“What do you intend to do?” he said. Or at least he intended to speak calmly, but his words came out in a withered shriek.
“Nothing,” said Dr Manzanares softly. The banal word struck the prisoner with more terror than any violent denunciation could have done.
He cast his eyes round desperately and then saw the meat cleaver. It lay on the cold stone floor in front of him, new, freshly sharpened and deadly. Just within reach of his fingers. He slid his right foot out quietly, slowly, inch by inch; if only he could keep them talking. But his foot tinkled against the cleaver and the heartless couple before him burst out laughing. Pizar was more bewildered than ever when Dr Manzanares kicked the cleaver towards him. He picked it up with his free right hand, the metal wet and chill against his sweating flesh.
“That’s right,” said Mme Freitas. “Take it. It’s intended for you.”
“What is this, a game?” demanded Pizar quietly.
“That’s right,” the doctor agreed. “A game, in which your wits will lead you to a decision and your life is the prize.”
Pizar saw that the vault in which he was chained was becoming darker; looking down at the shadowy waters of the canal he became aware that the sun was beginning its swift decline into the sea.
“You are in the vaults beneath the Palazzo, my friend,” the doctor went on. “The tide is coming in. But you have a weapon with which to defend yourself.”
Pizar still did not comprehend the doctor’s words; he looked back towards the iron gratings on the seaward side of the vault, then strained at the chain. It held firm. There were eyes and darting shapes down at the water’s edge. Pizar looked more closely and began to feel sick. Rats! There must have been hundreds of them, being driven in by the encroaching tide. Already the trapped man could see that the sullen wash of the water had reached the lowest of the ancient steps.
“You have two excellent choices,” went on Dr Manzanares, as though he were giving a lecture on philosophy. “As you will see, the construction of the vaults must drive the rats past your pillar, where they will assuredly attack you at the slightest movement. Remarkably bold, these sewer rats, I’m told. But, as you see, you may defend yourself with the cleaver. We are, it goes without saying, humanists and you have a first-rate chance of surviving an attack.”
Pizar did not reply. With a dead heart and trembling limbs he looked along the floor of the vault; it was just as Manzanares had said. It was a sheer six-foot drop to the level on which he was standing; he could see that Mme Freitas and the doctor had descended by a wooden ladder, which they would no doubt pull up after them.
With a white and twitching face, he began, “If I returned the money …”
“Too late,” said Mme Freitas, with a terrible smile. Pizar retreated to the pillar at his back; the chain rattled as he moved and the red eyes of the rats twinkled in the gloom at the water’s edge. He could hear their squeaks and furtive movements, almost smell their carrion stench. They had thick black mud coated on their filthy bodies. He clutched the cleaver to his chest and blinked as the doctor spoke again.
“As I said before, my friend, you have two choices. Oh, we are being generous. You may be eaten by the rats. But we have guarded against that. You have ample defence in your hands.”
But here he turned and pointed up the slope behind the pillar to which Pizar was chained.
“Though if you escape the rats, another problem faces you. They go some way farther up the slope, where they congregate to escape the tide. I am afraid you cannot, for your chain is more than twenty feet short of the high water mark. So if you elude the rats you may drown.”
A scream as though he were already drowning escaped from Pizar’s parched throat.
“I may drown?” he shouted. “You know I will drown.”
Mme Freitas moved then and looked Pizar quietly in the face.
“There is a third choice, you know,” she said with dreadful emphasis. She moved away and climbed up the ladder. As she went Pizar could see she wore thick leather thigh boots, a protection also afforded the doctor.
Manzanares lingered. The sun was almost gone now, only a faint carmine tinting the surface of the water. The waves slapped the edges of the worn steps, leaving an oily scum, and the rats shifted uneasily at the margin, curious and afraid of the human being who barred their path. But Pizar knew, with horrible certainty, that their fear of the water would certainly outweigh their fear of man.
