They put the weekly issue to bed the next day, and by the weekend Rohrbach was ready to play. There were many who firmly believed that being a bachelor millionaire in south Florida was one of the planet’s more enviable existences, but you couldn’t party every weekend. Bad for the constitution. So Rohrbach settled for making a day of it Sunday at Joe Robbie Stadium with a couple of friends, where from the Truth’s private skybox they watched the Dolphins beat the Bears 24–21 on a last-minute field goal.
It was as they were leaving for the limo that the pain stabbed through Rohrbach’s chest. He winced and clutched at himself. His friend Nawani, who owned a little less than a hundred of the Sunshine State’s finest liquor stores, was by his side in an instant.
“Rob, man, what’s the matter?” He waved. “Hey, get a doctor, somebody get a doctor!”
Even as a crowd started to gather, the pain faded. Rohrbach straightened, breathing hard, his heart fluttering from fear rather than damage.
“It’s okay. I’m . . . okay now.”
“You sure?” Nawani eyed him uncertainly. “Looked like you couldn’t get your breath, man.”
“Just for a few seconds. Felt like my shirt shrank about six sizes. But it’s all right now.”
“Yeah, well, you better see a doctor, Rob. Doesn’t pay to fool around with stuff like that. My brother Salim passed away two years ago. Went just like that. A quick pain, grabbed his chest, and boom, he was gone.”
Though still scared, Rohrbach was feeling much better. “I’ll check it out, don’t worry.”
He did, too. First thing Monday morning. The doctor found nothing wrong with him, no evidence of a heart attack or anything relational. “Probably just a muscle spasm, Rob. Happens all the time.”
“Not to me it doesn’t,” Rohrbach told him.
That night he was sliding into the custom, oversized bed at the mansion when he abruptly sat bolt upright.
The visitor was sitting on the lounge next to the built-in plasma TV. “Hello, Mr. Rohrbach.”
There was a six-shot Smith & Wesson in the end-table drawer. Also, Spike was watching game shows two doors down the hall. A buzzer on the end table would bring him running. The bodyguard would make chicken parts of this intruder, only—how the hell had he managed to get inside the estate’s heavily guarded, stuccoed walls?
He was wearing white pants now, with matching white loafers and a pale yellow, embroidered shirt. Far better dressed than the average nut. The kind anyone would be proud to introduce at their next party.
Steady, Rohrbach told himself.
“Are you going to ask me how I got in here again?” the figure inquired.
“No, but I know how you’re going to go out. In cuffs.” He reached for the intercom, watching the intruder warily.
“Chest feeling better?” The man seemed genuinely solicitous.
Slowly, Rohrbach leaned back against the thickly padded satin headboard. “How did you know about that?”
“I told you. Elvis wants those stories to stop. I was his friend; he couldn’t take care of this himself, so he asked me to step in for him.”
“Poison.” Rohrbach was thinking furiously. “At the stadium. Somehow you got something into my drink.” The publisher recalled having downed a number of drinks, not all from the same bottle.
The visitor shook his head. “I’m a very nonviolent individual, Mr. Rohrbach. I couldn’t do something like that. I couldn’t poison a fly, or shoot anyone, or use a knife. I wouldn’t know what to do. All I have any control over while I’m here is that which I know best.”
“Then how’d you hurt me like that?”
“Does it matter? I didn’t enjoy it. But Elvis was my friend, and I told him I’d help out on this. Are you going to stop the stories?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll stop them. I promise.”
“That’s good.” The visitor rose, and Rohrbach reached toward the end-table drawer. But the man didn’t come toward the bed. He simply let himself out, quietly.
As soon as he was gone Rohrbach leaped from the bed and locked the door. Then he was on the intercom like paparazzi on a senatorial assignation.
“Spike! Dammit, get your lazy ass in here!”
A half-asleep voice echoed back. “Boss? What’s the trouble, boss?”
“We’ve got an intruder!”
