The Hidden Man

by Anthony Flacco

  A sense of the woman’s power overwhelmed her. Without a doubt, Miss Janine Freshell could teach the Great Mesmerist a thing or two about making people see things that are not really there. That frightening command of illusion was the only aspect of the Eastern Whore that Vignette no longer called into question.

  There was very little backstage activity during the intermission; J.D. worked alone in these close-up presentations. The stage manager was back there, but without a backup cast or supporting players to oversee, he tended to his check-board and pretended to work while a couple of black-clad stage hands quickly swept the stage.

  J.D. had the hallway outside his dressing room all to himself, except for Detective Randall Blackburn and his assistant Shane something. Night-bird. Nightingale. The two men politely stood back near the offstage wings and gave J.D. plenty of room to pace, which he continued at a frantic rate.

  He only traveled a few steps in each direction before turning around, so that he remained close to the door of his dressing room. People were less likely to get curious about the contents of that big trunk in there if they never saw it in the first place.

  So for now, basic tasks: keep them away from the dressing room, finish the show, wait until everybody is out of the theatre, remove the trunk, take it far away, get rid of it, go back home, sleep for days.

  A simple schedule, by God. One that made sense. With plenty of time to figure out everything later on. Deduce the why of it. A dead woman, complete stranger, hiding to steal his elixir.

  Or perhaps he would drop it all into that same dark pit where so many other memories had been disappearing of late. How would that be? Let the cursed affliction serve some purpose, eh?

  “Perhaps it’ll even give old J.D. a whiff of luck and let him forget her altogether,” he said out loud.

  “Excuse me?” replied Detective Blackburn.

  “What?”

  “Who is it you want to forget, Mr. Duncan?”

  “Oh that. Nothing! A line! I do lines before the show starts again! Warming up and all! You understand!”

  “Sir, if you could hold still a minute and have a conversation with us—”

  “Go right ahead, Detective!” Duncan cried, pacing like a man trying to make up for lost time. “I do this! Intermission! Keep the blood all fired up, eh? You understand!”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I know you understand!”

  “All right, then. Mr. Duncan, we’ve looked at every single audience member tonight. If anybody plans to cause trouble, so far they aren’t doing anything to give themselves away. Nothing suspicious at all.”

  “Perhaps because of you, eh? Good, gentlemen! Good work!”

  “The thing is, sir, there are a lot of the big rookie officers who would like nothing better than to do body guard duty for you.”

  Not even J.D.’s labored pacing kept him from noticing that Blackburn’s assistant was staring. It felt like a spotlight beam. He could feel the heat of it.

  “Detective, did we not have this conversation? You come highly recommended!” He clapped his hands twice in a row to relieve a little more of the energy overload, wiped the sweat from his hairline, poured water from a pitcher into a tumbler, replaced the pitcher, and drained the glass, all without breaking stride.

  “Just ignore the jumping shadows,” J.D. reminded himself.

  “I don’t see any jumping shadows, Mr. Duncan.”

  “What? No! Lines, remember? Reciting. So forth.”

  “Mr. Duncan, I wonder if you could tell me who recommended me for this? It’s some sort of a mistake, that’s all. Then we can match you up with some guy who is a real bulldog. Any one of them would jump in front of you before they would allow you to take a bullet.”

  J.D. clapped his hands together. He hit them extra hard without meaning to, but noticed that the concussion released a little explosion of energy. He clapped hard again, felt a bit more of a release, and immediately began to clap once with every other step. Stomp, stomp, clap. Stomp, stomp, clap.

  He remembered that Blackburn had just asked him a question. So he raised his voice over his own background noise.

  “Come now, Detective! There’s got to be worse duty than guarding me—eh?” Stomp, stomp, clap.

  “Of course. It’s not that.”

  “Because I have to tell you, she expected you to see more of the potential in this assignment!” Stomp, stomp, clap.

  “She?” asked the other one, Night-something.

