Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  I nodded and knew he was right.

  THE END

  Learn more about the author at www.lisamorton.com

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  ###

  THE MAN IN BLACK

  By Nate Kenyon

  “I want to know more about this obsession,” Dr. Devey said. “Tell me about the man in black.”

  Andy looked around the perfectly square room. The walls had been painted a soothing shade of green, presumably to cool the heated minds of the psychotics. A ceiling fan ticked lazily overhead.

  He tried to cross his legs and found the restraints wouldn’t allow it. “I’m not a violent man, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Ask Annie, she’ll tell you. Can’t you loosen these a little?”

  Dr. Devey blinked at him. Devey was a small man with an overly large head, bald except for the barest wisp of hair around his ears. He looked like a chicken, Andy thought to himself, with his hooked nose and beady eyes.

  “We’ll leave them for now,” Devey said. “I want to avoid those…outbursts of yours.”

  Andy sighed. The man in black had taken over his life like some kind of fast-spreading cancer. What he had been forced to do in that alley made him sick. He’d been seduced, used and discarded like so much garbage. But nobody wanted to hear the truth. Devey had his own agenda and his own rules, and he was in charge here.

  “I don’t expect you to believe me,” Andy said. “It sounds crazy.” He shook his head. “Possession? I can hardly believe it myself.”

  “Just start at the beginning,” Devey said.

  And so Andy did.

  *****

  The man in black first appeared to him in a dream (at least he’d thought it was a dream then); this was about a week after Annie left.

  Andy tended to drift when asleep like a boat in a strong wind. A distant memory of his father, come to life again in a stiff white shirt and bowtie; his father began to speak and dissolved into a car that ran without wheels on tracks through the night sky, and the car turned into Annie’s pixie face, and then that dissolved into the hallway of his old high school in White Falls, where the doors to classrooms were all shut tight and locked from the inside and he was alone among his own echoing footsteps.

  Andy tossed and turned, twisting the starched sheets around his body in his sleep, and on the mattress next to him the dog lifted his head and whined into the darkness.

  At the sound of the dog, he drifted towards consciousness. That was when the man in black appeared at the foot of his bed. He wore a tuxedo suit with a black bowtie and a black shirt underneath. A black cummerbund was tied at his waist, and a black flower decorated his lapel. His eyes glowed like two red coals in the ashes of his face.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Andy said hoarsely. He sat up and clutched the sheets to his chest.

  “Don’t act so frightened,” the man said. “I think you know who I am. Yes, indeed.”

  “Get out of my room!”

  “Why are you trembling? Why do you try to pull away after the effort you extended to bring me here? Such a shame that you don’t have the guts to face me after all you’ve suffered through. I expected more from you, Andrew, really, but perhaps I was fooling myself. I’ve watched you live your pathetic little life for too long, and I’m tired of it.”

  The man waved a hand through the air like a hypnotist counting down from ten. “Goodbye for now. Sleep. You’ll see me again soon enough.”

  The next morning Andy tried to dismiss what he’d seen as nothing more than a bad dream. The dog hadn’t moved from the bed, after all; if someone had actually entered his room, surely the dog would have chased him off.

  He got up at six and went downtown as usual, where he worked as a clerk at a small law firm. He spent most of his time at the office writing letters, filing papers (which required nothing more than a stamp from Municipal court), and buying lunch for the lawyers. He worked on a summer clerk’s salary that allowed him to pay his rent and buy food, and left nothing else. He had little use for money. Annie had paid for most of the things they did, and now that she was gone, he did not feel the need to go out.

  He went to his desk, located in a cubbyhole outside Mr. Welk’s office. There was mail to open, form letters to be copied and sent out, filing to be done, but lately it all seemed so unimportant. The lawyers moved around him as if he were invisible.

  Mr. Welk came looking for the correspondence file for the Edwards case. Welk was a heavy man who combed his hair up over his head to hide a bald spot.

  “This is important, Andrew—we go to trial in two days.”

