Animosity Read online

  “Go ahead and play dumb, horror man.”

  “How the hell did you get this number?”

  “Hope you enjoyed your sick little game while it lasted. ’Cause we’ve got a real scary story to tell you.”

  “Look,” I shouted into the phone. “I don’t know who the hell you are, or what the hell is going on, but I’ve had all I’m gonna take of this shit! I want it to stop right now!”

  His voice dropped to a lecherous whisper, so low it was nearly inaudible. “Halloween’s comin’ early this year, Short Eyes. Wait and see.”

  He hung up before I could say anything else.

  With a wild-animal roar, I threw the cell across the room, where it shattered against the refrigerator in an explosion of shiny black plastic.

  ***

  Against my better judgment, I turned on the television as soon as I entered the living room. I had to know what the voice on the phone had been talking about…

  I didn’t watch for long. I couldn’t. After just three or four minutes I turned the TV off again in disgust, and the remote control suffered the same fate as my cell phone.

  On the television, a middle-aged man in a beige suit stood on a street corner in front of a white-brick building that I thought looked vaguely familiar. From off-camera, swirling red and blue police beacons flashed like psychedelic strobe lights across his surroundings; reflected in his wire-rimmed glasses, obscuring his eyes every half-second or so. In the background, a siren whooped. A stern-voiced woman yelled, “Get back! I mean it! I’m not gonna tell you again!”

  The microphone in the reporter’s hand was labeled WKLS. Beneath him, a bold white caption at the bottom of the screen read: LIVE!

  “Investigators have cordoned off the scene for the time being, so we can’t get any closer,” the man on the television was saying. “For those who are just tuning in, another child’s body was found this evening in a dumpster behind Sunrise Plaza, on Orosel Boulevard. Though police have not released the decedent’s name, one source who asked to remain anonymous stated that the child was a female between the age of five and seven years old. Foul play is suspected, but authorities declined to comment on the cause of the victim’s death or on any possible connection to the recent Rebecca Lanning murder.

  “Residents of Harrison County will recognize Sunrise Plaza as the home of, among other businesses, the Haunted Planet Book Shoppe. The Haunted Planet, which you see behind me, sits less than two hundred feet from where this latest victim’s body was found. The Haunted Planet is a bookstore specializing in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. During the last five years, the store has hosted several successful book-signing events for local writer Andrew Holland, author of the best-selling horror novels Wolf Moon, Slow Burn, and House on Harding Street. In a bizarre coincidence, it was Holland who, just three weeks ago, discovered the body of nine-year-old Rebecca Lanning on a construction site not far from his home. No arrests have been made in that investigation, but Andrew Holland’s neighbors are demanding his silence be broken…

  “With that,” the reporter concluded, “I turn things over to Staci Gayle-Mathis, who has been covering another side of the Rebecca Lanning story. Staci is also live just several miles from here. Staci?”

  The scene cut to a different one then. A female reporter, this time.

  “Thank you, Rich,” she said. She was bathed in the bright glow of a news-camera’s light splitting apart the gathering dusk. She walked backward as she spoke into her microphone, her gait confident and effortless even in her high heels. Her hair was very curly, the kind of blond that came only in a bottle. She wore a pink ribbon pinned to the lapel of her burgundy dress—in memory of Rebecca Lanning, I assumed, and I wondered if she had purchased it down the road at Round Man Miller’s 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop.

  The word LIVE! continued to blink at the bottom of the screen.

  It only took me a second or two to figure out where this footage was being filmed. Where it was being filmed this very second…

  “Oh, no,” I said. My voice was a pitiful squeak. “Oh, no…”

  Staci Gayle-Mathis stood in the middle of Poinsettia Lane, directly in front of my house.

  The camera’s eye wandered from her photogenic features just long enough to zoom in on my home.

