Part 45 (1/2)

'Start saying the states,' the black man ordered. He crossed his legs, shook out the fabric of his pants to preserve the crease, and brought a package of Winstons out of an inner pocket. Pearson realized his own cigarette was gone; he must have dropped it-in that first shocked moment, when he had seen the monstrous thing in the expensive suit crossing the west side of the plaza.

'The states,' he said blankly.

The young black man nodded, produced a lighter that was probably quite a bit less expensive than it looked at first glance, and lit his cigarette. 'Start with this one and work your way west,' he invited.

'Ma.s.sachusetts . . . New York, I suppose . . . or Vermont if you start from upstate . . . New Jersey . . . ' Now he straightened up a little and began to speak with greater confidence. 'Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Illinois - '

The black man raised his eyebrows. 'West Virginia, huh? You sure?'

Pearson smiled a little. 'Pretty sure, yeah. I might have got Ohio and Illinois ba.s.s-ackwards, though.'

The black man shrugged to show it didn't matter, and smiled. 'You don't feel like you're going to faint anymore, though - I can see you don't - and that's the important part. Want a b.u.t.t?'

'Thank you,' Pearson said gratefully. He did not just want a b.u.t.t; he felt that he needed one. 'I had one, but I lost it. What's your name?'

The black man poked a fresh Winston between Pearson's lips and snapped a light to it. 'Dudley Rhinemann. You can call me Duke.'

Pearson dragged deeply on the cigarette and looked toward the revolving doors which gave ingress upon all the gloomy depths and cloudy heights of The First Mercantile. 'That wasn't just a hallucination, was it?' he asked. 'What I saw . . . you saw it, too, right?'

Rhinemann nodded.

'You didn't want him to know I saw him,' Pearson said. He spoke slowly, trying to put it together on his own. His voice was back in its usual spot again, and that alone was a big relief.

Rhinemann nodded again.

'But how could I not see him? And how could he not know it?'

'Did you see anyone else getting ready to holler themselves into a stroke like you were?' Rhinemann asked. 'See anybody else even looking the way you were? Me, for instance?'

Pearson shook his head slowly. He now felt more than just frightened; he felt totally lost.

'I got between you and him the best I could, and I don't think he saw you, but for a second or two there it was close. You looked like a man who just saw a mouse crawl out of his meatloaf. You're in Collateral Loans, aren't you?'

'Oh yes - Brandon Pearson. Sorry.'

'I'm in Computer Services, myself. And it's okay. Seeing your first batman can do that to you.'

Duke Rhinemann stuck out his hand and Pearson shook it, but most of his mind was one turn back. Seeing your first batman can do that to you, the young man had said, and once Pearson had jettisoned his initial image of the Caped Crusader swinging his way between the art-deco spires of Gotham City, he discovered that wasn't a bad term at all. He discovered something else, as well, or perhaps rediscovered it: it was good to have a name for something that had frightened you. It didn't make the fright go away, but it went a long way toward rendering the fright manageable.

Now he deliberately replayed what he had seen, thinking Batman, it was my first batman, as he did.

He had come out through the revolving doors thinking of only one thing, the same thing he was always thinking about when he came down at ten - how good that first rush of nicotine was going to feel when it hit his brain. It was what made him a part of the tribe; it was his version of phylacteries or tattooed cheeks.

He had first registered the fact that the day had gotten even darker since he'd come in at eight-forty-five, and had thought: We'll be puffing our cancer-sticks in the pouring rain this afternoon, the whole d.a.m.ned bunch of us. Not that a little rain would stop them, of course; the Ten O'clock People were nothing if not persistent.

He remembered sweeping his eyes across the plaza, doing a quick attendance check - so quick it was really almost unconscious. He had seen the girl in the red skirt (and wondered again, as he always did, if anyone who looked that good would be any good in the sack), the young be-bop janitor from the third floor who wore his cap turned around while he was mopping the floors in the John and the snack-bar, the elderly man with the fine white hair and the purple blotches on his cheeks, the young woman with the thick gla.s.ses, narrow face, and long straight black hair. He had seen a number of others he vaguely recognized, as well. One of them, of course, had been the good-looking young black man in the cream-colored suit.

If Timmy Flanders had been around, Pearson probably would have joined him, but he wasn't, and so Pearson had moved toward the center of the plaza instead, meaning to sit on one of the marble islands (the very one he was sitting on now, in fact). Once there he would have been in an excellent position to calculate the length and curves of Little Miss Red Skirt's legs - a cheap thrill, granted, but one made do with the materials at hand. He was a well-married man with a wife he loved and a daughter he adored, he'd never come even close to cheating, but as he approached forty, he had discovered certain imperatives surfacing in his blood like sea-monsters. And he didn't know how any man could help staring at a red skirt like that, wondering just a little if the woman was wearing matching underwear beneath.

He had barely gotten moving when the newcomer had turned the corner of the building and begun mounting the plaza steps. Pearson had caught movement in the corner of his eye, and under ordinary circ.u.mstances he would have dismissed it - it was the red skirt he had been concentrating on just then, short, tight, and as bright as the side of a fire engine. But he had looked, because, even seen from the corner of his eye and with other things on his mind, he had registered something wrong with the face and the head that went with the approaching figure. So he had turned and looked, canceling sleep for G.o.d knew how many nights to come.

