The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

RAT CATCHER Steve Rasnic Tem

Jimmy hadn’t caught four hours sleep all week. Normally he was a dead man about five seconds after he hit the sheets. In fact he liked telling people “I work like a bastard for my sleepeye.” Not that he didn’t lie there staring at the ceiling a few hours now and then, but not like this, not for days, not for a week. Sometimes he might lie awake counting the tiles because he was trying to remember something, even though he might not know he was trying to remember something. Some special butt-saving part of his brain would nag at him until he’d think of that anniversary, birthday, or special favor for his boss that he’d completely forgotten. “Ah, Jimmy, thank you,” he’d say when he remembered these things, flat on his back in bed. Sometimes Tess would nudge him with her elbow a little when this happened, pretending to be asleep but still letting him know he’d saved his butt by just a hair this time (she figured he’d forgotten something having to do with her and most of the time she was right).

But not this time. He didn’t think his lack of sleep had anything to do with her. Not this time. What he forgot this time, he knew, came from somewhere deeper than that, from somewhere further back, off where the dog bled in the dark and the rats gathered round to lick the blood.

“Ah, Jimmy, thank you . . ."he said, but quietly, not wanting Tess to hear. Off where the dog bled in the dark . . .

Maybe he felt the scratching before he actually heard it. Later he’d wonder about that. He felt it up in his scalp, long and hard like fingernails scratching through a wooden door, the fingers bleeding from the effort and the mind spinning dizzy from the pain. Jimmy raised his head and looked toward the bedroom door—they always kept it open half-way and the hall light on because Miranda was just down the hall and at five years old she still hated the dark, almost as bad as Jimmy used to hate the dark. Almost as bad as he hated it now. They kept the door open because Jimmy wanted to be sure and hear her when she screamed, which she still did about once every two weeks. He didn't want to lose any time getting into his little girl’s room.

Tess was always telling him that he coddled the kids. That was a funny word— he didn’t think he’d ever heard anyone else use it besides his grandma, back when he was a kid. And maybe Tess was right. He’d never been able to talk much about what it is you do with kids—being a dad to them, disciplining them, that kind of thing—not the way Tess could. Sometimes she gave him these books to read, books on parenting by experts. He never got much out of them.

All Jimmy knew was to pay attention to them, love and protect them. And tell them when they did wrong, though after a while you couldn’t stop them from doing wrong, just slow them down a little. Just doing that much wasn’t easy, not like it sounded. The kids would find out soon enough that the world was worse than they’d ever imagined, and maybe they’d hate him a little at first because of that. But all he could do was try to keep them alive and teach them a few things that would help them keep themselves alive. And maybe someday they’d figure out he’d loved them and that he’d meant the best for them, even with all the mistakes he’d made. He figured love was mostly mistakes that turned out okay. And maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe he wouldn’t be dead when that someday came around.

A small black dog, maybe a cat, came racing by the open door, in and out of the little bit of light like a shadow pulled by a rubber band. On its way to Miranda's room, looked like. But they didn’t own a dog, not since they put old Wooly to sleep. And their cat was white as a clean pillowcase.

Kids scream for all kinds of reasons. But even for the silly ones Jimmy had never been able to stand it. When Miranda’s scream tore so ragged out of the dark he was up and heading out of the door without even pulling down the covers. Tess made a little gasp of surprise behind him as the headboard rocked back and banged the wall. The whole house was shaking with his legs pounding down the hallway and Miranda screaming.

As soon as he reached his little girl’s door he caught the sharp smell of pee, and when he slammed the light switch on he fully expected to find the rat up on the bed with her, marking her with his teeth and claws and marking the bed with his pee just to let Jimmy know whose was whose. But there was just Miranda huddled by herself, her face red as a beet (how do little kids make their faces go that color?), and the damp gray flower opening up all around her tiny behind.

“Daddy! A big mousy! Big mousy!” she screamed, words he would have expected from her two years ago but not now (Dad! I’m a big girl now!), pointing a whole pudgy and shaking fist toward her open closet door. Jimmy ran back into the hallway and Miranda started screaming again; he could hear the baby squalling in the back room and Tess and Robert were out in the hall, Tess shouting What’s wrongJ, but Jimmy could hardly hear her over Miranda’s Daddy! He waved a hand at Tess trying to get her to stay back, jerked open the hall closet door and grabbed the heavy broom, and ran back into his daughter’s room.

