The People Next Door (20 page)

‘Eric, no …’ Jason said. Fucker better not run.

Slowly the man walked around the door and stopped in front of the hood, arms hanging at his sides. Eric couldn’t tell if he
was wearing a ranger shirt, the belt with the tools. He didn’t think so. The shoulders were too smooth … and was that their
little ax hanging from his left hand? How did he get in the trunk? No, impossible.

‘You want to shoot something,’ the man said, sounding bored. ‘Take a shot at me.’

‘We’re not bothering anybody,’ Eric said. ‘We have a right to be here.’

‘As do we all.’ The man took another step. ‘But there’s a right, and then there’s what’s right. Go on. Aim it and pull the
trigger.’

Jason twitched, heels digging backward in the dirt. ‘
Oh shit man, give it up, E
.’

Shut the fuck up!
Eric wanted to scream, but he had to play this cool.

‘Your friend is smart,’ the man said. ‘Or, smarter.’

‘You’re not a cop,’ Eric said.

‘That’s true.’ He took another step. ‘Do you want to guess what I am?’

Eric was scared, afraid right down into his leg bones. He asked himself, for the first time, what kind of man wanders into
the woods like this. They would have heard a car or truck. Dude had come out of nowhere.

‘No? Maybe you’d rather guess what I want.’ Damn,
his voice was deep, deep and cold as something at the bottom of a well. And yeah, that was the ax.

Eric’s voice cracked. ‘What you want …’

The man seemed to be widening, and floating toward him like a shadow on silent wheels. He said, ‘I’m an angel. Sent to change
the world.’

Eric held the gun out between them, aiming a little higher, at where he imagined the heart was. ‘Don’t.’ And that was all
he had left to say. His tongue was swollen, his throat locked.

‘Or maybe I’m just a father out doing his best to provide for his family. Maybe the sound of my children’s bellies growling
is keeping me awake at night.’

The man stopped about twelve feet away. Eric could not make out the color of his hair under the black cap, but the glassy
eyes seemed solid black and wet. His hands were also black and Eric guessed those were black gloves.

‘You shouldn’t be nasty to other people, Eric.’ Wagging the ax. ‘You shouldn’t write ugly things on people’s cars, Eric. You
shouldn’t take firearms to school, Eric.’

The gun felt like it belonged to someone else now. Like he had already lost it.

Behind them, a trickle of dirt funneled down the mountain.

Jason’s voice came to him. ‘There’s more. Eric … they’re everywhere.’

Eric turned, casting his saucer eyes around the basin. Behind Jason, at the edge of the trees and standing in a
loose line up the hill, were three or four others. There was a small boy, androgynous, thin and dressed in black. And a girl
of indeterminate age, featureless and stepping delicately as if avoiding land mines, and then another, a woman with black
hair, who seemed to bleed in and out of the trees, closing the gaps between each other like a search party who had found their
quarry.

Jason backed up against a pine tree, snapping branches. He bent, clutching his jeans pockets, out of breath.

Eric’s belly was on fire with the poison, his face hot. The hills were waves, and every time one of the people in black stepped
down, a wave seemed to raise another one up. The woman with black hair, or perhaps another, different woman, was on the ground,
crawling on her belly, sliding down the hill like a snake, head raised, the face expressionless. Something gray and thin ran
through the dip in the trail behind the car, disappearing up the other side of the gully. Another tree branch broke.

Eric’s entire body went slack.

‘Think of it this way,’ the man said, coming close enough for Eric to touch him. He raised the chrome ax blade between them
and it looked like liquid. ‘All those children. And that sweet teacher. Are going to live because of you. They’re all going
to be safe, thanks to the sacrifice you’ve made tonight. There’s beauty in that.’

A ring of them had surrounded Jason, the boy holding J’s leg. They encircled him with their arms as he sobbed, hiding his
face. Everything was happening too slow,
hypnotically, and Eric decided if he didn’t act now, his only friend in the world was going down. He stole one glance at the
man, who was smiling at the others, then turned and fired twice at the circle.

