Rotters

by Daniel Kraus

  “There’s a rotter.” His voice was coarse with heroism. “Inside me.”

  32.

  A BALEFUL LULL DRAPED over the two of us as we closed in on Iowa. My muscles were weak from expectation. Boggs, though, no longer acknowledged me. He was too busy re-learning to breathe and walk in concert with the intruder wrapped inside of him. He seemed amazed by his ability to persevere and blinked down at himself in naked awe.

  Harman, Indiana, was the last stop before Bloughton. I kneeled at the edge of the night’s opened grave. I tightened the green straps on my backpack: tonight I wanted the pieces of my past as close to me as possible. I scrutinized the gravestone for the umpteenth time. The carved name was so pedestrian I couldn’t get it to stick in my head for more than a few seconds. It concerned me; I wanted to be able to remember. Once Boggs was at the bottom of this hole beneath five feet of clay, it was the name, after all, that would make visiting his final resting spot so satisfyingly simple.

  I peeked over the edge of the hole. Boggs was ten yards away, his back to me, completely absorbed in his Bradbury. I lowered myself and began to open the lid. Plenty of space would be needed for him to fit inside. Sadness nagged at me as I made room alongside the coffin’s bones. Boggs’s life had been one of unending tragedy. Even now he just wanted to be remembered. Instead he would be buried in a grave so anonymous even I doubted my ability to specify it.

  It was time. I lifted myself from the hole and held the shovel like a club. Boggs was not there. I squinted my eyes and listened for the guidance of the Rat King. There was nothing. I set down the tool and explored the surrounding hillside. With each step I felt the cold certainty that he was gone. Whatever entity he felt was inside him had marched him away through the headstones. The warm breeze cooled my perspiration as I searched for footprints, a discarded top hat, the wet residue of blood. Back near the grave I saw something nestled in the peeled turf. I crossed over, kneeled, and lifted it. It was a brown twist of something dry and swollen. I turned it over and saw letters. Bradbury—he would never leave it behind—oh, god, he was still—

  The clang of the blade rang off my pelvis. I sprawled and caught myself over the abyss. I tried to scramble away but I felt small hands draw tight my clothing and flatten me to the ground like a tossed gym bag. The trumpet and leg bone inside my backpack crushed against my spine. Above, a dry wind snapped the pages of Bradbury that had been pasted with blood across Boggs’s face and arms like a form of armor. His top hat blacked out the moon. The knife was raised and bloody.

  “There’s a rotter in you, too, son.” He nodded helpfully and crouched down. “Let me help you get it out.”

  He drove his knife at my stomach. Only my churning legs kept the point from landing. I wrapped the small man in a bear hug and bucked, expecting each second an impalement. Instead he pulled away from me. Panting, he stood and with his remaining eye cataloged me: knuckles, pelvis, clavicle, skull.

  “Don’t overreact, now. I ain’t trying to kill you.” He moistened his puffy lips and zeroed in on my sternum. “I’m trying to save you.”

  He cavorted toward me with mincing steps. I leapt across the hole and while airborne revisited what I had seen earlier: it had not been Bradbury he’d been paging through while stumbling away. It had been the Rotters Book, and he’d finally come upon my photo. Physical laws meant little to him, but books were truth. If the pages said that I was dead, then I was dead.

  Within arm’s reach of where I landed was our pile of belongings, and I dove for the swaddled Harpakhrad and lifted her as if she were mine. Though she was still wrapped in a blanket, the perfection of her weight and balance transfixed me. I was lost until a knife came out of nowhere to notch my shoulder blade. I felt the blow in my teeth.

  “Rotter! Rotter! Don’t you touch her!”

  I lashed out with Harpakhrad. Boggs was too short—she sailed over his head, the blanket unfurling as she twirled. The effort sank me; I collapsed to the grass. Boggs kicked me in the nose and, when I rolled again, the ear, and, when I rolled again, the teeth. Blasts of blood and pain clouded me. I couldn’t move and yet was moving: it was Boggs, toting me exactly the way Rhino had eons ago in the boys’ shower.

