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The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Page 33

by Norman Partridge


  God, sometimes Jack couldn’t stand having that thing in his head.

  He skipped a red light, nearly clipping a slow pickup. He slammed on the brakes and parked behind a police cruiser, intentionally penning it in behind a beige sedan. No flatfoot was going to cut things short on Jack Mormon.

  Jack opened the door and stepped — as it were — once more unto the windblown breech of the November night. He sized up the situation. The disgraced surgeon — the glorified body snatcher— sat in the rear of the police cruiser. The idiot actually waved at him.

  Two cops stood under a neon sign twenty feet away. ELM MANOR CONVALESCENT HOME. In Vegas, even grandpa’s last stop was lit up like a show on the Strip. The cops were busy with a crowd of senior citizens, every one of them clucking, pointing fingers.

  Jack Mormon eased a Howard Hughes signature fedora onto his head and slipped into a bomber jacket. He ground his cigarette under his heel.

  He smoothed his pencil-thin moustache.

  He became another man.

  The flies buzzed the gauntlet of aircraft models, darting and dipping in perfect formation like the Red Baron’s famed flying circus. Walter expected the insects to riddle the models with gunfire at any moment, even though he knew the idea was whacked out.

  Each maneuver was performed under the watchful eyes of Howard Hughes, as if he were a master of insect tactics. The old buzzard stood in the doorway, looking like a mummy without bandages, a tower of bone with jutting ribs like twin xylophones. Add to that spindly arms scarred over with cardboard flesh, no muscle tone at all, and those horrible fingernails. And don’t forget his eyes, bipping and bopping in huge hollow sockets.

  Those eyes locked on Walter’s, and the flies rushed his way.

  Walter ducked low, gasping as the insect squadron brushed past him.

  “Could you get me a television set, Walter?” Hughes asked.

  Walter closed his eyes, but that was no escape — he saw Uncle Jack, and Uncle Jack didn’t look happy. Howard Hughes wasn’t allowed to watch television. Uncle Jack said that it disturbed his routine. And the routine was what kept the machine running, even Walter knew that.

  The flies made another pass, but Walter didn’t open his eyes. “Did you hear me, Walter?”

  “Yes,” Walter whispered. “I mean… no.”

  “SPEAK UP, DAMN YOU!”

  Walter remembered that Hughes was nearly deaf. “THERE ARE NO TELEVISION SETS ON THE NINTH FLOOR, MR. HUGHES!”

  “But you could get me one if you really wanted to, couldn’t you?”

  “NO… WELL, YES. BUT UNCLE JACK… UH, MISTER MORTON SAYS THAT — ”

  Hughes’ screech cut Walter’s protest. “Who pays for your services, Walter?”

  ‘YOU DO, MR. HUGHES.”

  “And don’t you think I should get what I pay for?”

  “WHY… I GUESS SO… BUT UNCLE JACK WOULDN’T LIKE IT IF I GOT YOU A TELEVISION SET, MR. HUGHES.”

  A rattling cackle. “Are you a poetry enthusiast, Walter?”

  Walter shook his head.

  “My mother used to tell me this one: I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die. Isn’t that funny, Walters”

  “I don’t think — ” Walter wanted to say more, but he couldn’t, because five sharp fingernails had closed on his jaw, holding it open.

  All two hundred and forty-five pounds of Walter Sands trembled with fear. But he refused to open his eyes, no matter what. He wouldn’t do that. Not for anything. Not for a paper airplane worth a million dollars.

  Something rattled over Walter’s teeth, something that tasted rusty.

  A sharp jab. A tiny bit of pain. Walter tasted his own blood welling on his tongue. Next came a tickling sensation. Then a whining buzz filledhis mouth… tiny legs capered over his teeth, across his tongue, to the place where the blood flowed freely.

  The sharp fingernails went away.

  “Close your mouth, Walter.”

  Obediently, Walter’s jaw snapped closed. The trapped fly raced the length of his tongue. Tiny wings fanned his gums as the insect launched itself, crashed against his wisdom teeth and scampered across his tongue once again, all the while buzzing frantically.