It had to have been the drugs, because right when he raised the gun and the shots rang out, the people separated like bowling
pins – spreading away from J, but not falling down – and both bullets took Jason, one in the chest, the other in his neck.

Eric shrieked and Jason fell to his knees, his neck blown open like a giant red mouth full of white bone teeth, and J’s blood
pumped into the dirt.

The others crouched over him and watched him die and then began to play with his blood.

Eric’s sobs rippled up through him. The man stood over him and Eric was falling, looking up. The man’s eyes were silver with
clouds and the whole sky seemed to be in there. The man raised his arm high and swung the ax into Eric’s back. The pain was
explosive, all-consuming, and soon after that Eric Pritchard discovered his destiny. It wasn’t a gray room with high walls.
It was black, just a world gone forever black, where even his own voice carried no sound.

Amy Nash screamed so loudly, only two random factors prevented the rest of her family from wondering if she was being murdered
in her bed. The first was that she was sleeping alone in the guest room and the rest of the family were either dead asleep
(Kyle and Mick) or out (Briela, who was shopping with Ingrid). The second was that her face was pressed into a pillow and
she had inadvertently covered her head with a second pillow to block out the sunrise streaming through the blinds just an
hour or so before the nightmare provoked such a siren wail.

It was a nightmare so awful, so convincingly real, snapping herself awake to realize it was ‘only a dream’ was of no comfort.
The poisonous black cloud of death that hung over her, along with the cascading visuals of bloodshed that refused to fade
from behind her eyes, could not be shrugged off merely because she was conscious of the fact that the sun was shining and
she was in her own home, physically unharmed. Her entire body quaked. Runnels of mascara were streaked across the pillows
like Satanic symbols. Her head felt slammed
between a car and its door. Her stomach was so hollow and distorted with knife-stabbing pains, she felt disemboweled. It would
not be an exaggeration to describe what she had just experienced as rape-level fear, for in the aftermath her mind felt invaded,
assaulted, and permanently soiled.

She thrashed the covers away as if they were serpents, eels clinging to her limbs, and when she sat up, the room around her
felt turned upside down. She hung her head over her drawn-up knees and sobbed, shivering, trying to erase it – but the images
kept coming. She looked up at the window, almost directly into the morning sunlight, but she could not un-see what she had
seen.

Eric and Jason, those two idiot boys from her classroom, had been in the mountains, drinking and playing with sticks made
of fluorescent light. She couldn’t hear their conversation but she could read their moods by the moonlight on their almost
fawn-like faces. There was so much sadness and misplaced anger in their eyes, such false bravery in their bowed chests and
snarling lips. She had never before seen them so naked, so vulnerable, their commonly shitty family stories etched like tattoos
across the masks they wore to conceal the pain, depression, and anger they lived with every single day. Even when the gun
made its appearance in the dream, she was unable to see them as anything other than damaged, ignorant, chemically disturbed
children.

And then the people, if they even were people – and she didn’t think they could be as she had ever grasped
the term – emerged from the woods. First the man, as cold and emotionless as a Dahmer or Bundy right before they sunk the
drill into a lover’s temple. She couldn’t hear him either, but she understood from the moment he appeared that he was toying
with them the way a feral cat bats around a mouse. He was a hunter, a stalker, man as pure predator, a moral nonentity with
zero interest in anything other than the suffering of others. The way he moved, his flat expression – this whole episode was
mundane to him, an errand, grunt work.

The woman and her children were worse, because no woman or her child should be capable of such appetites, such focused hunger
for death. Unlike the man, the woman and children took more than pleasure in their conquest; they took interest, lost themselves
in every stage of what turned out to be a wilderness hunt and dressing of the felled carcasses.

Worst of all was that they were a family, a fact evident to Amy from the first moment. She could not read their faces well
enough to see a resemblance, but the fact of their blood relation was evident in their movements, their pecking order, the
way they worked as a team, intimate and instinctual. They each had a role, and fulfilled it.

