Original Scary Fiction
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Street People
by Mary Masterilli
(Originally published under the pen name M. C. Masters)
Copyright 1996 All rights reserved
He was sleeping like the dead when Karen first saw him.
It was dusk in the city. Stale summer air heavy with the smells of urine, garbage, car exhaust. Skyscrapers lining the street like broken teeth, blocking out the stars. The sounds of traffic, the wailing of distant sirens. Street people.
At first glance he looked like every other homeless person crowding these dirty sidewalks. Bearded, filthy, wrapped in layers of worn blankets and old, discarded newspapers. Karen passed his kind every day with hardly a glance. Funny how she never really saw them, she thought, until they were in her face, begging for handouts - or now, sprawled on the bus stop's only bench, taking both seats. She wondered tiredly how many commuters were standing tonight.
Whose city is it? she thought.
She was exhausted. She was eager to get home, to the suburbs, away from this squalid city. She'd just finished her shift at the clinic: twelve hours of stab wounds and gunshots and drug abuse and VD and, "Nurse, would you clean up the vomit in the exam room?" She was filled with a sudden, irrational anger at this man, this poor, filthy wretch whose only home was a concrete bench. Where was her compassion? Had she left it at work?
The man groaned, mumbling in his sleep.
Karen studied him closely. Tired as she was, she felt compelled to stand there, watching the rise and fall of his chest, listening to his dream-talk, hoping to understand him a little. She moved around the bench for a better view, forgetting her anger, curious now.
The man slept on. Seen close, he was gaunt, fortyish, with a mop of dark hair and a grizzled beard, and skin the color of a jungle at night. He smelled of the jungle too: fetid, fertile. He was wrapped in what looked like a wool blanket, though it had to be 80 degrees outside. There were newspapers, yellow and faded, covering his legs. He whispered something just below hearing.
Karen leaned closer, listening. With her ear practically pressed against his cheek, she could smell his breath, a flammable mixture of alcohol and rotting teeth. She was no longer curious. What was there to understand? It seemed perfectly clear who this man was, how he'd sunk so low, what he was all about.
She stood and backed away.
The sleeper moaned again, softly. A gentle wind blew from the west, rustling the papers that covered his legs - and it was then, in a moment of frozen time, in the blink of an eye, that Karen saw his feet. Thick, cloven, ivory. Hooves!
Karen's scream did not wake the bum from his sleep.
# # # # #
The staff of the High Street Health Center had their own theories about the homeless.
"They can't be helped," Dr. Gardner said simply.
Nancy, the night nurse, said they were morally weak. She called them all drug addicts and schizophrenics.
The social worker, Julie, called them 'free spirits' and compared them to the early American hobo, who had a rich culture, she said, complete with its own language and customs.
Karen listened skeptically, unsure of herself. She was over the shock of the previous night, having told herself that she did not see what she saw. Surely her eyes had played tricks on her brain. There had to be a logical explanation, she told herself. Men with hooves did not walk the earth as she knew it. But she wasn't convinced, not at all.
George, the orderly, said, "Fuckin' street people, they oughta be deported. Ship 'em off to they own island, I say."
Karen shared some of his anger. "They are a nuisance, aren't they?"
"They's a plague," George said. "Human waste products."
"I'm afraid the city agrees with you."
"Damn right," George said. "Street people got no self-respect. You can't help 'em, either. People gives 'em handouts, builds shelters, even puts on benefit concerts - an' what do the street folk do? They shits on the sidewalk, that's what! Fuckin' animals. They got no place here."
Whose city is it?
"I tell you sumthin' else," George went on. "I had my way, they'd all be shot."
"That wouldn't solve the problem," Karen said. "There would be others."
"Don't matter," George said, " 'cos I refuses to see 'em. They don't even exist."
But they were everywhere, Karen saw. In alleys, doorways, in cardboard boxes, rooting through dumpsters, huddled under the arches at City Hall. There were children, too. Children! Karen made herself look at them, their small, dirty faces and hungry stares. It was as if her eyes were open for the very first time, and having opened them, she could never close them again.
She envied George.
Her dreams were becoming malignant. The faces of children haunted her sleep. In her dreams, they would cling to their mothers - addicts, whores - who carelessly tossed them away to be trod upon by strangers. The puddles they left, tears mixed with baby fat, were washed away by the rains. Twice Karen woke up screaming.
Her efforts to reach them proved futile, but still she tried. She would seek out the homeless in their hiding places and tell them about the clinic, tell them it was free, they were welcome any time. They all said the same things, "Go away," and "Leave us alone."
