Sins of the Flesh

by Colleen McCullough

  “I hear you,” he said steadily.

  “The new terminals I put in, I then turned on by giving each of them the tiniest imaginable zap of electrical current. The current cut through the burned-out wreckage and reconnected each battery to its pathway. As I did this over and over, I built a new brain on top of the wreckage of the no-brain. The new brain is the new Walter—the Walter I created!” Jess cried shrilly.

  “You did it,” he said woodenly.

  “Darned right I did it, Walter! Why? Why is that? Because I am the only one who knows all the brain’s secrets! I just needed a framework, and I found it in the burned-out husk of your no-brain—a perfect frame! I gave Walter No-brain the brain of a sane, kind, decent human being! I might call you Walter Jess-brain.”

  His upper lip lifted in naked contempt. “Horseshit! Utter horseshit! You speak as if to a dim, dull-witted child. But I am not a child, and I am far from dull in my wits,” he said.

  She let out a bellow of laughter, one of those involuntary, amazed, I-can’t-believe-my-ears laughs that mask a total paralysis of thought, driven out of the mind by a colossal blow, the rudest of shocks. Jaw dropped, mouth agape, eyes staring wide and stunned, she sat looking at him emptied of any comeback.

  “You make me sound like an exercise in Meccano parts,” Walter said, “as if inside my pathetic cranium lies the nuclear wasteland after detonation. You built nothing, Jess! What you did was to implant dual tungsten microelectrodes in my brain using the specific stereotaxic co-ordinates your atlas told you were correct. Then you zapped the neurones in between the two tips of a pair of microelectrodes: It was a work of genius because you knew whereabouts to put your ultrafine electrodes and how much current to apply, but it could only succeed if you had an experimental animal—Walter Jenkins the homicidal maniac. But who says where the accolades should go? To you, who did the hack work, or to me, whose brain belongs only to me? Your part ended thirty-two months ago when you performed the last neurosurgical intervention. It’s I whose pathways have kept opening up, more and more and more. The man sitting here this morning has nothing to do with you. The man sitting here this morning is the I-Walter.”

  It never occurred to her to be frightened. As the power to think returned she had listened enthralled, staggered by the ease and familiarity of his delivery—never in a million years would she have dared to hope for anything approaching what he was airily showing her, a peacock spreading his gorgeous cerebral tail—!

  “Your vocabulary is amazing,” she said.

  “I feel things these days, Jess. I’ve found things to enjoy and things to dislike,” he said in dreamy tones. “If intensity of feeling turns like into love or dislike into hate, then I’m not there yet, though there’s one thing I do that lifts me high into pleasure. All my feelings belong to the I-Walter.”

  “And you have built the I-Walter,” she said.

  “Yes. The I-Walter worships you.”

  Now where was he going? Was this area still in regression? Certainly he gave off no emanations of sexual desire, which led her to presume that the pathways to his erotic nuclei and cortex were either still closed or at most unimportant. The I-Walter!

  Third person, or first person? First …. “Can you describe how you feel when you worship me, Walter?”

  “I feel that were it not for you, I would not exist.”

  “You feel for me as your maker, your creator?”

  The magnificently blue eyes flashed in scorn. “No! I made myself, I created myself. You gave me the framework on which to build, Jess. Haven’t I made that clear?”

  “It needed the elucidation of words, that’s all. Words are vital, never forget that! Without words, we go back to the animal, we can’t make our wants, needs, desires and wishes crystal clear. Don’t forget how many kinds of ‘clear’ there are, from a pane of glass smeared with the filth of a hundred years to a pane of glass polished five minutes ago. Both clear, but what a difference!”

  “I worship you too because you teach.”

  “What do you mean by worship?”

  “I mean that I would protect you from all harm, make you as happy as happy can be.”

  Her knees felt weak, her head was spinning; knowing the signs, Jess got up. “My blood sugar’s right down, I need to eat breakfast, or lunch, or whatever the cafeteria is serving. May I lean on your arm?” Jess asked.

  He was at her side immediately. “Still breakfast. Come on.”

