Autumn in the Abyss

by John Claude Smith

  His primary thought was that, despite the spot-on similarities, he could not let it reach a similar finality. This time there would be no questions asked, no chance for this bleak acolyte to weave his heinous philosophy into Vera’s now broken mind. He would unload the whole magazine into the madman and walk away. Though he’d been working with the FBI once the copycat crimes had commenced, and he was contacted by this unoriginal yet still quite lethal perpetrator for the finale, he needed no interference.

  Now… now he had to be alone to deal with this as he knew he must. He saw no other way, having spent the last three months on a condensed, accelerated reliving of the fourteen-year case that defined his reputation, yet tainted his life thereafter.

  The case of Corbin Andrew Krell: Krell the Destroyer, Krell the Creator.

  But Krell was incarcerated, buried deep in The Pit out at Stonewall, the maximum security prison, “on the border of Nevada and Hell.” Vera had even made a trip there a month ago to verify that Krell still occupied his cell within those dark, dispiriting walls. As if the loss of hope mattered to Krell. Phone calls to the warden were not enough. He had to go there, had to see Krell in the flesh. Not a deed taken lightly.

  Krell lived in his head constantly, even now. Fifteen months after his imprisonment, his philosophy and the video clips were a roll-call of torments Vera could never wash away. Only Vera’s own death would silence the screams, the victims’ surrenders, and Krell’s soothing, soul-annihilating words.

  When Vera had become a detective at twenty-seven, his motivation and spirit had been strong. He’d believed in justice, in right and wrong. Black and white. Rather patented and predictable and sounding like the spiel from some cigar chewing TV detective, yet he believed it to his core. He knew and understood there would be many sullied signposts along the way, showing him scenes and situations that measured darkness in blood and power, in minds gone to rot and obsessions mired in immorality. His resolve was stalwart. Even as he was put on the public map with his capture of Jimmy Nice, “The Bad Boy Murderer,” and the messy finale to that one, his resolve remained solid.

  Yet somehow— the job itself; the attrition of objectives; the heart of humanity gone black as a starless night— his stalwart resolve finally fractured, splintered, turned from oak to ash.

  Humans catered to the whim of madness with an ease that battered him down, over and over again.

  Krell, though, was pure evil, a step beyond madness. He was the reason Vera had lost his way. Over the years, after Krell had initiated his hellish objectives, there was nothing else but Krell.

  He remembered Krell’s words from clip number eight of twenty, victim number thirteen— Diana Bradley; Congresswoman Bradley from Oregon, a strong woman— as spoken in his reverberant monotone, as if somehow massaging words out of a steel plate.

  “Evil is malevolent, feeding on depravity, humiliation, and perversion inspired by the corruption of self and soul. Evil dwells in the mental sewers that no man dare fully explore. Until me. Krell the Destroyer, Krell the Creator.”

  Vera’s stomach roiled when he remembered what followed.

  “Tell Detective Vera who you are.” The words insinuated so much serene potency. They demanded the right response from Bradley. After a shockingly swift mental breakdown the camera focused on her make-up smeared countenance. Fiery pupils floated amidst puddles of deep blue eye shadow. Stray lines dripped off the edges of her cheekbones, cultivating an uneven, cubist digression worthy of Picasso. A bruise glowed neon red along her left cheek. Her bottom lip was split, smudged with blood, yet she smiled.

  “Say your name…,” Krell said, the voice of the snake, the hiss as language, as influence.

  Bradley’s smile widened, ugly as a dropped watermelon as she said, “I am Honeyfuck.”

  Krell slapped her, a lightning strike from the right of the screen. The bruise flared, but the look on her face indicated she knew— she knew— it was deserved.

  “Jesus,” Vera’s partner, Derek Sommers said, his voice smoldering with fury.

  Vera watched in silence.

  “Tell them who you are, Honeyfuck.” The prompt from Krell’s lips implied a depth of perversity Vera had never experienced, even with all he’d encountered with the job.

  Bradley’s eyes searched the room, settling on a point just beneath the camera. She started to salivate.

