He sniffed again. The corpse smell was unusual. That first whiff had reminded him of the trenches, the overpowering rotten stench of days-old, disemboweled, blown-apart bodies. But it wasn’t strong enough, and besides, if there’d been a dead body or bodies here for any length of time, the neighbors would have noticed, closed windows or not. The apartment building wasn’t that well constructed. Plenty of gaps and holes for a smell to travel…
Jordan thought about the situation for a few minutes, wondering if it would be best to leave this one. Call it in to one of the cops on the payroll…but then he didn’t know what it was about, and it probably concerned Sol personally. What could an extra go to the papers about, concerning the studio?
“Ah, crap,” he muttered to himself. He drew his pistol, worked the slide, and kicked the door in, the chain separating from the wall with a loud crack.
Jordan moved in quickly, stepping aside so he wasn’t framed in the doorway, the pistol ready. It was very dim, with the curtains drawn, but he could see the little sitting room was empty. Likewise the kitchenette, which was just an alcove off the main room. There were two other doors, one to the bathroom, one to the bedroom. He knew these cookie-cutter apartments.
He kicked the bathroom door in first, moving fast. The neighbor with the hungry kids might be stupid enough to come and have a look, or maybe even run out to get a cop. They wouldn’t have a telephone. None of these places had telephones.
Despite the need for haste, Jordan hesitated a moment before the bedroom door. It was the smell again, that sweet odor he didn’t like, even more than the stink of rotting flesh.
He took this door differently, turning the knob slowly, easing the door open, standing off to the side. The smell intensified, but even worse than that, he heard a soft, unpleasant noise, something he couldn’t identify but he instantly hated. He didn’t want to hear it, wanted to run away from it.
It was a kind of card-shuffling sound, real low, lots of little sounds joined together, one after the other, but it wasn’t hard-edged like with cards. It was wetter, softer around the edges, and constant.
Jordan peeked inside, his heart hammering worse than it had even when he was on the firing step, waiting for the word, for the whistles, to go over and up into the shrieking, machine-gun-drumming terror of an assault…
There was a body on the narrow bed. A woman. Probably. She had been wearing a nightdress, which had been white, and was now uniformly a faded pink, and shredded into fragments.
Things moved on the body. Insects, Jordan thought. Or worms. Or something…his eyes and brain couldn’t process what he was seeing. Lots of tiny things roiling across what was now just a lump of meat, the skin long since gone, half the flesh, too, and even the bones diminished, foreshortened…
Eaten.
Jordan choked back the bile in his throat as he worked out what he was seeing.
They weren’t insects or worms. All those tiny, fingernail-size things…they were mouths…
Tiny, toothy mouths.
And the sound was them chewing.
Jordan retreated. He eased down the hammer on his .45 and re-holstered it, trying to be methodical, even though his hands were shaking. He walked to the kitchenette, though every part of him wanted to run for the door. There was an almost new Direct Action gas stove; he’d seen it on the way in. He spun all the knobs on full, heard the gas hiss from the rings. He opened the oven door, and the hissing grew louder.
But even the smell of gas couldn’t overcome the horrible sweet smell. Jordan tried to breathe shallowly as he flung open the kitchen cupboards, pulling out everything, throwing things down to the floor until he found what he’d hoped for, or close enough.
A full tin of lighter fluid.
He was working on instinct now. The kind of sixth sense that had kept him alive in the war, and in a few tight situations since.
His fingers shook as he undid the cap on the tin. He forced himself to walk steadily back to the bedroom.
The chewing sound was louder, more rasping. The mouths were working on big bones now. Jordan held his breath and tiptoed closer, the can ready. As he drew near, he saw the mouths slow, stop their work. And they began to slowly move down the remnants of the woman’s legs toward her feet.
Toward him.
