SHORT AND NASTY, by Darrell Schweitzer

Originally published in Obsessions (1991).

My friend, who will never read this, I’m writing this for you. I want to tell you about the sound of the rats on the metal stairs. You’d appreciate that. Once, that would have been your sort of touch.

The rats. I heard them skittering after me as I descended into the darkness from the El platform at Ruan Street. At times the sound they made suggested not many creatures, but one, and not a rat either, but some sort of crippled, twisted dwarf: Scrape-scrape, thunk! Scrape-scrape, thunk!

Ridiculous, then.

In the old days, we would have started this together like some collaborative Gothic novel, telling how we travelled comfortably by coach for some days in the winter of 182—while composing our thoughts in separate diaries with enviable elegance (alternating passages from such diaries forming the opening section of the novel) before reaching London and calling our old friend Sir Archibald Blank, with whom we had enjoyed cordial business and personal relations, lo these many years. That way the three of us could at least look forward to a cozy evening’s chat by the fire, gently sipping brandy, our glasses unobtrusively kept full by the taciturn, enigmatic butler, who would figure hugely in the subsequent plot once the requisite weirdness began to manifest itself.

That was the old way, Henry, when we were young. Remember? When we two were in college together, when everybody else was reading Hermann Hesse, we were heavily “into” Gothic novels—Monk Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe, and the ever prolific Anonymous—the early Romantics, De Quincey, Byron, Keats, Mary Shelley—in short anybody who seemed suitably exquisite, melancholy, and doomed for Art’s sake.

Remember how we used to try to top each other’s affectations, just for the fun of it, the outrageous, frilly clothes, the sweeping gestures, the dialogue never heard outside of a bad costume flick: “I say, old chap, I think I shall take up opium. It’s so frightfully decadent.”

“I much prefer laudanum, old bean. The visions of Hell are much more vivid that way—”

Neither of us could have fooled a real Briton for a minute, by the way. Our accents were pure college theater. I suppose most of our classmates just thought we were gay.

Ah, with a sweeping sigh. We had joy; we had fun; we had seasons in the crypt.

* * * *

I try to be funny, Henry, to take the edge off the pain. We laugh to avoid weeping. There is no other way. It is hard to go on.

* * * *

This isn’t even London. It’s merely Philadelphia. And I don’t have much time.

Henry, the years have a way of taking the glitter off our dreams. Think of some piece of a Mummer’s costume, soggy in the gutter the day after New Year’s.

Rats on the stairway. I walked down, into the darkness as the train rumbled away above me, into the rain-slicked street of boarded-up storefronts and rubbish, past the occasional furtive late-night pedestrian; no longer the would-be Romantic fop but a worn-out man huddled in a worn-out trench coat against the bitter wind and drizzle, not exactly young either, but slouching into middle-age gray-haired and forty pounds heavier.

Now I was there because Gretta, your wife, had called me. She said you were dying.

“Shouldn’t you call an ambulance, then?” I’d asked.

“He’s—crazy. It’s too late. He says, no. You have to come. Now. Please.” She was sobbing then.

Rats on the stairway, amid the trash on the street. Scrape-scrape, thunk.

* * * *

I came because I was afraid, for you Henry, yes, and of you in a way, but mostly out of an even harder to define fascination, which brought me there at such an hour on such a night despite everything, despite even the souring of our friendship and the ostensible strangeness of Gretta’s—and your—request that I, of all people, should be with you in your final hour.

Remember? The last time we’d seen one another there were a lot of obscenities. I think you started it. It hardly matters. Maybe it was me.

I came because I wanted to know how much you knew, Henry. That was what I was really afraid of. You’d found out a good deal about me, of course. And I’d found out that you’d found out. But I still had my own secrets. Yes.

I came because I had dreamed of you, and in my dream Gretta called on the phone and spoke exactly those same words in the same tone of voice. “Paul, you have to come. Now. Please.”

Then I rode the elevated train, in my dream, and there were rats scraping on the metal stairway above me as I descended from the platform; and I walked in the cold January rain; and Gretta stood white-faced and wide-eyed at the door. She ushered me in without a word, without a sound; up to the dingy bedroom where you lay in the darkness, oblivious to the flickering TV in one corner. The place was crammed with books on leaning shelves, and odd statues and metal devices: pendants and symbols and a single, staring metal mask above the bed. The whole house smelled of dust and mildew and decay. The ceiling had cracked and sagged dangerously.

