Blue World

by Robert R. McCammon

  Old gears moaned. The elevator was coming up. It opened when he was almost even with it. Out walked his next-door neighbor, Julie Saufley, and a young man with close-cropped blond hair.

  She almost bumped into him, but she stopped short. “Hi, Cray. You’re prowlin’ around kinda late, aren’t you?”

  “Guess so.” Cray glanced at the young man. Julie’s latest friend had pallid skin that was odd in sun-loving California, and his eyes were small and very dark. Looks like an extra in a Nazi flick, Cray thought, and then returned his gaze to Julie, whose dark brown hair was cut in a Mohawk and decorated with purple spray. Her spangled blouse and short leather skirt were so tight he couldn’t fathom how she could draw a breath, “Had to use the bathroom,” he said. Didn’t that just sound like an old fool? he asked himself. When he was forty years younger such a statement to a pretty girl would have been unthinkable.

  “Cray was a movie star,” Julie explained to her friend. “Used to be in…what did they call them, Cray?”

  “Serials,” he answered. Smiled wanly. “Cliff-hangers. I was the—”

  “I’m not paying you for a tour of the wax museum, baby.” The young man’s voice was taut and mean, and the sound of it made Cray think of rusted barbed wire. A match flared along the side of a red matchbook; the young man lit a cigarette, and the quick yellow light made his eyes look like small ebony stones. “Let’s get done what we came here for,” he said, with a puff of smoke in Cray Flint’s direction.

  “Sure.” Julie shrugged. “I just thought you might like to know he used to be famous, that’s all.”

  “He can sign my autograph book later. Let’s go.” Spidery white fingers slid around her arm and drew her away.

  Cray started to tell him to release her, but what was the use? There were no gentlemen anymore, and he was too old and used-up to be anyone’s champion. “Be careful, Julie,” he said as she guided the man to her apartment.

  “My name’s Crystal this week,” she reminded him. Got her keys out of her clutch purse. “Coffee in the morning?”

  “Right.” Julie’s door opened and closed. Cray went into his room and eased himself into a chair next to the window. The boulevard’s neon pulse painted red streaks across the walls. The street denizens were out, would be out until dawn, and every so often a police car would run them into the shadows, but they always returned. The night called them, and they had to obey. Like Julie did. She’d been in the building four months, was just twenty years old, and Cray couldn’t help but feel some grandfatherly concern for her. Maybe it was more than that, but so what? Lately he’d been trying to help her get off those pills she popped like candy, and encouraging her to write to her parents back in Minnesota. Last week she’d called herself Amber; such was the power of Hollywood, a city of masks.

  Cray reached down beside his chair and picked up the well-worn leather book that lay there. He could hear the murmur of Julie’s voice through the paper-thin wall; then her customer’s, saying something. Silence. A police car’s siren on the boulevard, heading west. The squeak of mattress springs from Julie’s apartment. Over in the corner, the scuttling of a rat in the wall. Where was Seymour when you needed him? Cray opened his memory book, and looked at the yellowed newspaper clipping from the Belvedere, Indiana Banner of March 21, 1946, that said HOMETOWN FOOTBALL HERO HOLLYWOOD-BOUND. There was a picture of himself, when he was still handsome and had a headful of hair. Other clippings—his mother had saved them—were from his high-school and college days, and they had headlines like BOOMER WINS GYMNASTIC MEDAL and BOOMER BREAKS TRACK-MEET RECORD. That was his real name: Creighton Boomershine. The photographs were of a muscular, long-legged kid with a lopsided grin and the clear eyes of a dreamer.

  Long gone, Cray thought. Long gone.

  He had had his moment in the sun. It had almost burned him blind, but it had been a lovely light. He had turned sixty-three in May, an old relic. Hollywood worshiped at the altar of youth. Anyway, nobody made his kind of pictures anymore. Four serials in four years, and then—

  Cut, he thought. No use stirring up all that murky water. He had to get back to bed, because morning would find him mopping the floor in the Burger King three blocks west, and Mr. Thatcher liked clean floors.

