The Sixteen Burdens (36 page)

Fairbanks walked up to him.

“Stay there, Atlas!”

But Atlas swatted Fairbanks to the side, sending him into a stack of crates. Blood trickled out of his ears. He couldn’t hear Fairbanks.

“Eye…Deda,” Atlas wheezed. “My only chance.”

Pickford stepped up to Atlas, focusing all of her beauty on him. Rays of energy beamed from her face.

“You can chase me until the day I die,” she said. “But you will never have the Eye. Now leave.”

But Atlas just stood there, looking at her with unfocused, bloodshot eyes. Even her Beauty seemed to have no effect on him in this state. He brought his fist down on some metal scaffolding next to him and it crumpled like paper. He then reached out for Pickford and grabbed her around the waist.

“Die,” he said.

She grabbed at his hand as he lifted her off the ground.

“Gray, the Eye!” Fairbanks shouted. “Give it to me. Quickly!”

Gray pulled the Eye from his pocket but hesitated.

“Trust me,” Fairbanks said. “Just this once. For your mother.”

Gray handed him the Eye.

“Atlas!” Fairbanks shouted.

The giant man looked in his direction.

“This ends here. See? The Eye!”

Fairbanks held up the Eye and waved it around to make sure Atlas could see it. He then cast a glance at Gray.

“I hope you’ll accept this as my sincere apology.”

Fairbanks blew a kiss to Pickford.

“You are the love of my life, Mary Pickford! If I can’t be your hero in life, then let me be it in death.”

Fairbanks held the Eye up to his face and walked over to a full-length mirror someone had used for dressing. Just as he had seen Gray do, he looked through the narrow side and leaned in so the mirror would reflect his gaze.

Gray remembered what Howard Hughes had told him: A Burden’s power would bounce back and forth, gaining intensity in an endless loop until the energy destroyed the device and released the essence inside.

The metal around the Eye glowed red hot. Fairbanks struggled to grasp it as it burned his hand. It sizzled and Gray could smell burnt skin, but still Fairbanks grasped the object and looked through it to the mirror. There was a pop of breaking glass and Fairbanks collapsed.

“Douglas, no!”

The Eye rolled out his hand. Atlas dropped Pickford and reached down for it. The glass on both ends was broken and the inside looked like a burned-out bullet casing. Something like steam floated out of it and away.

Pickford knelt by Fairbanks.

“Oh, Douglas! Douglas!”

An otherworldly shriek left Atlas’s mouth as he examined the broken Eye. He crushed the remains of it in his hand. Then he raised his fist high into the air, about to bring it down on Pickford. She and Fairbanks would both die, together. Gray ran up to Pickford to pull her away.

But Atlas didn’t swing. He stood there, as if frozen in time. Then, like a top-heavy statue, he fell backward and smashed into the ground, cracking the concrete under him.

His eyes remained open, his fist still tight above his head. After a moment, Gray ventured over to him. Something changed about the man. Darko Atlas seemed to shrink. To wither just the slightest bit. It was difficult to place exactly what it was, but Gray had the sense of a balloon deflating. All of his parts were still there, but something had left him. His soul?

His strength.

Gray stood. He looked around for Vlad’s body. He followed a trail of blood down the side aisle where Fairbanks had kicked the head. Spatters of red followed a straight line and then curved left before abruptly ending at a cardboard box. This was where the head should be.

It was gone.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY
-T
WO

G
RAY
HAD
LOST
so much blood the white scarf around his neck had turned black, like an eel caught in an oil slick. A loose end of it had even begun to float off his body.

He and Pickford staggered out of the warehouse together, through the parking lot and toward the street. Pickford was mostly unharmed—a bullet had only grazed her shoulder—but she was inconsolable over Fairbanks. She had pulled her veil down, but it didn’t mask her sobs.

As the sun grew higher in the sky, the chill from daybreak broke into a pleasant, mild morning. For a moment, the street was empty and silent. Young ficus trees planted along the sidewalk rustled softly in the breeze. Far off, there was a cry of sirens. It grew louder.

