The People Next Door Read online

  At twenty-eight, after crashing her Mustang into a dry cleaner’s storefront, sobriety came easily, immediately replaced by food addictions. She liked to order twenty-four cheese-and-bacon-loaded potato skins from Bennigan’s and eat them in the car on the way home. A dozen glazed donuts for breakfast. In the middle of the night, an entire bag of Ruffles, a tub of cottage cheese for the dip. Bacon cheeseburgers and Pizza Hut Meat Lover’s pan pizzas in pairs, the stupor of greasy food her antidote to the straight life. On her thirtieth birthday she weighed two hundred and eighty-seven pounds.

  She tried everything to combat her hungers, but in the end realized she should consider herself blessed that she had the willpower to switch the object of her desire, if not quench the desire itself. It was – she realized by age thirty-six, having declared bankruptcy for the second time – a matter of choosing healthier targets. So drugs, alcohol, food, and expensive clothes became fresh fruit, gym memberships, yoga attire and videos, supplements and smoothies, infomercial meal plans, bicycles, high colonics and a battalion of running shoes.

  Running seemed to be the final solution. It was the only physical activity Melanie had found – short of sex with Keith Darden, who died in a drunk-driving accident four years ago, may God rest his eight-inch wonder dick – with the power to cleanse all negative thought and physical need. She had been running regularly for a little more than seven years – the same period of time required, it is said, for the human body to replace every cell, becoming entirely new. She was no longer the poisoned glutton of her past but literally a whole new being. Healthy, happy, self-forgiven.

  Of course she knew that running was her new drug, and that there was always a risk of over-exertion. But she also knew that running was the reason she had lost one hundred and forty pounds, quit smoking, and developed toned muscles and new curves where there used to be sagging corners and flat cliffs. Running was responsible for shearing the wild peaks and valleys off her moods, leveling her mental state into something that was lucid and energized but calm. She was doing better at the office, where it was rumored she would soon be up for a promotion to field sales rep with profit sharing (Preferred Paper sold shipping supplies, boxes and foam peanuts, and she had been an office manager for seven years). Even her relationship with Rayell had improved, mother–daughter competition giving way to mutual respect and support of each other’s unique traits, quirks, and life adventures.

  She was cresting the big hill on Reservoir Road when the first cramp began to bare its teeth in her right side. She had only gone four miles or so, and was planning on an easy ten, so this minor stitch was troubling. She slowed, the flat plane below her rib cage clenching with a dull, twisting ache. Funny how it was never your legs or feet, the parts that were taking the brunt of the abuse. It had to be something inside, a layer of muscle that felt like some kind of rarely utilized organ you never knew you had. She had taken her potassium last night and she was not dehydrated. There was no reason for this dang nuisance (except maybe for that psycho rhymes-with-punt who had forced her to spend the weekend like a shut-in). She beat the cramp back with willpower and plowed on, the reservoir’s white entrance gates coming into view, then retreating as she continued on 51st, where it turned to dirt and curved around the lake’s west bank.

  But whatever it was, the pain spiked again, bringing her down to a fast walk. Melanie hated fast-walking. She was only forty-three. She could fast-walk when she was sixty-three, not now. She would give it five minutes.

  The entrance to Eagle Trail off of 51st appeared and she was glad to see there were no cars parked in the turnaround. She would have the lollipop route to herself, looping around the wide field before turning back to the lake for a six a.m. dip. She walked through the cramp, remembering her tomboy years, the summer she spent catching sunfish with Danny and Luke, then using the sunfish to trap a giant snapping turtle. Good times, kissing boys and playing with fish, learning how to hook a worm while teaching them how to unhook a JC Penny D-cup. The cramp had vanished and Melanie was back to her normal cruising speed.

  Farmland opened on all sides. Fresh planes of light diluted the indigo sky, but the land was still dark, the weeds waist-high around the gravel path, the occasional grasshopper springing out of her way, armor clicking. She was a little less than a mile along the lollipop when she heard the nubby gravel crunching sounds behind her. The buzzing approach came out of nowhere, moving fast, and she veered to the right edge of the path. Her ankle twisted on the loose shoulder, but her tendons there were strung by good muscle, and she righted herself with no problem. She glanced left and saw a thin bicycle wheel, a flash of handlebars with small pale hands on the taped grips, and then something jabbed her in the hip bone, knocking her off stride.

