Ratcatcher

by Chambers, V. J.

  What was that supposed to mean, anyway? Was that a nice thing to say about someone? Sometimes, Lark thought Shane had been around people who adored him for too long. He didn’t think about what he was saying before he said it. And sometimes, that wasn’t such a good thing. “Right,” said Lark. “Well, I’m not going.”

  “Please, Lark? Just say you’ll think about it.”

  “I’m not going.” It wasn’t only the one time backstage that Chris had said something to her. He cornered her on a regular basis, whenever he seemed to be able to get her alone. He really didn’t like her, and he was always threatening. Lark was pretty frightened of Chris, who seemed to be out to get her. There wasn’t an exchange they had in which Chris didn’t tell her to get the hell off the tour or to go away. Lark tried to avoid him as much as possible. The thought of going to the MTV Movie Awards and having to be with Shane and Chris the entire night, possibly having to be photographed with Shane, did not sound appealing to her at all. She wasn’t budging on this issue, and Shane would just have to deal with it.

  “I’m not giving up,” said Shane.

  “Ask somebody else,” Lark said. “There are tons of women out there who would love to be on your arm in front of cameras.”

  “Yeah, but I want you to come with me.”

  “Forget it,” Lark said and went into the bathroom, hoping that would signal the end of the conversation.

  When she emerged, Shane was doing lines in preparation for the show that night. He offered her some coke, but Lark declined. She wasn’t hanging out backstage tonight. (She didn’t if she didn’t have to. Chris didn’t like her back there, and she didn’t like Chris.) She had tickets for the show, so she’d be watching it with Rainey. She didn’t want to deal with cocaine cravings for the rest of the night, and once she started snorting coke, it was pretty hard to stop. Shane kind of spent all his time hyped up on cocaine. That was why he needed those pills to sleep. Sometimes, Lark worried about him. She didn’t think he was being exactly healthy. Of course, she didn’t suppose she could really comment on healthy lifestyles, considering she herself didn’t exactly take excellent care of herself. Still, there were gradations to treating one’s body like shit. Shane fell heavily in a pretty scary range.

  “Are you going to be backstage tonight?” Shane asked.

  “Uh uh, I’ve got tickets,” said Lark.

  “Too bad,” said Shane. For some reason, he liked it when she was backstage. “You know, maybe it’s kind of silly for you to be wasting your money on concert tickets.”

  “I like seeing my friends,” said Lark.

  “Right,” said Shane. He sounded a little dejected. Lark realized that Shane didn’t really have friends anymore. Not the way she did, anyway. Being famous was kind of a bum deal, wasn’t it?

  “Do you sometimes miss not being a rock star?” she asked.

  Shane shrugged. “Being a rock star was all I ever wanted to be,” he said. “I wouldn’t know what to do if I wasn’t doing it. Even though sometimes I think I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing, I don’t know how to stop.”

  God. Not this again. Lark hated it when Shane got on one of his kicks about how he should end the tour because he was endangering his fans. It sounded plain crazy, and it scared her. Almost more than his drug use. “You shouldn’t stop,” said Lark. “I just meant...you know, do you miss being anonymous?”

  “That’s why I dress up as Ivan,” said Shane.

  But Shane hadn’t dressed up as Death Man since she had moved in with him, she realized. Death Man used to show up in the Entourage’s parking area two or three times a week. But Shane hadn’t done that in a long time. Did it have something to do with her presence? Was that a good thing? Sometimes, Lark could hardly believe she was as close as she was to her favorite rock star. It seemed unreal. Too good to be true.

  “Anyway,” said Lark, “I’ll see you after the show.”

  “I know,” said Shane. “And you haven’t told your friends where you’re staying, right?”

  “Of course not,” said Lark, “but you know, if I did go with you to the MTV Movie Awards, they might figure it out.”

  Shane considered. “I guess I don’t care if you tell them,” he said finally. “Just don’t bring them back here. I don’t want to be mobbed by a whole bunch of people.”

