Walk on the Wild Side

An Awareness of Angels



He surrendered so meekly. It was over so quietly. It was anticlimactic.

Sheriff Jimmy Stringer certainly thought so. “Please.” And there were tears quavering his voice, but his hand with the .357 was steady. “Please. Just try something. Please try something.”

But the killer just stood there placidly in the glare of their lights, blood-smeared surgical gloves raised in surrender.

In the back of his van they could see the peppermint-stripe body of the fourteen-year-old hooker, horribly mutilated and neatly laid out on a shower curtain. Another few minutes, and all would be bundled up tidily—destined shortly thereafter for a shallow grave in some pine-and-scrub wasteland, or perhaps a drop from a bridge with a few cinder blocks for company. Like the other eleven they had so far been able to find.

“Please. Do it,” begged Stringer. One of the eleven had been an undercover policewoman, and that had been Stringer’s idea. “Come on. Try something.”

But already there were uniformed bodies crowding into the light. Handcuffs flashed and clacked, and someone began reading the kid his rights.

“Steady on there, Jimmy. You’re not Clint Eastwood.” Dr Nathan Hodgson’s grip on his shoulder was casual, but surprisingly strong.

His own hand suddenly shaking, Stringer slowly lowered his Smith & Wesson, gently dropped its hammer, and returned the revolver to the holster at his side. His belt was a notch tighter now, needed one more. He’d lost fifteen of his two hundred pounds during the long investigation, despite a six-pack every night to help him sleep.

More sirens were curdling the night, and camera flashes made grotesque strobe effects with the flashing lights of police and emergency vehicles. They’d already shoved the killer—the suspect—into one of the county cars.

Stringer let out a shuddering breath and faced the forensic psychiatrist. Dr Hodgson looked too much like a television evangelist for his liking, but Stringer had to admit they’d never have nailed this punk tonight without the shrink’s help. Modus operandi was about as useful as twenty-twenty hindsight; Hodgson had been able to study the patterns and to predict where the psycho most likely would strike again. Like hunting a rabbit with beagles: wait till it runs around by you again—then, bang.

“Suppose now that we caught this little piece of shit, you’ll do your best to prove he’s crazy, and all he needs is some tender loving care for a couple of months.”

Stringer’s freckled face was sweaty, and he looked ready to hit someone. “Dammit, Nate! They’ll just turn the f*cker loose and call him a responsible member of society. Let him kill and kill again!”

Dr Hodgson showed no offense. “If he’s guilty, then he’ll pay the penalty. I don’t make the laws.”

An old excuse, but works every time. Stringer tried to spit, found his mouth too dry. The bright flashes of light hurt his eyes. Like kicking over a long-dead dog on the side of the road. Just a bunch of wriggling lumps, all bustling about a black Chevy van and the vivisected thing in its belly. Lonely piece of two-lane blacktop, an old county road orphaned by the new lake. Old farm fields overrun with cedar and briar and a couple years’ growth of pine and sumac. Probably a good place to hunt rabbits. He had half a beer in his car. “Neither do I,” Stringer said heavily “I just try to enforce them.” Right off the TV reruns, but he was too tired to be clever. He hoped some a*shole deputy hadn’t used his beer can for an ashtray.

His name was Matthew Norbrook, and he wanted to make a full confession. So they’d only found a dozen? He’d show them where to look for the rest. If he could remember them all.The ones in this end of the state. Would they like to know about the others? Maybe the ones in other states?

Too easy, and they weren’t taking chances on blowing this case due to some technicality. The judge ordered a psychiatric examination for the next morning.

Dr Nathan Hodgson was in charge.

There were four of them in the observation room, watching through the two-way mirror as Dr Hodgson conducted his examination. Morton Bowers was the court-appointed defense attorney— a gangling black man cleanly dressed in an off-the-rack mill-outlet suit that didn’t really fit him. Cora Steinman was the local D.A., and her businesswoman’s power suit fit her very well indeed. Dr something Gottlieb—Stringer hadn’t remembered her first name—was wearing a shapeless white lab coat and alternated between scribbling notes and fooling with the video recording equipment. Stringer was wearing his uniform for a change—none too neat, and that wasn’t a change—partly to show that this was official business, but mainly to remind these people that he was in charge here, at least for now. A further reminder, two of Stringer’s deputies were standing just outside in the hallway. In charge for now: the state boys would be crowding in soon, and probably the FBI next.

