Marvel Novel Series 09 - The Marvel Superheroes

by Len Wein

  Alone, Matt was grateful for the coffee. It was a long wait for midnight. Twice he took the red Spandex leotard and tights out of the false bottom of his briefcase, and twice he decided against heading out the window and cruising Times Square for muggers. He didn’t trust the intelligence of the men in the helicopter enough to believe they’d follow their own plan and arrive no earlier than midnight.

  He dialed Carole’s number every half hour and let it ring ten times before hanging up. He gave up after the fourth try. When the coffee wore off and the pot was empty, he took the portable alarm clock without the crystal out of his desk drawer and set it to allow himself a two-hour nap. In his present condition, he did not trust his internal time sense to wake him in time.

  He awoke long before the alarm. In his dream, plane tickets to St. Croix had danced before his eyes. There had been two of them at first, but then a pair of disembodied female hands had appeared out of nowhere and had torn up one of them. He sat up with a start, rubbing his useless eyes from force of a very old habit. He swore softly to himself and wished he had been blind since birth, so that the image maker that crept inside his head as he slept would have no raw materials. He thought that nightmares made of pure imagination would be preferable by far to any based on reference points from the world as it was.

  He wandered around the suite of offices aimlessly, studying the squeak of his new shoes. He had planned to go out into the corridor just before midnight and listen as the men from the helicopter worked. When they had nearly finished, and he knew what they had done, he would approach in his noisy loafers and scare them off. He would defuse the charge they had spoken of and then go off to deal with the man named Doyle.

  Upon reflection, he admitted to himself that it was not the sort of plan he would have come up with had he been thinking clearly. He had been tired the night before and a few hours sleep in his own bed had done little to improve his condition. His brief nap on the floor just now had been more hindrance than help; his back was beginning to remind him of his little escapade outside the Tishman Building. No, the squeaky-shoes routine would have to go. In his present condition there would be too wide a margin for error. It would be a good way to get himself killed.

  He kicked off the noisy shoes and replaced them with the rubber-soled red boots from the briefcase. He liked their sound much better: barely audible to him, completely silent to anyone else. He would let them break in and get started, then do his version of coming in shooting.

  At 11:46 he heard the helicopter just as he pulled his mask into place. He thought for a moment that he might have been wrong about the men in the helicopter. Then he remembered once reading in National Geographic about a chimpanzee who had been taught to tell time.

  When he heard them on the roof, he took up a position in the alcove beside the elevators. They would have to be coming through the stairwell on the roof, and some rapid mental triangulation told him that the stairway gave onto the corridor at such an angle that a man crossing from the stairs to the door marked “Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law” could not see the alcove.

  He did not need the sound of their heartbeats to know when they were about to step into the corridor. Daredevil imagined them congratulating themselves on their stealth and had to suppress a chuckle.

  The waves gave him their silhouettes as they worked the lock on the front door. Only one of them matched his height and build, and the shape corresponded to the familiar heartbeat in the helicopter. That tripped the memory like a circuit closing: the man’s name was Burgess and he had a right cross old Battling Murdock would have given his left arm for. Burgess’ presence meant that Daredevil had pegged Doyle correctly. Daredevil stopped smiling.

  He listened for the sound of a tumbler lifting but it didn’t come. According to his silhouettes, the smallest of the trio was kneeling with his forehead against the doorknob. The little man was swearing into the keyhole; his twirl was giving him a hard time. Daredevil scanned for a sense of their hardware, and noted that each of them carried a small penlight. So they were going to do this in semidarkness. Good. It would give him an edge.

  The fifth skeleton key on the little man’s ring opened the door, but he swore anyway. Daredevil held his breath. If they were going into Foggy’s office they’d be right on the other side of the alcove. He gave them five minutes, then moved.

  The door to Foggy’s office was standing ajar. He realized a split second after he pushed through it that he had been wrong about the pen-shaped objects in the men’s hands. He felt a slight warmth along the right side of his face just before the trio turned and saw him. It could only be coming from the pole lamp in the corner, near the clock. If they had flashlights . . .

