The Skelly Man

by David Daniel

  I managed another hundred yards before a campus cop waving a pink wand barred the way. He wanted me to exit into a parking lot. I motioned that I needed to pass, but that got me nowhere. I did as he said. I got my trench coat out of the car. I dragged it on over my bloodied shirt, turned up the collar. I stuffed the flashlight into one pocket. I put my gun in the other. I put on my hat. Each task dizzied me.

  There was a flow of people on the sidewalk. Older folks, mostly, the same ones you saw Sunday afternoons at the free lectures at the War Memorial Auditorium, but they had anted up tonight. Some were in costume, and I remembered the show was also a party. The thought didn’t thrill me, but for the moment it was okay. I got in among them, and nobody looked twice. Bogie was cool. Here’s looking at you, kid.

  On campus there were more uniforms, both the university and the city variety. It was Halloween; maybe the cops weren’t cops. If they were, I could stop, hope to convince them I was on the level, that Corbin was at risk. Except what if they wanted to take me to a hospital first, or downtown, put the questions to me, like why had I kept them in the dark so long? Why hadn’t I reported finding Ross’s body? Where was I going with a rod in my pocket? Just who the hell did I think I was anyway? The clock on the campus bell tower showed 7:51.

  The foot traffic began to slow. Conversations were full of anticipation and excitement. I glanced to my left, looking for passing room. That’s when I spotted someone moving across the quadrangle there, into the darkness, away from the crowd. He was garbed as a warlock, maybe, or a monk, and it took me a few more strides to realize that it wasn’t a costume but a coat with a hood drawn up and that I had seen the getup before.

  I stepped away from the lighted walk and started across the grass, after him. I didn’t yell out this time the way I had the night I’d spotted him coming out of Alumni Hall and had given chase. I didn’t like the idea of moving too quickly—it made me think of blood flowing—but I had to get to him.

  He was moving along at a purposeful clip, unaware of me. I saw him go around a building, and then I was alone in the dark, my feet shuffling in the rug of pine needles. I quickened my own pace, but you could’ve completed a master’s program by the time I rounded the corner. Even so, I was panting. As I reached the rear of the auditorium, I looked for the man in the hood, but he was gone. The only thing between me and the building was a large trailer van, marked with the NBC peacock. It was hooked to the auditorium with electrical cables, as if it was giving the building a jump start. As I got near, I could hear it hum. When I got there, I used the handrail and went up a flight of portable metal steps and opened the trailer door.

  The interior was narrow and dimly lit. A handful of people sat at a long control panel, staring at a lot of little TV screens. Most wore headphones. The woman who didn’t turned my way.

  “Hey,” she said. “This is off-limits.”

  I looked for the man I had been chasing. The cool air felt good. I closed my eyes.

  “Mister … Hey, are you sick or something? You look kinda pale.”

  I wiped a hand over my face and brought it away damp. “Naw, I’m just—”

  One of the screens showed the cowled figure jogging toward some bushes. The action was in black-and-white. I watched, disoriented. “Where’s that?”

  The TV woman looked confused. “What?”

  “That screen.” I pointed. “Where is it?”

  “I don’t know. Look, you’re gonna have to—”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s a roving camera.” She addressed the others: “Where’s four?” One of the technicians spoke into his microphone. “Four, what’s your location?”

  Then the camera roved more, and I recognized what it was aimed at. I lurched out of the trailer and down the steps. The woman called something after me, but I didn’t turn.

  It seemed a very long distance to where the man in the hood had just been. No one was around when I got there. A wind was rising, swirling leaves. The air was colder. I went through the bushes I’d seen on the monitor. My eyes had grown used to the darkness. Beyond the thicket, I crunched down a weedy slope. A branch took off my hat, and I reached for it but missed. I didn’t stop. At the bottom was the building I had recognized on TV. I found the door and opened it. Heat lapped across me like a dragon’s breath. I stepped into the steam plant.

  A memory thawed, like the tip of a mastodon tusk coming out of the ice: fuh, fuh, fuh … the sounds that had murdered my sleep two nights ago … the voice on the telephone. Full fathom five thy father lies. Shakespeare?

