A stir in the chamber. Not a particularly stately chamber. One might expect to see it contain a meeting of insurance salesmen looking at graphs. A stir, and a woman said, “This is . . . definitely a . . . one of ours?”
Bagnell said almost wearily, “It is definitely one of ours. By and by we’ll show you another photograph. You’ll need no convincing. But how it got to be part of a Caribbean cult ceremony in New York, I have no idea. Perhaps just as well because if I had an idea, so would the press.” He eased his long, lanky body back into his chair.
Elbaum began to pick up papers and read aloud. “ ‘Could the jerky gait ascribed to the String-Fellow be explained by the shortening of tendons? If so, which tendons and how do they shrink?’ Would you give that one some thought, Doctor Calloway?”
“Okay, Gus. Yes, get back to you on it.”
In the silence right after, the incessant sound of the airconditioning made itself heard. Before Elbaum could read another slip of paper, there was a vocal query in the bland, blank room. “What became of the mental patient, Hillsmith, who -?”
Bagnell stirred and spoke. “Yes, I investigated that myself. Oh, Hillsmith is certainly insane, with a horrible and disturbing delusion. On one level it’s a mad reiteration of parts of the Bible. Particularly the vision of Ezekial in the valley of the dry bones. No doubt about that. But, on another level, perhaps it was triggered by the actual sighting of dormant Paper-Men, a whole group of them maybe, in a very old house, suddenly coming alive, so to speak, and beginning to move. Enough to knock anybody off the steady spin around his mental axis.”
Claire said softly and thoughtfully, her black hair hugging her round face, “Dr Elbaum, I’ve been wondering why - so far - there only seem to be Paper-Men. Why hasn’t there been a single report of a Paper-Woman? This is hardly an Equal Opportunity issue, but still I wonder, don’t you?”
Elbaum poured a glass of water and after a moment said, “We just don’t know. That’s a measure of our ignorance, not our knowledge. Why do women get pregnant and men have prostate trouble? We all know why, but with this other we can’t and don’t see why. One of many things for which we have no answer, but that’s not to say we don’t have a question. Why do sightings of Paper-Men occur most frequently just before outbreaks of war? Does the hostility and tension in the air stir them? Do our current tensions explain the upsurge of recent sightings? We have far more questions than we have answers.”
A pale woman in an odd sort of hat scratched some notes on a pad and spoke, “If the disease model is correct, all the life processes would be slowed down . . . metabolism . . . pulse . . . peristalsis . . . mental functioning . . . extreme desiccation. Could the Paper-Man possibly speak? When he’s jolted from his dormant state, or when he’s still in the transition from life to pseudo-life, could he talk to us?”
“Impossible,” said someone. There were murmurs of discussion in the meeting room. “. . . mmm . . . nnn . . .”
Someone else said, “There would be no pulse as we know it, I should think. The hedgehog in hibernation may be said to cease breathing. Hibernating hedgehogs have been submerged in water for over half an hour and they didn’t drown, they just got wet.”
Silence. The air a dull cool which did not refresh.
“I’d say . . . from what I’ve heard and read and thought about ... it seems to me that some of them died despairing and some died hating . . . and those ones that are most dangerous died hating.”
Someone who had been drinking water suddenly put it down and asked, hastily, “Oh say, Gus. Rats? About those rats -”
* * * *
About the rats ...
Elbaum wondered aloud, “Where to begin, where to begin?” Then said that he would begin by considering not merelyno supernatural explanation, but no explanation that could not be made in only moderately non-conventional terms.
