Darkest Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  from taurus’s distant eyes!

  as t deems them all to be

  flush with his breath,

  so washed by his empowering

  hand they will be flowering

  and cleansed.

  “Jeez, and you say this was written in 1930?” asked Jessica.

  “Late thirties, thirty-seven or -eight.”

  “Here I thought sheer hatred toward women was a more modern development, along with gang rapes, wife battering and nasty lyrics out of rap groups like 2 Live Crew,” Jes­sica confessed.

  “A man ahead of his time, perhaps,” suggested Eriq.

  “Oh, no... no... no, hellering was a gentle man, a kindhearted man. This hardly reflects his feelings, but rather is a lament of twisted souls which he simply crystallized in a moment of artistry.”

  “You’re saying he could write this stuff objectively? That he didn’t feel the rage that he wrote about? Or that he was in control of that rage?”

  “I’m saying all of the above.” Eddings nervously wiped sweat from his brow. “Warm in here, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is uncomfortable,” Jessica agreed.

  “You’re a very lovely woman, Dr. Coran,” he near- whispered.

  “Tell me more about this guy hellering.”

  “He was a small man in stature, extremely bookish, not... not unlike myself; thin, however. A quiet man, no doubt, extremely controlled—tightly wired, as they say... but he had fun, his own brand of fun ...”

  “Really? Then you see this poem as an exception to his major work?”

  “Oh, quite certainly. Although no doubt every man feels some rage toward women, as every woman feels some rage against men—and deservedly so, wouldn’t you say?”

  The remark caught Jessica’s breath as she contemplated Jim Parry, how much she both loved and hated him at the moment. “Yes, I suppose I might say as much.”

  “But you are in control of your faculties, and you would not murder a man because of the arrogance or stupidity of his sex, am I right?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Like the artist, you do something constructive with the rage,” Eddings continued, going to a nearby copy machine to make duplicates of the poem.

  She followed while Eriq, tiring of the little obit man, began to wander the lush stacks and stare at the old pictures on the walls.

  Jessica shadowed Eddings and asked, “Do you mean then that the artist releases his anger in the process of, say, sculpting, painting, writing?”

  “The true artist works with his emotions—all of them, the entire cascade of feelings, don’t you see? Both light and dark are released through and reflected in his art.”

  “Released ... reflected?”

  “Yes... placed through a prism, released out into the world and out of himself, perhaps to save or at least hold on to his sanity.”

  She nodded and probed further. “And you’re saying this is a healthy exercise?”

  “Oh, extremely... like writing out one’s anger or fears for the purpose of releasing the demons. Excellent and cheap therapy, if only people knew.”

  She thought of her sessions with Dr. Donna LeMonte, which had come to an abrupt end when Donna decided that seeing her any longer would only turn the psychiatrist’s couch into a crutch. At first Jessica had been infuriated, but it had actually proven beneficial when they struck a com­promise and Donna began accepting her letters as therapy, an outpouring of all her grief, guilt, remorse and anger over the years since she’d become an FBI agent.

  “The criminally insane, however, don’t know what to do with art; they must have a real time forum, a tangible me­dium, something other than clay to carve on, is that it?” she asked.

  “Uncontrolled, unfettered madmen make poor music, the Mozarts and the van Goghs notwithstanding. The crimi­nally insane take artistic license beyond sanity.”

  “And therefore are no longer involved in pure art but in a tainted, compromised danse macabre wherein victim be­comes medium, weapons tools and materials to reach not creation but destruction?”

  “Creation is turned inside out, yes; destruction becomes the demented means to creation, and that is why he is no longer a true artist, for now he is working less with art and the stuff of dream and nightmare to mirror his soul as he is with real time and real victims, and art becomes skewered on the lance of insanity.”

  “You’ve given a lot of thought to this, haven’t you?” she asked.

  “I have...” He hesitated. “Since these killings began, yes, I have.”

  “So, if I’m understanding you... the artist on a subcon­scious level may feel, for instance, that his mother was a victim to his father all his life, and this incenses him as much toward his mother as his father?”

