by Chris Carter
Hunter studied the lock on the door. It looked old, but solid. He took another deep breath and looked around him again.
Nothing but darkness and silence.
He stretched out his left arm, placed his fingers on the door handle, twisted it downwards and gave the door a slow but firm push.
He was wrong.
To his bewildered surprise, the door moved inwards. It was unlocked.
‘What the hell?’ he whispered under his breath.
Hunter held the door in that position for a long moment, his brain quickly trying to figure out what to do next.
He’d come too far to turn back now.
As cautiously as he could, he pushed the door just another inch. Then another. Then another. Then another. Until the gap was wide enough for him to peek inside.
He saw nothing. Whatever this first room was, it seemed to be completely empty.
Hunter held his breath, pushed the door just a couple more inches and furtively slid into the building, slowly closing the door behind him.
The air inside was warm and dusty, heavy with the smell of bleach and disinfectant, very similar to the odor that he and Garcia had picked up inside Mat Hade’s apartment in East Los Angeles.
Hunter stood still for a moment, his back now flat against the inside of the door. His eyes were already used to the moonless night outside so it took them no time at all to acclimatize to the darkness inside, which suited him perfectly. He wanted to avoid using his flashlight as much as possible.
Hunter found himself standing at the entrance to a wide corridor, which had been stripped of all furniture and decorations. The walls were gray and made of cinder blocks, the floor and the ceiling of solid concrete. The entire hallway looked like a square, concrete tunnel – claustrophobic and airless.
It extended about seven yards in front of Hunter, leading to a second door, which lay ajar. A faint light came from somewhere behind it.
With watchful, soundless steps, Hunter quickly moved to it, pausing by the wall to the right of the door. He stood there motionless, waiting, listening.
One minute.
Two minutes.
The silence was deafening.
He finally twisted his body, craned his neck and very carefully peeked through the gap. The light source, which Hunter was unable to identify, was extremely weak, keeping most of the room in shadow. From where he stood, he could only partially see one half of the room without exposing himself, and it looked almost as sterile as the corridor he was in. Toward the back of it, a dark fabric armchair faced a blank wall. To its left, Hunter saw a small, wooden coffee table. On the floor, just in front of the armchair, a rectangular, black and white rug bridged the gap between the armchair and the wall. That was it. Hunter could see nothing else other than dark corners.
With his back still against the wall to the right of the door, he waited another two full minutes.
No sound or movement from inside.
Time to move on.
Hunter took a deep breath and, in a noiseless and well-rehearsed movement, rotated his body into the room, his arms extended in front of him, his gun searching for a target everywhere . . . anywhere.
He found none.
The second half of the room was even emptier than the first.
Hunter’s eyes were still frantically searching the barren space for some sort of target, but he was looking the wrong way. The movement came from the shadow directly behind him.
Fast.
Precise.
Unstoppable.
As Hunter began turning back toward the door he had come in by, he received a blow to the back of the head that was so powerful it propelled him forward and against the wall.
A millisecond later, all thought was swallowed by total darkness.
Eighty-Five
Hunter’s consciousness returned to him slowly and painfully. With every heartbeat, his head throbbed with an intense pain, like a spiked ball was pulsating at the center of his brain. He blinked a couple of times, but his eyelids felt too heavy for him to be able to fully open them, so for now he kept his eyes closed. He took a deep breath and as the warm air inflated his lungs, it seemed to also inflate that damn spike ball in his brain. Agonizing pain exploded inside his head like a furious thunderstorm and brought with it a second, searing and debilitating pain. This one ran the length of his arms, stretching and pulling at both ends as if his arms were about to be violently ripped from their sockets.
Hunter blinked again, but this time he finally found the strength to force open his eyes. Through the pain and the confusion, it took him a moment to understand what he was looking at – his bare feet resting on the floor, limp as if they belonged to a dead man. That was when he realized that he had been tied up in the exact same position they had found Alison Atkins inside that barn-like building. His arms were stretched high above his head. His wrists had been shackled together by a shiny steel chain and then looped around a metal pipe that ran across the ceiling. Two different padlocks kept it all in place. The chain was supporting the whole of his weight and it was biting deeply into his wrists. Thin lines of blood had run down his bare arms and over his shoulders.
Fighting the sickening pain in his head and arms, Hunter lifted his head and looked up. There was no way he was getting out of those shackles by himself.
‘I must admit that you’ve surprised me, Robert.’
The voice came from somewhere in the shadows in front of him. Hunter looked in that direction but saw no one.
‘I never thought you’d get here. I never thought you’d figure it out.’
Despite the voice sounding somewhat different from the one in the two 911 recordings he’d heard, Hunter was still able to recognize it. He’d heard it enough times.
That was why he showed no surprise when the man walked out of the darkness and stopped directly in front of him.
‘Hello, Robert.’
Eighty-Six
Squirm hadn’t slept at all. How could he? Every time he closed his eyes he saw her. Naked. Arms stretched out above her head. Her body dangling from that wooden beam while suspended by the chain shackled to her wrists. He would never forget the way in which she had looked at him.
The terror in her eyes.