Where he slammed her closet door as far back as it would go and held the broom up, waiting.

Miranda’s screams had choked off into hard, snotty breathing. He could feel Tess and Robert behind him at the door, Tess no doubt holding Robert’s jaw in that way she had when she wanted him to know he shouldn’t talk just now. Daddy’s real busy.

Suddenly there was movement at the bottom of the closet: Miss Raggedy Ella fell over and Jimmy could see that half her face had been torn away into clouds of cotton and he just started waling away with the broom on Miss Ella and Barbie and Tiny Tears and Homer Hippo and the whole happy-go-lucky bunch until they were all dancing up and down and laughing with those big wide permanent grins painted on their faces (except for Miss Ella, who now had no mouth to speak of) and screaming just like Miranda did. “Daddy, stop! You’re hurting them!”

“It’s a rat! A rat, goddamit!” He didn’t know who he was yelling at; he just didn’t know how they could be bothering him when there were rats in the house.

Eventually he stopped and when there wasn’t any more movement he used the straw end of the broom to pull out Miranda’s toys from the bottom of the closet one by one until it was empty.

He found a flap of loose wallpaper along the back wall above the yellowed baseboard. He lifted the flap up with the broom handle and discovered a four-inch hole in the plaster and lathe.

It took Miranda a long time to go back to sleep that night. She was trying to forget something but that part of her brain expert at saving your butt wasn’t letting her forget so easily. Instead Jimmy knew that memory was getting filed back there where the rats lick the blood off the wounded dog.

Tess kept telling him, “It’s all over now. Go to sleep, honey.” And finally he pretended he had.

And thought about the rats he didn’t want to think about living in his house, sniffing around his kids. He wasn’t about to forget that one. He wasn’t about to forget any of it.

He’d never thought that his momma had a dirty house, and he didn’t think the other ladies in the neighborhood thought so either else they wouldn’t have kept coming over to the house, drinking coffee, eating little cakes his momma made and getting icing all over the Bicycle cards they played with. But this was Kentucky and it was pretty wet country up their valley down the ridge from the mines and half the rooms in that big old house they didn’t use except for storage, and fully two-thirds of all those dressers his momma kept around were full of stuff—clothing, old letters, picture albums, bedding—and were never opened. His momma never threw away anything, especially if it came down from “the family,” and she had taken charge of all of grandma’s old stuff, who had never thrown away anything in her life either.

So it was that he found the nest of hairless little baby rats in that dresser drawer one day. He wasn’t supposed to be messing with that dresser anyway. His momma would have switched him skinny if she’d have caught him in one of her dressers.

Back then they’d looked like nasty little miniature piglets to him, squirming and squealing for their momma’s hairy rat-tit, but not quite real-looking, more like puppets, a dirty old man hiding inside the dresser making them squirm with transparent fishing line. He’d slammed the drawer shut right away and good thing, too, because if he hadn't then maybe that dirty old man would have reached his burnt arm out of the drawer and pulled him in. Jimmy’s momma had never told him to be scared of rats but she sure as hell had told him about the ragged, dirty old men who stayed down by the tracks and prowled the streets at night looking for young boys to steal.

He never told his momma about the rats either and they just seemed to grow right along with him, hiding in their secret places inside his momma’s house. Like the rats he’d heard about up in the mines that grew big as beavers because they could hide there where nobody bothered them. He’d heard that sometimes the miners would even share their lunches with them. Then the summer he was twelve the rats seemed to be everywhere, in all the closets in the house and you could hear them in the ceilings and inside the floors running back and forth between the support beams under your feet and his momma got pretty much beside herself. He’d hear her crying in her bed at night sounding like his dear sweet little Miranda now.

He remembered feeling so bad because he was the man of the house, had been since he was a baby in fact and he knew he was supposed to do something about the rats but at twelve years old he didn’t know what.

