Darkman (19 page)

The pizza tasted like a hot piece of cardboard without its usual assortment of goodies on top, but Darkman had no desire for Peyton to have bad breath today. He ate it by rote, pizza sauce and red saliva dribbling down his skeletal chin, dripping on his trusty raincoat. Without lips, he had discovered with absolutely no glee at all, everything he ate tended to squirt out through his teeth. Just another benefit of being roasted alive.

It had taken six hours to complete the awkward digitization by hand, a process the computer used to do in seconds with only a photograph and a lot of electricity. It had taken Peyton three months to invent it, back in the days when he was Peyton and the skies were blue. Next to the Bio-Press, it was the most important tool in skin production. But, like all of life’s other disasters, Darkman was getting used to it. He smeared his head with mastic, just loving the odor, and assembled his new head in four parts: face, back, top, neck. He pressed the seams together and looked at himself in the chunk of mirror he had found in the dead and musty Fresh Splash rest room.

Not bad. The skin tone and texture were exactly like Peyton’s, down to the small childhood scar on his chin. The lips were colorless, but a light application of lipstick would take care of that. The eyebrows had a hairlike texture to them. A little eyebrow pencil would make them passable. At this stage the most obvious flaws were the too-tight cheeks and the hairless head. Peyton reborn was a chrome-dome. Thus the wigs. He only hoped Julie would not run her fingers through his hair and dislodge the fake fur. Wouldn’t that be a riot? The fun simply never ended in the wild and zany life of Darkman.

Millings Supply had furnished the after-shave he had requested. He dumped some onto his hands and splashed his face, hoping to trade the smell of the mastic for the manly smell of English Leather. That done, he used the makeup, not particularly liking it, and certainly not very good at applying it. But when he was done and checked his appearance in the mirror, he grunted with satisfaction. What a pretty face for a bald guy.

The hair went on next. Last night before going to bed on his mattress of fiberglass, Darkman had dyed the wig to the color he remembered, the medium-brown crop that formerly had resided on his head. A snip here, a snip there, and it looked great. Looking once again in the mirror now, Darkman was amazed to see Peyton Westlake staring back at him.

He had done it. He was back.

He smiled, and his new face, pulled by burned remnants of muscle and tendon, smiled with him, only slightly off-kilter. He frowned, and so did Peyton. He laughed at himself, holding up his hands, these strong man’s hands where lines of veins showed and realistic knuckles stood out in bony perfection. He looked like a million bucks. Well, he was forced to admit, maybe just half a million, but that was more than he’d been worth five minutes ago.

Once dressed, tie in place, he ran a swift mental double check, looking for flaws or things forgotten. Everything was as it should be. The stopwatch registered eleven minutes.

He wended through the maze of his helter-skelter laboratory, opened the front door, and stepped out into the light of a glorious afternoon. Nothing could go wrong.

But of course something
did
go wrong, and it wasn’t his fault. He arrived at Julie’s apartment, barely able to chase a huge grin of triumph away from his face, nearly trembling with anticipation. There was a bouquet of red roses in one fist. The other hand was busy pushing Julie’s doorbell.

His grin began to fade as the bell rang again and again. Wasn’t this just keen? He makes a reappearance for the first time in two weeks and nobody’s home. Why hadn’t he called first, and why wasn’t she home?

He knew the answer to these, for what it might be worth. Point number one, Julie would consider it a horrible practical joke if he had called, something a teenager would do out of raw meanness. Second, he realized now that she was probably held up at work. All of the hours spent constructing this facade had been wasted.

He dug the stopwatch out of his pocket and checked the elapsed time—a bit less than one hour. His heart went cold when he realized he had barely forty minutes left. He had had to hike some twenty blocks before he entered an area that was alive and had taxicabs. With the autumn sun burning on his face, the imitation skin should decay even faster. He shrugged to himself, full of bitterness that bordered on anger. Of all the screwball schemes in the world, this had to be one for the record. He had failed to perfect the artificial skin. He had gotten Yakky killed and himself cremated. He had failed as a scientist and as a man.

