“Burned. Nasty provocative little things. I’m astonished any reputable high school would allow you and your raffish companions to wear them-much less make them an official uniform.”
“Did you… do stuff to me? While I was out?”
“Like what?”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “Like… sex stuff?”
“Would it bother you if I did?”
“I’m only seventeen, and I’m still a virgin and-”
“Liar.”
“I am!”
“My dear, I can assure you I conducted a most thorough examination while you were unconscious.” He looked at her sternly. “You are no virgin.”
Her eyes were trained on the pendulum. “How-how high up is that thing?”
“At present, it swings about four inches above your lovely chest, but it is descending at a rate of an inch every minute. So you see, you still have a little time to enjoy the lovely mesmeric swinging-before you feel its cold blade slicing your flesh.”
Her head whipped back and forth, her face contorted with fear. “Why are you doing this to me? I haven’t done anything to you.”
“Oh, my sweet thing. Please listen.” He scooted his chair closer to the table-though careful to stay out of the arc of the pendulum. “I know this will be difficult for you to comprehend. So much of what we are told in life is simply… wrong. The emphases are put in all the wrong places. Look at you. Devoting yourself to cheering for the accomplishments of others instead making accomplishments of your own. Dressing up in that blatantly objectified costume that can serve no possible purpose other than the titillation of the dominant male hierarchy. Painting your lovely face.”
He reached forward and stroked her cheek. “You have fine features, my precious. Why would you smear paint all over them? Because society has taught you that your God-given looks are insufficient. In order to be attractive to men-and of course that is your principal function in life-you must add artificial color. It’s a shame.”
JJ licked her lips. “If-if I promise not to wear makeup, would you please stop that-swinging thing?”
“I merely use this as an example of what society has done to you. Just as it has taught you that because I take lives I must be some kind of monster. Just as it has taught you that your ephemeral life here on earth is so precious you must cling to it even when it is perfectly evident that your time is coming to an end.”
“I-I don’t want to die!”
“Darling,” he said, leaning close and whispering, “your life on earth is over. But because of my work, because of your sacrifice, we will all be translated to a better world, a happier one. We will leave behind this earthly plane of disappointment, discontent, and disillusionment. We will usher in a Golden Age.”
She trembled so much it was difficult for her to speak clearly. “Is-that-why I’m strapped to this table?”
“I would like to believe you have the strength to remain in position when the pendulum begins its final descent. That you would not run or attempt to save yourself. But the flesh is weak, even when the spirit is willing. And so much is at stake. I felt a few precautions were in order.”
“Where are my friends?” Her eyes followed the blade, back and forth, back and forth. It was so close now it never escaped her line of sight.
“They are in other rooms. Enjoying similar experiences I’ve devised for their delectation.”
She stared at the blade, barely an inch away now. “Is it going to hurt very much?”
“Yes,” he said, stroking her brow, “I’m afraid it is.” He pushed to his feet. “It’s almost time. I’ll leave you alone now.”
She quivered, then rocked hysterically, crying, wailing. And the pendulum kept swinging. She screamed hysterically. “Stop it! Please help me! Please!”
The pendulum swung again and this time she felt it crease her exposed flesh. She cried out. But it did not stop. Again it swung and again it cut her. A thin line of blood trickled to the surface. She cried out uncontrollably, insanely, crazed, her eyes wild with frenzy. The next pass would be the one, she knew. The next swing of the pendulum would kill her.
“Please, God! Someone! Help me!”
The pendulum descended even lower, sweeping toward her chest-
Then stopped.
She was so hysterical she couldn’t hold still. She arched her back and twisted, flinging herself from one side to the other, straining against her bonds, as if she’d lost all sense of time or place, all reason, all sanity.
Above her, holding the pendulum barely an inch from her breast, the Raven smiled.
28
The only thing more frustrating than knowing a killer is on the loose and not being able to do anything about it is knowing a killer is on the loose and not having anything to do. I was totally stymied. Waiting for reports. Waiting for lab results. Waiting for someone to give me the magic piece of information that would allow me to catch the miserable table-strapping picture-taking bastard once and for all. But that magic bullet was not forthcoming.
I thumbed through the stack of information that had trickled across my desk. They still hadn’t gotten a fix on who owned or had built the cabin out by the dam. Speculation was that hunters or fishers had slapped it together, maybe dug the basement to store or cure fresh kills. Edgar found it and took it over. Maybe killed the original occupants, who knows? There were few other dwellings in the area, and they had found no one who had any knowledge of who lived there. Some of the new FBI personnel working the case had managed to track down the identity of two of the girls found in Edgar’s basement-two out of twenty-two-by comparing the physical remains against old missing-persons reports in the FBI database. They were both runaways, both last seen in small towns in northern California about six months before. Although it was difficult to make reliable determinations about bodies so decomposed, the coroner believed they had been killed first, then brought to the shack sometime afterward. The logical conclusion was that our Edgar had a previous life-one in which he buzzed up and down the coast killing helpless girls, then dumped their corpses back here. All before the Poe motif fully developed.
