Authors: Patrick E. McLean
Bruce opened the door before I could turn the handle.
“Thank God, we thought The Rat had gotten you already, man.” Bruce gave me a big hug. Who better for me to have as a best friend than a guy who hangs around corpses? He had to be the only guy left from my life who wasn’t afraid to hug me.
Marie stood up from the couch and walked over to us with a strange look in her eye.
Bruce touched my arm, “How much longer do you have left?”
I showed him. “Midnight.”
“Midnight. That’s so wrong man. That’s so… It’s like, such a bad cliché,” said Bruce.
“Clichés have power.”
Marie stared at me as her wide eyes filled with tears. What was that about? “It’s okay,” I said, “I have a plan. But I’m going to need your help.”
Bruce nodded. Marie said nothing. This was bad. I needed both of them. I knew I could count on Bruce and I thought Marie would help because of what The Rat had done to her stepfather, but now – I tried again, “Can I count on you?”
With deadly sincerity Bruce looked at me and said, “Yeah, brother, anything, you know that.”
Marie burst into tears. When Bruce saw her his face twisted in revulsion. “Come ON!” he said without an iota of sensitivity. Guess the romance was over.
I touched her arm and asked, “What is it?”
“He offered me a deal.”
“Who?”
“The Rat.”
Bruce’s jaw fell open. “The Rat?” he said in disgust. “The Rat! After all that, that, THING has done to you, you made a deal with The Rat?”
That did it. Marie collapsed into full on sobbing.
“Lay off Bruce, let her talk.”
Marie pulled it together enough to say, “The Rat, he told me that I was…” then she made up her mind, “I don’t think you want my help.”
“Marie,” I said, “Marie, I need your help. I can’t face him without you.” She rubbed her face against the cold of my torn and ragged palm as if it was something soft, something decent, something beautiful. “Now tell me, Marie. What happened?”
“He came to me. He told me he would give my stepfather his name back.”
“In return for what?”
“If I helped him. If I helped him take your soul.”
My face twisted into a smile. “You know he only deals for his own advantage?”
She nodded.
“What did you tell him?”
Bruce said, “Man, why are you even listening to this bitch, man? You know you can’t trust her -- she’s already sold you out!”
I turned to Bruce. I could see the anger and disquiet in his body. Was everyone this easy to read when you didn’t have emotions of your own roaring through you? All that noise and by-product of life messing with you? “Bruce, be quiet.”
“Nah, man, this bitch,” he said, really angry.
“Bruce, enough.”
I sat Marie down on the couch and looked into her eyes. Warm, moist, fragile, fallible, alive. So impossibly alive. Had I ever been that alive? In my whole life had I ever felt that deeply? I must have. I’m sure I had tuned it out or turned it off at some point. But I must have been that alive. And now it was gone. In that moment, everything else seemed to me to be so pointless in comparison. The thousand minor angers, the grudges I nursed, the hate I had harbored, the wars my ancestors had fought -- all of it seemed childish and trivial compared to the divide that separated me from Marie. The line between the living and the dead.
I don’t think I have ever loved anyone -- or life -- so much as I did in that moment.
“So how were you going to help him?” I asked.
“He said I would know when. He said I would know how.”
I nodded, encouraging her to go on.
“He wasn’t the same as before. He seemed nervous. Afraid.”
I felt a strange new kind of power course through me. Not life, in all its imperfections, but something more eternal, more perfected, more gentle. “Will you help me?”
“Help you? Do you know what that rat offered me? It’s the only thing, it’s everything I ever wanted.”
“But it’s wrong.”
“But, but, but, it’s all wrong. All of it is wrong. You, The Rat, my stepfather drooling in the corner. Maybe there is no right. Maybe there’s just what you get and what you take.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I can’t do anything about any of that. The one thing that I can think to do, I need your help for. So what did you tell The Rat?”
“I didn’t tell him anything,” she said as she rubbed some tears away with the heel of her hand. “I didn’t tell him anything. But in my heart, I wanted to tell him yes.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
Bruce exploded. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter? She sold us out, man! Sold. Us. Out. Don’t you see, man? Never trust a woman. All they do is smoke your weed, man. That’s all they do.”
