The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

where Carl had lain unmoved for months. A thick mass of tiny roaches scurried in fear of the light.

I spun away in a tripping, tumbling run home, scratching my hands, ripping my jeans. I entered through the garage and made it to my bedroom window as the ambulance pulled out of Mrs. Baker’s yard. Mom’s car was the next to leave, and, finally, the policeman’s. I tried to shake Carl’s tormented image from my mind, but could only soften it by thinking of Carl’s eyes, the way they had somehow thanked me.

I undressed quickly and was in bed by the time Mom came upstairs. She opened my door, and I knew she was looking in at me, probably wondering how a mother could subject her son to such horror, but love can be far more cruel than hatred. She closed the door softly, and, a few minutes later, I heard her retching in the bathroom.

She woke me as dawn slivered through the trees and bathed the pond in gray iciness. She sat on my bedside, looking frail, drained. She reached back, took my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Poor, poor man”

The state placed Carl in a long-term convalescent home, his care VA funded. As for Mrs. Baker, she stayed in her house. No charges were filed, but, in the long run, it didn’t matter. In June, the same policeman who’d answered Mom’s call about the screams found Mrs. Baker dead.

Twelve years later, lung cancer killed my dad. And last summer, a drunk murdered Mom in a head-on crash. I moved back to this house last October. The Baker place across the pond is still standing, but kids have shattered all the windows, and termites have weakened the structure so that it sags in the middle.

After that terrible night, I tried to forget Carl, but, lately, I can’t get him off my mind. Maybe it’s because I see that old house every day; maybe not. In any case, I’m sure he’s still alive, although I have no idea where he’s living. I must find out. And soon.

Last night, frenzied knocking rattled the outer wall of my old bedroom.

THE SHABBIE PEOPLE by Jeffrey Osier

I

Their skin was smooth and colorless, so translucent that it looked like a liquid held in place by a thin, glutinous membrane. The long, loose threads along the edges of their shapeless garments seemed to wave in synchronized patterns, like cilia or some delicate reef-dwelling invertebrate. Even now I believe the Shabbies were human beings, although it seems as time goes on, that I base this conviction more and more on a desperate hope that has less to do with them—or even her—than it does with the way I cling to the notion of my own humanity.

I had a job in those days. Five days a week I rode the “L” train downtown, where I immediately took a narrow set of stairs down to Lower Wacker Driver, a bleak dust-blanketed stretch of road that ran directly beneath Wacker Drive proper and alongside the Chicago River. It was not a short cut—in fact, it added a good five minutes to my walk—and the only practical excuse I had for preferring it to a shorter, street level route was that it was cooler in summer and warmer (because of the heating vents from the buildings) in winter. But I walked Lower Wacker for a different reason entirely—for the darkness, the solitude. At street level I would have been no better than the rest of the office workers and clerks: in a hurry to get to work or to their trains, all milling and colliding and seething beneath the screeching elevated trains.

On Lower Wacker I’d seen transients scattered along the catwalk, many asleep between scraps of newspaper and cardboard in the early morning. Otherwise there were only those few commuters who parked their cars in the designated spaces between the catwalk and the street itself. Occasionally a car would slow and the driver—hoping to claim a parking space—would ask if I was going to my car. I would cast the driver an accusing, condescending glare and simply say, “I don’t drive.”

I would look up at the concrete ceiling and listen for the sounds of heavier traffic flowing above, but I never heard it. Sometimes that ceiling seemed to be a mile or more thick, and the blackest, sootiest patches on it the entrances to vast, inaccessible caves.

On the morning I first encountered them I was going down the steps when I saw a haggard old man with worried eyes waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Before I even made it to the bottom he was talking to me. I averted my eyes and attempted to pass him by, but he held out a shaking hand to block my path.

It was then that he said the word, not as part of a sentence, but just as a single, exhausted exclamation: “Shabbie.”

As I attempted to sidestep him, I lost my balance and nearly fell onto the dusty, glass and ratshit-laden sidewalk. I cursed the old man and continued on my way.

I knew what he’d been talking about as soon as I saw them. There were about twenty on that first day: men and women—none of them standing any closer than ten feet from each other—on the catwalk, among the parked cars at the foot of the catwalk, even along the edges of the road. They didn’t look at anything except each other, with vacant, expressionless faces, hands deep in their pockets, hugging shapeless garments around themselves. There were a few more street people hovering along the edge of this strange, scattered group. They whispered to each other, laughed, complained, but refused to pass beyond a certain point into that arena where the brown-ragged strangers stood so silently, so oblivious to anything but each other.

Another old man called to me as I walked past the huddled transients and onto that stretch of blacktop where the strangers stood. Almost immediately I could hear a ringing, feel the pressure of an invisible fluid closing around me. I looked into their incredible eyes. If they knew I was even walking among them, they made no sign; and when I finally passed the last of them I felt a tremendous release in pressure, as though I’d just surfaced from a deep swimming pool.

All the rest of that day I felt as though there was a wet gloss clinging to me, but whenever I ran fingers over my skin, they came away dry and clean.

I didn’t see them again for several days, but in the meantime I saw a piece of graffiti on one of the cement pillars that lined Lower Wacker:

“BEWARE OF THE SHABBIE PEOPLE.”

It was an unseasonably cold evening in early October. For some reason I can no longer remember and probably couldn’t have pinpointed at the time, my usual depression had been boiling into an uncharacteristically vicious rage against everyone around me, against inanimate objects that got in my way, against my pathetic little room and, of course, against myself and everything about me: my thick, hopeless face, my job, my loneliness. I pushed my way through the Wabash Avenue crowds and made for the nearest stairway down to Lower Wacker Drive.

A rat, obese from eating the garbage that filled the dumpsters and piled along the base of the catwalk, waddled quickly across my path. I had to stop in my tracks to keep from kicking the beast. I suddenly focused all my rage on this foul-smelling creature that had the audacity to block my way for even a split second. My fists clenched and I searched the shadows, wishing I had kicked it, wishing I…

When I first heard her voice, I could swear she was laughing. It was only when I heard the telltale impact of flesh smacking against flesh that I was sure she was crying—no, screaming. Then I heard the man’s voice: loud, cruel, wet with lustful anger, and I realized what was going on.

They were on the catwalk, near a stairway that led to street level. I jumped onto the walk and grabbed the man before I had any idea who or what they were. With a downward straightarm, I loosened his grip on her clothes as I grabbed his collar and swung him around to face me.

He was a Shabbie. They were both Shabbies. He was about my height, very thin, but there was an animal hunger across that emaciated face that would have scared me off had I not already been so wound up in my own furies. He screamed, a high-pitched flurry of incomprehensible sounds, and his face seemed to stretch forward, forming a threatening, toothy snout.