  The person behind the camera must have lain down in the road for the next few seconds, I assumed, as he or she perfectly captured during that moment a worm’s-eye view of my house. The intended result was effective, I had to admit. From this angle, 217 Poinsettia Lane no longer resembled the quiet domicile of a divorced father who just wanted to be left alone to write his books and pay his bills… now it had transformed into the sinister lair of someone who was surely up to no good in there. It reminded me of every generic cover to every generic haunted-house novel I had ever read (or written).

  Its windows were like eyes, leering out at a world it loathed and wanted to murder bit by bit.

  Even when the cameraman rose again, pulling back to a shot of Staci Gayle-Mathis standing in the foreground, my house slightly above and behind her, my goosebumps did not fade. There was something so surreal, dream-like, about viewing my house from a different angle at the exact moment I sat inside. It seemed strangely unfamiliar, like a place where I had once experienced a handful of pleasant memories but it had never truly been home.

  I could even see the flickering blue glow of a television through the drawn white curtains, and I was quite sure I even glimpsed a fuzzy gray humanoid shape—my own silhouette?—hunched inside there as well. That gave me a weird primal chill, as if I suddenly possessed the power to be in two places at once. As if I had stepped outside of my body to view myself from afar.

  I shuddered, listened to what the reporter had to say although I did not want to. Half of it I had already missed, thanks to a high-pitched buzzing that filled my skull and made my teeth ache.

  “. . . meanwhile, the novelist’s neighbors are furious over what they consider a clear case of the Harris City Police Department ‘dragging its feet,’ if you will. Many on this formerly peaceful street claim that the authorities have blatantly neglected to do their job. I spoke with several Poinsettia Lane residents here tonight, and I could feel the anger and sense of sheer hopelessness that weighs upon the hearts of each of these people—many of whom are parents themselves—in the wake of this terrible, ongoing nightmare. Here is an example of a neighborhood shaken to its core, a community that is no longer sure who it can trust, as nearby lurks a man who not only makes his living creating tales of murder and madness, but who, in February ——, pled guilty to—”

  That’s when I turned off the television.

  I couldn’t take anymore.

  When would it end, this carnival of madness? When would the vultures decide that enough was enough?

  I hated Staci Gayle-Mathis with every fiber of my being. She was the enemy. She represented every yellow journalist who had caused all of my problems in the first place, with her endless insinuations and irresponsible, sensationalistic approach to Rebecca Lanning’s story. And now the bitch was digging my grave even deeper.

  I wished I could snap my fingers and make her disappear… make it all disappear…

  Strangely enough, at the same time, some small part of me didn’t want her to leave. As much as I despised her, and prayed this harassment would end, I did not want to be alone. Not tonight. I did not want her to wrap up her “story” and move elsewhere.

  Because somehow, with the all-seeing eye of the news camera stationed in front of my home, there was an inexplicable feeling of safety along with its intrusiveness. A merciful delay of the inevitable…

  But once the street grew silent once again… when the thick, black night encroached upon my property…

  . . . then, I knew, I would be vulnerable.

  Another little girl had fallen prey to a predator of the worst kind. A mother and father were left behind to mourn this most unimaginable loss. I did sympathize with them. But at that mo
ment, I could only focus on what this latest development meant to my already hopeless situation.

  After every vile act my neighbors had perpetrated against me the last two weeks, fueled by their idiotic prejudices and misguided preconceptions, I realized none of it compared to what was about to happen.

  I held my head in my hands. My lips moved soundlessly, as a taunting voice sang loud and off-key in the back of my mind, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet…”

  God help me, I did not want to be alone with my neighbors.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  That night, as I had feared, they came for me.

  All of them.

  Before it was over, every one of us would have blood on our hands.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Hollaaaaaaaaaaaand!” someone shouted at the top of his lungs.

  I flinched.

  It came from outside, a primal war-cry that seemed to fill the entire neighborhood. It might have come from Ben Souther, but I couldn’t be sure.

  “HOLLAAAAAAAAND!!!” Louder this time, and filled with even more rage than the first.

  A cold chill caressed my body. My chair clattered to the floor as I rose from the kitchen table, where I had been sitting for hours with my head in my hands.

  According to the clock on the microwave, the time was 7:54 p.m.

