The People Next Door Read online

  Mick felt a sadness and pity for the man. All at once he felt guilty for severing the friendship in a cowardly way, by cool temper and years of neglected invitations to parties, blatant shunning in public places. By all accounts, the man had spiraled into addiction and familial despair, and all through it Mick had shed not one ounce of empathy for him. A real friend would have told Roger to his face that he was out of control, behaving like an asshole, and that he needed to get his shit together for his own health and for the sake of his family.

  ‘I’m sorry, Roger,’ Mick said. They should have reached Boulder Municipal Airport by now, but he saw no gliders or the fence or the runway. Apparently there were entire pockets of land back here that Mick had driven by a thousand times growing up but never explored. He felt like crying. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Roger said without slowing or looking back. ‘What for?’

  ‘I should have been there. I could have done something for you.’

  ‘There’s nothing you could have done for me,’ the dentist said. ‘What do you think you could have done?’

  ‘I should have been kinder to you on the lake, and the other times.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Roger said. ‘But in your own way, you did save me. I’m free of all my addictions. Now it’s my turn to help you.’

  Mick was frightened beyond his adult understanding of fear. Something terrible was out here. Roger was leading him to some awful intersection of knowledge and possibility, a place where the ground opened up and showed you the eventual, final future, a place where worms fed on dead prairie dogs and dried-up birds and gray-muzzled raccoons who died without anyone to comment on their departing souls, where there were no pretty flowers or fond memories, only the absorption of the decaying carcass into soil.

  ‘Where are we? Roger?’

  The dentist did not respond. Mick hurried, head down for a while, and when he looked up again Roger was standing against a white wall that extended hundreds of feet in either direction. It was his new neighbor’s security wall, and the house stood lightless on the other side. What should have been a walk of only three or four minutes and covered less than an eighth of a mile had taken an hour or more. The house seemed to tilt toward him, leaning like a parallelogram, a shadow of itself.

  My demons caught up with me. Soon yours will too.

  ‘Who are they?’ Mick said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Roger said, and in the dark his eyes were soft, almost childlike. ‘But they are very interested in you and your family. They have been searching for a long time and now they are here. They want to be your friends, but they aren’t anybody’s friends. They will do anything to get what they want. They use other people, make them do horrible things.’

  ‘They did this to you,’ Mick said.

  ‘What happened to me has already happened,’ Roger said, his tone suggesting that he did not like to be reminded of his condition. ‘It is no longer important. This is about you.’

  ‘I don’t understand. None of this makes any sense.’

  ‘True, but it’s happening. They found you, Mick. If you’re smart, you’ll get away, move, take your family some place far from here and hope they lose interest.’

  ‘I can’t leave,’ Mick said. ‘This is our home. The restaurant …’

  The dentist took what was supposed to be a deep breath, his face creasing with sadness. ‘Then there’s only one other option for you.’

  ‘What?’ But he did not really want the answer.

  ‘Kill them. Kill them in their beds, destroy them, before they come for you.’

  ‘This isn’t real,’ Mick said. ‘I can’t accept it.’

  Roger shook his head slowly. ‘It’s survival, Mick. If you don’t put an end to them, they will infiltrate your lives and break you down and your family will spend the rest of your days in a living hell. I promise.’

  Roger turned and trailed his fingers along the rough stucco. Mick watched him shamble along the length of it and turn the corner, disappearing on the south side.

  ‘Roger?’

  The dentist did not answer. Mick walked to the corner and peered around, but the field was empty. Roger was gone.

  Mick stood alone in the darkness, a hundred questions in his mind. What was he supposed to do now? He turned in a circle and saw only deep black rolling land in all directions – except for this white wall. He couldn’t see his own house, which was supposed to be just a couple of acres behind him. He made his best guess and started walking in that direction, feet cold, everything cold, shivering.

