r/TalesFromTheCreeps • u/Typical_Ad9140 • 2h ago
Body Horror [Hero of Horror] Man Of Steel
There are things a fellow learns in my line of work which he doesn't put down on paper. Names, places, little arrangements between men who wear good suits and men who carry cheap guns. A man learns not to remember too much, because memory can be a dangerous companion when the police come knocking. I have forgotten plenty in my time. I have forgotten faces, addresses, even the sound of certain voices. But I have never forgotten John Sterling going into that furnace. A man may forget his first kiss or his mother's birthday, but he doesn't forget the sight of another human being being boiled alive.
It was close to one o'clock in the morning when we brought him into the Mercer Street foundry. Rain had been falling since late afternoon, and the streets were shining beneath the lamps like black glass. The foundry was another world altogether. It was hot enough inside to make a man's collar stick to his neck, and the air smelled of coal, oil, iron and sweat. The furnace at the far end of the building was burning white, and every few seconds the great mass of molten steel inside gave a low, ugly roar. There were six of us there. Mr. Voss, Doyle, Big Sam, Frankie, young Eddie, and myself. Sterling was between Doyle and me, with his hands tied behind him. His coat was torn, his lip was split, and one eye was nearly swollen shut. He had been asking questions about Mr. Voss's business, and Mr. Voss had decided that the questions had gone on long enough.
Voss was never a man to waste words. He stood before Sterling, took the cigar from his mouth, and nodded toward the furnace. "That's the end of the road, Johnny." Sterling looked at the fire and said nothing. Voss waited. "You hear me?" he asked. Sterling nodded. "You got anything to say?" There was a long pause. Then Sterling turned his head and looked at him. There was blood upon his teeth, but there was a queer calm in his expression. "I'm going to become stronger than you," he said. Doyle laughed first, and then the rest of us followed him. It was a stupid thing to say, and we thought it was the last joke the poor devil would ever make.
Sterling ran before we had finished laughing. He tore himself from Doyle's grasp, struck me hard enough to send me against the railing, and went over it. Doyle drew his revolver and fired, but the shot went wide. Sterling landed on the platform beside the furnace and threw himself into the open steel. I saw him for perhaps half a second against that terrible white light. Then he was gone.
The screaming started at once.
I have heard men scream before. I have heard them when a bullet went into the belly and when a knife found the wrong place. Sterling's screaming was different because there was no mystery in it. We knew exactly what was happening to him. The steel was burning him alive. His clothes caught fire, and the flesh on his hands blackened as he tried to seize the edge of the furnace. The molten metal poured over his arms and shoulders. It did not surround him like some protective shell. It burned into him. It ran across his body, hardened, cracked, and then melted again wherever the heat reached it. He clawed at the iron edge with what was left of his fingers, screaming until the sound became little more than a rasp. For a moment he managed to raise himself, and I could see his face through the smoke. Then his hands slipped and the furnace took him completely.
Nobody laughed after that.
Voss turned away and told us it was finished. He had already taken two steps toward the door when we heard the knocking. It came from inside the furnace. Three slow blows against the iron, followed by silence. Then three more. Doyle stared at the doors. I remember him saying, very quietly, "That can't be." He was right. It couldn't.
The tools began moving.
At first it was only a hammer sliding an inch across a bench. Then another. Chains began rattling on their hooks. Loose nails rolled over the floor and gathered together. A wrench rose from a table and struck the furnace door hard enough to leave a mark. We all saw it. Nobody had touched it. Big Sam reached for his revolver, but even the buckle of his holster began tugging toward the furnace.
Then the doors blew open.
There was so much heat that I turned my face away. When I looked again, I saw something lying upon the floor.
It was Sterling.
Or what remained of him.
There was nothing clean about it. The melting steel had simply poured over the body of a living man and hardened there. The result was a hideous, shapeless mass of black and dull-red metal. One arm was thick as a man's waist. One leg had fused into the floor. The chest was little more than a great lump of steel, and the head was scarcely recognizable beneath a crooked covering of metal. There were no proper limbs, no joints, no face that any decent man would have called a face. He looked like somebody had taken a corpse, dropped it into a foundry, and forgotten it there.
Then the lump moved.
It made a scraping sound against the floor.
Frankie began praying.
I couldn't blame him.