  “I am…,” she said.

  A grunt of disapproval from Krell.

  “I am Honeyfuck,” she said— in his voice, in Krell’s voice— a dark groan of defeat meshed with desire. “I am Honeyfuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” she said, pleaded, insisted, “This is who I am!”

  Sommers turned from the screen in the small apartment Vera never called home anymore; it was only where he laid his weary head and empty heart. It hadn’t been home since his wife, Marina, had left—

  —“You’re barely here when you’re here, Bobby,” Marina said, ebony eyes for the man he used to be to somehow materialize again, sweep her off her feet and take her into his arms, his strength her home, their inhibitions not just discarded but never a part of the equation. Their passions unbound.

  “It’s the job.” A feeble excuse, the main excuse now, not even feigning the battle within to find other reasons to satisfy her. No longer willing to shovel shit as lies, the pungent stench of the truth was obvious enough.

  “No, it’s not just the job. You used to at least try. You would find precious moments with me. I lived for those precious moments. But it’s been so long, Bobby, honey,” she said, tears welling, her hand on his bicep. “Ever since Krell…”

  Vera averted his preoccupied gaze from her, not wanting her to see the black rage that blossomed within.

  “My heart wants to explode with the love I have for you, you know? .”

  “Don’t go.” It was all he could muster.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to, but I must. I can’t live like this. I can’t stand to see you like you are now. The man I love buried in a hell he may never climb out of. I love you so much, Bobby. So much.”

  Vera watched Marina pick up her suitcase; she’d be back for the rest of her stuff later, when he was out, which was most of the time. Her long black hair glimmered in the uncertain twilight. He ached to run his fingers through it, to pull her close and taste her lips, her fire. She was the best part of him, his beacon through it all, the emotional tether he needed to balance the vagaries of the job, until Krell. Krell, a diseased thought, one he feared was a life sentence. He felt his heart would explode from anguish. He needed to say something, to stop this, but he knew there was nothing he could do or say that would hold any weight.

  She turned to him, her softness a wish he might never envelop again. “Call me if…” Her voice wavered, yet she started again: “Call me when you decide to be human again. I can’t guarantee anything, but…” She set the suitcase down and rapidly crossed the hardwood floor to him, the quickened pace of her footsteps matching the beat of his heart. She leaned up, slim fingers to his salt and pepper whiskered cheek, and kissed him. It was a precious moment, something to cherish. He inhaled the smell of her: the crisp, lively spices that always danced off her fingertips and something not defined by lotions or perfumes, but distinctly her. Marina Vera nee Ojeda, a fervor ignited by the melding of the old soul animal within her and the firecracker steam and sensuality of the woman standing tall before him. She carried such strength, such wonder. What had he allowed to happen? Her aroma was a heady concoction that even now awakened every sense, suggested so many possibilities, destinations unknown taken without hesitation… yet they were not alone in his thoughts; never alone anymore. The bouquet was swift to fade as she hurriedly paced toward the suitcase and her exit, not looking back. She closed the door with a click that felt like a vacuum sucking the life out of him, if there was anything left to take.

  The hours into days into months since she left— almost two years now— were dotted with an occasional call from her, checking in, as if h
oping to hear her Bobby again. Neither one of them filed for divorce, their marriage stuck in limbo. Missing her was a different type of torture. Often he would punch up her name on his cell and stare at it, unable to dial her number afraid of being sidetracked by the job that had overtaken his life; the job and, hence, Krell. He would set the phone on the table at the ready until the battery ran out, while in his head, all he heard was Krell’s satisfied laughter—

  —“I’m going to kill that bastard,” Sommers said, striding with urgency toward the door. “Put a bullet in his head and fucking kill him.”

  “No, Derek. We won’t sink to what he is. We won’t…” But the words died as Vera watched Bradley move toward the camera, lowering herself as she did, a shaking movement rising up from below the screen. Krell stroked his engorged penis as Bradley took the scarred, swollen head into her mouth. Krell spit out the word, “No,” and she reluctantly disengaged, her mouth still slack, her eyes mesmerized as Krell said, “Tell them again who you are.” No hesitation from Bradley. Nothing but Krell’s voice from her throat and Krell ejaculating in her face, ropes of semen slashing at her flesh— singeing her flesh. She seemed as though she wanted it, needed it. She repeated her name, her new name, over and over as it went on and on and gruesomely on.

