He’s a thin, ragged man, barely more than sticks and knobby, jutting joints, dressed in rags that toss in the wind. His hair is straggly and tangled. His eyes glare out of his face, unmoving and unblinking, inhumanly intense.
He’s like a scarecrow come to life.
Tom hasn’t used the sign for the evil eye since his nonna insisted on him learning it when he was a kid. He finds himself shaping it now.
If the man notices it, it doesn’t work on him. He comes up to lean a shovel against the counter and sets down a box of nails, a pair of thick gloves, a jug of kerosene and a workman’s apron.
Tom looks at the items to keep from meeting those eyes. “That be all?”
“Do you have chain?” he asks in an English accent that could cut glass.
Tom glances up at him, startled, then looks over his shoulder to the rolls of chain in various weights behind him. “Uh. Yeah?”
The man cocks his head, staring blankly over Tom’s shoulder. “I need about ten feet, please,” he says after apparently having to think about it for a bit. “Suitable for hauling a…ah, well, about three or four hundred pounds.”
It takes willpower to turn around and reach for the bolt cutters. Putting his back to this guy creeps him the fuck out. But he measures out the chain length, cuts it off and brings it back.
“Thank you,” the man says, polite as a salesman. He sets down a couple bills, gathers his things, and goes.
***
The old shipping warehouse burns that night.
Half the town comes out to watch as the oily black smoke pours out to lie heavy over the town and the volunteer fire brigade bustles around pretty much uselessly. It smells fucking awful. It always smells awful, like something huge is rotting slowly in there even though mold and damp’s eaten holes in the planks and the inside looks empty except for a lot of old crates, rats and spiders. If anything, fire’s a cleansing influence here. They’re all happy to watch it go.
About five, ten minutes in there’s a hubbub around the side. A crowd starts massing there. Everybody’s rowdy. Sounds like somebody in there’s gotten sick. Tom squeezes his way in.
It’s the gaunt man from the store. He’s folded almost double, hunched over his knees, hacking and retching. His skin’s black with soot and dirt, and there’s some blood in there too, and he smells like rot and burning warehouse.
“He must’ve been in there,” says Darby from the barber’s shop.
The man pushes himself up, whimpering something that sounds like a man’s name—John? There’s just John Welch, and he’s the assessor, nobody’d call out to him like they thought he’d save them—and shoves something out from under him.
The hubbub turns into shouting and hollering because it’s not a what. It’s the Yardley’s kid. Their little boy who’s been missing for a week. The scarecrow shoves him a bit more, rolls him toward the closest person in the crowd. The boy flops and sobs, alive but too out of it to coordinate himself. He looks like he climbed out of a grave.
“Get him—” Cough. “His family, are they—?” Cough. With what’s visibly a supreme effort of will, the scrawny Brit gets out a whole sentence. “None of the others…were alive.” He points back toward the warehouse, where flames are now licking through what’s left of the roof.
Tom takes a few steps to the side, trying to see in, between everybody else jumping around and carrying on. It looks…kind of like the floor in there’s been dug up? There’s a heaping pile of something dark, silhouetted by the fire. He can’t make it out through the smoke.
When he turns back, the man’s gone.
***
The story comes out over the next couple days. It’s not the kind of secret a little town can keep—and besides, it wasn’t just their kids.
A lot of kids. Little bodies buried under the floor of that godforsaken warehouse. Only the Lord knows how long this horror’s been going on, let alone who was responsible.
They’ll find the rat bastard, everyone agrees. Whoever did this, they’ll send him straight to Hell where he belongs
But Wolfe, the oldest guy on the fire brigade, is an old friend of Tom’s. They’re at the bar late one night a few days after and Wolfe’s hitting the sauce like he means it. He cuts Tom a sharp look from the corner of his eye, and Tom would fucking swear he’s checking to see if Tom’s drunk enough for him to start talking.
“It wasn’t no man,” Wolfe says when he’s satisfied with what he sees.
Tom’s in the middle of a shot, which he downs in record time to keep from choking on it. “Come again?”
“There was a body in there, sure enough,” Wolfe says. There’s something in his voice that isn’t grim. Grim isn’t bleak enough. Disbelief maybe, or wishing he could. “Size of a small whale. Hadta be fifteen feet at least. Shaped like…” His hand starts shaking and he sets his glass down, too hard. Whiskey sloshes out. “Can’t say what it was shaped like. I don’t think there’s anything shaped like that. Wasn’t human, Tom.”
Tom stares. There’s a note in Wolfe’s voice like desperation. Hysteria even. From Wolfe.
“Wasn’t human, Tom!” Wolfe says again, like he’s begging. Like maybe Tom could fucking make it human if he just insisted hard enough. “It was burying those kids. It was burying them…” He crams a hand over his mouth. “It was dead. Praise fucking Jesus. Had a chain wrapped three times around its neck and locked to a pole. Strangled to death. I think. If it could breathe. Guess it…guess it must’ve, since…”
Tom picks up the bottle of Jack, contemplates it, and pours them both more. “There wasn’t a body, Wolfe.” That can’t be possible. Nobody in town could keep a secret like that, and besides… It’s fucking crazy.
“What do you think was on fire?” Wolfe grabs his booze, takes a swallow, and sets it down again, ignoring the slosh of liquid over the back of his hand. “I’m leaving soon. Moving away in a couple weeks. I can’t stay here and…and know I fucking saw what I saw and nobody’d ever believe me even if I told ‘em.”
For whatever reason, that’s when the scarecrow man pops back into Tom’s head, along with everything he’d bought that day. Just remembering those eyes puts an atavistic shiver down Tom’s spine. Inhuman. Uncanny.
Curled over a little kid’s body even though he’d been bleeding and there was barely anything of him, himself.
He downs another shot, and then sets the glass upside down on the table. “Well. Fuck. I believe you anyway.”