Gray Matter

by Shirley Kennett

  Suddenly there was cold water splashed in her face, and she gasped with the shock of it and shook her head. The shaking made her woozy, as if she was at sea during a hurricane, rising and falling as huge waves traveled beneath her boat.

  “Awake, I see,” said a soft voice near her ear. “Good. All the best ones stayed awake.”

  A figure came into her field of vision. It was the cook, but with a subtle change: he was the one in control now, the one with the power, not just a man flipping burgers or pushing a mop.

  She was in the kitchen, tied up, straddling a chair.

  “My name’s Pauley Mac,” he said, extending his right hand as if to shake hers in greeting. “Oops,” he said, pulling back his hand, “I guess you’re not quite up to that at the moment.” He used his left hand to clasp his own right hand, and pumped up and down enthusiastically. “Hello,” he said in a feminine voice that parodied her own, “I’m Doctor Penelope Fucking Gray. Glad to meet you.

  “Now that we’ve met, I’d like to ask you a few questions before we get down to business,” Pauley Mac said in his own low-pitched, flat voice. As he spoke, he unpacked items from a large black case onto the kitchen table, deliberately within PJ’s view. Plastic bags, which he removed from the case, turned over thoughtfully in his hands a couple of times, and then replaced. A cloth-wrapped set of sharp tools, whittling knives and picks for fine work. A plastic-wrapped bundle of fresh clothing. Finally, and most horrifyingly, a machete with a scarred handle and a foot-long blade that glinted and flashed sinuously under the light as though it were moving under its own power. His gloved hands lingered over the cutting tools and then traced the length of the cleaver affectionately, as PJ would pet a cat from nose to tail-tip.

  PJ’s mind worked furiously. She sensed that while he was willing to talk, he wouldn’t pick up that machete. If she could keep him talking, she could stay alive longer. And suddenly every minute was precious. “Call me PJ,” she said, finding her voice and marveling that it was far steadier than she felt.

  “Is that what your man friend calls you, your Detective Leo Schultz? Is that what he calls you when he’s sticking it to you, when you’re begging him to fuck you so hard you’ll split open, when you have your legs wrapped around his ass? Does he call you PJ then?”

  Fear took over PJ’s thought processes again, and for a moment she couldn’t speak. She had to think, had to get a handle on how to talk to this man. This murderer.

  “He’s just a friend of mine, a co-worker, actually. We just work together. He calls me Doc.”

  “Doc, huh? I kind of like that. Doc. I think I’ll call you Doc, too. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “You can call me anything you like.” He hummed some more as he rubbed his whittling knives on a polishing cloth. Her arm throbbed, and she felt a warm drop run down her arm. The cloth tied around the wound must be saturated.

  “What I want to know, Doc, is how you knew about the murders. I mean, the little things, the case and the plastic bags and all.”

  She almost opened her mouth about the computer, then thought that he wouldn’t want to hear that. He wouldn’t want to know that his moves could be analyzed. Predicted.

  “I’ve always been good at making up stories,” she said, working to keep the strain from her voice. “Even when I was a little girl. I could start with a bare story, just a sentence or two, and add all the details like I was seeing them, but it would only be in my mind.”

  “You saying you made all those things up?”

  PJ gulped. “Yes.”

  There was a pause, then a strange noise. Pauley Mac was out other sight at the moment, and she couldn’t see his face, so at first she didn’t relate the sounds she was hearing to laughter. When she did realize that he was laughing, relief flooded through her. She had said the right things, at least so far.

  “So you fooled everybody, did you?” he said. “They think you’re some kind of slick-as-snot Sherlock Holmes, and all along you were just keeping your ass out of the fire making things up. That’s a good one.”

  “Don’t tell anybody, OK?” Her attempt at rapport fell flat. He went back to humming, and she worried about his next move. Suddenly he thrust his face into hers.

  “Question number two: how did you know it was me?”