I leaned over the bed, in my dream, and you struggled to raise yourself on your elbows. At last you got a hand on my shoulder and pulled yourself up. You tried to whisper something—and out of your mouth came the sound of the telephone ringing, and Gretta’s distant voice begging me to come, and her sobbing followed by the rattle of the train, and muttered words in my own voice, and the scrape-scrape-thunk of the rats.

Then I was at the door again, and once more Gretta ushered me upstairs, and you tried to rise, only this time you were visibly smaller as you lay there, fully two feet shorter than before.

You tried to speak, and the sound of the phone came out of your mouth.

And for a third time I reached the door, and Gretta met me, and your voice was no more than a faint croaking. You had shrunk to the size of a dwarf, or a malformed child.

And again, and again, until you were no more than a white lump of flesh like a beached and dying fish flopping among the bedclothes, still trying to speak, your face distorted almost beyond recognition.

You squeaked and wheezed. I couldn’t make out any words. The noise was like rats, scratching.

I awoke with a start, sweating, my sleep interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing.

It was Gretta.

* * * *

When I saw her standing at the door, where I somehow knew she would be, I didn’t say anything. But I remembered a lot. I remembered what it had been like when both of us were young. I remembered one night in particular, when she had leaned dreamily out the window of my car as we drove along slowly somewhere out in the country, and the wind and the moonlight made her hair seem like flowing gold.

That was one of my little secrets. You hadn’t been along that night. We’d never told you about it. It was only a few weeks before your wedding. I thought of it as my hopeless, impossible last chance then, and I suppose it was.

Now her face was lined, and her hair wasn’t yet gray entirely, but it was stringy. It had been a long time since the moonlight.

I nodded to her and walked slowly up the stairs, certain of what I was going to see.

* * * *

There you were in the semi-darkness. I can’t begin to describe what I felt, what I feared, confronting you at your pathetic end.

I don’t think you were even aware of me as I leaned over and switched off the TV. You lay still, your breathing labored. Then, suddenly, you tried to raise yourself. I sat down beside the bed, leaned over, and you caught hold of my shoulder.

That was the worst part, you touching me, just then.

You struggled to speak.

“You bastard—”

I pulled away. You dropped back.

“Now, now, my dear Henry old chap, old bean, that’s no way to talk to—”

“You slime-sucking bastard—”

“Ah, Henry, we had such dreams in the old days. Remember? We were going to be great poets, novelists, playwrights, actors, and now it has come to this.”

“Fuck you—”

“Henry, at the very least, you always had a more impressive vocabulary than that.”

“1 know—”

God, Henry, I felt all the rage pouring out of me then, all the useless words pent up for years. “Shit. What do you know? That I stole money from the firm? That I took it from you, my esteemed partner in the second-rate, second-hand costume rental business? You can’t prove a thing, Henry, for all the hurtful things you’ve said, for all you have ruined our friendship with your own paranoia. I never took more than my due. Not a cent more.”

Even then I couldn’t say everything I wanted to. There was so, so much. Could I tell you how you’d been the millstone around my neck for so many years, how every time I looked in the mirror and saw myself a little grayer, a little more rumpled, I thought of you? Yes, you, and I told myself that I could have taken another path, walked another road in life other than the one Henry Fisher led me on with his promises and his absurdities and his so-called ambitions. You wasted the best part of my life, Henry. You, somehow, you dragged me down, and I blame you for it. You made me part of the mediocrity we are today. I cannot forgive you.

* * * *

One more joke, Henry, the knife twisting in my gut. You accused me.

“I don’t give a shit about the money. I know what you did—”

I leaned forward and whispered, “You know that I went to see Laura Howard? Yes, I did. She’s very good. I thank you for recommending her to me.”

* * * *

I indulged in a little untruth, my friend. You merely mentioned that you’d run into her after so many years. You gave me the address of her shop. That was enough.

I never got over Laura any more than I ever got over Gretta. She was very special, more than another old college chum, Miss Occult 1970, whose burning ambition at nineteen had been to conjure up the ghost of Aleister Crowley so it could possess her and make her the greatest magician in the world. Now she ran a magic shop along Frankford Avenue, not far from your present hovel, behind one of those boarded-up storefronts. As your mind had gone progressively softer, as you babbled more and more about auras and past lives and all that New Age crap, you became rather a disciple of our old friend Laura Howard, didn’t you?

I attended one of her, ah, sessions. At first it was all I could do that night to contain my laughter.

But no—

Afterwards, when all the suckers were gone, with visions of Atlantean past lives dancing in their pointy little heads, she just stared at me, like a snake, her gaze inscrutable and implacable. Something deep inside me told me that it was time to leave, that it was time to run, that my entire soul was laid bare.

