The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

I

Their skin was smooth and colorless, so translucent that it looked like a liquid held in place by a thin, glutinous membrane. The long, loose threads along the edges of their shapeless garments seemed to wave in synchronized patterns, like cilia or some delicate reef-dwelling invertebrate. Even now I believe the Shabbies were human beings, although it seems as time goes on, that I base this conviction more and more on a desperate hope that has less to do with them—or even her—than it does with the way I cling to the notion of my own humanity.

I had a job in those days. Five days a week I rode the “L” train downtown, where I immediately took a narrow set of stairs down to Lower Wacker Driver, a bleak dust-blanketed stretch of road that ran directly beneath Wacker Drive proper and alongside the Chicago River. It was not a short cut—in fact, it added a good five minutes to my walk—and the only practical excuse I had for preferring it to a shorter, street level route was that it was cooler in summer and warmer (because of the heating vents from the buildings) in winter. But I walked Lower Wacker for a different reason entirely—for the darkness, the solitude. At street level I would have been no better than the rest of the office workers and clerks: in a hurry to get to work or to their trains, all milling and colliding and seething beneath the screeching elevated trains.

On Lower Wacker I’d seen transients scattered along the catwalk, many asleep between scraps of newspaper and cardboard in the early morning. Otherwise there were only those few commuters who parked their cars in the designated spaces between the catwalk and the street itself. Occasionally a car would slow and the driver—hoping to claim a parking space—would ask if I was going to my car. I would cast the driver an accusing, condescending glare and simply say, “I don’t drive.”

I would look up at the concrete ceiling and listen for the sounds of heavier traffic flowing above, but I never heard it. Sometimes that ceiling seemed to be a mile or more thick, and the blackest, sootiest patches on it the entrances to vast, inaccessible caves.

On the morning I first encountered them I was going down the steps when I saw a haggard old man with worried eyes waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Before I even made it to the bottom he was talking to me. I averted my eyes and attempted to pass him by, but he held out a shaking hand to block my path.

It was then that he said the word, not as part of a sentence, but just as a single, exhausted exclamation: “Shabbie.”

As I attempted to sidestep him, I lost my balance and nearly fell onto the dusty, glass and ratshit-laden sidewalk. I cursed the old man and continued on my way.

I knew what he’d been talking about as soon as I saw them. There were about twenty on that first day: men and women—none of them standing any closer than ten feet from each other—on the catwalk, among the parked cars at the foot of the catwalk, even along the edges of the road. They didn’t look at anything except each other, with vacant, expressionless faces, hands deep in their pockets, hugging shapeless garments around themselves. There were a few more street people hovering along the edge of this strange, scattered group. They whispered to each other, laughed, complained, but refused to pass beyond a certain point into that arena where the brown-ragged strangers stood so silently, so oblivious to anything but each other.

Another old man called to me as I walked past the huddled transients and onto that stretch of blacktop where the strangers stood. Almost immediately I could hear a ringing, feel the pressure of an invisible fluid closing around me. I looked into their incredible eyes. If they knew I was even walking among them, they made no sign; and when I finally passed the last of them I felt a tremendous release in pressure, as though I’d just surfaced from a deep swimming pool.

All the rest of that day I felt as though there was a wet gloss clinging to me, but whenever I ran fingers over my skin, they came away dry and clean.

I didn’t see them again for several days, but in the meantime I saw a piece of graffiti on one of the cement pillars that lined Lower Wacker:

It was an unseasonably cold evening in early October. For some reason I can no longer remember and probably couldn’t have pinpointed at the time, my usual depression had been boiling into an uncharacteristically vicious rage against everyone around me, against inanimate objects that got in my way, against my pathetic little room and, of course, against myself and everything about me: my thick, hopeless face, my job, my loneliness. I pushed my way through the Wabash Avenue crowds and made for the nearest stairway down to Lower Wacker Drive.

A rat, obese from eating the garbage that filled the dumpsters and piled along the base of the catwalk, waddled quickly across my path. I had to stop in my tracks to keep from kicking the beast. I suddenly focused all my rage on this foul-smelling creature that had the audacity to block my way for even a split second. My fists clenched and I searched the shadows, wishing I had kicked it, wishing I…

When I first heard her voice, I could swear she was laughing. It was only when I heard the telltale impact of flesh smacking against flesh that I was sure she was crying—no, screaming. Then I heard the man’s voice: loud, cruel, wet with lustful anger, and I realized what was going on.

