Hanging off the side of the building, I looked up and saw the Beast staring down at me. He crouched down and growled at me through his black mask. He looked like an animal, more than a man.
Then, the Beast breathed out a blue fire that felt real. My hands were searing with pain, as I saw my skin blackened and flake. But, I held on as hard as I could. I held on, until I could no more.
“James!” said Violet.
I looked up, and the Beast was gone. Instead, it was Violet was looking down at me.
“James!”
Violet flickered with blue light and was disappearing before my very eyes.
“Violet! What’s happening.”
“The Beast he's taking me again.”
A few seconds later Violet was gone.
Finally, the pain was too unbearable, and I let go, falling into the dark night.
III
THE DEAD NEVER REST
19
If It Bleeds, It Leads
Every morning, Lawrence Mason rode the subway from Kew Gardens to Queensboro Plaza in Long Island City, with a copy of the Queens Gazette under his arm that he picked it up at a stand in one of the subway tunnels. He stepped off the purple seven train, ready for another day at work.
He breathed easier, now that the thing with Luella was behind him, for now.
Lawrence walked over the pedestrian bridge at Queensboro Plaza and down to the street floor. By the last couple of steps, the air from the street smelled like gasoline. A row of MTA buses idled on the side of the sidewalk. Lawrence made his way through Dutch Kills Green Park and crossed the 41st Avenue. He entered the lobby of the 14-story Queens Gazette headquarters with a neogothic clock tower where the hands of the clock haven't moved in decades.
Lawrence took the elevator to the tenth floor. Along the way, he thought about Luella, thinking how he was going to miss her. Lawrence admitted to himself, wanting to sleep with her. The first time he saw her. But, he quickly brushed that thought away.
It wasn’t completely over with Luella. Lawrence still had to send an assistant to pack up her stuff and mail it back to her apartment in Queens.
Lawrence remembered that Pharaoh asked him for the identity of Luella's contact in the police department. He promised Pharaoh that he would look. There was a chance that she left a clue behind in her stuff.
At 9 am, Lawrence Mason and his assistant Troy took the elevator down to Luella's office. There was a pile of notes that he wanted to review for himself. Maybe, there were a couple of names in there that could help him figure who her informant in the police department.
Lawrence and Troy walked into Luella’s office. Troy went inside first. He carried three empty cardboard boxes. When Troy looked inside, all the cardboard boxes fell out of his hands.
“Jesus Christ.”
They both stood there in shock and disbelief, as a shadow swung back and forth over Lawrence and Troy's face.
“Good God,” said Lawrence. "How horrible."
This morning in Luella's office, Lawrence and his assistant witnessed a dead woman hanging from a light fixture over Luella’s desk. There was a bag over her head, and he couldn’t tell. It couldn’t be, Luella. But this didn’t look like a suicide.
It was murder.
"What do you want me to do?" asked Troy.
Then, Lawerence noticed that there was a folded letter taped to her chest. He hoped that it wasn’t Luella, with every step he took toward the body gently swaying side to side. He reached up, snatched it off of her and opened the letter. It was the letter that the beast wrote to Luella. “Jesus Christ.”
“What is it?”
“Call the police.”
Quickly, the assistant got on the phone.
Lawrence examined the letter and flipped the page over when he saw another note from Beast. This time, the message was scrawled out in blood.
“Publish my fucking letter, already.”
20
The Hunting Fields
Sometime ago, before Joseph Hillard became, Beast, he was a murderer himself, the worst kind. He was a serial killer, a man who allowed unspeakable things to dance around his head, as he stood next to his wife and daughter at the train station.
From the outside, they looked like a tight family of Jehovah Witnesses, spreading the good news in the neighborhood of Sunnyside. Joseph acted like a chameleon. Throughout his time on the killing field, the only thing that remained the same were his blue eyes. Besides that, he was never the same person in the same year. He did not fear change to feed his hunger for blood. Maybe, it was this quality in Joe that the Beast saw in him. The man invited evil. He stood there with his dark circular glasses. His face was as paler than his wife and daughter.
Since the beginning of the year, he stood with his family inside the 46th Street Station on the Q train. As people circulated through the station, he carefully observed everyone who passed by, even though he never moved his head and the glare of the light hid the focus of his eyes. He looked at all kinds of people throughout the day, as he waited to play his favorite sport on the field.
His blue eyes looked cold, soulless.
You see, Joseph Hillard deliberately and relentlessly hunted down his victims with the sole intention of coldly murdering them. His motives did not arise from factors in his link with the victim. Usually, there was no relationship. The serial killer preyed on strangers for a complex set of motives known only to him. He preferred strangers because it made him harder to catch.
Joseph watched everyone who passed by him in the New York street. With stacks of magazines in his hand. Again, Joseph was there with his wife and daughter. They stood there like a photograph. They did not talk to each other. They looked at the people who walked pass them.
At about 10, they decided to get a late dinner. Joe, Mary, and Sophia ate chicken soup at Foxy Diner, something cheap, straightforward and quick. After dinner, he walked them home. He left his wife at the door and was about to turn away.
