by Aaron Polson
He counted to himself. He saw his wife’s smiling face in each shadow. Each number, each step, one foot, the other, brought him closer to the moving thing at the end of the hallway. It was one of them, he was sure, the half-dead ghouls made by fever and disease, forced to fester in the ghetto by the barricades, the police, and the soldiers with rifles outside. He loathed the Grey Men, but could he kill one if he had to? They had been his neighbors before the fever, his fellow inmates in the tenement, and some of them factory fodder like him. Why was Lilian spared the disease, only to die in childbirth and become food for these awful things? Why had it spared him—no, not spared. He felt the stirrings in his joints over the past week; he woke in the night with silent burning in his bones. He wasn’t spared the fever, only delayed… His sentence only postponed.
The thing turned toward Tommy. Its yellow eyes almost glowed in the dim corridor, black veins cracking across the moony surface. Tommy was only twenty feet away from the Grey Man when it tilted its head to one side. Its vertebrae snapped with a soft, wet pop. It opened its mouth, a black hole above its throat. A noise leaked out.
Tommy stopped. A shiver worked through his skin. His shoulders lurched slightly. He could hear the slow scraping crawl, the owners of those damp, boney fingers pulling slowly across the boards to grab at him again. The door to the stairwell behind him clicked shut, and an echo worked its course down the hall. Something—more of them—had followed him down the stairs. Tommy was pressed on both sides.
“Pardon, sir,” Tommy said, finding his voice small but patient in his throat. He shielded the child from the Grey Man’s vision. “Pardon, but may I pass?”
The thing lowered its ruined face. A black tongue crossed sour teeth. “I smell blood.”
Behind Tommy, thudding feet crossed through the waste in the corridor.
“Pardon,” he said again, his voice shrinking. His free hand found the midwife’s shears in his waistband.
A gnarled finger, like a grey twig, poked toward the bundle under Tommy’s arm. “Whatcha got?”
The thudding feet drew closer. More sounds echoed through the hall: A grunt, the heavy sound of a boot meeting soft flesh, a curse. The other Grey Men were slowed by the near-dead refuse in the passageway.
Tommy drew the shears from his pants and jammed the point into the leering guard’s neck in one steady, swift arc. The Grey Man grabbed at silver handles, but stumbled into the wall at its left, black blood coursing from its throat. Tommy sped away into the stairwell, fleeing the dying groans of one monster and the angry howls of its brothers.
The second stairwell smelled as badly as the first, but the air felt cooler after his ordeal in the hallway. He clomped down the stairs, two at a time, cradling the infant with both arms now. A few windows were left unboarded at this end of the building, and trickles of thin moonlight cast the stairs in a silver haze. Sounds chased him: a heavy crash against the door and slobbered, angry voices as his pursuers struggled to lug the body away—a lucky break.
Tommy hesitated at the bottom. Through the open archway, he could see dim shapes moving in front of a large fire; flickers of orange and yellow light cast grotesque mockeries of humanity against the far wall. The only exit was thirty yards away.
Something black turned slowly on a spit above the fire.
Tommy would have to navigate through a throng of the monsters to make it to the exit.
He’d made this journey only an hour before, walked past the looming mob to fetch water from the well in the street. But that was before Lilian’s death. That was before the squirming thing under his arm was born. It was before he ran from those things, before he killed one with the shears only two floors above. Now, they would surely smell the blood on him. They would hold him long enough for their grim brothers to join the crowd and his flight would be in vain.
Slowly, one foot in front of the other, he stepped through the archway and began the long march to the door. The first floor had been a place of commerce not long ago, a closed market where the factory workers and new immigrants would come to trade and barter, a place of celebrations and dancing on Saturday nights. Now, the wide space held a great cooking fire and charred bones of previous meals. Since the quarantine, since the new scarcity of food, the fevered ones gave up long-held taboos.
Meat was meat.