“Okay . . . about them eating rats; let’s say we have someone named Jack Jones in, say, Memphis in 1845, suffering from any one of a number of possible diseases causing intense cramps and vomiting. Say there’s been an outbreak of cholera. Or plague. Everyone will at once assume he’s got the pest. . . and everyone will clear out, fast. So now assume that he is a stranger in Memphis, and he’s all alone in some shack, some whore’s crib. Okay. Time passes. No one comes near him. He might very well have died, but, somehow, he doesn’t die. After a week or two he’s probably on the floor and he may be partially naked, hell, even entirely naked. Need I say that he’s terribly emaciated, puking and nearly dead, glarey-eyed and gaunt and very likely more than a bit out of his mind. He’s famished, famished. If there’d been a crust of bread, a cheese rind or a bacon rind, why, he’d already eaten that long ago, as soon as he could eat. Then along comes a rat. A rat creeps along the wall as rats do.”
Elbaum sipped from a coffee cup, gazed around the meeting room and continued. “Now I have never tried to catch a rat with my bare hands, and I grant you that it’s hard for even a healthy man to catch a rat. And Jack Jones is not in good health at all. But. I give you this thought. Perhaps the rat is not in good health either. Rats get sick and rats die, sometimes where people can see them. If a plague was on, more rats would be dying openly. Perhaps the rat is nearly dead from plague - or maybe it’s got something related to Paper-Man’s disease. Jack Jones eats the rat, or laps its blood - and, his immune system already weakened, of course picks up whatever sickness the rat has.
“Now let’s say that by and by someone else is sneaking around, looking for something to steal in a presumably empty shack. Now, who is this potential thief? It could be some low-down, uneducated, ignorant, ignoble, dim-witted, down-and-out fellow named, mm, Anse Drobble. He comes sneaking up to this shack. He peeps inside. He sees a sort of living skeleton with glaring eyes biting into a rat. What do you think Anse Drobble does? Do you think that he tarries? That Anse Drobble comes forward and says, ‘Worthy and suffering Christian brother, allow me to give you succor and sustenance’? Hell no. Anse Drobble never gave anybody anything . . . except maybe the clap. He runs off and his poor maggoty mind is going to report, ‘I seed a daid man eating a rat!’
“Even though it’s now believed that the Boss in the Wall never actually eats the rat, merely he laps its blood. Easier than chewing with wasted jaw muscles, and easier to digest, as well.
“Multiply this one instance by hundreds, and our rat-eating legend takes off.”
Hamling Calloway M.D. looked down along the table provided with, at intervals, the pads of paper, the short sharp pencils, the glasses of water. The table might have been set for a meeting about changing zoning laws, or a discussion of splitting a stock. “Gus, the picture you have just drawn, why it’s very vivid. No reason why it couldn’t be perfectly correct. So let us not linger. I’d like to move along to, why certainly not to a supernatural explanation, but to one which is certainly impossible to explain in fairly, or even unfairly, conventional terms.”
Elbaum absently stroked his short and grizzled beard with its still-visible streaks of red. “What do you -”
“What do I mean? Well, what happened to Jack Jones? What became of him? Back then in Memphis, in 1845? After he’d recovered enough to eat his rat, or, rather, lap its blood . . . what happened to him?”
Elbaum suggested that any number of things might have happened. He might have recovered after his nip of rat blood, and gotten dressed and on his feet and returned to the cotton farm or the river boat. “Maybe. But maybe Jack Jones never quite died, but never quite recovered from his rat-borne disease. Maybe he became an outcast and a skulker and a lurker. Imagine that if you can. Growing older and filthier and more emaciated, creeping from one abandoned house to another, living off scraps and rats. Never able to be anything but emaciated. Sometimes hiding in the walls ... a boss in the wall, but a boss nowhere else. And maybe, in colder weather, wrapping his wasted body in layer after layer of old newspapers to keep out the cold, as all his physiological functions declined.”
Elbaum again str
oked his reddish-gray beard. “Imagine this in hundreds of cities and towns, not just in the 1800s, but now. We know that most derelicts we see in doorways are suffering from the diseases of alcoholism or schizophrenia, or from a diseased society - but some may be slowly wasting away from Paper-Man’s disease. That could explain why there are always more ‘Bosses’ forming, even though so many get killed off. And that could explain why the Boss in the Wall legend appears everywhere, and never dies out.”
