We settled into a routine. Both the guys worked at a paper mill just outside of town, and I cleaned and cooked meals. They never said a word about me looking for a job, and I never did make it in to town. They never had nobody come visit them. Both their parents was dead like mine and yours, Sophia. They told me the people at work were okay but not too trustworthy. The other guys at the mill made fun of Verne sometimes, which Jules didn’t like.
“It was real domestic. They never tried nothing gross either. Like I said, we were all like brothers and sister. I really grew to love them."
She was crying again, absently, not bothering to wipe her cheeks where the salt traced silver tracks down her smooth skin. Her black eyes were still hollow, overflowing endlessly.
“You really did,” I said, aghast. I could feel it coming off of her in waves, buffeting against my zone of protection. Her grief was nearly tangible, like tar coating me. I tasted bitterness, the flavor of crushed aspirin, poisonous on my tongue. I saw what she would say in that aftertaste left in my mouth, before she even spoke.
“Arsenic kills slowly, over time. It’s a man-made poison, though the material comes from the earth. It is therefore forbidden to me, but nature provides. Foxglove kills nearly instantly, but it’s messy. Other herbs and plants can kill slowly but need large amounts and taste bitter.” She smiled, knowingly. I gagged and shook my head, trying to clear the phantom poison from my taste buds.
“Hemlock,” she forged on with her lesson, “kills very quickly and is almost tasteless. It is a gentle death too. The victim feels cold and then the body shuts off nearly at once after that.”
As she spoke, a chill crept into the room. It spread from my feet upward. I fought it off, envisioning crackling fires and the heat of the August sun. She kept talking, ignoring my growing distress. I could feel her in my mind, searching for me so she could feed from my emotions of fear and loathing.
“I loved my twins. I didn’t want them to suffer. It doesn’t take much hemlock to kill a grown man, but I took no chances. I collected it under the full moon and made an infusion. I put the entire batch into their iced tea with a particularly nice dinner. Fried chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, and roasted corn on the cob. Both boys loved that meal,” she said the last to herself, but continued at once.
“They went real quiet when the hemlock hit their bodies. Verne didn’t understand what was happening to him but he said he was cold and wanted to lie down. I tucked him in his bed and covered him up with a bunch of blankets. He asked for a song, so I sang him ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ and then I told him I needed to go check on his brother.”
My body began to thaw just as a gust of wind blew through the barren cell, blowing her magnificent hair around her face in a corona of fire. I heard Brad shout in surprise and then call for backup on his radio. I focused on Catherine. She was no longer crying but by her voice sounded as pissed as I’d ever heard her.
“Jules was nearly dead when I got back to the dining room, lying on the floor under the table. He couldn’t speak by then but he managed to grab me by the throat and nearly choke me to death. After everything I’d done for him and his ugly brother! He finally died, leaving bruises all over my neck that took weeks to fade away.
I had to get the hand truck from the garage to move Jules into his brother’s room, and then pull Verne off the bed onto the floor next to Jules. I undressed them and found that neither of them had all the right man parts. Someone had cut off their balls at some point in their lives, both of them. That explained why they never tried to jump my bones, I guess. I worried though that their incompleteness meant they weren’t going to be a good enough sacrifice, that I’d killed them for nothing. I guess it didn’t matter though because I heard the dark lord telling me to balance their lives back in June when I first met them so I went ahead with my ritual. I used Jules’s chainsaw to cut them both in half lengthwise. Boy was that messy! I cut them right down the middle as neat as I could. Half a nose, half a chest, half arm and leg. I let each of them keep their man parts, what they had left anyway. I figured they had suffered enough in that department. Plus I didn’t want to touch those nasty things. They were like brothers to me. It would be just wrong.
“I sewed each half of a brother to the other half. That was the balancing part. I had to use an ice pick to make the holes and wax string to bind them together, so it wasn’t very pretty. Plus it took forever and it was really freaking hot in the house. Also, I had to do it twice, front and back, for each brother.”
