The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

THREE

The program director — who was pulling an all-nighter to prepare the listings for next month’s TV Guide — was red-faced by the time he slammed into the control room and confronted the technician. “Hey, Charlie, this isn’t the picture we’re supposed to be showing! You know as well as I do that the Hughes people will go nuts if we change the schedule without their approval!”

Charlie stared at the monitor. Glorious shades of black and white painted the 26-inch tube. But Charlie decided that those colors were more than adequate, because the man on the screen wore nothing but black, and his face was as pale and immobile as that of a corpse.

The pale man’s dead eyes seemed to stare directly at Charlie. A shiver traveled the length of the technician’s spine. “The biggest damn vampire ever to stalk the silver screen,” Charlie whispered.

Hulking Robert Mitchum stood on the lid of a coffin, guiding the strange craft through fog-choked bayou waters with supernatural ease. Just ahead was an antebellum mansion, soft light spilling from its windows. Behind crumbling pillars that were alive with black vines, a buxom maiden in a flimsy negligee waited on the leaf-strewn veranda, eager for his cold embrace.

And then Mitchum began to shrink, bit by bit, inch by inch. A bat rippled off his slick hair. His gloved hands sprouted leathery wings and flapped into the night. A dozen fanged creatures peeled away from his broad shoulders, and the process continued until only his dead eyes hung in midair, and then they too were transformed into winged nightmares…

Charlie rubbed his eyes. God, he must have fallen asleep. And this wasn’t right. There weren’t supposed to be any bats in this picture. Only sword fights. And where the hell was Stewart Granger?

“You hear me, Charlie?” The program director shook him. “What’s going on? You want to get both of us fired?”

Charlie’s brow wrinkled, crinkling like a paper bag.

His eyebrows arched and split into sharp segments.

Bat wings unfolded from his face with the rattling music of Japanese fans.

And then Charlie wasn’t there at all. A wave of bats curled through the air. Deafening screeches spilled from a hundred mouths lined with razored teeth.

The program director’s jaw dropped open.

But no more questions spilled from his lips.

Only blood.

The old folks circled Jack Mormon like a pack of hungry wolves, but he wasn’t signing any more autographs. He. was too busy dialing KLAS-TV’s phone number.

He couldn’t get past a busy signal. He hung up, dialed again. Damn. The station manager knew better than to show horror pictures, especially this horror picture. If Hughes was watching it — and there was little doubt in Jack’s mind that Howard Hughes was behind this, one way or another — then things could get really dicey back at the Desert Inn.

The Desert Inn! Jack dropped the receiver and pushed through the crowd. The geriatric set babbled questions about the Spruce Goose and Jane Russell and other Hughes marginalia, but Jack had no time for questions other than his own.

What was going on at this moment on the ninth floor? He’d left the hypochondriacal football player alone with Hughes. It had been unavoidable, but now… Jack cursed his stupidity. It was a bad decision, even if it had been unavoidable. The kid was brain dead, perfect fodder for flyboy duty. But he didn’t even know that Hughes was dangerous. None of the flunkies knew anything about the billionaire’s peculiar condition.

Jack slammed through the double doors. Politely put, he was up excrement creek without a implement of locomotion. Hughes, even in his weakened condition, wasn’t a man who’d cut his rivals a millimeter of slack.

The glorified body snatcher yelled at Jack from the rear seat of the police cruiser, but Jack didn’t stop to tell the old ghoul that he was off the hook. The cops could do that. The limo was warm and ready to roll. The driver, Provo Sam, knew his business — he got out of Jack’s way, sliding into the shotgun seat.

Jack put the car in gear, hit the gas, and cut off a delivery truck as he made the first light with a whisper of yellow to spare.

The big car roared toward the Strip. Jack got on the radio. He was patched through to Nellis Air Force Base in a matter of seconds.

The bats darted across a fog-shrouded riverbank, gliding toward the veranda. Flying in a tighter formation now, they formed a swirling tornado that darkened, thickened, coalesced…

The bats became Robert Mitchum.

Howard Hughes smiled. This was his masterpiece. Oh, the critics had panned it, just as they had panned his Genghis Khan epic. They had claimed that Robert Mitchum was no more convincing as a vampire than John Wayne had been as a Mongol warrior. But Hughes knew better. He knew what he saw.

The bats. The beautiful, beautiful bats.

The critics complained about them, too. They said that the bats garnered more screen time than Mitchum. Untrue, of course, but a quibble nonetheless. Were the simpering idiots truly blind to the beauty of these creatures?

Could they not seer

Hughes could see. The bats were beautiful, as gorgeous as the warplanes that had soared in his first epic, Hell’s Angels, and something more.

The bats had true freedom. They were not machines.

A certain amount of cinematic legerdemain had been involved in their creation, to be sure, but there was a good deal of magic involved, as well. Hughes had found a Japanese magician through Orson Welles, a prestidigitator whose greatest trick was producing a colony of bats from a simple stack of black paper. Hughes had offered the man a great deal of money to share his secrets. At first the magician refused, but Hughes pursued him with the single-minded fervor he had trained on so many others — businessmen, aviators, starlets — until the man surrendered.

That was how it seemed, at first. Hughes stared at the screen. Robert Mitchum advanced on the beauteous Jane Russell, her skin pure cream, his hands black horrors.

Hughes looked away, at his own skin. Dark veins slithered beneath tissue-paper epidermis. His entire body rippled with scars, tiny and large.

