The worst aspect of his fall from grace was the stubborn clarity of his mind, which even massive quantities of alcohol could pollute only briefly. The prickly burrs of his hangover headache were a mild inconvenience when compared to the sharp thorns of memory and self-awareness that bristled deeper in his brain.
He heard someone approaching. Heavy footsteps. A faint limp: one foot scraping lightly against the pavement. He knew that tread. He began to tremble. He kept his head down and closed his eyes, willing the footsteps to grow fainter and recede into silence. But they grew louder, nearer… then stopped directly in front of him.
“You figured it out yet?”
It was the deep, gravelly voice that had recently begun to haunt Sammy’s nightmares. But he was not asleep now. This was not the monster of his turbulent dreams. This was the real creature that inspired the nightmares.
Reluctantly Sammy opened his grainy eyes, and looked up.
The ratman stood over him, grinning.
“You figured it out yet?”
Tall, burly, his mane of hair disordered, his tangled beard flecked with unidentifiable bits and chunks of matter too disgusting to contemplate, the ratman was a terrifying figure. Where his beard did not conceal it, his face was gnarled by scars, as if he had been poked and slashed with a white-hot soldering iron. His large nose was hooked and crooked, his lips spotted with weeping sores. Upon his dark and diseased gums, his teeth perched like broken, age-yellowed marble tombstones.
The gravelly voice grew louder. “Maybe you’re already dead.”
The only ordinary thing about the ratman was his clothes: tennis shoes, charity-shop khakis, cotton shirt, and a badly weathered black raincoat, all stained and heavily wrinkled. It was the uniform of a lot of street people who, some by their own fault and some not, had fallen through the cracks in the floorboards of modern society into the shadowy crawlspace beneath.
The voice softened dramatically as the ratman bent forward, leaned closer. “Already dead and in Hell? Could it be?”
Of all the extraordinary things about the ratman, his eyes were the most disturbing. They were intensely green, unusually green, but the queerest thing was that the black pupils were elliptical like the pupils of a cat or reptile. The eyes made the ratman’s body seem like merely a disguise, a rubber suit, as if something unspeakable peered out of a costume at a world on which it had not been born but which it coveted.
The ratman lowered his voice even further to a raspy whisper: “Dead, in Hell, and me the demon assigned to torture you?”
Knowing what was coming, having endured it before, Sammy tried to scramble to his feet. But the ratman, quick as wind, kicked him before he could get out of the way. The kick caught him in the left shoulder, just missing his face, and it didn’t feel like a sneaker but like a jackboot, as if the foot inside was entirely of bone or horn or the stuff of which a beetle’s carapace was formed. Sammy curled into the fetal position, protecting his head with his folded arms as best he could. The ratman kicked him again, again, left foot, right loot, left foot, almost as if doing a little dance, a sort of jig, one-kick-anduh-two-kick-anduh-one-kick-anduh-two, not making a sound, neither snarling in rage nor laughing scornfully, not breathing hard in spite of the exertion.
The kicking stopped.
Sammy drew into an even tighter ball, like a pill bug, curling around his pains.
The alleyway was unnaturally silent except for Sammy’s soft weeping, for which he loathed himself. The traffic noise from the nearby streets had completely faded. The oleander bush behind him no longer rustled in the breeze. When Sammy angrily told himself to be a man, when he swallowed his sobs, the quietude was death-perfect.
He dared to open his eyes and peek between his arms, looking toward the far end of the alley. Blinking to clear his tear-veiled vision, he was able to see two cars halted in the street beyond. The drivers, visible only as shadowy shapes, waited motionlessly.
Closer, directly in front of his face, an inch-long wingless earwig, strangely out of its environment of rotting wood and dark places, was frozen in the process of crossing the alley. The twin prongs on the insect’s back end appeared wicked, dangerous, and were curled up like the stinging tail of a scorpion, though in reality it was harmless. Some of its six legs touched the pavement, and others were lifted in mid-stride. It didn’t move even one of its segmented antennae, as if frozen by fear or poised to attack.
Sammy shifted his gaze to the end of the alley. Out in the street, the same cars were stalled in the same spots as before. The people in them sat like mannequins.
The insect again. Unmoving. As still as if dead and pinned to an entomologist’s specimen board.
Warily Sammy lowered his crossed arms from his head. Groaning, he rolled onto his back and looked up reluctantly at his assailant.
Looming, the ratman seemed a hundred feet tall. He studied Sammy with solemn interest. “Do you want to live?” he asked.
Sammy was surprised not by the question but by his inability to answer it. He was caught between the fear of death and the need to die. Each morning he was disappointed when he woke and found that he was still among the living, and each night when he curled up in his rag-and-paper bedding, he hoped for endless sleep. Yet day after day he struggled to obtain sufficient food, to find a warm place on those rare cold nights when California’s climatic grace deserted it, to stay dry when it rained so as to avoid pneumonia, and he looked both ways before crossing a street.
Perhaps he did not want to live, but wanted only the punishment of living.
“I’d like it better if you wanted to live,” the ratman said quietly. “More fun for me.”
Sammy’s heart was beating too thunderously. Each pulse throbbed hardest in the bruised flesh that marked the impact points of the ratman’s ferocious kicks.
“You’ve got thirty-six hours to live. Better do something, don’t you think? Hmmmm? The clock is running. Ticktock, ticktock.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” Sammy asked plaintively.
Instead of replying, the ratman said, “Midnight tomorrow the rats will come for you.”
“I’ve never done anything to you.”
The scars on the tormentor’s brutal face grew livid. “… chew out your eyes…”
“Please.”
His pale lips tightened as he spoke, revealing more of his rotting teeth: “… strip away your lips while you scream, nibble your tongue…”
As the ratman grew increasingly agitated, his demeanor became not more feverish but cold. His reptilian eyes seemed to radiate a chill that found its way into Sammy’s flesh and into the deepest reaches of his mind.
“Who are you?” Sammy asked, not for the first time.
The ratman did not answer. He swelled with rage. His thick, filthy fingers curled to form fists, uncurled, curled, uncurled. He kneaded the air as if he hoped to squeeze blood from it.
What are you? Sammy wondered but dared not ask.
“Rats,” hissed the ratman.
Afraid of what was about to happen, although it had happened before, Sammy scooted backward on his butt, toward the oleander bush that half concealed his packing crate, trying to put some distance between himself and the towering hobo.