  She could feel his breath on her face. It was hard to concentrate, but she had to say something. He expected an answer. Her professional instincts warned her away from the first thing that sprang to mind, which was his humming, the same humming as she had heard on the video tape. Then she thought of a way to test her theory that he was trying to acquire the skills of his victims.

  “It…it was your painting, the one I saw at Millie’s. It’s very good. As good as Sheila Armor’s work.”

  His face softened a little. “At least you can recognize true talent when you see it.”

  “The way you do?”

  “Yeah, I see the things that other people can do, and I figure I can do them just as well.”

  “So you take classes?” PJ knew she was pushing it.

  His benign expression melted away. “Cut the crap, Doc. We both know what I do.” He turned away from her. “I’m not a cannibal. You hear that, bitch? Cannibals are scum. What I do has nothing to do with being a cannibal.”

  “I believe you. I never really thought that you were. I was just going along, you know, trying to keep my job.”

  “Just so you know that.” He made an animal sound, a growl deep in his throat. It was the most chilling thing PJ had ever heard. “Now Dog might just do something like that,” he said, “if nobody was watching him.”

  She wondered what he was doing behind her back. Her head hurt so badly she wished she could slip back into unconsciousness, but she knew she couldn’t do that. If she did, she wouldn’t wake up again. She licked her lips and decided to try a different approach.

  “Tell me, are you interested in their personalities too, or do you just collect skills?” She tried to summon some professional detachment. “You’re really unique. I’d like to understand you a little better.”

  “Don’t give me any of that shrink bullshit, bitch, or I’ll cut your head off one little slice at a time. I know about shrink talk. You just want to hear about the voices. They all do.”

  She felt a hot pain, like a finger of fire tracing across the skin of her back, high on her right shoulder. Sickened and immobilized by the sudden pain, she realized that Pauley Mac was beginning to carve on her skin. Another streak of pain. Gasping, she fought back the blackness at the edge of her sight.

  “What about your carvings, then,” she said desperately. “Tell me about the dog pictures. They’re done so well. You have real talent.”

  Pauley Mac paused in his work. PJ took several deep breaths, hoping he would answer, hoping he would talk to her.

  “Do you really think so?” he said. “None of my other guests have really appreciated them.”

  PJ struggled to keep her voice under control as blood ran down her back and into the waistband of her shorts. She had to keep him talking. “I’ve never seen anything like them. Why did you choose a dog?”

  “It’s kind of a self-portrait.” Another stroke. She tried to close off the pain, lock it in a little compartment in her brain. “I wasn’t planning to do a full job on you, Doc, but I just might change my mind. You’re fun to talk to. Mostly I get moaning, that sort of thing. You’re not part of this cycle, you know. You don’t by any chance play a musical instrument? Dance? Paint?”

  PJ shook her head no, and regretted it as the room spun.

  “No? Too bad. But then I’m done with this cycle anyway. Time to move on to something else.” He leaned forward over her back, and put his lips next to her ear. “I’ve already picked a new theme. You’ll be the first to know. It’s Childhood Innocence. Sad to say, you don’t qualify there, either.”

  PJ tried to pull her thoughts together. There was something there, if she could just grasp it. Voices. Guest
s. Self-portrait.

  “This is a waste of time,” Pauley Mac said, suddenly irritable. His voice sounded odd. It was as if someone else were in the room and had just spoken for the first time. “Let’s get on with it. You don’t have to finish the carving. She’s not part of the cycle. She won’t be a guest.”

  PJ realized that he was speaking to someone else, discussing her fate with someone whose voice she couldn’t hear.

  Voices.

  An idea burst upon her. It was far-fetched, but she had to try something. He had put down the carving tool and was about to pick up the machete.

  “Sheila! I want to talk to Sheila,” she said, the words pouring out. “She’s one of your guests. I know she’s there. Sheila, I’m talking to you. Only you. Remember when we met in my office? We were friends, Sheila. We liked each other from the start.”

  Pauley Mac hadn’t said anything, but his face showed…surprise? He hadn’t been aware that PJ and Sheila knew each other.