Jordan shook the can, spraying lighter fluid across the end of the bed and the feet. The mouths moved more swiftly, climbing on top of one another, building up a facsimile of flesh again, already obscuring the bare bone, three…four…five inches high, growing so quickly—
Jordan retreated, pouring lighter fluid in a trail behind him. He dropped the can a few feet from the door, got his Zippo in his hand, simultaneously ripping the cellophane off a thirty-cent cigar with his teeth. He pulled the door half closed, shielding himself, and flicked the lighter. It clicked but didn’t ignite. He flicked it again, and again, watching the bedroom, smelling the gas from the kitchen, the stink of rot, the horrible, sweet blossom smell growing ever stronger.
The flame made him jump. For a moment he thought the next thing would be a gas explosion, and death.
But there wasn’t enough gas in the room, not yet.
Something moved in the bedroom door, along the floor. It looked kind of like a tide of mud, moving slowly, only six inches high. But it wasn’t mud, it was the mouths, clambering over one another, still sticky with blood and bits of flesh. Trying to climb up, to reach him…
Jordan lit his cigar, puffed twice, and threw it dead on the can of lighter fluid. He saw the whoosh of blue flame and felt the rush of sudden heat, even as he pulled the door shut and ran to the door across the landing.
“Fire!” he shouted, using every ounce of that command voice Sergeant Quinlan had cultivated in him at officer school. “Fire! Everyone out! Fire!”
The door swung open, revealing a child of six or seven. Jordan pushed him inside and slammed the door with his heel.
“Fire!” he shouted again. “We got to go out the windows.”
A harried woman stared at him, another child on her lap, a spoon of some indigestible-looking glop halfway to her daughter’s mouth.
Jordan ran to the open window. He just got to it when there was an almighty boom. The building shook, and suddenly the acrid smell of smoke banished the last of the awful sweet smell from Jordan’s nose.
The older kid needed no help climbing out; he’d probably done it a hundred times. Their mother hesitated by the window, until Jordan lifted her over the sill and swung her down. He carefully passed down the little girl, dropping her the last few feet. The mother caught her.
Jordan followed straight after, and hurried them away across the lawn and down the street. Another resident, a middle-aged man, came out the front door behind them and followed, coughing and choking. His undershirt was on backward, and the belt on his trousers hung slack, unbuckled.
“Where’s a telephone?” asked Jordan urgently. “I got to call the fire station.”
The mother and the undershirt man stared at him, jaws slack, the fire roaring up behind them, smoke rising dark and terrible, like a living thing.
“Where’s a telephone?”
“Around the corner,” said the boy, pointing along the street. He could hardly bear to look away from the fire. “The store, they got one.”
Jordan paused for a moment to glance at the fire himself, taking grim satisfaction from the fierceness of the flames that were leaping out of the windows of the apartment he’d been in, and already out through the tiles of the roof. Those hideous mouths would be burned to ashes, sure. He spun on his heel and started off, ignoring the cries of “Hey mister!” behind him.
He did call the fire station from the corner store, but only long enough to gabble out the address, before hanging up to call Tremont 52. The studio, where he was put through immediately to Mrs. Hope.
“This is Harp
er. Look, I…what the…what was Miss Sorenson going to tell the papers? When did you…whoever talk to her?”
“Are you all right, Mr. Harper? You don’t sound like you usually do—”
“Yeah. Yeah. I know. Listen, did you talk to Sorenson?”
“I already told you Mr. Theakston simply asked me to tell you to talk to her.”
What was unsaid in that sentence was when and how an extra got to talk to the head of the studio, and the likelihood that it was the usual thing, Sol seeing an attractive newcomer, calling her up to his office, promising real roles.
“Okay. I got to talk to Sol. Immediately. Is he there?”
“Yes, but he’s with—”
“Put me through.”
“One moment.”
Jordan leaned back from the mouthpiece and took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. Mrs. Hope came back again in a few seconds.
“I have Mr. Theakston for you, Mr. Harper.”
“What is it, Jordan?”
