Feydor was no serial killer, nor would he ever be-not in the strictest sense of the word, he told himself-but now Feydor saw his mission clearly. And this felt good and right and correct; it felt like Satan's hand at work. That all these years of badgering Feydor had been for a reason, this reason had to do with Dr. Jessica Coran, for she, like Wetherbine, knew too much about Satan's comings and goings, knew too much about his business.
For Feydor a whole new hope opened up. He now had a plan; finally, a way to end his misery, a way to leave this world on the even keel he had begun, a way to ante up and bow out with grace and dignity and perhaps escape Hades in the bargain. It was a plan posited in his brain by no mere hellion emissary this time, but by Satan himself; it was a plan Feydor had at once agreed upon, and it had brought him to Las Vegas to kill a young blond woman he didn't even know.
God must be forgiving of me, he thought, not daring say "God" aloud, for if He understands that Satan is, after all, the breeder of all serial killers walking this world, that I am nothing, a mere vessel, a helpless conduit through which the master killer of all time has chosen to continue his awful work on Earth, then God must save a place for the likes of me…
Satan had come to Feydor, had selected him specifically to fulfill a task. It was Satan, and not Feydor Dorphmann, who had become fixated on this path of pending destruction of life, this murderous romp, and nothing and no one could dissuade Satan from his plans for the woman Satan most hated of all women in this dimension. How better to destroy her than through Feydor Dorphmann, Satan had said, whispering a coiling message that slithered through Feydor's brain and being.
Sometimes Satan took the form of a dense black shadow that lay over Feydor like a heavy blanket; other times Satan existed as a mere milky cloud, sometimes a mad, slavering hound, sometimes a horned goat, an eyeless bat, an enormous spider larger than Dorphmann himself, sitting in the corner of a ceiling. More often of late, he came as a hunched-over, horned gargoyle sitting squarely atop Feydor's chest whenever he tried to sleep, sucking in Feydor's breath while the helpless mortal lay there exhaling.
Still other times, the Devil came as a solid black cube turning on an axis directly between Dorphmann's eyes, square in the middle of his forehead, boring into his brain, a black inkblot, threatening to turn his mind to ink and infinite pain as well. The Beast would churn up the headaches, the ringing in Feydor's ears, making it a constant, hateful, debilitating irritation, threatening to explode inside Feydor's brain.
Then came the red. Satan turned his skin red-the redness and fire bubbling with boils just below the epidermis, staining his skin a poker-hot crimson. The Monster added scales and hair and itchiness-the itchiness of invisible roaches or locusts crawling the length and breadth of Feydor's tortured body-but then, it wasn't completely Feydor's body anymore, now, was it?
Wetherbine had understood that much… Satan sometimes came in the form of small insects or animals, staying outside Dorphmann's body, surrounding him like an army before a citadel. The siege might last for hours, a day, two days, their million beady eyes all trained on him, all like hissing black marbles, hissing a warning, all just watching him, studying him and his movements.
When he left his place, stepped out onto the sidewalk and walked down the street, there in San Francisco, going among other people, the insect army crawling over his body clung to him, shadowed him, but their spectral nature made them invisible to all others, so that when he lashed out at the insects, just to brush them from his brow, eyelashes, and mouth, people stared at him as if he were the Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was the constant vigilance of Satan's army of insect eyes that had broken Feydor. The way they moved everywhere with him, riding on him, in the folds of his skin, his pockets, in the cuffs of his pants. But now that had all changed since the moment Feydor had accepted Satan, the moment he had agreed to become Satan's hammer and breath in this world, the moment he had killed Wetherbine.
Feydor recalled it vividly, how Wetherbine pleaded, saying, "No, Feydor! You can't succumb!"
That was when Feydor's hidden knife came flashing down, driven by the force of Satan.
Sometimes the Devil came in the form of wind-sometimes a subtle wind that whispered through Dorphmann's soul; other times an angry storm-and sometimes in the form of an old hag in the middle of the night, and the old crone would wave a wand, and at the end of this wand trailing silver glitter, Feydor could see the souls of the damned, dangling as if on the head of a pin, all blazing in the inferno, all filled with excruciating, everlasting scalding, never-ending pain, swishing about in a soupy fire there at the end of the witch's wand. Then one of the old woman's eyes would literally leave its socket, wrench free of her head, and come straight down into his throat, her huge eye becoming his, so that he could see into his own frail insides, into Satan's invisible world of the dead, into the spirits of the everlasting cauldron called Hell, which was depicted as a cosmic stomach down through which they must journey.
It was a place he did not want to see or to visit, but the witch took him there often, and without speaking a word. The place made him tremble; he knew that this was his fate unless he could deliver up to Satan a far more suitable subject, one that Satan himself had made a worthwhile, chosen substitute. A woman named Coran, Dr. Jessica Coran…
"But I gave you Wetherbine," he'd pleaded.
"I don't care about Wetherbine. I want Coran," Satan declared.
The moment Feydor pushed open the door to room 1713, he felt a sudden surge of control. He was now in control. It was a feeling that had eluded him now for so many years.
It was the right time, the right place.
ONE
Scream like the devil's baby
"Says here Nevada's the seventh-largest state in the union," John Thorpe told Jessica Coran, reading from his guidebook in an attempt to bring her from her doldrums. "Yet it has one of the smallest populations."
The cab they were in almost hit another, their driver shouting an obscenity and blowing his horn, all for naught. Jessica imagined that half an hour from the clutter and clatter of downtown Vegas, all she might hear would be a desert wind howling across the uninhabited red earth, playing the sagebrush like so many lilting harps. She was wishing to be there, maybe in a Jeep, exploring the vast and strange and otherworldly wasteland of the arid West. Such a lark had to beat hell out of the casinos and the proposed series of dull talks on forensic medicine. If she wanted to return home with any lasting memories-she'd been told by those in the know that the real Nevada had nothing to do with the unreal surreal called Vegas-she'd take Warren Bishop up on his offer, and she'd escape Vegas for the surrounding mountains. However, ditching J. T. could prove hard, and she didn't want her friend's feelings hurt when she did it to him. So she'd told J. T. nothing and decided to bide her time; when the time was right… maybe…
Warren Bishop knew the terrain, and she had always felt secure and safe in their friendship, which had, off and on, flirted with something more serious than just friends. Warren had been one of her training officers at Quantico when she'd first become an agent. He was a man who subtly got his way by making a recruit believe she was doing precisely what she, not he, wanted. He had a gift as a teacher, and no one knew firearms like Warren Bishop. Four years ago, he'd been offered any branch field office in the country, and he had chosen Vegas for reasons still unclear to her. He wasn't a big gambler, but he had fallen in love with the area, and he kept a wide collection of Wild West and American Indian paraphernalia, including old guns. She'd been looking forward to seeing Warren and rekindling their friendship. But a quick call from the airport to the Vegas FBI branch office told her that Bishop had been unexpectedly called out of town, so she was now nursing a funk that poor J. T. hadn't a clue about.