  Again, Hughes cackled. “This isn’t much fun, is it, Walter?”

  Walter agreed with a pathetic groan.

  “Then there’s only one thing to be done.” Hughes’ brittle fingernails tickled Walter’s belly. Walter giggled in spite of himself, his exhalation blasting the trapped fly against the prison walls of his teeth.

  “Swallow, dear boy.” Hughes laughed. “Just swallow, and everything will be all right.”

  Walter took the elevator to the eighth floor, where he rammed through the first door he came to as if it were a defensive back who had said something cruel about his sister.

  No one was home. That didn’t surprise Walter. Paradise waited seven floors below — hundreds of slot machines, poker and blackjack tables, and women with magnificently large breasts who dispensed free liquor.

  Walter unplugged the television set and held it under one arm. Funny, his elbow hardly hurt at all anymore. He returned to the elevator and, using the passkey that allowed him access to the ninth floor, made his way back to Howard Hughes’ suite.

  He plugged in the television. Turned it on. Extended the rabbit ears. Switched to the Hughes-owned Las Vegas station — KLAS-TV, channel 8 — which was showing a Stewart Granger movie.

  Hughes reddened. He screeched, “Walter, that is not what I want to see!”

  Walter didn’t know what to do. Apparently, Hughes did. The old man snatched a fly from mid-air and went to work on it with his fingernails, twisting it this way and that, turning the wings, creasing and uncreasing them until the fly seemed several times larger than a fly could possibly be. The wings, previously transparent, were now black and thick. Hughes unfolded them as urgently as Walter unfolded his paper airplane checks, but the thing Hughes held in his hands couldn’t be cashed in any bank.

  The bat sprang from his bony grasp and fluttered weakly about the room.

  Very suddenly, the creature picked up speed and crashed through the window.

  Rooted like a Sequoia before the broken window, Walter watched the bat slice through the neon night.

  Flying too fast for the fastest of hands.

  The November winds blew hard off the desert, but they didn’t slow the thing that came from the ninth floor of the Desert Inn. It wasted no time arriving at the studios of KLAS-TV.

  For several minutes, the thing flitted around the big glass doors in front of the television station. Then the doors flashed open, disgorging a tired executive. Beneath the hiss of the wind came the sound of crisp paper wrinkling. A hundred tiny folds were made as the double doors rushed to meet their casings.

  The gap narrowed to an inch.

  Plenty of room for a fly.

  A lobby. Then corridors. A staircase, going down. A technician, snoozing.

  His mouth open.

  The technician awoke with a start, coughing. Jesus, he felt like he’d swallowed a moth or something.

  He glanced at the monitor. Stewart Granger, quite literally, was foiling a half-dozen villains. The technician sprang from his chair, completely awake now, his gut churning uncomfortably. The fear in his belly sparked a sudden realization in his brain. He was showing the wrong damn movie! If the station manager was watching, this would be his last night on the job!

  God, how could he be so careless? He was supposed to be running a Dracula picture tonight! He was sure of it!

  That old RKO deal, the Howard Hughes remake from ’57.

  Dracula in New Orleans. The picture with Robert Mitchum as the count… the picture with all those goddamn bats in it.

  Jesus! Running the wrong picture! How could he be so stupid?

  He hustled to the film library, his stomach a tightening knot.

  Maybe he had swallowed a goddamned moth.

  If so, t
hat goddamned moth had saved his job.

  He was in the lobby of the nursing home with the cops and the fossils, busily signing autographs while he talked. “So you see, officers, it’s all a simple mistake. Dr. Hackett was supposed to pick up a charity client in room 101 at the Elm Haven Convalescent Home. He copied the address from a phone book… but he copied the wrong address. That’s why he came here, to the Elm Manor Convalescent Home.” The speaker turned and patted the head of a shrunken lady in a wheelchair. “Dr. Hackett wasn’t trying to kidnap Mrs. Lang. She was simply the occupant of room 101. But at Elm Manor; not Elm Haven.”

