Ratcatcher

by Chambers, V. J.

  Inside, the bar was dimly lit. There weren’t too many people inside, but to Shane’s surprise, he recognized one of them. He couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but he was someone who used to live in town years ago. Shane had frequented numerous parties where this guy had hung out. He wracked his brain, trying to remember the guy’s name, but he couldn’t, so Shane resolved not to speak to him. Instead, he just sidled up to the bar and ordered a shot of whiskey from the bartender.

  The guy approached him. “Adams?” he asked. “Is that you?”

  Damn it. Shane turned to the guy. “Hey,” he said. “How are you?”

  “Dude, you remember me?”

  “Uh...yeah. I do. I really do. But, um, I forget your name.”

  “It’s Anthony.”

  “Right. Anthony.” Shane still didn’t remember. “You used to live out Harrington Road, right? With, uh, Trina?”

  “Trish,” said Anthony. “Still do. That’s crazy, man. I heard you were back in town, but I didn’t think you’d actually come out. It’s so cool to see you again.”

  Shane smiled. “Hey yeah. It’s cool to see you too. So, you and Trish still...?”

  “We’re married actually. Trish is pregnant with our second kid. I don’t get out much, but sometimes, after work, I like to slip out for a beer or two. Relive the good ol’ days, right? I’ll have to tell Trish I saw you. She won’t fucking believe it.”

  Married. Kids. Shane sometimes was jarred by the fact that most people his age were doing stuff like that. He almost never thought of it himself. He guessed that for years, he’d really been married to his band and his music.

  “Well, uh, congratulations, man,” said Shane. “That’s awesome.”

  “Hey,” said Anthony. “You know what? There’s an open mike next door. You know Gus? Who used to work at the coffee shop?”

  “Yeah,” said Shane. “I remember Gus.”

  “He runs it now. I’m sure he’d let you borrow his guitar. Would you play, man? I would love to hear you play again.”

  Damn it. Shane sighed. “I’m sorry, Anthony. I can’t. I’m sort of retired.”

  “Retired?”

  “Yeah. I don’t think I’m going to play ever again. My band broke up. Did you hear?”

  Anthony nodded. “I heard, Shane. But you can’t stop playing. It’s in your blood. You’ve got a gift. It would be really cool if you played next door.”

  Shane shook his head. He couldn’t play. There was just no way he could do that.

  * * *

  Whitney hit play on the Shane Adams CD again. She’d been listening to it nonstop ever since she and Tim had gotten back off tour. Tim was in her kitchen, making them drinks. “You sure you don’t mind if we listen to this CD again?” she called. “I’ll understand if you’re getting sick of it.”

  “Never get sick of The Wrenching,” Tim called back. “It’s cool.”

  After the tour had broken up, and The Wrenching had broken up, she and Tim had both felt more lost than they imagined they would. They’d skulked back to their respective homes. A few days later, Tim had called her. He couldn’t pay the rent on his apartment. Whitney had been feeling disoriented ever since they’d gotten home. She felt responsible for Tim’s situation. She asked him to move in with her. He did. He slept on the couch. At first, Whitney tried to set up some interviews, but they all fell through. She was drinking pretty heavily, and she had a hard time getting up in the morning. Or showering. Or traveling places. At first, she thought having Tim in the house would help, because she’d feel obligated to take care of him. He was a guest after all.

  However, Tim didn’t need much looking after. He didn’t seem very into the ideas of getting up or showering or traveling places either. Mostly, they just drank. In the morning, it was screwdrivers if they were lucky enough to have orange juice in the house. Later in the afternoon (which usually wasn’t too long after morning, really, considering they usually didn’t make it up before noon), they graduated to caffeinated mixed drinks. They ate too. Sometimes. But it wasn’t the lack of food that drove them out to buy groceries. It was the lack of alcohol. If they ran out of mixers, they just drank drinks on the rocks.

