Intermusings

by David Niall Wilson

  There was no color. Only shades of grey. Good and evil and that place where we store our darkest secrets. That corner of the mind where no one's ever invited in. It was there the beast went to sleep. There within me. Curled round childhood terrors and adult superstition, the beast dreamed its nightmares of pleasure and pain, mingling the two until they were indecipherably the same. Teasing the one with the other, until the emotions themselves lost their identity.

  But I had come for once to tease it.

  To pull its tail and invite it out.

  As it rose from the shadows, its cruel jaws were twisted in a feral smile that said it had known this day would come, that it had been waiting all those centuries for this moment. And, more, that we would never be the same because we'd never be separate again. No longer would the beast slink out once a month demanding a kill. Henceforth we'd walk together among the mortals . . . among the sheep.

  And our days would be ones of red, red glory.

  It was a snarl that stopped Underhall from driving a nail through Martin's brain. He turned to look and, over the carpenter's shoulder, Martin saw too. What hung on the wall was no longer a woman, but a cat larger and blacker than any leopard. What hung on the wall could not have been contained with a score of nails, let alone two.

  She ripped herself free, landing cat-like and silent on the blood-spotted carpet. With a shake of her head she discarded the torn strip of duct tape. Her teeth shone impossibly white against the absolute black of her muzzle. Her eyes were darker yet, holes in the fabric of Martin's shattered reality. Underhall raised the nail gun to shoot her, but somewhere between his brain and his finger the order to pull the trigger got lost. Eyes glazed with shock and terror, the carpenter was still pointing his weapon when she leaped past Martin and drove him to the floor.

  What happened next was quick and brutal and reminded Martin of nothing so much as a National Geographic episode with some predatory cat shaking a tiny deer by the throat. The only exception here was that the prey was a man. As the animal's jaws closed vicious about his head and it shook him about, he had no more substance than a rag doll. Martin scrambled for his revolver, crawling on his knees and one good arm. From across the room he heard Underhall's skull collapse, a sound to end all sounds, even Underhall's screaming. When Martin turned and looked back, she was shredding the body, her great claws rending the flesh from the bones, pulling up ribs like they were tree roots, scattering organs like the stuffing from a mistreated teddy bear.

  Martin raised the .38, cocked the hammer and sighted best he could without his second hand to steady it. When she heard the hammer go back, she raised her bloody face from the cavity of Underhall's chest and stared.

  For several long minutes they remained that way: he with his back against the wall, the gun wavering in his grasp; she poised over the gruesome mess of the killer. In her eyes he saw the merciless, beautiful woman, la belle dame sans merci, that he'd first seen that night in the hall. But she was more than that. More than the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen. His mind pulled one of its tricks, digested one random fact and several others, tied them together to make a case in his head. Underhall wasn't the first serial killer she'd stalked. Her last had been in New Orleans. Martin had read the file over the police net. And before that, a string of others.

  But, whatever she was, she'd just saved his life. He couldn't kill her. How might Keats have put it?

  Alas! thou this wilt never do:

  Thou art an enchantress too,

  And wilt surely never spill

  Blood of those whose eyes can kill.

  He lowered the gun, leaned over, and opened the apartment door. She remained a moment longer, her midnight eyes unwavering as she studied him. A slow strand of crimson drool trailed from one gleaming incisor. Then she sprang through the door and was gone, the musky breeze of her passing darker than any other secret he hoarded.

  Martin holstered the .38 and looked about for a phone. There wasn't one in this room. Perhaps in the next. He crawled to the bedroom door and flung it open.

  His cry of anguish was heard several floors above and below room 3-C.

  I most vividly remember the way he looked back at me that time in the hallway outside Vicki Marsh's apartment. I think he knew even then that there was something dangerous about me, just as I knew there was something dangerous about him. I can picture him warning Tony to stay away from me, all the while conjuring up a plan that would see him in my bed.

