"When we got to Quito, where I was to leave them, one guy came down sick. Dysentery or something. The other guy didn't want to go into the jungle alone, and I was looking for adventure. Anyway, he arranged with the Corps to take me on as local labor, or some such lie.. They don't pay much, but that doesn't matter. I like it here. I can do what I want. Mostly I take river excursions by myself. I like my own company."
"Yeah?" Selena said. "Well, I like your company too."
Sparky smiled. "Here. You hold the jars while I tape them and mark the sample location."
As Selena held the first container Sparky removed a knife from its belt sheath and cut a piece of adhesive tape from a larger roll. Together they labeled the jars.
It was as Sparky was resheathing the knife that a yellow and blue macaw, four feet from beak to tail, shrieked in the branches above them. Selena glanced up just in time to see a flight of green parrots rise from the tops of the trees. Then there was silence. Again nothing stirred in the brazen sunlight. Not a cloud flecked the hard blue of the sky. And with the silence came a thought. Selena looked at Sparky.
"Are you finished your work?" she asked, digging into the breast pocket of her shirt and removing a small glass vial.
"Uh huh," Sparky said.
"Then we got some time to relax?"
"Sure. I don't see any hurry."
"Good," Selena said grinning, and removing the lid from the vial.
"Why?" Sparky asked. "What have you got in mind?"
"This," Selena said, and she tapped the contents of the container into the palm of her hand.
"What's that?"
"Just heaven,babe, that's all. Wanta do some acid?"
"I don't feel so good."
"It'll p a s s."
"No, really. I don't feel well a t a l l."
"Hey don't freak out on me, babe. Acid always starts in the gut."
"It's not my gut I'm talking about. It's my h e a d!"
"Shush. Just listen to the sounds."
It was forty minutes since they had dropped the acid, and now it seemed to Sparky as though the slow moving river had become a great sound conductor, an evil whispering gallery that gathered the noise of an entire continent and delivered it in distorted form to this very spot. It was as if the world had gone electric, each tiny movement adding to an increasingly tinny hum that rose eventually into a nerve-shredding, brain-vibrating crescendo of metallic abuse. This jungle was altering in its very form, transmogrifying into something evil, miasmic, swampy—like a warm festering wound. Sparky was afraid.
Soon loosely associated thoughts were slipping through Sparky's mind . . .nothing to fear but fear itself . . . fear itself afraid of fear . . . nothing but fear . . . fear . . . fear . . . help! I've got to get out of here. . . .
Abruptly Sparky stood up, almost stumbling in the effort.
Before the rush hit, they had broken camp and moved their supplies down to the bank of the river; they had then sat down by the water and waited for the effect of the drug. But whatever Sparky had expected, it certainly wasn't this.
Oh God! What's happening to me?
Unchecked and coming in sporadic flashes, refusing to fall into any scheme of order, sharp barbs of unwanted thought now pierced the flesh and hooked themselves inside Sparky's brain. With each tug on a fishing line, fear moved up a notch.
Nausea! Weakness! Tremors! Distortion! My body is out of control!
Sparky's heart had lost its rhythm and begun a crooked beat. Lungs now choking, unable to squeeze oxygen out of this atmosphere of decay. Throat dry, very dry, tasting the color gray. Each sound, each slight insignificant noise, had now begun to form its own geometric pattern before Sparky's eyes—weird objects in a phantasmagoria of kaleidoscopic colors seemed to change in size and shape, to fuse with the background until the very boundaries of life, the body, the self were fluid and disintegrating. Sparky had become a part of this vast, foul-smelling, oozy stretch of bog that undulated with the motion of an unsqueezed sponge. Oh God! Now my brain is out of c o n t r o l!
Then Selena started to go.
At first it was gradual, like the rot that comes with death. Her skin began to fluctuate between pallor and flush. Her pupils dilated, her eyes beginning to bulge like a fish. And then rapidly her body took on a terrifying pulse, each throbbing vein and artery visible just beneath the surface of her skin. The skin itself was changing, half flesh, half metallic blue, and the muscles below the outside shell seemed to give off a succession of silent cues. Her face distorted into a frightening caricature, a perversion of woman incarnate, lips, eyes, nostrils flaring and dripping with sex . . .sex . . . sex! Oh no! Let me out of here!
