Tin Man
by K.C. Ball

He couldn’t smell a thing when he was on a bender, but it was always the odors that he noticed first, coming down. Oily-cold conditioned air. Musty bed linen. Urine carelessly pissed away wherever it was convenient. A tang of sweat lay over it all, thin and sour as a jail blanket and tatted with a ragged stitching of old booze.

Malachi Woodman winced, as an air conditioner coughed into asthmatic rhythm nearby. The Sleep Inn. Room seventeen. That particular mechanical death rattle was as permanent a memory as Malachi ever managed at times such as this. It was a beacon, calling him back to Seattle from wherever it was that he went to after drinking himself into oblivion.

He opened one eye. His left hand rested palm down inches from his nose; there was a tin can growing from the back of that hand and the can pulsed. Malachi closed his eye and lay still, considering the possibility that it was the onset of delirium tremens after two years of unremitting drunkenness.

He opened both eyes; the can was still there, an over-grown metal pimple. Malachi pushed at it with his chin and beard stubble raked across the top seam. The can moved; pulling at his skin, pinching.

“Jesus,” Malachi said, not certain if the whisper was blasphemy or demand for absolution. “What did I do this time?”

#

This time was going to be the mother of all benders, a dog-kicking, bent-dick, yellow-eyed, dirt-breathe, gut-puking and swollen-green drunk. Malachi was certain of that, sitting there at the Brass Monkey, perched upon a bar stool between Murmet and Leon, and he was an expert on that topic.

Almira, the afternoon bartender, had the right of it.

“If a college anywhere offered a PhD in professional intoxication,” Almira would tell new patrons, “Malachi would be the program director!”

She said it was a joke; Murmet and Leon said she was angry because Malachi offered lascivious proposals to her as he fell into the bottle and then rebuffed her when she acknowledged his sweet nothing.

She was attractive, to be sure, but Malachi didn’t look upon her as a sexual partner. He never saw any of the women who offered to share their beds in that way, for none of them were Dorothy. Long legs. Dark hair. Quirky sense of humor. Malachi crawled into a bottle two years ago, the day she packed her bags and flew away to Topeka.

But Malachi found no bottled succor this time. He might not remember what day it was when this one ended, but it began on a Tuesday, in the afternoon, in an examination room with Dr. John Osbourne.

“Ischemic heart disease,” Osbourne said, that Tuesday.

Osbourne was one of a kind, a sturdy fellow with a thatch of white hair and canny eyes, the only doctor Malachi trusted to check into his bouts of dizziness and shortness of breath.

“In English, please.”

“Your heart isn’t getting enough blood. In most patients, that means there’s a buildup of plaque in the cardiac blood vessels, but your tests came back negative for plaque.”

“Can you fix it?” Malachi asked.

“No,” Osbourne replied. “It’s what we call idiopathic; a disease of its own kind. I’ll send you to someone else, if you want, but there aren’t any specialists in unknown diseases.”

Malachi grunted. It was poetic in a way; he was going to die of a broken heart. He thanked Osbourne and left without another word. His first stop was The Monkey, where he joined Murmet and Leon at the bar.

#

Now he was here, sprawled upon the sorry excuse for a mattress in Room seventeen at the Sleep Inn, staring at his hand. He examined the can. It was new and bright, almost as big as his fist; the sort of individual serving container used to sell sliced carrots or whole-kernel sweet corn. French-cut green beans, too.

There was a snap-tab on top and the cover was still in place. Malachi twisted his wrist back and forth, experimenting. The can felt empty; no weight to it at all. He tapped it with a fingernail and was rewarded with a hollow pop.

“What the hell?” he said, and reached for the pull-tab.

“Don’t do that!”

It was a woman’s voice. She was standing in the open doorway to the bathroom, running her fingers through her dark mop of hair. The woman was tall, nearly his own height, and well turned; dressed in jeans and a tight green tee shirt with a slogan printed in white letters just above her breasts. Prey For Whirled Peas.

