Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

Hearthstone challenged The Shroud. “Come in, you bastard. If you dare… if you are not frightened.”

The scarlet thing was breathing fast now. It slid away, toward the ceiling, but the smell of blood was too great a lure. The shadow sprang from the wall, poured over Hearthstone’s hand, and burrowed inside his wound.

I know you, Hearthstone began. I know your amber-eyed bitch.

Great whistling gasps wracked the professor’s lungs. He felt claws scrabbling over his heart, fighting for purchase.

Nothing there, devil. No fear to hold onto. Only hatred, strong and pure.

The Shroud twisted in his guts. Hearthstone doubled over.

Oh, you’re good. But not that good. Because I remember. I met a man who fought you to a draw, and I learned well the lessons that he taught me.

Teeth ripped at his brain. A fist clenched his heart.

Hearthstone’s insanity pushed them away. I’ve had your bitch. I’ve pressed my lips to hers. Felt that creamy skin under my fingertips. And now I have you.

The Shroud slipped across the condemned man’s shoulderblades and down the bones of his arm. Hearthstone pressed his left hand over the wound on his right. Not so fast , he thought. Don ’ t leave me just yet…

The Shroud coiled inside Hearthstone’s forearm. The professor felt the thing shiver. Felt it shrink.

Hearthstone laughed. Your Irishmen were tougher than this. Your bitch had more backbone.

Footsteps sounded in the corridor. A guard on bed-check duty.

“Now comes the real test,” Hearthstone whispered. “Let’s see who’s in control.”

Hearthstone parted his fingers. He willed The Shroud to extend itself in a thin coil that snaked between the bars, and then he unleashed the full power of his insanity, creating a dark monster in his mind, commanding it to grow in the shadow-choked corridor.

Part jaguar.

Part ogre.

Part Kong of Skull Island.

The shadowthing roared. The guard fired his pistol once and was batted against the brick wall by a huge black tail. He lurched to the center of the corridor, unconscious but still on his feet, and was smashed against the opposite wall by a shadowfist.

Keys rattled. Hearthstone’s cell door swung open.

Hearthstone stepped from his prison and joined his ebony escort.

Soon the prison corridors swam with blood.

Later, laughing uncontrollably, the professor wandered the deserted city streets. He twisted The Shroud into a gnarled knot, a feeble arthritic thing. Blew the devil up like a balloon until it was a fat ebony clown. Made the demon crawl on its belly, an armless, legless freak.

Tired of frivolity, Hearthstone ripped the thing’s umbilical tail out of his wrist. The Shroud twisted on the pavement, a red-muscled horror that whined like a skinned dog. Hearthstone stomped it, spat upon it, laughed at it, gloried in the way it shrank from the dim glow of the streetlights.

He kicked it down the street, watching it carom like a child’s ball. Chased after it, kicked again. It bounced from one curb to the other, then suddenly sprang claws and raced toward the gutter. Nails clicked on wet pavement, and a second later it disappeared into a drainage opening.

Hearthstone ran to the curb. “Run away, coward!” he shouted, his eyes yellow in the glow of the streetlights. “Run away from the man who turned an electric chair into a throne!”

Dempsey padded forward, secure on a leash that Hearthstone held in his left hand. In his right he gripped the automatic, which he’d reloaded while the dog gobbled a second filet mignon.

No shadows, the professor told himself. No shadows here. And no shadows on the night the thing died. No shadows then, either.

It had been a great change for him, of course. Leaving America. Relocating to Japan. But the country had seemed ripe for the plucking at the close of World War II, and he’d cashed in his chips in America and reinvested in the land of the rising sun.

It proved to be a wise course of action. Soon Hearthstone doubled his money. Then he tripled it.

He waited for someone to challenge him. No one did. Not the Americans. Not the Japanese.

Not The Shroud.

But did it matter where the shadows hid? His bride… the doctor… the yakuza… even the dog… they had all walked among the shadows at one time or another, had they not? And surely they had all bled. Was there not the possibility? Wasn’t it always there?

As long as he remembered.

As long as he pulled over the riddle of The Shroud.

It was.

So, best to be careful.

Eagerly, Dempsey pulled at the leash as they moved down the hall, but the professor held him back. “Easy, boy. Easy, Dempsey. ”

The money didn’t make him feel much better. He took a young bride, but she didn’t make him feel much better, either. He remembered The Shroud’s promise that he would suffer before he died. And one evening he looked at his bride and realized that he was making himself suffer.

His bride had beautiful amber eyes. She could have been a sister to Anastasia White. And he had slipped the ring on her finger, not The Shroud. He alone had brought her into his home.

Hearthstone felt the sting of prophecy. He knew that as long as he remembered the past, he would suffer each time he looked into his bride’s eyes.

Dempsey stopped at the end of the corridor. Scrapped at the closed door there.

“I don’t know if we should disturb her.” Hearthstone was unable to banish fear from his voice. “The doctor says she hasn’t much time left. ”

The past was always there. Hearthstone was carrying it around, all of it, locked in his heart. All those old failures scrabbling over his innards like the claws of The Shroud.

But there was a way to put an end to it.

He would collect all the pieces of his past, everything that he hadn’t destroyed. He would stare at them, make his peace with them. And then he would crush them under the heel of his boot.

And then, and only then, could he begin to live again.

With shaking fingers, Hearthstone opened the door a crack. Closed it and shrank away.

Shadows. The room was full of them.

In there, in the dark, she was sleeping. Though Hearthstone had instructed Taoka to keep the room well-lighted at all times, the good doctor had obviously disobeyed his orders.

The professor stared at the black line of darkness where the bottom rail of the door fell just short of meeting the plush rug.

Calm yourself, Jacob. The thing is dead.

No. Not as long as you remember. Memory makes everything alive.

Drawing a deep breath, Hearthstone reached for the knob once again.

The yakuza brought a dozen old Irishmen to Hearthstone’s country estate. The professor watched their executions on a gray morning, so early that the event didn’t seem quite real. Afterwards, he returned to his bride’s bed for a few hours, where he dozed and dreamed of the beating he’d suffered years before. Waking, he talked to her of the executions and of his memories. He was delighted to find that both events seemed unreal, as if they’d happened to another man.

Three doctors followed the Irishmen. They came of their own free will, under the assumption that they were attending a medical conference. It was only while waiting in the cabin of Hearthstone’s yacht that they realized something was amiss, for even after the passage of several decades each man recognized the others as old colleagues. None of them remembered Jacob Hearthstone, but he was considerate enough to relate his own memories of his stay in the prison infirmary. When the pleasantries were over, he introduced the doctors to three bosozoku with sledgehammers in their hands.