  Whitney wasn’t sure how long it had been going on. But they’d both come to the conclusion that it couldn’t last forever. They couldn’t live like this. For one thing, they would eventually run out of money. Tim was already basically broke, and Whitney was living off her savings. So the order of the evening was to plot how they were going to make money.

  Okay, that wasn’t exactly true. The plan was to plot ways to make money, but the reality was that they mostly talked about whether or not they should go to Tennessee and camp out on Shane Adams’ lawn and try to beg him to go back on tour. They were on the fence about it because it seemed crass and little juvenile. In addition to that, they knew that if they went and camped out on Shane’s lawn, they’d lose even more money. They’d probably lose Whitney’s apartment as well. This, they realized, was a bad thing, but they were having a harder and harder time remembering why. They knew that in order to eat and live, they needed money.

  But they were drinking a lot now. And it was hard for Whitney to write or set up interviews when she was sloshed all the time. Tim was having a hard time filling out applications or making it to interviews. They talked briefly about trying to stop drinking, but neither of them took it very seriously. It seemed like a silly idea. At the beginning, camping out on Shane Adams’ lawn had seemed like a silly idea too. Every day, it seemed less and less silly.

  Whitney wandered back into the kitchen. Tim handed her a rum and coke. She took a sip. “Good,” she said.

  “Not too strong?” Tim asked.

  “You know you can’t make my drinks too strong,” Whitney said.

  “So,” said Tim, “any ideas for making money while you were gone?”

  “No. You don’t have any vintage guitars we could sell or anything, do you?”

  “Did,” said Tim. “Did that already.”

  “Damn it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess I should write a story,” said Whitney.

  “I guess I should get a job.”

  They were quiet for a few minutes. Whitney sat down at the kitchen table and sucked on her drink. Tim followed suit.

  “So,” said Whitney. “About going to Tennessee.”

  “I thought we said we were going to stop talking about that.”

  “We are,” said Whitney. “You’re right. We shouldn’t talk about it anymore.”

  “Yeah.” Tim took a long drink. “But, um, if we were going to talk about it, we’d talk about how we were going to get there, I guess.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would we fly or drive?”

  “It’s a long drive.”

  “It is.”

  “But we could take camping materials with us if we drove,” said Whitney.

  “That’s true. Which would be cheaper?”

  “Don’t know. I’d have to look into plane tickets. But if we drove, we could just pretty much pick up and go. We wouldn’t have to plan as much. And we could leave whenever we wanted. And we wouldn’t have to rent a car in Tennessee.”

  “So we should probably drive. I mean, if we were gonna go, that would be how we should get there.”

  “Yeah,” said Whitney. “If we were gonna go.”

  “Which we’re not.”

  “Of course not.”

  They were quiet again.

  * * *

  Anthony signaled the bartender to bring him and Shane another round of shots. Shane shook his head. “If I take another shot, I’m not going to be able to drive home,” he said.

  Anthony clapped him on the back. “Shane, you’re getting old!” he roared.

  Shane felt old. If Lark were here, she’d tell him not to take another shot. Lark always looked out for him. But Lark wasn’t here.

  The bartender set the two shots in front of him and Anthony. Shane picked one up. Stared at it.
Fuck it. He downed it.

  For a few minutes, nothing happened, but then Shane felt the liquor begin to seep into his brain and body. Everything was warmer, fuzzier. He smiled lopsidedly at Anthony.

  “Let’s go to open mike,” said Anthony.

  But Shane wasn’t going to play. He wasn’t going to play, because...because...

  * * *

  “We shouldn’t do it, though,” said Tim, rattling a now empty rocks glass.

  “No,” said Whitney. “We really shouldn’t.”

  “It’s crazy,” said Tim.

  Whitney nodded.

  * * *

  Shane stumbled up to the microphone with a borrowed guitar. He fit his fingers to the frets and stared out at the crowd of locals. He knew he shouldn’t do it, but they were screaming for him. Screaming.