“Marie,” I said, “I forgive you.” With the words came a rush. Saying the words and meaning the words and being the words and feeling the power of it, poured through me. A roaring noise was in my ears and rushing of wings obscured my sight.
“But how do you know that I won’t change my mind? Won’t become weak in the moment?”
“I don’t,” I said. “There’s nothing I can do about that. You will or you won’t. I think maybe you won’t, but I can’t know for sure. All I can do is forgive you and ask for your help.”
There was a long silence. When she looked up at me her eyes were bright and clear. “I wouldn’t forgive you.”
“I know.”
“But why?”
I looked at Bruce. Then I looked at her. “Both of you should know that there’s a good chance that you will die. You see what The Rat did to me. You see what it did to the man with no name. There are forces at work in the world that I cannot understand. I used to think it was all bullshit. That nothing meant anything. Now I don’t know what anything means, but I know it means something.
“It’s funny; now that I’m dead I finally have something worth living for. Well, not living. That’s not what I’m trying to say.” I held up my forearm and displayed the black mark. “My time is up. I don’t see any way around that. The only choice I get is how I go out. And the only difference between you and I is that you can’t see the mark on your arm. But it’s there. And each second that goes by your life draws a little closer to its conclusion.
“It’s a world of pain and suffering. Of the lost and the damned and the just plain clueless. The lost can be found. The damned can be redeemed. But the clueless, the ones who have lost touch with their souls and take no wonder in the sweep of the sky; these are the saddest, most defenseless of them all.
“I know, because I was one of them. And this rat preys on them. So I get one last throw of the dice. And I know how I’m going to lay my chips. I see a chance to stop this rat, once and for all. To ease, if only in some minor way, the suffering of the world. So what the hell, I figure I’ll give that a try. Try doing something that doesn’t involve feeling sorry for myself for a change.
“And what I’m asking is, will you help me? Will you give me the chance to do something right before I go?”
There was a long silence. Marie nodded first. When I turned to Bruce, his nod was already in progress.
Then I told them the plan. I didn’t even get three sentences in before they started laughing.
* * * * *
It was of those rare nights in the city that you only get at the very end of summer, when the heat lifts and wind from the North blows all the shit we put into the air far out to sea and you remember, after months of feeling like a mammal trapped between contracting walls, that the world doesn’t have a ceiling. One of those nights you can sit in a lawn chair on a roof with what passes for a beautiful girl, drink cheap beer and stare into the night sky imagining what it would be like to fall off the world into space.
I stood on the spot where I had been killed. I let my weight sink deep into my heels, deep into the very core of the Earth and waited. For the first time since I had died, I knew where I stood.
Everything had been prepared. Well, as much as it could be. This was either going to work or it wasn’t. Victory or… oh, who was I kidding. It was death. Death or something worse. Something I couldn’t comprehend, but just by getting a glimpse of it out of the corner of my eye, I had been able to guess that what The Rat had in store for me was pretty goddamned, god-awful.
God-awful like this alley. The only things that belonged here were things nobody wanted. Several bags worth of trash had been broken open and scattered across the ground.
The problem with waiting is that it gives you time to think about everything. And as I waited, what I thought about was pain. I remembered the pain of the first time I skinned my knee. The pain of breaking my wrist in 7th grade. And most of all, the pain that The Rat had returned to me in Marie’s apartment. Excruciating pain. I knew that pain. And I knew fear.
I said, “It’s time for you two to get out of here.”
Bruce said, “Nah, man, I’m staying. I’m staying right with you. I’m not going to betray you like some –”
Very quietly Marie said, “I stay.”
“Then I’m staying to keep my eye on her.” Lovers, haters and if they weren’t killed they’d probably be swapping spit two seconds after I was dead.
“Guys, you’ve done everything you can do. You should go.”
Marie turned to face me. Her face was hard and flat like slate. A beautiful piece of slate, to be sure, but just as implacable. “I stay,” she said.
Bruce puffed up in response. “Then I’m staying, too. We can’t trust her.”