“I’m sure you did the best you could for them,” I said, numb. The chilling cold and the windy theatrics had left. All that remained was two women, each with her own demons, facing each other across a wooden table. Brad and the other officers blocked the cell door, two facing the hall but casting fearful looks into the cell at the Raven Witch Killer, hearing every word from her twisted and beautiful mouth.
She brightened at my words. “I did! I really did try my best. I’m sure they would have appreciated my efforts. Now they were perfectly balanced, you see? Smart and dumb. Handsome and ugly. I cast my circle around them because I was too exhausted to move them to a cleaner spot. I cut my legs, each one, to draw the raven on their chests. I broke the circle when the ritual was complete and packed up all the nice things they’d bought me.”
“What kinds of things did they buy you?”
“Clothes, makeup, books, stuffed toys...you know, things. Damn Sophia, hasn’t anyone ever bought you anything before?” She was annoyed again.
“Sorry. What did you do next?”
“I loaded up Jules’s truck. I figured the cops might be looking for the Outback, so I left it even though I didn’t want to. I liked that car. The next thing I did was douse the bodies and the house with gasoline, like the history guy’s house and his dead meat. I lit that sucker on fire and got the hell out of there. I wanted to give the twins a decent burial but that was the best I could do for them,” she added, slipping back into melancholy with the ease of an eel through water.
“So where did your dark lord send you next?”
“We went to Mount Union.” Her use of the plural ‘we’ is a good indicator of just how crazy she is, I thought. I was surer than ever Catherine Meara would never see the inside of a courtroom. I was right, of course, but for different reasons.
“What did you do in Mount Union?”
“We paid a visit to the devil.”
15-The Devil
“Excuse me? You and your ‘Horned God’ visited the devil?” I smirked. Her story was weak in the dark lord department, in my book. I didn’t doubt she believed what she was saying, but like many serial killers who hear voices, her recollection of these conversations was spotty at best. A god described as wearing horns visiting the devil is almost too ironic for even her to believe, I thought. She scared me, I admitted it as much, a long time before we came to the devil part of her story. I was rapidly becoming a believer in the rhetoric she was spouting and for a lifelong Catholic, a reorganization of religious beliefs at the hands of a serial killer was frightening at best. I hated her for making me face that part of me I’d suppressed for so long.
Instead of anger or scorn, she just simpered at me. “Isn’t it deliciously ironic? Imagine my surprise when the devil card chose a woman to be his raven. Oh, the dark lord has such a light-hearted sense of humor!”
“You chose another woman for your next victim? What was her name, did you know?”
“We did not choose the raven, Sophia. The cards chose the ravens and the dark lord sanctioned their sacrifices. No, I never knew her name. I was in a hurry, trying to get somewhere before the Autumnal Equinox. I had something special planned on that particular September 22nd.” Her haughty superiority had returned, having shed that hick routine once the twins were a distant memory. She still had shiny streaks on her face where she’d cried for them, and I knew her grief was real though it was now long forgotten. She was ready to show off some more. But her story gaps were starting to
piss me off.
“So, you missed Spring Equinox, Beltane even, and both Solstices, but Autumnal Equinox was an emergency?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Didn’t you tell me you didn’t plan any of these things? The dark lord commanded and you bowed down like his bitch was what I’ve gotten from these stories.”
“Who says I missed any of those holidays?” Her sly cat grin didn’t work as well with empty, soulless eyes. The void in them served to emphasize my point, making her seem like a marionette whose strings were manipulated by an amateur. She continued, saying, “We both know why the Autumnal Equinox is most important.”
My spine stiffened. I’d forgotten the importance of September in the midst of all her craziness. “It was the month my parents were killed in a car accident.”
“You sure it was an accident? Better check on that, Sophia,” she whispered. “And ye-eesss...it is a month which prepares for death. My parents met their end the same year and month as yours did. But I can promise you, theirs was no accident.” She grinned wickedly.
