#
I’m sure we looked like that comedy routine, a guy dragging his drunk friend to a waiting taxi. I probably appeared half-drunk myself, wobbling from unexpected lurches in Jack’s weight, and a few sinister wriggles from the satchel in my left hand.
We were alone in the elevator, thankfully, because that growl and shriek sounded from the satchel, muffled by the leather and whatever padding Sullivan kept inside. Bent steel rods reinforced the inner frame of the satchel. A few of the bars made a subtle ribcage pattern on the stretched leather.
The lobby was an eternity, since I was afraid the manikin would howl again. When we got to the front, a bellhop smiled knowingly and held the door for us. He started to hail a taxi, which would have been nice, but the thought of that satchel shaking and growling, the awful waft of that frightened animal stench in an enclosed car, made me decline the offer. A few blocks into the fresh air, Jack’s legs started to work. He still hung on to me, but I got relief from dragging him forward.
The manikin howled twice during the long blocks to our hotel. Two in the morning, but the city sidewalks were still crowded. Nobody noticed.
#
I held the door for Jack then followed him inside. The bed was unmade, a greasy meat and onion smell rose from our sandwich wrappers in the overfull trash bin, and tinfoil was still twisted around the television antenna. I’d never been so happy to see such a cruddy hotel room.
The satchel twisted in my hand. I set the burden down.
I patted my back pocket and retrieved Jack’s notebook. A small leather fliptop, but it dropped into his palm like I handed him an unabridged dictionary.
“Sorry about all the . . . theatrics back there,” he said.
“I’m just glad you’re okay.” I meant it. I could get mad in the heat of the moment, especially when Jack used those images to manipulate me. But the important thing was that we’d gotten away from Sullivan. “You are okay, aren’t you? He didn’t . . . ”
“I was mostly out of it, but you arrived just in time. I mean, I sort of recall his hands all over my chest, and he may have kissed me a few times, but that’s as far as he got. That was some drug he slipped me, though.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and ran his fingers through his hair. I joined him, put my arm around his waist. “In the champagne, right?”
Jack nodded. “He was pretty smooth. Kept telling his stories like nothing was happening, and then the room starts spinning.” He opened his notebook. A few pages of legible scribble, but the last page looped into hieroglyphs. “He’s done this before. A lot of times.”
“You’d think we would have heard rumors . . . ” Because really, you heard rumors about everybody, true or not. Magazines might print a photo of two male stars together at a restaurant or on the beach. There’d be a blind item in a gossip column: Eagle eyed readers spotted a certain rugged screen hero at The Gaiety this weekend, slipping dollars in a go-go boy’s g-string while his pregnant girlfriend craved ice cream and pickles alone at home. I never dreamed of plugging Grant Sullivan’s name into such rumors. For one thing, there were so many confirmed stories about romanced female costars. And I don’t like to reinforce stereotypes, but he always seemed too masculine, as if it were impossible he could be gay or even bisexual. He wasn’t that great an actor in many respects, and yet he was so convincing as an onscreen lover of women.
“Pretty sure the answer’s in the satchel.”
I was afraid that’s what Jack would say.
#
We cleared most of the desk and set the locked satchel on top, leaving the gooseneck lamp as a spotlight to guide our work. We didn’t have a key, of course, but Jack started with a plastic knife leftover from dinner. The brass clasp was secured with a small padlock, but that didn’t matter if he could tear the whole clasp off the satchel. Jack wasn’t having much success, but I pulled a loose handle off a desk drawer and suggested he use it to pry at the clasp.
He scooped under the clasp with the hollow end of the handle, turned and twisted it until a tiny screw popped out of its groove, loosening one corner. He did the same with another corner, making a small tear in the leather, but then he got impatient and tried to rip the whole contraption off in a single move. “Let me have a shot.” I didn’t really want to, but I could tell Jack was still weak from the drug Sullivan slipped him. He pushed his chair back from the desk.
The partially broken clasp was still warm from Jack’s touch. I stood with one hand braced against the top of the satchel, the other ready to pull the clasp like the choke chain on a lawn mower.
