by Jack Ketchum
—Shaun Hutson
Shaun Hutson has had more than 60 books and a number of short stories published since 1981 (32 of these books under his own name and the rest under six different pseudonyms). He has also written for radio and TV and has appeared in a couple of low budget horror films just to illustrate that as an actor he's a very good writer! He also lectured to the Oxford Students Union back in the early 90's. Needless to say he's never been asked back. He lives in Buckinghamshire.
—A Question Of Morality
By Shaun Hutson
I am not a paedophile.
I despise those people and what they do as much as I detest being labelled with that same derisory and derogatory name. Any man or woman who sexually abuses a child should be destroyed in the same way a sick animal would be destroyed. Put down. Executed. Use whichever term you wish, but no one who sexually abuses children should be allowed to live.
This is not a reactionary statement. It is one that comes about when any modicum of sense and morality is applied to the whole subject of sex with children. It is never forgivable and it should never be accepted by the law or by anyone with any shred of decency. People who indulge in this kind of monstrous act are scum. There is no other word for them.
I am not a paedophile.
People have accused me of this and I will defend myself and refute these foul accusations until the day I die. It is too easy these days to brand people unfairly. To tar them with the same brush. That is what happened to me. I lived alone. I had no choice. My wife had died, we never had children. My parents were gone. I was alone because I simply had no one. I didn't want to be alone. Just as I didn't want to be targeted by the fools and the idiots who peered at me from behind their twitching curtains and who were pleasant to my face and yet malicious behind my back. I can imagine the things they said about me. How I was always in the house and hardly ever went out. As if living a solitary life was a crime. I never bothered them because I didn't want to impose. People pretend to be friendly and they say they are there to help, but they don't really want to be bothered. I knew I was the same. I liked my privacy. I enjoyed not being responsible to anyone or for anyone.
I loved my wife more than words can say but caring for her through her illness for two years was painful and trying, and although I was heartbroken when she finally died, there was a part of me that breathed a sigh of relief. And don't think I haven't felt guilty about that these past few years. I would give anything to have her back with me.
If she had been here now, perhaps I would not be in this position.
With her I had a purpose in life, without her I began to wonder what the point was to even my own existence. There was no one to share a joke with. No one to comment to about the rubbish on television in the evenings. I still miss her now. And when I left our home because I couldn't bear to stay there accompanied by so many memories, I moved into another area and wished I hadn't. The people there were much younger than I. All seemed to have small children and they all seemed wary of me from the first day I moved in.
I could sense them looking at me as if I was an outsider. They spoke to me out of enforced politeness. They didn't welcome me into their community.
And when I spoke to one of their children, they glared at me with accusing eyes, and I could imagine what they were thinking and saying about me behind my back. I could almost hear what they were calling me. But they were wrong.
I am not a paedophile.
What is so wrong about merely speaking to small children? I was never furtive in my approaches to them. I saw them in the street, children I knew lived around me and, out of nothing more than friendliness, I spoke to them. Laughed and joked with them. What is so terrible about that? My wife and I always spoke to children when we were out shopping. No one thought anything of it when we were together. No one viewed our approaches as sinister or potentially dangerous, but because I continued my friendliness as a single man, I was viewed with mistrust and eventually hatred. And yet no one had any evidence against me except what they invented in their own twisted minds. They were the ones who were sick, not, as they intimated, myself. What kind of mentality could accuse a man of some of the things they accused me of? What kind of warped and abnormal thought processes could come up with some of the offences they said I was guilty of?
When the police were called, I couldn't believe it. More to the point, I couldn't believe that these men and women who were supposed to represent the law were so hostile towards me.
They had arrived at my house to interview me about the disappearance of four local children and their presence had been prompted by nothing more than hearsay. The malicious and poisonous gossip of those who lived around me and who viewed me with such mistrust and fear. I was confused and angry that my neighbours had done this to me. I was furious that their small-mindedness had caused them to react in such a way. They condemned me without knowing any facts. Simply because I was not one of them, I was singled out for persecution. I told the police that, but they seemed unimpressed. They were on the side of the accusers rather than on mine. There was no benefit of the doubt given. They had, it seemed, condemned me as surely as those who had clamoured for my arrest.
When the police arrested me, many of my neighbours stood at their front doors and shouted abuse at me as I was being taken to the police car. Some even spat in my direction and they yelled names like paedophile.
I am not a paedophile.
I have never sexually abused a child in my life. I never would. Those that I kept in my cellar were treated well. Right up until the time I ate them.
—Jonathan Templar
Jonathan Templar has had stories published by, among others, Open Casket, Wicked East Press and Smart Rhino Publications. He has contributed to the forthcoming shared-world anthology World's Collider and his novella The Angel of Shadwell is due in spring 2012.
Jonathan can be found hiding from the sunlight at www.jonathantemplar.com
—The Meat Man
By Jonathan Templar
Charlie worked with rats.