“But, you were just a child!” There was no way she could have killed her parents at nine years old and gotten away with it...was there?
“Children hear the light and the dark in equal measure. Why do you think your grandmother never taught you as soon as she knew what you were? Why do you think she insisted on drowning your power in Catholic bullshit?”
She drummed her fingers on the table top. I didn’t care to dwell in the past with her, and certainly not to question my Nonna’s motives with a killer, so I said, “What happened when you found the next victim?”
She gave me those blank eyes for a moment. “It was only mid-August but like I said, I was in a hurry. I found her by accident. She was walking along the side of the road and dressed in very little. I mean, is there modesty left in the world? She had blond dyed hair, all sprayed and teased. She was wearing tall red heels, totally inappropriate for walking. They were what I like to call ‘hooker shoes’. She stuck out a manicured thumb when she heard my truck. I could feel the Devil card insisting on fulfillment and the dark lord agreed she would do as the next raven. I stopped on the shoulder and she jumped in the passenger side.
She had perfect makeup, fake boobs, and plucked or shaved bits of skin showing everywhere. She was a disgusting whore!” Catherine’s voice was laced with acid contempt.
“Was this Neve Ramirez?” I asked suddenly, thinking perhaps the teen had incensed Catherine with skimpy clothing and over sexual tones. It was clear that sex was a hot button topic for her, but then I thought it through and answered my own question. “No, wait. It couldn’t be her, could it...the timeframe doesn’t match, and Neve had brown hair. I suppose she could have bleached it...”
Catherine elaborated. “That girl disappeared up by Sunbury, remember? I didn’t get to Sunbury until the day I turned myself in.”
I came to a realization. “You didn’t have anything to do with Neve Ramirez, did you?”
“Of course not,” she shrugged. “I read about her disappearance in the paper when I blew into town and used it to get myself where I needed to be. Right here with you.” She winked at me.
I shook it off and forged ahead. “Okay. So what happened after the blonde got in the truck?”
“The Devil card is a duality, or symbiosis, of sorts,” she responded, using her scholarly persona again. “It represents bondage and materialism. Or, bondage because of materialism. I could see why the hooker in heels girl fit the card. All she cared about was her lost phone, the condition of her clothes, how she needed a new manicure...she never stopped talking about herself or her appearance. All I could do was nod in the appropriate places, as my input was not required. She droned on and on about a fight with her boyfriend, saying, ‘How is it my fault that guys like to look at me?’ She was a slave to keeping up her looks. She bragged about how she got a lot of different men to buy her things. She’d said, ‘Look at these,’ and grabbed her own boobs. ‘You think I could afford these babies on my own?’ and then laughed about tricking some idiot into paying for them. I could not wait for the opportunity to kill that bitch.
“I asked her where she was going and where she came from, but she was very vague. I had the idea from something I read in her thoughts that she’d done something criminal she was trying to get away from. Stealing money from some guy, I thought. She said she was going wherever I was headed and where she came from was in the past and so it didn’t matter anyway. I said I was going to Mechanicsburg. She said that was fine with her. Of course, she never made it to Mechanicsburg. She only made it a few miles west of Mount Union. I pulled off on a national forest road, saying I needed to pee. She was all for stopping so she could fuck with her hair some more. I’ve never met anyone so vain in my life!”
“I parked near the port-a potties and checked for other cars or hikers. Even though it was summer time, most of the crowd would be near the water, trying to cool off in the heat if possible. This particular rest area wasn’t terribly close to the water and not too close to the main road either. It was perfect. As always, the dark lord provided.
