Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  But the human wreck didn’t notice. He stripped off his rags and his appearance made Nettle gasp. His body had no meat on it. He was all ribs and distended belly, his back a mass of dried and fresh new blood where he’d been attacked by vermin.

  He cleaned off several layers of dirt and blood and changed into a shirt and pants from the shelter’s wardrobe. Then he followed the others to the dining hall for a meal of stale bread and skilly—a sort of oatmeal mixed with tepid water so unclean Nettle doubted a dog would drink it—and he would have received that meal had he not had the misfortune to pass Bill on his way inside.

  “You!” Bill said, his eyes turning hard as flints with surprised anger, his tone like that of a man who’s just found the boy who made his daughter pregnant and then made a run for it.

  The man stopped in his tracks.

  “Look who we ‘ave ‘ere,” Bill said loudly, looking around at the crowd.

  Slowly, every head in the place turned to look.

  The man kept his eyes on the floor.

  “I’ll be damned if it ain’t Barlow the Butcher. Look ‘ere, we got Barlow the Butcher!”

  This meant nothing to Nettle, but it clearly did to the peg house crowd, for in short order they became a riotous mob. They fell on Barlow and began to beat on him with a savagery that would have made a tribe of cannibals blush.

  Nettle waded in and pulled Barlow out of the flurry of fists. Barlow, though, didn’t wait around to thank him. As soon as he was clear of the mob, he made for the door and ran off into the night.

  Nettle was left with a decision to make. He was ringed by angry faces, some of them bleeding where they’d been hit by others trying to land blows on Barlow, and he had a feeling he knew what would happen if he stayed there, now that they had the taste of blood. He wisely went for the door himself, stepping out into the street in time to see Barlow, or, rather, a crowd of homeless at the end of the street, separating for Barlow, as he rounded the corner onto Stepney Green.

  Nettle ran after him, and managed to follow him for a good ways before he lost him in the maze of the East End’s soot-stained back alleys. He became lost in short order, every cross street and alley meeting him with endless vistas of tumbledown misery and bricks.

  Walking with his head on a swivel, trying to find something familiar, he eventually stumbled onto the Brown Hay Road, where he stopped in front of an enormous abandoned warehouse. It was a blackened, eyeless hulk, not a single window down its entire length, and it made him feel strangely uneasy. There were, Nettle had seen already, very few empty buildings in London’s East End. Real estate, any real estate, was at a premium, as landlords could pack as many as eight families into a home no bigger than the small, one-story apartment he had shared in New York with his mother and his sister Anna. One was more likely, he’d been told, to see a giraffe swimming down the Thames than to find an unoccupied building in the East End.

  But the moldy warehouse in front of him was most certainly abandoned, and something about it made the skin crawl down his spine. And then someone was there, staggering toward him from the other side of the street. A patchwork of shadows played across the man’s face, but the little Nettle could see was ghastly. The man’s joints had swollen, and his body had withered away to almost nothing. His skin was black in places, almost mummified, like it had begun to rot, and it wasn’t until he got halfway across the street that Nettle could tell part of the man’s leg had been torn up as if by some sort of animal.

  The man raised his hands and flexed his fingers in a weak grab at Nettle, moaning as he stumbled closer. At first, Nettle thought it was just a moan, meaning nothing beyond the pain it obviously conveyed, but then he recognized the word inside the pain.

  “Fooooood,” the man moaned.

  Nettle turned on his heel, thinking robbery, and started to walk the other way.

  “Fooooood,” the man groaned again.

  “See here,” Nettle said, “I don’t have anything for you.”

  He was very close to running then, and had already stepped up his pace, when a hansom cab suddenly lurched around the corner at a full sprint and mowed the man down. The driver of the hansom never slowed, and a moment later, he was gone.

  Nettle was frozen with shock. What was left of the man after he’d been trampled by the horses and his body sliced open and dragged by the hansom’s wheels was in two gory pieces connected by a clotted smear of liquefied meat.

  The man’s legs were still in the street, but his torso was near the curb. Nettle staggered that way, hands over his mouth, and knelt down next to the bent-over-backwards mess that the hansom had made of the man.

