Everybody knows there's a monster on our street. It took a while for the disappearances to be noticed, but once they were, everybody knew. It's that kind of a place - everybody knows everybody else, and 'secret' is just another term for 'fact we pretend not to know to spare your feelings'. There are no secrets here.
Well ... there's one.
Colin, my next door neighbour, leant over the fence the morning after the third child went missing, and whispered, “Have you noticed? Another child's gone missing, and Mr Davis' curtains are all closed.” I nodded gravely, and whispered it in turn to Susan, who told Jane, who told Steph, who told Alan ...
You get the idea.
By the end of the day, the street buzzed with the whispers, and it only got worse as the children kept vanishing. It was I who noticed that old Mr Davis was staying inside far more than before, and I who told the others that he'd been round my house asking about the neighbourhood watch scheme I was setting up.
Asking out of interest, or concern that he'd be caught? whispered my neighbours. It didn't take long for the others to come out of the woodwork. Susan had seen him talking to one of the lost little boys before he vanished. Mary-Anne swore she'd seen him dumping a large rubbish bag into the skip at the other end of the street in the dead of night, and Jeff recognised the scent that sometimes drifted up from the old house at the end of the street.
Rotting meat, he told us.
Something has to be done, we all agreed. But what evidence did we have? The police would never listen, I reminded them, and by the time we had more evidence, it would be too late for another child.
I wouldn't call the group that's gathering in the street a mob, exactly. I've seen my fair share of mobs, and I know that there's usually a lot more shouting, a lot more swearing, a lot more pitchforks and burning torches and boundless rage. My neighbours don't have any of that - but what they do have is a steady, grim determination to see the neighbourhood purged. They'll get the job done, and the children will be safe once more.
And I suppose I'll have to move on, after an appropriate amount of time. I think I'll wait until they find the half-eaten bodies I buried in Mr Davis' garden, then start searching for my new town. The same trick won't work twice in the same place, of course, but a girl's gotta eat, and there are always strange men and lonely old women and misunderstood teens, wherever you go. There's always someone to blame, and there are always people looking to blame them.
I'll start my whispers up again, and we'll see if I can get a proper mob going this time.
---
by reddit user acingit via: reddit.com/r/
Comments