The shoes were all right; the dark-gray Andre Cyr suit, looking as solid and as dependable as the door of the bank vault in the bas.e.m.e.nt, was even better; the red tie was predictable but not offensive. All of this was fine, typical top-echelon banker's attire for a Monday morning (and who but a top-echelon banker could come in at ten o'clock in the first place?). It wasn't until you got to the head that you realized that you had either gone crazy or were looking at something for which there was no entry in the World Book Encyclopedia.

But why didn't they run? Pearson wondered now, as a raindrop fell on the back of his hand and another fell on the clean white paper of his half-smoked cigarette. They should have run screaming, the way the people run from the giant bugs in those fifties monster movies. Then he thought, But then . . . I didn't run, either.

True enough, but it wasn't the same. He hadn't run because he'd been frozen in place. He had tried to scream, however; it was just that his new friend had stopped him before he could throw his vocal cords back into gear.

Batman. Your first batman.

Above the broad shoulders of this year's most Eminently Acceptable Business Suit and the knot in the red Sulka power-tie had loomed a huge grayish-brown head, not round but as misshapen as a baseball that has taken a whole summer's worth of bas.h.i.+ng. Black lines - veins, perhaps - pulsed just below the surface of the skull in meaningless roadmap squiggles, and the area that should have been its face but wasn't (not in any human sense, anyway) had been covered with lumps that bulged and quivered like tumors possessed of their own terrible semi-sentient life. Its features were rudimentary and pushed together - flat black eyes, perfectly round, that stared avidly from the middle of its face like the eyes of a shark or some bloated insect; malformed ears with no lobes or pinnae. It hadn't had a nose, at least none that Pearson could recognize, although two tusk-like protuberances had jutted from the spiny tangle of hair that grew just below the eyes. Most of the thing's face had been mouth - a huge black crescent ringed with triangular teeth. To a creature with a mouth like that, Pearson had thought later, bolting one's food would be a sacrament.

His very first thought as he stared at this horrible apparition - an apparition carrying a slim Bally briefcase in one beautifully manicured hand - was It's the Elephant Man. But, he now realized, the creature had been nothing at all like the misshapen but essentially human creature in that old movie. Duke Rhinemann was closer to the mark; those black eyes and that drawn-up mouth were features he a.s.sociated with furry, squeaking things that spent their nights eating flies and their days hanging head-down in dark places.

But none of that was what had caused him to try that first scream; that need had come when the creature in the Andre Cyr suit walked past him, its bright, bug-like eyes already fixed on the revolving doors. It was at its closest in that second or two, and it was then that Pearson had seen its tumorous face somehow moving below the mottles of coa.r.s.e hair which grew from it. He didn't know how such a thing could possibly be, but it was - he was watching it happen, observing the man's flesh crawling around the lumpy curves of its skull and rippling along the thick cane-head shape of its jaw in alternating bands. Between these he caught glimpses of some gruesome raw pink substance that he didn't even want to think about . . . yet now that he remembered, it seemed that he could not stop thinking about it.

More raindrops splattered on his hands and face. Next to him on the curved lip of marble, Rhinemann took a final drag on his cigarette, pitched it away, and stood up. 'Come on,' he said. 'Starting to rain.'

Pearson looked at him with wide eyes, then looked toward the bank. The blonde in the red skirt was just going in, her book now tucked under her arm. She was being closely followed (and closely observed) by the old party with the tyc.o.o.n's shock of fine white hair.

Pearson flicked his eyes back to Rhinemann and said, 'Go in there? Are you serious? That thing went in there!'

'I know.'

'You want to hear something totally nuts?' Pearson asked, tossing his own cigarette away. He didn't know where he was going now, home, he supposed, but he knew one place he was most a.s.suredly not going, and that was back inside The First Mercantile Bank of Boston.

'Sure,' Rhinemann agreed. 'Why not?'

'That thing looked quite a lot like our revered Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Keefer . . . until you got to the head, that is. Same taste in suits and briefcases.'

'What a surprise,' Duke Rhinemann said.

Pearson measured him with an uneasy eye. 'What do you mean?''

'I think you already know, but you've had a tough morning and so I'll spell it out. That was Keefer.'

Pearson smiled uncertainly. Rhinemann didn't smile back. He got to his feet, gripped Pearson's arms, and pulled the older man forward until their faces were only inches apart.

'I saved your life just now. Do you believe that, Mr. Pearson?'

Pearson thought about it and discovered that he did. That alien, bat-like face with its black eyes and cl.u.s.tered bunches of teeth hung in his mind like a dark flare. 'Yes. I guess I do.'

'Okay. Then do me the credit of listening carefully as I tell you three things - will you do that?'

'I . . . yes, sure.'

'First thing: that was Douglas Keefer, CEO of The First Mercantile Bank of Boston, close friend of the Mayor, and, incidentally, honorary chairman of the current Boston Children's Hospital fund-drive. Second thing: there are at least three more bats working in the bank, one of them on your floor. Third thing: you are going back in there. If you want to go on living, that is.'

Pearson gaped at him, momentarily incapable of reply - if he'd tried, he would have produced only more of those fuzzy whuffling sounds.

Rhinemann took him by the elbow and pulled him toward the revolving doors. 'Come on, buddy,' he said, and his voice was oddly gentle. 'The rain is really starting to come down. If we stay out here much longer we'll attract attention, and people in our position can't afford to do that.'