The Devil Next Door (21 page)

Louis just stared at him, pretty certain now that Earl was mad, too. They had all gone mad, each in their own way. And this was certainly Earl’s way. “That’s very interesting, Earl.”

“Isn’t it?” Earl stabbed a finger at him. “But what does this have to do with human populations? I think you’ve already made the connection. Our population has reached dangerous, critical proportions. We are destroying the environment to accommodate this massive population explosion. Nature has thrown every conceivable stumbling block at us to slow it down…disease, famine, natural disaster. But we’ve beaten them off one by one. And now? Yes,
the ace in the hole.
That same biological imperative that exists in locusts, lemmings, even rats. We are, essentially, swarming. We are purging ourselves. We are cleansing the stock, so to speak. There was a very intelligent man name of Hutson. Roger Hutson. Hutson was an ethnologist from Oxford, over in jolly old England. He wrote a marvelous book called
Swarm Mechanics
many years ago where he warned of just such a species-threatening event. He claimed that in each of us, as in the aforementioned animals, there was a rogue recessive gene that would become activated if our population reached hazardous levels. That it would bring about unprecedented savagery, that we would literally exterminate ourselves until our population stabilized. And it has come to pass, has it not? This gene is activated, Louis. God help us, but it is. All of them out there…animals, they are regressing to animals, throwing off the yoke of intelligence and civilization, returning to the jungle and survival of the fittest…”

Earl went on and on, unable to stop himself. He cited studies with rats. How when they were overcrowded as humans were now in their towns and cities they began participating in degenerate, self-destructive behavior just like people. Murder, incest, homosexuality, cannibalism. Anything to weaken the overburdened population, to burn it out at its roots. To poison it out, cull the weak, preserve the identity and genetic purity of the breeding pool.

“The human garden will now be weeded,” he said.

“But, Earl—”

“Oh, how arrogant we were!” Earl raged. “To think we were the masters of this planet! To think we could rape the environment and subvert natural law! And all the time, it was not nuclear war or some deadly pathogen waiting to undo us, but
ourselves! We are the instruments of our own destruction! Inside each and every one of us there is a loaded gun and radical population explosion has pulled the trigger! God help us, Louis, but we will exterminate ourselves! Beasts of the jungle! Killing, slaughtering, raping, pillaging! An unconscious genetic urge will unmake all we have made, gut civilization, and harvest the race like cattle as we are overwhelmed by primitive urges and race memory run wild!”

“Listen, Earl,” Louis said. “I need to get going, I have to”

“WHO’RE YOU TALKING TO OUT THERE, EARL?”

It was Maureen, Earl’s wife. She was hard of hearing and shouted everything. Even if you were in the same room with her. But Louis was glad for the intrusion.

Earl shook his head. “I’m talking to Louis! Louis Shears from next door!”

“WHO?” Maureen shouted through the kitchen window.

“Louis! Louis from next door!”

“LOUIS? IS MICHELLE OUT THERE?” she cried. “I SAID, IS MICHELLE OUT THERE?”

“No, she’s not!” Earl looked apologetically at Louis and shrugged his shoulders.

“WHAT?”

“I said she’s not out here!”

“WELL, WHAT ARE THE TWO OF YOU DOING?”

“We’re not doing anything! We’re just talking!”

“WELL, IF YOU WON’T ANSWER, I BETTER COME AND SEE MYSELF!”

Earl sighed. “Christ, but she’s getting bad, Louis. Real bad. All day long she asks me what I’m doing. I’m taking out the trash and she wants to know what I’m doing. I’m cutting the grass and she wants to know what I’m doing. What the hell does she think I’m doing? You take out the trash because it’s full and you cut the grass because it’s getting long just like you take down the Christmas tree or throw the Halloween pumpkins in the can, because it’s time! Because it’s time!”

The screen door creaked open and out came Maureen with her cane, looking suspicious as she always did that something was going on and she had not been informed about it.

Louis looked over his shoulder, wondering what was taking Macy so damn long.

“WHAT IS GOING ON OUT HERE? THAT’S WHAT I’D LIKE TO KNOW!”

“See?” Earl said. “It’s like this all day. How would you like to deal with what I deal with?”

Louis sighed. They were a nice old couple, but now was not the time for this shit. But he knew he wasn’t leaving. Not yet. Not until Maureen came over and got her two cents in. She always had to know what was going on even when nothing was.

“LOUIS! DID YOU HEAR ALL THEM DAMN SIRENS?” Maureen shouted. She was a little woman with a bent back, bad knees, and glasses that made her eyes look about the size of golf balls. She looked frail and she probably was, but her lungs were working fine, despite the two packs she smoked every day. “I SAID…DID YOU HEAR THOSE DAMN SIRENS?”

Louis felt a headache building at his temples. “Yeah, I heard ‘em.”

“WHAT?”

“He said he heard ‘em for chrissake!” Earl interpreted.

Maureen nodded and pulled a Benson & Hedges 120 from her pack and lit it. But her eyes were bad and it took some doing. She held the lighter with both hands and as she brought the flame to it, she kept backing away from it as if she was afraid she was going to light her nose on fire. It took some doing, but soon the old chimney was stoked and clouds of smoke were blowing from it.

“WHOLE TOWN’S GOING TO HELL, LOUIS! FROM ROOT TO ROSEBUD, JUST A MADHOUSE! A MADHOUSE, I SAID!”

“She said it’s a madhouse, Louis.”

But Louis had heard just fine and wondered as always why Earl felt the need to repeat a woman who was on the same decibel level as a Metallica concert. Already his ears were ringing.

“WHERE’S MICHELLE?” Maureen wanted to know.