They were on the catwalk, near a stairway that led to street level. I jumped onto the walk and grabbed the man before I had any idea who or what they were. With a downward straightarm, I loosened his grip on her clothes as I grabbed his collar and swung him around to face me.

He was a Shabbie. They were both Shabbies. He was about my height, very thin, but there was an animal hunger across that emaciated face that would have scared me off had I not already been so wound up in my own furies. He screamed, a high-pitched flurry of incomprehensible sounds, and his face seemed to stretch forward, forming a threatening, toothy snout.

I was standing too close to take a swing at him, so I brought up my elbow and struck his nose. The glancing blow stunned him long enough to allow me to step back and punch him as hard as I could with my good arm. He stumbled off the edge of the catwalk, bounced onto the hood of a car and melted into the deep shadows, moaning and whimpering.

When I turned to her she was looking at me with horrified eyes, as though I had been the sole aggressor. I opened my mouth to say something in my own defense, but she ran up the nearest set of stairs. I took one last look at the Shabbie man lying between two cars and then followed her.

She was on the top step, looking out at the city lights as though she had never seen anything like them in her life.

“Are you all right? Miss? Did he hurt you?”

The sound of my voice sent a brief tremor across her face. She reluctantly took her eyes from the skyline and looked me in the eyes.

“I didn’t mean to scare you like that. Down there, I mean.”

Once her eyes locked into mine, she would not let go. She looked at me as though I was something disgusting she had just been ordered to eat. She nodded toward the buildings, trying to draw my attention to them.

“It’s a pretty skyline, isn’t it? When they turn on all the lights…”

But she wasn’t listening. I looked at her closely then, because she seemed to have lost all interest in me. Her hair was thin and medium brown, laced with silver streaks and hanging limp and careless to her shoulders. From this vantage point, only a couple of feet away, it was almost impossible to resist trying to make out the skull beneath that clear skin and those delicate blue veins just beneath the surface. But her face was too wide—or her head was too narrow; at any rate, the effect was to jut her nose and the center of her lips forward and pull her eyes and the edges of her mouth around to the side.

I could make out her delicate slenderness even beneath the shapeless brown rags she wore. Her feet were big and her breasts were small, like a young girl’s, but she was clearly more than a girl. There were traces of age and pain in her face. In spite of her plainness, her strange face and her ragged clothes, I found her unusually attractive and appealing. The fact that she was one of the Shabbie People who had been haunting stretches of Lower Wacker Drive only made the attraction stronger.

“Miss, could I… buy you something to eat? A cup of coffee or something?”

She made no response, so I turned away, humiliated, and headed for the train. I did not bother going back down to Lower Wacker; I was only two blocks from the train now and the crowds were beginning to thin. As I walked I tried not to think of the latest, capstone humiliation of this wretched day; I had saved a pretty girl from an attacker only to have my respectful advances ignored afterward. The incident seemed to have neutralized me. I no longer felt any anger, only that creeping numbness that was my biggest enemy but probably also the one thing that had kept me from taking my own useless life years before.

I went downstairs to the ticket window and showed my monthly pass. As I pushed through the turnstile I turned and saw her standing there, looking at me, looking at the turnstile and the glass booth, confused and afraid. She stared me straight in the eye, the skin of her brows furling over her eyes.

“What?” I asked her, my voice impatient and suddenly exasperated. I was not so numb that I wasn’t willing to strike out just a little at the woman who’d rebuffed my only minutes before. “Huh? What is it? Do you need money? Is that what you want? You could say something to me, you know.”

I turned away and headed for the stairs, but as I reached them I heard that cry again. But this time it was not a cry of fear over a man who was beating her and probably about to rape her, but the cry of a young child, alone and lost with absolutely no idea what to do. When I turned back she was looking at the lady in the pay booth with a terrified expression.

So I did what I had to: I paid her fare. She followed me down the stairs and when the first train came and I did not get on it, she gazed thoughtfully back and forth from me to the train and then let out a strained breath and relaxed at my side, no more than six inches away from me.

When my train came, we got on. There were no seats, so I had to stand, clutching a vertical bar; and when the train lurched for the first time, she grabbed the shoulder of my jacket and did not let go until we stopped at my station.