  Shane started to play, the first chords of his first song echoing out into the small venue. The crowd went wild. He leaned into the microphone and began to sing.

  * * *

  “Let’s just fucking do it,” said Whitney. “Right fucking now. Let’s go.”

  Tim nodded, a feverish look in his eyes. “Let’s go. Let’s definitely go.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Lark didn’t get on the bus. Instead, she got her bus ticket refunded and called Shane from a pay phone. He didn’t answer his phone. That figured. He was probably asleep. His phone was probably on the other side of the house. She hung up without leaving a message and called another cab. She wasn’t going to leave. She really wasn’t.

  Luckily, she got a quieter cab driver for the ride home. He didn’t make any comments about the address when she told it to him either. Lark was almost sad, because she wouldn’t have minded a little bit of chatter. She was feeling a little foolish for making such a dramatic exit and then turning around and changing her mind.

  When she arrived back at Shane’s house, she noticed that Shane’s car wasn’t there. That was weird. She entered the house, which was unlocked—very trusting of Shane—and began calling for him. He didn’t answer.

  She wished for the umpteenth time that she had a cell phone. It would be so much easier for people to reach her if she had a cell phone. But she couldn’t afford one, so that was why she didn’t have one. She couldn’t afford anything. She didn’t even know how she managed to survive half the time.

  Lark bounded the stairs, heading for Shane’s bedroom. At the top of the steps, she sniffed the air. Did she smell smoke? Was Shane home?

  “Shane!” she called.

  She went back the hall to Shane’s room. Tendrils of smoke curled around the closed door—under it, between the door and frame, around the hinges. Alarmed, Lark threw open the door, yelling Shane’s name again. But no one was in the room. The rats were wandering around on the floor. A few looked up at her with their rat eyes. Lark swallowed. The rats didn’t seem to notice the smoke, which was pouring out of the painting that Jimmy had made. It was lying on Shane’s bed.

  Heart in her throat, Lark approached the painting. Looked down at it. Lark’s breath began to come in gasps. She was starting to panic. She was having a hallucination. Maybe it was from stress. Maybe it was some kind of freaky acid flash back. Maybe she had lost it, just like Shane, and she was going absolutely insane. She struggled to steady her breathing, to try to think of what to do. Through the smoke, she could see the image of the ash man. He was sitting on his throne of sorts. His red eyes danced cruelly. And...he was moving.

  Lark swallowed.

  The fucking painting was moving!

  Fuck, fuck, fuck!

  Lark gazed into the painting, watched as the ash man slowly lifted his arm and beckoned her.

  Lark shook her head violently. This wasn’t happening. She’d seen Jimmy destroy this painting. He’d taken a kitchen knife to it. And later, he’d threatened her with that knife. The painting shouldn’t fucking exist! And hell, maybe she should never have come back here. No, she mouthed at the painting. No, stop.

  But the ash man only beckoned again, snickering at her.

  And the walls of Shane’s room swam in front of her, going blurry, then swirling into each other, and the painting grew larger and larger and larger until all she could see was the painting, and she was surrounded by ashy smoke, smearing the air around her, except now, the smoke didn’t look real anymore. Instead, it looked as though it had been made with brush strokes. She reached out and ran her hand through it, and her hand came back covered in oil paint. When she breathed, her mouth filled with the taste of paint and turpentine. She thought of Jimmy.

  The ash man loomed in front of her, huge and threatening. He leered at her as he towered over her and then he spoke. “Lark,” he said. His voice was an oily whisper, as if it too had been painted.

  Lark screamed.

  The ash man laughed.

  Lark wanted to run. She wished for it. Willed her leg to move. Nothing happened. She stayed where she was, gazing at the ash man, looking deep into his terrible red eyes.

  “I need bodies,” he said. “You’ve come back, but I still need bodies.”