Stringer sipped on his coffee. It reminded him of watching some bad daytime drama on the big projection TV they had in the bar at the new Trucker’s Heaven off I-40—actually their sign read “Haven,” but try to tell that to anyone. Stringer wished for a smoke, but they’d all jumped on his case when he’d earlier pulled out a pack. It had all been boring thus far: preliminaries and legal technicalities. Stringer supposed it all served some purpose.

Trouble was, you could be damn sure that the purpose was to make certain this murdering little pervert got off scot-free. Stringer just wished they’d leave him alone in a room with the filthy creep—two-way mirrors or not. He might be pushing fifty, but...

“Before we go any further,” Norbrook was saying, “I want it perfectly understood that I consider myself to be entirely sane.”

He was wearing orange county-jail coveralls—Dr Hodgson had insisted that they remove the handcuffs—but he still managed the attitude of having kindly granted this interview. His manner was condescending, his speech pedantic to the point of arrogance.

Some bright little college punk, Stringer judged—probably high on drugs most of the time. About thirty, and tall, dark, and handsome. Just like they say. He’d have no problem picking up girls: Let’s climb into my van and snort a little coke. Here, try on this gag while I get out my knives. Stringer knotted his heavy fists and glared at that TV-star nose and smiling mouth of toothpaste-ad teeth.

“Are you sometimes concerned that other people might not think that you are entirely sane?” Dr Hodgson asked him.

The psychiatrist was wearing a three-piece suit that probably cost more than Stringer’s pickup truck. He was almost twice the age of the suspect—of his patient—but had the distinguished good looks and gray-at-the-temples pompadour that seemed to turn on women from teeny-boppers to golden-agers. Stringer had heard enough gossip to know that Hodgson was sure no fairy, and maybe there was a dent or two in the old Hippocratic Oath back up North that had made the doc content to relocate here in a rural Southern county.

Norbrook’s smile was supercilious. “Please, Dr...Hodgson, is it? We can dispense with the how-do-you-feel-about-that? routine. My concern is that the story I propose to tell may at first sound completely mad. That’s why I asked for this interview. I had hoped that a psychiatrist might have the intelligence to listen without preconception or ignorant incredulity. All Sheriff Andy of Mayberry and his redneck deputies here seem capable of understanding is a body count, and that rather limits them to their ten fingers.”

Stringer dreamed of sharing Norbrook’s ten fingers with a sturdy brick. Afterward they’d slip into those surgical gloves just like Jell-O going into a fancy mold.

“This story you want to tell me must seem very important to you,” Dr Hodgson said.

“Important to the entire human race,” Norbrook said levelly. “That’s why I decided to surrender when I might have escaped through the brush. I didn’t want to risk the chance that a bullet would preserve their secrets.”

“Their secrets?”

“All right. I’m perfectly aware that you’re fully prepared to dismiss everything I’m about to tell you as paranoid fantasy. And I’m perfectly aware that paranoid schizophrenics have no doubt sat here in this same chair and offered this same protest. All I ask is that you listen with an open mind. If I weren’t able to furnish proof of what I’m about to tell you, I’d never have permitted myself to be captured. Agreed?”

“Suppose you begin at the beginning.”

“It began a hundred years ago. No, to be precise, it began before history—perhaps at the dawn of the human race. But my part of the story begins a century ago in London.

“My great-grandfather was Jack the Ripper.”

Norbrook paused to study the effect of his words.

Hodgson listened imperturbably. He never made notes during an interview; it was intrusive, and it was simpler just to play back the tape.

Stringer muttered, “Bullshit!” and crumpled his coffee cup.

“I suppose,” continued Norbrook, “that many people will say that madness is inherited.”

“Is that how you sometimes feel?” Hodgson asked.

“My great-grandfather wasn’t mad, you see—and that’s the crux of it all.”

Norbrook settled back in his chair, smiling with the air of an Agatha Christie detective explaining a locked-room murder.

“My great-grandfather—his identity has defied discovery all these years, although I intend to reveal it in good time—was a brilliant experimental surgeon of his day. Because of his research, some would have condemned him as a vivisectionist.”

“Can you tell me how all of this was revealed to you?”

“Not through voices no one else can hear,” Norbrook snorted. “Please, Doctor. Listen and don’t interrupt with your obvious ploys.

“My great-grandfather kept an extensive journal, made careful notes of all of his experiments.

“You see, those prostitutes—those creatures—that he killed. Their deaths were not the random murders of a deranged fiend. On the contrary, they were experimental subjects for my great-grandfather’s early researches. The mutilation of their corpses was primarily a smoke screen to disguise the real purpose for their deaths. It was better that the public know him as Jack the Ripper, a murderous sex fiend, rather than a dedicated scientist whose researches were destined to expose an unsuspected malignancy as deadly to humanity as any plague bacillus.”