  Huh. Tell Rainey she was staying with Shane Adams, but then be unable to prove it? Was it even worth it? Rainey would just laugh in Lark’s face. She wouldn’t even believe her. Still, maybe it would keep Rainey from worrying. “So, it’s okay for me to tell Rainey, then?” she asked. “I think she’s worried about me, and the secrecy is getting a little hard to keep up.”

  “Sure,” said Shane. “Tell her. I don’t care.”

  “I won’t bring her back. I promise.” It was odd, because she’d expected Matt to blab it all over the place that she was hanging out with Shane Adams after he’d followed her that night. But apparently, Matt had been so embarrassed by the way Shane had talked to him that he hadn’t breathed a word about the incident to anyone. She thought it was kind of strange. Actually, the incident seemed to have soured Matt on the entire Entourage experience. Rainey said he kept talking about leaving the tour. That freaked Rainey out, of course, because she stayed on the van with Matt, and if he dropped off the tour, she’d have nowhere to stay. But Matt wasn’t definite yet. He might stay on the tour. After all, he sold a lot of drugs that way. It was a lucrative enterprise for him. It wasn’t like he was doing anything else with his life. Lark figured it would take more than that to chase off Matt. She was almost sad, but she didn’t really like Matt anymore. She half-wished he would just go away and never come back. Her life might be easier if she never saw him again.

  * * *

  Rainey, as Lark had predicted, did not believe Lark when Lark told Rainey that she was staying with Shane Adams.

  “Sure, you are,” Rainey said, lighting a cigarette and leaning against the bar in the venue where The Wrenching had played that night.

  The concert was over, and the two of them were hanging out as the rest of the crowd emptied the club. They hadn’t had much time to catch up while the band was playing, and Lark had made it just as The Wrenching was taking the stage, due to the fact that Shane hadn’t wanted to go on, and she’d had to talk him into it. He’d gotten into another one of his funks about how he was killing all his fans. Lark did not like it when Shane got that way. He didn’t do it too often, but he did it often enough for it to worry her. She was generally successful at talking him out of his funk, but it took patience and time (to do it, to do it right now). She didn’t mind spending time with Shane. She didn’t mind that at all. She genuinely liked him, even if he was a little nuts. But she did wish he didn’t feel so sad and confused.

  “I figured you wouldn’t believe me,” said Lark.

  “How would you convince Shane Adams to let you stay with him?”

  Well. She couldn’t tell the truth about that, now could she? Lark shrugged. “I just did.”

  “What? Are you going to tell me you’re fucking him?”

  “No. We sleep in the same bed, but we don’t have sex.”

  “Oh my God. Now, I know you’re lying.”

  “I only told you because I know you’re worried about me. You don’t have to worry. I’m fine.”

  “Sweetie, you don’t have to lie to me about this stuff,” said Rainey.

  “I’m not lying,” said Lark.

  “Sure.”

  “I’m not. Look, he asked me to go with him to the MTV Movie Awards. If I did that, would you believe me?”

  “Wait. Did you say no?”

  “Well...it’s complicated.” Lark didn’t even know why she’d brought that whole issue up. She couldn’t go with Shane to the MTV Movie Awards. She just couldn’t. But, God, if it wasn’t galling to have Rainey call her a liar. As if she’d ever lied to Rainey in her life.

  “You’re full of shit,” said Rainey, “and you know it. But now I’ll have to fi
nd a TV and watch the MTV Movie Awards.”

  Damn it. Did that mean she was now going to have to go to the MTV Movie Awards with Shane? Fuck. Lark sighed. “Well, then do it. Because I’ll be on the fucking TV.”

  “Why can’t you just take me back to his tour bus and introduce me?”

  “He doesn’t want to be mobbed by people.”

  Rainey rolled her eyes. “Right. Of course he doesn’t.”

  For some reason, this was making Lark irrationally angry. “You know what, I cannot believe you think I would lie to you.”

  “Oh God, Lark, come on. You tell me this ridiculous thing, and you expect me to believe you?”

  “I’m your best friend. When have I ever lied to you before?”

  “Jesus, do not even be like that,” Rainey said.

