Night bait, page 19
As if in that room, he was really a god. Not just a man, but something more.
"You must be clean before you go upstairs," he said, and walked over to the side of the room. "Get in the tub."
It wasn't really a bathtub, just a large metal barrel full of water. The wires were not visible from the outside.
She climbed up the footstool along side it, then stepped into the barrel. When she sat down, only her head showed above the lip. Directly behind him stood a utility shelf on which rested a power transformer. One of his hands reached back and set a finger over the power switch. The way he was standing, his body kept the transformer out of her view. With his other hand, he picked up a square block of black rubber. A close look at it would reveal many jagged teethmarks. It was a shallow trick, but equally necessary. He couldn't stand to hear them scream.
Not knowing what it was, she took the block of rubber when he handed it to her. "We keep dental records of all the prisoners here for purposes of identification. I want you to bite down on that piece of rubber for one minute."
Fuddled, she opened her mouth and bit down on the rubber block.
"Are you scared?" he asked.
She shook her head, the block sticking out of her mouth.
"You should be."
His finger quickly snapped the power switch down.
There was a loud buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees, hideously amplified. The girl's head whipped back over the rim of the barrel, her eyes bulging forward, her bared teeth biting down on the rubber, almost cutting it into two pieces. Her body went painfully stiff, and she held that position for several seconds. Then she began to convulse and thrash wildly about in the barrel as the flow of electrical current continued to pulse through her limbs. She tossed and turned and flipped around, like a mouse on a hotplate, her spine bending back into a grotesque U-shape, her head banging against the hull of the barrel as though it were a bellgong.
When she was dead, her head was completely submerged under the water, and one of her legs hung out over the rim of the vat, bent at the knee, her bare foot slowly wriggling to a stop.
Just as he did not know why he had to watch them die, he also did not know why they had to be dead before he could attain any kind of sexual pleasure. Another one of his inexplicable infatuations. He only knew that it was the only way for him.
Standing on the stool, he hoisted the girl out of the barrel by a stray foot, grasped her about the waist, and carried her over to the platform. The water funneled off her body as he went, dripping, trickling, leaving a trail behind him. He threw her down on the platform like a sack of flour; her back landed on the stained wood with a wet slap.
He lowered his tan trousers and climbed on top of her.
And then, like so many times before, he took her.
He fucked her.
While she was dead.
He thrust himself into her soft parts, which were still warm in death. His climax came like a mainline.
Then it was over.
And so was the dream.
A bright shaft of daylight fell across his eyes from the crack in the blind as he lay peacefully in his bed. With one eye open, he glanced over at the clock on the nightstand. Its hands told him it was four in the afternoon. He had slept for ... a day and a half? His head lay half buried in the soft bulk of his pillow, and he smiled in the recollection of the dream he had just woken from. It had been a while since he had dreamed, but of course it had been a while since he had slept, too. He liked to dream; he enjoyed the memories and the images of his past life. And they were always good dreams, to him at least. But he knew he was different, and he suspected that his dreams were other men's nightmares. Sometimes, he would dream of old friends, or of his home: the seas of sand, the oil derricks, the brilliant spot of the sun setting in the clear, azure sky. But what pleased him even more were the images of the women he had taken. How many had there been? Hundreds? Thousands? No, not thousands, but it seemed that many. And he would never forget them. The dreams would always bring them back.
Sweet dreams.
The Benzedrine had done a good job of clearing his head. And, fortunately, he had slept off the unpleasant aftereffects. Now he felt fine, his body replenished. He couldn't remember the last time he had felt so good.
He was ready for a new day.
While showering, he did some thinking about himself. He knew that by most standards he would be considered insidiously insane. But, he thought, there is a significant difference between froth-mouthed madness and the affliction I am subject to. He could still think, calculate, function, and the fact that he had risen to his current position of importance proved that he wasn't crazy. It wasn't really insanity; it was just that his needs were different from everyone else's. The course of his life had brought him to need something more than normal sex. So what if my desires step past the boundaries of normality? he asked himself. I cannot help it that there is only one way for me. I cannot help it that they must be dead before there can be any fulfillment or meaning.
He had been this way for years and years, ever since the time he had seen the soldiers do it. That was his earliest childhood memory. He had only been—what?—five, six years old? Something like that, but he could still remember as if it had been yesterday. The time when he had been standing in the road, watching the truck convoys drive through his town, during the first overthrow, when the old regime had been the new regime. The last truckload of troops in the convoy had run down a little girl in the road. The truck had stopped, and several of the soldiers had gotten out of the truck. He had thought that they were getting out to help the little girl, to see if she were still alive, but they had picked her crushed body up out of the road and had taken it into the back of the truck. The truck didn't move for a long time; he wondered what they were doing back there, so he tiptoed around and climbed onto the back to peek inside. He had watched them for quite a while; he had watched what they were doing to the dead little girl. Taking turns. It must have been several minutes before any of them had noticed he was watching, and one of the soldiers cursed and pushed him off the backgate of the truck. Later, they threw the little girl's naked body out into the road, and then they drove away.