“Intruder? But boss, Security hasn’t said nothin’, and the alarms—”
“Get your head out of your ass! About six-one, blond, white male. White slacks, yellow shirt. Get on it!”
The intercom clicked off. Spike was in motion, and Rohrbach pitied the intruder if the bodyguard found him first.
He didn’t. No one did. Security swore that no prowlers had been seen on the estate, and every alarm was quiescent. Rohrbach ranted and howled, but it didn’t do any good. He had the mansion’s security checked and rechecked, as well as warning people at the office. And he put Danziger, one of his best researchers, onto finding out anything he could about a man named Johnny Anderson who just might, just possibly, have once had some kind of peripheral connection, as a dedicated fan or whatever, with Elvis.
The next week, with grim deliberation, he caused to have printed on the inside front page of the Truth a story about Elvis’s disfiguring birthmark and the surgery that had failed to cure it, as well as a follow-up on the gay housemate story that purported to show Elvis’s male lover being buried in a cemetery in San Jose.
Then, with his entire staff alerted, he sat back and waited.
Nothing happened the next day, or the day after that. He began to relax.
On the third day, he was stepping out of the limo outside one of Miami’s finest seafood restaurants, where he was to meet for dinner with an extraordinarily beautiful and admirably ambitious new editorial assistant, with whom he anticipated discussing little having to do with newspaper work of any kind. Spike wasn’t with him.
Bedford, the chauffeur, opened the door to let him out. It was warm but not overly humid, a gorgeous night that he expected to end rather steamier than it had begun. He took a step toward the mahogany-and-leaded-glass doorway of the restaurant.
His feet spun him around to face the sidewalk and hustled him irresistibly forward.
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. What could you say when your feet suddenly took off with you, utterly indifferent to every mental command and imprecation? No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t his feet that were running away with him: It was his shoes.
Down the sidewalk he went, flailing wildly with the bewildered Bedford yelling in his wake. Off the curb and out into the street.
Straight into the path of a pumped-up, oversized, bechromed pickup truck thumping out Tupac as deep and low as the pounding of a sauropodian heart.
Rohrbach screamed; oversized all-terrain tires squealed; Bedford gasped. A chrome pipe bumper whacked Rohrbach in the chest, sending pain shooting through his ribs and knocking him down. A trio of terrified teenagers piled out of the truck to gather anxiously around him. If possible, they were more scared than he was.
“Shit, mister, I didn’t see you!”
“He stepped right in front of you, Don! I saw him! Right in front of you!”
“I’m all right.” A shaken Rohrbach climbed to his feet, brushing at his suit. His ribs ached, but it didn’t feel like anything was broken. “Forget it. We’ll all pretend it didn’t happen. It was my fault.”
“Yeah, man,” the third boy blurted. “Damn straight it was your fault! You—!” His friends grabbed him and dragged him away, back into the truck.
Bedford was at his side, at once angry and concerned. “Are you all right, Mr. Rohrbach, sir? What possessed you to dart out in the street like that?”
“I’m really not sure, but I’m okay now. Forget it. Just forget it.” He glanced down at his shoes. When he started back toward the sidewalk they obeyed. Why shouldn’t they? They were just shoes.
Carefully primping his thinning hair back into place, he pushed past the chauffeur a
nd strode into the restaurant.
She was as attractive and eager as he’d expected. Not that she had a lot of choice if she expected to move up the ladder under him. The food was excellent, and the wine made him forget the near-fatal incident out in the street.
They were waiting for dessert when his briefs started to tighten up.
At first it was merely uncomfortable. Smiling across the table at her, he squirmed uncomfortably in his chair, trying to free up the kinks. At first it seemed to work.
Then they tightened afresh. Much tighter.
His eyes bulged, and his expression grew pinched as he jerked forward. His date eyed him with concern.
“Robert, is something the matter? Are you . . . ?”
“Be right back,” he told her hastily. “Something in the stone crab . . .”
He straightened and headed for the men’s room. Halfway across the floor his briefs suddenly seemed to contract to half their normal size. He bent double, a sickly green expression on his face, and fought to keep from grabbing himself. Several well-dressed diners seated nearby looked at him askance. Somehow he staggered the rest of the way to the hall, then slammed through the door into the elegant men’s room.
