The Road to Hellfire

by Michael Panush

They came roaring out every shadow and crevice and wrapped over Cane. He swung his shotgun around and fired, unloading both barrels in a storm of lead. Gore spewed into the green sewer water and then the rats were on him. There were all sizes, from the normal rodents to the rats that rivaled dogs for size, and everything in between.

  Cane slipped backwards, his hands darting down to his revolvers. They were up and firing but then the rats were on top of him, biting and clawing with a thousand paws and mouths. He was bleeding in a dozen places in a matter of seconds. Then he toppled over and struck down into the sewage.

  It splashed around him. The smell was overpowering. Cane wanted to retch, but told himself not to. He rolled over and forced himself to stand. He dropped the lantern. There was no point in seeing the rats now. He just had to get away. Instead, he grabbed his revolvers, holding one in each hand. He fired, blasting both pistols at the rats at his feet. They died all around him. He started to run. Rats tried to cling onto him, but they fell off and splashed into the sewage.

  The flashes of gunfire let him look ahead through the sudden blazes of light. He could feel weakness seeping into him, his strength dripping away through a thousand cuts. Blood dripped into his eyes and he did his best to ignore it. Cane stared ahead and then he saw it – the rungs of a ladder in the wall. A manhole cover had to be above it. That was a way out of the sewer – and away from the rats.

  With a final grunt, Cane ran for it. He was filthy, bleeding and weak, with a few rats still clinging onto him. The last of his pistol shots cracked off and then he reached the ladder. He gripped it tightly and began to pull himself up. The weight was almost too much. He felt like he had lost too much blood. He gritted his teeth and kept climbing and then he reached the end of the ladder.

  The rats were coming after him. Cane could hear them making their way up the ladder. Some went by the rungs, while others used their claws and crevices to clamber straight up the wall. Cane looked down and reached for his knife. He drew it out and gripped it tightly, just as the rats were reaching his boots. One of the larger rats was close enough to take a bite. Cane kicked down, slamming his boot into the rat’s skull and sending it squealing back down into the sewers.

  He jammed the knife at the edge of the manhole cover. His wrists ached. The rest of him did too. The manhole cover creaked open and a little sliver of sunlight crept in. It was like staring into a bonfire. Cane’s eyes hurt but he forced them open. He rammed his shoulder against the manhole cover and it creaked and flipped open, falling hard on the pavement. Somehow, he managed to climb out and sprawl weakly on the street.

  A few rats followed him up, but they scattered in the sunlight and hurried away. Cane rolled over, breathing heavily. He closed his eyes for a few moments and felt something white and hot burn inside of him. His eyes slipped open. The whiteness seemed to stay. Cane slowly pulled himself up and looked around. He still hadn’t caught his breath.

  The people of Van Wessel Street stared at him. Even the street vendors had fallen silent as they watched him take a limping, stumbling step in no particular direction. Cane knew what he must look like – a monster, coated in filth and blood, which had just emerged from the sewer. He wondered how true that was. After all, he was working for the men who kept Van Wessel Street poor – and he certainly was monstrous enough.

  Cane took a single step. He looked up at the tenements. They towered above him, blocking out the cold gray sky. They seemed gray as tomb stones. The tenement buildings shifted as Cane struggled to move. Each one seemed like a single claw on a gigantic hand. Before Cane could take another step, the hand flexed and the fingers closed. They smothered him in darkness and he collapsed in a heap on the street.

  He awoke in pain. The hundreds of cuts and bites seemed to flare to life, one by one, until they were all blazing at once. Cane felt something soft beyond them and realized it was a bed. His duster was gone and his shirt open. Bandages had been set over his deeper wounds, with even a few on his face. Clayton Cane forced his eyes open and did his best to ignore the pain. He tried to sit up.

  “No, no, sir. There’s no need for that. Just lie back now.” It was a kind voice, feminine and with an Irish lilt. Cane was sitting in some cramped tenement apartment, a small window overlooking the crowded street below. It was unadorned and empty, with bare wooden floors and an open door overlooking the cold cement hall and stairwell where other boarders crowded into the hall. They all had to be curious about him.

