A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  . . . calling the police is not my way of handling the likes of Joe Mosely . . .

  “Seen anything lately worth writing to any of the medical journals about?”

  “Not a thing.”

  . . . the diseased limb has to be lopped off and discarded . . .

  “Just another day in Ludlum Bay then?” Doc Johnson said.

  “Oh, I hope not.” I could not hide the tremor in my voice.

  . . . sometimes triage has to be of a more active sort where radical decisions must be made . . .

  He chuckled. “Charles, my boy, I think you’ll do all right here. As a matter of fact, I’d like to refer a couple of patients to your office today. They’ve got complicated problems that require more attention than I can give them at this time. I’ll assure them that they can trust you implicitly. Will you take them on?”

  I paused. Even though my mind was made up, I took a deep breath and held it, waiting for some argument to come out of the blue and swing me the other way. Finally, I could hold it no longer.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Charles, I think you’re going to do just fine in Ludlum Bay.”

  CUTS

  It started in Milo’s right foot. He awoke in the dark of his bedroom with a pins-and-needles sensation from the lower part of his calf to the tips of his toes. He sat up, massaged it, walked around the bedroom. Nothing helped. Finally, he took a Darvocet and went back to bed. He managed to get to sleep but was awake again by dawn, this time with both feet tingling. In the wan light, he inspected his lower legs.

  A thin, faintly red line around each leg about three inches up from the ankle. Milo snapped on the night table light for a closer look. He touched the line. It was more than a line—an indentation, actually, like something left after wearing a pair of socks too tight at the top. But it felt as if the constricting band were still there.

  He got up and walked around. It felt a little funny to stand on partially numb feet but he couldn’t worry about it now. In just a couple of hours he was doing a power breakfast at the Polo with Regenstein from TriStar and he had to be sharp. He padded into the kitchen to put on the coffee.

  As he wove through LA’s morning commuter traffic, Milo envied the drivers with their tops down. He would have loved to have his 380 SL opened up to the bright early morning sun. Truthfully, he would have been glad for an open window. But for the sake of his hair he stayed bottled up with the a-c on. He couldn’t afford to let the breeze blow his toupee around. It had been especially stubborn about blending in with his natural hair this morning and he didn’t have any more time to fuss with it. And this was his good piece. His back-up had been stolen during a robbery of his house last week, an occurrence that still baffled the hell out of him. He wished he didn’t have to worry about wearing a rug. He had heard about a new experimental lotion that was supposed to start hair growing again. If that ever panned out, he’d be first on line to—

  His right hand started tingling. He removed it from the wheel and fluttered it in the air. Still it tingled. The sleeve of his sports coat slipped back and he saw a faint indentation running around his forearm, just above the wrist. For a few heartbeats he studied it in horrid fascination.

  What’s happening to me?

  Then he glanced up and saw the looming rear of a truck rushing toward his windshield. He slammed on the brakes and slewed to a screeching stop inches from the tailgate. Gasping and sweating, Milo slumped in the seat and tried to get a grip. Bad enough he was developing mysterious little constricting bands on his legs and now his arm, he had almost wrecked the new Mercedes. This sucker cost more than his first house back in the seventies.

  When traffic started up again, he drove cautiously, keeping his eyes on the road and working the fingers of his right hand. He had some weirdshit disease, he just knew it, but he couldn’t let anything get between him and this breakfast with Regenstein.

  “Look, Milo,” Howard Regenstein said through the smoke from his third cigarette in the last twenty minutes. “You know that if it was up to me the picture would be all yours. You know that, man.”

  Milo nodded, not knowing that at all. He had used that same line himself a million times—maybe two million times. If it was up to me . . .

  Yeah, right. The great cop-out: I’m a nice guy and I have all the faith in the world in you but those money guys, those faithless, faceless Philistines who hold the purse-strings won’t let guys with vision like you and me get together and make a great film.

  “Well, what’s the problem, Howie? I mean, give it to me straight.”