  I opened my mouth to a foul taste—ZadenScent, I was sure of it. Then gravity compacted my guts and everything green and blue swapped places. I dropped. Ancient bones splintered against my chest. Oxygen shot from my lungs. Minutes were lost, many. I opened my eyes only in time to see the first shovelful of dirt swarming at me like a cloud of bees.

  It hurt when it hit my face, a million little bullets. I used my elbows as cover and shouted for him to stop. Dirt caked my tongue. It kept coming, insanely fast, blotting out the sky. Already the weight was crushing. I corkscrewed and found myself face to face with the skeleton beneath me and wondered for an instant if it was my own—maybe the fall had knocked the rotter right out of me.

  Up I went, taking hold of the edge, but the flat bottom of the shovel cracked against my knuckles. I collapsed but was right back up, taking two holds in hopes of being able to maintain one of them. It was no good: two strikes and I was at the bottom again. My arms and shoulders were numb. I feared losing more digits. But still I came, pedaling my feet up the dirt walls and elbowing back to the surface. This time the shovel connected with my left ear, just like my mother, two ear injuries, two deaths.

  When I landed there was no sound. Dirt fell about me, mute as snow. Deafness then reversed itself and my skull shook with an ascension of noise so great it blew tears from my eyes. Hiding from the clamor was the only hope. I drew up my legs and burrowed inside the casket. I pulled on what remained of the lid, but pounds of dirt impeded the hinges, and the bulk of my backpack got in the way. Both of these problems were solved in a few frenetic seconds and then I was sealed off from weight and light. The dreadful ringing shifted to the left side of my head. Brittle hisses of dirt broke through the bulwark of sound. Somewhere within was the whisper of the Rat King, telling me that I should’ve seen this coming, I’d had so many chances, I should’ve taken him down first.

  Terror whipped in black fragments. The anonymous name on the grave, it was mine. Hard surfaces pressed against my elbows and hips and knees. My lips kissed the casket lid and ate dust. Scattered points of light shone through the blackness and I mistook where I was dying: beneath the falling stars of Boris’s bedroom, the cage of the band room closet, the breathless box of rehearsal room B, the cold dungeon of the locker room shower, the filthy crevice of the cabin sink.

  Where I least expected it—from the barren throat of the skeleton—came a voice so patient it slid through the din. Words we had gone over a hundred times, I recognized them. His locked jaw and persistent repetition, I remembered them. I hugged cold bones and pretended it was him and pleaded for just one more go-round: Teach me one more time, I swear this time I’ll listen.

  The bones spoke in my ear and told me to repeat.

  “Calm, remain calm.”

  Within the airless vessel my voice was inharmonic.

  “Air, conserve air.”

  His fear, my dismissiveness. None of it had been easy on him.

  “Shallow, shallow grave.”

  High above me the dirt was packed, the sod sewn, and Boggs was limping away in temporary truce with his internal rotter: one Digger down, next stop Bloughton. But despite how the Rotters Book might read, I wasn’t dead. The Resurrectionist had already performed his resurrection. Heart rate was steady. Rank air issued through my sinuses in fixed time. Even five feet down, I realized, I had every advantage. The lid was already broken, I knew the center of balance, and most importantly I had a tool. It took five minutes for me to remove the femur from my backpack. I would have to break it in half to gain the necessary leverage, but nothing lasted forever.

  Through it all, even ascending through dirt, I made my apologies.

  The cemetery balanced on my back. I shouldered it off and ran. I was made of earth and pieces of me fell off and shattered as I escape
d. Inside the backpack the trumpet fought musically with the remaining dagger of leg bone, a duet that superseded the fading ringing. I was over a fence, down a road. Boggs’s hatchback was gone, but he was half blind, his body no longer tuned for the operation of machinery. There was still time, though I could not falter. I could beat him back to Bloughton, back to Hewn Oak, back to the tiny cabin on the Big Oak River to save the man who had brought this boy back from the dead.

  33.