  Vera pulled his mind from the deep well of dread that Krell imbued into his every thought. He checked and rechecked the magazine in his Glock 21— a sleight of hand theft from evidence storage at the Oakland Police Department two weeks previous — sliding it in and out with practiced precision, though he’d only ever fired a gun three times outside of shooting ranges over the twenty-two years he’d been a detective.

  Krell racked up a total of twenty-five victims over the span of fourteen years. He had murdered his first six victims, with his bare hands— strangling, pummeling— before adding rape to his repertoire, murdering and raping the next six victims. The following eight had been rapes, as the murders had ceased. There had been escalating degrees of mutilation, though. First from Krell, then, with the last three rape victims, by their own hands. These were captured on the video clips. The final five victims were not raped. Krell’s evolving repertoire of horrors moved deeper into mutilation, specifically self-mutilation, in ways that stepped out of what Vera or Sommers or any of the FBI agents had ever imagined possible. He barely touched his victims beyond abduction, but it was his wishes they fulfilled.

  The video clips started with victim number six. The thirteenth victim, the eighth video clip— Diana Bradley— was the first victim to live, if living was what one would call what followed for her.

  Upon barging through the door to an apartment in the center of the city— a vacant though quite expensive rental— she had been found furiously masturbating in the bathroom, covered in her own filth as well as Krell’s; even her hair was clotted with excrement. Sommers approached her as she moaned and cackled, calling her, “Congresswoman Bradley,” which triggered her spitfire response as she slashed at him, fingers curled into claws, “I am Honeyfuck, you fuck. Honeyfuck, fuck, fuck you.” She was feral, an animal guarding its kill: her soul… extinguished. Vera pulled Sommers away from her, away from the being who used to be Diana Bradley. Bradley was not even a memory within this new being’s head. She was taken to an institution where, with no signs of change to this day, they medicate her just to make sure she does not rub her clitoris raw, her nipples and anus as well.

  Sommers had eaten lead three months after Krell’s capture as a means of escaping what he and Vera had experienced: touching base with true evil. Not some cut-and-paste Hollywood bastardization of evil. Not some worthy but failing fictional attempt at understanding true evil. Not some monster from the real world universally agreed upon as the embodiment of evil. No, true evil eradicated all previous conceptions of what it was. With Krell, it had moved beyond evil, though— this was the thing that Vera had gleaned over the years. Krell had evolved, more so, devolved, as it might be. Further evidence of Krell’s transformation, no matter how unhinged the ambition seemed to Vera, was expressed in their recent, oblique meeting at The Pit—

  —“Evil should not be, Detective Vera. Truly never can be. But in defining it as such, an inherent human bond with negativity confirms its very existence. Its mere acknowledgement cancels its credibility. Evil is nothing— the lack of anything of substance— made concrete as a balance to everything else. Evil is not, yet it is a part of each human, because humans welcome its participation in their lives. They speak of it in anger or disgust, fear or even wonder— the most appropriate response— giving it a stronger foundation with every passing thought it distorts. Though within their pliable minds, they welcome it with the glee of the ignorant, nurturing the unthinkable, thinking the unimaginable, imagining the most horrid, abysmal designs, embellishing them with an insidious veracity until evil is as substantial a reality as their next breath. I strive for something else, beyond evil’s claustrophobic clutches. I strive to transcend evil by becoming pure nothing. I strive as my followers strived.” He paused, his ideology a cancer, spreading… “I am, yet I strive to not be. Do you understand, comrade?” His tone suggested fellowship, disciples of the same obscene religion. Vera did not believe evil and madness required mutual participation, yet with the latest developments from Krell in The Pit, he was not sure anymore. Because this latest stage moved beyond logic he could fathom. Krell hadn’t even touched on the questions of his copycat follower, besides a curt, “My footsteps are deep. Many shall follow my path.”

