Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

So Jack Mormon was doing what he always did — thinking on his feet. Well, he was actually thinking on his butt while he was busy driving the car, but that was the kind of completely technical description that would captivate an anal-retentive like Howard Hughes. Jack was thinking, and that was the important thing. Thinking for a thing that waited on the ninth floor of the Desert Inn, hungry for its dinner, a thing that provided a pipeline to one of the most powerful portfolios know to man.

God, sometimes Jack couldn’t stand having that thing in his head.

He skipped a red light, nearly clipping a slow pickup. He slammed on the brakes and parked behind a police cruiser, intentionally penning it in behind a beige sedan. No flatfoot was going to cut things short on Jack Mormon.

Jack opened the door and stepped — as it were — once more unto the windblown breech of the November night. He sized up the situation. The disgraced surgeon — the glorified body snatcher — sat in the rear of the police cruiser. The idiot actually waved at him.

Two cops stood under a neon sign twenty feet away. ELM MANOR CONVALESCENT HOME. In Vegas, even grandpa’s last stop was lit up like a show on the Strip. The cops were busy with a crowd of senior citizens, every one of them clucking, pointing fingers.

Jack Mormon eased a Howard Hughes signature fedora onto his head and slipped into a bomber jacket. He ground his cigarette under his heel.

He smoothed his pencil-thin moustache.

He became another man.

The flies buzzed the gauntlet of aircraft models, darting and dipping in perfect formation like the Red Baron’s famed flying circus. Walter expected the insects to riddle the models with gunfire at any moment, even though he knew the idea was whacked out.

Each maneuver was performed under the watchful eyes of Howard Hughes, as if he were a master of insect tactics. The old buzzard stood in the doorway, looking like a mummy without bandages, a tower of bone with jutting ribs like twin xylophones. Add to that spindly arms scarred over with cardboard flesh, no muscle tone at all, and those horrible fingernails. And don’t forget his eyes, bipping and bopping in huge hollow sockets.

Those eyes locked on Walter’s, and the flies rushed his way.

Walter ducked low, gasping as the insect squadron brushed past him.

“Could you get me a television set, Walter?” Hughes asked.

Walter closed his eyes, but that was no escape — he saw Uncle Jack, and Uncle Jack didn’t look happy. Howard Hughes wasn’t allowed to watch television. Uncle Jack said that it disturbed his routine. And the routine was what kept the machine running, even Walter knew that.

The flies made another pass, but Walter didn’t open his eyes. “Did you hear me, Walter?”

“Yes,” Walter whispered. “I mean… no.”

“SPEAK UP, DAMN YOU!”

Walter remembered that Hughes was nearly deaf. “THERE ARE NO TELEVISION SETS ON THE NINTH FLOOR, MR. HUGHES!”

“But you could get me one if you really wanted to, couldn’t you?”

“NO… WELL, YES. BUT UNCLE JACK… UH, MISTER MORTON SAYS THAT — ”

Hughes’ screech cut Walter’s protest. “Who pays for your services, Walter?”

‘YOU DO, MR. HUGHES.”

“And don’t you think I should get what I pay for?”

“WHY… I GUESS SO… BUT UNCLE JACK WOULDN’T LIKE IT IF I GOT YOU A TELEVISION SET, MR. HUGHES.”

A rattling cackle. “Are you a poetry enthusiast, Walter?”

Walter shook his head.

“My mother used to tell me this one: I knew an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she’ll die. Isn’t that funny, Walters”

“I don’t think — ” Walter wanted to say more, but he couldn’t, because five sharp fingernails had closed on his jaw, holding it open.

All two hundred and forty-five pounds of Walter Sands trembled with fear. But he refused to open his eyes, no matter what. He wouldn’t do that. Not for anything. Not for a paper airplane worth a million dollars.

Something rattled over Walter’s teeth, something that tasted rusty.

A sharp jab. A tiny bit of pain. Walter tasted his own blood welling on his tongue. Next came a tickling sensation. Then a whining buzz filledhis mouth… tiny legs capered over his teeth, across his tongue, to the place where the blood flowed freely.

The sharp fingernails went away.

“Close your mouth, Walter.”

Obediently, Walter’s jaw snapped closed. The trapped fly raced the length of his tongue. Tiny wings fanned his gums as the insect launched itself, crashed against his wisdom teeth and scampered across his tongue once again, all the while buzzing frantically.

Again, Hughes cackled. “This isn’t much fun, is it, Walter?”

Walter agreed with a pathetic groan.

“Then there’s only one thing to be done.” Hughes’ brittle fingernails tickled Walter’s belly. Walter giggled in spite of himself, his exhalation blasting the trapped fly against the prison walls of his teeth.

“Swallow, dear boy.” Hughes laughed. “Just swallow, and everything will be all right.”

Walter took the elevator to the eighth floor, where he rammed through the first door he came to as if it were a defensive back who had said something cruel about his sister.

No one was home. That didn’t surprise Walter. Paradise waited seven floors below — hundreds of slot machines, poker and blackjack tables, and women with magnificently large breasts who dispensed free liquor.

Walter unplugged the television set and held it under one arm. Funny, his elbow hardly hurt at all anymore. He returned to the elevator and, using the passkey that allowed him access to the ninth floor, made his way back to Howard Hughes’ suite.

He plugged in the television. Turned it on. Extended the rabbit ears. Switched to the Hughes-owned Las Vegas station — KLAS-TV, channel 8 — which was showing a Stewart Granger movie.

Hughes reddened. He screeched, “Walter, that is not what I want to see!”

Walter didn’t know what to do. Apparently, Hughes did. The old man snatched a fly from mid-air and went to work on it with his fingernails, twisting it this way and that, turning the wings, creasing and uncreasing them until the fly seemed several times larger than a fly could possibly be. The wings, previously transparent, were now black and thick. Hughes unfolded them as urgently as Walter unfolded his paper airplane checks, but the thing Hughes held in his hands couldn’t be cashed in any bank.

The bat sprang from his bony grasp and fluttered weakly about the room.

Very suddenly, the creature picked up speed and crashed through the window.

Rooted like a Sequoia before the broken window, Walter watched the bat slice through the neon night.

Flying too fast for the fastest of hands.

The November winds blew hard off the desert, but they didn’t slow the thing that came from the ninth floor of the Desert Inn. It wasted no time arriving at the studios of KLAS-TV.

For several minutes, the thing flitted around the big glass doors in front of the television station. Then the doors flashed open, disgorging a tired executive. Beneath the hiss of the wind came the sound of crisp paper wrinkling. A hundred tiny folds were made as the double doors rushed to meet their casings.

The gap narrowed to an inch.

Plenty of room for a fly.

A lobby. Then corridors. A staircase, going down. A technician, snoozing.