Eddie looked at me and said in an almost boyish tone, “Oh, come on, let’s see what you got. Come on, Jackie, let’s play peekaboo, just like in those disgusting peep shows.”
The sweat started to run down my face. I put my hand forward and showed him the message. I suddenly smelled fear from him. His back stiffened. “How dare you, Jackie? Think you could outwit me by showing me what I have done? You’re right, I didn’t know her name. Nor did I care to.”
I felt Patricia pushing me aside. I struggled frantically to get back in, terrified that I would be left outside, stuck here forever with Eddie. He could see this and watched us both. “Okay,” he said to Patricia, “you got what you want.”
“Why did you kill me?” The question exploded out of me.
Eddie crossed his legs. Frost came out of his mouth. “Is it cold in here, or is it the frigid temperature of that cold, steel, lonely place—the end of the end? Can you hear the door slam? The tight coffin lid? The sickening stench of your remains?” His eyes rolled back with lustful pleasure.
Patricia sat up a bit taller. “No, Eddie, I don’t!” she hissed. “That doesn’t exist in my world, not anymore. You’re the one stuck in hell. In spirit, you’re able to leave and roam, invading other people. But in flesh, in the reality of the human race, you are and will always be in a cage. You can only live through a host.”
I pushed—so hard I almost fainted—and got her to step back. I grabbed his hand with mine and pressed the bloody message into his palm. He tried to pull away. “No, Eddie. You’re going to relive your deranged life. Feel me, Eddie. See me now. It’s Jackie, not your helpless victim and all the others. Look at your own mirror now. Look in my eyes.”
We stared into each other’s eyes. I hadn’t planned on this when I arrived, but now I knew that I needed to take him back and show him the child that he was before the devil came to him. That was my plan, anyway.
I saw myself running up the staircase of an apartment building. Babies cried and people fought and screamed behind closed doors. Old, dusty liquor bottles littered the steps. Eddie was in me, and this was his home, the drug-infested projects. As I made my way up the stairs, I could feel the glee in him build. “I’m home, Mom!” Not so fast, Eddie, I thought. I held on to the stair railing with both hands, because I was starting to hear the screams.
If people had been watching us in the visiting room, all they would have seen were two people sitting very still and holding on to each other with a death grip. But inside, my grasp on that stair railing was slipping. I heard every scream come from every one of his victims. It wasn’t a few, or even several. It was a crowd full of moans and pain tearing through as if it had broken free and was finally able to rip him apart. Just as he had done to them and their families.
I looked up, trying to find the ceiling of the prison visiting room—the real, concrete world. With all that is good and pure, God, please help me. My grandfather and more. All the souls I have helped find their ways back home. Show mercy on me. Give me only strength. But I stayed in the stinking tenement stairwell. Eddie kept pulling me toward his old apartment. I knew now that I would not find the child Eddie. There was nothing left of him but what the devil already owned. And I knew that if he succeeded at dragging me inside that apartment, which symbolized the devil’s house and the graves of all his victims, I would never leave this real-world prison. He would become the keeper of my soul, and my body would leave these walls looking like Jackie but housing Eddie. He would walk free. To complete his deeds upon the human race. Through me. I would be the Zodiac Killer. The Gemini. The body of Jackie and the soul of Eddie.
In the tenement, one hand reached for the door knob. I heard an older woman say, “Eddie, is that you?” He wanted to say, “I’m home, Mommy,” but I pressed my lips shut, muffling his voice and hopefully stopping his advance. He turned on me. “Open your fucking mouth and eat me,” his voice roared in my head. “Take my body. We are one. Drink from my cup and spill the blood.”
We were there now. His doorway was at my fingertips. I felt lifeless—heavy and dull and empty. Was this what it would feel like when that door opened? He pushed my hand toward the knob. And then the light appeared. A bright ball came through the building’s roof as it cracked open. Debris fell past me and crashed down flights of stairs. The light tumbled with it, reaching the corners of horror. And out of it came a man with rolled-up sleeves and a top hat. He held the hand of little Jane, and his steps sounded like thunder. He brought her closer and her voice echoed through the dark hallways.
