For generations, It had been a city of decay. Long ago a prosperous manufacturing and railroad hub, it had slowly turned into a city of despair, a city of pain, a city of death. It was in this city that I took a job as a librarian.
The library was housed in a large Neoclassical building, constructed in 1897, when the city was a large steel producer. It must have been a sight back then, but it, like the rest of the city, had decayed. The pillars were chipped, the walls covered with graffiti, the steps cloaked by weeds. The inside was even worse. Mold blanketed the walls, the ceiling often leaked after a heavy rain, and the shelves stood half empty. There was simply no money.
It was not surprising that this edifice was no longer a place for reading, a place for research, a place for learning, a place for joy. Instead, it was the city’s de facto daytime homeless shelter. With no other options, dozens of homeless men spent their days among the stacks. I took the job believing that I could turn it around, but I soon realized that was a pipe dream. Optimism can only go so far with no funding.
Out of all the homeless patrons, there was one who stuck out. He looked about 60 and was nearly bald, with only a few tufts of white hair around his ears. His head was extremely large, resembling that of an archetypal alien. Although his clothes were wrinkled and stained, he tried to dress nicely, always wearing a sport coat and tie, even in the scorching summer.
He did not interact with the other homeless men, did not join their games of dominoes or cards. He sat alone, studying the same book every day: an early-20th-century translation of Turgenev’s poems. He had several notebooks spread out on the table, in which, at times, he would scribble furiously like a mad man. At other times he would stare at a page as if in a trance, seemingly not blinking for hours on end. He also had a curious affinity for plastic bags. If he saw one on the ground, he would dash over to it and stuff it in one of his pockets, which were overflowing with dozens of others.
His behavior was odd, yes. I thought that he, like many of the other homeless individuals, had an untreated mental illness. But there was nothing I could do. The state’s and city’s social services were overwhelmed. A seemingly harmless individual like him would be at the bottom of their priorities.
I didn’t mind having him visit the library. He was always polite, greeting me every day with a “good morning, sir” in an accent that I couldn’t quite place, perhaps British, perhaps West Indian. At the end of every day, would return the volume to its proper place on the shelves. He never drank in the library, never attempted to bathe in the urinals, never got in any fights, never started screaming for no apparent reason. Wished all the patrons were as well behaved as him.
It was early September when I found his body. I was doing my morning rounds when I noticed a pool of blood emanating from a second-story bathroom. Inside, his body lay curled up under the sink, a large meat cleaver resting by him. There were two cuts to his neck, forming an X where they crossed his Adam’s apple, so deep that he was nearly decapitated. His ears had been severed, but were no where to be found. By his head was a lighter and a pile of ash, presumably the remnants of his notebooks. The window on the far side of the bathroom was open, a crisp breeze blowing through, the first signs of the coming Autumn.
The coroner ruled that his wounds were self-inflicted. I had my doubts, for it seemed to me that after a single blow the man would have been incapacitated, if not dead. The motion-activated security camera showed that the man entered the restroom shortly before closing time. The night watchman came around an hour later, but did not check the inside of the bathroom as he was supposed to. No other footage was captured until the following morning. The exterior security camera, which would have recorded anyone who climbed into the window, had been broken for years.
I honestly didn’t know what to believe. Both theories—that the man managed to nearly decapitate himself, or that some intruder climbed into the second-story bathroom and mutilated him—seemed equally improbable.
The library reopened the next day. A few of the regulars asked me where ‘The Professor’ or ‘The Plastic Bag Man’ was, but, in general, it was like nothing had ever happened. Life went on.
The following March, an elderly lady approached me at my desk, telling me that a book she had checked out was unreadable, covered with scribbles. Only after she left did I recognize it, the volume of Russian poetry that had so entranced the man now known as John Doe #74.
I flipped through the pages. Every inch of white space on the first hundred pages was covered in a series of numbers, written in red ink. No spaces, no commas, just a long stream of digits. I wondered if the mysterious man was the creator of the cipher, or if he had spent those long hours trying to crack the code.
After the numbers ended, the doodles began, thousands of macabre drawings done in red ink, filling the margins. A hellish nightmare of gleeful devils torturing naked men, roasting them on spits, devouring them alive only to regurgitate them later. I flipped through the pages, trying to see if it contained a clue to the man’s identity. On the last page, there was, in red cursive lettering, a brief note addressed to me. It simply read “133.4” and was signed “The Plastic Bag Man.”
133.4. My first thought was that it was a Dewey Decimal call number. I didn’t remember what books were classified under 133, but I knew that the 130s contained works on the paranormal, the occult.
I ventured deep into the stacks and pulled out the handful of books we had in that section— books on witchcraft and magick, sorcery and demonology—flipping through them, trying to find some sheet that had been secreted away, Nothing. I was about to gather the volumes and return to my desk when I noticed a small black box, the type that might hold a woman’s earrings, on the back of the shelf.
Inside were two ears. Not the ears of John Doe, which had never been found, but my ears. I felt my face; my ears were still attached, but they were simultaneously in the box. I was sure of it.
I heard laughter from behind me and turned around. There was John Doe standing a few feet away. He did not look like a ghost; his body was solid, the gashes on his throat still oozing blood. In his left hand he was holding a necklace, a necklace made of his ears and those of dozens of others, including mine.
I turned and ran. He did not chase me, but kept laughing. “You can run to the ends of the earth, but you will never escape me,” he cried.
I quit that very day. Found a new job a few thousand miles away on the West Coast. But I did not escape John Doe #74. I see him sometimes out of the corner of my eye, in my rearview mirror, in the reflection of the moonlit sea. Always holding the garland of ears, always laughing. What he wants, I do not know. But I suspect I will soon find out.