“Hello Paul,” she said softly. I couldn’t make any sense out of her tones, her words, her gestures. They seemed a mixture of surprise and fondness and hatred and almost robotic apathy, all blended together.

We talked for a long time, about the old days, about you, and about Gretta, and sometimes she was almost like a confessor, someone I could lay my soul bare before, and at other times she was an inquisitor and I her helpless captive.

We went out for something to eat, not to a fancy restaurant, no, not in that neighborhood, but to this ridiculous hole-in-the-wall Japanese place which, in deference to the sophistication of the customers, served sukiyaki on a hoagie bun.

Then we came back, talked some more, and had sex. That, I think, was part of the spell she worked on me, something magical.

Afterwards she stared into my face in the semi-darkness—her eyes as impenetrable as a cat’s—and she said, “You want something, Paul. You want it very much.”

And I did. I was afraid to say it. But I did, just then, want a way to go back and reweave the strands of my life, to make everything better, to be rid of you, Henry.

Then she told me. She told me the secret of your death.

* * * *

“1 know what you did—”

You surprised me again by actually sitting up of your own accord. I could tell how gaunt and wasted you had become, like a ninety-year-old man with both feet and half your legs in the grave. I thought you were going fall apart then and there into a mass of bones and squishy goo. But you were determined to have your say.

“I know about my death,” you said. How you ranted just then, Henry. How your face was twisted with—was it simple hatred or elementary fear? “It has been growing within me like a seed, ever since I was born. Laura told me that. All that lives must die. Death is built in. When we’re young, it’s small, dormant, like a pinhead-sized tumor nobody’s found yet. But it’s there, slowly growing larger as we age, as our living tissue diminishes, until by the time we’re old we carry around a great load of death, with little life remaining. Sometimes very old people can look in a mirror and see death staring back, death wearing an old man’s face like a tissue-thin mask.”

“She told me its name,” I said. “I can make it come and go fetch, like a dog. All I had to do was whisper that name each night for a week, and I woke it up. So I did, every night before I said my prayers, thinking of you.”

“Why?”

That took me aback. Suddenly it was I who dangled there on the edge of the abyss. I fumbled for words.

“Why? Because you deserved it.”

“No, why did Laura Howard do it?”

That was exquisite, my friend. Your deft touch from the old days. Artistic and agonizing. Just then you seemed pleading with me, despairing not that your death was devouring you from the inside out even as we spoke, or that I seemingly hated you, but because you had lost Laura Howard’s friendship, because she had turned on you for some inexplicable reason.

I really wanted to comfort you then. My own hatred started to unwind. I wanted to make it easier for you.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I paid her for her, ah, professional services—I mean the secret, the name, the spell, whathaveyou—but I don’t think she cared about the fee. It’s part of some machination of hers, probably. God knows what she is trying to do. We’re just tools to her, puppets.”

I felt helpless then. I rose to leave.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why did you ask me to come here tonight if you knew all this? Just to confront me? What good would that do?” I was angry at you again. “You were always a bit of an idiot, Henry.”

“Yes, I was, but not this last time. I went to Laura too, once I understood what was happening.”

I paused in the doorway.

“She was as you described her, Paul, like an inscrutable snake, neither horrified that her old friends were murdering one another, nor pitying, nor anything at all. I don’t think she’s quite human anymore—”

“Henry, she’s got more humanity left than you do just now, or I—”

“Shut up and let me finish. She told me something important. Something I found very comforting, all things considered. I think it’s part of her scheme that you know this, so Goddamn you, Paul, you’re going to hear it. She told me that my death was indeed like a little doggie out in the back yard which would come running after it had finished its business, after it had dropped the gigantic turd that is my rotting corpse. Then it comes running. Home to Papa. You. And it’s hungry.”

I turned back into the room, ready to—I don’t know what—ready to throttle you then and there with my own hands, for the satisfaction, so I could deny, negate everything, so I could shout in your face as you died, No, no, you sniveling moron it’s all your fault—

But you were too quick for me. You died even as you as sat there, eyes suddenly rolling up white, jaw dropping, and out of your mouth came the sound of the phone, of Gretta’s voice, the rumble of the El, and the scratching on the metal stairs.

And there was something more, something crawling inside you under your skin, not like a dog at all, but more like a huge spider scratching to get out.

