Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Elbaum sipped from a coffee cup, gazed around the meeting room and continued. “Now I have never tried to catch a rat with my bare hands, and I grant you that it’s hard for even a healthy man to catch a rat. And Jack Jones is not in good health at all. But. I give you this thought. Perhaps the rat is not in good health either. Rats get sick and rats die, sometimes where people can see them. If a plague was on, more rats would be dying openly. Perhaps the rat is nearly dead from plague — or maybe it’s got something related to Paper-Man’s disease. Jack Jones eats the rat, or laps its blood — and, his immune system already weakened, of course picks up whatever sickness the rat has.

“Now let’s say that by and by someone else is sneaking around, looking for something to steal in a presumably empty shack. Now, who is this potential thief? It could be some low-down, uneducated, ignorant, ignoble, dim-witted, down-and-out fellow named, mm, Anse Drobble. He comes sneaking up to this shack. He peeps inside. He sees a sort of living skeleton with glaring eyes biting into a rat. What do you think Anse Drobble does? Do you think that he tarries? That Anse Drobble comes forward and says, ‘Worthy and suffering Christian brother, allow me to give you succor and sustenance’? Hell no. Anse Drobble never gave anybody anything. except maybe the clap. He runs off and his poor maggoty mind is going to report, ‘I seed a daid man eating a rat!’

“Even though it’s now believed that the Boss in the Wall never actually eats the rat, merely he laps its blood. Easier than chewing with wasted jaw muscles, and easier to digest, as well.

“Multiply this one instance by hundreds, and our rat-eating legend takes off.”

Hamling Calloway M. D. looked down along the table provided with, at intervals, the pads of paper, the short sharp pencils, the glasses of water. The table might have been set for a meeting about changing zoning laws, or a discussion of splitting a stock. “Gus, the picture you have just drawn, why it’s very vivid. No reason why it couldn’t be perfectly correct. So let us not linger. I’d like to move along to, why certainly not to a supernatural explanation, but to one which is certainly impossible to explain in fairly, or even unfairly, conventional terms.”

Elbaum absently stroked his short and grizzled beard with its still-visible streaks of red. “What do you — ”

“What do I mean ? Well, what happened to Jack Jones? What became of him? Back then in Memphis, in 1845? After he’d recovered enough to eat his rat, or, rather, lap its blood. what happened to him?”

Elbaum suggested that any number of things might have happened. He might have recovered after his nip of rat blood, and gotten dressed and on his feet and returned to the cotton farm or the river boat. “Maybe. But maybe Jack Jones never quite died, but never quite recovered from his rat-borne disease. Maybe he became an outcast and a skulker and a lurker. Imagine that if you can. Growing older and filthier and more emaciated, creeping from one abandoned house to another, living off scraps and rats. Never able to be anything but emaciated. Sometimes hiding in the walls… a boss in the wall, but a boss nowhere else. And maybe, in colder weather, wrapping his wasted body in layer after layer of old newspapers to keep out the cold, as all his physiological functions declined.”

Elbaum again stroked his reddish-gray beard. “Imagine this in hundreds of cities and towns, not just in the 1800s, but now. We know that most derelicts we see in doorways are suffering from the diseases of alcoholism or schizophrenia, or from a diseased society — but some may be slowly wasting away from Paper-Man’s disease. That could explain why there are always more ‘Bosses’ forming, even though so many get killed off. And that could explain why the Boss in the Wall legend appears everywhere, and never dies out.”

A woman in the far corner now lifted her head and cleared her throat with an odd sort of sound. Vlad had not really registered her presence, and, judging by a sudden shuffling and half-turning on the part of others, there were a number of them who had now suddenly remembered that they had forgotten. Jack Stewart said later that she had instantly reminded him of “Aunt Pearline, the one you never see except at a funeral and you see her at every funeral, including the ones you try to keep quiet.”

Vlad (in a whisper): “Ed. Who is she?”

Bagnell: (writing his reply on a pad): Dr Isabella Crokeshank. Rats.

She was by no means a young woman. She cleared her throat again with that odd sort of squeak, and touched her lips with a tissue. They were probably, by now, by nature, pale lips; but Dr Isabelle Crokeshank had been a young woman when young women were first able to combine make-up and respectability; and, however odd it seemed, her withered lips were still, in the manner of her youth, rouged red with lipstick. Bright, against that pallid face. Bright red.

At last she spoke. “What Dr Elbaum says is logical, very logical. Now, I was first drawn into this. somewhat clandestine project here, purely because I might learn something which might lead to some explanation of the irregularly regular appearances of exsanguinated rats. I was skeptical. Perhaps more than I need have been. There are some weird and wonderful things about rats. Don’t let me go on for too long, it’s more than a discipline, it’s an obsession. But have you ever heard of a Rat King? I see few of you have. I refer you to my work called ‘Tail-Tied kings’. Well, it’s not a king of the rats, not an individual rat but a group of rats. This. King. Oh, from time to time there have been found, in Europe, in America, a number of rats of both sexes which are bound together by, literally, their tails being tied together. No string or cord, just the tails themselves. I long ago ruled out hoaxes; for one thing they have been found in places ordinarily inaccessible to humans, found when buildings are being demolished, for example. Now what has caused this phenomenon?”

Dr Isabelle Crokeshank paused and drank water. No one moved. “Well now, how, for example, did they live? Obtain food? Water? Evidently this was brought by mouth by other rats. The only theory ever really seriously considered was that other rats had selected them as a sort of gene pool, breeding pool, while they were very young, and by tooth and claw and paw had made those knots. The matter certainly remains not proven. During the course of this conference a notion came to me. It is only a notion. Is it possible, I have asked myself, that this. your. the Boss in the Wall? The Paper-Man? Is that what made them? Could those. oh. dare I borrow from another legend a term, the un-dead ? Could they have tied the rats’ tails together? Taken young rats and done that? Leaving up to the rat-groups the perhaps instinctively-performed job of bringing food, perhaps food dipped in water?

“So that when and if the Boss in the Wall wanted a rat… it had only to go and get one.?”

Perhaps the silence shuddered. No one offered an answer. No one said a word or made another sound. For a while.

Dr. Elbaum looked at his watch. Then he said, “It’s two o’clock. I believe that Dr Dave Branch and Dr Ed Bagnell — Boys.?”

They nodded. Got up. Bagnell set up a screen while Branch got the projector ready. Branch’s narrow face was usually grave. Now it was somber. “All right,” he said, nodding. Bagnell turned out the lights. Branch said, “We are about to show a photograph of perhaps the only intact Boss in the Wall — oh, I don’t know why I prefer that name — or Paper- Man. Not a head alone. It’s even less of a pretty sight, so all those suspecting they may be faint of heart may leave.”