by Kim Newman
Most of them were buried out of the way, and hushed up. The bound back-numbers of the Herald in the town library were full of neatly clipped holes, sometimes extending to entire editions but for the weather reports. For one month in 1908, only the weather reports were clipped – which often made Stockton ponder what had passed through back then, making itself known only through climatic influence.
A clatter, and he was out of his reverie.
A train, pulling out. The 7.12, leaving for the city.
He hadn’t noticed who got on, hadn’t cared, but it disturbed him that his vigilance had clouded even for a minute. The past, the old stories, had swarmed in on him, settling on his brain. He had been running through a medley of monsters.
He focused.
On the 7.32.
It would be a bad one.
And then everyone would remember. The yarns their parents and grandparents had told them. They were true! Eventually, they’d remember him, thank him for standing watch, need his advice. His hands couldn’t wrap round a shotgun and his legs weren’t up to a hike through the woods holding up a flaming torch, but his mind was still sharp. He still had the expertise.
There’d be bodies, of course.
He regretted that, but knew it was a stage. Before he’d be believed, before people paid attention, someone had to die. And die ugly, die strange. Two ragged holes in the throat of a woman bled whiter than virgin snow. A child torn to pieces as if by a wild animal but with clearly scratched gypsy signs in his tattered skin. A succession of elderly academics alone in locked libraries with their hearts stopped as if by an icy fist squeezing them dry. Men turned inside-out. Glowing green alien matter in wounds. Sea-widows drowned miles from water. Eyes or whole heads missing.
He couldn’t think of the people who would become these bodies.
They were a necessary stage. Material he needed to work with.
Irene looked in on him.
‘Looks like a chiller?’
She was commenting on the weather. But she spoke a deeper truth, asked a more pertinent question.
‘Ayup.’
He got up out of his chair, a process that became more difficult every single time. He saw Irene thinking about helping him, and knew that eventually she’d give in and step forward, reaching for his arm. He kept his grunt to himself, felt the ache wriggle up and down his back.
A bad one.
His intention was to stroll casually out onto the platform, but he creaked as he walked, every step as clumsy as Doc Stone’s ‘child’. Irene did open the door for him, the courtesy he should be showing her. He nodded a thanks.
The cold outside was good for the pain, froze it away.
The 7.32 was coming. He felt the vibration in his gums, rattling his partial plates, before he even heard the train.
Before he saw the sleek, dull metal tube of the commuter train, he held in his head the picture of a real locomotive. Pistons and a funnel, clouds of steam, a shrill whistle. When those clanking things were phased out, the bulletheaded electrical creatures that replaced them seemed like things off the cover of Amazing Science Fiction. Streamlined, beautiful Flash Gordon props. When did they become just a part of the furniture?
The train came in and stopped.
He looked for a door opening. Not all the town’s visitors needed to open doors, but most did. He supposed it was fair, that even the unnatural needed to grip a handle and turn.
A door did open.
Another person might have thought no one got off, but Stockton saw clearer.
A man-shaped bubble, shot through with black filaments, moving slowly. The prints of bare feet among the wet leaves left on the platform. A chattering of unseen teeth.
He congratulated himself on having worked it out ahead of time.
This was the only one left. The Man.
‘You,’ he called, ‘I’ve been waiting.’
The bubble froze, turned sideways, disappeared into stillness.
There was a coughing and racking. Somehow with a British accent.
Stockton stepped towards the noise. He saw small movements in the air. Up close, the Man was discernible by dozens of tiny tell-tales. Feet naturally picked up dirt and so outlines that looked like grubby ankle-socks stamped up and down against the cold. Ten black crescents – dirt under fingernails. A shell-like spiral of clotted blood lining an infected invisible ear. A wrinkled, mottled sleeve of grey, dead skin. Irregular black discs that floated – breaks in bones set but not healed, suggesting a body bent and crooked by age and abuse. A squeezed tube of digested food, palely transparent in the twisted bulb of the stomach, blackening in the wrap of the lower bowel to form what looked like a nasty obstruction. And the dark tendrils winding around bone and through the meat, making unhealthy balloons of the weakly pulsing lung sacs. He’d seen enough friends pass to recognise the symptoms. The crab. He knew the Man was a heavy smoker, liked to take the smoke in and fill out the shape of his gullet and lungs as a party piece. Now he was paying for it.
