treating addictions with psychotropic
drugs has not been encouraging. Like al recovery techniques, we found that it only works if the subject wants it to. But like al addictions there's a reward attached to it. Drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual
addiction, compulsive shopping or
gambling, and serial homicide. In the
addictive personality, these behaviors
give them a high that's almost
irreplaceable. They do it because it feels good. In many cases it's the only thing in their lives that feels good to them. We would in effect be asking them to give up that feeling of euphoria for a life of
relative boredom. They may not want to
do that, no matter how many drugs you
pump them ful of."
Professor Locke thanked the doctor and
hung up. He sat in the dark for hours
wondering what to do. Then he sat down
at the computer and began trying to find out al he could about Joseph Miles.
He began by logging on to the university database and searching through his
school records. He wasn't sure exactly
what he was looking for, but if Joseph
believed that he was afflicted with this disease then it fol owed that there must have been a point at which he would
have contracted it, meaning he himself
must have been victimized by a serial
kil er.
It didn't take the professor long to locate the anomaly he was searching for. It was in his elementary school records. Back
in fifth grade, Joseph Miles had been
excused from school for three months
due to ". . . severe medical and
emotional trauma ..." The professor then went to the website for the local
newspaper, the Seattle Ledger, to check for any articles that might coincide with that date. He found the connection in a sensational headline that electrified the hairs on his neck.
TEN YEAR OLD BOY SURVIVES
CHILD MURDERER!
Last month, a ten-year-old boy, whose
identity is being protected due to his
age, was discovered bleeding badly
from several stab wounds, apparently
the victim of a violent sexual assault. Police now have a man in custody that
they say matches the description the
young boy gave to the police.
Seventeen-year-old Damon Trent was
arrested yesterday on suspicion of the
rape and murder of six other young boys in the Seattle, Washington area. When
the police entered Trent's home to
execute a search warrant the remains of three of the missing boys were found in his basement in what witnesses
described as "vats of blood." Further investigation uncovered several
containers fil ed with blood as wel as a bottle in which blood had been
combined with red wine apparently to
improve the taste.
It is now believed that the boy who was attacked last month may be the only
surviving victim of this vicious child kil er. In a press conference fol owing the
arrest of Damon Trent, Detective Wayne
Wil iams stated that the ten-year-old boy was ". . . most likely the kil er's first victim. His savagery increased with each subsequent attack." When asked about reports that Trent claimed to be a
vampire who gained power by drinking
his victim's souls through their blood the detective declined to comment.
The professor inhaled deeply as he read further reports of Damon Trent's
arraignment and trial and final y his
sentence to a hospital for the criminal y insane in Tacoma, Washington. If Joseph real y believed that there was some
correlation between this attack and his own dementia, then he might be going
back to Washington to confront Trent.
"They got to you too, huh?" Professor Douglas interrupted, standing in the
doorway and smoking his pipe in a
deliberately professorial pose. Locke
winced as if struck and jerked back in
his chair.
"Jesus, man! You scared the shit out of me!"
"Sorry. Those detectives visited you too, I see."
"Yeah."
"They're pretty good at laying the guilt on." Douglas swaggered into the room, stil puffing on his pipe. "So what did you find?"
"It looks like Joseph survived an attack by a serial kil er. You know about his
theory that serial kil ers are the result of a transmittable disease?"
"Yeah. He was asking me about how
vampires and werewolves transmit their
curse and how to cure it. Oh my God! I
told him the only way to cure the
vampire's curse was to kil the head
vampire."
"That's about what I figured he was up to." Locke turned his computer screen toward Professor Douglas as a new
headline flashed on the screen:
Vampire Killer Found Not Guilty by
Reason Of Insanity
"He's going to kil the head vampire."
Thirty-four
Joseph rented a room in an extendedstay motel that had monthly and weekly rates, three miles from the state hospital. Alicia waited in the van, chained to the steering wheel as he walked into the
office to pay the deposit and get the
keys. They had scouted the
neighborhood for the perfect place.
Joseph parked across the street and
watched the flow of traffic in and out of the motel before picking a secluded
room on the first floor of the dilapidated two-story structure for its privacy and isolation. It was far from the office at the end of the parking lot near the trash
Dumpsters. A row of overgrown shrubs
covered the front, blocking the view from the street. It was perfect.
"Yeah, it's not the Four Seasons but you'l have al the privacy you could want. None of your neighbors are terribly interested in having the cops come in here, and
neither am I. Just don't be cookin' meth or makin' any other kind of drugs in there and don't bring any kids in your room.