The despair in her expression.
The fear that oozed from every pore in her body.
Alison. That was her name. Just like with the previous two women, ‘The Monster’ had made him repeat it until it was engraved on his brain.
‘The Monster’ had dragged Squirm out of his cell, tied him to a chair and made him watch as he slit that poor woman’s abdomen open. A cut so wide Squirm thought the man was about to sever her in half.
Blood cascaded through the cut in large crimson sheets, recoloring her legs before dripping down on to the floor, creating the biggest pool of blood Squirm had ever seen. And the smell that came with it was like nothing he had ever experienced before – sweet and metallic, as if the blood were made out of copper.
But all that blood was nothing compared to what had come next. With a bright smile on his lips, ‘The Monster’ had approached the woman, looked straight into her eyes and slowly shoved his hands deep inside the opening he had made. Seconds later, they came out holding on to her insides.
Squirm had felt bitter bile shoot up from his stomach and travel up his throat, but by now he knew better than to puke in front of ‘The Monster’. Clenching his teeth and squeezing his eyes tight, Squirm managed to swallow it all back down.
But ‘The Monster’ wasn’t done yet. He carefully began pulling and twisting whatever it was that he had ripped from inside her, creating some sort of visceral string and allowing it to drop down into the ever-growing pool of blood on the floor.
It became so long, Squirm could hardly believe it had all come from inside her.
But what had terrified Squirm to the point that he had wet himself was the fact that, through all of that, the woman was still alive. She was still conscious. Despite the devast
ating pain that she was going through, she also had to watch as ‘The Monster’ exenterated her like an animal, and spread her guts all over the floor like play dough.
‘This, Squirm, takes skill,’ the man had said to him as he plopped another piece of her insides on to the floor. Every time she looked like she was about to pass out, ‘The Monster’ would either slap her face or bring a small flask to her nose so she stayed awake.
Squirm wanted to look away but he’d found it impossible to. It was like he had been hypnotized by the savagery of it all.
Now, back in his cell, Squirm had a new thought and that thought carried with it a sliver of hope. The police might not have been looking for him but they sure as hell would be looking for those women. Unlike his own, their fathers hadn’t paid ‘The Monster’ to get rid of them. Squirm was certain of that. So, if the police were searching for the man who was abducting and killing those women, the police were searching for ‘The Monster’. And if they found him, they would find Squirm.
That thought planted a new seed of hope inside the boy’s heart.
Eighty-Seven
Hunter’s shirt was soaked through with perspiration and he felt beads of sweat dribble down the back of his legs. He looked around the space, trying to understand the room he was in.
Despite the faint light that came from somewhere above his head, the space was dark and shrouded in shadow, just like the room Hunter had found himself in before the killer had gotten the best of him. But this certainly wasn’t the same room. The walls were made out of cinder blocks, the floor of solid concrete. Several metal pipes crisscrossed the ceiling in different directions. Over to Hunter’s left he saw a short flight of stairs leading up to a closed door. Hunter had no doubt now that he was down in the basement of this godforsaken house. If the place could even be called a house.
The man who had stepped from the shadows paused directly in front of Hunter and waited.
Hunter didn’t even look at him. His hands felt stiff and swollen. The chain around his wrists was constricting the blood flow. He tried moving his fingers. He could flex them, but the movement brought with it excruciating pain.
Hunter groaned.
The man smiled.
‘Please tell me, Robert,’ Detective Troy Sanders, the head of the LAPD Missing Persons Unit’s Special Division, said, ‘How did you figure it out?’ His posture was relaxed, his voice calm.
Hunter’s eyes moved to look at him.
Sanders waited.
‘You told us,’ Hunter said. His voice, on the other hand, sounded hoarse and fatigued.
‘Did I?’
‘The notes you sent us. First to Mayor Bailey, then to me. They were full of clues.’
Sanders smiled. ‘They certainly were.’
‘We just didn’t know what any of them meant . . . Until tonight.’
‘So what gave it away, Robert? What made you understand what the clues meant?’
Hunter coughed and it made the spike ball inside his head stab at his brain again.
‘Your last nine-one-one call,’ he finally replied.
That answer seemed to surprise Sanders. ‘Really? How so?’
Hunter licked his cracked lips, trying to get some moisture from his face. ‘Cut me down and I’ll tell you.’
Sanders laughed as he walked around Hunter, disappearing behind him.
‘Well, I can’t do that, Robert. But let me see what I can do.’
All of a sudden, Hunter heard the sound of metal on metal. The chain shackling his wrists lost some of its tautness and his feet were finally able to touch the ground. Just. That allowed him to teeter on his toes and use his legs to support a small percentage of his weight, relieving some of the tension from his arms. It felt like heaven.
‘Better?’ Sanders asked.
Hunter said nothing.
‘So tell me, Robert, how did my last nine-one-one call help you figure it all out?’
Hunter breathed in slowly. ‘The victim’s name,’ he replied. ‘Alison.’
Sanders walked back around to face Hunter.
