Perfect Victim (22 page)

Some hidden part of him, buried way back in the recesses of his mind, screamed that it was the drug, the yellow fluid in the vial, the tincture of poison that had gotten into him, but the urge to laugh was so strong because the luminous dust motes dancing across his infrareds looked a lot like snowflakes, and that seemed so ridiculous he started giggling and thinking of a Bob Hope Christmas special:
Ladies and gentlemen, a special holiday greeting to all our boys in the service stationed down here in hell, we've got a great show planned for you tonight, we've got Joey Heatherton, Rip Taylor, The Amazing Kreskin, and a nifty apocalyptic battle between two displaced spirits for the fate of the world!

Grove's breathy giggling climbed the musical register into a full-bodied, intoxicated laugh.

He laughed so hard his eyes watered and he nearly doubled over, which was unfortunate, because he didn't see the dark figure emerging from the alcove thirty feet away until it was too late to take cover.

The projectile jumped up across his infrareds the moment he looked up.

Grove jerked against the wall at the last possible moment; the silver blur whizzed past him, only inches away from his face, striking the wall behind him and making a loud clanging noise as it scraped the stone.

The spark flared green in Grove's goggles, the back of his head tagging the wall—
ouch!
—the sharp pain like a crack across the chartreuse view screen, crawling down the back of his spine.

A knife! In the snow! On Christmas morning! Grove giggled hysterically at the absurdity of it all—one of Santa's evil elves, no doubt, wanting to play Tom-and-Jerry games in the basement toy factory. Okay, fine, great, looks like loads of fun!

Grove darted across the main corridor, his stun gun gripped in his sweaty palm, the view screen lit up with movement in the tunnel about twenty-five feet away, a blurry figure spinning toward an adjacent doorway. Yellow rose petals of light trailed after the evil twin.

“I see you!”

Grove's shrill voice sounded in his own ears as though it were sped up to
Alvin and the Chipmunks
speed, juiced with helium, which made him chortle all the more uncontrollably as he raised the stun gun and fired off a shot at the dark figure diving for cover inside a rock cut.

Blue tendrils of lightning stitched through the darkness and struck the stone wall, five feet short of the rock cut, making the chartreuse view screen bloom with brilliant delicate veins of color in the falling snow. Grove was awed by it and let out a mesmerized laugh.

He ducked inside a ten-by-ten-foot chamber of darkness left decades ago by a mining drill.

The darkness awoke around him. Purple flowers blossomed across the walls in time-lapse, invisible icy-blue candle flames coming to life in the corners. Grove pressed his back against the wall near the opening and thumbed the recharge button on the stun gun.

The bullwhip sound of the cable-spike being sucked back into the gun filled Grove's ears.

Out in the main tunnel, the sound of breathing rose and bounced off the moldering stone bulwark like a beautiful symphony of whispers. Grove looked down at his hand and saw that his rubber-gloved fingers had changed. They had swollen to cartoon proportions. Like fat sausages in white gloves. Great big Mickey Mouse fingers.

God, it was hilarious, and it made Grove let out wild guffaws of laughter in the radiant darkness of that rock chamber, so wild that he dropped the stun gun. It clattered cheerfully across the coal cinders. Grove giggled convulsively for several moments.

Outside the doorway, the breathing sounds had faded away into tomblike silence.

Still giggling, Grove awkwardly scooped up his stun gun, turned, and lumbered out the door.

 

John Q had vanished. Dematerialized. His presence absorbed into the walls like a vapor.

Feverishly searching that black netherworld known as level one—with its charred ruins and ancient passageways, its gaslit pillar rooms and prehistoric train tunnels—Grove was reminded, much to his ironic, drugged amusement, of Victorian Whitechapel, where Jack the Ripper had similarly eluded authorities with supernatural stealth. It also brought to mind New Orleans, where the Holy Ghost had haunted forgotten back allies of the French Quarter. It was Every-Hell, the
locus malefactum
—the place of savagery that had tainted Grove's dreams for most of his life—and now it had swallowed John Q like a giant gullet…until Grove had to admit to himself, still giggling maniacally, that he was hopelessly lost. Lost in the first circle of hell with a few protein bars, a knife, and a brain under the influence of unknown chemicals.