I was feeling better. Not 100 percent, not even close, but given what that bastard put me through, I was pretty damn solid. I called Rachel, but she was out. Basketball game. Seems the team was still undefeated and if they won another game would be guaranteed a spot in the play-offs. Bully for them.
Called Lisa, too, but she was not at home.
Found a book on the corner of my desk, one I’d forgotten about in all the turmoil following my abduction. Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: A Prose-Poem. The only Poe I hadn’t read yet, as far as I knew. And weird as all get-out.
I opened the book and started to read. It was hard going. Strange. Poe as writer qua astrophysicist. Lots of cosmological theorizing, but couched in unscientific, poetic language that made it extremely difficult to follow. I’d read Poe’s bio-he was no scientist. Why had he written this? It was like Carl Sagan on an acid trip.
I had to reread a passage three times-some babble about irresistibly attractive forces-before I got any sense of what he was talking about. Then it occurred to me that what he was describing, an enormously powerful force in space sucking everything toward it, sounded a lot like a black hole. Did we know about those in Poe’s day?
Then there was the passage in the coded message Edgar sent us: From that one Particle, as a center, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically-in all directions-to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space-a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.
Which, placed in context, sounded for all the world like the big-bang theory, once I read it over about six times and decoded some of the nonscientific terminology. My history of science was sketchy, but I thought that idea came later, that in Poe’s era people were still mostly buying into the Adam and Eve bit. How could Poe know this?
Normally, I tried to empathize with a living, bre
athing person, but this time, I let my mind wander into the psyche of this writer, long dead, who had penned this bizarre work. What was he trying to accomplish? And what did Edgar-our Edgar-get out of it? Why was this book so significant to him that he led us to it? It was baffling.
Until I started to see a weird sort of pattern emerging, a secret latticework woven between the sentences. And some disturbingly familiar terminology. Dream-Land. Ascension. Golden Age.
That was when I started to get it.
I was so absorbed in my reading I didn’t even notice the woman standing at the other end of my desk. She had to clear her throat, then drum her fingers.
“Thallium.”
I looked up. It was Jennifer Fuentes, the toxicologist.
I squinted. “You’re saying I need Valium? Do I seem stressed?”
“Not Valium. Thallium. A deadly poison.”
I pulled my head out of the book. “And the reason you’re saying this is…”
“I found it in Fara Spencer’s mouth, just like the O’Bannon kid predicted. I used a wide range of reagents for different hard-to-detect poisons. Thallium clicked. The spectrophotometer confirmed it. It had broken down, as any poison would over that period of time. So to double-check, I put the sample in a graphite tube and heated it to vaporize the poison. Put it under the blue light. Voilà. Thallium. Judging from what was left more than a week after her death, I’d say it was a significant dosage.”
“Enough to kill her?”
“Oh, yeah. Instantly.”
“So he took the heart out after she was dead.”
“I think so. Immediately thereafter, before the blood had a chance to coagulate.”
“But she wouldn’t have felt the pain.”
“Not if she was dead.”
Of course not. He’d captured her, sure. Probably terrorized her, just like he did me. And he’d taken the heart, because that’s what Poe wanted him to do, and that’s what he wanted to mail to me. But he couldn’t do it while she was alive. She wasn’t an offering, and outside of his twisted plan for redemption, he lacked the requisite cruelty. Or at least one of his personalities did.
And Darcy had known it all along.
“Tell me about thallium, Doc. Is it hard to get, like that voodoo zombie stuff?”
She shook her head. “Rat poison, most likely. Contains thallium sulphate. Half the people in Vegas probably have it in their garage, never suspecting how deadly it can be.”
“But Edgar would know. Edgar knows everything.”
“I feel like an idiot. I would’ve missed it altogether if it hadn’t been for that kid.”
“Don’t feel bad, Doc. You were meant to miss it.”
Jennifer walked humbly back to her office and I returned to my reading.
I’m getting close to you, Edgar, I thought. I was still missing a few key pieces of information, but it was starting to fall into place, like snowflakes on a Colorado mountaintop. And the few things I didn’t know yet, I knew where to find.
In this book.
There was a reason why Edgar was who he was, why he did what he did. And I was going to discover it. Before his damned Day of Ascension. Before it was too late.
Who are you? Where did you come from?
29
“Please, Nana, please. We’ll be careful.”
“No. You’re too young. You children should stay near the house.”
“We’re old enough. Honest.”
“Ernie, I’ve given you my answer.”
“But Nana!”
The twins had lived with their grandmother for almost a month before she relented, on a bright summer morning when the California air was so cool and the sun so warm even she must’ve found the temptation irresistible. Her small rural house backed up against a forest full of brush and hidden dangers, maple and oak and tall pines, redwoods and relicts of redwoods. Even better, not a quarter mile beyond the forest was a vast expanse of beach, a private access road to the Pacific Ocean. Nana’s family had bought this choice land not far from Salinas at the turn of the century and never let it go, even though they were poor as dirt and it came to be worth a substantial sum. But what good did it do the twins if they weren’t allowed to leave the house?