  “All right,” Howie said, showing his chicklet caps between his thin lips. He was deeply tanned, wore thick horn-rimmed glasses; his close cropped curly hair was sandy-colored and lightly bleached. “Despite my strong—and, Milo, I do mean strong—recommendation, the money boys looked at the grosses for The Hut and got scared away.”

  Well. That explained a lot of things, especially this crummy table half hidden in an inside corner. The real power players, the ones who wanted everybody else in the place to see who they were doing breakfast with, were out in the middle or along the windows. Regenstein probably had three breakfasts scheduled for this morning. Milo was wondering what tables had been reserved for the others when a sharp pain stabbed his right leg. He winced and reached down.

  “Something wrong?” Regenstein said.

  “No. Just a muscle cramp.”

  He lifted his trouser leg and saw that the indentation above his ankle was deeper. It was actually a cut now. Blood oozed slowly, seeping into his sock. He straightened up and forced a smile at Regenstein.

  “The Hut, Howie? Is that all?” Milo said with a laugh. “Don’t they know that project was a loser from the start? The book was a bad property, a piece of cliched garbage. Don’t they know that?”

  Howie smiled, too. “Afraid not, Milo. You know their kind. They look at the bottom line and see that Universal’s going to be twenty mill in the hole on The Hut, and in their world that means something. And maybe they remember those PR pieces you did a month or so before it opened. You never even mentioned that the film was based on a book. Had me convinced the story was all yours, whole cloth.”

  Milo clenched his teeth. That had been when he had thought the movie was going to be a smash.

  “I had a concept, Howie, one that cut through the bounds and limitations of the novel. I wanted to raise the level of the material but the producers stymied me at every turn.”

  Actually, he had been pretty much on his own down there in Haiti. He had changed the book a lot, made loads of cuts and condensations. He had made it “A Milo Gherl Film.”

  But somewhere along the way he had lost it. Unanimously hostile one-star reviews with leads like, “Shut The Hut” and “New Gherl Pix the Pits” hadn’t helped. Twentieth had been pushing an offer in its television division and he had been holding them off—who wanted to do TV when you could do theatricals? But as the bad reviews piled up and the daily grosses plummeted, he grabbed the TV offer. It was good money, had plenty of prestige, but it was still television.

  Milo wanted to do films, and very badly wanted in on the new package Regenstein was putting together for TriStar. Howie had Jack Nicholson, Bobby DeNiro, and Kathy Turner firm, and was looking for a director. More than anything else in his career, Milo wanted to be that director. But he wasn’t going to be. He knew that now.

  Well, at least he could use the job to pay the bills and keep his name before the public until The Hut was forgotten. That wouldn’t be long. A year or two at most and he’d be back directing another theatrical. Not a package like Regenstein’s, but something with a decent budget where he could do the screenplay and direct. That was the way he liked it—full control on paper and on film.

  He shrugged at Regenstein and put on his best good-natured smile. “What can I say, Howie? The world wasn’t ready for The Hut. Someday, they’ll appreciate it.”

  Yeah, right, he thought as Regenstein nodded nonco
mmittally. At least Howie was letting him down easy, letting him keep his dignity here. That was important. All he had to do now was—

  Milo screamed as pain tore into his left eye like a bolt of lightning. He lurched to his feet, upsetting the table as he clamped his hands over his eye in a vain attempt to stop the agony.

  Pain! Oh Christ, pain as he had never known it was shooting from his eye straight into his brain. This had to be a stroke! What else could hurt like this?

  Through his good eye he had a whirling glimpse of everybody in the dining room standing and staring at him as he staggered around. He pulled one hand away from his eye and reached out to steady himself. He saw a smear blood on his fingers. He took the other hand away. His left eye was blind, but with his right he saw the dripping red on his palm. A woman screamed.

  “My God, Milo!” Regenstein said, his chalky face swimming into view. “Your eye! What did you do to your eye?” He turned to a gaping waiter. “Get a doctor! Get a fucking ambulance!”

