Darkman

by Randall Boyll

  Sitting on the cushy recliner across from Louis, becoming embarrassed by their mutual silence, she opened her mouth to speak but discovered she had nothing to say. Louis was watching her, a well-built man with nice black hair, anybody’s dream boy, every girl’s secret boyfriend. Some kind of magnetism hung around him, an attraction that went beyond looks or money. He was invulnerable but he was also helpless. He was sweet enough to make honey sizzle but was able to command empires. He was, Julie had to admit, a very wonderful catch.

  But Louis had a dark side, she had already concluded, and that dark side showed its strange face from time to time. A drunken businessman had stumbled over to their table at the High Rider while Julie and Louis were spilling out their souls to each other. The drunk quickly became a pest, a leering idiot with eyes that raked up and down Julie’s new dress, a tongue that was hanging out and a conviction that he was Mr. Cool. Louis had contained himself far longer than was necessary, but when the time was up, he grabbed the man’s tie and thunked his head on the table. Mr. Businessman was ejected in a hurry. The manager hustled over with enough apologies to fill a wheelbarrow. Louis was kind, but there was a flickering in his eyes that said, You just lost a customer. She would swear that the manager went white before he was done shoveling out his apologies. She had just laughed. What kind of wonderful new world had Louis handed her? Scratching the depths of her checkbook in her old life with Peyton, handing out rubber promises that bounced and broke, she was now being catered to by a millionaire. Is this what she had wanted all along? Enough money to be an upper-crust, nose-in-the-air debutante, enough dough to toss power and weight around like confetti?

  She didn’t know, tried not to think about it. The whole thing was breathtaking and glorious, but it was dark and horrible too. What did she want out of life? The old stand-by-your-man routine, no matter what grievances the future might offer? Or let’s-party-till-we-die, how about that? Louis Strack seemed to be a giver of both. He had enough cash to write his own ticket, and if she hung on to him, she would be a happy lady indeed.

  So why did she feel so lost and afraid all the time, this after-Peyton time?

  She shrugged inwardly. What was the use of pondering, anyway? That was yesterday and this is today. If life is a roller coaster, she was only along for the ride, no matter how scary it might be.

  Now she felt, as the silence grew huge on this evening, that something ought to be said. She leaned forward in the recliner and softly rubbed her hands together. “Louis?” she said, almost a whisper.

  He looked at her. “Still here, Julie. Still here.”

  She offered a smile that felt mechanical. Peyton was intruding. “I want to thank you for a wonderful evening. It’s been a long time since I’ve really been able to enjoy myself.”

  Boy, but did this sound lame. Julie resisted the urge to run into the bedroom and drop dead. Instead she did the only thing left to do: “Can I offer you a drink?”

  He smiled, nodding. “You bet. Whiskey neat, no fuss, no muss, no trouble. Want me to get it?”

  He started to stand; she waved him down, glad to be on her feet and away from this awkward scene. What might Louis be thinking? Did he have thoughts of bedding her down or thoughts of being only a friend?

  She snorted to herself as she made his drink. The man had more culture and breeding than your average French poodle. He did not jump a woman’s bones simply to chalk up another one on his tote board. The persona that was Louis Strack screamed that delicious word class from head to toe.

  She finished pouring the drink, and walked over to hand it to him. He frowned and stood up.

  “Julie, could I use your telephone? Business call.”

  She nodded, and placed his drink on the coffee table. Apparently he felt as strange and wordless as she did. The attraction was there, and so was the memory of Peyton. Only the people were missing.

  He finished dialing, and waited for an answer. Julie assumed he was about to raise the value of the peso in Mexico. The man was chock-full of surprises.

  “Hello, Franz? What did gold close at in Zurich?”

  He waited, listening.

  “Sounds fine. Make a play for fifty-thousand Krugerrands when the market opens. I’ll be in touch.”

  He hung up the phone, smiling a bit. “I haven’t felt this good since the old days, when Dad would turn a catastrophic deal into a profitable deal. I guess I’m just an over-the-hill financier trying to recapture a few moments from his glory days.”

