The tearing sound went on, somewhere back in the shadowy corners, and so did the inhuman slobbers and grunts. She went forward cautiously, expecting only pleasant surprises, too scared to envision anything but Peyton playing a huge practical joke at her unwilling expense. She opened her mouth, about to make a funny remark for Peyton’s benefit, but she realized that nothing was funny here. There were no jokes at all left in this miserable ruin of a factory, and whoever was in that corner making horrible noises had to be Peyton and no one else.
Her feet gritted over dirty cement as she walked to where the light was better, down a short flight of steps and into the heart of the building. Her hand slipped up to cover her mouth, and her wide eyes took in everything.
It was a lab, a sordid copy of the laboratory where Peyton had slaved so long, this one nothing but splintered doors hung from chains, crates for tables, a dead office chair parked in front of a computer. Empty Pizza Hut boxes were in a ragged pile nearly five feet tall against the far wall. She shook her head in disbelief. From the look of things he had been here quite a while. But why?
The grunting and ripping noises stopped abruptly. Some thing—some black and furry thing—sailed out of nowhere, flipping end over end, and flopped against the computer. Two black-button eyes glittered from its face as it fell and rolled across the floor.
Julie had almost screamed, thinking of giant bats, but this was no bat, this twisted rag.
She walked resolutely to the thing on the floor. She picked it up.
A stuffed elephant. In better light it would be pink. No matter now. It had been torn and smashed, the stuffing gutted, the arms and legs perforated with bite-size chunks still damp with warm saliva.
She let it drop to the floor. The computer screen to her right was pulsing, casting a sick green glow across the rusty frame of the office chair. She bent to look, pushing the chair aside. The wheels squeaked briefly. The screen read,
PEYTON DIGITIZATION COMPLETE.
She frowned again. That sounded familiar, that odd word, that digitization thing. She had pet names for almost every piece of Peyton’s research equipment, having spent many hours with him, serving as timekeeper. Everything had a name, from the Camera-Slamera, the ThinkTank-PinkTank and the Bio-Mess, to the Digitization and Masturbation machine. It had been kind of cutesy, back in the days when Peyton was so sure he would be successful, before his dreams and his artificial skin disintegrated into flames and failed hopes.
So he was trying again. She was still not sure why.
Burns.
He isn’t burned.
Artificial skin for burn victims.
HE ISN’T BURNED!
A hideously mangled victim of explosion, flame, superheated air.
Superheated air?
She could hear someone breathing, now that the tearing noise of the elephant being ripped to shreds was gone. She thought she heard deep, almost piglike moans and slobbers, but they came from a dark corner of the factory, where the lights were burned out and a broad wedge of shadow masked what might be inside. She stepped toward the strange sounds, tight inside with fear and a timid sort of curiosity. Madame, she thought with a sick and bloated kind of bad humor. Madame, the lady, or the tiger. The door behind you is no longer a mystery. The dark ahead is a door of another kind, something that may be revealed as light and hope, something that may be horror and death. Enter at your own risk.
She was about to ease into the shadow when something flipped through the air over her head. It plopped against the lid of the Bio-Mess and lay there hissing and bubbling, giving off a loathsome smoke that smelled of decay and putrefaction.
She pressed a hand over her nose, breathing through the cracks between her fingers, wanting to see what Peyton had worn over his face.
She went over and picked it up with two fingers. It was hot, a melted mask with drooping slits for eyes, two holes for a nose, and a long horizontal slit for a mouth. Dripping lipstick ran from the soft bulges that had been lips. Even in this stage of cellular destruction she knew what it was. She had seen masks like this hundreds of times, when Peyton had been working on his doomed project. But the remnants of this bubbling sample even looked like Peyton.
Two more flapping objects sailed a short distance into the light and flopped across the dusty floor, leaving wet smears that exuded thin yellow smoke. One was a ball of mush, unrecognizable. The other was a sticky rubber glove, its deflated fingers crossed over each other and tucked under the palm in disarray, the whole hand going rapidly flat, smoky.