  The room adjacent to the cell had reeked of a dense uncleanliness, a blackened suet of filth that coated walls and crawled as worms from Krell’s gasping pores; part of a transformation only his company, his existence, could inspire. Krell remained in the shadows the whole time. When Vera had requested more light, Krell had said, “You won’t want to do that,” in a voice that vibrated through Vera’s body. Everything about being in Krell’s presence felt corrosive. When he left, bereft of any pertinent information besides the confirmation that Krell was indeed in Stonewall, in The Pit, he had vomited in the parking lot, purging a bit of Krell’s poison from his system—

  —Sommers’ suicide note simply stated, “No more. Please. No more.”

  That was a year ago, only a year. Krell had been in The Pit for only fifteen months at this point. The more things change, the more they fucking stay the same, thought Vera. Then he spoke out loud, “No,” his words pluming as mist in the frigid air as he checked the icy doorknob; it was unlocked.

  He stepped inside and immediately headed in as direct a path as possible to an enclosed office to the far right, the only light in the building.

  The copycat had to be there, the monster about to die, as Krell should have; as Sommers’ fury had suggested.

  Vera weaved between the dead shells of machinery gone to spoil. He sucked in dust but did not cough or sneeze. As he approached the wooden door, he could see the vague silhouette of a figure through the cracked glass to the right; a supervisor’s office, watching over the ghosts, the decay.

  He kicked at the door and stepped inside. Vera knew part of this he could not change would play out first, as before.

  Stephanie Campbell, version two’s victim number twenty-five, squirmed on the figure’s lap, naked, more naked than any person he had seen since the first time he had witnessed self-mutilation of this mind-numbing enormity. She held a bloody scalpel in her left hand, having already dug deep ridges— some even to the bone— into her body; every inch of her body. Blood seeped moistly, congealing in clumps, glistening from everywhere. The stench made his eyes water. He didn’t know how she still could be alive.

  The new monster’s voice cut through the buzzing in his head, as if a swarm of flies had taken roost in his skull.

  “Tell Detective Vera what you are,” it spoke, not as imposing as Krell’s voice, but perhaps that was experience telling Vera it could not be; nothing could be. Yet it was so close, so close.

  Vera cut in— “No— stop.”— knowin
g it was a useless expenditure of energy, but something he could not help. What was the use anyway, what with Campbell’s mentally, spiritually, and physically defeated condition?

  The being that used to be Stephanie Campbell— a college professor, for God’s sake; intelligent, opinionated— said in a voice much like this monster’s voice, “I am… Not!”

  Vera groaned out loud.

  Campbell jammed the scalpel into her vagina and pulled up, scaling her torso, as if anxious to eviscerate herself, to show Vera, as the original victim number twenty-five— Alicia Amadae— had done, that she was Not.

  Vera fumed in exasperation at the charade playing out before him, but there was no way to stop the inevitable. Campbell was already dead; it was simply the faint flicker of what once was that drove her onward with her final task.

  The scalpel reached her sternum and she stopped and moaned as if in ecstasy. The new monster’s large hands held her together from his perch behind her for a few seconds more as she repeated, “I am Not! I am Not! I am nothing! I am Not!” And he pulled her apart, her insides spilling out in stinking tides, blood gurgling from her mouth as well, her flesh husk and crumbling bones dropping into the pile of viscera that stained the concrete floor. Blunt and precise, as before.

  That’s when Vera saw the monster, naked as always, adorned in a smattering of scars, significantly less than Campbell’s physical aberration, as if the copycat only dabbled and did not dive in, as his victims did. Vera thought it the one iota of Krell as human, too, perhaps a fear of pain, of suffering somehow derailing his intentions; the one suggestion of madness as opposed to the evil and now post-evil with which Krell draped his ideology. The sexual perversion was not a part of the pattern anymore, hadn’t been for the last five victims. The copycat was simply naked, and rising up. That’s when Vera scaled the new monster’s body to take in its face— his face: Krell.