The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (28 page)

I walked with him to an adjoining room that looked like an office. There were two desks inside, facing opposite walls, both with large computer monitors. He sat me down at one desk while he stood over me. Even though the wounds were in my breastbone and ribcage, it hurt like hell when I sat down. He asked me if I wanted a drink. I nodded and before he left, he typed in a domain name so quickly I couldn’t read it, then a user name and password at the same blinding speed.

He took his time coming back. I now know it was intentional. He wanted to give me plenty of time to fully absorb the experience. To make sure I got it. I didn’t get it right away. Except the obvious part. It was a serial killer site. I’d seen a few before, with essays and photos of the famous killers. This one was different. The porn was one new twist. But it took a few more minutes before I realized just how different it was.

I browsed around, the terrible truth of it still eluding me. Then I heard The Striker’s tinkling doorbell in the other room. It sounded like reindeer bells. I heard the door open and close. Hushed voices. Secret laughs. None of that activity interfered with my almost total immersion in the horror before me. The case histories. The pictures! There were at least three-dozen killers in the database, each one categorized more thoroughly than an FBI profile. Yet I didn’t recognize any of the names.

That was the final giveaway. I’d been studying serial killers for years. I knew everyone in the field. Yet here were all these people I’d never even heard of. There was only one possible explanation. I didn’t know who they were because they hadn’t been caught.

I gawked and gaped, unable to fully comprehend it, and all too characteristically, unable to turn away. I tried to read the domain name, but the home page header was just a long list of indecipherable letters, numbers and symbols. It was accessible only through a link from God knows where, followed by a user name and password. For members only.

Why had he shown me? Because of my collection, I assumed. Yet that was so risky. Even though I couldn’t tell the police the name of the site, I could tell them it was there. Did he really think I was into this shit? Did he think I was
one of them
?

I had to get out of there fast. I’d play dumb, pretend not to get it, make an appointment for a follow-up session and never show up. Then I realized there was something else I needed to check before he came back. I typed
Striker
into the site’s search engine. His list of victims was three pages long. There were even pictures of him—in action. With those droopy eyelids. That loincloth. That hammer. There was a video clip too. He was leaning over a girl, his big iron mallet poised over his head, ready to “strike” again. I say again, because it was hideously clear that the mallet had come down…hard…at least twice before this clip started. I watched in horror as he finished driving two spikes into the screaming young girl’s eye sockets.

I tried to stand up, but a big hand pushed me down. It wasn’t The Striker’s skeletal digits. These looked like they belonged on a catcher’s mitt…and they didn’t have fingernails. I looked into the face above me and felt something I still can’t describe. It was fear, but worse. His eyes were bright and bluish-gray, his hair long and stringy. Blond or maybe white that had yellowed. I couldn’t tell how old he was, but if I had to guess, I’d say he was in his sixties. His drooping mustache was dirty and tinged with red. He was dressed all in black, with a long black overcoat. The Striker leaned in the doorway behind him.

I thought I recognized him. That was the thing that frightened me the most. That, and the fact that he definitely recognized me. “Hello there, Billy,” he said in a booming voice with an Irish accent. “Oh, yes, I should introduce myself, eh? You’d know me by the handle King of Spades, but you can call me Paul.”

I tried to get up again but he held me down and plopped into the chair behind me.

“My dear friend here told me all about you. Not that I needed much new information. I’ve had a keen interest in you for some time now, Billy, very keen indeed. I’m a collector too. As you can see, I have quite a collection of my own.”

“This is your site?” I asked skeptically. He looked like a Bowery bum.

“Why, don’t I look like the dotcom type?” he asked, his laugh garbled with phlegm.

“No,” I said bluntly. He didn’t take offense.

“I can’t take that much credit for it, if the truth be told. I merely provide the ways and means. The inspiration came from an entirely different source.”

I said nothing but he read the question on my lips.

“Why from
you
, Billy, from you!” he shouted.

My mouth hung open like a drafty cave. Every word that followed etched itself into my memory: “I heard about your collection years ago, almost as soon as you started. I’ve got lots of friends, Billy. In fact, I made it easier for you to acquire some of your most prized trophies.”

I still couldn’t speak. I didn’t have to. He was far from finished.

“I was so impressed with your dedication, your perseverance…the lengths you went to, the sheer obsessiveness…well, it got me to thinking. I said to meself: I’ll bet there are a lot of other young, impressionable people out there, who, with the proper direction and guidance, might develop a similar interest
.
Juice ’em up with a little S&M, then make it more and more extreme, ‘til nothing but a steady diet of snuff will do the trick. Then start charging subscription fees to weed out the less dedicated souls, and take it from there.”

“Take it where? What are you trying to do?”

“Hhmph! That’s the big question, now isn’t it?” He stopped for a deep breath and a gulp from a silver whiskey flask. “This is what you might call a social experiment. Of all the worms you’re gawking at, how many do you suppose ever touched a hair on anyone’s head before they started watching this filth? Yes, some of them were born to it, or trained for the task at an early age, but so many others found their way here through their own perverted yearnings. Best of all, it was so easy! The longest it took to make one of these monsters straight from scratch was a year and twenty-one days!”

I was glad to be sitting down when he said that. My head was spinning so fast I almost grabbed it. This was unbelievable. He had to be making it up! Then it dawned on me…he
was
making it up! “You guys are cops,” I said flatly. “You got me in here to bust me for my collection.” I looked around for hidden cameras, shouting, “This is entrapment! I never broke any laws getting that stuff. I’ve never hurt anyone in my life!”