  “I haven’t seen the file, Mr. Welk.”

  “I’ve got a lunch appointment. Could you hunt for it in my office?”

  Welk’s office was a mess. File boxes stacked on top of one another leaned in one corner by the window. Casebooks and supplements littered the floor. Andy went through it all patiently. He moved to the big desk and sorted through a jumble of pens, pencils, scratch pads, batteries, paper clips, computer disks, candy bar wrappers. He failed to come up with Edwards file.

  Discouraged, he moved to the center drawer. There, under a couple of legal pads and sheets of stationary, he found the money.

  *****

  “That’s what set you off, isn’t it?” Dr. Devey interrupted. “Seeing all that cash just sitting there for the taking.”

  Andy sighed and shook his head. Devey simply didn’t understand. The money really had nothing to do with it. He had been visited by something that defied description. He had been seduced, possessed and ultimately betrayed at his moment of greatest weakness. Whatever that thing was, it was long gone now, and he had been left alone to be locked up here.

  “We’ll stop there for the day,” Devey said. “I think we’ve made some progress, don’t you? I simply want to understand you, Andy. I want to help.”

  Andy shrugged. What did it matter? Devey was an idiot.

  The men came in and released him from his chair bonds, and Andy let them dress him in the straitjacket before they led him down the soft green hallway to his cell.

  *****

  The next session with Dr. Devey began the following morning at nine o’clock. Andy was brought from his padded cell to the green room, where the doctor waited, pad in hand. He looked even more like a chicken today, with his wisp of hair fanning out behind his skull and his eyes darting here and there. No, not like a chicken, like...some other kind of animal.

  The two orderlies sat him down and began the tedious process of worming him out of the straitjacket and into the chair’s bonds. Andy often wondered why they didn’t just leave him in the jacket. After all, he wasn’t about to go leaping at the doctor and tearing at him with his teeth. Devey might have been an idiot, but he wasn’t particularly offensive. And ever since the man in black had left him alone, Andy had felt himself again. Perhaps they wanted to afford him the remains of his dignity; but bonds, after all, were bonds. Did it really matter if they came in little leather straps instead of a straitjacket?

  “Where did we leave things yesterday?” Devey asked. He looked at his notepad. “Ah, yes. You found the money. What happened then?”

  “I went to look for the file somewhere else.”

  “You didn’t take the money at that point?”

  He shook his head. What could it have done for him? He lived a simple life.

  “You knew the money was there if you needed it. Do you think that knowing you had a means of escape somehow facilitated the act?”

  Andy stared at Devey. He couldn’t believe the depth of the man’s ignorance. “The money had nothing to do with what happened at the club. Nothing at all. That was self-defense. He attacked me. I didn’t plan it.”

  “I see. And the others?”

  Andy didn’t say anything. How could he possibly say what he believed to be true? That he had been terrorized by a demon? That he had become a kind of plaything in a much larger game? />
  Devey leaned back and crossed his legs, as if flaunting his own freedom to move as he wished. I was wrong, Andy thought. He was starting to find Devey offensive, after all.

  “Tell me what happened next, Andy. Continue the story.”

  *****

  He worked through the next day as usual, and the next. The Edwards file remained missing, and Mr. Welk went on without it, albeit in a foul mood.

  As the days passed Andy began to dread going home to his empty apartment. His thoughts and feelings were becoming disjointed, erratic. Ever since Annie left, he had been wading through a hip-deep stretch of dark water, and lately he had felt it rising. Soon, he feared, it would be over his head and he would drown in loneliness.

  Annie used to tell him he was selling himself short. “When are you going to wake up? You just have to find the guts. People take what they want in this world, and if you let them, they’ll take it from you.”

  She finally left him after two decent years for a man with “more guts.” When he’d found her note, it drove the air out of him like a fist to the stomach.

