Darkman (15 page)

Too late now, though. Peyton’s face was gone and his fingers were abominations. He was entombed in darkness now, Darkman was, and there he had to stay, hidden from the world. He even had to wait for sundown and its protective darkness before emerging from this hole.

He cried some more, then quit, knowing this wasn’t getting him anywhere. He stood up, swaying with fatigue, knowing what he had to do.

He would brave the light and the humiliation, make his way to that phone on Ackurd Street and call Julie.

Because he trusted her. And more than that, he needed her.

She wouldn’t be frightened by a simple phone call from the dead.

Would she?

The kids were the worst. With his hands buried deep inside the pockets of the raincoat and his head swathed in drooping bandages, Darkman forged his way through fear and nineteen blocks, not seeing a soul, if you discounted gutter winos who looked very dead. It was at the Martin Street crossing, block number twenty, that the first child screeched and pointed. The mother towing him by the hand looked over to Darkman with an apologetic expression, one that rapidly became a mask of shock and revulsion. Darkman wished he could suck his head inside his body, but since that wasn’t possible, he decided to be casual and to whistle, as if everything were good indeed.

It was hard to whistle without lips. He wound up emitting a dry, catlike hiss, which sent the mother and boy hurrying to get away. Welcome to the world of the burned, you miserable bitch, Darkman thought.

No, no—no need to get angry. Plot your course by the sun and the stars and get yourself posthaste to a phone. Julie awaited, and with her the future of Peyton Westlake. He forced his numb feet and battered shoes to move faster, and left the frightened mother and the brat behind.

More trouble loomed as he was within a block of the phone booth. This time it was kids again, but they were older. Not wiser but older. Stupider, probably. They wore leather gloves with no fingers, sparkling chains, menacing hairstyles. Darkman’s footsteps slowed as he approached them. The last thing he needed that morning was a brawl with three punks, one of them with green hair sticking out of his head like colored wires. Darkman’s own sloppy, bandaged head was torment enough. He tried to cross the street but they had already seen him.

They nudged each other, grinning with inner secrets, not about to let this opportunity pass by. They smirked at Darkman, the tallest one flashing buckled teeth, the guy in the middle picking his nose and smirking, the smaller one smiling a cruel smile. Take the leather off them, Darkman thought, and you would have the three bears—Daddy, Mommy, and Baby, out for a walk in the cement-and-metal forest, ready to scratch and bite and kill.

He made himself move faster. The bears started after him, sauntering, looking casual. Darkman heard a click and knew it was a switchblade.

No, please, I’m just a college professor in a world of hurt. Give up on me and find some junkie to work over. Please? Pretty please?

He heard them coming closer, feeling like a scrawny kid in a strange school where the toughs ruled and the nerds crawled and begged. Was he a nerd? He probably was, not that he cared, but there was no more Peyton, only Darkman. And by no means was he a nerd. He had joined the ranks of the tough.

He stopped in place and turned around, hands still deep in his pockets, expression irrelevant because there was no face to form it. The bears stopped and leered at him. Mama Bear flipped a booger his way.

“What the fuck are you?” the tall one with the switchblade said. “The invisible man? You look like a fucking stork with your pale-ass legs sticking out. Are you a stork, man? Or are you somebody just too fucking ugly to look at?”

Darkman’s breathing speeded up. Adrenaline flowed into his system, making his stomach lurch as if he had jumped on a Ferris wheel going too fast. His vision swam momentarily, then solidified into one motionless picture.

He warned them, tried to; tried to warn them before it was too late:
“Run for your lives!”
Darkman hissed at them in his fire-ravaged voice.

“Oooh,” Baby Bear said, being very casual on this jaunt through the cement jungle. “We’re so fucking scared.”

What happened next came as a surprise to everyone, even to Darkman. In unison the three lunged at him, intending to pin his arms behind his back and work him over from the front. The fastest one was Baby Bear, and he was the first to be surprised. As he charged, Darkman whipped one hand out of the raincoat, too fast to see, and caught Baby by the throat. The punk squawked. Darkman hoisted him off his feet and tossed him aside; he went end over end and smashed against a lamppost some fifteen yards away. Darkman blinked. How the hell had he done that?

“Fucking mummy man!”
the tall one barked, and tried to stab Darkman in the stomach. Darkman’s other hand flashed out and caught the cool steel blade in mid-swing. His finger bones crunched down on it. Papa Bear tried jerking it free, obviously appalled by the idea that a man could snag a knife blade and hold on without losing a few fingers and a lot of blood. Darkman gave a sharp pull on it, and then it was his, sliding out of the punk’s greasy hand. His rage was huge, overpowering. He turned the knife around with the intention of stabbing Papa Bear to end his useless and miserable life, but as he drew back to do it he was overwhelmed with horror, seeing himself stab the kid again and again, gutting him like a fish. Disgusted with himself and this repulsive vision, he threw the knife away. It flew the entire length of the block and skittered into a sewer drain.

“Want to die?” Darkman hissed as his self-control began spiraling away, to be replaced by a whirlwind of insane anger. He reached for the punk’s throat.

For a big bad bear Papa was getting very scared very fast. He looked at Darkman’s reaching hands, his eyes growing large.

“What in the fuck
are
you?” he asked, falling back, seeming genuinely puzzled.

Darkman could have come up with a dozen handy answers. He lurched toward the boy, drunk with the desire to rip his throat out and see hot blood splashing, smell it, roll in it.

You are Peyton Westlake.

No way, man. I am the dark angel of death. I make the rules.

For God’s sake, stop now!

Where was God when I was burned alive for no reason? Where is He when a mud slide in Chile kills twenty-five thousand people? There is no god left for me. I am the beginning and I am the end.

