The People Next Door Read online

  ‘It makes you wonder,’ Render continued, standing, pacing the room. ‘When the living see the dead, we call them ghosts. But when the dead see their own kind, when the dead see their victims, what do we call them? What do you call yours, Mick?’

  The light in the room seemed to dim. Mick felt funny inside, and then he felt nothing at all, as if his physical sensations were only memories.

  ‘It’s over,’ Mick said softly.

  ‘It’s only beginning,’ Render said. ‘Eugene and Virginia Sapphire are not over. You saw them. Were they behaving like the good little dead senior citizens they’re supposed to be? Or were they … something else?’

  The closet door opened then, and Troy turned, raising his Maglite. But it was too late for him. Eugene and Virginia came forth, healing and bleeding and hungry, and it was too late for all of them. Oh, Amy, I’m so sorry I left you alone. I should have taken them out myself.

  ‘Which one of you was it, Mick? Can you even keep track of your family any more?’

  Mick felt trapped inside a box. He couldn’t breathe. He felt as though he were having a heart attack. He placed a hand over his chest and felt nothing but a deep ache spreading into his limbs. His heart did not beat. His lungs did not fill. His body was so heavy. He was so very tired. He was always tired now, except when he was fighting to preserve –

  Render stopped pacing and hovered above him, eyes alight. ‘We breathe as if by habit. We sleep with open eyes. We can barely stomach ordinary food and we are always hungry. We bleed without purpose and our hearts beat only in memory.’

  ‘No,’ Mick said. ‘You’re sick, a parasite.’

  ‘And you’re running out of time!’ Render yelled. ‘I can’t keep cleaning up after you. It’s time to work together and increase our numbers or we are headed for extinction!’

  ‘You don’t know us. You have no right …’

  Render said, ‘How long do you think you can continue to operate in this town before someone sees you the way I have seen you? Eric Pritchard and Jason Wells, cut down like trees in the forest. Who was there to hear them scream?’

  We walked into the woods together, all dressed in black. We’d followed the Honda in Amy’s Passat, then parked up the road from the turn-off, covering the car with pine branches. The children did not ask questions, only followed their parents, their instincts awakening as they trekked deeper into the hills. The silence between us as what we were about to do stirred our hunger. I pointed up the hill and separated from them as I took the road and they flanked the boys in the gully. I looked back one last time at my son’s face and saw a kind of frightened wonderment and, beneath that, predatory intensity.

  ‘Officer Terrance Fielding of the Boulder Police Department,’ Render said. ‘What was happening in your restaurant after hours, Mick?’

  I crouched before the bar’s refrigeration unit while Terry droned on and on about the missing dentist. I saw white, and I changed. I turned and rose, finding the baseball bat under the bar and bringing it up and around so fast Fielding never had time to pull his gun. The blow staving in the temple as the cop spun sideways and flopped to the floor. I rushed around the bar to finish it, thud thud thud, the wood striking the skull. Dragging Fielding into the kitchen to find Carlos my chef and Jamie my best server watching me, the blood draining from their faces. Carlos going for the door as Jamie screamed, but they didn’t get past the hanging rack of skillets before I caught them. Quick bites along the necks. The long night of sitting with them, waiting for them to resurrect.

  ‘Dr Roger Lertz and his mistress, Bonnie Abrahams, whose bodies were never found. Why did Amy take the boat back out after I had already pulled you out of the water? When did you get to them? Before or after lunch? Did you take them alone or with your entire family? What was it, envy? Did he provoke you?’

  Kyle was excited by the sight of blood. All of us were excited by the prospect of blood. We turned back to fetch the ski, then trolled in the afternoon sun, coasting up on Roger’s vessel before the dentist even knew we were there. I boarded first, opening the cabin door, seeing Bonnie in there with her broken nose.

  ‘It was an accident,’ Roger said. ‘She slipped, Mick. Tell him, Bonnie.’

  Bonnie was crying. ‘You bastard. Don’t touch me! Get him away from me!’

  Roger lunged, calling her a lying bitch, and I stepped in to separate them, Roger fighting back, fighting back and losing. Amy and the kids boarded to join me, breaking a bottle over Roger’s head and then jagging him across the throat while Bonnie screamed at us, a free for all until the berth was packed with bodies thrashing against one another.

