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But that girl was beyond my reach. The only Victoria I met was the later version, the one with the three comely children and the respectable title of Mrs. Hallett. I had stopped drinking by then, I had a job at the Bilt-Rite Clothing factory, and had reacquainted myself with razor blade and shaving soap. Given this veneer of respectability, she received me willingly enough. I told her who I was only because-if I am to be honest to the end-lying was not an option. I could see in the slight widening of her eyes that she had noted the resemblance.

Gee, but he was sweet, she said. And so crazy in love. Im sorry for Shan, too. She was a great gal. Its like a tragedy out of Shakespeare, isnt it?

Only she said it trad-a-gee, and after that I didnt go back to the Gallatin Street alley anymore, because for me Arlettes murder had poisoned even this blameless young Omaha matrons attempt at kindness. She thought Henry and Shannons deaths were like a trad-a-gee out of Shakespeare. She thought it was romantic. Would she still have thought so, I wonder, if she had heard my wife screaming her last from inside a blood-sodden burlap sack? Or glimpsed my sons eyeless, lipless face?

I held two jobs during my years in the Gateway City, also known as the City of Fools. You will say of course I held jobs; I would have been living on the street otherwise. But men more honest than I have continued drinking even when they want to stop, and men more decent than I have ended up sleeping in doorways. I suppose I could say that after my lost years, I made one more effort to live an actual life. There were times when I actually believed that, but lying in bed at night (and listening to the rats scampering in the walls-they have been my constant companions), I always knew the truth: I was still trying to win. Even after Henrys and Shannons deaths, even after losing the farm, I was trying to beat the corpse in the well. She and her minions.

John Hanrahan was the storage foreman at the Bilt-Rite factory. He didnt want to hire a man with only one hand, but I begged for a trial, and when I proved to him that I could pull a pallet fully loaded with shirts or overalls as well as any man on his payroll, he took me on. I hauled those pallets for 14 months, and often limped back to the boardinghouse where I was staying with my back and stump on fire. But I never complained, and I even found time to learn sewing. This I did on my lunch hour (which was actually 15 minutes long), and during my afternoon break. While the other men were out back on the loading dock, smoking and telling dirty jokes, I was teaching myself to sew seams, first in the burlap shipping bags we used, and then in the overalls that were the companys main stock-in-trade. I turned out to have a knack for it; I could even lay in a zipper, which is no mean skill on a garment assembly line. Id press my stump on the garment to hold it in place as my foot ran the electric treadle.

Sewing paid better than hauling, and it was easier on my back, but the Sewing Floor was dark and cavernous, and after four months or so I began to see rats on the mountains of freshly blued denim and hunkering in the shadows beneath the hand-trucks that first brought in the piecework and then rolled it out again.

On several occasions I called the attention of my co-workers to these vermin. They claimed not to see them. Perhaps they really did not. I think it far more likely that they were afraid the Sewing Floor might be temporarily closed down so the ratcatchers could come in and do their work. The sewing crew might have lost three days wages, or even a week. For men and women with families, that would have been catastrophic. It was easier for them to tell Mr. Hanrahan that I was seeing things. I understood. And when they began to call me Crazy Wilf? I understood that, too. It wasnt why I quit.

I quit because the rats kept moving in.

I had been putting a little money away, and was prepared to live on it while I looked for another job, but I didnt have to. Only three days after leaving Bilt-Rite, I saw an ad in the paper for a librarian at the Omaha Public Library-must have references or a degree. I had no degree, but I have been a reader my whole life, and if the events of 1922 taught me anything, it was how to deceive. I forged references from public libraries in Kansas City and Springfield, Missouri, and got the job. I felt sure Mr. Quarles would check the references and discover they were false, so I worked at becoming the best librarian in America, and I worked fast. When my new boss confronted me with my deception, I would simply throw myself on his mercy and hope for the best. But there was no confrontation. I held my job at the Omaha Public Library for four years. Technically speaking, I suppose I still hold it now, although I havent been there in a week and have not phoned in sick.

