"That do?" the guard asked.
"Yeah," Remo said as his eye caught sight of the headline STARTLING FURTHER RELEVATIONS OF "DEAD MAN."
"Remember that promise," the guard said, walking off.
"Sure, no problem," Remo said vaguely, folding open the front page. There was a reproduction of the earlier artist's sketch of his face. It looked like a police I.D. sketch, but beside it was another sketch. This one was of a wizened old Asian man with a wisp of a beard hanging from his chin, and clear, penetrating eyes.
In a box beside that face was the following: "First Look at Dead Man's Spirit Guide, Identified by Enquirer Panel of Psychics as Lim Ting Tong, High Priest of the Lost Continent of Mu. See Page 7."
Remo, reading this, sank onto his cot heavily. The face of the old Asian was identical to the face from his dream. The one called Chiun. Swiftly Remo turned to page 7. He read so fast his eyes skipped over whole sentences as he searched for his own name. He found it.
The gist of the article was that Enquirer readers from across the country had written in to share sightings of Dead Man, who had been brought to the Enquirer's attention by renowned University of Massachusetts anthropology professor Naomi Vanderkloot. According to Vanderkloot, Dead Man, by virtue of his superhuman feats, could be none other than the vanguard of the next evolution in Homo sapiens.
Enquirer readers had come forward with their own accounts, many of which agreed that Dead Man was often accompanied by an old Oriental in colorful robes. No one knew Dead Man's true name. Or at least no one could agree upon it. A Detroit hotel manager had identified him as a former guest of his establishment who had signed the register book "Remo Murray." A Malibu boat dealer claimed that "Remo Robeson" had purchased a Chinese junk from him only last year and sailed away in it. And on and on the reports went, some sightings going back over a dozen years. All the reports agreed that the man's first name was Remo. The last name was always different. "Williams" was not one of the examples.
"My name," Remo Williams muttered in the reflected pink glow of his bare cell. "My face. But how could I be in two places at once-in prison and out on the street?"
Remo read the article over and over until he knew it by heart. Then he stuffed it under the mattress. Lights-out came and Remo didn't bother undressing or getting under the covers. Tomorrow at seven A.M. he would walk down the line, not for the killing he hadn't committed over twenty years ago, but for the murder of a Trenton guard he had been forced to kill only because he had been sent up for a killing he never did in the first place. The guard had been an asshole. He had asked for it, Remo thought, but he was a corrections officer. The irony was that after fighting to escape death row for someone else's crime, Remo Williams was about to pay the ultimate price for one he was forced to commit.
Remo replayed the killing over and over in his mind. He remembered sticking the makeshift shank in the man's stomach and "jugging" it-twisting the rusty blade to maximize the internal damage. It replayed like a continuous loop film strip. He didn't realize he was drifting off to sleep.
Remo dreamed. He was walking down a long treelined country road. The fog hung low, as if in an old Universal horror movie. Up ahead, the wrought-iron gates of a sprawling brick complex loomed. In his dream, Remo thought it was a prison, but as he approached, he saw the brass plate gleam against a stone pillar topped by a severe lion's head.
It read: FOLCROFT SANITARIUM.
The gates were padlocked. Remo leapt for them anxiously.
"Let me in," Remo cried, rattling the chain. He pulled on the fence. It rattled too, but wouldn't budge. "Can anyone hear me? They're coming to get me."
A splash of headlights illuminated him from behind. A long car turned the corner, its wheels lost in fog. It was a hearse. A white hearse. Remo attacked the fence with renewed ferocity.
"Someone answer me! Please!" he cried.
And through the mists on the other side of celllike fence floated a figure in saffron robes. The old Oriental. Not Lim Ting Tong. His name was Chiun and he pointed at Remo with stern, long-fingered nails.
"Go back, white. I deny you. Never again will you enter these hallowed halls."
"It's me. Remo. Don't you know me?"
"I know you too well," Chiun intoned. "You have shamed me. Forever. I can bear to look upon your disgraceful form no longer."
"But why? What did I do?"
"Your elbow." The voice rumbled like doom.
"What about it?" Remo said anxiously. Car doors slammed behind him. He was afraid to look back over his shoulder.
"It was bent!" The Oriental's words dripped bitterness.
And then, materializing from the mists was a tall vulturelike figure in black robes. Not an Oriental kimono, but a judge's funereal robes. The figure looked at Remo with a disapproving expression on his dry-as-dust features. Remo recognized the face. Judge Harold Smith.
"He refuses to leave us alone," the Oriental told Smith.
"Remo Williams," the judge pronounced, "I have sentenced you to death." Smith pointed beyond Remo. Remo turned. The white hearse was parked with its rear gate to him. It was open, and inside was a legless electric chair. And standing beside it, attired in a three-piece gray suit, was the executioner, his head smothered in a black leather hood.
"Who are you?" Remo demanded.
The executioner's voice was chilly. "You know me. We have done this before."
Impelled by some irresistible urge he could not explain, Remo approached the executioner.
"Please take a seat," the executioner said solemnly. His feet were enveloped by low-lying ground fog, like a ghost.
"I know your voice," Remo said. Impulsively he reached for the hood. It came away, leaving the craggy, soft features of Harold Haines. But there was something wrong with the face. It didn't match the voice. Remo pulled at the man's suddenly obvious false nose. The face came away, and the hair. A mask. And behind it were the austere features of judge Harold Smith.
"No!" Remo shrank from Smith's cold, unhuman eyes. He made a break for the gate. The old Oriental bounded to intecept him. He took the gates in his tiny hands as if to hold them in place against Remo's assault.
Remo shouted in mid-course, feeling the ground pushing against his running toes. He ran into the stone wall and up the side, his toes shifting from the soft horizontal ground to the hard vertical wall as easily as from sand to blacktop.
At the top, Remo paused, read the distance to the ground, and jumped. He floated to the grass as if weightless. Remo ran past the old Oriental, away from judge Harold Smith's grasping hands, and into the building. An elevator took him to the second floor and the door marked DIRECTOR. Remo pushed the door in.
A man sat in a cracked leather chair behind a Spartan oak desk. The chair was turned to a big picture window that framed a large body of water, so that only the back of the man's head was visible over the high seat back. His hair was white.
Then the chair slowly swiveled and the sharp profile came into view, continued until the shaky fluorescent lights made the round rimless eyeglasses momentarily opaque, and then the gray eyes looked at him reprovingly.
Remo's eyes jumped to the nameplate: "Harold W. Smith, Director."
Without a word, Smith pressed an intercom button and suddenly Remo was surrounded by burly orderlies in hospital green. They grabbed Remo by the arms and the legs and wrestled him to the floor, trying to force his arms into a straitjacket. Only after they had succeeded in locking Remo into the strangling garment did he see the electrical connectors on the jacket front. Then, to his horror, they were pushing into the office a complicated electronic device on a wheeled stand. Swiftly, grimly, they plugged heavy old-fashioned jacks into the connectors, and the voice of Harold W. Smith, as astringent and pitiless as lemon dishwater detergent, was asking Remo a doleful question. "Do you have any last words?"