“Oh, God will surely welcome me home now,” she said, then paused. “Are you certain these are mine? They feel kind of strange. Itchy, way inside my head.”
“You’d better hurry up with your questions,” Branch whispered through a shark-toothed grin. “Crump’s parts can be a bit…aggressive on their own.”
Holt gently prompted the girl to describe what had happened the afternoon of her murder—how she’d been listening to All-American Andy and decoding the Eagle Squadron message when the thing came out of the radio. “It looked like a bear. Like Paddy, sort of. It even wore a little hat like his,” she said, “but it wasn’t him. It was a monster that took my decoder and then took my eyes. It had a saw, like the one my father uses in his shop, only littler.”
“Did it say anything when it attacked you?” Holt asked.
“It was hard to understand, but I think it called me a leech,” she said, struggling now to speak. The lidless eyes rolled in her head and the skin on her face bulged and writhed. “It told me…I had to…pay my…share…”
One of Crump’s eyes had turned completely inward so that the nerves and muscles were exposed. They pulsed from the orb, snaking tendrils that spread out and burrowed into the flesh on her cheek and then her neck. The other eye, the blue one, had fixed its gaze on Holt. Soon it was joined by a trio of new eyes that burst through her skull, all of them glaring hatred at the crime-fighter. Bones snapped and folded in on themselves as her body was reshaped. Through it all, the little captive remained mercifully silent.
The child dissolved into a shifting mass that shattered the chair and slipped free of the ropes. Holt fired twice into the blob, but the bullets had no effect. The thing lashed out, knocking the twin Colts from Holt’s shriveled fingers. It snared him with an eye-studded tentacle. He struggled against its surprising strength, managing after a time to pull a knife from a sheath at his ankle. He drove the blade deep into the malice-filled blue eye, which had remained locked on him throughout the struggle. The thing reared back in pain.
“Don’t just stand there, you demented scarecrow,” Holt shouted. He slashed madly with his blade, trying to free himself. “Get Crump’s other eye!”
Mister Branch remained motionless beside the struggling forms. He had one hand raised, as if he were hesitating before selecting an apple from a cart, and a fatuous grin quirked his lips. Finally his hand darted forward, a rapid serpent’s strike. The thin fingers came away from the writhing mass of flesh with his partner’s other eye. He crushed it, then scraped the remains onto the blade of his shovel.
“We should gather up our dead and depart before any more of Mister Crump’s parts get restless,” Branch said.
He crammed his fellow grave robber into the sack and tied it off with his gallows rope while Holt used the candles to set fire to what remained of the thing that had been Cindy Reisbig. If anything survived the fire, the graveyard’s caretaker knew not to investigate too closely. Branch and Crump had made the Resurrection Cemetery their secret home in Chicago for more than a decade, and the arcane symbols and charred flesh that might be discovered in the tomb were nothing compared to the other horrible things they’d left in their wake over the years.
“You’re going to have to settle up with Doctor Grimm for the work he’ll need to do to make Crump right again,” Branch noted after they’d filled in the empty grave and he and Holt were crossing the moonlit cemetery. He carried the massive bulk of his partner casually, as if he weighed no more than the empty sack. “Well, as right as he can be made, anyway.”
“Of course,” Holt replied. “I always pay my debts. At least I got the information I was looking for. The syndicate is probably behind this madness.”
“Gangsters?” Branch asked. For the first time that evening the resurrection man seemed surprised. “You think those blithering imbeciles Moran or Capone are capable of conjuring monsters?”
“No, not them. The syndicate behind the comic strip. The thing that came out of the radio took the decoder the girl had. That’s the key, and that’s part of their business.”
“I’ve never trusted those who pander to the masses with picture books. They were a bad idea when that lout Pfister first used movable type to print his Paupers’ Bibles back in Bamberg. They’re a bad idea now.” Branch shook his head. “Still, Crump will be disappointed if you have to stop them from publishing. He rather enjoys the All-American Andy strip. When the child gets into danger, it makes him laugh almost as much as the comics where the mouse brains the cat with a brick.”