The build-up was an act of sadistic suspense, almost as if Amy could sense what was coming. Things escalated quickly when,
in a panic, Eric turned and shot Jason, which was bad enough, but what the woman and her offspring did after that was beyond
Amy’s capacity to believe her own species capable of. They had
kneeled as if in a church, and then after a short silence during which Amy thought she could hear Jason’s blood trickling
onto the mountain’s dirt and pine-needled floor, they lathered in him. The boy pressed his face to Jason’s throat and the
little girl used her fingers, digging into the abdomen, licking them like her mother was baking a cake and she was the lucky
one who got to test the batter. They clawed and scratched, and ripped their way into him at leisure and Amy was powerless
to look away, until Eric’s sobs and then screams filled the canyon.

When the mind-movie cut abruptly in the way of such nightmares, the man was looming above the fallen Eric, swinging the ax
again and again, until his face shone with the crimson spatters of his labor. He packed Eric away in the Honda’s trunk. The
others dragged Jason’s remains across the forest floor and wrapped him in a bed sheet that when cinched looked more like a
wet bag of sand than any kind of shroud.

The dreaming Amy – as well as the fractured Amy who understood vaguely that she was dreaming even as the dream continued –
knew the meaning of the empty seats then. Eric and Jason would never come to class again. The two chairs at the back of the
class would be empty during her next session, and during the one after that, and any others to come, because Eric Pritchard
and Jason Wells were gone forever. This man and his family had ended them.

This dream was not a dream. This had happened.

After closing the trunk, as the children walked in
something of a daze and got into the car, the man turned and looked at her. Amy knew in the dream that he was looking directly
into his wife’s eyes (she was no longer on the mind-screen), but it felt as though he were peering into
her
eyes, into her soul, as if he knew every little secret she carried, and was coming for her. His cold black eyes, filmed over
with white cotton like an old man’s, searched her most private thoughts, invaded her body and soul, and he smiled at what
he found there. She knew then that he was not just some figure in a dream. None of them were. They were real, lived in this
world, walking among us, a family of monsters disguised as regular folks, the people next door, and Amy had been caught watching
them. They were not merely humans capable of murder and wanton slaughter and other indescribable things. They had an unholy
power to step from the other realm, where dreams and demons shared the stage, into this world. Her world.

They were coming for her. Her and Mick, Briela and Kyle.

She started screaming then, screaming until she woke herself up. She was still crying now. She hitched her legs and hugged
them a few minutes more, and finally forced herself to get out of bed, needing a shower, wishing she could wash out her mind.
In the stall the water pounded her and she cried a bit longer, shivering, turning the water as hot as the dial would go, and
still she felt cold inside. She closed her eyes and saw his clouded eyes, his blood-speckled face.

Eventually she found the strength to move on, but
the nightmare, if that was all it had been, never really left her. It was there inside her, infecting everything in the days
to come, and it went the other way too. Gradually but relentlessly burrowing into the cave of her past, a torch illuminating
things no sane person could live with.

It was still raining and all of the lights were off in each of the villas as I ran up the path and knocked on the Percys’
front door. No one answered for the first few minutes but I knew they were in there, so I knocked again.

Bob answered a long minute or two later. He was excited, in an unsettling way. He was dressed in his Bermuda shorts and a
big T-shirt, and his sandals were crusted with wet sand. ‘Come in, come in,’ he said, dragging me by the arm, and maybe it
was from spending all day in the sun, but his hand on my forearm was hot. Beyond fevered. I could swear that if I had not
been wearing that jacket, Bob’s big mitt would have left a red welt on my forearm.

It was dark in the corridor, the hall leading into the house. It was like talking to a man in an alley at night, and something
about it – about the way Bob was so excited and urging me into the house – immediately made me nervous. I could smell something
in the wet air, something foul, like spoiling fish.

