Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (23 page)

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.