Norbrook leaned forward in his chair—his face tense with the enormity of his disclosure.

“You must understand. They aren’t human.”

“Prostitutes, do you mean—or women in general?”

“Damn you! Don’t mock me!”

Stringer started to head for the door, but Norbrook remained seated.

“Not all women,” he continued. “Not all prostitutes. But some of them. And they’re more likely by far to be hookers or those one-night-stand easy lays anyone can pickup in singles bars. Liberated women! I’m certain that they engineered this so-called sexual revolution.”

“They?”

“Yes, they. The proverbial they. The legendary they. They really are in legend, you know.”

“I’m not certain if I follow entirely Could you perhaps...?”

“Who was Adam’s first wife?”

“Eve, I suppose.”

“Wrong.” Norbrook leveled a finger. “It was Lilith, so the legend goes. Lilith—a lamia, a night creature—Adam’s mate before the creation of Eve, the first woman. Lilith was the mother of Cain, who slew Abel, the first child born of two human parents. It was the offspring of Lilith that introduced the taint of murder and violence into the blood of mankind.”

“Do you consider yourself a Creationist, Mr Norbrook?”

Norbrook laughed. “Far from it. I’m afraid I’m not your textbook religious nut, Dr Hodgson. I said we were speaking of legends—but there must be a basis for any legend, a core of truth imperfectly interpreted by the minds of those who have experienced it.

“There’s a common thread that runs through legends of all cultures. What were angels really? Why are they generally portrayed as feminine? Why was mankind warned to beware of receiving angels unawares? Why are witches usually seen as women? Why was mankind told not to suffer a witch to live? Why were the saints tormented by visions of sexual lust by demonic temptresses? What is the origin of the succubus—a female demon who copulates with sleeping men?”

“Do you sometimes feel threatened by women?”

“I’ve already told you. They aren’t human.”

Norbrook leaned back in his chair and studied the psychiatrist’s face. Hodgson’s expression was impassively attentive.

“Not all women, of course,” Norbrook proceeded. “Only a certain small percentage of them. I’m aware of how this must sound to you, but consider this with an open mind.

“Suppose that throughout history a separate intelligent race has existed alongside mankind. Its origin is uncertain: parallel evolution, extraterrestrial, supernatural entities—as you will. What is important is that such a race does exist—a race that is parasitic, inimical, and undetectable. Rather, was undetectable until my great-grandfather discovered their existence.

“They are virtually identical to the human female. Almost always they are physically attractive, and always their sexual appetites are insatiable. They become prostitutes not for monetary gain, but out of sexual craving. With today’s permissive society, many of them choose instead the role of a hot-to-trot pickup: two beers in a singles bar, and it’s off to the ball. Call them fast or easy or nymphos—but they won’t be the ones complaining about it on your couch, Doctor.”

Dr Hodgson shifted himself in his chair. “Why do you think these women are so sexually promiscuous?”

“The answer is obvious. Their race is self-sterile. Think of them as some sort of hybrid, and you’ll understand a hybrid of human form and alien intelligence. To reproduce they require human sperm, and constant inseminations are required before the right conditions for fertilization are met. It’s the same with other hybrids. Fortunately for us, reproduction is difficult for them, or they’d have reduced humanity to mere breeding stock long ago.

“They use mankind as cuckoos do other birds, placing their eggs in nests of other species to be nurtured at the expense of natural hatchlings. This is the truth behind the numerous legends of changelings—human-appearing infants exchanged in the crib for natural offspring, and the human infant carried away by malevolent elves or fairies. Remember that elves and fairies are more often objects of fear in the older traditions, rather than the cutesy cartoon creatures of today. It’s hardly coincidence that elves and fairies are usually thought of as feminine.”

“This is a f*cking waste of time!” Stringer muttered—then responded, “Beg pardon, ladies,” to Dr Gottlieb’s angry “Shh!”

To Stringer’s disgust, Dr Hodgson seemed to be taking it all in. “Why do you think they only take the shape of women?”

“We’ve considered that,” Norbrook said. “Possibly for some reason only the female body is suited for their requirements. Another reason might be a genetic one: only female offspring can be produced.”

“When you say ‘we’ do you sometimes feel that there are others who have these same thoughts as you do?”

“All right, I didn’t really expect you to accept what I’ve told you as fact. I asked you to keep an open mind, and I ask that you continue to do so. I am able to prove what I’m telling you.

