He had a why: he was a child of God, and that was why he was on earth, to just be. That was his why. He was a young man—twenty-six—who had a genius I.Q. Under different circumstances (he thought) might have been a world leader or a brilliant poet. Instead, he had murdered three of his girlfriends, keeping their heads in water in his kitchen sink. The sink was large, the industrial kind. It could’ve fit a few more heads, but Rob had been arrested before he could collect another one. The heads still spoke to him when he was by himself, and they told him about all the secrets of the world. They told him about the whys. He told the policeman who arrested him that just because he cut off their heads didn’t mean they had stopped living. They were still there, hiding from him, talking to him, telling him that they loved him. The heads.
Rob tried to show remorse for his crimes, but he didn’t really understand remorse, or guilt, or shame. Still, he was very good convincing women that he wallowed in misery and pain.
And he was one of the most beautiful creatures in all of creation. He had been told so on countless occasions throughout his life. He was an Adonis from his earliest years, and women had always loved him. Always.
That was why the night shift whore was in love with him. That was her why—with women, he knew, the why usually had to do with love.
Donna Howe.
He thought of her as ugly. She had a nose like a potato, and skin scarred and mottled with pits and craters. She was on the small side but still had broad shoulders, no boobs, a rear end like two old sagging pumpkins left out too long after Halloween. She’d remained a virgin ‘til she was forty-one, which is when Rob first did her. She was a beast on the outside, but a total romantic within. She was meant to be used. She was meant to be taken by him.
Six weeks ago.
She had been easy to seduce. She had never had a date, and Rob looked like a hunk, he knew it. He knew how to get a girl to like him, any girl. He could’ve written a book on it: you just find out what they like in a guy, and then you become that thing, that guy, that dream.
It was always so easy for him.
It was time, now, for her weekly dose of his lust, so Rob gave a whispery whistle, knowing that the night shift whore would be waiting, listening just for this sound. She had never had it so good, he knew, and she was just about at the point when she would do anything for him.
He didn’t plan on killing her.
He didn’t consider himself a killer. He had never killed anyone. He had cut off his girlfriends’ heads, but it hadn’t killed them. They had kept talking, telling him about the men their bodies were still humping, all the tens of thousands of men who were laying them, even, now, humping them all over, every orifice they had, and then some. Humping. Doing. Making. He couldn’t say the f word, just like he couldn’t say the v word. He couldn’t even think them. He had only used those words once in his life. Never again. He had learned not to use them from the scrubbing that his mother had given him. He had learned never ever to use the f or v words again. He had felt the wire brushes against his skin. The Comet. The Clorox. The rubbing alcohol. His mother could not get him clean enough after he had said that f word. She spent half the night trying to, but she could not wipe it off his skin, his face, his tongue.
And the v word. His mother had told him to call it a purse. “It opens up like a purse,” she told him. “It’s where you put all the things you don’t want anyone to see.”
He was a nice boy. His mother had raised him to be a nice boy.
How could a boy like him kill anyone?
Rob Fallon did not plan on killing the night shift whore.
He could never do a thing like that.
But he did need her eyes.
He did need her eyes.
Then, he would see her why.
Her why was in the eyes.
3
“Hey,” Rob Fallon whispered. He leaned against the doorframe. He could be James Dean if he wanted. He was as cool as anyone could be. He flashed a grin.
The woman wearing the white and blue uniform was moving slowly. She held a chart in her hand, close to her small breasts. She wore too much make-up. Her eyes were blue smudges. Her lips were crimson.
Rob could tell just by the way she moved that she had begun getting frightened of him. She was like a rat standing before a snake. She stopped in the hallway, and leaned against the wall.
She stared at him.
In her eyes, that look of fear.
He would have to calm her.
He drew a folded piece of paper from his back pocket. He held it up. “I wrote this for you.”
Her fear seemed to retreat. Her squinty eyes cleared. She was a girl in love. She was his.
She glanced up and down the hall. There was the distant echo of the cooks in the cafeteria as they clanged plate and tray and metal utensil.
No other sound.
Her heavy footsteps. Her fat ankles. Her uniform, so unbecoming on her unwieldy form.
The night shift whore stepped over to the doorway.
Rob Fallon handed her the note.
She unfolded the lined notebook paper. She read the poem. She half-grinned.
He watched her eyes. No fear there. They were bloodshot. They were small. Lurking within them, her why.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, looking over his shoulder at his roommate. “You wrote this?”
“Yeah,” he said, and believed it himself, even though he’d copied it out of one of the books in the library. But Rob believed that he was the author of all.
He leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, slipping his tongue into her mouth. She accepted it, and he reached for her, holding her. When he withdrew from her lips, he whispered, “I’ve wanted you for so long. Just for a kiss. Nothing but a kiss. We don’t have to do what we did before. I know it was wrong.”
“I can’t,” she whispered, shrugging off his embrace, stepping back. “It’s too risky. When you’re released, we can be together. It’s too dangerous now.”
He sighed. “I know. I think about you all the time. I think about our life together. How I want to be with a woman like you, someone who loves and accepts love. I wish...I wish things could be different.”
