ANIMOSITY (Excerpt)

Ten minutes ago I killed three of my neighbors.


***


Perhaps I should feel something - disgust, remorse for what I have done. But for now I am only numb.

Hot blood drips in my eyes. Some of it is mine, but not all of it.

“Drive faster,” I tell the man behind the wheel. I can barely hear my own voice above the shrill ringing in my ears.

I cough, tasting cold steel and bitter bile, and something ricochets off the dashboard, into my lap. Several somethings: small, off-white, speckled with dark crimson and trailing meaty pink tails . . .

Two of my front teeth. And the jagged splinter of a third.

“Faster,” I start to weep. “P-please . . . . “

I peer down at the hole in my chest. It seems to pucker up and grin at me, like a cruel alien mouth dribbling gore.

My tears burn like acid through the grit upon my face.

“For Christ's sake, d-don't stop for anything . . . . “



***

Ten minutes ago I killed three of my neighbors.

Four, if you count the baby.


***


Ben Souther was the first. At one time, I suppose I would have called Ben a friend. Many a beer we had shared together on his front porch on many a hot summer night. No matter how depressed I got about my recent divorce, he always made me smile with his endless repertoire of spontaneous quotations. Of course, that was before I put a bullet in my next-door neighbor's throat, watched him fall to the ground jerking and gurgling like a rusty faucet that has not been used for decades.

Next was a stooped old man by the name of Sal Friedman. Sal had a thick Jersey accent, drove a Cadillac the size of a small yacht. Last I heard from Sal, he was yowling for Sweet Mother Mary to please put him out of his misery, after I shot him pointblank in the groin. His fancy pink golf pants had gone bright red, and his curly white toupee hung off one side of his skull like a sated parasite as he writhed upon my lawn.

Then there was Donna Dunaway, the lady who lived across the street from me. I used to think Donna was one of the prettiest women I ever met, and I admit I did enjoy a bit of harmless flirting with her even while I was married. I could never understand how her husband, Allen, had left her last spring (for another man, if you believe the rumors) especially since she was due to have a baby any day now.

I did not want to hurt Donna. Or the child inside of her.

But I had to shoot her twice.



Part One

July 17 - July 31



CHAPTER ONE


It seems like months have passed since it all began. Hard to believe it has barely been three short weeks.

Twenty-one days since my world came crashing down, and my life became a nightmare.

Like something out of one of my books.



CHAPTER TWO


My name is Andrew Kenneth Holland. I am thirty-nine years old.

And I am a horror writer.

Shit . . . that sounds like some sort of confession, doesn't it? A shame-faced introduction to Hacks Anonymous:

ME
(hanging head, sniffling softly)
Hello. I'm Andy. I write horror for a living.

FELLOW LOSERS
Hi, Andy!

Once upon a time, I did not apologize for my profession. After all, writing about demons and zombies and vampires and serial killers has done quite well for me through the years.

These days, however, I find myself wishing more and more that I had followed in my father's footsteps.

Surely life would have been much safer, in the HazMat business.


***


I was twenty-one years old when I sold my first novel, Wolf Moon. The critics loathed it - “a plotless plethora of sex and gore redeemed only by the death of its despicable 'anti-hero,'” Monthly Fiction Digest called my book -- but when all was said and done that hardly mattered. Nine months after the release of the paperback edition, a top production company in Hollywood bought the movie rights to Wolf Moon for a price totaling somewhere in the mid-six-figure range. The nasty comments made about my work by a few self-important “reviewers” rolled off my back like so much bloody water (if you will), and I have been writing for a living ever since.

To date I've published thirteen novels under my own name. Blood Dance, Brain Fever, The Night People, and House On Harding Street are a few titles you might recognize. Most of my books have seen print in at least a dozen different languages all over the world. Wolf Moon VI: The Return was released just last month direct-to-video, and though I cringe when I think of what the producers did the first five times to my tale of werewolves in the Big Apple, I really cannot complain considering I was once again paid handsomely for my ideas. I have also written four young-adult horror novels - Cannibal High, Devil's Detention, A Date With Dracula, and Go See Principal Zombie -- under the pseudonym “Anthony Dutch.” Per our contract, I owe my publisher one more of those (the last in my popular “Frightsville, U.S.A.” series) before the end of this year.