  IT WAS EARLY MORNING before I found an unlocked car. I had watched Boggs hot-wire plenty and was still a good student—just thirty minutes of tinkering before the asthmatic sputter. I put the car into gear and swung it around on the quiet suburban street. Tiny birds squeaked on their wires; public radio listlessly relayed the weather through an open window. These soft surges overtook the last residues of ringing. I felt light and quick. It was as if the hole I’d emerged from had held me for months. Sounds were more salient, physical objects finer. The landscape solidifying about me was manufactured but beautiful: the queues of identical homes, the columned porches, the husbanded lawns baubled with dew. So tempting, these trappings, that it was hard to drag my eyes back to the front.

  A man with a shovel. In the road.

  I swerved. The windshield exploded into cobweb and I saw Harpakhrad’s silver and gold blade ricochet away. I stomped my foot and my forehead scrunched glass. Tires screeched. Somewhere nearby a shovel clanged to cement. Too fast, it had happened too fast—he could not have tracked me down, not already. I spat windshield. My skull hummed. My lungs stung from the steering wheel. I blinked and more glass fell from my lashes.

  Harpakhrad scraped across the cement.

  I kicked the windshield until I had blown away a fist-sized hole, and in that hole I saw Boggs advancing, top hat twisted low, his instrument twirling acrobatically. He was real. He had tracked me, probably followed me all night. If I hadn’t found a vehicle, how long would he have toyed with me? I hit the gas and cranked the wheel. Rubber squealed and the driver’s side window shattered.

  Wailing enough to match the screeching tires, I glanced off the side of one parked sedan, then another. Somehow I found myself bouncing down the center of the street. A water sprinkler turned on. A man stood motionless at the end of a driveway, holding a distended garbage bag. Shit—a cul-de-sac. Dead end. I fumbled for my seat belt and secured it. I checked the rearview. A block away, Boggs was still advancing.

  A delirious three-point turn later, I was turned around and barreling. All that road and it only took seconds to reach him. He didn’t budge. He swung Harpakhrad like a samurai sword. Though I was the one inside a car, I was afraid. I jerked the wheel. I felt two of my tires leave pavement. The wheels landed and hurdled the incline of a front lawn, and through the hole in the windshield I saw Boggs tossed noiselessly by the front left fender. An instant later the hood crumpled against an SUV. The windshield disintegrated into my lap. The diagonal sash of the belt burned my throat.

  Smoke sat in the air and the SUV’s alarm was going crazy. I unbelted and reached for my door but it was already hanging ajar. I took hold of my backpack, put one foot outside, then another, and then swayed as if an earthquake were twisting the planet. I hurt everywhere. The car was totaled. Across the metal carnage of the hood, I saw daubs of blood. But I was okay. I was okay. I walked, felt old like Lionel. Right, left. One more step. Right, left. Over freshly trimmed grass and past a novelty mailbox in the shape of a tractor. Behind me metal crackled and plastic sizzled. “Rotter. Rotter.”

  I teetered in the middle of the road. Dimly I was aware of white faces appearing at windows, men with ties in their hands and women with sleep-tousled hair. With reluctance I faced the disaster I had made of someone’s front yard. Boggs was hobbling from the wreckage, using Harpakhrad as a crutch. The bones of his left foot and ankle had been detached, and the dead weight drooped heavily in its fleshy sack. He took another hop and the foot flapped so freely I could see the outline of a snapped bone poke curiously at its soft container.

  “Rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter.”

  Maybe the drugs had roasted the pain receptors of his brain. His suit smoked, his vest sizzled with motor oil, his hat was dented and oblique. He kept coming. Pages of Bradbury remained crusted to his skin but now popped as they were incinerated by razors of heat. He kept coming. His face was knotted and blackened except for the one perfect eye beckoning as beautifully as my first glance of ocean through trees. I felt my knees buckle in submission. Harpakhrad could split me in half, even if swung by a man as broken as this one.

  Tiny puffs of air plumed his shredded lips.

  “Rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter.”

