Darkman

by Randall Boyll

  But if only he could see himself, he would be more sure.

  Julie had scissors. She had a mirror. She had a tender heart and would love him no matter how bad the scars were. And about that twig of bone where his fingertip should have been? No problem. They probably had had to amputate a little bit because of the severity of the burns. The bone had been left for the wound to heal around, and would be clipped in a few weeks. Make sense? Do you buy it, this little tale of how great things would be if only things weren’t so lousy?

  He swore to himself that he did, then aimed himself toward Julie’s house, convincing himself of these things. He did not look at his finger again, and when he had convinced himself that everything was indeed okey-dokey, he tripped on an invisible crack in the sidewalk and fell heavily on his stomach, smacking his well-padded face on the cement. He pushed himself up on his hands, furious at his clumsiness, ready to scream with senseless rage. As if things weren’t screwy enough already, he had to go and fall on his face. At least it didn’t hurt, thanks to the Rangeveritz Process. His whole body seemed strangely numb. And the bastards hadn’t even asked him for permission. Once again rage boiled through his veins. They hadn’t even asked.

  He stood up, toying with the idea of going back to the hospital and kicking some ass. Or maybe just hiding in an alley here and waiting for someone to happen by. Boom-pow-crunch. God, but would that feel good.

  He shook his head to clear it. What was going on? He was no fighter, most certainly no killer. Where were these vile thoughts coming from?

  He was about to take a step when something on the sidewalk caught his eye. He bent down and was able to scoop it up with his boxing-glove hands. It was a tooth. An incisor, to be exact.

  Frowning at this mystery, he probed his mouth with his tongue. There was in fact a tooth missing, but he could not taste any blood. Worse than that, he could not find his gums. Just long, dry teeth anchored in bone.

  He hurried on, too frightened to examine this hideous new catastrophe, afraid of its implications, because if he didn’t have any gums in his mouth, he most certainly would not have any . . . any . . .

  Any face.

  He broke into a trot that quickly became a dead run, jumping puddles, falling and scrambling up again, his eyes full of rain, his gauze streamers flailing behind him and his borrowed raincoat flapping. He ran to escape this fresh burst of horror, which was threatening to extinguish his sanity. But the horror ran with him, ran inside him and on him and all around him, a horror with no name and no face.

  Julie lived in a stylish brownstone in one of the more affluent parts of the city, where she paid an exorbitant amount of rent in exchange for a one-bedroom apartment in this safe and cozy neighborhood of doctors and lawyers and plumbers. On this rain-drenched night three days after Peyton’s death, she had in mind to walk six blocks to the nearest Circle-K, not because she particularly needed to buy anything but because it gave her something to do other than sit in the house staring at a television she no longer heard, walls that seemed close and oppressive, a stereo that seemed to play only crashing heavy metal or funeral dirges.

  She went down the stairway to the front door and the foyer, beige raincoat securely buttoned and belted, collar flipped up like Bogart, crazy-colored umbrella dangling from her wrist. She opened the door to a blast of wind and rain that seemed about to end this little voyage before it had a chance to start, made a decision, and stepped out, closing the door softly so that Mrs. Wiggins downstairs would not come out and hand out more condolences, which Julie was absolutely sick of. She let her umbrella spring open, gauged the wind direction and the slant of the rain, and went down the stone steps to the sidewalk. Streetlights glared off the street in white pools, and the maples that straddled the street danced and bowed, whispering their secrets to each other and casting leaves to the wind. Julie had a momentary vision of the wind hoisting her by the umbrella, Mary Poppins reborn, and depositing her in England. It was a goofy thought but it made her feel better, even made her smile to herself and into the dark. Anything was better than splashing around in a bottomless ocean of grief.

  She turned at the corner and went right, her heels tapping steadily on the walk. For an instant she thought she saw something—a man, maybe—but the shadows shifted and there was nothing. Spooked a bit, she made herself move a little faster. Then she heard a strange swishing sound, the noise of wet cloth dragging on the wet street. She glanced over her shoulder nervously, where her apartment house stood safe and secure. Maybe this outing was a bad idea.