Louis swallowed, wondering the same thing. “She’s at work,” he said, refusing to shout. He just wasn’t up to it. “I have to go pick her up.”

“WHAT?”

Earl tossed his hedge clippers aside. “He said she’s at work! He has to go pick her up!”

“WHY IN THE HELL ARE YOU WHISPERING, EARL?” she wanted to know. “WHEN I ASK A QUESTION HAVE THE DECENCY TO ANSWER IT!”

“I did answer it!”

“NOT THAT I COULD HEAR!”

“Well you can’t hear a damn thing anyway!”

Louis stepped back from the hedges, trying to get a look at his house. Macy had been gone too long. He was starting to get a funny feeling about that. What if she’d decided to dart over to her house to write Jillian a letter…and then gone downstairs?

“WHERE DID LOUIS GO?” Maureen asked.

“He’s right here!”

“HE DIDN’T EVEN SAY GOODBYE! HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?” Maureen just shook her head, staring right at Louis but not seeing him. A few feet out of the direct line of sight and she lost you. She pulled off her cigarette. “WELL, IT’S A WONDER MICHELLE PUTS UP WITH HIM! HOW LONG HAVE THEY BEEN MARRIED AND STILL NO CHILDREN! DON’T TELL ME THERE’S NOT SOMETHING FUNNY ABOUT THAT, EARL!”

Louis reddened, but was not surprised. You could pretty much hear Maureen up and down the block when the windows were open in the summer and she routinely gossiped about the neighbors.

“Jesus Christ!” Earl said to her. “Louis is right here! Are you blind?”

“WHAT?”

“I said, Louis is right here!”

Maureen pulled off her cigarette and squinted. “OH! WELL HE CAN’T HEAR ME WAY OVER THERE!”

“I need to get going, Earl. I have some things to take care of.”

“Okay, Louis. Sorry about Maureen.” He tapped a finger to his head. “She means well, but her eyes are shot, her hearing’s no good, and she’s getting soft upstairs.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Louis told him.

“Think about what I said, Louis.”

“IS LOUIS LEAVING?”

“Yes!”

“WHERE’S HE GOING?”

“He’s got errands to run, goddammit!”

“EARL GOULD, YOU QUIT THAT DAMN WHISPERING AND SPEAK UP LIKE A MAN! YOU KNOW I CAN’T HEAR SO GOOD!”

“Shut up!”

“WHAT?”

Louis saw it coming just as he’d seen it coming when Earl started talking about the inevitability of the town going insane, of rogue gene expression sacking civilization as we knew it. The darkness was there. Hiding in the cracks and crevices of his mind and now it was bleeding out like shadows when the sun went down.

He turned to his wife. “I told you to shut the fuck up!”

“WHAT DID YOU SAY? QUIT WHISPERING LIKE A LITTLE GIRL FOR GODSAKE!”

And that was it.

Earl was talking about critical mass and catalysts and all the rest, well here it was for him. Critical mass had been reached and things were about to explode out of control. Race memory descended. He was a fine, gentle old man, but that all changed in an instant. He took two steps right over to Maureen and hit her in the face with everything he had. She went right down, blood splashing from her mouth right up to the bridge of her nose. Her dentures were hanging out like a set of wind-up chattery teeth.

It happened that quick.

Louis actually looked across the street toward the Maub’s house, the Soderbergs, to see if anyone had seen what he’d just seen.

But there was no one around.

“Earl!” he said. “
Jesus Christ, what do you think you’re doing?”

But Earl did not hear him or care what he said.

He walked right over to his wife and gave her a good kick in the side and she howled with pain, gagging and gasping and spitting drool and blood into the grass.

Louis was about to intervene, but he heard Macy calling out to him. “Louis! Louis!
Mr. Shears!”

Louis suddenly forgot about what he had just witnessed. He turned on his heel and ran to the house. He could hear Macy crying out and whatever was going on, it was bad. Real bad. He jogged up the steps and went right through the front door and it wasn’t hard to follow her voice.

She was in the kitchen, but she wasn’t alone.

She was behind the kitchen table and facing her was Dick Starling from across the street. But not the Dick Louis knew. Not the same Dick that had taken a picture of him with Jillian Merchant over his shoulder, that same funny and wisecracking man that had helped Louis lay the slab for his garage out back or threw Sunday afternoon backyard barbecues during football season.

No, this was not
that
Dick Starling.

This Dick Starling was covered in mud and dirt, hair wild and matted, completely naked, his penis standing erect. And his eyes…God, cold and dark like undersea caves. A rank stench of blood, death, and moist black earth blew off him. And he had a bloody axe in his hands.

“Hey, Louis,” he said in a clotted, dirty voice. “I’m gonna get me that little cunt and when I’m done, you can have what’s left. It’s only fair that I have some, don’t you think?”

Dick Starling was a monster…

31

Inside Benny Shore’s head, there was a mirror maze like the kind you could find at a carnival. You looked into this one and you were a compressed little dwarf, into that one and you were a tall skeleton man. You looked here, there were ten of you, over there and there were fifty Benny Shores. Sometimes they were the principal of Greenlawn High School and sometimes they were little boys with frightened faces lost in the expressionistic tangle of their own jagged thoughts.

Careful, careful, Benny, those thoughts will kill you.

See how they glisten?

See how the lights catch their razored edge?

Yes, yes, easy now, because those thoughts will slit you right open, spill all your goodies out in coils of red, slopping things.

After he ran over Billy Swanson, Shore drove home taking a most leisurely route to his house over on Tessler Avenue near the river. He was in absolutely no hurry. When that headache had finally found him, delivered him from the here and the now into some distant and possibly primeval place deep in the core of his being, it had done things to him. It had changed his needs and wants and ambitions.