  He closed the memory book and put it aside. On the floor was a section of yesterday’s L.A. Times; he’d already read the paper, but a headline caught his attention: FLIPTOP KILLER CHALLENGES POLICE. Beneath that was a story about the Fliptop, and eight photographs of the street people whose throats had been savagely slashed in the last two months. Cray had known one of them: a middle-aged woman called Auntie Sunglow, who rocketed along the boulevard on roller skates singing Beatles songs at the top of her lungs. She was crazy, yes, but she always had a kind tune for him. Last week she’d been found in a trash dumpster off Sierra Bonita, her head almost severed from her neck.

  Bad times, Cray mused. Couldn’t think of any worse. Hopefully the police would nail the Fliptop before he—or she—killed again, but he didn’t count on it. All the street people he knew were watching their backs.

  Something struck the wall in Julie’s apartment. It sounded like it might have been a fist.

  Cray heard the springs squalling, like a cat being skinned alive. He didn’t know why she sold her body for such things, but he’d learned long ago that people did what they had to do to survive.

  There was another blow against the wall. Something crashed over. A chair, maybe.

  Cray stood up. Whatever was going on over there, it sounded rough. Way too rough. He heard no voices, just the awful noise of the springs. He went to the wall and pounded on it. “Julie?” he called. “You all right?”

  No answer. He put his ear to the wall, and heard what he thought might have been a shuddering gasp.

  The squall of the springs had ceased. Now he could hear only his own heartbeat. “Julie?” He pounded the wall again. “Julie, answer me!” When she didn’t respond, he knew something was terribly wrong. He went out to the corridor, sweat crawling down his neck, and as he reached out to grip the doorknob of Julie’s apartment he heard a scraping noise that he knew must be the window being pushed upward.

  Julie’s window faced the alley. The fire escape, Cray realized. Julie’s customer was going down the fire escape.

  “Julie!” he shouted. He kicked at the door, and his slipper flew off. Then he threw his shoulder against it, and the door cracked on its hinges but didn’t give way. Again he rammed into the door, and a third time. On the fourth blow the door’s hinges tore away from the wood and it crashed down, sending Cray sprawling into the apartment.

  He got up on his hands and knees, his shoulder hurting like hell. The young man was across the untidy room, still struggling with the reluctant windowsill, and he paid Cray no attention. Cray stood up, and looked at the bed where Julie lay, naked, on her back.

  He caught his breath as if he’d been punched in the stomach. The blood was still streaming from the scarlet mass of Julie Saufley’s throat, and it had splattered across the yellow wall like weird calligraphy. Her eyes were wet and aimed up at the ceiling, her hands gripped around the bars of the iron bedframe. Without clothes, her body was white and childlike, and she hardly had any breasts at all. The blood was everywhere. So red. Cray’s heart was laboring, and as he stared at the slashed throat he heard the window slide up. He blinked, everything hazy and dreamlike, and watched the young blond man climb through the window onto the fire escape.

  Oh, God, Cray thought. He wavered on his feet, feared he was about to faint. Oh, my God…

  Julie had brought the Fliptop Killer home to play.

  His first impulse was to shout for help, but he squelched it. He knew the shout would rob his breath and strength, and right now he needed both of them. The LaPrestas were still fighting. What would one more shout be? He stepped forward. Another step, and a third one followed. With the rusty agility of a champion gymnast, he ran to the open window and slid out to the fire escape.

  The F
liptop Killer was about to go down the ladder. Cray reached out, grasped the young man’s T-shirt in his freckled fist, and said hoarsely, “No.”

  The man twisted toward him. The small black eyes regarded him incuriously: the emotionless gaze of a clinician. There were a few spatters of blood on his face, but not many. Practice had honed his reflexes, and he knew how to avoid the jetting crimson. Cray gripped his shirt; they stared at each other for a few ticks of time, and then the killer’s right hand flashed up with an extra finger of metal.

  The knife swung at Cray’s face, but Cray had already seen the blow coming in the tension of the man’s shoulder, and as he let go of the shirt and scrambled backward, the blade hissed past.