An expression of sadness etched across her face. “I wish life were easier.”
Rob Fallon nodded. He leaned against her again, took her head in his hands, pressed her lips against his. He slid his lips across her face to her cheek, then her nose, then to her left eye.
He kissed her eyelid.
Something in him urged: now.
The why is in her eyes.
He tasted her eyelid. Salty. Bitter from the blue eye shadow.
She whispered, “Do you love me?”
He kissed from her eyelid to her forehead to the edge of her scalp down to her ear. He whispered, “Yes. God, yes.”
He felt the rhythm of her body, something beyond her control, as it pressed against his. He knew that that place between her legs, her purse, was opening for him. He knew that her purse wanted him inside her.
He whispered, “Where can we go? I need you now. Right now.”
4
Another patient, two doors down from Rob Fallon’s room, on the other side of steel double doors, stirred in her sleep. The room was practically bare. A single chair in the corner, beneath the barred window, which was shuttered, also. The bed itself, a narrow hospital bed with crib-like bars along one side. The blankets were olive drab, the woman’s skin, where her hand showed, was pale white. Her hand twitched slightly.
She was dreaming: the gleaming metal in her hands, and looking into her lover’s eyes as they shared this most secret of pleasures. The yellow flickering glow from the candles. The smell of animal fat as it cooked in the large pot set down in the hearth. The sounds of the street, beyond the cramped, stone basement—horses on cobblestones, the cry of a fishmonger, the shouts as the copper from around the corner came upon some creature dying in an alleyway.
But in their sanctuary, the man an
d woman, caressing each other.
The tastes between their lips, mingling.
She had a thin cloth over her face, almost like a pillowcase but lighter, like a thin gauze. Still, breathing was easy. She could see shadow, but only during the daytime, if they unshuttered the windows. She didn’t mind the cloth too much. It was supposed to be removed at night, but sometimes they forgot. Sometimes they left it on because they didn’t want to see the face beneath it. Sometimes, she wished she could scrape that face away, herself. She wished she could find her true face beneath this one, the one which was lurking. The face that had no skin.
Her arms were strapped to the sides of the bed. Her feet were similarly strapped. Her fingers were strapped, too, as if someone thought that if even one of those fingers were loose, it would be too dangerous.
That even a single finger might mean that this small, pale woman might tear her way out of her tether and claw her way through wall and flesh for release from this place. She was small—barely five foot one, and built proportionately, like a doll, perfect hands, perfect waist, perfect legs, perfect hips. Her hair was long and blond. It needed cutting, but sometimes they forgot to attend to this detail. Her skin had chafed some, and she had bedsores at times. They didn’t even always have the decency to turn her over. They used to, but they were getting negligent. She longed to feel sunlight on her face again, to walk in the garden, to talk to the lost she had lost...the one who was so close to her and far away at the same time...
A single shaft of light penetrated the room—it was the light from the hallway, as someone opened the double doors.
Opening the door to her room, too. The metallic scrape of the door as it slid open. The smell of the hallway—rubbing alcohol, a fresh coat of paint, the distant steam of food cooking in the cafeteria.
The woman in the bed began breathing more quietly.
She felt the light across her face.
It was warm.
She was sensitive to these things, now.
Time and space, all at once.
She smelled perfume, light, almost undetectable.
Backward and forward, one existence to the next.
She smelled someone’s underwear—it was filthy.
The smells pleased her. She was too used to the stink of the putrid food, the odor of rubbing alcohol and the plastic taste of the red and green pills they shoved down her throat.
A woman had come into her room. The womansmell was always the strongest, the most disgusting. This woman was just finishing her menstrual cycle. This woman entering her room had that last scent of dead blood there between her legs. Who else? There were other footsteps.
All right. And a man, too.
Good.
The man was very clean. He smelled like Ivory Soap. He smelled like—Johnson’s Baby Shampoo? No, something cheaper. A generic brand. Maybe from PayLess, or...no, she couldn’t tell. He smelled to clean for someone at this time of the morning. He was someone who kept himself brilliantly clean. Someone who was terrified of filth on himself.
She knew this man. She didn’t know him by name, but she knew him by smell. She remembered all, for all she had now were memories. She had a photographic mind, she memorized details and faces and smells and tastes. She had smelled the man once before, passing by her room. He was allowed free rein, she supposed. He was not like her. He was stupid. Men tended to be stupid, to underestimate others. To assume that women didn’t have minds. Men thought women couldn’t be doctors, could only be nurses, or orderlies, men thought women should stay home and care for their old people who vomit and urinate all over and stink the place up.
That was what men thought.
But she liked clean men, like this man in her room, with this woman. The woman was dirty—she had to wear an old Elizabeth Arden perfume, called Chlöe, the woman in her room did, to cover up the stink of her panties. Her hair smelled greasy, too. She only washed it once a week. She kept it in a net, probably, beneath one of those tacky white fake nurse caps.
When men were clean they didn’t think, they just were.
But the woman who was walking near her bed, now, she smelled like she never douched. Is the man putting his clean fingers up into the filthy woman’s panties?