“If we could only come to some arrangement ...” he began quickly. One look at the doctor’s hard eyes counselled him to save his breath.
Dr Manzanares looked him up and down with something like satisfaction.
“I am sure you will think of something,” he said.
He moved away to follow Mme Freitas and pulled up the ladder after him.
“I hope you can swim,” he called cheerily to the man chained to the pillar.
Pizar heard the distant clang of a closing door and the sound fell on his soul like the long weight of eternity. He moved and the chain clinked; the light on the outer surface of the canal died and it was night. The tide slopped on the foul floor of the vault, damp air blew in and he caught the foetid smell of the rats. They crouched at the water’s edge, moving closer now, scuttling with mincing steps as the tide menaced their feet, their red, unwinking eyes watching his face with quiet confidence. He breathed shallowly and sickly, felt he might scream and clutched the cleaver tightly in his right hand.
He braced himself against the pillar, praying that he would not trip on the chain; the tide crept in inexorably; the putrid mass of the rats shifted and changed shape before his dazed eyes. The first wavelet burst foaming on the floor of the cellar and then they were coming at him, squeaking to themselves, their red eyes murderous, their foul, slime-encrusted bodies brushing his as they leaped for his eyes and throat.
Pizar shrieked and screamed as he wielded the blade, the handle slippery with blood, slashing and hacking with the courage of a man in whom all faith is dead, hoping that he would not become entwined in the chain and fall. Froth was on his lips and madness in his heart when he paused in his blind rage; he tested the edge of the cleaver against the links of the chain but it was high-grade steel and only blunted the blade.
He awaited the next onslaught of the rats, balanced on the balls of his feet, caught his breath deeply and began hacking for his life.
~ * ~
IV
There were enquiries, threats, police investigations and intimation of legal proceedings, of course; all the makings of a first-class scandal. But to all accusations Mme Freitas and Dr Manzanares maintained smiling denials. Albano Pizar had never been to the Palazzo Tortini after his visit regarding the book; was his return likely after the scandalous way in which he had treated the dead author’s widow?
Certainly, the authorities could visit the vaults of the house. The authorities did visit the vaults - but found nothing suspicious and retired with apologies. The servants were no help; no, they had never seen M. Pizar at the Palazzo; perhaps the authorities were confusing the occasion? The chauffeur could not recall ever having driven him to and from the station, other than in the one instance. The authorities shrugged and retired; after all, there were more important things to investigate. Mme Freitas and Dr Manzanares exchanged secret smiles of satisfaction and referred to the matter no more.
Albano Pizar returned to his office in Paris a year or so later, paler and thinner than before; in fact, very much more like the young man he had been in the distant past. He would never indicate to any of his friends or business associates how he came to lose his left hand, which seemed to have been hacked from the wrist, but everyone noticed how much better he treated his authors thereafter. And women clients he would not handle at all.
<
~ * ~
DAVID A. SUTTON
Night Soil Man
THE EAST END was gettin’ too hot, so I left with just the clothes on me back
, me cart and donkey, and walked the slow miles back to the Black Country. Following on, the loathsome thing? I ‘ope not. He knows I knows, see.
~ * ~
The night sky was a-glow with the red fires from the furnaces at Russell’s gas-tube factory and brown chimbly smoke clotted th’ air and choked me throat. But the iron-tastin’ smog, foul as it were, meant I ‘ad distanced meself from the pea-soup and what it ‘id in the night down south. Least I ‘oped so. Obscurity was round about guaranteed hereabouts. Factories and iron foundries, mine works, eight pubs on me birth street alone. I dae wanna go there, so I got me a billet as a lodger with the Mole family on Loxdale Street.
At three I’m emptying the privies on the ‘olyhead Road and the stink is worse than the stench of them sliced-up women. Me nice noo calico cap got coated in muck when it fell off into one of the pots. Ne’er mind, it’ll be plastered in soot soon enough. On’y doin’ the job for enough money until the sweeping pays off.