It took her the space of four seconds to add two and two. The sum she came up with was as four as four ever got.
Peyton was burned—had been burned. His . . . face was destroyed. His hands were disfigured.
She whirled to face the blackness of the corner where Peyton had hidden himself, where he had murdered the elephant, and where he had hidden when he’d hurled his disturbing costume across the room.
“Peyton!” she snapped, actually angry now. “Why didn’t you tell me? If you loved me, why didn’t you tell me?”
Better accustomed now to the dark, she could perceive his shadow and a small outline of his face. In this dismal light he looked very fine, and she wondered if her two and two might equal five.
He raised his arms and covered his face. This did not change Julie’s attitude. Why was this new Peyton so strange, anyway? There were thousands and thousands of burn victims in the world, maybe millions. Did they shuffle off to an empty rat hole like this? Did they avoid contact, run away, hide in corners? She thought not.
“Peyton,” she demanded. “You come out here now.”
He didn’t move. For no particular reason Julie could think of, she began to cry. God, the hurts she had endured, the grief and agony, the desperate wish to die and be with him, the hours spent at his graveside seeking peace. And all along, here he was in this rent-free dump, putting his laboratory back together, making himself a new life, a masked marvel.
Julie stared at the black apparition named Peyton Westlake, sobbing with anger because he had put her through a special sort of hell while he schemed and chemistried and slunk in darkness like a rat.
Her teeth were clenched tight, her fingernails digging into the heels of her hands, burning tears slipping down her cheeks, ruining her mascara. “Talk to me!” she screamed, and the man in the corner stepped forward hesitantly. A bar of yellow lamplight struck a portion of his face momentarily, and Julie saw crispy black skin at the edges of his face, a chunk of dirty white bone, twin holes the shape of apple seeds where his nose should be.
She shook her head, her eyes full of reproach and pity. “You really thought it would make a difference to me, didn’t you? Did you also think that I was in love with your face and nothing else? Your hands? How little do you think of me?”
His head dipped with obvious remorse.
“Peyton,” she said firmly, “you will come to me now and we will plan our future together. I do not care what you look like.”
The shape moved. Feet scraped over filthy cement.
Julie waited, tense, a reservoir of pity and helpfulness that was held in place by a solid dam of love, the dam ready to crumble and engulf this wretched man in the balmy waters of unquestioned acceptance.
And she waited, ready to raise her arms and engulf him, absolutely not caring how mangled he might be.
The footsteps faded. They quit abruptly.
“Peyton!” she screamed.
Nothing.
“Peyton!”
Nothing.
“Peyton?”
Nothing.
And then, very far away, maybe on the second floor, a raspy whisper: Julieeeee . . .
But she had already had enough and was finding her way out. The path was dim, her eyes swimming with tears, the floor littered with lines of cable. She stumbled once, falling to one knee and tearing her pants open. Finally the back of the Fresh Splash sign was overhead. She had found the door.
29
&nbs
p; Louis and Julie
THE NEXT MORNING found Louis Strack in high spirits. His investment counselor in Austria, Franz, a wonderful businessman who never dressed like an Austrian—no feathered cap, no lederhosen—was working miracles for Louis. Louis’s original investment of fifty thousand South African Krugerrands two weeks ago had witnessed a gain of nearly eight points on the international monetary exchange, and Franz, true to his word, waited for a slump and then bought at the bottom. Louis Strack became twelve thousand dollars richer in thirteen days.
Only twelve grand. Louis was not satisfied. That morning he was prepared to celebrate, but with only a twelve-grand profit he decided not to invite anybody to the celebration but himself. Guests of Louis’s caliber did not assemble to congratulate a piddly fortune of such a shoddy magnitude; they wanted to see molten gold flow from fountains, silver from water faucets, platinum and uranium from backyard sprinklers. The local crème de la crème would hardly stand for rejoicing bum’s wages.
