Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

“Go on… I’ll try to follow.”

“That’s jake. Now I’m gonna lay it out flat, and if you don’t want to believe me, you just say the word and I’ll never look at you again. But what would you think if I told you that the screws strapped me into the electric chair back east two years ago, and one of ‘em pulled the switch and gave me a real good ride, and nothing happened to me at all?”

Hearthstone thought of his fast-approaching execution date. “I’d ask you how you managed the trick.”

The Electric Man grinned. “Oh, it’s an easy one, y’see. All you got to do is get someone to come inside you, swim around in your blood, and steal your soul.”

Hearthstone grinned. “Where do I sign up?”

“It ain’t funny, Jake,” The Electric Man said. “You ever hear of something called The Shroud?”

“As it happens, I’ve met the fellow.”

“Uh-huh. I thought you had the look. Well, I’m the world’s greatest expert on the son of a bitch. I’ve had him in my head, and it wasn’t what you’d call a barrel of laughs.” The Electric Man shivered at the memory. “And ever since then I been tryin’ to figure it all out. Figure him out. But I just can’t do it. I got too many questions. And now I’m startin’ to think that it ain’t a thing you can answer. It ain’t like a puzzle where all the pieces fit.

“Look, Professor, I only want to know one thing: if that devil made off with my soul, and if they strapped me in the chair and it didn’t do nothin’ but curl my hair, do you think I’m ever gonna be able to die?”

Hearthstone said, “Before I can answer that question, you must tell me what you know of The Shroud.”

Hearthstone readied his pistol.

The dog’s grin gaped into a yawn, and then the animal dipped its huge head and sniffed at the food that the professor had pushed its way.

Hearthstone smiled. “Oh my, you’re jumping at shadows, old boy, jumping at every damn stimulus that fires those very old synapses… ”

Dempsey began to eat.

Hearthstone relaxed. Remembered.

The Electric Man’s voice: He came after me, y’see. Doesn’t matter what I did, doesn’t matter that other guys did worse… he just came after me. Told me I was gonna suffer, then die. Oh, he kept his word about that sufferin’ part. My wife, well, the first night he came around she seen him, and she got so damn scared she went into convulsions and almost bit her tongue clean off. Right on the livin’ room rug. Yeah, that was sufferin’ all right, and I ain’t even sure the bastard meant for that to happen. Then things got worse. He started stealin’ money from me — it’d just disappear right out of my pockets — and I couldn’t pay off my boys, and soon they was huntin for me.

The sounds of Dempsey licking meat, chewing, swallowing.

Yeah, came for me in the morning, he did. I was shavin’, looked up and seen him behind me. Well, the razor slipped and I cut myself. Bam! He was on me like a wild animal or somethin’ and then he wasn’t there at all — outside of me, that is — but I could feel him swimmin’ around in my blood, squirmin’ in my guts. The devil was inside of me!

The filet mignon was gone. Tentatively, Dempsey licked at the severed finger.

He makes me get all duded up — straw hat, corsage… everything. Makes me get my Tommy gun, y’see. Walks me out to a Cadillac, a Sport Phaeton, and there’s a dame sittin’ behind the wheel. Brown eyes that was almost gold, pretty, a dancer from one of my speakeasies. She don’t say nothin’ just smiles and drives me over to my boys’ digs and drops me off But that devil’s still inside me, seel He trots me upstairs. Makes me open up on my own boys. God, I seen some things… but this was awful. These was my friends. And I got mad — crazy mad — thinkin’ about what he’d made me do, thinkin’ about how he d hurt my wife.

The dog took the severed digit in its teeth. Flicked its head. Bit.

I started to fight the bastard then and there. I stuck my hand in front of the gun barrel and blasted a few rounds right through it, through my wrist, too— see the scars here? Anyway, I was screamin’ — my hand spewin’ blood all over me and all over the room and my boys, the awful stink swimmin’ in my head — screamin’ for the bastard to get the hell out of me. Willin’ him to get out of me!

Dempsey swallowed. Panted.

And then came the worst part. It was bad enough back home, lookin’ at my eyes in the mirror, lookin’ at the little cut on my neck, knowin’ that thing was inside of me. But it was even worse seein’ it wash out of me in all that blood. God, it was scrambled all over the floor like rotted guts from a slaughterhouse, and it pulled itself together… just came together like somethin’ out of a nutty cartoon. The damn thing crawled over the bodies of my boys and I started to let it have it with the gun… wracked the thing pretty good, wracked up my boys’ dead bodies, too, but I didn’t even care no more… and then it spun around when it got to the window, stood up, holdin’ out something black in its hand, a bloody thing that looked like a baby. And it said in that voice it has, ‘You live without it, dead man. You just try living without your soul…’”

Dempsey ducked his head against Hearthstone’s shoes and whined, begging for another finger.

So, there was a weakness in the fabric of The Shroud, a weakness that gave Professor Hearthstone hope. Perhaps it was simple fear, and perhaps it was something more complex — something that could not be named. Still, Hearthstone knew that if the riddle of The Shroud could be solved, death might not be inevitable.

Hearthstone considered all the possibilities as his execution date drew nearer. He thought of The Electric Man’s state of mind during The Shroud’s invasion of his body and decided that the gangster’s own fear had allowed The Shroud to control him. And then he remembered how The Electric Man’s own anger had grown - anger at what had happened to his wife, anger at what The Shroud had forced him to do to his fellows — boiling to a hateful rage that was pure and possibly quite insane.

When he finished his examination of The Shroud’s battle with The Electric Man, Hearthstone was confident that he could form a plan of attack should the demon reappear. He prayed that such a creature as The Shroud could not glory in silent victory. He concentrated on hate, and he was pleased to find that insanity was a prize well within his grasp. And on the night before his execution, the thing came, a nightmarish red-black pudding that sluiced through the bars of his cell and puddled on the brick wall, oozing a great, ugly grin.

“I have supped on your suffering, Jacob Hearthstone,” The Shroud said. “And now, as I promised, you will die.”

The professor’s only reply was a smile. He thought of Anastasia White. He closed his eyes and saw her. Straightened and heard his ruined back pop and complain. Gritted his remaining teeth and pictured bloody molars dotting the slimy cobblestones of a San Francisco alley.

“Tomorrow when you sit in the electric chair, I will be there,” The Shroud said. “I will be inside the man who wears the hood. Mine will be the hand that pulls the switch.”

Hearthstone wasn’t listening. He was deep inside his own head. He saw Thomas Clancy sitting before him, a bloody bubble on his lips. Saw the bowie knife clenched in Clancy’s left hand, the thin cuts on the Irishman’s wrist.

Suddenly Hearthstone stood and stepped close to the wall, confronting the scarlet grin, sucking the fetid breath that boiled from The Shroud’s mouth as if it were the finest perfume in all the world. He removed his glasses, slipped the cover from one of the ear pieces, and drew the rough metal across the back of his right hand. A trickle of blood seeped from the wound.