Ugly As Sin (24 page)

They went down.

The old man stared straight ahead as the elevator descended. His breaths were very loud in the confined space. He wheezed like something choking out its final death rattle.

Nick said, “I’m guessing this is the part where you spend the next twenty minutes boring me with your nefarious plan.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Isn’t that usually the villain’s downfall?”

Mr. Balfour laughed. It was an obscene sound, like a mold-covered door creaking open to reveal a cellar full of rotting corpses. “That would assume I am the villain here. Which is a matter of perspective. I have no ‘nefarious plan.’ I am simply a man who is proud of his collection, and wishes to show it off to a guest in his home.”

The elevator stopped.

“And here we are...”

The elevator door opened. Little Sister stepped out, flicked a switch on the wall.

Fluorescent lights flickered on.

Before them was a rectangular room, its walls and floors painted a uniform gray color. Two long, gray metal shelves traversed the length of the room, both of them nearly as tall as the ceiling.

Mr. Balfour said, “You’ve heard of Robert L. Ripley, I’m sure? Of
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
?
He has long been a personal hero of mine. In fact, it was reading about Ripley and his adventures throughout the world when I was a much younger man that started my...obsession...in the first place.”

“What is this?” said Nick.

“There was a time in my life when I collected...oddities of nature, if you will. Freakshow abnormalities. ‘Pickled punks.’ The practice of preserving and displaying these poor souls has been around for centuries, starting with King Frederick III of Denmark, whose collection numbered in the thousands. Throughout the years, I discovered that many of them were gaffes, hoaxes created by smooth-talking conmen. But just as many were real, a testament to God’s cruelty.”

Mr. Balfour coughed gently, before rolling on. He was weak, and obviously did not have many years left on this Earth, but a fire burned in the old man’s eyes as he spoke of his bizarre pursuits. The motor on his wheelchair hummed like something alive, malevolent.

Little Sister walked behind Daddy, her shiny black shoes clicking softly on the concrete floor like a clock counting down the seconds until this all came to a head. Meanwhile, Jeremy hummed some tune to himself as if he had seen it all a billion times before.

As they passed those metal shelves, Nick saw hundreds of glass jars of every size and shape. Inside the jars, floating in yellow liquid, were mutated infants—human, bovine, feline, and species he could not identify. Some had more than one head, or flippers for legs, or huge, hydrocephalic skulls. Scattered among these pickled punks were countless manmade cryptids as well, such as a shriveled monkey torso sewn to the bottom half of a fish (“the original Fiji Mermaid, leased for twelve-dollars-and-fifty cents a week by none other than P.T. Barnum himself,” Mr. Balfour explained, “even fooled
The New York Sun
at the height of its popularity”). Here and there were stuffed calves, rats, dogs, and lizards with two heads or more. A thousand glassy eyes stared back at Nick as if waiting for the big man to blink so the beasts could attack in unison.

If he weren’t so intent on finding Sophie and ending this once and for all, Nick might have been impressed with the crazy old coot’s collection. Although he never would have admitted such a thing. Perhaps he would have been gripped, too, by the odd sensation that he shared a sort of
kinship
with the freaks on display.

There was something about this room and everything in it, however, that Nick found...
abandoned
. Neglected and forgotten. Like the inventory for a business that went under years ago, now moldering in the dark with no one around to account for it. The shelves were in disarray—crowded, unorganized, and covered with a thin layer of dust. Many of the stuffed creatures lay on their side, or teetered on the edge of the shelf, about to fall. Most of them were missing some of their fur, or were leaking the sawdust that had replaced their vital organs.

Nick found himself thinking of poor Leon at that moment, and how his friend had been so proud of owning a faded old Widowmaker T-shirt. That was the difference between the have-nots and assholes like this wrinkled fuck in his cash-colored PJs and his motorized wheelchair. Those who had next to nothing appreciated what little they did have. Those who had never known what it was like to go without took their possessions for granted; too much was never enough, and the thrill of the hunt was like a drug to them. They were always searching for something that might impress them even though they had long ago passed the point of being impressed by anything.

