Grave Instinct
( Jessica Coran - 10 )
Robert W. Walker
Robert W. Walker
Grave Instinct
PROLOGUE
Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee?
— The book of Job, 40:4
Groveland Memorial Cemetery, Morristown, New Jersey August 16, 1990
Working quietly, Daryl Thomas Cahil had dug into the cemetery earth for several hours while the windswept night played about the headstone he had located.
AMIEE LEE PHEIFFER
BELOVED DAUGHTER 1983-1990
He again sank the spade into the dirt, finally gaining a response-a greeting between metal and concrete. At last, he'd found the little crypt. A concrete vault concealing the coffin, a slab-stone top over all.
“ All right… good…” he congratulated himself from the bottom of the grave he'd spent the early-morning hours reopening. Glancing at his dirtied watch, he read 4:02 A.M. Less than an hour and the cemetery superintendent would be driving up to unlatch the rusted old gates. Still, it was enough time to gain the prize buried here, which he had come to claim as his.
Daryl had to dig out earth alongside the vault to create space enough to force the concrete lid aside, just enough to get at the coffin. He worked to clear the lid of remaining soil as a light sprinkle began to add to his problems. He needn't remove the lid entirely, only partially, enough to climb in and open the coffin lid.
Spade tip against stone tablet clattered more than once, making him wince. Finally, he tossed up the spade to the level earth, fearful it was making too much noise now against the outer stone coffin.
The cemetery stood amid a half-mile-long quad of neighborhood homes, homes he would just as soon leave undisturbed. He could not afford waking so much as a dog.
He got down on all fours.
He clawed away at the dirt lying over the small coffin.
He imagined what lay inside, what he had come for, his goal.
He felt his pulse quicken, his heart pound.
He felt cold and hot at the same time. And the cold rain only added to the chills following the sweats.
His brain calmed him, talking soothingly to him, saying, “Once you have it and you consume it… you will know a tranquility and enlightenment like none other.”
He kept digging and clawing the dirt away from the lid. Soon Daryl Thomas Cahil reached up over the lip of the grave to locate the crowbar. As he felt for it, he also felt that the temperature in the grave was far cooler than that overhead at ground level. Stretching for the crowbar, he heard the night sounds of the graveyard-leaves rustling along the ground, scurrying in unison with small vermin; dead branches scratching at tombstones; a haunting whirr of the city's electric current coursing through the silence.
His hand found the crowbar and his handheld, battery-operated bone saw. He brought both into the pit with him. With the crowbar held firm, he pried open the small stone lid, the noise of his rending the stone from its moorings sent up a soft scraping sound like muted barking and crackling.
A dog somewhere on the other side of the cemetery walls barked its reply. Daryl cursed under his breath. He had come a long way to find Groveland-a quiet old cemetery protected by a high wall on all four sides, its entire length and breadth. And he had spent many days and nights waiting to learn of a suitable burial in the papers. He had even listened for the weather report, and he expected the wind to soon turn to storm, rain and possibly thunder and lightning.
This was not his first grave-robbing foray, and the newspaper in Newark had made so much of his earlier raids that he'd had to come to Morristown for a fresh start. In Newark over the past year, he had earned a reputation in the press as the New Jersey Ghoul.
The lid moved slowly under his bleeding hands now. He had finally made enough jpace to crawl through to get at the coffin inside. The actual coffin lid came open easily once he located the latch, and there she lay as if in slumber, a little princess. Blood from his bruised and cut hands dripped onto the child's virginal white taffeta dress.
Overhead, he heard the low rumble of approaching thunder, and the light sprinkle turned to full raindrops that found him even below the concrete lid inside the vault. “I only need your head, dearie,” he said to the corpse in her ballet outfit. The papers said she'd been buried in her favorite dancing outfit, that she'd been a beauty-pageant child, and he could see why. But he was little interested in her appearance, her name or who she'd been in life-only that her brain was intact. “I only want your head,” he confided as he brought the battery-operated handheld saw to her throat.
The thunder would help mask the noise from the saw, but even as he turned it on, light flooded into the chasm of the vault and men and dogs descended into the pit and onto the stone lid, the dogs barking wildly. Daryl saw guns pointing and heard voices shouting for him to drop the saw and to come out with his hands in the air.
He instead desperately turned to the dead girl and began cutting her head off until a powerful blow struck him unconscious, and he fell across his dead victim, whose head had been halfway severed.
“ My God, we got the Ghoul, Mac! It's him, the one they've been troubling with for a year in Newark. It's gotta be the Ghoul.”
“ If it ain't him, this one'll do for now. Cuff 'im and drag his ass outta here. Get 'im up to ground level.”
Pulled and yanked aboveground, Daryl Thomas Cahil watched as lights in the windows from all the surrounding houses came on in a flurry of activity. “Turn your lights on the girl! Illumination. You can see I only wanted a piece of her,” he shouted.
Daryl pulled loose from a uniformed cop's grasp and dove headlong back into the pit, shouting, “I must have her brain! I must have it now!”
Again Mac Strand and his Morristown police officers dragged the ghoulish offender from the child's disturbed grave.
ONE
Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.