  Slowly, he turned and looked at the woman who saved him. Her gray hair was in a tight bun that seemed to pull at the skin of her face and she wore a dress of faded calico. Her crooked nose and wrinkled face surrounded two brilliantly blue eyes, which were wide and kind and sad. She handed Cane the flask of whiskey from his coat and he knocked it back without a word.

  “My name is Rose Corcoran, sir,” she explained. “I’ve lived in this room for years, just by myself now, and help the people around me when I can. I saw you outside and knew you were one that could use some assistance.”

  “I’m obliged to you,” Cane replied, the whiskey settling warmly in his chest. “You patched me up good.” He looked away from Rose. “Name’s Clayton Cane.”

  “I did my best, sir.” Rose pulled aside the whiskey. She looked over her shoulder, at the crowded hallway. “They’re all curious about you, Mr. Cane – and I must admit, I am as well. It is not every day that you see a fellow emerge from the sewer, dripping with refuse and bitten by rats. We know you were hired by the men in Algonquin Hall, but we didn’t know why. Killing rats hardly seems like something a man of your type would do.”

  “It ain’t.” Cane grunted and sat up. He pulled himself off the bed and tested his legs on the ground, before coming to his feet. His guns, coat and hat lay in a pile at the foot of the bed. Cane reached for them. “Bounty hunting’s my trade, but I’ll kill just about anything if the price is right. For these rats, it was.” He set his hat firmly on his head.

  “So you work for Varrick and Talbot and McCall?” Rose asked. “They are wretched men, Mr. Cane – criminals and scum, the lot of them. Why, if you only know what they did—”

  Her words made him pause. “What did they do, ma’am?” he asked. “Anything that would set these rats on them?”

  “Well, I don’t know. There are all sorts of strange things in this city – ghost stories and the like. But that’s the same as anywhere in this country, isn’t it? We come here from County Kerry, or Calabria, or any place, and we bring our ghosts and our fears with us. And when we find the same kind of cruel men in power as we did back home, then we fear even more. I think that might be the case here.”

  “You been in this street long, ma’am?” Cane wondered.

  “Nearly all my life.” Rose walked down the hall, to her open door. She closed it gently. “I do work around the building here, minding children for some of the families and cleaning up when I can. These folks don’t have much to pay, but it’s enough to live on.”

  “And your husband?” Cane asked.

  “Dead and gone, with our three children to keep him company by the right hand of God.” Rose lowered her eyes. “I’ve been living here for a long time, Mr. Cane, since their passing. I hear all manner of gossip and I know that a good deal of it is far too horrible to be true. That must be the case with what happened to Father Badalamenti.”

  Cane sat down on the bed and folded his hands. He got the feeling he was closing in on the truth. “Father Badalmenti,” he repeated. “An Italian priest?”

  “Yes, Mr. Cane. He ministered for the little church, just down the road – though no one goes there now. It is haunted, they say. Father Furio Badalamenti was the priest’s name and he was a good man. I’ve heard that many of my countrymen doubt that the Italians even share our faith. They don’t consider them Catholics at all. But I know that can’t be true. Father Badalamenti was a man of God if ever there was one. And that’s why they killed him.”

  “You mean Varrick, Talbot and McCall?”

>   “That’s right.” Rose Corcoran sat down next to him. “Father Badalamenti spoke out against them. He told the workers in Talbot’s sweatshops and the tenants in his buildings to demand their rights and stop their labor. He told the men to stop losing their money to drinking and dice games at McCall’s establishments. He even told everyone not to vote for Algonquin Hall’s candidates in the elections and risk getting thrashed by McCall’s thugs. Father Badalamenti tried to make things better for the people on Van Wessel Street. I believe you can imagine what happened next.”

  “Yeah,” Cane muttered. He knew Talbot, Varrick and McCall had committed all manner of sins to stay in power – and he was still taking their money and working for them. Maybe hearing it just removed the doubts in his mind. “But you can tell me anyway.”

  Rose’s voice faltered. “I don’t know the details. Like I said, I heard all this secondhand, from rumors. But these rumors say that Talbot and Varrick gave the order and McCall and his gangsters carried it out. They found Badalamenti in his church and beat him bloody with fists, boots and clubs, and then drew their knives and slashed him to pieces. But the truly horribly thing is what happened next – McCall brought in a few rats from one of his baits, which he had starved in a cage for days, and then unleashed them on Badalmenti. When the poor man could suffer no longer, McCall shot him through the head.”