  Protesting bitterly, Delia was refused permission to continue at work, and Carmine knew exactly how to ensure obedience. He made a call to Rufus Ingham, gave him the barest bones of Delia’s ordeal, and half an hour later handed her into Rufus’s Maserati at the Cedar Street entrance to the police station. Whether she liked it or not, she was firmly anchored for at least a day.

  That done, he went back to the door in the HI wall, where the forensics team had made many discoveries. The interior was lit up like day, displaying Walter’s circular base of operations and the narrow passages going in opposite directions away from it. Already processed for prints and other evidence, the motorcycle had gone back to Forensics for further examination, its gas tanks drained. Abe was in command.

  He and the others had found Marty Fanes’s .45 Colt semiautomatic and a spare clip as well as a box of .45 projectiles.

  “Just as well he didn’t dare keep the pistol with him,” Abe said, proffering a magnifying glass. “He’s put quicksilver in the tips—beautiful job too.”

  A hunting knife had also been found, washed but still bearing traces of blood around the junction of hilt and tang.

  A shelf held warm black clothes, a set of black motorcycle leathers hung neatly from hooks driven into the mortar between the stones of the wall, and, in pride of place, a black helmet. A case of bottled Italian water, assorted imperishable foods, a first-aid kit that included suturing needles and silk thread, various tools and a home-made workman’s bench indicated that Walter had perhaps planned for a last-ditch stand inside his citadel.

  Aerie duty, involving a lookout on top of the wall in the watchtower under which Delia and the Meloses had been kept; if Walter was seen crossing toward his bolt-hole, the lookout was to ring an alarm bell; radio signals didn’t penetrate inside the wall. That meant four uniforms on guard just inside the “in” door, all armed with semiautomatic pistols as well as their .38 police special Smith & Wesson revolvers. Carmine himself packed a Beretta 9mm semiautomatic firearm these days, and Abe had followed suit; the flatter depth of the gun was more comfortable than a round-barreled revolver, and the magazine held more bullets.

  “There’s something else,” Abe said, drawing Carmine away from the four uniforms on guard.

  “What?”

  “Up here.”

  Abe led the way toward Delia’s prison, the passage lit up, gloomy rather than terrifying. The floor of packed earth, Carmine noted, was liberally dewed with debris from 150 years of enclosure: rodent skeletons, empty insect carpaces, living roots even—how did they get in there?—dead leaves.

  “I hope they dressed Delia’s feet well at the hospital,” he muttered, steering around a dead rat.

  “I phoned to make sure as soon as I had a look,” said Abe.

  “Good man.”

  In Delia’s prison he saw the relics of their incarceration—manacles and chains, a smell of urine. And the faint stench of an old decay. The passage beyond, he saw, was also lit.

  “What’s up there?”

  Abe grimaced. “The icing on what might be a different cake, Carmine,” he said.

  A hundred yards farther, and there they were, six headless skeletons stapled to the outside wall by bands of steel nailed straight into the mortar with flat-headed spikes.

  “Jesus!”

  “The Shadow List Women, you think?” Abe asked

  “I know,” Carmine said. “They never went anywhere, Abe.”

  “Paul is aware what’s up the passage, but we’re sitting on it for the moment—Walter is enough to go on
with. Unless you feel otherwise?”

  “No! No, no … What difference can a day or two make now?” Tears filled his eyes; he turned his head away from Abe, and swallowed convulsively. “Even robbed of permanent rest, the poor ladies. Coming and going on the stairs, unnoticed … Of course they were zombies, how couldn’t she see that?”

  “Worse than Walter,” Abe said. “They were done in ice-cold blood.

  Turning, Carmine walked back to the roundel, where he could face Abe with neither the living nor the dead to eavesdrop.

  “Our strategy, Carmine?” Abe asked.

  “What time is it?”

  “Eleven twenty-one.”

  “Right. We keep the four uniforms here in case Walter makes a run for it. He’s a never-to-be-released killer, so as lives are at risk the orders are to shoot to kill. Fernando’s issued the same orders. Our authority is the commissioner himself. I’m seeing Warden Hanrahan right now, it’s arranged. You, Liam, Tony and Donny should go on up the road to Major Minor’s and grab some lunch. I’ll hope that the Warden takes pity on me. Then at one p.m. we’ll meet outside the Asylum entrance. Once inside there, we head for HI. I will see Dr. Wainfleet while everyone else waits for me still outside the entrance to HI. If Walter appears, you will arrest him—full manacles, hear me? Feet as well as hands, all connected at the waist. If he doesn’t appear by one-thirty, I’ll join you.”