Then one day this big rat that should have been a raccoon or a beaver it was so big—a mine rat, he just knew it—came out from behind the refrigerator (that always felt so warm on the outside, smelling like hot insulation, perfect for a rat house) and ran around the kitchen while they were eating, its gray snake tail making all these S’s and question marks on the marbled linoleum behind it. Jimmy’s momma had screamed, “Do something!” and he had—he picked up the thick old broom and chased it, and that big hairy thing ran right up her leg and she screamed and peed all over herself and it dropped like she’d hit it and Jimmy broke the broom over it, but it started running again and he chased it down the cellar steps whacking it and whacking it with that broken piece of broom until the broom broke again over the rat’s back and still it just kept going, now making its S’s and question marks all over the dusty cellar floor so that it looked like a thousand snakes had been wrestling down there.

Jimmy kept thinking this had to be the momma rat. In fact over the next year or so he’d prayed that what he had seen down there had been the momma, and not one of her children.

The rat suddenly went straight up the cellar wall and into a foot-high crawlspace that spread out under the living room floor.

“You get it, son?” his mother had called down from the kitchen door, her voice shaking like his grandma’s used to.

He started to call back that he’d lost it, when he looked up at the crawlspace, then dragged an old chair over to the wall, and climbed up on the splintered seat for a better look.

Back in the darkness of the crawlspace there seemed to be a solider black, and a strong wet smell, and a hard scratch against the packed earth that shook all the way back out to the opening where his two hands gripped the wall.

The scratching deepened and ran and suddenly his face was full of the sound of it as he fell back away from the wall with the damp and heavy black screeching and clawing at his face.

His momma called some people in and they got rid of the nests in the dressers and closets but they never did find the big dark momma he had chased into the cellar. At night he'd think about where that rat must have got to and he tried to forget what wasn't good to forget.

There was one more thing (isn't there always, he thought). They’d had a dog. Not back when he’d first seen the big momma rat, but later, because his momma had felt bad about what happened and he’d always wanted a dog, so she gave it to him. Jimmy named it Spot, which was pretty dumb but “Spot” had been a name that had represented all dogs for him since he was five or six, so he named his first dog Spot even though she was a solid-color, golden spaniel.

Just having Spot around made him feel better, although as far as he knew a dog couldn’t help you much with a rat. Maybe she should have gotten him a cat instead, but he couldn’t imagine a cat of any size dealing with that big momma rat.

Jimmy didn’t think much about that dog anymore. Ah, Jimmy, thank you.

They had Spot four years. Jimmy was sixteen when the rats came back, a few at a time, and quite a bit smaller than the way he remembered them, but still there seemed to be a lot more of them each week and he’d dreamed enough about what was going to happen to him and his momma when there were enough of those rats.

Then he was down in the cellar one day when he saw this big shadow crawling around the side of the furnace, and heard the scratching that was as nervous and deep as an abscess. He ran upstairs and got his dead daddy’s shotgun that his momma had kept cleaned and oiled since the day his daddy died, and took it down to the dark, damp cellar, and waited awhile until the scratching came again, and then that crawling shadow came again, and then he just took aim, and fired.

When he went over to look at the body, already wondering how he was going to dispose of that awful thing without upsetting his momma when she got home, he found his beautiful dog instead.

He’d started crying then, and shaking her, and ran back up the steps to get some towels (but why had she been crawling, and why hadn’t she just trotted on over to him like she’d always done?), and when he got back down to the cellar with his arms full of every sheet and towel he could get his hands on, there had been all these rats gathered around the body of his dog, licking off the blood.

And now there were rats in his house, around his children.

The rat catcher, Homer Smith, was broad and rounded as an old Ford. Tess called Jimmy at work to tell him that the “rat man” had finally gotten there and Jimmy took the time off to go and meet him. When Jimmy first saw him the rat catcher was butt-wedged under the front porch, his big black boots soles out like balding tires, his baggy gray pants sliding off his slug-white ass as he pushed his way further into the opening until all of a sudden Jimmy was thinking of this huge, half-naked fellow crawling around under their house chasing rats. And he was trying not to giggle about that picture in his head when suddenly the rat catcher backed out and lifted himself and pulled his pants up all in one motion too quick to believe. Homer Smith was big and meaty and red-faced like he’d been shouting all morning and looking into his face Jimmy knew there was nothing comical about this man at all.