  Ahead I saw the faint glow from the old boiler-tender’s little pack rat’s nest. One of his bumper stickers was pasted on the wall. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Okay, good advice. Find the furnace man, have him guide me through the tunnels to the cellar entrance to the auditorium, locate Chelsea and get word to Corbin: hold the show, find St. Onge, screw the delays, in the long run it would build interest, and it would mean America could go on laughing with Jerry Corbin, because he’d be alive.

  EASY DOES IT, urged another sign.

  “Hey,” I said, remembering I’d startled the old fellow the last time. Curtis Smyth. With a y. I called it out. No response. Then I realized he’d be up in the auditorium in a secondhand jacket and tie with the complimentary pass we’d sent him. I stepped around the boiler.

  Smyth’s Philco was playing softly. Smyth himself was lounging just out of the spill of lamplight in his overstuffed chair, heeding the AA message. I gripped his shoulder. “Didn’t you get—?”

  His head lolled sideways. I stepped around to face him—and recoiled. Then I saw it was a rubber mask drawn over his head. A skull mask. I pulled it off. The face underneath was worse—because it was real. The flesh was purple; the eyes bulged. A twist of copper wire had cut off his final breath.

  In my line of sight, just beyond Smyth’s head, another of his signs said ONE DAY AT A TIME. But the days had run out. I switched off the radio, perhaps to give him peace, and I heard another sound. A shuffle of footsteps on concrete. I turned. The lamp threw a moving shadow. A gunshot exploded. The round whined off the cast-iron boiler. I was falling to the floor as a second bullet chunked into a furnace duct with a puff of dust. Grit sifted down onto my head. Asbestos. I’d probably contract cancer in thirty years. But I wasn’t worrying about cancer, or about thirty years from now. I was thinking of right this minute, one second at a time. The gun sounded like a cannon.

  I worked my own out of my coat pocket. I scrabbled forward to where I could point it up at the lamp, and squeezed. The room went dark. Echoes of my shot rang away to silence. I lay there in it, my heart drumming against my breastbone so hard I worried that my wound would start bleeding again. But somewhere in the darkness was the killer, and that worried me more.

  He had struck boldly, and though his pattern suggested intelligence, there was the thread of madness woven through it. Apparently, he was unafraid of anything; intent only on the one goal he’d been intent on the whole time, starting with that first note and running right through all the weirdness to now. He wanted to kill Jerry Corbin.

  And what stood between him and Corbin—and whoever else he would take down in the process—was me.

  With a finger I squeegeed sweat off my brow. I crept forward on the insides of my forearms and thighs. The low crawl, we used to call it in the army. It had never been one of my favorite sports, and it was even less so now on the cold, dusty concrete, with a rip in my chest and a maniac nearby, looking to kill me.

  I heard a shuffle of footsteps and I fired. My gun muzzle sparked in the darkness.

  More sound, diminishing along the tunnel. I lay still until a door creaked open at the far end, light flared, and the door slammed shut, taking the light. I got up. I dug out my flashlight.

  I looked at Curtis Smyth. I probed the wrinkled folds of flesh beneath his chin. He hadn’t been dead long. I was one campfire behind his killer, perhaps had been for days and hadn’t known it; and I still didn’t know for sure who h
e was. On the floor by the side of Smyth’s chair was a small envelope of the kind that tickets come in. I picked it up. All my best! was handwritten on the outside, and it was signed Jerry Corbin. It was empty.

  At the end of the long tunnel I came to a metal-sheathed door. I got it open, peered in, and went through as fast as I could manage, ready with the .38. Another length of tunnel, this one dimly lit with overhead bulbs, some of them burned out. It forked in two directions, both empty. Stenciled on the cinder-block wall were a pair of pointing hands. One aimed left, with KITCHENS underneath. The other aimed right. AUD. and ALUM. HALL the faded words under it said, and another little piece fell into place. The night I had surprised the murderer coming out of Alumni Hall, he had been down in these tunnels. Which raised another question. Why?

