The old black man behind the newspaper peeked over its top, squinting into the crowd that filled the train station. Through the filter of flowing foot traffic he saw a young girl with a small rainbow suitcase pause to frantically scan the crowd for her parents, and was almost to his feet when a red-faced man in a long beige coat stepped out of the river of people and snatched her into his arms. Her daddy, he could see that from here. It was clear in the way she pressed her head to his chest and in the way she threw her arms around his neck, and the old man behind the newspaper always breathed a sigh of relief when he knew he wouldn’t have to sound the alarm.
It had been quite a while, but for a time the old man had been known as a sort of hero. “Mercy Station’s own guardian angel,” as he’d been referenced in Mercy’s daily newspaper, the Crier, a day after he’d alerted a security guard that he’d seen a man traveling with a child that wasn’t his own, and had seen them get on the A train to Waukegan. The train was delayed as security called the police in to investigate, and as multiple officers combed the train, the pedophile (named Richard Handy and who, as it turned out, was already wanted in three other states for child molestation and kidnapping) left the little boy he’d taken in Michigan a week earlier and had tried to run.
That first time had been an accident, he thought; the hero most people just called Gray had just happened to look up at the right time to see something that struck him as very, horribly wrong. He knew what the man pulling the little blond boy in the dirty red velcro shoes was the moment he saw him, and yet for some oddly tragic reason it seemed no one else cared to notice.
After he’d helped put Handy in jail, helped reunite the little boy with the family who had so sorely been missing him, Gray found himself walking to Mercy Station every day, a copy of the Crier under his left arm as his right maneuvered the cane. Citizens and security guards nodded at him as they walked by, and he always smiled and tipped his hat. Throughout the next year he thwarted three kidnappings and pegged another pedophile, this one a fat man who tugged along a little girl in ripped, soiled jeans.
He still walked there every day, though age slowed his steps and added weight to his cane. It had been years since the last time he’d had to sound the alarm, but he knew it wasn’t his fault. The word was out about Mercy Station, and criminals avoided it. The crime may have trickled, but the old black man named Ken Grayson (but whom everyone just called Gray) went on noticing things others didn’t (or couldn’t) just the same.
The little girl safely in her father’s arms, Gray checked his watch. There were five minutes until the flamboyant little courier would deliver his package. 3:33 every day, at the very moment the second hand on his watch ticked past twelve, a little man dressed in boisterous clothing would enter his cone of vision from the left, and would proceed to weave through the constant traffic of tourists and voyagers at a high rate of speed. The first time he’d seen it happen, Gray’s mind had been tricked into thinking that the little man had been running. But no, he hadn’t been. His legs barely swished past each other, his sneakered feet gliding along the floor like a moonwalk in reverse. Or like skating; Gray couldn’t honestly compare the little man’s movements to anything he’d ever seen before.
At first sight he knew the man didn’t belong. He wore light yellow slacks held up by crimson suspenders, and a dark orange tee. His hair was spiked in strange hooks, and yet no one else saw. Every day Gray watched with interest as the little man carted his package, always the same nondescript brown package secured with clear packing tape. It’s shape was indeterminable, as it seemed to occupy many at once. Looking at it, it seemed to Gray, was like trying to see your face without a mirror. It slipped and slid in his vision, not holding still long enough for him to really see what it was, even though he knew that in a way, it was as stationary as it could be. He watched as the utterly conspicuous and utterly ignored thing in man’s clothing dropped the package into the wall directly to his right, through the brick and apparently into an invisible slot.
That first time he’d not really been surprised at what he’d seen; just curious. He waited extra long before he got up to walk the four blocks back to his house and his wife, waited to see just what kind of thing would come to collect the package that had been left for it. But nothing came, and the next day the little man was back, wearing clothes that were different from the first but just as loud. Still no one noticed him, and again he dropped a brown package covered in packing tape into the invisible hole in the wall. After a week of this, Gray had stopped trying to see who would check for the package, even though he was sure that if he just stayed long enough, just once, that he’d see it. The straw had broken his back on the sixth day, when he’d stayed until half past nine. Nothing out of the ordinary appeared, and Rebecca had left his dinner, cold and uneaten, on the kitchen table before going to bed. He slept on the couch that night, his old bones aching from the new positions he’d folded himself into while he dreamed. In the morning he felt incredibly foolish, for during the night he’d dreamed of the other side of the wall, and seen a dark man walk up to a mailbox and remove a package. He’d spent all this time looking for any sort of being that would retrieve what the little man left, only to realize that the retrieval point was in a place he could not see.
But the next day he’d gone back, and sat watching, cracked skin at the corners of his mouth folding up into a little grin when the slight man inexplicably arrived at the same time he always did. His unnoticeable friend. And, it seemed to Gray, that to the little man he was unnoticeable as well. An invisible, impotent eye placed benignly behind a newspaper on a bench no one else seemed to ever use. It was his role and somehow, Gray was content with that.