‘Aren’t you in bad shape, though,’ he declared.
The cough became a cackle. A cracked cackle. Never forget that the Man was mad. Even before disappearing, he’d been odd. Now, uniquely apart from mankind, he’d be completely crazy.
Before – on the late, late show – when a man like this died, he faded into view. He could only be invisible when alive; in death, he appeared. Obviously, from what Stockton could see, he was a quarter dead already.
‘Welcome, stranger,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the Elephants’ Graveyard.’
This was where the monsters came to die. It was in the natural supernatural order of things that there be a place like this. And a man like Stockton.
‘You’re the last of them, as far as I can tell.’
‘Once, I – or someone like me – called himself Invisible Man the First,’ said a voice from nowhere. No, not from nowhere.
Stockton saw a faint funnel in the air, smelled bad breath, could even make out a brown tooth. The voice came through pain. It was cultured and croaky at the same time, speaking with the clipped, artificial tones he associated with knighted theatrical actors slumming as Nazi war criminals in very poor films. The Brits you heard on TV these days – prime ministers and pop stars – didn’t sound like this any more, if any real folks ever had.
The Man wouldn’t take much killing.
No struggle to shove a stake in its heart, or a dozen men tossed about like straw dummies as they tried to wrestle it down, no bell-book-and-candle recitals, no calling-out-the-national-guard.
He could just reach out and break it, then watch it turn into an old, naked, dead man.
The Man wanted him to do it.
That was what he had come to understand. These things came to town to make a last stand, to do their schtick one final time for an appreciative audience and then fade away completely. Or, in this case, shade in completely.
The clutch came, at his throat, surprisingly fierce, cold and dry as black ice.
That rotten tooth came closer. The sick breath stench was stronger.
Stockton cursed himself for thinking too much, drifting off. He had made the mistake too many folks made. He had momentarily been taken with the wonder of the creature before him, had felt not only an empathy with the Man’s plight, a kinship with its all-too-familiar pains, but even a fondness for its uncomplicated madness, a nostalgia for the world it had terrorised and which was as long-gone as steam trains and old-time radio serials.
For a moment, he had forgotten what it was to be a monster.
A thumb was under his ear, pressing on the rope of vein; long-nailed fingers were in his neck, ragged edges cutting the skin.
‘You all right, Mr Stockton?’
Irene was looking at him. From twenty feet away.
He was being held upright by the grip on his throat. His arms and legs dangled. He couldn’t speak, but he tried to gurgle.
‘If you let her get suspicious,’ whispered words directly in his ear
, ‘I will kill her.’
He raised a hand and waved, tried to construct a reassuring smile.
Irene shrugged and went inside again.
His arm dropped. It hurt a great deal.
‘Very sensible,’ said the voice, more conversational now, more upper-hand.
Stockton looked down, trying to swivel his eyeballs to the grip. He saw a seam in the air, an old scar.
The Man changed hands, letting him go with his right and taking up the grip almost as severely with his left. Bloody fingerprints floated in the air, and rubbed together.
‘I’m most fearfully sorry, old son,’ said the voice, tittering on the edge of hilarity. ‘One of my great practical problems is trimming my nails. I imagine they’re horny talons.’
Stockton tried to get hold of the arm that must stretch out beyond the grip. His fingers scrabbled on greasy, cold skin.
‘That tickles.’
He was punched in the stomach. A solid drive, dimpling his padded hunter’s jacket. The pain roiled in his belly, shook his bowels.
He did not intend to have an ‘accident’.