A woman in the far corner now lifted her head and cleared her throat with an odd sort of sound. Vlad had not really registered her presence, and, judging by a sudden shuffling and half-turning on the part of others, there were a number of them who had now suddenly remembered that they had forgotten. Jack Stewart said later that she had instantly reminded him of “Aunt Pearline, the one you never see except at a funeral and you see her at every funeral, including the ones you try to keep quiet.”
Vlad (in a whisper): “Ed. Who is she?”
Bagnell: (writing his reply on a pad): Dr Isabella Crokeshank. Rats.
She was by no means a young woman. She cleared her throat again with that odd sort of squeak, and touched her lips with a tissue. They were probably, by now, by nature, pale lips; but Dr Isabelle Crokeshank had been a young woman when young women were first able to combine make-up and respectability; and, however odd it seemed, her withered lips were still, in the manner of her youth, rouged red with lipstick. Bright, against that pallid face. Bright red.
At last she spoke. “What Dr Elbaum says is logical, very logical. Now, I was first drawn into this . . . somewhat clandestine project here, purely because I might learn something which might lead to some explanation of the irregularly regular appearances of exsanguinated rats. I was skeptical. Perhaps more than I need have been. There are some weird and wonderful things about rats. Don’t let me go on for too long, it’s more than a discipline, it’s an obsession. But have you ever heard of a Rat King? I see few of you have. I refer you to my work called ‘Tail-Tied kings’. Well, it’s not a king of the rats, not an individual rat but a group of rats. This . . . King. Oh, from time to time there have been found, in Europe, in America, a number of rats of both sexes which are bound together by, literally, their tails being tied together. No string or cord, just the tails themselves. I long ago ruled out hoaxes; for one thing they have been found in places ordinarily inaccessible to humans, found when buildings are being demolished, for example. Now what has caused this phenomenon?”
Dr Isabelle Crokeshank paused and drank water. No one moved. “Well now, how, for example, did they live? Obtain food? Water? Evidently this was brought by mouth by other rats. The only theory ever really seriously considered was that other rats had selected them as a sort of gene pool, breeding pool, while they were very young, and by tooth and claw and paw had made those knots. The matter certainly remains not proven. During the course of this conference a notion came to me. It is only a notion. Is it possible, I have asked myself, that this . . . your . . . the Boss in the Wall? The Paper-Man? Is that what made them? Could those . . . oh . . . dare I borrow from another legend a term, the un-dead? Could they have tied the rats’ tails together? Taken young rats and done that? Leaving up to the rat-groups the perhaps instinctively-performed job of bringing food, perhaps food dipped in water?
“So that when and if the Boss in the Wall wanted a rat... it had only to go and get one . . .?”
Perhaps the silence shuddered. No one offered an answer. No one said a word or made another sound. For a while.
Dr. Elbaum looked at his watch. Then he said, “It’s two o’clock. I believe that Dr Dave Branch and Dr Ed Bagnell -Boys . . .?”
They nodded. Got up. Bagnell set up a screen while Branch got the projector ready. Branch’s narrow face was usually grave. Now it was somber. “All right,” he said, nodding. Bagnell turned out the lights. Branch said, “We are about to show a photograph of perhaps the only intact Boss in the Wall - oh, I don’t know why I prefer that name - or Paper- Man. Not a head alone. It’s even less of a pretty sight, so all those suspecting they may be faint of heart may leave.”
Nobody left.
“All right, here we go, at the count of three: one . . . two . . . three . . .”
The image on the screen was very blurred and only gradually became clear. Very clear. The photograph was actually two photographs, side by side on one slide. Fore. The mouth seemed fallen open. One eye looked right at them, one eye was rolled up. One clawed hand was at chest-level. The other seemed to gesture from alongside the ear. Only shreds of clothing were left and in some places only shreds of paper, with here and there-only a patch of it adhering to a skin which clung to the bones like crepe paper.
