weren't paying much attention to anything then. But I'm sure they suspected something, because Lily didn't show up at night anymore. And that's what was doing it. She'd gotten into our blood. She'd made us crave what she did to us. I guess… that's what pushed Marie over the edge.

"She and Gordon got into a fight. She chased him out to the garage and took… took my, urn… she used the… chainsaw. On him. Then me. My face… my arm. I… shot her. Killed her." He closed his eyes a moment and shuddered.

“As they were carrying me out to the ambulance, I saw her. Lily. Across the street and down two houses. Standing on the sidewalk. I went crazy, started screaming something about demons and evil. They thought I was nuts, of course, in shock, or something. In the ambulance, I realized I'd better cool it or they'd put me in the psych ward. But I've never been able to get that image out of my head: Lily standing on the sidewalk, smiling, with those two fucking dogs.”

"Sodom and Gomorrah?" Robby asked.

"No. They weren't the dogs she has now. These were two Dobermans. Cain and Abel."

"More biblical names."

"Yeah. Cute, huh? She has an interesting sense of humor. I tried to kill one of the Dobermans. I'm not sure which. About a year later." He laughed in a way that frightened Robby for a moment. "Well, what I did should have killed it, anyway. Her, too. A normal person – a human – would have died." He removed his left glove, revealing the hand that had so frightened Jen. Light reflected dully on the thin metal tendons and knobby knuckles as Prosky turned the palm up, doubled his fist with soft metallic clicks and hisses, then snapped his fist back abruptly.

Robby flinched as a deadly, shining twelve-inch blade shot from the heel of Prosky's metal hand.

"I slashed her dog with it," Prosky whispered through clenched teeth. "Then I put it into her stomach, twisted it, cut up, then down. I expected her guts to fall out onto my shoes. I was looking forward to it. But she just smiled. She laughed while I watched her wounds close. They were gone in seconds." He pressed the tip of the blade to the table's edge and pushed it back into his hand until it locked with a click; then he put the glove back on and leaned close to Robby. "I've been just a few steps behind her all this time, but now I've finally found her again. And I'm scared, Robby. In less than a week she's done to your neighborhood what it took her six months to do to mine. She's moving faster than ever now. I was hoping to find someone like you to help me stop her, but now I don't know. It might be too late. Things might have gone too far already."

Robby's eyes stung with misty tears, not because he was crying, but because he was terrified. The back of his neck seemed to crawl up into his scalp and he had to take a steadying breath before he could speak.

“What is she?" he breathed.

"I know it sounds insane. I thought so, too. But you know, don't you, that there's something very wrong with her."

Robby nodded.

"She's not human. Your new neighbor is a daughter of Lilith. Conceived ages ago on the shores of the Red Sea in an orgy of demons. She's a sexual vampire. A succubus. She's sucking the life – the soul – right out of you.”

After telling his story, Prosky explained that his wife's brother, Anthony Scolari – a very wealthy and prominent businessman in Chicago with a lot of connections, some of a rather dubious nature – had come to the hospital as soon as he heard what had happened and immediately made arrangements for Prosky to be treated by a cosmetic surgeon Scolari knew. Insisting that everyone leave Prosky's room in intensive care, Scolari said, "This may not be the time for it, Ronnie, but I've got to ask. What happened? I know my sister, and I know she wouldn't just do this. So what really happened, huh?"

"You… won't believe me."

"Let me decide what I will and won't believe, okay?"

Groggy from the drugs that had been pumped into him, Prosky said, "If you want… I'll explain it in detail later. For now, I'll tell you this. One person is responsible for what happened. But you have to swear… to keep it between us. I can't… I'll never be able to… prove it. Don't… tell the police."

"I never intended to tell the police."

"Our neighbor… Lily Kress.”

“You're sure?"

"Dead sure."

"All right, then. We'll talk about it more when you're better. Don't worry about anything. I'm making sure you're in good hands."