  Milo was groggy from the Demerol they had given him. In the blur of hours since breakfast he’d been wheeled in and out of the emergency room so many times, poked with so many needles, examined by so many doctors, x-rayed so many times, his head was spinning.

  At least the pain had eased off.

  “I’m admitting you onto the vascular surgery service, Mr. Gherl,” said the bearded doctor as he pushed back one of the white curtains that shielded Milo’s gurney from the rest of the emergency room. His badge said, Edward Jansen, M.D., and he looked tired and irritable.

  Milo struggled up the Demerol downgrade. “Vascular surgery? But my eye—!”

  “As Dr. Burch told you, Mr. Gherl, your eye can’t be saved. It’s ruined beyond repair. But maybe we can save your feet and your hand if it’s not too late already.

  “Save them?”

  “If we’re lucky. I don’t know what kind of games you’ve been into, but getting yourself tied up with piano wire is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.”

  Milo was growing more alert by the second now. Over Dr. Jansen’s shoulder he saw the bustle of the emergency room personnel, saw an old black mopping the floor in slow, rhythmic strokes. But he was only seeing it with his right eye. He reached up to the bandage over his left. Ruined? He wanted to cry, but Dr. Jansen’s piano wire remark suddenly filtered through to his consciousness.

  “Piano wire? What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t play dumb. Look at your feet.” Dr. Edwards pulled the sheet free from the far end of the gurney.

  Milo looked. The nail beds were white and the skin below the indentations were a dusky blue. And the indentations had all become clean, straight, bloody cuts right through the skin and into the meat below. His right hand was the same.

  “See that color?” Jansen was saying. “That means the tissues below the wire cuts aren’t getting enough blood. You’re going to have gangrene for sure if we don’t restore circulation soon.”

  Gangrene! Milo levered up on the gurney and felt his toes with his good hand. Cold! “No! That’s impossible!”

  “I’d almost agree with you,” Dr. Jansen said, his voice softening for a moment as he seemed to be talking to himself. Behind him, Milo noticed the old black moving closer with his mop. “When we did x-rays, I thought we’d see the wire embedded in the flesh there, but there was nothing. Tried Xero soft-tissue technique in case you had used fishing line or something, but that came up negative, too. Even probed the cuts myself but there’s nothing in there. Yet the arteriograms clearly show that the arteries in your lower legs and right forearm are compressed to the point where very little blood is getting through. The tissues are starving. The vascular boys may have to do bypasses.”

  “I’m getting out of here!” Milo said. “I’ll see my own doctor!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”

  “You can’t stop me! I can walk out of here anytime I want!”

  “I can keep you seventy-two hours for purposes of emergency psychiatric intervention.”

  “Psychiatric!”

  “Yeah. Self-mutilation. Your mind worries me almost as much as your arteries, Mr. Gherl. I’d like to make sure you don’t poke out your other eye before you get treatment.”

  “But I didn’t—!”

  “Please, Mr. Gherl. There were witnesses. Your breakfast companion said he had just finished giving you some disappointing news when you screamed and rammed something into your eye.”

  Milo touched the bandage over his eye again. How could they think he had done this to himself?

  “My God, I swear I didn’t do this!”

  “That kind of trauma doesn’t happen spontaneously, Mr. Gherl, and according to your companion, no one was within reach of you. So one way or the other, you’re staying. Make it easy on both of us and do it voluntarily.”

  Milo didn’t see that he had a choice. “I’ll stay,” he said. “Just answer me one thing: You ever seen anything like this before?”

  Jansen shook his head. “Never. Never heard of anything like it either.” He took a sudden deep breath and smiled through his beard with what Milo guessed was supposed to be doctorly reassurance. “But, hey. I’m only an ER doc. The vascular boys will know what to do.”

  With that, he turned and left, leaving Milo staring into the wide-eyed black face of the janitor.

  “What are you staring at?” Milo said.

  “A man in big trouble,” the janitor said in a deep, faintly accented voice. He was pudgy with a round face, watery eyes, and two days’ worth of silvery growth on his jowls. With a front tooth missing on the top, he looked like Leon Spinks gone to seed for thirty years. “These doctors can’t be helpin’ what you got. You got a Bocor mad at you and only a Houngon can fix you.”