  I knew about him and his ladies. The beast likes a lady's man. The beast would have liked you, Martin Zolotow.

  But the beast is gone. Or not—depending on how you look at it. I'm not sure which of us is in control of this new Katherine. I think she's her own woman.

  I know she's hungry.

  But she's not fooling herself. Not for one minute. You're out there, Zolotow. And you know what to watch for. You let me go because I saved your life, but then you found Tony in the back room. All deals are off now, aren't they?

  Too bad. I think you'd have been magnificent in bed.

  La Belle Dame Sans Regrets

  By Brian A. Hopkins and David Niall Wilson

  As the two detectives closed the door behind him, Martin Zolotow accepted the offered seat without a word. The seat wasn’t offered as a courtesy. It was a show of power. It was intentionally lower than the desk and the Lieutenant who sat behind it. The two detectives stood, ominously present in Zolotow’s peripheral vision. One was Hispanic; the other was so white, so buzz-cut, so completely Aryan, that he looked like a former poster child for the Nazi regime.

  "Detective Zolotow, I’ve reviewed your file, and I must admit . . . I’m impressed."

  Zolotow didn’t have to ask how San Antonio’s P.D. had access to his records from San Valencez. Lieutenant Sieber’s desk was clean but for a blotter, a phone, and a shiny new Pentium PC. The co-ax cable screwed into the rear of the machine spoke of network access and information accessibility. Zolotow’s own relationship with the computer was kind of a love-hate thing. At the moment, he hated them. His medical record was probably in there as well.

  Leaning forward to rest his elbows on the Lieutenant’s desk, Zolotow said, "If you’ve reviewed my file, then you know I’m on an extended leave of absence."

  Sieber nodded, opened his mouth to speak —

  "And you’re wondering why I’m on your turf, sticking my nose into your case, and asking to see a tape which the media doesn’t even know exists."

  Sieber leaned back in his chair as if to offset Zolotow’s leaning forward, as if to place more distance between them. It didn’t smell like retreat though; more like a gauging of distance, an adjustment to achieve optimum striking distance. A slight smile crossed Sieber’s face and Zolotow had the impression that the young Texan was enjoying the confrontation. Maybe he even respected Zolotow’s directness. Sieber glanced up at one of the detectives. "Gun?"

  The Hispanic thumped Zolotow’s Beretta down on the desk, sans magazine which he tossed over to Sieber.

  Sieber’s smile widened. "You’re not licensed to carry this in Texas, Detective Zolotow." With his thumb, he began to eject the cartridges into the trash can beside his desk. "Even if you were, your records indicate that your official sidearm is a .38 revolver, not a 92FS."

  Zolotow rubbed at the stubble on his chin. He’d been about to shave when the two detectives had knocked on the door of his hotel room. "If you’ve read my file, Lieutenant, then you know why I’m here, and who I’m after. I put six thirty-eights in her in Corpus Christi three months ago; she walked away. While I doubt that fifteen nine millimeters are going to make up the difference, I thought, what the hell, it can’t hurt."

  The Lieutenant’s smile didn’t waver. "She being the cat woman who killed your partner?" One of the detectives sniggered. Sieber glanced over at the computer screen. "Tony Saucier?" The last nine millimeter round clanked into the metal trash can and Sieber tossed the empty magazine on the desk with the Beretta.

  Zolotow
bit his lip and said nothing. He didn’t have to point out the facts; the file was on the computer screen. Tony had been killed by a large animal, no doubt of that, and there was no better explanation than his own on the board.

  Sieber wiped at the corners of his mouth and the smile was suddenly gone. "How did you learn about the tape?"

  "How I learned about the tape isn’t important."

  "It is to me."

  "What’s important, Lieutenant, is what is happening in your city. You have a serial killer on the loose."

  "We have two murders which we’re not even sure are connected," Sieber interjected. "The M.O.s are similar, but not necessarily the same."

