But the best laid plans of mice and psychopaths frequently come to the same ends. Either Aldous drove the car into the wrong pool, or a tree had fallen into the pool, or someone else had ditched a car there, because the cop car only sank to the top of its doors.
Aldous sighed. The energy he had gotten from the trooper’s soul was fading rapidly. Blackness had been creeping into the edges of his vision for a while, but now his will to force it back was fading. He pulled himself through the window and onto the hood of the car, where he lapsed into a daze. He wasn’t fully unconscious, but he watched the day pass into night like a room going dark after the light switch clicks.
When he regained himself, he had no idea how long he had been there. The sun was high in the sky. He was hungry, he was thirsty, and he knew things were going badly, but he couldn’t quite care. He was alive, therefore he would triumph.
In gun safety classes they generally teach that the only time your finger should be on the trigger is when you are actually ready to shoot – when the gun is aimed at an actual target. Aldous was not following that rule. He was reclining on the windshield of the car with his finger on the trigger of the trooper’s gun. When an alligator lunged out of the water, Aldous twitched enough to pull the trigger, and a 9mm slug hurled against the gator’s thick skull.
Aldous had been so still the gator hadn’t noticed him. It was actually just looking for a high place to sun itself. After the initial twitch, Aldous kept firing. The gator’s mouth opened, and by the time its mouth snapped shut the gator had 4 gunshot wounds, including two down its throat, one through the top of its snout and one that managed to find its brain.
The gator flung itself into its death throes, and Aldous flung himself onto it. Not being the sort to ever ponder if dogs went to heaven, he had never even considered the possibility of non-human souls. Under the circumstances, he was desperate, and this was certainly a mighty creature, so he thought he had nothing to lose by trying. The sense of urgency gave him the strength to throw himself on the flailing reptile. His arms wrapped around its snout and his lips wrapped around one nostril, and he felt the familiar feel of a soul passing into him. Once the creature was still, Aldous fell back onto the windshield of the car.
It wasn’t long before the gator started talking to him. “Fool,” it hissed. “You were seeking the divine, but now you’ve got me.” After a pause it added, “Or maybe I’ve got you.”
At that moment Aldous knew fear like he had never known in his life.
The gator went on, hissing in his head, “Didn’t cha ever wonder what the serpent looked like before it lost its legs? You weren’t expecting some little garden snake were you?”
Justin Wheeler
Justin Wheeler was born on July 15th 1963. He was exceptionally bright and, according to his parents, siblings, teachers, and most of his friends, an exceptionally well-behaved child.
One day, when Justin was nine, he came home with a wounded squirrel. The small creature had been hit by a car, was missing some skin, and had one broken leg. Though his parents told him that it most likely had injuries they couldn’t see, injuries that would kill it, Justin was adamant about taking care of it.
Justin bandaged its wounds. He made a tiny splint for its leg using popsicle sticks, which he split lengthwise so they would be skinny enough. He kept it in a box next to his bed, and over the course of the next several weeks he nursed it back to health. As it healed it became more and more tame, and he began taking it places with him. More than once he took it to school, peeking out of the pocket of his pullover sweatshirt.
Once the squirrel was fully healed, Justin’s parents told him it was time to release it, and let it get back to its life as a squirrel. They told him the poor beast would be happier if it could run and play with the other squirrels. Justin had known this day would come, in fact he had counted on it and planned for it.
Justin only fussed a little when his parents told him to take the squirrel back to where he had found it and set it free. Talking about it later, they would brag to their friends about what a good boy Justin was.
When the day came, Justin took the squirrel out to the woods and nailed it to a tree. He relished the squirrel’s screams and the horrified look in its eyes. The suffering was so much sweeter because the squirrel had come to trust him. Once he had it crucified, he played doctor with it. Actually, the game could be better described as ‘surgeon.’ He used his father’s Swiss army knife for that game.
Afterward, he left the hollow shell that had once been his pet squirrel nailed to the tree. Three days later he brought Daniel, a classmate, to the place to show him what he had done. Justin showed Daniel the knife and told him that if Daniel ever told anybody he would play with him the same way he had with the squirrel.
Daniel believed him and never told. Many years later, after Justin made the evening news for the first time, Daniel would have told, but he didn’t watch the news that week.
The squirrel was not the first animal Justin hurt, and it was far from the last.
Justin’s grades were always outstanding, and nobody was surprised when Harvard accepted him. By his second year in college, Justin had three girlfriends: Monica, Carol and Cindy. None of them knew about the others. By the end of his junior year he was engaged to all three.
In the first month of his senior year, Justin stole a large pair of soiled boxer shorts from a Laundromat and took them to Carol’s apartment. He kicked them under the bed. A week later he came back and ‘found’ them. He informed her that he couldn’t possibly marry someone who had been unfaithful. It was an ugly scene, but he was adamant – he never wanted to see her, or even think of her again.