She followed me down the street, into the foyer of my building, up the steps and finally, while a quaking mixture of excitement and suspicion surged through my every limb, up to my door.

“Do you need a place to stay? Is that it?” I opened the door and she followed me in, passing by me and moving through my apartment with a timid, quiet grace, her face stretched with the same wonderment with which she’d looked at the skyline.

She was the first woman who had ever stepped into my apartment. She did not react when I shut the door and locked it, and didn’t even bother to turn and look me in the face for another hour.

II

What was I to think, so afraid of her presence and the peculiar bearing with which she carried herself through my cheap, unkempt room? She would not respond to my questions, and though she seemed interested when I finally got the nerve to step into my kitchenette and fry myself a cheese sandwich, she seemed not even to understand when I offered the sandwich to her. As soon as the sizzling in the pan died, she turned away from me and the kitchenette and returned to the window, where she looked out with rapt fascination upon a brick wall, a neon sign, an alley and a sliver of street. Or maybe she was just enthralled by the duct patterns on the window. Her manner was so strange, the sudden shifts of attention so abrupt, and yet, to judge by her expression, so true to some obscure inner logic, that there was no way of telling just what she saw when she looked at the shambles in which I lived.

I considered throwing her out, but of course I couldn’t. This strange but otherwise very plain young woman seemed graced by a kind of dangerous beauty when seen in the context of my lonely little apartment. I tried ignoring her as the evening progressed, drinking a beer or thumbing through a book, but I literally could not take my eyes off her, so finally I just watched her until I caught myself nodding off to sleep in my chair.

I offered her my bed, indicating with hopelessly loud and well-articulated words and awkward arm gestures that I would sleep on the couch. I lay on the couch then, a blanket pulled up to my eyes, watching her in the semidarkness. She continued to move from one end of the apartment to the other, occasionally stopping at the window before moving on again, examining books, wall prints, the dirty plates in the sink.

The last thing I remember is her going into the bathroom and using the toilet with the door open. I could see nothing—would not even look—yet I ended up with a furious erection that followed me into sleep and writhed its way to climax within the confines of some forgotten dream.

I tried to convince her to leave the next morning. At least I told her she should. In truth, I didn’t want her to leave at all. She had slept on the floor at the foot of the bed and was still there when I left. I wondered whether she would be there when I got back as I locked the bottom lock but not the top, giving her the final option—but only after debating for a full minute whether I should just lock her in.

I was thirty-four years old at the time and still a virgin. Only my hands—and even those with awkward, infrequent rendezvous—stood between me and a lifetime of abstinence. Perhaps it was because I was ugly or had difficulty speaking to people, or because of some kind of physical or social flaw to which I was simply blind. Whatever the cause, I had never slept in such close proximity to a woman, and all day I reeled with the myriad implications of that event. I fantasized that on my return home she would be communicative, thanking me for saving her virtue or maybe even her life the day before and for offering her refuge and, of course—inadvertently though it might have been—for having been a gentleman through it all.

When I returned home she was watching television. She stared at the screen as though hypnotized not by the images themselves but by the thousand flickering signals that made up the images. I tried talking to her, I offered her food, I offered her the bed; but nothing worked. Once again she slept on the floor.

It went on this way for a week. I was growing more and more dependent on the idea that when I opened the door at night, I would find this warm, living, increasingly attractive creature placidly sharing my apartment.

Finally I gave up offering her the bed. The couch was starting to bother my back anyway, so on the seventh night I decided to sleep in the bed myself.

In a gesture of had-it-up-to-here defiance, I threw back the sheets, undressed and crawled into my bed, leaving only the hoodlight on in the kitchen. She stood by the refrigerator, eating pickles out of the jar and watching me with a puzzled expression. I shut my eyes as I nested in my bed for the first time in a week, sure that I’d be asleep in a minute.

I could hear her, feel her breath as she suddenly stood over me, watching me as she’d never done on the nights I’d slept on the couch. Was it our “familiarity” or was it the fact that it was such a sudden shift in routine? I was never able to figure out which of the two might have prompted her actions as I opened a single eye while she pulled the shapeless dress over her head and dropped it to the floor. The naked body underneath was sleek and had a sweet, pleasant aroma. When she pulled back the sheets and crawled in next to me, immediately folding her arms around me, I opened both eyes and gazed deep into a face that suddenly looked equally tender and eager. I leaned over to kiss her, realizing that I had never kissed a woman in my life and wasn’t even close to being sure exactly how it was done.