“You got rats,” Homer Smith said, like it wasn’t true until he’d said it. Jimmy nodded, watching the rat catcher’s lips pull back into a grin that split open the lower half of his bumpy brown face. But the high fatty cheeks were as smooth and unmoved as before, the eyes circled in white as if the man had spent so much time squinting that very little sun ever got to those areas. The eyes inside the circles were fixed black marbles with burning highlights. “Some call me out to look at their rats and it comes up nothing but little mousies they coulda chased away their own selves with a lighter and a can of hairspray. If they had a little hair on their chests that is.” Miranda’s “mousies” sounded lewd and obscene coming from Smith’s greasy red lips. “But rats now, they don’t burn out so good. That hair of theirs stinks to high heaven while it’s burning, but your good size mean-ass rat, he don’t mind burning so much. And you, son . . ."He raised his fist. “You got rats.”

Jimmy stared at the things wriggling in the rat catcher’s fist: blind, pale and constantly moving, six, maybe eight little hairless globs of flesh, all alike, all as blank and featureless as the rat catcher’s fingers and thumb, which now wriggled with the rat babies like their own long-lost brothers and sisters. “How many?” Jimmy asked, glancing down at his feet.

“How many what?” Smith asked, gazing at his fistfull of slick wriggle. He reached over with a finger from the other hand and flicked one of the soft bellies. It had a wet, fruity sound. Jimmy could see a crease in the rat skin from the hard edge of the nail. A high-pitched squeak escaped the tiny mouth.

Jimmy turned away, not wanting to puke on his new shoes. “How many rats? How many days to do the job? Any of that,” he said weakly.

The rat catcher grinned again and tossed the babies to the ground where they made a sound like dishrags slapping linoleum. “Oh, you got lots, mister. Lots of rats and lots and lots of days for doing this job. You’ll be seeing lots of me the next few weeks.”

And of course the rat catcher hadn’t lied. He arrived each morning about the time Jimmy was leaving for work, heavy gauge cages and huge wood and steel traps slung across his back and dangling from his fingers. “Poison don't do much good with these kind o’ rats,” Smith told him. “They eat it like candy and shit it right out again. ’Bout all it does is turn their assholes blue.” Jimmy wasn’t about to ask the rat catcher how he’d come by the information.

If he planned it right Jimmy would get home each afternoon just as Smith was loading the last sack or barrel marked “waste” up on his pickup. The idea that there were barrels of rats in his house was something Jimmy tried not to think about.

If he planned it wrong, however, which happened a lot more often than he liked, he’d get there just as the rat catcher was filling the sacks and barrels with all the pale dead babies and greasy-haired adults he’d been piling up at one corner of the house all day. Babies were separated from the shredded rags and papers they’d been nested in, then tossed into the sacks by the handsfull, so many of them that after a while Jimmy couldn’t see them as dead animals anymore, or even as meat, more like vegetables, like bags full of radishes or spring potatoes. The adults Smith dropped into the barrels one at a time, swinging them a little by their slick pink tails and slinging them in. When the barrels were mostly empty, the sound the rats made when they hit was like mushy softballs. But as the barrels filled the rats made hardly a sound at all on that final dive: no more than a soft pat on a baby’s behind, or a sloppy kiss on the cheek.

Jimmy had figured Smith was bound to be done after a few days. But the man became like a piece of household equipment, always there, always moving, losing his name as they started calling him by Tess’s name for him, “the rat man,” as if he looked like what he was after, when they were able to mention him at all. Because sometimes he made them too jumpy even to talk about, and the both of them would stay up nights thinking about him, even though they’d each pretend to the other that they were asleep. A week later he was still hauling the rats out of there. It seemed impossible. Jimmy started having dreams about a mine tunnel opening up under their basement, and huge, crazy-eyed mine rats pouring out.

“I don’t like having that man around my kids,” Tess said one day.

Jimmy looked up from his workbench, grabbing onto the edge of it to keep his hands from shaking. “What’s he done?”

