The Neighbourhood

Sighing and looking out into his front yard, Mr Theodore Maxwell of 288 Baker Lane placed the barrel of his revolver up into his mouth and pulled the trigger one last time; with that, his massacre was ended. It had been a relatively normal morning for the Maxwells, not unlike any other day they had lived since moving to The Neighbourhood, but it had ended in bloodshed when Theodore went to his safe and proceeded to slaughter every member of his family, and take his own life, all before the meatloaf finished cooking.

Theodore’s body fell just by the large window in the living room, his wife was dead in the kitchen with a bullet hole through her back, and his two children were nestled up in their beds with single shots between the eyes. Each shot was that of a professional, a suburban hitman with a vendetta against his very blood. He had killed the wife first, then changed the girls into their nightclothes before putting them down, he was the last target of his own rage, and it took around ten minutes after the time it was finished for even a single police officer to arrive.

There had been one witness to the killing spree, one who still lived to tell the tale of what Mr Maxwell did, a paperboy who was just delivering the news to the house across the street. The boy, Felix, had looked over just after hearing the second and third shot; he stood frozen for a minute until Mr Maxwell, dressed from head to toe in the blood of his victims, walked to the window. Felix had, against his better judgement, waved at the man. He had raised a single hand up into the air, and rocked it back and forth a few times until he was sure he had been seen, but Mr Maxwell did not wave back. He sighed, shoulders rising and falling with the breath, and shot himself in the head. Felix described the way that Mr Maxwell’s head seemed to open up at the back, painting all behind with a spray like water from a loose hosepipe, how he’d been sure he’d seen brain coming out, and how he’d seen the bullet lodge in the portrait of Dwight Eisenhower they kept on the wall furthest from the window.

He remembered every detail, as he saw them every night when he closed his eyes.

Felix hadn’t found it necessary to tell the police about the brain, but he had a great time explaining that detail to all of his friends at school the next day. At first, he had been shaken by what he had seen at The Maxwell House, but at school he suddenly found it to be the funniest thing ever. He and his chums took great joy in debating the details of the situation, especially when the police began releasing new facts in the papers over the following weeks.

The first of these further official details came out three days after the boy’s thirteenth birthday, when the paper told the public directly that Mr Maxwell had indeed shot his wife through the heart. The headline mockingly read ‘The Heartbreak of a Lifetime’, which Felix’s dad took great amusement in when he read it over breakfast that morning. He had flicked the paper out, glasses on eyes and smoking pipe in mouth, and let out a low, morbid cackle.

“Look at this, Marge.” He chuckled, holding the front cover of the paper to his wife. “Heartbreak of a lifetime.” He read it to her, then pulled it back before she could bring her eyes up to look at it from her knitting. “You hear the guy shot his kids too? God, some guys get to live my dream.”

His chuckle suddenly broke out into a full-blown laugh, he slapped an open palm against his thigh repeatedly as he did so. Felix knew his father was joking, but something in those terrified eyes let lose the truth that he was secretly terrified that he would do the same thing at any moment. There had been no sign Mr Maxwell would do such a thing, he just randomly decided to arm himself against his own family, And what terrified Felix the most was that his father’s gun safe was a lot more stocked up.

He had been shown the gun safe once, drunk with tiredness after being woken up by his father in the middle of the night; there had been a party and he had been drinking heavily, and something compelled him to wake up his boy and show him the armoury. He slammed the bedroom door open, a mostly finished bottle of red wine in his hand that he would swig from occasionally despite the fact that most of the contents was now mostly watered down by foamy remnants of his spit that was being backwashed with every sip.

“Come, boy.” He took a second to get his breath back. “I wanna show you something.”

Something about him felt different, his voice was closer to a growl than to his normal voice; he had probably strained it trying to shout over the music at the party, Felix had wanted to complain about both the volume of that and his father’s voice for most of the party, but had been ultimately too afraid to. He was slow, every syllable was dragged out and followed by a steep inhale.

Felix obeyed immediately, and was over by his father’s side before the rim of the bottle could hit his lips again. As they crossed the landing into the spare bedroom that was his father’s office, Felix realised he could hear crying from downstairs. Not his mother, she never cried as long as she was drugged up enough on painkillers, and it wasn’t either of his sisters as they were both in bed. It was a woman, probably one of the many family friends who poured through that house like it was more of a venue than a place to live, and she was crying like a wounded infant at something completely out of his comprehension. He had gone to ask what the crying was about, when the door behind him shut and he found himself in complete darkness. His father had then lit a candle and used that to light his way over to the gun safe, once he had inputted the combination it swung open and revealed the extent of his little firearms fetish.