But Louis was pleased enough with his own prosperity to refuse to invite a bunch of octogenarians and their decrepit spouses to his house, anyway. It was this attitude, then, that ruined the idea of a party. Sure it was a meager profit for a multimillionaire to make, but the old geezer, Strack, who had run the company for so many years, never had experienced such fast money. His drab old real-estate purchases were usually in the discussion stage for two years, the closing set for two additional years later, the parties involved paying lawyers hefty fees to rake the other parties over the coals and find a flaw. It was a business that was conservative to the bone. Louis would continue in his father’s footsteps, but first he would do something he had dreamed about for years.
At exactly quarter after eight in the morning, when he was normally up and stuffing four poached eggs down his throat with toast and coffee, Louis was doing something quite strange. He was taking a bath in Krugerrands. Strange even for Louis, who was not prone to such peculiarities.
He had told Franz to ship him a strongbox of fifty thousand Krugerrands via Federal Express, damn the expense and damn the fear of getting embroiled in an international money scandal. The Krugerrands had to pass through Britain, which was a problem, because England refused to do business with anything even remotely connected with South Africa. Thus the loot had to be disguised. That left good old Franz of Austria in a bit of a bind, so he marked the incredibly heavy crate MACHINE PARTS, and off it went. Louis received it one day later, not a scratch on the old-looking crate, a box of machine parts if ever there was one.
It was in the bedroom of his mansion now, carted there the previous day by two Federal Express teenagers in blue-white-and-red outfits. Louis had tipped them a gold Krugerrand each. Young, baffled, they had asked if it was a Spanish doubloon. Better than that, Louis had replied. They went away, smiling uneasily, studying their booty, wondering if they had gotten the shaft.
You dumb little jerks, Louis had thought, and slammed the door on them.
Now, however, he was fulfilling a fantasy.
The strongbox had been heavier than a crate of anvils. Dragging it this sunny morning by one rope handle, naked to the bone, he tugged the crate across the floor to the bed, then paused there, panting. With more effort he upended the crate and let the strongbox fall open on the unmade bed.
They sluiced out, bright gold tiddledywinks surging across the mattress, clattering change that could make a monk swear off poverty forever. The box got lighter as it emptied. Many of the golden coins slid off the mattress and tinkled to the floor as Louis shook out the last few of them, probably a million dollars’ worth of 99.99 percent pure African gold.
He dropped the empty box beside the bed, his eyes large with love. The gold coins winked at him as the morning sun played through the windows, the breeze ruffling his chiffon window drapes, strong sunlight filling the room with yellow beams and making these odd coins the size of silver dollars sparkle happily. Louis took three steps backward, pressed his hands together as if to pray, and launched himself onto the bed and its coating of gold. Having dreamed of this moment for years while his late father doddered around in a dark age of stupidity, Louis was sure it would be the best roll in the hay of his life. Sure the Rockefellers were rich, and the Kennedys, the Morgans and the heirs of Howard Hughes—if they were finally sorted out—the Capusteins and the Fords. But Louis had a need for money they could never understand. The Stracks had never had a silver spoon shoved into their infant mouths, had never been handed the family fortune and the keys to an empire without working for it. Louis had worked high steel for two years, just to get the feel of real sweat. Old Man Strack had been a self-starter, rich because he’d made himself that way, and this fact put his many financial rivals on the offensive. Had to work to get rich, eh, old boy? How perfectly shoddy.
Not much of this was on Louis’s mind as he breezed through the air of his bedroom like a pink dolphin and landed facedown on golden coins. The landing was unexpectedly abrupt, even painful, but it didn’t matter. At last, at last, he was actually swimming in gold. He crowed a laugh into the pillow, turned over, and backstroked through the coins while making sea-gull noises. His sexual feelings had switched to high gear, shifted there by feelings full of power and gold. He flopped over again, grinding his hips into the mattress and its cool blanket of money. He would have been content to lie there all day, his head thumping with desire and his body determined to get satisfaction, even if he had to order another fifty thousand Krugerrands to make the penetration complete.
