Whenever they got off the bus after the day's journey, everyone's bags were placed before the door at the hotel or motel they stopped at, and a key was pushed into each party's hands. The bus tour company made life easy for its passengers, and for Chris Dunlap in particular.
Inside his room now, alone, alongside a plethora of Polaroid photographs of burning bodies, Feydor stretched out his own body serpentine fashion, the mattress and his skin feeling fiery hot. But it was a good heat he now felt: neither rash nor burn. It was no longer the dreaded and hated redness Satan used to punish him with. No, this was more a warm glow, like the way other people described themselves feeling after what they termed "normal" sex, something Feydor had no firsthand knowledge of.
Still, for the first time in his life, Feydor Dorphmann felt whole and in control; there came a sense of accomplishment with performing the ritual that Satan had given him to do, but there also came a sense of purpose and power. He hadn't expected so much personal satisfaction. In fact, he hadn't expected any satisfaction to come of the gruesome work he had done, but in the doing he had discovered himself.
In fact, he had discovered some semblance of understanding that his purpose-guided as it was by Satan-must in fact be, dare he think it even, God's directive. For nothing Satan ever did came of his own volition, but as a scheme set into motion by God Himself, or so many Christian religious leaders professed.
Inscrutable as God himself, so must be God's plan to appease Satan, or to perhaps trip the Old Serpent up on some transcendent level mankind could never hope to glimpse, much less understand. Feydor knew himself to be in the presence of cosmic forces beyond himself; he felt privileged in glimpsing-although "glimpsing" was hardly the word-glimpsing the small truth he had glimpsed. He struggled for a better word than "glimpsed," angry at his limited thought patterns, the linearity and limited boundaries of the mind. A peek, an impression, a quick and momentary view beyond which his brain would fry. A subliminal image of his Satan, a force to be reckoned with, a force that, of course, must sense the whole as well as the parts of all existence, and this intense power must know that while Dorphmann was merely a pawn in this empyrean game of cat and mouse, that God would, in the end, redeem Feydor's soul because, after all, he was as much God's pawn as the Devil's.
And so, the grand and vast plan must go forward now of its own volition…
Yet Feydor, on some primal level he did not himself understand, felt a need to rekindle memories of his last three kills, one of which neither Jessica Coran, nor any of the other authorities, had as yet discovered.
His limbs felt strong and powerful for the first time in his life. Propped up now on one elbow, Feydor examined himself and the Polaroid photographs, one after the other. He'd earlier scattered what he called his "most memorable moments" about the bed, peeled his clothes off, and lay down nude beside the still memories. And from across the room he could see himself reflected in the mirror.
The others on the national parks tour bus with him had all been taken on a side tour, bused out to a copper mine somewhere nearby. In the relative peace here at the hotel, he found silence and solace, and he could here give full vent to his sexual excitement over the memories he had collected.
He clutched one of the photos and brought it to his chest, rubbing it into his nipples and down to his flat stomach. Each photo was taken at the moment the crackling fire opened up the bodies like melons.
God would forgive him his small and petty pleasures; Satan had directed him, and God had allowed it all. He was, after all, only human…
So he would continue to indulge and enjoy himself now as he had then, on seeing them die amid licking, stroking flames. He hadn't known it would be so potent a sexual high that he achieved when the flames' tongues licked a victim's fat away. It recalled his excitement as a child when he had burned small things and rubbed their ashes against his body. It recalled a certain moment in the dim past when he'd killed that little girl, had watched her being swallowed up in the jaws of a searing fire, in the very mouth of Satan.
He had forgotten the thrill of it all, had denied his true nature. Now he knew that in order to feel-to feel anything-for him, there was no other way. At least not until his pact with the Devil was a fait accompli.
He stared into the next photo he grabbed up, imaginatively climbing into it to become the burning victim, his body catching the wavelike fire. The photos helped him to return to the moment and excite himself anew.
He brought the picture down to his crotch, rubbed it along his inner thigh with the other one in his other hand pressed against his penis. Semen stained the photos with his release, and seeing it come forth, he saw, felt, heard, smelled, and tasted it as an epiphany of memory, and a monumental memory came like a horseman from his unconscious mind.
He had once seen with his amazed little boy's eyes the evidence of Satan's own semen where it bubbled up from Hell, had seen it and had wanted to leap into it, but he had forced the event into a corner of the deepest cave within him. And so it felt natural, this sexual explosion he felt with each burning body. It was as natural as nature itself, he believed.
And so it was natural for Satan to have selected him for the work at hand.
Feydor groaned at the overwhelming sexual release he now felt, and he rolled over onto the other photos, his brain replaying the actual events in his mind so vividly that he was once again there in the room with the flaming corpse, first this one and then that and then the other, again and again, over and over, hearing the tormented cries, which only further excited his genitals.
Still, Dr. Stuart Wetherbine had somehow managed to keep a foothold somewhere in the back of Feydor's brain, and he now loudly condemned Feydor's puerile connection with Satan's semen, with fire and flaming corpses. Wetherbine's was the one small voice remaining in his brain that told Feydor he was simply rationalizing away his conduct, but a larger part of his brain said otherwise, a larger part brought to the argument the actual fact that he-Feydor Dorphmann-had, of all the billions on the planet, been selected, that he had been contacted by demonic powers due to his twisted birth needs, perhaps due to his DNA, his genetic makeup.
He'd spent years in self-analysis and had created a complete picture of his own needs, but for years after coming to the conclusion that only through burning himself with matches, cigarettes, and candles could he ever achieve any sexual satisfaction, only then could he control the urges. And he had successfully done so for most of his adult life, putting away "childish" things. However, the dike broke when Satan came into the picture, telling him to open himself up to Satan, to answer his own birth needs, to accept the seed placed in him at birth.
And so he had, and so others must burn so that he might rejoice. "Rejoice, ye sinners!" he said and laughed. "Rejoice, and behold the righteousness of evil."
Sated for the moment, he rolled over on his back, Polaroids sticking with semen to his body. He now stared up at the ceiling when Satan whispered anew in his ear, asking, "Who's next? Number four is waiting. "
Feydor contemplated number four. He didn't think of them as kills, as people being burned alive; he thought of them as gifts given over to him by Satan. Satan arranged for the firewood, Feydor the fire. And God… God allowed it all. God allowed Satan-and Feydor by extension-his way.
Again he told himself, speaking to the room and to Satan, "I have done your bidding in good faith. I have accomplished far more than I ever realized possible in so short a time and in good fashion; I am fully one third of the way to your goal of nine victims."
"It's… not… enough," Satan disagreed, his voice spilling over with threat.