The rats, you see. They found me there, too. I began to see them crouched on piles of old books in the Binding Room, or scuttering along the highest shelves in the stacks, peering down at me knowingly. Last week, in the Reference Room, I pulled out a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for an elderly patron (it was Ra-St, which no doubt contains an entry for Rattus norvegicus, not to mention slaughterhouse) and saw a hungry gray-black face staring out at me from the vacant slot. It was the rat that bit off poor Acheloiss teat. I dont know how that could be-Im sure I killed it-but there was no doubt. I recognized it. How could I not? There was a scrap of burlap, bloodstained burlap, caught in its whiskers.

Snood!

I brought the volume of Britannica to the old lady who had requested it (she wore an ermine stole, and the things little black eyes regarded me bleakly). Then I simply walked out. I wandered the streets for hours, and eventually came here, to the Magnolia Hotel. And here I have been ever since, spending the money I have saved as a librarian-which doesnt matter any longer-and writing my confession, which does. I One of them just nipped me on the ankle. As if to say Get on with it, times almost up. A little blood has begun to stain my sock. It doesnt disturb me, not in the slightest. I have seen more blood in my time; in 1922 there was a room filled with it.

And now I think I hear is it my imagination?

No.

Someone has come visiting.

I plugged the pipe, but the rats still escaped. I filled in the well, but she also found her way out. And this time I dont think shes alone. I think I hear two sets of shuffling feet, not just one. Or Three? Is it three? Is the girl who would have been my daughter-in-law in a better world with them as well?

I think she is. Three corpses shuffling up the hall, their faces (what remains of them) disfigured by rat-bites, Arlettes cocked to one side as well by the kick of a dying cow.

Another bite on the ankle.

And another!

How the management would Ow! Another. But they wont have me. And my visitors wont, either, although now I can see the doorknob turning and I can smell them, the remaining flesh hanging on their bones giving off the stench of slaughtered slaught

The gun god where is the stop

From the Omaha World-Herald, April 14th, 1930

Bizarre Scene Greets Hotel Security Man

The body of Wilfred James, a librarian at the Omaha Public Library, was found in a local hotel on Sunday when efforts by hotel staff to contact him met with no response. The resident of a nearby room had complained of a smell like bad meat, and a hotel chambermaid reported hearing muffled shouting or crying, like a man in pain late Friday afternoon.

After knocking repeatedly and receiving no response, the hotels Chief of Security used his pass-key and discovered the body of Mr. James, slumped over the rooms writing desk. I saw a pistol and assumed he had shot himself, the security man said, but no-one had reported a gunshot, and there was no smell of expended powder. When I checked the gun, I determined it was a badly maintained.25, and not loaded.

By then, of course, I had seen the blood. I have never seen anything like that before, and never want to again. He had bitten himself all over-arms, legs, ankles, even his toes. Nor was that all. It was clear he had been busy with some sort of writing project, but he had chewed up the paper, as well. It was all over the floor. It looked like paper does when rats chew it up to make their nests. In the end, he chewed his own wrists open. I believe thats what killed him. He certainly must have been deranged.

Little is known of Mr. James at this writing. Ronald Quarles, the head librarian at the Omaha Public Library, took Mr. James on in late 1926. He was obviously down on his luck, and handicapped by the loss of a hand, but he knew his books and his references were good, Quarles said. He was collegial but distant. I believe he had been doing factory work before applying for a position here, and he told people that before losing his hand, he had owned a small farm in Hemingford County.

The World-Herald is interested in the unfortunate Mr. James, and solicits information from any readers who may have known him. The body is being held at the Omaha County Morgue, pending disposition by next of kin. If no next of kin appears, said Dr. Tattersall, the Morgues Chief Medical Officer, I suppose he will be buried in public ground.