  She went on, anyway, and when the hand crept out of nowhere behind her and pressed itself onto her shoulder, she uttered a squawk, instinctively ducking. The hand swung in front of her face as she bent, catching the streetlight and revealing, to her endless horror, a muddy flap of gauze with skeletal fingers sticking out like short white spokes. She screeched and spun around. A bedraggled mummy with black slits for eyes was there, making inhuman, piglike noises. The bandaged jaw worked up and down, squeezing out water that drooled down onto a threadbare black raincoat. The mummy reached out both hands to her, twiglike bones gleaming a loathsome dirty white in their bedding of soggy gauze. Her blood seemed to stop in her veins, instantly coagulated by shock and fear.

  She screamed, a good, healthy scream of pure fright, and the mummy fell back, hiding its hands behind itself. Still it made the throaty gobbling noises.

  Julie found herself suddenly running as fast as she ever had, to her building and her apartment and safety, her umbrella flipping inside out, the wind and rain making tatters of her hair. She got there in thirty seconds, hurled the door open, and disappeared inside.

  Peyton batted a hand against his throat, shambling after her, trying to make his voice do more than squeal. As she vanished into her house he was able to croak out a sentence that was almost comprehensible.

  “Julieeeee! It’s meeeee!”

  But by then, of course, she was gone, and all hope of ever seeing her or touching her was gone with her.

  12

  Darkman

  IT WAS NEARING dawn when Peyton made it to the remains of his laboratory. The eastern sky was an unhealthy shade of pink and purple, and still the rain came down, came down as if to wash away the world and the man whose name was a memory, a man with no future and no past. Peyton found the front door open and swaying back and forth in the wind, while its hinges screeched as if in pain. He went inside and tried to shut it, but the knob was gone as usual, this time probably for good. He peered through the gloom while the stink of old wet ashes stung his nose . . .

  Nose? Have I got a nose?

  Jesus H. Christ, of course you have a nose.

  . . . and made his eyes water. The place was practically gutted, the stairs a black shambles where fire had walked its way down and nested in the old wood. Peyton tested the first step, which shattered with a puff of ash and nearly spilled him over. He took another step, not caring that sharp splinters were sticking out of the gauze around his right foot or that the cloth was slowly staining red. He felt nothing. On hands and knees he crawled up the stairs, nearly falling through the missing fifth step. What had once been easy habit was now forgotten, and when he did make it to the upper story, his breathing was ragged and his mind was bordering on rage again, rage at himself for being what he was and rage at the human devils that had caused this. The roof was gone, blasted to powder, and the endless rain was making dirty puddles and piles of sludge on the floor. He stood up again and hobbled through the wreckage of his former world, stumping crazily because his foot was stuck full of splinters. With a groan he sat on the remains of a steel chair and pulled the splinters out. Blood dripped down into the ashes, nearly black in this ugly light. He did not care. Somehow his shoes were lying where the ThinkTank-PinkTank had been, curious casualties that had been ripped from his feet in the explosion. He unwrapped his dead feet and put them on.

  A part of him that had not died in the fire urged him to get busy, to clean this place up and make
it back into what it was. He stood and hoisted an overturned table, making it upright. He brushed the black putty of soot off it with both hands, turning the gauze an unlovely black, and stared at himself in the weak reflection of the polished steel.

  He was a man made of dirty cloth, a bizarre Mr. Potato Head with no pipe and no hat and no hope. He scrabbled among the debris and found a charred scalpel, the one he had used to slice samples of Yakky’s artificial face. He turned back to the table and carefully cut a small flap free from his right cheek, then peeled it back and looked at whatever mysteries might be inside.

  It was . . .

  Ah, God, no!

  It was naked . . .

  Help me, somebody, help me!

  It was naked bone and baked muscle, peeled and blistered like old paint, a hideous monster’s face.

  With shaking hands he cut another flap, this one on the forehead.

  Bone.

