Robert W. Walker
Fatal Instinct
One
Each day that Gerald Ray Sims awoke in the Federal Penitentiary for the Criminally Insane, he was amazed at having survived another night locked up with Stainlype. Nor could he believe that the authorities, with such total control over him, could do nothing about Stainlype's comings and goings. Would they never understand the nature of the beast? That it was Stainlype and not he who brutally attacked and killed all those defenseless women?
Each day Gerald spent in captivity gave Stainlype more reason to hate him, just as Matisak had said via prison communique. All of Stainlype's venom, once directed outward, was now cut off with no measure of release, so the anger twisted back on Gerald himself.
Stainlype was feminine by nature, and when she spoke to Gerald, she called him Stainlype, a clever attempt to throw off the doctors, but the doctors couldn't be that dumb. Arnold and the lady doctor who visited from Washington, D.C., couldn't possibly believe that she-Stainlype-and he-Sims-were the same. No way…
Gerald was convinced that Dr. Coran had to know the truth. She must understand that Stainlype remained so murderous and malevolent a force that Stainlype simply could not be denied her needs; that when she wanted human flesh to feed on, she would take whatever she craved, whatever was at hand, and currently this meant his flesh. The bite marks all over his body proved it, bites in places not even a contortionist could reach. This Dr. Arnold could not explain away with psychobabble and mumbo jumbo.
The bites were steadily enlarging whole fleshy chunks ripped from him. The doctors couldn't possibly believe that he'd inflict such pain and torture upon himself, could they?
“ But you did that with your own teeth, Gerald,” Dr. Arnold had countered.
“ They're not my goddamned teeth anymore; they're her teeth, and she's using them on me! She hates it here and-”
“ We provide for all your wants here, Gerald.”
“ Inside me!” he'd shouted. “She hates being trapped inside me, inside this place, unable to feed.”
How completely at her mercy he was when Stainlype claimed possession of his hands, his body, his mind and heart. When she used him, he had no power to stop her from cannibalizing those girls. Stainlype had an insatiable appetite for the young ones.
Now he was locked away with her in cell number HI-32, deep inside the federal facility in Philadelphia. He shared the same cell block with an assortment of infamous serial killers, many of whom were being studied, watched, filmed and tested like so many rats in a laboratory.
Alongside him was Dominick Jeffries, “the Collector,” and down from him was Mad Matthew Matisak, “Teach” to some, who had terrorized the Midwest with his wide-ranging, blood-draining kill spree in which his victims gave up every ounce to literally quench his thirst for blood. They called Matisak a vampire, a true-life Dracula. Gerald didn't belong here with such monsters; Stainlype did, but not him.
The last time Dr. Coran had come around she had been nice to him, and she was so pretty, with fresh, smooth skin and soft eyes, a glistening moisture in them, and those lips that she frequently wet with her tongue, all very beautiful, framed as it was in her long, auburn hair, her hazel eyes like a final floral touch. Stainlype, who refused to talk to Dr. Coran or Dr. Arnold anymore, whispered to him that Jessica Coran looked tasty. Stainlype made his eyes bulge as she tried to get a good look at Dr. Coran through the 3-inch-thick glass casing.
Dr. Coran told him that she liked seeing the recent progress Dr. Arnold and he had made. “Although it's far from a breakthrough,” she'd said, “it does appear that you are finally accepting responsibility for your own actions and that Stainlype has stopped or slowed in her efforts to harm you.”
That had been a month before. He'd agreed with her, as Stainlype told him to. She was recording their conversation on camera, the lens just outside his glass cage, staring in at him like some ever-present evil eye. He'd forget that the camera was there, running twenty-four hours a day, until she came. Then it bothered him, made him nervous, fidgety.
Now that Stainlype had been in hiding for a long time, Dr. Arnold had seen this as a sign of progress. Apparently so did Dr. Coran. But Stainlype was very much with him, biding her time, through with doctors and talk. What did the doctors really know? They couldn't feel Stainlype's slug trail inside his head, the leaden feeling when Stainlype invaded the pit of his stomach, twisting and turning through the coiled passageways of his intestines, squeezing at his heart and flitting shadowlike over the irises of his colorless eyes. No, Stainlype was not any weaker, just patiently waiting.
Dr. Coran made Gerald review in detail what she had done to those women, what she'd done to their flesh, making his body mount them after they were dead, making him perform carnal acts on their corpses. Dr. Coran had a word for it: necrophilia. Knowing that there was a word for it helped just a little, the way a salve helps a sore. Dr. Coran made him tell her about how Stainlype had lured the women to their deaths, how she had struck them, the weapons used and what happened after, about the cannibalism, everything. Dr. Coran told him it was good for him to relive the events and that what she learned from him would help the FBI and law enforcement across the nation, and that his case would be written up in journals. He had wanted to forget, but she had made him remember, and it was only after she came that he learned that the demon within him was a woman.
Dr. Arnold called that progress.
Gerald had made it clear to them both that during the horrid attacks, he could see and hear what was going on around him, but that Stainlype had made off with his feelings of touch and taste, his motor capabilities, his powerful arms and legs, the hands used in killing, the mouth and teeth used in eating. Stainlype was now filled with frustration and rage, her anger directed more and more at him, as attested to by the new bites. He'd remained too afraid to tell Dr. Arnold that his worst fears seemed on the verge of coming true, because Arnold would have his guards strap him down again, further restricting Stainlype and adding to her now burning hatred of the body she'd possessed for all these years. Dr. Arnold would take away the few privileges he now enjoyed, a stack of comic books, the occasional newspaper, a deck of cards.
Stainlype kept up a constant complaint over the fact Gerald had allowed himself to be locked away inside a mountain of mortar, but he felt like a free man by comparison to the Gerald Ray Sims who'd spent almost a year in a rubber-walled cell where he was constantly strapped down.
“ Free man,” Stainlype scoffed. “What a joke.”
Dr. Coran worked for the FBI and was at first talking only to Matisak down the way, but then she started coming to see Gerald. She'd told Gerald that she liked him. So where was she now? Quantico, Virginia, Arnold had said, and Arnold was no help, either. He just kept saying, “You get what you give, Gerald. You've got to cooperate with her if you want her to keep coming all the way back here to see you.”
“ I told you,” he'd replied, “I can't tell her any more about where the bodies are buried. Stainlype warned me that if I told any more, she'll kill me!”
“ But what can Stainlype do to you? And besides, why should she care, Gerald, what you tell us?”
“ She cares… she cares plenty.”
“ Why?”
“ I don't know why! She just does.”
Dr. Arnold had gotten up, saying he had more important matters to attend to.
“ Stainlype will kill me!”
“ Dr. Coran is not going to return here unless you are willing to talk seriously, Gerald.”
“ Stainlype still hates her victims, still wants them to suffer, even in death, and wants the families to suffer. I know Dr. Coran wants to help people, but Stainlype could give a fuck.”