  This is why you don’t talk to people when you’re like this.

  “She, he, whoever it was, I’m not saying, I can’t recall, it doesn’t matter.” Stomp, stomp, clap. Stomp, stomp, clap. “Just please watch them as they leave the theatre, don’t let anyone come back here after the show. No fans, no autographs.”

  “You said ‘she,’” Blackburn interrupted, taking a step toward him. “There aren’t any women in the command chain, Mr. Duncan.”

  J.D. stopped pacing. It felt good for the truth to be out. One less thing. A rush of affection for Detective Blackburn washed through him, filling him with empathy for the man’s plight. A manly fellow such as this detective would surely take offense at having his fiancée meddle with his career. How sad, he thought with an inward sigh, that Detective Blackburn could not allow himself to appreciate the fruits of his woman’s ambition. So many men suffered from that character flaw.

  J.D. walked over to Detective Blackburn and embraced him. The detective stood still for a moment, then gently pulled his arms from around his neck and stepped back. J.D. could not repress a sad little laugh.

  “It’s a real shame, Detective. She meant well.”

  “Who did, Mr. Duncan?”

  “See? You just said ‘who,’ but you didn’t ask. It wasn’t really a question! Oh my friend, we are brothers in the fools that they make of us, are we not?”

  That Shane fellow spoke up again. “You are referring to Miss Janine Freshell?”

  “Gentlemen! Gentlemen, please! She wanted it kept from you, but I have no doubt this is the best way. Trust in me! Go home and embrace her! Give her your thanks!”

  Detective Blackburn cleared his throat and found his voice. “Mr. Duncan, why would my fiancée have any influence in this department?”

  “I don’t know that she has any at all, Detective. But she is a published author, here in San Francisco to write her next book. If anybody is listening to her, I’d guess that it’s not the department officials, but the local politicians they work for, eh?”

  He watched Blackburn turn to the Shane fellow. The two men had a heated conversation for another minute or so. Despite all the empathy that filled him for his fellow suffering humans, J.D. was careful to keep himself posted between them and his dressing room door. He busied himself with pretending to warm up his voice while he silently rehearsed stories to get these two to leave the backstage area.

  “Just tell them you have to concentrate!” he shouted.

  “What?” replied the detective.

  “The show! The part where I have to concentrate! That’s all! But in fact, I need to concentrate now. I mean, before curtain time. Just alone. Here. So thank you.”

  “Why would Miss Freshell want me to guard you?”

  “Oh, I really think that this is a private conversation for the two of you. As for now, please just watch the crowd after the performance, then you can go. I’ll ring you up on your new telephone tomorrow afternoon. Opening week, coming up! Big week!”

  Blackburn again turned to the Shane fellow and exchanged meaningful looks and a few murmurs. Then he turned back to J.D. and looked him straight in the eyes. “Mr. Duncan, my captain has ordered me to accommodate you, but I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

  “Fine, fine! But for now, if you could—”

  “It’s all right.” Shane stepped close to them. “We can discuss this with the captain or someone. Later. So, Mr. Duncan, we’ll go ahead and keep them away after the show.”

  “Excellent!”
>
  “And you don’t need an escort home, or anything?”

  “Nothing! Thank you! Good work! I’ll be sending my compliments up the chain of command! People never hear enough praise of a job well done, eh?”

  “Yes, sir,” Shane replied, taking Blackburn by the shoulder and physically turning him away. “We’ll go on out, now.”

  “Thank you, gentlemen! Good night!”

  Nightingale. That was it. Shane’s last name. He watched Shane Nightingale keep his arm on Blackburn’s shoulder and walk him out of the backstage area and back into the main house.

  With the backstage finally empty, J.D. sagged against the door of his dressing room and took a deep breath. Moments later, the opening music blared from the orchestra pit, leaving him with less than a minute until his cue.

  Nothing else to worry about at this particular moment but the triggers for the setups that he had carefully planted in the audience during the first half of the show.

