They had so enjoyed his case. They'd enjoyed experimenting with various psychoactive drugs on him in an attempt to cure his so-called severe hallucinatory and schizophrenic tendencies and problems-his fantastic fantasies and overwhelming fear of the Antichrist. But there'd only been one way to overcome his fear of the Dark One, and that was to agree with him.
The doctors had claimed he had fixated on the Antichrist, Satan himself, and that he had fixated on helping to combat Satan's enemies. Satan, known also as the Ruler of Wind, feared any assault on his godlike powers. In an attempt to protect himself and his rule, Satan used weak men, men like Feydor, or so Feydor had surmised around the psychobabble of his therapy.
Dr. Stuart Wetherbine had understood, up to a point. He'd once told Feydor, "Yes… we know that people are sheep, that we are all such fools."
"Precisely," agreed Feydor.
Wetherbine had continued, "People in general haven't the slightest idea that should the Antichrist select any one of them, that they, too, could become Satan's tool, his instrument or plaything."
Feydor nodded vigorously, adding, "Satan's slave."
"So many naive among us who fail to understand that Satan is capable of overwhelming anyone he may choose, that 'there for the grace of God go I…' "
It was then that Feydor's eyes grew to saucer size and he revealed, for the first time, the red brain thoughts firing his insides and coursing through his very being. He'd pronounced his truth in calm understatement, so as not to frighten Wetherbine, because at the time, Feydor had believed that perhaps he had finally found another human soul who might possibly understand. It was a requiem he repeated to Wetherbine three times before he realized that Stuart Wetherbine was just like all the others.
He'd told Wetherbine, "Satan feeds me filthy, crawly things to eat, and I become those things I consume, the things I eat. Satan scalds my mind, brands my brain, and while I am screaming, he… he adjusts me, rewires the circuitry so that I am now his puppet on a synaptic string…"
Feydor had once been a practicing psychiatrist, before the Evil Wind began to whisper in his ear.
When the bastards at the mental institute weren't treating him like a highly interesting case or a piece of cardboard, they had treated him like a child. All the while they were pumping him with more drugs-and getting his drugged consent to go farther-until one day, suddenly, he was told to go home, to have a nice life… that he was cured so long as he remained on his medications. But this came only after long years of learning precisely how Feydor's doctors wanted him to behave, to duplicate the exact mannerisms and beliefs the white-coated army expected. His newfound behavior had worked, for when he began to do as they wanted, when he shut up about the horrors he saw behind his eyelids, they finally released him to a halfway house. Following this, he continued in Pavlovian fashion to tell them what they wanted to hear.
He learned to deny his own reality, learned to deny Satan and Satan's enormous revelations to him. The doctors wanted lies… that he knew neither Satan nor the ways of the Antichrist… so, he had given them lies that bespoke his healing.
Still, none of the pull and draw of Satan's grim gravity had ever truly been reduced, not a whit of it, which he learned for sure after taking his last pill for what his doctors called religious-linked psychosis nervosa. They said it was a psychotic condition that engendered hallucinations-in Feydor's case, hallucinations surrounding religious icons and beliefs-but that his condition also caused strong allergiclike reactions in the skin and orifices. This was their explanation for the red scaling of his skin, the purple-red palate, the red eyes, the pounding, pumping, burning blood in his ears.
Feydor Dorphmann and Dr. Wetherbine alone knew the true cause of the red. Where it came from, how it came to be, who and what brought it about, and that no amount of medical attention would ever, or could ever, eradicate the red.
The red filled his brain.
The red fed on his soul.
The red was forever with him, unless he made a deal with the Devil.
When he said yes to Satan, the scaly, itchy redness subsided, the heat below his skin, and the puffiness about his eyes, and the fire in his mouth scaled down to an acceptable, tolerable level. A kind of green glow engulfed his mind and staved off the red. And now he found it-the red-getting better since having abducted the girl, since doping her up and arranging for her cremation…
What relief from his demons came, however little it might be, was welcomed, and he'd spread the green relief over his body like a balm. This relief was promised him if he’d follow his instinctual need to rid this world of what Satan considered necessary, and how better to do so than to do his bidding.
Satan talked to him in many voices, many tongues, acid and green, creamy and white, buttery and yellow, putrid and rancorous and bile-tasting in his mouth, burning pokers in his ears whenever the Antichrist became angry with him. Still, no matter how many voices there were, no matter how many disguises, still Feydor knew that all their voices and inflections and dialects channeled through one voice: the voice of his god, the voice of the Dark Angel, the ruler of storm and calamity.
No end to him. No end to his being… Certainly no end to his being in Feydor Dorphmann's head, unless Feydor obeyed, faced the tests, conquered in the name of the Prince. Satan. Satan was without end… No end to his pattering about the coiled recesses of Feydor's mind and intestines, playing havoc with Feydor's sanity and bodily functions down to his sexual requirements and ejaculations. No end to the wailing, the tolling of the bells, the cacophony of animal and bird and jungle bug noises in the inner ear, noises that were constantly nibbling away at his strength, sapping him of any resolve. He hadn't told Wetherbine or any of the other doctors the half of it.
He had attempted suicide, several times, but the Beast within wouldn't let him die. Suicide was not an option. The Beast needed him… or rather, needed Feydor's limbs, his eyes, his mouth, his body to go about in this realm of reality, on this plane of material existence. And so Feydor's body was chosen, and for a time Feydor had felt a surge of elation at having been a chosen one, an outpouring of pleasure in knowing that some supernatural being had selected Feydor Dorphmann to do its bidding.
After killing Stuart Wetherbine and finding Wetherbine's notebook in his breast pocket, Feydor realized that the doctor had understood more than any other man alive. Satan read Wetherbine's words over Feydor's shoulder that night. Then Feydor's headaches came, the nausea and vomiting, the sick, empty feeling in the gut and the tug to earth, as if all of the entire force of gravity was being focused on Feydor. Soon Feydor learned to detest his fate, detesting his lot in life, detesting the things that now lived inside him, but more importantly and beyond all detestation, he feared. He lived in constant fear. He feared when the Devil of devils, when Satan himself, came calling. And lately, he came often.
Wetherbine knew this much, but his counsel and his medications were no match for such supernatural powers.
In the end, the institute had put Feydor back on the street. Only Dr. Wetherbine had held out against approving his release, but the good doctor's objections held up matters for a mere month.
Feydor had seen a lot of television at the institute, particularly CNN, which he enjoyed. He enjoyed seeing the clear mark of Satan the world over, and what better place than on CNN-live? Disasters both natural and man-made abounded, murder was rampant, Satan was afoot.
The tube said it was so every day.
It was on the tube that he caught his first glimpse of the target Satan had set for him. Her name was appended to a degree, a medical degree: Dr. Jessica Coran, praised by the reporter interviewing her as the FBI's number one serial-killer catcher.