The People Next Door Page 31

  I stared at them for I don’t know how long. I was beyond shock now. I was completely unmoored. They were so still and collective in their demeanor, I felt as though I were witnessing a ritual, that these people were waiting on a divine revelation, or for their cult leader to appear.

  ‘Do you see it?’ Bob whispered beside me.

  Of course I saw it.

  ‘No, not them,’ Bob suggested.

  What else was there to see?

  But then I did see it. The water. The surface of the pool was as he had described the water inside the cenote his son had fallen into. It was silver, twinkling and flashing like his arm had been. No light shone down on it – the moon that night was obscured by clouds – but the water reflected something, glowed like a thousand tiny dulled diamonds, scales on the back of a giant snake, writhing and shimmering, alive.

  They had taken to the pool, and taken it with them.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Bob said. ‘You can’t imagine what it feels like.’

  ‘You’ve been in with them?’ I whispered in disgust.

  ‘I don’t feel refreshed,’ Bob said. ‘I feel reborn.’

  The wind was still blowing and the waves were swishing and sighing not a hundred feet away. We were speaking softly. They couldn’t have heard us.

  Nevertheless, at that moment they began turning in unison, like they were all experiencing the same premonition or the queer sensation of being watched. They turned and looked up at us on the balcony. At first their faces were nothing more than expressionless dark spots in the darker night. But soon I could see faint spots of white, their eyes and teeth, and then more white, in the same places, and I realized they were grinning. They began to murmur and mumble unintelligibly and it did not make sense but they were clearly … aroused … by our presence.

  That is when I turned and ran away from them. I ran down the stairs of the Percy villa, out the front door, into the night. I ran blindly up the road and I don’t remember looking back, but I do remember them chasing me, walking after me, all twenty or thirty of them half naked and drained and maybe that was my imagination working on a boost of adrenaline as I had never experienced, but then again maybe it wasn’t.

  I crashed into our villa and woke my wife and our children. I told them to leave everything, throw on some clothes and get in the car. We had rented a Dodge Durango with four bald tires and a weak battery but it started. The tires slipped and squeaked on the wet road but we got out of there. I drove us to the tiny airport just a couple of miles away, but of course there were no planes available, not at a little after three in the morning. I was all but hysterical. The first ferry left at six but that was too slow and what if some of them decided to take the ferry with us? We purchased tickets for a puddle jumper leaving Vieques at 5:45 a.m. Whatever I had seen, whatever Bob had seen me run away from, I could not shake the feeling that he and the others would be displeased. That they wanted me to participate. That they would come looking for us.

  We needed a place to hide for the next two hours.

  I drove in circles, up and down the narrow streets of Isabel Segunda until I found the police station – and even then I debated stopping. Every minute that we lingered was another minute we were at risk of the infection, or another encounter with the infected. But I could not in good conscience just leave them to their own devices, possibly spreading it. I was certain it had changed them in some terrible way.

  I knocked on the door but the police station or small annex we found was deserted. We crossed the island and found another in Esperanza, also deserted. We searched these two small towns for a patrol car or officer on horseback but the island was asleep. No one walked the wet streets. I had left my phone at the villa and we had no other options. We went back to the airport. We would deal with matters from the big island, after completing what was only a twenty-minute flight.

  By sunset we were safely among the masses of travelers at San Juan International. I checked us into a chain hotel across the street. I told my wife the truth, of the infection from the well, sparing her the worst details but mentioning dozens of ‘victims’. We inspected ourselves and the kids, but, perhaps incredibly for me (for he had touched me at least five times), none of us displayed the symptoms that Bob had. We showered and scrubbed anyway, and dressed in new clothes purchased from the lobby gift shop.

  I called the police department and two officers met me in the lobby of the hotel. I forced myself to speak calmly in as plain a language as possible. I told the truth inasmuch as I could without making them think I was insane while also scaring them enough to ensure they sent manpower back to the island. I gave them the name of our villas and the address and said there was what I believed to be an infection or outbreak of some kind among the people renting units next door. I used the term buckets of blood, said six families had been sickened, some were possibly dead. In an effort to ‘cleanse themselves’ they had taken to the pool in the middle of the night, but many were not ‘coherent’. The ones I had seen were catatonic but upright, I explained.

  To my surprise, a detective on Vieques called me less than two hours later, just before we were to board our American Airlines flight at 12:45. We were in a food court in the terminal, seated at a crowded cafeteria-style restaurant. The kids were tired and sullen, but my wife and I were still filled with anxiety. The detective introduced himself as Javier Arguelles and he sounded every bit a professional officer who had taken my report seriously, not some Third World lackey who promised to look into things mañana.

  He confirmed my name and the address of the villa we had stayed in. He stated that he and a fellow officer of the Vieques policia had visited our abandoned villa as well as the six neighboring villas. He and his partner introduced themselves to the tenants (he would not confirm their names to me, though I had given the ones I remembered to him) and were granted permission to perform a search of all six villas. The families were not injured and did not appear to be ill, and all were friendly but expressed dismay at the inquiry. They claimed to have no idea who I was.