Slowly, not quite aware of it, Peyton crushed the roses between his hands, rolling them back and forth until the stems went limp. He looked down from the door that opened on nothing and saw what he was doing. His eyes narrowed.

“Son of a
bitch!”
he shrieked, hurling the flowers aside. He hammered the door with both fists, these perfect-looking but useless fists. He jumped back and was about to kick it down when the elevator at the end of the corridor slid open and Julie walked out.

He froze in place, anger forgotten, while his heart thumped loudly in his chest and throat. Julie was coming, barely thirty feet away, laden down with a green briefcase he had never seen before, a stack of manila folders, and a light fall coat draped over one arm. She was nearly staggering under the load.

He commanded his feet, in these wretched half-cooked shoes, to move. They did, agonizingly slowly, as if he had just yesterday learned to walk. When he turned, he stumbled away from the door and Julie’s approach, filled with confusion and fright, knowing he could not see her now with these roses tossed all about and his skull baking under the stupid wig. Because of all the sunlight, his face and hands might begin to sizzle and smoke any minute now. He would have to try again tomorrow, maybe call her and suffer the agony of being hung up on as a cruel impostor.

He forced himself to keep moving, pretending to look at the apartment numbers, keeping his face away from her sight. Wearing real skin, his face would be red and broiling with embarrassment that was not entirely well founded. Why, he asked himself, was he running away from the woman he had come to see? Was he afraid of her, or of his own socially clumsy self? He felt much the way he had in elementary school the first day he’d worn glasses. Everyone then seemed to be looking, pointing, whispering. He was nearly dead with shame, trapped inside the strange confinement of a plastic frame and thick, heavy lenses, naked to the world, as exposed as a closeted four-eyes from the beginning.

He heard Julie rattle her keys. She slipped one into the doorknob. It turned soundlessly, and then he heard nothing.

Was she gone? Was she? He dared to look back.

She had tossed her things inside and was on her knees gathering together the junked roses. She looked misty-eyed and puzzled. Peyton felt a great surge of sorrow for her—and the cold certainty that he had made her life pure hell these last weeks.

When she was done, she went inside and closed the door. The latch clicked softly, and their joyful reunion had changed from something wonderful to something strange and nearly sickening. Peyton came to the end of the corridor and stopped at the window there, looking out over the city without seeing. He propped his hands on the sill and leaned tiredly forward until his nose touched the glass. His breath fogged it immediately. Proof, at least, that though he was dead inside, he was still alive and kicking on the outside. The battle was not over, never would be.

He pushed away and started to walk to the elevator, defeated. Julie’s door wafted open and she stepped out, no more briefcase, no more manila folders and coat. She had wrapped the stems of the roses together in tissue paper, salvaging them from what Peyton might have done to them, given enough time. Peyton flattened himself against a wall, thinking in desperation that he had almost walked into her, and what a neat surprise that would have been. They both would have screamed.

She went into the elevator. He saw her punch the control panel. The doors slid shut and she was gone.

He wiped a hand across his forehead in force of habit from the years when he had had real skin that could sweat. Feeling empty, he went to the elevator and tapped the down button, wanting only to get back to his crumbling hovel and get some sleep. Julie had been almost close enough to touch but he had turned chicken. To his inner list of physical and personality flaws he added a new crime: cowardice.

The elevator climbed back up and opened for him. He punched the
L
and began the trip to earth in this metal sepulcher made by Otis. The elevator stopped at the sixth floor and a fat lady got in. She gave him a glance and did not scream.

Whoop-de-doo,
he thought tiredly.
The only monster here is inside me, and he is named Darkman.

The elevator bottomed out and opened. The fat lady hustled away. Peyton strolled to the exit with his hands in his pockets, his face expressionless. Would he have more courage tomorrow? What if his anger ballooned out of control? Would he hurt her?

Please, no. He could not bear to hurt her.

He frowned as he went out onto the noisy street. Is that why he had not showed himself today? For fear of hurting her? What—mentally or physically?

Ah, stop asking yourself unanswerable questions. Get the hell home and curl up with some nice fiberglass.