“We know that, lad,” Paul continued, ignoring my other accusations, nudging The Striker in his bony ribs. “The only thing we can’t figure out is why. Maybe you can sort out that mystery for us. It’s a real brainteaser, that one.”

They both laughed so hard I thought their heads might roll off. That’s when I knew. They weren’t cops. It was all real. I didn’t know what to say or ask. Was I in a dream? How was this possible? Self-preservation topped the agenda. I needed a way out. “I gotta get some rest,” I said, like I hadn’t seen anything. “Do you still want to buy the lamp…or not?”

“I didn’t come for the lamp, William,” he replied, all life and expression drained from his face. “I came for you.”

I almost shit in my boots. I didn’t want to know what he meant, but I asked anyway. He answered with a question. “Do you remember the first time we met?”

I related how we met in the AOL “Dahmer” chat room and kept corresponding until the subject of the collection came up. We’d been e-mailing each other for weeks before I felt safe enough to sell him a .44 slug from Son of Sam.

“That wasn’t the first time,” he said cryptically. “If you can’t recall, we’ll have to explore that matter at a later date, and since you’re so tired and achy, methinks you’re wise to follow your own advice. So go home, and while you’re napping, maybe you can think about what you’ve seen here tonight.”

I nodded with too much enthusiasm. I thought he was letting me go. Fat chance. He grabbed my arm as soon as I stood. “But first, you need to have a peek at this.”

He reached over and scrolled through the list of members until he came to…my name
.
When he clicked on it we were taken to my very own home page. There I was. Photographs. My face. My back. My chest. All the tattoos. There was a bio, outlining every aspect of my life. They even had pictures of my mother! How did they get all this stuff? I wanted to throw up and almost did. I felt such panic and dread my skin went clammy. But the worst part was still coming.

The Striker pointed his bony finger at another photo at the bottom of the screen. It was a beautiful young girl. Underneath was a caption. The caption was typically brief. It described how I murdered her.

“I’ve never killed anyone!”

“Yet,” said Paul. “Look at the date.”

The date of the murder was four months from now, next to the descriptions of how my victim was tortured and finally murdered.

“This is crazy!”

“Isn’t it though?” The Striker whispered.

I felt like I was in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
. I looked at their laughing faces and tried to speak, but nothing came out.

“How do you like your nickname?” Paul asked.

Billy, The Kid. I didn’t. I leapt from the chair. Paul grabbed my arm in a lockjaw grip and said, “If you ever breathe a word of what you’ve seen to anyone, anyone at all, those statistics will be exchanged with another one of our members in the database. You will be linked to their crimes and that information will be instantly forwarded to the police. The necessary trophies to corroborate the crimes will be added to your collection while you’re under interrogation.”

“Why are you doing this to me? What do you want?”

“The
why
I’ll reveal in my own sweet time,” he said, loosening his fingers. “The
what
is the only thing you need concern yourself with—as in
what
you’ll do for me. This murder we’ve documented…you will make it real.”

“Real?” I gasped, trying to think of something else to say, some chip to bargain with.

“
Real
real,” Paul nodded, making a pantomime of a noose yanking on his neck.

He guided me toward the door with a soft shove on my rump. “Sweet dreams, Billy,” he whispered. “We’ll see you again…real soon.”

I walked to the door, propelled by the shove, so numb my feet barely made it. As I passed through the door, to what should have been my freedom in the cool night air, I kept wishing and hoping and praying that there was another way out.

Martin didn’t feel all that comfortable with Rose and Michael going back there unsupervised, but he was grateful not to have her around now that Paul wanted to have an even more candid chat. He wasn’t sure what the topic was going to be, but he was certain he didn’t want Rose to hear it. As for Bean, he could always kill him later.

Rose walked down the corridor with Bean, looking back at Martin with nervous concern, and at Paul with bold contempt. When she reached the slightly open door, her guts swirled with butterflies. She looked back again. Paul was smiling, but the smile didn’t look real. Martin was nodding with encouragement. Something didn’t look right about that either.

She pushed the door open and felt a rush of curiosity and foreboding. What was on the other side? A drug laboratory? A hidden arsenal of weapons? A chamber of horrors? With this guy it could be anything. She braced herself as she took the final step…into a very white room.

Everything was white. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, the wooden chair sitting in the middle of the otherwise empty room. The lighting was bright as well, amplifying the effect. What was the effect? Rose tried to get a bead on how she was feeling, other than craving a pair of very dark sunglasses. It was clean. No, more than clean. Sterile. Like a hospital. Or a lunatic asylum. No. It felt safer, warmer. Lived in.

Michael was confused, plain and simple. In a million years, he never would have imagined that the guy out there would sit in a room like this. Everything was so clean and white it was almost invisible…the white chair on the white floor…the more you stared at it, the more it seemed to disappear. He walked over and sat in the chair. “Cool,” he said.

“What?” Rose asked, trying to act like she had been in here at least once before. Michael simply stood up and offered her the chair, shaking his head and grinning.

Rose sat down. “Cool,” she said. The effect was more than cool. It was completely disorienting. The chair faced a perfectly blank wall that pointed away from the door, so that even in your peripheral vision, all you could see were two more white walls on either side. Even more bizarrely, the corners of the room had been filled with some kind of material that softened the usual right angles into a smooth, seamless transition that made the walls blend in with each other and virtually disappear. The ceiling and floor junctures were treated the same way. When you sat and stared straight ahead, all you could see was white. No top, bottom or sides. Just white. It was like closing your eyes and seeing white instead of black.