  “Whatever,” said Lark. She was angry, maybe mostly because she didn’t want to deal with Chris Dearborn at the MTV Movie Awards, but couldn’t see a way out now. Still, she decided to take it out on the nearest receptacle for her anger, Rainey. “You’re being totally rude.”

  “Lark!”

  “Forget it,” said Lark, and she stalked off.

  She heard Rainey calling after her, but she didn’t turn back. She fumed all the way back to the tour bus, and she didn’t even set up her table to sell dresses in the parking lot. She was too pissed off. Back in the bus, she stormed around slamming doors and swearing at the rats, who seemed to sense her mood and tried to stay clear of her.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck! Well, at least Shane would be happy that she was going. He seemed to want her to come along pretty badly. She still didn’t really see why. Shane was weird sometimes. Okay, Shane was weird all the time. She didn’t understand him one bit.

  He didn’t come back to the bus for a while, because it took some time for the band to get out of backstage. When he did, he was sweaty and exhausted. He rummaged around for coke.

  “Don’t,” said Lark. “You’ll just be really awake and then have to take pills in two hours.”

  Since this was the first thing she’d said to him, he looked at her with a hurt expression on her face. She realized she’d never spoken sharply to Shane before.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Lark shrugged. “I’ll come with you to the MTV Movie Awards,” she said.

  “Cool,” said Shane. “That’s awesome. So, what’s wrong?”

  “That’s what’s wrong,” Lark said. But she didn’t want to talk about it, so she just shrugged and blew it off. “Don’t snort any coke,” she said.

  “You don’t think I should?” He considered. “Okay,” he said finally.

  Soon after that, they went to bed. Shane moved around a lot more because he hadn’t taken his sleeping pills, but he did go to sleep pretty quickly. Lark lay awake for a while, watching him next to her, his slow breathing making his chest rise and fall. She hoped he was okay. She realized that she wanted to do everything within her power to make sure that he was okay. She wished she could protect him. Sometimes, he seemed so fragile. As if he were coming apart at the seams. Eventually, she fell asleep too. And she dreamed.

  In her dream, Lark was at home, making dinner for Jimmy, because he’d demanded that she do so. He sometimes got like that. He’d write out a menu for her, and she had to go and figure out how to cook whatever it was he wanted her to cook. If she fucked it up in any way, he got livid. Angry. Threw things. Screamed. She didn’t like it when Jimmy got angry. She felt as if she spent all of her time just trying to keep Jimmy from getting angry.

  She was making vegetable lasagna. Jimmy was in the living room, muttering to himself, writing on the walls in some gibberish that he claimed was the language in another world. Jimmy could speak in that language. He talked to her in that language sometimes, for hours on end. And he got angry when she couldn’t talk back to him in it. When she couldn’t understand him.

  And she didn’t want Jimmy to be angry. She wanted to do whatever she could to make sure Jimmy wasn’t angry. It was her mission in life. If she could keep him calm...

  Jimmy came into the kitchen. He looked different than he usually did, but that was because this was a dream. Lark knew that. She always knew she was dreaming when she dreamed about Jimmy these days. Supposedly, if she knew she was dreaming, she could control things in the dream, but if Jimmy was there, she couldn’t control anything. Jimmy never let her have control of anything at all, not even her own body.

  Jimmy was standing in the kitchen, his arms crossed over his thin chest. He was so thin, the way he’d been at the end. There was a large gaping hole in his forehead. There was a rat crawling out of it. Jimmy’s face was gray. His skin was leathery. He looked like one of those zombies in the Romero movies. Except his eyes. His eyes were alert. Alive. But his wounds were old. There was no blood. Instead, Jimmy was rotting. In her dream, Lark could smell it, and it was overpowering the smell of the lasagna.

  “You’re dead,” whispered Lark.

  Jimmy moved forward then, quickly, too fast for Lark to track the movement. His hand thrust out. His fingers closed around her throat, and he pulled her to him.

  “Jimmy, you’re dead,” gasped Lark. “Can’t you just go be dead?”