Unfortunately, I do not know when that will happen. If it will ever happen . . . .

So much has changed, you see.

Everything's fallen apart.


***


I used to consider myself fortunate. There are only a handful of writers who make a decent living working in this genre, much less a very good living. I often have a hard time believing I am one of them.

Horror has long been considered, depending on whom you ask, the “ghetto” of the literary world. It is a genre just one step above smut in many critics' eyes. I know -- I have experienced such pretension firsthand. I've witnessed the way readers of “real fiction” peer down their noses at me when they wander into a bookstore where I'm scheduled to do a signing. I have seen the condescending smiles on the faces of the reporters from the Harris City Tribune who beg me for an interview every Halloween (that is the time of year, after all, when it is okay to dwell upon evil and darkness and ghastly, grinning things from the grave). To this day, I still field countless questions from my friends and family regarding when I plan to write a “serious” novel.

I usually just grin every time I hear that old standby. I humor those who ask it, and lie, “Wait. I'm working on several as we speak.”

As for my neighbors . . . once upon a time, the folks in my community seemed proud to know me. As if, by acquainting themselves with someone “famous,” they felt elevated above the humdrum suburban roles they had fallen into long before we met. Don't get me wrong - by no means do I consider myself a celebrity. I am far from a household name. But to the ladies and gentlemen of Poinsettia Lane, I might as well have been a movie star. Even the ones who claimed they never read “that horror stuff” -- which was at least ninety-nine percent of them, frankly -- offered me more-than-friendly waves and hearty hellos every time I passed them in my Explorer. Sal Friedman, from up the block, called me “Mr. Writer Fella” from the first day we met; his trademark greeting was “How's the horror business?” and the old guy always seemed so sincere in wanting to know despite the fact that he perpetually mispronounced my genre “hair-o.” Joe and Eileen Tuttle, the black couple who lived in the Dutch Colonial four houses down from mine, used to plead with me on a weekly basis to come speak before their respective eighth- and ninth-grade English classes (as “Anthony Dutch,” of course, my young-adult nom de plume). While she claimed Harlequin Romances were more her speed, Mitzi Pastorek never failed to come knocking at my door within days after the release of every new hardcover I published, requesting I personalize a copy for her niece Brianna, who lived in San Francisco and “was always on the lookout for books and movies relating to the paranormal, since she decided she wanted to be one of those 'gothic people.'” Ronnie “Round Man” Miller, owner of the 7th Avenue Stop-N-Shop across town, habitually overstocked my novels on the racks beside his cash register; any time I dropped by his store for a cup of coffee or a tank of gas he made sure I signed every last copy before he'd let me leave (being the nice guy I am, I pretended not to notice the 200% mark-up on their cover prices the next time I paid “Round Man” a visit).

Of course, I could always expect as well the inevitable inquiries any writer who has been in this business for more than a few years has heard in endless supply - questions like “where do you come up with this stuff” and “do you know Stephen King” and “I always wanted to write a book, man . . . maybe I could tell you one o' my ideas and we could split the money?” I suspect horror authors hear the latter more often than writers of mainstream fiction, as if he who posits such a query has narrowly escaped being lumped in with the sorts of sickos who forge successful careers dealing in the macabre.

Sickos like me.

Alas, it is that exact mentality which now makes me realize I should have seen it all coming a long time ago, before things turned bad around here. On more than one occasion after we moved into the house on Poinsettia Lane, I remember my wife mentioned the subtle derision lurking in our neighbors' eyes, beneath their beaming white smiles and eager salutations. The way they stared at me sometimes, Karen said . . . it was as if they could not decide whether they wanted to ask me for my autograph, or condemn me for concocting tales of madmen and monsters in an already mad, monstrous world.

I told her she was being silly, warned her that we'd better not start making enemies before we had a chance to make friends.

Still . . . she had a point. A damn good point. I see that now.

They liked knowing me. It made them feel special.

But that never stopped the world around me from thinking I was a little bit weird.





It began with the death of a child. A child named Rebecca Faye Lanning.

I found her body one sunny Thursday morning, less than two hundred yards from my front door.



-- end --


(from ANIMOSITY, copyright 2008 James Newman)