Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set (25 page)

“Pray?”

“Yes, William.  There’s a power in prayer that has sustained me through my hard times.  I think it can do the same for you.”

Barlow wrinkled his brow, then a huge smile crossed his face.  “Let’s pray for another beer, mate.  You want me to pray?  I’ll pray for that.”

But Barlow wasn’t Nettle’s only project.  He was still expected to learn the ropes at the shelter, spending time in each of the numerous jobs that were necessary to keep the operation going on a day to day basis, and a few nights later he was back with Bill, the porter, passing out blankets in the sleeping quarters.  The overnighters would come in, take a blanket from Nettle, and head to a long, narrow room with two large oaken beams traversing its length.  Rough pieces of canvas were stretched between the beams, and the men slept on the canvas.  When he first heard about the arrangement, and before he had seen it, Nettle thought of seamen in hammocks, rocking to sleep with the rhythms of the open sea, but the reality was nothing like that, and the actual arrangement lacked any of the adventurous dignity a landsman could envision for the life of a sailor at sea.  The men were packed in shoulder to shoulder, and the room was dreadfully noisy with snores and coughs and breaking wind, and in the right light, the whole room shimmered with a living cloud of fleas.

He was watching this sad display with a heavy heart when Bill appeared at his shoulder.

“What are you about, sir, talkin’ with Barlow the Butcher?”

“Excuse me?” he said, alarmed by the man’s tone, even though he was a good six inches taller, and maybe forty pounds heavier.

“You become ‘is reg’lar drinkin’ mate’s what I ‘ear.”

“I have not,” Nettle protested.  He stammered, trying to rise to his own defense, and finally managed to tell Bill his plan, how his goal was the man’s salvation.

Bill just laughed.

“What’s wrong with going after a lost sheep?” Nettle said.

“‘e ain’t no sheep,” Bill said.  “A devil, aye, but ‘e ain’t no sheep.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s an em’ty warehouse down on the Brown Hay Road.  D’you know it?  A big, ugly brute of a buildin’?”

“I’ve seen it,” Nettle said, cringing inwardly at the memory of the beggar and the hansom cab.

“Your mate used to be the union man there.  ‘bout two years ago.”

Nettle eyed him warily.

“Did ‘e tell you ‘bout the people ‘e killed there?”

“Killed?  What are you talking about?”

Bill sneered at Nettle.  “Aye, I thought not.”

“Tell me what you mean, sir.  You cannot accuse a man of such a crime and not state your proof.”

Bill only shook his head.  “Nothin’ was ever proved ‘gainst ‘im.  Didn’t ‘ave no blood on ‘is ‘ands.  None that the courts could see, anyway.  But ‘e killed ‘em all right.  Just as pretty as you please.”

Nettle searched the man’s face for some indication that this was a joke.  It had to be.  He searched the creases in the old man’s face, the cracked red map of lines that colored the whites of his eyes, but found nothing to indicate that this was a joke.

“When you say ‘killed,’ do you mean...”

“I mean ‘e murdered ‘em.  Sure as the Pope eats fish on Fridays.  Murdered more’n an ‘undred people.  Men, wimmen, and children, just as pretty as you please.”

Nettle felt his legs go to gelatin.  He fell against the wall and said, “A hundred people?”

“Aye.”

“But, how?”

“Why, ‘e starved ‘em.  Locked ‘em in that warehouse for full on twelve days.  When they finally opened ‘er up, every one of ‘em, men, wimmen, and children, was dead as dead can be.”  Then he leaned close and said, “I ‘eard tell some of them bodies was eaten on.”

“That’s impossible,” Nettle countered.  “How could he do such a thing?”

“I already tol’ you, sir.  ‘e was the union man, and those people went on strike.  The comp’ny tol’ ‘im to fix the problem, and ‘e did.”

“A man can’t starve to death in twelve days,” Nettle said.

“You’ve seen these men,” Bill said.  “Not a one’s more than a week away from death’s door.”

“But somebody would have done something to stop him,” Nettle said.  “You can’t just kill a hundred people and expect to get away with it.  Somebody would have said something.”

But Nettle didn’t need see the blank expression on Bill’s face to know that wasn’t true.  Not here in the East End.

Feeling angry, and confused, and betrayed, Nettle ran from the peg house and set out for the coffee house where he and Barlow had been meeting in the afternoons.  He knew no other place to look for the man, but as it turned out, it wasn’t necessary to look anywhere else.  He found Barlow in the back alley behind the shop, rifling through a paper bag of trash he’d found on the curb, pulling out little bits of orange peels and tearing what remained of the pulp from the pith with his blackened front teeth.

“Mr. Barlow,” Nettle called out from across the street.

Barlow looked up and smiled.  But then his smile fell.  Perhaps he saw the savage expression in Nettle’s eyes, or heard something sinister in his tone, but whatever it was, his expression instantly changed, and he took off running into the night.

Nettle didn’t bother to chase him.  It was enough, for the moment, to see him run.  That was all the proof he needed that Mr. Barlow, also known as Barlow the Butcher, was a devil of the highest magnitude.

