Henry and the Bic-Man

Henry and the Bic-Man
By Sara King

         Every History major agreed--it was the week from Hell. It was as if every professor in the department had gotten together in a bar one night and stayed until Last Call deciding how to best screw over the poor fools enrolled in their Masters program.

         Henry was running on fumes. Coffee fumes. He could still smell the sickly burnt aroma filling his apartment from yet another all-nighter, the spreading brown stain on the ivory carpet that he hoped would come out without dropping fifty bucks on a Rug-Doctor. God, he just wanted to go to sleep.

         But he couldn't. Professor Benton docked ten percent of the final grade for each missed class, Professor Marlow was having a 'quiz' on the three-fifths Compromise that just happened to take up thirty percent of the grade, and Professor Lee wanted all research bibliographies for the final thesis turned in by the end of the day. This was all before finals, which started tomorrow.

         Henry slumped down on the bench outside the Humanities building and glanced at his watch. Half an hour. He began to sweat, watching the seconds tick by. Did he dare take a nap? He needed one. Sweet Jesus, he needed one. But the chance he'd oversleep and miss his class was too great. Marlow and the 'quiz' was first, and the crotchety old bastard was notorious for locking the door on latecomers.

         Instead, Henry took out his books and began to review his notes. His favorite pigeon, a black-and-white speckled one that reminded him of his Dalmation he'd left with his parents at home, inched closer along the back of the bench, almost as if it were trying to read his notes with him. "Sorry," Henry said by way of apology, "Didn't bring any food with me today." He went on studying. The pigeon hung around a few more minutes, then flew off in search of easier fare. Noticing a misplaced date, Henry dug in his backpack for a pencil.

         All time seemed to stop when Henry patted the pouch and found it empty.

         In his coffee-induced haze, Henry had forgotten to grab a pencil.

         Dr. Marlow, who had gotten his first PhD from Stanford and his second from Yale, demanded punctuality and preparedness, would take no pity on him, and certainly wouldn't lend Henry one of the pencils that perpetually decorated his desk in a wrought-iron jar. Henry glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes. The other students were his best bet. He gathered his things and got up, mentally preparing his pride for a beating, knowing it was either that or lose his scholarship for failing a class.

         Henry loitered outside Marlow's room for several minutes, begging, but no one seemed to have a pencil to spare. Henry grew angry, knowing that they did, but that the rich brats wanted to see the poor kid squirm. He checked his watch again. Twelve minutes. Six kids had passed him on their way to their seats, but not one had confessed to having a spare writing utensil.

         Henry was about to leave when Carl Brandon stopped him in the hall. Carl was about as close to a cliched rich kid as Henry had ever seen. He drove to school in a Ferrari, usually had at least two girls fawning over him, and always had a perfect tan and perfect teeth.

         Except today, Carl had the remnants of his breakfast stuck against the gums of one of his front teeth, something that looked like a piece of lettuce. Henry stared at it as he asked about a pencil, the tiny imperfection drawing his eyes.

         Carl, to Henry's surprise, actually checked his briefcase. "Yeah," he said, rummaging, "I think I do, Hank. Just hold on a minute."

         Henry hated to be called Hank and Carl knew it, but he bit his tongue, hoping for a break.

         "Huh," Carl said, straightening. "Let me go get settled and find it. If I can't find one, Joe's got one he'll give me. Just stay here and I'll bring you one. Don't want the cranky old bastard to see you without the proper equipment."

         Henry glanced at his watch. Five minutes left. "Thanks a lot, man. I seriously thought I was gonna have to run to the library and steal one."

         Carl clapped him on the shoulder. "Just stay here a minute. I'll be right back." Henry nodded his thanks and Carl went inside. Sighing with relief, Henry slumped against the wall and stared at the ceiling. The world wasn't filled with assholes. It just felt like it.

         Henry loitered outside the classroom for several more minutes, waiting for Carl, then he glanced inside to find out what was taking so long.

         Carl was chatting with a girl, his satchel forgotten on the floor by his feet. Carl looked up, saw Henry looking at him, tapped his watch and grinned, making little running motions with his fingers.

         The son of a bitch.

         Henry glanced at his watch. Three minutes. The class was almost completely full now. Several of the kids were looking at him and snickering.

         At that moment, Henry's anger almost overrode his good sense and he almost went inside and asked Professor Marlow to borrow a pencil. Almost.

         Instead, he turned on heel and ran toward the student center, counting on statistics to save his ass. At least thirty students hung out in the student center at any given time, and the chances were there was at least one of the thirty would take pity on him. Or would they?