“By ‘we’ I mean my great-grandfather and those of our family who have pursued his original research.”

“Could you tell me a little more about what you mean by research?”

“My great-grandfather made his initial discovery quite by accident—literally. A prostitute who had been run over by a carriage was brought into his surgery. She was terribly injured; her pelvis was crushed, and she was unconscious from skull injuries. Her lower abdomen had been laid open, and he worked immediately to try to stop the profuse bleeding there. To his dismay, his patient regained consciousness during the surgery. His assistant hastened to administer more ether, but too late. The woman died screaming under the knife, although considering the extent of her injuries, she could hardly have noticed the scalpel.

“Her uterus had been ruptured, and it was here that my great-grandfather was at work the moment of her death. His efforts there continued with renewed energy, although by now his surgical exploration was clearly more in the nature of an autopsy. When his assistant set aside the ether and rejoined him, my great-grandfather described a sort of lesion which he characterized as an ‘amoeboid pustulance’ that had briefly appeared under his blade at the moment of her death agony. The lesion had then vanished in the welter of blood—rather like an oyster slipping from the fork and into the tomato sauce, to use his expression—and subsequent diligent dissection could reveal no trace of it. His assistant had seen nothing, and my great-grandfather was forced to attribute it to nervous hallucination.

“He might have dismissed the incident had not he been witness to a railway smashup while on holiday. Among the first to rush to the aid of the victims, he entered the wreckage of a second-class carriage where a woman lay screaming. Shards of glass had virtually eviscerated her, and as he tried to staunch the bleeding with her petticoats, he again saw a glimpse of a sort of ill-defined purulent mass sliding through the ruin of her perineum just at the instant of her final convulsion. He sought after it, but found no further trace—these were hardly ideal conditions—until other rescuers drew him to the aid of other victims. Later he conducted a careful autopsy of the woman, without success. It was then that he learned the victim had been a notorious prostitute.

“Despite my great-grandfather’s devotion to medical research, he was a man of firm religious convictions. In deliberating over what he had twice seen, he considered at first that he had witnessed physical evidence of the human soul, liberated in the instant of death. I won’t bore you with details of the paths he followed with his initial experiments to establish this theory; they are all recorded in his journals. It soon became evident that this transient mass—this entity—manifested itself only at the moment of violent death.

“Prostitutes seemed natural subjects for his research. They were easily led into clandestine surroundings; they served no good purpose in the world; they were sinful corrupters of virtue—undeserving of mercy. Moreover, that in both cases when he had witnessed the phenomenon the victims had been prostitutes was a circumstance not lost upon my great-grandfather—or Jack the Ripper, as he was soon to be known.

“He was unsuccessful in most of his experiments, but he put it down to imprecise technique and the need for haste. Fortunately for him, not all of his subjects were discovered. Mary Ann Nichols was his first near-success, then nothing until Catherine Eddowes. With Mary Jane Kelly he had time to perform his task carefully, and afterward he was able to formulate a new theory.

“It wasn’t the human soul that he had glimpsed. It was a corporeal manifestation of evil—a possession, if you prefer—living within the flesh of sinful harlots. It was an incarnation of Satan’s power taken seed within woman—woman, who brought about mankind’s fall from grace—for the purpose of corrupting innocence through the lure of wanton flesh. This malignant entity became fleetingly visible only at the instant of death through sexual agony—rather like rats fleeing a sinking ship, or vermin deserting a corpse.”

Norbrook paused and seemed to want to catch his breath.

“I use my great-grandfather’s idiom, of course. We’ve long since abandoned that Victorian frame of reference.”

Dr Hodgson glanced toward the two-way mirror and adjusted his tie. “How did you happen to come into possession of this journal?”

“My great-grandfather feared discovery. As quickly as discretion allowed, he emigrated to the United States. Here, he changed his name and established a small practice in New York. By then he had become more selective with his experimental subjects—and more cautious about the disposal of their remains.

“He was, of course, a married man—Jack the Ripper was, after all, a dedicated researcher and not a deranged misogynist—and his son, my grandfather, grew up to assist him in his experiments. After my great-grandfather’s death shortly before the First World War, my grandfather returned to England in order to serve as an army field surgeon in France. The hostilities furnished ample opportunity for his research, as well as a cover for any outrage that may have occurred. Blame it on the Hun.