* * *
Ib Ellid never intended to go legit. He’d come to Chicago ready to make a name for himself with one or another of the gangs carving up the city and then settle into a long and profitable career on the wrong side of the law. He tried bootlegging, numbers running, even a brief stint as hired muscle for a protection racket out in Stickney. During those grim years, he was fortunate enough to avoid the bloody fates that claimed so many of his colleagues and smart enough to recognize that this good luck would not last forever, particularly the way the turf wars were heating up. So he got into comics.
Ellid couldn’t draw. He couldn’t tell a story to save his sainted mother’s life. What he could do is spot a sweet racket, and that description certainly applied to the job of comics syndicate owner. All day long, would-be geniuses pitched him what they imagined to be the next Katzenjammer Kids or Barney Google. Sometimes, it turned out, they were right. He contracted the best, ensnaring the rights to these gems in legal red tape in return for a promise to hawk them to papers across the country. Since the dailies only bought from the syndicates, the artists had to deal with him, as did the toy and kiddie book and moving picture companies who wanted to use the characters from one of his strips. In a lot of ways, running a syndicate was like selling beer to speakeasies in a territory controlled by your mob, only no one ended up floating face-down in a canal when a transaction got messy.
Not that he wasn’t sometimes tempted to fall back on old business methods when dealing with the artists. They were an odd lot, particularly the creator of All-American Andy. In his former line of work, Ellid had met George Moran a time or two, and he was convinced that Bramwell Platt could give the unhinged gangster a run for the nickname “Bugs.”
“I don’t care what you want,” Platt said. His quiet voice somehow made Ellid’s cavernous office seem cramped. “Our contract clearly states that I have approval for any publicity centered upon me or my ward, and I don’t approve of this proposal.”
It wasn’t the passion of Platt’s declarations that Ellid found disturbing, but the lack of any passion in them at all. Arguing with the man was like debating a statue. The dark glasses the artist constantly wore gave that impression of inhumanity even more weight. Ellid stared into those black circles and felt his anger boil up.
“These national magazine interviews could help us push All-American Andy over the top,” he snarled. “The property could be bigger than Felix the Cat, for Christ’s sake. I already got us the radio show on WGN, didn’t I? And the Liberty Bar deal? I pay you what you’re promised every month. I ain’t even skimming!” He slammed a fist down onto his desk, toppling two stuffed Paddy bears and scattering a box of Andy pin-backs. “But you still give me the business about some lousy puffery! We do these and I can get us a deal for animated shorts from the guy who did the Laugh-O-Gram and Alice series!”
“You’ll have to secure that deal without the press putting me or Andrew on display like sideshow attractions. We are nothing. Show them the strip. The work is all that matters.”
Ellid knew that when Platt uttered those words, the conversation was over. It was as much a catch phrase as “Right is right” or any of the various Red-bashing dictums Platt was always working into his strips. There was just no getting past it.
“Well, you’ve just guaranteed that the next artist to sign with me will get a worse deal than the one you got,” Ellid grumbled by way of a strategic retreat. “I hope you’re happy. Your refu
sal to play ball has made it bad for everyone else.”
“Everyone else is not my concern,” Platt said and calmly rose to leave.
“From the way you dress, you’re not even your own concern,” Ellid snapped as the artist crossed the office. “You look like you rolled a hobo for those clothes.”
“I know my worth and the value of my success,” Platt replied. To emphasize his point he grabbed a handful of cloth, further wrinkling his already creased and baggy suit. “I’m not so insecure that I have to display that success for others.”
“You was a washed-up gag writer when I signed you, Platt. Sure, you made up All-American Andy, but you would be nowhere without my help. Nowhere! Your ledgers would be as blank as the eyes of your creepy little drawings!”
Platt unceremoniously turned his back on Ellid. The former gangster briefly considered going for the gun in his desk drawer as the cartoonist exited to the hallway. Instead, he waited a moment and then barked for the yegg lurking in the file storage closet off the main office.