She forced her mouth against mine in a brief, awkward struggle and after that, I just followed. My hands wandered the contours of her body in absolute disbelief while she finished undressing me. I climaxed the moment her hand glided between my legs, but she did not laugh or grow angry, and instead seemed to understand everything about me at that point. For a week she had been living on the periphery of my world, and she must have realized that beneath these sheets together we had passed beyond the edges of that world and into hers.

At least it seemed to be wholly her world. My clumsy gestures grew smoother and more acute under her guidance and as her kisses and caresses grew more passionate, I began to mimic them. My next erection followed soon after and she guided it gently into the soft, wet darkness between her thighs. We remained very still for a while after that—neither our hands nor our hips moved more than a slight quiver as she looked deep into my eyes and smiled her first real and perfect smile. By the time we began our slow rhythmic movements I knew, from the feel of our interlocked bodies and from that sweet, understanding face, that both our lives had been irrevocably changed.

When I finally slept, I dreamed of her. We were standing at the gravely edge of a body of water at night, with only the light of a distant suspension bridge delineating us in the darkness. She looked at me and began to speak. The things she said were shocking and horrifying, but they made perfect sense to my dream-self. I remembered the entire dream in vivid detail the next morning—all except the words she had spoken.

She grew more at ease within the grimy, chaotic confines of my apartment and widened her palette to include an increasing variety of foods in my cupboards and refrigerator. If anything, she paid less attention to me than she had before we’d first made love. As soon as I turned off the lights and crawled into bed each night, she would crawl in with me and we would make love for half the night, so that I found it almost impossible to get up in the morning for work. I finally had to start going to bed two hours earlier than usual. As we made love or held each other tenderly afterward, I seemed to be the absolute center of her life. But the next morning or the next evening, I was merely a more active, more transitory piece of furniture in a tiny room in which she seemed to be hiding from something… out there.

I gave her a name. Mona. My mother (the original Mona) died when I was four years old, and so I felt no particular attachment to the name—at least none that I realized, but it gave me comfort to bestow the name on the frail, bewildered and unceasingly curious girl. Most of the time I believed she was a simpleton and that I was doing her a favor by protecting her from the outside world, by trying to find foods she could eat, trying to teach her to speak, all the tiny gestures that seemed to fail at every turn but which, in the end, always brought her back to my bed.

I would dream of her almost every night after our love-making. Sometimes it would be just the two of us, sometimes there would be others, loud, shadowy and enveloped in a thick luminescent haze that seemed to spread for vast distances across landscapes that, as weeks progressed, became more and more uninviting, even threatening. In these dreams she always spoke with words that I could never remember upon awakening, trying to lure me into the bright haze that seemed to recede from us as we approached, the haze that was so full of cascading, breathtaking lifeforms too diffuse to see clearly, but always very real and, in spite of their retreat, always very near.

III

And so Mona consumed those late fall and early winter months. We did not communicate; we rarely even looked each other in the eye and I never quite got over the sensation that she was—or would have preferred to be—completely oblivious to my presence. But I was utterly dependent on the sound of her breath, of the creaking floor beneath her feet, of the fact that this creature had consented to keep me company and in only a few months had made the vision of my past life almost unbearable to remember. And that she made love to me, that even in some strange, limited way, I was someone’s lover, began to strengthen my confidence and gave me the sense that I was a functioning, even determining factor in the world around me, a world that had always seemed close to collapsing upon me.

But she grew restless. She discovered the apartment door—as though it had never been there before. She would tug at it and pound on it and I was afraid the commotion would bring too much attention to us. So I gave her a key, taught her how to use it, bought her some winter clothes and a coat, took walks with her and, finally, because I was afraid to use the physical force to stop her, I allowed her to go out by herself. I told myself this was only right, that otherwise I was her jailer, she was my prisoner—or worse, my pet. And yet Mona was not a normal human being, was she? She was no longer with her people and I was the only thing between her and that hostile world out there, the world that had crushed me, the one she had stared at with such wide-eyed amazement one night from the top of a set of concrete stairs.