At foive I’m toutin’ for business along Bridge Street. The ‘ouses are big and so too the chimblys. I’m thin and short, so’s I fit up ‘em real neat. At half-six I’m in the darkness, scraping away the burned-on, hardened coal cinders. Heave up, and brushing soot now, me cap black, me face black, me shirt and breeches black, coal dust itchin’ me balls, the smell of the soot in me conk. From the chimbly top high above an engine hoots and there’s a clatterin’ of metal wheels on rails as the train on the Great Western line passes nearby the ‘ouse.
Then silence agin and I’m thinking, me sensitive emotions harking back to him, the beast I left behind. And I start t’ get the collywobbles. As if he was still around. Hauntin’ me. But he’d never find me, not once I’d come off the turnpike road, the dark towns too many, each of ‘em wi’ ‘undreds of dark alleys and courts, the people crowded in them back-to-backs, a swirlin’ mass of ‘uman bodies. He was out o’ luck.
But I’m up the chimbly, black as night with the burned smell and that other smell’s coming back and I’m seem’ ‘im... Dropping down, sliding wi’ his mardy bulgin’ eyes and ‘is ‘ands clenchin’ at me, drivin’ cinders into me eyes, chokin’ hot... He’d got up there somehow, up there and still follerin’!
I’m down in a sec’, coughin’ an’ heavin’, and the missus of the ‘ouse is open-mouthed as she sees me standin’ and shakin’ in a load of soot in the fireplace. A’ter I tendered me apologies, I tidied up and bagged me soot and got paid and pitched the sack on the cart.
The donkey woke up and eyed me. I was lookin’ at him funny-like. He knew I was sore terrified. He knew me. And I was shiverin’ still.
Mrs Mole was makin’ gloves when I opened the duwer to her ‘ouse, and she were sittin’ by the winder in the kitchen, for the meagre light. On the hob a pot of something cookin’. I’d sold the soot and clinker, supped two pints in The Cross Guns t’steady me nerves, and took a pinch or two of snuff, and given up sweepin’ for the day. Mrs Mole eyed me with a peculiar eye and I told her I was feelin’ crook. She told me to stick the wood in the ‘ole and to tek some tea and that her husband wouldn’t be home till ar’ter seven. Why’d she say that? Her eye caught me agin. It was akin t’the donkey’s. I’d had to bash ‘im a few times since I’d owned ‘im and his look was always a-fear. Mrs Mole had the same eye; the same but different. Like it was dread and yearnin’ at the same time. Like me donkey.
Mrs Mole’s ‘usband Thomas had married her just two months past and they’d set up home across the court from her dad. They needed lodger’s money to pay the rent as his wages from the iron works wouldn’t cover all the outgoings. I’d come along at just the right time. The missus had a bump of a belly too, so there was another mouth to be fed on the way.
Wednesb’ry’s a town of minin’ and iron works. It’s where I come from, original like, where I was born. Me dad was a gun maker - a trade now gone from the town - and he got me an education; should say he had a way to keep me attendin’ school, wi’ a leather strap. Me cousin Harry was a sweep and I started as a ‘prentice to him soon as I could. No middlemen, like what Mrs Mole had to contend with sewing her gloves, not wi’ sweepin ‘. I did me own hours and finished early in the day, and I gambled and drunk a fair bit too; fighting me corner sometimes. In any argy-bargy I could tek a few knocks.
Then I upped and went, to mek a new start in the East End, and lodged in Miller’s Court. Don’t know what made me leave ‘ome that spring. Weren’t money; ‘ad enough o’ that, that’s for sure - me cousin didn’t see all’s the cash I took as ‘is journeyman! I’d ‘ad a dizzy spell or two, maybe that was it. Yes, them wobbly spells; drunked waster, Ma said afore she piped it.