— Aesop, 6th century B.C.
Duval County, Jacksonville, Florida June 6, 2003
Grant Kenyon grabbed his head in his hands and pleaded, “Stop asking me to kill. Stop making me kill.” Grant sat upright in the lonely Jax-Town Motel bed in his empty room, catching glimpses of his mirror reflection as if it were someone else. “It is someone else. Sure,” he said aloud to himself, yet if he worked at it, he recognized something in the twisted image-the boyish face, the sad and deep-set eyes. But here in the semi dark, there was something else going on… Nothing fit-not his features, not his manner and not this place so far from his wife, Emily, and little Hildy. Staring into the looking glass, he felt that the real Grant Kenyon had fallen into it and metamorphosed into what he now saw. “It's really not me, this guy in the mirror. It's some other force that has hold of me.”
He lifted the beer and toasted to the uncanny image toasting back, and he hated what he saw.
He clawed his way to a standing position and, once sure of his footing, Grant bellowed and charged at the reflected image now moving toward him-that other entity-and they nearly collided where they met, face-to-face. “What the hell do you want from me?” he asked the stranger in the mirror.
“ Just do what you're told,” replied the other.
“ Leave me, now! I don't want this… this kind of life… this possession of me by… by you.”
His reflected image in the half-light showed an irregular brow, eyes too close together, a crooked nose larger on one side than the other, a sad set of dark eyes, a mouth in perpetual downturn. Do I feel as bad as I look? He wondered.
“ I've grown 350 percent since your ancestors crawled out of the muck, Grant,” his reflection said, as if it had a brain independent of his.
Gr
ant beat a fist on the bureau top and glared at his Hydelike reflection. “Damn you, how many times're you going to tell me that? How fucking many times? I am pleading with you, my insistent brain, to never repeat that goddamn number again.”
“ Three hundred fifty,” it replied.
“ I've heard it all before.”
“ Your simian ancestors discovered that eating the brains of their enemies increased their mental capacity,” the reflection said. “Read about all the folk remedies of the Chinese, Tibetans, Hindus and Arabs.”
“ I know… I've heard you say it a thousand times. I know man's brain is a stimulant, an aphrodisiac, a medicine to expand the powers of rational mind.”
The man in the mirror grimly replied, “Then you know why we're doing what you're doing.”
“ I'm not doing a damn thing. You… you're doing it,” he replied to his reflection. “And I won't allow it again! Not once more. I forbid-”
“ Not once more. Not once more,” mocked his mind of the distorted image. Then the voice turned deadly serious. “What are you saying, Grant?”
“ I'm saying, don't lie to me. It's not working. I know it's a twisted obsession, a morbid craving that-”
“ Me? Lie? But me is you and you is me, Grant.”
“ All that crap about your being somehow special, the descendent of all the prophets, all the philosophers, all the teachers, the wise men and the great spiritual leaders since time began.”
“ How then do you account for me, Grant? The most highly organized material substance on Earth-the human brain?”
“ You're just an organ, an electrochemical factory.”
“ Nonsense! I am the great raveled knot, the-”
“ I've heard it all be-”
“- world has ever known. I am the enchanted loom, the giant-”
“ I don't want to hear it!” Grant tore out tufts of his hair, hoping the self-inflicted pain would blot out the voice inside the him inside the mirror. It failed to help.
“ Within this 'chemical factory,' as you call me, are the secrets of the universe. 1… you… us… we have the blood of kings running through our veins, Grant. The molecules of Plato and Aristotle. We… us… we're on the verge of complete enlightenment, on the verge of becoming pure energy, Grant. You must understand that?”
“ So hang in there?” he scoffed at his reflection. He then violently shook his head, while his reflection maintained calm. Staring directly at his own forehead, he said, “Mind… mind you are so damn repetitive, so please, I'm begging you. Shut off! Piss off!”
For a brief second, his brain was silent. Then it said to him, “I need nourishing until the metamorphosis comes, Grant.”
“ I ought to just kill you.” “I am you, Grant, and you art I, and we are what we art.”
“ We are what we are?” Grant asked.
“ So you must feed me.”
Grant thought of the taste of the gray brain matter he had already fed on. He had tried it in casserole form, even in Hamburger Helper to mask the taste. “Feed you… from the brains of virtuous young women.”
“ As virtuous as we can find. Now feed me.”
“ But it's murder, what you've made me do.”
“ God doth work in mysterious ways indeed. His wonders to perform.”
“ Now you're claiming to be God? At least it's a new approach.”
“ God is in the over mind, the cosmic mind, Dr. Grant.”
“ What more can you possibly want from me? Already I've taken two lives, two souls for you.”
“ It's not enough.”
“ It's not? Well, tell me, what is enough with you? Three, six, nine, nine hundred?”
“ We are seeking out the over mind, the cosmic being here, Grant. No one said it was going to be easy!”
Someone next door pounded loudly on the wall. The clock flipped to 1:35 A.M. Some teens or children raced down the hallway en route to or from the pool, even this late. Their racing shadows slowed to peep beneath his door.
“ So you want me to dissect another person for her brain… Why not dead children like Daryl Cahil did in Newark and Morristown in '89 and '90? You sure he wasn't on the right track?”