“He hasn’t done anything, exactly. It’s just the way he looks, the way he moves.” Jimmy thought about the rats down in their basement, the rats in their walls. “He’s doing a job, honey. When he’s done with the job he’ll get out of here and we won’t be seeing him anymore.”

“He gives me the creeps. There’s something, I don’t know, a little strange about him.”

Jimmy thought the rat man was a lot strange, actually, but he’d been trying not to think too much about that. “Tell you what, I’ve got some things I can do at home tomorrow. I’ll just stick around all day, see if he’s up to anything.”

Jimmy spent the next day doing paperwork at the dining room table. Every once in a great while he’d see the rat man going out to his truck with a load of vermin, then coming back all slick smiles and head nodding at the window. Then Jimmy would hear him in the basement, so loud sometimes it was like the rat man was squeezing himself up inside the wall cavities and beating on them with a hammer.

But once or twice he saw the rat man lingering by one of the kid’s windows, and once he was scratching at the baby’s screen making meow sounds like some great big cat, a scary, satisfied-looking expression on his face. Then the rat man looked like the derelicts his momma had always warned him about, the ones that had a “thing” for children. But still Jimmy wasn’t sure they should do anything about the rat man. Not with the kind of rat problem they had.

When he talked to her about it that night Tess didn’t agree. “He’s weird, Jimmy. But it’s more than that. It’s the way the kids act when he’s around.”

“And how’s that?”

“They’re scared to death of him. Miranda sticks herself off in a corner somewhere with her dolls. Robert gets whiny and unhappy with everything, and you know that’s not like him. He just moves from one room to the next all day and he doesn’t seem to like any of his toys or anything he’s doing. But the baby, she’s the worst.” Jimmy started to laugh but caught himself in time, hoping Tess hadn’t seen the beginnings of a smile on his lips. Not that this was funny. Far from it. But this idea of how the baby was reacting to the rat man? They called their youngest child “the baby” instead of by her name, because she didn’t feel like a Susan yet. She didn’t feel like anything yet, really—she seemed to have no more personality than the baby rats the rat man had thrown down outside the house. Tess would have called him disgusting, saying that about his own daughter, but he knew she felt pretty much the same way. Some babies were bom personalities; Susan just wasn’t one of those. This was one of those things that made mommies and daddies old before their time: waiting to see if the baby was going to grow into a person, waiting to see if the baby was going to turn out having much of a brain at all.

So the idea of “the baby” feeling anything at all about the rat man made no sense to Jimmy. He felt a little relieved, in fact, that maybe they’d made too much out of this thing. Maybe they’d let their imaginations get away from them. Then he realized that Tess was staring at him suspiciously. “The baby?” he finally said. “What’s wrong with the baby?”

“Susan,” Tess replied, as if she’d been reading his mind. “Susan is too quiet. Like she’s being careful. You know the way a dog or a cat stops sometimes and gets real still because it senses something dangerous nearby? That’s Susan. She’s hardly even crying anymore. And you try to make her laugh—dance that teddy bear with the bright blue bib in front of her, or shake her rattle by her face—and she doesn’t make a sound. Like she knows the rat man’s nearby and she doesn’t want to make a noise ’cause then he’ll figure out where she is.”

In his head Jimmy saw the rat man prowling through the dark house, his baby holding her breath, her eyes moving restlessly over the bedroom shadows. “Maybe he’ll be done soon.”

“Christ, Jimmy, I want him out of here! And I know you do, too!”

“What reason could I give him? We’re just talking about ‘feelings’ here. We don’t really know anything.”

“What reasons do we need? We hired the man—we can fire him just as easy ”

“Easy?”

“You’re scared of him, Jimmy! I’ve never seen you so scared. But these are our kids we’re talking about!”

“He makes me a little nervous, I admit,” he said. “What you said about Susan makes me nervous as hell. And I am thinking about the kids right now, and how I can keep things safe for them around here.”

“So we just let him stay? We just let him sneak around our kids doing god-know’s-what?”

