Darkman (23 page)

“Tell her to buy a bottle of booze. Pink elephants guaranteed.” He laughed again and lit his cigarette.

A dark pall seemed to descend over Peyton, a billowing red shroud called anger. With tremendous effort he reined in the feeling. “The pink elephant, if you please!”

Julie tugged at his sleeve. He jerked away.

“Peyton, it doesn’t matter,” she said, putting a hand on his arm.

He jerked away again. “It does
too
matter. I won a pink elephant for you. For my fiancée.”

“Buzz off,” the dirty kid said, and flipped ashes at him. “I got other customers.”

“The elephant!”

He sighed and prodded Peyton’s chest with two dirty fingers. “Get out of my face, asshole, or I’ll knock you upside the head with your own fucking leg. Scram.”

The shroud became complete. Peyton’s right hand swooped to his chest. It wrapped itself around the two prodding fingers there. The kid’s eyes became larger.

Peyton bent his fingers until they touched the back of his hand. There was a short, damp snap as one of them broke. He twisted tighter. Another snap. The kid uttered a hoarse, breathy moan. Peyton hoisted him by the hand, tossed him up as easily as he might toss a balloon, and caught him by the neck and crotch. He hurled him through the other standing bottles. They clattered like loud bowling pins. The kid flopped through the canvas back of the booth and was gone. A moment later he ran out onto the fairway, hands clamped together, leaving a trail of drops of blood in the dust.

Peyton leaned over the counter and unhooked the elephant. He jerked it away and thrust it at Julie.

She took a step backward, shaking her head slowly, eyes wide with terror.

“Take it!” Peyton said in a voice hoarse with rage. His hands were shaking and his face was twisted into something obscene. A blister formed on the back of his neck where the sunlight had played longest. It popped. Yellow smoke rose in a tiny cloud.

“Peyton, please,” she said, her eyes jerking to the people who were beginning to stop and stare at the spectacle of a man about to clobber his date with a stuffed elephant. “Please,” she said again.

He bared his teeth while more smoke bubbled from the back of his neck.
“Take the fucking elephant!”
he screamed.

Julie blanched, frozen, staring at him with incredulous eyes. Boils were forming on his cheeks and nose. One popped with a puff of yellow smoke. He covered his face with a hand, but the hand was alive with rising blisters.

He turned and ran, the elephant tucked under one arm, forgotten. Julie broke out of her shock and ran after him. The trail was easy to follow. She only had to follow the wispy smoke and the smell of Peyton as his face and hands disintegrated into mush.

PART THREE

Unmasked

28

Julie

H
E SHOULD HAVE
bought a car.

Julie, not quite thirty yet, was occasionally known to go insane and get up before dawn, slip into her Jordache jogging sweats, and put in two miles before sunrise. She didn’t do it regularly or often, but it proved to her that she still had the strength, if not the willpower. And unfortunately for Darkman the man named Peyton was a notorious couch potato whose only passion was research. He didn’t have a potbelly yet, and his years prevented any possible heart disease, so he was, Julie had sometimes thought, a guy who would wake up one morning and find himself forty going on dead. Then he would go insane, as she did, and he would jog and play racquetball and tennis, and he would begin to eat bran flakes because he couldn’t stand the thought of wearing a colostomy bag as he cruised toward fifty and the health-horrors that waited there.

So it was not all that surprising that Julie could keep up with him as he ran, smoking and blistering, back to the only refuge he knew now. Julie stayed about a block away, slinking into alleys and shadows when she thought he might turn around, flattening herself against dirty brick walls when her instinct told her he was about to glance over his shoulder. As soon as he left the lively part of town he slowed, seeming to feel more at peace in the ravaged section where nobody went, and his pell-mell run became an easy, fast walk.

Julie was wondering about many things as she followed. Uppermost on the roster, though, were what was wrong with his skin and what was wrong with his temper. She had never seen him so enraged. Her Peyton shuffled along with his head full of formulas and his feet stuffed into Hush Puppies, the world’s kindest man, if a bit eccentric. When he wasn’t deep into a research project, he was as nice as you please. Behind the hard blue of his eyes was a brain that never stopped, always running in high gear on an eternal speed trip to the farthest reaches of human knowledge. Julie wondered if this was why she loved him—for his brain and the places it could carry him.

What had happened to him? What was he hiding?

It struck her that she should not ask and never know. The baloney about superheated air cooking his lips was barely plausible, if at all. That stuff on her fingers had been lipstick. And when he held her face to be kissed, his hand had been as cool as a corpse, his lips as cold and unyielding as ice in the sunlight. And that other smell, the turpentine. What was it?

Go back.

No, not quite yet. First we must discover what has become of Peyton Westlake.

You don’t want to know, Julie. He is kind and good and is hiding a dark and terrible secret. Let him work things out by himself.

A block ahead, he slowed and turned his head.

Julie shrank back, in time to miss his gaze but with enough time to see one side of his face.

He had a halloween mask on, some plastic device that looked like running tallow and bare bone. She dived into the protective shadow of an alley, panting, her face red and slick with sweat.
Okay, Julie,
she said to herself,
you’re a lawyer. Put this case together. Assemble the facts and damn the torpedoes.

Fine. Something was wrong with Peyton’s face. Something was wrong with one of Peyton’s hands, maybe both. He had mentioned a coma and severe burns.

But . . . he didn’t
have
any burns.

She frowned. Still frowning, she peeked around the corner.

He had veered left, crossing the street. Ancient factories and high rises bulked to the sky around him, buildings black with coal soot and decay. He looked over his shoulder once more, pulled the elephant free from its position under his arm, looked at it, then banged open the door of a squat two-story building and vanished inside.

Huh?

No problem here, she thought in an attempt to remain cool. Peyton has become a fan of dreary darkness, slum dwellings, and half-starved pigeons. The guy always had one strange quirk after another, as genius scientists tended to. And if he wanted Julie here, he would have asked her to come.

She walked to the building, pulling her sweater tighter against the windy gusts of the oncoming season, determined to follow him until she knew everything, and then she would help him. No matter how strange his affliction might be, she would help him.

She came to the door and touched it gently. It did not open. She pushed harder and the hinges squealed a metallic protest. Pulling her hand away, the door still open a crack, she was still debating, still unsure.

A noise from inside caught her ear. Something—cloth?—was being torn in there. Someone—something?—was shouting and grunting, the echoes in the abandoned building rebounding off the walls two times before evaporating. It was as dark as a cave inside, vaguely damp and cool. A breeze wafted out of the crack in the doorway and reeked of dust and rotten meat.

She gathered her nerve and pushed the door fully open.

Something large and whitish was hanging just above eye level, hard to see in this light. Under a cloak of dead varnish and dust was a sign proclaiming this place to be

REYTON SOAP COMPANY
HOME OF FRESH SPLASH SOAP
AND OTHER HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTS.

How nice, she thought. Peyton has purchased a soap franchise. Time to go now, Julie, old pal, and on April second we shall be wed.

She stepped inside, wrinkling her nose at the smell. The place was dimly lighted by old lamps hanging on chains from the ceiling. She stayed motionless, waiting for her eyes to adjust, seeing big blotches of purple and silver where the sun had shined in her eyes. In thirty seconds she was less blind.

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.