The Haunting of the Gemini

by Jackie Barrett

  When I had finished drawing the symbols, I read from an old book of psalms, my voice rising louder and louder as the summoning began. The chandelier above me started to sway and the bulbs to flicker. Light bounced off the walls, and the air became thick and still. The smell of freshly turned earth rose from the floor. The dead walked alongside me now.

  “Come forward, child.” I spoke as I sat and began rocking back and forth. “Come forward and speak to me.”

  The candle flames shot up and then blew out. The music box stopped. The floor began to creak and then, in the far corner of the room by the door to the laundry room, was the image of this little girl. I dropped the Book of Psalms and leaned forward.

  “Who are you?” I asked gently. “Why are you always with me? Why do I know you?”

  I stared into the dark corner. She had her face to the wall. Small cries, like a dove in distress, came from her. And then, a soft voice.

  “I was never supposed to interfere with the person I am now. My body is in heaven. My spirit is you.”

  I sat back, shocked. It was true. I had tried for so long to convince myself otherwise. I had been in denial. I couldn’t have ever been a victim. I was the person other people came to for justice! I helped others deal with their deaths. How the hell was I supposed to help myself? How could I get past the feeling of my own killer’s hands around my throat?

  “You are to avenge the broken wings of innocence,” she said to me. “I know who I went into at birth, and you saw me, too. For all the people young and old, it is you who shall attract the monster, rid them.”

  This little girl in a yellow raincoat named Jane was me in a previous life. And her choosing to be reincarnated as me was no mistake. She knew that if anyone could get justice and exact vengeance, it was the daughter of a medium and a medicine man. I could not speak. Pictures of this child’s murder played in my mind. I jumped up in horror, instinctively trying to get away, and my foot accidentally went through the chalk line and broke the circle. I searched frantically for the chalk—I knew that with the circle open, I was exposed to the dark elements and in great danger. I saw it rolling across the floor, spinning quickly out of my reach as though pulled by an invisible force.

  The laundry room door banged open, and Patricia’s voice yelled for the child to run. The girl took off like dust in a windstorm. The door slammed shut, and she was gone. That corner of the room plunged into black. And then, barely, he moved. The tall man in black crouched down to mimic the height of the child. He hid his face with his arm, and spoke to me in a child’s voice.

  “Let’s play a game . . . I’ll count. One . . . two . . .”

  His long combat knife slid across the floor and into my broken circle. The handle hit my leg.

  “Three . . . pick it up.”

  I sat still.

  “Four . . .”

  My hand shook uncontrollably as I tried to stop myself from reaching toward it.

  “Nine . . .”

  “Stop!” I yelled. “You can’t go from four to nine! Stop!”

  He was still using her little-girl voice.

  “Pick it up and slit your throat.”

  I closed my eyes and told myself that this was not real. The next thing I knew, he had crawled over to me—into my broken circle, damn it—and grabbed my hands.

  “It is real. It’s all real.” His grip hurt. “Look at me, Jackie. Don’t you believe in God? Isn’t that what you preach? What would God be without me?”

  His fingers were like iron on mine.

  “Now, we don’t need you knowing too much. Pick up that knife before I do.”

  I took the knife, and his eyes gleamed with victory.

  “I knew you would, Jackie. Put it to your throat. Let me eat your sins away. It won’t hurt.”

  I stared into his eyes. His words were hypnotic. I began to forget my own existence, as though a huge eraser were wiping away my memory. I felt lost. I was close to death, close to taking my life at his command. And then something came over me. It was a rage and a love all at once. I remembered who I was. I was loved. I was needed. And I fought this kind of evil. I would fight it now with its own weapon.

  I turned the knife into this rotten thing that slinks from prison and finds its next victim, then slithers back in glory, slapping God in the face. I leaped toward him and shoved the knife deep into his gut.

  He just looked at me, and then we both looked at his stomach, where there was no wound and no blood. He fell, laughing and holding his middle. “Ohhhh, she killed me . . .” He rolled on the floor, still laughing.

  I had to do something. I grabbed one of the mirrors and held it up to him, to show the devil his own face. He knocked it out of my hands.

  “Jackie, you’re a killer, just like me. You plunged that knife in so hard, so good. You made me proud. How did it feel, Jackie? Better than sex?” He laughed in my face. “You can’t kill what’s already dead.”

  He walked through my broken circle, kicking over my religious relics, and sat in my office chair. He leaned back and nonchalantly rolled a smoke. I knew what he was doing—reliving Eddie’s actions years later. The killing man.

  “Hey, Jackie. You’re supposed to ask me if I got a smoke.” He held up the cigarette as though he were enticing me over. I did not move from where I’d pressed myself up against the wall on the other side of the room.

  “Come over to me, Jackie. Let’s take a walk in the park.”

  I still didn’t move.

  “Take this!” He jumped toward me. “It’s what you wanted, remember, Patricia?”

  I took it. He lit it. I smoked it.

  “You’re a sinner, Jackie.”

  The sound of my inhale was drowned out by the garage door opening. Will was home. He would come through the laundry room door any second.