  So that was what happened. Cane could imagine what came next. He had seen it often enough. Father Badalamenti’s spirit, still full of rage and sadness from his untimely death, had sunk into the rats of Van Wessel Street. The rats had been trying to get revenge – so Varrick, Talbot and McCall had gone and hired Clayton Cane to protect them.

  “Will you stop these rats, Mr. Cane?” Rose asked. “You’ll do like those horrid masters of Van Wessel Street ask?”

  His only answer was to reach for his coat. Clayton Cane slid it over his shoulders, and then did the same with the strap of his rifle. He had lost his shotgun somewhere in the sewers, but it didn’t matter. He tied on his gun belt and slid in both revolvers. Finally, Cane reached into his pocket and pulled out a bundle of folding money. He held it out to Rose Corcoran.

  “That’s all right, Mr. Cane.” Rose raised her hand. “I was just helping a weak man who needed my aid. I expect no money for that.”

  Cane tossed the dollars onto her bed anyway, and then walked to the door. He pushed it open and stepped into the hall. A number of dark-haired children were perched on the stairwell above him, peering down with curious faces. Cane stared back at them. They caught a glimpse of his scarred face and hurried away, whispering in Italian.

  He headed down the stairs. “You’ll be all right, Mr. Cane?” Rose called after him as he left.

  “Yeah.” Cane didn’t look back. He walked down the long stairwell, feeling better with each step. The job wasn’t done. He had to get to that haunted church.

  Just like Rose Corcoran had said, the church was at the end of Van Wessel Street, as far as possible from Algonquin Hall. About a block before he reached the church, the streets emptied. There were no drunks or vagrants in the alleys, no vendors on the sidewalk and not even stray dogs curling around the gutters. The horse-drawn carts and wagons going past seemed to speed up, like the animals didn’t want to linger. Cane didn’t feel like lingering either, but he did anyway.

  He stood outside the church, looking up at the crumbling stone columns and collapsing gambrel roof. The door hung open, and Cane could see only shadows inside. He reached down and clasped his revolvers. There was no point in waiting. Cane strode up and walked inside.

  It took his eyes a few second for to adjust to the dark. A set of busted pews stood before a chipped stone pulpit, with something behind it. There was some kind of carpet under the pews and on top of them, like living, moving shadows. It took Cane only seconds to realize they were rats. The rodents were everywhere, pressed together in a terrible, living mass. They were on top of the pews and in the corners and around the pulpit.

  That was where Cane walked. He stepped carefully around the rats. They scurried out of the reach of his boots, squeaking slightly. Cane kept his hands on his revolvers. He didn’t draw iron. There was no point. The rats would rise up against him if he gave them an excuse.

  Moving carefully, avoiding the rats on the ground, it took him a few moments to reach the pulpit. There was a great mass of the rats there, piled around the bars and railing of the stone pulpit. Cane realized that it was like the outline of a person, wearing a costume of rats. Cane reached out with one finger. The rats parted to avoid his hand.

  There was bone under them. As soon as he touched it, Cane watched as all the rats fled the pulpit. They scurried away like spilled water. They revealed a skeletal body, slumped back over the pulpit’s railing. The skeleton wore a ragged preacher’s cassock, stained with dried blood. Cane looked at the hollow sockets, where a few scraps of flesh still remained. The rats hadn’t eaten their fill. A few bites would have been enough to fill them with Father Furio Badalamenti’s vengeful spirit.

  “Afternoon, Padre,” Cane said. Before any of the rats could stop him, he drew his revolver and slammed it against the forehead of the skull. He knew the bones were a tether of Father Badalamenti’s ghost to the world of the living. Destroying it could weaken the spirit to send it on its way. The other way to do that was giving the ghost what it wanted – to fulfill what the spirit had never done in life. In Badalamenti’s case, that would be Varrick, Talbot and McCall. Whatever was left of Father Badalamenti wanted nothing more than revenge.

  All around Cane, the rats scurried in to attack. They raced for him, but then Cane raised a hand. “I feel any of them little claws one me and I’ll pull the goddamn trigger!” he roared. “Go on and see if I’m lying! You’re fast – but you know I’m faster!”

