Absolute Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  He stopped and she stopped with him, and he stared deep into her eyes. “When absolutely?”'

  “Oh, I'm sorry, Giles. I don't want you to think I'm just blowing you off like that, no!”

  “Then just say when.”

  “Sheeze, you can be pushy for a shy guy. All right, as soon as ever I can find time. Now you mustn't become a pest about—”

  “What about tonight?”

  “Tonight?”

  “After the Orion exhibit. Come back with me. Promise me.”

  “I can't promise you it will be tonight, Giles. Perhaps sometime tomorrow.”

  “Promise? Really.”

  “I give you my word, but you know how busy my schedule is, so please don't be disappointed if... Oh, don't pout. Now you've learned my secret horror! My word is worthless!” She laughed nervously and patted his hand. “I will get there, soon. Not tonight but soon, I promise, Giles. OK? Tell me it's OK. I'll just die if you don't.”

  “Yes, I see...” The bitch is never going to see the work, he thought.

  They walked the few blocks to the Fine Arts Center. She spoke of Keith Orion and Keith's melancholic nature, and Keith's showmanship, and Keith's genius, and Keith's wonderful chances for a showing in Chicago. Giles wanted to kill Keith before ever having met the man, and once they arrived, Lucinda immediately latched on to Orion's arm without a thought of introducing them. Giles was left to wander about the center on his own.

  Orion was all that she'd said and more. He even dressed like a successful artist in the most expensive cloches Lucinda could find for him. He'd been well turned out, and his booming, masculine voice, good looks and charm filled the gallery. But an hour into the showing, Orion and Lucinda had a posh but loud falling out with one another on the gallery floor, and even in this short measure of time, Giles realized that the show had quickly sagged of its own weight. In Giles's estimation, and obviously in the estimation of the combined Milwaukee, Wisconsin, art critics' circle, Keith Orion had relied too heavily on his David Copperfield imitation, his charm thinning rapidly, and too many of Orion's oils and sculptures derived from Picasso and his disciples, showing nothing really original save the colored lighting and the special effects around and outside the frames, with little to recommend what was inside the frames. The sculptures, too, had taken on the feeling of Moore derivatives. Nothing unique. Nothing challenging to the eye, and certainly nothing leaping out at the audience, grabbing hold, and holding it hostage. Nothing like Giles's work.

  “I sculpt circles around this clown. I make him look like a Boy Scout,” he told himself, but others near him overheard and moved away as if he might pose a threat.

  Still Giles felt happy, and if not happy, hopeful. Guardedly hopeful. He could clearly see that the public reaction to Orion's work proved disastrous. The comments of the evening spelled death for Orion in Milwaukee, and so Chicago was a pipe dream for him now.

  Giles didn't see Lucinda again; she'd simply disappeared. Never going up to Orion, not bothering to pursue any contact, Giles inched toward the huge glass doors and left. Outside, he located a cab and went home to his sculptures.

  Milwaukee was a loss. Besides, showing his work so near his scavenging could prove unwise and unhealthy. Lucinda had told him of a small cafe in Chicago where she knew the owners, and she felt his work would fit perfectly their little galeria de' artes. To this end, she had penned a letter of recommendation, should he ever care to use it.

  Perhaps the letter represented an earlier brush-off, he now realized. Perhaps it was time to move on. Lucinda had led him by the nose long enough. Fuck her. Fuck this city. Fuck this state.

  However, when he got home, Lucinda stood in his doorway. “I'm sorry about earlier. I apologize, and I've come to look at your work, Giles.”

  It shouldn't have surprised him. She needed to bankroll a new artist. Still he said, “That's surprising.”

  “What do you mean? I've always said I'd take a look, see if you're as good as you say.” She gave him a coy smile.

  “All right, if you're sure... . Come on up.” He led her to his studio.

  The surprise visit worried Giles, as his work in progress hadn't had the final touches applied, and one spinal cord remained in a solution and hadn't as yet been painted.