  Zolotow saw no reason to argue the point. He tried another approach. "You have another killer who preys on serial killers bound to show up here soon, if she’s not here already —"

  "Cat woman," the white detective whispered to the other.

  "— and now you’ve got some sort of cult sacrificing black panthers to who knows what pagan god. Do you want this bleeding all over your precious tourist business on the Riverwalk, or do you want my help?"

  "Leopard."

  "Huh?"

  "The zoo officials said it was a leopard."

  "What’s the fucking difference?"

  Sieber frowned. "What makes you think the incident at the zoo has anything to do with the two killings we’ve had on the Riverwalk?"

  Zolotow leaned back and rubbed at his eyes. God, but he was tired. Boston. Kansas City. Miami. San Bernardino. Then, of all places, Cat Creek, Montana (which should have been a joke, but she’d left three dead there). Corpus Christi next, where he’d come so fucking close to catching her that he’d actually saved the life of the child molester she’d been about to slaughter. Then Biloxi, Mississippi, where there was now one less patron of dockside gambling. Then here. All in the last year. He’d been in so many hotels that he’d had to start writing himself notes, otherwise he’d forget where he was going at the end of the day. He considered himself fortunate that she had, thus far, confined her efforts to the States.

  "Look." Sieber suddenly sounded sympathetic. "I’ve seen your psychiatric records, Zolotow. Maybe you need to retire. Get some help or something."

  Zolotow took a deep breath, cursed for the hundredth time the entries that some shrink in San Valencez had made in his records, and silently recited the words from Tennyson’s "Ulysses" which gave him the most strength at times like these:

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are —

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  The poetry was his defense against the jumbled neurons in his cross-wired brain. Mixed cerebral dominance, they called it. It affected his depth perception, his short term memory, his balance . . . his performance. Since the incidents in San Valencez, it had gotten worse. There were mornings when he literally had to check the hotel stationery to remember what city he was in.

  Still, some memories were unshakable. The image of Tony in a pool of blood was so clear in his mind that it might have occurred only yesterday. But there were times when he wondered if he’d manufactured those memories. The shrinks said he had a problem. What if they were right? What if he had invented all of it? What if there was no Katherine, no Kat, no leopard with eyes of black glass and teeth like slivers of the moon?

  "Well?"

  "What I need, Lieutenant, is to see that tape. If what I’ve been told is correct, if what is on that tape is what I think it is, then someone else is hunting her. Someone besides me. Whether that helps or hinders my investigation, I don’t know, but I do know that there are going to be more dead. More like Tony. More like the three brothers in Montana whose only crime was that they liked to get a little rough with some hookers in Billings. More like the innocent guy who got in her way in Biloxi, never mind the bastard who was killing women and leaving them on the beach for the crabs. More like —"

  Sieber held up his hands. "And what makes you such an expert, Zolotow?"

  Zolotow thumped the back of the computer monitor. "You’re the one with the computer records. You know I’ve been following her for more than a year now. No rest. No pay. I’ve spent a fortune of my own money hiring private dicks to research her past. I know when she killed her first serial killer—a guy from Mississippi named Damon Thomas who butchered six women, including his wife, before he met up with Kat." He glared back over his shoulder at the two detectives. "That’s Kat with a ‘K,’ boys. Short for Katherine.

  "I know some of what she did before she decided serial killers were her preferred prey, all the way back to a string of murders in Salem in the eighteen hundreds. Given time and money —" He didn’t add that he was almost out of the latter. "— I think I could trace her activities back even further. What surprises the hell out of me is that you don’t care to see the pattern, the string of serial killer killings spread across the country. Much easier to dismiss me as a lunatic."

  "No one disputes the obvious string of vigilante activities," Sieber countered. "It’s the supernatural element you’ve tacked onto the case that no one believes, Detective Zolotow. A cat woman who’s been around since the eighteen hundreds? If you’re not a lunatic, then you must see why we have our doubts."