  When he had gone only half a dozen paces, a sound brought him to a halt. Low voices. Urgent mumbling, and then whining. A girl was whimpering, on the edge of hysteria, and someone older was talking to her, whispering, telling her to stay quiet.

  Mick turned and stared at the wall, the large house looming behind it. The noises were coming from the other side of the fence. The girl was hiccupping with grief, keening softly. Briela.

  His daughter was over there, on the other side.

  ‘Daddy?’ she said. ‘I’m scared. I got lost and I can’t find my way back home. Please, I just want to come back. I promise I will be good—’

  Briela gasped and was silenced.

  Mick ran toward the wall and jumped, reaching over the top and pulling himself up as his feet paddled against the rough surface. He was halfway up when his feet slipped and his knees slammed into the stucco grain, scraping skin there and on his elbows as he dragged himself upward. He got his hips over the flat top, and rolled, twisting as he fell down into the yard. He landed on his feet and staggered to one side, catching himself with one hand, his skinned knees burning with rash.

  ‘Briela? Daddy’s here, sweetie—’

  But she wasn’t near the fence, not in either direction, and the rest of the yard was one great field of grass that seemed to be expanding as he surveyed it. He searched the house’s many windows for his daughter, or whoever had her, but they were all dark. The house grew taller, enlarged, rearing back as if tilting on high stilts. The sight of it sent a spasm of vertigo through him and he groped for something to hold onto. Beneath him the ground shifted and for a moment he seemed to totter on the edge of the world.

  Where there should have been a yard of grass, a patio, or even a foundation, now there was nothing but a giant gaping hole, a drop-off that went on for hundreds of feet, a thousand, became bottomless. Mick swayed above it, feeling like a man on a balance beam. It seemed infinite, containing nothing, but the longer he stared, the more he could see. It wasn’t bottomless. The bottom was liquid, a mirror disc of silver and black reflecting the night sky.

  Laid out on this cold surface as if floating were three white figures, one larger than the other two. From this distance they looked like piano keys, flat white bars with thinner bars of silver-black in between. But they were shifting, moving, changing in some way, and soon he realized they were rising, coming up to meet him.

  The floor of the well rose like an elevator in a stone shaft and a cold draft blew up into his face, his hair. An awful butterfly sensation wound through his stomach and he couldn’t breathe. The surface wasn’t rising, he understood at last. He was falling. The cold wind sailed around him, and the squirming figures beneath him enlarged, magnified, resolved.

  They were his family members, white as Roger’s back had been, naked and dead. Their eyes were fleshed over and their mouths were open in the manner of infants mewling in the newborn wing of a hospital. But if that soft warmth was their beginning, this was their end. He knew they were dead, even as they writhed in agony, their bodies animated by unholy energies whose purpose was pure pain and endless chaos and the sucking of human souls.

  Amy. Kyle. Briela.

  They were suffering in a purgatory of lifelessness outside of time and he fell to meet them, knowing it was too late, he had been tricked, and they had fallen for his mistakes. His failures, his weakness, his sins. It was too late to save them, or himself. Mick screamed in everlasting despai
r as he slammed into the blackness.

  15

  Mick dozed in and out of the morning light, too comfortable to get up for another hour, until his lower back was stiff and throbbing. He forced himself to rise and made his way to the shower.

  Stepping under the rain spout’s hot spray, he felt strangely rested and upbeat, ready to move on from the disaster that was yesterday. He knew he was supposed to take it easy and avoid stress, Dr Amy’s orders, but he thought he would whittle away the morning until she left for school, then sneak by the restaurant for an hour or so, just to make sure everything was functioning smoothly.

  The hot water beat against his forehead, the steam opening his sinuses, loosening his shoulders. He was in less than a minute when his knees began to sting and spots around his elbows began to burn. He reached for the lever to adjust the temperature and froze. His mouth fell open in sigh of stunned remembrance. He rotated his left arm so that he could see his elbow.