Soon she began staying out late or, once in a while, all night. I couldn’t ask where she’d gone, and though I considered it, I never really had the nerve to follow. I just sat in my apartment fretting, no longer understanding or even wanting to understand the loneliness and solitude I had learned to accept in my previous life, merely aching for that presence, that touch, those simple, living sounds.

She would return with things she’d found on the street. I tried to keep her from bringing them in, but at these moments she would suddenly grow hostile and protective. Desiccated rat and pigeon corpses, rusted shards of metal, branches, wire, all of which she would arrange methodically in the darkest corner of my apartment and hide behind a sheet. I stopped protesting, because more than disgust over the garbage she insisted on accumulating in my apartment, I felt fear of her independence. She could leave and never come back. The possibility was inconceivable.

I tried to ignore the shrine she was constructing behind the sheet, this complex mingling of forms that after a while no longer seemed random at all. They were no longer dried corpses or discarded hubcaps and splintered boards; they were minor elements in a dense and disturbing mosaic. Mona was reconstructing something of her own world in this tiny corner of mine.

In late February I began walking to work along Lower Wacker Drive, after having avoided it completely since the day I saved Mona from her Shabbie attacker. I found no trace of them—only a cloud of white spray-paint where someone had scrawled BEWARE OF THE SHABBIE PEOPLE.

I wondered where she went at night. Would she have remembered the train ride up to my neighborhood; would she know how or have money to pay and get on the “L” train and find her way down here on her own? There were times when I would linger down there as though all it would take was the right squint and the right tilt of my head in order to see them there. I wondered if she came down here to do this very thing, not knowing how to find them and trying desperately to summon them back from whatever inaccessible netherworld into which they’d retreated, crying out for them to take her away from this cold, bleak place and the stumpy little man who held her prisoner.

Then one night, during an unseasonably warm spell after weeks of heavy snows, I walked Lower Wacker, avoiding the widening pools and the spouts of water spilling from the streets above and whining to myself about Mona, whom I had not seen in two days. Had she disappeared for good? Could something have happened to her? I wandered Lower Wacker for a while, drinking in the desolate and expansive solitude that seemed like such a perfect extension of my mood.

The area where the Shabbies used to stand was now under a foot of water. As I stepped to the edge of this pond I saw a rat half-swim, half-scurry across it, cutting a line of splashes neatly down the middle. As the waters settled, erasing all traces of the rat’s pathway, I saw what I believed to be a reflection of the ceiling above me, and my tired eyes began to unfocus along the strange contours formed there.

Suddenly there was movement in the water, something large, struggling up from an impossible depth in this shallow pool. In the brief moment it broke the surface I was sure that it was a man, but the water settled over it and the pool grew still and silent, as though nothing had happened. I looked around; there was no one anywhere, and the green lights illuminating the underground were all flickering in synchronization.

Another splash—there it was again, exploding to the surface. Only this time it did not seem to be a man at all, but rather some kind of slimy, chaotically misshapen encephalopod, transparent and thrashing furiously before sinking once again beneath the surface. I looked carefully at the once-more placid surface, then at the ceiling above. Only a reflection.

I hurried on my way, considering for a moment taking the nearest stairway up to street level and then changing my mind when I saw the ominous shadows moving along the entrance to the stairway. I began to run, but there were puddles and roaring downspouts everywhere, and in the weak, still-flickering green light, it was difficult to negotiate the water, and the soles of my shoes were sliding treacherously on the wet ground. Finally I stopped, leaning against a steel and concrete beam while a downpour of water roared just on the other side. I crept around to look at it more closely as I caught my breath. Was this water running down here from the street? I looked up but there was only a blackness from which the water didn’t seem so much as fall as simply appear, materializing out of a void.

And then I heard it. Oh, I recognized the sound, all right. The moment I heard the voice I was sure I must be lying in bed alongside Mona and having another one of those dreams, because it was Mona herself, speaking in the voice with which she had so often called out to me in so many of those early dreams. But it wasn’t just a single woman’s voice, it was several, along with manly voices that spoke in deep, threatening tones. I looked into the falling column of water and saw transparent figures struggling within, little more than water themselves, thrashing away as though trying to force their way free. I blinked and leaned closer, my face set in what must have been a ridiculous, gaping mask. I could see human forms in there, all occupying the same small spaces, trying to break away from each other. Every splash against my face felt like fingertips grasping out toward me. Finally a hand emerged, then an arm. I backed away as it reached out and then disappeared. I can’t say for sure whether it sank back into the spout of water or merely splashed shapelessly to the ground.