  Over the next several nights, Andy saw the man in black every time he closed his eyes. Tuesday morning he sat bolt upright in bed. Something had been chasing him down pitch-black corridors. Andy had run blindly through the darkness, hands in front of his face, through corridors that were without end. He ran through the center of the earth and back again, sure that the man in black was at his heels. The corridors bounced sound in such a way that it was impossible to tell which way to turn. Finally he saw the light ahead and pressed forward, his throat locked in a silent scream; and when he had reached the light, he turned to face the creature chasing him—and found nothing but emptiness.

  After the horrible dream, he took a sick day to go to the zoo, hoping to calm his nerves. That was where he saw that the man in black had followed him out of his dream world.

  The zoo was a favorite place of Annie’s. She had loved to watch the lions pacing their cages, the monkeys swinging and chattering, the big birds preening in all their glorious colors. “Animals are so refreshing,” she said once. “They don’t care what other animals think of them. They just go about their business.”

  Andy began to understand what she meant as he watched the monkeys in their cages. They fought and chased each other with a seemingly endless supply of energy; they exposed themselves, defecated, made love without restraint. They were not held back by any moral code. If one monkey was larger than the others, he simply took what he wanted. That was the nature of things, as Annie had often told him. Eat or be eaten.

  His skin began to crawl. He turned away from the cage and froze. The man in black was standing in his shadow.

  “Have you learned anything yet, Andrew?” he asked. “Or do we need to watch a while longer?”

  Andy turned and ran, and the man in black’s laughter followed him all the way through the park to the gates.

  After that, Andy began to see the man in black everywhere. Through the windows of shops, in the rush-hour crowds on the street, at the bus stop. He seemed aware of Andy’s every move, and positioned himself for the moment of greatest surprise. Appearing in mirrors, or as a shadow glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Andy wandered through the city streets without direction, the words of the man in black following him everywhere. Have you learned anything yet, Andrew? Or do we need to watch a while longer?

  Finally, a nervous wreck, he ended up at the office after the sun went down. The empty spaces were like tombs. He walked past the conference room behind a wall of glass, and Mrs. Underwood’s office with its strange African sculptures like offerings for the dead. He entered Mr. Welk’s office, then crossed the floor quickly and rummaged through the center drawer. His trembling fingers found the envelope and he fumbled to open it, almost dropping the money onto the floor. He counted it out. $1,600 in cash. It was a small fortune to him, over two week’s pay.

  Then he imagined them catching him in the act. Mrs. Underwood calling the police from the front desk. Mr. Welk, a look of disappointment darkening his chubby face as he stood in the doorway shaking his head. Andy could almost see him there now, watching. The images were so strong he could see where they might lead, and was helpless to shut it all out; Mr. Welk’s body sprawled across his desk, his fat belly slit open, Mrs. Underwood with purple handprints around her neck.

  Andy shuddered. The emotion that had carried him thus far died in his breast. He replaced the envelope, slid the drawer shut and left the office.

  On the way out he almost ran headfirst into the janitor. The man shied away like he was being threatened. “Mr. Lomos!”

  Andy kept his hands shoved deep into his pockets and told himself to be calm. He had not done anything. He was not a thief. He caught a sudden brutal image of the man like a snapshot; lying across his cart, bloody, staring, his eyelids cut out. The man in black stood beside the corpse, his eyes red-rimmed with hell-fire.

  Andy clenched his teeth and did not scream. “I’m sorry if I startled you,” he said.

  “Didn’t know anyone was here. Be out of your way in a minute.”

  “Take your time. I was just leaving.”

  The janitor gave him one more look and pushed his cart full of spray cleaner and rags out ahead of him.

  Andy left the office and began to wander again, and the man in black followed him. There was something more insistent in the man’s gaze now, an eagerness that had not been evident before. He became bolder, showing himself in every angle, every crevice and alleyway. There seemed to be a pattern to his movements, as if he were directing their path to an awaited end.