  Lark didn’t know what to do. He was saying the thing that Shane had said he’d said in his hallucination, so this was clearly something her brain had cooked up, something stress related. It wasn’t...real. Not real. Not real.

  “I was letting you leave,” said the ash man. His mouth twisted into a satisfied smile, as if he were being very generous to offer such a thing. “But you came back.”

  Lark started to cry. She couldn’t help it. Hot, wet tears started pouring out of her eyes. They splashed into the smoke, settling onto it, beading up against the wet paint.

  “I need the bodies. Need them. Need bodies. You understand, don’t you? You can’t get in the way of the bodies. You can’t get in the way. You do understand. Don’t you?” His voice thundered then. His eyes bored into her. “Don’t you?” he repeated.

  “I-I-I-” Lark couldn’t speak through her tears.

  And then, abruptly, it was over. She was standing back in Shane’s bedroom, where the air was clear and there was no smoke. She was holding the painting, sobbing loudly, and all the rats had crowded around her, as if they weren’t sure what was wrong with her.

  The phone rang. Not Shane’s cell phone, but the phone in the house. The landline. Lark hadn’t even known that Shane had a landline. It hadn’t rung once since she’d moved in. She didn’t even know where the receiver was. But it was ringing loudly, so there had to be a phone in the bedroom. Somewhere close. Yes. There it was. On the bedside table. Lark reached over and picked it up.

  “Hello?” she said, her voice shaking.

  “Is this Shane Adams’ house?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Hi, this is Anthony. I’m an old friend of Shane’s.”

  “I’m his girlfriend,” said Lark. God. What was that? What had she just seen? Was she going insane? Was Shane rubbing off on her?

  “Good,” said Anthony. “Shane’s passed out on the bar in town. Someone needs to come get him.”

  Shane needed help. Good. She could focus on that. She could forget the silly hallucination and think about Shane. “Oh God,” said Lark. “Okay.” Passed out? Shane drank every day. Lots. He must have really had a lot to drink to pass out on the bar. A lot. “Um, well, then I can come—no, wait, I can’t. Shane has the car.” Damn it! “I guess I can call another cab.”

  “No can do, sweetie,” said Anthony. “Cab service stopped about an hour ago. Doesn’t run late at night around here.”

  “Oh,” said Lark.

  “I hope it’s okay that I called,” said Anthony. “I found this number in Shane’s cell phone. Figured someone would be back at his place, like a maid or a butler or something.”

  “No,” said Lark, “Shane doesn’t have like...servants. He’s rich, but he’s not... Never mind. It’s fine you called. And, um, I’ll figure out some way to come get him.”

  “You know, it’s funny. He didn’t mention a girlfriend.”

  “W
e had a fight,” said Lark. “That’s probably why he went out drinking.”

  “You sound awfully young.” Anthony’s voice seemed a little accusing.

  “Don’t you watch MTV? I broke up the band with my young, feminine wiles.” Lark couldn’t resist. This guy was trying to help Shane out, but that didn’t mean he had to be insulting.

  But Anthony just laughed. “Doesn’t Shane have more than one car?” he asked.

  “He...might. I don’t know. But I don’t know where the keys are.”

  “Are you sure you’re his girlfriend? Maybe you’re some crazy groupie who broke into his house.”

  “You know what, Anthony, thanks for the heads up. I’ll find a way to get Shane.” And Lark hung up the phone. She was pissed at Anthony. What right did he have to— Didn’t matter. What she needed to concentrate on right now was how she was going to get to Shane and get him back home.

  She stared down at Shane’s phone. It was one of those phones that allowed you to program your most used numbers into it, and she stared down at the three numbers that Shane had programmed into his phone. Chris’ home phone. Chris’ cell phone. His publicist. Gosh. Shane must be lonely. But Lark knew what she was going to have to do. She was going to hate doing it too.

  * * *

  Chris picked up the phone on the fourth ring. His caller ID said it was Shane. Shane was calling him! His heart leapt. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d missed his friend. “Hello?”