The fire had been artificially restrained, so far—the stage had no good air source below it. It would burn without great flames, more like fast-moving rust, until it heated everything under the stage to the combustion point. Then it would require nothing more than the chance to take one good, deep inhale. It would scream flames into the air.
J.D. was beginning to hate his crisp senses and crystal-clear thoughts. This was what he had been fighting so hard to preserve? Why? It had seemed so important to regain it all. Yet he had awakened into a situation that perfectly demonstrated one undeniable fact—consciousness was hardly worth the trouble. All it really did was make you aware of an ever-growing list of dangers and threats.
He saw a flash in Shane’s eyes and realized that the skinny kid was finally coming around after having his brain rattled, fighting off a plague of doughnut holes where his memory was supposed to be. Young Nightingale had saved J.D.’s life, but it cost the kid a real skull-buster of a head blow and a quick trip to the floor.
J.D. was cheered to think that after all this was over, they would be able to sit down together and he could tell him all about his memory struggles, knowing that Shane would understand him perfectly well. Maybe the two of them could work something into the act, since Shane and Blackburn were going to be around backstage anyway.
In the next heartbeat, he was struck by the absurdity of thinking about a future, a reflex that could not help him now. He ran his gaze across the center stage area, knowing what had to be there, and spotted the telltale small iron ring lying flat in a carved-out circle that allowed it to lie flush with the floor. He could barely make them out, in the semidarkness, but there were the clean lines of the large rectangle cut into the floor. This one was well done, invisible from the audience perspective.
He had used trapdoors for trick entrances and exits a thousand times, sometimes assisted by smoke, but sometimes daring to use them even when he was covered by nothing more than shifts of light to distract the eye. This trap was a good size, maybe four feet long and three feet wide, lifting up on the upstage end and hinged on the downstage side.
The bastard’s back was to Shane, so that he did not yet realize that Shane was again among them. He leaped in shock when Shane called out, “No matter how many I kill, it never comes out right!”
The bastard spun to Shane, confused about hearing his own thoughts narrated to him. Shane hurried on without giving him the chance to interrupt.
“They don’t act the way they’re supposed to! I need them there, I need them to watch me kill them. But they die out from under me before they do anything right!”
J.D. was so close to being telepathic in that moment that he could practically converse with Shane over the plan. He knew that Shane had just bought him a few precious seconds, and that he would have to act inside that small margin.
He bent forward and grabbed on to the recessed iron ring, then pulled hard. The trapdoor smoothly rose on well-oiled hinges until it stood perpendicular to the stage.
The bastard let out a scream of frustrated rage and crouched to leap at Shane, except that in the next instant J.D. had him from behind with his arms pinned back.
It was during the third blink of an eye that the air flowing in through the open trapdoor reached the starving fire down below. And with the deafening sound of a hundred banners snapping in the wind, orange and yellow sheets shot up through the trap.
J.D.’s personal clarity was bright and alive inside of him. He saw without any burden of doubt that jumping into a Hell pit and dragging his life’s greatest mistake along with him was going to be the perfect way to begin the long atonement that he expected to serve for having set this monster loose upon the world.
The fourth instant passed, and he felt the younger man’s mortal fear kick in. The bastard was about to begin fighting for his life and J.D. knew that he could never prevail over him.
It had to end right away. There was not even time to explain it to himself any further than that. The edge of the hole was about four feet away, the closest part being just to his left. He crouched and leaped, throwing all of his body weight toward the left side of the open pit.
The bastard stumbled toward the hole under the force of J.D.’s impact. But there was not enough momentum to pitch them over the edge. There would be no opportunity for a second chance. So when they toppled sideways together, he forcefully contracted his legs and shoved his knees forward, throwing his body weight into their forward momentum. When they landed on the floor next to the edge, that momentum was just enough to keep them moving toward the hole.
There was no time for either man to do more than grunt with the physical shock of the impact with the floor. They went over the ring of fire and dropped into the artificial volcano.
The moment that J.D.’s son landed on the blazing basement floor, he reflexively gasped and took in a lungful of the superheated air. It instantly seared his airways and vocal chords so badly that he could produce no other sound but a frenzied gurgling. It did not carry against the roar of the flames.
After that, his arms and legs did the talking for him. His limbs flailed in spasms that described a frenzied dance with his own agonies. It went on for instants that were too prolonged to measure, until pain overwhelmed his consciousness and chased him out of his body. The carcass continued twitching before, during, and after he died, so that it was impossible to tell when his actual moment came.
When J.D. landed, the bill for all of his backstage stomping on cracks finally came due; he broke his lower back and instantly lost all power of movement and all feeling below the waist. However, in clutching on to the bastard during the fall, he had clenched his upper torso muscles with a level of power that only a poisonous overdose of the miracle medicine could enable him to do. When he hit the floor, his contracted muscles helped him avoid the impulse to gasp in a lungful of air. Thus he remained fully conscious and alert after the impact.