  “Let’s pray it finishes soon,” Abe said.

  “I’m going back into the forest. See you at one.”

  Warden James Murray Hanrahan had suffered atrociously at the whim of Dr. Jessica Wainfleet over the years, or at least as he painted it to Carmine during the first twenty choleric minutes of a long and impassioned interview. Stomach grumbling from lack of food, the captain of detectives resigned himself to a litany of complaints, on the theory that, if unopposed, Hanrahan’s tirade would cease more quickly, its deliverer somewhat purged of his ire.

  “This is what happens when inexperienced public servants try to graft two disparate things together ass-to-ass!” the Warden roared. “Instead of letting me run a maximum security penitentiary properly, I’m forced to take a back seat to to an obsessive-compulsive fool with no correctional training! The power she’s accumulated in D.C., Hartford and Holloman mystifies me! I am just her animal care facility, her source of well-fed experimental subjects. I tell you, that woman is dangerous!”

  “I know,” said Carmine, giving the warden his sweetest smile, “but, Jimmy, look on today as Deliverance Sunday, and on me as your own Archangel Gabriel. Leave things to me, and HI will be put in its proper place. Act independently, and you’ll fall flat. You’re not without friends, Jimmy, and they’re working quietly on your behalf. Dr. Wainfleet overestimates her power, whereas you underestimate yours. Just sit still, and all will be resolved.”

  The Warden’s reply was perhaps inadvertent, but to Carmine it sounded wonderful. “Do you like egg salad?” he asked.

  “I love egg salad,” Carmine said fervently.

  “Then we can eat while we talk. It’s only sandwiches, but the bread is fresh. If I don’t eat, I’m afraid my stomach acids will chew another hole in my belly.”

  Sometimes, reflected the captain of detectives, the most ordinary of queries can provoke the most delight.

  “Make sure you have reserved your best padded cell in complete isolation, as well as maintain maximum security from the moment I leave,” Carmine said somewhat later. “Walter Jenkins must be taken dead or alive, I hope at the hands of the police, but otherwise, by yours. Most importantly, after he’s caught, you must ensure his isolation is preserved—no visitors, including Jess Wainfleet.”

  “It will be done, Captain, you have my word on it.”

  Jess and Walter lingered all morning in the cafeteria, then decided to eat lunch there before moving. The long silences between them were quite usual, though over this particular meal the paucity of their conversation was not due to any of the normal reasons.

  Jess was still shaking off the last vestige of her shock at discovering exactly how far Walter had come—and how well he had concealed his progress. Nor had he told her all of it yet, she was positive; there was a lot more to make public, and she was dying to know what. In one aspect her ego was so enormous that she saw herself as a mighty sun alongside Walter’s dying ember, yet in another way her ego was so small that she saw Walter as a supernova alongside her own wan moon. She had no genuine concept of God, especially a God imaging her own species; she tended to think God was the Universe, and so she was a part of God. In which case, she reasoned, how then to classify Walter, who saw with diamantine clarity that he had created himself? Did that mean that Walter was the Universe, that Walter was God? A God who had created himself, but had needed the vital spark she gave him?

  Walter sat wrestling with the knowledge that something inside him was slipping the way a snake swallowed its tail, the insatiable jaws and the coils of muscle behind them already beginning to digest the engulfed tissues of his disappearing tail into nothing. But that made no sense! He didn’t know what, or why, or where, or how. What he felt was a sensation akin to pain yet was not pain. Somewhere inside himself everything was going around and around, swirling and churning, but he had no idea of a name, or a function, or a reaction to pin on it. And ever and always came memories of the ecstasy he was driven to seek, to repeat. Though he had a name for the idea of ecstasy: the I-Walter. He, Walter, served the I-Walter.

  He gave a grunt of exasperation and ran his hand over his aching forehead, screwing up his eyes, grinding his teeth.