Fools, both of them. But I could see that there was no arguing with them. “Hide.” I said, “Hide and watch. But don’t do anything stupid.” Even as I said it I realized how ridiculous that advice was. Here I was, doing what had to be the most stupid thing of my young life and untimely death. It felt ridiculous. It felt hopeless. Honestly, it felt like being alive again.
Bruce and Marie both headed towards the same dumpster, stopped and then looked at each other. They did a funny kind of dance, a little tango of contempt, as they both started off in opposite directions, then reversed, then split -- ah, love. Eventually, Marie hid behind the dumpster and Bruce ducked down behind the stairs.
I stared straight up into the sky. Maybe it was written all there for us to see. Not in complex fables and allegories, but in a visual metaphor. Maybe that’s what it was, miniscule, momentary bright flecks and then vast swaths of darkness. The astronomical distances between them representing the true distance between people. Or, less imaginatively, representing death. As the Scots say, “You’re a short time living and a long time dead.”
A short time living. A long time dead. And certainly no more time as whatever the hell I was.
Then the stars disappeared. I thought I was slipping away without a confrontation with The Rat. But no, I couldn’t be so lucky. The alley was still there and still depressingly real, but the night rolled in like a fog. The streetlight sputtered and struggled against the damp black.
Against the darkness, I struck a flare and held it high. It wasn’t much use. From all sides, I had the feeling that one gets when standing at the top of a cliff or high building. The urge to throw my body into the void was overwhelming.
No longer could I see the edges of the alley. The stairs and the dumpster, Marie and Bruce, were gone in the blackness of the night.
I was alone.
* * * * *
The Rat stepped in out of the night and smiled. Even in human form, I could see its high, delicate cheekbones twitching slightly as it spoke. “Time’s up,” it said. As it said the words, I felt a small twinge of pain from the black mark on my forearm. I didn’t let it show. I didn’t want to give the rat-bastard the satisfaction.
“Yeah, we’ve come to the end of it,” I said, trying to sound like John Wayne and failing miserably.
The Rat looked around the small circle of light that the night permitted to exist between us. “I don’t see a body.”
“You know there’s no body. You knew I couldn’t kill him. This whole thing was a setup from the start.”
“There’s always a chance. Always a chance,” it said, cocking its head and sniffing at the air. “But now your time is up. And I’m here for your soul.”
“You can’t have it. It’s mine.”
“But we had a deal.”
“Yeah,” I said, “we did. A raw deal from the start. But it doesn’t matter. See, I’ve learned something about souls. They’re not the kind of thing you can trade for.”
The Rat smiled and seemed not the least bit surprised. “Oh, but I want your soul, Danny Boy, and I’ll have it all the same.”
“You can’t take my soul, all you can do is trick me into thinking you have it. Enslaving me with my own will for all time,” I said. Or at least, that was what I was going to say. I got about halfway through it when pain wracked my body.
Pain, instant and complete. I thought he had given me all of it last time. But I was wrong. I collapsed to the ground, convulsing in agony, my dried guts trying to heave their dust through my mouth. Inches from my face, the flare sputtered and sparked against the ground. I was helpless. I had waited too long to spring my trap.
“You’re right,” said The Rat, looking down at me the way I might stare at a roach dying on its back on a dirty linoleum floor. “Your soul is yours, the way round belongs to a circle. But you will serve me all the same. It’s easier if you believe, of course, but in the absence of belief,” it waved its claw and the pain reached new heights. I felt one of my molars shatter as I ground my teeth together. “Pain will suffice. Before we are done, you will beg me to take your soul.”
Convulsions wracked my body; I jerked and threw myself around on the pavement. My head slammed into something. I realized it was a foot. In the midst of my agony, I realized Marie was standing next to me. No. I thought. Get the hell away, Marie. What a foolish girl. What a foolish gesture.
“Marie, my child,” said The Rat, “I already have him. My offer no longer stands.”
“Namo ti futata Seebo Legbu,” Marie hissed, and then she kicked the flare.
The flare spun and skittered through the debris that covered the floor of the alley. The pavement burst into flame. Concealed beneath the trash were lines carefully drawn in magnesium. The Rat was surrounded by a burning pentagram.