Malachi snickered. Whirled Peas, huh? He’d show her whirled peas, or maybe French-cut green beans; it was hard to tell just what it might be because the damned can didn’t have a label. He curled his finger through the pull-tab.

“I said don’t do that!”

“Why not?”

“Because you paid a lot of money for it.”

The woman stalked to the door, scooping up an over-sized leather jacket and matching purse along the way.

“What did you do to me?” Mal asked.

“Nothing you didn’t ask for,” the woman said. She glanced at her watch. “Look, I’ve got business across town and I’m late.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry! You slept too long!” She shook her head and tried again.

“We met last night and you asked for help; I gave you your money’s worth.” She stabbed her left index finger at the floor.

Malachi peered over the edge of the bed; lines and circles were drawn upon the gray carpet in blue chalk, a giant compass star laid upon a life-sized map. It looks as if there was melted wax at the cardinal points. He didn’t remember candles. Her voice called him back.

“The can will drop off when it’s done,” she said. “Now I’ve got go.”

Despite her words, she didn’t move. Her left hand waved his attention across the room, and Malachi spotted a black video cassette atop the television.

“I rented a video camera from the desk clerk and I recorded instructions for you,” she said. “Follow them to the letter.” She fiddled with something inside the purse.

“The recording quality may not be spot on,” she said, not looking up. “I don’t get along well with recording equipment.” She opened the door.

“It’s got something to do with helical scanning speeds, magnetic field resonance and ethereal phasing,” she said. “Anyway, good luck. I’ve got to fly!”

She slammed the door behind her, raising a thin cloud of chalk dust and leaving Malachi to wonder just how he should interpret her last remark.

#

“—there is a poison within you of your own making—” The words blurted from the television speakers, metallic and sharp.

Malachi sat on the floor, his face a foot from the screen, every inch of him aching from the effort of sorting out the jumble of images he carried home from the Sleep Inn. The screen flickered and blinked, fading in and out of focus, filled with darkness and unexpected flashes of light. The volume was at maximum but there were stretches of tape offering little else but whispers and silences.

The bursts of coherent recording, with vivid colors and crystal sound, were frightening. The woman had recorded fifteen minutes of instructions; the snippets and bits that Malachi could understand consumed a minute and a half of tape. From those ninety seconds, he learned that he had cursed himself with his thoughts.

“A curse is just bad thought become real through words,” The woman said, in one clear segment. “The Catholic Church calls it malediction. Speaking evil.”

Malachi had discovered three other facts. He would die if the curse wasn’t removed. He had paid the woman to work a magic that gave form to the curse. And the can was the instrument that would free him.

“Unchecked, the curse will weave a web around your heart,” the woman said, in a chilling stretch of clear tape. “Tightening until it ends your life.”

What was most worrisome was that he could not find a single coherent statement about the workings of the can. What did she mean when she said the can would fall off when it was done? Would the creature be drawn into the can? If so, what was he supposed to do with the can after it dropped from his hand? Put a label on in and slip it onto a shelf at Safeway?

Malachi fought to suppress a nervous giggle, imagining little cans of beans or peas or carrots nervously rattling away from his surprise delivery, giving the new guy some space.

But the section of tape that bothered him most was near the end. The static cleared, and the woman peered out from the screen, her image sharp-edged and looking so much like Dorothy.

“Whatever you do,” she said. “Don’t—”

And then the sound died as if it had been sliced away.

The woman’s image was still there, clear and bright, and she looked wise and beautiful and frightening all at once, but Malachi couldn’t understand a single word. He had an idea how he could know her words, but he didn’t have the courage to show the tape to an innocent who happened to read lips.

#

Malachi wasn’t certain how long he slept after he crawled upstairs and into bed, but he was awakened by the morning sun sweeping through the high eastern windows of his bedroom. In an instant, he was alert and filled with energy. He rolled from his bed, savoring the heat of the sun-soaked carpet on his feet and the sweet taste of the morning air.