After hundreds of days of watching the same thing occur at the same time, the old black man started to notice littler things. He noticed the way the air seemed to crackle with energy as the sound of feet on pavement softened by a immeasurably small amount. He noticed the way travelers held themselves a little tighter as the time came. Above all, he noticed the tingling in the tips of his fingers, and the way they shook as he held the newspaper.
None of those things happened today. At first he thought he was mistaken, that he was expecting the signs of the courier’s arrival early, but he checked his watch. The minute hand was resting in the gap between the thirty-second and thirty-third notch on the watch face. The second hand was rounding the giant six at the bottom.
Something’s wrong, he thought, and immediately his stomach dropped. He swallowed hard, and wave of fear that had been hidden deep within his chest rose up, squeezing his heart with horrible clenching jerks. Fifteen seconds left now, and Gray knew the man wouldn’t be on time, wouldn’t even be a minute late, or five minutes. The old black man had an image of a long arm reaching out of the wall where the slot must be and sweeping from side to side, looking for the package it received every day at this time. Gray stood up sharply and, gripping his cane for support, forced his old bones over to the wall. He didn’t have to look at his watch to know that it was no longer 3:32.
He lurched forward, grasping at the wall and finally stopping to breathe at the point the little courier always loosed his offering. Gray leaned his cane against the wall and began to feel the old bricks, his arthritic fingers tracing their pattern as they felt for a hole, or any opening. It has to be here, he knew it was, and yet he felt nothing. For a moment he stood with his hands pressed against the cool brick, eyes pressed shut, heart clenching, and then he relaxed, sighing.
No. Of course I wouldn’t be able to find it. It’s not really there. It was, of course, a lie, but one that relieved him so greatly he would gladly add to it.
I’m old, and sometimes my mind plays little tricks on me. There’s no courier, no one skating through the crowd every day at the same time to drop a package in the wall. Of course he isn’t real; there hasn’t been a time when any other person’s seen him. None of it’s real. There’s no hole in the wall. I’m old, and getting older.He took his hands off the wall and opened his eyes. He found the cane and put it into his left hand. Then, slowly, he turned.
The little man was there, wriggling extra-dimensional burden clasped between his hands. He looked at Gray, and his mouth positioned itself into a questioning pout. Gray looked back, and his mouth opened impulsively, vocal chords forming the guttural sounds his lips would change into words.
“You’re late.”
The little man, still pouting at Gray, heard this, and his eyes widened. His lips pulled back in what Gray at first thought was a snarl before he realized it was an expression of fear. As the words further sunk in to the little bright-colored thing’s mind, the whiter he grew. His clothes paled, somehow, hot oranges and yellows dripping off, leaving only a bleached gray image of a little haggard demon. The little thing shook its head, blinking and swallowing with great rapidity. Then it spoke.
“My… My Lord…” Its voice was like the grating of coarse sandpaper on metal. Gray winced. But the little man said no more. Its eyes rolled up into its head and it fell back, dropping to the floor in a heap. The package slithered out of its hands.
Gray stood staring at the pile of flesh and clothing for a long moment, mouth open, hands placed in front of him in a position that might, at another time, be used to communicate the idea of calm, and caution. It was the first time he’d come close to feeling anything like shock in, well, further back than he could remember. For a moment his subconscious held on with incredible fervor, wanting nothing more than blank-eyed incomprehension, but then the rational mind in Gray forced that desire down, beating it wearily back into whatever dwelling it had crawled out of. He would not refuse to see, to understand. Tiny red veins pulsed in the whites of his eyes as Gray blinked, and again took in the scene before him.
The little man (if that’s what he’d been; Gray was somehow resistant to the idea that the thing was human, had ever been human) was dead. The color of its flesh dripped off the way it had dripped from it’s clothing, the way its flesh was dripping from its bones even now. Dripping not like the steady, fluid drops from the tip of an icicle during the last days of Winter, but like pine sap from a severed limb. It was too slow to see if he looked for it, but from the corner of his eye it happened fast enough. The bulges and hollows that formed the horrible sea of migrating flesh made Gray want to close his eyes, close them now; if he didn’t he felt he would go blind.
But Gray didn’t close his eyes. He simply passed his gaze over the dead heap on the train station floor; a heap his inner mind knew would eventually disappear completely, leaving no trace of the being and whatever it had brought with it from whatever world it had come from. He passed his gaze over the dead thing and rested it on the package.
It lay on the cool concrete, all sides facing up. Gray squinted at it, trying to trace its outline. He couldn’t. All at once, the package was every possible shape. A line, a flat square, a box, a cylinder, a sphere. All at once, all of its sides were inside out, edges facing this way and that, vertices vibrating and undulating in and out of existence. He wondered, briefly, if he would be able to pick it up. Then, scolding himself (You can’t pick that up, it ain’t yours, it ain’t right. Belongs to the man in the wall, you leave that thing alone), he swallowed and looked back toward the dead thing.