  Inside the dimly lit room, he quickly placed a towel over the tub in which Joyce Olsen's spine lay in a saline solution. He then turned a spotlight on his two finished sculptures and his work in progress. She stared at the lifelike clay representations of serene looking women with pleasant smiles and an aura of peace, while backbones bulged outside of their backs, floating just above them, hovering in dragonlike grace in the air. And it stirred something inside Lucinda. “My god... Giles... who... who is your model for these? Don't tell me. Your mother? Beautiful... the perfect expressions... the perfect ages... so tranquil... and the touch of life in the skin tones, and the animals milling about their feet, and their blood red backbones bulging through their backs—such a... so startling a contrast... such a juxtaposition of materials, motifs...”

  Giles beamed. He saw she meant what she said, saw it in her gleaming eyes. He dared say nothing. He held his breath instead.

  “It makes me at once agitated, excited by the work, and perhaps a bit fearful... uncomfortable—no, agitated—no, disturbed, yeah, that's it. Disturbed to my core. And the animals are a stroke of genius. What a touch. Birds, how sweet.”

  She then turned her full attention to the work in progress.

  “This one's without animals?”

  “A dog this time. Being finished in the other room, along with a horse.”

  “A horse? Really. How soon before all of them are finished?”

  “Not long, really. I just have to attach the parts I'm working on.”

  “The animals and to this one the spine, right?” she asked.

  “Right... that part takes time.”

  “The sculptures are so... so unusual, Giles. Photos don't do them justice, not even the oils you showed me do the work justice. Have you only the three pieces?” She went straight for the towel he'd covered the tub with and snatched it away, gasping at the sight before her. “My god, it's so lifelike. How did you get the lifelike tones? And why is it in water?”

  “It's not water. It's a special solution that gives the clay a sheen so the paint adheres better.”

  “So you sculpted it of clay? Amazing. It doesn't look like clay.”

  “It's a discovery of my own making.”

  “It's so lifelike, not like the two red ones on the finished work. Why do you paint the bones red? It might look better if you used this natural bone color.”

  “I use a specially mixed paint on them that sends a message. Red stands for life, the lifeblood in us all. It represents our essence. I want to capture that in my work.”

  “Yeah, but you're missing the point.”

  “What point?”

  “Don't you want to... I mean isn't your aim to disturb your audience?”

  “Disturb on the one hand, enlighten on the other, to find eventual peace. I want them to find peace and comfort in my work.”

  “Really... That's beautiful.” She turned toward Giles and said, “I wish you had maybe two or three more completed. We could launch a showing first at the gallery, charge a mint for these, and then, who knows, if it's successful...”

  “That's my dream,” he replied. “But these take time to create.”

  “How much time do you need?”

  He feared answering her. Feared losing his chance. “What if we put these three up alongside the oils?”

  “I've only seen the two paintings you brought to the gallery, sweetheart.”

  “Let me show you more. Come over here.” He guided her to a bedroom area where the walls were lined with oil paintings of women in various poses with animal friends about them, their spinal columns showing like an exaggeration of those starving Nigerian refugees seen on TV.

  “The, paintings do have a certain strange appeal
,” she said. After looking closely at each painting, Lucinda sat on his bed, took his hands in hers and guided him to stand facing her close in between her legs. Giles wondered if this was how Orion had gotten an exhibition of his work. He decided, danger or no danger in showing his work here in Milwaukee, he would go for it.

  He pressed his lips to Lucinda's, and he began to fondle her, giving her what she wanted. As he began making love to her, he thought of the box his mother had given him to be opened after her death, and her repeatedly saying, “Your father's in that box. All you've ever wanted to know about the bastard, you have in that box—my final gift to you, Giles, your legacy. It isn't much but it will tell you why you are the way you are, trust me on that score.”

  The sagging bed on which he made love to Lucinda bounced over the lid of the large box bequeathed him where, so long as he had resided in Milwaukee, the box had rested, still unopened and unexplored after all these years—just waiting for Giles to find the nerve and the right time and place to delve into it, and to learn about Father.

  Giles pushed it from his mind now as the joy of sexual release and the eroticism of sleeping with a rich, spoiled brat who held his career in her hands began to excite him to greater and greater passions.

