The Devil Next Door

34

“I don’t want to go crazy again,” Macy said as they pulled away from the house. “I don’t want to feel like that again.”

Louis licked his lips, wondering if he should ask what he needed to ask. “Was it… was it very bad?”

Macy just stared straight ahead, but didn’t seem to be so much looking out as looking in. She nodded her head slightly. “It was horrible. It was kind of blurry before, but now I’m remembering more. I mean, I knew what I did, I could recall it all right, but I couldn’t make sense of it.”

“But now you can?”

She nodded. “Yes, I can. I never liked Chelsea… that’s the girl I attacked… I didn’t like her then and I don’t like her now. She’s just a preppy, stuck-up bitch. I know I shouldn’t say that, but that’s all she ever was. She treated me like dirt. Always had. I never did anything to her, I never smarted off to her… nothing. But she always hated me, always had it in for me. She’s just one of those people, right? Oh, look at me, look at how wonderful I am. I’m popular and special so that gives me the right to turn my nose up at everyone and be a snotty, uppity witch. So, yeah, I guess I hated her. I think most kids do, except for the idiots in her little posse and all the boys that drool over her.”

“And you think the way you felt about her, that had something to do with it?”

Macy wrapped her arms around herself. “Yeah, I think so. Something in me always hated her, you know?”

Louis nodded. “I know, believe me, I know. Kids like Chelsea are nothing new, Macy. They’ve always been around, always treating other kids like shit. There were plenty of them when I was in school, too. Most of ‘em need a good kick in the ass or a good slap across the face, but they never get it. The social elite. Most of ‘em have money and think they’re better than everyone else. That kind of nonsense starts at home and if the parents don’t jump all over it when they see it, it only gets worse and worse and then what you have is a monster on your hands.”

No, Louis did not have kids of his own, but plenty of his friends did and he saw it first hand. Spoiled, demanding, snotty brats that became impossible teenagers. Parents usually spoiled kids out of love, but that was the wrong kind of love. They weren’t doing them any favors by letting them think they were better than anyone else and that the whole world simply existed for their convenience. Louis didn’t know Chelsea Paris—thank God—but he’d known plenty of others like her. Kids so wrapped up in themselves and their own fleeting teenage food chain, spoiled and bossy and whiny, that when graduation came and they were thrust out into the real world, they were totally unprepared for it.

You were the most popular kid in school, eh? Prom queen? Cheerleader? Varsity quarterback? You knew all the right people and moved in all the right circles?

So what?

Once you stepped out of high school, the world at large did not care. It did not exist to assuage your ego or worship you or hand you things on basis of who you knew and who you blew. All that snotty, selfish, uppity behavior came back to bite you in the ass.

Show me a snobby little teen princess, Louis thought, and I’ll show you a girl in for real trouble, in for a very rude awakening.

“Well, that’s Chelsea, all right,” Macy said. “A monster from hell. Her and Shannon Kittery and all the rest.”

“Kittery, eh? Her mom must be Rosemary Kittery. I went to school with her. She married Ron Kittery. Back then she was just Rosemary Summers. Great to look at, but with all the personality of a rattlesnake. Cheerleader, prom queen, the works. A petite little blonde with a big set of… ah, well the boys liked her. Ron Kittery was a stoner in school. Just a total waste. Rosemary wouldn’t even acknowledge his existence. Then she got out of high school and found herself in the real world. Ron’s mom and dad had money, Rosemary’s old man—Shannon’s grandpa—was broke. He was president of First Federal, but they lived way beyond their means and he started embezzling. He was caught, of course. They hushed it up, but this is a small town and everyone knew. So what was little miss prom queen to do? She pursued Ron until he finally married her. And now she’s turned out a carbon copy of herself in Shannon, I see.”

Macy allowed herself to laugh. “Petite, blonde rattlesnake with big boobs? Yup, that’s Shannon the magnificent.”

They shared a chuckle over that and Louis was surprised, and not for the first time, how parents often managed to duplicate themselves, good or bad, in their children. It was actually kind of scary, when you came right down to it.

