Darkman (2 page)

“Ah. I was engaged to a girl with a wooden leg once.”

Durant’s man brightened. “Yeah? What happened?”

Eddie shook his head glumly. “Poor girl. I had to break it off.”

His workers howled. Eddie chuckled. How fine it felt to be in charge. “Well,” he said, “it’s time to cut the chatter. Durant, I’ve only got three things to say to you.” He held up one finger. “First, I’m not selling you my property.” Another finger. “Second, nobody muscles Eddie Black. Especially a bunch of jerks like you.” Third finger. “Last, if you are unhappy with the previous two, we’ll be more than happy to amputate your privates and nail them to the wall. Sort of like a poor man’s doorbell.”

The workers screamed laughter while Eddie basked in the limelight of his own cutting wit. How great it was to be onstage with an admiring crowd. He turned to his men, good men all of them, every one, and while they howled and screeched and pounded each other, one of Robert G. Durant’s goons jumped at the one-legged man and pulled his wooden leg out of his pants. Something metallic flipped down from the wooden calf, a handle of some sort with a trigger. He pressed the wooden foot to his shoulder, took quick aim, and fired.

At any other time Eddie would have found this trick quite laudable; after all, Durant was in the business of high-pressure sales tactics and should be as prepared as possible for any upsetting little detail, such as thirteen dockworkers armed only with clubs and chains. The machine gun blatted, spitting smoke and fire, drilling through the uneven line of men, bowling them over. The machine-gun-in-the-leg trick was absolutely stunning to Eddie, because now he was seeing thirteen men fall in bloody heaps while body parts—arms, legs, guts, brains, unidentifiable red blobs—flapped through the air and spattered down on the cement. There was groaning; there was screaming. Eddie did not realize that it was he himself, Eddie Black, who was screaming the loudest. His fingers had dug themselves into his cheeks, pulling his face down into a mask of insane horror.

The machine gun swung toward him. He dropped to the floor without saying so much as howdy to the cement, and hugged it for dear life, eyes squeezed shut, heart pounding in his throat, sweat beading on his forehead, while the machine gun
—good trick—
hammered away at his new Dodge. Glass exploded and rained down on him. A tire blew with a bang, then farted its air out. The car clunked down when another tire blew. Bullets perforated the shiny new paint with a sound like small hammers hitting steel. Eddie screamed some more, screamed until he realized the gun had shut down and the only noise left were echoes of gunfire and his screams booming off the walls and high ceiling.

He raised his head. Glass pebbles slid off his hair. Gunsmoke as thick as fog wafted in the still air, smelling like burned chemicals and sulfur. The one-legged man was hopping around on his only foot while his leg was put back together. He accepted it and stuck it back in his pant leg.

Feet shuffled. Eddie was hauled upright. He tried to stand but was forced to his knees. His terrified mind showed him a horror house of things yet to come. Knives in his eyes. Decapitation. Strangulation. The cutting out of his tongue. Castration. Any number of new and interesting things.

Durant stood over him, grinning. A hand grabbed Eddie’s hair and jerked his head up. Oh, yeah, Eddie thought, wild with fear. Gonna cut my throat. Jesus God, my
throat!

Durant reached inside his suit coat and withdrew a long cigar.

Burn my eyes out, oh God, oh no, HELP!

He reached into another pocket and produced an unrecognizable gold gadget. It looked like a small guillotine. He thumbed it and a hole appeared. He stuck the end of his cigar into the hole. Snip! A small piece of cigar dropped to the floor. He stuck the clipped end in his mouth and withdrew yet another gold gadget from a pocket. Eddie looked on, his thoughts a chaotic and useless whirl. What the hell did Durant have in mind?

Durant touched a button. A tiny finger of flame burst alive. He lit his cigar. Nice lighter, Eddie screamed inside. Let me live and I’ll buy you a truckload of them. What is that, anyway? Electronic ignition? One little button, and presto, you’ve got fire. Question is, what do you intend to do with it?

Durant went into a squat, facing Eddie eye to eye. The lighter burned. Better blow it out, Eddie was able to think. Blow it out or that fancy gold job will overheat and burn your hand.