  “Jesus Christ, what now?” I cursed.

  I lurched to the front of the house. Wondered what I would find on my lawn this time. Perhaps my neighbors had armed themselves with guns, and the second I stepped outside they would cut me in half right there on my welcome mat… or maybe they planned to throw an old-fashioned lynch party with me as the guest of honor… perhaps they were preparing even now to burn my house to the ground, as I thrashed about inside, doomed to roast alive…

  Slowly, I gripped the doorknob. I took a deep breath, held it in. I did not want to answer their call, but when it came again I knew I had no choice.

  “Holland! Get your ass out here right now!”

  I eased open the door. Stepped out onto the porch.

  My blood turned to ice in my veins.

  In my yard, beneath a late-evening sky the fiery hue of peaches ripe for picking, stood nine or ten of my closest neighbors, glaring up at me with murder in their eyes.

  And there were twice as many still on the way.

  Like zombies in a bad B-movie, they shambled toward me from all sides. Crossing their own lawns and driveways one by one, marching down Poinsettia Lane through the dusk to surround my property en masse.

  “What the hell do you want?” I shouted at them. “Haven’t you done enough?”

  Ben Souther was out there, standing in the middle of my lawn. So was his wife, Marianne. To their immediate left stood Gabe and Valerie Pearson, to their right Joe and Eileen Tuttle. On the hood of my ruined SUV sat Floyd and Francine Beecham, and nearby were their good friends Ned and Mitzi Pastorek. Just now arriving were the Tomblins, Ernie and Suzanne, as well as Steve and Ginger Heatherly. Chad and Kimberly Rickman followed close behind, walking hand in hand as if they were enjoying a leisurely late-day stroll together. A few seconds later, Donna Dunaway waddled over to stand in one corner of my yard, her huge pregnant belly leading the way.

  And still more of them came. More. Filling up my yard with every passing second…

  Sal Friedman. Keith Whitmire. Todd and Patty Carstensen. Freddy Morgan. Drew and JoLynn Pruitt. Lorne Childress. Hank and Bethany Glover. Glenn and Charlene Sommersville.

  Even sweet old Mona Purfield soon made an appearance, her Siamese cat Miss Pretty slinking along in her shadow.

  Most of them were fully dressed, but others approached my house in their pajamas, nightshirts, and bathrobes. They came with bare feet, and in grass-stained knee-high socks or fuzzy bedroom slippers. Two or three of the women wore curlers in their hair, and somewhere in the crowd I might have even glimpsed a thick green mud-mask glowering up at me like something long dead but still blinking.

  It was as if every last resident of Poinsettia Lane had dropped whatever he or she was doing to answer some satanic higher call…

  If the hateful gathering on my lawn had not been enough to set my heart fluttering, it was what they brought with them that conjured a frigid rash of goosebumps over every inch of my body. In their hands, my neighbors gripped ordinary household tools and utensils that—under different circumstances—would have been anything but threatening. Here, though, now, those mundane items were brandished with a deadly purpose. And God help me, I knew what they were for…

  Baseball bats… bicycle chains… sledgehammers… tire irons… crowbars… rusty steel pipes… fireplace pokers… golf clubs… even shiny metal meat mallets crusted with the pinkish ingredients of recent meals.

  At the rear of the mob, Freddy Morgan wielded a vicious-looking length of wood—a cedar two-by four from which jutted three long silver nails—and I knew instantly where it had come from. He had ripped it from his fancy new deck across the street, improvising for the task at hand.

  “Get the hell off my property,” I told them.

  My voice came out as little more than a whiny croak. So I said it again.

  “Get the hell off my property. Now.”

  “Not until we discuss a few things, Andy,” Ben Souther said from the center of the throng. He wrapped one arm around his wife, pulled her close. “We need to talk about your horror books, and what they’ve done to this neighborhood.”

  “What they’ve done—?” A mad titter slipped from between my lips. “Don’t you hear what you’re saying? Do you know how ridiculous you sound?”