Lily was not mentioned again for nearly four months. Prosky was still in the hospital, learning to walk again and adjusting to his new arm, which had been arranged and paid for by his brother-in-law. Prosky had never seen a prosthesis quite like it and asked why he'd been given such an unusual arm. He was told that the arm met the specifications given by Scolari.

A week before Prosky was to leave the hospital, his brother-in-law paid him a visit. They exchanged small talk for a while, then Scolari said, "Would you like to tell me what happened?"

"Not really."

"How about if I insist?"

"Look, Anthony, I don't really know what happened myself."

Scolari sat on the bedside and spoke quietly. "Look, Ronnie, let's be straight, okay? I think you know that I do a lot more than buy and sell stocks and run a little corporation. I think you know I've got some friends who do things that aren't quite within the law. We've never talked about it, but it's always been there, right? I'm sure Marie told you plenty. So this isn't going to come as a big surprise. I had a friend put a tail on your neighbor lady. Frankly, I was planning to have her killed. Okay? I mean, I was pretty shook up, you know? She moved. To Indiana. My man followed her. A week after she settled into her new place, we lost contact with him. He was found beside a creek, several miles from her neighborhood. He was also found in a garbage dump about a mile from there. And we never found all of him. So… are you sure you don't want to tell me what happened?"

Prosky was shocked, but he still did not tell his brother-in-law the whole story.

"You say this woman's responsible for what happened but you can't prove it, so you can't go to the police, and yet you mean to tell me you're turning down an offer of help from an outside source? You think this is all her fault, and yet you can honestly say you don't want her to pay for it?"

"You want to know the truth, Anthony? I'd like to kill her myself."

Scolari smiled. He lifted the prosthetic arm and carefully removed a pin from the wrist. "Do this," he said, nodding at the arm as he held out an arm, made a fist and snapped it back.

Prosky did as he was told and the blade appeared.

Scolari was still smiling. He cleaned his manicured fingernails with the steel pin as he spoke. "It's your decision. You can forget it if you want. You can even have another arm if you want. But I've got somebody else watching her now. I know where she is. It's up to you."

Prosky had been following her ever since.

Robby told him everything. He was hesitant at first, then spoke with more ease, relieved to finally face the fact that something was not right, and even more relieved that he did not have to face it alone. When he spoke of Jen, he lost his control and began to cry, unable to continue.

"It's okay, Robby," Prosky said. "At least you're seeing it now, before it's too late for you. I'm not going to lie, it might be too late for them. But maybe not. You might be able to help them."

"Huh-how?"

"Remember I told you I never used to believe in a higher power? That all of this changed that?"

Robby nodded.

"Well, like I said, I'm not gonna send money to any of these tall-haired, diamond-ring-wearing televangelists with a private jet and a few limos. But I do believe in… something. Some force of goodness. And a force of evil. I know that's a touchy topic of conversation, but we don't have time right now to debate our differences of opinion about the… the creator, or… whatever. So, I’ll just say this. I think there’s a piece of both of those forces in all of us. Good and evil. Call it whatever you want, I think we’ve got it in all of us. And it’s up to us which side tips the scale. Sometimes we can influence that scale for others, too. Like right now. Your family. You love them, don’t you?” “Course I do,” Robby croaked. He wanted to say, This is bullshit! Horror movie bullshit! But he couldn't, because he knew he would not believe his own words.

"Well, Robby, you need that love right now. It can help you tip the scales in the right direction for your family. Lorelle is trying to suck that love out of you and replace it with something… bad. She creates hatred where there was once love. You’re seeing it in your family right now. But she can only do that if she’s allowed to do it.” He took a drink of his coffee.

Robby gulped down the lump in his throat. “Well? What do I do? What do we do? To stop her, I mean."

Prosky put his mug down on the table with a thunk and contentedly smacked his lips. His smile was terribly distorted, but it was still a smile. "I thought you'd never ask.”