         And, even if they did, would he make it back to his class before Marlow locked the door?

         Henry was mentally calculating those odds when he saw a Bic pen lying against the wall, abandoned. He stumbled, veered, and grabbed it. The end had been chewed and the little black plug had been popped loose, teeth marks from its last nervous owner clear upon the white plastic end. Frantically, Henry made a scribble on his textbook cover to determine if it worked, no longer caring if he couldn't sell it back to the university at the end of the semester.

         The pen worked.

         Somebody, somewhere, had taken pity on him. Henry spun and jogged back. He'd actually have a couple minutes to spare, and Dr. Marlow, near-blind from reading texts and essays his entire life, actually preferred pen.

         Henry had to read every question three times before he could make sense of Marlow's convoluted multiple-choice. It would have been easy on a full night's sleep, but he hadn't slept more than twenty minutes cramming for finals.

         Carl, looking much fresher than Henry, finished first, probably using a key he'd bought off of last semester's students. He caught Henry's eye as he left, snickered, and sauntered out the door.

         Regardless, Henry finished the class on Cloud 9. Nothing like the threat of one's entire academic future crumbling before him to put a bounce in his step when it passed. Henry was even pretty sure he did well on the test, despite not being able to remember any of it the moment he dropped it in the basket on Marlow's desk.

         As he was leaving the classroom, a rough hand grabbed him and dragged him to the side. At first, Henry thought it was Carl, but the insane blue eyes that stared back at him were set in a pale, fleshy face that reminded him of the pulsing body of a maggot. Henry jerked away in revulsion, slamming his head against the stone wall behind him.

         "The pen," the man said, leaning forward until his greasy jowls were only inches from his own.

         "Look, buddy..." Henry glanced to the side. Two girls were leaving Marlow's classroom, but they only gave Henry's predicament a curious glance before hurrying on. Then he was alone with the kook.

         "The pen!" the man screamed--screamed--into Henry's face. The sound was slow and careful, that of a mentally retarded child.

         "Jesus!" Henry snapped, trying to jerk out of the larger man's moist grip. "What the hell are you on? What pen?"

         "The one you stole from me," the man said.

         Henry froze. There was something about those twitching blue eyes that left him with goosebumps as they scanned his face, searching. Something that left him certain the asshole would go ballistic if he forked over the pen he'd found in the hall.

         "I don't know what you're talking about," Henry said. "Find your own damn pen."

         The fat man let out an animal roar and wrenched him away from the wall, spun him, and slammed Henry into the other side of the hall. His words began devolving into a childlike babble that was all the more frightening for the obvious insanity behind it. "Give me the pen. Give it to me! Give me the pen. Give it! Give!" He was pinning Henry to the wall with one cold, fat hand around his neck and reaching for his backpack with the other. "It's mine. Mine. Mine!"

         Henry was beginning to black out from the pressure on his throat. Either no one in the hall wanted to help or he was alone with the freak. Either way, he had to take matters into his own hands.

         Henry slammed his knee into the man's groin, then watched the stranger's crazy blue eyes widen. For a second, Henry thought it hadn't worked and the stranger was about to strangle him. Then the soft wet grip on his throat loosened and the stranger fell to one knee.

         Once free, Henry backed away from the guy, spooked, grabbing his throat to make sure it was still there. "Here!" he cried, fumbling in his pack. He found the chewed Bic and tossed it at the stranger. It bounced off a bloated shoulder and fell beside one tan workman's boot straining to contain the fat inside it. "There's your pen, asshole." Then he turned and left the man there, every nerve afire with adrenaline and the need for sleep.

         Later, once the adrenaline wore off, Henry was more exhausted than ever. To his surprise, Professor Benton came to his desk halfway through her class, during the bathroom break, and told him to go sleep. He protested, mentioning the research bibliography Dr. Lee required by that afternoon and she took it from him and tucked it under a slender arm. "I see him at the faculty meeting today. I'll give it to him. Go home and get some rest, Henry. Try not to pass whatever it is you've got to the rest of the school."

         She winked at him, and Henry did not have the courage to tell her it was just a lack of sleep that made him look like the walking dead--a lack of sleep born of procrastination and poor planning, two things she valued almost as highly as Professor Marlow. He simply accepted her reprieve, grateful, and hurried out before the class could reconvene.

