Nails
by Bill Hughes
“Nails” was first published in June of 1997 when a guy--if I remember correctly he was based in Florida, but I sadly cannot recall his name--who ran a website called Raise the Dead accepted it. Two other stories of mine, “Hadley’s Noose” and “Under the Willow” appeared on the same site later that year. Unfortunately, Raise the Dead went down in December of 1997 when someone took offense to some of the content on the site and complained to the webmaster’s server.
“Nails” was first published in June of 1997 when a guy--if I remember correctly he was based in Florida, but I sadly cannot recall his name--who ran a website called Raise the Dead accepted it. Two other stories of mine, “Hadley’s Noose” and “Under the Willow” appeared on the same site later that year. Unfortunately, Raise the Dead went down in December of 1997 when someone took offense to some of the content on the site and complained to the webmaster’s server.
I’ve seen guys go ape shit before. In twenty years on the force you see a bit of everything. Well, almost. So like I said, I’ve seen guys snap before, but none of them like Chambers. One minute the three of us--me and Chambers and Thompson--are just walking to the car and the next . . . wham. I turn and he’s all over Thompson and Big T’s shouting and trying to pull his piece, but he’s not having much luck. Then all of a sudden he’s got Thompson down, which is weird because Chambers is giving away sixty or eighty pounds, and Big T starts screaming. I pull my gun and yell at Chambers to stop. He doesn’t, so I grab him by the shoulder and try to drag him off. I might as well be wrestling a statue. I pistol-whip the son-of-a-bitch twice and he doesn’t even notice.
He has Thompson by the throat and there’s blood flying and the big guy’s screams start to sound more like a kid blowing bubbles in the bath tub. I get the picture: Chambers is definitely our man. I shove my department issue in his face and let him have it right between his beady red eyes. For some reason, the first bullet doesn’t seem to faze him, even though it blows away a good piece of his forehead and his left eye. I can see the puffy white ridges of his frontal lobe. I pull the trigger again and he finally stops throttling Thompson and slides to the sidewalk, his face oozing onto the concrete like the leftovers of somebody’s cherry slurpie.
I radio for an ambulance and some back up. A crowd is starting to gather, so I wave my badge at them and tell them to stay the fuck back. Then I lean against the car and shake like a leaf in a hurricane. I try not to look, but I have to. Thompson looks pretty dead. He’s an open, red moat from chin to collar. Then I see them, the long, claw-like spades tipping the ends of Chambers’s fingers: nails that would turn a hooker green with envy. All ten look as though they’ve been dipped in red paint. I can’t believe I missed them before.
Thompson’s blank eyes meet mine across the pavement. I lean over and do something I haven’t done since I was a rookie--blow dinner all over my shoes.
I run through everything from the beginning, trying to figure out what I could have done differently. The case: a woman, Sara Masters, found in her apartment with her throat ripped out. Ripped, not cut. It looked like an animal did it, but animals don’t leave big, smeary hand prints in blood all over the walls. Thompson and I located a bartender who remembered seeing Masters with some guy a few hours before she turned up dead. A few weeks of pounding on doors and asking questions yielded nada, then our mixologist called back with a license plate on the man, who’d showed up at the bar again. The plate gave us Barry Chambers--forty, gainfully employed salesman, no criminal record. Tonight, Thompson and I come and pay him a visit. Chambers is a nice guy, cooperative. He agrees to come to the station with us to answer some questions.
We don’t even make it to the car.
I’m in the process of telling myself that nothing was out of place, that you can’t cuff a guy when you take him in for routine questioning, when I think of the fingernails. I turn to look at them again, but they aren’t there. Chambers is lying like before, dripping brain all over the sidewalk, and I can still see his hands clearly. But the murderous nails are gone, replaced by ordinary little nose-pickers. I stare at Chambers’s hands and wonder what the hell’s going on.
I’m still staring when Jenkins and Harris arrive, the ambulance right behind them. Jenkins takes one look at Thompson and turns white as porcelain. Harris is doing his hard-ass routine, but he doesn’t bother to get real close.
“What the hell happened,” he asks finally.
I fill them in on everything except the nails. There’s no use in making them think I’ve been drinking. The medics do a perfunctory check for vitals and cover both bodies with a rubber sheet. The crowd of ghouls starts to thin. Jenk and I go inside, leaving Harris to mind the store.
Chambers’s apartment looks like a big nothing special, a normal single guy’s place, just like it did a few minutes ago when Thompson and I were in there: lumpy furniture, a few magazines and newspapers scattered about, hair all over the bathroom sink. I’m in the kitchen looking at a stack of dirty dishes, thinking it’s all a waste of time, when Jenkins calls me.