You are just the end, man. Just the end. No past and no future. Do yourself a favor and crawl in a hole with your cousins, the worms and the mites and the maggots. That is how low you will sink if you kill this boy.

“Shut up!”
Darkman screamed aloud, scaring the punk even more. He turned and sprinted away before the bony claws had a chance to clamp over his throat. Darkman fought a lengthy mental duel with the voice of reason, the last remnant of the memory that was Peyton Westlake. Thou shalt not kill. It was no lie.

All that was left was the medium-sized guy, Mama Bear, the one with the green hair. He apparently didn’t like the looks of this; his eyes were wild and frightened as he reconsidered things. He turned to run.

Let him go,
Peyton Westlake commanded, and for a moment Darkman hated him more than he hated the punks, more than he hated himself and his new role. Lord, the chance to open a vein on the kid and watch his blood soil the street. And then gut him, gut him, gut him as if he were fresh and hanging in a slaughterhouse.

He jumped at the kid, who was ten feet away and moving fast. For a moment Darkman was Superman, fifteen feet in the air with his arms outstretched and his hands hooked into claws and his raincoat flapping like a sorry black cape, performing the world’s longest long jump. He landed behind the fleeing bear and spun him around. He hoisted the kid by the spikes of his hair. Leather squeaked and creaked as Mama Bear pedaled his legs frantically, uselessly.

Don’t do it!

The voice was too strong to ignore. He kicked the bear in the crotch with one ragged shoe, wanting to do more, needing to do more.

The ghost of Peyton would not let him, but it was a voice that was growing weaker, becoming dim.

Darkman leaned his head back and shrieked with raw fright and interior pain. The Mr. Hyde inside him was becoming strange and frightening. He was one step away from mastery of his mind. He knew with a terrible and dreadful certainty that he was a man . . .

thing???

. . . on the verge of going insane.

By the time he found the phone booth on Ackurd, he was sick and shaking. He lurched into the booth and pushed the door shut, then slumped against the glass wall.

“What happened to me?” he whispered, full of doubt and a strange, drowsy kind of terror at what he was becoming. He stared at his hands, his criminal hands. “How could I think of doing that to those . . . boys?”

Simple. You redirected their miserable lives. You ought to be proud.

But—I . . . I wanted to
murder
them!

Law of the jungle, big boy. Ask Darwin.

Shut up. You don’t even know who you are anymore.

We’re Darkman, baby, and we can rock and roll. Julie’s just a phone call away, and Durant can’t be much farther. Revenge will taste even sweeter than tossing those boys around and trying to scare them to death. Dig it?

Darkman dug in his raincoat pockets, not digging anything but change. He dropped two dimes in the slot and dialed Julie’s apartment.

It rang many times. Not there.

He dialed Pappas and Swain, and talked to the receptionist. “Miss Hastings is on temporary leave, sir,” she told him, “but I can forward a message.”

“Do you know where she might be?”

“Well, I probably shouldn’t say, but I believe she is spending the day with Louis Strack.”

“Who?”

“Louis Strack, of Strack Industries.”

“Where can I find him?”

She gave him the address of the Strack family mansion.

And then he called Millings Supply for more equipment, racked with fear at what he was becoming, for what Julie might think of him when he came back from the dead.

The time, and this strange test, were not far away.

18

An Interlude at Millings Supply

J
ASON
P. M
ILLINGS
was the owner and president of that large company, and he had a standing policy that any unusual or exotic orders would have to be cleared through his office. On this early morning he had awakened with a pounding headache, thanks to last night’s ingestion of a fifth and a half of Four Roses whiskey, normal fare for a man who stood five feet six and weighed nearly three hundred pounds. He was a man with a drinking problem so severe that he had to get drunk every day in order not to be frightened to death at the enormity of his addiction.

He was sleeping sitting up at his giant desk this Monday, his nose mashed against the blotter, his arms dangling to the floor, his ample ass spread across an executive chair manufactured especially for fat asses. The desktop intercom buzzed and he raised his head. His eyes were as red as spring tomatoes; his unshaved face a disaster area of Four Roses-ruptured capillaries and veins; his breath so bad, he could smell it himself. He slapped the intercom with one big hand and dropped his head back onto the desk.

“Yeah, what is it,” he said with a moan.

“Another order that needs clearance from you. This one’s wild.” His secretary, Ms. Jackson, tittered loudly into the intercom. Millings flinched as these loud new hurts were pounded through his skull.

“Bring it on in, then.”

She got there fast, holding a sheet of computer printout. Millings made himself sit up. She thrust the paper at him.

“Please,” he grumbled unhappily. “Just read it to me.”

She nodded. “Okay. One two-hundred-forty-volt generator, gasoline powered.”

“We can get that.”

“A Starling briefcase, brown with gold latches.”

“We’ve already got a billion of those.”

“A box of cigars seven inches long with one-inch diameter, dark brown in color, natural-leaf wrapping.”

“What are we, a tobacco store? Tell whoever it is to get screwed.”

“Fine. One dozen wigs for a size-eight head, no color specified.”

“Screwed.”

“Forty bottles of hair dye, every color.”

Millings sighed. Why did some idiots think this was a department store?

“Five dress suits, long-sleeved shirts, and matching ties. Size forty-two.”

“Help me, God.”

She laughed. “There’s a lot more. Four shades of lipstick. A tube of nontoxic mastic. A cassette recorder with microphone. An SLR camera with telephoto lens. Rolls of film. A package of men’s underwear. Press-on fingernails. Eyebrow pencil. Colored contact lenses, nonprescription, in green, brown, hazel, slate. Two watches—one gold, another silver. A complete darkroom kit with chemicals. Tweezers. Pair of socks. Eleven things I can’t even pronounce: protohydro-emulsiactor, dillotantinantin, guar gum—what the hell is that for? Also, six other—”