  Julie scowled good-naturedly. “Don’t be childish, Louis. It’s not nice to fish around for compliments.”

  He laughed. “You’re right, damn your luck. You don’t let me get away with anything.” He sat back down and put his hands back behind his head. “You know what, Julie? Sometimes it’s difficult being in a position of power. People defer to you, people tell you what they think you want to hear. But . . . they rob you of your humanity. I just want to be liked for what I am, not the power my millions have given me.” He sat up straighter, dropping his hands onto his knees. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you?”

  He looked genuinely stricken, a portrait of confusion. Julie had a fleeting idea to go over and sit by him, stroke his hair, whisper good things into his ear. Poor Louis seemed dejected and upset, but she wasn’t sure why.

  “Were you ever married?” she asked, trying to turn the conversation around. “I know it’s none of my business, but—”

  He raised a finger and shook his head, indicating approval. “Damn right I was married,” he said. “Married and in love. Deeply, deeply in love.”

  “What happened?” she asked, not wanting to open bad memories but curious all the same.

  “She was killed,” he said a little too easily, a little too fast. “Airplane crash over the Great Smoky Mountains. I almost went crazy. Ah, shit, Julie—I don’t ever want to remember those days.”

  She nodded, feeling stupid. What a way to end an evening. The ghosts of the past were floating around both of them—his an old ghost, hers a new one. But both ghosts all the same. For a tiny moment she hated Peyton for dumping this catastrophe of grief on her.

  Louis stood up, looking stricken. He patted his hair with the flat of one hand, a perfect crop of black hair with a troubled man beneath it. “I think I’ll get some air,” he said, and walked to the sliding glass door that opened on the balcony. “Join me?”

  She did, trying to toss the image of Peyton aside but not quite succeeding. With time, she assumed, she would have trouble remembering his face. It was a fate he didn’t deserve but a fate that was already prepared and handed out. Peyton Westlake, you no longer exist. May your ghost dwindle to nothing.

  Unexpected tears formed in her eyes. Was it so easy to toss a loved one into the pot of memory and expurge it whenever it got to be a burden? Peyton had been alive two weeks ago. Did he mean that little to her?

  She clutched her mouth with her hand. The tears spilled down, hot against her fingers. She clenched her fists and begged this mental avalanche to draw back.

  And it did, in less time than she thought was possible. Louis was out on the balcony, alive and breathing. The corpse of Peyton was all shattered life and inexplicable death.

  She walked over to the door and stepped out. Louis had his hands on the railing and was searching the sky, where stars glimmered with a cold, strange precision. He turned to face her, putting on a limp smile. “Guess I’m getting morose,” he said. “Thinking of the bad times.”

  Julie drew up beside him. “How long did it take you to . . . get over it?” she asked, immediately regretting it. What a depressing subject for the middle of the night.

  “You never really get over it,” he replied without hesitation. “The memory just dims. The pain becomes an ache, the ache becomes a permanent part of you. And sometimes it hits you so hard again, out of the blue, and you wonder why you’re not insane from it all.”

  He inhaled deeply. The city lights were strung out below, orange and white and
cold, forming rectangles. Louis put a small, tense little smile on his face. “You know,” he said, “I can fight another man. I can fight the bigwigs who want to turn Strack Industries into dust. But I cannot fight death. Death is the only sure winner on this planet. More powerful than taxes, even.”

  He chuckled at this, but it sounded to Julie like a concocted laugh made of contempt and sorrow. She reached over and put her hand on his. “Louis, please . . . let’s forget I opened this can of worms. We both have crosses to carry, and maybe together we can win in the end.”

  He turned his face, a face grim with memory and pain. No tears though, Julie noted. This is not a man who can cry.

  He clutched her hand, squeezing it tight, almost too tight. Then suddenly he thrust his face at her, his hands coming up to draw her into an embrace, his shoes scraping across the balcony’s cement floor as he drew near. It was too sudden, too quick. She was aware of his skin and the tiny stubble of his whiskers against her face, aware of his cologne and his breath. She jerked back with surprise, her thoughts scattering. What about Peyton?