Aft. There was more paper on the backside, and, along the backbone this seemed deeply depressed on either side. The skin on the lower extremities seemed more tightly fitted, though the left leg and buttock appeared much torn; it was not evident, how.
“Well. Had enough? Too bad.” The screen went blank, Branch moved to another projector. “All those who now know that they are faint of heart may now leave. What we are now about to show purports to be the only moving picture of a Boss in the Wall.” Evidently somebody wanted to; there was a scuffle of a chair being pushed back, the dimness was relieved for an odd moment as a door opened, shut. “Here we go, at the count of three . . .”
The film was badly made. It was jerky and dim and it flickered. It was, also, totally and horribly convincing. In a voice which, low as it was, carried, Branch said, “I’m not allowed to tell you where, when, how it was shot.” The lights came on again.
Elbaum spoke up after a moment. “My question now is: is there anybody here, anyone amongst us, who still doubts the actual and physical, factual, tangible existence of the creature known as the Paper-Man or The Boss in the Wall?”
A massive black man with an immense face opened his massive mouth and spoke in an immense bass organ note, “Let the record state that Bishop Burton Blankenship has no doubt and never had. I now yield.”
“. . . don’t know how anybodycould . . . any longer . . . after that movie . . .”
Hughes of the Criminology Lab, dapper, calm, seeming not in the least worried or upset, Hughes said, “Ah yes, that movie. Impressive. How do we know it’s the real thing?”
“. . . well . . .”
Hughes lightly stroked his mustache, slightly smiled; then said, “I trust that no one trained in a scientific discipline is going to say to anyone else trained in a scientific discipline, ‘You’ll just have to take my word for it.’ You, Dr Dave Branch, have declared that there are things about the film which you can’t or won’t tell us. How can you really expect us to bring in any other verdict except the Scottish one, ‘Not proven?’ “
“. . . well . . .”
“How can you be certain that you yourself have not been hoaxed? You can’t, I think. After all, what are generally called ‘special effects’ have been around a pretty long time. Isn’t that so? Not all hoaxes are done for money. Or notoriety. Or this. Or that. I believe, and it’s an educated belief, that most hoaxes are done because the hoaxer liked that particular hoax. People whom I trust, as I trust you, have been known to be taken in by doctored evidence. So I say I have to withhold my judgment. I, don’t, know.”
* * * *
The pause after he concluded was punctuated by a small sub-vocal sound from a middle-aged man in - despite the summer’s heat - a dark suit and white shirt. He now looked up and with slightly raised eyebrows looked around, not as if he were waiting for others, but as though the others were waiting for him. The technique worked, and Dr Darnell Frost began to speak. There was something in his manner which reminded Vlad of certain members of the clergy; of those few denominations which do not have a paid ministry, and thus have to earn their income by worldly means. When they served in the marketplace there was nevertheless a touch of the pulpit in their manner; and, when they served in the pulpit, a touch of the marketplace.
He spoke in a manner both rapid and clear; his sparse hair was reddish-gold, and he wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses. “Perhaps we have been too much carried away by the unpleasant aspects of our subject. Is this possible? Our subject is not really a damned soul, after all, he’s a very - a most unfortunate human being. But nonetheless a human being. He is the victim, it seems likely, of a dread, a very dread disease. Like old Tithonus, he has been cursed with eternal life without eternal youth. We don’t know how many he may be, but he is not a demon cast out of a herd of swine; he is simply an unfortunate human being to whom something extraordinary has happened. He is our fellow countryman, and in at least one instance he has fought in our country’s wars, wearing the indigo uniform. We all know there was an old farmhouse right in the middle of the battle of Bull Run, and an old woman died there during the battle. How can we know who else crawled into that house to die - or to not die? How can we not have compassion for him, as our brother?”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology] Page 43