  “I am always with you,” he hissed.

  Will opened the door and there was only me, standing against the wall, smoking a cigarette. He looked at the scattered relics and smudged chalk.

  “You doing a ritual or something? Who were you talking to? I heard a man’s voice.”

  He wanted my husband to think I was crazy. He would be back.

  The house phone rang upstairs, and we both ran up the steps. It was the prison. My finger automatically accepted the call by pushing number 3.

  “Hi, Jackie, this is Eddie. Did you see it?” He was excited, I could tell.

  “Yes, I saw. Eddie, what made you kill?”

  His excitement came through the phone line.

  “It’s a long story that’s unfolding for your eyes only . . . God and the devil are sitting at a big table. God tells the devil, ‘Move forward and be known.’ And I was born.” He chuckled. “Be careful, Jackie,” he said sarcastically, “so it doesn’t jump into you.”

  * * *

  Eddie kept calling me from prison. We had been having phone conversations for more than a year now, and of course, Patricia had used me to contact him even before that. I was pretty much the only human being he talked to. Sometimes we would just chat about mundane things. He told me what he ate, how he was feeling, what other prisoners were located in cells near to his own. He was housed by himself, and he liked it that way. He had no problem being alone with his thoughts. His cell was about eight and a half feet long and six feet wide, and his bed was a concrete slab covered with a thin mattress.

  Other times, he would bring up other subjects. “Jackie, you listened to the newspapers when they ran my story, to all the movies, to experts on me and others just like me. Now listen to me. I am the Zodiac. They think it’s safe. The public can sleep. How wrong are they . . .

  “I have taught you about weapons. How I work alone in the dark. Studying the prey, developing my skills. I can easily leave and transform into anything.” Now it was my job to find him, he told me. He could change his color or his gender, but I would
find him because his eyes—those all-black orbs—would always be the same.

  “You’re different. The others don’t see me coming. You not only see me but feel my blood begin to pump; my mouth begin to water. The taste of blood, the feel of it on my skin, moving my tongue over my teeth. The stench of death that surrounds me could never be washed away. You’ll look in the mirror and see me . . . You’ll feel me touch your skin, that old familiar that I am now. When I take a deep breath, I can smell you. When I close my eyes, I can pull your body in. When I speak, I can sound just like you.”

  He loved taunting me. “What are you going to say? ‘Hello, 911, the Zodiac Killer is able to move from person to person. He’s haunting me.’” And he was right. What would I say to people who lived only in the “normal” world? People who couldn’t see? He knew—and I knew—that the only time most people questioned these types of things was when a seemingly normal person went on a senseless rampage. There was no rhyme or reason for who the devil picked to live in, he told me. I knew that, too.

  On the surface, Eddie was not one of those normal people anyway. He’d had a rough upbringing—no father in his life; a childhood in a bad, drug-infested neighborhood; very little education. There were reasons and rationales for why he had become such a killer. But then, there were the other things, things a bad childhood certainly couldn’t explain. How did someone with practically no formal education and a technically low IQ teach himself how to assemble guns and make bullets? And how did he know about things like the occult when—back in the days before the Internet—such subjects were almost impossible to learn about without being part of an established occult group? He didn’t learn any of these things on his own, that’s how. He had his devil twin to help him.

  Eventually, Eddie told me about what he considered to be his masterwork, his murder of Patricia. Over several days, he relived how he’d killed her, savoring both the details of the crime and how much hearing them hurt me. Patricia was an unwanted presence in my life, sure, but I knew she was a victim, and to hear how she had died was excruciating for me. I kept him talking, though, because I thought it was important for people to know exactly what he had done and what he was thinking while he did it. About the night he became the soul collector.

  * * *

  It was nighttime in the park. The wind blew through the trees. People walked around, lovers kissed. He knew exactly where to wait. He had waited two years since his last attack, and now it was time. He told himself to get ready. Here she came. Don’t move too fast, steady yourself. Look at her.

  He could tell she had nothing, was nothing. Talking to herself every few seconds. The filth had no bra on, swinging her hips, trying to get fucked. She made him sick. He licked his lips and moved around the bushes to watch her in her tight pants. He could see her nipples through her black T-shirt, which had a flower design on the front. Flowers, which laid on her like she was in a coffin, like when they place a bouquet over a body’s chest. He was her undertaker, coming to collect her body. His sweet, dear little sinner. She wanted him to fuck her.

  He crept a little closer and she felt him. He smiled. He heard her ask someone for a smoke. He quickly rolled a piece of paper as though it were a cigarette and held it up enough to catch her eye. He had her now. He turned and walked ahead of her, his heart beating with joy. He didn’t even have to turn around. He knew she would follow.

  She did, and his joy grew, but then she spoke. He hated that. He never wanted his kills to speak.

  “Why don’t you stop walking? Where are you taking me?” she said.

  He looked back. Just a little bit farther. She climbed the steps after him, her breasts jumping up and down as she tried to keep up. He reached into his back pocket, took out his ski mask, and put it on. She told him she thought it was sexy.