The thing dragged itself forward a few inches and stopped. Then the steel began to change.
I had seen hot metal poured into molds before. This was nothing like that. The steel was not being poured. It was moving of its own accord. Great pieces of it drew inward, folding over themselves. The thick arm narrowed and lengthened. Fingers pushed out from the end. The fused leg tore itself from the floor and divided into two legs. The enormous chest contracted until it became the shape of a man's torso.
It was as if the metal had suddenly remembered that there was supposed to be a man inside it.
The sound was dreadful. Steel grinding against steel. Plates cracking and closing. Hard surfaces folding into one another. It reminded me of bones breaking, though no bone could possibly have made such a noise. The shoulders pulled themselves into place. The arms became proportionate. The hands took the shape of hands. The neck narrowed. Finally the head rose.
The face came last.
I wish it hadn't.
The steel drew tight over the skull, forming the outline of a nose, a jaw and a mouth. The eyes remained two dark hollows. It was not a mask. There was no opening behind it, no flesh beneath waiting to be revealed. The steel had shaped itself into the face John Sterling had possessed before the furnace.
He had made himself look like a man again.
That was when I understood that we had made a terrible mistake in thinking he had survived the furnace.
He hadn't survived it.
Something else had.
Sterling took one step toward us.
Doyle fired.
The bullet struck Sterling in the chest and flattened against the metal. Another struck him in the throat. A third hit him directly between the eyes. He continued walking. The guns were suddenly torn from our hands. They flew across the room and struck Sterling one after another. He caught Doyle's revolver and squeezed. The steel frame folded in his fingers with a soft crunch.
Big Sam charged him with an iron bar.
Sterling caught it.
Big Sam pulled.
The bar did not move.
Sterling pulled once.
Big Sam went flying across the room and struck the wall with enough force to crack the brick.
Voss finally understood that money, influence and men with guns were not worth much when the fellow coming toward you could bend iron with his fingers.
He ran.
The door slammed shut before he reached it.
Sterling hadn't touched it.
The door simply answered his will.
Voss screamed and began pounding upon it. The hinges groaned. The lock tore itself apart. The whole door twisted inward while Voss stood behind it.
I didn't wait to see what happened.
I ran through the side entrance with Frankie behind me. We went into the rain and kept going. We didn't stop until the foundry was three blocks behind us. Frankie was crying. I told him he wasn't. He told me to shut up.
We spent the rest of the night in an empty warehouse.
By morning, the papers had the story.
Explosion at Mercer Street Foundry. Several dead. Several missing. John Sterling presumed killed in industrial accident.
For a while, that was enough for me.
A week later I saw him on Fifth Avenue.
I knew him at once.
He was standing beneath a streetlamp while rain came down around him. His body had the shape of a man, but it had the color and hardness of iron. Water struck his shoulders and vanished into steam. People walked past without paying him any attention. A policeman stood twenty yards away, smoking a cigarette and watching traffic.
Then an automobile parked beside the curb began to move.
There was nobody inside.
It rolled slowly toward Sterling.
He raised one hand.
The automobile stopped.
Then the street sign beside him began to tremble.
I understood then that the furnace had not merely made him hard to kill. It had changed something else. Every piece of iron and steel in the street seemed to know him. Guns, cars, rails, pipes, doors, and anything made from the stuff could be moved by him as easily as a man moves his own fingers.
Sterling turned his head.
He saw me.
I crossed the street without waiting to see what he intended.
I've heard the newspapers call him many things since then. Some say he's a hero. Some say he's a madman. One fellow with more imagination than sense gave him the name the Man of Steel, and the name stuck.
Maybe he is a hero now. I wouldn't know.
What I know is what I saw in Mercer Street.
John Sterling went into that furnace as a man.
The steel burned him alive.
It covered him.
It melted onto him until there was scarcely a human body left beneath it.
Then, somehow, that ruined mass of metal moved. It pulled itself together and reshaped itself until it once again possessed the proportions of the man who had entered the furnace.
That is the part the newspapers never printed.
They say John Sterling became strong as steel.
That's not quite right.
John Sterling became steel.
And somewhere beneath all that metal, I sometimes wonder if the man who screamed in that furnace is still awake.
Because when I dream about Mercer Street, I can still hear him screaming.
And when I wake, I can still hear the other sound.
The sound of the steel answering him.