  He started to pray…and then the man opened his eyes.

  Nettle fell backwards onto the wet cobblestones. The man’s eyes were horrible, like staring into the void.

  “Fooooood,” he groaned, and tried to claw his way toward Nettle, his fingers digging so hard into the edges of the cobblestones that the fingernails shattered and tore loose.

  Nettle got up and ran and ran and ran. He ran till he broke down, and then he cried. He was still crying when, by chance, he stumbled back onto the Mile End Road.

  The next morning, still badly shaken by his encounter, Nettle packed his bags and knelt by his bed to pray. He had fully expected to leave that afternoon, but his prayers had taken him in another direction, and when he rose to his feet he had made the decision to stay, and half convinced himself that what he seen the night before couldn’t have happened. He was upset, nothing more.

  Nettle’s faith had never led him astray, and the next few days, and a chance encounter with the man the mob had chased out of the peg house on his horrible first night there, reinforced the wisdom of the decision he had made during prayer.

  Nettle took to wandering up and down the Mile End Road, watching the people as they struggled for existence, and he noticed a curious little thing. The homeless always seemed to keep one eye on the spittle-flecked sidewalks, and when they’d see a morsel, they’d snatch it up and eat it on the fly. Most, it seemed, could pluck an orange peel or an apple core from the cobblestones without ever losing a step.

  Nettle had been watching people go by late one afternoon, and Barlow had been coming the other way on the same sidewalk. Barlow had stooped to pick up something nasty, and when he rose, his nose collided with Nettle’s chest, for Nettle was a good six inches the taller of the two.

  “Oh, hello,” Nettle said, and had a devil of a time over the next few moments trying to assure the man that he had no intention of braining him to death.

  They talked in the eaves of a coffee shop, and gradually the look of a rabbit trying to find an opening through a pack of hounds faded from Barlow’s eyes. And then a strange thing happened. Nettle, whose over stimulated humanitarian urges were in danger of melting down if he didn’t find some specific point, some single human face to put on all this misery he had been witnessing, bought a pint of beer for Barlow, who was desperately in need of some kind person to buy him a pint of beer.

  It was the first pint of beer Nettle had ever bought, and it was the first full pint of beer Barlow had had in a very long time. Nettle bought a second round, and by that afternoon, as the windows of the coffee shop sizzled with rain, he had come to a conclusion. He was not going to be the salvation for all the world’s poor—indeed, there was no way he could be, and it was vain to think so—but he could be the door to this man’s salvation. Nettle had a project now, something he could manage.

  And so they sat there in the coffee shop, the rich, well-meaning American and the homeless, nearly starved Londoner, and the American talked about God and goodness and reward, and the Londoner drank his beer and nodded.

  They met in the afternoons at the same coffee shop over the next week, and gradually Nettle began to realize that it wasn’t the man’s grotesque, almost troglodyte appearance that had sparked his philanthropy, but rather his cynicism. The man cared little for his own life, and not at all for anyone else’s, and Nettle found
it hard to believe that a creature who so hated life could actually go on living.

  “Beer,” Barlow said. “Beer’s what makes a man feel like a man. You can take all the rest of it away, but you take away a man’s beer, and there ain’t no reason left for ‘im to go on bein’.”

  Nettle squinted at his own almost untouched beer and thought about that as a philosophy of life, and it seemed tragic, empty.

  “What about a family?” he asked. “A home? A wife and kids?”

  Barlow snorted with laughter. “I saw enough of that growin’ up,” he said. “I saw what me Ma did for me old man. That was enough. Made ‘im mis’rable, she did, always a-bangin’ me brothers and sisters about, makin’ ‘is ‘ome a noisy racket. ‘e no sooner walk through the door and she’d be a-yellin’ at ‘im, barkin’ at ‘im like a dog. Take me word for it, mate, and don’t waste yer time on a wife ‘n kids. Do nothin’ but take yer ‘ard earned money and keep you from drinkin’ a beer when it suits you.”

  Nettle was stunned, bewildered. Such a wasted life! His mind raced for a response, for something worthwhile to say, and at last, he found it. “William,” he said, “I want you to pray with me. Will you do that?”