  “Do you like me? Do you want me?” She was trying to turn him on. Come closer. She did and tried to take what she thought was the smoke. She rubbed herself on him, but he wasn’t hard from that. He was hard from the thought of his next move. He pushed her away slightly, backing her up to get a good shot.

  “I like you so much, I’m going to keep you forever.”

  She saw the gun and said, “No, please.” He felt his eyes roll back in his head and his belly begin to fill. He shot her and she went down. He waited for her to die, because only then could he collect her soul. But she did not. She struggled and fought to get up. Silly girl. He shot her again. She fell again but kept trying to drag herself away from him. How dare she try to get away from her god!

  He wanted to see the panic in her eyes, so he got down on his belly beside her and crawled along with her. She kept begging him, but that only turned him on more. That was when he decided that he needed to feel his knife plunge into her, so he could hear the sound of it piercing her flesh.

  He pinned her down and slowly licked both sides of the knife blade. She tried to shield her face with her arms, and he laughed at her. As if that would stop him. He plunged the knife in . . . so many times he lost count. It felt so good, he couldn’t stop. When he was finally done, he lay beside her and looked at his treasure. She was drenched in her own blood.

  But not a drop had touched him. He watched her life run out—those last breaths were always so satisfying. He wanted nothing more than to lay beside his bride, his child, his best kill, his everything. He had waited so long for the perfect one. He saw his breath, despite the August heat, and wiped his mouth as he stretched out next to her, his other half that he would keep forever. He wanted to collect her soul and share their togetherness. Such a sweet moment, he thought.

  She had only just begun to live under his thumb, to be his eternal and ever-after slave. He would never be hungry again. She filled his gut. He lay there and thought.

  I am humanity.

  I am tranquility.

  I am the ocean, the sky.

  I am your tears.

  I am the brother of man—the other brother.

  I am the air on your cheeks.

  I am your last drop of blood.

  Even though the park was full of homeless people and druggies, he and she were alone. He felt light-headed as he looked at his knife, still shiny with blood. He felt like it was Christmas morning, and he had just gotten the toy he’d been wanting all year. But now he had to get home. He wiped off the knife and put it in his jacket pocket, along with his mask.

  He left the flesh behind for the pig cops to find and walked quickly out of the park—not because he was afraid of getting caught, but so that he could get home to be with his newly collected soul. He passed by people who all seemed to race by as though they couldn’t see him. Figures and faces he couldn’t make out flashed by as a voice inside told him how good he had done.

  He closed the door to his room and put his gun and the knife in his desk drawer. He changed his clothes and jumped into bed, smelling the blood on a rag he held. Then he made love to his kill. Not the body, but the soul. He felt her next to him. So exciting.

  He got up and looked at his body. He let his hand run over his chest. He had done it.

  I accomplished it. I am the Zodiac.

  The higher beast.

  The hunger.

  The hunter.

  The master.

  * * *

  I thought Eddie telling me all this was a one-way confessional, but he did not want to play that way.

  “Jackie, I have been meaning to ask you something.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Tell me what happened to you at age eight. Do you remember yet?”

  “A lot happened to me,” I said quietly.

  “Do you see it?” he pressed further. “Can you tell me?”

  I heard a guard in the background yell for him to hang up the phone.

  “Ooops. I have to go, Jackie. Time is up. Session over.” He paused. “Tomorrow, you get to lay on the couch, and I ask the questions.
We’ll play shrink . . .”

  He laughed and hung up. I was left standing stunned in the middle of my kitchen. I had never mentioned my visions of Jane, never referred to reincarnation in any way.

  He liked to shake me up. At the end of a different conversation, he told me that he sometimes sat in his cell and wondered what I was doing. “I stare at the ceiling and it begins to swirl around, like water, and I see you . . . I can see you . . .”

  SIXTEEN

  I had planned to have after-dinner coffee with a dear friend. As time rolled on, I kept trying for normalcy, so I made the plans days before. But instead of dressing to meet her, I put on a black hoodie and tucked a wrapped bundle into a tote bag. I walked down the West Side Highway, looking for a place to dump it. I heard people’s thoughts as they walked past me. “What’s with her face?” they asked themselves, unaware that I could hear every word. I kept searching and finally found a sewer. I threw the bundle down it as hard as I could, like I was afraid it would hurt me. “There,” I said, “you can’t kill me again.”

  I had just dumped every kitchen and utility knife from my house into the sewer. As I stared down the hole I came to myself, like a sleepwalker awakening to find herself in front of the refrigerator. I shook my head. I remembered the walk but had no idea where I was, which scared the hell out of me. I stopped a passerby and asked for directions to the subway. I felt like a child away from home and wanted to say, “Help me, I’m lost,” but I kept my mouth shut.

  I stumbled in the direction the man pointed me. I didn’t know how long I walked before I passed a night club that had thumping bass coming from inside and two huge bouncers standing outside.

  “Hey, Patricia, you coming in tonight?” one of them hollered at me.

  What?

  The other one scowled at me. “No drunken shit tonight. I’m not in the mood,” he growled.