  “Look at him… laughing!” Mona Purfield pointed her cast-iron skillet at me, as Miss Pretty rubbed up against her varicose-veined legs. “Two children are dead now, Andy Holland. This is hardly a laughing matter.”

  Murmurs of agreement rose up from the crowd.

  “Poinsettia Lane used to be a good place to live.” Floyd Beecham climbed down from the hood of my Explorer. He wore a faded Green Bay Packers tank top and wrinkled gray pajama bottoms at least a size too large for his skinny frame. A wide leather strop dangled from his hand like something obscene as he moved across the yard to stand by Ben. “Ain’t gonna be that way again till we get rid of the likes of you.”

  “The police got their heads up their asses,” said Ned Pastorek. “Just ’cause you’re some kinda big-shot ‘celebrity,’ they let you walk around free as a bir—”

  “Not all of us, Ned,” said Keith Whitmire, stepping from the shadows at the far corner of my yard where my property met the Sommersvilles’. He was still in full uniform, but his shirt hung open, unbuttoned, exposing the hairiest chest I had ever seen. He carried a bottle of Michelob Light in one hand. In his other: a shiny black nightstick.

  Pastorek nodded the cop’s way. “Right. Thank the good Lord we’ve got you in our corner, Keith.” He turned back to me. “This has gone too far, Holland. It’s time you paid the piper.”

  “It’s just us and you now, boy,” said Floyd Beecham. “Nobody here to save your sorry ass.”

  He walked across the lawn, but stopped at the foot of my steps.

  “What do you gotta say for yourself now?”

  My mouth hung open. I shook my head back and forth, unable to believe what I was hearing. “You’re all insane. You… you’ve lost your fucking minds.”

  “We ain’t the ones writin’ books about the Devil,” Valerie Pearson said, in that thick Southern Belle accent of hers I had once upon a time found so sexy.

  Her husband Gabe finished for her, “Stories about people eatin’ other people, and kids turnin’ into demons!”

  “What kind of a psycho makes up stuff like that?” pondered Patty Carstensen.

  “ ‘Every artist dips his brush in his own soul,’ ” Ben Souther said, as if in answer to her question, “ ‘and paints his own nature into his pictures.’ ”

  I glared at my neighbors.

  They glared back.

  No one moved.

/>   “I tried to warn you, Andy,” Ben said then. Softly. With a tone of sincere regret. “I told you, you should just pack up your things and leave. But you wouldn’t listen.”

  “Ben,” I said, “For God’s sake… why don’t you tell them? Tell them they’re talking crazy. You know I could never—”

  “It’s much too late for that, don’t you think?”

  “You people wrecked my car,” I said. “You killed my dog. What else do you want from me?”

  They did not reply. They just stood there glaring at me, the last weak rays of the day’s setting sun tinting their flesh an eerie amber color. Their shadows stretched slowly across my lawn.

  “Whitmire!” I shouted at the burly cop in the middle of the mob. “What about you, man? Do something. Are you gonna let them get away with threatening me like this?”

  Officer Keith said nothing. A smug grin stretched across his stubbled face. He used the end of his billy club to scratch at an itchy spot near his left nipple. Then he crossed his arms, shrugged.

  I’m off the clock, the bastard’s expression seemed to say.

  “Fuck you, then. Prick.” I turned to head back inside. “I’m calling the real police.”

  But I hesitated a second too long. My neighbors did not disperse as I expected.

  They called my bluff.

  The mob suddenly surged forward.

  I fumbled with the storm door, fighting to get it open. Their footsteps made snake-like hissing noises in the grass as they surrounded my porch.

  “Stop,” I said, holding one hand out toward my neighbors in a placating gesture. “Dammit, wait—”

  They raised their weapons in the air.

  “Eat shit, dirtbag!” barked a gruff male voice.

  And that was when someone threw the beer bottle at me.

  I never saw it coming. It shattered when it struck my forehead.

  The world went fuzzy. Blood filled my eyes. For those next few seconds, that high-pitched crash of breaking glass rang through my skull like a sustained note of agony drowning out everything else.