She wasn't discouraged. She was learning, understanding, more and more. They were a paranoid group, for instance. They did not trust uniforms, didn't want medical attention. Too many people had tried to "help" them already. But Karen found ways around this obstacle. She would leave parcels - food, medicine, clothing - where they could be found by those who needed them. She was proud of her efforts. The nightmares went away.
It was early autumn, late September, when the roundups began.
It started weeks before with a well-publicized incident that made headlines in all the local papers. It involved a tourist and his family, an English magistrate on holiday, who was mugged right in front of City Hall, in front of his children, by what he described as a "psychotic maniac with a knife." The maniac was homeless, as it turned out, and his crime sparked a public outcry. The mayor's office logged more than two thousand calls that week. People were sick and tired of having their streets used as a toilet. Store-owners were losing customers. Businesses were leaving the city. The Powers that Be started talking about an 'image problem.'
The mayor responded by ordering a roundup of the homeless population - for their own safety, of course. Winter was coming, after all. It wouldn't do to have the streets littered with the frozen corpses of its forgotten citizens.
So it was that Karen found herself standing on the steps of City Hall, watching the roundup of the street people she now had names for. There was Spider, Einstein, Elf, the Marlboro Man with his cowboy hat and cigarette. There was Paul Bunyon, his sidekick Babe, Tiger Lily, Jezebel, Cousin It, the Unnamable - and Hoof, her friend from the bus stop. They were being loaded into police vans, and although they outnumbered the cops five to one, they did not resist.
Karen wanted to scream. Why couldn't they all learn to live together?
She couldn't just stand there. Anger gave vent to action, and she raced through the crowd of spectators, fighting her way past the police barricade, where she grabbed one of the officers by the arm. "Where are you taking them?"
The cop shoved her back behind the line.
"Where are you taking them?" Karen demanded. She had visions of genocide, mass extermination, helpless sheep. The cop turned hardened eyes on her. "There's nothing to worry about, ma'am."
"Are they under arrest?"
"Nobody's being arrested," the cop said impatiently. "We're taking them to the shelter on Mission Street. Three hots and a cot, lady. The rest of us should have it so easy."
Another van, filled to capacity, pulled off down the street, lights strobing. The crowd erupted into wild cheers, glad to see them go, to be rid of the constant reminder that not everyone was as fortunate as they. A few sober faces dotted the crowd, a few guilty looks, but the overwhelming mood was one of victory, the battle won.
Defeated, Karen turned to leave. Sparing a final look at the police vans, she saw a face she recognized from work. It was George, the orderly. In handcuffs!
What the hell...?
She ran toward him, shoving others aside. "George!" she called. "What are you doing here?" She confronted the cops. "I know this man."
They were not impressed.
Karen watched as George was helped into the waiting van. George with his hair hanging in greasy strings, wearing tattered clothes, looking like he hadn't bathed in a week.
"What happened to you?" she asked.
The man who thought the homeless should be shipped off to their own island, the man who, given a choice, would shoot them all, looked at her blandly and said, "Leave us alone."
# # # # #
Bill Myers, the psychiatric intern, told Karen she was working too hard. She seemed... well, driven lately. She was going to burn herself out at this rate. He was becoming concerned about her health.
"I tell you," she said, "that was George Copton, the male orderly, I saw."
"George quit his job."
"What?"
"He just resigned, no notice, no good-byes." Bill shrugged. "He just cleaned out his locker and left."
"Where did he go?"
"He didn't say." Karen shivered, suddenly cold. "He's one of them," she whispered.
Bill wore a worried frown. "Your concern for the homeless is commendable, but you have to stop pushing yourself. You're coming unglued. You're beginning to sound like one of my patients."
He was right, of course. It was time to put this business behind her. She would never, not in a million years, understand these people - and so what? She could live with that. She could leave the city, find work in the suburbs, closer to home, and never have to see another street person as long as she lived.
So Karen got on with her life, no wiser than before.
Others began to disappear.
It happened slowly, at first. There was old Mr. Schwartz, who ran the delicatessen across from the clinic. He'd been a widower for years, no children to inherit the business. One day he simply closed up shop. The sign said "Closed," but the place looked abandoned, the floor unswept, meat left rotting in the display cases. Days later, Karen saw him in the park, talking to the jittery one, Spider. She recalled how Mr. Schwartz had always fought with him, chasing him from his store with a broom, dumping cold water on him. Now they were talking like old friends.
Then there was Flora Gambone, who owned the boutique where Karen often shopped. Her daughter, now working the register, said she'd moved back home, to Italy. She was, in fact, living in a cardboard crate under the freeway overpass on Front Street. She was pushing a cart full of aluminum cans when Karen last saw her.