  The final copy Eddings needed required another dime, but he didn’t have it. Jessica fished in her purse for change and came up with a quarter, which the machine gobbled down.

  “Every monster has to have a willing victim,” Eddings agreed. “The artist has a powerful sense of justice”—the hum and flash of the Minolta copier punctuated his words—”and the fact that the monster’s mother, the crea­ture who brought him into this world, nurtured or neglected him, the fact that she allows herself to be humiliated and whipped like a dog all the child’s life then leads him to ambivalence, yes. By the same token, a parent, mother or father, who physically or sexually abuses a child sows the same sort of seeds of hatred, which in later years spring forth full-blown as rage.”

  She wondered how much Eddings was speaking of their phantom killer and how much of himself. He seemed turned inward for the moment, as if searching in some secret look­ing glass of his own.

  “By ambivalence, you mean he finds himself in the unenviable position of having to both protect and cherish his mother right alongside detesting and hating her?”

  “She asks for it! She steps right up to it; she allows herself to be a victim, and this feeds his rage toward all women.”

  “I see, I think ...” “Instead of going out to victimize other women as some men would do, the artistic-minded among us resolve the conflict in more creative endeavors, from building a busi­ness to writing a poem—creativity is born of pain, no mat­ter the pleasure it gives...”

  “Do you write poetry, Mr. Eddings?”

  “I don’t, no, but I have a novel I’ve been shopping around for years.”

  “By fashioning a world or a poem inside which women are brutalized, you’re saying no harm but rather good comes?”

  “In the fictive world, we are in constant control of the props, the staging, the curtains, all the strings, my dear, so that it is safe to unleash these passions, however evil, how­ever bleak and destructive or raw to the bone, perhaps so that we do not act on these same impulses in the real world as the Night Crawler obviously has.”

  So this explains the little man’s interest in the killer, she thought. “And you think all men have such ingrained feel­ings toward women?”

  “Given our genes? Given our race, our heredity, our pri­mal instincts or that leftover-from-another millennium be­ginner’s brain we all started with and still carry around inside here like a ticking bomb?” He ended by poking his cranium. “Yes, I’m afraid so. Even those of us who deny it in both appearance and deed are saddled with it. yes.”

  “So you are yourself a writer, other than at the news­paper, I mean?” she asked.

  “I’m working on my second novel, yes. Working toward publication.”

  “Oh, really? And what’s it about?”

  “It’s something of a nasty little mystery coiled around the newspaper business, the spiraling injustices one young reporter faces at the hands of his superiors, one of whom is a woman not unlike the owner of the Heralds rival pa­per, for which I used to work. If it ever sees the light of day, I’m through in this town, certainly at the Herald, you can bet on that.”

  She wondered just how deep his anger toward this woman ran. “But the writing keeps you sane?”


  “Precisely.”

  She momentarily wondered who was the real victim here in this little obit man’s world, where he had squirreled away his hatred and anger only to resolve it amid black ink mark­ings hidden like glyphs in an undiscovered cavern, an un­published book, a poem like hellering’s. Or was the true victim the target of C. David Eddings’s venom, the mystery woman he mentioned? She further wondered if Eddings was sleeping with the woman he hated so much, and if so, what made him so full of rage. Her control over him? His need for her? Or the fact that he was the leak at the Herald, giving away the trust of his current bosses, and perhaps that of a woman he truly loved? In any case, he seemed a walking basket of nerves strolling along a needlepoint of stress as a result, all in the name of love, or hate. In that moment she caught a glint in his eye that told her he had seen the understanding in her eye, and in that in­stant, she saw a reserve of anger leaving a trail just for her.

  Santiva noisily rejoined them, remarking on how nudity in paintings by the old masters like Rubens was perfectly acceptable in libraries like this, but that a brown paper wrapper had to go around the cover of Penthouse. He got no response from either Jessica or Eddings, who instead extended a sheaf of paper to him. Santiva accepted a copy of the hellering poem. “Ahh, good,” he crooned. “Now each of us is armed with words which we share with the killer...”