“Let her go! You have no power to kill anymore!” Jane turned toward me and pointed. “Run, Jackie. Come up toward the light.”
I pulled myself up and heard the chants of an American Indian war dance. I felt the power flow into me like a blood transfusion. And I walked past Eddie’s door. He screamed in rage and failure. And I kept walking.
Jane and her faithful Jacob moved aside and took the light with them. Behind it was a cinder-block cell with only a desk, a sink, and a hole for a toilet. This was Eddie’s real home. I wrestled with him—I had to get him back into his dungeon. I looked behind me and saw that Jacob and Jane, in the yellow raincoat, had been replaced by Will and my Forever Guardian, the spirit of the eight-year-old Jackie who died on the operating table and had protected me ever since. I stared in thankfulness. Will had always been my protector. This showed me that he always would be. It gave me such strength and hope that I was able to turn back around and face the cell, which was clear as day in my vision.
Eddie sat at his tiny school desk humming a lullaby. “You will always bear the mark of the twin. You are everyone’s twin.” He leaped up and raced for the cell door. “You are the open gate to hell, like it or not.”
* * *
I let go of Eddie’s hand. The murmurs of other visitors drifted past. The guards still stood at their stations. I pulled my hand away and opened it, palm up. The writing was gone. He looked around the room in a panic. “You brought all my victims up with you! Didn’t you, Jackie?”
I settled into my chair. “No. They came on their own to confront the person who cowardly killed them.” He covered his eyes. I reached out and yanked his hands down, and he pushed back and out of his chair.
The guard rushed over, demanding, “Sit down, or I’ll put you down.”
Eddie squirmed under the authority and apologized. But I saw his eyes drift down to the guard’s gun. He licked his lips. Always wanting the power.
The guard sat him back in his chair. I could still see the desire for the gun in his eyes. “Eddie, let go of the demon.”
“No, never,” he said. “It’s what keeps me alive. And someday I shall be out. I will find you. You can’t shake me off that easy, Jackie.” He stared at me like he was gearing up for something. And, boy, was he.
“Oh, I saw your mother,” he said. “All done up like a whore and—”
I stopped him. The idiot had no idea. “If you did, you wouldn’t be alive to speak about it.”
He scoffed at me. “The priest couldn’t help her. God was too busy, Jackie. She was like you. Having this extra-special intelligence, this passage to the other side.”
I started, “Eddie, this isn’t about my mother—”
“Don’t you call me mother. Wash your mouth out with poison, you little bitch,” the voice of my mother came out of Eddie. It was one of many that came out of him during the hours I spent with him. He mimicked people I love, people I have lost—trying to break me so he could slide inside and then out the prison gates he would go.
“Now that we tested each other in person, in the flesh, what do you want me to say, Jackie?” he asked, back to being Eddie. “That I’m sorry?”
Now I was the one scoffing. I knew he would never apologize. He started touching on different subjects, and throughout it all, he did not blink once. Occasionally, he would close his eyes in pleasure or triumph, but that w
as it. I realized that you don’t notice when a person blinks, but you sure notice when he doesn’t. It was one more demon-tainted trait in a being full of them.
“Let’s talk about us, Jackie,” he said. “You know I can go into anyone I choose, any crack, and live through that person. But only you, the medium, can see me. There has to be a better name for your gift. It’s extraordinary. I bet there must be a high price on your head, knowing the things you know. And it’s how you deliver that makes you so fascinating.
“Look at these walls and watch the magic show begin,” he demanded. “Look! Now don’t cheat.” I looked around the visiting room, from the ceiling on down. I saw people chatting, a guard chewing gum a few feet away. I glanced back at Eddie and saw him squeeze his eyes shut and hold his lips tight until saliva foamed from one corner. I knew what he was doing—causing a psychic illusion. Here we go, I thought.