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Tess accepted twelve compensated speaking engagements a year, if she could get them. At twelve hundred dollars each, that came to over fourteen thousand dollars. It was her retirement fund. She was still happy enough with the Willow Grove Knitting Society after twelve books, but didnt kid herself that she could go on writing them until she was in her seventies. If she did, what would she find at the bottom of the barrel? The Willow Grove Knitting Society Goes to Terre Haute? The Willow Grove Knitting Society Visits the International Space Station? No. Not even if the ladies book societies who were her mainstay read them (and they probably would). No.

So she was a good little squirrel, living well on the money her books brought in but putting away acorns for the winter. Each year for the last ten she had put between twelve and sixteen thousand dollars into her money market fund. The total wasnt as high as she might have wished, thanks to the gyrations of the stock market, but she told herself that if she kept on plugging, shed probably be all right; she was the little engine that could. And she did at least three events each year gratis to salve her conscience. That often annoying organ should not have troubled her about taking honest money for honest work but sometimes it did. Probably because running her gums and signing her name didnt fit the concept of work as she had been raised to understand it.

Other than an honorarium of at least twelve hundred dollars, she had one other requirement: that she be able to drive to the location of her lecture, with not more than one overnight stop on the way to or from. This meant she rarely went farther south than Richmond or farther west than Cleveland. One night in a motel was tiring but acceptable; two made her useless for a week. And Fritzy, her cat, hated keeping house by himself. This he made clear when she came home, twining between her feet on the stairs and often making promiscuous use of his claws when he sat in her lap. And although Patsy McClain from next door was very good about feeding him, he rarely ate much until Tess came home.

It wasnt that she was afraid of flying, or hesitant about billing the organizations that engaged her for travel expenses just as she billed them for her motel rooms (always nice, never elegant). She just hated it: the crowding, the indignity of the full-body scans, the way the airlines now had their hands out for what used to be free, the delays and the inescapable fact that you were not in charge. That was the worst. Once you went through the interminable security checkpoints and were allowed to board, you had put your most valuable possession-your life-into the hands of strangers.

Of course that was also true on the turnpikes and interstates she almost always used when she traveled, a drunk could lose control, jump the median strip, and end your life in a head-on collision (they would live; the drunks, it seemed, always did), but at least when she was behind the wheel of her car, she had the illusion of control. And she liked to drive. It was soothing. She had some of her best ideas when she was on cruise control with the radio off.

I bet you were a long-haul trucker in your last incarnation, Patsy McClain told her once.

Tess didnt believe in past lifetimes, or future ones for that matter-in metaphysical terms, she thought what you saw was pretty much what you got-but she liked the idea of a life where she was not a small woman with an elfin face, a shy smile, and a job writing cozy mysteries, but a big guy with a big hat shading his sunburned brow and grizzled cheeks, letting a bulldog hood ornament lead him along the million roads that crisscrossed the country. No need to carefully match her clothes before public appearances in that life; faded jeans and boots with side-buckles would do. She liked to write, and she didnt mind public speaking, but what she really liked to do was drive. After her Chicopee appearance, this struck her as funny but not funny in a way that made you laugh. No, not that kind of funny at all. 2 -

The invitation from Books amp; Brown Baggers filled her requirements perfectly. Chicopee was hardly more than sixty miles from Stoke Village, the engagement was to be a daytime affair, and the Three Bs were offering an honorarium of not twelve but fifteen hundred dollars. Plus expenses, of course, but those would be minimal-not even a stay at a Courtyard Suites or a Hampton Inn. The query letter came from one Ramona Norville, who explained that, although she was the head librarian at the Chicopee Public Library, she was writing in her capacity as President of Books amp; Brown Baggers, which put on a noon lecture each month. People were encouraged to bring their lunches, and the events were very popular. Janet Evanovich had been scheduled for October 12th, but had been forced to cancel because of a family matter-a wedding or a funeral, Ramona Norville wasnt sure which.

I know this is short notice, Ms. Norville said in her slightly wheedling final paragraph, but Wikipedia says you live in neighboring Connecticut, and our readers here in Chicopee are such fans of the Knitting Society gals. You would have our undying gratitude as well as the above-mentioned honorarium.