"Got to hand it to him. The old guy's got a natural talent," the base op said, bewildered.
Past the runway lights they watched Chiun speed toward a high drift. He skimmed the top of it with barely a mark and sailed skyward, clearing a high pine. He was cackling exultantly.
"I don't think you have to worry about him," Remo said.
Chapter Eleven
Seymour Burdich set down the crowbar and moved his fingers to get some feeling back into them. He stood knee-deep in snow at the locked iron gate to Shangri-la. Through the swirling snowstorm he could barely make out the dark outline of the mansion.
They were in there, ail the Beautiful People who made the world go round, only they weren't beautiful now. They were screaming and shivering in helpless terror over the thought that their guru, Dr. Foxx, had abandoned them. Like children, Burdich thought, blowing on his hands. He'd managed, in the hour or so that he'd been outside, to pry open two of the bars, nearly wide enough to squeeze through. He picked up the crowbar and went to work again.
He was going to be a hero for this. The thought warmed him a hundred times more than the old kerosene lamp that glowed dully beside the ironwork of the gate. Heroes were immediately accepted with that group. Look at Remo. He wasn't even a member, and they'd let him stay on. Because he was a hero.
God knew he was the only one in that crowd, although, he had to admit, Posie Ponselle was okay. She'd at least kept her wits about her. Posie pulled out
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blankets and organized a team to keep the fireplaces going and brewed coffee over the open fire in the banquet hall and played the piano. Also, she'd talked the group into changing out of those ridiculous togas they were wearing and into party clothes. That was just !ike Posie, turning a nightmare into a party.
She was okay. Burdich would do a special writeup on her in the Celebrity Scoop when he got back to New York. But the rest of them were completely out of it, screaming their heads off about the end of the world and dying of old age and all kinds of crazy nonsense. A bunch of babies, that's what they were. Some Beautiful People. Ai! the guts of a playground full of kin-dergartners.
And to think that he'd agonized for twenty years about not having the scratch to join them at their precious Shangri-la. What a crock. When it came right down to it, no one had even volunteered to help him pry open the gate. They'd all said they were too old.
He'd laughed secretly to himself at that one. Here were the creme de la creme, the chosen few who, like Coleridge's dreamer in the poem Foxx read at the ceremony, had entered the magic circle of eternal youth. Here were people who had drunk the milk of Paradise every month since before the Flood, practically, until every one of them looked twenty years younger than he did, and they were all moaning that they were too old. Crybabies.
The weird thing was, when Burdich looked at them in the firelight before he left the house, they did, look old. It was scary. Even Posie Ponselle, easily one of the great beauties of all time, was starting to look haggard. There was something around her eyes and mouth. It wasn't right there on the surface-she was
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still a knockout-but it seemed to lie just beneath her skin, something that was trying to come through, something . . . decayed.
Burdich shook his head to clear it. It was just his imagination. Posie was tired, that was all. That went for all of them. Tired and hysterical. And it went triple for Burdich. He was half frozen already, and he hadn't even made it out of the gate yet.
But it would be worth it. Once he carne back with the cops, all the rich nobs at Shangri-la would give him a hero's welcome. He wouldn't be-what did Remo call him?-a mascot. He wouldn't be their mascot anymore, tolerated at their highbrow parties because he was mildly helpful to them. No more. After he saved their rich butts, they would take him into their hearts without reservation. He would be one of them. He would belong.
Still, at the moment, Burdich's forthcoming triumph seemed empty. Shangri-la, for all its illustrious clients, was a weird place, and he'd come out into the cold as much to get away from it as to perform his heroic act. He wanted to help them, yes. He wanted to be their savior, their champion. But mostly he wanted to get as far away from that dark house full of screaming half-ghosts as he could.
With one last, back-wrenching tug that pulled his shirt and his undershirt out of his pants so that his back was exposed to the stinging waves of snow, the bars squeaked open the last centimeter or so necessary to let him out. He pressed himself through the bars, feeling as if he were going through a spaghetti machine, grateful that he hadn't put on much weight through the years. Keeping his boyish figure had been mostly a function of being stone broke most of
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the time, but it had finally been of some use. He pulled the flickering kerosene lamp out after him and started the long hike toward . . .
Toward what? He hadn't seen so much as a bird-house on the way out. But there had to be someplace. This was Pennsylvania, not the Himalayas. Someone had to live around here.
He trudged off through the trackless, snow-covered road, squinting to see five feet in front of him. The decision to leave Shangri-la had been the right one, he knew. He could feel it. Just outside the gates the air seemed sweeter, somehow, more alive. Inside, with the guests at the mansion, it hadn't smelted good. There was something stale and putrid there.
Suddenly the image of Posie Ponselle's face came to him again. Something decayed, just below the surface. ... He felt ashamed for thinking about her that way. Posie was a good egg, the best of the lot. Still there was something about her that reminded Burdieh of the stink of a beggar.
Then, with swift, blinding clarity, Burdieh knew what it was in that house that he had feared so much that he was willing to walk all night in a raging blizzard to escape. It was death. He knew it as surely as he knew it was snowing. When those wild-eyed nobs in there were screaming about dying, they weren't just whistling Dixie. Death crouched in that house like a dog waiting for scraps.
He walked for what he guessed was a half-hour or more, although it could have been longer or no more than a few minutes. He couldn't tell. His brain had numbed along with his fingers and toes and the ice cube on his face that had once been his nose. Posie's face (just below the surface) kept occurring to him
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(death crouched in the corners, stinking like a beggar), but he tried to blot that out of his mind and concentrate on his steps, one foot in front of the other.
His eyelashes were frozen into sparkling spikes. They gave off brilliant flashes whenever he blinked, and that was a nice diversion. One foot in front of the other. His steps were growing shorter, since his legs had numbed with the cold. He had long since stopped rubbing his hands together to introduce some feeling into them. The last time he'd tried that, over the kerosene lamp, he'd burned off a patch of skin the size of a half-dollar on the backs of his hands, before the lamp had flickered and then gone out-and he hadn't even felt it.
(Death crouched.)
And his eyelashes! Jesus, they must weigh a ton. So hard to raise them more than a slot. ... A slit, a slot, a happy thought. . . . His brain was dancing. The Celebrity Scoop was on the presses, banging away to tell the world about Jackie O's new man and "LIZA'S NERVOUS BREAKDOWN," as the headline would read, only to clear itself in the text, by saying she wasn't suffering any such thing, but by then Liza's fans will have already bought the Scoop, so it didn't matter. The Celebrity Scoop was running, and the front pages were shuffling out into the stacker, and all the stars were on it, the Beautiful People, and his picture was there, too, big as life. SEYMOUR BURDICH, BEAUTIFUL AT LAST.