I screamed and ran onto the catwalk, where the shadows were heavy, but it was dry and I had quick access to the next set of stairs leading up to the street.

Though my train ride home was uneventful, I couldn’t stop thinking of the hallucinations I had experienced on Lower Wacker. I arrived home in an absolute panic. Inside I found Mona, wearing one of the simple, second-hand dresses I had bought her, looking up from the television and smiling sweetly.

“Mona!” I cried, rushing over to her.

And then she did a strange thing, unlike anything she had done before or would do over those last few days she remained with me. She put her arms around me and rocked me, shushing me as though I were a small child. As we stood there, her rocking me gently and running her fingers through my shamelessly thin, greasy hair, I stared at the bulging contours of the sheet draped across her shrine. And as I listened, it was almost as though her wordless whispers were rising from the things she had hidden away there.

Then we made love—for what turned out to be the last time. I drank of the sweetness between her thighs and then sank deep inside of her while we lay still, both of us breathing hard, both of us trying to freeze this instant in time while her soft hands glided over me until they began to urge my movements.

When it was over I buried my face between her cheek and shoulder and fell into an unsettling sleep which was disturbed by a series of unbearably sharp stomach cramps. I tossed and turned, trying to force my eyes open, gradually becoming aware that the pains I was feeling were something more than those of a simple stomach ache. Something was burrowing into my body and tearing it apart, breaking through my rib cage and devouring my heart, my lungs… everything inside that twisting, struggling cavity. Though my eyes were still not open, I was able to see the thing that was eating me. It glared at me, shreds of meat hanging out of its bloody mouth.

Mona.

I awoke screaming. I sat up in bed and looked over to the kitchenette light, the only light on in the apartment. There, drowning out my single scream with its constant, hideous cries was an animal—not much different from the one I’d seen struggle in the explicable depths of that shallow pool on Lower Wacker—stretched out upon the kitchen table, thrashing furiously beneath the slender young woman who dug through its flesh with her teeth and claws.

“Mona…” I croaked, as a piece of the transparent beast was ripped from its body and flung across the room. A small bit of it stuck to my cheek and I collapsed onto the sheets, trying to rub the hot, steaming mass from my face. I pulled the covers over my head and tried to wake up, realizing that the stomach pains had disappeared without a trace, as though they had belonged to someone else all along.

When I rose the next morning Mona was gone. I examined the kitchenette thoroughly, trying to find traces of the gruesome feeding I had witnessed the night before, but I detected no sign of a struggle among the usual clutter on the table. I felt the spot on my cheek where the glutinous flesh had splattered me and remembered that elusive oily sensation I had felt on my skin the first day I’d walked through the motionless array of Shabbies.

Then I heard it. A familiar ringing noise that seemed to snake through the air, stinging my skin and jabbing into my ears like a long needle.

I turned to the corner where Mona’s secret shrine lay. As I stepped toward it I could feel the pressure of that invisible fluid closing in around me again. I knelt and placed my hand on the sheet. It was warm, its surface like silk; and when I ran my palm across the gentle luxurious folds in the fabric, it sighed and twisted like reacting flesh.

When I yanked the sheet aside I did not see the disturbing mosaic of clutter, but an emptiness, black and cold. A stench rose from that emptiness, and with it invisible clouds of oil that struck at my face and hands. I let the sheet drop back into place. Its movement was slow and graceful and did not end until it stretched and spasmed, letting out a quivering sigh as it finally stopped.

I touched my face and my hand came away with a layer of transparent ooze that grew warmer and warmer the longer it remained in contact with my skin.

IV

Her last few days in the apartment were a nightmare for me. She was in and out all the time, leaving each time as though she would never return, and later walking back in the door as though returning had been an unforgivable failure of nerve. It was no longer as though she didn’t know I existed; it was as though she were suddenly so aware of my presence, so appalled by it, that she had to keep moving and distracting herself to keep from being overcome by it.

The warm weather that had brought the Shabbies from whatever realm they ordinarily inhabited would be returning in a matter of weeks and so, I believed from Mona’s nervous manner, would the Shabbies. I knew that every time she walked out the door could easily mark the last moment I would ever see her.