  “I need your help now. Help me, Sheila,” she said pleadingly. She didn’t have to fake the desperation.

  “Help me. Stop this man from killing me. Make him stop.”

  Pauley Mac put his hands over his ears and pressed tightly. He wanted to shut out the bitch’s voice. He had to think, and her words were keeping him from thinking clearly.

  She had perceived, or guessed, the true nature of his mind. He had partaken of the Armor woman’s brain, as he had so many others, to get the special talent she had, to claim it as his own. But there were strings attached; it was a package deal. When he got the skill, he also preserved a bit of her, the essence of her, in his mind. It wasn’t voluntary. He never would have chosen such a thing, to have his days and nights played out with internal commentary. Not just Armor, but all of them: the voices of his guests were with him all the time. Dog, with his no-nonsense animal conviction and predilection for brute force, dominated all of the guests and kept them in line.

  He stood motionless, as his thoughts bounced from one corner of his mind to another. Not for the first time, he wondered if he was simply insane. Were the voices all just splinters of himself? Were they part of some grand psychosis that had gripped him since childhood, that had been born in that bed with Ma and Pa or in the closet where he was often locked for punishment, arms and legs tied, mouth gagged to stop the screams that welled up from inside, left for hours with only thirst, hunger, fear, and his own urine and feces for companionship?

  Maybe nothing was real except the trail of corpses he had left behind.

  No. No, the skills were real. He could play the piano.

  He could.

  And dance, and paint. And play basketball, run like the wind, ski as though he had come out of his mother’s womb with miniature skis on his tiny wrinkled feet.

  He could.

  So the voices were real, too, just a little unexpected side-effect of his method.

  “Sheila, stop him. I know you can do it.”

  He heard her even though he was trying to block his ears. “Shut up, bitch!” he shouted. “Shut up! I know what you’re trying to do, and it won’t work.”

  Sheila Armor had been a strong-willed woman. He had known that, had felt it in her struggle, had seen the final defiance in her eyes when he lifted her head for the killing stroke. The remnant of her that he preserved in his mind was strong, too. He had felt her presence more than once. He had not been aware that Sheila and the bitch were friends, and now that fact grew in importance, magnified by the bitch’s pleas.

  Pauley Mac struggled to figure out what their friendship meant to him. No outsider had ever tried to talk to a guest before.

  Dog was having none of it. Concepts like friendship meant nothing to him. The guests were simply his, to be tolerated or tormented. He reached for the machete, his hot thoughts channeled toward killing, thinking of the weight of it in his hand, the swoosh sound as it descended, the arc of blood.

  Something fluttered inside Pauley Mac. Like a newborn antelope struggling to rise and run within minutes of its birth, something pushed itself up on shaky legs and took a tentative step.

  The remnant of Armor’s indomitable personality that Pauley Mac believed he harbored within himself, believed with all his heart and with decades of conviction behind it, was asserting itself. Pauley Mac screamed for Dog to restore order, but Dog was lost in bloodlust and couldn’t be yanked from it fast enough.

  Armor’s voice, raspy but recognizable, forced its way out of Pauley Mac’s mouth.

  “I want to stop him,” he said, gasping, trying to choke back the words. “I will stop him. Dog doesn’t scare me. I’ll kick his ass so hard it’ll come out his mouth.”

  A cacophony of other voices burst into his mind, urging him one way and the other. Dog turned away from his images of death, reluctantly, to do battle and set things right. But a mutiny had taken hold, spearheaded by Armor, with its ranks swelled by the other guests who had abhorred the killing.

  Dog trembled, indecisive for the first time in his life. Pauley Mac froze, his hand on the machete, immobilized by the struggle within.

  On his way to PJ’s house, Schultz had an increasing sense of urgency. He ran a few red lights and coasted through a couple of stop signs. He thought about how he had messed up the night Sheila Armor was killed, how the scale on which his personal accountability was weighed canted sharply down on the side of failure.

  Again he was in the situation where he would blame himself, regardless of what anyone else said, if something happened to PJ.

