The shoes were all right; the dark-gray Andre Cyr suit, looking as solid and as dependable as the door of the bank vault in the basement, was even better; the red tie was predictable but not offensive. All of this was fine, typical top-echelon banker’s attire for a Monday morning (and who but a top-echelon banker could come in at ten o’clock in the first place?). It wasn’t until you got to the head that you realized that you had either gone crazy or were looking at something for which there was no entry in the World Book Encyclopedia.
But why didn’t they run? Pearson wondered now, as a raindrop fell on the back of his hand and another fell on the clean white paper of his half-smoked cigarette. They should have run screaming, the way the people run from the giant bugs in those fifties monster movies. Then he thought, But then . . . I didn’t run, either.
True enough, but it wasn’t the same. He hadn’t run because he’d been frozen in place. He had tried to scream, however; it was just that his new friend had stopped him before he could throw his vocal cords back into gear.
Batman. Your first batman.
Above the broad shoulders of this year’s most Eminently Acceptable Business Suit and the knot in the red Sulka power-tie had loomed a huge grayish-brown head, not round but as misshapen as a baseball that has taken a whole summer’s worth of bashing. Black lines — veins, perhaps — pulsed just below the surface of the skull in meaningless roadmap squiggles, and the area that should have been its face but wasn’t (not in any human sense, anyway) had been covered with lumps that bulged and quivered like tumors possessed of their own terrible semi-sentient life. Its features were rudimentary and pushed together — flat black eyes, perfectly round, that stared avidly from the middle of its face like the eyes of a shark or some bloated
insect; malformed ears with no lobes or pinnae. It hadn’t had a nose, at least none that Pearson could recognize, although two tusk-like protuberances had jutted from the spiny tangle of hair that grew just below the eyes. Most of the thing’s face had been mouth — a huge black crescent ringed with triangular teeth. To a creature with a mouth like that, Pearson had thought later, bolting one’s food would be a sacrament.
His very first thought as he stared at this horrible apparition — an apparition carrying a slim Bally briefcase in one beautifully manicured hand — was It’s the Elephant Man. But, he now realized, the creature had been nothing at all like the misshapen but essentially human creature in that old movie. Duke Rhinemann was closer to the mark; those black eyes and that drawn-up mouth were features he associated with furry, squeaking things that spent their nights eating flies and their days hanging head-down in dark places.
But none of that was what had caused him to try that first scream; that need had come when the creature in the Andre Cyr suit walked past him, its bright, bug-like eyes already fixed on the revolving doors. It was at its closest in that second or two, and it was then that Pearson had seen its tumorous face somehow moving below the mottles of coarse hair which grew from it. He didn’t know how such a thing could possibly be, but it was — he was watching it happen, observing the man’s flesh crawling around the lumpy curves of its skull and rippling along the thick cane-head shape of its jaw in alternating bands. Between these he caught glimpses of some gruesome raw pink substance that he didn’t even want to think about . . . yet now that he remembered, it seemed that he could not stop thinking about it.
More raindrops splattered on his hands and face. Next to him on the curved lip of marble, Rhinemann took a final drag on his cigarette, pitched it away, and stood up. ‘Come on,’ he said.
‘Starting to rain.’
Pearson looked at him with wide eyes, then looked toward the bank. The blonde in the red skirt was just going in, her book now tucked under her arm. She was being closely followed (and closely observed) by the old party with the tycoon’s shock of fine white hair.
Pearson flicked his eyes back to Rhinemann and said, ‘Go in there? Are you serious? That thing went in there!’
‘I know.’
‘You want to hear something totally nuts?’ Pearson asked, tossing his own cigarette away. He didn’t know where he was going now, home, he supposed, but he knew one place he was most assuredly not going, and that was back inside The First Mercantile Bank of Boston.
‘Sure,’ Rhinemann agreed. ‘Why not?’
‘That thing looked quite a lot like our revered Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Keefer . . .
until you got to the head, that is. Same taste in suits and briefcases.’
‘What a surprise,’ Duke Rhinemann said.
Pearson measured him with an uneasy eye. ‘What do you mean?”
‘I think you already know, but you’ve had a tough morning and so I’ll spell it out. That was Keefer.’
Pearson smiled uncertainly. Rhinemann didn’t smile back. He got to his feet, gripped Pearson’s arms, and pulled the older man forward until their faces were only inches apart.
‘I saved your life just now. Do you believe that, Mr. Pearson?’
Pearson thought about it and discovered that he did. That alien, bat-like face with its black eyes and clustered bunches of teeth hung in his mind like a dark flare. ‘Yes. I guess I do.’
‘Okay. Then do me the credit of listening carefully as I tell you three things — will you do that?’
‘I . . . yes, sure.’
‘First thing: that was Douglas Keefer, CEO of The First Mercantile Bank of Boston, close friend of the Mayor, and, incidentally, honorary chairman of the current Boston Children’s Hospital fund-drive. Second thing: there are at least three more bats working in the bank, one of them on your floor. Third thing: you are going back in there. If you want to go on living, that is.’
Pearson gaped at him, momentarily incapable of reply — if he’d tried, he would have produced only more of those fuzzy whuffling sounds.
Rhinemann took him by the elbow and pulled him toward the revolving doors. ‘Come on, buddy,’ he said, and his voice was oddly gentle. ‘The rain is really starting to come down. If we stay out here much longer we’ll attract attention, and people in our position can’t afford to do that.’
Pearson went along with Rhinemann at first, then thought of the way the black nests of lines on the thing’s head had pulsed and squiggled. The image brought him to a cold stop just outside the revolving doors. The smooth surface of the plaza was now wet enough to reveal another Brandon Pearson below him, a shimmery reflection that hung from his own heels like a bat of a different color. ‘I . . . I don’t think I can,’ he said in a halting, humble voice.
‘You can,’ Rhinemann said. He glanced momentarily down at Pearson’s left hand. ‘Married, I see — with kids?’
‘One. A daughter.’ Pearson was looking into the bank’s lobby. The glass panels in the revolving door were polarized, making the big room beyond them look very dark. Like a cave, he thought. A batcave filled with half-blind disease-carriers.
‘You want your wife and kid to read in the paper tomorrow that the cops dragged Da-Da out of Boston Harbor with his throat cut?’
Pearson looked at Rhinemann with wide eyes. Raindrops splattered against his cheeks, his forehead.
‘They make it look like junkies did it,’ Rhinemann said, ‘and it works. It always works.
Because they’re smart, and because they’ve got friends in high places. Hell, high places is what they’re all about.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ Pearson said. ‘I don’t understand any of this.’
‘I know you don’t,’ Rhinemann returned. ‘This is a dangerous time for you, so just do what I tell you. What I’m telling you is to get back to your desk before you’re missed, and roll through the rest of the day with a smile on your face. Hold onto that smile, my friend — don’t let go of it no matter how greasy it gets.’ He hesitated, then added: ‘If you screw up, it’s probably gonna get you killed.’
The rainwater made bright tracks down the young man’s smooth dark face, and Pearson suddenly saw what had been there all along, what he had missed only because of his own shock: this man was terrified, and he had risked a great deal to keep Pearson from stumbling into some awful trap.
‘I really can’t stay out here any longer,’ Rhinemann said. ‘It’s dangerous.’
‘Okay,’ Pearson said, a little astounded to hear his own voice coming out in normal, even measures. ‘Then let’s go back to work.’