  Her cell phone popped out of her fanny pack into the dirt and Melanie cried out, more in surprise than pain, as she stumbled into the weeds. She threw her hands out for balance as the bicycle flashed ahead, the short figure hunched and pedaling as if in a sprint for the ribbon.

  ‘What the hell …’ Melanie came to a halt in the weeds, just shy of a nearly invisible irrigation ditch. ‘Jesus, watch it!’

  The road bike – silver, tall, a man’s – was a ways ahead of her, the thin wheels wobbling. The person sitting atop the saddle had short hair, the head as pale as the thin white legs jutting from a bunched-up dress or some kind of skirt – not the attire of a serious cyclist. The bare feet barely reached the pedals. The bike had no lights or reflectors on it. Hadn’t the woman seen her? Was this an accident or some kind of harassment?

  Melanie’s anger walked her back onto the path. The woman on the bike was slowing, swerving wildly, probably drunk.

  ‘An apology would be nice!’ Melanie hollered, dipping into the pack for her phone. It wasn’t there. ‘Idiot.’

  The woman disappeared around the bend. Weed buds twisted in the dark, the head sliding out of view. She turned the pack around to her front and dug into it, but the phone was gone. She scanned the ground, during which time it occurred to her that this might not be a random idiot at all, but Cassandra Render.

  No, it couldn’t be. A confrontation at a neighborhood birthday party was one thing. Following a stranger you had exchanged harsh words with out into the country at four-thirty in the morning was something else. Rich bitches like Cassandra Render didn’t ride bicycles and take out their grudges this way. They manipulated your friends, shunned you from dinner parties, spread gossip about your finances.

  Another minute passed and her phone was not on the path. She could hear Rayell again. You’re being paranoid, Mom. Chill.

  Melanie heard the bike returning before she saw it, and then it was hewing to the outside edge of the lane on its way back. The wheel, the loose dress, the lowered pale head. It was coming for her.

  She halted and spread her feet at shoulder width, wondering what the possible outcomes were here. An apology she’d asked for, but now she hoped the drunken twat would ride off and leave her alone. And if it was Cassandra Render, well, maybe it was time the woman learned what happened when you messed with a member of your own gender who had you by six inches and fifty pounds.

  The bike was a hundred feet off and closing, its rider leaning over the bars as if studying the ground, afraid of dumping it at any moment. The tires pinched pebbles that sprang with doink and pling sounds. My God, Melanie thought, this derelict doesn’t even know how to ride a bike. She has to be wasted.

  She was still debating whether to run toward the bike and get ahead of it or turn back for the road when the woman rose off the seat and began to pedal furiously. The bike found balance with the speed, and as it closed the distance Melanie realized this was not Cassandra Render – it wasn’t even a woman.

  It was a child, barely a teenager, and maybe as young as ten. She shouldn’t be out here biking alone, and what the hell is she doing on her dad’s bike?

  Melanie backed into the weeds to give the muppet a wide berth.

  That’s not a dress. It’s a jacket
tied around her waist.

  And the hair’s not short. It’s bald.

  The bike came whizzing down the center of the path, but at the last second swerved at her. The little person’s face came up and Melanie almost got off a scream as it launched itself over the handle bars, baring teeth fenced with plated metal braces. The small body slammed into her chest and the two of them were falling back into crackling weeds. The bike tumbled with them, tangling in their limbs, gears and spokes catching Melanie’s fingers, scraping her bare back.

  The child was growling. Grunting, hissing, throwing some kind of fit. Melanie felt something cut into her rib, screamed and rolled, hurling the bony frame. The attacker rolled in the grass and hopped to her feet, swaying like a tiny gladiator. Melanie blinked, registering details, the lack of certain features, the carnival presence of others.

  That’s no little girl. It’s a boy in a rubber swimming cap.

  The eyes are solid black and leaking blood.

  Those aren’t braces. The mouth is full of blades.