  The scrape was the diameter of a baseball, with a comet streak of red up his tricep. His knees were also raw, one of them bleeding a pink trail down his shin, across the pebbled shower floor.

  Sleepwalking, it had to be, and yet Mick had never been a sleepwalker, not even as a child. He exited the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist, then walked the length of the hall, flicking on the lights to inspect the carpet.

  A single wet footprint waited for him outside his bedroom door. The blot of it had faded but was still visible in the low wool blend. He touched it with his hand. The dark spot was moist, if not wet. He stood and held his naked size ten over it, heel and toes hovering less than two inches above the gray outline. His foot was at least two sizes too small. This print belonged to a man with a size twelve, maybe a thirteen. Someone heavy, solid, maybe six-two or six-three.

  Kill them. Kill them in their beds, destroy them, before they come for you.

  Of course the water might have soaked in and spread, making the print appear larger than the foot that had made it. There were no other prints in the bedroom or hall. If Roger had actually been here, there would be more of them, a trail. Mick might very well have made this print less than a minute ago, when he was inspecting the hall.

  But then again, summers in Colorado were known to be very dry. Nights when Mick came home from work feeling hot and filmy, he often showered before bed, and then again in the morning, and the same towel would be nearly dry after hanging on the rack for only eight or nine hours. So it was impossible to say when this print had been made, and a person could go crazy thinking about such unprovable details. The worst nightmare you’ve ever had doesn’t make it more than a nightmare. The real world does not allow for things like he had experienced last night. Whatever had happened to the dentist, Roger and his warnings were the product of Mick’s traumatized subconscious, his mind’s way of working through the stress of his drowning accident.

  Such were the reassurances Mick supplied for himself as he dressed for work, pulling his jeans over his bandaged knees.

  PART TWO

  Close Encounters of the

  Neighborly Kind

  An empty belly hears nobody.

  ENGLISH PROVERB

  16

  Amy was crossing town on the Foothills Parkway in her Passat wagon when she saw the white hood in her side mirror and realized Jason Wells and Eric Pritchard were following her home from school. Half a mile ahead, the stoplight at Valmont turned red. The Honda gained as she let off the gas. If she coasted a while, maybe the light would change and she could speed up again without having to stop and look at them. What more did they want? Hadn’t they done enough? She tried to pretend it was a coincidence, then flushed with shame, then felt like crying, but refused to give them the satisfaction. And how far were they going to take this? Were they going to follow her all the way home? If so, then what?

  The light turned green. She pushed the Passat up to sixty and zoomed through the intersection. The Honda fell off a bit, but within half a mile had returned, racing up on her ass and swerving into the left lane. She tried to get a look at them as the car looped around her, but the windows were not so much tinted as opaqued. She dropped the Passat down to fifty and the Honda took the lead. This Civic had the same giant gray louver fin. It was them, no question. She gripped the wheel and slowed to forty as the Honda left her far behind.

  They aren’t really dangerous, she told herself. Get a hold of yourself. We’ve got too much to do to spend the rest of the day in a funk. She listened to her voicemail – Lowry, the coordinator from This Takes the Cake, about the design Amy had submitted. Deep Sea Wonderland in blue chocolate with white fudge frosting, preliminary bid: $320. It would be ready in time for the party, but Lowry had a few questions about the creatures and logistics. Did she want sea lions or walruses? In plastic figurines or sculpted frosting? I dunno, Lowry. I just don’t know.

  She merged with the Diagonal Highway tiredly, the long summer afternoon as oppressive as her To-Do list. She had yet to decide about the balloons, go to the party store for cups and napkins, follow up on the email chain of questions flowing back from the e-card reminders she had blasted out, and hit Grand Rabbits for more plush take-homes. Plus the groceries, but it was too early for that, the big day still ten days away.

  Cancel the party, a voice inside her warned. It was getting out of control before Mick’s accident. Now you have to worry about him too. It’s not too late.