He turned. Julie was at the curb, waiting for a slowpoke to pay the driver and free the cab for her. He did, and Peyton looked on, too stunned to move. She leaned inside and Peyton heard her tell the cabbie to take her to Eastlawn Cemetery.

And then she was gone, whisked away in a battered old Checker while Peyton stood with his mouth hanging open and his shoulders drooping.

Eastlawn Cemetery? Who was buried there whom she had known? Her folks were still alive, as far as he knew. Anyway, they lived in Chicago and had no business being buried here.

He puzzled for a few seconds while people surged past, most of them looking annoyed at this moody man who was blocking pedestrian traffic. Peyton jerked as the realization stung him.
He
was buried there. Probably Yakky, too, but Julie scarcely knew him.

A cab drew up and disgorged a passenger. The cabbie leaned over and looked up at Peyton quizzically.

Peyton got inside. “Where will it be?” the driver asked, looking at him in the mirror.

“Eastlawn Cemetery.” He pointed. “Just follow that cab.”

The cabbie snorted. “You ought to hire a new writer, bud. That stuff went out with Bogart.” He chuckled, liking this.

Peyton didn’t smile. “Just hit the road, will you?”

“Hit the road? Man, you are a scream.”

He took off, laughing heartily. Peyton felt like strangling him.

The cemetery was on the north side, eleven dollars’ worth of cab time. Peyton paid the happy fellow and hoped he would be in the middle of a ten-car pileup on the way back. Then he walked under the rusted steel arch and into the broad expanse of parched grass and leaning tombstones that was Eastlawn, a cemetery so unkempt and bedraggled that no one was dying to get in. Arf-arf, Peyton thought with dismal humor, and looked for Julie.

He saw her a distance ahead, stepping between the graves with the roses held high, obviously looking for something not easy to find. He ducked behind a dead tree and watched her until she disappeared over a rise. Slinking like a criminal, he made his way to the hilltop and hid behind a tall gravestone.

She had found her target and was on her knees. She laid the roses on the hump of dirt and tired sod that was capped only with a small stone marker. She ducked her head and he heard her sob.

He swallowed, not wanting to see her like this.
I did this,
he thought, not for the first time.
Why didn’t I call her from the hospital? Why have I been hiding?

It was too easy to answer. How do you come back into a loved one’s life with your face burned off and your hands baked to cinders? One look at the real him and she would run in terror.

He checked the stopwatch. Nine minutes left. That wasn’t enough time. He needed to go home and make a new batch, maybe make an appearance later tonight.

Okay, then. Tonight it is.

He turned to slink away when Julie tilted her head back and howled. The eerie sound made gooseflesh break out on his back. He turned again. She looked ready to collapse. It came to him what she had howled. A name, one name.

Peyton.

So it was his grave. What they had found to bury was something he would never know. He stood, in full view if she would turn around, his common sense battling with his desire that Julie’s suffering be erased. It was when she pressed her face to the ground, doubled over with agony, that he made the decision.

He stepped away from the tombstone and walked toward her, his heart booming thunderously. He tried to say her name, but all traces of saliva had evaporated from his mouth and throat, leaving him speechless. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Julie!”

She straightened, turned, and looked at him. The color washed out of her face, which was puffy from crying. Her eyes grew huge. She lurched to her feet, shaking her head in silent denial. Peyton came close enough to touch her.

“You’re . . . dead,” she hissed, backing away. A wisp of hair was stuck to her wet cheek. Peyton moved to brush it aside, and she jumped like a cat, keeping her distance.

“Julie,” Peyton said, “it’s all right. It’s me, really me.”

She shook her head, seeming mesmerized. “No. You can’t be.”

“It was all a terrible mistake, sweetheart. I survived the explosion. I was in a coma. I was badly injured but not killed.”

Her eyes became narrow and suspicious. This was not the reception he had envisioned. “You look the same,” she said thickly. “You look fine.”

“I
am
the same,” he said, nearly pleading. “God, Julie, give me a hug!”

She came to him, moving slowly. He saw her nostrils flare slightly. “You smell like Peyton,” she said dazedly, and pressed herself to him. He enfolded her in his arms, nearly weeping, wanting her to take him and protect him and make all the terror and misery go away.