* * * *
The Nain Rouge skipped, hopped, and babbled its way into the old middle-class professional district of Brush Park. Once a place where doctors, attorneys, auto executives, and lumber barons lived, Brush Park was now a wasteland of specters, a graveyard for old houses that were rotten, abused, and haunted by the shades of lifestyles long since over with. Ritchie Carbone remembered it well. He'd had an old grade-school friend from Brush Park, a Jewish attorney's son called Ron Sachs. His family had moved out in the sixties and Ron had eventually gone to Harvard. Last Ritchie had heard of Ron, he'd been practicing law in L.A. Good for him.
Up ahead, the Nain stopped outside the moonlit remains of a Gothic mansion and bent over double. Then it pulled its pants down and it farted at him. Infuriated by its rudeness, Ritchie could feel his blood pressure go through the roof as his head began to pound with anger and with booze and with the unaccustomed exercise he was getting. His father had died from a stroke back in the ‘80s, he'd have to be careful. But what for? The Nain, fart over, shuffled on, grunting and babbling and laughing through its awful, cracked teeth.
What for? Ritchie thought again. What am I breathing, what am I existing, what am I living for? Even before he'd sold the business his marriage had been on the skids. Maria, his wife, had been so over serving Coneys, she'd run off with a professional poker player back in 2008. Now, apparently, Maria and this Ralph were holed up somewhere outside Reno. Her kids wouldn't see her, but then neither Kathy nor Frank came to see Ritchie that often either and he was the so-called “injured” parent. No one lived in Detroit anymore, no one. Old Jigsaw had offered to buy him some apparently very fierce German Shepherd off some junkie from Eastern Market, but Ritchie had passed. Freddie hadn't been a guard dog, he'd been a friend. Ritchie didn't want to have some beast he was terrified of stopping him from leaving his apartment.
Ritchie followed the Nain onto John R Street and then stopped to catch his breath. This part of Brush Park was completely gone to urban prairie. There was nothing. No wrecked houses, no vegetation—apart from grass—and no objects but litter. People reported seeing skunks in such places, even coyotes. The nothingness of it made Ritchie shudder. This was a district where he'd played as a kid, where he'd had tea with Ron Sachs and his family in his dad's elegant, turreted mansion. All gone. He looked around for the Nain and just saw a void. Even the creature that traditionally presaged doom for the city couldn't stand this. Maybe Brush Park represented “job done” to the evil little freak. After all, the destruction of Detroit was its final aim. Over the centuries since Cadillac founded the city, almost every disaster that had befallen it had been heralded by a sighting of the Nain. Back in ‘67, during the riots, there had been a lot of sightings. But then Detroit had survived; it had changed too. Black folks had had enough and so they'd expressed their anger and they'd forced change. Ritchie had cheered them all the way. So what Da Man had done to him, came still harder. As he'd tried to tell the boy at the time, "This white trash has always been on your side!" But it hadn't meant squat. Not to Da Man or to any of his crew.
There was a frigid late February moon in the sky and the frost on the ground was so hard it was almost ice. Cold as unwilling charity, it was too bitter to snow and all but the most desperate addicts, the dying junkies, the most deprived of the deprived, were inside their homes, their squats, or their crack shacks. No one was about and the silence, with the exception of the blood pounding through Ritchie's head, was complete. Come March it would be Nain banishing time again, unless, of course, he could get the little prick dealt with early. But it had disappeared. Not that it had ever really been anywhere in the first place. A product of vodka shots, the Nain was just a bile-scented vomit from his sick, tired, and bitter mind. It wasn't Detroit that was falling apart, at least not completely and not yet, but Ritchie Carbone. With no savings, no pension, and only a small apartment on Cass by way of assets, he was pretty much finished. With welfare he could exist, but he couldn't live. Ritchie's pa had died when he was only two years older than Ritchie was now and he'd been ready to go. Agnes, his wife, had been dead for almost thirty years by the time old Salvatore died when he was sixty. Ritchie still remembered how the old man had cried for her every single day.