  Zolotow thrust a finger across the desk. "Someone else believes it, Sieber. Someone killed that panther—pardon me, leopard. Someone wants her as bad as I do . . . and they want her dead."

  Sieber pursed his lips, considering. Finally, he reached out and pushed the handgun across the desk. "You’re not only out of your jurisdiction, but on a leave of absence, Detective. Store that firearm when you get back to your room. If my men catch you carrying it, you’ll be arrested." He glanced up at the waiting detectives and it was obvious that the meeting was over.

  Zolotow snapped the empty magazine into the Beretta and thrust the weapon into the holster beneath his left arm. "What about the video tape?"

  Sieber keyed something on his computer. "Understand this: we consider the incident at the zoo to be completely unrelated to both this Katherine person you’re hunting and the two murders downtown."

  Zolotow said nothing.

  "For that reason, I’ll consider your request a matter of professional interest expressed by a law enforcement official passing through. I’ll let you view the tape. On one condition: I want you to tell me how you became aware of its existence."

  Zolotow sighed. "I can’t reveal my source."

  Sieber shrugged. "Then we have nothing further to discuss. I suggest you enjoy some of the finer, uh, attractions our city has to offer." A sideways glance at the computer screen, a knowing leer, and Zolotow knew what piece of information Sieber had found in his file.

  He got the hell out of there.

  The tape arrived that afternoon. The bellhop who brought it up from the front desk said it had been dropped off earlier by person or persons unknown. It was sealed in a plain manila envelope, with no note inside, and nothing but his name and room number on the outside. Correction: the outside did not bear his full name, but rather the nickname he’d been known by for twenty-years at the San Valencez Police Department.

  Zolo.

  A call to the front desk got a VCR sent up to his room.

  The tape was amateurish. Black and white, with no sound. The focus was terrible, and there were enough crooked angles to set his head pounding. The original might have been better, but he doubted it was better by much. There appeared to be three perpetrators, two handling the cat and one behind the camera. The two he could see wore dark ski masks and trench coats that flapped in the wind like ceremonial robes. The leopard was securely tied, its mouth so tightly wrapped in duct tape that Zolotow wondered how it could still breathe.

  They held it, suspended between two lengths of rope, over the zoo’s dolphin pool, swinging it back and forth and screami
ng at it. He thought then how stupid they were. If it had been Kat, instead of some innocent animal raised on corn-fed beef at the zoo, she’d have torn free of the ropes and ripped them to shreds. Chains, that’s what would be needed to contain Katherine. Strong chains.

  There was no sound, but he caught one word repeated often enough that he could read their lips.

  Change.

  They were yelling at the cat to change into something it was not.

  Finally, after they’d doused the leopard several times—even going so far as to let it sink to the limit of the tethers—and still nothing happened, they dragged it back out on the cement. One of the men drew a large caliber revolver and shot it in the head. The briefly opened trench coat afforded Zolotow the glimpse of a white business shirt and a tie. The second perpetrator used a large knife to open up the feline, then commenced to pull out organs and intestines. A black puddle ran across the cement and darkened the water of the dolphin pool.

  They didn’t find what they were looking for.

  When they were done, they kicked the carcass into the pool, yelled and fired the gun several times at things off camera. The camera careened wildly as it was thrown, showing first the night sky, then the glistening black streaks on the cement, then the water. It continued to work for several seconds as it sank—Zolotow thought he saw a dolphin streak past—then the camera went out.

  He rewound the tape, watched it again. And again, making notes because he rarely trusted his memory these days. The gunman favored his left knee. The one with the knife was left-handed. The camera operator once shot a view of his feet. He was wearing expensive loafers.

  The tape prompted more questions, answered none. What had made the three men think the leopard at the zoo was Katherine? How did they know about her? Why go to all the trouble to get her near water . . . Was there a weakness there that he didn’t know about? Who had sent him, first, the anonymous, handwritten tip that the tape existed and then the tape itself?