Lesser Demons of the North Shore

Get to know your new neighbors with Juan Martinez’ delightfully creepy new story! ~ Julian and Fran, April 21, 2024

This month’s stories are by authors Eric Smith, Julie C. Day, Juan Martinez, and E.C. Myers. The first story of the month is free to read, but it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep publishing great stories week after week.

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Lesser Demons of the North Shore

by Juan Martinez

Here’s the story that should have served as a warning: Four years before we moved to the suburbs, my wife, Clemencia, worked at an after-school nonprofit in Bucktown, and one of the volunteers she supervised, Staci, drove from Winnetka to help out. Our commute was much easier than Staci’s, just a hop on the El from our Pilsen apartment. Clemencia said she didn’t really know Winnetka, didn’t really know about the North Shore. Staci said she hadn’t really known about it either. She’d married into the suburbs. Staci had been an actor. She worked at the Goodman and Steppenwolf and kept at it after she’d met her lawyer boyfriend and moved. Don’t move, Staci told her. You’ll think, Oh, it’s Chicago with a yard, but it is not Chicago with a yard. The North Shore isn’t Chicago. She said, in our neighborhood there’s this woman, she’s in her sixties, she has the blowout, the fur coat—the whole North Shore thing.

I’d seen her everywhere, Staci said, in her furs in the freezing cold without a hat. Even in February you’d see her, just walking. Neighbors called the old woman Cruella, Staci told Clemencia, and so she started to call her that too, though she felt bad about it.

Staci saw Cruella walking for about a year—alone, bereft, something hungry about her eyes. I must have been about your age, no kids yet, Staci told Clemencia, and my wife kept quiet and listened.

Staci tried saying hi a few times, but Cruella ignored her, stared past her. They lived a block away from each other. Staci had seen the woman leave her house—her mansion, she corrected. It was a total mansion. But Staci also lived in a mansion: the lawyer came from a family of lawyers.

So the North Shore is super rich and super snooty, I said. Got it.

That’s not it, Clemencia said. My wife had interrupted Staci with the same comment, but no—that wasn’t why Staci was bringing up the woman in furs, that wasn’t the point or the warning. The woman in furs walked alone, sure, and she lived alone, and it wasn’t until a year of seeing her walk the sidewalks that authorities traced missing household animals to the woman’s home. She’d been taking them since she had found herself alone, abandoned in her mansion—her husband had apparently just up and left. She had grabbed cats and dogs, dragged them to the basement.

No, I said.

That’s what I said! my wife said.

Yes, Staci told her.

And yes—animal sacrifices. Of the satanic variety that people in the suburbs usually freak out about. The woman had an altar and robes and everything. Get this, Staci said, she even sacrificed hamsters. She had this one tiny sacrificial knife and everything.

That’s when my wife and I looked around our tiny Pilsen apartment with its many translucent cages and mazes and tubes and grew concerned.

Cruella didn’t break into houses to steal the hamsters, Staci clarified. Those she bought at a pet store. Like, she bought a lot of hamsters. Too many. That’s what finally did her in, not the many missing cats and the occasional small dog. Anyway: the woman spent a month in jail. And she did some community service. Anyway: she’s back at home, back in her mansion, back to walking the neighborhood in her fur coat.

That’s got to be an urban legend, I said. I mean, it’s like actually Cruella de Vil, practically.

That’s what I said, my wife said, but Staci sent me a couple of the news stories, like some from weird Nextdoor groups but one from the Tribune. It really happened. My wife forwarded me the stories. I don’t think I ever clicked on any of the links, and then a year later the pandemic happened, and we moved out of the city and out to Kentucky, and when it was time to come back, we bought remotely—we decided for Lake Forest because we’d seen Dolly Parton play Ravinia when we first got to the city, and Lake Forest was just north of that. And super pleasant, super affluent, and because the houses all looked lovely and mid-century, the yards expansive and full of squirrels, and we figured it’d be Chicago but with a yard—but it wasn’t, not at all. We’d forgotten Stacy’s story, and everything that allowed us to blend in when we lived in Pilsen—our skin, our accents, our Colombian passports—all of that made us stand out.

***

Clemencia was pregnant, two weeks past her due date, when we moved in. We walked even though it was January because the nurse said it would help induce, and we did, we would be out walking, but no baby, and all these neighbors walked too, all of them in expensive leggings, and we said hi but they didn’t say hi back, they’d just look past the two freezing Colombians.

My wife said we’d made a terrible mistake, we should have stayed in the city. She was right, but I refused to admit it.

We had so much room for our cages, though. So much room for the blue tubes and the mazes and the squeaky treadmills.