movie…
“Please!” said a busty, frowzy woman with flapper-style brown hair. She was pinioned on the left side of the practice stage. “Let me go!” Her eyes kept fluttering, perhaps because one of them was losing its false eyelashes. She wore a ripped black shift and one red pump, the other foot bare.
In the center framework, a middle-aged man with a tonsure of white hair shook in his bonds in rage and fear. His suit was torn and bloody, his nose was swelling and leaking blood, his left eye swollen shut. Cohen’s third “guest” was a young man in a T-shirt, with tousled blond hair and a little red-blond beard that, along with his green trousers, made Martin think of Robin Hood. He looked like he was drugged or drunk; he just sort of hung there in his restraints, murmuring inaudibly, eyes slitted, lifting his head now and then.
“We shall call these three Winken, Blinken, and Nod!” declared Cohen, parading around them, clapping his hands.
“Please, Mr. Cohen!” the woman wailed. “I wasn’t holding out on the tips! The other girls all keep the same amount!”
“The constables Hector and Cavendish caught these three for me, Martin,” Cohen said, taking a cigarette lighter and a silver cigarette case from the pocket of his smoking jacket. He tapped a button on the case so that a cigarette popped out of a little hole; he lipped it up to the lighter, puffed, and blew smoke in Blinken’s face.
“Cavendish!” Blinken snarled. “That crook! Supposed to be the law! You bought him off!”
“And isn’t that always the case with the best policemen?” Cohen said, putting the cigarette case away. “That Sullivan is such a square. Won’t take a bribe. But Cavendish likes my little gifts… doesn’t he, Blinken?”
“That’s not my goddamn name!” the older man shouted. His remaining eye blinked furiously as he struggled with the tight leather restraints around his wrists and ankles. He went angrily on, “You know damn well who I am! I worked for you a good six years, Cohen! I did a hell of a job in that crappy little casino of yours!”
“Oh, but you were skimming the winnings, old Blinken,” Cohen said, his voice oily. He toyed with the cigarette lighter.
“Ask anybody in Fort Frolic; I was completely on the level!” Blinken snarled. “I was totally—”
He interrupted himself with a long, pealing scream as Sander Cohen put his cigarette out in Blinken’s remaining eye.
Cohen made a face at the man’s shrieking—and then came that sucking sound, the thump, the sparkling, and Cohen had vanished.
… Only to reappear close beside “Nod.” Cohen reached out and stroked the young man’s blond hair. “The problem is an artistic one, a compositional question,” Cohen said, raising his voice to be heard over Blinken’s cries. “Shut that one up for now, will you?”
“Sure.” Martin was glad to do it. Blinken’s screams were distracting him from the movie. He strode over to him, took him by the throat—but instead of squeezing, something else came from his fingers. Not quite intentionally.
Ice. It spread out from his fingers onto the man’s neck, his head, and clickingly up over his chin. It covered his face like a helmet. In another second it had coated his shoulders, his torso—the man was caught in a carapace of ice.
“Stop!” Cohen barked.
Martin stepped back, unsure as to what had happened at first—then realized that he’d used the plasmid. The power of the specialized ADAM he’d been given had sent a current of entropy from his fingers, slowing molecules, drawing water vapor from the air—coating Blinken in ice.
“If I hadn’t stopped you,” Cohen said, playing with the lighter, flicking it on and off, “you’d have frozen him right through in another second. This way he’s in a pretty cocoon of ice, for now…”
It was true. Blinken was wriggling in the sarcophagus of ice. A little melted water, mixed with bloody foam, slipped about his face, his cries were muffled; one wild eye was bleeding, the other rolling under its blackened, swollen lid…
Martin marveled that he felt so little, that he was so distanced from what was happening this close in front of him. But the rolling hotness, the transporting sweetness of the plasmid high was still upon him, dominating him, and nothing else was truly real.
“Please, Mister, don’t do that!” the woman shrieked. “No no
Martin turned to see Cohen flicking the lighter under her ragged clothing, her hair. Setting “Winken” on fire.
“We’re almost ready, Martin!” Cohen crowed as she writhed, shrieking in a growing plume of flame. “You must capture her in ice when she’s in just the right posture for the composition! We’re making a glorious tableau, a lovely triptych of tragedy: the human condition! I shall entitle it,
Martin could barely hear him over the woman’s shrieking. Most of her hair was gone now…
What was this movie he was in again? What was the title? Martin couldn’t remember…
“There!” Cohen shouted, leaping with excitement. “As she arches her back and howls and spreads her fingers! Now!
Martin stretched out his arm and willed the plasmid to emanate from his fingers—he felt the chill of it passing out of him, saw ice crystals shimmering in the air in front of his hand. Suddenly, the fire around the dying woman was snuffed out.
She was instantly frozen solid, her eyeless sockets—the flame had melted her eyes—filling with pockets of crushed ice. Her mouth agape around a chunk of ice, her singed-away hair replaced by icicles…
Martin felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He was starting to see that this was real. These people were real…
Cohen vanished, teleporting—then reappearing near Blinken. Who was just starting to crack out of his ice cocoon.
“As soon as he breaks out, when he opens his mouth to shout at us—freeze him!” Cohen ordered. “Freeze him solid!”
At least that would end the man’s terror, Martin thought. The thought making him feel sick in itself.
He emanated the entropic power of Winter Blast—and the plasmid quickly froze the man through and through. And Martin shuddered, as if he was frozen himself.
“Ha
Martin found he was drawn to Nod, that his hands went easily to him. He was a very pretty young man, after all. Cohen took out an elegant little straight razor…
J. S. Steinman was bemused and distracted. Admiring the eyeless, limp face he had so deftly removed from the woman’s skull, holding it up to the sea light from the windows so that he could see the deep blue of the North Atlantic through her empty eye sockets, Steinman thought:
And then the visitor buzzer razzed intrusively at him.
“Damn them, why won’t they leave genius to be genius!” Steinman muttered, hanging the detached face —complete with her nose and eyebrows—over the lamp beside the operating table. The electric yellow lamplight came prettily through the sockets, but the blood emitted an awful stench in contact with the hot lamp.
The buzzer buzzed again.