Tommy’s eyes began to water, an effect of the smoke-haze but also the realization that Lilian’s corpse would soon fuel their bellies. He forced his gaze forward toward the exit. One foot in front of the other, he moved closer. Ten yards now, close enough to run, and Tommy’s heart vibrated a tremolo against his ribs. Loud barks echoed behind him. His pursuers had made the first floor. In his peripheral vision, Tommy could see the Grey Men lurching to their feet. Ruined hands stretched out.
With five yards remaining, Tommy ran. He bolted for the door with snarls and curses licking at his heels. His lungs erupted in fire, and he nearly staggered to the ground with coughing, but he slipped from the poisoned air into the blue night just ahead of the closest ghouls. He didn’t stop, but burst across the courtyard into the heavy shadows beyond, stumbling over bits of debris on the way.
The fever had taken some of Tommy’s strength, and his flight had burned deeper than it would have two months ago. He crouched in the shadows, panting for breath. The Grey Men stopped pursuit. Why? Tommy swung his dizzy head to one side, away to the barricades.
The soldiers’ silhouettes lowered their rifles: Tommy’s last obstacle, and then the convent, sanctuary for his babe. With the sweat cooling on his brow, he looked down at the infant. I’ll call her Lilian, if I have the chance, after her mother. His stomach tightened. He only had a few moldy potatoes and some stale bread to eat over the past week. When he ran from the building, the smell—the awful smell of blackened flesh—had tickled his appetite.
God no. It’s the fever, is all. I’m sick.
Tommy slid along the brick wall. He checked each door and window and found all of them locked. The barricade was the only passage out of the quarantine. The arm in which he’d carried baby Lilian grew numb. How could an infant be so heavy?
He glanced at the Distillery, the polluted hive. He’d escaped, hadn’t he? But the Grey Men wouldn’t give up, not yet. They were only regrouping and would intensify the search, slink around in the shadows until their awful hands found him. After all, he killed one of them. He had to move. Tommy knelt and grasped a hunk of wood from the scattered debris on the street; with one tremendous, aching effort, he tossed it against the barricade as far from the shadows as he could. The silhouette soldiers snapped to the sound, and Tommy ran.
God, he ran. He ran as if to distance the hunger from his body. He pushed his worn shoes into the gritty pavement and leapt over a shallow dip in the barricade. The toe of the trailing foot just cleared the makeshift hurdle, and Tommy staggered on the other side.
Sanctuary.
“Patterson, your station!” came a shout to his left.
The hot metal ball ripped through Tommy’s body and dragged him to the ground just as the rifle crack snapped to his ear. His chest bloomed midnight crimson, but he was able cushion the baby, twisting as he fell. The blood in his throat was warm and metallic, and the world began to bleed with black ink. Two pairs of boots, military style with blue, woolen trouser legs pulled over the tops, approached.
“Good shot, Patterson.”
“God, is that a baby?”
Take her… She’s healthy. Wet gurgles squeezed from Tommy’s mouth instead of words.
“Goddamn thing is probably sick, too. Tainted.” A pause. “Either leave it here for the meat wagon, or toss it back over the barricade. Let her own kind deal with her.”
Tommy felt the baby lifted from his arm...
In the Primal Library
When we were twelve, Bobby Milton and I rode our bikes to the library to look at naked pictures in the National Geographic magazines they kept on the second floor. We would go after school, in the autumn of our seventh-gra
de year, before the weather turned too cold for boys on bikes. Bobby’s older brother, Nate, told us about the pictures of bare-chested native women. Being dumb and horny and without access to real nudie mags—Bobby’s dad was a youth pastor at the Baptist church and my dad was in Hawaii with his secretary—we scurried up the creaking stairs to the magazine room and spent an hour or so flipping through the glossy pages.
The Springdale Carnegie Library was an imposing structure of stone, a tomb filled with dusty, creaking innards. The woodwork, though intricate and beautiful, had weathered years of schoolchildren’s abuse. Railings groaned with the slightest provocation, floorboards rubbed against one another with wails and whimpers, and the whole place reeked of yellowed paper and mildew. The second floor, where the magazines waited in tall cardboard sleeves, was illuminated by a few naked bulbs and always rested in uneasy shadow.