His lumbar vertebrae had shot slivers into his spinal cord, but he was not going to be needing his legs anymore. The loss of sensation in the lower half of his body was merciful; his right leg was resting directly on a burning beam and he felt nothing.
Still, he was the sole visitor in that place, and there was really nothing else for him to do there but roast. So when the heat overtook his willpower and the inevitable attempts to scream unlocked his chest muscles, he opened up with a tremendous inhale.
It was as if a giant blast torch was shoved into his mouth and fired directly down his throat. The delicate flesh of his vocal cords and airways instantly scorched over with a black crust. The resulting blackened tube channeled the killing fire straight down inside.
Meanwhile, J.D.’s highly trained mind, capable of such tremendous feats of concentration, remained self-aware and conscious of what was happening to him. His grasp of the incoming flow of sensory information was just as insistent as the blowtorch firing down his throat and the blazing heat peeling away his flesh.
J.D.’s awareness had already continued for several eternal seconds longer than his crisping and curling accidental son. That was to the credit of the elixir, just as his professional survival over the past few declining years had been.
As for his current condition, he clearly recalled that the German scientists made it a point to inform him about the mysterious power of their discovery: that an overdose could flush his glands of their powerful influences and send them all raging into his bloodstream at the same time.
He was at that rare place now.
His pain response was practically wiped out by the stuff. Even though he was suffering, his sensors were dulled to a shadow of themselves. An honest experience of what he would be feeling without the elixir would be enough to snuff the life from him. It would happen as easily as the wind puffs away a flame.
The elixir’s gift of clarity denied him the comfort of oblivion. Instead, it claimed its ugly price for all the days and nights that it had pulled him through meetings, interviews, and even something so
simple as a pleasurable day browsing in a quiet library. The price came home to him by the elixir simply continuing to do what it did so well, long after there was any need. Straight pins may as well have been jabbed through his eyelids, holding them wide open and forcing him to witness the flaming of his clothing, of his skin.
Even when his eyeball fluids predictably exploded, the plunge into blindness went unnoticed, for the raging visions in his mind’s eye. And even still, the relentless curse of consciousness did not release him.
The oil in his body fat reached its natural ignition point and his flesh itself caught fire. Still his crystalline mental clarity remained spring day perfect; he was still quite unable to stop himself from noticing that his blackened flesh was actually not the problem of the moment.
He had absolutely no power to prevent himself from recalling, with photographic clarity, the specific page of the medical text wherein he had once learned that human nerves stop firing once heat turns them black. There is no message of pain to be conveyed by destroyed flesh. When part of someone is burned to blackness, that is actually the merciful part of the injury. It is the advancing burn that carries the Devil’s pitchfork. The living nerves die off just slowly enough to trigger their loudest messages of what their host will recognize as mortal agony, before they burst open and sizzle away.
J.D.’s final revelation concerning life in this world was that it was possible for the flow of time to melt into nothingness. An instant or an eon, now. They were the same for him.
For one brief flicker of that eternity, overheating brain cells fired and died in miniature convulsions that broke off chemical shards of memory and spewed them into his awareness. He wondered whether he would be able to use any of this new knowledge in his act. It would be a great addition.
Now, with his own body burning, this other part of J.D. ignored his mortal state and imagined himself perched center stage and bellowing to a packed house of enthralled audience members. Everyone who had ever mattered, for reasons good or bad, filled the house and occupied the best seats for clear sight lines and optimum sound. His agent was there, all the way from Manhattan in the great New York City, and the soulless bloodsucker was finally fulfilling his promise to bring along those new clients with the new chain of theatres. The men were ready to invest in James “J.D.” Duncan because they had wisely decided that these new motion picture devices were a fad that would dry up and wither.
As for the general audience, every eyeball in that sea of upturned faces was privileged to see him spew the depths of his rage before them. He bellowed like King Lear over the egregious seeping theft of his mind. The folks out there in the darkened theatre stared back up at him, spellbound one and all, clearly feeling oh-so-sorry for having failed to appreciate him as much as he deserved, in this nasty old trick of a world.
This eternal second took place in what would be termed the very briefest of moments, by anyone whose flesh oils had not ignited.
SIMULTANEOUSLY
THE CITY HALL STATION
THE RAIN AFTER MIDNIGHT was persistent and came with ground-level clouds, so the creeping fog rendered even the newest electric streetlamps useless. As for the older gas flame models, their dim light receded into pale ghosts that hovered overhead. Vignette found that the bleak surroundings perfectly mirrored her drizzling mental state. She paced the streets back and forth in front of City Hall Station, keeping her eye on the front door so she would spot him in time to get to him first, no matter what direction he came from.
It was the third hour of her vigil. All she knew was that there was no one at home; Randall would pick up the thing right away, and she was sure that Shane would even answer it. His curiosity would get him. But neither one had answered the useless thing.
She prayed that they were at least together out there in the chilly rainfall. So far, the long vigil had done nothing more than assure her that none of the cops knew where their Detective Blackburn was. If so, there would have been talk of his reaction to learning about his fiancée’s murder.