  No rooms with blood. No traces of any violence or of a cover-up. Just five families cooperating with what was sounding more and more like a crank call. Detective Arguelles asked me to repeat my story, and I did so before asking him to confirm that he had the right address and complex of villas. He did, but by now I was beginning to annoy him. I lost my temper and eventually the call was disconnected. I am not sure if Detective Arguelles hung up on me or if it was simply a dropped call.

  Perhaps they got to him.

  The airline announced that our flight was boarding and I saw no reason to stay. Whatever further inquires I decided to pursue, I could do so from home. We left Puerto Rico and our lives resumed, but I did not forget about that night or any of the things I had seen. The image of those people in the pool haunted me for many days and nights, and I lost a lot of sleep wondering what had become of the families. Had they gotten off the island, like we had? Had it changed them permanently, or was it a passing sickness? If they had survived, were they functional enough to return to their normal lives?

  The answer to those questions came nine days after we returned home to Colorado. My wife caught it first. Then my son, and very soon after, our daughter. I was the last to go, so I was the one who watched them bleed and writhe in agony. Twenty-six minutes was all it took to bring all four of us down. It happened too fast for any of us to call 9-1-1. By the time I thought of reaching for the phone, my wife was dead. By the time I realized my attempts to revive her had failed, the kids were gone. By the time I surfaced from the rapture of grief long enough to feel the fever spiking, my wife was rising from the bathtub.

  She cleaned up the children and locked them in the basement. She could not bear to look at them alone. She waited for me to come back, and then we began the discussion about how to deal with our new condition. We decided not to tell the children. Perhaps one day they would be ready for it, but not then, not that first night, or during that first endless week when
we all stayed in the house together, showering and showering and pretending we were ‘only sick with a terrible flu’. We did not leave the house for six days, but on the seventh night we were forced to leave.

  We were very hungry and the food we had in the pantry had done nothing to slake our appetites.

  Of course my wife and I fooled ourselves in more ways than one. The children knew how they were different, how we had all changed. But as we took our first meal together, as our eyes met over the first body we took there in the field off of Niwot Road, a high-school boy walking home late because he was too drunk to drive, we each understood that we now shared a tremendous secret. We each understood that this was a thing outside of the rest of our lives. We each understood that we would have to be very careful until we found a cure, or a way out.

  It occurs to me now, we never really left the island. We came home, but we have been stranded ever since. We understood a great many things about what it meant for all of us, but we did not talk about it. We never have. How could we?

  Sometimes it doesn’t seem real enough to bother.

  57

  ‘Tell me how you found us,’ Mick said.

  ‘We were there, of course. In the fourth villa.’ Render stood and began to pace the room, studying his art. ‘After it all went down, I did not know the first names of the other families, but I had their surnames and, more importantly, I knew Bob Percy owned a car dealership in Mt Horeb, Wisconsin.

  ‘Using a Yellow Pages Internet search, I phoned Bob at his dealership. It was a Friday morning, five days after we had returned. A receptionist transferred me and Bob answered in less than a minute. I recognized his voice instantly. He did not recognize mine, nor did he remember me when I introduced myself by name, nor through the recollection of what had happened.

  ‘“Buddy,” Bob Percy laughed, and it was the same laugh I had heard less than a week ago, “you sound like a nice guy, but I don’t have the foggiest dang clue what you’re talking about.”

  ‘“Vieques,” I insisted, clutching the phone. “Last week. I was in the villa next door. The well. The storm. Your neighbors …?”

  ‘“Via-what?” Bob said. “Where is that again?”

  ‘“In Puerto Rico,” I shouted. “Why are you bullshitting me?”

  ‘“You must be confused, sir.” And he was so genial. He was either an amazing actor or truly believing the words coming out of his mouth. He said, “I’ve never heard of Vieques, though I wish I had. My family and I have never vacationed outside of the fifty states. I wouldn’t mind taking a trip like that right about now. Hardly November here and already colder than frozen snot.”

  ‘“Your health problems,” I said. “I know all about them. You need a new hip, you have diabetes, and more than likely a heart condition.”

  ‘Bob said, “Ahhhh, okay, now we’re getting somewhere. See, now I know you got the wrong guy. I don’t have any problems like that and I have never felt better in my life.”

  ‘I argued. I pleaded and raged and calmed down again and Bob Percy, give him this, he was patient and polite, but he did not give in. I realized there was nothing more to accomplish over the phone. I was furious. How many Bob Percys are there in the world who live in Mt Horeb and own a car dealership?

  ‘I was in the process of purchasing a plane ticket to Madison six days later when my wife showed me the news item on MSNBC: Mt Horeb, Wisconsin family found dead in home. The media called it a heinous murder-suicide. People who knew the couple claimed they were such decent folks but yes, matter of fact, they had been having serious financial problems. That was the story, but I didn’t believe it.