I asked him if everyone was all right and he said, Yes, fine, never felt better. In the kitchen Bob lit a candle
he’d found in one of the drawers. There was only a small glow and the rest of the house around us was dark from the cloud
cover and approaching dusk.

‘Did you get stuck out in that weather?’ I asked him.

‘The weather?’ Bob said, tilting his head like he hadn’t even thought about it until now. He had a silly grin on his face
and in the dark beside that candle he looked like a big Halloween pumpkin. ‘Never mind that,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to
believe what we found.’

‘Where are your wife and kids?’ I asked.

‘Upstairs changing,’ Bob said. ‘But listen …’

They’d been hearing about a special beach from one of the other families, and found it early that morning. After a few hours,
Bob’s son Timothy wanted to do some exploring in the jungle, see if he could catch an iguana. His parents told him not to
go too far, but of course what’s too far mean to an eleven-year-old boy?

After half an hour they were worried Tim was lost, so they gathered up their daughter and the three of them trekked back in
about a mile or so. They could see their son’s footprints in the sand, and pretty soon they heard his voice, calling to them.
His voice seemed to be coming out of a bullhorn, or echoing from a canyon. They knew they were close, and after another hundred
meters or so they came to the well in the clearing.

Have you ever been to Chichen Itza, the Mayan ruins outside of Cancun? There is a cenote down there, a sacred well, spanning
about sixty or seventy meters across. It’s a natural geological formation in the limestone, a depression, caved in from water
running underneath
the stone for hundreds or thousands of years. The well at Chichen Itza is only about a hundred feet deep, forty of water and
sixty of stone above that. The Mayans dedicated it to Chac, the god of rain and lightning, whom they appeased with human sacrifices.
We know they threw live bodies into the well. Archaeologists have found human bones and skulls down there, as well as masks
of copper and gold, and other ornaments – gifts to Chac, on whose generosity with the rain the Mayans thrived or starved.

What Bob Percy from Madison, Wisconsin, was describing to me then sounded a lot like the cenote at Chichen Itza, but I was
skeptical such a thing would exist on an island, and such a small island at that.

‘It’s smaller,’ Bob told me, ‘maybe forty feet across, and about as deep. Inside, the water is silver, like melted pewter.’

When he and Lynn arrived and looked down, their son Timothy was swimming in it. Hollering like a wild man, having a ball.
At first they thought he’d fallen in, but Tim said he wasn’t hurt, and while they were asking him what happened and generally
panicking about what the hell to do, their daughter, Tanya, was shaking Bob’s hand, pointing. ‘Look, Daddy, look.’

On the other side of the well, cut into the limestone or whatever type of rock lies under the sandy forest of Vieques, was
a stairway. It looked like a carved rock version of the ladders you see on the side of an oil refinery tank, curving down,
only this one was inside the wall. Descending in a spiral until it disappeared into the water. It was narrow but the steps
were just wide enough
for a small adult or child to walk up or down. According to their son, he stumbled upon the well and decided to see how close
he could get to the water. He didn’t slip and fall until he was about six steps from the bottom, when he imagined seeing a
shape beneath the surface, and an arm reaching up to pull him in.

You might ask now the same thing I asked myself at that moment in Bob’s story. If this well was used like the cenote in Chichen
Itza, a repository for human sacrifices, what was the purpose of this ladder? The ladder suggested humans had carved it and
used it for some purpose, but a gift to the gods is not something you take back. They wouldn’t retrieve the bodies. So there
would be no need to
go down
. But, you might ask, as I asked myself, what if there was a need to
climb out
?

Of course I was skeptical of Bob’s story. None of the maps or guidebooks for Vieques mentioned a well or landmark of any such
sort, and I had done my share of research on the place, so I would have remembered that.