  And now the Fliptop Killer stepped toward him—a long stride, knife upraised, the face cold and without expression, as if he were about to cut a hanging piece of beef. But a woman screamed from an open window, and as the man’s head darted to the side Cray grasped the wrist of his knife hand and shouted, “Call the po—”

  A fist hit him in the face, crumpling his nose and mashing his lips. He pitched back, stunned—and he fell over the fire escape’s railing into empty space.

  3

  A Red Matchbook

  HIS ROBE SNAGGED ON a jagged edge of metal. The cloth ripped, almost tore off him, and for three awful seconds he was dangling five floors over the alley, but then he reached upward and his fingers closed around the railing. The Fliptop Killer was already scrambling down the fire escape. The woman—Mrs. Sargenza, bless her soul—was still screaming, and now somebody else was hollering from another window and the Fliptop Killer clambered down to the alley with the speed and power of a born survivor.

  Cray pulled himself up, his legs kicking and his shoulder muscles standing out in rigid relief. He collapsed onto his knees when he’d made it to the landing’s safety. He thought he might have to throw up enchiladas, and his stomach heaved, but mercifully there was no explosion. Blood was in his mouth, and his front teeth felt loose. He stood up, black motes buzzing before his eyes. Looked over the edge, gripping hard to the railing.

  The Fliptop Killer was gone, back to the shadows.

  “Call the police,” he said, but he didn’t know if Mrs. Sargenza had heard him, though she disappeared from her window and slammed it shut. He was trembling down to his gnarly toes, and after another moment he climbed back into the room where the corpse was.

  Cray felt her wrist for a pulse. It seemed the sensible thing to do. But there was no pulse, and Julie’s eyes didn’t move. In the depths of the wound he could see the white bone of her spine. How many times had the killer slashed, and what was it inside him that gave him such a maniacal strength? “Wake up,” Cray said. He pulled at her arm. “Come on, Julie. Wake up.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Mr. Myers from across the hall stood in the doorway. His hand went to his mouth, and he made a retching sound and staggered back to his apartment. Other people were peering in. Cray said, “Julie needs a doctor,” though he knew she was dead and all a doctor could do was pull the bloodied sheet over her face. He still had her hand, and he was stroking it. Her fingers were closed around something; it worked loose and fell into Cray’s palm.

  Cray looked at it. A red matchbook. The words GRINDERSWITCH BAR printed on its side, and an address just off Hollywood and Vine, three blocks over.

  He opened the red matchbook. Two matches were missing. One of them had been used to light the Fliptop Killer’s cigarette, out in the hallway. The Fliptop Killer had been to the Grinderswitch, a place Cray had walked past but never entered.

  “Cops are on their way!” Mr. Gomez said, coming into the room. His wife stood at the door, her face smeared with blue anti-aging cream. “What happened here, Flint?”

  Cray started to speak, but found no words. Others were entering the room, and suddenly the place with its reek of blood and spent passions was too tight for him; he had a feeling of suffocation, and a scream flailed behind his teeth. He walked past Mr. Gomez, out the door, and into his own apartment. And there he stood at the window, the brutal neon pulse flashing in his face and a red matchbook clenched in his hand.

  The police would come and ask their questions. An ambulance without a siren would take Julie’s corpse away, to a cold vault. Her picture would be in the Times tomorrow, and the headline would identify her as the Fliptop Killer’s ninth victim. Her claim to fame, he thought, and he almost wept.

  I saw him, he realized. I saw the Fliptop. I had hold of the bastard.

  And there in his hand was the matchbook Julie had given him. The bartender at the Grinderswitch might know the Fliptop. The bartender might be the Fliptop. It was a vital clue, Cray thought, and if he gave it up to the police it might be lost in shufflings of paper, envelopes, and plastic bags that went into what they called their evidence storage. The police didn’t care about Julie Saufley, and they hardly cared about the other street victims either. No, Julie was another statistic—a “crazy,” the cops would say. The Fliptop Killer loved to kill “crazies.”