“It was my grandfather’s opinion that the phenomenon was of an ectoplasmic nature, and he attempted to study it as being a sort of electrical force. He married an American nurse at the close of the war and returned to New York, where my father was born. By now, my grandfather’s researches had drifted entirely into the realm of spiritualism, and his journals, preserved alongside my great-grandfather’s, are worth reading only as curiosa. He died at the height of the Depression—mustard gas had damaged his lungs—discredited by his peers and remembered as a harmless crank.

“It was intended that my father should follow the family tradition, as they say. lie was working his way through medical school at the time of Pearl Harbor. During his college days, his pro-Nazi sentiments had made him unpopular with some of his classmates, but like many other Americans he was quick to enlist once bombs and tanks replaced political rhetoric. His B-17 was shot down over France early on, and he spent the remainder of the war in various prison camps. After the fall of Berlin, my father was detained for some time by the Russians, who had liberated the small prison camp where he was assisting in the hospital. There was talk of collaboration and atrocities, but the official story was that the Russians had grabbed him up along with all the other German scientists engaged in research there. My father was a minor Cold War hero when the Russians finally released him.

“He left the Army and resettled in southern California, where he married my mother and spent his remaining reclusive years on her father’s citrus farm. His manner was that of a hunted fugitive, and he had a great fear of strangers—eccentricities the locals attributed to the horror of German and Russian prison camps. His journals recounting his wartime experiences, fragmentary as they are, show that he had good reason to feel hunted. By the time I was born, a decade after the war, there were rumors of newly declassified documents that linked my father to certain deplorable experiments regarding tests for racial purity—performed under his direction. I’m afraid my father was rather obsessed with the concept of Aryan superiority, and his research was vitiated by this sort of tunnel vision. It was about the time they got Eichmann when they found him hanging in the orange grove. They ruled it suicide, although there was talk of Nazi hunters. I know better.

“So did my mother. She sold the farm, bundled me up, and left for Oregon. I heard that afterward the whole place was burned to the ground. My mother never told me how much she knew. She hardly had the chance: I ran off to San Francisco early in my teens to join the Haight-Ashbury scene. When I hitched my way home five years later, I found that my mother had been murdered during a burglary. There was insurance money and a trust fund—enough for college and a medical education, though they threw me out after my third year. Her lawyers had a few personal items as well, held in trust for my return. My great-grandfather’s Bible didn’t interest me, until I untied the cord and found the microfiche of the journals tucked into a hollow within.

“I suppose they got the originals and didn’t concern themselves with me. In any event, I covered my tracks, got a formal education. Living on the streets for five years had taught me how to survive. In time I duplicated their experiments, avoided all the blind alleys their preconceptions had led them down, formed conclusions of my own.

“It’s amazing just how really easy it is these days to pick up a woman and take her to a place of privacy—and I assure you that they all came willingly. After the first it was obvious that the subjects had to want to be f*cked. No, kidnapping was counterproductive, although I had to establish a few baselines first. They’re all the same wherever you go, and I should know. Over the past few years I’ve killed them all across the country—a few here, a few there, keep on moving. In all this time I’ve been able to establish positive proof in about one case out of twenty”

“Proof?”

“Portable VCRs are a wonderful invention. No messy delays with developing film, and if you draw a blank, just record over it on the next experiment. You have to have the camera exactly right; the alien presence—shall we consider it an inhuman ovum?—exudes from the uterus only in the instant of violent death, then dissipates through intracellular spaces within the dead tissue. I’ve come to the conclusion that this inhuman ovum is a sentient entity on some level, seeking to escape dissolution at the moment of death. Or is it trying to escape detection? I wonder.”

“There were videocassettes found in your van.”

“Useless tapes. I’ve put the essential tapes in a safe place along with the microfiches.”

“A safe place?”

“I’ve already told my attorney how to find them. The judge tried to appoint a woman attorney to defend me, you know, but I saw the danger there.”

“You say you allowed yourself to be captured. Wasn’t some part of you frightened?”

“I have the proof to expose them. My forebears lacked the courage of their misguided convictions. Personal safety aside, I feel that I have a duty to the human race.”

“Do you see yourself as handing this trust on to your son?”

“I have no children, if that’s what you mean. Knowing what I do, I find the idea of inseminating any woman totally abhorrent.”

“Tell what you remember most about your mother?”

Norbrook stood up abruptly. “I said no psychiatric games, Dr Hodgson. I’ve told you all I need to in order to establish my sanity and motives. That’s all a part of legal and medical record now. I think this interview is terminated.”

The door opened as Norbrook arose. He turned, with cold dignity permitted the deputies to cuff his wrists.