         Outside, Henry thought he saw the same stranger that had thrown him against the wall hunkered in a corner, seemingly reading a children's book. A literature comparison class? He couldn't tell if it was the same stranger because the man's back was to him, his face turned away, but Henry was pretty sure he recognized the pale tan workboots. Henry frowned, waiting for the stranger to look up, but he continued to read. Someone else, then.

         Or maybe I'm just really fucking tired and I'm seeing things.

         Somehow, Henry made it back to his apartment. Somehow, he unlocked the door. Somehow, he found his bed.

         He woke well past eight that evening, the last remnants of an odd dream that he had left the faucet running in the sink. Groaning, groggy, Henry rolled out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. He used the toilet, then frowned down at the sink when he reached for the hot water knob. The bowl was wet.

         Unlike the rest of the apartment, the sink was new. The spigot didn't leak.

         Frowning, Henry washed his hands and went to dry them.

         He stopped with his hands hovering over the handtowel. The towel was damp, the clear impression of a wet hand still dark on the light blue fibers.

         Henry wiped his hands, then went to the kitchen. He fixed himself some coffee, found his backpack, and sat down at the table with his textbooks for the next day. He was opening the tome on Western Civ when his eyes caught on the chewed Bic. It was centered perfectly on the table, parallel to the edges.

         It had not been there ten minutes before.

         Henry got to his feet and did a hasty sweep of the apartment. "Hello?" Nothing. From one room to the next, nothing. He did notice, however, little items were no longer where they should be. A cheap plastic contest award was overturned here. A book that Henry had not read in ages sat open on the arm of the easy-chair, where he had not sat in weeks. Henry righted the plastic figurine, replaced the book, and tucked the legrest of the easy-chair back into position.

         In his bedroom, one of his pictures had fallen from his nightstand. Henry reached for it, shaking. The photo had occupied a space only a foot from where his sleeping head had been only an hour before. Someone had been standing here. Watching him sleep.

         I'm being paranoid.

         Henry put the shattered picture-frame back on the nightstand and took a deep breath. He had half an urge to look under his bed.

         Now I'm really being paranoid, he thought, giving a short, nervous laugh. He bent and scraped up what glass he could, careful not to look in the dark recesses under the bed. His every muscle was tense and he almost expected a pale, maggot-colored hand to reach out and grab him from the darkness underneath, then yank him under with a moist, immobile grip.

         Henry threw the glass shards in the trash and went back to his kitchen. He was imagining things. That had to be it. Lack of sleep did strange things to people. Hell, the Bic-man probably wasn't even real. It wasn't strange at all to imagine something that never--

         Henry came to a dead stop when he found his front door cracked open. He went to it and pulled it open. No one stood outside. He was about to shut it again when the knob spun oddly in his hand. He glanced down. The lock had been shredded, with little splinters of metal littering the hall outside. His breaths began to come more shallowly as he stuck his head around the corner. "Hello?"

         The hall was empty.

         Henry stepped back inside, glanced back down at the little splinters of metal that could only have been caused by a drill or some other intentional ill-will, and called the police. They came, looked around, noted that nothing was taken, and took down his statement. It was all they could do. Henry couldn't even give a good description of the Bic-man, other than he had a face like a pulsing maggot.

         The next day, Henry took the Bic with him and trashed it on the way to his morning classes. He felt uncomfortable all morning, the same itching in his skin that one felt with someone staring at them from a distance. When Henry looked, however, no one was ever there.

         Henry ate lunch on the bench outside the Humanities building, hoping to make his lapse the day before up to his speckled pigeon, but the bird did not make an appearance.

         Henry stopped by a hardware store after his final class and bought a new lock for the door. He set the package down on the counter and made himself coffee, deciding to install it just as soon as he read a few chapters in--

         Henry sloshed his coffee onto the floor for the second time that week when he saw the chewed Bic back in its place, perfectly aligned with the edges of the kitchen table. This time, however, it came with an erratic note etched into the tabletop with the sharp bead of the pen's tip.

         You lost this.

         Henry stared at the note for long minutes, then slowly did the rounds of his apartment again, fearing what he'd find.

         Bic-man had been back, and this time it was much worse. Seeing the devastation, Henry could imagine his maggoty fingers rummaging through his belongings, tearing apart his pillowcases, rubbing shit across the walls of his bathroom. And, there in the sink, Bic-man had left a decapitated pigeon.

         Henry stood in the entry of his bathroom for long minutes, staring down at the white and black feathers, knowing which pigeon it was. Anger built within him, a fury that only grew when he found the head stuffed in a jar of mayonaise inside his fridge, oozing blood over the greasy white spread.