Before they had found a place to sit, the Grand Marshal car appeared, limping down the street toward them. It had two flat tires and was smoking from under the hood. Chaplin was driving. Panchito sat up front, with Elsie and Lulu in back. He pulled the car over when he saw Gray and Pickford.

As soon as Chaplin stepped out, Pickford stumbled into his arms.

“He’s gone!”

She sobbed into his chest.

“Atlas?”

“Douglas!”

Chaplin grew pale and put his arms around her. He gripped her fiercely, as if to squeeze out the pain, or perhaps to hold tight to the memories the three had shared for twenty-five years. Fairbanks had betrayed them, and yet his friends still grieved him.

Friendship that powerful was foreign to Gray. As much as he wanted to offer a kind word or gesture, he was helpless to comfort them. He stepped away.

When Elsie approached him, his heart leapt. He couldn’t help it. She must have sensed it because she smiled and forced a hug upon him. Her face was pale, as if all the blood had drained from it.

“You look like death,” he said.

“Not a dollface anymore?” Elsie asked.

“Or more a dollface than ever.”

She saw the scarf around his neck soaked in blood.

“What happened?”

“I was bit by Dracula.”

She gave him a look.

“I ain’t kidding.”

“Newton’s Eye,” Panchito said. “It’s destroyed, isn’t it?”

Gray nodded.

“How did you know?”

“Lulu doesn’t have my courage anymore.”

Lulu held a pebble in her hand. She screwed up her face but nothing happened.

“She’ll have to do with her normal amount of courage,” Elsie said, “which is more than enough for a girl her age.”

Lulu stuck out her tongue.

“I still have my speed.”

Gray noticed scratches on the side of Elsie’s face.

“What happened to you?”

“Jack Siegel,” she said, but before he could ask more, she shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. Not yet.”

While Pickford and Chaplin took a moment, Gray told the others about Atlas first, and then about Vlad the Impaler.

“How was Atlas killed?” Panchito asked.

“Some kind of poison, I think. I guess he wasn’t immune to that.”

“Vlad,” Elsie said, “He died too, right?”

Gray had a flash of the head rolling toward him, its expression obstinate in the face of death. Those eyes that locked with Gray’s, they spoke as clearly as if words had been said aloud:

I’ll be back for you.

“Probably,” Gray lied. “His head came clean off. Fairbanks kicked it like a football.”

“And even if he isn’t dead,” Panchito said, “The Eye is destroyed. There’s nothing else he wants.”

Gray nodded, and even offered a smile that didn’t feel convincing.

He wants me. He wants all of us.

“Right,” Gray said. “I think we’ll be able to get back to normal.”

Normal.

What did that mean? Nothing would be normal ever again. And that was a good thing. He belonged to a group of people now. No one could take that away from him. These friends, they were a team. Maybe more than a team. Maybe a family.

“It’s best that no one sees us,” Gray said. “We should hightail it back to…”

Gray didn’t know how to finish the sentence. To where? He wouldn’t go back to the home, not for a thousand new fedoras. And he had agreed to leave Chaplin’s mansion.

Panchito clapped him on his good shoulder.

“You can stay with me for a while. We’ll figure something out.”

“Nonsense.”

Pickford entered their circle. She must have overhead them.

“You’re my son. You’ll live with me.”

The first image in Gray’s mind was of the quaint drawing of Pickfair on the moviegraph map. Then he remembered he had seen the real Pickfair—he had been through its iron gates and crossed the sprawling lawn. There were more bedrooms than he could count, and he had heard there was even a swimming pool in back.

Most important, it was where Mary Pickford lived. It was where his mother lived.

“Girls, you’ll stay with us too until we find you more suitable housing,” Pickford said. “I believe Elsie is overdue for a career change. Now, let’s get home where I can call my house doctor and get everyone properly cared for. He’s very discreet. He’s used to my eccentricities.”

Pickford gave one long glance back at the warehouse.

“Charlie, can you…?”

Chaplin nodded.

“I’ll take Doug to his home. We’ll make sure he’s discovered there.”

That settled, Pickford let out a shaky sigh.

