Earl was down on one knee, still grinning, though his eyes were filled with tears.
“Tell me what you did, Earl. Tell me what the fuck you did to your wife and how it felt when you were doing it,” Louis said, needing to rub the old man’s face in the stink he had created. “C’mon, tell me all about it.”
Earl was blubbering now. Just beside himself with guilt and anguish and Louis actually found satisfaction in that because he wanted to see them all like that, down on their knees feeling the pain of their actions. And particularly Michelle. The woman he loved. The woman who had betrayed him now in ways Louis himself could not even begin to catalog.
Jesus Christ, you idiot! She’s sick! They’re all sick! You can’t blame them for it any more than you can blame an alcoholic for hitting the bottle or a junkie for sticking a needle in his arm! Sick! Sick! Sick!
Louis knew it. He knew it was true, but it wasn’t buying beans with him now. Not after what he’d seen. Not after what he’d experienced. Not after what his own goddamn wife had done to him. Finally he sighed. “I’m sorry, Earl. Really I am. Tell me what happened. Take your time.”
It took some time, all right, but Earl did. He opened the flue and all the heat and smoke and suffering blew out of his soul. It had been itching in the back of his skull for hours, the insanity, the need to run free like an animal, the dire compulsion to act out his most debased fantasies and urges. He refused to tell Louis what these were, but Louis could just imagine. There’s nothing more sordid and filled with crawly things as the human subconscious mind, that pit of fears and desires, wants and needs, repressed feelings and anxieties that the rational, conscious mind will simply not allow to be expressed. Louis understood what Earl was saying, because it was much the same thing Macy had told him. Earl said it was caused by a gene. Regardless, it first infected the subconscious, releasing images and ideas and primal wants, flooding the mind with them, and by that point, such things as inhibition and restraint no longer existed. The infected became, essentially, an animal with a human brain, though highly degraded, primitive. It had taken complete charge of Earl as he talked to Louis over the hedges. Maureen’s shouting had acted like some sort of trigger and there was no turning back. He hit Maureen, put her down. Kicked her and kept kicking. She was old, she was frail. She should have been dead, but she wasn’t.
“So I kept hitting her,” Earl said, his eyes wide in the moonlight coming through the window. Like mirrors reflecting the awfulness inside his head. “But she wouldn’t die, Louis. She just wouldn’t.”
“Take it easy, Earl.”
He uttered a cold and sterile laugh. “Oh yes, take it easy. How can I take it easy, Louis? How can I possibly take it easy? She wouldn’t die! She wouldn’t die so I went into the garage and got a hammer. You know what? I remember doing it, I remember wanting to do it. Can you understand that? No, you can’t. You can’t understand or know what it was like, Louis! I went and got that fucking hammer and I was whistling the whole time! Whistling! Like I was going to fix the back door! When I got back there, when I got back to her—”
“You don’t have to do this, Earl.”
“Oh yes, I do! I got back there and… and she was gone! She had dragged herself around the side of the house! I followed the blood trail and when I found her, found her curled up and bleeding, I bashed her goddamn brains in! I kept swinging and swinging and I never wanted to stop! I liked it! I loved it!”
Louis was feeling sick to his stomach now. Yes, he’d seen his share, but this was so much worse. So intimate. A peak into the mind of a lunatic. He thought if he looked deep enough, he might see something in Earl’s eyes that would validate what was in his head. Something looking back at him and grinning.
Earl was kneeling on the floor, rocking back and forth, just devastated by what he had done. “But you don’t know the rest, Louis, you don’t know what it was like.”
“Please, Earl. Stop this.”
But Earl shook his head. “It got her too, Louis. It got in her head and she was just as loony as I was. When I found her there, around the side of the house, she laughed at me! She fucking laughed at me! Started saying all the terrible things she’d always wanted to say to me! And then, and then she…”
Earl broke down into tears and Louis went to him, tried to put a hand on his shoulder, but the old man just batted it away.
“I killed her because I had to! And because she wanted it!”
Louis sat back down. “What do you mean?”
Earl uttered that awful, bitter laugh again that maybe wasn’t insane, but was living right next door. “I mean she wanted me to! After she said those things, something snapped in her, Louis! Just snapped! It was a violation of everything that dear woman was! She couldn’t live with it! So… I killed her! I killed her because she begged me to do it! Begged me to smash her head in!”
Louis could say nothing to that.
He was speechless and simply worn out by all of this. Earl sobbed and shook and eventually the tears just went away and he was silent, just silent. Not even moving. Not doing anything but dying inside.
“When did you come out of it?” Louis finally asked.
“Before… earlier… I don’t know. It just fades away a little at a time. And now I’m sane, I’m perfectly fine, aren’t I?”
“It wasn’t your fault, Earl. Not really.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Louis. Please don’t do that.” He pulled himself up and sat back on the recliner. “Anything but that. I’m like the others now. A killer. I’m nothing but a killer…”
70
The pack waited patently on the hillside.
In the moonlight, their bodies reticulated with bands of mud-brown, blood-red, and midnight blue like jungle serpents, they were nearly invisible. Only their teeth gleamed in the moonlight, their staring eyes. A slight breeze was carrying the smell of prey, the delicious odor of live meat, and a ripple of excitement ran through the pack.
Down below, in a tree-lined hollow at the edge of what had once been known as Lower Fifth Street, a group of prey had hidden themselves away. They thought they were safe from the things that stalked the night. They were wrong.
The Baron examined the gleaming edges of his weapons—the K-Bar knife, his hatchet, his spear, and his machete which was really just the razor-sharp blade from a paper cutter with a handle at one end. They pleased him. Their edges caught the moonlight, held it. Touching the necklace of ears at his throat, he made a grunting sound under his breath.
The pack rose from the grass.
They were his children. They surrounded him, pressing up against him, smelling the raw blood-stench of brutality that he wielded like a weapon. It made them feel strong.
Without a word, the Baron slipped down the hillside with the others following him. He avoided the sparsely placed streetlights, haunting the shadows, becoming the shadows, sliding through their ebony depths like a snake skimming a pond.
There were three houses and he broke his pack into three hunting bands, each led by his fiercest warriors.
It was time.
Letting out the wild cry of a wolf, he charged through the first yard. He came to a locked door, but it was flimsy and he kicked it open, his band rushing in. Inside, there were lights and screams. His hunters had found a woman and two children cowering. They impaled them with their spears, hacking them with hatchets until patterns of blood were sprayed up the walls and spattering the ceiling.
A man lay dying on the carpeted floor in a pool of his own blood.