“Where are you going, Joe?” She asked him.
Joe looked down at her, and she stayed quiet with fright. There was always a wall that Joseph Hillard would never allow her to pass. He walled-offed a part of himself from all the women that he dated in the past. He strung them all until everything fell out of the bottom. This time would be no different.
Joe smiled at her, “I’m just going to work. That’s all. I'll be back before morning.”
Mary looked at him again and said. “Okay honey. I love you.”
Mary watched Joe turn the corner and back into the night he went.
Neighbors typically described Joseph as aloof and private but a good father who always took his children out trick-or-treating on Halloween. Richard was a lonely boy. Over the years, he had been steadily employed for the last sixteen years as a computer operator at Empire State Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance company on Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan. He was a valued and dependable employee.
Even though there was so much to choose from on the streets of New York City, Joseph frequented prostitutes, like many serial killers before him. On many times like this, he loved to go on the hunt.
Always in threes, he replayed each in his head.
The last one was precious. The heads and hands of the first victim in the Times Square hotel were never recovered, despite an extensive search by police. The police identified the second one through hospital X-rays as Columbian, a twenty-three-year-old prostitute. The third victim, estimated to be in her late teens, remains unidentified to this day.
Six months later, Joseph killed and mutilated another New York prostitute, twenty-five-year-old Alexandra Gomez. She was found in the historic but declined Seville Hotel on 29th Street near Madison Avenue. This time, he severed the victim’s breasts and set them down side by side on the headboard of the bed before setting fire to the room, where he burned his arm. He would either pick up his victims on the streets of Manhattan or meet them in bars. Either way, he would buy them drinks and slip a date rape typ
e drug into their glass. He then would maneuver or lure the semiconscious victims to his car and drive them across the river to New Jersey to cheap motels that lined the complex of highways there. He carried them in through motel back doors and then molested and tortured them in his room for extended periods of time.
The memory of his victims replayed in Joe's mind, in flashes of light, with such delight shining in his eyes.
The lucky ones would later awake from the effects of the drug finding themselves raped and sodomized and covered with horrific wounds, dumped naked by a roadside or on the floor of a motel room with little memory of what had transpired. They were alive because Joe did not derive his pleasure from killing, but from torturing the victim.
He couldn’t care less whether the victim lived or died once he was finished. If the victim did die during the attack before Joseph was satisfied, he would continue abusing the corpse until satisfied.
Once done, Joseph would abandon the victim like trash and whether she was dead or alive was inconsequential to him. Some victims were lucky to survive, but others were not.
One time, the police found a hideously disfigured corpse stuffed underneath the bed. Joe tied the victim’s hands with handcuffed behind her back. When the police found her, there were bite marks, and her chins beaten. Valerie Street had died of asphyxiation and traces of adhesive tape were found inside her mouth. Joeseph had carefully taken it away with him after killing the girl. He must have lost the key to the handcuffs, as he left arms restrained, as police would lift his fingerprint from the inner ratchet of the cuffs. However, that fingerprint wouldn’t match any in their database.
One of his victims was not a prostitute. Twenty-six-year-old radiologist Mary Ann Carr had been found dumped by a chain-link fence near the parking lot of the same Queens motel. She had been cut at the chest and legs, beaten with a blunt instrument, and covered in bites and bruises. Her wrists showed marks from handcuffs, and her mouth had traces of adhesive tape. She had been strangled and suffocated by the adhesive tape.
Tonight, Joseph picked up eighteen-year-old Nancy O’Dell, who was trying to make enough money to keep going to Canada. At night, she worked the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 82th Street. She had arrived in Queens, New York on a bus from California. Four days earlier she was turned into a street prostitute by a pimp standing by the bus station.
Joseph bought her drinks and talked to her about his job and house in the suburbs until about 3:00 A.M. He then offered to take her to a bus terminal in New Jersey so that she could escape the pimps in New York.
Leslie appreciatively accepted.
After crossing the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey, Joe bought her a steak at an all-night diner. He was charming, generous, sympathetic, and helpful. At some point she agreed to have sex with him for $100. It was around dawn when they checked into the very same Hasbrouck Heights Quality Inn where he had left his last mutilated victim stuffed under the bed eighteen days earlier, and nobody at the front desk of the motel recognized Joe.
After getting a room, Joe drove to the back of the motel. They entered through the rear entrance. Leaving the girl in the hotel-room alone, Joe returned to his car, telling her he wanted to move it to the front. He came back carrying a paper bag with whiskey and an attacheÌ case. It was now nearly 3:00 A.M., and he had only begun.
Joe offered to give the tired girl a massage, and she gratefully rolled over onto her stomach. Straddling her back, he drew a knife from the attache case and put it to her throat as he snapped a pair of handcuffs on her wrists.
While Nancy attempted to persuade Joe that all that was unnecessary, he began torturing her, nearly biting off one of her nipples. She later testified that he said, “You have to take it. The other girls did, you have to take it too. You’re a whore, and you must learn.”