Sam “Soupy” Fitzroy slouched into the room and, hands thrust deep in his pockets, awaited his employer’s orders. He was known throughout Chicago as a top-notch second-story man and safecracker, despite the botched bank job up in Milwaukee at the start of his career that had left him so horribly scarred. The more discreet of his fellow mobsters described his face as perpetually melting, as if the flesh were dripping off the skull on the right side. The deformity made him hard to look at and harder still to talk to. His speech possessed the same bubbling, liquid quality as his skin. At least that’s how those few fellow thugs, who had supposedly heard him speak, described his voice. But he was good at his work; that was all that mattered to Ellid.
Fitzroy nodded or shook his head at the appropriate times as the syndicate boss stalked around his office, outlining the job he wanted done. Since Platt didn’t believe in banks—he considered them part of some vast government conspiracy to make people less self-reliant—his copy of the syndication contract was hidden somewhere in his home in Cicero. Fitzroy was to break into the house, find the contract, and replace it with a slightly modified version that contained all the loopholes necessary to allow Ellid to take control of the press approvals and even net a few more bucks off each transaction, just to cover the grief the artist had caused him.
Ellid held the phony contract out to the thief. “You got all that? We clear?”
He didn’t look Fitzroy in the eye as he spoke. No one ever did.
Fitzroy nodded and took the contract in his gloved hands. Then he gestured for the first half of his sizable payment. He counted the money before uttering, “We’re clear,” in his unsettling voice. The deal was sealed.
Ellid had no inclination to watch the scarred man leave his office, let alone trail him as he made his way from the Rogers Building on Michigan to a far less desirable neighborhood across town. That was just as Tristram Holt had expected as he slunk into a dive in the Levee to wait for night to descend upon the city. Soupy Fitzroy had been one of his first creations after the attempt on his life and regularly proved the most useful for gathering information about Chicago’s underworld. His deformities made him memorable enough that he could cobble together an oversized reputation with ease—take part in a few successful heists, attach himself through rumor to three times that many felonious triumphs and he was set. No one seemed to catch on that his employers eventually got pinched for other seemingly unrelated crimes or, worse, fell afoul of the Corpse. Such were the perils of criminal enterprise in the Windy City.
Fitzroy’s hideousness also guaranteed that no one ever looked at him too closely. Holt’s days on stage with Northwestern’s college dramatics society had given him a working knowledge of stage makeup and costuming, but with the deformed yegg, his artistry only had to be good enough to repulse, not consistent enough to hold up under careful scrutiny.
So it was as Soupy Fitzroy that Holt had wormed his way into Ib Ellid’s inner circle, hoping to uncover any evidence of the syndicate boss’s involvement in the attacks against Cindy Reisbig and the half-dozen other orphan children whose eyes had been stolen. He came up empty. Ellid, like the police and the papers, had yet to even connect the murders to the radio show or the decoders, let alone conclude, as Holt had after first learning of them, that the assaults were more likely than not supernatural in origin. He’d seen enough of the strangeness plaguing the city since he hauled his poisoned and bullet-riddled body out of the Chicago River to recognize the uncanny when he saw it.
It was not as Soupy Fitzroy but as the Corpse that Holt left his Levee hideout just before midnight. He found it easy enough to slip between identities now, and the Scourge of Evil seemed the most appropriate for the confrontation he felt was coming. He skulked through the nighttime shadows shrouding the city, his cloak fluttering raggedly behind him like the taunting ghosts of his dead foes. He carried Ellid’s fake contract with him, and a satchel filled with an assortment of weapons and the other tools of his dark trade.
The Platt house itself was, at first glance, as unassuming as its owner. It was a modest two-story on a quiet side street, a little shabby, but not decrepit by any means. Hardly the home of an artist raking in thousands from his work, but a perfect retreat for someone who wished to blend in with the gentile scruffiness of the neighborhood.
Only when Holt crept around to the back did he see anything that he would not have found repeated a dozen times over on any of the nearby streets. Where other homes might have boasted a screened-in porch looking out over the fenced backyard, Platt’s had a cage. As Holt moved closer, the bear cub inhabiting the enclosure snuffled loudly. Platt had purchased the bear from a bankrupt petting zoo, and it was the beast’s interaction with his adopted son that reportedly inspired him to create All-American Andy. But since then, Platt had allowed no pictures to be taken of the pair, or of his home, or of himself.