“We don’t know he’s doing anything except acting a little eccentric. We could fire him and the police could force him off our property, but that doesn’t help us any with what might happen later. ”

“Later,” she repeated. Jimmy couldn’t bear how scared she looked. “What are we going to do?”

“I’m staying home again tomorrow. I’ll park the car down the street and hide in the house. If he’s doing anything he shouldn’t he probably figures he can avoid your one pair of eyes. But tomorrow you’ll be following your normal schedule and I’ll be your extra pair of eyes. Between the two of us we shouldn’t miss much.” Jimmy looked down at the floor, thinking of the beams and pipes and electrical conduit hidden there. He listened for the rats, but the only scratches he heard were the ones inside his head.

The rat man came out exactly at nine in the A.M. like always. You could set your clock by him. He started unloading all his equipment, including the sacks and the metal barrel he threw the adult rats in. Jimmy crouched low by the master bedroom window, watching for anything and everything the rat man did. The first sign of weirdness, he thought, and he’d be hauling his kids’ asses out of there. Tess went to work in the kitchen; they agreed it’d be best to pretend she was having a normal day.

The rat man disappeared around the corner of the house with the big metal barrel. Jimmy was thinking about shifting to another room when he came back, holding four stiff rats by the tails, their black coats grayed with dust. No way he could’ve caught and killed them that quick, he thought. The rats appeared to have been dead a good day at least. Jimmy watched as the rat man waddled up to the corner where the house turned into an “L,” the corner with the window to the baby’s room. He watched as the rat man dangled the stiff rats against the rusting screen, clucking and cooing, rubbing his fingers up and down the smooth, hairless tails, talking to Jimmy’s baby through the screen and smiling like he didn’t realize where he was, like he was off in another place entirely.

Off where dogs bleed in the dark and the rats gather round to lick the blood.

All day long Jimmy watched as the rat man sneaked dead adult rats and hairless baby rats out of his rusted green pickup and planted them in the crawl spaces under the house only to haul them out again and replace them in the barrel and the sacks. The same ones, over and over. Jimmy wondered how many rats they’d actually had in the first place. A dozen? Six? Four? Just the one, trapped back under Miranda’s bedroom, and coming into the rat man’s hand easier than a hungry kitten?

Now and then the rat man would come out with something wrapped in a towel or a rag, cradling it carefully in his arms like it was his own baby. Jimmy couldn’t quite credit the gentleness he was seeing in the rat man; he looked silly, really. Jimmy wondered why the rat man would want some of the rats bundled up.

Right after the rat man left for the day Jimmy told the whole story to Tess. “I wasn’t about to confront him on it here,” he said.

“Well, if he’s just a con artist then we can call the police.”

“He’s a helluva lot more than that—I think we’ve both figured that one. That little office he has in town is closed and there’s no home phone number listed. So I’m going to have to go out to his place tonight. I’m going to tell him not to come around here anymore.”

“What if he says no?”

“He’s not allowed to say no, honey. I’m not going to let him.”

“What if I say no, Jimmy?” Her voice shook.

“I don’t think you’re going to say no. I think you’re going to be thinking about the kids, and that crazy man dangling rats in front of their faces like they were baby toys.” He stroked her shoulder. After a few seconds she looked away. And Jimmy grabbed his coat and went out to the car.

The rat man lived out past the empty industrial parks on the north end of the city. Here the municipal services weren’t so good, the streets full of ragged holes like they’d just run short of asphalt, the signs faded, with a permanent, pasted-on look to the trash layering the ditchlines.

It wasn’t hard finding the right house. “The rat catcher man? He lives down the end of that street don’t-cha-know. ” The old man was eager to tell him even more information about the rat man, but these were stories Jimmy didn’t want to hear.

The rat man’s house didn’t look much different from any other house in that neighborhood. It was a smallish box, covered with that aluminum siding you’re supposed to be able to wash off with a hose. A small porch contained a broken porch swing. There were green curtains in the window. A brown Christmas wreath hung on the front door even though it was April. Two trash cans at the curb overflowed with paper and rotten food. And the foot-high brown grass moved back and forth like a nervous shag carpet.

