Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (22 page)

Finally, a nervous wreck, he ended up at the office after the sun went down. The empty spaces were like tombs.  He walked past the conference room behind a wall of glass, and Mrs. Underwood’s office with its strange African sculptures like offerings for the dead.  He entered Mr. Welk’s office, then crossed the floor quickly and rummaged through the center drawer.  His trembling fingers found the envelope and he fumbled to open it, almost dropping the money onto the floor.  He counted it out.  $1,600 in cash.  It was a small fortune to him, over two week’s pay.

Then he imagined them catching him in the act.  Mrs. Underwood calling the police from the front desk.  Mr. Welk, a look of disappointment darkening his chubby face as he stood in the doorway shaking his head.  Andy could almost see him there now, watching.  The images were so strong he could see where they might lead, and was helpless to shut it all out; Mr. Welk’s body sprawled across his desk, his fat belly slit open, Mrs. Underwood with purple handprints around her neck.

Andy shuddered.  The emotion that had carried him thus far died in his breast.  He replaced the envelope, slid the drawer shut and left the office.

On the way out he almost ran headfirst into the janitor.  The man shied away like he was being threatened.  “Mr. Lomos!”

Andy kept his hands shoved deep into his pockets and told himself to be calm.  He had not done anything.  He was not a thief.  He caught a sudden brutal image of the man like a snapshot; lying across his cart, bloody, staring, his eyelids cut out.  The man in black stood beside the corpse, his eyes red-rimmed with hell-fire.

Andy clenched his teeth and did not scream.  “I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said.

“Didn’t know anyone was here.  Be out of your way in a minute.”

“Take your time.  I was just leaving.”

The janitor gave him one more look and pushed his cart full of spray cleaner and rags out ahead of him.

Andy left the office and began to wander again, and the man in black followed him.  There was something more insistent in the man’s gaze now, an eagerness that had not been evident before.  He became bolder, showing himself in every angle, every crevice and alleyway.  There seemed to be a pattern to his movements, as if he were directing their path to an awaited end.

Eventually he sought refuge inside a club on Seventh Avenue.  Lights flashed above him.  Bodies writhed together on the dance floor.  He ordered a beer, drank it down, and ordered another, and yet another, feeling the heavy beat of the music deep in his chest.  Soon he was turning and moving with the crowd.  It had been a long time since he had felt this way among a group, his own insecurities and self-consciousness dissolving in a bubbling stew of colored lights, naked flesh, and sweat.  Each of the dancers around him had their own smell, he noticed; a pretty young girl, her sweat clean and light, and a man with a heavy belly who smelled like sour milk.  What did he smell like to them, Andy wondered.  Did he have a recognizable odor, and if so, was it pleasant or offensive?  That was something he wished he had asked Annie.

At the thought of her the room darkened and the colors bled out of the lights until they flashed in shades of gray.  The faces that surrounded him were pale, fleshy lumps; they leered at him as the light played games with their features, elongating noses and deepening the pouches under their eyes.

Andy danced and drank with the wolves and a while later he noticed the man in black standing in the shadows across the room, watching him.  The man in black’s eyes glowed blood-red among the grays.

*****

He did not know when the girl started dancing next to him; it seemed as if she had just appeared there all at once.  She wore a blue halter top that showed the upper halves of her breasts and cut away to reveal her belly below.  He fixed his gaze on her like a man drowning in the ocean, and she stared back, unashamed, her body moving with the music as if of its own accord.  Andy clung to her like an island in a storm.

They danced together until suddenly, without warning, one of the wolves poked bony fingers into his chest.  “You think you’re hot shit,” the wolf said, his hairy face slick with sweat.  His tongue lolled from one corner of his grinning mouth.  “That’s my girl.  I think you and me, we go for it, right now.”

The girl frowned and held Andy’s arm.  “Leave him alone, Brian.”

“What, you gonna get with this guy now?” the wolf said.  “He’s a sorry piece of shit.”

“Stop it, Brian.  Just stop.”

Andy could feel her hot flesh against his arm.  Annie had liked to do that when they were in public; holding his arm as they walked, touching his knee under the table at restaurants.

The wolf grabbed for her, and the girl shrank back. The lights and the beer and the smell of flesh overwhelmed him.  The dancers spun on all sides, leering at him.  He caught a glimpse of the man in black again.  He was standing closer now, just over the wolf’s left shoulder.  As Andy watched, the man in black raised a finger to his throat and slashed.

“Why don’t you leave her alone?” Andy said.

The wolf grabbed him by the shirt.  “Not here,” Andy managed to whisper, and then they were shoving people aside in their rush for the door.  He felt consumed by an urgent need for conflict of any kind; his very muscles ached.

The wolf dragged him into a darkened space between two buildings. “I told you to stay away from my girl, man,” the wolf said.  “Now you’re gonna learn to listen when I talk to you.”

It was dark, and a red neon sign advertising some beer lit up the wolf’s face just slightly, causing it to pulse and move with the light like a wound.  But that was not what had caught his attention; over the wolf’s shoulder stood the man in black again.

He was grinning.

The wolf swung a fist at him.  He moved to one side as the wolf’s claws glanced off his skull, and then he swung his right fist upward from his hip with all his strength.  He heard the hiss of breath as he connected and then Andy slipped and fell, hitting the slimy brick wall of the alley hard with his shoulder.  The wolf lay on his side, wheezing painfully and holding his stomach.

Andy struggled to his feet as the dampness of the alley floor soaked through the knees of his pants.  His head was spinning; he felt the music beating through the wall next to him, smelled the mold in the dark corners and the rot of old buildings.  This was what it was like to lose control like an animal.  The feeling was glorious!

He caught movement below him and looked down as the wolf lunged upward from a crouch.  Silver flashed in the wolf’s claws before he felt a biting pain near his elbow.  He managed to push the wolf away from him, feeling the wetness he knew was his blood trickling down his forearm into his palm.  Enraged, he struck the wolf in the back of the neck, sending the creature into the wall with such force that pieces of the crumbling brick fell to the pavement.  He heard the blade click against the brick and then the ground.

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.”