‘Elephants’ Graveyard?’ mused the monster. ‘I like that.’
‘You’re all here,’ Stockton snarled, with difficulty. ‘All dead and gone. Dust and bone.’
‘You miss the point, Chief.’
The voice seemed genuinely friendly, amused, superior.
‘Now, let us go for a little walk.’
He was jerked along the platform, taking more puppet-steps. His left ankle turned and he yelped, then dragged his foot.
‘Easy now, old-timer. Don’t go on and on and on.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Why, to your house, of course. I could do with some breakfast, and you’re having a trying day.’
* * *
An old suit of clothes sat in his favourite armchair, casually comfortable, trouser-legs crossed, empty space between the cuff and a dangling slipper that pointed up or down as an unseen foot stretched.
Though they were indoors, the Man had decided to wear a hat, a hunter’s cap with flap-downs over the ears and the back of the head. Stockton found it impossible not to look at the hole where the face should be and focus on the ragged fleece lining of the back-flap. The offer of a pair of sunglasses had been rejected with a tart ‘Indoors and in autumn, I don’t think so.’
Stockton couldn’t help noticing the Man seemed healthier, as if exerting his power over someone else assuaged his own hurts. He was bundled up and wrapped away now, but it seemed the black filaments he had noticed earlier were far less apparent.
His guest was disgusted that Stockton didn’t have any cigarettes. He’d given up, on doctors’ orders, years ago. The doctor who’d ordered him was dead. Emphysema, so he’d known what he was talking about.
‘This is a very decent cup of tea,’ said the voice.
The cup tipped in the air. Liquid slithered around the shape of a tongue and mouth, then squirted down past the collar of Stockton’s old wedding-and-funeral shirt.
‘Far better than one would expect to find in heathen Yankeeland.’
Stockton’s throat still hurt. He had examined the scratches in the mirror, and saw rimmed white pressure-spots that would last for days.
‘So you think we’re the last?’ asked the Man.
‘You’re the last.’
‘Invisible Man the Last?’ Shoulders lifted in a shrug. ‘Perhaps. Though that’s been said before, too many times. And I deliberately used the first person plural. We. You’re a part of this too. You’re as much a coelacanth as I am.’
‘Coelacanth?’
‘Living fossil. Prehistoric fish. Thought extinct for millennia, until one showed up in some African peasant fisherman’s net back in the twenties.’
‘I’ve heard of that story.’
‘Good. It’s the duty of a lively mind to take an interest in sports and freaks, don’t you think. You might aver that it was your specialist subject.’
Stockton nodded.
‘How many of us have you killed, Chief Stockton?’
The question was a surprise, a slap.
‘Come on, don’t be modest. I’ll admit to all my murders. Little men and big, women and children. Dogs. I’ve happily killed dogs. It used to be that not a day went past that I didn’t murder something. Now, as time creeps on, why… it’s been months, maybe years. And the last time was a farce. Took forever to throttle and stifle some twig-like spinster I’d have done for in a trice on my best day. We’re both professionals. We have licenses. I have my… condition,’ a handless sleeve up before an absence of face suggesting a gesture, ‘and you had a badge and gun. I imagine you’ve still got your old trusty service special around. You Yanks and your blessed firearms. Makes everything too easy. You’re not a proper killer unless you get up close, feel the flesh part, the warmth dissipate, the heart stop. It’s a good thing you can’t see my face, because I know it’s arranged into an expression you would find even more horrifying than my words. And you know why my words horrify you? Of course you do, Chief. It’s because you understand.’
Stockton remembered a scatter of dust on a red-lined cloak, a spike stuck into its folds; the pie-sized scarlet holes in hairy black hide made by a scattergun packed with shot mixed in with ground-up sterling silver dollars; various steaming piles of loathsome putrescence. Monsters dying. That he had seen a deal of.
‘For you this isn’t a graveyard, it’s Death Row. And you pull the switch.’
