Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  Both of them scrambled for the knife. Andy got to it first. An animal growl rose unbidden to his throat. He gripped the knife and thrust it blindly upward, feeling it jerk and slide in deep.

  The knife leapt in his hand like a fish at the end of a line. He let go and the wolf fell.

  Sudden silence met his ears. Andy climbed to his feet. The handle of the blade stood up from the wolf’s left side, a quivering, silver-and-red-stained flag. Andy raised his wet and bloody hands towards the light. He felt a great pressure on his legs as if he were sinking into the pavement.

  When he looked down again, he saw that the creature lying at his feet was only a man. Horrified, he backed away, until he felt something hard and rough against his shoulders, and there he crouched.

  Andrew.

  He cringed; the man in black stood over him in the shifting light. He started to shriek, “Go away!” but was drowned out by the creature’s voice, which echoed through his head:

  The world does not care whether you live or die—it has always been that way, and those who have the will to survive continue to flourish while all others are eaten. You are no different from them. You have the devil inside of you, as everyone does. There is nothing noble about having your face pressed into the dirt. Learn to fight, and conquer. Take what you deserve.

  Andy felt a change in himself. A clarity of thought, of purpose, that he had never felt before. A stranger lived beneath this familiar skin; all these years, he had been comforted knowing that the dark corners of his mind were known to him and that the worst was not so bad. But now there were new corners and new nightmares.

  Andy left the alley with the man’s blood on his hands and jacket. He did not know where he was going, only that he needed to be moving. As he passed a large store window, he caught his reflection in the glass and stopped short. A hairy, snarling face with heavy brows and glowing eyes stared back at him.

  *****

  “And you truly believed at that point that you had become … this beast?” Devey sat poised over his notepad, as if he were studying something. But Andy could see the look on his face, a look of disbelief, the look a sane man reserves for the insane, or the weak. For wasn’t that what insanity was, in the eyes of others? A weakness?

  “Yes,” Andy said. “But I don’t anymore, of course.”

  “I must say, this is extremely interesting,” Devey said, lifting his wire-rimmed spectacles from his nose and examining their curved lenses. He lifted the sleeve of his shirt to polish them, and then settled them back on his nose again. “Although you became quite disjointed in telling the story. Jumping around from place to place and time to time. I had some trouble following you.”

  “That’s the way I remember it,” Andy said. “I can’t tell it any other way.”

  “Yes. Well, I’d like you to relax. Just take a deep breath.” Devey waved his hand. “That’s better. So you went back to the office the next day?”

  “No.” Andy was puzzled. “I went home and went to bed.”

  Devey knew perfectly well what he had done. The police had roused him from a sound sleep at his apartment that morning, when they had made the arrest.

  “Ah.” Devey set the pad down on the desk. “Tell me about the money, Andy. When did you actually take it?”

  “I didn’t take the money. I told you.”

  “But we found it in your possession. The police did. Surely you remember. Did the lawyers surprise you at the office earlier that day? Did they walk in on you at an awkward moment? Perfectly understandable. You had no choice. I sympathize.”

  Devey’s falsely soothing voice enraged him. He still can’t grasp it, Andy thought. No one can.

  If he hadn’t killed the man at the club, the man would have killed him. Self defense. He had committed no other crime. He was not responsible for anything other than ignorance. He had been pushed to the brink of madness by one of the creatures that haunted those shadowed places between this world and the next. His only mistake had been in listening to its ravings. But he had been in a vulnerable state, with Annie gone. Surely the doctor understood that much.

  But no, Devey was once again missing the point. There were more important things to consider here.

  “What does the money or the rest of it matter?” Andy whispered. “He was real.”

  “You’re talking about this man in black.”

  “Of course.”

  Devey reached down and opened a drawer of his desk. Andy saw with some surprise that the man’s hands were shaking; he could show emotion, after all. “I wasn’t going to do this,” Devey said. “I was afraid it would overwhelm you. But I don’t see that I have any choice.”

  He pulled out an envelope and spilled its contents on the desktop. A series of photographs in vivid color; Mr. Welk sprawled across his desk, his throat cut in a wide red yawn, his entrails hanging down like monstrous purple worms; Mrs. Underwood in her sterile cold office, her neck twisted, her tongue visible between puffy lips. Devey held up another photo. The janitor in his dirty yellow jumpsuit now spattered with blood, thrown across his cleaning cart, fixing the camera with a wide-eyed stare. The janitor’s eyelids had been cut out.

  “Do you see these?” Devey said. “You did this, Andy. You. No ghost, no spirit. Nobody else. They were helpless, innocent people. You murdered them in cold blood.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Andy whispered. His mouth was a dusty bowl, his temples throbbed. Had Devey’s ears grown more pointed? Was that a shadow of hair along his jawline?

  “The police found the Edwards file at your apartment along with the money. Do you understand? You took it.”

  “No! The man in black—”

  “This is how they found you that morning, Andy,” Devey said. He held up the last picture. “Here is the man in black.”