There were others, too. The blond teller from the First Trust Bank. Josh, the stockboy at Lunney's Market. The retired Army Colonel who used to walk his dog, Bonnet, by the clinic each morning. All of them living on the streets now, used-up and lost-looking.
Karen was deeply disturbed. Nothing made sense! What was driving these seemingly average people to leave their homes, their businesses, their families? Would she be next?
Bill Myers said, "It's the economy." He said businesses were closing every day, millions of people losing everything they'd worked for all their lives. He wasn't surprised to hear about Mr. Schwartz, or Flora, or even young Josh. He found it surprising there weren't more people living in the street.
She was on her own, she realized. If she told anyone her fears, they would laugh at her, or think her insane. Yet she couldn't ignore the facts. Almost daily there were new disappearances, quiet, unwitnessed, never talked about. Events were closing in around her. She had to act.
There was one man who had the answers.
# # # # #
It was the longest five blocks she'd ever walked. They were with her, all the way down High Street, watching from the shadows, from alleys, rooftops, from doorways; marking her progress with lifeless eyes that shone dully in the evening gloom. She heard Them whispering to each other. She saw Their signs, crude drawings on the sides of buildings, on lampposts - at the bus stop.
He waited there.
His beard crawled with unseen life. He wore a dark green overcoat that bulged in strange places, tumor-like. He turned at Karen's approach and jabbed a finger at her.
She froze.
Hoof gave her a smile like icicles in Hell. "Go away," he said.
His lips curled into a sneer, revealing pink, wet gums. 'I must be crazy,' Karen thought. "I'm not leaving until you answer some questions," she said.
Hoof regarded her lazily, as a hawk regards a mouse.
"Who are you?" Karen asked.
His feet were covered, the bandages torn, leaving gaps where callused flesh showed through, taut and shiny. "Go away," he repeated.
Karen gulped air, drawing strength from the night. "Answer me, damnit! Who are you?"
The street man stared, deaf and uncaring.
"Tell me!" she cried. "What have you done? What's happening to everyone?"
"Read the signs," Hoof said, and would say no more.
Karen did. For the next two hours she walked the streets, searching out the carved figures, the chalk and paint and crayon markings, product of countless invisible hands. At Lunney's Market, the deli, the bank, Mrs. Gambone's boutique, City Hall. The signs were the same: a stick figure with its hands in the air. A man held at gunpoint.
Slowly their meaning dawned on her.
The enemy lives here.
Mr. Schwartz and his broom. Mrs. Gambone, who hurled curses in her native Italian and wielded a baseball bat like a pro. Young Josh, the stockboy, who once bragged of robbing a homeless man of his shoes. The bank teller who could never spare a dime. The orderly, George. They had all mistreated the homeless. Now, one by one, they disappeared.
Karen raced down the street, fighting hysteria. The shock of discovery had quickened her blood, sent her running back to the clinic in pure adrenaline flight. She stopped outside the door, numb and breathless.
The sign was there. It might have been drawn by a child, so crude was its form. A man drawn in crayon, arms in the air, no legs or hands. It looked out of place among the swastikas and gang names and messages of hate.
Karen went home to the suburbs, leaving the city to its heirs.
# # # # #
It was all over the news:
Wide-angle shot of the homeless shelter on Mission Street, the lady reporter frowning, clearly disturbed, surrounded by unwashed masses of humanity, calling it a crisis unlike anything the city had ever faced. The homeless population had soared to unheard-of proportions, nearly doubling in the preceding six months. The mayor had appointed a special task force to study the problem and recommend actions. The best minds in the country were focused on this 'perplexing tragedy.'
Karen turned down the volume. It didn't seem real, watching it on television. War, famine, plagues, homelessness; these were things that happened to other people in other cities. It was hard to appreciate the impact of a tragedy in just two dimensions on a 19-inch TV screen.
Karen turned off the set. Her gaze drifted to the window, out across the lawn, and beyond, to the parking lot, where Hoof and a dozen friends were bedded down for the night, drinking noisily from a paper bag and urinating on Mr. Boyle's cherished rose bushes. Mr. Boyle, who lived in 303, had complained bitterly to the management. Like others who had argued with their new neighbors, he soon joined their ranks. It was a large apartment complex. Many units stood empty.
There was a knock at the door.
Karen opened it a crack, peered out. It was a man she'd never seen before.
He pointed to the sign on her mailbox. The sign was a cat, drawn with great care and attention to detail, befitting the woman who lived here. Kind-hearted woman, it announced to the world. Karen smiled, throwing the door wide open.
The man held out his hand.