It were dowen in London I was learned in the ways of women. Wasn’t never right, they always had the eye on me and they smelled of the privies. I tried, but was no good at it - and them women, they ‘ad no patience and no tender feelings. Then he came on the scene and the smell got worse. Dunno why. He’d bin in all the papers. Mitre Court, the Whitechapel Road, Hanb’ry Street. I could smell ‘im through the soot, I could. No matter how filthy I got with cleanin’ the flues, the raw burned smell couldn’t ‘ide it. I got faint with it and me ‘ead went funny-like and though I read it all in the papers, it seemed like I already knew what he was doin’ on them secret nights in them shit-wet streets ... and I ‘ad t’ get out. Away from the sinfulness. I’m not a church-goin’ man, but it were loathsome seein’ ‘im at work; in me ‘ead like.
~ * ~
In the night I woke up to the smell of muck.
I could hear the furnaces goin’ on Portway Road, keepin’ sleep away, that and the reisty stink. At fower, I was up and tipping privies on to the dung cart with the gang I worked alongside, and we’d soon taken our ‘uman waste t’ the privy midden. At foive I was happy to be on me own agin and working the chimblys, scourin’ cinders and brushing soot. Whistlin’ t’ meself...
... And then he was on me agin, in the dark space, me one place that I coulda called me church, me sanctuary. The tight black bricks crushin’ me in, holdin’ me arms, so’s I couldn’t fend him off. The soot turnin’ t’ shit, the riffy smell overpowerin’, drip-pin’ down the chimbly. Me breath a-heavin’, throat choked, the air full o’ it. His face black and eyes a-bulgin’. He’d done summat and he wanted t’ tell me about it. He was in me ‘ead and I knewed what it was, I cud see what he’d done.
~ * ~
The old turnpike road out o’ Wednesb’ry was rutted with a muddle-up of snow and mud and me donkey was rooted, the cartwheels half-buried. Even as I lashed him, and gi’ ‘im a thud on his ‘ead with me cosh, I knews he was goin’ no further. His eye was on me and it was like hers. I’d ‘ave to leave him rooted, freezin’ to his death, servin’ hisself right.
I’d got to leave me new ‘ome. Now that he’d found me agin. He didn’t want no witnesses, just an accomplice. I could find another town. I’d be a’right, for a while.
I grabbed one of me empty coal sacks from the cart and shook snow off it. Threw the loaf o’ bread I’d took from the larder and bottle o’ gin in with it, and me tools and the guttin’ knife, and slung the sack o’er me shoulder. And set orf, trudgin’ through the snow and mud.
Me brain was dull and I ‘ad bad thoughts. Her, Mrs Mole on her mattress, mixed with the horsehair; like dog mess turning to wool. Hair and purple blood and them other things.
The vile thing. He’s always follerin’. I shan’t never get rid of ‘im.
Gawpin’ back along the road I can sees me donkey, kneelin’ down in the snow now, shiverin’ and brayin’, still tethered to the cart, like he’s a-prayin’.
Hope he’s prayin’ for me soul. Hope he’s sayin’, Jack, God have mercy on yer soul...
<
~ * ~
BRIAN HODGE
Let My Smile Be Your Umbrella
FORGET EVERYTHING YOU think you know about yourself. Forget those twenty or twenty-five years of assumptions. However old you are. Instead, try looking at yours
elf from someone else’s perspective for a change. My perspective. Empty out all those pitiful preconceptions and just look at yourself. Look at the effect you’re having on the world.
What do you see then? Do you see what’s really there? Can you even be that honest with yourself?
If you could, then I think you would agree that there’s not much choice of what to do about it, is there? The end result? You’ve been claiming all along it’s what you want.
What I see, it’s not a question of saving, not any more. It’s too late for that. Now it’s come down to quarantine and eradication.
So it’ll be the same with you as it’s been with the others:
I’ll take more pleasure in killing you than you take in being alive.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 9