We stayed long enough for the sun to skirt closer to the horizon, almost vanishing from the narrow windows—just long enough to find other pictures under the yellow magazine covers, grotesque cave paintings from Lascaux in France and artists’ renderings of Neanderthal man. Pictures that inspired an imaginative game of chicken, Bobby and I conjuring the poor Neanderthal into some hunched creature of the shadows, a man-beast that chomped and crunched on the bones of little boys who remained on the second floor past dark.
"He’s got awful teeth," I’d say, "yellow-saw teeth, for grinding and tearing."
Bobby countered: "A big, flat forehead and black eyes for seeing at night."
"Hands as big as your head."
"Muscles and veins popping through his skin."
"Face like rough leather."
"Looks like a bear, extra hair all over."
"He bites his prey on the neck and tears out the jugular."
Our original purpose lost, we pushed our hideous descriptions until one of us broke and bolted for the stairs. We clambered onto our bikes and rode to my house because it was closer. On the way, every crooked tree limb reached out as the gnarled hand of our prehistoric man-thing; we collapsed on the front lawn, heaving and panting until our hearts slowed and our panic crackled into laughter.
Winter came, and our trips to the library stopped. Bobby’s father was transferred, and I lost the courage to climb to the second floor. In time, I forgot the Neanderthal man’s smashed face.
It’s a shame how some things can be forgotten.
Six years later, when I took Stacy Pfiefer to the second floor under the guise of studying for a physics exam, the memories of our man-thing resided in the most primitive folds of my brain. Stacy said she wanted to study—alone—and my broiling hormones permitted one motive.
"We need a quiet place to study," she had said.
I heard, I want to be alone with you, Nick, and my heart quickened.
But once she spread her homework across the walnut table in the reading room, once she flicked on the little lamp and started reciting equations, once she pushed me away when I started nibbling her neck, I knew my interpretation of "quiet place to study" had landed wide of the mark. I was aroused, though, perhaps prompted by memories of the twelve year old who had climbed those creaking stairs with his buddy to sneak a peek at a naked breast in an old magazine.
After one more failed attempt at romance, Stacy pushed me away and said, "Look, mister. I’m here to work. I thought you understood." Her face distorted in the dim light.
"Sorry," I said, happy in the shadows because she couldn’t see the bulge in my jeans.
Embarrassed and horny, I excused myself, intending to relieve a little tension in the bathroom. There were three rooms on the second floor: The big periodical reading room, with its boxed copies of old magazines and racks of newspapers, the nonfiction collection on the other side of the building, and the small alcove between with the stairs on one side and a tiny storeroom and toilet on the other.
Stacy had just the one lamp on in the reading room, so as I stumbled toward the bathroom I smacked my foot against a heavy object, nearly dropping to the floor. My eyes adjusted gradually, and my arousal was lost to curiosity. I lifted a yellow-bordered copy of National Geographic; the box was full of them, for sale—a nickel apiece.
What’s more, I recognized the cover: Paintings from that cave in France, bizarre renderings of men and animals from prehistoric times. The memories started to flicker: Bobby and I, boys of twelve; the shadow-men we imagined. I flipped the magazine open, hungry to find the picture of our Neanderthal that inspired so much childish terror.
"Nick?" Stacy called from the next room. "You all right?"
"Yeah, fine. I’ll be back in a minute."
"Hurry, okay? It’s a little spooky in here. I heard a noise."
"It’s an old building," I said.
I turned every page, but couldn’t find the picture. I knew that magazine. We’d looked at it so many times. Confused, perplexed, and just a little frightened, I moved to the doorway of the small storeroom, reached inside the opening, and felt for the light switch.
The light flickered, illuminating the room like a flash of lightning, and went out. A blown bulb. In that moment, I saw images on the walls—misshapen paintings, black-and-red stylizations of deformed, not-quite human, things. There were other beasts engaged in carnal acts with the man-things. Smears of blood. Elongated arms, legs, genitalia. The walls spread in twisted, pornographic cave paintings—not the hunting images from National Geographic. Twisted. When the light flickered off, I was momentarily blinded, but the images remained, lurking behind my eyes.