  “Oh, Julie,” he whispered into her face. His breath was as sweet as his cologne. His lips were warm against her cheek and mouth.

  She shoved him rudely backward, almost making him trip and fall against the railing. His face in the dim light was an expression of surprise and remorse.

  “Julie,” he said with a moan, finding his balance. “I’m so sorry.”

  She was ready to weep. It was screwy, everything was screwy. Peyton was dead, and no amount of denial would change that. For all practical purposes, his atomized corpse might as well be on Mars. The memory of him was nothing but failed hopes and pain. She realized this and started to apologize, but Louis was already through the door.

  “Please don’t leave,” she said, going in, and he stopped.

  “I understand your pain,” he said to the front door, one hand on the knob. “I was there once myself. Good-bye, Julie. I’ll call you sometime.”

  “Louis!” she blurted, but then he was gone, the door easing gently shut as she watched, for Louis was a gentleman who would never slam a door. Nothing could change that. Yet, above all, Peyton was still dead.

  She wandered, almost in shock, almost ready to collapse, back onto the balcony. Her feelings dumped themselves on her in one great mental cataclysm, and she dropped to her knees and sobbed into her hands. The world was just too cruel.

  And Darkman, standing across the street at the top of a minor skyscraper, watching everything without hearing, slunk away into the darkness, as puzzled as Julie was.

  He still loved her.

  But she wouldn’t love him again until he became the man he once was. Right?

  He found he did not know. Tomorrow still held many secrets.

  Because tomorrow Peyton Westlake was going to come back from the dead.

  23

  A Ghost from the Recent Past

  IT WASN’T UNTIL late afternoon the next day that Darkman was done with the manufacture of a new him. The hands, oddly hairless but very realistic, and the face, a little too tight around Darkman’s naked cheekbones but passable, first struck daylight at four-fifteen. He clicked on the stopwatch and hurried to get himself into a suit. His hands were shaking and his throat was parched. For breakfast he had ordered a plain cheese pizza and a Coke. The delivery boy looked absolutely stricken as Darkman peeled dollar bills out of a large bundle, then recounted them, his claws chattering and clicking. The boy refused a tip and hurried out of the factory. A moment later he peeled out with a tornado of tire smoke, giving the aged red Pinto a good shaking as he fled for his life. Like Bosco, he, too, would hand over his keys and quit his job when he got back.

  The pizza tasted like a hot piece of cardboard without its usual assortment of goodies on top, but Darkman had no desire for Peyton to have bad breath today. He ate it by rote, pizza sauce and red saliva dribbling down his skeletal chin, dripping on his trusty raincoat. Without lips, he had discovered with absolutely no glee at all, everything he ate tended to squirt out through his teeth. Just another benefit of being roasted alive.

  It had taken six hours to complete the awkward digitization by hand, a process the computer used to do in seconds with only a photograph and a lot of electricity. It had taken Peyton three months to invent it, back in the days when he was Peyton and the skies were blue. Next to the Bio-Press, it was the most important tool in skin production. But, like all of life’s other disasters, Darkman was getting used to it. He smeared his head with mastic, just loving the odor, and assembled his new head in four parts: face, back, top, neck. He pressed the seams together and looked at himself in the chunk of mirror he had found in the dead and musty Fresh Splash rest room.

  Not bad. The skin tone and texture were exactly like Peyton’s, down to the small childhood scar on his chin. The lips were colorless, but a light application of lipstick would take care of that. The eyebrows had a hairlike texture to them. A little eyebrow pencil would make them passable. At this stage the most obvious flaws were the too-tight cheeks and the hairless head. Peyton reborn was a chrome-dome. Thus the wigs. He only hoped Julie would not run her fingers through his hair and dislodge the fake fur. Wouldn’t that be a riot? The fun simply never ended in the wild and zany life of Darkman.

  Millings Supply had furnished the after-shave he had requested. He dumped some onto his hands and splashed his face, hoping to trade the smell of the mastic for the manly smell of English Leather. That done, he used the makeup, not particularly liking it, and certainly not very good at applying it. But when he was done and checked his appearance in the mirror, he grunted with satisfaction. What a pretty face for a bald guy.