  “Walter! Walter! What’s the matter?” Jess was asking.

  He stared at her, eyes clouded and distrait. “A headache,” he said. “I looked up the word ‘ecstasy’.”

  “That’s an interesting word to look up! Why?”

  “I feel it when I become the I-Walter.”

  “Tell me first what you think ecstasy means.”

  “Lifted out of myself in a pleasure so great I yearn for it to happen over and over and over again.”

  “Is it a reaction inside your body? A part of your body?”

  “No, it belongs to the spirit.”

  “When does the ecstasy happen?”

  “When I become the I-Walter.”

  Is he regressing or progressing? Jess asked herself, at a loss. “Tell me what the ecstasy consists of, who the I-Walter is.”

  “It happens when I watch the life-spark die in a pair of eyes,” Walter said, the only emotion in his voice a faint pleasure. “But it took a while to find the right way.”

  “What is the right way?”

  “I put my hands around its throat and squeeze while I’m either sitting or lying on top of it. Then its eyes are very close, I can see right into them and watch the life-spark die.” He rushed on with his explanation, it seemed forgetting that she sat there. “I can get in and get out of here, I stole a motorcycle. Oh, I have a headache! I find it asleep and I put my hand around its neck and I squeeze all the life out. Ecstasy!”

  Her howl brought all talk in the cafeteria to a paralyzed halt; every face turned to look at Dr. Wainfleet, on her feet and howling like a dog, and Walter Jenkins, scrabbling backward in his chair.

  “No! Jess! Jess!” he cried.

  The howling rose to shrill yammers; Walter finally leaped to his feet, both hands to his head, then, without looking toward Jess Wainfleet again, he ran out of the cafeteria into the hall, and headed for the fire stairs.

  At the bottom he forgot the back fire door, erupted into the front hall and sprinted for the glass doors. The shrieks had alerted the small group of detectives outside; they went for their guns.

  No shots were fired. Five paces from the doors Walter’s back arched and he emitted a solitary scream of agony that ripped through brick and plaster as if it were made of tissue paper. Still in mid-stride, he pitched forward to the floor and lay on it, motionless.

  Beretta out and safetly off, Abe Goldberg approached the body slowl
y, cautiously, searching for the eyes. Only one was visible, staring at Abe’s right foot, its pupil fixed and dilated. Abe relaxed a little, came close to Walter, then knelt and groped for a carotid pulse.

  “He’s dead, but we don’t disregard instructions,” Abe said to Liam and the rest. “Manacle him properly. He’s a brain case, and I’m not taking any chances that this might be some kind of trance or catatonic state. Once he’s manacled, he’s safe.”

  Carmine arrived, breathless, a minute later, Warden Hanrahan in tow, to find the lifeless Walter Jenkins as per instructions, in full manacles.

  The Castigliones were at the top of the main stairs, forbidden to descend; Carmine joined them.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “You tell us!” Moira Castiglione snapped. “Jess was having one of her eternal chats with her precious Walter, when she suddenly—I don’t know!—came apart, disintegrated, went into hysterics—God knows what, because I sure don’t! She started making weird noises like an animal yowling. She was standing, Walter was still sitting, but apparently he was the cause of her state because he began backing his chair away from the table looking as guilty as sin. I think he appealed to her, but if he did, she took no notice. Then he jumped up and ran away in the direction of the fire stairs. Jess collapsed. We put her in the room she uses here for resting if she works late, and when doesn’t she?”

  “Did you sedate her?”

  “No. We figured she might be needed to answer questions.”

  And you hate her guts into the bargain, Carmine thought to himself. Lots of would-be directors of HI around here.

  Carmine leaned over the landing railing. “Abe? Could you join me up here, please?” He thought of something else. “Warden Hanrahan? Many thanks, but your cooperation won’t be needed now. I’ll call you tomorrow with the full story.”

  Jess Wainfleet had recovered from whatever Walter had said or done to trigger her hysteria, though both Carmine and Abe had a fair idea what the trigger had been: the monster had informed his Dr. Frankenstein that he was out and about the countryside murdering for the thrill of it rather than from ignorance.