“Rats,” the ratman repeated, and he began to tremble.
It was starting.
Sammy froze, too terrified to move.
The ratman’s trembling became a shudder. The shudder escalated into violent shaking. His oily hair whipped about his head, his arms jerked, his legs jigged, and his black raincoat flapped as if he were in a cyclone, but no wind huffed or howled. The March air was as preternaturally still as it had been since the hulking vagrant’s appearance, as if the world were but a painted stage and the two of them the only actors upon it.
Becalmed on reefs of blacktop, Sammy Shamroe finally stood. He was driven to his feet by fear of the roiling tide of claws, sharp teeth, and red eyes that would soon rise around him.
Beneath his clothes, the ratman’s body churned like a burlap sack full of angry rattlesnakes. He was… changing. His face melted and reformed as if he stood in a forge controlled by some mad deity intent on molding a series of monstrosities, each of which would be more terrible than the one before it. Gone were the livid scars, gone were the reptilian eyes, gone the wild beard and tangled hair, gone the cruel mouth. For a moment his head was nothing but a mass of undifferentiated flesh, a lump of oozing mush, red with blood, then red-brown and darker, glistening, like something that had been poured out of a dog-food can. Abruptly the tissue solidified, and his head was composed of rats clinging to one another, a ball of rats, tails drooping like Rastafarian dreadlocks, fierce eyes as scarlet as drops of radiant blood. Where hands should have hung from his sleeves, rats bristled out of frayed cuffs. The heads of other rodents began to poke from between the buttons of his bulging shirt.
Though he had seen all of this before, Sammy tried to scream. His swollen tongue stuck to the roof of his dry mouth, so he made only a panicky muffled sound in the back of his throat. A scream wouldn’t help anyway. He had screamed before, during other encounters with his tormentor, and no one had responded.
The ratman came apart as if he were a rickety scarecrow in a sundering storm, pieces of his body dropping away. When each part hit the pavement, it was an individual rat. Whiskered, wet-nosed, sharp-toothed, squealing, the repellent creatures swarmed over one another, long tails lashing left and right. More rats poured out of his shirt and from under the cuffs of his trousers, far more than his clothes could possibly have contained: a score of them, two score, eighty, more than a hundred.
Like a deflating balloon that had been crafted in the form of a man, his clothes settled slowly to the pavement. Then each garment was transformed as well. The wrinkled lumps of cloth sprouted heads and limbs and produced more rodents, until both the ratman and his reeking wardrobe had been replaced by a seething mound of vermin squirming over and under one another with the boneless agility that made their kind so repulsive.
Sammy could not get his breath. The air grew even more leaden than it had been. Whereas the wind had died earlier, an unnatural stillness now seemed to settle over deeper levels of the natural world, until the fluidity of oxygen and nitrogen molecules declined drastically, as if the atmosphere had begun to thicken into a liquid, which he could draw into his lungs only with the greatest effort.
Now that the ratman’s body had disintegrated into scores of squirming beasts, the transformed corpus abruptly dispersed. The fat, sleek rats erupted out of the mound, fleeing in all directions, scuttling away from Sammy but also swarming around him, over his shoes and between his legs. That hateful, living tide spilled into the shadows along the buildings and into the vacant lot, where it either drained into holes in the building walls and in the earth — holes that Sammy could not see — or simply vanished.
A sudden breeze harried crisp dead leaves and scraps of paper ahead of it. The swish of tires and the rumble of engines arose as cars on the main street moved past the mouth of the alley. A bee buzzed by Sammy’s face.
He was able to breathe again. He stood for a moment in the bright noon light, gasping.
The worst thing was that it had all happened in sunshine, in the open air, without smoke and mirrors and clever lighting and silk threads and trapdoors and the standard tools of a magician’s craft.
Sammy had crawled out of his crate with the good intention of starting his day in spite of his hangover, maybe look for discarded aluminum cans to redeem at a recycling center, maybe do a little panhandling along the boardwalk. Now the hangover was gone, but he still didn’t feel like facing the world.
On unsteady legs, he returned to the oleander bush. The boughs were heavily laden with red flowers. He pushed them aside and stared at the large wooden crate under them.
He picked up a stick and poked at the rags and newspapers inside the big box, expecting a couple of rats to erupt from hiding. But they had gone elsewhere.
Sammy dropped to his knees and crawled into his haven, letting the draperies of oleander fall shut behind him.
From his pile of meager possessions in the back of the crate, he removed an unopened bottle of cheap burgundy and unscrewed the cap. He took a long pull of the warmish wine.
Sitting with his back against the wooden wall, clutching the bottle in both hands, he tried to forget what he had seen. As far as he could see, forgetting was his only hope of coping. He could not manage the problems of everyday life any more. So how could he expect to deal with something as extraordinary as the ratman?
A brain steeped in too many grams of cocaine, peppered with too many other drugs, and marinated in alcohol could produce the most amazing zoo of hallucinated creatures. And when his conscience got the better of him and he struggled to fulfill one of his periodic pledges of sobriety, withdrawal led to delirium tremens, which was populated by an even more colorful and threatening phantasmagoria of beasts. But none of them was as memorable and as deeply disturbing as the ratman.
He took another generous swallow of wine and leaned his head back against the wall of the crate, holding fast to the bottle with both hands.
Year by year, day by day, Sammy had found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy. He had long ago ceased to trust his perceptions. Yet of one thing he was dismayingly certain: the ratman was real. Impossible, fantastical, inexplicable — but real.
Sammy expected to find no answers to the questions that haunted him. But he could not stop asking: what was this creature; where did it come from; why did it want to torment and kill a grizzled, beaten-down street person whose death — or continued existence — was of little or no consequence to the world?
He drank more wine.
Thirty-six hours. Ticktock. Ticktock.
3
Cop instinct.
When the citizen in the gray cords, white shirt, and dark-gray jacket entered the restaurant, Connie noticed him and knew he was bent in some way. When she saw that Harry had also noticed, her interest in the guy increased dramatically because Harry had a nose that would make a bloodhound envious.
Cop instinct is less instinct than a sharply honed talent for observation and the good sense to correctly interpret whatever is observed. With Connie it was more a subconscious awareness than a calculated monitoring of everyone who crossed her line of sight.
The suspect stood just inside the door, near the cash register, waiting while the hostess seated a young couple at a table near one of the big front windows.
He appeared ordinary at first glance, even harmless. But on closer inspection, Connie could identify the incongruities that had caused her subconscious to recommend a closer look at the man. No signs of tension were visible in his rather bland face, and his posture was relaxed — but his hands were fisted tightly at his sides, as if he could barely control an urgent need to strike at someone. His vague smile reinforced the air of absentmindedness that clung to him — but the smile kept coming and going, flickering uncertainly, a subtle testament to inner turmoil. His sportcoat was buttoned, which was odd because he wasn’t wearing a tie and because the day was warm. More important, the coat did not hang properly; its outer and inner pockets seemed filled with something heavy that pulled it out of shape, and it bulged over his belt buckle — as if concealing a handgun jammed under the waistband of his pants.