The Hidden Man (25 page)

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

T
HE 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.

There 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.

Shane could not begin to imagine what Duncan suspected of his son—or what he might have already known about him—that would drive him to use this means of apologizing to the world for creating such a life.

And now Shane needed to get the hell out. The rush of air into the trap had so vastly accelerated the fire that the entire stage was smoldering, about to burst into flame. He began thinking about the fastest way to sound the alarm, once he got back onto the street. But within moments he was astonished to hear the unmistakable sounds of fire sirens, the big steam engines, and rubber tires squealing to a halt, just outside the front of the building.

They know?

There was no way for the fire to be visible from outside the theatre. Not yet.

How?

He had only managed to take two steps back into the offstage wings when the entire stage floor burst into flame. The explosion of air pressure knocked him against a big rack of scenery flats. By the time he regained his bearings, a wall of flame blocked him from the front of the house. He looked around for the rear fire escape, remembering its position from before, and quickly spotted it through the rolling black smoke. His legs were already in motion before he decided to run for it.

The backstage exit did not have any sort of special release handle for emergencies, but that barely slowed him down. He slammed into the heavy wooden door, simultaneously yanked back the draw bolt and untwisted the knob lock, turned the handle, kicked the door open, and hurled himself into the alley before he had time to think about any of it. Within a few more heartbeats, Shane was safely away, running in the opposite direction of the arriving fire units.

The wet night air thickened into a rolling overhead spray. Before he traveled another full block, it swelled to a persistent drizzle. Good news for the firemen. The miraculous firemen. The speedy fellows who could not have arrived so soon unless they were tipped by whoever started it.

As soon as he reached the point where the alley emerged into the street, he stepped onto the sidewalk, turned east, and walked away down Market Street and toward the bay. He never looked back at the firefighters while they deployed into action. It felt as if someone might catch his eye and shout for him to return.

Shane was grateful that he never heard their attacker’s name before he was wiped off the planet by the Last Will and Testament of James “J.D.” Duncan. It made it easier to trust that Duncan did the right thing. Action far louder than words. It left no room for lawyering.

The fire department’s response was shaping up to be big. Fortunately for the arriving crews, there was no interference from traffic and the streets were mostly empty at that hour. However, the few morning workers who were already out and about had all turned and headed toward the theatre, curious about the action.

That was the only reason that Shane noticed Randall Blackburn moving along, on the opposite side of the wide commercial boulevard. They were the only two people out there who were heading in the opposite direction.

On any other day, Shane would have immediately been concerned over Randall’s presence, ready with a dozen questions. Now he only thought of how good it was to see him after this bizarre and terrible turn of events. Shane moved at a brisk trot across the wide street, jumping the emerging puddles and the melting horse piles. Once he was finally across, he avoided calling attention to himself by moving up behind Randall at an easy pace.

He was only a few paces away when the first twinge of awkwardness sank in. He could not think of how to greet him, under the circumstances. Instead, he just silently fell in beside him and walked along, an arm’s length away. For the first few steps he did not meet Randall’s gaze, as if they were just coincidentally walking along there and unaware of each other.

“Son of a bitch! Shane?” Randall nearly whispered it.

Shane turned and saw Randall’s eyes boring into him. He immediately felt a wave of dread roll through him. Shane saw that the flesh of Randall’s face was sunken, making his eyes seem to bulge. His color was pale ash.

“Hi. Well. This is something. I was just inside the theatre. Mr. Duncan and I were dragged in there by this street thief, but there was a fire. And Randall, Duncan grabbed him and pulled him into the stage pit. They both died down there. I saw it.”

Randall stopped walking, at that. He turned and looked him in the eyes with more pain than Shane had ever seen on his face.

Shane went on. “I, ah, guess you’re headed to the station?”

Randall looked off in the distance and a dry smile slowly spread over his face. He turned back to Shane and nodded. And with that, resumed walking.

“Where’s the car?”

“The car. The car is at the station.”

“Why did you leave it?”

“I didn’t. I parked outside the theatre, right out front. The captain had his men tow it back to the station to hold on to, until I did my job. Something about using it to help frame me if I didn’t.”

“So. Now, ah, now you can retrieve it?”

“That was the deal.”

“Why are they going to be willing to release the car now? You know, as opposed to before?”

“Because I did what they asked.”

“Ah-hah. What, uh…”

“I set the Pacific Majestic Theatre on fire.” He said it simply, without looking at Shane, and kept walking at a brisk pace.

Shane kept up with him, but he was already panting. His old stutter returned, the way it still tended to do when things went bad in a hurry.

“N-no—no. You didn’t seh-seh-set that fire. It was the guy who has been after Duncan all along. There really was a ssssstalker, the way, the way, the way that Duncan feared!”

Shane ran around in front of Randall and stood in his way so that he had to stop. He stared into his eyes and pushed all of his will into his words.