ANGIE SAT AT the head of the small, hard twin bed, her back pressed into the corner so that she could feel the nubby plaster wall biting through the baggy flannel shirt she had chosen to sleep in. She sat with her knees pulled up beneath her chin, her arms wrapped tight around her legs. The door was closed; she was alone. The only light coming in through the window came from a distant streetlamp.
The Phoenix was a house for women “rising to a new beginning.” So said the sign on the front lawn. It was a big, rambling old house with squeaky floors and no frills. Kate had brought her there and dumped her among the ex-hookers and ex-dopers and women trying to escape boyfriends who beat the shit out of them.
Angie had looked in at some of them watching TV in a big living room full of ratty furniture, and thought how stupid they must be. If there was one thing she had learned in life, it was that you could escape circumstance, but you could never escape who you were. Your personal truth was a shadow: There was no denying it, no changing it, and no getting rid of it.
She felt the shadow sweep over her now, cold and black. Her body trembled and tears rose in her eyes. She had been fighting it off all day, all night. She had thought it was going to swallow her whole right in front of Kate—an idea that only added to the panic. She couldn't lose control in front of anyone. Then they'd know that she was crazy, that she was defective. They'd ship her off to the nuthouse. She'd be alone then.
She was alone now.
The tremor began at the very core of her, then opened up wider and wider into a weird, hollow feeling. At the same time, she felt her consciousness shrinking and shrinking until she felt as if her body was just a shell and she was a tiny being locked inside it, in danger of falling off a ledge into some dark chasm inside and never being able to climb out.
She called this feeling the Zone. The Zone was an old enemy. But as well as she knew it, it never failed to terrify her. She knew if she didn't fight it off, she could lose control, and control was everything. If she didn't fight it off, she could lose whole blocks of time. She could lose herself, and what would happen then?
It shook her now, and she started to cry. Silently. Always silently. She couldn't let anyone hear her, she couldn't let them know how afraid she was. Her mouth tore open, but she strangled the sobs until her throat ached. She pressed her face against her knees, closing her eyes tight. The tears burned, fell, slid down her bare thigh.
In her mind, she could see the burning corpse. She ran from it. She ran and ran but didn't get anywhere. In her mind, the corpse became her, but she couldn't feel the flames. She would have welcomed the pain, but she couldn't conjure it up with just her mind. And all the while she felt herself growing smaller and smaller inside the shell of her body.
Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! She pinched her thigh hard, digging the ragged edge of her fingernails into the skin. And still she felt herself being sucked deeper and deeper into the Zone.
You know what you have to do. The voice unfurled in her mind like a black ribbon. She shivered in response to it. It twined itself through vital parts of her, a strange matrix of fear and need.
You know what you have to do.
Frantically, she pulled her backpack to her, fumbled with the zipper, and dug through an inner pocket for the thing she needed. Her fingers curled around the box cutter, which was disguised as a small plastic key.
Shaking, choking back the sobs, she crawled to a wedge of light on the bed and shoved up the left sleeve of the flannel shirt, exposing a thin white arm that was striped with narrow scars, one beside another and another, lining her arms like bars in an iron fence. The razor emerged from the end of the box cutter like a serpent's tongue and she drew it across a patch of tender skin near her elbow.
The pain was sharp and sweet, and seemed to short-circuit the panic that had electrified her brain. Blood blossomed from the cut, a shiny black bead in the moonlight. She stared at it, mesmerized as the calm flowed through her.
Control. Life was all about control. Pain and control. She had learned that lesson long ago.
“I'M THINKING OF changing my name,” he says. “What do you think of Elvis? Elvis Nagel.”
His companion says nothing. He picks up a pair of panties from the pile in the box and presses them to his face, burying his nose in the crotch and sniffing deep the scent of pussy. Nice. Smell is not as good a stimulant as sound for him, but still . . .
“Get it?” he says. “It's an anagram. Elvis Nagel—Evil's Angel.”
In the background, three televisions are running videotapes of the local six o'clock newscasts. The voices blend together in a discordant cacophony he finds stimulating. The common thread that runs through them all is urgency. Urgency breeds fear. Fear excites him. He especially enjoys the sound of it. The tight, quivering tension underlying a controlled voice. The erratic changes in pitch and tone in the voice of someone openly afraid.
The mayor appears on two screens. The ugly cow. He watches her speak, wondering what it might be like to cut her lips off while she is still alive. Maybe make her eat them. The fantasy excites, as his fantasies always have.
He turns up the volume on the televisions, then crosses to the stereo system set into the bookcase, selects a cassette from the rack, and slips it into the machine. He stands in the center of the basement room, staring at the televisions, at the furrowed brows of anchormen and the faces of the people at the press conference shot from three different angles, and lets the sounds wash over him—the voices of the reporters, the background echo in the cavernous hall, the urgency. At the same time from the stereo speakers comes the voice of raw, unvarnished fear. Pleading. Crying for God. Begging for death. His triumph.
He stands in the center of it. The conductor of this macabre opera. The excitement builds inside him, a huge, hot, swelling, sexual excitement that builds to a crescendo and demands release. He looks to his companion for the evening, considering, but he controls the need.
Control is all. Control is power. He is the action. They are the reaction. He wants to see the fear in all their faces, to hear it in their voices—the police, the task force, John Quinn. Especially Quinn, who hadn't even bothered to speak at the press conference, as if he wanted the Cremator to think he didn't warrant his personal attention.
He will have Quinn's attention. He will have their respect. He will have whatever he wants because he has control.
He turns the televisions down to a dull mumble but leaves them on so he won't return to silence. Silence is something he abhots. He turns off the stereo system but pockets a microcassette recorder loaded with a tape.
“I'm going out,” he says. “I've had enough of you. You're boring me.”
He goes to the mannequin he has been playing with, trying different combinations of the clothes of his victims.
“Not that I don't appreciate you,” he says quietly.
He leans forward and kisses her, putting his tongue in her open mouth. Then he lifts the head of his last victim off the shoulders of the mannequin, puts it back into its plastic bag, takes it to the refrigerator in the laundry room, and sets it carefully on a shelf.
The night is thick with fog and mist, the streets black and gleaming wet in the glow of the streetlights. A night reminiscent of the Ripper's London. A night for hunting.
He smiles at the thought as he drives toward the lake. He smiles wider as he presses the play button on the microcassette recorder and holds the machine against his ear, the screams a twisted metamorphosis of a lover's whispered words. Affection and desire warped into hatred and fear. Two sides of the same emotions. The difference is control.