  “Pray?”

  “Yes, William. There’s a power in prayer that has sustained me through my hard times. I think it can do the same for you.”

  Barlow wrinkled his brow, then a huge smile crossed his face. “Let’s pray for another beer, mate. You want me to pray? I’ll pray for that.”

  But Barlow wasn’t Nettle’s only project. He was still expected to learn the ropes at the shelter, spending time in each of the numerous jobs that were necessary to keep the operation going on a day to day basis, and a few nights later he was back with Bill, the porter, passing out blankets in the sleeping quarters. The overnighters would come in, take a blanket from Nettle, and head to a long, narrow room with two large oaken beams traversing its length. Rough pieces of canvas were stretched between the beams, and the men slept on the canvas. When he first heard about the arrangement, and before he had seen it, Nettle thought of seamen in hammocks, rocking to sleep with the rhythms of the open sea, but the reality was nothing like that, and the actual arrangement lacked any of the adventurous dignity a landsman could envision for the life of a sailor at sea. The men were packed in shoulder to shoulder, and the room was dreadfully noisy with snores and coughs and breaking wind, and in the right light, the whole room shimmered with a living cloud of fleas.

  He was watching this sad display with a heavy heart when Bill appeared at his shoulder.

  “What are you about, sir, talkin’ with Barlow the Butcher?”

  “Excuse me?” he said, alarmed by the man’s tone, even though he was a good six inches taller, and maybe forty pounds heavier.

  “You become ‘is reg’lar drinkin’ mate’s what I ‘ear.”

  “I have not,” Nettle protested. He stammered, trying to rise to his own defense, and finally managed to tell Bill his plan, how his goal was the man’s salvation.

  Bill just laughed.

  “What’s wrong with going after a lost sheep?” Nettle said.

  “‘e ain’t no sheep,” Bill said. “A devil, aye, but ‘e ain’t no sheep.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s an em’ty warehouse down on the Brown Hay Road. D’you know it? A big, ugly brute of a buildin’?”

  “I’ve seen it,” Nettle said, cringing inwardly at the memory of the beggar and the hansom cab.

  “Your mate used to be the union man there. ‘bout two years ago.”

  Nettle eyed him warily.

  “Did ‘e tell you ‘bout the people ‘e killed there?”

  “Killed? What are you talking about?”

  Bill sneered at Nettle. “Aye, I thought not.”

  “Tell me what you mean, sir. You cannot accuse a man of such a crime and not state your proof.”

  Bill only shook his head. “Nothin’ was ever proved ‘gainst ‘im. Didn’t ‘ave no blood on ‘is ‘ands. None that the courts could see, anyway. But ‘e killed ‘em all right. Just as pretty as you please.”

  Nettle searched the man’s face for some indication that this was a joke. It had to be. He searched the creases in the old man’s face, the cracked red map of lines that colored the whites of his eyes, but found nothing to indicate that this was a joke.

  “When you say ‘killed,’ do you mean...”

  “I mean ‘e murdered ‘em. Sure as the Pope eats fish on Fridays. Murdered more’n an ‘undred people. Men, wimmen, and children, just as pretty as you please.”

  Nettle felt his legs go to gelatin. He fell against the wall and said, “A hundred people?”

  “Aye.”

  “But, how?”

  “Why, ‘e starved ‘em. Locked ‘em in that warehouse for full on twelve days. When they finally opened ‘er up, every one of ‘em, men, wimmen, and children, was dead as dead can be.” Then he leaned close and said, “I ‘eard tell some of them bodies was eaten on.”

  “That’s impossible,” Nettle countered. “How could he do such a thing?”

  “I already tol’ you, sir. ‘e was the union man, and those people went on strike. The comp’ny tol’ ‘im to fix the problem, and ‘e did.”

  “A man can’t starve to death in twelve days,” Nettle said.

  “You’ve seen these men,” Bill said. “Not a one’s more than a week away from death’s door.”

  “But somebody would have done something to stop him,” Nettle said. “You can’t just kill a hundred people and expect to get away with it. Somebody would have said something.”