  Eventually he sought refuge inside a club on Seventh Avenue. Lights flashed above him. Bodies writhed together on the dance floor. He ordered a beer, drank it down, and ordered another, and yet another, feeling the heavy beat of the music deep in his chest. Soon he was turning and moving with the crowd. It had been a long time since he had felt this way among a group, his own insecurities and self-consciousness dissolving in a bubbling stew of colored lights, naked flesh, and sweat. Each of the dancers around him had their own smell, he noticed; a pretty young girl, her sweat clean and light, and a man with a heavy belly who smelled like sour milk. What did he smell like to them, Andy wondered. Did he have a recognizable odor, and if so, was it pleasant or offensive? That was something he wished he had asked Annie.

  At the thought of her the room darkened and the colors bled out of the lights until they flashed in shades of gray. The faces that surrounded him were pale, fleshy lumps; they leered at him as the light played games with their features, elongating noses and deepening the pouches under their eyes.

  Andy danced and drank with the wolves and a while later he noticed the man in black standing in the shadows across the room, watching him. The man in black’s eyes glowed blood-red among the grays.

  *****

  He did not know when the girl started dancing next to him; it seemed as if she had just appeared there all at once. She wore a blue halter top that showed the upper halves of her breasts and cut away to reveal her belly below. He fixed his gaze on her like a man drowning in the ocean, and she stared back, unashamed, her body moving with the music as if of its own accord. Andy clung to her like an island in a storm.

  They danced together until suddenly, without warning, one of the wolves poked bony fingers into his chest. “You think you’re hot shit,” the wolf said, his hairy face slick with sweat. His tongue lolled from one corner of his grinning mouth. “That’s my girl. I think you and me, we go for it, right now.”

  The girl frowned and held Andy’s arm. “Leave him alone, Brian.”

  “What, you gonna get with this guy now?” the wolf said. “He’s a sorry piece of shit.”

  “Stop it, Brian. Just stop.”

  Andy could feel her hot flesh against his arm. Annie had liked to do that when they were in public; holding his arm as they walked, touching his knee under the table at restaurants.

  The wolf grabbed for he
r, and the girl shrank back. The lights and the beer and the smell of flesh overwhelmed him. The dancers spun on all sides, leering at him. He caught a glimpse of the man in black again. He was standing closer now, just over the wolf’s left shoulder. As Andy watched, the man in black raised a finger to his throat and slashed.

  “Why don’t you leave her alone?” Andy said.

  The wolf grabbed him by the shirt. “Not here,” Andy managed to whisper, and then they were shoving people aside in their rush for the door. He felt consumed by an urgent need for conflict of any kind; his very muscles ached.

  The wolf dragged him into a darkened space between two buildings. “I told you to stay away from my girl, man,” the wolf said. “Now you’re gonna learn to listen when I talk to you.”

  It was dark, and a red neon sign advertising some beer lit up the wolf’s face just slightly, causing it to pulse and move with the light like a wound. But that was not what had caught his attention; over the wolf’s shoulder stood the man in black again.

  He was grinning.

  The wolf swung a fist at him. He moved to one side as the wolf’s claws glanced off his skull, and then he swung his right fist upward from his hip with all his strength. He heard the hiss of breath as he connected and then Andy slipped and fell, hitting the slimy brick wall of the alley hard with his shoulder. The wolf lay on his side, wheezing painfully and holding his stomach.

  Andy struggled to his feet as the dampness of the alley floor soaked through the knees of his pants. His head was spinning; he felt the music beating through the wall next to him, smelled the mold in the dark corners and the rot of old buildings. This was what it was like to lose control like an animal. The feeling was glorious!

  He caught movement below him and looked down as the wolf lunged upward from a crouch. Silver flashed in the wolf’s claws before he felt a biting pain near his elbow. He managed to push the wolf away from him, feeling the wetness he knew was his blood trickling down his forearm into his palm. Enraged, he struck the wolf in the back of the neck, sending the creature into the wall with such force that pieces of the crumbling brick fell to the pavement. He heard the blade click against the brick and then the ground.