  The instinct to stand her ground was extinguished. The deep blooming terror inside Melanie matched and then eclipsed the Cassandra incident. That had been chilling. This was reality-melting, bad-acid-trip fear, the kind of raw alarm that electrifies the limbs. She bolted over the path and deeper into the field, toward the nearest subdivision some quarter of a mile away.

  The small footsteps tore at the ground behind her and she watched for prairie dog holes as the weeds whipped at her sides. She saw the three-line barbed-wire fence a second before she would have slammed into it and hurdled off her right foot, certain her shoe or one Lycra-skinned shin would snag. But her training paid off and she sailed over it, her Asics plowing into soft-tilled rows of soil. She put a palm down, pushed off, and sprinted across the rows of low green vegetation.

  Her skin came alive with sour sweat. Clods of dirt dragged at her shoes. Her right knee was strained in some way, the cramp had come back with a vengeance, the pain worsening with every step, and she could not keep an even stride. She made out a flatter field of mown grass beyond the soil rows and, higher up on the hill, the first house – a McMansion with a caged trampoline standing in the sweeping backyard. The lights were off, but that did not matter. She would scream, break the door down, find a place to hide, snatch up a weapon, call for help. Maybe once the thing saw the house, it would give up.

  She chanced a look back. It had not given up. It was still there some fifty feet back. Running clumsily but, yes, she was certain, it was also learning, somehow improving its stride with each step.

  Goddamn it, you’re a runner. She had to be faster than this thing. Whatever it was, it was just a kid. Her breathing grew ragged.

  The house was less than a city block away now.

  Melanie was on solid ground and moving at full speed when she ran into the second barbed-wire fence. Her right leg passed through the gap between the top and middle wires, her waist slammed the top, and her left leg hitched into all three flatly, the spikes of steel puncturing and ripping into her abdomen and thighs, stringing her upside down as she folded over. She cried out, scissoring her legs, hands pulling at the bottom two wires to free herself. Barbed knots gouged her arms and left breast, ripping the strap of her sports bra before she finally tore free and flopped onto her back, her torso and every limb striped in agony.

  She was rolling onto her hands and knees to push herself up when the thing landed on her spine and cut her ear off with a swipe. The pain in her back was shocking, blinding. She was smashed to the ground, her mouth and nostrils filling with dirt. Something cold slashed the back of her neck deeply and one of her arms went numb. She struggled, rolled onto her back, and it was above her, thrashing, mouth open. She stabbed out at the face with her thumb, jabbing and screaming frantically. The first poke missed but the fifth or seventh went into the thing’s eye and her thumb came away wet as the child-thing wailed and fell off her.

  Pain ran in molten streams up and down her back and legs as she got to her feet and hobbled away, almost hyperventilating now, staggering with dirt in her mouth and eyes. She found her stride and in her pure panic the house seemed to meet her halfway. A flower garden, the patio. She pulled on the sliding glass door and fumbled her way inside, slamming and locking it behind her.

  ‘Help! Somebody help me!’ Great cramps tugged at her and she fell against the kitchen counter, driving a basket of fruit and a stack of bills to the floor. She retreated deeper into the kitchen, bleeding on marbled tile, eyes on the glass door. She groped around in the dark for a knife, anything sharp or heavy. She knocked the dish rack into the sink with a crash.

  ‘Oh God, oh God … help me!’

  Upstairs, footsteps and voices. The light fixture shaking above her. Then more footsteps, harder, thudding down the stairs.

  A light threw itself into the hall and the adjacent dining room.

  Melanie rubbed at her face and when she felt for her ear it wasn’t there and she tried to breathe but she couldn’t contain her panic. She shrieked, her words garbled.

  ‘Oh, God, please, help me, someone’s out there, it tried to kill me, call the police!’

  A woman in a sheer yellow bathrobe and silk under-garments appeared in the kitchen, staring at her in wonder, arms crossed over her stomach.

  ‘What did you do? How did you get in here?’

  Melanie slid to the floor, pointing. ‘Out there. Tried to kill me. Please help me … please … call help … not safe.’

  The bandy legs, boxer shorts, and pot belly of a man appeared behind the woman. He was short and squinting, hair standing up in wave of thick black curls. He rubbed his mouth and shook his head.