Then something broke inside Sparky's head. It was like a total letting go, an overload, a chemical psychosis that fractured Sparky's id.
Reality broke away.
The real world had become as elusive as the fragments of a dream. Vision after vision began to waver in the flicker of afterimage. Details—unnoticed before—now seized and demanded attention.
All that was left of Sparky's life was creeping paranoia. Danger was everywhere. Inside and out.
Then Selena stood up and took off her shirt.
It was not a fluid motion, for the young woman seemed to disintegrate as she moved, recovering her image just in time to disintegrate again. Transfixed, frozen, mesmerized, Sparky watched this slow strip that seemed as if it had been planned a century in advance. For Selena uncoiled from the ground like a waking cat, standing, stretching her arms skyward as though in worship of the sun. Then with button after button, she released the flaps of her blouse.
Sparky could see the deep valley that ran between her breasts.
A tiny white tick called a garapate du chao had adhered itself to one milky mound and now grew pink as the woman's blood filled its transparent body.
Then the cloth fell away and Sparky shivered as Selena's breasts burst forth in nakedness, exposing every little pocket of fat, every vein, every highlighted blemish. One breast now grew larger than the other, then smaller, then bloated larger again. The nipples were dry and cracked like a sunbaked riverbed.
"God!" Selena shouted, shaking loose her wild mane of black hair. "It's positively primal. This place is f u c k i n alive!"
Rocking her body and rolling her shoulders and moving to some hidden rhythm, she stepped toward the lagoon.
Don't,Sparky's mind screamed. Watch out for the leeches! But the thought never found words; it just fell unspoken like a bird shot bleeding from the sky.
Selena had reached the mudbank and was now buried knee-deep in ooze. The mud seemed to suck at each sinking foot as the woman threw back her head and laughed wickedly out loud: "Eat me, Mother Nature! Suck your daughter dry!"
To Sparky, the voice seemed detached, unnatural, little more than a growl that scraped from Selena's throat. Yet two of the words, echoing, hooked into Sparky's mind: Eat me . . . Eat me .. . Eat me, Sparky! Yes, child, I've come back!
Sparky stopped dead.
Now only Selena was moving, turning, holding out her arms. And her face was aging fast.
I said, "Eat me, Sparky!" Take your Mama away.
"But... but you're not alive! You're buried in the ground!"
Selena frowned and mouthed the words, "Who are you talking to?" Then abruptly she laughed, reaching for the waist button to her shorts, fumbling, getting it loose, pausing for effect before she pushed them down.
Heat flamed up from the sun-drenched bank.
Small deep pools now studded the surface of the mud, each one gleaming like a crystal against the background of lacquer green.
Then the mud seemed to climb Selena's legs, reaching out for the shorts that were coming down, coming off, first one leg sucking out of the goo, then the other, then the woman standing spread-eagled and naked before Sparky's terrified eyes.
Sparky looked at the woman's crotch, and that was when the thought unwanted ripped through Sparky's mind:tzantza! Again:tzantza!Again:tzantza! It
would not go away.
Suddenly the strain of gazing at the brilliant sheet of mud became too much; Sparky's eyes sought relief in other details of the scene. Like the purple wasp with dull orange wings that slipped by to the right. Like the werewolf wail of the howler monkey lost somewhere in the canopy of gloom above and behind. Like Selena's tumbling black hair with one long loose strand that—
No! Not a strand of hair-—but rather a slow, regular, unhurried movement—-a slithering, sliding, swaying black, heading toward Sparky. Now Selena was approaching Sparky, her feet sucking through the mud as she reached for her shoulder bag lying on the bank. Selena now dripping sex from her Medusa smile as the anaconda wrapped its coils round and round her head, the jaws of the snake snapping open for a quick glimpse of small white teeth, its dark eyes black with fury and hate as it lashed like a whip with its tail.