  “Get lost!” Milo said.

  He lay back on the gurney and closed his good eye to shut out the old man and the emergency room. He hunted for sleep as an escape from the pain and the gut-roiling terror, praying he’d wake up and learn that this was all just a horrible dream. But those words wouldn’t go away. Bocor and Houngon . . . he knew them somehow. Where?

  And then it hit him like a blow—The Hut! They were voodoo terms from the novel, The Hut! He hadn’t used them in the film—he’d scoured all mention of voodoo from his screenplay—but the author had used them in the book. If Milo remembered correctly, a Bocor was an evil voodoo priest and a Houngon was a good one. Or was it the other way around? Didn’t matter. They were all part of Bill Franklin’s bullshit novel.

  Franklin! Wouldn’t he like to see me now! Milo thought. Their last meeting had been anything but pleasant. Unforgettable, yes. His mind did a slow dissolve to his new office at Twentieth two weeks ago . . .

  “Some conference!”

  The angry voice startled Milo and he spilled hot coffee down the front of his shirt. He leaped up from behind his desk and bent forward, pulling the steaming fabric away from his chest. “Jesus H.—”

  But then he looked up and saw Bill Franklin standing there and his anger cooled like fresh blood in an arctic breeze. Maggie’s anxious face peered over Franklin’s narrow shoulder.

  “I tried to stop him, Mr. Gherl, honest I did, but he wouldn’t listen!”

  “You’ve been ducking me for a month, Gherl!” Franklin said in his nasal voice. “No more tricks!”

  Maggie said, “Shall I call security?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary, Maggs,” he said quickly, grabbing a Kleenex from the oak tissue holder on his desk and blotting at his stained shirt front. Milo had moved into this office only a few weeks ago, and the last thing he needed today was an ugly scene with an irate writer. He could tell from Franklin’s expression that he was ready to cause a doozy. Better to bite the bullet and get this over with. “I’ll talk to Mr. Franklin. You can leave him here.” She hesitated and he waved her toward the door. “Go ahead. It’s all right.”

  When she had closed the door behind her, he picked up the insulated bras
s coffee urn and looked at Franklin. “Coffee, Billy-boy?”

  “I don’t want coffee, Gherl! I want to know why you’ve been ducking me!”

  “But I haven’t been ducking you, Billy!” he said, refreshing his own cup. He would have to change this shirt before he did lunch later. “I’m not with Universal anymore. I’m with Twentieth now, so naturally my offices are here.” He swept an arm around him. “Not bad, ay?”

  Milo sat down and tried his best to look confident, at ease. Inside, he was anything but. Right now he was a little afraid of the writer stalking back and forth before the desk like a caged tiger. Nothing about Franklin’s physical appearance was the least bit intimidating. He was fair-haired and tall with big hands and feet attached to a slight, gangly frame. He had a big nose, a small chin, and a big Adam’s apple—Milo had noticed on their first meeting two years ago that he could slant a perfectly straight line along the tips of those three protuberances. A moderate overbite did not help the picture. Milo’s impression of Franklin had always been that of a patient, retiring, rational man who never raised his voice.

  But today he was barging about with a wild look in his eyes, shouting, gesticulating, accusing. Milo remembered an old saying his father used to quote to him when he was a boy: Beware the wrath of a patient man.

  Franklin had paused and was looking around the spacious room with its indirect lighting, its silver-gray floor-to-ceiling louvered blinds and matching carpet, the chrome and onyx wet bar, the free-form couches, the abstract sculptures on the Lucite coffee table and on Milo’s oversized desk.

  “How did you ever rate this after perpetrating a turkey like The Hut?”

  “Twentieth recognizes talent when it sees it, Billy.”

  “My question stands,” Franklin said.

  Milo ignored the remark. “Sit down, Billy-boy. What’s got you so upset?”

  Franklin didn’t sit. He resumed his stalking. “You know damn well what! My book!”