We don't need that kind of trouble. The hookers are bad enough."
Joe gave the desk clerk his last three
hundred dol ars to rent the room for the week; then he went back to the van to
secure Alicia in her new home.
"We're here."
Alicia looked back at him with wide eyes fil ed with that familiar confusion of lust and fear. Her long curly tresses lay limp and damp with perspiration and road
grime, pasted to her scalp like a bad
toupee. She flinched when Joe reached
over to lift her from the van.
"How can you stil not trust me? After al we've shared together?"
He was right. There was no need to kil
her now that she was an accomplice.
Her teeth marks and saliva would be
found on Frank's corpse along with
Joseph's. In the eyes of the law she
would be just as guilty as he. Stil , that wouldn't stop him from kil ing her just to assuage his psychotic hunger.
She al owed him to toss a blanket over
her and carry her to the door of the motel room, feeling deliciously vulnerable in his massive, sinuous arms. Part of her
wanted to cry out for help but she was
stil confused about her own involvement in Frank's death and her feelings for the superpredator. Before she could make
up her mind as to whether or not to raise the alarm, the door closed behind her
with a resounding slam.
"Do you want me to bring you something to eat?" Joe asked as he tied her to the cheap motel bed.
"Nothing that screams and fights back."
&
nbsp; "How about if I kil it first?" Alicia blanched and shuddered, visibly
appal ed.
"That was just a joke."
"Was it?"
"Of course it was, but after the virus has worked deeper inside you, you won't find the prospect of live meat quite so
distasteful."
"It's not going to work deeper because you're going to find the cure, right? You have to now. If there's a virus inside of me then I'l turn into a monster too. You don't want that, do you? I mean, if you continue like this, eventual y you'l be caught. And no matter how good it feels to feed that hunger it'l feel a hundred times worse to be locked away where
it's just going to gnaw at you forever with no way to feed it. That's what prison wil be like when they catch you. Is that what you want? Is that want you want for me?" Her eyes were wide and sad.
Joe wilted beneath her gaze. His
massive shoulders slumped forward and
his head dropped toward his chest in
surrender. "No, of course not. I love you and you're right. I've got to end this now." Joe stood up and walked into the
bathroom. He came back with a towel,
which he wadded up and crammed into
her mouth to gag her. She closed her
eyes and tried not to think about the
dingy rag as it was forced between her
lips.
"I'm going to see Damon."
He turned and walked out of the room,
leaving Alicia alone with her thoughts
and fears.
Alicia fought back tears as she heard
the door slam and Joe's footsteps strike the asphalt. She was alone again,
chained to a bed in a strange room, in a strange town, with no one to count on but herself and the man who'd kidnapped
her.
Her mind kept trying to go back to her
youth, to the taste of her father's semen on her tongue. She fought the memory
away only to have it replaced with the
image of the librarian enjoying
cunnilingus before being cannibalized by Joe and final y the smel of Frank's slowroasted corpse and the succulent taste of his hickory-smoked genitals as they
melted in her mouth and slid luxuriously down into her bel y. She shook her head and screamed into the rag until the
image fled and she was back in the
room.
In order to keep her mind in the present, Alicia began investigating her
surroundings as best she could while stil tied to the bed. She listened to the
sounds of life teeming al around her
from the other grimy little apartments that adjoined her own tacky pisscolored
prison.
Next door she heard a persistent
knocking as someone tried desperately
to awaken her sleeping neighbor.
Through the adjoining wal Alicia heard the door open, a few mumbled
greetings, then silence. Minutes after the man had entered there began a chorus
of grunts and moans and the bang and
squeak of the overused bed. It was over almost as soon as it began.
Moments later the neighbor's door
opened again and the same footsteps
stalked off across the parking lot,
fol owed soon by the sound of tears and curses. This would be repeated three
more times before the day was ful y
born.
Trying to drown out the sounds from the room next door, Alicia stared up at the ceiling to watch a cockroach scamper
across what must have been an
immense distance for something so
smal , only to find itself ensnared in a dusty cobweb in the corner above her
bed. Seconds later a miniscule spider, a third of the size of the cockroach,
crawled out across the web and began
to further entangle its larger prey in a silken cocoon. Soon the spider had
latched onto the cockroach, sucking it
dry. Life was rough al over. Alicia turned away.
She began counting the water and
cigarette stains yel owing the antique
white wal s. She imagined she could see faces screaming out from the various
blotches and streaks. Her stomach
growled, reminding her of her last meal and almost causing her to regurgitate.