A series of hot shivers passed through Sparky's gut.
Time had become a drone; Pandora's Box opened.
Now there was fear in the hair-snake, all slimy with muscles that appeared from nowhere to play beneath its skin, rising up in knots or dissolving into jelly at the command of the small brain within the spade-shaped head.
There was fear in what Selena now held in her hand. The object emerging from the shoulder bag looked like some two-faced Janus-head, like tongues of the Devil curving up to lick the jungle air.
And there was fear in Selena's voice, her words steamy and sultry in Sparky's tortured ears: "Don't you look away, babe. I got the hots for you. Just walk right i n t o me and let that animal loose. Come on—"
and eat me, child. Take your Mama away!
Selena reached out and with a growl grabbed Sparky by the arm as her other hand, with the Devil in it, went for the shorts. In panic Sparky pulled away sharply, and slipped and fell in the mud. Selena laughed as the shorts ripped, baring Sparky's groin. Then she tossed the garment up on the bank and stood with her legs spread, towering above the figure sprawled on the ground at her feet. On hands and knees, through tear-filled eyes, ripped and stoned by the acid. Sparky looked up.
It was at that moment that Sparky's hand touched the handle of the knife still in its belt sheath.
Then Selena was squatting slowly, her groin now coming to life.
Tzantza? No, not tzantza but . . . but—
A black mass of hair rose up on its haunches from the woman's crotch to wave several strands of pubic wisp hypnotically in front of Sparky's face. Within moments the patch of black had eight legs of various lengths covered with long coarse hair. Then it had become an obscene fat sack, round and bulging with a pair of unpleasant eyes that glared forth from a kind of watch tower above the body. Next the spider sat back on four of its legs, the other four raised in the air—then it dropped and moved with a furtive, sinister motion back into the swamp of Selena's crotch.
A second later, Selena sat down on Sparky and her hand, which held the Devil's head issued forth.
"F e e l t h a t, babe, just feel that. Have I got a t r e a t for you."
"No!"
Sparky!
"go away!"
"Ah ya, slip it deep inside. Now fuck me, babe."
I hate you, Mother! Daddy, help me please!
Selena bucked with a sudden jerk, the forceful thrust of her body slamming Sparky against the ground. Then she began to thrash convulsively, her limbs now twitching and her eyes bulging wide. At first there was just an unearthly sound from where the knife had pierced her windpipe, a noise halfway between a bubble and a hiss as if someone were sucking at a clogged tube. Then Sparky yanked the blade savagely to the right, tugging it when it caught. And with a gargle, Selena's throat slit open and a fountain of blood in pulsing spurts sprayed the air with a crimson fog.
Sparky started to scream.
* * *
Silence.
A vast silence that was no silence at all—but more a holding of breath. For though all sound had ceased and a hush had come over the forest, this was jungle silence, watchful and alert. This was the silence of the snake, the tiger and the bat. This was a silence to call forth the self-protective in man. This was the sort of silence that said: "Seize the nearest weapon—for that which comes, will come too quick for thought."
The woman knew this jungle, so she put down her bowl of chicha and cocked her head to one side.
She was an ugly Jivaro woman, clothed as was the custom with the left shoulder bare. Her hair was filthy with dirt and infested by lice, her face painted in wild designs. Listening, she sat in front of a poorly constructed, thatch-roofed hut the bamboo walls of which seeped quantities of smoke. A tzantza hung above the narrow door.
In front of this woman, a fire was burning under a clay pot filled with a muddy stew. Beyond the pot, a young child with spindly legs and a swollen stomach was pulling the tail of a mangy, flea-bitten dog. The dog had ceased to play and now listened like the woman.
The first sign of anything unusual was a dull, high-pitched screaming that came from the trees above. First a colony of monkeys worked themselves up to a feverish excitement, then all the other creatures of the jungle seemed to join in—only to stop abruptly. This left an eerie path of silence down which came a shriek of such terror and ecstasy, each emotion bouncing wildly off the other, that the woman jumped up sharply and ran to retrieve her child. In fear she clutched the infant to her breast, her eyes darting about in the forlorn hope that her mate might suddenly return to their home.