Macy was silent for awhile, then she said, “That’s what it was about, Louis. That’s what it was really about. I know that now. I’d hated Chelsea for years. And something inside me decided enough was enough. It rose up inside me, only I couldn’t stop it. We all have crazy thoughts, but we don’t act on ‘em, do we?”

Louis nodded. “So you think that this… whatever this craziness is… it just plays on something already inside you? Lifts inhibitions? Maybe frees the beast within?”

“Yes!” Macy said, sitting up and startling Louis. “That’s it! I always maybe wanted to punch her in the face or something, but I didn’t. I kept those thoughts in the back of my head where they belonged. But this… whatever it was… it brought them to the front and instead of being able to say, no, you can’t do that, I was like, well, why not? Why not give that little witch what she’s been begging for?”

It made sense, this thing freeing all the darkness and black thoughts of the people of Greenlawn. Inhibitions neutralized, social constraints eroded, morals and ethics ground to ash… nothing left to stand in the way of your darkest, most repressed and dangerous fantasies. And when you yanked away things like civilization and morality… what was left? Just the malign shadowy side of the human animal, the barbarity and bloodlust and savagery which is our inheritance. We were animals… hunting and killing and raping, smashing anything or anyone that got in our way.

It was sobering, very sobering.

But the same dilemma remained: what was the vector, the mechanism which had infected those people? And why had it gotten to Macy and then released her?

Maybe Earl Gould wasn’t far from the truth. Maybe he was, in fact, absolutely correct.

God help us, Louis, but we will exterminate ourselves! Beasts of the jungle! Killing, slaughtering, raping, pillaging! An unconscious genetic urge will unmake all we have made, gut civilization, and harvest the race like cattle as we are overwhelmed by primitive urges and race memory run wild!

Louis found that he was sweating.

He was terrified.

Was this how it ended? In a primal fall? A new Dark Ages of savagery that threw the human clock back 20,000 years if not fifty or a hundred?

Louis did not dare repeat any of Earl’s theories to Macy. It was enough that he knew. More than enough. Earl. Good God, Earl. After the run in with Dick Starling, Earl and Maureen had not been out in the yard when Macy and Louis got out there to the car. And honestly, Louis just didn’t have the heart to go looking for them.

Macy was just staring at her hands now as they drove. “The thing was, Louis, I… I didn’t feel in control, you know? Maybe those thoughts were in my mind like they’re in anyone, but it wasn’t like I made a… conscious decision to set them loose. It was like being in a car and somebody else was at the wheel.”

Louis swallowed. “Did you feel like you were being… I don’t know… compelled somehow or controlled, something like that?”

She shrugged. “I guess. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was like something else was in charge. I know that sounds stupid, the Devil made me do it or something, but that’s how it felt. And when it went away, I just burst out crying. I was scared, really scared. It felt like I was possessed or something, being taken over. It’s dumb, but that’s how it felt.”

Louis sighed. “It’s not dumb, Macy. But it is disturbing.”

And it was that, all right. It felt like I was possessed or something, being taken over. That was merely Macy’s subjective impression, of course, but if Earl was right, if he was right, then this possession was not some fantasy like diabolic influence or even mind control exactly, but something inherent in the human condition. Something ancient and absolutely evil.

“I guess I don’t care what happens as long as I don’t go nuts again,” Macy said.

“Maybe you’re immune now,” Louis said.

“What about you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know why it hasn’t gotten to me. But maybe if it hasn’t, it hasn’t gotten to a lot of others, too.”

Maybe. He just hoped he was immune. For wasn’t it possible that if this was a genetic impulse of sorts, an ancient imprinting, that it might have been bred out of certain segments of the race or that it might malfunction in certain individuals?

He hoped so.

For the idea of becoming some primal beast was frightening. The idea that he might get “infected,” might become something like Dick Starling.

Because if that happened… what might he do to Macy?

Louis shook it from his head, trying to tell himself that Earl Gould was nothing but a crazy old crackpot whose brain was soft from too much research, too many crazy old books.

But he didn’t believe it for a minute…