No, he didn't question the way he was. He accepted it. He accepted that they had to be dead, just as he accepted that he had to watch them die first. To him, death was an art, and he had considerable experience at it. Like an artist with his own style of brush-stroke, he had his own method of killing, which he had chisled to perfection. Some people considered human childbirth a spectacular sight to behold, like watching the process of creation with one's own eyes. It was the same with death. That, too, was spectacular. Killing them any old way just wouldn't be the same. And of course, there were more efficient ways of killing them: smothering, strangulation, poisoning. They were all equally efficient, but something important to him would be missing. That's why he preferred the bathtub routine. It had been his favorite since he had first been assigned to the prison years ago. It left nothing out. Like childbirth, death was an incredible sight to witness, and death by electrocution was the most devastating of all. He cherished the way their faces would contort into masks of inflamed agony, and how their petite little bodies would flip-flop in the tub, wriggling, heaving, convulsing into inhuman configurations.
And the way their eyes would bug out.
And after he had disconnected the power, he would carry them, still warm and moist, and lay them down on the bed, which he had covered with a plastic sheet. He would look at them for a while, look at death in all its serenity and stillness. He would touch death, kiss death, relish it as though it were his own child.
Then he would take them.
He knew there was a link between orgasm and death. So many of the avant-garde French and British writers would elaborate on this point in their works. But their associations were vague; they could only make allusions, but they could never deliver the sum total of the idea. He could, though. He knew the substance behind the idea and what it meant. He knew what happened when orgasm and death were put together.
Indefinable ecstasy. An otherwise unattainable felicity of mind and body. Perfect union.
It amused him now how the newspaper people regarded him. Already, he had become famous. The last few had made the front page; his nightly excursions had produced fear on a city-wide scale. These squeamish Americans, he thought, if they only knew what went on in the rest of the world. It makes what I have done seem a light-hearted joke. They don't know about the countries in which torture and murder are a way of life. The things that his subordinates used to do at the prison were commonplace in many countries. Torture was part of military procedure, a way of keeping the government strong over its people, unlike the soft, liberal follyfarms of the west. He thought back to some of the things he had seen during his assignment at the prison. Sometimes, they would restrict a prisoner to a platform and slowly pound the victim's body to mash with huge wooden mallets, first the hands and feet, then the limbs, and finally the head. Burning seemed to be the best way to extract information. For that, they used a soldering iron or sometimes an acetylene torch. Applications to the eyes and genitals brought the most expeditious results. Pressure to the joints with vises and screws worked well also. When a prisoner was sentenced to slow death, the variety of methods was unlimited: driving nails into bones, skinning, dislocating joints, cutting away parts of the body. Torture techniques in those veins were restricted only by the administator's imagination. And, of course, torture was not limited to pain and brutality. Some of the best modes did not involve violence at all. Solitary confinement in total darkness would turn the most willful of men into brainless babies. Another effective way was simply to keep the prisoner from sleeping. A guard would stand with the prisoner at all times and force him to walk. Whenever the prisoner started to nod off, he would be dunked in a trough full of cold water and smacked in the genitals with a baton. Day in, day out. With time, a prisoner would become a complete gibbering vegetable, and sometimes they would actually die from lack of sleep. One of the most interesting forms of psychological torture entailed strapping a prisoner to a chair in a roomful of hacked, dismembered bodies. They would tell the prisoner that some of his relatives lay among the corpses, and the prisoner would spend hours on end straining his eyes to examine unnumbered severed hands for his wife's wedding ring, or intensely checking the details of a crushed and battered skull to see if it were his mother or father. Naturally, it was all a lie. The corpses were always the remains of executed criminals whom the prisoner did not know.
Torture and execution was nothing unusual in his part of the world. Quite ordinary, actually. Yet, in the west, anything the least bit cruel was forbidden. It seemed so self-defeating, especially in America. Where he came from, criminals were taken care of with deliberate expedience. But in America, criminals were given rights. It didn't surprise him that the crime rate here was so staggering. The government practically invited criminals to take advantage of the populace. The entire system was funny. And the funniest part of all was the advantage he was taking. Is the rest of America like this? he wondered. So lax toward the protection of its citizens? So easy? So far, whenever he felt the need for a woman, all he had to do was to get in his car and take the first one that crossed his path. Like plucking fruit from a tree. In fact, things were so unmindful that he didn't even have to discipline himself about the locations he chose to shop for his victims. Most of them thus far had been street hookers working in the red light district. Surely, the police knew this, yet they had done nothing to deter him from returning. After several murders, the area surrounding 14th and Vermont Avenue had remained unmonitored; he'd scarcely seen a single police officer near the place. And since the game on 14th Street was better than anyplace else, there was virtually nothing stopping him from going back again and again and again, as if he were a customer in a butcher's mart. How did that saying go? Crime doesn't pay? Well, here, crime did pay. And he knew that as long as he continued to operate carefully, he would never be caught. The city was too large, and the minds of the police were too small. It was there for the taking. The newspapers were calling him THE ELECTROCUTIONIST, the mad necrophile still on the loose.