  The swimming after, to wash away the blood. To cleanse. To forget.

  I dropped my family off on the dock. Silent, mutual understanding between me and Amy: You have to go back and clean it up, clean it all up, Mick. She waited and waited for me to erase all evidence, throwing the bodies overboard, and then I slipped, knocking my head against the gunwale, falling into the lake.

  How many hours was Roger underwater before he revived? How did he spend his hours waiting for dark to fall, until it was safe to come back and warn me about our new neighbors?

  ‘And why do you keep returning to the lake?’ Render continued. ‘The swimming. The others couldn’t stay away from the water, either, as if that well was still calling them, trying to bring you all home. Myra Blaylock. You must remember her.’

  Myra’s bronze minivan exiting the lot, Amy’s wagon emerging from the shadows with its headlights off to follow her. I turned away, lying to myself, even after I returned home that night to find her Passat missing, the guest room empty.

  ‘She was your lover before any of this started. She visited your restaurant and was never seen again. The boys in the parking lot. I watched them be destroyed myself, and I have a good bit of it on video. Would you care to see the footage? If you watch closely, you can actually see the moment of change. The rage comes over you and you turn, rising from the ground with the strength of five men.’

  I was blind with rage, seeing spots, my blood roaring, glands seldom utilized sent into battle. Despite what should have been a broken femur, a shattered ankle, a paralyzing black-out concussion, I got back up, throwing them off as I sprang to my feet and the pain-obliterating rage cut through my fog and sent me into an ecstatic fury.

  ‘No? Then how about this?’ Render went to the table, opened a box, and removed a rubber swim cap. White, with a blue Speedo logo, smeared with dried blood. He flapped it in front of Mick’s face and dropped it in Mick’s lap. ‘Do you recognize that? Your daughter likes to swim, yes? It protects her hair and disguises her rather nicely. I found it at that house off of Eagle Trail, where Melanie Smith took her morning runs. Melanie was last seen at your daughter’s birthday party, but I cleaned her up. Melanie and a family of three. Hunted down by a nasty little blonde monster. There are more, people close to you. What is happening to them, Mick? Why does everyone who crosses you and your family wind up in pieces? How much longer can your family survive without protection? Where does the evil go? The Percys lost control early, but the other families worked with me and learned how to integrate their Gift. I’m offering you fortress and fortune to join us for the coming change, but you have to do your part. You have to do your part!’

  Mick shoved Render away and stood. His fury was back, as all-consuming as it had been in the parking lot the night he was attacked. He was going to kill his neighbor, put an end to it all right here once and for all so they could go back to the way things were. He opened his mouth to tear into Render and someone upstairs started screaming hysterically.

  58

  Amy was studying Cassandra’s beautiful face, the fine blue veins beneath her cheeks that touched the corners of her mouth, when the hostess’s eyes shifted abruptly behind her sunglasses, registering trouble.

  Kyle shouted, ‘Briela, no!’

  Amy turned and spilled her wine, the red falling in nearly suspended blobs as the afternoon slowed with t
he hyper-clarity of impending trauma. In the final split seconds before everything changed, Amy felt the wine splashing on her foot and glanced down to see the red there staining her sandals, dripping from her toes.

  The night she first met Cassandra, on the patio, when her strange new friend stepped on the wine glass. Amy bent over with a broom in one hand and a dust pan in the other, kneeling on her flagstone patio, leaning down with a hungry moan, tongue flicking, first on the stone and then tasting the sweet copper of Cassandra’s blood. Lapping it up like an animal, every last drop, until the stone was clean. She thought of the orange cinnamon rolls, how she retreated into some darkened corner of her mind where Amy Nash could continue living as she always had while the other one, the hungry beast inside of her, came forth.

  The wine splashed around her feet.

  Amy looked up.

  Life as they knew it ended.

  There was a flash of blonde hair, her daughter in motion, running full speed and in the same blur a tremendous banging of metal, the sound of cymbals crashing.