He didn’t even bother to close the stall door behind him as he desperately unbuckled and unzipped his slacks and looked down at himself. So deeply had his briefs dug into his flesh that blood was showing in several places around the elastic. He pulled at the material. It wouldn’t give.
The pain increased, and he slumped onto the stool, still clawing frantically at his briefs. Just when he thought he was going to pass out, some give finally returned to the elastic. Making no effort to get up, he sat there breathing long and slow in deep, shaky gasps, waiting for the pain to go away.
How long would his conquest-to-be wait for him? How cooperative would she be later if she thought he was suffering from some unknown disease? If he had a hope of salvaging the evening he had to get back to the table.
He rose and pulled up his pants around the torn briefs, hoping they wouldn’t show. The dinner jacket should cover any lines. He stepped out of the stall and took a deep breath.
It was cut off halfway as his tie tightened around his throat.
Wide-eyed, turning blue, he wrenched at the tie. It was very expensive silk, custom made, blue and crimson, and it didn’t fray or ravel. Staggering wildly around the bathroom, he banged off the wall, the sinks, the stalls, his fingers fighting to find some space between the silk and his flesh. Eyes bulging, lungs heaving, he fell to the floor and lay there kicking and fighting. Everything was getting blurry and hot, as if he’d spent too much time in the pool with his eyes open underwater.
Dimly, he was aware of the door opening, of a figure bending over him and yelling. He wanted to respond, to explain, and tried to, but he couldn’t get enough air, not enough air to . . .
They let him out of the hospital the next day, around lunchtime. It had been a near thing, and he was more fortunate than he could imagine. Not every executive in Miami carried a pocket knife to their favorite restaurant. While someone else had called 911, his savior had severed the asphyxiating necktie. The sole reminder of the experience consisted of a small bandage on the publisher’s throat. It covered the tiny nick the knife had made. So constricted had the necktie been that Rohrbach’s rescuer had been unable to slip even the narrow blade cleanly between silk and skin.
He responded to every inquiry that greeted him on his return to the office, even to those from individuals he knew hated or despised him. He didn’t get much work done the rest of that day, or the next.
By the third morning after his release from the hospital he was feeling much more like his old self, and friends commented freely on his recovery. It wasn’t the near strangulation that had slowed him down, he explained. Unless you’ve experienced something like that you can’t imagine what it’s like; the loss of air, the knowing that Death is standing next to you, just waiting to reach down and take you for his own. It’s the mental recovery, he explained, that takes longer.
Awaiting his sage perusal were stories about crop circles in Wales, a two-hundred-pound twelve-year-old in Rio, a woman who had won three sweepstakes by using astrology, a man in Bombay who claimed to grow the only genuine aphrodisiac in the world and who had eighty-three children, a nuclear worker who glowed in the dark, and . . . a freelancer in New Orleans submitted a story about a shrimper who claimed that Elvis Presley had been living in the swamps outside Lafayette and had been working for him for years, and that he’d married a local Cajun gal and lived only on gator meat and red beans and rice.
The assistant editor who’d brought in the story looked expectantly at his boss. “Mr. Rohrbach? I thought maybe page five, opposite the breast enlargement ad? Mr. Rohrbach, sir?”
The publisher only half heard him. Still fresh in his mind was the remembrance of choking, the silken garrote tight as a steel cord around his throat, the wheezing sounds, the screaming in his lungs, the . . .
“No,” he said.
A look of pained disbelief came over the assistant’s face. “Sir? It’s a good story, sir. They can’t check very well back in that swamp country; it just meets our possibility criteria, and the food tie-in offers some intriguing advertising possibilities.”
“I said no.” He blinked and looked around the table. “Kill it. No Elvis stories. Not . . . now. My gut feeling is that Elvis is . . . overexposed. Get me something fresh. Cher. We haven’t had a good lead on Cher for a month. Come on, gang, get on it!”
