She begged, “No, no… please, Patrick. I just want to go home… I just want to go home. Please?”
He mimicked her words, and followed with a taunting laugh. He stepped into her line of vision, looking like some sort of monster, huge and hulking. “Your friends there”- he pointed as if he were on a stage, reading lines from a script he’d memorized-”what were their names? Julie and Cynthia? They will read about you in the papers, Tammy. Isn’t that nice? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“ Don’t… hurt me, please… Please, if you’ll just let me go, I won’t tell anyone, not a thing. I… I promise… I swear. I know I led you on. It wasn’t your fault, Patrick. Please, please, just let me go.” Her words trailed off in a keening, animal whine which further excited him, bringing him to his knees over her, bringing him to begin to trace his finger along her naked thigh, sending dread throughout her body.
“ I’ll let you go… when I’m finished with you.” Where was this maniac coming from? What did he want of her? Why had he done this to her? The Patric she’d wanted to love was here but not here, a phantom somewhere in the air around her while this evil twin kept them both in its awful clutches. “Patrick!” she screamed.
He clamped both hands over her throat, drowning out her cry. Subdued, certain now he meant to kill her, she again fell silent, wide-eyed and fearful. More than anything, she feared fainting. She feared that if she lost consciousness again, she would not awake a second time. He suddenly released his stranglehold on her and cruelly latched on to her hair, then dragged her to the back of the boat, kicking and screaming. It had become obvious that they were far out in the middle of the ocean. No one could hear her screams.
“ I want to show you something, sweetheart.” He pushed her aside and began tugging on a thick, black nylon rope which hung taut over the stern. He pulled at what was a great weight at the other end. For a time, she thought he’d be unable to lift whatever was on the other end, but soon the rope and its hoard were hoisted up.
She expected to see a large fish perhaps, but instead she found herself staring into the dead eyes of a completely waterlogged dead girl near her own age and similar in general appearance, her hair like seaweed, her skin drained of color, only the shell of life remaining. Tammy screamed, causing Patrick to laugh delightedly and push her head into the dead girl’s now mushy countenance, some of the skin peeling off and adhering to Tammy’s forehead and cheek.
“ Like looking into the future, into a mirror that reflects back your own future, Tammy, don’t you see? I didn’t want to lie to you another second.”
He pushed her down, where she feebly grabbed on to his legs, pleading.
“ Now that you know, it’s… well, out of the way. It’s good now that you know exactly what’s going to happen here.
” While Tammy began to whimper and blubber, he stared fixedly into the eyes of the dead girl he’d placed at the end of the nylon rope. “Her name was Allison. She’s been in the water for a long time. See?
” He snatched up the dead girl’s right arm to reveal that it had been severed at the forearm. “Sometimes I feed the sharks, you know, bits and pieces…”
Tammy’s scream wafted across the great expanse of the Atlantic. He dropped Allison’s body back into the depths and yanked in succession at two other ropes that hung over the stern. “Mary Ellen and Carrie Beth,” he named each rope. Then he tugged at a fourth rope that gave easily, looping about his hands. “This one’s for Tammy.”
“ Ahhhhh! Oh, no, no, please!”
“ Shut up!” He slapped her hard across the face and she fell to the deck. “Why? Why?” she pleaded. “What did I ever do to you?”
“ Nothing and everything. You were born to be mine.
You’re a perfect victim.” He dug his thumbs into her throat again, registering the life’s blood of her pulsating heart there. He easily, helplessly choked and choked her, enjoying the pleasure of it all, feeding himself on the life as it was given up from her a second time.
She fell again, eyes bulging wide, into unconsciousness. As he continued to squeeze, he felt the life draining from her, rising into his fingertips, into his hands, along his forearms and toward his heart and head. It was a feeling that gave him a sense of incredible power, a sense of identity and purpose and freedom from the mundane world.
“ Thanks to you, Tammy, I’m no longer bored,” he told the unconscious woman.
While she was out, he tied the thick nylon rope in a sailor’s knot about her throat and bound her hands with a leather thong.
“ When she returns to consciousness, Tauto,” he spoke to himself and the cosmos, “we’ll put her in the water and she’ll be all yours to enjoy, hey?”
Then he set about fulfilling his perverted sexual needs on the near-dead victim for a second time this night, baying at the moon as he did so.
ONE
We wove a web in childhood, A web of sunny air.
The flight to Miami from Quantico, Virginia, played unrelenting hell with Chief Eriq Santiva and the tourists, but it delighted the innocent children and Jessica Coran, since she and they reveled in a ride through rough waters-in this case air pockets, shifting thermals that rocked the air- boat like crashing waves from every direction while it cruised at 30,000 feet. The pilot, either by design or inability, seemed unable to get above or below the disturbance. But it made Jessica feel something, and that was the rush, because for some time now she had been without feelings or emotions. The flight provided an adrenaline rush she hadn’t felt for a long time, proving-at least in her case-that fear was sometimes better than no emotion whatsoever. Some people, even those she counted as friends-without voicing it, unable to put it into words- worried nowadays that she was perhaps beyond what others might consider the everyday, normal, rational fears and anxieties, and maybe she was. Maybe it was the legacy left her by Mad Matthew Matisak and other such monsters she’d hunted down and destroyed.
True or not, she considered going down with the plane in a storm a small fear. After all, she’d faced down New Orleans’s Queen of Hearts serial killer the year before, and compared with dying as one of that monster’s victims, a plane crash seemed an almost pleasurable end.
Below their airplane, the entire Eastern seaboard remained blanketed in an ocean-thick, roiling, bubbling, gargantuan glacier of gray-white cloud, and below this the continent was under attack by an arsenal of thunder, lightning, sleet, snow and hail, the world pounded by an unfeeling, killer storm. But unfeeling was hardly the right word. What natural phenomenon of raw power had feelings? Jessica thought it foolish of newscasters to call a storm cruel or heartless or evil, or to give it any human characteristic whatsoever or bestow the feminine personal pronoun she on it, since it had not a whit of human emotion about it. Like a so- ciopathic criminal on the loose, a storm destroyed life and limb without any more emotion than was felt by the sea or the void of outer space. None of these acts of nature or acts of God or abominations experienced any feelings one way or another toward human suffering. Yet some lamebrain news- people insisted on calling this the cruelest storm in recent history, perhaps the meanest in a decade, and on reporting that she meant to torture the mid-Atlantic and Eastern states for days, playing out her unkind work until she might finally exhaust her evil self over the very land she ravished. And it further infuriated Jessica that storms were always characterized as female fury, unleashed feminine emotion. May as well read a Harlequin romance novel as listen to the weather report these days, she thought.
Jessica had seen on the Channel 2 TV newscast how the computer rendition of the storm appeared, and how on the forecaster’s maps and screens, it was given an unreal, cartoonlike quality, making it look like a swirling mass of harmless, honeycombed whip cream, friendly in every aspect. A cotton candy apparition hunkered over thousands of miles of territory.