  Lucinda moaned and brayed under him, the rod of his manhood ramming into her, his perspiration falling into her eyes.

  Part of him stood in the corner and marveled at the double-backed, four-legged crab created of their bodies there on the bed. But one of the eyes of his second self wandered to the beautifully carved wooden and leather-bound box tied with ribbons still smelling of Mother's perfume, wafting up from just below the lovers.

  SIX

  When did man become the higher form?

  — DR. ASA HOLCRAFT

  WITH Darwin using her restroom to throw water on his face and freshen up, Jessica sat on the terrace under light flooding from the room. It was nearing one in the morning. She'd been poring over her copy of Asa Holcraft's If Christ Came to New York and the Ensuing Autopsy, part coroner's memoir, part handy, compact compendium of information on all facets of the human body and body parts, from organs to eyes and back again to see what her old mentor had to say about the spinal column.

  After dining, they'd ordered up drinks, and after a couple of beers and whiskey sours, Darwin had become somewhat drowsy and was now working toward getting his second wind. Jessica called to him from the terrace, asking if he were all right and getting no answer, she stepped back into the room.

  Darwin had removed his shirt and his rippling muscles shone in the half light of the bathroom. He came nearer, toweling off his hair, replying, “Must be getting old. Past my bedtime.” Darwin spoke through the towel.

  She stared for a moment at his enormous pectorals and felt a momentary attraction she quickly put in check. I'm old enough to be his mother, she thought, lifting his shirt off the back of a chair and throwing it at him. “Get dressed. We've got a lot of work yet to do.”

  “Sure... sure,” he replied, working the buttoned shirt over his head and slipping into the sleeves. What would I do with a twenty-six-year-old Sidney Poitier—Vin Diesel look-a-like? Jessica wondered.

  She rushed back out to the terrace, a safer place. There she sat at the table and opened Asa Holcraft's book again. She'd been going from it to the murder books and back again, looking for answers.

  “Maybe the sick motherfuckingsonofabitch has begun his own stem cell research in an effort to find a cure for whatever ails him,” she half joked.

  “That may not be so far-fetched,” he replied, stepping out onto the balcony.

  Jessica sipped at her whiskey sour as she continued to read.

  “Asa was a genius, a somewhat obsessive one, to have put together so much arcane and scatological and lost-to-time information between the covers of a single volume.”

  “Never heard of his book,” admitted Darwin.

  “Unfortunately, the thriving publisher that Asa earned a great deal of money for, Pendant, allowed its Pax Books division to go under as a write-off, and Holcraft's invaluable work, along with countless others, has joined the innocent yet somehow disdained horde of out-of-print titles left to die on the vine.” This had happened the year before Asa's death. It had hurt the old man deeply to think that his years of backbreaking toil to bring this information to light, to put it into perspective, and to place it into every forensic student's hand had ended in such ignominy. The publisher, of course, had as much as told Asa it was somehow his fault as it must have been with all the authors in the Pax division who'd been used as tax write-offs.

  “That's too bad. Guess every horror story you ever hear between writer and publisher is true, huh?”

  “That's right. But I've got a contact who's very interested in reprinting Asa's work. She is as determined to see it back in print as I am.”

  She located the section that discussed the human spinal column, and next scanned down the page looking for what information she could find on the vertebral column in man. There were sections under S for spine and V for vertebrae and B for backbone. She hefted the book and stood, pacing to the terrace railing, reading aloud to Darwin. “ 'Made up of thirty-three segments, the spinal column breaks down into five groups. One, cervical, the seven vertebrae making up the bones of the neck; called the first cervical vertebra and appropriately the atlas—' “

  Rubbing the back of his neck as if in sympathy pain with the victims, Darwin interrupted, “ 'Atlas'? Why 'atlas'?”

  “Because it supports the universe, the known world—the head.”

  “Got it.” Darwin stood and stretched, groaning with the effort.