  He sensed Burgess’ right hand come up quickly. There was a tickling sensation on the left side of his neck, then a bizarre feeling in his throat, hot and cold at the same time, all along his carotid artery; then numbness; then sharp pain. They were each carrying the miniature equivalent of an electric cattle prod.

  For a moment the pain seemed to deaden all sensation in his left side. It cleared in time for him to get his bearings and block Burgess’ next pass with the prod. He struck out at the big man with a hard left. It caught Burgess in the sternum and Daredevil thought he could sense the man’s features squeeze together like the bellows of an accordion.

  The short guy came up at him from under the pole lamp. With one swift, slashing movement, he neutralized the nerve endings in both of Daredevil’s legs, from the knees down. As his legs buckled, Daredevil came forward and met the man’s nose straight on with a right. He could hear the prod fly out of the little lock picker’s grasp as the man toppled over backward into the pole lamp.

  Burgess was still wheezing from the pain in his chest, and it gave Daredevil his position. He didn’t have to worry about the third man, the whiner, just yet. He had time to reach up from his crouch and knock the prod out of Brugess’ hand with a karate chop to his wrist.

  The whiner had been circling the action all the while, either waiting for an opening or trying to put off getting involved. Daredevil thought of a buzzard circling a dying calf and was startled by the aptness of the image when the whiner’s right hand darted forward and clawed at Daredevil’s side. When the hand pulled back, Daredevil felt four deep gouges just below his left rib cage and a burning pain that raced down his side like a brush fire.

  The waves flashed a silhouette image at him: a hand dripping blood from four pointed steel finger caps which gave the hand a resemblance to the talons of a predatory bird. If he had needed further proof that he was right about who Mr. Doyle was, he didn’t anymore.

  He folded over in the direction of the pain and the brassy odor of blood rushed up and struck him in the face. Powerful hands grabbed his shoulders and pulled him up. He knew it was Burgess from the smell of him even before the big man spat in his face and launched him backward with a powerful shove.

  He went down against Foggy’s desk and the sharp corner of the overhanging glass desk top caught him between the shoulder blades. That was all he could take.

  His whole body began to throb with a dull ache as he came to. The fact that the pain in his side was less severe than it had been was small consolation to the rest of him. He suspected that one of his shoulders had been dislocated.

  He didn’t know where he was, but he was sure he knew whose place it was, and his returning senses only added confirmation. He could tell by the distance of the street noises that he was high above street level, on what was probably the top floor of a commercial building. He heard footsteps from far away, yet they seemed to be coming from elsewhere in the same room, and the way they echoed suggested a high ceiling. He had to be in a loft.

  The moisture in the air told him it was still night, but he could sense none of the subtle warmth of heated tungsten filaments. The room was dark, or—to be more accurate—dim. He barely felt the presence of what little light there was. It seemed to be infrared.

  He was lying on something l
ow, flat, and hard: a pallet of some kind, perhaps an army cot. He tried to sit up and the wounds below his left ribs protested. Then he realized that something else was making it difficult for him to rise: his left wrist and right ankle were restrained. He heard the clanking of chain, and realized he was shackled to the legs of the cot, which in turn were bolted to the floor. He untangled himself from the lengths of chain and managed to sit up. A pulling sensation across his abdomen told him someone had bandaged his wounds.

  His head did not clear quickly enough. He felt drowsier than he knew he should be. His mouth was dry. Then he fully remembered where he had been and what had happened, and suppressing a momentary panic, he raised his free hand to his face. The mask was still there.

  “Calm yourself, old friend. No one has seen your face.” A rambling, wheezing voice that sounded as if it came from deep within nitrate-encrusted catacombs. A familiar voice that spoke haltingly as the lungs behind it struggled for air. “I instructed my men to refrain from—how shall I say?—invading your privacy. That and allowing you to live were courtesies I wished to extend you, so that, if need be, I can rescind them.”