But the phone rang. He sat up, his face growing angry under his tousled cap of black hair. He raised a hand and brushed his fingers through his hair, with little effect.
It rang again. “Jenkins!” he shouted, knowing that the old geezer was toddling around with a feather duster, stupidly intent on his current task, deaf and dumb to the world like dear departed Father had been.
“Jenkins!”
Ring. Ring.
Louis jumped out of bed, ready to hire a hit man to take care of Jenkins, and pounced on the phone. His teeth were bared as he answered it. “What!”
The lines of his face quickly smoothed out. He smiled. “Of course, Julie, of course. Don’t worry about this being Sunday, and no, I don’t go to church. At the office in one hour? Damn right I’ll be there. In an hour. No problem.”
He hung up and looked sourly over his shoulder to the bed, where a ton of money sat waiting to be spent. Or hoarded. Or melted down to form the world’s largest ingot. Hmm. At any rate, it was here.
He dressed quickly, tailored suit as always, impeccable shoes and shine, a tie that was brother to the suit. Before he left his bedroom he checked himself in the mirror on the wall.
“Hairbrush,” he said, and went out.
She got there five minutes after Louis arrived, stepping out of the elevator on the third floor with the Strack suite just ahead to her left. She walked to the door, then hesitated, summoning her courage, nervously touching her hair as if her appearance really mattered at this stage of their doomed relationship. She did not know what to expect from Louis when she dropped this particular bombshell, but he was a gentleman and would probably bow out with no hard feelings. Anyway, he seemed permanently in love with his dead wife, and now that Julie was no longer a victim of tragedy like Louis, they no longer orbited in the same sphere.
She tried the doorknob. Unlocked. So Louis was already there. She swung the door and stepped inside, where the aroma of newly cleaned carpet and filtered air was light and refreshing. Past the secretary’s large desk, the door of Louis’s office was open a bit, a trace of cigar smoke drifting out to be snatched up by the air ventilators. She could hear him speaking and wondered if someone else was here. Timidly Julie went to the door and knocked softly.
A phone was hung up in a hurry, plastic banging against plastic. Julie hesitated again, feeling like a snoop. She flicked the door with her fingernails, not knowing what to expect.
“Julie? Come on in.”
She p
ushed the door fully open and saw Louis standing behind his desk, his clothing flawless, his desk utterly clean save for the intercom/telephone, a closed brown briefcase, and an ashtray in which a dead cigar sat looking glum. There was a large velvet drapery on the wall to his right, something Julie couldn’t recall having been there. But then again, maybe it had been. She was always so fascinated by Louis that she failed to take in what her eyes offered, nearly hypnotized by his presence and the authority he exuded. “Hi, Louis,” she said, and went to one of the two chairs that faced his desk. “Sit?”
He rolled his eyes, grinning. “Nah, don’t dare sit in front of me, woman. I am Lord Strack of Strack Industries, and of gold investments.”
She returned his smile, nearly overwhelmed again by his personality, and sat down before her knees could unhinge and dump her on the floor. “Louis,” she said before her nerve had a chance to leave her dumbstruck and speechless, “we have to talk.”
He rubbed his hands together, never losing his smile. “Sure thing, doll. I love to talk. Brandy before we start?”
She shook her head, determined to see this through without false courage.
“Up to you. I think I’ll have one, though.” He rolled a drawer open and pulled out a bottle and a snifter. He blew into the snifter and wiped the rim on his sleeve. “Ancient things, these,” he said by way of apology, and turned to the window to let the morning sun travel through the glass, inspecting it for traces of dust. “I must warn you, Julie, that this is a very fine Napoleon you have just passed up. Chances like this don’t come often. Share?”
She shook her head again, inner resolve spiking up her courage, goading her on before this got smarmy and she professed her undying love. “Louis,” she said, “I can’t see you anymore.”
Okay, fine, now it was out. He turned. She glanced into his eyes, expecting anything between a laugh and an atomic explosion. She got neither.
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