He played the same scenario over, with variations, at his other girlfriends’ places. At Monica’s, it was a love letter, at Cindy’s, a stash of pills. By the end of his senior year he was free from romantic encumbrance. From time to time he would fondly remember the pain on each of their faces as he left. You can’t hurt a stranger like that. It isn’t hard to hurt a stranger, but it lacks depth. Only when there is trust can there be betrayal, and loss only matters when it is loss of something valued. For Aldous in those days, nothing was sweeter than betraying someone in such a fashion that they didn’t even realize they had been betrayed.
By the time he was twenty-three years old, Justin had climbed the ladder from intern status to full-fledged stockbroker. In general he gave his clients good advice, which kept them happy, and he kept their accounts churning, which kept his employers happy, as well as earning him a steady stream of commissions. Nobody could fault him if every so often he gave a bit of bad advice; after all, it was always given to the clients who asked him for an investment with the potential for really high gains. Penny stocks could double overnight, or they could plummet to worthlessness. His clients knew the risks.
His clients had no way of knowing, however, that some of the stocks he was directing them to had been steadily rising because Justin had been buying them under a set of assumed names, often selling shares back and forth to himself just to drive the price up. Just about the time the price was reaching the level of obscenely unsustainable, Justin would make a few phone calls to clients and tell them about the fast-rising star of a company, and they would buy, and he would sell, and he would make money, and in the end, they would lose it.
At that time, Justin had nineteen aliases. He had been collecting them since his first year in college. Monica, Carol and Cindy had all known him by different names. Most of his identities were obvious shells, but others were fully fleshed out. All his aliases had bank accounts, brokerage accounts, and taxpayer numbers, but some also had addresses, driver’s licenses, credit records, credit cards, and library cards – in other words, all the little details that investigators might check, if they ever wanted to investigate someone. The fully fleshed-out identities were the backup plans, existing in case anyone ever caught him in his hobby. Those identitie
s never did anything illegal; they never even bought the penny stocks. The shady transactions were the job of the sketchier personas. All the profits eventually wound up in numbered accounts in off-shore banks,
Justin never touched that money; he didn’t need it. Financially, he was doing quite well in his career. The off-shore accounts were just a way for him to keep score in a game that only he knew he was playing.
Sometime after he turned twenty-six, in the fall of 1989, Justin’s personal hygiene began to decline. Nothing too dramatic – just unkempt hair and the occasional day’s growth of beard. By that time he had enough of a proven track record with his company that they were willing to overlook a little eccentricity, especially since he did almost all of his work over the phone. In the same time period, he also began to give progressively worse advice to his clients, but his mistakes were the sort that would not be noticed for many months. In this regard he was lucky, because the market conveniently plunged, hiding his mistakes. By the time anyone realized how negligent he had been he was gone, because one day it all fell apart.
The technical term for it is a psychotic break – in layman’s terms it might be called going around the bend. It started for Justin one day in the subway while looking at a mosaic. One thing, so many parts. Before his eyes he saw it change. He first saw it as the whole picture, a painting on a single tile, then he saw the tiles breaking off one at a time very rapidly from the right side to the left, until he saw it transformed from a whole to a set of fragments representing a whole…
It was at that moment that he understood God. Souls had to come from somewhere, and where else could they come from but from the divine? The first few had been no significant loss, but now there were so many … No wonder the source of all souls had been silent for so long. But now he saw the way, he saw what he must do. It was his job to reconstruct what was broken, to put enough of God back together to have a voice. It was up to him to collect the fragments, or at least enough of them, however many that might be.
All this had gone through his mind in a flash, but he was filled with certainty. He had been talking to a coworker, who had not even noticed the momentary faraway look in Justin’s eyes. Justin was now as far removed from the conversation as he was from any conversation anywhere in the world.
A train was pulling into the station, and Justin pushed his right arm into a stranger’s back. The stranger, a middle-aged man in a tan trench coat, fell silently in front of the train. At least it seemed that way. If he had made a sound it couldn’t be heard over the roar of the train.
Nobody attempted to stop Justin as he walked away from the platform, and from his life. He left his briefcase where he had set it. As he walked he shed elements of his old self. The necktie went first, and then his overcoat and jacket. He dropped his key ring and money clip near the exit to the subway. The money clip was scooped up within seconds of being dropped, but the briefcase was still on the platform when the police arrived.
The subway surveillance video and documents in the briefcase gave the police a positive ID on Justin, but the credit cards from his money clip led an interesting life, mostly involving strip clubs and pawn shops, for the next few days, giving the police a number of false trails to try and track him.
This was the first time Justin made the news, and in a sense the only time, because it was the only killing ever linked to Justin Wheeler. Most of his murders never made the news at all, and those that did were usually called missing persons rather than murders.
By the time Justin strode out of the subway, he was wearing nothing but pants and a tank style undershirt. His mind was spinning with questions. Why didn’t he feel different after the stranger’s death? He had no doubt he was supposed to be absorbing souls, but if simply killing someone did not grant him their soul, what would? How could he find out? He walked briskly, but without direction, his soft, bare feet bruising unnoticed on the pavement.