Then she shuddered violently, for it froze her to the bone.
This wrench of primal passion.
Sparky's first orgasm.
Psycho
Vancouver, British Columbia, 1982
Tuesday, November 2nd, 9:30 a.m.
"Did you enjoy the reading?" Dr. Ruryk asked.
"It was informative," DeClercq replied. "But pretty heavy going."
The psychiatrist nodded. "How shall we handle this?"
"If you have no objection, I'd like to make a tape. It will be on file in the squad room for those who want to listen and benefit from your views. Nothing formal, just a general discussion with free association."
"Sounds okay to me," Dr. Ruryk said. "Let's roll."
Dr. George Ruryk was a man of advancing years and growing reputation. DeClercq's wife Genevieve spoke highly of his ability and was rather amazed that the police had made so little use of his knowledge in the past. She had persuaded her husband not to make the same mistake. That more than any other reason—for DeClercq valued his wife's opinion— was why the Superintendent now found himself sitting in the wicker chair opposite the psychiatrist as filtered sunlight streamed into the greenhouse and brought the color of the roses vibrantly alive. Ruryk wore round wire-rim glasses and a Vandyke goatee that made him look like Freud. As DeClercq picked up the microphone he thought,Why is it that psychiatrists all have beards? What have they got to hide?
He punched on the tape recorder.
"This tape," DeClercq said, placing the microphone down on the corner of the desk between them, "concerns the Headhunter case. With me is Dr. George Ruryk of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. The purpose of our meeting is to discuss a possible psychological profile of the killer whom we seek. I wish to recaution you strongly, however, on the danger of tunnel vision. What comes out of this discussion may parallel reality or be entirely off base. Dr. Ruryk?"
"First let me say that I must agree completely with your warning. A number of years ago the man dubbed the 'Boston Strangler' reduced that city to a state of terror. At one point during the hunt for him a panel of experts composed of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, criminologists and policemen was convened. This panel decided that the murderer they were seeking, without a doubt, would be a schizoid, unmarried, latent homosexual with a disturbed psychosexual life and suppressed mother fantasies. When he was eventually apprehended Albert DeSalvo turned out to be a happily married man with two children. So I reiterate your caution.
"Havi
ng said that, however," the psychiatrist continued, "I do believe that we can postulate several possible theories about the Headhunter's thinking. I also believe that one at least will eventually prove true. Let us begin though with a general orientation."
As he spoke the doctor reached into the pocket of his tweed jacket, complete with leather patches at the elbows, and removed a smoking apparatus befitting Sherlock Holmes and a package of tobacco. For at least a minute, between sentences, the professor performed his igniting ritual, and when at last great billows of sweet blue smoke twisted about the room, the Superintendent inwardly sighed and thought, I wish you'd think of the plants.
"Psychiatry basically recognizes three major types of mental abnormality," Ruryk stated. "Psychosis. Neurosis. And Character Disorder.
"Of these, the psychotic—the one who suffers from a psychosis—is the most disturbed. He or she would correspond to the layman's term 'crazy.' The distinguishing feature or symptom of psychosis is that there has been a loss of touch with reality: in other words, because of the pressure of the illness, the psychotic has replaced some important aspect of the real everyday world with a creation of his or her own deranged mind. Here are a few examples. At issue in the recent Yorkshire Ripper trial was whether or not Peter Sutcliffe, while standing in a grave that he was digging as a cemetery laborer, actually heard a voice which he interpreted as God informing him that it was his mission to rid the world of prostitutes. David Berkowitz—New York's 'Son of Sam'— evidently conversed with his neighbor's talking dog before killing six people with a .44 caliber pistol.
"The neuroses—that is the second main branch of mental illness—are somewhat different, and for the case in question probably irrelevant.
"Of more importance from our point of view, however, is the third major class of mental aberration—namely character disorder. For it is here that we find the psychopath or sociopath with his or her case history of unbelievable horror.
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