He’s in the bedroom looking at a book. I scan the titles on the shelf: Wolves of the Great Northwest . . . Timberwolf! . . . The Mysteries of Lycanthropy . . . Werewolves . . . Jenkins smiles and tosses me the book he’s been leafing through: A Werewolf Omnibus.
“Looks like we know where your boy’s head was at,” Jenk says as he walks out of the bedroom. I flip the pages of the book and a scrap of paper flutters onto the floor. I pick it up. “Barton” is scribbled on one side, and a phone number. I slip it in my pocket, put the book back on the shelf, and follow Jenkins out.
The lab boys are on there way in, so I leave and go to the station to make my statement. During the next couple hours, I tell about the deaths of Thompson and Chambers so many times that I never want to hear of either of them again. It doesn’t make a very convincing story. If you shoot an unarmed man twice in the head at point-blank range it’s going to raise eyebrows. But I’m not too worried: Big Jack Thompson on a slab with his neck torn open is all the evidence I need to beat an excessive force rap.
It’s after two a.m. before I get out of there, but I’m not tired. Having your partner slaughtered while you stand there like a goob isn’t conducive to restfulness. I run it over in my head again, and it still doesn’t add up. The first part is easy enough: Chambers kills Masters and freaks because he thinks we have him. But that doesn’t explain how he wrestled Thompson to the ground and shred his throat, or why he didn’t bat an eyelash when I whacked him with my revolver, or how he kept going after I blew half his head off. It doesn’t explain the fingernails, either. I know if I go home to bed, I’ll just stare at the ceiling all night.
I check into a phone booth and pull the book, but there’s a page and a half of Bartons. I dial the phone company and give them the number. The cross-reference gives me the residence of a Dr. Andrew Barton on Ohio Avenue.
When I pull up outside, the house is dark. It’s a little two story with sagging gutters and pealing paint. Whatever branch of medicine the doctor practices must not pay very well. There’s a chain link fence, but I’m betting there’s no dog. I don’t see any sign of one as I cross the yard and mount the rickety porch.
I give the door a good beating, but nobody seems to be around. Just as I’m beginning to wonder if I should risk adding breaking and entering to my night’s accomplishments, a light comes on in the living room and the door swings open. I flash my badge at the bald-headed dude inside and ask to see Dr. Barton. Before he can answer, I’ve elbowed my way in.
He shuts the door and asks what he can do for me.
“You Barton?”
“Certainly.”
I decide to cut straight to the chase. “Doctor, are you acquainted with a man named Barry Chambers?”
Barton sits down in an armchair a little too quickly.
“Doctor?”
“Yes. I know him.”
“Know him well?”
“Only professionally. Why? ”
“Chambers is dead. He killed a police officer tonight. My partner. Killed a woman, too, a few weeks back.”
Barton puts his face in his hands. “I was afraid something like this was going to happen.”
“And what made you think that?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I mean, nothing in particular. It was more . . . he wasn’t a well man.”
“And you were his psychologist.”
He looks up at me and shakes his head.
“O.K., you tell me, then.”
He sits quietly for a moment, then seems to come to a decision.
“Would you like some coffee detective . . .”
“Baker.”
“Baker, thank you . . . I know it’s not really the time for it, but I’m afraid I’m rather a caffeine addict.”
I follow him into the kitchen. I don’t like his changing the subject, but a spot of coffee sounds good, so I let it go. He shovels a few spoonfuls of brown crystals into the machine and fires it up.
“So?”
He sighs and sits at the kitchen table. “I’m a neurologist, actually. Mr. Chambers was a participant in a research project I’m conducting at the University.”
“What kind of research?”
“Does the word lycanthropy mean anything to you?”
Bingo. “You’re saying Chambers thought he was a werewolf?”
The old boy sniffs. “Hardly. Werewolf is such a loaded term. These people have an illness. Lycanthopy is a disorder of the central nervous system . . .”
“Enough on terminology. You expect me to believe that when the moon was full the guy would grow a fur coat and fangs and run around on all fours?”
“Of course not. Frankly, I don’t expect you to believe anything I tell you. But you asked. Anyway, such manifestations as you’re describing exist only in movies.”
“So if there’re no ‘manifestations,’ as you call them, what’s the difference between a lycanthrope and any other head case?”