Then something sharp jabbed into one of his buttocks and he turned around to see the Nain, its vile fingers jabbing into his butt. When he looked at it, it screamed with laughter and Ritchie, furious, said, “You are so freaking dead!”
* * * *
The Nain took off like a rocket back towards Erskine Street, whooping and grumbling and waving its disgusting furry arms in the air. It was having a high old time!
Heavy, breathless, and now seeing stars in front of his eyes, Ritchie Carbone pulled his unwilling body after it, his mind seething with visions of carnage and revenge. Nobody jabbed him in the butt! Not even Da Man and his crew had stooped to that. Some freaky thing from his subconscious wasn't going to get away with it! He ran after the thing and was about to follow it into some rotting house when he recognised exactly where he was. He stopped. At one time there had been two turrets attached to the old Sachs house, now there was only one. But it was definitely where Ron and his family had lived. Ritchie put a hand up to his chest as he gasped for air and tried to deal with the shock. Mrs. Sachs had been house-proud crazy! What would she make of the place now? Ritchie knew that it would break her heart and it made him want to cry. Mrs. Sachs had always made chocolate refrigerator cake, which had tasted so wonderful he'd closed his eyes with pleasure every time he'd eaten it. He'd been young and he and Ron had always talked about what they wanted to do when they grew up. Ritchie hadn't wanted to go into his pa's Coney Dog business, he'd wanted to be a U.S. Air Force pilot. Not just a broken dream, but one hammered out of him by necessity, by recession, by the systematic destruction of his city.
As he ran up the teetering staircase to the place where the Sachses’ front door had once been, Ritchie let out a howl like a wounded wolf. But then, suddenly, he stopped because it was in front of him. The Nain, scowling and spitting and yet at the same time laughing at him. He wanted to strangle it until it croaked.
It laughed one more time and then he was upon it.
* * * *
In spite of the cold, Ritchie slept better in that terrible skeleton of the old Sachs house than he'd done in his apartment for months. The Nain had fought, of course it had, it was well known throughout history for its viciousness. But he must have prevailed because he was still alive, even though his body hurt and he could see a spider's web of small scratches on his hands. Amazingly, to Ritchie, he'd had neither a stroke nor a heart attack either. Maybe killing the Nain had somehow, magically, restored him to full health again.
But then what did he mean by “killing the Nain"? Now that he was sober, there was surely no more craziness and therefore, no more Nain? He had a bunch of small cuts all over the backs of his hands, but then he probably got those scrambling up into the old Sachs place. How he'd remembered where to find the old house after so many years, especially drunk out of his gourd, was hard to know—until he remembered. He'd followed the Nain. But then that wasn't really possible, because the Nain Rouge didn't exist. It was a folktale.
Ritchie stood up and felt the rotted floorboards splinter underneath his feet. If he remembered correctly, the Sachses had had a basement. Ritchie moved as carefully as he could until he felt he was on a rather more solid footing. He'd just congratulated himself on surviving that particular ordeal when his eyes were caught by the sight of a tattered, miserable bundle underneath where a great bay window had once been. It was red, and although Ritchie knew that it couldn't possibly be the Nain, because the Nain didn't really exist, he knew that he feared it.
For what seemed like hours he tried to formulate an excuse he could give to himself for not seeing what the bundle contained. But he couldn't. On the one hand he never wanted to see what was in there, while on the other he wanted to do that more than anything else in the world. If
it was the Nain, all his conceptions about reality and the world he thought he lived in would be shattered. If it wasn't...
As quickly as he could, before his fear consumed him, Ritchie reached down with one shaking hand and pulled the thing apart. His hands pulled at tattered velvet crimson material. A little dress.
The child was quite dead. Her face as white as milk, her long, thick, bright red hair carefully arranged around her head like a halo. Had he done that? Had he placed her carefully on the floor of the old Sachs house. Had he killed her?