  And another over his nose.

  Toasted bone with two skull-faced slots for nostrils.

  The scalpel dropped from his fingers and clattered on the table. He mashed the flaps shut, almost too sickened to move. The bastards had not only stolen his future, but his face as well. And his hands, don’t forget his hands, where dirty stalks of bone poked out of black gauze and cooked meat. Even a blind man would flee in terror from this monstrosity. And Julie? She already had.

  He pounded his hands on the table, hoping to break the horrible white sticks where fingers should have been. Anger welled up, surging through his brain and body, pushing reason aside, turning him into the grotesque atrocity that he had so unwillingly become, turning him into a beast made of bone and scars and hate. He howled like an animal, beating his hands on his face now. He stuck his skeletal fingers through the gauze over his mouth and tried to bite them off. No such luck, but at least they didn’t hurt. Nothing really hurt, thanks to Mr. Rangeveritz, may he rot in hell.

  He stood up and hurled the table across the room, where it banged against the charred leftovers that had once been a wall. He threw the chair next, overcome with an insane rage more powerful than anything he had ever experienced. He stumbled backward and tripped over the black husk of his computer, a nice IBM job that had once held the secrets of his experiments, all those useless experiments. He pushed himself erect, seized the computer by its monitor, and hauled back to throw it, ready to scream with delight when it shattered. Something fluttered out of it, a thin strip of paper that pinwheeled to the ashen floor and landed faceup. Peyton looked at it and his rage dwindled to nothing.

  Julie and Peyton, clowning around in a carnival photo booth, kissing, laughing, living.

  He put the IBM gently on the floor. This was no accident, no freak occurrence. Julie had been here, standing among the wreckage of their dreams, and for reasons even God might never know, she had slipped the picture strip into the bowels of the computer. For the first time Peyton realized that he was considered dead, legally dead, and that Julie was stunned with grief.

  So she still loved him. But could she love the gruesome creature he was now? Could she?

  He looked around the lab. The force of the explosion had been vented upward when the roof blew. Maybe some of this junk could be made to work again.

  He started sorting through the ashes while wild ideas sailed through his mind, making his heart hammer. Could he do it? Would it work?

  Yeah. Ninety-nine minutes at a time, but time is what Peyton had by the handful. He was, after all, quite dead.

  Something unusual caught his eye. He picked up a smashed amber prescription bottle, shards held together by a soggy label. He wiped it clean and held it to his eyes.

  VALIUM 5 MG.

  1 TABLET 2 x A DAY

  RICK ANDERSON

  321 WESTERLY, APT #6

  If he had lips, Peyton would have smiled. The man named Peyton Westlake was indeed very dead.

  But the Darkman had just been born.

  PART TWO

  Revenge

  13

  The Party

  WELL, THIS CERTAINLY stinks, Julie thought, feeling guilty and confused. Louis Strack had called with an invitation to attend a swank private party, where she could chitchat with the upper crust and possibly ingratiate herself with some old cad who held the keys to, say, the district attorney’s office. “It never hurts to promote yourself,” Louis had said, and with the reassurance that there was to be nothing remotely romantic between them, Julie had agreed to go.

  And so she was here on this balmy Saturday evening eight days after Peyton had blown himself and Yakky to kingdom come, wearing a slinky black dress that gave new meaning to the world curves. She was in the powder room of the ultraswank Condor Hotel’s grand ballroom, practicing phony smiles in the gigantic mirror. It wasn’t going very well. Her eyes seemed to have grown large purple bags in the last few days; in her mind her hair resembled a heap of straw, the dress a weary rag. She was tired and frazzled and sick of crying, because reluctantly she had acknowledged the simple fact that Peyton was never coming back, and that made it all the harder to bear.

  There was a young woman seated beside her, smearing her lips with screaming red lipstick. Julie wished she would go away. Contact with other people, normal people, was an irritation she could do without. It felt better just to sit at home and swim in a sea of grief. It seemed it was the best way to keep Peyton’s memory alive. She had even sworn a private oath that she would remain celibate for the rest of her days.