After Joe had finished, he went to his latest dumping ground. In the middle of the night, he drove to Calvary Cemetery in the Borough of Queens. The place was vast with nobody around. Sometimes, Joe looked for an open grave. Otherwise he would have to dig one himself, as the Long Island Expressway loomed overhead.
That night, Joe found an open hole in the ground, between a narrow set of graves. He hauled the hands and threw into the hole in the cemetery. Joe only needed to dig in only a little. He did so with his bare hands. He dug up the ground and patted the dirt down. There was nothing else for him to do. Soon, the grave digger would place the coffin inside and that would be all. There would be no reason for anyone to reopen this grave. He felt relieved and the sense of paranoid subsided. He climbed out of the grave and shook his pants from the dirt.
Joe was on his way back to the car when he thought he heard something come from among the tombstone.
“Help.” It said. “Help.”
“Yes?” said Joe, as if he knew who was out there.
“Help me.” said the voice again.
Yes. There was no question in the sound of the voice. He felt like there was a young woman’s voice. He stared at a dark place underneath the shadow of a canopy and saw the woman he just killed.
“You? What are you still doing alive.”
He grabbed her and she grabbed his forearm.
“Will you help me?" Then, looked over my shoulder. "Watch out!” she said.
When Joe turned around, it was already too late. The Beast engulf him in an everlasting darkness.
This night the Beast showed him pain, as much as he abused all those girls.
In the early morning, he lay on the steps of the mausoleum. His face regained life. Now, he was resurrected to serve the Beast. Except, he didn’t know it.
The red morning sun cut sideways across his face. It was morning, when he regain consciousness. There was a black garbage bag by his legs. When he grabbed the plastic, he understood exactly what he needed to do for the Beast.
Joe made it back to the car and drove down 51st street in Woodside. The red tail light turned bright when he stepped out of the car door. Joe walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. He grabbed the bag holding the girls severed-arm. Then, he tossed it on the sidewalk filled with a mountain of black bags. A few minutes later, he was gone.
The sun shined in Joe’s eyes as he made his way to a YMCA in Sunnyside where he showered and changed his clothes. That morning, he cleaned up and changed into a suit and grabbed his “AWAKE” magazines from the back trunk. Except, there were spots of blood, he noticed. He dumped that one in a garbage bin on the corner before getting on the train. It was time for him to meet his family that morning in Jackson Heights. He was excited to see them.
Throughout the day, Joe didn’t feel like himself on the train.
Again, he heard a voice. Then, he heard it again.
“Help me.” said the voice, as Joe washed the dishes, later that night. As he washed away his sins, he listened to the voice that possessed him that night, and every night after. Without realizing it, he disappeared into another level darkness, one that he would never come back from.
21
It Was Never A Dream
Again, I was at Charlene's loft in Tribeca.
"Wake up. Charlene! Wake up!"
It happened again. Back in my bed, I held Charlene in my arms. I tried to wake her again.
But, she would not snap out of it, not as quickly as last time. I stared into her wide opened face, in mid-fright. She stopped breathing, and I felt her slipping away as if she were going to die. Her face turned purple, and I panicked. I shook her a final time, to snap her out of it. But, nothing was working.
"Please, Charlene! Wake up!"
When I closed my eyes, Charlene finally woke up, gasping. It was my god damn eyes.
Charlene’s eyes became calm and reasonable. A thick sheen of sweat covered her face, neck, and chest. She took a deep breath, coughed. Mucus from her throat flew out, as she fell over on the wooden floor of the loft. She sat up on the bed, and her heart slowed. She was dizzy, and a part of her wanted to throw up more.
James
tried to calm her.
"Charlene, what happened?. I'm here for you. Everything is okay."
I kept my eyes closed. I did not want to frighten Charlene again, with my pupil-less eyes.
"Everything is okay, now," I told her. Even though I meant every word, I felt Charlene turn and slip away.
"I told you not to look at my eyes, Charlene. But, everything is fine now. I'm not going to hurt you. There's nothing to be scared of."
Charlene heard every word, and she wanted to believe me. But she felt a pain running through her arm. Then, she looked down and saw a purple bruise around her bicep.
“It wasn't a dream, James. It was real.”
And for the first time, Charlene doubted our relationship. There was an air danger around me that I could never shake. It didn't matter who I dated, at the time.
I always kidded myself. None of the girls were safe, as long as they stayed by my side. For the first time, I frightened her, more than ever before.
I knew the relationship was over.
Later that night, a ray of blue moonlight fell across Charlene's face, as she sat on the bed. She was dazed. I saw several images from her nightmare flash through her head, like a strobe light. I could tell that there was a sadness growing in her stomach that she could not fight back.
Sadness welled up inside Charlene, and a single tear gathered on the brim of her right eye. It sparkled with moonlight.
Charlene rubbed the bruise on her arm, and another tear fell on her lap. She thought about her father who warned her, many times, about James. But, she did not listen.
Now, everything he said was coming to pass and she did not want to admit that her father was right. She glanced down at the bruise on her arm, and her father's words echoed in her ear. "He's a freak, Charlene."
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