“The extra, Sorenson. Truelove, whatever. She’s dead. There’s something bad…what exactly did she say she was going to tell the papers?”
There was a moment of silence, a little self-defensive throat-clearing, and a pause followed by the click of a door. The sound of whoever had been with Sol leaving, hurried out by an urgent wave of the presidential hand.
“She sent me a letter,” said Sol. “To my home, Jordan! To my home.”
“Yeah, what about?”
“She wanted money. She complained the makeup she had to put on for It Came from the Crypt wouldn’t come off, and it was hurting her skin, obviously a ruse…Jordan?”
“I’m here,” croaked Jordan. He was seeing those mouths again, hearing the liquid rustle of their chewing. “When was the letter sent?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yesterday!”
“Yeah, I got it this morning. Lucky I was there, Benton was bringing in the post as I left, so I looked through it.”
Jordan shook his head. That half-eaten corpse, the smell…he’d thought it must have taken days…
“It Came from the Crypt is still shooting, isn’t it? When was she on set?”
“How would I know? Look, I had her up at…you know, once. I saw her dancing at the Cocoanut Grove, I said I could use her in a film. Look, she was fine with being an extra, she didn’t want more, not then, this letter was a surprise. I thought—”
“Okay, okay. Who’s heading the makeup team on Crypt?”
“Victor, I would presume…No wait, he’s on Penguin Dance…and Jacques is doing Roses of Monaco….It must be someone Deville brought on, freelance.”
Dreyfus Deville, or Bernie to his friends, was perhaps the worst of Pharos Pictures’ directors. But he was fast and cheerful, if pedestrian in talent, and Jordan liked him.
“Okay. I got to get on it.”
“You said she was dead? I mean, I was only with her once, two weeks ago—”
“I’m on it, Sol. You hang up.”
The phone clicked.
“Mrs. Hope?”
He knew she’d been listening. She always listened. Mrs. Hope knew everything.
“Put me through to Bernie.”
“Immediately.”
Click-click-click. A bored male voice answered the phone and reported Mr. Deville could not be disturbed, as he was on soundstage four and shooting.
“This is Jordan Harper. Go get him right now or else I’ll come over there and use you as a club to get his attention. This is a studio emergency.”
The voice got suddenly attentive. Everyone in the studio knew Harper.
“Yessir! I’ll get him.”
Jordan heard footsteps running away from the phone. He turned to look out the open store door, catching the spreading plume of smoke above the line of apartment buildings. An asthmatic siren wheezed closer, announcing the first of Engine Company 27’s shiny new appliances speeding toward the fire. A ladder truck, which seemed kind of pointless for a low-rise.
“Jordan?”
“Bernie. Who you got doing makeup on Crypt?”
“Uh, well, Victor was busy, and Jacques—”
“Who?” shouted Jordan.
“Fellow calls himself Ozymandias,” muttered Deville. “Highly recommended, and he’s done good work.”
“You remember an extra called Amity Truelove? Sol put her in?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Okay, after this conversation you don’t, right? Never heard of her. All extras look the same to you. When was she on set? What was the scene?”
“The Temple of Seth-Anthrax, she was one of the slaves who carry the—”
“She have special makeup for that?”
“Yes, yes, of course. Oz…I call him Oz…he painted these really quite horrific little mouths on her, all along her arms and…Jordan?”
“Yeah…a fly flew in my mouth. How many slaves?”
“Four.”
“They all get the little mouths painted on?”
“No, only Miss…the one you mentioned. One had eyes, one sort of tentacle suckers—”
“Where’s this Oz now. On set?”
“Well, he was. Funny thing, he was taken unwell, maybe ten minutes ago. Odd, because he’d been looking so good the last few days. Almost younger, but then—”
“Where’d he go?”
“His home, I suppose—”
“Mrs. Hope, you there? Call all the gates, Gower and Sunset and the Adit. This Ozymandias is not to be let out. Tell them he’s dangerous. They’re to hold him at gunpoint, don’t get close, march him to the special room in my office, quiet as possible.”