  ‘The hell is this? What’s wrong?’

  ‘… says there’s someone trying to get her,’ the woman said.

  He stepped past the woman and unfolded a pair of reading glasses. His nose bunched and sniffed.

  Melanie was crying with mild relief but they weren’t doing enough. ‘Lock the doors … you don’t understand … it’s not human!’

  ‘Mom? What’s wrong?’ A boy’s voice carried in from behind her but Melanie couldn’t see him.

  ‘Stay there, Alex,’ the woman said. ‘She’s hysterical. Dangerous. I don’t know what.’

  The man said, ‘I should call the—’

  The sliding glass door shattered, raining safety glass into the breakfast area. The little body came after it, bare feet walking slowly over the beads. Melanie screamed and tried to stand but her foot slipped and she fell back to the floor now slick with her blood.

  The man and woman stepped back and their faces went slack.

  ‘Oh dear sweet Jesus,’ the woman said.

  ‘There, now,’ the man said.

  The little figure darted into the kitchen and found the magnetic knife rack mounted above the marble back-splash and there was a zing. Adroitly he crouched in front of Melanie and ran a nine-inch serrated fillet knife in and out of her stomach with the speed and accuracy of a sewing machine.

  Melanie ruptured, saw black and red stars, bayed as if giving birth, and lost her breath as her face locked in a silent-movie scream.

  The child pivoted and ran to the now fully awake residents and impaled the father first, plunging the kidneys and carving down in looping oval scoops, then abandoned him for the mother. She slid around the corner and disappeared into the hall, and Melanie understood from the squealing and crashing sounds that filled the entire first floor he had brought her down too.

  The thing’s footsteps trampled up the stairs and the boy screamed and it might have taken pity on him for he was silenced quickly even though his father was still walking on his knees across the floor at Melanie, one hand reaching for his open back the other groping for her as if she could help him now, as if anything could save them.

  Melanie no longer had the strength to scream or get up or think of anything else. Her lap was wet and hot. The one that had pursued her emerged around the counter and looked at her and then
the man. It was just a boy, she saw now, a boy not yet ten, with no hair to speak of, no sign of emotion in his dark eyes, and he wasn’t even breathing hard. In fact he didn’t look to be breathing at all.

  He finished the man with a swipe across the throat, pulling the chin from above while straddling the larger body. Crimson fanned across the floor and the man fell into his jet stream, the arm that had been reaching for Melanie slapping the tile at her feet.

  The boy-thing dropped the knife. He crouched low and watched her. He began to crawl toward her. Hesitantly at first, testing the air and finding what it smelled to its liking, then hurrying into it as the animal inside rediscovered its earliest capabilities and most basic drive.

  Moving on a final surge of adrenaline, her body drawing on every resource to preserve itself, Melanie rolled away as the thing crashed into the refrigerator. She clawed at the slick floor and scrambled onto carpeting into a darker space that looked like a den and maybe a better hiding place but she didn’t get past the dining room.

  It was there, under the table draped in champagne linen, she swooned. Dawn broke across the Front Range and a cold draft swam inside her leg. There wasn’t any pain left, only the boy. He wants all of me, she thought, offering herself with the noble acceptance of the impala kneeling under the cheetah. Her will to resist collapsed under his bite and she thought, I wonder why. But as soon as she asked the question, her ancestral genetic code supplied the answer: In the kingdom they waste nothing, consume all. She wished he hadn’t found her, but in the end she understood him as clearly as she understood her own history.

  Then he was getting into places she had never known, taking and taking and bathing in her, until Melanie Smith and all of her appetites were no more.

  47

  Amy had no idea what was so urgent that she had to drive to Whole Foods at nearly nine p.m. on a Tuesday night, and she cringed when she saw the glowing green sign across the Mapleton Center’s parking lot. She hated shopping here. Ever since Whole Foods had become Whole Paycheck (ho ho! though not so funny now that it was true) and she had reverted to buying donuts and sugar cereals at the regular grocers, she couldn’t help feeling like a traitor amongst the Organic Reich every time she set foot inside the store.