  Briela was looking over her shoulder at Adolph when she collided with the Weber kettle. The entire bag of coals were now, to a briquette, at their white-hot cooking prime. Briela tripped over the tripod legs and sprawled between the toppled grill’s basin and flipped lid, rolling in dusty clods of red-white charcoal that sank into the skin of her chest, neck, right cheek and arm. Her beautiful blonde hair singed and flamed to life, her blouse cratered and smoked. The flesh over her ribs and shoulder blackened, rippling and curling, and great blisters of pink swelled and opened around her collar, up the side of her face.

  And in the midst of her own private inferno, Briela did not scream or cry out, only blinked, her mouth working at sounds that refused to come, her beautiful blue eyes large and sky bright. She was frightened, Amy saw, but not of what had happened. She was terrified of what it meant for them, what would happen now.

  She knew, Amy thought. She’s not crying because she’s known all along and she’s been trying so hard to be a good girl, to conceal it the way we all have.

  For a moment, time elasticized beyond all reason, no one moved. Amy was rooted by the broad daylight reality of it. Cass stood by, her expression dull, eyes unreadable behind her glasses, while before them Briela rolled in the fire, thumping side to side like a small mammal caught in a trap. She used her good arm to prop herself up and patted the small flames at the bib of her new overalls.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ she reassured them, a child afraid of being spanked. ‘I didn’t mean to, Mommy. It was an accident.’

  ‘For the love of God,’ Ingrid screeched behind them, running from the house with a towel, breaking the spell. They used her to watch us, Amy realized. Convinced her to help and now Ingrid was with them, part of this day. The day of our intervention.

  And then there was only her love for her daughter, Amy’s undying love for Briela. It did not matter what they had become or what happened next. Her daughter needed her. Her daughter, who would never be an adult, would always need her.

  Amy sprang forward at last, but Ingrid got to Briela first, clobbering the girl with the towel. Amy’s feet, shod with designer strappy heels, slid on the patio and she fell and rolled among the coals but felt no pain. She crawled and reached for Briela but Ingrid was already pulling the thrashing girl away.

  The towel covered the face and most of the body, but Briela’s right arm was flung to one side, stirring dumbly on the stone like a lizard’s amputated tail. For a moment Amy was sure it was no longer attached, but when Ingrid lifted Briela the arm came up with the rest of the bundle and folded against their sitter’s body, leaving a streak of black and red across the white stone patio.

  ‘Call an ambulance!’ Kyle shouted, in denial. ‘Call 9-1-1!’

  ‘It’s all right, Kyle,’ Cass said with cool authority. ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Give me my daughter!’ Amy screamed.

  Ingrid turned, cooing into the girl’s ear as she backed away from Amy. The small body writhed against her breast and the small feet twitched at Ingrid’s thighs. Psychological reflexes for dumb limbs.

  ‘Ingrid, give her to me,’ Cass said.

  ‘What are you going to do with her?’ Ingrid said as Cass walked toward her. ‘Stay away. All of you, keep away from her. You’re sick. She needs help!’

  Amy screamed again. Briela’s head lolled over Ingrid’s shoulder.

  ‘Mom!’ Kyle was wailing, fumbling Egg. ‘Where’s Dad? What’s going on? Where’s Dad?’

  June moved alongside Kyle and took the device away, mumbling to him urgently. Kyle stared at his girlfriend with pleading panic but the look in her eyes stopped him and he settled into a numb daze.

  Ingrid continued backing away from Amy and Cassandra.

  ‘Give her to me, Ingrid!’ Cass said. ‘You don’t have any idea what’s happening.’

  Amy wailed at both of them. ‘What did you do with my husband? Give me my daughter!’

  ‘Stay back!’ Ingrid backed off the patio, into the grass. ‘Hold still, Briela, hold still, baby, it’s not so bad. I’ll take care of you, I promise.’

  Amy screamed a third time.

  Briela squirmed in Ingrid’s arms, and Ingrid wrestled her under control. She turned her face into her nanny’s neck.

  ‘Be careful, Ingrid,’ Cassandra warned. ‘Calm down, Amy. I told you this was coming. Everything’s going to be fine but first we need—’

  Ingrid gasped and let go of Briela but the girl clung to her, biting into her throat. The first bellowing scream was cut off and there was a sucking-tearing sound as Ingrid fell backward in the grass. Briela thrashed on top of her, shaking her head like a dog with a pheasant. Blood fountained up onto the back of Briela’s burned hair and sprayed the lawn.