For the past twenty-four months, he had been mourning the loss of Dorothy; damning himself for how he had let her go, acting as if he didn’t care whether he lived or died. Sitting before the television screen, struggling to understand the video tape, he discovered that he did care, that he wanted to live. Dorothy might never return, but it was certain he never would see her again if he threw away his life.

He needed help, though, to discover what had happened to him, and he knew just the guys to help him.

#

“What did you get yourself into last night?” Murmet asked, when Malachi slipped onto his usual barstool.

Murmet was all arms and legs, a beanpole with a big nose and a thatch of straw-colored blond hair. He claimed to be a professor and knew all sorts of unexpected things and he seemed to know about this. He extended a finger, almost touching the can, which was beginning to feel to Malachi as if it held something, but withdrew before making contact.

“You’ve involved yourself in some sort of magic,” Murmet said. It was an accusation, not a question.

“Yes,” Malachi said.

“She did this, didn’t she?” Murmet said.

“Who?” Leon asked.

“The woman Malachi left here with last night,” Murmet said.

“You know her, Murmet?” Leon asked.

“I know her kind. What did she tell you, Malachi?”

“That I’m not sick; I’m cursed.”

“And the can is supposed to help?” Leon asked.

“Uh huh,” Malachi said. “But she didn’t tell me how it’s supposed to work.” Leon shrugged it away.

“We’ll figure it out, won’t we, Murmet?”

Leon was big, hairy and laconic, the sort strangers figured for an ex-biker. He was an accountant, but like Murmet, he had the heart and courage of a gentleman of the road. Murmet took a long pull at his gin and tonic, draining the glass.

“Yes, we will,” he said. “Let’s have one more drink and then we’ll hit the road, see what we can find.” Malachi passed but bought a round for his friends.

#

They spent the rest of the day searching. Upon the Internet at a wifi coffee bar. At a brittle-parchment bookstore tucked into a courtyard off Post Alley. In the Fremont district, within narrow shops filled to the rafters with bizarre merchandise. In conversation with a gnarly little man, who sat in a high-backed chair nested in an avalanche of this and that within an old tugboat tied off below the West Seattle Bridge.

None of it offered hope of salvation. It was well after midnight when Malachi called a halt and the three of them made plans to meet the next day.

#

Malachi awoke to find the can engorged. His arm throbbed with the weight of it and the back of his hand had turned a nasty purple. He paced about the house, waiting for Murmet and Leon; not able to settle anywhere, watching the can swell.

Shortly before nine a.m., Malachi decided he could wait no longer; the can wasn’t going to fall off. Whatever the woman had warned him not to do, in his ignorance he must have done that very thing.

The can was swollen and pulsating. Obscene. Malachi was certain it had done the job for which it was intended. It had captured whatever had grown within him, but the thing was not destroyed and it was going to escape its tin prison. Soon.

Malachi made his way to the kitchen, pulled a carbon-steel Furi meat cleaver from its holster and laid his wrist upon the maple chopping block. He would get away before the thing escaped, even if it meant leaving a piece of him behind. He stole a glance to the telephone, hanging just out of reach on the wall.

Call 911 now. There might not be a chance later.

His left hand twisted of its own accord and there was a soft popping sound; his eyes snapped back to the can. The top seam had split, just a fraction of an inch. He eyes hurried back to the telephone for an instant but returned to his hand just as fast. Three quick numbers might save his life, but there was not enough time to dial.

He would have to save himself.

Malachi swung the cleaver, driving its tip into the wooden surface just beyond his outstretched fingers; still within hurried reach. He might need a weapon.

He had been running away from everything for two years; it was time to make a stand. Later, if he survived, if Dorothy surrendered to his pleas and agreed to return to him, she would come home to a whole man.

The can was a shining pustule, a festered boil ready to burst and spread its corruption. Malachi wiped sweat from his upper lip, took a deep breath, slipped his right index finger into the tab and pulled.