  “And thoughts and emotions, Eriq,” she replied as Ed­dings reached for her change at the bottom of the copier.

  Eddings had gone silent. He extended fifteen cents to Jessica, and in the exchange she felt a well of emotions firing the little man’s spirit.

  “Do you think the Night Crawler is insane then, because he acts on his hatred?” she asked Eddings.

  Eddings removed his glasses, cleaned them with a hand­kerchief and nodded. “Yes, I do.”

  “Then he’s no artist.”

  “No doubt in my mind. He may think of himself as an artist; he may have once been an artist, but once the killing started in this world, the artist in him no longer existed, you see. If Picasso were ever to have killed anyone before he painted out his bare emotions of slaughter and rage in Guernica, then the depiction of raw murder and carnage of that awful war would have fallen flat. As it is, it moves anyone who sees it. Why? Because he emptied the vessel from which the emotions flowed directly into the painting, and not into a world without a frame.... Had he gone out and killed someone in retaliation for the real Guernica de­bacle, he could not have brought the passion to bear on a world both confined and radiated by form.”

  “How did we get to Picasso?” asked Eriq.

  Eddings ignored Eriq. “Art both confines passion and crystallizes it. So neither a van Gogh, a Picasso, a Michel­angelo, a Kipling or a Sartre, nor a Twain or a hellering, could ever have proved murderers... Look through the history of the world, the history of murder in particular— and being an obituary man, I know something of murder. How many true artists have been murderers? There have been far more doctors who’ve become murderers than writ­ers and painters, I assure you.

  ” Eddings’s voice had risen on the final words as he warmed to his subject, and this brought a snarling librarian from behind the counter to ask them to please be quiet. Santiva nudged Jessica and said, “Let’s get out of here, shall we? This place is giving me a case of indigestion.”

  “Everything gives you indigestion.”

  “I was the kid in school who always got caught talking in the library and sent to the principal’s office for talking back to the librarian.”

  “I’ll bet, and you were always talking about books, too, right?” “You got me... girls.”

  “That would figure.”

  “I like a good figure...” Jessica realized only now that like many men, Santiva saw little use for poetry, that it was about as significant to his life as was a little man like C. David Eddings. Eriq showed his boredom in his face; it appeared he felt the direction they had taken was costing them too much time and energy for whatever dividend they might reap. For this reason, Eriq had already stepped away from Eddings once, and now he wanted farther away from the round obituary editor, without even fully knowing why. Jessica, too, wanted away from the small man at her side whose dream of becoming a satirical novelist revealed an ambiguous creature filled with copious, venomous and passionate se­crets all of his own making. He had in effect told her that so long as he regarded himself as an artist, he would remain sane, but that should that self-image ever be shattered, he, rightly or wrongly, would blame others—specifically fe­male others; he had told Jessica that one day she could well be hunting him. She wondered how many other men bal­anced their sanity on such a flimsy, egoistic scale. Then she thought of Adolf Hitler, the failed painter, and Manson, the failed performer.

  Jessica and Eddings followed Eriq toward the huge en- tryway and foyer of the library, but Eddings stopped at the desk, whipped out his library card and asked for assistance in checking out the book from which he’d made copies.

  “What’s he doing now?” asked Eriq, who had found himself going through the checkout gate alone and having to return to Jessica. As she stared across at Eddings, he asked, “Is it me, or does this guy give you the creeps, too?”

  “He reminds me of Burgess Meredith in that old Twi­light Zone episode—you know, he’s the last man on earth, surrounded by books, but he breaks his prescription glasses.

  ” Eriq only guffawed and said, “Let’s get some air.”

  They waited just outside at the Grecian columns and the huge stone staircase, a place where Charlton Heston in robe and sandals might have played a scene out of Ben Hur if only the traffic noise, the overhead airplanes and the constant buzz of city construction and electricity could be silenced.

  “Here you are,” said Eddings when he joined them.