* * * *

I screamed then and ran out of the room, down the stairs, colliding with Gretta. I hardly realized she was in my arms. We stumbled together to the base of the stairwell, bouncing off the wall, grabbing the railing, never quite off our feet. It was a weird kind of dance, and I was crazy then, as if the record needle in my mind were skipping and scratching all over the record, and everything was a jumble, a bit of that, a screech of this—and before I knew what I was doing I kissed her hard, passionately, not because I desired her anymore, but to deny it all, Henry, to fling one last defiance in the sanctimonious face of time; as if for just an instant you’d never existed and she and I had been married all these years but we weren’t old and poor and everything had turned out differently; as if, no, that wasn’t it at all—as if somehow the three of us were still together and you were still my friend and we both loved Gretta and she loved both of us equally and the end we came to was beautiful and romantic and not just sordid—

She broke away, frightened.

“What’s happened?” she said.

“I can’t talk about it. I’ll call you later—”

I think she thought the look on my face and the tone of my voice bespoke grief.

She was sobbing behind me as I ran out of the house, down the street in the cold rain, toward the rusty elevated platform.

* * * *

Scrape-scrape, thunk!

It was waiting for me. I saw it once, wriggling between the steps almost at my feet. I caught a glimpse of it as it dropped down into the darkness below: something like a fleshy, scaleless fish with a human face, and with crab-legs and claws.

I ran the rest of the way up the stairs, onto the platform.

A black man sat at the far end of the furthest bench, smoking and reading a newspaper. He glanced up once, then resumed his reading.

Scrape-scrape.

I gazed down the steps in growing horror as I saw something moving on the landing below where the stairway turned. Something dwarfish and misshapen, but more human now, with arms and legs.

I wanted to run to the black man. But what could I have told him? What could he have done?

Down there on the landing, the thing stepped out of the shadows, into the half-light, and I saw that it had my face, hugely out of proportion to the body. Our eyes met. It spoke, clearly, with your voice, my friend.

“1’m all yours now.”

* * * *

I would have run then. I would have scrambled across the tracks risking getting fried on the third rail. But just then I saw that the train was coming. It was all I could do to remain where I was, clinging to a pillar and watching as the thing on the stairs ascended painfully, inexorably the steps much too large for its stunted legs.

It was all I could do to hang on as the train’s light got brighter and brighter, as I could hear the rattling cars draw nearer, blessedly nearer.

Then I was aboard. The black man sat at the far end of the otherwise empty car, still reading his paper as if he hadn’t noticed a thing. Just as the doors wheezed shut I saw the creature at the top of the stairs, glaring at me, croaking something I couldn’t make out.

I think it had grown taller by then.

* * * *

Of course there was no such easy escape. Your death at the very least knew where I lived, either from your memory or instructions, or from some inevitable homing instinct.

When I got off the train at 69th Street in Upper Darby, I heard the same scrape-scrape thunk! on the stairs behind me. I glanced back once across the nearly deserted station and saw something shuffle furtively behind a locked-up newsstand. I heard it scraping on the concrete floor.

A cop stared at me strangely, but only at me.

There was a cab outside, thank God, but just as I closed the door something struck hard against it, tearing metal, and I looked out; and there, inches from my face was my face or a distorted parody of it, filled with hate, mouthing words, the body behind it hunched and powerful.

“Drive!” I shrieked at the cabby.

“Where to? I said, where to?” he demanded. He hadn’t seen, heard anything. I managed to give him my address correctly. He shrugged and muttered, “Jeez,” and must have taken me for a drunk.

Not that my continued flight did any good. How the thing travels is something of a puzzle, alternately fast and slow, if undeniably relentless. Did it hang onto the outside of the El train? Possibly it doesn’t travel at all, but merely gathers itself together nearby like a cloud of guilt each time I come to a halt.

Somehow the cab ride confused it, and bought me a little time, so that, in the approved Gothic manner, this document serves as my confession and the tale shall end with my demise.

You would have appreciated that. If only we could go back, be young again; if only we—I—could find the strength within ourselves to go on, to shape our own lives. Hatred is a mere admission of failure. If only we could still be friends and talk about this in Sir Archibald Blank’s cozy study and feel that last, delicious frisson. Then, it would all fit. I wouldn’t be afraid of dying then. If it fit.

Then I might tell one final joke. I might speculate that the footsteps I hear on the stairs outside, that shuffling and thudding and crashing, could very well be two gigantic furniture movers delivering a grand piano to the apartment upstairs at four o’clock in the morning.

But, that would wreck the ending.

Scrape-scrape, thunk.

This story is for you, old friend. It’s the least I can offer.