“I want you children where I can see you. No telling what kinds of mischief you might get into.” She had a cat in her arms, a huge peach-colored Maine coon that stared at Ernie with eyes that never blinked. “I know what you were up to when your parents weren’t watching and I won’t have any of it. You just stay put.”
“But there’s nothing to do in the yard!”
“And what is it you think you’re going to do in the forest? Don’t you know that place is full of ticks? Poison ivy? Do you know what poison ivy looks like? I’ll bet you don’t. You get a dose of that and you’ll be miserable for days. Snakes out there, too.”
Ernie was unconvinced.
“Did I tell you about the wild boars? My mother saw one, just before the Lord took her home. Teeth like razors. Could eat little things like you two in a single gulp.”
But Ernie did not relent. To him, the forest was an unexplored wonderland teeming with adventure. Even from a distance he could see its dark and foreboding corners, and the mystery made it all the more alluring.
“We could play lots of games in there. We could build forts and play hide-and-seek.”
“You can do all that in the yard.”
“Not good. Not like we could there.”
Nana’s eventual surrender was inevitable, given how both Ernie and Ginny pounded her with the relentlessness only eight-year-olds can muster. “But just for one hour. And I want you to carry this tin whistle. You get in any trouble, meet up with a wild boar or something, you blow on it, hard. And when you get back, I’ll be inspecting you for ticks.”
“All right, Nana. We will, Nana,” he said, throwing himself up against her and hugging her tightly.
“That’s enough of that,” she said, pushing him away.
“And what about the beach? Can we go there, too?”
“Under no circumstances are you to go near the beach. I couldn’t hear you out there even if you did blow that whistle. Now get along, before I change my mind.”
“Yes, Nana,” he said, already running.
And so the revels began. They were like pagans, Ginny and Ernie, romping through the forest, worshiping each other and secret gods known to no one but themselves. They would pretend to be astronauts on another planet searching for new life-forms and alien civilizations. They would play endless games of chase. There were no other children living anywhere near them, and they never minded in the least. They were a world unto themselves.
On some afternoons, Ernie’s favorite ones, after the running and chasing were done, they would sit together on their makeshift table, a huge stump of a tree that had been logged a generation before. Hidden amidst the maple and second-growth redwoods, they would tell each other everything. They had no secrets. Why would they? Each was an extension of the other. As far as they were concerned, they were two parts of the same person.
“Do you ever miss Mom and Dad?” Ginny asked, one such afternoon.
“I dunno.” He stretched out, sunning himself. “Kinda sorta. You?”
“Maybe. Sometimes.”
“I don’t miss Mom yelling all the time.”
“No.”
“And I don’t miss Daddy’s spankings. Which really weren’t spankings because they weren’t on my butt.”
“He never spanked me.”
“That’s ’cause he liked you. He spanked me all the time. He just liked you.”
“Yeah,” she said, drawing her arms inward as she spoke, staring at the leaves. “He sure did like me.”
“I hated it when they acted all weird and crazy and couldn’t hardly walk.”
“Me too. But that was when Daddy liked me the most.”
“And Nana’s pretty nice. Even if she is old and kinda strange.”
“Yeah.”
&nb
sp; The breeze blew a trace of honeysuckle between them, rustling the leaves and giving them both a slight chill.
“But I still miss Mom and Daddy. Sometimes,” Ginny said quietly.
“Yeah. Me too, I guess.”
True to her word, when they returned from the forest each day, their grandmother performed full and thorough inspections.
“Those ticks are insidious. They dig down deep and they never let go. Strip!”
And she meant it. The inspection did not begin until both children were standing before her starkers. “No underwear. Nothing.” Now they really looked like wild animals, primordial wood nymphs, hair tangled and full of leaves, even bugs, dirt sweat-stained to their skin. Their grandmother checked each nook and cranny, every fold and orifice. The children didn’t much enjoy this assessment. But it did not deter them. Next day, they were back in the forest.
“Do you want to touch it?”
He had seen her looking at him while he went to the bathroom behind a tree. It was not the first time.
“No way. Gross.”
“Isn’t gross. It’s just me.”
“Well, I don’t have anything like that.”
“That’s ’cause you’re a girl.”
They sat on the stump in silence for a few moments. He knew what she was thinking. It was always like that, and not just with her. He could tell what anyone was thinking, sometimes before they knew themselves. And he knew Ginny’s mind as well as he knew his own.
“Okay,” she said, something like fifteen minutes later, out of the blue.
“Okay what?”
“Okay I want to touch it.”
He considered. “You’ll have to let me touch yours.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Well, whatever you got, I want to touch it.”
“Okay.”
Ernie dropped his shorts. And his Sears-bought Underoos, which drooped over his shoes.
And she touched it.
“That wasn’t so much,” she remarked, then giggled. “It’s all sticking out now.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Why’s it doing that? Just ’cause I touched it?”
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