Well, not literally, although sometimes he'd beg to differ. No, he dealt with the vermin, brought violent closure to their flea-ridden lives. He was an exterminator, although that was a word no longer in fashion. Respectable people recoiled when you used the word extermination, as if they imagined that rats would be taken to a new life somewhere on a carpet of cheese, pleasuring themselves all the way, rather than dying in agony as poison took a hold of their tiny little systems. People, ordinary people, had gotten so soft that they even romanticised rodents.
They were fucking idiots, the lot of them.
Charlie had seen what rats could do, seen them gnawing down on the body of some old dear who had died on her own and had nobody to clean her up, who'd just been left there to be fed on. He had witnessed firsthand the mewling abhorrence of a pack of blind newborns sucking the teats of some vast mother rat lying bloated in a hole under the ground, and once you saw that kind of thing, you would never think of them as anything other than unholy, filthy beasts.
Charlie's trouble was that he looked a bit like a rat, and he smelt like one as well. To every other human he might as well be vermin himself. This had coloured his relationship with most people he'd met. He didn't have friends and he had never had so much of a sniff of the prospect of a wife and children. Charlie was wandering aimlessly into his 50's with the growing knowledge that the stuff he was coughing up in the mornings suggested things inside his body were starting to decay, that the cigarettes he constantly held between his thin lips were indeed killing him as his mother always said they would.
Dying didn't frighten him, not really. His life had been grim enough, there was little that he would fight to hang on to, and anything he did enjoy slowly killed him. But he had his job, and he enjoyed it, enjoyed the solitude it allowed, enjoyed that it gave him the power of life and death over things that were smaller and stupider than he was.
Charlie worked the underground. They say you'
re only ever ten feet away from a rat in a city. In the underground, the little buggers might as well be sitting on your shoulder. They were everywhere, scampering through the dark tunnels and the drains and culverts that made a maze beneath London, happy in their domain but stupid enough to poke their heads out into the light from time to time and become what the sanitised folk who lived above ground termed a nuisance.
Charlie had some sympathy for their situation. They lived under the ground where the light didn't shine and kept mostly to themselves. If people chose to come down and dig tunnels it wasn't the rat's fault if they couldn't always get out of the way. This was their turf after all.
But they did pop up, and so Charlie had been sent to see them off.
It had been a couple of years since his supervisor, Dale, sent Charlie down here. Dale was a halfwit 20 years younger than Charlie fresh from some management training course. The sort of man who wore a tie under his red work clothes as if the vermin might be somehow more impressed by him. Dale always talked to him while breathing only through his mouth, and Charlie knew this was because he thought Charlie stunk, that he was unhygienic and that his lack of attention to his own personal health constituted a disciplinary offence on the grounds that it was anti-social. Charlie knew this because he'd snuck a look at his own personnel file. He had read in the many, many dispatches sent from their office that Dale had taken to his post of supervisor with a zeal and a professionalism that the company in general would never bother to appreciate. His request for disciplinary hearings and time management reports would simply be scoffed at by the brass. They had had been doing this for years and were well aware that pest control hardly attracted the cream of the employment market.
There had been no disciplinary for Charlie, but when the chance had arisen to bury him in the underground, a permanent posting that came with a one room base camp and no daily supervision, Charlie didn't even get the chance to put his name forward, he was down the tunnels, never to be seen again.
Charlie loved it.
He was left alone, he kept his own hours and he had a comfy little room all to himself with a nice chair and a radio, a kettle to make frequent cups of tea and it was next to a heating exchange, so it was toasty warm all year round.
About a year ago, Charlie had stopped going home in the evening. He only had a one room apartment near King's Cross which stunk from its proximity to the communal toilet and got broken into by drug-addled scum at least once a month. He only had enough belongings to fill a shoulder bag so he packed them all up and brought them down here. A few times a week he'd pop up to the surface, take out some cash from the bank, from an account that filled up quicker than he could possibly spend it with no outgoings. He'd do a tiny bit of shopping, he had simple needs; some tinned sardines, packs of instant noodles, some custard creams and a box of teabags. He didn't drink, but he'd stock up on his smokes from a Ukrainian who came round once a week selling knock offs, flogging his dirty wares across the network.
It was a shit life, but then it always had been, at least he didn't have anything to worry about down here.
And he still did his job; he did it properly and with a degree of pride. Charlie would place traps wherever he found spore, he'd put poison down in the places where people would never go, the dark corners and the places between, if any of the stations had an infestation he'd make his way across the network (they even gave him a free ticket!) and he'd deal with it quickly and efficiently. And if the people he met doing his job tended to recoil from him, then what did he care anymore? He was long past worrying what other people might think of him.
He first met the Meat Man deep down in the tunnels where few others ever ventured. The Meat Man was from Africa, or somewhere dark and distant anyway, he wasn't English and Charlie rarely had much time for anyone who wasn't English. But he took to the Meat Man.
The Meat Man had a number of tasks; he was officially termed a Sanitation Officer, a nice title that hid the truth of what he did. He was paid to sanitise. To wipe things down, to keep things clean. But nowhere on his job description did it mention just what it was he was usually wiping up.