  While he was contemplating baring his ass in front of the X-ray technician, PJ was on the killer’s home territory rooting through trash.

  While he was twisting his son’s arm, a lab technician was making the connection between the blood samples from the cat’s claws, Armor’s fingernails, and the styptic pencil.

  While he munched on nacho chips outside Sheila Armor’s apartment, her headless body waited to be discovered inside.

  While he looked away, his son became a drug pusher.

  While he buried himself in his work, his wife fell out of love with him.

  While he smugly took the back entrance to the place where he and his partner were going to make a “routine” bust, his partner was blasted away at the front door.

  He didn’t want to add another entry to the list of self-recriminations: while he was busy being dense about the implications of the missing case, PJ lost her head.

  By the time he reached her house, he was sweating. The Pacer had no air conditioning, but the window was down and the flow-through ventilation had created a strong current of air that stirred the few long hairs left on the top of his head as he drove.

  Judging by the front of the house, no one was home. The front windows were dark, upstairs and down. He pulled into the driveway, killing his headlights so that they wouldn’t shine into the windows and across the back yard. When he rounded the corner into the yard, he spotted the Dodge pickup. The color was red, but it appeared nearly black in the dim light that leaked from the kitchen windows. The license plate was in the shadows, but Schultz knew that if he swept his flashlight across the plate it would read BADDOG.

  Restraining his urge to jump out of the car and dash into the house, he used his car phone to call for backup. Then he quietly got out of the car, grateful for a change that the Pacer’s overhead light was burned out, and eased his gun from his holster. He approached the truck from the rear, and peered into the bed. Nothing but a few bits of trash and some cans.

  He moved slowly up the passenger’s side toward the window, aware that the pickup’s large side view mirror could be showing his every move to the occupant.

  No one in the cab, either. He wondered if he was being observed from the bushes, but he didn’t have that feeling like ants creeping up his back that he got when he was being watched.

  The house, then.

  He reached the back door. The glass of the door was covered with curtains, but there was a one inch gap where the two panels met
in the middle. He leaned close.

  What he saw stopped his breath and very nearly his heart. Hampton—Macmillan—stood frozen like a statue, one hand gripping a wicked-looking machete that gleamed under the kitchen lights. In front of him, PJ, tied to a chair and naked from the waist up, body rigid with tension, blood-streaked back, eyes tightly closed. The hair on his arms rose as Schultz watched a rivulet of blood slide down her back and drip onto the floor.

  Hampton’s face had a puzzled look, as though he had lost track of what he was doing, or was undecided whether to swing the machete.

  Indecision wasn’t a problem for Schultz. He raised his gun, aimed carefully, and squeezed the trigger, firing through the pane. The first shot shattered the glass and hit Hampton low, near the hip, spinning him so that for a split second he faced Schultz. The second shot took him in the chest, bursting his heart. The machete clattered to the floor noisily, but Hampton dropped as quietly as a snowflake.

  “Police,” Schultz whispered. “Freeze.”

  Pauley Mac raised the machete but couldn’t seem to muster the conviction to swing it. His muscles didn’t want to obey, preferring to wait until the internal argument was settled before following the orders of the victor. Dog was snarling and snapping, trying to grab the taunting voices and shake them into obedience.

  He felt something slam into his hip, and hot pain bolted out through his flesh from the point of impact. The force of it spun him, slowly, it seemed to him. Everything was moving slowly, except the pain, and that ricocheted and reinforced itself as it sped along his nerves. The back door came into view. Shards of glass were still falling, slowly falling, bright splinters that danced in his vision before settling gracefully to the floor. The light from the kitchen fell on the face and body that filled the opening in the door where the glass used to be. Jagged edges of glass framed the face, but Pauley Mac could only make out the eyes—eyes that had dealt death before and were black with it now.

  Pauley Mac felt pain blossom in his chest. His muscles spasmed and the machete slid from his grip. The voices grew still in his mind, hushed as though holding their collective breath. Splinters. Splinters of glass, splinters of himself.