***
The big man didn’t belong in this bar. Not like Widner did – you could take one look at Widner and tell that he’d spent most of his adult life on a fake leather stool throwing back vodka tonics. The big man was different.
When he’d walked in, the jingling bell on the door (old Fluke, the bartender, made this one concession to the holiday spirit and no other, which is why Widner drank here) was nearly drowned out by the howling winds outside; the big man brushed snow off of his shoulders, thus removing the only thing that marred his five hundred dollar suit. He had perfectly styled hair, blue like gun steel and with a precious little spit-curl that he absently smoothed back into the coif that had probably cost more than the suit. He sat at the stool next to Widner and ordered a Soder.
Well, at least it wasn’t milk, thought Widner, wincing his way through another vodka. The big man peered at him through his big, round glasses as if he was a jeweler looking for flaws; he’d find plenty. Only two types of people looked at you that way: cops and queers.
“Take a picture, pal,” Widner hissed. “It’ll last longer.”
The big man chuckled. “Actually,” he replied, “it wouldn’t. I have a photographic memory.” He sipped at his cola and gave a bit of a pull to his blandly handsome face, as if it was stronger than what he was used to.
“You a cop?” Widner asked. He wasn’t particularly worried; there was no paper on him that he could remember – nothing fresh, anyway – but he still didn’t relish the prospect of dealing with the law, not with the problems he was having.
“No, I’m no policeman,” the big man said, chuckling in a rehearsed-sounding way. “Actually, I’m a reporter.”
Widner squinted through the vodka mist. “Hey, yeah, you look familiar, actually. You from TV? I seen you before, I’m sure of it.”
The big man shook his head with finality. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m strictly print. I work for the Planet, up in Metropolis. I’m down here researching a story, as it happens – I sort of got lost along the way and stopped in here to get my bearings.”
He kept peering at Widner through those hokey coke-bottle lenses. It was starting to make the half-drunk barfly extremely nervous. “Look,” he said, in a lush’s voice that tries to hide itself but comes out as suspiciously quiet, “what, why do you keep staring at me like that? What’s this story you’re doing in a dumpy little burg like this, anyway?”
“Oh, it’s a real pip,” said the big man. “I’ve been following the story of this SKULL experiment that went awry. Apparently they’d hired a lot of fellows, ex-cons mostly, and subjected them to a radiation treatment that changed them somehow.”
Widner’s face went as pure white as the snow stacked around the corners of Fluke’s windows. He flashed back to the ad he’d answered six miserable years ago in the Underworld Star, the horrible sterile chamber they’d stuck him in, the sickly pink glow that washed over his body and turned him into a monster for a penny-ante paycheck. He remembered how all his troubles began.
“It so happens,” the big man continued with a gregarious smile on his wide, honest face but a steely glare behind his round frames, “that what this treatment did was to unleash the id of these men. It somehow actually gave a sort of parapsychic life to their innermost desires, to their basest instincts. The men couldn’t control this id-creature. Different things would trigger its release – particular sights or smells, emotional reactions, even combinations of words.”
On his creaky barstool, with subzero temperatures outside, Widner began to sweat. He couldn’t pull himself away from the big man’s piercing gaze. And as he spoke, as he described the exact circumstances that had turned Widner’s life into an unending nightmare, Widner flashed on the last six years – how, once a year, whenever anyone would say two little words, two words people only said during the last few weeks of December, he’d black out. When he’d awaken, he’d have money in his pockets, blood on his hands, and the knowledge that he’d soon see a newspaper article about a hideous pink demon made of glowing light that had wreaked havoc in a bank, a bordello, a police station.
“At any rate,” the big man continued, “it turns out that there’s a very simple cure. But there’s one man left, who didn’t get the word, and I’m trying to track him down.”
Widner panicked. Simple cure, my ass: this guy was probably some sort of snitch. If he fessed up, the big man would turn him over to the cops in a heartbeat and he’d spend the rest of his days in a cage – or strapped to a table in some lab. No, sir. Not for Sal Widner. The big man stared at him more steadily than ever, but somewhere, somehow, Widner found the strength to tear himself away. He leapt up from the barstool, nearly pitching over forward into the big man’s arms.
“Listen, pal,” he sputtered in panic and false bravado, “I ain’t never heard of this crazy crap, and I don’t like the way you’re lookin’ at me. Now, why don’t you clear your big-city ass up on out of here, before I clean your clock?”
The big man simply smiled, a jovial, reassuring smile, and rose from his own barstool. “Sure thing, friend,” he said. “Didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers. I’ll be on my way, to see if anyone knows the fellow I’m looking for.”
As the big man walked with a confident, easy gait towards the jangling door, Widner couldn’t help but call out to him. “Hey!” he shouted. “What’s the so-called cure, anyway?”
The reporter turned and smiled that calming smile again. “A concentrated, fast dose of x-rays,” he answered. “You have a merry Christmas.”
And, for the first time in six years, nothing – glorious, holy nothing – happened to Sal Widner.
***
Like I said, a great story.
Season's Greetings!
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