“ No dead bodies. We tried that, remember, at your morgue? As for children… too much uncontrolled thought and nervous, directionless energy, and you don't need that.”
“ No… that's a certainty.”
“ Young women are pliable, their minds energetic and well modulated and, Grant, don't tell me you get no satisfaction out of it. You may be able to lie to your ego, but you can't lie to me, Grant old boy.”
“ How can I derive pleasure from it? I have no conscious memory of it happening until you fill me in. You got a name?”
“ It's 'Phillip' if it helps, and I have enough conscious memory of the feedings for both of us, Grant, so no guilt afterward.”
“ But none of this… it's not normal.”
“ Normal is as normal does. What's normal, Grant? What's normal enough. p”
“ For me or for you, you mean?”
“ For anyone. Look, just accept it, and get on with it. If you can't face yourself, Grant, then I'll do it for you. A nice compromise for that tiresome phrase, 'To thine own self' all that…”
He turned to the bed, his reflection doing the same with the reflected bed in the mirror. Each curled up in opposite dimensions, each wary of the other, but Grant in this world could not move away from his brain sitting atop his head. He momentarily wondered if the guy in the mirror could escape his brain. Then he wondered what he meant by “his brain.” Was it sensible to say that his mirror image was carrying his brain as well as his features? Or was the mirror-man's brain separate from his own?
“ No more thoughts of getting rid of us. OK, Dr. Grant? All that'i behind us, right?” His brain spoke now from the coiled recesses and fissures of the cerebral cortex.
“ No… no such thoughts.”
“ I know… I've been monitoring.”
A knock at the door. The food from a carry-out deli that specialized in giving the customer what he wanted. Grant prayed the delivery boy was a boy and not a girl. He got up, found his wallet and opened the door on a pimply-faced young man with a dour and sleepy look. They exchanged food for money, and Grant returned to bed with the food and drink, giving silent thanks for the specialty order-a cheese, egg and brains calzone and a bottle of V8 juice. “Brain food,” he muttered and bit into the calzone.
Kansas City Public Library The following day
THE nineteen-year-old community college student had nowhere but the library to work on her paper, since the computer center was closed on Sundays. She had set up everything she needed and had begun surfing the World Wide Web for information on the brain and functions of the mind for her term paper assignment. She logged on to something dealing with the cosmic mind, the strangest Web page she had ever come across. She forgot about her term paper and simply read:
The flesh, blood and body of man is nothing to the brain which houses the soul.
“ That's beautiful,” she said aloud. She read on:
As the great thinkers and poets of all time have pointed out time and again-the beauty of the soul lies in the mind. The brain stem, the medulla oblongata, the pons Varolii, the reticular formation, the cerebellum, the cranial and trigeminal nerves, all these masterful works control every movement of the body down to the twitch. The tenth cranial nerve alone controls the ear, neck, lungs, heart and abdominal viscera. It controls breath and digestion, all at the direction of the mind.
Man's brain is larger than that of ten prehistoric reptiles that measured one hundred feet long but whose brains were the size of walnuts. According to evolutionists, man's brain began growing at an unprecedented rate one million years ago. Strangely, the mind of man is, a million years later, still trying to determine its own power and energy, and the source of that energy. Many cannibalistic tribes reported to eat the brains of their enemies killed in battle claim they have touched on
that power, glimpsed it, as a result of brain-feeding. If you are interested in knowing more about the mystery of the collective universal soul inherent in the brain, read on.
The student hesitated, unsure she wanted to read on. There seemed to be something ominous about this information. Still, it was intriguing, and if there was something to it-that cannibals had some sort of insight into the very deepest inner workings of the universe through a recognition of the soul housed in the human brain-then perhaps she ought to write her paper on that. But who would believe it?
She paused her hand over the keys, trying to decide whether to move on to some information more in keeping with an encyclopedia or to continue on this strange Web page. Either way, time was running out. That paper and Mrs. Weston weren't going to wait. Maybe the safe and conservative road was best, after all.
But her eyes, unlike her fingers, weren't poised. They read on…
TWO
When armies are mobilized and issues joined, the man who is sorry over the fact will win.
— Lao-Tzu, 6th century B.C.
FBI Headquarters, Quantico, Virginia The following day
It feels like a war being staged, thought Dr. Jessica Coran, medical examiner for the FBI, and she was fearful of how long and hard this battle might be. For now the human frenetic energy from activity and tension in the hallways as people made their way to the debriefing room rang like free-flowing electrical current. Everyone sensed something big was on the horizon, but so far only a handful of people knew precisely what that big item might be. Jessica and Dr. John Thorpe, her closest associate at the lab, were among the select few on a hastily put together psychological profiling team to deal with two back-to-back killings, which might be a kill spree that ends abruptly or the beginning of a serial killer's career that spans years-like none Jessica had ever seen before. In these two mutilation murders, the attacker had used medical knowledge to literally open his victims from scalp to ears and across the forehead at the eyebrow line, creating a surgically precise window on the forebrain. From there the victims' brains had literally been ripped from them. Speculation ran rampant as to why.
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