‘You’re all monsters.’
‘And monsters can’t live? We kill people. No argument here, old thing. It’s just that… well, Chief, how can I put this without seeming ungracious about your hospitality, but perhaps you shouldn’t enjoy destroying us quite so much. Your kind always hates and fears the extraordinary.’
‘Uh uh,’ Stockton said, bristling, ‘you don’t get me like that, Mr Clever Man. I didn’t start this. We – regular folks – we didn’t set out to hunt you all down and see you dead just because you were different. Nothing wrong with being different. We took objection to the murders. And the other things, the worse crimes.’
A sleeve hung in the air, invisible finger tapping invisible chin.
‘Of course you did.’
They were argued into a corner.
‘I put rat poison in your tea,’ Stockton said.
‘I know. I drank it.’
White lines were winding up around inside his head, outlining a skull. Red wires crept over it. A face was forming.
‘Soon you’ll be face to face with the Visible Man.’
An old face, of course. Weather-beaten. Eyes mushroomed in sockets, watery blue, lids forming around them.
‘Then it’ll be over,’ muscle-flaps in the shape of lips formed the words. ‘You’ll have killed the last but one coelacanth, and it’ll be down to you. My guess is you won’t see out the winter. Spring will come and you’ll be gone. Without us, what’s the point of you?’
‘That doesn’t bother me. I’ve lived my life justified.’
‘I suppose you have. I say, this poison is rather painful. Stomach feels as if it’s been through a mangle. You could have just shot me, you know.’
‘Then we wouldn’t be having this… little chat.’
He tried to mimic the Man’s clipped tones.
The Man laughed. ‘What do you think you sound like?’
Skin was forming – pale from years out of the sun, withered over bone, white beard thick on the cheeks but scraggy under the chin. Of course, he couldn’t have done much of a job of shaving.
‘It’ll start again, Chief. It always does. It’s what makes monsters monstrous, in a way. We can be killed, but we come back. When I’m fully opaque, some other idealist or madman will start to disappear. Knowledge is out in the world and can’t be taken back. This town isn’t just a graveyard, it’s a spawning ground. Sure, we come here to die, but we also come to be reborn. And many of us are from here. Just like you.’
; The voice stilled. There was a dead old man in Stockton’s favourite armchair.
For a while, the air was clear and the pain was gone. There were no monsters in the world, in this town.
Then, a black little bulb under a field somewhere nearby began to sprout.
Stockton saw it in his mind, and knew he was seeing a truth. It was part of his legacy, his gift. He also recognised that somewhere this morning he had suffered another stroke. He couldn’t feel his left arm and a cord in his neck was spasming beyond his control.
Damn monsters.
He needed to do something about the body. This was a particularly inconvenient one. Some dead things resolved to bone and ash or were such obvious inexplicable departures from the norm that cops and coroners quietly absolved their destroyers from legal blame. This one lost its defining feature in death and looked uncomfortably like a poor old vagrant poisoned by a mad old cop. There were precedents, and he hoped his name still had enough pull – but it didn’t matter. The way justice ground on these days, this wouldn’t come to trial before spring and his visitor had been right in estimating that Stockton wasn’t liable to be around when the leaves greened.
He picked up the phone, ready to dial – no, the rotary phone was long gone; to punch out – the familiar number. He would talk to the new chief. No, he realised, he had to talk to someone else first. That black bulb had spider-limbs now, reaching above ground.
If the pests came back, so must the pest-controllers.
He stabbed buttons.
This would take some convincing talk, but there was evidence enough. A duty could be passed on, as it had been passed on to him.
At the end of the line, the phone rang once.
‘Highway Patrol,’ responded a voice.
‘Get me Stockton,’ he said.
‘Is this police business? I can take your call. Stockton’s out on the road, and won’t be back ’til later.’
‘It’s police business,’ he said. ‘And family business. Get her to call her father’s uncle. There are things she needs to know.’