I got out of the truck and pulled the tire iron out of the back as she was getting out of the passenger side. I held it down and behind me a bit, not that she noticed. I followed her as she headed for the john, lugging her giant purse full of hair supplies and makeup. She got in one of the little toilet cubicles and I followed right behind, crowding and pushing her inside. I locked the door behind us. She must have been use to sharing facilities because she didn’t ask questions about why I was in the cramped and smelly room with her. She just asked if I wanted to go first. I shook my head and she peeled off her holey shorts, no underwear I noticed to my disgust, and plopped down on the toilet seat. She started to open her mouth as her stream was released from her body, but I brought the tire iron down on the top of her skull and shut her up quickly. She didn’t even scream out. I think she welcomed release from her bondage to herself. I beat her over and over with the tire iron, across her head, her face, her neck, and her stupid fake ass tits. She didn’t try to fight back or defend herself. I hated her for that.”
“So...you beat her to death in a port-a-potty?” I was incredulous. She’d confessed to some of the most brutal and cruel acts I’d ever heard of, but this was unreal. Besides, it was less methodical than I was used to hearing from her. It smacked of desperation.
“Yes, I did. I cast the circle all around the thing, on the outside, and drew the raven all over her squishy implants. They felt like play dough,” she mused. “Then I dumped her body into the hole and left.”
“Wasn’t there blood everywhere? You would have had to have been covered in it.”
“Not really. After the first whack, she kind of slumped backward, up against the rear cube wall. I think most of the blood went down the piss hole. I had a little bit on me, but nothing too noticeable. The most blood I saw came from my wrist, where I cut it with my knife to draw the raven symbol.”
“Did you keep her purse, or go through it to find out who she was?”
“Why would I keep that? I didn’t need make up or hair crap. Besides, I don’t care who they are, mostly. She was just an easy way to fulfill the promise of the Devil card, and I don’t really like knowing their names, though sometimes it’s unavoidable. It’s better when they’re just meat. I mean, you don’t name the cows you make hamburgers out of, am I right?”
I felt nauseous at her analogy, but I kept going. It was after midnight, and I’d been there for a while already, but I felt the situation was gaining momentum. I wanted to finish this and stop coming here to hear these terrible things. I wanted Catherine Meara to pay for what she’d done. I was impatient for justice to be served, and something inside me knew the black eyes she wore hinted at impending doom.
“Okay,” I said, getting her details straight. “After you killed the blonde, you left. You told her you were headed for Mechanicsburg. Was that true?”
“Absolutely. I needed a Tower, and Philly
was too far away to make it in time. Besides, the raven I needed for the Tower was hard at work, building his nest in Mechanicsburg. I had the perfect building, and raven, in mind and I couldn’t wait to get there.”
“You knew the next victim beforehand? You didn’t find them at random?”
“Sophia, really. You act like I’m this unorganized freak. Yes, when the opportunity presents itself, I’ll take advantage like any hunter. I’m a planner at heart. You might say the whole project, my tribute to the dark lord, began with the seed of an idea involving the raven whose manner of sacrifice was chosen by the Tower card. A wicked little raven named Damien Edwards.”
16-The Tower
Something nagged the back of my brain, a fleeting memory, but I couldn’t hold it firmly in my grasp. Finally, I said, “Okay, I’ll bite. Who is Damien Edwards and why was he an ‘evil raven’ destined to die on the Tower?”
“Aw, you almost had it,” she clucked sympathetically. “You probably read about it in the papers since you’re not big time enough to cover such a story on your own. But...if you cast back far enough, you might remember him from high school.”
At those words, memory broke through the fog and shattered into a thousand fragments. I remembered a tall young man, mocha skin gleaming with health under the stadium lights. A football hero, I recalled, handsome and popular, skimming the hallways of the high school with the ease of a person who is having the time of his life. I was a book worm, mostly, a loner. His polar opposite. He was a few years older than me too, but he was always nice to me. I remembered that with painful clarity.
More memories swam to the surface, like koi darting to kiss the air in a pond. He and a younger version of Catherine holding hands in the halls. Him insisting they sit at my table during lunch. His white teeth contrasting so beautifully with his dark skin as he smiled at me, asking about the book I was reading. So earnest, trying so hard to include me. And Catherine, staring off into space, bored, or staring at me with her weird eyes like I was a specimen in a Petri dish.
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