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.

We had close to three hundred hamsters now, all comfortable in their Habitrails, their massive tube-connected metropolis. When not at work, I spent most of my time maintaining it, making sure their litter was clean. Each of these fierce, ridiculous creatures had a little soul, a furious life, and each with a name, though we’d forgotten all but a few—Ricardo, Carlos, Miriam—and they occupied less of my mind now that our child was due to arrive. But the hamsters definitely had more room than when we lived in the city. Life was definitely easier—no more parallel parking, no more trudging up and down with hamster supplies, and all of us now rooted in the bluffs and ravines and ancient trees of this part of Illinois that felt—unlike Chicago and unlike the rest of our flat and swampy state—like it knew its own beauty and called to the deepest part of us, the one we had to keep tucked away, our most natural selves. Here, nature looked and felt like nature, even if the North Shore people did not look or feel like people, with their Teslas and their leggings and their blowouts.

That’s what I was thinking as we walked and hoped for the imminent birth of our child.

That’s when my wife called me out.

She used my real name, not the one we used around people, so I knew it was serious. She pointed directly across the street.

On the other sidewalk, an old woman in furs walked. No dog. Her hair was perfect. She stared directly ahead like everyone else. She hadn’t seen my wife point or she’d pretended she hadn’t seen her point.

“That can’t be her,” I said. “Staci said she lived in Winnetka.”

“Isn’t that close?” my wife said. “She could have walked here, right? From there?”

“I guess,” I said. We didn’t know the North Shore at all, that much was true. We didn’t know our new home at all. I thought of our hamsters safe in their tubes. “She didn’t see us, at any rate.”

“Right.” My wife put her hand on her belly, on our son.

“Hey,” the woman said. “Hey.”

We stared past her even as she walked toward us, walked fast to our home like we’d seen everyone else do—the woman in furs close behind, telling us she knew us, knew what we were. We were afraid that she was right, that she really did know, that she’d tell the whole neighborhood.

We locked the door. The house, I reminded myself, was beautiful—clean and mid-century and full of windows. We had not installed any curtains, and had talked about how weird it was, to have basically this entire wall that was nothing but glass overlooking the yard. “Anyone could see in,” Clemencia had said. I told her we’d get curtains. But I never felt all that exposed, not until today, when the woman stood in our backyard and stared at us, at the elaborate Habitrails, a smile turning her face into a mass of wrinkles. She must have a tiny knife in the pocket of her furs.

“You’re trespassing,” Clemencia said through the glass. “Go away.” She pulled out her phone. “We’re going to call the cops.”

The old woman pointed at her ear. She couldn’t make out what we were saying. We tried miming it, me getting pretend-handcuffed by my wife, and the woman just stood and watched our whole performance, her face mostly bored, darting to the hamsters and their perpetual transit. She’d leave, eventually. Or she’d break in. If we moved to the bedroom, she’d break the glass and go after the tiny animals. I knew what we had to do, of course. So did Clemencia.

“She’ll leave,” I said. “She has to. She has to eat. She’ll have to use the bathroom. People can’t just stand for hours staring at the living rooms of strangers.”

“She’s old.”

“That’s what I’m saying. She’ll get tired or she’ll have to go to the bathroom.”

“I meant,” Clemencia said, “she’s old and she’s got nothing else to do.”

“She’s not going to hurt them,” I said, looking at the hamster I’m pretty sure we called Ricardo. I was pretty sure it was Ricardo. “We’re not going to let her.”

My wife didn’t look convinced. Why should she? The woman in furs—Cruella—had already hurt animals. She had gotten off easy. Why should she be afraid?

“You know what we have to do,” Clemencia said.

I did, even though I didn’t want to say it, and I didn’t want to bring up what we’d taken to calling the Indiana Rule, sometimes the Ohio Rule, back from our time in Kentucky—though of course it applied to Illinois. I really didn’t want to do it, but my wife sat pale and sweaty and super pregnant in our new house, our new life, and so I stepped onto our porch full of trees and alive with fat squirrels in the sudden inexplicable heat of a February night. I tapped on the flashlight icon of my phone. The woman was no longer there. I walked back in.

“Maybe she won’t come back,” I said, not believing it.

My wife didn’t believe it either.

We locked our doors. It was almost time for bed.

***

My wife woke up at three in the morning. Labor pains. We drove to the hospital in a rush, and they sent us back, told us to return when the contractions were closer together, even though my wife insisted that they felt extremely powerful—that something didn’t feel right. The nurse waved us off: go back, it’s fine, you have at least a day. We drove home and I swept open our front door, my keys still in my pocket.

The woman in furs waited for us in our living room, upright and looming over our hamsters, hands still in her pockets.

I was scared, of course, and also angry, mostly ready to shield Clemencia from any potential harm. The woman only went after animals, I reminded myself, not anyone or anything you could mistake for humans. Whatever. I just wanted this woman gone, far from us.

“Open it up,” she said, hand finally out, knife flashing. “Let me see them.”

My wife was in pain, the woman wasn’t welcome here. She didn’t belong.

That’s what I wanted to say, even as I kept the worst thought inside: that the old woman did belong here and we didn’t. I kept quiet, of course. You don’t say anything when you’re swinging as hard as you can at an old lady, when you’ve had enough of her and figured she had it coming. I swung hard at her face with my fist and felt the face give way, just a mass of bone and rubber, and all of her swung with the punch. And then I kicked at her torso. I shoved her. The old lady stood, bouncy, pliant. Upright. I expected her to slip, to fall. I expected bones to crack, blood to seep.