“Let us negotiate,” Durant said evenly. “I believe we have a sale to discuss in very fine detail. Stop whimpering so. You haven’t been hurt.”

Yeah? Not
yet
I haven’t. But if you do not extinguish that lighter soon, it will be very, very hot.

Ooops. Hot lighter. Perhaps as hot as, say, a branding iron?

Nope.

Durant touched the flame to Eddie’s hair. At his age Eddie was not blessed with a bountiful crop, but for a man nearing sixty he wasn’t all that bald. His hair crackled alive. In seconds it was a burning cowl. The stench of it filled the building, making some of Durant’s boys hold their noses and giggle through their mouths. Eddie, meanwhile, began exercising his voice again. He whooped and bellowed while his hair evaporated as if by magic, leaving only burned stubs and a scalp gone pink and black. He was inclined to get up and run, but the strong hands holding him down changed his mind. Instead he had to content himself with whipping his flaming head back and forth and screaming.

“Jeez,” Durant said, looking apologetic. “Did I do that?”

More giggles. Durant blew on Eddie’s head, making the last remnants of hair glow brightly before going out. Eddie moaned and gobbled. He was unaware that one of his hands had been captured and was being held out, pointing at Durant.

“Now,” Durant said, withdrawing the cigar trimmer, “I want you to consider these points one by one.” He clicked the trimmer, making a hole appear. He slid the device onto Eddie’s forefinger.

“Number one: I try not to let anger get the better of me.”

He squeezed the trimmer, hard. Eddie screamed as the razor-sharp blade dug past his flesh and into the bone. Durant grunted and the blade clicked home.

Eddie looked down at his newly trimmed hand with bulging eyes. Instead of a finger he had a spurting stump. Durant waddled backward, to avoid staining his suit.

“Point number two!” he shouted over the noise Eddie was making. “I don’t always succeed in overcoming my anger.” He slipped the trimmer over another finger, the second one. Eddie struggled against the hands that held him.

Snip!

Eddie saw everything through a blood-red mist of pain. His screaming was winding down to sloppy chuckles.

“Point number three,” Durant said, and snipped again.

Eddie swayed, moaning, drunk with pain.

Durant grinned cruelly as he fitted the trimmer over yet another finger. “Point number three, Eddie, is this: I have seven more points.”

Everyone laughed at this—everyone except Eddie, of course. Eddie was too busy with his own problems to see the humor in this, or anything else.

PART ONE

Destuction

1

Yakky

F
OR
Y
AKITITO
Y
ANAGITO
—a name so unpronounceable that his friends at Wayne State University called him Yakky, which sat just fine with Yakitito, because he had no idea what Yakky might mean—the first Thursday afternoon as lab assistant to Dr. Peyton Westlake was a memorable one. Westlake was a tall, loose-jointed man just easing into his thirties. Likeable if a bit skittish, he was the kind of guy who might kill you in a basketball game or nail you to the wall with an impossible Chem 101 exam, and then go home and invent Flubber. He could be seen dashing across campus in his white lab coat on some inexplicable mission, deaf and blind to his surroundings or hunched over a microscope at the biochem lab, jammed so tightly into his own little world that there was no room for anybody else. Yakky had indeed heard a lot about Peyton Westlake, even seen him a few times charging from building to building with his lab coat flapping. As a foreign graduate student at the university, Yakky could easily understand what it meant to seem strange, even bizarre, to the rest of humanity; he felt that way all the time.

Standing now at the door to Peyton Westlake’s private laboratory, ready to peck at the glass, Yakky felt a surge of fresh apprehension. This place was strange. A two-story red clapboard affair, it was seedy and generally run-down. Some windows were boarded over with plywood that was slowly surrendering to rot, other windows were broken and gaping, even the tin roof leaked. The whole sorry structure was located within fifty yards of a sludgy river that smelled of toxic waste and dead fish. Yakky felt decidedly nauseated as he stared at his own pale reflection in the glass of the door, the only thing around here that appeared to have survived the ravages of time and vandals. He smoothed his hair. He adjusted his tie. He took off his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses, which weighed nearly half a pound, stuck his nose to the glass, and searched his face for pimples until it occurred to him that he had not had a pimple since he was seventeen.

