by J. S. Volpe
* * *
Bastard Jack was deep within Spooky Swamp when the rain started. At first he thought it was no big deal; he’d keep going; a little water wasn’t going to stop Bastard Jack, the baddest bandit in all of western Glí. But soon the rain was coming down in stinging, blinding sheets, and Jack realized that if he didn’t stop soon he’d wind up becoming the swamp’s latest victim.
He had been following a series of muddy but traversable ridges between scum-blanketed pools of black water, and though the going was slow in the darkness, he had so far been able to pick his way among the sedges and clusters of dead, leaning trees without mishap. But not only did the driving rain obscure everything beyond a five-foot radius, it started turning the ridges to sludge. The muddy ground grew increasingly soupy and sections started sliding away into the pools on either side. If he didn’t get to some kind of shelter soon, either his horse would get stuck in the mud and break a leg, or both of them would wind up skidding down into the dark, rain-churned water.
Unfortunately Jack had no idea where any shelter might be. He had visited the swamp only a handful of times in the past, usually when hiding out from the constables, and he had crossed all the way through it only once, long ago. He knew there were run-down shacks dotting the swamp—the abodes or former abodes of the few misfits and isolates who made the swamp their home—but it wasn’t as if he had memorized the shacks’ locations. And in any case, how would he be able to see a shack in this downpour?
He plodded on. His horse’s hooves kept sticking in the mud, and it grew harder and harder for the horse to pull them out. Only after concerted effort would they pop free of the mud’s suction, each time with a thick schlop.
After another ten minutes of slow, wearisome travel, the slanting veils of rain thinned out a bit and lightning flashed, briefly illuminating a long multi-storey building about a quarter of a mile to the northwest.
Jack swiped the slick locks of dripping black hair out of his eyes for a better look, but it was too late: The lightning had already faded, and the rain had worsened, once again casting its gray curtain over everything.
“Fuck,” Jack mumbled. The discovery of potential shelter wasn’t as cheering as it should have been, because it meant Jack was completely lost. He had never seen or heard of a building that large in the swamp. In the blinding rain, he must have wandered far from what passed for a beaten path here in this wet hell.
Still, it was shelter, and he hadn’t seen any lights burning within it, so it was probably abandoned. He could just hole up in there for a while, dry off, maybe take a quick nap, and then, after the rain had let up, try to find his way back to familiar ground.
He spurred on his horse and made his way along the ridges toward the spot where he’d seen the building. None of the ridges led straight there, so he had to follow a mazy, meandering path, hoping as he did so that he wasn’t drifting too far off course. And all the while the horse’s hooves kept sticking in the watery mud: schlop, schlick, schlup.
When fifteen minutes went by without his arrival at the building, he began to suspect that he had drifted off course. But then a brick wall materialized out of the gloom a few feet in front of him. The horse came to an abrupt halt and snorted.
“Ha!” Jack said. “No damn rain’s gonna stop me.”
He turned his horse to the right and followed the wall in search of a door. Thankfully, the ground here was fairly level and considerably denser than elsewhere in the swamp, consisting of hard, clayey earth overlain with a two-inch-thick layer of dirty water.
The wall slid slowly past. Wide cracks zigzagged across its surface, and the bricks had a pitted, decayed looked. The mortar between them was broken and crumbling. Definitely a pre-Cataclysm structure.
Before long a window came into view just up ahead, and for a moment Jack thought he had found his way inside, but as the window drew closer he saw that it was crisscrossed with metal bars.
With a grunt, he stopped his horse next to the window and pulled at the bars. Though they were so rusty that his hands came away caked with dark flakes that reeked of iron, they wouldn’t budge.
“Shit,” he growled, then spurred on his horse.
More windows, one after another, swam out of the rain. All of them were barred fast. Jack’s irritation grew.
Finally a doorway appeared. A double doorway, actually. There was no sign of any actual doors, though; they must have rotted into slime centuries ago.
Above the lintel was a long rectangle of gray stone carved with the words “Happy Hills Sanitarium.”
“Hm,” Jack said, peering into the doorway and wondering what “Sanitarium” meant. He could see nothing inside but darkness.
He dismounted, tied his horse to a small, sickly beech growing next to the doorway, unhooked his lantern from the horse’s saddle, and stepped into the building, the roar of the rain dwindling to a dull hiss as he did so. Once he was safely away from the rain, he lit the lantern and held it up.
He was in a spacious room, the walls of which were covered with rotted, spongy paneling. Chunks of plaster had fallen from the ceiling and lay in gluey heaps in the three inches of murky water that covered the tiled floor. To the left of the doorway stood a stone pot as tall as a toddler. Inside it was half an inch of dirt and the bones of a small animal, probably a mouse or vole. The splintered, decaying remains of a table jutted from the water to the right of the doorway. A heap of broken wood, rusty springs, and a few swatches of discolored imitation leather were all that remained of a couch against the wall opposite the entrance. Every surface was dark with mold.
To the left of the couch was another doorless doorway. Jack strode through it. If he wanted to rest and dry out a bit, he’d have to head to an upper floor, where there wouldn’t be all this standing water and mold.
Beyond the doorway was a long corridor in a state of decrepitude that matched that of the entry hall. Numerous doorways opened off this hallway, some of them even containing actual doors, though most of the doors were soft with rot and hung askew on rusty, twisted hinges.