  But it was too late. Things had been set in motion. The RSVPs were trickling in and if they scaled down now, it would only worry Briela about her father and the strength of the family in general.

  She reached Jay Road, turned right, and half a mile later her mailbox came into view. She turned into the long driveway and parked in front of the garage on the house’s east side. She sat motionless as the A/C bled out and the heat baked in.

  Go on, look again. Confront it, deal with it.

  She looked in the rearview mirror and the vicious graffiti on the wagon’s rear window jangled back at her in reverse, horror-movie-style red letters.

  STIT GOHTRAW

  She had left the high school annex today in the same mood as she had left the first three sessions: in a hurry, feeling dirty, wishing she had taken a part-time job as a cashier at Best Buy, anything but this. She had not looked at any of the students milling around in the parking lot-cum-smoking area. She could not understand why they lingered when they resented having to be there for summer school in the first place, and she couldn’t bear another glimpse into their bitter, listless, pimply faces. She had kept her eyes on the ground until the Passat’s Mojave metallic rear end entered her field of vision, looked up, and it hit her like a thrown cup of urine.

  WARTHOG TITS

  She knew immediately that Eric Pritchard and Jason Wells were the culprits. The skinny, smoke-reeking boys had been acting up the entire three hours of the morning session. When she finally snapped at them, after fifteen or so polite reminders to please pay attention, they had scowled at her from the back of the classroom and whispered conspiratorially.

  People’s evidence number two: when she twirled, scanning the parking lot to see if anyone had noticed it yet – her first instinct was to avoid embarrassment, not ascertain the perpetrator – they were already laughing. Standing just six spaces away, leaning against Eric’s hopped-up Honda (with its giant gray louver fin), smoldering Marlboros in hand, feasting on her reaction. Identified, they covered their mouths and fell into each other, guffawing, ‘Aw, damn!’ and ‘Ouch!’ But they did not run away or deny what they had done.

  They hovered at a safe distance as she scrubbed the glass furiously, but the wad of purse Kleenex failed to do so much as smudge the letters. They had used permanent markers, and there lay the smoking gun. She’d seen them in the halls last week, tagging lockers with their artless signs and calling cards. By then it was unbearable. Going back inside to track down Dick Humphries, the custodian, was out of the question. She’d be here another hour, and Dick’d probably e
njoy the dirty insult almost as much as Eric and Jason were enjoying it now.

  As their laughter reached its crescendo and began to fade into a morbid curiosity about what she was going to do next, Amy wanted to march over and remove the cigarettes from their mouths and plant the coals in their eyeballs. Instead she gasped like the schoolmarm she was becoming, chirped the power locks, and sped away.

  The saddest part was that she knew she wouldn’t do anything about it. She could sit them for detention, but she wasn’t getting paid enough to spend her summer afternoons making them read Great Expectations, and she doubted they could read. She had only the next four weeks to get through, eight more sessions, and then Eric Pritchard and Jason Wells would be free to make their disgusting jack-off faces at their teachers at Boulder High or September School, or at the guards at the Boulder County Jail – the eventual if not next stop on their descent.

  But it would only get worse as the weeks wore on. She had no experience with average high-school students, let alone the kind of metal shop ’n’ meth miscreants that were her charges this summer. She had taught grades three, four, and five, and taught them well, for eleven years. But it had been a bad (couple of) year(s) for the restaurant.

  To pick up some of the slack, Amy had used her background in human resources to wrangle her way into teaching Workplace Economics, the vocational technical program created to reward high-school kids who were also holding down jobs of at least twenty hours per week, and who were – due to their financial demands, sloppy grades, difficult home environment, or lack of discipline – at risk of not graduating. Successful completion of WorkEcon earned the kids fifteen credits, the equivalent of three regular semester classes; for Amy, an extra fifty-five hundred before taxes and health insurance. Her net take-home would be less than one mortgage payment. But it was something at a time when every little bit helped.