  His fingers tightened. She could barely breathe. Jimmy lowered his rotting face to hers. The smell was so bad now that Lark could barely handle it. The rat crawled out of Jimmy’s forehead and onto Lark’s face. Lark shied away from it, lifting her hands to push it away. But Jimmy grabbed her hands. Pinned them behind her back. Put his lips on hers. They felt dry. Cold. And his skin was flaking off, getting inside her mouth. It tasted old and dead and musty and Lark started to scream, or to try to scream. But she couldn’t breathe. She thrashed ineffectively in Jimmy’s grasp, and he kept kissing her, inexorably strong and patient.

  * * *

  Shane awoke with a start because Lark was screaming. He sat up straight in bed and then realized she was still asleep. He watched for a second as she squirmed in the bed, squeezing tears from her eyes. He felt frightened, unsure of what to do. He’d never seen Lark show any sign of weakness. The idea of Lark crying. Of Lark screaming...

  Gently, tentatively, he reached for her. Touched her. When she kept screaming, he nudged her, softly at first, then with more force, until he was shaking her.

  Lark’s eyes fluttered open.

  She was beautiful. Sometimes Shane didn’t understand how a girl could like his music so much, and want to look out for him so much, but not seem to be attracted to him. Because, he’d realized, he was really attracted to Lark. He had been from the moment their hands had touched. That day, in his Ivan get-up, her looking at him from beneath her long, black lashes. Lark was a little sweaty now, and she looked distressed, but she just seemed to glow. And she was so close to him.

  “You were dreaming,” he murmured, looking down at her.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  There was no one around for them to disturb, but it seemed right that they didn’t speak too loudly. Shane lay back down. Propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah... It was just a dream.”

  “It sounded bad.”

  “Yeah.”

  She didn’t want to talk about it, then. That was okay. They didn’t do that with each other. They didn’t open up to each other. Shane respected that. Some things were too dark and too secret to be shared.

  But Lark was shaking. She was still crying.

  He did it without thinking. It just seemed like the right thing to do. He reached for her and pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her, cradling her head against his shoulder. Lark’s body melded into his, as if it fit there. And he held her while she sobbed.

  “It was bad,” she said finally. “It was very bad.”

  “Should I...” he trailed off. “Is this okay?” He meant the fact that they were close. He didn’t know if she understood.

  She burrowed into him. “It’s okay,” she said.

  Good. That was good. Sh
e moved her head away from his body. Looked up at him. Tears glistened on her face. And their lips moved to each other like magnets.

  She was soft against him. Her lips opened, her tongue slid into his mouth. And holding her like that, so close to him, felt so good. Shane hadn’t felt like this in a long time. He felt alive. Bursting.

  Happy.

  Yeah. That was what happy felt like.

  She moaned softly.

  He thought he might die. It was just too nice.

  But as he pulled her closer still, the world suddenly stretched tight in front of him, like a rubber band, tearing in just a few places. Smoke poured through the rips. And he heard the voice again. Cracked, deep, angry—

  Shane shook himself. The world went back to normal. Not for the first time, he wondered if he was losing his mind.

  * * *

  “Your article is awesome,” said Tim O’Doole’s voice over the phone, “and I want to put it on the cover, but...”

  There was always a “but,” wasn’t there? Whitney sighed heavily. It was beginning to look as if she’d never get this damned article published. She should give up on it.

  “...the editor-in-chief won’t go for it,” said Tim. “And I don’t get it. It’s an excellent article. It’s juicy stuff. I’m pissed off.”

  Really? He was pissed off? “You are?” Whitney asked, taking a sip of the gin and tonic she was drinking. Okay, a gulp.

  “Hell, yeah, I am. It’s ridiculous. This article is awesome. This is a career-making article. You got Shane Adams to say shit that no one ever gets him to say. He’s a tough nut to crack. No one gets interviews with him ever. And if anyone could do it, people should know that it would be Whitney fucking Eros. And they should just trust the fact that you can deliver the goods. And they should fucking run the goddamned article!”

  Whitney agreed. “Thanks,” she said. “But, don’t worry about it. I understand. I’ve been getting the run around from everyone.”

  “Well, don’t you think that’s weird?”

  Actually, it was weird. “Yeah, but I guess I’m just getting used to it.”