Nick fought off the temptation to tear it all down right now, to flood the room with broken glass and formaldehyde and then light a fucking match.

Gotta keep your eye on the prize
, he kept reminding himself.
They’re gonna take you to Sophie...then and only then you can show your hand and bring this whole fucking thing to the ground...

Nick stopped in front of a jar containing a plump human fetus with two heads. His own gruesome reflection stared back at him, superimposed over the mutant floating in its liquid. He thought about a pair of conjoined twins born not far from here a half-century ago, twins sold by poverty-stricken parents to a filthy rich pervert who believed that his money gave him the right him to buy anything...even a human being. Maybe that had been the first time Hiram Balfour had purchased a person. Maybe not. But it certainly wasn’t the last time.

He wondered if Little Sister and Jeremy shared similar stories. Decided he didn’t give a damn if the duo were golems sculpted from the old fart’s toe-jam then conjured to life via black magic.

And then Nick found himself pondering who was the real monster here: this wrinkled fiend whose “family” was composed of people he had purchased as part of his peculiar obsession...or a deadbeat father who had ignored his own flesh and blood entirely lest it interfere with his wrestling career. At least those who called Hiram Balfour “Daddy” didn’t appear to want for anything. Nick couldn’t say the same for his own daughter, whom he had known was damaged from the moment he saw her sitting in that corner booth in Annie’s Country Diner (
“somebody who was there for you, did the things fathers are supposed to do, he deserves to be called Daddy, not me”
).

He snapped out of his reverie when he realized Mr. Balfour was rambling on again: “Alas, my fascination with human oddities and aberrations of nature withered and died. I grew bored with it all. And I moved on to...other things.”

They came to a heavy metal door painted the same forest-green as Mr. Balfour’s pajamas. Little Sister reached into a pocket of her suit, pulled out a small key. She stuck the key in the lock and opened the door.

She flicked another switch, and more fluorescent lights came on...this time exposing a room that stretched into forever. It appeared to be a converted garage, albeit a garage that must have housed thirty or forty vehicles once upon a time. The carpeting was a black-and-gray pattern, like an immense chessboard laid out before Nick and his hosts; it covered the floor as well as the walls. Huge air-conditioning vents blew frigid air down on them as they entered the room.

Balfour said, “As you can see, Mr. Bullman, the last forty years of my life I have been intrigued by the...
cult of celebrity
, if you will. I believe the stars of stage and screen are the freakshow of our modern age. But these ‘freaks’ have become our gods. Tabloid deities. I suppose what you see before you was a natural progression of my interest in those classic sideshow curiosities. The carnival conmen of yesteryear lured in their marks with promises that they would see ‘Bonnie and Clyde’s Death Car,’ or rust-eaten implements purported to be the tools of history’s most notorious murderers. Some men collect comic books or baseball cards; others decorate the walls of their private studies with the severed heads of wild game. This is
my
collection, Mr. Bullman.”

“What
is
all of this?” said Nick.

“See for yourself. But, please...I must insist you do not touch anything.”

Where the previous room full of pickled punks and stuffed curios had been disorganized, dusty, and abandoned years ago for different pursuits, the collection in this room was obviously a source of great pride for Mr. Balfour. Everything had been painstakingly situated beneath glass cases, or behind velvet ropes, or atop fancy pedestals illuminated by subtle track lighting...like the old man’s personal museum...

Here was an orange pill bottle, supposedly one of the very bottles that led to Elvis Presley’s demise, according to the brass plaque on its cylindrical base...there, stretched across a wooden frame, was the blanket upon which Marilyn Monroe’s body lay the night she died (the square of pink satin was discolored in the center, as if the material were stained to this day by the beauty queen’s bodily functions)...atop a thick velvet cushion, sat a pair of round hippie glasses with one shattered lens (“JOHN LENNON/DEC. 8, 1980”)...here was a cape that once belonged to TV’s first Superman, George Reeves, who had killed himself via a gunshot to the head...there, enclosed within a glass case, was a jar of white greasepaint supposedly worn by Brandon Lee the night he died on the set of
The Crow
...