  As he hobbled over a manicured stripe of flowers and past the tractor-shaped mailbox, I took a single step away. I didn’t even mean to do it. Surprise flickered across his face. I tried it again—I took a second backward step and he pooched his lip in consternation. Soon I was backpedaling with considerable speed. The blue eye burned. To me it was a signal: keep moving. No car, maybe that was true, but there were always more cars. For now I would run—yes, my legs were running—and take every advantage of his injury. Hinges squeaked as people retreated to call 911. They would arrive too late, at least for me; now I was sprinting. Down the block, through the alley, and across side streets, his mutter chased me long after he had dropped from sight.

  “Rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter, rotter—”

  34.

  OVER FIELDS AND FENCES, barbed wire catching my cuffs and cow patties baking to my soles, I kept myself aligned with the interstates by the stink of melted rubber. In Swenson, Indiana, I seared my fingers hot-wiring an early-model Skylark and in that tin oven crossed the Mississippi. I broke down in Tedrow, not fifty miles from Bloughton. I ditched the heap on the shoulder and made tracks through the ditch and the woods.

  It took me nearly three days to make what should’ve been an eight-hour trip. I felt woefully late, yet made myself wait until dark before walking the last ten miles. To kill time I rifled through trash cans for food. It wasn’t until I noticed the inordinate amount of popcorn in one of these that I recognized the building as the movie theater where Foley and I had held hands. I squatted against the brick and munched discarded Mike and Ikes and relived the atrocities that had begun there.

  The clock tower rang ten as I passed the Amtrak station where I had first landed, the store where I had bought an instant camera and a bar of soap, the library where Harnett and I had researched pawnbrokers. Bloughton now seemed preposterously puny, the corners too sharp and the streets too clean for it to be anything but an unoccupied replica. Life was proven only by living room windows flickering with evening programming. Unconsciously I began to slink. I was a criminal here, in all probability a wanted man.

  The town square was lit with too many lights and I hugged a line of storefronts. Hurrying by was the only sensible course, and yet I paused. For so late at night, there was an unusual amount of people milling about. Upon closer inspection I made out several loose groups of children playing in the grass and a few teenagers threading among them. A few steps closer—I had strayed into the middle of the road now—and I discerned several large objects resting in the central pavilion. Aside from the yearly Christmas display, the structure usually sat empty. I could not resist; I went closer.

  The objects were coffins. The receptacles had become so prevalent in my life that it took me several minutes to appreciate the abnormality of their presence in the center of the square. People of great significance must have died. I reached the edge of the grass and stopped cold. Gottschalk, Woody, Celeste—what if what I had done had driven them to suicide and this was their ongoing elegy? No matter how bad they had been, I was worse. Self-disgust choked me. Three boys looked up and backed away. I wiped my mouth and
edged closer to the pavilion until I realized that these could not be the caskets of my former tormenters. Not only was the workmanship and style of a different era, but I recognized the evidence of tampering. The markings were more than familiar. They were my own.

  A girl of six or seven stood next to me. Her curly black hair was split into pigtails. She wore pink shorts and a rainbow shirt further colored by the dribblings of long-gone ice cream. A Bratz doll dangled from her hand. Her teenage guardian, bestowed with the same curly black hair, was occupied with what looked like very meaningful texting. I forced a smile at the little girl and pointed at the coffins.

  “Why—” My voice was wild and I coughed it down, fighting for stability. “Why are these here?”

  “So they can catch the bad man.” She seemed grateful for the opportunity to flaunt her memorization. “And so to remember the bad things he did. And also to punish the bad man for the bad things he did.”

  I spoke so carefully the words hurt. “What did the bad man do?”

  “He took them out of the ground, silly.”

  My intestines knotted.

  “That was silly,” I managed. “Did they catch the bad man?”

  “No, but they’re going to. My daddy says they’re going to.”

  “When are they going to catch him?”

  “Right now, silly,” she said. “They went down the road. That’s why my sister is playing babysitter.”

  I strained to control my pulse.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Blood,” she said, pointing at my hip. Next she pointed at my shoulder. “Blood.”

  “That’s right, I have an owie,” I said. “What’s your name, sweetie?”