Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

When I’m dead and laid out on the counter,

A voice you will hear from below,

Sayin’ send down a hogshead of whiskey,

To drink with old rosin the bow.

In a dark corner, all alone, sat Thomas Clancy. Hearthstone elbowed his way through the crowd, one gloved hand on his hidden pistol.

Hearthstone sat down. Clancy grinned. The Irishman held a bowie knife in his left hand, and he was sawing it gently across the top of his right wrist. There were dozens of small cuts there, some scabbed over, some weeping blood.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Clancy whispered, “for a high ‘n’ mighty pris, she was awful lively ‘tween the — ”

The pistol thundered, time and again, until the chambers were empty.

Clancy still grinned. His voice came in a purring whisper. “Remember, Jacob Hearthstone, I come for those who are evil… Those who are evil must suffer… They must suffer, and then they must… ”

Clancy slumped backward. His jaw slackened and a bloody bubble formed on his lips.

Hands grabbed at Hearthstone’s arms. Someone wrestled the empty pistol from his grip.

The bloody bubble burst. A scarlet shadow poured from Clancy’s mouth and rippled across the scarred tabletop. It hit the floor and slithered over the professor’s shoes. Hearthstone screamed at the icy feel of the thing. The crowd screamed as well, but their screams were for him, for his blood.

The professor fought against his subduers, and he saw for the first time that they were policemen. Irishmen like Clancy. A punch thundered into his stomach. Clancy was a busted copper, but there was no such thing as a busted Irishman.

The professor hit the floor. Filthy sawdust caked his bleeding lip and stained his expensive camelhair coat. He rolled away from his attackers, desperately trying to gain his feet. He didn’t fear kicks or punishment. No, he feared the scarlet shadow that had slipped from Clancy’s mouth, the shadow that had to be The Shroud.

God. Where were his reinforcements? Where were the wing chun men now that he needed —

The Irishmen pulled Hearthstone to his feet and towed him into the alley behind the saloon — deeper, deeper — the professor’s eyes watching the street, drinking in the maddening scene with the sardonic humor of a true masochist, an unabashed cynic.

For in the street, he saw it. The shadowthing that was The Shroud. It expanded like a great net and ensnared the wing chun masters, whose punches and chops proved laughably ineffectual as the thing tightened its grip on their muscular bodies, crushing bones and reducing flesh to bloody pulp.

Then came the true horror.

Once more a snake, the scarlet shadow slithered across the bloodslick pavement. Encircled a creamy gold ankle. Coiled around a delicate calf, a perfect knee, and disappeared beneath the skirt of the woman with amber eyes.

The Doberman advanced, growling, its nails ticking against the tiled kitchen floor.

“Down, Dempsey… Good boy, Dempsey.” Hearthstone whispered, inching toward the center of the kitchen.

He glanced at Machii’s corpse. Damn. For the last few months, the yakuza had been feeding Dempsey, and now the dog thought that Machii was its master, thought that Machii was the one who provided teriyaki-marinated filet mignons.

Hearthstone almost laughed. If only his bride hadn’t loved the dog so much. If she hadn’t spoiled the animal, and if he hadn’t gone along with the spoiling… If only he’d complained about the price of filet mignon in the Japanese markets, then maybe Dempsey wouldn’t care a damn about the dead man on the floor… If only…

If only he hadn’t been crazy enough to think that Machii was The Shroud returned.

Hearthstone toed the expensive dish and slid it toward Dempsey. Slowly, slowly…

“Good boy. Good doggy.”

The dog began to pant.

Sniffed at the teriyaki-drenched finger that floated in the dish.

Parted its lips… and grinned.

After three months in the hands of incompetent prison doctors, Hearthstone was happy to join the general population in the penitentiary. His ribs had healed nicely, his back bothered him only when the weather was bad, and he soon accustomed himself to eating solid food despite the absence of several teeth which he’d left behind in a San Francisco alley.

Silly, really. The whole idea. Heal a man in order to fry him whole and hearty in the electric chair.

Though most death row inmates were not allowed to work or even move among the general population, an exception was made in Hearthstone’s case. After all, the warden had never before had the services of a full professor at his disposal.

So, Jacob Hearthstone, prisoner number 37965, was allowed to present lectures to his fellow convicts. These lectures took place in the prison library, and before long Hearthstone had insinuated himself among the library staff. In a few short months he was a member of that staff, charged with the delivery of books and magazines to the prisoners in their cells. This duty gave him a feeling of freedom and took his mind off the execution date which drew closer with each passing day.

Hearthstone wanted to move among the general population for one reason: he wanted to determine if he was a madman. His visits from the demon known as The Shroud seemed increasingly fantastic as time passed, and he often wondered if he had imagined the monster, conjured it up, as it were, out of thin air. As he moved from cell to cell he listened for any mention of the mysterious creature, and sometimes he ventured a question or two with inmates he knew and trusted.

In Hearthstone’s seventh month of incarceration a new prisoner appeared on death row, a transfer from a federal pen on the east coast. Hearthstone struck up a conversation with the man soon after, explaining that he was a pipeline to the library and could obtain materials that would help the new fish pass the time.

“Sure.” The man smiled at the suggestion. “Bring me anything you got on electricity, and bring me anything you got on the human soul.”

Hearthstone thought the requests odd, but he didn’t say anything, for he had learned that questioning a prisoner’s taste in even the most unimportant matters could be a fatal mistake. He’d seen a con killed with a sharpened spoon for daring to denigrate his cell mate’s preference for a certain brand of cigarette.

And apart from all questions of jailhouse etiquette, Hearthstone didn’t trust this man’s eyes. They were dark green and always moist, almost as if brimming with tears, two fathomless pools that swam on the con’s chalky, stretched visage. The eyes were part of the new fish’s mystery, and their peculiar cast made Hearthstone all the more eager to investigate him.

So he brought the man a stack of books. Books by Edison and books by Kant. And then he brought more. William James, Descartes. The new fish read them all. And soon they were talking .

Hearthstone called his new friend The Electric Man.

Before long, The Electric Man exhausted the prison library’s meager resources. “Just let me talk to you, Jake,” he said. “You’re a professor. You should know all the answers.”

Ignoring the vulgar familiarity, Hearthstone said that he was happy to indulge such a request.

“Okay, Professor. I been reading all this stuff, and it just don’t tell me what I need to know. I mean, I know about electricity. That stuff I can figure. The stuff about the soul is tougher, but some of it makes sense, too. But what I don’t get, what I don’t know anything about, is the two things together. Get me?”