  Andy could not speak. His heart was racing and his throat closed as he stared at the last image captured on film. A picture of himself in police handcuffs, standing against the wall of his apartment. He wore a black tuxedo suit with a black bow tie, and a black shirt underneath. A black flower decorated the lapel. The camera had turned one final, ironic trick; in the light of the flash, his eyes glowed red.

  “There was one more body, Andy,” Devey said. “It had been there, under the floorboards, for some time. A female. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The green-colored room spun across his sight. It could not be! Annie. No. Annie had left him alone with the demon, and his flesh had been weak, but he was not a cold-blooded murderer! He had not done this!

  When he looked up again, Devey was grinning at him. His nose had stretched itself into a snout, his ears grown long and pointed with tufts of hair, his teeth sharp and yellow. One of the others. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Dr. Devey wasn’t a chicken at all. Devey was a wolf.

  As he realized this, the room seemed to darken, and out of the darkness stepped the man in black. He stood directly behind the doctor, and as Andy watched, his mouth opened wide. Inside, it was deep and very red.

  Am I wasting my time here? Will you let them take you under like so many sheep, or will you act?

  “Andy?” Devey still held the last photo in one hairy paw. Now it showed nothing more than an empty bedroom, which of course was what it had shown all along. “Are you all right?”

  Andy made a fist. One of the straps was loose. The letter opener on Devey’s desk was within reach.

  “I’m feeling much better now, doctor,” he said. “Thank you.”

  THE END

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  ###

  STARVATION ARMY

  By Joe McKinney

  From the window of his abominably small second story room, Jonathan Nettle could see the alleyway where he’d found the body earlier that morning. He’d stumbled on the corpse by accident, while he was wandering the huge, unending slum of London’s East End
, looking for the homeless shelter on the Mile End Road where he was to take up his new post as assistant minister.

  He’d smelled the noisome stench moments before he came across the homeless man’s body, and he’d spun on his heel and vomited all over the sidewalk when he saw the black, iridescent flies swarming around the mouth and eyes. After that, he’d stumbled out of the alley way and grabbed the first policeman he saw. He babbled and pointed and grunted until, at last, he made himself understood enough for the policeman to follow him.

  The policeman looked at the body, at the bruise-like splotches on the skin that weren’t bruising, but lividity, at the emaciated, rail-skinny arms and legs, and merely nodded.

  “Yer an American, ain’t ye, sir?”

  “Huh?” Nettle said, the back of his hand against his lips. “Uh, yes.”

  “What are ye doin’ here in the East End?”

  Nettle told him he was looking for the homeless shelter, and the policeman merely nodded. “The peg house yer lookin’ for is over there,” he said, and pointed over Nettle’s shoulder.

  Nettle could barely take his eyes off the body, but he did long enough to see the tumbledown, soot-stained building the policeman pointed out for him. He looked back at the policeman—at the bobby, he reminded himself—and said, “What…happened to him?”

  “This bloke? Prob’ly starved to death’d be my guess, sir.”

  “Starved?”

  “Aye,” the bobby said.

  Nettle had said nothing to that, only nodded as he tried to take in the wonder that a grown man could starve to death in the middle of the largest city on Earth, in the heart of the most powerful empire the world had ever known. He tried, but couldn’t wrap his mind around it.

  His stay was supposed to be brief, only long enough for him to get some experience with the great things William Booth and his “salvation army” were doing for the poor here in London, so he could take those practices back to his Methodist ministries in New York and Boston. But he could already tell that the “problem of the poor” that such great orators as the Reverend Merle Cary of New York had spoken of so eloquently to audiences up and down the New England seaboard all that preceding summer of 1875 was far worse than he had been led to believe.

  Just then, almost as if on cue, several men began lugging bags of garbage out of the hospital across the street and dumping them on the sidewalk below Nettle’s window. The bags split open on the ground and soon there was an almost liquid pile of corruption festering in the open air. Nettle watched the pile grow into a shapeless mass of rotten vegetables, scraps of meat, orange peels, and bloody surgical rags and blankets. The street was a miasma of squabbling and obscene yelling and fighting, and yet no one said a word about the garbage. Indeed, after it had been sitting there for a few minutes, children converged on it, burying their arms in it up to their shoulders, digging for any kind of food they could find and devouring it on the spot.

  One boy, a stunted little runt of perhaps six years old, came up with something black that might have once been a potato, and tried to steal away with it. Several older boys surrounded him, punched him till he fell, then kicked him till he gave up the nasty potato thing he clutched near his groin.

  For Nettle, it was too much. His sister Anna had snuck a dozen oranges into his luggage as a treat for him. Fully aware that indiscriminate charity is cruel, he made up his mind to be cruel. He collected the oranges in a paper sack and went down to the street.

  “How old are you, son?” he asked the boy.

  “Twelve, sir,” the boy said.

  Nettle blinked in shock. Twelve! And he had envisioned the boy a runt of six. How this place must beat them down, he thought.

  He handed the boy the oranges, and the boy’s eyes went wide, like he’d just been given all the jewels in Africa.

  “Go on,” Nettle said. “Enjoy.”

  The boy was gone faster than the sun from a November day, and Nettle, feeling a little better, went back up to his room to write a letter to his sister in New York.