Fools, he thought. They all think I'm mad, when actually I am the sanest man on earth.
Vickie's body had finally grown accustomed to the new nighttime schedule. When she woke up at four in the afternoon on Saturday, she felt refreshed and physically prepared for a new day. Her first few days of working the night shift had left her sluggish after waking up, and unable to sleep for several hours when Chet brought her home in the mornings. But now her metabolism had adjusted, and it realized that her mornings were now her nights, and her nights her days. She thought that it would have taken longer to get used to so radical a change, but then she remembered that it was really nothing new. She had worked the night shift before.
She was not happy. Though she felt physically alive, she also felt mentally dead. Her life had never been easy; it had made her tough; it had hardened her to the point that she could deal with anyone. For years, her existence consisted of contending with other people, most of whom were bad people, ugly, brutal, dishonest people. Her life had cured into a vast spectrum of human beings, ranging from profane alcoholics like her father, to demented killers like Cadillac. No, life hadn't been a charm for her, yet she had been able to survive, to adjust to the people who threatened to ruin her. But things were different now. There were no people to reckon with anymore, no enemies. No friends either. Even when she had been a prostitute, she had friends to relate to. Only a week ago, she had a normal job, a roommate and best friend, and a man who loved her. Now she had none of that. It had all vanished. Her temporary stint with Dignazio and his crew was anything but normal; Jennifer was dead; Steve had left her cold, sickened by what he had learned about her. Now, she was alone. There were no people for her to associate with, good or bad. When Steve had abandoned her, so had life in general. Solitude ruled her life. She would sleep during the day, alone. She would do her job on the block, alone. Then she would return home and spend her few hours of free time, alone. The only person she even came close to knowing was Chet, and she supposed he felt the same way about her as Dignazio did, regarding her only as a tool rather than a person. And since she had no friends left, her choices of recreation were one in the same. She could go to the movies by herself, or she could go out to eat by herself, or she could go to a bar and get drunk by herself. She told herself that once this Electrocutionist business was over with, she would go back to Lee's Brothers, then everything would be normal again. But inside, she knew that was a big, fat lie. It would be no different. Selling typewriters wasn't much different from selling sex. Just smile, nod, turn on the charm, ring up the sale, and do it all over again for the next customer.
As tough as she was, she realized she couldn't hack this kind of life. She had been through holy hell, groveling to survive, peddling her tail, living with junkies, whores, pimps; and somehow she had managed to keep herself going and walk away from it. But when she was faced with something as simple as loneliness, she didn't know what to do. It was like running the hundred-yard dash into a cinderblock wall. And now the walls were closing in. She needed someone. Anyone.
But there was no one.
Is this the way it's supposed to be? she asked herself, still in bed. Is there anything left? Chet's ideas swooped down on her like a flock of black crows. Maybe he was right. Maybe there was something behind all that hodgepodge rigmarole about the relationship of man to the universe. He had said that the only way a person can find true happiness and meaning was to give up the attachments to society and to live as a single unit. Well, she was living as a single unit; she had thrown away her associations with other people, but she was not happy. She was miserable. Maybe it takes time... Vickie didn't realize she was crying until she saw the reflection of her own face in the bathroom mirror. It was like looking at the face of someone she did not know. The mirror-image reminded her of how she might look if the doctor told her she was dying.
ι She jerked away from the mirror and got ready for her shower. The water spouting from the silver faucet sounded like heavy rain. When she was finished, she dried her hair, then went to select her costume for the night. Both pairs of pants were in the laundry. All that remained were the two dresses. She didn't want to wear either of them—it was too cold to be standing around on the corner in a slinky dress—but she realized the importance of looking like the others. So as asinine as she would look, as cold as she would be, she stepped into her stockings and put on the blue dress. After applying the last touches of her makeup, she went out and stood on the porch. For some reason, the radio tower appeared to be taller today, perhaps because the sky was clear, as Opposed to yesterday's low-hanging blanket of gloom.
That was one good sign at least; it didn't look like it would rain. She couldn't stand rain, especially in the city. It always made the sky look gray and drab; and even after it had stopped raining, an icky glaze of dampness seemed to linger everywhere. It mixed with the dirt and the grime of the streets, creating a gritty, tarlike smell, which suspended in the air like animal stink in a barnyard. But now the air smelled clean and crisp. Looking almost straight up, she saw the blank white disc of the moon. It was almost undiscernible since it was still light out, but the more she squinted at its pale shape, the easier it was to see. And like the radio tower, the moon seemed larger than it should have been.
Almost an hour passed for her out on the balcony as she stood and smoked, trying to think of an answer to her life when she wasn't really sure what the question was. All she accomplished was knocking out half a pack of cigarettes and dropping the short butts over the railing to watch them plummet two stories down like tiny falling stars.