My heart lodged in my throat.
I opened my mouth, ready to call for Stacy, but a thumping sound stopped my voice, followed by a heavy crash, like a body hitting a hardwood floor. My limbs became stone; terror crept up my spine and locked onto my brain stem—the primitive brain. I was twelve again. I stumbled away from the dark room, glanced to my right, to the reading room where I’d left Stacy. Black shapes shifted across the lamplight. I fled, crashing down the stairs and through the front door.
I left Stacy alone on the second floor. I climbed into my car and drove away like Bobby and I rode our bikes—spurred by fear, frightened by every misshapen shadow along the quiet, neighborhood streets. I breathed for the first time in my driveway, panting like a child.
I rested my head against the steering wheel and waited for my heart to stop its assault.
After a few moments, I laughed. I pounded the steering wheel and laughed at myself, pricking my courage and replacing my fear with embarrassment. The paintings had been figments of my imagination, memories of those afternoons years ago, when I was a horny, stupid kid. When the light popped, I was startled. No body hitting the floor, just the protests of an old building. I glanced at the clock on my car’s dash. Nine o’clock, the library’s closing time.
Stacy was going to be pissed.
I worked through excuses, writing my script for Stacy, trying to find a reason for my sudden flight. As I turned down the final street of my return trip, flashing red-and-blue lights screamed. Police lights—and an ambulance. I parked and wandered toward the lights, drawn like a Neolithic primitive to the fire. A small crowd had gathered, watching as she was wheeled out on a gurney, covered with a sheet. Our shadows were blown obscene by the flashing lights—strange shapes dancing across the parking lot and lawn.
The librarian fingered me, said I’d come in with Stacy. She said she heard me pounding the stairs, running away. It wasn’t until closing time, when the she checked the second floor, that she found Stacy’s body crammed inside the narrow bathroom. The police questioned me, took molds of my teeth to compare with the marks on Stacy’s neck and chest. Springdale broiled with the cannibal case for four months. In the end, I was absolved by the snatches of skin found beneath her fingernails, the flesh that Stacy gouged as she fought for her life.
Of course, I was as guilty as anyone, but I wasn’t alone. That thing in the library had been born all those years ago—in the depths of our imaginations—of two fathers.
The teeth marks on her body may have mimicked my own, but the flesh belonged to Bobby Milton.
Familiar Faces
A short, stout man in a wrinkled grey suit stood next to the window of his hotel room. He poked one thick finger through the Venetian blinds, prying them open slightly so he could peer into the darkness outside. A single light flickered high on a lamppost above a silver sedan—a long, luxury model that showed its age with a little rust around the wheel wells. The only other light came from a little cluster of orange fire blinking in the distance. Behind him, sitting on the edge of a double bed with a rust-colored comforter, a thin woman, mid-thirties, wearing garish, slightly smeared lip gloss poked her hair into an awkward pile on her head.
“Are they out there, Manny?” She asked, her voice hushed.
The man turned, showing her his square face smudged by a few days’ worth of beard. The blinds snapped shut as he pulled his finger out. “I can’t see anything.” He stroked the few greasy strands on top of his head. “Hell, I should move the car. Y’know, park it closer to the doors.” He waved the black pistol in his other hand, gesturing toward the blinds.
“What? Go out there now?” She stood up and wrapped herself in her own arms. “Not with them out there, Manny. We don’t know. They might be waiting for you.”
“Yeah. Alright. Sit down, will ya?” Manny shuffled to the nearest nightstand and laid the handgun on top. “You’re right.” He dropped onto the bed, and the old springs gave a weak whine under his weight. “So Liz, what now?”
“You need some sleep, Manny. Look at your eyes. We can’t keep this up.”
He glanced into the mirror on the opposite wall, noted the cheap knock-off abstract painting above the bed, and squinted to see the purple circles around his eyes. Liz paced in front of the mirror, slapping her pale upper arms. “It’s so cold in here,” she said.