  ‘The reason I did not believe it was because the Percy children, Tanya and Timothy, as well as Bob’s wife, Lynn, had been beheaded before someone moved Bob to the garage, doused him in gasoline, and set him aflame. Where the investigators saw a mentally unstable man under financial duress, I saw local townfolk, neighbors, someone who knew what an abomination they had become, coming for the Percys in the night, like villagers waving torches and pitchforks outside of Frankenstein’s last stand.

  ‘Two weeks later another item broke in the same area, this one concerning two high-school students – a sixteen-year-old boy and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend – from Dodgeville, Wisconsin. That’s a small town less than twenty miles from Mt Horeb. They had been missing and their parents thought they had run away together fifteen days earlier – they had disappeared just one day before the Percy massacre.

  ‘The girl’s Chevy Caprice was found in the woods near Yellowstone Lake, less than twenty miles from her home, covered with tree branches. A hunter stumbled upon it and though he was seventy-eight years old and hardened by farming life and two wars, he required medical attention from the shock of the discovery. The bodies inside had been stripped to the bone, devoured by something the likes of which this hunter had never seen.

  ‘I tracked down the other families through the rental agent who owned the villas. She was based in Seattle and knew nothing useful. From there it was not difficult to locate them. I bought a large map of the States and a box of red pins. I followed the local, state, and national news. The map began to grow clusters of the sort police use to triangulate a serial killer. The clusters matched the metro areas of each of the families. Disappearances, missing women and children who went for a walk or a hike and never came back. Two of my investigators connected the Greenwalds of Las Vegas to three beheadings in the Nevada desert thought to be the work of organized crime, the bodies desecrated by coyotes. A spike in disappearances from the casino hotels. It went on and on. The faces on the milk cartons changed.

  ‘For the next two years I became obsessed. I traveled, I surveilled, and eventually I introduced myself. I got close to and met with three of the families. The Robertsons of Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Weavers of Boise, Idaho. Both claimed never to have been to the island of Vieques and pretended to not remember me. All of the family members were in exceptional health. The Chavez family were back in Miami, but were increasing their travels to New York City to visit relatives there, where they had a greater population to blend into and poach from. I rescued them from a warehouse in Hoboken where they been living like animals, stockpiling victims. Even after I confronted them with the evidence of their nighttime adventures, they did not remember what had happened, and they did not know what they had become. Except, in a way, they did.You could see it deep down inside of them, buried like a history of incest.

  ‘Whatever it did to them, it not only has the power to heal, like it only temporarily healed Bob Percy, it created a dark other inside them that allowed each of them to carry on separate lives. Dahmer, Gacy, the Zodiac and Green River killers. All of the great hunters operated with separate personas. It’s how they got through their sloppy days.

  ‘I helped them get it under control. I established safe houses for the families, fortified compounds where they could keep a low profile until everything was organized. And I knew there had to be others. What if this thing could be harnessed at the source? Imagine the power of containment, the value of patenting, the government contracts, the number of lives this could save in combat theater, controlled manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry, a cure for heart disease, alzheimer’s, cancer …

  ‘I went back to Vieques, of course, making three trips in the eight months that followed that first trip. I searched every square inch of that island for the cenote, but I never found it. A small team of archeology students I paid to scour the jungle happened upon a blast site full of sand and rock near a beach that was being graded for new construction, but there was no well. Maybe the Navy caught on and filled it in. Maybe the local authorities covered up one of the last great mysteries. But all that is history. Dying history. The world is changing and we have a lot of work to do.

  ‘What I am curious about is why you are so quiet. I find it strange you have not asked me the most important question, because there is a gaping hole in my account of what happened on that isl
and. What do you think, Mick? Did you see it? Do you see the black bottomless well in your world?’

  Mick did not respond for a long time. He was trying to see a way through this and the only available path was dark.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you want from me.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’ Render leaned forward. ‘The villas, Mick. A row of six. Six villas, six families. But I only mentioned five. The Greenwalds, Gomezes, Robertsons, Weavers and Percys …’

  ‘And the Renders,’ Mick finished. ‘You’re infected like the others.’

  ‘Such an ugly word, infected. We prefer evolved.’ Render smiled. ‘So that’s only six. You’re forgetting, Cass and I were hiding in the sixth unit, the one you never entered during your inspections with Bob Percy. There is still the matter of the seventh family, the one in the stand-alone unit. What happened to them? Who are they? What have they become?’

  Troy the security guard turned away and opened the master bedroom door. He stepped in, shining his light around. Into the bathroom, around the fireplace and bench seating area, across the neatly made bed.

  There’s nobody in here, Mr Render. What did you say you saw?

  I don’t remember, Troy. I get so confused these days. The timing of these things. It’s hard to keep track of the nights when you live like this.

  Why did you shut the door, Mr Render? Sir? I’m going to ask you to back away now and please exit the house.

  One of us was here already. Check the walk-in closet, Troy. I know they’re in here somewhere.