  I went right. I could tell by the dust in them that the tunnels were little used. I was thinking again of wire and tubing, trying to make them come together. Overhead I heard a noise, and I twitched the flashlight beam upward. Among the cobwebs and the medieval slither of shadows shone a length of new aluminum tubing. I puzzled on that for a moment and then remembered the little artifact of tubing and wire that Curtis Smyth had found on the floor the night I’d met him. I thought I should go back and see where the overhead tubing began, but I didn’t have time. The noise I heard above me was the sound of people. I was nearing the auditorium.

  I went on, pointing the light up every few yards to see if the tubing was still there. It was. I was under the auditorium now. I could feel the vibration of movement above, the pulse of a crowd. The flashlight picked up a little gleam on the cement floor ahead. I bent and saw it was a splash of lead solder. I pondered that a second, then shone the light straight up. The tubing ended there, and from it several strands of electrical wiring ran up through the ceiling. And then I knew.

  I got to a door marked AUDITORIUM. I reached for the handle and pulled. Right, like I expected it to swing open on its counterweights to a trumpet fanfare. It didn’t budge. Above me I heard feet stamping on the floor, applause.

  I checked my watch and felt my heart sink.

  8:00 P.M.

  Show time.

  30

  I KEPT UP a steady pounding on the metal-sheathed door. After a long moment, it opened. A heavyset campus cop stood there.

  “Did someone just come through?” I asked, guessing the answer, guessing where Curtis Smyth’s ticket had gone.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Explanations were going to take too long. I managed to get out my license. When the cop stopped laughing, he handed it back. “Nice try, skipper. All right, back the way you came and buy a ticket like everybody else.”

  “That’s for real,” I said. “There’s a dead man back in—”

  “And you’re Sam Spade.” He started to close the door, but I blocked it with my foot. “Christ, what is it, the full moon?” he said. “Take a hike!” He put a hand on my chest and shoved.

  I staggered a step backward, wincing with pain, but managed a grin. “Okay, I can’t fool you,” I said. “The problem is at central casting they ran out of toy guns. They gave me this.”

  Nearsighted bank tellers and old parties in mom-and-pop stores can sometimes think a squirt gun is the real thing; but it never works the other way. When the campus cop pulled his eyes off the blue-steel barrel of the .38, he was putty in my hands. I got him into the steam tunnel and locked him out. Holstering my gun, I oriented myself, saw I was in the backstage area of the auditorium. I was getting close. I went down an adjoining corridor. I went through a door. Several heads turned.

  “Hey! Rasmussen!” It was Gus Deemys. “Hold it!”

  Maybe I’d have tried to tell another cop, but not Deemys. I ducked out.

  “Sonofa—Hey!” Deemys shouted. “Someone grab that bastard!”

  I started to run along the corridor. I wasn’t sure where I was, or where I needed to be. I turned into another doorway, into a darkened room, and stumbled. Cables and wires snaked across the floor. The hookup to the broadcast truck in back. I followed the cables past a partition and emerged in the auditorium. I was near the front. The house lights were down but I could see that every seat was filled and people were standing in the back. The stage was lighted and TV cameras hovered at the dim edges. The set I had seen yesterday was occupied with actors, and there was one addition. A big ornate metal gong hung from a stand at center stage.

  Then I saw something which rooted me to the spot. Jerry Corbin, in his tuxedo, was moving toward the gong with a steel mallet.

  I stepped toward the stairs and shouted his name. He looked startled, then his face tightened in what had to be anger. Here I was torpedoing his debut, and not even wearing a tux! He glanced suddenly toward the side.

  The curtain was flung aside. A cowled figure charged out, gun in hand. Before I could react, there was a blur of motion from the wings: the tuxedoed bulk of Gripaldi. The man in the cowl whirled and fired. Gripaldi went down as if a barbell had dropped on him. The auditorium erupted with screams.

  Corbin threw aside the mallet and went to Gripaldi. Chelsea rushed out, too. As I struggled up the stage stairs, the man in the cowl grabbed Chelsea.

  I left my gun where it was. Corbin stood up. He stepped toward the cowled figure. I still couldn’t see a face.

  “You want to talk about this, okay,” Corbin said. He was miked and his voice went through the auditorium. “You and I. I’ll listen. But whoever the hell you are, or whatever this is, it’s got nothing to do with her. Let her go.” Jerry turned to the audience, his face red and sweating. “Everyone be calm!” he commanded. Cops had materialized in the wings, their hands on their guns. The red lights told me the cameras were on, catching it all.