The satchel shook against my grip. Instead of the usual growl, a tiny, breathy gasp exhaled from within. I felt a misty heat coat my thumb near the small tear in the leather. The foul animal stench assaulted me stronger than ever, a phlegmy roadkill musk I could practically taste in the back of my throat.
We shouldn’t open this. We didn’t want to know what was inside.
I yanked the clasp, hard.
The leather and those tiny brass screws held stronger than you might expect. I pulled so hard with my right hand I ended up lifting the satchel from under my anchoring arm. The satchel slid across the desktop, knocking the gooseneck lamp onto the floor and shattering the bulb. In the last ghost of light I saw the satchel fly across the room and disappear with a clank behind the far side of the bed.
Jack’s chair scraped back as he stood. “Find the light switch. Gotta block the door, too, in case that thing got out.”
I couldn’t believe we’d relied on that tiny desk lamp. The room was now pitch dark. Curtains, pulled tight, blocked all the glow from the street—perfect if we didn’t want sunlight to wake us in the early morning; not so perfect if we had a small monster scampering through our hotel room.
I remembered how fast the manikin moved in the movie. There was a blur, Jack had said. Definitely a blur!
Something scraped and creaked on the other side of the bed. Avoiding the smashed bulb, I stepped carefully toward the near endtable, reaching for a bedside lamp.
Jack clicked the wall switch by the entryway. “Crap. I think this one was connected to the desk lamp.”
My knee scraped the side of the bed. I wondered if the wooden base went all the way to the floor, or if there was room beneath for the manikin to crawl at me from the other side.
I found the endtable lamp and felt around for a twist knob, waved beneath the shade searching for a hanging chain. I searched the base of the lamp, finally found a knob and turned it.
Click. Nothing.
“This one’s connected to a switch, too.” I patted at the wall. “I can’t find it.”
I continued to wave my hands in front of me, a blind man groping for familiar objects. I smelled the creature, its awful musk so pungent that I panicked, thinking the animal had launched itself in the air toward me. To protect my eyes from the manikin’s claws, I held my hands over my face.
The musk was even stronger. I gagged, but nothing touched me. I realized I was smelling the sticky breath from earlier that had misted over my thumb.
I still couldn’t find another wall switch. From across the bed, a rustle of leather and a clack of claws against tiny metal bars suggested the creature was still trapped in his satchel.
If I opened a curtain, the glow from outside would illuminate the rest of the room.
Jack shouted my name, asked what I was doing. “Shhh,” I said before moving. I didn’t want to speak my plans aloud, afraid the manikin would understand me; I also didn’t want my voice to give away my location.
The satchel rustled as if dragged across the carpet.
I banged my leg against the bed again.
“Shawn?”
“I’m okay,” I said.
Then the room went completely silent. The creature had the same idea, I think, not wanting to give away its position.
Holding the foot of the bed for guidance, I sidestepped toward the curtains.
From my recollection, the room was small. Only
two short steps from the far edge of the bed to the window ledge. I decided to rush it, my hands outstretched to grasp the curtains and yank them apart.
My first step was fine. The second step didn’t reach the carpet—my foot hit a bump and something grabbed my ankle. I fell over while the manikin growled and its claws tore at my leg. The horrible smell covered me like spray from a skunk, and I screamed and kicked at the thing with my free leg—but the creature held on, tearing and biting deeper as I struggled, swinging with my fists, bashing the trapped foot against the side of the bed.
And Jack was there. He brushed past me, a comforting hand on my shoulder, then he threw open the curtains.
The dim light revealed the leather satchel over my left foot. The bent caging inside had closed over my ankle like a bear trap.
(If Jack were here now, he’d say the creature had already escaped and I screamed and whimpered with my foot stuck in an empty satchel. But I’m telling it now, Celia, and I have to insist the manikin was still trapped. My foot bent the bars open further, and the creature bit and tore and climbed over my leg to escape. Plenty of reason for me to cry out either way, don’t you agree?)
