July 8, 2003

George is ninety years old, but that doesn’t stop him from drinking his way through a forty-ouncer of brandy a week.

He’s a master barber. I’ve been coming here for years and I wouldn’t trust anyone else to cut my hair or give me a shave with a straight razor.

Even when he is drunk.

The barber shop is empty this morning, but it’ll be full on the weekend. With it being summer, a lot of guys will be coming through to get their summer cuts. Most of them high school jocks getting their brush cuts.

With a last few snips of his shears, George finishes up. He sweeps the excess hair off my shoulders and brushes some talc powder into the nape of my neck.
I check my reflection in the mirror.
Once again, a perfect haircut.

A shave and a haircut cost ten bucks. George has never had any use for a cash register, doing all his transaction from a tarnished brass money clip.
I pluck a bill out of my wallet and it disappears into his pocket. He never even looks at it.
George is old school. Trusting.
I jip him with a five.

He never remembers who I am anyway.

I’m leaving on a consulting gig out in Denver in a couple of days and I’ll need the extra money. The pay is decent, but I won’t see a penny of it until the job’s done. Standard contract. Keeps me in smokes, bourbon and whores for a couple of months - if I indulge sparingly.

I’ve never been to Colorado. Maybe I’ll pick up one of those disposable cameras.

“Bye, George. See you next time” I say as I grab my coat.

He lifts his arm in a weak wave as he shuffles back to his chair in the corner. He doesn’t even give me a second glance.

I look over at Robert. The old redbone turns his big brown, wet eyes towards me. “You too, boy” I say.

He lets out the faintest whine and his tail flicks a couple of times before he shifts his head to a more comfortable position between his paws.

Out of the corner of my eye I spot Martin. He’s peeking in the window, right at the edge where he won’t be noticed.

I knew he was there about fifteen minutes ago when Robert perked up and gave a half hearted woof to let us know that Martin was back.

The brass bell above the door chimes as I open it and step out into the late morning sun. It chimes again as the door closes behind me.

It’s already warm and the sky is a pale blue. Only a few clouds can be seen off in the distance, hovering over the lake.
A perfect start to a perfect summer day.

I shrug on my coat and fish through the pockets Martin’s still looking into George’s Barber Shop window, not yet realizing that I’m standing here.
Finding my Rothmans, I pull a cigarette.
Only three left.

I hate disposable lighters. They never light on the first try. I hold up the clear orange plastic and see that it’s still more than half full.

After thumbing the wheel and shaking it a dozen times, it finally catches.
I’m going to have to get myself a new Zippo soon. One day I’m going to need to light something fast, and it won’t light. Then I’m going to get killed. All because of some piece of shit disposable.

“Hello, Martin.”

He never answers me the first time.

“Hello, Martin." I say again.

He turns towards me, his eyes staring vacantly, lost deep in the bog of his own thoughts. His face, haggard with years of hard living on the street, is plotted out like a road map. Looking at him, I could clearly see every abuse he ever survived, every tear he ever shed, every heartache he ever suffered; just as easily as I can read the sign in George’s window.

After a moment, his eyes refocus and he sees me. “Hello, Harvey.”

“How are you today?” I ask.

His eyes flick to the cigarette hanging off my lips. “I could really use a smoke.” he chews nervously at his split lip.

“You know I can’t do that. Besides, I only have three left.” I hold the pack up for him to see.

Martin moves closer and I exhale a lungful of smoke in his direction.
Inhaling deeply, he closes his eyes and savors it. Years slough away. He looks at least a decade younger.

When he opens his eyes the misery comes splashing out again, spilling down his face, soaking his ugly mug with sadness. But at least now he’s more lucid now.

“Have you seen the Angry Man?” I ask.

Martin’s attention span is short.
Like goldfish short.
I have to get to the point fast before he loses interest. I can already see him drifting.