On the inside of the door, his father had made a pistol display case, it held eight different pistols in order of their size. At the back were the heavier weapons, the shotgun and the two assault rifles as well as the bolt action hunting rifle which used to be displayed above the mantlepiece until he was forced to take it down at the insistence of his wife. At the bottom was a neatly organised array of bullet boxes, so many colours and brand names and all open to show their contents it was like looking into a candy store for psychos. Felix reached a hand out, lightly brushing the tip of a nine-millimetre bullet and recoiling slightly at the cold lead that he encountered.

“This, this is my right. This is the best thing you’ll ever receive from me, so don’t expect any more when I die. Your sisters, they’re getting the money; you, you get the guns and my books. You don’t have no money when you die? Then you’re shit outta luck. But don’t you ever fucking dare sell one of these here guns, or I’ll come back and-”

His talk was suddenly cut off, the crying had moved from the dining room to the front door. Felix heard the door open, and the crying woman add the occasional ‘no’ and ‘please, God, no’ into her wails. He bolted for the window, at that age he had still been too small as to see over the windowsill on his own, so he used a small footrest to launch himself slightly and he ended up on the ledge with his face pressed up against the window.

It was dark out, but everything he needed to see was captured in the halo of a streetlamp. The crying woman had turned out to be Mrs Denver, one of the wives of his father’s work pals. she was in her late thirties, and Felix had always thought she was rather pretty; she had been wearing a full body, black and white polka dot dress and knee-high black boots, but the dress was torn slightly at the sleeve and a man was removing the boots from her as another held her arms behind her back.

“You can’t hide the truth.”

Those were the last words she got out before a third man tied a rubber ball in her mouth to muffle her screams. The Men, the ones taking her, looked so normal to what Felix knew men to be in that town; all of them wore suits, finely fitting and all in a distinctly classy charcoal grey, and they all seemed to have the same short, cropped hair, and even the hue of brown in their hair appeared to be the same. He wouldn’t have been able to tell any of them apart at a glimpse, but soon noticed that the third man had a scar running from the bottom of his chin to the bridge of his nose which cut through both lips and left them setting against each other uncomfortably. That man smiled grimly up at the young child and turned his sights back to Mrs Denver, she tried to pull away from him, but he grabbed her face and brought it near to his.

“We can hide anything, my dear.” He smirked. “We can hide anything, and we can hide it for as long as we care to hide it for. They say you die twice: once when your heart stops, and again when your name is spoken for the last time. How about we see which happens first?”

That statement seemed to reignite some fire inside Mrs Denver, her eyes went wide, and she shook her head against the vice like grip his hand had around her chin. Her crying turned to screaming, even through the rubber ball it was blood curdling to hear.

Felix jolted as he felt a hand on his shoulder, his father was leaning in close to him as he watched along with him. His breath made Felix want to be sick, it reeked of cheap booze and cigarette smoke in such a concentration he was fearing he’d get drunk off the smell alone.

He hated it, every bit of it, but he couldn’t for the life of him look away. Then he woke up. He was so sure he had been awake, but he woke up. He was in his bedroom, breathing heavily, cloaked in that oppressive darkness his room took on at night. He couldn’t remember the last time he saw the moon, maybe it was sometime before he moved to that neighbourhood, but it was almost like it had never been there at all.

Just then, he felt something calling. It was no louder than a mouse’s whisper, but it was loud enough to make him sit up and head for the window. The moon was back, and it was looking through the window at him.

“Head to the sign.” It seemed to instruct him.

Staring The Moon in the eyes, he began to silently run back through the events that had lead to that moment. The massacre, the breakfast, the dream… when did he go to sleep? He was probably still, in reality, at the dining table; he was probably slumped in his breakfast, his father still laughing away at his joke and his mother still knitting and his siblings still running around. It was then that he started to wonder if he ever had siblings.

Overwhelmed by a dizzying feeling of confusion, Felix placed his head in his hands and held it there until his eyes went fuzzy; then he looked back out into the world and found out he was on the edge of town. Before him stood Theodore Maxwell, grinning with a chin bathed in blood and a glazed look over his eye.

“I knew about the sign.” He spoke, his breath sounding like that of a drowned man. “We all did. When you know about it, they come. You either die, disappear… or you touch the sign.” He explained, gesturing a porcelain pale hand at the sign.

It was about four foot tall, with a large face painted with an image of a green, tree-flanked valley and a river; it stood on two mighty legs, buried into the grass beside the road.

“Okay.”

Felix knew he was awake now, he never seemed to speak in his dreams. That one confirmation as he sheepishly reached out to touch the sign was enough to know he wasn’t dreaming anymore.

The wind around his feet changed direction, the sound of the river seemed to grow a little louder, and Felix suddenly felt a little older. When he turned back, the whole town had disappeared, The Neighbourhood was gone, and he knew he was finally free of that horror.