  Jessica looked up to see that he was offering hellering’s book of poems to her. “I’m not sure—”

  “There’s two weeks on it. Return it to me when you can. I’ll pay any late fees.” He was adamant. “Who knows, you might learn something valuable—something that might help you with the case, I mean.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Eddings.”

  “If anything comes of it, you can thank me then.” Just what she’d hoped to avoid, she thought—ever seeing him again. He obviously wanted it otherwise, however. They parted company back at the newspaper, the original note from the killer safely tucked away in Jessica’s valise. From there, they drove to FBI Headquarters in Miami, where Jessica ceremoniously turned over the evidence to Eriq. “You’ll make sure, then, that Kim Desinor sees this im­mediately? Are we agreed?”

  “Consider it done. I read all about how she helped you in N’awlins last year.”

  “You have no idea.”

  I have every confidence that our psychic sector will flourish in the coming years. Say, Jessica, do you think that Eddings was any help? He sure was a sad sack.”

  “Yeah, something melancholy about him, that’s for sure, Eriq. As for being a help, who knows. Although in a sense, he’s predicted for us what the Night Crawler’s next love note will contain.”

  “The second stanza?”

  She nodded, a chill running up her spine.

  “Spooky, huh? And the guy was kinda spooky, too. You don’t suppose he’s the Night Crawler, do you? That would tie in with the Herald connection.”

  “Sure, he chooses to send his murder messages to his own paper, then identifies the source for us. No, I don’t think so.”

  “Strange little guy in a way, kind of a mix between Peter Lorre, Wally Cox and Bela Lugosi, wouldn’t you say?”

  This made her laugh, which felt good. There hadn’t been much to laugh about in a long time.

  “Did I hear him say something about writing a book?” Eriq asked between laughs.

  “As a matter of fact—”

  “What could a guy like that have to say that anyone would want to hear?”

  “Well, it takes a certain amount of arrogance on the part of an
ybody to write a book, to believe they have enough to say to the world and that people—strangers to them— are going to actually be riveted to ink markings on a page. But you’ve got to admit, he was the only one in that room who knew about hellering’s bizarre little poem, if you re­member,” she defended, not knowing why.

  “Yeah, yeah... I stand corrected. He wasn’t like, you know, hitting on you, was he?”

  “And what is it with you men who feel threatened by a little man like Eddings, or... or a woman with a brain, anyway?”

  “Threatened? Who feels threatened?” Eriq threw up his hands.

  “Forget it. Just get me back to Miami Crime Lab; I’ve got lots to do there. You promise now to get the killer’s note, the original, off to Kim as—” “Like I said”—he was annoyed—”consider it done.”

  •SEVEN •

  When, on the road to Thebes, Oedipus met the Sphinx, who asked him her riddle, his answer was: Man. This simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of Oedipus’ answer.

  —Giorgos Seferiades

  The Following Morning

  Morning came to Miami as if all of nature’s most peaceful and warm and beckoning best had come knocking at the door of mankind’s most striking artifices—the towers of the modern city. A brilliant, blinding Florida sun omni- sciently and without struggle won the battle for hierarchy here, alongside an equally rich and stunning blue sky, a sky which acted the foil for the creamiest, whitest clouds Jes­sica had ever seen in any place other than Hawaii, all vying for attention amid a lush cityscape of skyscrapers and man- made spirals and pinnacles. For a moment, looking out over the pearl-white sand beaches, she thought that she was back in the paradise which she and Jim Parry had shared; imag­ined for a moment that he would step out onto the wrap­around balcony here with her. A part of her soul went out to him. He had to be feeling her, even from this quantum distance.

  But she stood alone on the Fontainebleau balcony over­looking a fresh, new paradise which was compromised once again by the stain of human passions, and unable to answer her own questioning heart, she wondered anew why she had chosen to be so alone. Was there some truth in what C. David Eddings had communicated to her, all that about male/female roles and how you could no more escape the hatred and contempt than you could escape the allure and fascination, unless you were a bona fide third sex maybe? She imagined it might be called a UNIX—a completely combined mix of the female and male sides of the species coming together as in some bizarre and wonderful Clifford Simak science fiction tale.