Excerpted from CLUTCH 1900, by Craig Rodgers, via APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL PRESS. Available now.
In the hotel lobby there was a woman who sat by a fire, older, old, a thin face all angles and bone protruding from the woven blankets in which she was bundled. Haggardy laid his purchases on a table. He took hold of a chair and dragged it nearer the fire. He put his hands out and turned them over that heat, rubbing them together and rubbing them along his sore leg. The woman said nothing and he said nothing, two strangers together in solitude.
The hotelier struck a match and lit a cigarette rolled thin. He came to the fire to throw away the spent matchstick and once there he did not move away. An elbow rested on an unadorned lintel. He breathed smoke in slow waves. He smoked the roll down to a nub and this he gave up with some reluctance to the flames before he turned to face Haggardy.
“Do you know him?”
“Who?”
“Your writing man. Your biographer.”
“Know him.”
Flat, a statement.
“Met him? Had you spoken before the telegram?”
“I know him.”
Haggardy heaved himself up in his chair and he sat thinking and then he began to tell a story, much of it true. He told of a charlatan’s flock, castoffs fled up a mountain, lost souls wanting. He told of a preacher who’d grabbed up a black powder pistol he’d taken off a German whom he’d brought to the Light and that man of God vowed he’d bring each of those poor heathens back to the Lord one damn way or other. He told of a writing man come to town in time to hear this sordid tale a hundred ways and that selfsame writing man taking up the notion that he’d get the truth of it his own self. He told of weeks or more spent hemming and hawing before Haggardy took it upon himself to follow the trail of this parade of fools up the mountain and drag that writing man back down before the mountain decided it was keeping him.
Haggardy stopped talking. He sat in thought a moment, then he looked at the hotelier.
“You got another of those?”
The hotelier reached into his jacket and retrieved paper and match and tobacco held in a pouch made from sealskin. Haggardy opened the pouch and his eyes fell closed as he breathed the fragrant tobacco scent, sweet like old fruit. His old fingers took their time rolling the cigarette. He smoked in silence for some time and then he went on. He said they’d been dead awhile. Some shot, some other things. The eyes had been dug from the face of every man. The writing man sat by a fire, face carved up like the rest. He was bone thin but he was alive. The beard he wore had gone white. It looked wrong. He did, the writing man. Sick, wild. Haggardy got him back to town and there this writing man was laid up, doted on. Stories got around. People took to calling him the eye man. He took on an air of legend, a ghost in some hotel. And then he moved on one day, was well enough and was gone. Wrote his book, maybe.
The hotelier chewed his own lip, face turned down. He dug in a pocket and he held out his tobacco. Haggardy shook his head. The hotelier looked at the works in his hand and he began to roll an overlarge cigarette as he spoke.
“How?”
“How what?”
“How would he write a book with no eyes?”
Haggardy shrugged. He sank back into his seat.
“Ask him when he gets here.”
The old woman spoke up then. Her voice came out in a hoarse whisper, the sound of something left unused for years.
“What about the preacher?”
Haggardy looked at the old woman and he looked away.
“The preacher,” he said. “The preacher came walking into town crazed or drunk the next spring. He said the wrong thing to the wrong someone and that fool preacher got himself shot dead.”
The old woman had gone back to staring into the fire as if she had not spoken. The hotelier smoked and when another boarder entered he went to share talk with the newcomer. Haggardy sat. His hand held onto the sixgun in his pocket.
“Sometimes I think that man was no sort of preacher at all.”
RAY
Each step is a story. The boards call out in the quiet. Ray climbs to the third floor landing and he stops. A separate stair leads up to the roof. A single bulb burns overhead, white, searing. The fixtures along the hall have long been left to darkness and the shadows go on forever.
He moves past a doorway. The door is open and if the room is occupied by man or object Ray does not see. Another, another. He passes each open door and the opaque reality held there with little notice. He halts when he has come to the single closed door among the many gaping entries. He waits. When he is ready he knocks.
“Mr. Isaacs?”
Nothing moves and in the unlit minute that passes unchanged the world could be on hold, waiting. Then there is a footfall, a slow step that takes time with its story. It approaches in its own unhurried manner and at the door it stops. Ray leans in. Time passes. His voice is a whisper.
“Mr. Isaacs.”
The silence is everywhere. Ray stands listening, his ear an inch from the door. His breath is loud in the quiet. Heart beats in thuds. He opens his mouth to speak the name a third time but floor cries out as the step begins its slow retreat on the other side of the door.
