The Devil Next Door

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Somebody had painted the walls with their own feces.

The naked man sat there on the floor, his body a map of bruises and contusions, and smiled at this. His skin was crusty with blood. Some of it was his own and some of it belonged to others. He could tell by the taste. He stared at the walls, licking the salt off his fingertips, trying to make sense of the elaborate graffiti of fingerpainted shit on the wallpaper around him.

Somebody marked this place with their own filth so they could smell it, find it even in the dark.

He wondered what all the childish scrawls might mean, sensing there was important ritualistic symbolism behind them. They seemed familiar. Like maybe once, perhaps as a child, he’d painted a room like this, smeared shit on the walls to marks it as his lair.

What if whoever did this came back?

There was a knife. He looked at it, marveled at the dark stains on it. Sniffing them, he remembered each one.

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