  The porter’s name was Bill Lowell. He was a weathered, bent-back old man whose job it was to watch the door to the shelter and tell the poor wretches who came there for shelter when there was no more space available. Most nights, there was room for between 20 and 50 people, depending on the shelter’s food stores and what work needed to be done—for the cost of a bed indoors and a hot meal was a day of hard, hard labor.

  “We open the doors at six,” Bill said to Nettle, who’d been told he’d work at each job in the shelter so he could better learn its overall operational strategy, “but the line’ll start formin’ ‘fore noon. By four the blokes’ll be lined up ‘round the corner.”

  “Even when there’s only room for a few of them?”

  Bill shrugged. “We’ll need to search ‘em as they come inside,” he said. “Sometimes, they try an’ sneak tobacco inside in their brogues, and they ain’t allowed that.”

  Nettle glanced through a window next to the door, and sure enough, a long line had already formed and was snaking its way down the sidewalk and around the corner. Word had gone out earlier that there was only room for twenty-five, and yet no one in the line seemed to want to leave his spot.

  The faces he saw all looked hollow, the eyes vacuous. It wasn’t until several days later that Nettle learned why everyone he saw shared the same corpselike expression. London law didn’t allow the homeless to sleep outside at night. The idea was that if the homeless weren’t allowed to sleep outside at night, they would find somewhere indoors to sleep. To those who only saw the problem from the stratospheric heights of wealth and power, it was a clear example of give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. The reality, though, was a homeless population that was constantly driven from one doorway to the next by the police, forced to stay awake by the toe of a boot or the bite of a baton, resulting in an expression of slack-jawed exhaustion that stared back at Nettle from every pair of eyes he met.

  Bill himself had nearly shared that fate, he told Nettle. He had had a family once—a wife, three daughters, and a son—but had outlived them all. His wife and daughters he’d lost to scarlet fever, all within a month of each other, but the son survived, and had helped Bill in his work as a carpenter in days past.

  One day, Bill had been carrying a load of nails that was too much for him. “Something in me back just broke,” Bill said. His load of nails had spilled, and he’d ended up flat on his back, unable to get up. He was taken to a hospital, but they refused to admit him, telling him, essentially, to “walk it off.”

  This he had tried to do, but two hours later was on his back again. He was taken to a different hospital, and this time spent three weeks in bed. He emerged a broken man, unable to do the hard labor that was, unfortunately, the only kind of work that he and most of the men like him were qualified to do, only to learn that his son had fallen from a rooftop and died the week before his release. The boy was buried in a pauper’s grave, unmarked, along with a dozen others.

  He lived on the streets after that—carrying the banner, as the expression went—chased from one doorway to the next by the police, until, as luck would have it, he ended up in the Mile End Road shelter on the day they had an opening for a porter who could also do a little light carpentry. His nine pounds a year in salary made him a veritable Croesus among the East End’s poor.

  Nettle thought idly that such a man as Bill, who had narrowly escaped a cruel death by exposure and malnutrition, would be more charitable toward his fellow men, but such was not the case.

  Bill, much to Nettle’s unease, seemed to heartily enjoy his position of relative power over the poor, and stared down his soot blackened nose at all who entered, demanding from each their name, age, condition of destitution, and what kind of work they were good for, before searching them all with a rough, hard hand.

  In one of his searches he found a ragged pouch of tobacco inside a man’s sock. Bill proceeded to beat the man with a st
ick he evidently left by the door for just such a purpose, and probably would have gone on beating him indefinitely, Nettle figured, had he not intervened.

  When Nettle tried to berate him for his violence, Bill only scoffed. “Why, ‘e’s nothin’ but a worthless beggar, ‘e is,” he said, and, with all the sour disposition of a man who kicks the cat because he’s afraid to kick his wife, went to the door, where a wrecked shell of a man stood on the threshold waiting for admittance, and said, “Be gone, you. Full up!”

  “Please, sir,” the human wreck said. “Please, I ain’t ‘ad food in me belly for five days.”

  “Full up!” Bill said.

  Nettle’s heart broke to see the pain in the man’s eyes, and before Bill could close the door, he was at Bill’s shoulder and said, “We can take this man in, I think.”

  “But, sir,” Bill said, “there’s only room for twenty-five tonight. We’re full up.”

  “And that man,” Nettle said, pointing at the bleeding bag of bones Bill had beaten for the insolence to smoke cheap tobacco, “was to be number twenty-five. Now, I believe, this man is twenty-five.”

  Bill said nothing, but his eyes did.

  “Thank ‘e, sir,” said the wreck, and walked inside.

  Bill’s other job at the shelter, after the doors were locked and the homeless shuffled inside, was to monitor the bathing room.

  Making the homeless take a bath seemed like a good idea to Nettle—that is, until he saw the process in motion. The overnighters were all lined up, and one by one let down into a dark room with a single tub of warm water and a single threadbare towel hanging from a hook on the wall. Each man used the same water and towel as the man before him, and by the time the man Nettle had forced Bill to let in got his turn, the water in that tub was a frightful stew.