Holt gave the cage a wide berth and chose to slip inside through a side window blocked from the main road by a thick hedgerow. He found himself in Platt’s workroom, a sizable studio with two drawing tables, shelves of neatly arranged art supplies, stacks of paper and, in one corner, a small safe. Holt made short work of the lock without resorting to the nitroglycerine “soup” he carried with him for tougher safecracking jobs. Inside lay orderly stacks of money, boxes of gold coins, and not one, but three contracts. Ellid’s syndication deal was the only one written in ink.
In the moonlight streaming through the open window, Holt skimmed the other two contracts. He read about the gifts Platt and his ward were to receive, even how they were to be collected and delivered, all set down in precise legalese. As he did, the bear began yowling piteously. A flashlight beam pierced the darkness on the upper floor, and a red-headed young boy in a nightshirt followed it down the stairs. He moved tentatively, right hand gripping the banister tightly with each cautious step.
“Are you okay, Paddy? It’s not any of them crumbum gangsters come to kidnap you again, is it?”
Holt peered cautiously around the doorjamb of the studio and watched the boy move off into the kitchen to open the interior cage door and allow the bear to trundle inside. The beast made happy, snuffling sounds and rubbed up against the child, who laughed brightly.
“I wish I could see you better,” the boy said, “but we’ll fix that again soon. Right, pal?”
“We have other business to take care of first,” said Bramwell Platt in his soft, flat voice from the top of the stairs. He had hastily dressed and looked even more the transient for it. He was, for once, without his dark glasses. “We have a spy in our midst. A filthy commie, maybe.”
Tristram Holt stepped into the living room as Platt turned on the light, and Andy returned from the kitchen, the little bear in tow.
“I’m here to terminate these contracts,” Holt said. He held up the two documents penned in blood and scribed on what appeared to be sheets of human flesh. “Or, rather, to tell you that there are no contracts. You’re being duped.”
“We’re no dupes, mister,” Andy said hotly. He squinted at Holt through eyes that had once belonged to Cindy Reisbig. Their irises were fading, just like all the other stolen eyes had done. Eventually, the boy would be returned to near-blindness.
“What did it offer?” Holt asked Andy. “The return of your eyesight? And you,” he said, pointing to Platt. “Success with your art? And it pretended to create formal agreements written in blood, like the ones in the old stories about deals with the Devil. It even taunted you with loopholes—your stolen eyes fading and needing to be replaced, or the press hounding you for publicity when all you wanted was to be left alone to work.”
He gripped the two contracts tightly and tore them in two.
Platt and his ward gasped, but the sound was drowned out by the horrible growl of the bear. It reared up on its hind feet—and then continued to grow. It expanded until it was twice the size of the boy, a monstrous, ursine thing wearing a cap and an appalling grin that made Holt think of Mister Branch.
“Go on,” it said in a heavy Irish brogue. “Make a joke about knockin’ the stuffin’ outta me. You know you want to, boyo.”
“I won’t play your games,” said Holt. “Show yourself.”
The thing lost its bear form and became a central stalk of darkness with twisted limbs of mist reaching upward. Bursts of ichor sprouted from the branches, then wilted and reformed, like the leaves on a ghastly and growing gallows tree, familiar to Holt from his nightmares. That was how the thing had appeared to him all those months ago, on the night he realized that he was going to survive the tortures Drucci’s men had inflicted upon him. He lay shivering in a burned-out warehouse, dreaming of revenge, hungering for it, when the thing came to him. It promised him power and filled his mind with visions of endless vengeance upon those who had wronged him and all who preyed upon the innocents in the city. His city.
As with you, I merely offered them their fondest desires. The voice was inside Holt’s head, seductive, comforting. He wondered for an instant if it had ever truly left, and shivered at the realization. They were gracious enough to accept my offer. Unlike you.
Peel Back the Skin Page 17