Large cockroaches began to pour out of the seams in the ceiling. Thousands poured out until I couldn’t even see the wall anymore. They engulfed the guard, covering his face, going into his mouth, sticking to his chewing gum, running up his shirtsleeves and down his collar and into his nose. The sound of their wings and legs rubbing filled my ears as they took over the entire room, going in and out of every human opening possible. And everyone acted as though nothing was wrong.
“Are you done?” I asked. I closed my eyes tightly and made my own psychic illusion of a large hole in the wall. It became a suction hose and pulled every last bug in before snapping shut.
“Very good, Jackie!” Eddie clapped his hands. He was already thinking of his next trick, though. He told me he could make the guard not see and then use the opportunity to snap my neck. He would make sure no one noticed until all the inmates were back in their cells. Then there would just be a dead woman and a prison guard in the room. The guard might go down for murder, he said gleefully. But a second later, his ego backed off that goal.
“But again, that would be my work,” he said. “You don’t think Michelangelo would let someone else take his work!”
And if I had learned anything, it was how proud Eddie was of his “work.”
“Why do you think Patricia contacted me from the grave using your body?” he asked.
I sat and looked at him. “Why, Eddie? You tell me.”
“Because I needed you to free me once and for all.” He was trying to convince me that he had been in control of all this from the beginning. That he had been the one who sent Patricia to me so that he could get my attention and use me for his own ends. Bullshit. Patricia had found me on her own. Patricia had found her freedom, and I’d helped her. Eddie could sit there and rationalize all he wanted, but his victim had escaped him. He had no power over her anymore.
“And you took her away from me.” He continued talking. “I kept her in prison—my prison—dying over and over again. Can you imagine reliving your death over and over again? Climbing those steps in that drug-infested park. Thinking I wanted to fuck her. I watched her struggle like a pig. The first few blows staggered her. Confusion, disoriented, bleeding. The shock across her face.
“It was like a young boy catching Santa Claus coming down the chimney covered in snow and frost, shaking bells and unloading his sack of bodies—I mean goodies—for all the little boys and girls . . .” Sometimes his tangents made very little sense. “Anyway, I was so thrilled to watch her. When I had enough of her fighting to get up, I stabbed her. The more I plunged the blade, the blood would come up at me like striking oil! Squirt! Squirt!
“You know the amazing thing—I didn’t have any blood on me. I couldn’t figure it out. Sure, a little on my hands . . . I walked away. Not run, walked. My master covered me. Oh boy, was I going to take down so many.
“Sure, I wanted my prisoner back. I used to stick my finger in the bullet holes and dig around while she moaned. I needed some entertainment. And you took her away.” He glared at me. “You know the Bible says ‘An eye for an eye.’”
I met his gaze. “Yeah, Eddie. It does. It also says ‘And thou shalt not kill.’”
He laughed. “Good one, Jackie.” Because, to him, that was a joke.
TWENTY-THREE
Crime writers, newspapers, television—they all paid too much attention to the victims, he said. I stared at him. What the hell was he talking about? They were the victims.
“Exactly!” he said. “Only when the person is killed do others have sympathy. Where were they when she was roaming the streets? And strapped down in restraints in those mental institutions? Selling her body? I only ask for the truth to come out. We all see the descent, but no one speaks about it. Let’s just hint around. I’m not saying she is less a victim. But why does everyone care after the fact? Ask yourself that.”
He had a point on this one. Most people don’t care when these lost people are alive, when they can still be helped, when they can still be saved. It’s a lot easier to pretend they are not there. That is where we as a society fail. We lock up the killers, but we don’t care for their victims before it’s too late.
* * *
He eyed me. “Okay, Jackie, what is the question you’re holding back?”
In some of our numerous telephone conversations, he had eluded to actions or phrased sentences in a way—like referring to people as dessert—that made me think he had done something unspeakable.