By the time Grove reached the alcove on the far side of level one—a site the older, more grizzled miners used to call The Asshole of the Universe—his hilarity had transformed, almost imperceptively, into the stoic awe of a dreamer regarding a dream.

Or perhaps
nightmare
was a better word.

On his green view screen he saw the massive rusted arms of the block-and-tackle crane like a great fossilized praying mantis standing guard over the second, deeper shaft. He saw the giant oxidized pulley wheel that raised and lowered coal buckets and miners thousands of feet down into the mine's innermost viscera.
How low can you go? You ain't seen nothin' yet, ladies and gentlemen!

Dizziness washed over Grove then, the darkness popping and fizzing all around him, shadows coming to life on his view screen like noxious black dust devils of poisonous glittering sparks. He dropped the stun gun. The sound clattered and echoed.

He staggered backward, nearly losing his balance. He gripped the side of a stone pillar for balance. The narcotic noose tightened, an anvil pressing down on his head. He fell to his knees. He ripped the goggles from his face and flung them into the deeper shadows near the pit. They scudded and echoed across the stone floor before coming to rest near the lip of the shaft.

The darkness strangled him then. It squeezed its cold fingers over his face. He blinked and stared back at the crackling, flickering abyss. It was impermeable, this darkness, as opaque as onyx, but it was also alive in Grove's mind with a menagerie of shapes and colors and strange denizens of the deep with their cloven tails and rippling antennae and fluorescent eyes floating on undulating stalks.

Grove laughed at the desolate beauty of this absurd world, this anus of the universe.

He laughed and laughed as he threaded trembling hands through his frizzy hair, and he laughed some more, and soon he was tearing hanks of his tightly coiled hair from his scalp, and even these sharp pangs of agony were accompanied by beautiful fireworks of light, right up until the point he heard the footsteps behind him—the heavy, methodical, rhythmic footsteps.

Coming toward him.

Under normal circumstances Grove would have easily darted for cover—or at least crawled the eleven feet or so between him and the fallen stun gun—but now the drug had gotten its hooks into his nervous system, and all he could manage was a hamstrung attempt at rising to his feet. His partially paralyzed legs tangled immediately.

He collapsed into a heap on the cold cinders. His vision blurring, his mind veiled in narcotic haze, he could very faintly make out the shape of a figure about fifty feet away, coming toward him, closing the distance slowly, steadily, taking careful strides.

Transfixed, gazing through the tunnel of his single functional eye, Grove watched the figure approach. On some level it was a clear to Grove now that it was John Q coming to finish him off. The game was over, and now all that was left was the formality of death. But right then, Grove could not stop marveling at the
manner
in which John Q was approaching.

The strangest part was not that fact that the figure held some kind of a blunt weapon in one hand, a leather sap or an old-fashioned blackjack, the kind used to stun a hog bound for slaughter. Nor was it the fact that the man was as naked as the day he was born, oily with sweat and sticky with blood from the knife wound in his side, or the fact that his long thick penis was semi-erect, bouncing with each stride.

The strangest part was the fact that the man was walking on the ceiling.

Grove blinked and giggled and stared. And giggled and gaped some more. And he tried to register through the drugged laughter what he was seeing: an upside-down doppelgänger, creeping toward him in the pitch-dark with the nimble, jerky motions of a housefly. Grove had to literally feel the floor around him to make sure
he
was still adhering to the laws of physics.

With the spastic tics of a spider sniffing its prey, the monster loomed.

Grove looked up at it, wide-eyed and transfixed. He couldn't move. He couldn't feel his arms. Something pinched him around his ankle, but there was nothing he could do. His legs felt as though they were light-years away right now, as though they belonged to some other solar system.

The monster drew close enough for Grove to smell the coppery odor of his blood and the rancid-meat stench of his breath. Then he paused, maybe two feet away, maybe three, his head cocked, his arm coiled and ready to strike.

Grove gazed up at the upside-down face. And the two souls regarded each other.

For that one mesmerizing instant, as two worlds finally collided, Grove was enthralled. It was like looking into a mirror—albeit a funhouse mirror, a perfect corruption of Grove's own face—which paralyzed Grove with the suddenness of a meat hook to his brain.