Some men snap by degrees.  Like green wood, they bend a long ways before the tension takes its inevitable course.  But other men break like porcelain.  They cleave with sudden fury, shattering into thousands of irredeemable pieces, their edges left razor sharp.

Nettle was of the later sort, and when his mind snapped, it came with the illusion of sudden clarity.  It seemed he was thinking clearly now for the first time, like somebody had turned a light switch on in his mind, and the path before him seemed clearer now than it had ever been before.

He suddenly saw in Barlow, not an individual’s face to put on all of humanity’s troubles, but a cause of its misery, and there was only one thing to do with such causes.  The fact that he had befriended such a beast, that he had bought such evil a drink, for God’s sake, didn’t terrify him so much as instill in him a sense of personal responsibility.  His proximity had given him ownership over the ending to Barlow’s sordid little history, and he set out to bring that history to a close.

He carried the banner that night, walking the streets of the East End without stopping for rest or sleep—indeed, without even feeling the need for rest or sleep—ferreting out the hiding places of the homeless, but with his mind on only one man.

He caught up with Barlow in a doorway, the man sitting on the top step, his knees bunched up to his chest and his head bent down between them, trying to sleep.

Nettle kicked his foot.  “Wake up,” he said.  “I want a word with you.”

Barlow thought him a policeman at first, and had already half pulled himself to his feet when the haze of sleep left him entirely, and he realized who was standing in front of him.

“You owe me an answer, Mr. Barlow.”

But Barlow didn’t stand still to give it.  He turned and ran with all the energy a scared, weatherbeaten, and prematurely old man could muster.

Nettle followed him at a jog, yelling “I want an answer!” over and over again at Barlow’s back, and as they slipped deeper and deeper into the warren of slimy streets that made up the bowels of the East End, a cold, light rain began to fall.

Nettle finally closed on him in a back alley off the Brown Hay Road, the streets deserted now and splashy beneath their feet.  Barlow had curled up under a flight of stairs and was trying to hide his face with his arms.

“You have some explaining to do,” Nettle said.  The rain rolled off his face unnoticed.

Barlow stared up at him with abject fear.

“What did you do?  Answer me!”

“For the love of all that’s ‘oly, sir, please don’t yell.  You’ll—”

“I’ll what?  Wake the dead?  Go on, you villain, say it!  Say it!  Are you afraid they’ll hear us?”

Barlow looked seasick.  His eyes pleaded for silence, but got none.

“Spill it!” Nettle roared.  “Tell me what you did.”

Nettle waited, and for a moment there was no sound but the pattering of a gentle rain on cobblestones, but then it came, as both Nettle and Barlow knew that it most assuredly would, the sound of slow, plodding feet dragging on the cobblestones behind them.

Nettle looked over his shoulder, and saw a small crowd of shamblers had appeared out of the mist.  There were men, women, and even children in that crowd.  Their faces were dark with disease and their cheeks empty from extreme hunger.  Their eyes were carrion eyes, and a smell that could only be death’s smell preceded them, filling the street with its sad, inexorable power.

A man in the front of the crowd raised his arms, and it looked like one of his hands had been partially eaten.  He groaned, “Fooooood,” and Barlow jumped to his feet and tried to run.

“Where are you going?” Nettle yelled after him.  “Don’t you know you can’t run from this?”

Barlow didn’t make it very far, only to the middle of the Brown Hay Road.  There, he stopped, wheeling around in a panic, surrounded by the dead on every side.  They stepped out of every doorway, out of every alley, from behind every staircase, taking shape out of the shadows.  He fell to his knees in front of Nettle and started to cry.

“Please,” he begged.

“Tell what you’ve done,” Nettle said.

Barlow looked at the groaning, starving dead, and he shook his head no.  NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!

“Say it,” Nettle said.  “While there’s still time.”

But there wasn’t any more time.  Barlow could no more belly up to the magnitude of what he’d done than he could force himself to stop breathing, and as the rotting dead shouldered their way past Nettle and closed on Barlow, all that he could do was close his eyes.

The dead tore at Barlow with their hands and their teeth, ripping his flesh like fabric.  Nettle stumbled away, into the dark, and as he walked he heard Barlow’s screams carry on and on and on.  They seemed to go on far longer than it seemed possible for any one man to suffer, but go on they did, and they echoed in Nettle’s mind even after the shrillness of them disappeared from his ears.

After that, Nettle wandered, his mind unhinged, until he began to see people.  These he tried to tell what he had seen, but they flinched away from him, alarmed at the intensity in his eyes and the urgency in his voice and the complete lack of sense in his speech.

As day broke, a russet stain behind plum colored smoke clouds, Nettle collapsed less than 50 feet from the doors of Stepney Green Hospital.  He lay there, lips moving soundlessly, eyes still as glass beads, until an orderly from the hospital knelt beside him and said, “Hey, mate, are you hurt?  What is it?  Are you ‘ungry?”

If the smile wasn’t on Nettle’s face, it was nonetheless there, in his mind.  Eat, he thought, and sensed his body in complete revolt at the idea. 
God no, I’ll never eat again
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