Stringer stopped the psychiatrist as he followed the others into the hallway. The sheriff scowled after Norbrook as his deputies led him away to the car.

“Well, Doc—what do you think?”

“You heard it all, didn’t you?”

Stringer dug out a cigarette. “Craziest line of bullshit I ever listened to. Guess he figures he can plead insanity if he makes up a load of crap like that.”

Dr Hodgson shook his head. “Oh, Matthew Norbrook’s insane—no doubt about it. He’s a classic paranoid schizophrenic: well-ordered delusional system, grandiosity, feelings of superiority, sense of being persecuted, belief that his actions are done in the name of a higher purpose. On an insanity scale of one to three, I’d have to rate him as four-plus. He’ll easily be found innocent by reason of insanity.”

“Damn!” Stringer muttered, watching Norbrook enter the elevator.

“The good news, at least from the patient’s point of view,” Hodgson went on, “is that paranoid schizophrenia so easily responds to treatment. Why, with the right medication and some expert counseling, Matthew Norbrook will probably be out of the hospital and living a normal life in less than a year.”

Stringer’s hand shook as he drew on the cigarette. “It isn’t justice, Nate!”

“Perhaps not, Jimmy, but it’s the way the law works. And look at it this way—the dead don’t care whether their murderer is executed or cured. Norbrook may yet live to make a valuable contribution to society. Give me one of those, will you?”

Stringer hadn’t known the doctor smoked. “The dead don’t care,” he repeated.

“Thanks, Jimmy.” Hodgson shook out a Marlboro. “I know how you must feel. I saw a little of what was on that one videocassette—the one where he tortured that poor policewoman, Sherri Wilson. Hard to believe she could have remained conscious through it all. Guess it was the cocaine he used on her. Must have really been tough on you, since you talked her into posing as a hooker to try and trap him. It’s understandable that you’re feeling a lot of guilt about it. If you’d like to come around and talk about it sometime...”

Hodgson was handing back the cigarettes, but already Stringer had turned his back and walked off without another word.

Cora Steinman, the district attorney, stepped out from the doorway of the observation room. She watched the elevator doors close behind Stringer.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said finally.

Dr Hodgson crushed his unsmoked cigarette into the sand of a hallway ash can. “I know my man.”

From the parking lot, the report of the short-barreled .357 echoed like cannon fire against the clinic walls.

“Morton, you’ve taken care of the journals?” Hodgson asked.

The black defense attorney collected his briefcase. “I took care of everything. His collection of evidence is now a couple of books on Jack the Ripper, a bunch of S&M porno, and a couple of snuff films.”

“Then it’s just a matter of the tape from the interview.”

“I think there’s been a malfunction in the equipment,” Dr Gottlieb decided.

“It pays to be thorough,” Steinman observed.

A deputy flung open the stairway door. He was out of breath. “Norbrook tried to escape. Had a knife hidden on him. Jimmy had to shoot.”

“I’ll get the emergency tray!” Dr Hodgson said quickly.

“Hell, Doc.” The deputy paused for another breath. “Just get a hose. Most of the sucker’s head is spread across your parking lot.”

“I’ll get the tray anyway,” Hodgson told him.

He said to the others as the deputy left, “Must keep up appearances.”

“Why,” Steinman wondered, as they walked together toward the elevator, “why do you suppose he was so convinced that we only exist as females?”

Dr Hodgson shrugged. “Just a male chauvinist human.”





But You’ll Never Follow Me



It wasn’t the smell of death that he hated so much. He’d grown used to that in Nam. It was the smell of dying that tore at him. Slow dying.

He remembered his best buddy stuck to the paddy mud, legless and eviscerated, too deep in shock to cry out, just gulping air like a beached fish, eyes round with wonder and staring into his. Marsden had closed those eyes with his right hand and with his left he put a .45 slug through his friend’s skull.

After that, he’d made a promise to himself never to kill again, but that was as true a promise as he’d ever made to anyone, and never-intended lies rotted together with never-realized truths of his best intentions.

Marsden found a moment’s solitude in the slow-moving elevator as it slid upward to the fourth floor. He cracked a zippered gash into his bulky canvas flight bag, large enough to reach the pint bottle of vodka on top. He gulped down a mouthful, replaced the stopper and then replaced the flask, tugged down the zipper—all in the space of four floors. Speed was only a matter of practice. He exhaled a breath of vodka as the elevator door opened.