“Immediately,” interjected Mrs. Hope, over Deville’s splutterings.
“What—”
Jordan hung up, flung a bunch of nickels at the counter, and ran for his car.
* * *
“Yeah, we got him, Mr. Harper,” reported Billy, the senior of the Sunset Gate guards. “Lee took him up to your office, done like Mrs. Hope told us you said. Quiet, but Lee had his gun on the feller. He didn’t cause no trouble. What’s he done?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Jordan, and the way he said it they both knew he wasn’t joking. “Thanks, Billy.”
He parked in his spot and strode up the path to the bungalow that housed his office. It was set apart from the other four executive buildings, and Jordan had all of it. It was his private domain. The fixer’s realm. Not just his office, but also a large bathroom, a pleasantly appointed sitting room for telling people bad news, and the special room, which was actually a jail cell.
Only when he got inside, Ozymandias wasn’t locked in the special room, and Lee was slumped in the corner of Jordan’s office, dead as a doornail, his empty revolver in his hand.
“I suppose people are used to the sound of gunshots here,” said Ozymandias. He was sitting in Jordan’s chair behind the mahogany desk. He was maybe forty. Average height, thin, and elegantly groomed, with graying hair, an unmemorable face, but striking violet-colored eyes. He was wearing the whites the studio issued the makeup artists, nurses, and bakers in the commissary. There were five obvious bullet holes in his diagonally buttoned jacket, grouped tightly around the heart, but there was no blood.
“There’s nearly always an oater being shot on the saloon set, stage six,” replied Jordan. “The cowboys like to unload outside from time to time. Blanks, mostly, unless they’ve been drinking.”
He glanced at Lee, looking for the horrible, all-consuming little mouths, and then swiftly back at Ozymandias again. He thumbed back the hammer on the .45 and kept it trained on the makeup artist, even though it seemed it wouldn’t do any good.
“I have seen the cowboys about the place,” replied Ozymandias. “An exuberant bunch.”
His voice was quit
e high, and he had a faint accent Jordan couldn’t place. Sort of Southern, but not….
“I haven’t been in the movie business long, you know. It seemed to me to be a good place to find the sort of young person I needed, and so it was. But alas, not without complication.”
“I guess you might say that.”
He looked at Lee again. He couldn’t see any mouths.
Ozymandias caught the look, and smiled, showing his teeth.
Jordan swallowed a sudden surge of bile. Ozymandias’s mouth was identical to the myriad small mouths that had eaten Miss Sorenson. Or rather, those small mouths were perfect copies of the larger.
“I hear you’re what they call a fixer,” said Ozymandias. “I have a proposal for you.”
“Okay, let’s hear it,” said Jordan. He was thinking furiously, trying to work out what he could do. The guy was bulletproof. He used magic. There was no other word for it. He’d killed Lee without leaving a trace…
“I need another young woman, and swiftly. One who won’t be missed.”
“What for?”
“To eat!” spat Ozymandias. He wiped his face with his sleeve and continued, more softly. “By proxy, as it were. The consumption of the actual flesh is in fact almost incidental. It is the essence of youth and beauty I consume, to restore my own, which now ebbs by the minute, thanks to you preventing the completion of my planned repast. Give me a woman, and you will live. What else can you do?”
Jordan pulled the trigger, the boom echoing through the room, acrid smoke wafting up. He winced at the ricochets, the first off Ozymandias’s forehead and the second from the corner of the desk, before the bullet embedded itself with a dull thud in the wall plaster.
“Your weapons will avail you not,” hissed Ozymandias, rising from his chair.
“Okay,” said Jordan slowly. Fire had worked on the little mouths. If he could somehow set Ozymandias alight…but there was nothing at hand….He had to play for time. “I had to see for myself….”
Final Cuts Page 34