  Jessica read on. “ Two, thoracic, or dorsal, twelve bones attached to the ribs, completing the rib cage and making up the trunk bones.'“

  She moved one hand to her own rib cage.

  “And three?”

  “'Lumbar, five bones in the small of the back or loins; four, sacral, five bones in the rump, lying between the two haunch bones, and forming the back wall of the pelvis; in the adult these are fused together into a triangular bone called the sacrum.

  “All right, so what's the fifth section of the spine?” he asked.

  “ 'Coccygeal, four small bones forming the coccyx which is Greek for cuckoo—'“

  “It's all Greek to me.”

  “'—so named from its supposed resemblance to the shape of a cuckoo's bill. The coccygeal vertebrae correspond to the root of the tail in animals.' “

  “All of this scientific mumbo jumbo gobbledygook is only putting me to sleep,” complained Darwin. “It isn't going to catch a killer, Dr. Coran.”

  “I happen to find it fascinating,” she countered, waving the book at him. “Look, we all know that the vertebral column encloses the spinal cord, a basic part of the nervous system without which a person can't function, cannot even... ahhh... slither in snake fashion as our limbs would be paralyzed without it. Hell, if the spinal column and cord had not evolved as it has, we'd be big-headed slugs incarcerated in our reptilian beginnings, likely still in the sea using a dorsal fin to guide us and a series of clicks to communicate.”

  Darwin put up his hands in mock surrender. “All right, all right. I know it's all important. I just want to get something on this guy, and I don't think we're going to find it in any books other than the case files.”

  “You may be right, but listen to this.” She again read from Holcraft's book. “ 'The spinal cord and vertebrae hold endless fascination for early mankind and the shaman in particular who rattles the bones of fallen warriors overhead. It was both symbolic and concrete proof of deboning a man, rendering his flesh and his spirit helpless to ever harm his enemies ever again. The backbone was revered by ancient peoples—our cannibalistic ancestors cleaned the bones with their teeth and saliva.' “

  “They used the bones of their fallen enemies to summon the gods or something, right?” Darwin asked.

  “Or something. Holcraft talks about looking past the mere function of an
organ or a set of bones or nerves and muscle to understand the value and symbolism a people placed on say the eyes, the heart, the brain, and in this case the backbone.”

  “All right, so you think our killer might place some kind of crazoid notion of importance on the spinal cord, so he has to have it—repeatedly. But it has to be plucked from a living human being. No five-and-dime knockoffs, no substitute for the real thing.”

  “Maybe... perhaps he has some notion of it carrying magical powers, that it can bring him powers. There is that possibility.”

  “I can just see some old crazy shaman shaking 'dem bones overhead at the sky, railing at the gods and rattling his rattles.”

  “A rattle of vertebral bones,” she replied. “Indo-Europeans believed that the soul of man, like a fire or flame, fed on the cerebrospinal marrow.”

  “Is that what this monster is doing?” he shouted, his grimace and shake of the head telegraphing his disbelief turning to belief. They remained silent for some time, contemplating the horrid possibilities. She returned to sit at the table and poured from an open bottle of wine now. The wine, a rich burgundy, in this light, held a kind of purple hue. She poured him a glass as well, and she raised hers for a toast. “To feeding on the cerebrospinal bone marrow of his victims.”

  She downed a large gulp, but Darwin stared at the dark liquid. “Cannibalizing the marrow... maybe the spinal fluid... in some sick belief that maybe both can provide him with life-giving, power-granting strength and renewal?”

  “Whatever he's doing with the spines, we are dealing with a sick, twisted mind that likely has cultivated an equally twisted fantasy and a liking for it.”

  Jessica read on as Darwin set aside his wine. “ 'An injury to the spinal cord between the first and second vertebrae causes instantaneous death; between the third and fourth vertebrae produces an arrest of breathing; below the sixth vertebra, an injury gives rise to paralysis of the chest muscles; injury lower down causes paralysis of the lower limbs, bladder and intestines.'“

  “And, as we know, removing the entire damn thing causes death!” he scoldingly added. “Come on, Dr. Coran. We don't have time for a science lesson.”