Animosity Read online

  Someone, I noticed, had even defecated on my welcome mat. Recently. It lay coiled before me in a stinking wet pile, like a cruel gag gift.

  I grasped the doorframe with both hands to keep from passing out, wondered when all of this had ceased to be about the death of an innocent child… and when it had become one gigantic fucking block party.

  “Andy…?”

  At the curb, her mouth hanging open as she gazed at the bedlam, stood my ex-wife. She wore a knee-length dress the same color as her car, dangling gold earrings and a modest touch of make-up. She had cut her hair since the last time I saw her, and unless it was a trick of the sunlight she might have added a few blond streaks to it as well.

  In spite of my situation, I couldn’t help thinking that she looked gorgeous. Angelic.

  “Andy? What the hell’s going on here?” she called to me from across the yard, a tremor in her voice.

  “Karen!” I wept. “Oh, thank God… Karen!”

  “What is this? I don’t—”

  “Karen, please… you’ve got to get help!”

  “Are you hurt? Jesus, what have they done to your—”

  Impatience rippled through the crowd between us, drowning out the rest of her question. As one, my neighbors moved, shifting forward slightly.

  I stepped back, braced myself for their attack. Prepared to slam the door.

  “About time you showed your face!” Ben Souther shouted up at me from his place near the front of the mob. He wore a navy blue bathrobe above red-and-white plaid pajama bottoms, no shirt. “You’ve already made this a lot harder than it has to be, boy!”

  “That’s right,” Floyd Beecham agreed from a few feet away. “We told you before, we just wanna talk to you! But you been locked up inside there, like you got something to hide!”

  “Don’t look good on your part!” a younger, teenage voice insisted, but I could not see who said it.

  “Shut up,” I growled at them, through clenched teeth. “Just… shut up. Karen, get back in your car. Get the hell out of here.”

  “What is this, Andy?” she asked me again. “What’s happening? I was worried about you. We’ve been up at the lake the last few days. I tried to call, but—”

  “Karen—”

  “—I wanted to drop by and make sure you were okay—”

  “Call the police. Go.”

  No one moved. No one spoke. The air seemed to hum with tension.

  Overhead, a distant airliner streaked across the sky. I wished I could be up there with its passengers. Comfortable. Safe. Peering down like an apathetic god upon someone else’s problems.

  When Karen stepped over the curb and onto my lawn, my neighbors echoed my own shocked gasp. They each turned to gawk at her with the same incredulous expression they had displayed when I first came to the door. As if they did not believe the nerve of my ex-wife, daring to proceed. As if they could not understand how anyone would still choose to associate with me, after everything that had happened.

  I watched, my pulse hammering violently within the wound upon my forehead, as they gripped their weapons tighter.

  “Karen, no,” I whispered. “Don’t be stupid…”

  As she parted the sea of bodies, Karen paused to make eye contact with several of my neighbors, and the look on her face was the one she used to scold Sam when our daughter misbehaved.

  “Francine?” Karen said, when she swerved to avoid a broken beer bottle in her path and nearly collided with Floyd Beecham’s better half. “What are you doing here?”

  Each subsequent victim of her admonishment stared down at his or her shoes, as if ashamed. For a brief moment, I saw the face of a kind neighbor I once knew. But only until my ex-wife’s back was turned, and she moved on to someone else…

  “Donna? Patty? Yvonne?” Her brow creased as she glanced down at the rolling pin in Patty Carstensen’s chubby hand. “I don’t understand. You ladies are a part of this, too?”

  She took several more steps toward my house, and as she did so she kept shaking her head in disgust.

  “Is this some kind of twisted joke? Because if that’s what this is, it’s not the least bit funny. Sal? Sal Friedman? What is it you think Andy’s done? You should be ashamed of yourself, old man… I can’t believe you people. You know Andy…

  She took several more steps, surveying the crowd.

  “Is that you up there, Ben Souther? What the hell has gotten into you? I thought you were his friend. Joe? Eileen? My God, Charlene… put down those hedge-clippers before you hurt yourself.”

