In the dark I heard his body hit the floor. I lowered my aim and pulled the trigger again, but this time there was nothing, not even a click.
The rain stopped. The thunder and lightning moved off, and after a while the power came back on. I could see him, then, sprawled on his back in the kitchen doorway, not moving. He was just a man now; his eyes were glassy, and he had a new expression on his face.
He looked surprised.
Now, this next part may be a little hard to believe.
Really.
You know normally, if you shoot an intruder in your house, especially a serial killer, the first thing you do afterwards is call the police.
Right.
Or just run like hell to the neighbors’.
Right.
Right. But I didn’t do either of those things.
What did you do?
I got sleepy. I mean, the guy was dead—I kicked him a couple times to make sure—so it’s not like notifying the cops was urgent anymore. And now that I knew I was safe, I just really felt like lying down for a while. I thought, my aunt and uncle will be home in a few hours, and we can deal with the aftermath then.
So I went upstairs to my room. I barricaded the door with my dresser—just in case—and lay down. I slipped the NC gun under my pillow. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them again, it was morning. My bedroom door was wide open, and I could hear my aunt making breakfast in the kitchen. I got up and went downstairs, and stood in the empty doorway where the janitor’s body had been.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” my aunt said. “Would you like bacon with your eggs?”
The porch door was open too, and I could see my uncle out back, walking around the remains of a lightning-blasted tree.
“Hold off on the bacon,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I ran upstairs and looked under my pillow.
The gun was gone too, wasn’t it?
Yeah. But there was something else in its place. A coin. A gift from the pistol fairy, maybe.
It was the size of a quarter, but thicker and heavier. It looked like gold. It had the same image on both sides, a hollow pyramid with a glowing eye inside of it, you know, kind of like the capstone from the pyramid on the dollar bill. Running around the rim of the coin was a three-word slogan: OMNES MUNDUM FACIMUS.
My Latin is rusty. Mundum means “world”?
Yeah. I got a Latin dictionary from the school library and worked it out. Omnes is “all of us,” and facimus, that’s “create” or “make,” so omnes mundum facimus is like, “We all make the world.” That’s how it translates; as for what it meant, though, that was trickier. It was a puzzle, see? A sort of aptitude test, like the hidden message in the crossword, only much harder, so it took me a lot longer to get it.
How much longer?
Twenty-two years.
white room (ii)
THE NEXT TIME THE DOCTOR ENTERS the room, he’s carrying a second file folder, thick with evidence.
“Checking up on my story?” she guesses, as he deals the folder’s contents into three neat piles on the table.
He nods. “I don’t like to confront patients, but in prison psychiatry I find that taking an aggressive tack early on can be very useful.”
“For separating the con artists from the genuine head cases?” She looks amused. “So what’s the verdict on me?”
He offers her the first of his evidence piles. “This is a report filed by the Madera County sheriff’s office in October 1979. A man named Martin Whitmer was found dead in his van in a roadside ditch outside Fresno. Whitmer had worked as a janitor at a rural high school, but quit his job after an unidentified student accused him of being the Route 99 Killer.”
“Well there you go. It’s just like I said.”
“Not quite.” He flips to a page near the bottom of the pile. “There’s no mention of a bullet wound in the autopsy. Mr. Whitmer died of a coronary.”
“Yeah, I know. I told you, I shot him with an NC gun.”
The doctor thinks a moment. “NC stands for Natural Causes?”
“Right. Sorry, I thought that was obvious.”
“The gun shoots heart attacks.”
“Myocardial infarctions,” she says, tapping a finger on the cause-of-death line in the autopsy report. “MIs. And the CI setting, that’s for cerebral infarctions. Heart attack and stroke, the two leading killers of bad monkeys…” She smiles. “So what else have you got?”
He pushes forward the second pile, which consists of just two sheets, printouts from a newspaper microfilm reader. It’s a story from the San Francisco Examiner, with the questioning headline ANGEL OF DEATH HANGS UP WINGS?
“‘Sixteen months after the Route 99 serial killer claimed his last victim,’” she reads aloud, “‘state police are beginning to hope that the so-called Angel of Death—whose identity remains a mystery—may have gone into retirement…’ Yeah, see, I told you the cops didn’t believe me about the janitor. So even after he turned up dead, they thought the Angel was still out there.”
The doctor points to a circled paragraph farther down the page. “Keep reading.”
“‘Thirteen-year-old David Konovic, the boy believed to have been the Angel of Death’s eighth and final victim, disappeared from a Bakersfield gas station on December 12th, 1979…’”
“December,” the doctor says. “Two months after Whitmer was found dead.”
“Are you sure the newspaper didn’t screw up the date?”
He slides the last evidence pile across the table. “The sheriff’s report on David Konovic’s abduction. The date matches. And when the boy’s body was recovered, he was found to have been tortured and strangled in the same manner as all the other Angel of Death victims. So what does that tell us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on, Jane.”
“You want me to say that Whitmer couldn’t have been the Angel of Death, is that it?”
“Doesn’t that seem like a reasonable conclusion?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was the Angel of Death.”
“Well if that’s the case, how do you explain this last victim?”
“I don’t.”
“You mean you can’t.”
“It’s a Nod problem,” she says.
“An odd problem?”
“A Nod problem. You know, the land of Nod, east of Eden? In the Bible?”
“I know the reference, but…”
“Cain kills his brother Abel,” she says, “and God sets him wandering in the wilderness as a punishment. Cain ends up in Nod, where he settles and gets married. Which is a problem, logically, because Adam and Eve are supposed to be the first people on earth, and as far as we know, Cain and Abel are their only children. So where did this wife come from?
“Now, people who don’t believe in the Bible tend to think the Nod problem is a big deal. Like for example, there was this guy my mother dated one time for a couple months, Roger, who was this totally rabid atheist, and he used to pick on Phil—”
“Your brother was religious?” the doctor asks.
“In a little-boy kind of way. My mother was raised Lutheran, and even though she didn’t really believe, she took us to church because she thought it would be good for us. I stopped going as soon as I was old enough to say no, but Phil really got into it. Said his prayers every day, the whole bit. So along comes Roger, and he’s constantly razzing Phil about inconsistencies in Scripture. ‘Hey Phil, it says here in the Gospels that Judas hanged himself because he was sorry for betraying Christ. But it says in Acts that Judas wasn’t sorry, and he died when his stomach exploded. How come there are two different versions of the story?’ Or, ‘Hey Phil, if all the disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane, how did Matthew know what Jesus said in his prayer?’ The Nod problem, though, that was his favorite: ‘Hey Phil, it says that God put a mark on Cain to warn other people not to harm him. What other people, Phil? His parents? The same ones who didn’t listen when God told them not to eat the fruit?’”