  “Super party, huh?” the young woman said, then clamped her lips over a piece of Kleenex. “Have you seen that movie-star guy yet?”

  Julie shrugged.

  “I can’t remember his name, but he used to be on one of the soaps. I can’t remember which one, but they told me he would be here. I haven’t seen him, though. Have you?”

  Julie shook her head. Please go away, she thought. Just go away.

  “He’s cool, I think. I think he’s got blond hair like yours. Nifty hairdo you’ve got. I haven’t seen one like it in years. Maybe his is brown. Who knows?”

  You certainly don’t, airhead.

  “Well,” the woman said sprightfully as she shoveled the contents of her purse back inside, “gotta go!”

  Do that. For God’s sake, do that.

  She left. Julie blew a small sigh of relief. The party sucked. She felt worse. She believed she was shrinking, fading away. Soon all they would find of her would be her shoes, and they would be full of tears. Peyton had left a gaping hole in her soul, stripped her clean of confidence and the illusion that both of them were immortal. The facts were cold and hard: You live and then you die. What fun.

  Another woman breezed in, high heels clicking on the terra-cotta floor. She proceeded immediately to start yakking. She went into a booth, clicked the door shut, and went on talking.

  Julie tiptoed out, knowing that the only way she would survive this evening would be to get loaded and stay that way. But she had tried that once before, alone at home slugging down straight vodka and waiting for the relief it would bring. But the bottle dipped down to the halfway mark and she wound up crying, like a derelict wino blubbering about some ancient hurt that had never healed. Did she have a hangover the next morning? Goddamn right she had a hangover. She chugged a quart of V-8 for breakfast and swore off booze forever.

  Like most brash resolutions, this one faded in only a few days. Now she walked down the marble steps, hoping no one would look at this specter of ruin and death floating toward them and scream. No one did. She headed off toward the bar, leaving behind the party area and the dancing couples. The band was cranking out some old Guy Lombardo tune full of horns and muted saxophones. Men in tuxedos and women in their finest swirled and smiled and even laughed. It made Julie feel vaguely ill.

  She parked herself at the bar and was immediately the center of attention. One bozo hopped up and planted himself beside her. His ruddy complexion showed he had indulged in too much liquor and had drunk it too fast. He breathed on her and she tha
nked God she wasn’t smoking. The blast would demolish the building.

  “How ya doon?” he said, leering at her.

  “Doon fan,” she said with enough sarcasm to make most mortals cringe.

  “Drowning your sorrows, are you?”

  Julie gave a little shrug, relenting. “Just giving them something to swim around in.”

  “Name’s Jimbo, pretty lady. What’s your pleasure?”

  “I’m sure it wouldn’t involve you.”

  He grinned. “Barkeep! Get the lady whatever she wants. Put it on my tab.”

  The bartender ambled over. “Vodka and lime,” Julie told him, and he went away. Jimbo took the opportunity to put a warm hand on her thigh. Smooth devil, that Jimbo.

  “Get your filthy paw off me,” Julie said, beaming.

  Jimbo opened his mouth to reply when a hand clamped down on his shoulder. He spun around in his seat, already snarling.

  It was Louis. “You’ve had too much to drink. Get out.”

  Jimbo blanched. “Right away, Mr. Strack.”

  He hurried off and was enfolded by the crowd. Louis turned back to Julie. “Glad to see you,” he said, smiling. In his well-fitted tux, Julie had to admit, the man looked like a million bucks. Maybe a billion.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  He raised a finger. “No thanking allowed on your part. I’m very glad you came. Have you been . . . waiting long?”

  “Just got here,” she lied. In truth she had been in the powder room for almost forty-five minutes, unable to face this.

  He seated himself as the bartender brought Julie’s drink. She gulped it down as fast as decency would allow.

  “I haven’t bothered you over the last week or so because of what happened to Mr. Westlake,” he said. “I know it’s a tough period. But I have to know if you’ve come to a decision on the matter of the Bellasarious memo.”