  She stood within just five or six feet of my front porch when they finally spoke back.

  Someone at the bottom of the steps—a young man I did not recognize right away, though he might have been Drew and JoLynn Pruitt’s boy, Darren—suddenly stopped Karen from going any further. He was tall, lanky, had a silver hoop in his eyebrow. He trembled with an obvious mixture of rage and nervous anticipation as he blocked Karen’s path with a long, thin lawnmower blade stained with splotches of green.

  She looked down at it, back at the spiky-haired teenager.

  “Excuse me,” she said in her nastiest tone.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, lady,” he told her. “You’re going to get hurt.”

  Undeterred, Karen replied, “Get the hell out of my way.”

  “Andy made his bed,” shouted someone at the back of the crowd. Chad Rickman, perhaps. Or maybe Glenn Sommersville. “Now he’s gotta lie in it!”

  “You people have lost your damn minds,” Karen said.

  The crowd surged forward again, closing in on her.

  “Maybe you were in on it, too,” someone said.

  “Now look here—” Karen started, turning in a complete circle, searching for the person who would dare suggest such a thing.

  For the first time, I recognized a hint of fear in her eyes.

  “You left Andy for another man, didn’t you, Karen?” Ben Souther asked her. “So what are you doing here now?”

  “I beg your pardon? I hardly think that’s any of your business, Ben.”

  “It’s true! She’s nothing but a slut!” Ernie Tomblin shouted from his position at the far corner of my house. He sat perched on my porch railing, gripping the hilt of a rusty samurai sword in both hands, a sight I might have found insanely humorous if circumstances had been different. “A woman who’d marry a freak like that in the first place ain’t got no fucking morals!”

  Sal Friedman: “She probably helped him think up all those hair-o books, I’ll bet you anything!”

  “Birds of a feather,” added Francine Beecham. “They flock together!”

  “Whore!” someone yelled.

  “Tramp!”

  “You fuckin’ slut!”

  They all joined in then: “Slut! Whore! Slut! Whore!”

  The unease on Karen’s face morphed into pure terror now.

  She made a run for the house, but she had only taken two or three steps when someone shoved her backward. Hard. Her breath burst out of her in a hoarse grunt—“oofgh!”—and she fell onto her butt in the center of my yard.

  My neighbors surrounded her, their chant rising to a deafening fever pitch: “Slut! Whore! Slut! Whore! Slut! Whore!”

  Her hair hung in her eyes as Karen picked herself up off the ground. I noticed she had lost one of her high heels, but she did not attempt to retrieve it. Ugly grass stains streaked her fancy dress. A river of bright red blood leaked from her left palm—she must have sliced it open on a shard of broken glass or a crushed beer can when she fell.

  “Get away from me! I’m warning you. Get away! You’re all crazy!”

  My neighbors pointed their weapons at her, roared with laughter as she sprinted for the street.

  “Karen!” I cried out to her.

  “I’m sorry, Andy!” she screamed over her shoulder. “I’ll send help, I promise I will! They won’t get away with th—”

  Karen made it to her car. Almost. But when she staggered off the curb and into the str
eet, her remaining high heel betrayed her. She came down on it wrong, twisted her ankle. She collided with the side of the Volvo, smearing a sloppy checkmark of blood across its front wheel well.

  She pivoted to the right, limping. Stumbled around the front of the car, fighting to reach the driver’s side.

  But Lorne Childress blocked her way.

  “Boo!”

  Childress gripped the neck of a half-empty bottle of Pepe Lopez tequila. He cackled drunkenly, and the liquid sloshed around inside of his bottle as he shook it at Karen as if offering her a drink.

  She let out a little yelp, twirled to flee in the other direction.

  And Freddy Morgan leapt out of the crowd.

  “Where you goin’, bitch?” he snarled.

  In his sun-browned hands, Morgan clutched the plank of cedar ripped from his new deck—that two-by-four from which jutted three long, shiny, galvanized-steel nails.

  “Leave me alone!” Karen wept. “Get out of my–”

  What happened next seemed to occur in slow motion…

  I watched, helpless to stop it, as Morgan reared back and swung the board at her with every ounce of strength in his skinny postman’s frame.