“Martin. Focus!”
I snap my fingers to get his attention. He jumps at the noise, and a stormy look passes over his face, hinting at an untapped fury lying just beneath the surface.

They say you shouldn’t do that. That it’s not wise to agitate them. I’ve never been much on etiquette.

Martin’s been living on the streets for as long as I’ve known him. Probably longer. I have no idea who he is, or why he keeps hanging around George’s, but he always has information I want.

“Martin, have you seen the Angry Man?” I repeat the question. Slower this time, with exaggerated articulation, like I’m talking to a retard.

He hesitates. Closing his eyes and cocking his head to the side. He’s listening to something. I strain to hear it, but I get nothing.
Nodding, he opens his eyes.

“Yes. He has come back. He’s looking for something.”

Martin is always cryptic.

“Where is he?”

“Sherman Textiles.”

I know the place - old textile factory on the north side.
Abandoned. Spooky.
Great.

“Thanks, Martin,” I say, “I’ll see you later.”

But Martin is already turning away, forgetting about me. He moves back to the edge of the building to resume his vigil, peering in the window.

Inside, George pours himself another brandy.

* * * * *

Before I head out to kick ass and take names, I make sure my incentive is still there.
I find a payphone and make a call.

I used to have the number written down on the back of a worn business card from some window cleaning company, but I’ve called it so often that it’s burned into my brain. I doubt even Alzheimer’s could bleach it out.

The number belongs to one Mildred Adlington of Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Mildred is eighty four years old and a widow. Her late husband, Eugene Adlington was a plumber by trade. She has no known relatives.

After the fourth ring a man’s voice answers, “Hello?”

“Hello, Norman. How’s your mother?” I recite the code.

There’s a pause. He’s going over the short list of people that would call this number and use the code.

“Harvey” Norman says when he recognizes my voice. I can tell he’s sneering.

Norman’s a bit of an asshole, so I try not to talk to him longer than I need to. He’s my union rep and the guy that mails me my checks. As much as it irks me, I have to act somewhat civil.

“What have you got on file about the Angry Man?” I ask getting right to the point.

I can hear a keyboard chattering away on the other end, then, “Case File 030206 or Case File 080302?”

“080302.” I say. “Wait.” That’s weird. “There’s two Angry Men?”

“Texas and Ohio” Norman replies after reading the specs.

“Could it be the same entity?” I ask, breaking my own rule about chatting it up.

“Negative.”

I leave it at that, but ask, “Are the files closed or active?”

“Both are active.”

“Good. I’m dealing with the Ohio case tonight. I’ll look at the Texas file later.”

A minute passes as Norman updates something on his end. “Confirmed.”
With that, the phone clicks as Norman disconnects.

See? Asshole.

* * * * *

The Angry Man.
This city’s greatest urban legend.

For fifteen years the Angry Man has been carving through the city like it was his own personal pig factory. Bodies piled higher. The gutters swelled with blood. There was an infinite supply of livestock, and no one knew where he would strike next.

Originally he was dubbed the Rainbow Killer. All the early victims had been fags.
The police vowed to apprehend him within days. But a year later the body count was still on the rise. He was impossible to track. The murders were all over the board.

There was no pattern.
A High school basketball player, a kid with cerebral palsy, some bored house wife and her dyke lover, a Mafioso (that one started a small war all on its own), an assortment of regular Joes, petty criminals, a good cross section of the minority groups and even a few local celebrities ended up entombed within the foundation of his skyscraping infamy.

There have never been any witnesses. Reliable witnesses that is. Forensics never found a thing. Even the killer’s gender remained unconfirmed.
Except that Martin said ‘he’.

And Martin is never wrong.

The Angry Man was the perfect serial killer. He would kill and then go underground. Vanish. He never tried to contact the press. No motives. No demands. No gloating. Even when the authorities tried to play on the killer’s ego, goading him out, he remained silent, unflappable, and infuriating.

The killer is a ghost; some kind of murderous spirit.
What else could he be? The more I heard the stories, the more sense it made.