Perhaps the middle-aged couple who waited there noticed his breath as he shouldered past them with his bag, but Marsden doubted it. The air of Brookcrest Health Care Center was already choked with the stench of bath salts and old lady’s perfume, with antiseptics and detergents and bouquets of dying flowers, and underlying it all was the veiled sweetness of urine, feces and vomit, physically retained in bedpans and diapers.

Marsden belched. A nurse in the fourth floor lounge scowled at him, but a blue-haired lady in a jerrycart smiled and waved and called after him, “Billy Boy! Billy Billy Boy!” Michael Marsden shut his eyes and turned into the hallway that led to his parents’ rooms. Somewhere along the hall a woman’s voice begged in feeble monotone, “Oh Lord, help me. Oh Lord, help me. Oh Lord, help me.” Marsden walked on down the hall.

He was a middle-aged man with a heavy-set frame that carried well a spreading beer-gut. He had mild brown eyes, a lined and long-jawed face, and there were streaks of grey in his short beard and in his limp brown hair where it straggled from beneath the Giants baseball cap. His denim jacket and jeans were about as worn as his scuffed cowboy boots.

“You’d look a lot nicer if you’d shave that beard and get a haircut,” Momma liked to nag him. “And you ought to dress more neatly You’re a good-looking boy, Michael.”

She still kept the photo of him in his uniform, smiling bravely fresh out of bootcamp, on her shelf at the nursing home. Marsden guessed that that was the way Momma preferred to hold him in memory—such of her memory as Alzheimer’s Disease had left her.

Not that there was much worth remembering him for since then. Certainly the rest of his family wouldn’t quarrel with that judgment.

“You should have gone back to grad school once you got back,” his sister in Columbus had advised him with twenty-twenty and twenty-year hindsight. “What have you done with your life instead? When was the last time you held on to a job for more than a year?” At least she hadn’t added, “Or held on to a wife?” Marsden had sipped his Coke and vodka and meekly accepted the scolding. They were seated in the kitchen of their parents’ too-big house in Cincinnati, trying not to disturb Papa as he dozed in his wheelchair in the family room.

“It’s bad enough that Brett and I keep having to drive down here every weekend to try to straighten things out here,” Nancy had reminded him. “And then Jack’s had to come down from Detroit several times since Momma went to Brookcrest, and Jonathan flew here from Los Angeles and stayed two whole weeks after Papa’s first stroke. And all of us have jobs and families to keep up with. Where were you during all this time?”

“Trying to hold a job in Jersey,” Marsden explained, thinking of the last Christmas he’d come home for. He’d been nursing a six-pack and the late-night movie when Momma drifted into the family room and angrily ordered him to get back to mowing the lawn. It was the first time he’d seen Momma naked in his life, and the image of that shrunken, sagging body would not leave him.

“I’m just saying that you should be doing more, Michael,” Nancy continued.

“I was here when you needed me,” Marsden protested. “I was here to take Momma to the nursing home.”

“Yes, but that was after the rest of us did all the work—finding a good home, signing all the papers, convincing Papa that this was the best thing to do, making all the other arrangements.”

“Still, I was here at the end. I did what I had to do,” Marsden said, thinking that this had been the story of his life ever since the draft notice had come. Never a choice.

They hadn’t wanted to upset Momma, so no one had told her about the nursing home. Secretly they’d packed her things and loaded them into the trunk of Papa’s Cadillac the night before. “Just tell Momma that she’s going for another check-up at the hospital,” they’d told him to say, and then they had to get home to their jobs and families.

But despite her advanced Alzheimer’s, Momma’s memory was clear when it came to remembering doctors’ appointments, and she protested suspiciously the next morning when he and Papa bundled her into the car. Momma had looked back over her shoulder at him as they wheeled her down the hall, and her eyes were shadowed with the hurt of betrayal. “You’re going to leave me here, aren’t you,” she said dully.

The memory of that look crowded memories of Nam from his nightmares.

After that, Marsden had avoided going home. He did visit Momma briefly when Papa had his first stroke, but she hadn’t recognized him.

Papa had survived his first stroke and, several months later, had surprised them all again and survived his second stroke. But that had been almost a year ago from the night Marsden and his sister had sat talking in the kitchen while Papa dozed in his wheelchair. That first stroke had left him weak on the one side; the second had taken away part of his mind. The family had tried to maintain him at home with live-in nursing care, but Papa’s health slowly deteriorated, physically and mentally.

It was time to call for Michael.

And Michael came.

“Besides,” Nancy reassured him, “Papa only wants to be near Momma. He still insists on trying to get over to visit her every day. You can imagine what a strain that’s been on everyone here.”