He had been right, it seemed. The mangled mess of clothes and flesh and whatever passed for bone in its homeworld was indeed disappearing, but not in any way he had been expecting. It seemed to ooze directly into the concrete, the whole mass squeezing itself through microscopic pores in the rocky surface. And already it was getting smaller. Apparently what magic the thing held when it delivered its daily package, the magic that allowed it to go unnoticed as it did its duty, continued working after its death, because Gray heard no unfamiliar sounds in the station. He saw no one break step, no one shooting any curious glances at him or his dead thing. No one else could see. No one else
would see.
More thoughts railed through his head during those few moments than had ever done at any other point in his entire life. Chief among them was the fact that he, Ken Grayson, was responsible for whatever had just happened here. He felt no real regret, not then, just an impossibly large unreality that didn’t quite fit with his absolute acceptance of the situation. He had killed the bright-colored postman. The action hadn’t been intentional, oh no. The two words out of his mouth most likely had something to do with it. And the thing’s face; it had been afraid. ‘My Lord,’ it had said. Gray did not harbor the hope that it had been doing any last second praying. No, it had been speaking to him. Speaking an apology. It had fancied him someone he wasn’t, a man so frightening that it might be better to die in fear of him than to incur his wrath.
So it thought it had slighted me. It knew me as the thing from inside the wall, the thing that gets the packages. I said “You’re late” and it died of fear right there. Who am I supposed to be, Gray wondered
. Another part of him answered.
You know, you know who it is you’ve been mistaken for. He, who can assume any shape, who can appear at any place, who can damn any man or demon to his Hell. The man in the wall is the Devil, and you’ve killed his courier.
The dead thing on the ground had almost completely disappeared, taking with it the sweet and sour smell of curdling milk and rotting apples. The package, however, remained where it was, as powerfully visible as it had been minutes before, in the thing’s arms.
He hasn’t gotten his package, Gray thought.
How long before he starts looking for it? How long before Satan himself comes looking for it, here? And what’ll you do when he gets here? Smile, and say “Sorry about that, guess ah killed your delivery boy.”? No, quit jumping to conclusions. The Devil isn’t real. If you don’t believe in God you can’t start referencing his nemesis as if you believed in him. But I saw...I saw. The little man was real. Real as only I could see.He felt his legs go hot, and then numb. Groaning inwardly in recognition of what was coming, he grasped desperately at his cane, pulling on it to keep himself upright. The wall was more than two steps behind him now, and he could not lean against it. For one heart-wrenching moment he thought he had done it. Had conquered the fall. But then he was too far forward, off his balance too much to do anything but let go of the cane and throw his arms in front of him. He landed, brittle bones vibrating with the impact, and he let out a wheezing groan. Not a bone snapped, however, and he supposed the dead thing that had cushioned his fall was part of the reason for that.
Strong hands grasped Gray’s shoulders.
“You all right, mister? Can you move?” The voice was young, and Gray looked up into the freckled face of a concerned college student.
“Yeah, I’ll be okay,” Gray said, thinking how thirty years earlier a white man would not lift a finger to help a black man, however old or helpless.
The kid put an arm around the old man’s waist, and hoisted him to his feet.
“Thank you, thank you. It’s my legs, I’d been standing too long. Can you help me over to that bench?”
And that’s all it took. He was back on the bench in less than a minute, massaging his sore leg muscles. The strong young man who’d helped him was on his way, asking one final time if Gray was all right before retreating into the crowd from which he’d emerged. Gray sat, bony knuckles massaging his aching legs, cursing himself for standing still as long as he had, limiting the blood flow to his legs.
From his perch on the bench, he could watch the package on the ground (and whoever might be looking for it) from general safety.
It was a sick sort of fascination that kept him seated for the rest of the day. The pile of otherworldly material that had been the little man was all but gone, and the package lay in the same spot. This is what had his attention. Logic told him to go home, as did his gut, and yet…and yet every moment he watched the package he felt that in the next something monumental would happen. And yet, at the end of the day, when none of the courier’s “Lord’s” other messengers came to retrieve the fare, he was a mite relieved. What if whatever had shown up had seen him? Known what he’d done? An old black man with a cane wouldn’t last more than a second against the minions of Hell.
Actually, he’d already met one, and he’d done pretty well against that one, hadn’t he? It was a fluke. In his mind he was already planning, and Gray tried talking himself out of it. Even if you wanted to take it with you, the thing would probably kill you to touch it. It’s not meant for normal hands. His greed argued with his reason.
What’s inside it, you think? Maybe it’s not safe, but look at it. It’s beautiful, it moves and stays still at the same time. Don’t you want to touch it? Know what it feels like? And you can’t just leave it there, what if someone comes by to take it? Someone who doesn’t know what it is? His fingers twitched. From somewhere either inside him or very close, a small feeling of dread knocked lightly on his heart.
It’s not yours.
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