Jack looked through a few of these doorways and found only more rotten furniture, more swampwater, more mold. What he needed was a staircase to the second floor.
He finally found one halfway down the corridor, at the end of a short side corridor on the right. Boots dripping water, he ascended the stairs.
On the landing between the first and second floors sat a three-foot length of rope. One end of it was frayed in a way that made Jack wonder if it had been gnawed by rats. More interestingly, the rope didn’t appear to be very old. It was a little discolored, but that was all. It probably hadn’t been here more than a few months, which meant that the building might be inhabited after all. If so, any occupants would be in for some serious pain if they dared to cross Jack.
He continued up the stairs to the second floor, where he again found himself in a long corridor. This time, though, the white tile floor was dry and the white walls were free of mold.
But Jack hardly noticed any of that. Instead his attention was drawn to a dim light up ahead, where the corridor ended at a T-junction. The light was coming from somewhere down the right arm of the T.
Definitely inhabited, then. Well, whoever lived here was in for quite a surprise.
Eyes narrow, a grim smile on his lips, one hand on the hilt of his sword, Jack stalked forward.
As he advanced, he noticed that all the doorways up here had doors, though they were nothing like the wooden doors on the first floor. These doors were metal, and each had a small square window that had been covered over with black paint. He tried a few of the doors at random. All were locked tight.
Jack frowned, puzzled. Why would someone want to paint over the windows? For that matter why did the doors have windows in the first place? The only explanation he could think of was that a Sanitarium was an ancient term for a jail, and the doors sported windows so the jailers could look in on their prisoners.
When he reach the T-junction,
his grip upon his sword tightened, but he didn’t pause to peek around the corner; he didn’t creep or worry; instead he stepped boldly into the cross-corridor and looked first down the left arm then the right arm with a smug, contemptuous smile, as if by his very presence he had already defeated any opposition he might face here.
A hundred feet ahead, the right-hand corridor dead-ended in a door that was slightly ajar, the only open door he had seen on the whole floor. Flickering yellow light—lantern light, most likely—fanned out from the six-inch gap between the black-windowed door and the frame. Nothing else moved. The only sound was the faint staticky hiss of the rain on the sides and roof of the building.
Jack headed toward the doorway, keeping his eyes on the yellow-litten gap as it grew larger and larger. After thirty paces he could discern that the room had a white tile floor like the rest of the building, but the opening was too narrow for him to see anything else. When he reached the door, he extended one hand and pushed it all the way open.
A long table with a stainless-steel top occupied the center of the room. Atop the table sat a burning lantern and a hacksaw. Shelves covered the walls, some laden with jars containing what Jack assumed were pickled fruits and vegetables, others with various tools—hammers, pliers, drills, and the like. To the left of the table was a cart draped with a white cloth, upon which lay a line of small metal utensils of a kind Jack had never seen before. They were long and thin and most ended in hooks or points.
Frowning, Jack stepped into the room. He wasn’t sure what to make of any of this. Was this a workshop of some sort? If so, what was done here that would require the use of both carpentry tools and these weird little things that looked a bit like lock-picking tools?
He walked over to the cart and stared down at the line of gleaming metal picks, or whatever the hell they were. He reached out to pick one up, but stopped when he noticed what appeared to be a spot of blood on the floor between the cart and the stainless steel table. The blood was no more than a few hours old; it shone dully in the lantern light and had a gummy, semi-congealed look to it.
Then Jack noticed another spot of blood near it, closer to the table. And then another, even closer.
Jack’s eyes moved up to the tabletop, whose edge, he saw, was equipped with a gutter that drained into a pipe that ran into a hole in the floor. On the heels of this curious observation came the discovery that the hacksaw’s serrated blade was caked with a soft, moist reddish-pink substance it took Jack a moment to identify as flesh.
His brow furrowed. Had someone been butchering animals in here, or…
His gaze settled upon a small white object that sat a few inches from the hacksaw.
It was a tooth. A molar. Definitely not from an animal. Its roots were slick with blood. Wet blood. Fresh blood.
And it was at that moment that Jack finally had an inkling of where he was and who lived here.
He stiffened and drew in a sharp breath, eyes widening and rising for a closer look at the jars on the shelves, knowing what he would see an instant before he saw it.
Eyeballs. Hands. A tongue. A scalp. A kidney. A penis. All of them floating and slowly dissolving in milky translucent fluid.
“Oh, fuck,” he said, barely aware of how small and scared his voice sounded.
He whirled around to run, to race out of the room, to fly down the hall, down the stairs, out of this terrible place before he got caught, before he ended up in jars on a shelf.
Standing in the doorway was the Snowman in his spotless white shirt and red suspenders and big round plastic mask. The carrot nose jutted at Jack like a dagger. The two round bumps that served as eyes and the curved line of bumps that formed the mouth were as black as death. The Snowman held a semiautomatic pistol in his right hand, pointed right at Jack.
Bastard Jack, the biggest, baddest bandit in all of Glí, the take-no-shit son of a bitch who had robbed hundreds of coaches and killed dozens of men and once even took down a troll with only a rusty knife and his two huge hairy hands, Bastard Jack made a tiny high-pitched noise in the back of his throat as his bladder let go, releasing a stream of warm urine into his pants.
“Bastard Jack!” the Snowman said, his voice high and merry though somewhat muffled by the mask. “Welcome to my happy world!”
And then he shot Jack in the left kneecap.