There had not been time for Vignette to risk taking an hour to get home and change and then return. She remained in her ridiculously fashion-correct costume with its stiff button shoes and blouse of regulation white: high-necked, form-fitting, and long-sleeved. The clownish, puffy-sleeved waist jacket that capped the outfit made her feel ridiculous. The whole picture was one more reason for men to speak to women with sneering disrespect.
In weather like this, the clunky shoes did her feet no good and the thin waist jacket repelled rain for around two minutes before soaking through. After that, its wet weight only added to the cold.
She knew that it would be foolish to simply go in and ask. There would be a scene if any of the policemen recognized her. No one in that place was going to tell her anything. Likewise, she could hardly stop the officers who were passing in and out of the station and expect them to give up their rumors or suspicions to her.
It was necessary to call upon old espionage skills, of the kind that she had picked up way back there at St. Adrian’s Home for Delinquents and Orphans. The skills came more from the delinquent side of the premises, but they had proved handy on nearly every day of her life since that time.
So she held up her handbag over her head as if to protect her hair, but used her bent arms to cover her face. Then she fell in behind any small group of two or three men who exited the station. She followed closely enough to eavesdrop until she determined that they weren’t talking about Randall. The repetitive and time-consuming work took her the better part of an hour, just to confirm that the murder victim up at the exposition grounds was officially identified as that New York author, the one engaged to Detective Blackburn. And that he had not been located yet.
These were the leading topics of gossip for anyone who had been inside the station within recent hours, but no one spoke about suspecting him of committing the crime. It was obvious from the tone of their voices that Randall was going to have a large and rapt audience for his story as soon as he turned up back at the station.
She thought that there was far too much eager anticipation in the voices of the men who were talking about this case, and precious few expressions of support. She had to get to him first, no mistakes, no excuses. Break it to him gently enough to give him time to get a grasp on some sort of a social face, before he had to sit for their blundering questions.
She felt a bolt of fear over the way Randall might react to thoughtless provocation from routine questions while he was under the shock of Janine Freshell’s death. Over the years there had been those rare occasions when Vignette had cause to witness him in the more brutal aspects of his line of work. She dreaded seeing him snap. If the idiots at the station casually employed their usual manly cruelty in telling him about the murder—and then questioning him, as the victim’s fiancé—he would probably hospitalize a few before they subdued him.
The underlying sense of physical power that he carried had always been a puzzle to her, because of the quiet and gentle manner he consistently used with her and Shane. He also was a gentleman in the company of other adults, as far as she ever saw.
She knew, though, that he could turn into somebody unrecognizable. At the drop of a dime. Sometimes he came home with terrible bruises, and seldom mentioned where they came from. But she had heard other cops laughing about the wrecked condition of Randall’s opponents.
There was no way to abandon her vigil long enough to get home for dry clothing, for food, for shoes that did not insult the foot. The terrible events of that night had already convinced her that she, Shane, and Randall were in the middle of a very bad trend. It felt as if their lives had begun swirling around a whirlpool and were being pulled toward the bottom, when the Eastern Whore…when Miss Freshell first came sniffing around. And unless their luck had already turned with her passing, then the moment Vignette dared to turn her back and flee home, of course Randall would return to the station just then, possibly even with Shane in tow.
Ther
e was no way to call home again from this portion of the streets, but she knew that if Shane had been at home, somebody would have reached him in calling for Randall, and would have told him about Miss Freshell. He would head straight for the station if he heard that.
She realized that this was yet another problem with these telephone voice devices; they would just as easily deliver a message to one person as to another. The potential for people to be betrayed by gossip traveling at such speed was enormous. It was plain to her that the public would soon realize that, and reject the jingling things altogether.
She remained stuck outdoors in a drizzle that felt more like liquid ice than falling water. The only good news so far was that at least she no longer needed to traipse along behind people, trying to listen in. Now she could move at top speed, so she rebuilt her body heat by pacing to the end of the block and back, over and over.
It was a costly effort. Already she sensed the rag doll weakness seeping into her. The woolen skirt was heavy with water, and the rotten thing tugged at her legs with every step. For Vignette, the sensation of that was a grating reminder of the pointless social impotence that her sex bestowed upon her. She had never felt the weight of that miserable yoke more than on this violent night.
Shane saw Duncan and his attacker go over the edge of the stage trap, but it happened too fast to stop them or even utter a sound. They had to have been killed right away. There would have been no saving them if he had been ready with a team of men and water hoses. Two lives blinked out before he could do anything more than witness it and stand amazed.
His neck wounds had spared his arteries and windpipe, meaning that he and Duncan could have eventually dominated this fellow. Shane had managed to stall off the attacker long enough to give Duncan the chance to fight back. But somehow, Duncan’s need to exterminate this troubled progeny once and for all was so strong that he had thrown away his own life, just to guarantee that his unclaimed son would at least die with him.
The Hidden Man Page 24