In the darkness, the monster's face began to change. Over the space of milliseconds, the face melted and reformed, melted and reformed, again and again, the flickering metamorphosis too swift to delineate individual identities: It was white one moment, then brown the next, pasty-pale one moment, then pudgy and slack the next, a pair of thick greasy eyeglasses flickering there for a beat, then a face with gaunt cheeks, then a stovepipe hat, then a stained John Deere cap.

Grove closed his eyes.

He had seen all these faces over the course of his career, some of them behind bars, some inside interrogation chambers, some in the pages of musty history books: Gacy, Ackerman, Mudgett, Doerr, Manson, Splet, Berkowitz, Jesperson, Dahmer, Ono-prienko, Jack the Ripper, all of them, all of them flashing across the canvas of John Q Public's elongated face—the ancestors of the Every-Killer.

Grove held his breath, opened his eyes again, and looked up.

What he saw then, only inches away, sent a wave of cold down his spine and made his head spin. The killer's face had changed one last time.

Grove managed to utter something then, his voice a dry, broken, mewling sound in the dark: “Good trick.”

The sap came down hard and quick, a blue streak in the half-light, striking Grove above his left eye. Grove's head snapped back with the force of the blow, the pain shooting off a fireworks display behind his retinas.

He sprawled to the cinder floor, his breath knocked out of him.

“The archetype is forty-two, to be exact,” the monster said with Grove's voice.

The killer had turned right side up now, and loomed over Grove with a miraculous new face. In his fugue state, Grove struggled to peer up through the disorienting pain at the avatar glaring down at him.

“He's married and has a family…a bland, ordinary, run-of-the-mill person with no outward eccentricities.” The monster's voice was an eerie replica of Grove's voice, right down to the faint Chicago-by-way-of-Kenya accent, the hard R's and the long A's.

It was like listening to a digital recording.

Grove tried to mutter something else from the floor as the comet trails of light veined through his vision, but it came out more like a grunt. The pain was bad—the sap was a leather-lined pad of iron—but the narcotic haze buffered it somehow, muted it, translated it into a foreign neurological language written in harsh fluorescent colors.

Finally Grove got out a few slurred, drunken words: “Y-you've duhhn yer homework.”

The sap came down again—another blow to the side of Grove's skull, which made a dull thwacking noise, accompanied by another fragment bomb of brilliant magnesium arteries across Grove's field of vision, this time launching him sideways against the adjacent wall. He banged his head off the stone and then folded, giggling uncontrollably at the slapstick quality of this beating, his mouth drooling pink frothy blood now.

The darkness glowed faintly around him, probably from the profuse amount of methane in the atmosphere, providing just enough light to illuminate John Q's face:
the face of Ulysses Grove.

The resemblance was more than mere resemblance; it was a perfect rendering, sans tattoos, right down to the subtlest detail—the strong high cheekbones, the deep-set eyes, every mole, every blemish.

It was Grove.

In reverse.

Grove was staring up at his mirror self.

“Very few serial killers are drifters, as the movies would have you believe,” the monster mimicked.

“P-please—”

Grove started to protest before the killer interrupted in that robotic voice: “Sixty-two percent of all children between the ages of six and ten wet the bed on a regular basis.”

Another flurry of blows landed on Grove's writhing, trembling body.

Grove curled into a fetal position as the sap struck every sharp angle of his body, every pressure point—his elbow, the back of his skull, the corner of his hip, the side of his knee, the top of his scalp—his maniacal giggling deteriorating into inarticulate grunts of agony.

The pain sent a tommy gun of brilliant sparks through his vision as stringers of blood looped out of his mouth. He held himself against the barrage, eyes slamming shut with each blow, one hand desperately probing the inner lining of his coat. He needed to get to the inner lining before he lost consciousness—he knew that much.

He had to find that tiny object tucked away there before the last shade came down.

 

The assault lifted—

—and out of that stunning dead silence Grove heard a rustling noise that registered in his brain like a parasite worming its way into his memory.

The killer, his back now turned in the darkness, was unfurling a cloth or a handkerchief of some sort. Grove detected a new odor in the air, a medicinal tang like the smell of a dentist's office.