A few of them eyed him strangely after the story conference, but no one said anything. Feeling slightly queasy, he returned to his office, speaking only to a couple of people on the way back. When he settled down behind his desk his thoughts were more than a little confused.
His researcher buzzed for admittance, and Rohrbach let him in.
“What is it, Danziger?”
“Sir. You remember that man you wanted me to try and trace? Anderson?”
Rohrbach looked up sharply, his mind now crystal clear. “Don’t tell me you found something on him?”
The researcher looked pleased. “Actually it wasn’t that hard, sir. His connection with Elvis is more than peripheral.” While Rohrbach looked on, Danziger glanced down at the notepad he carried. “Apparently he’s quite well known in the business.”
“The ‘business’? You mean, movies?”
Danziger nodded. “Knew Elvis real well. Did ten—no, eleven films with him.”
Rohrbach hesitated. “He’s an actor?”
“Nope. And the operative verb is was. He passed away in December of 1991.”
Rohrbach said nothing, just sat there behind the big desk, gripping the edge with unconscious concentration.
“In a way he was probably ‘closer’ to Elvis than just about anybody the King worked with.” Danziger was grinning, pleased with himself. “He was a wardrobe master. Whipped up all of Elvis’s costumes on those pictures, did the fittings, took the measurements, made—” Danziger stopped, mildly alarmed. “Are you all right, sir? Maybe you should think about getting some new shirts. That collar looks awfully tight.”
[Johnny Anderson and his family were my next-door neighbors two houses removed when I was growing up in California. Johnny was a great guy; everybody loved him. Johnny knew Elvis a long time. They got along great then, and I expect they do now.
There’s a picture of Johnny on page 144 of the Elvis Album.]
WE THREE KINGS
I love monsters. You love monsters. Everybody loves monsters. The literary and movie kind, of course—not the real ones who unfortunately inhabit our day-to-day world. It’s interesting that we like to read about invented monsters because they help us to forget about the real ones. Kind of like people who watch soap operas because they help them to forget about what they don’t have in their own lives.
But who do monsters love? Or do monsters love? Is there inevitably mutual admiration and respect, or must they of course fear one an
other? It’s a truly monstrous matter to contemplate.
Obviously the basis for a Christmas story.
It was overcast and blustery, and the snow was coming down as hard as a year’s accumulation of overdue bills. Within the laboratory, Stein made the final adjustments, checked the readouts, and inspected the critical circuit breakers one last, final time. There was no going back now. The success or failure of his life’s work hinged on what happened in the next few moments.
He knew there were those who if given the chance would try to steal his success, but if everything worked he would take care of them first. Them with their primitive, futile notions and dead-end ideas! All subterfuge and smoke, behind which they doubtless intended to claim his triumph as their own. Let them scheme and plot while they could. Soon they would be out of the way, and he would be able to bask in his due glory without fear of theft or accusation.
He began throwing the switches, turning the dials. Fitful bursts of necrotic light threw the strange shapes that occupied the vast room in the old warehouse into stark relief. Outside, the snow filled up the streets, sifting into dirty gutters, softening the outlines of the city. Not many citizens out walking in his section of town, he reflected. It was as well. Though the laboratory was shuttered and soundproofed, there was no telling what unforeseen sights and sounds might result when he finally pushed his efforts of many years to a final conclusion.
The dials swung while the readings on the gauges mounted steadily higher. Nearing the threshold now. The two huge Van de Graaff generators throbbed with power. Errant orbs of ball lightning burst free, to spend themselves against the insulated ceiling in showers of coruscating sparks. It was almost time.
He threw the final, critical switch.
Gradually the crackling faded and the light in the laboratory returned to normal. With the smell of ozone sharp in his nostrils, Stein approached the table. For an instant, there was nothing more than disappointment brokered by uncertainty. And then—a twitch. Slight, but unmistakable. Stein stepped back, eyes wide and alert. A second twitch, this time in the arms. Then the legs, and finally the torso itself.