Ritchie Carbone dropped to his knees as the sound of his own blood threatened to deafen him. She had to be seven years old at the most! A tiny child, probably the daughter of some spaced-out junkie, playing with him, taunting him, being the Nain Rouge and ... But had it been like that, or had he made her run?
He didn't know! He couldn't remember! Not like that, not in any detail! He looked down into her open-eyed, surprised little face and the hammering in his head became a wild, discordant cacophony. Suddenly weak, Ritchie Carbone tipped forward and then lay across the tiny body, twitching and unable to speak. Later, it snowed, and so neither of them was discovered for well over a week. A ghastly and macabre tableau that the police, when they attended, could only speculate about.
Come the vernal equinox, the Marche du Nain Rouge still managed to banish the little horror for another year. Everyone saw the evil dwarf burn, in effigy, on a big bonfire in Cass Park, just minutes from where Carbone's old Coney Dog place used to be. A lot of the revelers said that it was a pity there was nowhere left in the Cass Corridor to get a decent Coney anymore. But then they all agreed that it had probably been meant to be. Why, after all, should anyone get a lovely hot-dog treat after burning even a mythical being, even in effigy, to death?
Copyright © 2012 Barbara Nadel
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* * *
Fiction: THE LONG SHADOW
by Peter Turnbull
Since this issue goes to press before the banquet at which the Edgar Allan Poe Awards are presented, we can't tell you whether Peter Turnbull's 2011 EQMM story “The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train” (March/April 2011) has won in the category of Best Short Story, only that it is nominated. The compelling central character of that story appears here too, and in the Yorkshire writer's latest novel, The Altered Case (Severn House; June 2012).
Arresting.
It was the only word that the man could think of to describe the sensation. He was strolling past the shop window, not particularly paying any attention to the items for sale when he stopped in his tracks, arrested, as if his subconscious eye had seen it rather than his conscious eye. For there it was. About six inches in height, a grayish brown color, “dun” being the proper name for the hue, as was his favorite pub “The Old Dun Cow” in his village. And it was the figurine, the small chip at the base said so. The man stood and stared at it. It was like meeting an old friend, yet a friend with whom unpleasant experiences had been shared. So how many years had it been, eighteen, nineteen? He stood and smiled despite painful associations and said, “Well, well, well, and where have you been all this time?” It was Sunday, in the forenoon, the Minster bells peeled joyously over old York town, echoing in her alleyways and snickets, and the shop was shut. But tomorrow he would return. As soon as the shop opened he'd be there, like the alcoholics who can always be seen standing outside the pub doors in the city centre just before opening time, then when the doors are flung open they stampede to the bar, happy to drink stale beer which has spent the last twelve hours in the pipes. Tomorrow he'd be at the shop, he'd be the first customer over the threshold, anxious to buy the figurine or he'd lose it forever.
Oh, and he'd bring the police with him. He thought he'd better do that. He thought he'd better ask the police to accompany him, because eighteen or nineteen years ago his parents had been murdered during the course of the theft of the dun figurine of Dresden china. During the same burglary, quite a few other items had been removed from the house. The robbers quite calmly carrying item after item out of the house, past the dead or dying bodies of his parents.
The man returned home, said little to his wife and nothing about the figurine, though their relationship was warm and well. He spent the evening in his study and that evening he retired early.
The following day, the last Monday of that merry month of May, the first people to enter Lashko's Antiques, Micklegate, close to the medieval walls of the ancient city, and met pleasantly by Julius Lashko, were a middle-aged, prosperous-looking man with a pleasant and fulfilled countenance and, behind him, a much younger man who was trim and muscular. Julius Lashko thought that they were father and son.
“Mr. Lashko?” The young man spoke, and instantly Lashko realized that the first two customers that day were not father and son. In fact, they were not even customers at all.
“Yes, ‘tis I.”
“I am Detective Constable Sant, City of York police. This is...”
“Mr.... “said the older man.
“Mr. Toucey,” Sant continued.