The monster most likely was about to soak the cloth with ether, the means to make Grove manageable. It was the next step in the Archetype's MO, and Grove realized at once that
he
was the Perfect Victim now, he was the lone middle-aged woman. He was the transient, the working girl, the lost fringe dweller wandering home at night. He was Barbie Allison, he was Karen Wanda Finnerty, he was Madeline Gilchrist in Dante's purgatory, doomed to live out the torments of the damned at the hands of every killer who ever plagued the human race.

Grove's cold, numb, rubber-clad fingers suddenly located something small and hard—about the size of a kidney bean—inside the bunched-up lining of his coat. He froze. The next few seconds were critical. He had to get his fingers out of his duster and up to his mouth before the monster took him down into the black.

With shattering pain and effort he slowly, carefully, silently slid the vial of potassium cyanate from beneath the flap of his coat. Every bone in his body shrieked—the narcotic wooze long burned away now, leaving behind sober agonies.

The cloth appeared above him—a white smudge in the blackness.

Grove managed to get the pellet to his lips and slipped it into his mouth as the tiny pale cloud lowered across his failing vision.

The cloth softly pressed down on his face. The monster held it there almost tenderly. Grove did not bite down on the pellet.

Yet.

 

It took a few minutes for the anesthetic to fully take effect. Grove had studied this phenomenon over the years through blood and toxicology reports. From mapping the free-histamine levels in victims' wound sites, he knew practically down to the second how long the sodium thiopentol—its faint bitter-almond odor a dead giveaway—would take to knock him out. The average victim taken this way reaches total unconsciousness in slightly less than four minutes, although the immediate effects are paralysis, sedation, and disorientation.

At first Grove felt as though he were sinking very slowly into the primordial earth, his body gradually morphing into the black stone floor, a million years of history flying by with that syrupy time-lapse speed; his organs, bones, and flesh putrefying, hardening, fossilizing, vanishing into the ground, never to be seen again.

The killer moved around behind him and started dragging him headfirst across the pulverized rock toward the iron scaffolding.

Even in his altered state Grove knew where the killer was taking him. They were inching toward the mouth of that bottomless well known as the Back Shaft—more than ten thousand feet deep. That's where they were going.

Down the rabbit hole.

There was a bump as Grove's shoulder blades scraped the lip of the pit, and Grove nearly swallowed the poison capsule, now wedged between his cheek and molars. Everything began to spin, the darkness puckering around his one good eye, the light irising down like a silent-movie fade. Grove summoned all his strength to keep his eyes open.

The killer lifted Grove up by the arms and set him into an antique iron basket—a coal scoop that years ago had doubled as a conveyance for miners—that dangled from a cable at the top of the shaft. In the darkness the massive enclosure squeaked with Grove's weight like old bones creaking.

In his dwindling awareness Grove could feel the cold root-cellar air suddenly waft up around him. He could smell the damp, putrid decay. The iris continued closing down. It was so dark now Grove couldn't see anything.

That pinching sensation worsened around his left ankle as though tiny teeth were biting into his flesh. What the hell
was
that? A rat? With his tongue he moved the vial of potassium cyanate between his two back molars. Now all he had to do was bite down.

Bite down and avoid the horrors about to come: from his studies Grove knew that the next stage was torture, and not only could he avoid that by killing himself, he could also ensure at least a Pyrrhic victory.

The monster would be denied.

The enclosure creaked again as the monster climbed into the basket beside Grove, who now lay on his back. A stone fell through the bottom grate beneath them, and it fell and fell and fell and fell and fell and it seemed to go on falling forever and ever. Grove couldn't see, couldn't move, couldn't use any of his senses.

He prepared himself to bite down.

In the last little scintilla of light, probably from the distant dying methane glow, Grove managed to glimpse the silhouette of the monster once known as John Q Public, hovering over him in those close quarters, rippling tattooed muscles gleaming with sweat as he grasped the ancient cable—

—and he began to let out twelve inches at a time, slowly lowering the block-and-tackle-style pulley with a
squeak-squeak-squeak
—

—and the enclosure began to slowly descend into the bottomless pit, the asshole of the world, the last circle of hell—

—and Grove passed out before he got a chance to bite down.