It didn’t seem long before Justin found himself by the water. He stopped and stared until the choppy surface made itself as smooth as glass. He turned and looked around. He was standing near a relatively quiet alley with a good view of the water. He went to the alley and nested, peeking out from behind a trashcan like a child playing hide and seek.
The water was still glassy smooth to his gaze. Boats skated over its surface without leaving a mark. Though the surface seemed smooth, it still sparkled, like sun-bright stars in the night.
He stared until the boats went away, until the alley went away, until the sky went away, until the world went away, until nothing was left but the winking points of light. Two points slipped together and stuck. The new bigger point slid over another point, and collected it as well. The mass of light kept collecting points of light until it was a huge disc, and then it rose above the plane of the other points of light. Other sparkles moved in to fill the void it had left, and soon more had joined them until Justin was looking at a disc risen above a plane of sparkling light with a thick line of light pointing directly at him. They were souls, lost fragments of the whole, and it was his job to sweep them together. He understood the message. He had understood that before. But he still did not understand the method.
He blinked, eyelids scraping across dry eyes. It was night, and the moon was high over the water. He was not alone in the alley. A dirty man, wearing far too many clothes for the warm night, was asleep with a bottle of wine a few feet away from him. Justin cut his throat with a broken windowpane. Other than some gurgling sounds the man died quietly, and Justin knelt by him watching the process. As the gurgling stopped Justin saw something like fog come from the man’s mouth. It was too hot for breath to steam, even the blood wasn’t steaming. Justin understood. What he had seen was the breath of life – the soul. At that moment he understood how to collect souls.
Justin stood and stared at the lights in the water until almost dawn, and then he wandered away. His next kill was another homeless man. This time Justin sucked the dying man’s soul and felt it grow and swell inside him. Over the next couple of days, Justin went on a soul-collecting rampage, taking a dozen homeless people’s lives. He made no effort to hide the bodies, and little effort to hide his actions. Those killings made the news, though nobody connected them to the stockbroker who had lost it in the subway.
Then a level of reason returned to him. He had just taken the soul of a fifty-five-year-old woman, and as he stood there with her soul swimming through his body he realized that if he kept killing people so carelessly he would get caught. That thought was like a light bulb switching on; it brought with it all of his reason and all of his craftiness. He felt like he had been sleepwalking through the previous few days. He felt like himself again. He didn’t lose his sense of purpose, but he realized that collecting souls was going to be a grand game, better than simply swindling people, more exciting, with higher stakes for him if he lost.
He chose one of his aliases, and stepped into that life. His new name was Aldous Andmour. Thinking about it, he came to the conclusion that all of this had been his destiny – why else would he have created a name so perfect? Aldous Andmour: when he said it right it became ‘all this and more’, which is what he was becoming. He was already more than he had been, though nowhere near what he was going to become.
Aldous became his public face, and also felt like his true name.
For a while he lived in Memphis, working as a record producer. Or at least that was his visible employment. Through one of his aliases he had purchased a studio, and he did spend time there producing records. His real vocation remained the collection of souls. He traveled far and wide, across many states, bringing his victims back to a small house by a pond where he could collect their souls and dispose of their bodies at leisure.
He had created a fairly ideal world for himself in Memphis, but he never planned to stay there for too many years. Eventually, Aldous moved into his new life as a tour guide in New Orleans.
Sunday F
ebruary 16th
7:00 a.m.
There are few things that get attention in an emergency room faster than blood. Nakedness and apparent shock also get prompt attention. So when a dazed young couple enters an emergency room covered in blood and not much else, they get very prompt attention.
Within moments the staff was swarming Sarah and Jeremy. Because her mouth was working, and Jeremy’s was still glued shut, Sarah did the talking. The first thing she said was, “I’m not really hurt, take care of him. The guy that tried to kill us glued his mouth and nose shut. If a tall, naked man with a lot of tattoos and his throat cut comes in, he’s the guy that tried to kill us.” After that she mostly repeated variations on that theme.
The police were on their way even before the doctors started swabbing Jeremy’s mouth with acetone to release the glue. Once his mouth was open they did the same for his nose. By this time the police had arrived and had moved Sarah to a different room to take her statement.
The first wave of cops wanted to separate the two because it seemed pretty obvious that Sarah had been the one to assault Jeremy, and they wanted to get her away from him to give him a chance to talk. They had seen it before; a lot of women beat up their men – not that anybody really likes talking about it. That’s why they separate people: to give them a chance to think it over and rat each other out. It took about an hour of both Jeremy and Sarah telling their stories over and over in separate rooms before the local cops started to consider the possibility that they were looking at something much worse than spousal abuse.
It didn’t help that neither Jeremy nor Sarah had a good idea where they had been held. The good Samaritan that had rescued them could have taken the cops to the area, but he had driven off. Eventually they figured an approximate distance and direction. The kids had known the sun was coming up when they were picked up, and were able to figure out where the sun was in relation to the car for most of the drive.
The Whisper Garden Page 15