* * * * *

Back in the day, Sherman Textiles employed over six hundred people and was a cornerstone of the city’s industrial future. That was before the capitalist pigs discovered sweat shops and that child labor laws in the Far East were loosey-goosey.

Today, it’s nothing more than desiccated shell.

The walls are stained with a century’s worth of pollution. Where patches of the surface have eroded away, the original red clay of the brick can be seen underneath.
Soulless windows glare out hatefully, their shattered panes like a thousand black eyes.

Spider’s eyes.

I case the building from my car, parking down the road so I don’t attract any unwanted attention. It’s late and the streets are quiet. Except for that one asshole in his tricked out Civic and the thumping boom box.

I check my watch.
2am.
Time to go to work.

I make my way around the perimeter of the lot looking for a way in.
This place is huge.
Too many places to hide.
There are about a half dozen buildings on the property. They are spread out, leaving vast stretches of open ground in between. The buildings weren’t all built at the same time. Variations in the design of the windows, or the sizes and type of brick, and even the wood used in the door frames tell a story that easily spans thirty years.

A fifteen foot high chain link fence keeps everyone out. Neighborhood delinquents have kicked a gap in the fence, wide enough for me to crawl through.

On the other side, I find myself knee deep in a field. If it isn’t for the crunch of the asphalt under my feet, I could have sworn I was walking through an African savanna. Aside from the occasional breeze rustling through the dry grass, the night is silent. There’s something unsettling about this place. Something thick and oppressive weighs heavy in the air. It reminds me of the somberness of a battlefield.

A delivery truck with a skin of rust leans up against a wall, dead for over forty years. Corpses of jagged and unrecognizable machines lay disintegrating where they had fallen, their own bodies doubling as grave markers.

With my eyes adjusting to the darkness, I can start picking out details in the dark. Out on the street there was enough light to see clearly, but back here I am working with only a sliver of moonlight.

I’m nervous. The butterflies in my stomach are fluttering something fierce.

I can actually feel my heart thumping against the inside of my chest, pounding desperately to get out and make a run for it.

Every shadow, every yawning doorway, every fathomless window holds some sort of coiled threat waiting to lunge out and flay the meat from my bones. I make sure to keep as far away from those as possible.

All the first floor windows on the main building had been bricked over. The doors had at one point been sealed with boards, but have since been torn out.
Getting in is not a problem.

Drawing my gun, I pick an entrance and make my way towards it.

Fear gnaws at the fringes of my consciousness. Up until now I haven’t committed to anything. Out here, with at least fifty different directions in which to run, I don’t feel trapped. Once inside, my chances of survival will drop severely.

I reach the doorway and flatten myself against the wall right next to it. Fighting the urge to just turn around and run out of here, I force myself to calm down.
Deep breaths.
Using the diaphragm.
It really works.
I hold my breath and listen. There’s a monster waiting to claw my face off just a step or two beyond the threshold. The pumping blood drumming loudly in my ear is making it difficult for me to hear him, but I know he’s there.

I get my flashlight out of my coat pocket and test it; a quick on and off to make sure its working.

Taking a slow, deep breath to steady myself, I flick it back on and bring my gun in line with the beam.

I’ve watched Mulder do this all the time.

With the gun pointing directly where I shine the light, I go in. That first step is always the hardest. But I plunge through anyway. Waving the light around like a maniac, I slice at the darkness with the weak beam.

Nothing.
No werewolf.
This time.

With the beachhead secure, I pause and go into my yoga breathing exercises again.
I am in a foyer of sorts. Directly to my left is a closed metal door. I move towards it and check the push-bar. It’s not locked. The door opens a crack and the building exhales a breath of musty air. Beyond I see nothing but pitch black.

I’m not ready to commit to that quite yet, so I let the door settle back into place with an audible, metallic thud. I wince at the deafening sound.