I checked my leg for any serious injury. My sock was ripped in a few spots and there were scratches on my leg, but I didn’t see any blood.
“You’re okay,” Jack said. “Where’d it go?” He scanned the room. From the street, flashing signs and lights of moving cars jostled the shadows in our dim room.
A shadow rolled from under the desk, a bowling ball down an alley, arms and legs flailing, some English on the spin so it curved toward the side of the door. The thing was fast. It jumped from the floor, a long jump, arms swinging for the handle. It missed. It jumped again.
Jack went for it. He ran past the bed, his shoes crunching through the light bulb shards beside the desk. He scooped up the plastic trash bin, shaking it empty as he ran.
The creature caught the handle on its third jump, weighing it down; it stretched a foot against the door frame for leverage, and the door opened inward.
Jack got there, his hand at the top edge of the door to slam it shut. The manikin hung onto the handle, but Jack swung the trashcan, knocking the creature to the ground. Before it could scamper off, Jack upended the bin over it. He held the bin in place with both hands, leaning his body into it, and the plastic bulged and thumped as the creature struggled to get away.
“Feisty little thing,” Jack said. “Stinky, too.”
“What next?”
Jack didn’t say. He clearly hadn’t thought through to the next step. I think he was hoping the manikin would eventually wear itself out, but that cheap hotel trashcan kept shaking every which way.
“Come over and help,” he said. “When you get the chance, I mean.”
“Be right there.”
I was trying to ease my leg out of the satchel. Didn’t want to scratch myself up any worse. As it turned out, there was cloth padding around some of the bars, which saved me from getting sliced up too bad.
I noticed the satchel wasn’t entirely empty.
#
“Uh, Jack . . . ? What do you think this is?”
With a slight limp, I walked toward Jack. I found a switch outside the bathroom door and flipped it, giving the room some reasonable light, and I held out a metal case the size of a fancy pen set. I’d found it in a side pocket of the satchel, outside the interior cage.
“Why don’t you open it, Shawn? My hands are kind of busy.” The upturned waste bin thumped and shifted.
I wasn’t sure we should. I held the case to my ear and shook it, heard a clink and slosh of liquid.
Jack urged me to hurry. I slid the zipper around the edge then flipped open the case.
Several disposable syringes filled a compartment along one side. Three glass bottles fit perfectly into foam cutouts in the main compartment. The identification labels were torn off the bottles, but all of them seemed to have the same milky liquid within.
“That’s what I thought,” Jack said. “Can you load one of those needles for me?”
The serum bottles were hard glass, which kept them from smashing when I flung the satchel across the room and stomped on it. One of the plastic syringes had a broken casing, and a few of the needle tips were bent, but I found one in decent shape.
I stuck the needle through the top of a serum bottle then pulled back the plunger, watching the cloudy liquid fill the gradated cylinder.
Jack had turned his head. He was always squeamish about needles.
“It’s for the manikin, and not for you, I’m assuming.”
Jack nodded. “I think it’s the same drug Sullivan slipped into my champagne glass.”
The creature had stopped thumping against the waste bin. He might have pressed a tiny pointed ear against the side, straining to hear Jack’s instructions.
“When you’re ready, I’m gonna lift this and grab him. While I hold the little guy down, jab him good. Go deep—in his upper arm or in the neck, even.”
I did that little test thing, where you squirt a tiny arc of liquid into the air. Jack winced.
“I’m ready.”
Jack took a deep breath. He kneeled like a runner at the starting line, ready to sprint after the thing if it got away.
Then he slid the bin back and forth over the floor, shaking up the manikin inside. After a couple hard thunks had likely thrown the creature into a daze, Jack tossed aside the bin and lunged with both hands, fingers spread wide toward the furry shape.
His fingers held down the manikin’s arms, both thumbs pressed into the coconut-shell chest. The creature’s legs flailed, those tiny burlap shoes kicking at the air. Its body bucked and rolled. Another hiss of air and foul breath misted from its wide, toothy mouth.