Finally, one especially frigid night, she opened the door and cast a hateful, unregretting glare in my direction. I was sure that the time had finally come. I broke down and ran to the door, slamming it and whirling her around to face me.

“Mona. Please…”

She averted her eyes and tried to slip quickly past me.

I grabbed her by the shoulders and fought her sudden thrashings, but her strength and her will to resist were far greater than I had expected. I found myself literally trying to tackle her, pull her down to the floor. I was willing to kill her just so that she might have to look me in the eyes. Mona shrieked and wailed as she had on that evening on Lower Wacker Drive when the Shabbie tried to wrestle her to the ground for what were probably the exact same reasons.

She struck me across the face. I could feel the blood spreading down my cheek. I struck her next blow aside and backed away.

I called her Mona one last time.

And then she attacked. It was all a blur, the hazy, fading end of it a frail human girl, the harder, on-rushing, leading edge something ugly and ferocious—rows of twitching, flickering blades mounted on glutinous, transparent cords of flesh. I covered my face with folded arms and dropped to the floor as a thousand needle-points pierced and broke off inside my skin. I felt a sprinkle of cool water, then heard the door slam.

I lay there for quite some time, afraid to move. When I finally sat up, it was dark, and Mona was gone.

My skin was clean and unbroken.

I tried to sleep that night, but every time I closed my eyes I was struck again by the image of that girl zooming forward through a self-generated haze, her face turning into a grotesque, glass-flesh monster, mouth open and ready to tear me to shreds. I didn’t want to know what my dreams would have made of such a vision, and ended up going to work the next morning with no sleep whatsoever. I didn’t sleep the next night either, only nodding off occasionally on the train for the next three days, until on the fourth night sleep finally beat me into submission.

I avoided Lower Wacker and spent as little time in the apartment as I could; and when I did, I scrupulously prevented my eyes from coming to rest on that corner of hers.

Did I really believe she wasn’t coming back? It was only in my most agonizing moments that I actually convinced myself I was really in love with Mona and not merely a slave to the presence she had offered me as an antidote to my suffocating loneliness. I began to fantasize that she returned to me in the guise of a shy, repentant but otherwise quite normal woman who would speak to me and not only heal the wounds she’d left me with, but explain away the madness she had suffused into my body and my home and into the world I saw through my tired, suspicious eyes.

It was this hope, pierced with a lifetime’s worth of bitterness, that ruined me in the end.

I lost my job. Various reasons were given for my abrupt termination, but the real reasons were obvious and plentiful. I no longer bathed. I rarely changed my clothes. I talked to myself. Sometimes I talked to Mona. And sometimes I just wept for her, in loud but stifled gasps.

On the night I lost my job I returned to the apartment in a rage. I looked at the shambles I had made of it since I’d frightened Mona away; dirty clothes strewn and wadded across every surface, half-eaten food festering away on the floor and tabletops, magazines opened and tossed across furniture as though I were always in the middle of reading a dozen different useless articles and advertisements. The TV had remained on for three weeks, until the picture fizzled out and I was left with no more than twenty-four hours of static. I felt another useless bout of crying coming over me.

No, not again. No more.

I let out a scream and proceeded to tear the place apart. Why not finish the job since it seemed to be what my body really wanted to do? I tore up clothes and magazines, emptied the contents of my refrigerator and freezer across every surface upon which those contents could land or stick.

And then I tore the old sheet away from Mona’s corner. I was struck again by the insane logic that made it look like so much more than a mere collection of garbage. I began tearing away at the complex, symmetrical formation she had created, hurling rusted metal, grime-coated shards of glass, rat and pigeon corpses, and completely unidentifiable, convoluted masses of slick or hairy or sharp material across my room, so that what had once been a carefully but enigmatically constructed puzzle was no more than a scattered addition to the wasteland of filth and clutter that had once been my apartment.

But within days, the apartment was clean and barren and lifeless. I, too, had grown clean and barren and lifeless. I took showers until I was covered with red, raw patches, and though I stared out my windows for hours on end, I did not leave the place for over a week.

When I finally did, it was to take a train downtown and revisit my old haunts: Lower Wacker Drive, the crossroads of my former life. It was early April now, and the weather had that cruel, unpredictable bite Chicago weather always has in spring along the lakefront: cold or warm—not merely on one frustrating day to the next—but from one gust of wind to another, from one patch of light to the adjacent shadow.