A set of narrow stairs leads up to the second floor. That’s where I’ll check first. Mainly because there are windows up there and it’s bound to be better lit. Even if it is only ambient light, I’ll be able to screw up some courage before moving into the guts of the factory later.

* * * * *

My shoes scrap on the stairs as I crush all sorts of rubbish with every climbing step.
At the top I pause to peek around the corner.

Another door.

This one has a window in it. I’m not at all surprised that it too, has been broken. I decide to move through the door as quickly as possible. I’ve already made enough noise to rouse a city block, so I best assume that the Angry Man knows I’m here.

This door opens towards me. Stepping through, I find myself in the factory’s administrative offices - the managerial helm.

The room is a disaster.
What little furniture was left behind had been destroyed. Wooden desks were shattered, filing cabinets dented and twisted, and walls punched full of holes. The sizes varied according to what was thrown at them.

Glass covers every square inch of the floor and the noise I’m making walking across it is horrendous.

I clear the area, checking each small office that lines the outside walls on either side.
Two doors, one at each end, lead off into other parts of the factory. The one to the east opens up into a storage area. Heavy shelves, skeletal in their emptiness, are built from thick wood to hold the weight of hundreds of massive bolts of fabric.

I sweep the room quickly. It’s clear.

Beyond the western door, broken windows line both sides of the room for at least fifty yards before a concrete block wall breaks up the space. A double wide, double high opening provides egress into the next section. The factor is segmented like this all the way through. There are five sections in total.

Skinny steel pillars support the sagging roof overhead. I flash the light up into the rafters every so often, hoping I won’t see anything leering back down at me.

There isn’t much debris on the floors in here, but my footsteps still echo loudly on the thick wood planking.

Hulking iron monstrosities slumber everywhere. They had been created to modernize and mechanize the labor force, transforming it into a highly productive and cost-effective fabric manufacturing super-power.

These machines, once apex predators, are now nothing more than dead dinosaurs, fossilizing in the tars of antiquity.

Clearing every nook and cranny of these workshops is tedious. However, if I plan on staying alive, so I will need to be thorough.

Starting with the nearest machine, I examine every inch of it, shining my flashlight into ever gap, looking for anything even mildly irritated.

I wait for something to startle me, like a rat or a raccoon or something harmless like that. You see it happen on TV all the time. Unlike on TV, I plan on shooting it, regardless of how cute or harmless it is. On TV, this is when everyone seems to relax and drop their guard.
Not me.
I’m as jumpy as a Catholic altar boy.

* * * * *

I search the length and width of the upper level, finding no sign of the Angry Man. It takes me well over an hour to scour every corner. Each passing moment brings me closer and closer to the inevitable – I will have to go downstairs and search the entire first floor.
In the dark.

Right down to the core of my being, I know that going down there is nothing but insanity.

This is why I get turned down for life insurance.

* * * * *

I push the metal door and it swings open. Leading with my flashlight and gun, I go in.

The darkness eats my light.

Not for the first, I find myself wishing I went to art school.
Or became a crossing guard.

Something simple where things don’t try to kill me.

The door closes behind me under it own weight. The echo of its slam rolls off into the blackness all around me.

My flashlight barely illuminates anything. I might as well try to melt snow with it. When I go buy myself a new Zippo, I’m going to get a new flashlight as well. From the little that I can see, the place looks as if was hit by a tornado at least a hundred times. Not unlike upstairs. But you can only break something so many times before it just becomes stupid.

Columns, this time made of brick, held up the second floor. Black iron pipes, as dry as corpse veins, snake along the ceiling. The concrete floor is cracked and caked with filth.

Like upstairs, machines take up much of the space. Down here, however, they look in much worse shape.

I search for about half an hour without finding anything or anyone.

The Angry Man isn’t home.

He’s probably out butchering another random victim. Which, unlike for the victim, this works out in my favor.