That one really seems to bring the lecturer out in Barton. He rises from his chair and starts in. “I didn’t say there were no manifestations. I simply meant that they are less extreme than the transformations you were describing. I can assure you that lycanthropy is not a delusion. It’s a physical ailment with its own particular pathology. In all of the cases I’ve examined, there are always somatic symptoms that accompany the disorder. Mr. Chambers, if I recall, was rather typical. Some of them are things you can’t see but are nonetheless measurable--sharper hearing, improved sense of smell, increased strength and stamina. The observable changes are slight: a marginal increase of body hair, alterations in the shape of the nose, ears, teeth, and nails, that sort of thing.”
I’m thinking about Chambers’s fingernails. The whole room swims around me. I sink into a chair. “You expect me to believe . . .”
“As I said before, I don’t expect you to believe anything.”
I want to ask a question, but it keeps eluding me. Finally, I think I have it. “How do . . . What . . . that is, if . . .” I give up.
“What causes it?” he asks for me. I nod. “I’m not certain, although I suspect a malformation of the temporal lobe. Nothing supernatural, of course. You can bet that it has nothing to do with being bitten. Or the full moon, although moonlight does seem to trigger the seizures. A lot of things people think they know about lycanthropy is really a bunch of hogwash. Myth.”
He offers me a mug of coffee, and I slug down a mouthful. I don’t particularly believe it myself. Still, it seems to settle some of the lingering questions, even while it raises larger ones. I take another slug of bean juice.
“We’ll, doc, I have another myth for you. I pull back the flap of my jacket and tap my holster. “You don’t need a silver bullet.”
I’d planned to go home when I got done with Barton, but his coffee has me racing, so I drive to the hospital. I want another look at Chambers. I don’t know why, really, other than the fact that I keep seeing those hands, those nails, and I want to look him over again. I tell myself that maybe I’ll find something that’ll help disprove Barton’s loco theory. Besides, I know that if it were me stretched out on a slab like so many pounds of hamburger, Thompson wouldn’t go home until he had some answers.
In the hospital elevator, I press G2, the basement level that houses the county morgue. The box hums to life and my stomach does the bunny hop as it begins to drop.
When I step out of the elevator there’s nobody at the desk. I figure the night attendant’s gone to the head, so I sit. When he doesn’t show up, I go looking for him. The men’s room is empty. My cop’s instincts take over, and I find my .45 in my hand as I push open the door to the morgue.
I see the attendant right away, in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a crimson lake. I wonder how one body could have contained so much blood. His dead face gleams like ivory in the harsh, clinical light, creating a stark contrast to the bright red of his shirt and the lividness of his shredded throat. A few seconds later, I spot his killer, peeping out from behind a steel table to my left.
He moves in a crouch, like an animal. As he comes, I have time to I see the pink, smooth skin that’s already starting to grow back over the ruins of his shattered face, as if someone had grafted a baby’s bottom over the gunshot wounds. I see the new eyeball fixed on me from behind the narrow slit of a freshly-formed eyelid. Reflexively, I squeeze off a shot, which plows into his shoulder, but he doesn’t break stride. My second shot flashes by his head as he lunges forward. The last thought that occurs to me as the long nails burrow into my neck is that someone should tell Barton that I was wrong about that silver bullet.
Copyright 1997 by Bill Hughes
He has Thompson by the throat and there’s blood flying and the big guy’s screams start to sound more like a kid blowing bubbles in the bath tub. I get the picture: Chambers is definitely our man. I shove my department issue in his face and let him have it right between his beady red eyes. For some reason, the first bullet doesn’t seem to faze him, even though it blows away a good piece of his forehead and his left eye. I can see the puffy white ridges of his frontal lobe. I pull the trigger again and he finally stops throttling Thompson and slides to the sidewalk, his face oozing onto the concrete like the leftovers of somebody’s cherry slurpie.
I radio for an ambulance and some back up. A crowd is starting to gather, so I wave my badge at them and tell them to stay the fuck back. Then I lean against the car and shake like a leaf in a hurricane. I try not to look, but I have to. Thompson looks pretty dead. He’s an open, red moat from chin to collar. Then I see them, the long, claw-like spades tipping the ends of Chambers’s fingers: nails that would turn a hooker green with envy. All ten look as though they’ve been dipped in red paint. I can’t believe I missed them before.
Thompson’s blank eyes meet mine across the pavement. I lean over and do something I haven’t done since I was a rookie--blow dinner all over my shoes.
I run through everything from the beginning, trying to figure out what I could have done differently. The case: a woman, Sara Masters, found in her apartment with her throat ripped out. Ripped, not cut. It looked like an animal did it, but animals don’t leave big, smeary hand prints in blood all over the walls. Thompson and I located a bartender who remembered seeing Masters with some guy a few hours before she turned up dead. A few weeks of pounding on doors and asking questions yielded nada, then our mixologist called back with a license plate on the man, who’d showed up at the bar again. The plate gave us Barry Chambers--forty, gainfully employed salesman, no criminal record. Tonight, Thompson and I come and pay him a visit. Chambers is a nice guy, cooperative. He agrees to come to the station with us to answer some questions.