“I can guess,” said Michael, pouring more vodka into his glass.

“Where are we going, son?” Papa had asked the next morning, as Marsden lifted him into the Cadillac. Papa’s vision was almost gone now, and his voice was hard to understand.

“I’m taking you to be with Momma for awhile,” Marsden told him. “You want that, don’t you?”

Papa’s dim eyes stared widely at the house as they backed down the driveway. He turned to face Michael. “But when are you bringing Momma and me back home again, son?”

Never, as it turned out. Marsden paused outside his mother’s room, wincing at the memory. Over the past year their various health problems had continued their slow and inexorable progress toward oblivion. Meanwhile health care bills had mushroomed, eroding insurance coverage, the last of their pensions, and a lifetime’s careful savings. It was time to put the old family home on the market, to make some disposal of a lifetime’s possessions. It had to be done.

Papa called for Michael.

“Don’t let them do this to us, son.” The family held power of attorney now. “Momma and I want to go home.”

So Michael came home.

The white-haired lady bent double over her walker as she inched along the hallway wasn’t watching him. Marsden took a long swig of vodka and replaced the pint bottle. Momma didn’t like to see him drink.

She was sitting up in her jerrycart staring at the television when Marsden stepped inside her room and closed the door. They’d removed her dinner tray but hadn’t cleaned her up, and bits of food littered the front of her dressing gown. She looked up, and her sunken eyes showed recognition.

“Why, it’s Michael!” She held out her food-smeared arms to him.

“My baby!”

Marsden accepted her slobbery hug. “I’ve come for you, Momma,” he whispered, as Momma began to cry.

She covered her face with her hands and continued weeping, as Marsden stepped behind her and opened his flight bag. The silencer was already fitted to the Hi-Standard .22, and Marsden quickly pumped three hollow-points through the back of his mother’s head. It was over in seconds. Little noise, and surely no pain. No more pain.

Marsden left his mother slumped over in her jerrycart, picked up his canvas bag, and closed the door. Then he walked on down the hall to his father’s room.

He went inside. Papa must have been getting up and falling again, because he was tied to his wheelchair by a bath towel about his waist.

“Who’s that?” he mumbled, turning his eyes toward Marsden.

“It’s Michael, Papa. I’m here to take you home.”

Papa lost sphincter control as Marsden untied the knotted towel. He was trying to say something—it sounded like “Bless you, son”—then Marsden lovingly shot him three times through the back of his skull. Papa would have fallen out of the wheelchair, but Marsden caught him. He left him sitting upright with Monday Night Football just getting underway on the tube.

Marsden finished the vodka, then removed the silencer from the pistol and replaced the clip. Shoving the Hi-Standard into his belt, he checked over the flight bag and left it with Papa.

He heard the first screams as the elevator door slowly closed. Someone must have finally gone to clean Momma’s dinner off her.

A uniformed security guard—Marsden hadn’t known that Brookcrest employed such—was trying to lock the lobby doors. A staff member was shouting into the reception desk phone.

“Hold it, please! Nobody’s to leave!” The guard actually had a revolver.

Marsden shot him through the left eye and stepped over him and through the glass doors. Marsden regretted this, because he hated to kill needlessly.

Unfortunately, the first police car was slithering into the parking lot as Marsden left the nursing home. Marsden continued to walk away, even when the car’s spotlight pinned him against the blacktop.

“You there! Freeze!”

They must have already been called to the house, Marsden thought Time was short. Without breaking stride, he drew his .22 and shot out the spotlight.

There were still the parking lot lights. Gunfire flashed from behind both front doors of the police car, and Marsden sensed the impact of buckshot and 9 mm. slugs.

He was leaping for the cover of a parked car, and two more police cars were hurtling into the parking lot, when the twenty pounds of C4 he’d left with Papa went off.

The blast lifted Marsden off his feet and fragged him with shards of glass and shattered bricks. Brookcrest Health Care Center burst open like the birth of a volcano.

Two police cars were overturned, the other on fire. The nursing home was collapsing into flaming rubble. No human screams could be heard through the thunder of disintegrating brick and steel.

Marsden rolled to his feet, brushing away fragments of debris. He retrieved his pistol, but there was no need for it just now. His clothes were in a bad state, but they could be changed. There was no blood, just as he had known there would not be.

They couldn’t kill him in Nam, that day in the paddy when he learned what he was and why he was. They couldn’t kill him now.

Was it any easier when they were your own loved ones? Yes, perhaps it was.

Michael Marsden melted away into the darkness that had long ago claimed him.