The People Next Door Page 19

  Jason didn’t answer. The air cooled. In between songs a tree branch snapped somewhere above and behind them. Eric thought of deer. If a deer walked by now …

  ‘What are you babbling about?’ Jason said, zipping up on the way back.

  Eric stared at him. Did Jason even listen any more? Why didn’t anyone listen any more? Sometimes Eric felt like he was shrinking out of the world, his voice getting quieter and quieter until one day he would be standing in a corner of an empty room, a gray room with no furniture, just huge gray walls that went on forever, everyone else two thousand miles away, and no matter how much he shouted, they would never hear him.

  ‘Nothing,’ Eric said. ‘Are you rollin’?’

  ‘Maybe a little.’

  Something thumped to the ground, heavy like a boulder rolling into some bushes.

  ‘What was that?’ Jason said.

  Eric scanned the trees. He saw no movement.

  ‘Hell if I know. A deer?’

  ‘But you heard it too.’

  ‘I hear lots of things,’ Eric said.

  Jason sat on the log and pulled out a Glo-Stick. He broke it, tilting it from side to side. The stick turned a sad shade of pink. Jason began to twirl it between his fingers, the way his brother Rickie used to twirl quarters over his rings. Rickie went to Afghanistan two years ago. They’d brought him home in that box last fall and even though Jason was at the funeral, he said Rickie was still over there in the mountains, blasting dune coons. Eric thought that was fucked up but never said anything to Jason about it. The Glo-Stick fell in the dirt. Jason stared at it for a while, then dripped a long string of saliva down to it. When the string touched the pink, he cut it off with his teeth and let it fall. He smeared the stick with his foot, burying it in the cold fire ash.

  Eric took off his shirt. He was skinny all the way up and down, with the face of a falcon. He liked the bony hardness of his frame. He had no chest muscles. His breastplate was like armor, his belly button a puckered coin standing out. He was wearing his shark-tooth necklace and his goatee reached almost to his throat, soft as silk. In his earlobes were two spikes as long as golf tees, made of tempered steel. Purportedly Maori designs had been tattooed around his left arm; from the blade of his left shoulder, a purple panther that seemed to be clawing its way out of his skin.

  ‘I hate this part,’ Jason said.

  Eric picked up a long stick and began swiping at the air. ‘What part?’

  ‘Waiting.’

  ‘Shit’s getting fuzzy. Those trees are starting to woowoo.’

  ‘You sure you’re not just drunk?’

  ‘I don’t get drunk,’ Eric said, opening another Mickey’s.

  Jason leaned back on the log, staring up at the night sky, a faint band of the Milky Way streaking over them. The iPod shuffled into Kanye’s ‘Monster’ and Eric’s blood roared in approval.

  ‘You know what we should do,’ Eric said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take this to class.’

  Jason sat up and looked at the gun, his eyes darting to Eric’s cargo pants pockets like What else you got stashed in there? Eric smiled, rotating the weapon before his eyes. It was heavy. You could feel the fucking death heavy in it.

  ‘Where the fuck did you get that?’ Jason said.

  ‘Tol’ you I was gonna get one.’

  ‘What is it? A .22?’

  ‘It’s a .38, dumbass. My uncle gave it to me.’

  ‘It’s not loaded, right? Seriously, E. That thing better not be—’

  Eric fired a shot into the sky. The buck sent a nice twang through his wrist bones. Jason jumped to his feet as the echo rolled away.

  ‘Cut the shit! What the fuck did you do that for, man?’

  Eric snickered. ‘I ain’t playin’.’

  ‘Fuckin’ ranger’s gonna come.’

  ‘Let him.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Jason jammed his hands in his pockets. ‘Don’t even joke about that, you sick bastard.’

  Eric flew the gun in the air, a boy imagining his model airplane’s first flight. ‘Here, piggy piggy piggy. I forgot to bring my time sheet in, Mrs Nash.’ He laughed. ‘I hate that fat bitch. You see the way she looks at me, J? I can’t decide if she wants to slap me or suck my dick.’

  Jason looked away, shaking his head. They spaced out, grooving on their private thoughts. Five minutes passed, though it could have been half an hour. Eric wasn’t sure when he realized the Civic’s headlights had been doused, but they were now.

  Monsta, monsta, I’m a muthufuck— The music stopped. One second it was on, the next the mountain air was bugs and silence, every scrape of their feet on the pine needles too loud.

  ‘Do you have a license for that?’ a man with a deep voice said behind them.

  Eric spun, thrusting the gun against the darkness. ‘Who the fuck?’

  The man was standing behind the open door, hardly more than a shadow on the driver’s side, one arm resting on the roof. Eric lowered the gun as if he could still hide it behind his leg. He tried to think of something fearsome to say but his brain was crowded with orange balloons, adrenaline making him blink over and over. His mouth was very dry. Yeah, definitely booming now, kid.

  The guy just stood there a minute, solid, unmoving. His face was a faint white smudge. Everything else was black.

  ‘Hey, how about you get the fuck away from my car,’ Eric said.

  ‘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.

  39

  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 t
he 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.

  Island Living

  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.