What was different about the rat man’s yard was all the tires that had been piled there, stacked into wobbly-looking towers eight or nine feet tall, bunches of them sitting upright like a giant black snake run through a sheer, tangled together in some parts of the yard like a slinky run through the washer. Some of the tires were full of dirt and had weeds growing out of them. Some of the tires looked warped and burnt like they’d had to be scraped off somebody’s car after some fiery journey.

But it was the nervous grass that kept pulling at Jimmy’s gaze. It wiggled and shook like the ground underneath it was getting ready to turn somersaults.

When Jimmy moved through it on the way to the rat man’s door it scratched at the sides of his boots. When Jimmy climbed the porch steps it slicked long, trembling fingers up around his ankles, making slow S-curves and question marks that set him shivering almost—it was crazy—with delight.

When Jimmy actually got to the door he could hear the layers of scratch and whisper building behind him, but he didn’t turn around. The scratching got louder and Jimmy found himself angry. He started to knock on the rat man’s door but once he got his hand curled into a fist he just held it there, looked at it and made the fist so tight the fingers went white. The scratching was in his ears and in his scalp now, and suddenly he was in a rage at the rat man, and couldn’t get that picture out of his head: the rat man dangling those dead monster babies in front of Jimmy’s baby’s window.

He held back his fist before he punched through the rotting door and instead moved to the dingy yellow window at the back of the rat man’s porch. He let go of the fist and used the open hand to shield his eyes from the late afternoon glare when he pressed his face against the glass.

He saw the rat man’s back bobbing up and down like a greasy old sack moving restlessly with its full complement of dying rat babies. The walls of the room were lined with a hodge-podge of shelving: gray planks and old wooden doors cut into strips and other salvage rigged in rows and the shelves full of glass jars like his grandmother’s root cellar packed with a season’s worth of canning.

Jimmy couldn’t tell what was in those jars. It looked like yellow onions, potatoes maybe.

The rat man was taking something out of a sack. He moved, and Jimmy could see a small table, and little bundles of rags on it. The rat man picked up the bundles gently and filled his arms with them. Then he headed toward a dark brown, greasy-looking door at the back of the room.

Jimmy stepped off the porch and moved toward the side of the house. The rat man s grass seemed to move with him, pushing against his shoes and rippling as he passed. He looked down and now and then saw a gray or black hump rise briefly over the grass tops before sinking down inside again.

The first window on that side was dark and even with his face pushed up into the dirty screen he could see nothing. A tall dresser or something had been pushed up against the window on the other side.

The second window glowed with a dim yellow light. Jimmy moved toward it, through grass alive with clumps and masses that rubbed against his boots, crawled over his ankles, and scratched at his pants legs.

A heavy curtain had been pulled across the window, but it gapped enough in the middle to give Jimmy a peep-hole. Inside, the rat man was unwrapping the bundles. Around the room were more shelves, but here they had been filled with children’s toys: dolls, teddy bears, stuffed monkeys and rabbits, tops and cars and jack-in-the-boxes and every kind of wind-up or pull-toy Jimmy had ever seen. Some of them looked shiny brand-new as if they’d just come out of the box. Others looked as old as Jimmy and older, the painted wood or metal dark brown or gray with layers of oily-looking dust.

The rat man put his new toys up on the shelf: a Miss Raggedy Ella doll, Tiny Tears, Homer Hippo, GI Joe, a plastic Sherman tank, a baby rattle, and a teddy bear with a bright blue bib. Toys that belonged to Jimmy’s kids. And then the rat man picked up the last, slightly larger bundle, and placed it in a pink bassinet in the middle of the room, where he unwrapped it and rearranged the faded blankets.

Suddenly Jimmy felt the rats clawing at his ankles, crawling up his legs.

He turned so quickly—thinking he’d run to the porch and break through the (J_oor—that he stumbled and fell on his knees. Instantly he had rats crawling up on his back, raking at his legs, several hanging by their claws and teeth from the loose front of his shirt. He stood and brushed them off him, finally grabbing one that just wouldn’t let go with his hands around its belly and squeezing until it screamed and dropped.

All around him the towered and twisting mass of tires was alive with dark rats, scrambling over each other as they climbed and tumbled through the insides and over the outsides of the black casings. He didn’t make it to the porch without losing a few hunks of skin here and there. The rats gathered round to lick the blood . . .