The woman in bed held her breath so that she wouldn’t have to smell what these intruders in her room were about to do.
They were going to do the most repulsive surgery right there. Right in my room, she thought, and I am chained down, like an animal, I can’t do anything about these awful people, how that man is going to get his thing all disgusting with that woman’s swampy juices.
The man moaned a little. He whispered, “She can’t hear us, can she?”
The woman giggled. “Honey, she’s got so many pills in her, even if she could, she’d never understand it. It’ll be better doing it here than in the broom closet. And hell, even if she understands, who’d she tell? She never talks. She’s just a thing.”
The woman in bed almost giggled, too. She wanted to tell them that she could understand what the clean man was doing to the toad.
She wished the clean man would take this filthy woman into the shower—
sprays of clear, pure water—
and clean her off, make her all clean again.
the robe of red with blood roses sewn across it—
“Robby,” the filthy woman said, “I want you inside me now. Please.” By the voice, she recognized the woman.
Donna Howe. Just forty-one years’ old. Single. Bad habits. Bad teeth. Born in Oxnard. Parents in the Navy. Lives with two roommates in Moreno Valley, near the mall. Very needy. Large feet.
That was all the information she had on Donna. It was hard to find out about people in Darden, because once you asked someone a few questions, they became cautious.
The man was Robert Fallon. She knew all about him. He was a talker, and very nice, but since she’d only been unstrapped for a few months when she’d first arrived, she had not kept up with him.
Of course, he was insane, and not to be trusted, but he was a bit of a lapdog, so she didn’t think he’d be too much trouble. He was a sociopath, she knew, by the standards of psychiatry.
She was not. She knew what she was, herself, what her life was all about. But she recognized sociopaths as brothers and sisters, people who had purpose to their lives, and an understanding of the god-like nature of man which was denied by the other animals. When she had been free to roam, when she had been able to look the other patients in the eyes, she could see who was one of her kind. They were a different species from the rest of the world. They were the hunters and the gods of creation. In times past, she or this man Rob might’ve been the leaders of the animals. Instead, they were cast into prisons and tortured for their superiority. But the woman restrained in bed knew that the true measure of civilization was in how a culture treated her species. The hunters of men.
These thoughts didn’t erase fear from her mind, however. She still knew that the animals like this woman could hurt her. She knew that this woman was the enemy.
And what if no one came in and saw what these two were doing near her bed?
What if they did something to her?
Oh, lord, the woman in bed thought, they are animals, they are lower than animals, they are trying to make me do it, too, I just know they are, they can’t help themselves, oh, why doesn’t someone help me, why doesn’t someone come through that door and help me? These horrible animals are in my room!
The man was standing up and doing it to the filthy woman.
Like dogs, oh, someone come in and stop them!
They needed a shower, a warm, wet shower, with someone to scrub them down, to clean them, to sponge off the filth and muck.
The filthy woman was leaning forward. The woman in bed could smell her coffee-stained breath. The filthy woman set her hand down on the edge of the bed, near the straps.
Oh, please, someone help me. There are obscenities in my room.
And then, a miracle se
emed to happen for the woman in bed, for she was able to draw her index finger and her thumb out from the strap. The filthy woman’s slapping hand had loosened it.
Two fingers.
The woman in bed twitched her fingers, restoring circulation, as the disgusting animals pounded against each other.
She touched the tip of her finger to the tip of her thumb.
Freedom.
It was all she needed.
5
It took the restrained woman ten minutes to get her hand loose, and slip it beneath the covers so the animals couldn’t see that she was loosening her other hand from the strap. She would not be able to get her feet free, not right away, but she could grab Donna Howe and scrape her face clean before the toad woman would know what hit her.
She doubted that Rob Fallon would mind.
He might be scared of her, but fear was good.
Slowly, carefully, both hands free, the woman in the bed reached up to pull the cloth from her face, the cloth that kept the others from looking at her, from seeing her as a woman.
They wanted to see everyone as animals.
But it was them.
They were the animals.
The woman in bed unveiled her face, and wanted to say, “Boo!” to Donna Howe, but when she saw Donna’s face, she could only giggle.
Donna’s face was covered with sweat. She was being taken like a dog from behind. Her eyes were glazed over from the barbaric act. Donna barely noticed her, as if she was just waking from a dream. Then, when she did notice her, Donna’s eyes went wide, and her mouth began to open.
But the woman in the bed grabbed Donna’s head by the ears, and yanked it down to the bed, next to her own face.
As the woman in bed went to work, the man behind Donna kept pounding his body against hers, his moans becoming louder.
6
Memory: the room off the alley, near the river, by the bridge. It smelled of rats, and only had a half-dozen candles for light. They flickered yellow and green against the peeling paint of the plaster wall. Water dripped slowly from the ceiling, some of it striking her on the head. But she didn’t move, as much out of fear as of lack of will. She could hear the women on the street, hawking their wares to the men. She could hear the creak of wheels as the carts went by. Her skin felt cold. Her blood, warm.
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 2