And there they were. I don’t know why it surprised me so much. Only three of them, standing brittle and motionless, as though just barely focusing their translucent flesh into this world. Upon first seeing the three thin and ragged men, all their attention centered inward on some kind of transitional pain, I felt as though I could have stepped right through them and they would have collapsed—like water escaping through an abruptly ruptured membrane. I sat on the catwalk and watched them for several hours, waiting for a sign of movement—of life—just waiting for something that might be a clue, a signpost that would lead me to my Mona.

But as the rush hour began on the streets above, some of it spilled down onto Lower Wacker and people began to pass by on their way home. They didn’t seem to notice the three Shabbies at all. Instead they focused on me, sitting pensive and alone, a very clean but ragged man on a filthy catwalk.

I kept coming back. Soon I began to read those unsettling stares and glances of pity and revulsion on the faces of the passersby and I realized that they thought I was just another homeless resident of Lower Wacker Drive. But of course I had a definite purpose. I was watching the Shabbies, watching their numbers increase slowly and steadily, watching as they came gradually into focus and began moving around, transparent and iridescent at first, but nearly solid, nearly corporeal as the weeks progressed. I walked among them, trying to follow—to imitate—their seemingly random patterns, listening to them speak to one another in those rapid, wordless whispers, and occasionally looking one in the eye and have him return my stare, and acknowledge my existence with a nod of the head or with that unsettling stretch of the facial muscles that I had seen so often in Mona, that grimace which I had always told myself was a smile.

Soon there were dozens of them, milling about a stretch of Lower Wacker that was just over three blocks long. The police would drive by, sometimes lean out the window, but they seemed incapable of seeing the Shabbies for what they really were. So did the muddled and preoccupied commuters. Even the transients who haunted Lower Wacker feared them too much to get close and see what the Shabbies really were, or feel the tension their presence created on the thin, wet fabric of our world. When I arrived in the morning I would feel the warm, oily hug of the membrane as it closed in on me, greasing me as though to ease my passage into the great dark otherspace where Mona hid from me, not knowing how much I needed her, missed her.

Eventually I could no longer return home. I had to stay down there with them, knowing that they could all disappear at any moment, knowing that when that time came, I would have to be there with them, ready to cross over with them, ready to face Mona again and make her understand.

I began to think of myself as Shabbie. I told myself that my clothes and the pallor of my skin were beginning to resemble theirs, that when I spoke to them they were no longer merely words but part of that deeper, hushed language the Shabbies used themselves, that when Mona’s thousand needle-points had pierced me just before her departure, she had passed some of that essence into me.

But the Shabbies could not understand me and I could not understand them. And when I was hungry I had to buy something to eat—at first with my dwindling supply of ready cash, and when that was gone, with money I could squeeze from the people on the streets above me. The Shabbies merely disappeared—only a few at a time—and would return gorged, the stripped limbs of lesser creatures dangling limp from their hands.

One very cold October morning they began to migrate. I followed them as they marched toward lower Michigan Avenue, feeling the tug of the oily strands that brushed and bathed me, anointed me and, finally, held me back as the Shabbies began to disperse before my eyes, spreading out as weightless globules of amber fluid, scattering into smaller and smaller droplets until they were no more than a mist.

When it seemed I was all alone I turned and saw one last Shabbie, a young woman who looked not much difference than Mona had on her first day. I called her Mona but she did not respond. I could already see the frayed threads of her clothes pulling apart, waving like the cilia of smaller and smaller drifting organisms, her transparent flesh and the tissues underneath softening for the final diffusion.

I leaped at her, crying out. I caught a hot wave of the sweet smelling flesh and felt it rupture and collapse around and upon me. I fell to the street, sobbing out that name over and over again.

When I finally gathered myself and trudged toward the nearest stairway, I thought about my apartment, wondering whether I had been gone so long that it had been rented out from under me, whether I could even remember enough about the world up there to reintegrate myself into even the margins in which I had lived my life.

I made it to the top of the stairs and scanned the passing crowds. I breathed in the October city gases and felt the cold winds slap and sting at my dry, brittle flesh and the whispers of bitter cold darkness that seeped in toward my shabby soul.