The air in here is stifling. I’m getting sweaty and the heat is making me cranky. I decide to find a nice dark corner and wait patiently for him to come back. When he shows up, I’ll sneak up behind him and drop him with a bullet.
The plan is fool proof.
Too bad it all goes to shit.

* * * * *

A second ago there was nothing behind me.
Then there is.

I don’t hear it; just feel it. That’s what I hate most about ghosts. They can do shit like that.

With lightning fast reflexes, I spin around and fire. He’s so close that I have to take a quick half step back and fire more or less from the hip.

Usually bullets don’t have any effect on ghosts, but these are special bullets. I bought them from a magician. These expensive little beauties will tear through ghosts like they were made up of ordinary flesh and blood.

My revolver roars, washing the Angry Man in a blast of muzzle fire. I hit the bastard dead center.

He grunts.

Odd.

Ghosts don’t grunt.

For a second there I thought I had just shot Martin. But I knew that was impossible.
I need to double check.

So I pull the trigger again.

The flash lights up his face and now that I’m paying attention, I can see for certain that it’s not Martin.
I breathe a sigh of relief.

A filet knife falls from the Angry Man’s hand and clatters on the floor.
I remember the flashlight and bring the beam up into his face. A real person’s face. Not a ghost’s.

I just shot a real person.

Twice.

All kinds of crazy thoughts race through my head. Should I run? Should I apologize? Should I shoot him again?

A moment ago, in the light of the muzzle flash, his face was twisted into a mask of pure hatred. Now, the hate is gone, replaced by a calm sadness.

Tears well in his eyes and spill over, leaving long clean rivulets down his grimy cheeks.
I watch his eyes carefully. He looks around at the darkness, at times focusing on something I can’t see, and a smile tweaks the corners of his mouth. I consider turning and looking, but I’m a natural born cynic and I don’t trust him.

His eyes pass over me and just when I think they would find something else in the darkness, instead, they lock onto mine.

This time a smile does crack his face. And in a voice that is not accustomed to speaking, says, “Thank you.”

His eyes flutter and then close. His body collapses as his soul departs.

The Angry Man is dead.
Fifteen years of mutilations and terror, of manhunts and legend building, and all it took was two bullets? I stand there waiting for the other shoe to drop. This can’t be it? I look around thinking that the real Angry Man might be creeping up on me.

Nothing.

Then it occurs to me. What if the Angry Man really isn’t supernatural? The concept is so simple, that my twisted brain has a hard time comprehending it. Could pop culture have shaped him into something he’s not?
I stare at the cooling body at my feet.

He really is just a regular guy.

I’ve been Scooby-Doo-ed.

* * * * *

I make it home just as the sun cracks the horizon. I shower and finish off the pizza from the night before, then hit the sack. It’s well after dark when I wake up.

When I finally roll out of bed, the first thing I do is check the pizza box. Then I order some greasy Chinese food from the place down the road and eat most of it. Except the egg rolls. I should just not order them anymore, but it feels weird ordering Chinese without egg rolls.

Pouring myself a triple, I slide into my recliner. I keep meaning to patch the torn upholstery on the left arm, but I can’t remember where I put the roll of duct tape.

The Angry Man’s face haunts me.
It not the guilt of killing him (the butchering bastard deserved it). I’ve done far worse things in my life, and am managing to live with it.
No, there’s something else.

It was the look in his eyes.
In the flash of light when I shot him, I saw blackness. I’m not talking about the color, because his eyes were a shade lighter than faded cedar.
It was the intent buried deep within.
I saw intent. I saw a concept.
I don’t think there is any way to describe it, because it has no physical description, but I recognize it now as Malice.
It made me feel cold and small.
Like the entire void of deep, frozen space was staring back.

When the bullet hit his chest, the malice vaporized.
Just like that.

Maybe I’m just paranoid.
But my gut says that there is something more to it. Something bigger than anything I’ve experienced before. Something way above my pay scale.
And if there is one thing I have learned; it is to always trust my gut.

Hopefully I never have to find out.