  The triggers, he thought. The godforsaken triggers…

  The nondescript man had been very careful not to leave any revealing marks when he cut his doorway into the dead space behind the fake cliff in the caveman display. It remained carefully concealed. His own work during the unmanned late shift had allowed him to insulate the place for sound. And tapping into the alternating current lines running through the display for the background lighting was no challenge at all for a determined man with nothing else to do. Electricity afforded a mercifully quick death.

  There was the unexpected problem of heavy dampness inside that closed space. During those few days when he thoroughly enjoyed his random captive, the place had become positively steamy. He kept her alive until the last minute, on the day of Duncan’s show, but that was all the time he could spare her. It had gotten so close inside of there that he needed to get out for a while, anyway.

  In the meantime, he made use of his acquired skills, starting with a couple of interesting things that he picked up the first time desperation drove him to get relief. After his escape, when James “J.D.” Duncan turned on him and sent him away, he began life on the run as one of the lucky pukes who got to spend ten hours a day on the working floor of a Chicago slaughterhouse. It was the last stop before falling into the belly of Hell.

  Still, to the determined man, the man motivated by the scorching need for vengeance, there are lessons to be taken even in humiliation. His time on that killing floor taught him a handy bag of tricks for killing, tricks for handling a carcass, tricks for quickly stripping a large dead creature to the bone.

  Like the trick of using the tapped electrical line that he had run down into the dead space to administer repeated shocks to both ends of her spinal cord after she was dead. This handy slaughterhouse trick effectively delayed or even prevented rigor mortis from setting in—offering him the opportunity to transport her body and deliver it in any position that he needed to place her in, without having her stiffen up on him.

  The floor in the dead space had taken on so much of the air’s moisture that he had to use great care in working with the electrical lines. The second time that he got a small shock through his thick leather gloves, he realized that the floor had become dangerously wet.

  Now, back in the dead space after making the delivery to the theatre, he noticed that the floor had not dried out at all. This was despite the fact that nobody had been in the space for hours. He had left the hidden entrance door slightly ajar without giving away its position, enough to allow a draft to move through.

  Instead of drying, the floor was more damp now. Maybe a pipe joint somewhere. The entire fairground was built on artificial land, chunks of the old city that came down in the Great Earthquake nine years earlier. The artificial land was shot through with water pipes of every size and description, to service the countless needs of the exposition’s fountains, displays, and fixtures.

  At least there was no foul smell, so he wasn’t looking at a sewage leak. Slow leaks could be ignored, but a bad one could draw attention. So he would have to watch the floor: one more thing.

  He sat up on the work table and was finally able to enjoy that special feeling of being alone in a darkened place, the site of his recent exhilarating forays. He felt the rare sensation of being at ease in that glorious foyer of Hell where right and wrong meant nothing, and no one else had any power but him.

  He savored the thought of the fiasco that the girl’s body would cause at the theatre, once it was discovered. He enjoyed trying to decide whether Duncan would find it, or if one of the crew would get there first.

  And the touch of putting the powder that he stole from Duncan last time all over this girl’s mouth and nose—would they connect it to Duncan? They would, he decided, or an anonymous note would be delivered to City Hall Station the next day. That was the beauty of it. He didn’t have to sweat the details of Duncan’s downfall, he only had to stand back at a distance and give him the push.

  He had set a disaster in motion, but trusted in circumstance to add the finishing details. With the body deposited inside Duncan’s dressing room, there was no way for the famous man to walk free. The only question was what specific form of disaster would come crashing down on him.

  He was tired from his many exertions. But he had earned the right to sleep. He could finally allow himself to let go and give in to it, all the while chewing on the expectation of the story that would be coming out about Duncan in the next day’s newspapers.

  He had a list for Duncan:

  (a) Public humiliation;

  (b) professional destruction;

  (c) personal failure;

  (d) lack of any opportunity to recover;

  (e) all hope of leaving a respected legacy destroyed.