  He swung it like a baseball star hitting the most magnificent home run of his career…

  . . . swung it right into her face.

  Even from where I stood behind my storm door, I could hear the sound those nails made as they pierced my ex-wife’s skull and sank into her brain. It was a sound not unlike that of three screwdrivers stabbing in perfect sync through a plump, ripe watermelon.

  A golden spurt of urine trickled down Karen’s legs from under her dress, pooled on the pavement beneath her heels.

  From the back of her throat came a wretched gurgling noise, a hideous hybrid of stupefied gasp and hoarse, orgasmic moan.

  Her body jerked once. Twice.

  Then it went limp.

  My bowels lurched. Tunnel-vision blacked out everything around me except that God-awful sight across my lawn.

  I heard sirens screeching in the distance. Loud, warbling. Shrill. But a few seconds later, I realized they were not sirens at all…

  That keening wail came from me. It was my own delirious scream.

  At the curb, Freddy Morgan’s eyes grew impossibly wide. His mouth hung open in a bewildered “O” as he stared at the dead woman on the end of his stick.

  “Jesus Christ,” he babbled. “Agh, J-Jesus Christ.”

  He dropped the two-by-four as if it had grown blistering-hot in his hands.

  Karen crumpled to the asphalt with it.

  Morgan doubled over behind the Volvo a second later, and spattered vomit across its bumper.

  The crowd was silent.

  Poinsettia Lane grew eerily, unsettlingly still…

  My neighbors stood there staring at each other. At the murderer among them, and at that leaking, pink-crimson thing heaped upon the curb. Half of them looked sick, the other half frozen with fear. I wondered if they had finally come to their senses.

  Hope bloomed within me for the first time in many days as eight or nine of my neighbors suddenly broke away from the crowd. They sprinted madly down the street, as if their crime were something tangible, a hideous monster from whom they could escape if they only ran fast and far enough from the grisly evidence sprawled half-on and half-off my lawn. More than a few of them were weeping as they went. Their cries of disbelief echoed through the neighborhood.

  “I can’t be part of this no more!” I heard Steve Heatherly exclaim, while Gabe and Valerie Pearson fell to their knees in the middle of the cul-de-sac, clasped hands and started pleading with God to forgive them all.

  Others staggered off drunkenly in no specific direction, their heads down, shoulders slumped, numbed by the realization of what they had become.

  Perhaps the spell had been broken at last. Finally, my neighbors knew they had crossed a line that could never be uncrossed…

  Well. Some of them.

  The majority of Poinsettia Lane’s residents still stood in my yard. They watched the others go.

  And then… those who had stayed behind turned toward me once again.

  “He made this happen!” Donna Dunaway screamed. One hand lay atop her pregnant belly, as if shielding the child inside of her from the evil she presumed to lurk behind my screen door. The other stabbed into the air, pointing one long, skinny finger my way. “He’s the one responsible!”

  “You fucking monster!” howled Mitzi Pastorek. “It’s all your fault! You planned this, didn’t you?”

  I staggered back from the door. Grew dizzy.

  Again, the entire neighborhood began to chant as one: “Your fault! Your fault! Your fault!”

  “God damn you, Holland!” Sal Friedman wheezed at the foot of my porch steps, and I was quite sure I saw tears glistening on the old man’s wrinkled cheeks. “You won’t get away with this!”

  They stormed the porch.

  I slammed the door just in time. Threw the deadbolt as the whole house vibrated beneath their combined weight.

  They batted at the doors and windows. Screeched my name again and again and again.

  I waited with my back to the door, wondering when they would bust through. This is it, I knew… this is how it ends… any second now…

  But they didn’t. They didn’t break through.

  Because, I soon realized, my neighbors had work to do.

  A few minutes later, when the commotion had temporarily subsided, I dared to peek outside through a miniscule gap in my living room curtain.

  . . . and I witnessed several men at the rear of the mob clearing the scene of their crime. Rushing to hide the evidence.