  The hair went on next. Last night before going to bed on his mattress of fiberglass, Darkman had dyed the wig to the color he remembered, the medium-brown crop that formerly had resided on his head. A snip here, a snip there, and it looked great. Looking once again in the mirror now, Darkman was amazed to see Peyton Westlake staring back at him.

  He had done it. He was back.

  He smiled, and his new face, pulled by burned remnants of muscle and tendon, smiled with him, only slightly off-kilter. He frowned, and so did Peyton. He laughed at himself, holding up his hands, these strong man’s hands where lines of veins showed and realistic knuckles stood out in bony perfection. He looked like a million bucks. Well, he was forced to admit, maybe just half a million, but that was more than he’d been worth five minutes ago.

  Once dressed, tie in place, he ran a swift mental double check, looking for flaws or things forgotten. Everything was as it should be. The stopwatch registered eleven minutes.

  He wended through the maze of his helter-skelter laboratory, opened the front door, and stepped out into the light of a glorious afternoon. Nothing could go wrong.

  But of course something did go wrong, and it wasn’t his fault. He arrived at Julie’s apartment, barely able to chase a huge grin of triumph away from his face, nearly trembling with anticipation. There was a bouquet of red roses in one fist. The other hand was busy pushing Julie’s doorbell.

  His grin began to fade as the bell rang again and again. Wasn’t this just keen? He makes a reappearance for the first time in two weeks and nobody’s home. Why hadn’t he called first, and why wasn’t she home?

  He knew the answer to these, for what it might be worth. Point number one, Julie would consider it a horrible practical joke if he had called, something a teenager would do out of raw meanness. Second, he realized now that she was probably held up at work. All of the hours spent constructing this facade had been wasted.

  He dug the stopwatch out of his pocket and checked the elapsed time—a bit less than one hour. His heart went cold when he realized he had barely forty minutes left. He had had to hike some twenty blocks before he entered an area that was alive and had taxicabs. With the autumn sun burning on his face, the imitation skin should decay even faster. He shrugged to himself, full of bitterness that bordered on anger. Of all the screw
ball schemes in the world, this had to be one for the record. He had failed to perfect the artificial skin. He had gotten Yakky killed and himself cremated. He had failed as a scientist and as a man.

  Slowly, not quite aware of it, Peyton crushed the roses between his hands, rolling them back and forth until the stems went limp. He looked down from the door that opened on nothing and saw what he was doing. His eyes narrowed.

  “Son of a bitch!” he shrieked, hurling the flowers aside. He hammered the door with both fists, these perfect-looking but useless fists. He jumped back and was about to kick it down when the elevator at the end of the corridor slid open and Julie walked out.

  He froze in place, anger forgotten, while his heart thumped loudly in his chest and throat. Julie was coming, barely thirty feet away, laden down with a green briefcase he had never seen before, a stack of manila folders, and a light fall coat draped over one arm. She was nearly staggering under the load.

  He commanded his feet, in these wretched half-cooked shoes, to move. They did, agonizingly slowly, as if he had just yesterday learned to walk. When he turned, he stumbled away from the door and Julie’s approach, filled with confusion and fright, knowing he could not see her now with these roses tossed all about and his skull baking under the stupid wig. Because of all the sunlight, his face and hands might begin to sizzle and smoke any minute now. He would have to try again tomorrow, maybe call her and suffer the agony of being hung up on as a cruel impostor.

  He forced himself to keep moving, pretending to look at the apartment numbers, keeping his face away from her sight. Wearing real skin, his face would be red and broiling with embarrassment that was not entirely well founded. Why, he asked himself, was he running away from the woman he had come to see? Was he afraid of her, or of his own socially clumsy self? He felt much the way he had in elementary school the first day he’d worn glasses. Everyone then seemed to be looking, pointing, whispering. He was nearly dead with shame, trapped inside the strange confinement of a plastic frame and thick, heavy lenses, naked to the world, as exposed as a closeted four-eyes from the beginning.