Nothing cracked, nothing seeped.

She stood, her little knife in one hand, the other hand around my wife’s arm.

I had not even messed up her North Shore hair.

“I know you’re not Mexican,” Cruella said. “This isn’t a hate crime.”

“It’s a crime for sure,” my wife said.

“We’re Colombian,” I said.

“I know who you are,” Cruella said.

The knife flicked closer to my wife. Clemencia had her other hand up. Both of mine were up as well.

“Open the cage,” Cruella said.

“Don’t hurt them,” Clemencia said.

We were by the kitchen because the living room and the kitchen were all one room, because that was the whole thing about mid-century open-concept houses, and I could have reached for one of our cast-iron skillets and smashed Cruella to a pulp, or I could have grabbed the stapler and stapled her to death (because both the kitchen and the living room were also the office). I did none of these things, not because I didn’t want to, not because I was afraid of hurting her, but because I knew they would not work.

My wife flinched. Another contraction.

Cruella admired our Habitrails, the long and elaborate translucent blue tubes. She told us that the hamsters looked comfortable. She called out a name that sounded faintly familiar.

She said the name again: “Harold?” And again, softer. “Harold, are you in there?”

She flashed the knife at me. I was close enough to see the brand. An X-Acto, the type you use in balsa models. She said, “You have no idea how long it took to put it all together—how many people I had to talk to until I found one of you. And then how many of you demons I had to talk to until someone coughed up your names. You have no idea how many pieces of my soul I had to sell, bit by bit, how much money all you leeches wanted.”

She was wrong. I had some idea: it was expensive to live in the city, and just as expensive to move to the suburbs. We took what gigs we could find.

Cruella took off her fur coat. She wore a black dress, short and sleeveless, her limbs richly textured with wrinkles, tattoos all over her body. I recognized them all: charms, protections.

My wife groaned.

“Please,” I said. “We need to go to the hospital.”

“Please,” she said. “She’s not due for hours. Days, possibly.” She jabbed the knife at the Habitrail. “Just give me back my Harold and I’ll leave you monsters be.”

“Harold,” my wife said. She groaned again. Sharper now.

I said, “Let me get you Harold.”

I found a hamster that matched the tawny brown fur of her coat and fished it out of the cage. She put the knife down and smiled, her face smooth and unwrinkled. Years younger. All that anguish, all that sorrow. I tried to imagine what it must be, to lose your partner. I didn’t think about the repercussions of what we did, what we had to do, that often. It was surprisingly easy to not think about it.

“Harold,” she said, and turned to us. “He was just gone. He went to Bucktown for an errand and never came back. I told him to be careful.”

“We can’t turn him back,” my wife said, in a fit of unnecessary honesty.

I was hoping to attack Cruella—to do something violent enough to counteract every cantrip and protection permanently inscribed on her skin. I couldn’t, not anymore. Cruella held the hamster that was almost certainly not Harold, and my wife held on to the woman’s shoulders, everyone crying.

“I know you can’t turn him back,” Cruella said.

My wife groaned.

Cruella said, “You should go to the hospital.” She traced the snout, the cheeks. “It’s time.”

She held her hamster so tenderly in her hands. Maybe it was Harold. But no—I’d remember a Harold. And we really had stuck to the Indiana Rule, for the most part. We certainly didn’t take too many people in Bucktown. It was always men, though, and definitely always commuters—just anyone we didn’t think we’d imagine actually living in the city. Always someone affluent, middle-aged, white. I’d remember a Harold, I’m sure. And then I did: Harold wore chinos and a Cubs cap and carried a briefcase. A real estate lawyer. That poor woman.

She said, “How are you liking the neighborhood?”

I told her the truth: the trees and the yards and the spaces were lovely, the houses, too, but we found the neighbors cold and off-putting. No one said hi or acknowledged us.

“It grows on you,” she said. “It’s not so bad as all that. The neighbors, too. It can be lovely.”

And that’s when she asked us for what she’d come all this way for.

We did it, mostly so we could get on with the birth of our child. She sat still and waited for the transformation to happen, for an essential part of her soul to float into us (there was so little of it left, she’d given so much of herself away), and after it happened, I cupped the two hamsters and placed them into the busy, crowded tubes we’d engineered for the former humans who kept us going. I desperately hoped she’d find her husband in there, in the busy city we’d built for them; that was my hope while we drove to meet our son in the unseasonable warmth of this February morning, in the dark and empty splendor of our new neighborhood

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Juan Martinez is the author of the novel Extended Stay (Camino del Sol/University of Arizona Press, 2023) and the story collection Best Worst American (Small Beer Press, 2017). He lives near Chicago and is an associate professor at Northwestern University. His work has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, the Sunday Morning Transport, Huizache, Ecotone, Nightmare, McSweeney’s, NPR’s Selected Shorts, Small Odysseys, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Sudden Fiction Latino, Flash Fiction America, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Ploughshares.

“Lesser Demons of the North Shore,” © Juan Martinez, 2024.

The Sunday Morning Transport: Selected Stories 2022 is now available at Weightless Books!