Everywhere Nick looked was another morbid artifact, memorabilia once owned by a celebrity who was now six feet under.

Against one wall, behind a velvet rope, stood a twisted hunk of metal that resembled nothing so much as a large piece of abstract art. A plaque on a stand a few feet away from it read: “JAMES DEAN/SEPT. 30, 1955.”

“Impossible,” said Nick. “No way that’s the real thing...?”

“Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t,” Jeremy whispered in his ear. Nick had almost forgotten he was back there. “Daddy believes it’s authentic. To him, everything in this room is the real deal. That’s all that matters.”

Nick knew a lot about the power of belief. It made men do terrible things.

He shook his head as he stood there staring at the wreckage.

The old man rolled past the exhibit, the wheels on his chair leaving faint tracks on the carpet. But then he stopped, turned back toward Nick when he saw what had captured the former wrestler’s attention.

“Legend has it that when James Dean introduced himself to Sir Alec Guinness outside of a restaurant in Hollywood, Guinness took one look at Dean’s infamous Porsche Spyder and told the young man, ‘If you get in that car, you will be found dead in it this time next week.’ That conversation occurred one week before Dean’s death. For several years after the accident, what remained of the vehicle was displayed publicly. But in 1960, while en route from Florida to Hollywood, the wreckage disappeared. When the trailer reached its destination, it was empty. James Dean’s ‘Little Bastard’ was never seen again.”

“Every man has his price,” said Nick.

The senior citizen smiled his corpse’s smile. “And to some, money is no object.”

Nick wondered how many millions the crazy old coot had spent through the years. He stared up at a huge sliver of blackened steel bolted to one wall. According to the plaque beneath it, this was one of the helicopter rotors that had decapitated Vic Morrow during an accident on the set of a 1982 horror film.

“Oh, bullshit,” Nick mumbled to himself.

“Quiet, you,” said Jeremy.

“Did you know that the Roman guards gambled for possession of Christ’s robe when he was crucified?” The old man didn’t wait for Nick to answer. “Bystanders ripped a sleeve from President Lincoln’s coat after he was assassinated. When the FBI gunned down John Dillinger outside of the Biograph Theatre, spectators dipped their handkerchiefs in the bank-robber’s blood.”

If he had a point, Mr. Balfour explained it no further. At last, he rolled to a stop. He turned in his chair to face Nick.

They had come to the far end of the room. Against that wall stood a tall, thin wooden shelf. Sitting on the shelf at Nick’s eye-level, backlit by a glowing green light, was a glass jar filled with clear liquid.

Something else was in the jar, too.

“NICHOLAS JAMES BULLMAN,” read the shiny gold plaque beneath it, “A.K.A ‘THE WIDOWMAKER’.”

“What the fuck?” said Nick.

It took him several seconds to figure out what he was looking at.

After all, it had been three long years since the last time he laid eyes on it.

†

When the truth finally hit him—like a sledgehammer upside the head—Nick stumbled backward, crashing into Jeremy behind him.

“I know this must be a shock,” said Mr. Balfour.

Nick didn’t hear him. His pulse pounded in his ears like a tympani drum.

“You...sent them. Rebel Yell and One-Arm. You
sent them
...”

“I assure you,” said the old man, “I know no one by those names.”

“Liar! You hired them! God damn you.”

Nick took a step toward the old man, his hands balled into fists, but Little Sister stepped between them.

Balfour said, “I have no reason to lie to you. I acquired this particular specimen...after. I heard about what happened that night in Amarillo, and my associates moved quickly. The cost, of course, was extravagant. But then, nothing in my collection has ever been cheap.”

Nick’s guts roiled as he stared at it...at that rubbery thing stretched taut between two vertical wire rods inside its green-glowing canister...like a silently-screaming phantasm trapped between the dimensions of the living and the dead.

His face
. His fucking
face
.

He could even see a hint of stubble along its bottom half, where he had been in need of a shave the last time he had worn it. A few tiny bubbles were trapped within the hairs.

“They could have
saved
it. They could have sewed it back on. But they never found it. Because you paid...you twisted son of a bitch...you paid someone to—”