“Did you ever cannibalize anyone?” I asked.
“Oh, I hate that word. It seems so animalistic,” he said. “Does licking a bloody knife fall under that? The flesh is much too tough. And how would I cook them with Mom in the house?”
He paused and looked at me.
“I have my ways, Jackie. Ask yourself this. Where did all the blood go? Let’s look at our friend Patricia. One hundred gaping wounds and gunshots, and the pigs thought she overdosed?”
I thought about Patricia, so cruelly forgotten by society, and then so cruelly used by Eddie. I looked in his unblinking eyes and knew he was scoffing at my compassion.
“Getting into my mind is dangerous, Jackie,” he said. “But we can’t stop that. You were meant to catch the stars that fall from the blacked sky, the souls of others before being damned to hell. We are both on the same road, you on one side, me on the other.
“Is your cross heavy, Jackie? I see the pain in your eyes. Put it down, hand it to me—that bag you wear around your neck. Pull it off and throw it in the sewer. Denounce your faith.”
I was not wearing my mojo bag, with its amulets, herbs, and hair of the great wolf and of my father—it never would have made it past the security screening—but I knew what he meant. He wanted me to cast off all of my beliefs, my ancestral protection, my best defenses against the devil. Yeah, right. I wasn’t stupid. “I couldn’t wear it into the prison,” was all I said. I wanted to see where he would take this line of talk.
“You know you don’t have to,” he said. “You embed it in your flesh. I smell it on you.” Yet he really thought I might give it up?
“Not a chance in hell, Eddie,” I said. “Your god may want me, but my God holds my hand.”
He smiled. “Why be tormented your whole life? Your mother, Mary, didn’t win.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “but I’m not her.”
“Jackie, did anyone ever tell you Satan loves you? Your eyes are mirrors, holding the image of the suffering, the dead. Blue as the sky, oh, you do shine.”
* * *
Eddie had already told me several times about how he’d loved to break into houses and spy on people. What was he thinking as he did that?
“That unsuspecting moment is so thrilling,” he said, leaning in and licking his lips. “Now, don’t ask anything yet, Jackie. Let’s not get ahead of ourself [sic]. I want you to feel what it’s like—not that you haven’t, but why spoil the fun now? Begin to paint the picture in your oh-so-amazing mind . . . and feel the sheer panic when I was spotted sitting quietly in
a chair, right in the next room.
“I didn’t want to run right away. I wanted to see her flee . . . I didn’t know her name, nor did I care to. But I feel her heart in my hands. Not a feeling like that in the world . . . I see her heart beat so fast her blouse was moving . . . her eyes popping out of her head . . . Her breathing was so heavy I could taste her breath, that gasp of air that struggles to come out.” People think you scream in a situation like that, but you don’t, he said. The mind can’t accept it and the reflexes don’t act quickly enough.
During one break-in, a woman about twenty-five years old came out of the bathroom to find the Zodiac Killer in her room. All these years later, the memory still makes him smile. “It looked like she saw a fucking ghost.” She ran out and told her parents, who were in another part of the house. They called 911, and the operator asked who was in the house. The woman said she didn’t know. “She looks back as I stand, looking directly at her, giving her time to take in every feature. Make no mistakes, I didn’t run all the time . . . I come closer, out of the shadow and there in the flesh I stand. In that one moment, just one moment, I become a legend. And she knows in her heart and soul, the Zodiac lives.”
He had apparently saved up his dramatic flair for me. He was definitely on a roll now.
“I turn and slip out the same way I got in, through a very tiny crack. We both know those cracks, Jackie.” He explained how he’d exited out the back, jumped a fence, and come walking out onto the main street about forty feet away. He heard the woman give the arriving cops a description of a large black man. The police even stopped and asked Eddie if he’d seen anyone with those features while he was standing on the street. “Why didn’t she see me for who I am? Thank you, my master, for blinding the weak sheep.”
The Haunting of the Gemini Page 22