         This time, when Henry called the police, they were much more interested in his description of Bic-man. They even took pictures of the damage, which, while it didn't make his bedroom any more liveable, made him feel a little better.

         Then they left him alone.

         Bic-man, they said, would probably be back. They warned him to install a new lock, and that a police car would spend the night outside his apartment.

         Just the thought of those thick, pulsing, maggoty fingers sifting through his things again left Henry cold. He knew Bic-man would sit down in his chair, read a few passages from his book, maybe wash his disgusting hands in the sink again. Maybe not today, maybe not with the police watching, but soon.

         And Bic-man did come back. No matter where Henry moved, no matter which new address he took, Bic-man found him. Dozens of times. Everything Henry owned was destroyed again and again. Again and again, the same Bic reappeared on his table. His perfect table. Aside from the childish, hateful notes Bic-man inscribed with more and more frequency in its surface, it was untouched. Never turned over, never smashed. Just greasy where Bic-man's fingers fondled the pen before moving on to the rest of the house. Henry caught him at it several times, just standing in his living-room, running his disgusting hands across the ghostly white pen, his stupid mouth half open as he caressed it.

         Those times Henry caught him in the act, the Bic-man simply turned and walked away, almost as if he had wanted Henry to watch, had intended for Henry to watch. The audacity of the bastard left Henry shaking with rage every time. And every time, Bic-man's visits grew worse. He wrote childish messages in exaggerated scrawls across the wall, smeared his apartment with all sorts of horrible substances, and violated Henry's every private space. Every photo, he smashed. Every room, he destroyed. One afternoon, he even found Bic-man in his bed, wearing his underwear.

         The police almost caught Bic-man twice. Almost. Henry stayed up late, the telephone in his hand, waiting. As soon as he heard the moist fingers crawling across his door, fiddling with the lock, Henry hit speed-dial. Yet somehow Bic-man kept slipping from their fingers, a shadow that disappeared before they could lock him in the grip of their flashlights. And he kept coming back. Kept breaking in, kept terrorizing Henry.

         As soon as the police were gone after yet another visit, Henry flipped off all the lights. It was close to 2:00 in the morning. He had found out that afternoon his scholarship had been cancelled due to failing grades. He was being ejected from the degree program. Bic-man's nightly intrusions had seen to that. Henry hadn't been getting any sleep, and he did not have the money to retake the classes.

         All of his dreams had been shattered by a chewed Bic pen and its fat, larval owner.

         Wading through the darkness of his living-room, Henry propped the door shut with a textbook he would no longer need, then sat in a chair to one side to keep watch. Then he waited in the dark, knowing Bic-man would be back. He always came back after the police left. He had to see the pen. And, if the pen was missing, he always replaced it. The same chewed top, the same white and black Bic.

         Henry fell asleep, as he knew he would, but the textbook slamming to the floor woke him up.

         Bic-man was back, creeping into his home. Henry could see his pale fingers clutching the door, his insect eyes darting across the empty kitchen and to the bedroom beyond. He didn't look to the side. He didn't see Henry.

         Bic-man stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. Then he tiptoed across the entryway and ran his greasy fingers along the tabletop, questing. Henry heard a soft, perplexed grunt in the darkness. He stood as Bic-man reached into his coat.

         "Lose something?" Henry asked, walking forward.

         Bic-man whirled, insect eyes wide, startlement clear on his maggoty face. He looked like a child caught with its hands on a forbidden sweet.

         "Thought so," Henry said. He rammed the Bic into the man's fleshy jowls.

         Bic-man's mouth fell open, but he could not cry out. He reached for his neck with his fat hands, grasping, choking.

         "Self-defense," Henry said. Then he kicked him over and pushed the pen deeper into Bic-man's throat with the heel of his foot as Bic-man feebly batted at him with pale, moist fingers and tried to scream. Henry leaned down and smiled at him, grinding the tip deeper into the pale folds of flesh. "Sort of."

         The Bic-man stopped writhing suddenly and his icy blue eyes took on another look, one Henry had come to fear over the last few weeks. Bic-man smiled, his creamy lips pulled up over perfect rows of tiny teeth. Somehow, even through his ruined throat, the Bic-man said, "I'll see you tomorrow, Henry."

         Then, like a corpse deflated by insects on a time-lapse film, the Bic-man's body flattened under Henry's foot. As Henry backed away, eyes riveted to the Bic-man's remains, the skin shrunk inward, folding in on itself over and over, flap after flap dissolving upon itself, leaving nothing but...

         A pen.


Word Count: 3700