  The taller of the two cops shook his head. “I don’t know, Mr. Hughes.”

  The man with the pencil-thin moustache smiled, spotting a small reception room off the lobby. If this story held it would be a world-class miracle. Still, there was no turning back now. “Well, you boys probably know best,” he said. “But let’s talk about this. In private, huh?”

  The three men abandoned the geriatric autograph hounds. The man with the pencil-thin moustache followed the cops into the reception room and closed the door. He removed his fedora. Quite literally, he would come to them hat in hand.

  “You boys know that I don’t like a lot of publicity.”

  The cops nodded.

  “This is just a simple mistake.”

  Again, twin nods.

  “But if you insist on questioning my employee, who is on a mission of mercy that I have financed, I’m going to have to go over your heads. Not that I want to cause you fellows any trouble. It’s not that. There’s nothing at all personal about this. I just want to make that clear.”

  The cops exchanged glances, and then the tall one spoke. “I guess your word is good enough for us, Mr. Hughes.”

  “That’s fine.” The older man donned his hat and started toward the door.

  “Just one thing,” the tall cop said.

  “What’s that?”

  The cop blushed. “Uh… If it’s not too much trouble, that is. I mean, I know your hand is probably worn out after signing for all those folks out in the lobby… but could we get your autograph, too?”

  Jack Mormon obliged both officers, signing his employer’s name to two slips of paper which he folded into airplanes and sent gliding their way.

  The cops chased the planes like a couple of school kids. Mormon returned to the lobby. The pencil-thin moustache, the bomber jacket and the old fedora — the outfit had done the trick for him once again. He was the Howard Hughes that everyone wanted to meet, because no one really wanted to believe the stories about the nutty old recluse that ran in the papers. Not when the same guy had flown around the world, and conquered Hollywood, and bought half of Vegas.

  A solicitous smile was glued to Mormon’s face. The crowd stared in awe as he crossed the lobby.

  If they only knew the truth. But there was certainly no time for that. Mormon had to get out of here and grab another sick granny for Hughes’ dinner. How he would accomplish that at this hour would be real interesting. But not impossible. Not when you had a sneaky devil like Howard Hughes locked up in your head, not when —

  Familiar music swelled behind him, all haunting cello, moody bass clarinet, and funereal timpani. Without the slightest hesitation, Jack pivoted and made a beeline toward the source of the music.

  One of the nurses had a little TV on the reception desk, and he grabbed the thing and spun it around.

  It was tuned to channel 8, the station Hughes owned.

  Credits flashed, the letters as white as stripped bone. Dracula in New Orleans. Robert Mitchum… Jane Russell… Linda Darnell… Jack Buetel… Randolph Scott… Vincent Price… and Hoagy Carmichael as Renfield.

  The nurse grinned. “I think it’s your very best picture, Mr. Hughes.”

  THREE

  The program director — who was pulling an all-nighter to prepare the listings for next month’s TV Guide — was red-faced by the time he slammed into the control room and confronted the technician. “Hey, Charlie, this isn’t the picture we’re supposed to be showing! You know as well as I do that the Hughes people will go nuts if we change the schedule without their approval!”

  Charlie stared at the monitor. Glorious shades of black and white painted the 26-inch tube. But Charlie decided that those colors were more than adequate, because the man on the screen wore nothing but black, and his face was as pale and immobile as that of a corpse.

  The pale man’s dead eyes seemed to stare directly at Charlie. A shiver traveled the length of the technician’s spine. “The biggest damn vampire ever to stalk the silver screen,” Charlie whispered.

  Hulking Robert Mitchum stood on the lid of a coffin, guiding the strange craft through fog-choked bayou waters with supernatural ease. Just ahead was an antebellum mansion, soft light spilling from its windows. Behind crumbling pillars that were alive with black vines, a buxom maiden in a flimsy negligee waited on the leaf-strewn veranda, eager for his cold embrace.