‘You should have seen the water,’ Bob said. ‘Even as my son was paddling around in there like some kind of otter, the surface
was shifting, reflecting in the shade, rippling with crosscurrents that scaled the small waves the boy was making.’ Bob said
it reminded him of ‘sea monkeys, but instead of pink and brown little organisms, the water in this well is a mosaic of silver
and gray … hell, we don’t know what it was. Plankton? Algae? Bacteria? Something similar to the bioluminescent bay? Whatever
it was, the mercury surface of this water looked like it was alive.’

Despite being frightened when he thought he saw something rising from the depths to pull him in, Timothy did not want to leave
the well. He said it felt too good. But his parents were scared. For all they knew, their son was swimming in a toxic puddle
(Or amongst the bones and ancient dust and silt of the first Native American peoples who happened upon the island before the
Spanish arrived, I thought but did not say to Bob).

Bob and Lynn were screaming at him to get out. Finally Tim agreed, swimming to the base of the stairs, or where the stone
steps met the water, and he climbed out reluctantly, pouting. Bob and Lynn were worried he was going to fall, but the kid
moved right up and along in a sideways shuffle, never slowing or looking down, as if he had been using these stairs all his
young life.

They got him back to the beach and toweled him off, and that’s when they noticed that the water – the silver mass he had been
splashing around in for at least ten and maybe even thirty minutes – wasn’t coming off. It was on his skin and his limbs were
running with it in filmy lines that wouldn’t dry. It was slick, like oil. They decided to make him rinse off in the ocean.
They were worried it was on them now, too, because they’d been hugging Tim and inspecting his body for wounds. Neither Bob
nor Lynn found any on themselves or Tanya, but they all hopped in the ocean anyway, scrubbing themselves with sand. They emerged
from the sea about ten minutes later looking clean and feeling better. The silver stuff was gone.

Except, of course, it wasn’t gone.

I was standing there in the Percys’ villa, listening to this rather fabulous tale amidst the candlelight, when I saw it. On
Bob’s arms, along his neck and, when I held the candle out like a torch to illuminate his legs, it was down there too. On
his ankles, up his thighs. I’d never seen anything like it. I don’t think now that it was on their skin. I think it was already
inside
them, under or within the epidermis. Have you ever seen one of those new custom cars, with the paint job that changes color
depending on the amount of light and the angle from which you view it? It seems black when you stand in front of the hood,
but when you move around and stare down the side panel, you see purple and green and silver? Bob’s skin was like that. Very
faintly luminescent and in no way normal. Even in the darkness, with only candlelight, I could see that it was in him.

Bob wasn’t frightened. He felt fine, he said. Better than fine. He was animated by something other than the excitement of
discovering a well in the jungle. His eyes were black in the dark villa but wide with a childish delight, and he was grinning.
When I expressed my concern and stepped away from him, he laughed at me. I remembered how he had grabbed my arm when he answered
the front door, and I was very glad I had been wearing that windbreaker. I wanted to get away from the Percys as soon as possible.

Bob wondered if we were still on for drinks tonight. I made excuses, telling him that the storm had frightened the kids and
that my wife wasn’t feeling well. I just wanted to make sure you had made it back from the
beach in this weather, I told him. Bob watched me curiously and I am sure he knew that I was lying, but he said nothing as
he followed me to the door. I was so anxious to be on my way, I forgot to ask him why the lights were off.

I made it home a few minutes later. The wife and kids were eating soup and grilled cheese sandwiches around the glass dining
table. Our lights were still on. They asked me if everything was all right. Fine, I assured them, and then I went to have
a long hot shower before joining them for dessert.

I don’t remember tasting my wife’s key lime pie.

I did not sleep well that night. I tossed and turned in half-dreams, the rain pattering on our roof as my mind went round
and round with thoughts of the Percy family. Capricious thunderstorms rolled over the island in half-hour intervals, bulbs
of lightning flashing inside the belly of cloud cover and illuminating the bedroom like a photo negative every few minutes.
Sometime around two or three a.m., I came fully awake to the sound of fading thunder and people screaming.

Ungodly screaming coming from the villas next to ours.