  Oh, yes. He had a list. And in the case of James “J.D.” Duncan, a checkmark was going to be required next to every single item—then and only then could the nondescript man say that his mission had been accomplished.

  At long last.

  AFTER INTERMISSION

  THE PACIFIC MAJESTIC THEATRE—SAN FRANCISCO’S FINEST

  TONIGHT, HABITS INGRAINED AFTER forty years of experience combined to steel his resolve. He considered it a masterful stroke of self-hypnosis on his part, to insist upon being the Amazing Duncan. His real product was not hypnosis, anyway. It was the persona of James “J.D.” Duncan. On a night like tonight, that might be all he needed, if he pulled it off just right. The key to the technique was that everything he did had to imply a secret meaning.

  The first rule that he would teach to aspirants, if his knowledge were the sort of thing that one shared, was this: “The folks will buy it if you sell it like you mean it.” And for him, the message had always been the same: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am James ‘J.D.’ Duncan—And Now You Are Hypnotized!”

  Shane stood at his position in the side aisle near the front of the stage, fascinated and baffled at the same time. Something very strange was going on with Duncan, stranger still because Shane could not tell if this was a planned part of the performance or not.

  He glanced at the audience again and confirmed that they all seemed to be wondering the same thing. Where is he going with this?

  They were hardly ten minutes into the second half of the show, with no threats to Duncan visible in the audience. However, as for whatever it was that was happening up on the stage…

  Duncan screamed with laughter. He pointed straight at the crowd like an amused parent catching a child in some lovably foolish endeavor.

  Shane felt his insides begin to knot at the recognition of something from the Nightingale murders, which after nine years still seemed to have happened yesterday. The only other time in his life that he had witnessed such a high state of stimulation in a grown man was in the ranting of Tommie Kimbrough while he destroyed the Nightingale family. The common element of overexcitement in these men was what struck him. Tommie in the act of murder and Duncan in the act of giving a performance, both displaying states of excitement far higher than the occasion
called for.

  Even though Tommie had been in the process of committing multiple murders, he knew that he was safe from discovery or intervention. And yet Shane had listened to him kill with the frantic energy of someone who was fighting for his life. Tonight, Duncan’s state was clearly far more intense than anything he might need to put on a stage show. Shane could see perspiration pouring off Duncan’s face. Strands of his hair were splayed across his forehead. His hands visibly shook when he gestured to the crowd.

  He crouched forward, as if to guffaw at the audience again, but abruptly stopped cold. He did not move for several long seconds.

  Then gradually, his face relaxed, he stood up straight, dropped his arms to his sides. He looked over the entire audience, opened his arms and spoke as if he were delivering the Sermon on the Mount.

  “My Dear Ladies and Gentle Men, this has never happened to me before! Perhaps it serves to underscore this miraculous exposition being hosted here this year, or perhaps it is—and really, I personally believe this to be the case—perhaps it is the aggregate effect of the mental powers represented by this august body, right here in this theatre today!

  “Because I must confess that you have overwhelmed me, tonight. Over one thousand of the city’s greatest minds and strongest personalities, people of high education, people of great skill, even one or two who actually have both—ha!—Joking! Laugh along with us! Ha-ha!

  “And yet if you will permit me to be quite serious for a moment, my friends, you must allow me to humbly inform you that the strength of the mental waves created by the sheer power of your collective thoughts has overwhelmed my ability to employ the mesmeric skills.”

  Shane shook his head in wonder. A bargain was being struck with the audience and everyone could feel it. J.D. offered them the flattery of assuring them that they would not see such a thing happen again. The experience was exclusive to them alone. Why, the retelling, the bragging rights, the envy of friends and relatives!

  He gave them an elaborate version of a bow that Shane recognized as something from the Far East. It was just unusual enough to give the crowd the impression that he was ending the performance for them in a unique way. He gave the clear sense that it was fitting that such an overwhelming audience should share this secretive gesture with him.