  The rats froze. Cane kept his finger wrapped around the trigger. He looked at the hollow sockets of the skull. He thought about what Rose had told him – of the awful way that Father Badalamenti had met his end. Cane had seen men die for hundreds of reasons. Men died because they insulted another man’s woman, or had a funny look to their eye, or seemed to pose a threat to a whiskey-addled mind. In one case, a fellow had been shot by his supposed friend for snoring too loud. But men dying like animals because they tried to better their community? That was new for Cane.

  “Yeah,” Cane said to himself. “Reckon it weren’t fair, what they done to you. But this world ain’t fair. I look in the mirror and I know that for certain. I never asked to be put together. Never asked to get fused up with dark magic and to spend my life living by the gun. But that’s what happened, that’s what I am – and I gotta live with it.”

  He looked down at the rats. They didn’t seem frightening any more. They huddled close together, squeaking pathetically and looking up at him with their dark eyes. The rats were scared. Father Badalamenti’s spirit must feel the same way.

  Cane removed the revolver from the skull. He returned it to his holster with a spin. “I don’t work cheap,” he said. “And I aim to see some profit out of this trip. But why don’t we talk things over, padre. And don’t you worry. You’ll get to rest – one way or the other.”

  His plan was simple. It didn’t take long to think it up, once he was resolved. The rats listened expectantly and Cane knew that they were noting every word.

  Night came to Van Wessel Street. The vendors cleared off and their calls finally went silent. Traffic dried up and soon the street between the tenement buildings was empty. But the guards never left their post outside Algonquin Hall. They stood their ground, clutching their billy clubs as they looked out at the shadows that crept across the street. Accented voices came from the tall tenement buildings, but even those went silent after a while.

  Clayton Cane stood in the alley across the street from Algonquin Hall. He grabbed his rifle and brought it to his shoulder, taking careful aim. When everything was quiet, and the gaslight lamps above the street had been lit to provide just enough light to see, he deci
ded to strike. He fired twice, his gunshots blasting out through the silence.

  The peaked caps of both the policemen fell from their heads, a bullet in each brim. The cops tried to reclaim their hats, terrified by the sudden gunfire. Cane walked out of the shadows of the alley, working the lever on his rifle and raising it again. He knew the kind of trouble that came from putting a bullet through a badge, so he didn’t fire. Besides, he didn’t have to. He let the cops look at his scarred face and his duster, still stained with sewage, and kept the rifle trained at them.

  “Run,” Cane ordered. “And don’t you look back.”

  The cops ran without a word. Cane walked up the stairs to the gilded door of Algonquin Hall. He could hear footsteps pounding inside. There were more policemen inside, as well as McCall’s gunmen. Cane would have to work fast. He slammed his foot into the door, kicking it open.

  Then he looked back onto the street. “All right, Padre!” he roared. “Follow me on in!”

  All the manhole covers on the street slammed open, one after the other. Rats spilled out, like boiling water overflowing a container. They washed over the street in a dark wave. The rats didn’t squeak or squeal. The only noise was the endless pattering of their feet, so it seemed like a storm of pounding rain was striking Van Wessel Street. Cane saw them coming up the stairs and he walked in ahead of them.

  Three of McCall’s goons were in the lobby, going for their guns as Cane stepped inside. They were the worst sort of rowdy, with fashionable checkered coats in bright colors and stout top hats, knives and pistols slid into their belts. Cane swung his rifle around and opened fire, blasting one of the thugs through the upper chest. The recoil made his cuts and bruises ache, but he ignored it. He worked the lever and fired again, his second shot splattering open the skull of the second gunman. The third managed to draw a heavy pistol and get off a single shot, before Cane reached him.

  Cane rammed the butt of his rifle into his gut, knocking the wind from him. He grabbed his arm, spun him around and gave him a push – right into the swarm of incoming rats. Cane turned away and kept walking as the poor fellow was swept up by the black tide. He didn’t even have time to scream before the rats tore out his throat and were running over his writhing body. Cane kept going. He felt his heart pounding inside of him. He didn’t usually betray his employers. But somehow, it didn’t feel wrong.