The rat man’s door disintegrated the second time Jimmy plowed into it with his shoulder, but not without a couple of hard splinters lodging painfully into the top of his arm. He stumbled into the front room and crashed into the far wall where the shelves of old wood began pulling away from the wall, dumping row after row of Mason jars onto the floor.

His feet slid on the spilled gunk. He could feel soft lumps smashing under the soles of his shoes. He staggered and grabbed the edge of a shelf, bringing down more of the jars. He started moving toward the greasy brown door at the back of the room as if in slow-motion, looking down at his shoes and moving carefully so that he wouldn’t slash himself on the broken glass, but all the time screaming, yelling at himself to get his ass in gear and get to that bedroom at the back of the rat man’s house.

He saw, but didn’t think about, the bodies of the hundreds of hairless little rat babies bursting open under his shoes and smearing across every inch of the wooden floor.

He felt himself sliding, beginning to fall, as he jerked the door open and headed down a pitch black hallway toward a dim yellow rectangle of light at the other end. He pushed at the invisible walls of the hallway to keep himself upright and raced toward that rectangle, the walls going away around him as in a dream.

He wasn’t aware of pushing open the door to the back room. It just seemed to dissolve at the touch of his hands.

Homer Smith, the rat man, was bent over the pink bassinet, cooing and making little wet laughing sounds. Later Jimmy would wonder why it was the rat man hadn’t paid any attention to the ruckus in the front part of his house.

Homer looked up, his hands still inside the bassinet, as Jimmy hit him across the face as hard as he could. He fell to his knees with a noise like thunder, then looked up at Jimmy, then looked around at all his toys, smiled a little, like he wanted Jimmy to play with him. Off where the dog bled in the dark . . . Jimmy kicked him in the ribs this time, with boots still smeared and sticky.

Homer doubled over without a sound, then he looked up at Jimmy again, and his face was as soft and unfocused as a baby’s.

Jimmy thought about his baby in the bassinet, but couldn’t quite bring himself to look yet. He glanced around the room instead and saw the broom propped in one corner. He stepped over to it, still aware that Homer wasn’t moving, picked it up and brought it down across Homer’s left cheekbone. The straw-end snapped off like a dry, dusty flowerhead and Jimmy used the broken handle to whip Homer’s face until it was a bloody, frothy pudding, Homer’s head snapping back and forth with each blow but still Homer stayed upright, leaning forward on his knees. Jimmy couldn’t believe it, and it scared him something terrible.

He kept thinking about the baby, but couldn’t keep his eyes off the baby catcher, the baby snatcher. Finally he took the ragged, broken end of the broom handle and held it a couple of feet from Homer’s throat. Jimmy could feel the weight of the pink bassinet behind him, and the thing wrapped up inside it, not moving, not crying, keeping still as if watching to see what would happen, but Jimmy knew it wasn’t just keeping still. It was dead. Susan was dead. He hadn’t checked on her before he came out here after the rat man and he should have known, watching the rat man carrying all those swaddled objects out of his house like that. He should have known.

At last Homer Smith raised his bloody head and stared at the sharp stick Jimmy had poised at his throat and seeing what Jimmy was ready to do Homer began to cry a wet, blood-filled cry, like a baby, just like a baby Jimmy thought, and it reminded him of lots of things, not all of it bad, as he drove the sharp end of that stick as hard as he could into the soft skin of Homer’s throat.

The dying took a few minutes, Homer trying to pull the stick out but not being able to. Jimmy threw up over the bassinet until he had nothing left to heave. Finally he got to his feet again and stood over his baby, hesitated, then slowly unwrapped the blanket from around her.

And found two dead black rats there, curled around each other like Siamese twins. Homer had dressed each in baby doll clothes.

Jimmy felt the scratching up in his scalp, long and hard like fingernails clawing through a wooden door, long before he actually heard it. And then the sounds of hundreds of pale tongues, lapping.

He turned and looked off where the dog bled in the dark at Homer Smith’s body, and the hundreds of rats gathered round to lick the blood.