  But Nettle didn’t need see the blank expression on Bill’s face to know that wasn’t true. Not here in the East End.

  Feeling angry, and confused, and betrayed, Nettle ran from the peg house and set out for the coffee house where he and Barlow had been meeting in the afternoons. He knew no other place to look for the man, but as it turned out, it wasn’t necessary to look anywhere else. He found Barlow in the back alley behind the shop, rifling through a paper bag of trash he’d found on the curb, pulling out little bits of orange peels and tearing what remained of the pulp from the pith with his blackened front teeth.

  “Mr. Barlow,” Nettle called out from across the street.

  Barlow looked up and smiled. But then his smile fell. Perhaps he saw the savage expression in Nettle’s eyes, or heard something sinister in his tone, but whatever it was, his expression instantly changed, and he took off running into the night.

  Nettle didn’t bother to chase him. It was enough, for the moment, to see him run. That was all the proof he needed that Mr. Barlow, also known as Barlow the Butcher, was a devil of the highest magnitude.

  Some men snap by degrees. Like green wood, they bend a long ways before the tension takes its inevitable course. But other men break like porcelain. They cleave with sudden fury, shattering into thousands of irredeemable pieces, their edges left razor sharp.

  Nettle was of the later sort, and when his mind snapped, it came with the illusion of sudden clarity. It seemed he was thinking clearly now for the first time, like somebody had turned a light switch on in his mind, and the path before him seemed clearer now than it had ever been before.

  He suddenly saw in Barlow, not an individual’s face to put on all of humanity’s troubles, but a cause of its misery, and there was only one thing to do with such causes. The fact that he had befriended such a beast, that he had bought such evil a drink, for God’s sake, didn’t terrify him so much as instill in him a sense of personal responsibility. His proximity had given him ownership over the ending to Barlow’s sordid little history, and he set out to bring that history to a close.

  He carried the banner that night, walking the streets of the East End without stopping for rest or sleep—indeed, without even feeling the need for rest or sleep—ferreting out the hiding places of the homeless, but with his mind on only one man.

  He caught up with Barlow in a doorway, the man sitting
on the top step, his knees bunched up to his chest and his head bent down between them, trying to sleep.

  Nettle kicked his foot. “Wake up,” he said. “I want a word with you.”

  Barlow thought him a policeman at first, and had already half pulled himself to his feet when the haze of sleep left him entirely, and he realized who was standing in front of him.

  “You owe me an answer, Mr. Barlow.”

  But Barlow didn’t stand still to give it. He turned and ran with all the energy a scared, weatherbeaten, and prematurely old man could muster.

  Nettle followed him at a jog, yelling “I want an answer!” over and over again at Barlow’s back, and as they slipped deeper and deeper into the warren of slimy streets that made up the bowels of the East End, a cold, light rain began to fall.

  Nettle finally closed on him in a back alley off the Brown Hay Road, the streets deserted now and splashy beneath their feet. Barlow had curled up under a flight of stairs and was trying to hide his face with his arms.

  “You have some explaining to do,” Nettle said. The rain rolled off his face unnoticed.

  Barlow stared up at him with abject fear.

  “What did you do? Answer me!”

  “For the love of all that’s ‘oly, sir, please don’t yell. You’ll—”

  “I’ll what? Wake the dead? Go on, you villain, say it! Say it! Are you afraid they’ll hear us?”

  Barlow looked seasick. His eyes pleaded for silence, but got none.

  “Spill it!” Nettle roared. “Tell me what you did.”

  Nettle waited, and for a moment there was no sound but the pattering of a gentle rain on cobblestones, but then it came, as both Nettle and Barlow knew that it most assuredly would, the sound of slow, plodding feet dragging on the cobblestones behind them.

  Nettle looked over his shoulder, and saw a small crowd of shamblers had appeared out of the mist. There were men, women, and even children in that crowd. Their faces were dark with disease and their cheeks empty from extreme hunger. Their eyes were carrion eyes, and a smell that could only be death’s smell preceded them, filling the street with its sad, inexorable power.