  ‘Briela, stop! Stop, stop, stop!’ Amy screamed, running in and taking the girl by the waist, pulling but unable to separate her from Ingrid’s neck.

  Beneath them Ingrid’s eyes rolled back and her mouth overflowed with blood that bubbled at her teeth.

  Behind them June started screaming. Kyle fell into a lawn chair, stunned.

  Amy pulled with one arm and slapped Briela’s back and head with the other, until the girl released the dying sitter and turned on her mother, teeth gnashing. Amy caught one of her daughter’s arms and the girl snapped mindlessly, cutting into her forearm twice before Amy was able to fall on her, pinning her to the grass, her nostrils filling with the scent of burning pork ribs, her mind recoiling in disgust even as her stomach growled in hunger.

  Vince emerged from the house at a fast walk, glancing around with alarm but not panic – until he saw Ingrid on the lawn. Ingrid twitching, the life pouring from her. She coughed and her throat leaked a while and then she was still. Render turned away, looking at his children, his wife, and their guests.

  Sobbing, Amy clutched her daughter and pushed herself up, the two of them stuck together in blood and melted flesh. Adolph watched Briela as Amy carried her away from them. He seemed torn between sympathy and excitement, wanting to see more.

  Mick followed close behind Vince. Amy would never forget the look on his face as he noted the fallen grill and the mess of Ingrid on the lawn and his daughter in his wife’s arms. It was not surprise or fear. It was a soldier’s hardened gaze, the look of a father who has already buried three sons, the cold determination of a man who beholds ultimate horror and finds himself quite up to the task.

  ‘Take her home,’ he said. ‘Now, Amy. Go home.’

  ‘I have medical equipment,’ Vince said in a hoarse whisper, not looking at any of them but reciting lines he had been rehearsing. He cleared his throat. ‘Ingrid’s going to be okay. We can treat her here. She looked to both our families as her own, and now we will treat her as our own for the rest of her days.’

  ‘Stay away from my family,’ Mick said to Vince. ‘Amy, go home now. We’re all going home.’

  ‘Amy, stay,’ Cassandra said.

  ‘You don’t know
what’s at stake.’

  ‘You don’t know how bad it’s going to be,’ Vince said to Mick and Amy. ‘You don’t have to be afraid any more. We are connected to the other families and our time has come. You won’t make it on your own. This is the only way.’

  ‘Kyle!’ Mick barked, shaking Kyle from his catatonia. ‘Do as I say, son. Go with your mother.’

  Warily, the boy went to his mother. Amy squeezed Briela to her breast as her husband and son closed around her.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ Mick said to Vince. ‘If you follow us it will be the end of all of you. The very end.’

  The Nash family turned and headed toward home.

  ‘It’s not over,’ Vince said as Cassandra and their children came to stand with him. ‘I won’t let you jeopardize everything I’ve worked for, Mick. The others are waiting. You have until midnight and then we’re coming to finish it. We’re all coming for you.’

  Behind the Render family, the grass at Ingrid’s feet began to stir.

  59

  After having her bath, where her father had rubbed away the flesh that could not be saved and bandaged the seeping patches around her arm and cheek, Briela was as close to sleeping as was possible. The worst of the burns were already puckering, tightening in delicate pink strands and regenerating in smooth patches, the infection healing her as it had healed them all three years ago.

  Mick unclogged the drain while Kyle made a circuit of the house, locking every door and window, then ordered Kyle to stay in Briela’s room, guarding her until Mick and Amy had decided what to do.

  Amy did not emerge from the master bathroom until the sun was down. Mick had heard her in there, sometimes crying, sometimes making the sickness sounds. She stayed in the shower far longer than was necessary to wash away the blood. It reminded him of the showers they had all taken the first night, when the change came over them and turned them inside out, not speaking or even able to look each other in the eyes as they struggled to come to terms with the changes in their bodies. The showers they all took at odd hours to wash away the evidence of their feedings. The showers that had become a private ritual between the glimpses of what they were and the lives they were forced to carry on. He knew tonight would be worse for her, now that everything had been exposed and the spotlight of shame was fresh upon them. He had to keep them all together now. Together they would survive. Without each other, without his wife and children, he would be condemned for eternity.