  Corbin was walking forward carefully. I was, too; up the stairs, just out of the glow of lights, stepping over cables, looking for an angle, praying no one would panic.

  Corbin was closer. As he took another step, the man in the cowl flung Chelsea down. He grabbed Corbin by his lapels and started to swing him around. I wasn’t as near as I wanted to be, but time had run out. I lunged. My momentum knocked Corbin aside. I tackled the man in the hood. I tried to pull him down, but he yanked free, kicking at me. Stumbling, he lifted the .45 and fired. His backward motion took him into the gong.

  There was an explosive pop. For an instant, the juice drained from the stage lights, washing the scene in a sickish glow. Then they blazed back fully.

  Spotlighted at center stage, right where he had hoped Jerry Corbin would be when he banged the gong with the mallet, was the person in the cowl. He was spread-eagled against the steel disk. His coat smoked. His mouth gaped wide in a grin of horror as his skin started to blacken up around it like burning paper.

  The whole place went dark.

  Emergency lights came on, revealing: Jerry hugging Chelsea. The show’s guests on their feet, frozen. Gripaldi being attended to by cops.

  Alone, at the base of the gong, lay the stalker. I went over and squatted by him. For a moment, I did nothing; then I peeled back the scorched hood. Even under the blackened flesh and singed hair, I knew the face. I had seen it once before. Not the night I had pursued him across campus and he had eluded me, or when he had tried to run me down in the supermarket parking lot. Nor had I connected it with the voice on the telephone calling to frighten me away with obscure references to his own personal drama, or with the cast-off belongings stored in boxes at Eliot House at Harvard. No, it was an age or two ago, the time we had chatted amiably in the mild autumn sunshine as I had helped him carry stage-prop columns across campus. I could almost feel sympathy for this poor crazy kid who must’ve had such hostility and conflict about his father for leaving him, and yet had been drawn into the man’s sick fantasy of vengeance for imagined crimes. I could almost feel sympathy, but I didn’t.

  I looked away. He didn’t need a monster mask.

  31

  THE COPS GOT the crowd cleared out; power was restored; the show’s special guests depar
ted; paramedics arrived—none of this in any particular order that I was aware of. A bald man with a mustache made me sit on the stage as he snipped open my shirt and checked my wound. I was lucky, he said. There was a ragged puncture in the chest muscle, but nothing worse. He’d get it cleaned and dressed for me in a moment. I asked about Gripaldi and was told he was on his way to the hospital. Corbin came over with Ed St. Onge and Gus Deemys. St. Onge looked at me. “You got something to say?”

  “I’d like to thank the members of…” I let it go. I didn’t feel comedic.

  “Are you all right?” Jerry Corbin said.

  I nodded.

  “Anyone know who the dead guy is?” St. Onge asked.

  Corbin shook his head. “No idea.”

  I said, “The name Thomas Chapman ring a bell?”

  The makeup on Corbin’s forehead was streaked, giving the look of deep furrows. He added real ones. “He was on the Harvard quiz team, ages ago. But that isn’t—”

  “Chapman’s dead,” I said. “Died in a sailboat. That’s his son.”

  “There’re connections to me?”

  “Only weird ones, in his own mind. He was an electronics whiz. He wired up that gong to fry you when you hit it.”

  “Damn.”

  “Probably would’ve won you a posthumous Emmy.”

  “Damn.”

  “Probably has an activator in his pocket.”

  St. Onge motioned with his head for Deemys to check. Deemys came back with a tiny black box with a button in the middle. “He wanted to be sure it was you,” I told Corbin, “and not the dog-food lady.”

  St. Onge said, “He stab you?”

  “Westrake did. He was tied and gagged at the kid’s place, behind Westrake’s house. He’d gotten loose, and when he heard me come in … it was dark; he panicked.”

  “Where is he now?”

  I said I didn’t know, but it came to me that I did know. Over the years, Westrake’s life had become reefed in by books, and although in the end they had offered him no real protection, there was nothing else. “Try his office. But go easy. He’s more confused than dangerous. His only sins go back too many years to matter.”