  Julie had given him a clue. Had, perhaps, fought to keep it with her dying breath. And now what was he going to do with it?

  He knew, without fully knowing. It was a thing of instincts, just as his long-ago gymnastic training, track-and-field, and boxing championships were things of instinct.

  Inner things that, once learned and believed in, could never be fully lost.

  He opened the closet’s door.

  A musty, mothball smell rolled out. And there it was, on its wooden hanger amid the cheap shirts and trousers of an old dreamer.

  It had once been emerald green, but time had faded it to more of a dusky olive. Bleach stains had mottled the flowing green cape, and Cray had forgotten how that had happened. Still, he’d been a good caretaker: various rips had been patched over, the only really noticable mar a poorly stitched tear across the left leg. The cowl, with its swept-back, crisply winglike folds on either side of the head and its slits for the eyes, was in almost perfect condition. The green boots were there on the floor, both badly scuffed, and the green gloves were up on the shelf.

  His Green Falcon costume had aged, just like its owner. The studio had let him keep it after he came out of the sanatarium in 1954. By then serials were dying anyway, and of what use was a green suit with a long cape and wings on the sides of its cowl? In the real world, there was no room for Green Falcons.

  He touched the material. It was lighter than it appeared, and it made a secret—and dangerous—whispering noise. The Green Falcon had made mincemeat out of a gallery of villains, roughnecks, and killers every Saturday afternoon in the cathedrals of light and shadow all across America. Why, then, could the Green Falcon not track down the Fliptop Killer?

  Because the Green Falcon is dead, Cray told himself. Forget it. Close the door. Step back. Leave it to the police.

  But he didn’t close the door, nor did he step back. Because he knew, deep at his center, that the Green Falcon was not dead. Only sleeping, and yearning to awaken.

  He was losing his mind. He knew that clearly enough, as if somebody had thrown ice water in his face and slapped him too. But he reached into the closet, and he brought the costume out.

  The siren of a police car was approaching. Cray Flint began to pull the costume on over his pajamas. His body had thinned, not thickened, with age; the green tights were loose, and though his legs were knotty with muscles, they looked skinny and ill-nourished. His shoulders and chest still filled out the tunic portion of the costume, though, but his thin, wiry arms had lost the blocky muscularity of their youth. He got the costume zipped up, worked his feet into the scuffed boots, then put on the cape and laced it in place. The dust of a thousand moth wings shimmered gold against the green. He lifted the gloves off the shelf, but discovered the moths had enjoyed an orgy in them and they were riddled with holes. The gloves would have to stay behind. His heart was beating very hard now. He took the cowl off its hanger. The police car’s siren was nearing the building. Cray ran his
fingers over the cowl, which still gleamed with a little iridescence, as it had in the old days.

  I shouldn’t do this, he told himself. I’m going crazy again, and I’m nothing but an Indiana boy who used to be an actor…

  I shouldn’t…

  He slipped the cowl over his head and drew its drawstring tight. And now he saw the world through cautious slits, the air coming to his nostrils through small holes and smelling of mothballs and…yes, and something else. Something indefinable: the brassy odor of a young man’s sweat, the sultry heat of daredevilry, maybe the blood of a split lip incurred during a fight scene with an overeager stuntman. Those aromas and more. His stomach tightened under the green skin. Walk tall and think tall, he remembered a director telling him. His shoulders pulled back. How many times had he donned this costume and gone into the battle against hoodlums, thugs, and murderers? How many times had he stared Death in the face through these slits, and walked tall into the maelstrom?

  I’m Creighton Flint, he thought. And then he looked at the faded poster that promised a world of thrills and saw STARRING CREIGHTON FLINT, “THE GREEN FALCON.”

  The one and only.

  The police car’s siren stopped.

  It was time to go, if he was going.

  The Green Falcon held the matchbook up before his eye slits. The Grinderswitch was a short walk away. If the Fliptop Killer had been there tonight, someone might remember.

  He knew he was one stride away from the loony bin, and if he went through that door dressed like this there was no turning back. But if the Green Falcon couldn’t track down the Fliptop, nobody could.