‘You mentioned it three times,’ Hunter said. ‘You made sure that the operator had that down. Why would you do that? It made no sense, because that would’ve been one of the first things we would’ve found out anyway, especially since you used her cellphone to make the call.’
Sanders remained silent, but the ghost of a smile began to play on his lips.
Hunter tiptoed a little to his left to better support his weight. ‘The fact that you were so insistent that the operator write her name down – something didn’t sound right about that. So I went back to the note you sent me and studied it again.’
Sanders waited.
‘“The clues are in the name,”’ Hunter said. ‘You wrote that.’
Sanders nodded. The ghost of a smile grew.
‘The clues were the names,’ Hunter said. ‘The victim’s names.’
Clap, clap, clap.
Sanders applauded Hunter. ‘Very good, Robert. I’m impressed.’
Hunter licked his lips again. ‘You also wrote that you were –’ he coughed one more time and had to endure the spike ball for several seconds – ‘rewriting history.’
The smile finally appeared.
‘So you searched through history, using the victims’ names as your guideline. All of them.’
Hunter’s silence was a resounding ‘yes’.
‘Let me guess,’ Sanders said. ‘What you found out made your head spin.’
Hunter swallowed and the saliva fought to get through his swollen throat. ‘What I found out made almost every clue in both notes come alive. Suddenly, everything began making sense. The puzzle began to sort itself out.’
‘I’m glad,’ Sanders said. ‘But no matter what you searched for, Robert, I know that whatever result you got wouldn’t have answered every question. A very important piece of that puzzle is still missing.’
‘Yes,’ Hunter admitted.
‘So the picture is still incomplete, Robert. You still have no idea who I really am, do you?’
Hunter and Sanders locked eyes as if in a battle. Hunter blinked first.
‘Your real name is Richard,’ he said. ‘Richard Temple.’
Sanders looked back at Hunter in bewildered surprise. It took him several seconds to overcome the shock of what he’d heard. As he did so, he laughed again, but this time it was a strange laugh that disturbed Hunter. It gurgled up from the depths of his body as if he had chewed it for a long time in his lungs before spitting it out. It was raucous with pain. Emotional pain. When he spoke again, his voice was coated with a macabre tone.
‘You’re wrong, Robert. My name isn’t Richard. My name is . . .’
Sanders paused and moved his neck first left then right in an anxious manner.
‘Squirm.’
Eighty-Eight
Six years had passed.
Squirm’s hope that the police would one day capture ‘The Monster’ for any of the heinous crimes he had committed over the years had died a long time ago. He would never be saved. ‘The Monster’ would never let him go.
Squirm was eighteen years old now. He was still scrawny, but almost as tall as ‘The Monster’. He’d expected to be dead by now, but it seemed that ‘The Monster’ enjoyed having him around.
Every year, on Squirm’s birthday, ‘The Monster’ sat with him in the kitchen and talked to him as if they were old friends. Squirm listened more than talked, but still, that was the only time ‘The Monster’ treated him like a human being.
Today was Squirm’s eighteenth birthday.
‘The Monster’ had woken him up early – 5:45 a.m. – like he had done every single day in the past six years, shackled him (by a single wrist only) to one of the metal rings in the kitchen and allowed Squirm to eat breakfast. Not from the floor. Not with his hands. But like a civilized person.
‘I have a question for you, Squirm,’ ‘The Monster’ had said as Squirm finished his piece of chocolate cake.
>
For the past five years, as a present to Squirm on his birthday ‘The Monster’ had brought him a single slice of chocolate cake. It had become a sort of ritual.
Without making eye contact, Squirm nodded shyly.
Squirm had grown up shrouded by interminable fear and completely stripped of all self-confidence. A comparison to a scared puppy wouldn’t have been far from the truth.
‘How would you like to possess a woman?’
Squirm paused and this time looked back at his long-term captor.
‘You are officially a man now. So I think it’s time you learn what it is to be a real man.’ ‘The Monster’ slapped his own chest twice. ‘How about I give you some time with the next piece of trash I bring in here, huh? You would like that, wouldn’t you?’
Squirm froze.
‘Actually,’ ‘The Monster’ continued carelessly, ‘thinking about it, we can do better than that. We can do much better than that. How about, after you’re done with the piece of trash, you get rid of her? And you know just what I mean when I say get rid of her, don’t you?’
The pause that followed was so heavy that Squirm thought it would put a hole through the earth.
‘I know you know what to do, Squirm. You’ve had plenty of classes over the years, haven’t you?’
For six years, ‘The Monster’ had made Squirm watch every single one of his murders. Thirty-three in total. And he had made Squirm memorize the name of every victim. Squirm would never forget their names. He would never forget their faces. He would never forget how they died.
‘You can hurt her as much as you like, Squirm. How does that sound, huh?’
Squirm broke eye contact again. He could feel his throat constricting.
‘I know you have a lot of anger inside you.’ ‘The Monster’ scratched his crotch. ‘Well, maybe it’s time you set that anger free, Squirm, and I say punish her with everything you have. Make her scream with fear, with pain, with suffering and I guarantee you’ll feel liberated . . . vindicated . . . cleansed . . . powerful. You will feel like God.’