45 Acacia Avenue wasn’t quite like the other houses on the street. The lawn hadn’t been mown for months, and fast food cartons lay strewn the length of the drive alongside torn rubbish bags spilling their contents to the wind.
But it was the front door that gave away the fact that I’d left suburbia behind. It was covered in intricate drawings done in black charcoal; swirls and curlices around pentagrams and hexagrams. I’d seen something like it before, during research on another case that had taken a dive into the twilight zone. But this looked less like a formal magic protection ritual and more like a man trying as many symbols as he could, in the hope that at least one might work.
I knocked hard on the door.
Somebody moved inside, but they didn’t answer.
“Mr. Clarke? I know about the diet… and the Binding Agreement. I’m here to help.”
“Help? I’m afraid the time for that passed a while back.”
The door opened.
I expected to see another skeletal, shuffling figure, but this man was portly, almost fat. He was unshaven and smelled ripe, but otherwise seemed healthy.
“Peter Clarke?”
He hurried me inside and closed the door quickly. He led me through to a room piled knee deep in food cartons, beer cans and dirty clothing. It smelled worse than I did after a night on the town. The curtains had been pulled closed and the air felt stale and warm. There hadn’t been a window opened in here for a long time.
“It’s the maid’s day off,” he said, and spilled a waterfall of trash on the floor to make room for me to sit on an armchair. I let myself down gingerly, making sure I was going to be able to get back up before committing myself.
I lit up a smoke as soon as he sat opposite me. It helped some with the smell, but not quite enough.
We sat and looked at each other for a while.
“You’re looking well,” I said when he showed no signs of talking.
“In the circumstances, I suppose I can’t really complain. I could be dead, like the other three.”
“Other five,” I said softly.
He went pale.
“I’m the last?”
I nodded.
“Then it must be huge by now,” he said.
I didn’t have to ask him what he meant.
“I’ve seen it,” I said. “But I don’t know exactly what I was looking at. Care to fill me in?”
He lifted a six pack of beer and threw a can towards me. I was careful to give it a good wipe with the arm of my jacket before opening it. It was warm, but went down well enough.
“It was Duncan’s fault,” he began. “We were just a few days into the diet and we started talking about targets. Between the six of us we decided to lose around ten stone.
“‘That’s a full person’s worth’, Duncan said. And that’s what got me thinking that we should make ourselves a promise. So I had the contract written up, that we would go on until enough weight was lost to add up to a person. It was my idea that we sign it in blood, to seal the deal.”
He laughed bitterly.
“It was supposed to be a joke… just something to focus our attention. How was I to know that it wasn’t all bullshit?”
“Well, you know now,” I replied. I lit a second cigarette.
“I had an inkling when Annie died,” he said. “And then when the other two were taken at the office, I knew something was up. So I did some reading. Two nights later something scratched at my door after I’d had my supper, but I’d taken precautions and put up the protection. And it’s kept working.”
“You’ve been here ever since?”
He waved at the detritus around us.
“Welcome to my world.”
“And you knew how to stop this thing, but you let it take your friends anyway?”
He shrugged.
“I figured if it was pestering them, then it wasn’t pestering me. Beside, if they had any smarts of their own, they could have figured it out the same way I did.”
I was getting angry now, and had to push it down.
“They died horrible, piteous deaths you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.”
He shrugged again.
“Shit happens,” he said.
I had nothing more to say to this thing. The white beast had more humanity in it that he would ever have.
I stood and walked to the front door. He followed me and stood in the hallway.
“So you have no regrets for their deaths?”
“Survival of the fittest,” he said. “I win.”
He closed the door on me.
I turned to leave.
It stood there in the shadows beside the small porch… a white figure as tall as a man but unformed, featureless save for a gaping maw of a mouth. It swayed from side to side and keened in a high wailing like a child’s sob.
Survival of the fittest.
I turned back to the front door and wiped a smudge down the length of the protection spell. Then I walked away. I heard the door crash inwards as I reached the end of the driveway.
I might only have imagined that I heard the screams.