Now or never, he thought in his native Japanese as he repositioned his monster Mr. Ed glasses and rapped on the door. While he waited for a response he polished the tips of his Oxfords on his pants. Someone had told him that Dr. Westlake was notorious for dressing casually: cutoff jeans in the summer, a ratty field jacket in the winter. Still, Yakky had no desire to make a bad first impression. The grant that funded Westlake’s research was due for renewal in December, three months from now. In the last six months he had had three different lab assistants; all of them had gotten fed up with this or that and ran screaming into the night. There were rumors of a failed experiment that Westlake had become obsessed with and would not let die. Some spoke of spending hideously long hours staring at a stopwatch. None of it really mattered to Yakky. He needed the credit hours and he needed the money. Postgrad hours for out-of-state students had been jacked up to the sixty-two-dollar mark. Pretty bad, especially when your dad drives a garbage truck in Osaka.

He knocked again. In the distance he could hear some kind of machinery whining. Curiosity gnawed at him, but he did not give in to the urge to take a peek. Besides, it looked dark inside.

Time passed. He knocked again, harder now, as hard as his inbred sense of decency would allow. Sweat trickled down his neck. September in Michigan was an odd mishmash of too much heat or too much cold; nobody was ever satisfied, Yakky included.

Something clunked. Somewhere above, wood crunched. It began to rain sawdust on Yakky’s head. He looked up, squinting against the sawdust and the hot afternoon sun.

The boards on one of the windows were being wrenched apart. Yakky stepped back, his eyes behind the Mr. Ed glasses growing large. He saw hands. He saw the cuff of a white lab coat. He saw a large kitchen clock sail out the window and crash on the hard-packed mud near the river’s edge. It burst apart in a noisy explosion of glass and springs. Yakky looked on in horror.

A fist stuck itself out of the window, followed by a head. The fist was shaking angrily up and down. The head was screaming.

“You rotten stupid son of a bitch!”

The fist began to hammer the head, pounding it silly. Yakky blanched. Even for Americans this was strange behavior. He stepped farther back, hoping to dodge any other clocks that might come sailing his way. The man who was upstairs busily knocking himself over the head looked down at him. Yakky tried to force a smile. No good. All he did was grimace.

The man upstairs quit hitting himself. He smiled down at Yakky.

“Yakitito Yanagita, I presume?”

Yakky looked around quizzically, pointing a finger at his own chest. No one else was there. He had a strong urge to deny any knowledge of the poor slob named Yakitito Yanagita, and run away. He had a quick mental glimpse of himself sprinting the eight blocks back to campus while this lunatic hurled clocks at him. For a sensitive soul named Yakky it was a vision straight from hell.

“Come on in,” the man upstairs shouted, and Yakky knew, as his heart sank into his shoes, that this was Dr. Peyton Westlake and nobody else. He shuffled back to the door and grasped the knob. It fell off in his hand.

“Minor setback,” Peyton shouted above him. “I’ll plug it back in later. Watch the steps, though. They might be wobbly.”

Yakky pushed the door open, wishing he had not worn this shirt and tie because the shirt was threatening to suffocate him and the tie was about to strangle him, and who really cared when the next three months—longer if the grant was funded—were spent in the company of this madman?

He went in, ready to jump at shadows. It was dim inside, the air heavy and hot. Crates and boxes bulked to the ceiling on the far wall, most of them bearing the IBM logo. A staircase loomed in the dark on the right. Yakky put a hesitant foot on the first step, bouncing a little on the springy, eroded wood, testing it while visions of various fractures flitted through his mind like ghosts. He made it to the fifth step before the wood gave out with a dry snap, and he plunged downward, his hips wedging themselves between the riser and the fourth step. He suppressed a howl as sharp wood splinters dug through his pants; a man with thick glasses wearing a brown polyester suit, up to the waist in stairs.