Each one was a badge of honor.

Hughes recalled the magician’s smile on the night he revealed all. He recalled the swirling sheets of black paper, twisting and folding as they launched themselves, each one flying through the night with such ease, such grace.

Each one, cutting him so deeply.

Each one, leaving a scar.

Jack and Provo Sam hurried through the hotel lobby. They were close to the elevators when someone yelled, “Look, it’s Howard Hughes!”

Jack sighed. If he’d thought to shed the hat and the bomber jacket, he would have been just another guy. But with the costume, his naturally gaunt figure, his pencil-thin moustache… and this being the Desert Inn…

It was too late for second guessing. The two men broke into a trot, heading for the elevators. They were lucky. The middle elevator whispered open just as they reached it, revealing a bellboy with a load of luggage.

Jack grabbed the kid and shoved him out of the elevator. Provo Sam pulled a revolver, very discretely, so that only the bellboy would see it.

The kid ran. But the crowd kept coming. Flashbulbs popped. People screamed. His back to the crowd, Provo Sam cocked his gun. “You just give the word,” he said.

Fortunately for the crowd, the elevator doors closed.

Provo Sam inserted a key into the control box, flipping the lock that would allow the elevator to stop at the ninth floor.

Jane Russell swooned, falling into Robert Mitchum’s arms, and he caressed her naked shoulders with hands sheathed in leather gloves.

Hughes felt his blood rising. Collapsed veins plumped in his arms. This was the kind of stimulus he’d been missing. No Disney movie could stir his blood the way this picture did. He enjoyed true hunger for the first time in years.

Jack Morton had all but murdered him. It was Morton who had fed him a diet a saccharine cartoons when what he longed for was breasts… and blood. It was Morton who had prohibited films featuring creatures or machines that could take to the air on free wings.

Other humiliating memories of his captivity nearly made Hughes weep. Once, he had demanded some black paper, and one of the lackeys had actually brought a few sheets to his suite. But Morton had managed to intercept them at the last moment, after which he punished Hughes, forcing him to create paper dolls from scented pink stationary, rosy little horrors which danced and pirouetted until Hughes screamed in agony.

And Hughes’ pain didn’t stop there. For years he had subsisted on the blood of the sick and the aged, and he had grown weak battling the diseases of his victims. This too was Jack Morton’s doing.

Jane Russell moaned. Her plump lips parted, alive with warm blood. Mitchum’s hands were becoming more adventurous. His mouth closed on the marble beauty of Jane Russell’s neck, on a deliciously throbbing artery.

A wildfire of hunger burned in Hughes’ belly.

How much time did he have before Morton and his lackeys returned?

He hissed through a tangle of fanged teeth. He didn’t have long, he was sure of that.

Hughes turned to the only living creature in the room. Walter Sands was no Jane Russell, but this wasn’t the time to be particular.

Ignoring his pitiful whimpers, Hughes opened Walter’s shirt.

Using his longest fingernail, he sliced a thin line along Walter’s chest.

“Please, Mr. Hughes, I’ll do anything — ”

Howard Hughes didn’t listen.

He opened Walter Sands like an envelope.

Provo Sam grabbed a rifle from the armory in room 903 and joined Jack Mormon outside Hughes’ suite. Jack had a walkie-talkie in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

“He’s in there,” Jack said. “I can hear him feeding.”

Sam tried to ignore the insatiable moans that spilled from the room. He double-checked the rifle. “Tranquilizers,” he said. “The ones the CIA boys cooked up for us.”

Jack ground his cigarette into the plush carpet. “If Hughes gets through the window before you can hit him, don’t fire. We don’t know how much of that poison his system can take, and we don’t want our meal ticket splattering all over the Strip.”

Hughes knew that they would come. In fact, he was waiting for them. He wanted to see Jack Morton one last time. He wanted to spit Walter Sands’ blood in his doppelganger’s face.

But it was another man who came through the doorway, a man with a rifle. Hughes laughed at the weapon, but the man didn’t hesitate. He fired.

Hughes pulled the dart from his shoulder. The stink of the thing scorched his nostrils. It was a tranquilizer dart, but this wasn’t just any tranquilizer.

Garlic. The horrid essence pumped through Hughes’ veins. And now Morton stood before him, smiling beneath his horrible little moustache.

“Jack,” Hughes said, “you’re a real bastard.”

“I had a good teacher, Mr. Hughes.”

Hughes rubbed his shoulder, and then he began to laugh.

Provo Sam chambered another dart, but the vampire picked up Walter Sands’ corpse and threw it in Sam’s direction. Two hundred and forty-five pounds of dead football player bounced the shooter off the wall.

And now Hughes was in a hurry to leave. He ripped at his own flesh, and the sound was that of an eager child confronting a roomful of presents on Christmas morning.

Much too eager. In a matter of seconds, Hughes was an unrecognizable mess. Perhaps it was his eagerness, perhaps an effect of the garlic. Hughes looked like nothing so much as a kite made by an idiot child. But he sprang through the broken window all the same, dragging a bloody tail after him.

Jack Mormon watched Hughes go. He spoke a few short words into the walkie-talkie, brushed broken glass from the sill, and poked his head outside.

He looked to the heavens. Shot a “thumbs up” signal into the air.

A chopper, direct from Nellis, hovered over the Desert Inn.

Jack waved it on, after the vampire.