“Oh, yes. How can I help you?” A note of concern had crept into Lashko's voice. He was a small man with a pointed nose and a weak chin, wild, woolly hair. Sant felt that antiques dealers are not dissimilar to secondhand car dealers in that at one end of their way of business they nudge criminality, at the other they are above reproach. Sant, while keeping an open mind, felt that Lashko fell into the latter category.
“By allowing us to look at that figurine in the window.”
“Certainly,” Lashko said after a pause. He moved to the window and removed the figurine from where it stood between two Edwardian clocks and handed it to Sant. Sant handed it to Toucey, who held it lovingly.
“Yes,” Toucey said. “This is she all right, one of a pair, in fact ... it's the small chip on the base that identifies it. It's rare, eighteenth-century Dresden, quite valuable as it is, without the chip on the base and with her partner, she would be very valuable indeed.”
Lashko looked on in silence, paling slightly. Sant addressed him. “Mr. Lashko, can you tell me how you came to obtain this item?”
“I bought it from a man who came into the shop about ten days ago. He didn't seem suspicious.... I have to be careful, some shifty types come into the shop, usually young, usually in pairs, wanting to sell stuff that they don't know anything about. Clearly proceeds of a burglary. I decline to purchase from such people and notify the police as soon as they have left the shop. The police often pick them up before they get far. But the chap who offered me the figurine didn't fit that type at all. He came in a few days earlier, asked me to value it, something a thief wouldn't do. He also seemed to know something about it ... he correctly identified it, said it had been in his family for some time and he seemed reluctant to part with it. He was giving off all the right signals and I felt that I had no reason to be suspicious.”
“Well, unfortunately, we have reason to believe that it has been stolen.”
“Oh, I'm so sorry.” Lashko seemed to Sant to be genuine. “It does happen. I've been in the business a long time and there have been one or two previous occasions when, to my shame, I have found that I have bought a proceed from a burglary. It's an occupational hazard, and I lose, because having bought it, I have to surrender it and chalk up the loss.”
“As may be the case here. I'll have to take this into custody of the police in the first instance.”
“Of course,” Lashko nodded. “You'll let me have a receipt?”
“Yes. Did the person who brought it to you wear gloves at the time?”
“No. Not that I recall. But if you're hoping to lift fingerprints I think you'll be out of luck—the whole shop is given a good dusting every other day. Got to keep them dust free if I'm going to sell them.”
“It's worth a shot, though,” Sant placed the figurine in a large envelope. “Did you buy anything else from him?”
“Him? Oh, the man who sold me that, no I
didn't ... don't think so ... certainly not a regular. There are people from whom I buy regularly, one lady is trickling antiques onto the market to provide herself an income in her declining years. I have one or two other customers like her. I also have customers who have money and are putting it into antiques and so, like all businessmen, I have my regular customers. But that chap was not one of them.”
“Can you describe the man?”
“Well, it's going back a few days now ... but I did see him twice and he did deal with me, unlike the sort who treat the shop as though it were a museum, just wander in and look around and then wander out again. That's another occupational hazard. So the man...” Lashko shut his eyes. “He was middle-aged ... slim build ... he hadn't put on a lot of weight as many men of his age would do. He had an appearance which I have heard described as ‘genteel shabby.'”
“Genteel shabby?”
“I take the expression to mean a person who has been used to the finer things in life but who has fallen on hard times and, while trying to keep up appearances, has become a little threadbare, but what was threadbare was still of the best quality. He had a calm manner, he seemed warm about the eyes ... he seemed emotionally fulfilled. He wore a ring.” Sant scribbled on his pad.
“Dark hair ... not graying and hadn't lost any of it. Had worn well for his years, he'd retained much of his youth. Can't think of anything else about his appearance to report ... carried himself proudly, erect, like a former soldier. He had a soft Yorkshire accent, as if moderated by education ... not a broad Yorkshire accent of the football terraces, but a softer version, of the golf club or the boardroom. Oh, he was left-handed. I paid him cash and he held out his left hand.”
EQMM, August 2012 Page 7