  The heartbeat that matched the voice was slow, plodding, irregular. This grossly overweight man was Orson Doyle. He suffered from emphysema as well as photophobia—an acutely painful sensitivity to light—that forced him to live as he did, enduring rooms no better lighted than a photographer’s darkroom. This curious affliction lent itself to the pseudonym by which his intimates knew him, the Owl.

  “Owl,” Daredevil whispered. He heard the corpulent body settle into a chair opposite the cot.

  “If you insist. There are precious few whom I permit to address me thus. Now you are one of them. Another courtesy.” His voice had lost none of its rotund quality since their last meeting, nor had Orson Doyle himself lost any of his fondness for the florid phrase. “I seem to be in an unusually expansive mood this morning.”

  “Wonderful.” Daredevil shifted on the cot and clutched his side. “I’ll remember you in my will for that.”

  “Which kindness I hope I shall not reap for many years hence.” Doyle lit a cigar. The slowness with which he came to the point was his own exquisite brand of torture. “I trust you’re comfortable, old friend? You’ll forgive me if the manacles are not quite your size. When one has unexpected company, one must make do with what is at hand.”

  “Just as long as they don’t leave a green ring when you take them off,” Daredevil said.

  Doyle made a disparaging noise.

  “Why am I here?” Daredevil winced as he pulled himself to the edge of the cot. “They could have killed me easily.”

  “And I would have remained forever ignorant of whatever information is shared by the . . . concerned parties,” Doyle said. “Wouldn’t I?”

  “What information? If you don’t mind, Cuddles, I’m not quite up to ring-around-a-rosy just now.”

  “Perhaps not. But you were up to something.” Doyle began to chuckle. It turned into a cough. “My men report you did not come in through a window. You entered from the outer office. That would indicate that you were lying in wait for Mr. Burgess and party. You must know something about the, ah, project which occupies us at present.”

  “Mm. So now I get to sit through the bamboo-shoots-under-the-fingernails routine, right?”

  “Ah, no. You’ve suffered quite enough. Which I truly regret, old friend.”

  Daredevil touched his wounded side gingerly. Doyle must have noticed.

  “You must forgive Rooster,” Doyle said. “He tends to be a bit . . . overzealous with those sharp little toys of his. You know, you very nearly exhausted our supply of antibiotics—and painkillers, for that matter. Not enough to make you comfortable, mind you. Just enough to keep you from losing consciousness most of the time.”

  Painkillers. No wonder he was so sluggish.

  “And you’re quite fortunate you have not lost more blood.” Doyle leaned far back into the chair; it sounded like crushed velvet upholstery. “If you manage to leave here alive, I’d have that looked at. It might require stitches.” There was a long pause. “So. You’ve suffered enough. Answer the questions I put to you completely and truthfully, and you will suffer less. Decline to cooperate or dissemble in the slightest, and you will suffer more.”

  “You’re nothing if not fair.” Daredevil sensed that someone else had appeared in the room. Burgess. He stood behind the cot. “You’re telling me that I can leave here alive. But somehow, Doyle, coming from you that doesn’t fill me with a whole hell of a lot of optimism.”

  Doyle ignored him. “How you know about Helen Markesson?”

  “Never heard the name before in my life.” Doyle’s question confirmed the last of Daredevil’s suspicions.

  “Incidentally,” Doyle said, “we noted when we examined you that your right shoulder has been dislocated.” He snapped his fingers.

  Burgess stepped up to the cot swiftly and grabbed Daredevil’s free arm. He twisted it behind Daredevil’s back.

  Doyle spoke in measured tones, barely concealing his mounting fury. “What is your connection with the Markessons? I will not ask again.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Another twist. He clamped his teeth together tightly to keep from screaming.

  “Very well,” Doyle said. “Let us try another tack.” He sighed. “What do you know about Arthur Norback?”

  There was one other time besides when he was dreaming that Daredevil saw things. When he was in excruciating pain, bursts of bright-colored light seemed to appear inside his head. It was like watching a Fourth of July fireworks display.