She felt the bile scald her throat as she swal owed hard to keep Frank's remains
down. She went back to staring at the
wal s, trying not to think.
This room was a wreck. It wore its
history like a battered old soldier, each sin and vice leaving another scar on its aging facade. Alicia could see every
poorly textured drywal patch where
someone had shoved their fist or
someone else's head through the
Sheetrock. She could see where some
disinterested handyman had made a
cursory attempt at painting over blood
splatter. The brownish red streaks had
resurfaced through the paint as if
something were buried within the wal
and stil bleeding. The bul et holes that were simply spackled and repainted.
As little care as had been taken in
repairing the dump, even less had been
taken in its original construction. She could count each and every stud in the
wal where they were bowed or
misaligned. The ceiling's lid line dove as much as two inches on one side making
the room appear to be leaning. The
caulking was uneven and the lead-based
paint was peeling, curling up and flaking away like a bad sunburn.
Alicia closed her eyes and tried to sleep while the neighbor's bed renewed its
squeak and bump, headboard gouging
against the wal in rhythm with the
sounds of ecstasy and despair. She
heard someone cry out with a faked
orgasm that sounded to her like a wail of torment. Then the door slammed again
and Alicia drifted off, listening to her neighbor's anguished, wracking sobs.
T irty-five
A dark blanket of clouds smothered the
sky. Fat droplets of rain beat a steady pulse on the roof of the van as the
heavens bled out into the city, drowning the citizenry like rats in a flooding
basement. The rain was the second
thing about his childhood Joe was able
to recal with any clarity. It seemed that it had rained every day of his life right up until he'd left Washington. Now he'd
brought the rain back with him.
Work boots, sneakers, patent leather
wingtips, pumps, rubber boots, and
myriad other shoes of every description splashed through the murky puddles as
splashed through the murky puddles as
the last of the nine-to-fivers hurried off to work, now more than half an hour late.
Everyone in this town seemed to belong
here. There were no tourists. The people blended right in with the architecture, the food, and the drab, depressing weather. They were decorative accents added to
give the place more flavor.
Joe navigated silently through the
somber streets, his thoughts as chaotic as the weather as he looked from face to face, reading their stories in wrinkles and worry lines. Whenever their eyes
landed on him he turned away, afraid that they would read the horror story etched into his own features.
Joe drove west on Bridgeport Way to
Steilacoom Boulevard and turned left.
Less than ten minutes later he pul ed up at Fort Steilacoom, where the state
mental hospital sat.
It was an impressive complex of red
&nb
sp; brick buildings, imposing edifices of
concrete and steel, four stories high, with windows barred in wrought iron. It was a prison laid out on a sprawling campus
dotted with tal evergreen trees and lush lawns. The buildings were old, though,
and a hospital this size was bound to
have major security leaks. Joe was
already searching for them as he pul ed up into the parking lot in front of the main building. The windows were al barred,
however, and police cars came and went
fairly regularly. Getting Trent out would be tricky.
As expected, Joe passed the cliched
drooling patients lounging on lawn
furniture and sipping iced tea, their eyes fixed in a vacant stare. Nurses attended to them with pity and casual disdain, as if they were unaware of the crimes most of them had committed in order to be put there, and the danger they stil
represented. Even through their vacuous expressions, Joe could sense the
hunger stil burning inside them only
slightly diminished by the antipsychotics and depressants the nurses were
dutiful y pumping into them. Stil , armed prison guards stood close by, just in
case one of the inmates had forgotten to take his meds and decided to get a little frisky. Joe continued across the lawn and up to the front of the main building.
Joe wasn't sure exactly what he was
going to say in order to gain admittance into the hospital. He was hoping they
wouldn't recognize his name as one of
Damon Trent's victims. He was also
hoping that Trent's own perverse
curiosity would make him eager enough
to see his first victim al grown up to go along with whatever lie he came up with. The withered old crone who sat behind
the reception desk smiled up at Joe with a mouthful of pearl white dentures as he stepped cautiously into the lobby.
Instinctively his eyes ravaged her,
searching for an edible morsel on her
hard-worn body, but the meat that
sagged from her brittle skeleton had
long ago withered and spoiled. She was
in no danger of winding up on his menu. Not when there were so many more
scrumptious delicacies wandering every
street corner and darkened corridor.
"May I help you, young man?"
"I'm here to visit one of your patients."
"What ward is he in?"
"Uh, I'm not sure. He was pretty violent at one time. They might have him in