  The Volvo I had bought for Karen two Christmases ago slowly pulled away from the curb. Ben Souther’s burly form looked so awkward and out-of-place behind the wheel, but as he steered the car through a three-point turn he moved like a man embarking on a mission of utmost importance. Just before he drove away, I noticed that he was drinking from Lorne Childress’s tequila bottle, as if its contents instilled in Ben the courage he needed to continue with this conspiracy.

  In the Volvo’s wake, Childress and Freddy Morgan were hard at work dragging my ex-wife’s corpse down the street.

  The ghastly, clotted snail-trail her ruined head left upon the pavement was the color of cherry pie gone to rot.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Night. Again. A thin sliver of yellowish moon hung above Poinsettia Lane like a sleepy eye observing the proceedings below with half-hearted interest.

  Surrounded by darkness, I sat on my sofa, my arms wrapped around my knees.

  Meanwhile, the chaos outside my home continued…

  Glass shattered in my driveway. Something boomed on the roof. A woman giggled as if she were having the time of her life.

  At the rear of the house, my kitchen doorknob rattled like an angry serpent.

  But I did not even flinch.

  In some strange way, I found myself growing accustomed to it all. To this endless soundtrack of Hell all around me.

  A low crunch on the front porch—the sound of a beer can crushed underfoot—and someone pounded a sloppy “shave-and-a-haircut” tattoo upon my front door.

  “Andy?” It was Joe Tuttle, the black guy down the block who used to plead with me to come speak to his eighth-grade English class back when things were good. His voice was slurred with obvious inebriation: “Hey, Andy. You home? Hmmm? You in there, you sick muthafucka?”

  “Don’t be rude, Holland,” Floyd Beecham jeered from the opposite side of the house. “Your ex is here to see ya!”

  “Don’t forget his pooch!” yelled someone else.

  That was followed by more uproarious laughter, from what sounded like at least thirty or forty people. Of course, there couldn’t have been that many of them out there—could there?

  I shuddered. Hated them all with every fiber of my being. I fantasized picking them off one by one with a chattering AK-47, mentally choreographed the
ir dance of death as round after round ripped through their bodies. The thought nearly aroused me.

  Then, the awful reality of my situation—of what they had done to Karen—came crashing down on me again. I ran one hand through my unwashed hair. A distraught groan escaped from the back of my throat.

  I wondered where they had hidden her body.

  I couldn’t believe she was dead. My eyes burned with tears as I remembered the good times my ex-wife and I had shared. We’d had our problems, sure, especially after she decided to leave me for another man, but I never would have wished any harm to come to her. Once upon a time, I believed she was my soul-mate. She had given birth to my only child, and thus some small part of me deep down inside would undoubtedly love her forever.

  Now she was gone. Murdered. Buried, I assumed, in a shallow grave in one of my neighbors’ backyards.

  I wondered how I would tell Samantha what had happened to her mother, if I lived long enough to face such a dilemma.

  “Jesus,” I sobbed. “Why…”

  I closed my eyes, shuddered. The thickest, blackest darkness I had ever known swallowed me whole as I sat there rocking back and forth on the sofa. Images of Karen’s murder replayed in my brain again and again, like clips from a gory B-movie…

  Did any of them feel the slightest bit of remorse, I wondered? Or did my neighbors view their crime as nothing more than a justifiable means to an end?

  I gnawed at my fingernails and whispered, “I’m sorry, Karen. God, I’m so sorry…”

  As I sat there listening to the never-ending turmoil outside—

  “Come out, Andy, come out! Andy, Andy, come out!” Ben Souther began their latest mantra, and before long the rest of the mob joined in his song at the top of their lungs—my writer’s mind soon shifted into overdrive. I couldn’t help pondering how this whole outrageous scenario might have originated in the world of speculative fiction. In my novels, the bloodthirsty throng surrounding my home would have been possessed by some ancient demon or infected with a deadly virus that transformed them into slavering zombies. Perhaps, in a plot already done to death a trillion times, Poinsettia Lane would have been built upon some cursed Indian burial ground. Or a site once designated for top-secret nuclear testing.