  And then Mitchum began to shrink, bit by bit, inch by inch. A bat rippled off his slick hair. His gloved hands sprouted leathery wings and flapped into the night. A dozen fanged creatures peeled away from his broad shoulders, and the process continued until only his dead eyes hung in midair, and then they too were transformed into winged nightmares…

  Charlie rubbed his eyes. God, he must have fallen asleep. And this wasn’t right. There weren’t supposed to be any bats in this picture. Only sword fights. And where the hell was Stewart Granger?

  “You hear me, Charlie?” The program director shook him. “What’s going on? You want to get both of us fired?”

  Charlie’s brow wrinkled, crinkling like a paper bag.

  His eyebrows arched and split into sharp segments.

  Bat wings unfolded from his face with the rattling music of Japanese fans.

  And then Charlie wasn’t there at all. A wave of bats curled through the air. Deafening screeches spilled from a hundred mouths lined with razored teeth.

  The program director’s jaw dropped open.

  But no more questions spilled from his lips.

  Only blood.

  The old folks circled Jack Mormon like a pack of hungry wolves, but he wasn’t signing any more autographs. He. was too busy dialing KLAS-TV’s phone number.

  He couldn’t get past a busy signal. He hung up, dialed again. Damn. The station manager knew better than to show horror pictures, especially this horror picture. If Hughes was watching it — and there was little doubt in Jack’s mind that Howard Hughes was behind this, one way or another — then things could get really dicey back at the Desert Inn.

  The Desert Inn! Jack dropped the receiver and pushed through the crowd. The geriatric set babbled questions about the Spruce Goose and Jane Russell and other Hughes marginalia, but Jack had no time for questions other than his own.

  What was going on at this moment on the ninth floor? He’d left the hypochondriacal football player alone with Hughes. It had been unavoidable, but now… Jack cursed his stupidity. It was a bad decision, even if it had been unavoidable. The kid was brain dead, perfect fodder for flyboy duty. But he didn’t even know that Hughes was dangerous. None of the flunkies knew anything about the billionaire’s peculiar condition.

  Jack slammed through the double doors. Politely put, he was up excrement creek without a implement of locomotion. Hughes, even in his weakened condition, wasn’t a man who’d cut his rivals a millimeter of slack.

  The glorified body snatcher yelled at Jack from the rear seat of the police cruiser, but Jack didn’t stop to tell the old ghoul that he was off the hook. The cops could do that. The limo was warm and ready to roll. The driver, Provo Sam, knew his business — he got out of Jack’s way, sliding into the shotgun seat.

  Jack put the car in gear, hit the gas, and cut off a delivery truck as he made the first light with a whisper of yellow to spare.

  The big car roared toward the Strip. Jack got on the radio. He was patched through to Nellis Air Force Base in a matte
r of seconds.

  The bats darted across a fog-shrouded riverbank, gliding toward the veranda. Flying in a tighter formation now, they formed a swirling tornado that darkened, thickened, coalesced…

  The bats became Robert Mitchum.

  Howard Hughes smiled. This was his masterpiece. Oh, the critics had panned it, just as they had panned his Genghis Khan epic. They had claimed that Robert Mitchum was no more convincing as a vampire than John Wayne had been as a Mongol warrior. But Hughes knew better. He knew what he saw.

  The bats. The beautiful, beautiful bats.

  The critics complained about them, too. They said that the bats garnered more screen time than Mitchum. Untrue, of course, but a quibble nonetheless. Were the simpering idiots truly blind to the beauty of these creatures?

  Could they not seer

  Hughes could see. The bats were beautiful, as gorgeous as the warplanes that had soared in his first epic, Hell’s Angels, and something more.

  The bats had true freedom. They were not machines.

  A certain amount of cinematic legerdemain had been involved in their creation, to be sure, but there was a good deal of magic involved, as well. Hughes had found a Japanese magician through Orson Welles, a prestidigitator whose greatest trick was producing a colony of bats from a simple stack of black paper. Hughes had offered the man a great deal of money to share his secrets. At first the magician refused, but Hughes pursued him with the single-minded fervor he had trained on so many others — businessmen, aviators, starlets — until the man surrendered.

 

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