"I clean up the guts," he said, after a long, long draw on the unfiltered cigarette Charlie had passed him. It was a sackable offence to smoke down here. It was illegal, even. It didn't matter; there was never anyone else down here in the dark to notice.
"What guts?" Charlie asked him, innocently.
The Meat Man whistled through brown, stained teeth. "Anyone what gets themselves in front of one of them trains. Anyone or anything."
"People you mean?"
"Mostly. Happens more often than you think, they decide it's time to end it all, throw themselves in front of a bloody train. Ruin everybody else's day along the way. Make them all late for work. Ha!"
"Blimey."
"There's the tramps, of course, they get squished as well. Down here trying to find somewhere warm to kip, find themselves on the wrong track at the wrong time. Silly buggers. Most times the driver doesn't even know he's hit them, it's not like he's driving a car and the bastards have flown over his bonnet. No, he just carries on driving with what's left of a man dragging along underneath him. By the time he gets back to the depot, he's left quite a mess behind him."
"And you have to clear it all up?"
The Meat Man took another drag and smiled again. He smiled a lot. "That is my job. To go up and down these tunnels and mop up what's left of dead folk."
"You must have quite a stomach,"
The Meat Man shrugged. "Don't matter to me. It's all just meat, isn't it? I ain't never killed nobody. I like to think I show them the proper respect when I scoop "em up."
"I suppose so."
"It's not like you, Charlie. You're the Bringer of Death, my friend. The bodies you end up with in your bucket, you have their blood on your hands in a whole different way."
"They're just rats though," Charlie said as he lit another cigarette "Not the same is it?"
"Be the same if you're a rat, eh? I wonder if Our Lord Jesus judges us like that, what price is a rat's life compared to that of a man's?"
Charlie pondered this. "Rat hasn't got a brain like a man, does it? Doesn't have, what they call it, consciousness?"
The Meat Man nodded.
"Doesn't have consciousness," Charlie continued. "They're sly little bastards, I'll give them that, but that's all they are. They don't think like a man thinks, they just scamper about in the filth, hunt and eat and fuck."
The Meat Man patted him on the shoulder. "That sounds a pretty accurate definition of a man to me, my friend. I would have thought with all your experience down here, you'd have seen enough strangeness to know that there are more things on heaven and earth than you are ever likely to see on bloody television."
"I've seen plenty of strange things, but a rat is still a rat."
The Meat Man stubbed out his cigarette, collected his bucket and headed back to his duty. "You just keep telling yourself that, Charlie."
Things got stranger after that. Charlie remained uncertain if the Meat Man's words had been a warning, a prophecy or just bullshit coloured by coincidence. But whatever the reason, the behaviour of the rats became decidedly odd.
For a start, they kept themselves deeper, out of sight. Charlie was used to at least a couple dozen sightings being reported a week, and knew that was the tip of the iceberg as most people would just ignore the things when they saw them. It was mainly station staff who contacted him to tell him that there were vermin out and about, but for a couple of weeks now his phone had been deathly quiet.
Charlie hadn't seen many of them either, and the ones he did had been quick to scuttle away as soon as they were spotted, none of the bolshie bravado they often exhibited, the confidence that they may be small but they were still in their element, in their domain with its network of passages and short cuts that only they could squeeze their way through. They seemed to be actively avoiding human contact far more than usual, and despite the plethora o
f traps that Charlie had set across his patch, he hadn't found a single rat corpse for over a week.
He met the Meat Man again later in the week. He was dressed in his blue protective outfit, gloves and a facemask as he gathered pieces of a person from tracks they had been smeared over while humming a cheerful melody. He waved at Charlie with a blood-stained glove and mimed the action of smoking. Charlie nodded his agreement, stepped over pools of gore and joined his strange friend.
"The rats are being a bit peculiar," Charlie said.
"I thought that the rats were just rats, Charlie? Sly but stupid, wasn't that it?"
"I'm not saying otherwise. All I am saying is that they're acting odd. Furtive, like. Barely seen one of the bastards all week."
"So you've had a quiet week. Well good for you, my friend, good for you," the Meat Man pointed with his cigarette at the discarded gloves he had placed on the ground. "At least you have no blood on your hands."
Charlie was largely illiterate when it came to interpreting the intent of other people, was less than a master when it came to reading between the lines. He tended to take most of what was said to him literally. He did so now.
"They don't tend to bleed much," he said bluntly. "The poison gets them, makes them stiff as a board but they don't bleed."
The Meat Man just smoked with a smile. "There are many different ways to bleed," he eventually said softly.
"What do you do with all the mess?" Charlie asked him.
"The mess?"
"The bits. All the meat you collect. The rats get burnt up; someone from the council comes and collects them every week. What do you do with the people?"
"Oh much the same thing Charlie, much the same thing."
"Yeah?"
"Of course. What other use could there possibly be for a bucket full of flesh?"
And Charlie couldn't think of an answer. But even he, uncultivated in the ways of others, could see that the Meat Man was not being honest with him.