***
He tears a strip of painter’s tape from the roll and sticks it to the mailbox door. The name he writes there is his own. Now it is real. Now this is home.
Machine noise erupts somewhere nearby, mechanical shriek behind some wall or other. Ray turns and he listens for shift in tone, signposts of context or meaning. Pitch shifts up and something somewhere gives out a resonant thud felt more than heard. The shrill cry subsides to a buzz hungry and unending in feet and fingers and behind eyes that turn and search in vain for source, for origin of that tangible whine. It remains hidden, existing all around, a part of things now.
He opens the box that now bears his name. Inside there waits a variety of trash; flyers for lawyers or magazines or pills, pizza coupons, Eastern takeout coupons, assorted enticements for the desperate or the bored. Underneath is a tag for a package and a key. These he takes, the rest goes in a barrel of the same. Ray looks around once more at the room. The vibrating buzz and hum rises and it falls but it does not go away. He opens a door and enters the apartment house offices.
Ray breathes in the still air of a room undisturbed for hours or days. Desk and television and a single row of larger boxes, long like lockers. He fits the key into its lock. It turns and a pop follows as the box is opening all on its own by way of some spring or other simple mechanism unseen and he is taking out a package postmarked with his name, his address. He holds it and he waits but there is no one coming. He closes his eyes a moment. The hum is here with him. He leaves the key inserted in its keyhole.
The foyer is filled with that noise now grating, chewing apart the world and gulping it down as Ray stands at a small end table by the rows of mailboxes and slots and he’s gritting his teeth and he’s reaching into a pocket for a folding knife held there. He opens the blade and cuts into tape holding shut his package. He moves handfuls of foam peanuts and he picks up a thin candlestick decorated with a screaming angel. He sets this down and picks up another, this longer and with mouth wider and each side carved with designs both intricate and without discernible meaning. Trench art from the Great War, the shell of an oversized gun repurposed for a use modern and benign.
Other items he picks up and turns and with some satisfaction he sets each back in the box. He takes this package in both arms and is holding it this way when the noise climbs and his lip pulls back in a snarl he remains unaware of and with a dull thump the world falls silent. He blinks. He moves his jaw to pop ears but nothing changes. Then it does. The open and close of a door. A figure climbs the basement stairs and nods and removes goggles and an elaborate breathing apparatus and it is Otis. He offers a vague hello and says nothing of the noise. He hangs goggles and breather by their elastic straps from the banister at stair’s edge and he nods again as he passes on his way to and then out the glass door leading into the day. These events Ray watches with a passive participation and he is watching still as Otis stands on the sidewalk with eyes now closed and face turned up to a sun whose light ends just inside the apartment house lobby, well before it reaches Ray.
***
The room begins to take shape. Structure coalesces, it blossoms. Clothes sit sorted and folded. He unpacks his things in an order unregimented, pulling items and setting them in corners or on top of those items which came before until they can be rearranged in some semblance of order. He pauses his perfunctory decorating at times to check a page on his laptop. An auction under his name. The candlestick, the trench art, others. Bids trickle in as he checks and unpacks and checks again.
Books find their way from torn boxes to makeshift shelves. Milk crates, cinderblocks overlaid by a board. Rough but organized. The volumes lined there avoid uniformity but a theme does exist. Clutch and the Clock. The Hanging Tree. The Mayor’s Revenge. Worn first printings or ‘60s reprints with their kitschy covers. Styles from all over; foreign, domestic, paperbacks, hardbacks, some with their pages warped by water or time, some with no covers. Ray’s Cowboy Clutch collection.
He pulls a book from the shelf. The Rope Trick. The cover is faded and peeling. A textured noose is stamped there. He turns pages, seeking nothing in particular, his eye catching words here and there as his mind fills in the gaps of a story he’s read a dozen times.
***
The hangman wore a hood like some dark age holdover, an undying executioner walking the land, taking lives as years unspooled behind its heavy tread like miles of spent bloody ribbon.
Haggardy closed his eyes. He could feel the noose tighten, could feel the fibers cut into the skin of his neck, air first thinning before being cut off completely.
The hangman turned to the gathered crowd. He spoke in a murmur but the mask ate the words.
The trapdoor shook underfoot. Clutch tensed despite himself. It would be any moment, the knock of wood and the snap of rope and then a forever in nothing.
Any moment.
— Craig Rodgers is the name appearing on several books ghostwritten by a gaggle of long dead Victorian spirits.