“Good. Now, let’s just get through today so we can get on to tomorrow.”

She squeezed Gray on the arm.

Just get through today.

“And then what?” he asked. “Then what do I do?”

She touched his head, tentatively at first. When he didn’t recoil, she mussed his dirty blond hair.

“You’re the son of Mary Pickford, the heir to Harry Houdini, and a friend of Charlie Chaplin. You’ll do anything you like.”

There weren’t enough pages in the newspaper to cover all of the happenings of the past few days. The onslaught at the Rose Parade, the death and funeral of Douglas Fairbanks, the wrongful arrest of Charlie Chaplin for the Star Stalker murders. The overabundance of gossip put Hollywood at a standstill for the better part of a week.

Fortunately, luck was on their side. Luck, and a few reporters Charlie Chaplin kept in his pocket. In true Chaplin style, he was able to twist a few details from the events to their favor.

From what Gray could gather from articles in the
Examiner
and the
Times
, everyone agreed that Darko Atlas, an ex-convict with a lackluster circus show, was the true Star Stalker. He had attempted to abduct Shirley Temple during the Rose Parade, but police got wind and swapped Temple out with a stand-in at the last minute. Atlas had been bravely beaten back by police, and was mortally wounded.

Having discovered the real Star Stalker, Charlie Chaplin was released from jail with all charges dropped. No one seemed to notice that Chaplin had, in fact, already been out of jail for days.

There was no news of Chief Barry Stoker and his attempt to execute Chaplin. With no dead body, there was no crime to prove. But only two weeks later, federal investigators got an anonymous tip that Stoker had been taking bribes from the mafia to ignore their illegal casinos. When they searched his house, the feds found ten thousand dollars hidden inside a framed photo of Nina Beauregard.

Fresh out of jail, Chaplin had gone to visit his friend Douglas Fairbanks, whom he discovered dead in his home from an apparent heart attack. The actor appeared to have been there for days. He was buried at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, in a giant white marble tomb, as large and flashy as his personality.

Those were the details everyone seemed to agree upon. Beyond that, there was wild speculation about the events that had unfolded. The gossip columnists seemed to pose endless theories. Was Darko Atlas actually an officer in Germany’s
Schutzstaffel
, in the United States to provoke a campaign of terror? Was Charlie Chaplin actually a spy and, if so, was he working for British or American intelligence? Was Douglas Fairbanks’s heart attack from natural causes, or did one of his erstwhile lovers—namely Mary Pickford—seek revenge upon him?

There was so much news, and so much of it preposterous, that it was easy to miss the smaller stories of the week. Take, for example, the strange sightings that farmers east of the city had reported. They claimed to have seen a man stealing food from their farms and fields. The thief was inconceivably strong though not especially discreet; he had uprooted trees to get to fruit and had ripped the roofs off henhouses for eggs. The description of him was vague, for he had kept his distance, but one detail was consistent among all of the eyewitnesses.

People said the man’s head was on backward.

— THE END —

Acknowledgements

Thank you, first and foremost, to my parents, Jim and Dyanne, for their enduring encouragement over the years: when I pursued fields of study that were interesting but not lucrative; when I quit good-paying jobs to find my passion; when I jumped full-time into writing without any guarantee of success.

Thank you to my sister, Tamara, who has always been one of my biggest fans and supporters. You’ve always been there to bounce ideas around and encourage me. And thank you for your diligence and patience (with me!) in crafting a truly awesome book cover.

Thank you to Tino, the publicist I didn’t ask for but the one I’ve needed. You were excited about this book when even I wasn’t. And you were the only one who asked to drive around Los Angeles all day on a real-life tour of
The Sixteen Burdens
.

Thanks to my writing support system: to the Burbank Writers Group, whose candid feedback helped shape early drafts of this book. To my writing partner, Julie, who didn’t collaborate on this project but who has written with me some of the best comedy that may never see the light of day. And to the rock stars who volunteered to read this story in advance of publication.

And thanks to you, reader, for taking a chance on this novel. I hope you’ll pick up the next one and continue the adventure.