In the brightened indoor light, unobstructed by bars or shadows, the manikin looked fake again. The facial expression was fixed. Its eyes flashed red, like the LED trick of a drugstore Halloween decoration.
“Stick him, Shawn! I can’t hold him all day!”
The idea seemed ridiculous. Instead, I should open a compartment at the back, take out the batteries.
The manikin’s legs and arms wriggled. It seemed like Jack’s shaking fingers caused all the movement.
“Give me the needle!”
Jack’s willingness to use the syringe shocked me out of my hesitation. “I’ve got it,” I said, and kneeled beside Jack, lowering the needle toward the manikin’s neck.
The thing tried to roll at the last second, and I almost stabbed Jack in the web of his right thumb. Fortunately, I adjusted my aim and hit the intended target.
The needle went through with no resistance, as if it stitched through cloth instead of flesh. Another mist of foul, frightened stench clouded from the manikin’s mouth. I pushed down the plunger.
After a minute or so the creature’s flailing motions weakened, then ceased. Jack loosened his grip. He slid his legs beneath him and sat on the floor.
The manikin’s eyes flashed red, and I scooted backward.
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “He’s in la-la land.”
“Why are his eyes still open?”
“Look under them.”
At first I didn’t know what Jack meant. Then I noticed the faint vertical slit under each painted eye.
Jack turned the figure over. His nostrils wrinkled up from the smell, but he didn’t let it stop him from lifting the figure closer to his face. He supported the manikin’s stomach in the palm of his left hand, its head drooping, its legs and arms ragdoll limp.
With his free hand, Jack pulled off one of the burlap shoes. A watch battery was attached beneath the foot, a split wire leading into the manikin’s ankle.
Next he felt along the manikin’s back. His fingers smoothed aside thatches of fur. “Here it is.” He pinched something at the manikin’s collar, pulled it down.
Unzipped it.
Foam padding beneath the fur and latex gave more bulk to the tiny shape within. Of course, Jack was
right all along. The manikin wasn’t a stop-motion effect. He was that other staple of low-budget horror: a man in a rubber suit.
A shriveled little homunculus, judging from the figure Jack gently separated from the molded costume. He let the empty suit fall to the floor.
(Can you imagine how much worse it smelled then, Celia? God knows how long Sullivan made the homunculus wear that little suit—all day, at the very least, sweating into the foam rubber, midday sun beating down on that cage, then stuffed into a closed satchel at the back of a hotel closet.
Think about that clown in the bird suit at Camden Yards, how bad the inside of his costume must smell deep into an August game. But a game only lasts a couple of hours—and he gets to take bathroom breaks.)
Looking at that frail, naked thing lying face down over Jack’s palm, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for it. Sullivan had tortured it. Its entire body was the purple of a deep bruise, covered in the wet glaze of spoiled, rancid fruit with the skin peeled off. It was emaciated.
A tiny bubble of dark ichor seeped out his neck where I’d clumsily jabbed the needle through his costume.
There were inflamed circles around his wrists, ankles and upper limbs—where the wires and manacles had been attached through the suit. A small collar of wire twisted tight around his neck, a tiny eyelet screw at the back.
My heart ached for the poor thing. “Oh, Jack. What are we going to do with it?”
“Not sure.” He rubbed a curious finger over the creature’s back. The shriveled skin rippled at his touch. I got a sick notion of a finger pressed into the raw folds of an exposed muscle. “Sullivan’s kept this guy for a while, I think. Kind of a good luck charm or something.”
“He should have treated it better, then.”
“Hmmm.” Jack wasn’t really listening to me. He was lost in speculation about the movie crew, who knew and who didn’t know. He wondered how publicists could keep the strange story from getting out. I knew he considered larger implications as well, wondering what the creature might mean. Maybe, once it wakened, the manikin might be able to tell us something.
“Bring me the satchel,” he said, still seated on the floor. “We’ll need to fix the cage for when he wakes up.”
Odd Adventures with your Other Father Page 17