  Doyle waited patiently for Daredevil’s answer. Daredevil remained silent. He was busy watching the fireworks.

  “Mr. Doyle, sir,” Burgess said between twists, “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere this way.”

  “Thank you, Arnold,” Doyle said. “I was aware of that. Now, alas, there is only one way to end this. Release him.”

  Daredevil seemed to black out and come to again repeatedly, swimming in and out of consciousness as Doyle’s men carried him into a corridor. In a brief moment of wakefulness, he sensed that the shackle had been removed from his left wrist and placed on his left ankle instead. He felt the weight of chains dangling from his feet as they carried him, and assumed that the chains had been removed from the cot. He suspected the chains were going to be reattached elsewhere.

  There was a deep boring pain between his shoulder blades and a fire burning in his gut when he came to one more time. With a momentary sense of detachment, he noted the curious fact that it was pain that kept making him lose consciousness, and pain that kept rousing him again. Then his capacity for analysis left him, supplanted by an awareness of nothing but agony. The painkillers were wearing off.

  The stabbing sensation in his back came from the fact that his arms had been pulled behind him and tightly bound together at the wrists by a length of rough cord. He felt blood rush into his head and became aware of the way his body seemed to sag as if a weight pulled him downward. He realized that the fire in his belly was merely referred pain from the wounds in his side. The wounds were being stretched open further by the pull of gravity. He was hanging upside down.

  He heard the sound of grinding gears and the squeaking, rubbing noise made by a greased cable moving along a pulley. He heard Doyle’s voice from somewhere behind him, echoing as if Doyle were speaking down a well.

  “I told you that if you declined to cooperate, you would suffer more. I’m sure you wondered at the time how that was possible. Regrettably, you are about to find out.”

  The waves were weak, diluted by the pain that made Daredevil’s skull throb, but they told him that the chains had been shortened considerably. Their other ends had been secured to spikes driven into the walls on either side of him, at points above his head.

  Now he became aware of the pain in his legs and the full weight of his predicament became clear to him. His mind developed a picture
of himself hanging there from his ankles like a prisoner in a medieval dungeon.

  He actually appeared to be in a well; or, at any rate, some kind of long, narrow enclosure whose walls, his radar told him, were composed of brick and mortar. Like a well, or a chimney, or God help me, he thought—an elevator shaft.

  The Owl raised his voice to be heard above a brief sound of whirring and grinding from below. “A fascinating building, this one,” he said. “Some time ago, the owners wanted to install a modern elevator, you know, one of those ugly, sterile boxes with fluorescent lighting, the very thought of which makes my eyes—well, never mind my eyes.

  “The other tenants and I persuaded the owners to reconsider. We convinced them such an ‘improvement’ would spoil the building’s charm. And so the ancient relic, which will be your last sight in this life, remained.

  “They had to install safety locks on all the access doors. The doors used to be the sort that could open onto an empty shaft—the sort that have since been banned. Every few years, some poor wretch was falling in and killing himself. But there were ways around the safety feature. Particularly with the sort of help I employ.”

  Daredevil sensed the little man, Rooster the lock picker, standing beside Doyle.

  “Oh, and I must say we had quite a time with you,” the fat man continued. “You missed most of it, I’m sorry to say. Throughout the ordeal of, ah, stringing you up, you remained oblivious, secure in the embrace of Morpheus. Or should I say morphine?” He allowed himself a rich peal of laughter. This time, he did not cough.

  Morphine. Which explained why the pain was coming back with a vengeance.

  “There are, of course, simpler, more efficient ways to kill a man,” Doyle said. “But I did promise you suffering, and a promise is a promise. There is also the matter of some years of unpleasantness in Creedmore—hardly a place for a man of my breeding—for which I hold you directly responsible. Not to mention the many times we have gone this route before, with, shall I say, a fair amount of unsuccess on my part. I cannot contain my great glee at having the opportunity to correct my record of failure. Ah, yes, my dear, old friend, I owe you much.