We don’t even make it to the car.
I’m in the process of telling myself that nothing was out of place, that you can’t cuff a guy when you take him in for routine questioning, when I think of the fingernails. I turn to look at them again, but they aren’t there. Chambers is lying like before, dripping brain all over the sidewalk, and I can still see his hands clearly. But the murderous nails are gone, replaced by ordinary little nose-pickers. I stare at Chambers’s hands and wonder what the hell’s going on.
I’m still staring when Jenkins and Harris arrive, the ambulance right behind them. Jenkins takes one look at Thompson and turns white as porcelain. Harris is doing his hard-ass routine, but he doesn’t bother to get real close.
“What the hell happened,” he asks finally.
I fill them in on everything except the nails. There’s no use in making them think I’ve been drinking. The medics do a perfunctory check for vitals and cover both bodies with a rubber sheet. The crowd of ghouls starts to thin. Jenk and I go inside, leaving Harris to mind the store.
Chambers’s apartment looks like a big nothing special, a normal single guy’s place, just like it did a few minutes ago when Thompson and I were in there: lumpy furniture, a few magazines and newspapers scattered about, hair all over the bathroom sink. I’m in the kitchen looking at a stack of dirty dishes, thinking it’s all a waste of time, when Jenkins calls me.
He’s in the bedroom looking at a book. I scan the titles on the shelf: Wolves of the Great Northwest . . . Timberwolf! . . . The Mysteries of Lycanthropy . . . Werewolves . . . Jenkins smiles and tosses me the book he’s been leafing through: A Werewolf Omnibus.
“Looks like we know where your boy’s head was at,” Jenk says as he walks out of the bedroom. I flip the pages of the book and a scrap of paper flutters onto the floor. I pick it up. “Barton” is scribbled on one side, and a phone number. I slip it in my pocket, put the book back on the shelf, and follow Jenkins out.
The lab boys are on there way in, so I leave and go to the station to make my statement. During the next couple hours, I tell about the deaths of Thompson and Chambers so many times that I never want to hear of either of them again. It doesn’t make a very convincing story. If you shoot an unarmed man twice in the head at point-blank range it’s going to raise eyebrows. But I’m not too worried: Big Jack Thompson on a slab with his neck torn open is all the evidence I need to beat an excessive force rap.
It’s after two a.m. before I get out of there, but I’m not tired. Having your partner slaughtered while you stand there like a goob isn’t conducive to restfulness. I run it over in my head again, and it still doesn’t add up. The first part is easy enough: Chambers kills Masters and freaks because he thinks we have him. But that doesn’t explain how he wrestled Thompson to the ground and shred his throat, or why he didn’t bat an eyelash when I whacked him with my revolver, or how he kept going after I blew half his head off. It doesn’t explain the fingernails, either. I know if I go home to bed, I’ll just stare at the ceiling all night.
I check into a phone booth and pull the book, but there’s a page and a half of Bartons. I dial the phone company and give them the number. The cross-reference gives me the residence of a Dr. Andrew Barton on Ohio Avenue.
When I pull up outside, the house is dark. It’s a little two story with sagging gutters and pealing paint. Whatever branch of medicine the doctor practices must not pay very well. There’s a chain link fence, but I’m betting there’s no dog. I don’t see any sign of one as I cross the yard and mount the rickety porch.
I give the door a good beating, but nobody seems to be around. Just as I’m beginning to wonder if I should risk adding breaking and entering to my night’s accomplishments, a light comes on in the living room and the door swings open. I flash my badge at the bald-headed dude inside and ask to see Dr. Barton. Before he can answer, I’ve elbowed my way in.
He shuts the door and asks what he can do for me.
“You Barton?”
“Certainly.”
I decide to cut straight to the chase. “Doctor, are you acquainted with a man named Barry Chambers?”
Barton sits down in an armchair a little too quickly.
“Doctor?”
“Yes. I know him.”
“Know him well?”
“Only professionally. Why? ”
“Chambers is dead. He killed a police officer tonight. My partner. Killed a woman, too, a few weeks back.”
Barton puts his face in his hands. “I was afraid something like this was going to happen.”
“And what made you think that?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I mean, nothing in particular. It was more . . . he wasn’t a well man.”
“And you were his psychologist.”
