To say that the office looked dirty and shabby was to say that water looked liquid and wet. Newspapers, documents, magazines, clippings, files and folders lay stacked and slipped and scattered. Someone was thrusting his hand into a large manila envelope. Someone was turning the pages of an old illustrated publication. Someone was going through a scrapbook, moistening loose corners with a small glue-brush. On one webby wall was a sign: THE CONTRACT NEVER EXPIRES. None of the men was working hard or working fast, none of them seemed interested in what he was doing, and whatever they were all doing, they gave the impression of having been doing it for a long, long time.
The not-crisp card read:
Edward E. Bagnell
Professor of Ethnology
Sumner Public College
Curator Larraby of the Carolina Coast Museum looked up from the card. “Still sticking to ‘Ethnology,’ are they?” His tone was civil, even amiable, but there was a something in his eyes beyond the usual mere shrewdness.
“Yes sir, they are. Still sticking to ‘Public’, also.” Bagnell was sure there was something sticking to the Curator’s manner, inside the ruddy, well-worn face, lurking around the corners of the well-trimmed gray mustache and the picturesquely tufty silvery eyebrows. The Curator asked a few questions about Sumner Public College: Was Macrae getting on with his study of so-called “Moorish” mountain people? Was SPC having the usual small-college trouble with trustees who wanted more money spent on football than on music, say, or scholarship — real scholarship? Then there was a pause, and then the odd expression ceased to be odd at all, and was now plain to see.
Slyness.
And with that came the very slow, very quiet, “Well, what can I do for you, Professor Bagnell?”
Out with it.
“I understand that you have a Paper-Man here under lock and key, Curator Larraby.”
At once: “Yes I thought that was what you — don’t know how I knew, but I — what did you say?” The slyness was gone, it was quite gone. The ruddy face was now quite red, the slightly jowely mouth hung agape. “What did you say?”
“A Paper-Man or Paper-Doll or Paper-Doll Man. A Hyett or Hetter or Header. A Greasy-Man or String-Fellow. A Rustler or Clicker or Clatterer. And/or other names. Though I assume. I’m sure you know.”
For a moment, silence. Then an audible swallow, a shake, as though the heavy, aging body had been set slightly askew and needed to be set right. A shudder, and then the slumped old man said, “This assumption cannot be allowed to get into the newspapers or the newsreels. This. ”
The newsreels! Bagnell had never seen a newsreel, anymore than he had ever seen a passenger pigeon or a Civil War veteran. “Oh God no! That’s the last thing we would want!”
The effect was galvanic. The curator was on his feet. “I require another name, and then we’ll see how sure you are that I know.”
Bagnell said, “The Boss in the Wall.” Larraby was out the door before Bagnell was finished, but he was waiting in the hall.
“I was, as I said, sure that was what you wanted, young man. Pardon me, Professor. But I figured you’d go about it slyly.” The older man put his arm through Bagnell’s, and the gesture at once dissipated all mistrust. “I’m taking you to the top of the tower, it’s up these stairs, and I may lean on you quite a bit: no elevator. Slowly. Good.”
The stairs were swept clean and smelled of old wood and polish, but as they went up higher a strong odor of disinfectant became predominant. “- And if you had, why, I’d have hustled you right out of here. And here’s the key, Dr Bagnell. The first key.”
Inside the tower was a locked room which required a second key, and inside this was a modern steel cabinet with two keyholes; alongside it stood an open jug of creosol. “Tower door locked behind us? Make sure. Lock this one and swing the night-bolt too. Now, got a strong stomach?”
Bagnell said that he had helped to find and bury hurricane and flood victims. He now noticed another odor in the rather small room, a strong one, entirely different from the tarry reek of the disinfectant.
“Had such experience? Well, useful. Don’t say it’s better, don’t say it’s worse; different. Clean different.” He was gently inserting a key. “But not clean. God, no.” He looked up, withdrew the key. “Oh, forgot. Got a handkerchief? Put some of that bay rum on it; you may feel that you want it in a hurry.” On a small table in the corner was, of all things, a bottle of that once-widely-used gentlemen’s lotion and hair-tonic. Bagnell had thought it had gone out with newsreels. Was that the source of the other odor? God, no! Bagnell obediently scattered some spicy bay rum on his handkerchief. Larraby had the second key in and out.
Inside were two perfectly ordinary large cardboard cartons with laundry soap logos on them. “Two? I thought there was one.”
“Think twice. There is.” And so there was.
It was in two pieces.
The trousers and jacket were antique, and dull with dirt and some sort of grease; the words corpse fat came swift into Bagnell’s mind. On one bony foot, and it was as though the skin had been scraped thin before being replaced over the bones — and the skin was filthy beyond anything he had ever seen before, was a part of something doubtless once a shoe The jacket was torn; it was worn-torn and it was ripped-torn, and beneath it was part of a shirt. And the shirt-part was worst of all, for it must have once been white. No other color could ever have become so ghastly grey, and here and there were stains of other colors, though none was bright.
“Breathe through your handkerchief, and don’t get too close as you lean over it.”
Bagnell obeyed. Though not before an accidental breath gave him knowledge of the actual smell. A breath was enough. It was not what he had imagined it might be. The smell was organic, he was sure of that, but it was nothing like any organic — or for that matter inorganic — odor he had ever been exposed to before. It was worse than mere decay or decomposition, worse than any disease, worse — He had covered his nose but he could, even despite the scented distillation of the bay and the thick rank creosol, taste it; he covered his mouth as well.
Pieces of shredding yellowed-filthied paper poked out here and there: from under the ragged ankle-edge of the trouser cuff. From out of the gap where the fly had been, the tattered paper protruded like a codpiece. Worn and stained paper formed a sort of ghastly lace jabot high in front. And all of it that he could see showed awful and ugly stains, and even some of the stains had stains.
Larraby took up an exceedingly long pair of rather odd tongs and turned the upper torso half-over; it must have been very light for him to do it with one hand. “Look there.” There was an immense hole beneath the left shoulder-blade. And it had been stuffed, there was no other word for it, stuffed with paper.
Larraby said, through his own handkerchief mask, “Of course we never attempted to examine all the paper, but I can inform you that it seems to consist mostly of the special election supplement of the New York Herald of November whatever-it-was, 1864, which proves nothing; old Greeley shipped his weekly edition all over the country.”
Bagnell’s eyes were darting here and there, noting the claw-like hand encrusted with far more than a century’s (perhaps) filth, noticing the rubbed-out part of the sleeve from which protruded a something grimy and grim which was likely an elbow. Noticing . not noticing -