He looks up at me and shakes his head.
“O.K., you tell me, then.”
He sits quietly for a moment, then seems to come to a decision.
“Would you like some coffee detective . . .”
“Baker.”
“Baker, thank you . . . I know it’s not really the time for it, but I’m afraid I’m rather a caffeine addict.”
I follow him into the kitchen. I don’t like his changing the subject, but a spot of coffee sounds good, so I let it go. He shovels a few spoonfuls of brown crystals into the machine and fires it up.
“So?”
He sighs and sits at the kitchen table. “I’m a neurologist, actually. Mr. Chambers was a participant in a research project I’m conducting at the University.”
“What kind of research?”
“Does the word lycanthropy mean anything to you?”
Bingo. “You’re saying Chambers thought he was a werewolf?”
The old boy sniffs. “Hardly. Werewolf is such a loaded term. These people have an illness. Lycanthopy is a disorder of the central nervous system . . .”
“Enough on terminology. You expect me to believe that when the moon was full the guy would grow a fur coat and fangs and run around on all fours?”
“Of course not. Frankly, I don’t expect you to believe anything I tell you. But you asked. Anyway, such manifestations as you’re describing exist only in movies.”
“So if there’re no ‘manifestations,’ as you call them, what’s the difference between a lycanthrope and any other head case?”
That one really seems to bring the lecturer out in Barton. He rises from his chair and starts in. “I didn’t say there were no manifestations. I simply meant that they are less extreme than the transformations you were describing. I can assure you that lycanthropy is not a delusion. It’s a physical ailment with its own particular pathology. In all of the cases I’ve examined, there are always somatic symptoms that accompany the disorder. Mr. Chambers, if I recall, was rather typical. Some of them are things you can’t see but are nonetheless measurable--sharper hearing, improved sense of smell, increased strength and stamina. The observable changes are slight: a marginal increase of body hair, alterations in the shape of the nose, ears, teeth, and nails, that sort of thing.”
I’m thinking about Chambers’s fingernails. The whole room swims around me. I sink into a chair. “You expect me to believe . . .”
“As I said before, I don’t expect you to believe anything.”
I want to ask a question, but it keeps eluding me. Finally, I think I have it. “How do . . . What . . . that is, if . . .” I give up.
“What causes it?” he asks for me. I nod. “I’m not certain, although I suspect a malformation of the temporal lobe. Nothing supernatural, of course. You can bet that it has nothing to do with being bitten. Or the full moon, although moonlight does seem to trigger the seizures. A lot of things people think they know about lycanthropy is really a bunch of hogwash. Myth.”
He offers me a mug of coffee, and I slug down a mouthful. I don’t particularly believe it myself. Still, it seems to settle some of the lingering questions, even while it raises larger ones. I take another slug of bean juice.
“We’ll, doc, I have another myth for you. I pull back the flap of my jacket and tap my holster. “You don’t need a silver bullet.”
I’d planned to go home when I got done with Barton, but his coffee has me racing, so I drive to the hospital. I want another look at Chambers. I don’t know why, really, other than the fact that I keep seeing those hands, those nails, and I want to look him over again. I tell myself that maybe I’ll find something that’ll help disprove Barton’s loco theory. Besides, I know that if it were me stretched out on a slab like so many pounds of hamburger, Thompson wouldn’t go home until he had some answers.
In the hospital elevator, I press G2, the basement level that houses the county morgue. The box hums to life and my stomach does the bunny hop as it begins to drop.
When I step out of the elevator there’s nobody at the desk. I figure the night attendant’s gone to the head, so I sit. When he doesn’t show up, I go looking for him. The men’s room is empty. My cop’s instincts take over, and I find my .45 in my hand as I push open the door to the morgue.
I see the attendant right away, in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a crimson lake. I wonder how one body could have contained so much blood. His dead face gleams like ivory in the harsh, clinical light, creating a stark contrast to the bright red of his shirt and the lividness of his shredded throat. A few seconds later, I spot his killer, peeping out from behind a steel table to my left.
He moves in a crouch, like an animal. As he comes, I have time to I see the pink, smooth skin that’s already starting to grow back over the ruins of his shattered face, as if someone had grafted a baby’s bottom over the gunshot wounds. I see the new eyeball fixed on me from behind the narrow slit of a freshly-formed eyelid. Reflexively, I squeeze off a shot, which plows into his shoulder, but he doesn’t break stride. My second shot flashes by his head as he lunges forward. The last thought that occurs to me as the long nails burrow into my neck is that someone should tell Barton that I was wrong about that silver bullet.
Copyright 1997 by Bill Hughes
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