Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  "Honey. Hey, mister."

  Hal gasped for breath. His sweat was slick and cold.

  "You musta had a bad dream."

  It was a woman's voice. He looked over at her. It took him a moment to orient himself to his surroundings. He was in bed, in a dingy room he reluctantly recognized as his own. The woman was beside him. They were both naked.

  "Do I know you?" he asked groggily, rubbing his hands over his face.

  She smiled. She was almost pretty.

  "Sure, baby. Since last night, anyway." She snuggled against him and flung her arm over his chest.

  He pushed her away. "Go on, get out of here."

  "Watza matter?"

  She's not even angry, Hal thought. She's used to it. He pulled the filthy covers off them both, then saw the bruises on the woman's body. "Did I do that?"

  She looked down at herself, arms spread in self-examination. "Oh. No, hon. You was real nice. Kind of drunk, though." She smiled at him. "I guess you want me to go, huh?"

  She didn't wait for an answer as she wriggled into a cheap yellow dress.

  "What . . . ah . . . What do I owe you?" Hal asked, wondering if he had any money. He remembered borrowing twenty from Zellie Moscowitz, who had just fenced some diamonds for a second-story man in Queens. That had been yesterday. Or the day before. He pressed his fingers into his eyes. Hell, it might have been last week, for all he knew. "What day is this?"

  "Thursday," the woman said. She wasn't smiling anymore. Her shoulders sagged above the low-cut bodice of her dress. "And I ain't no hooker."

  "Sorry."

  "Yeah." She zipped up her dress. "But now you mention it, I could use cab fare."

  "Sure." Hal swung his legs woodenly over the side of the bed and lurched toward a pair of pants draped over a chair. They reeked of stale booze and cigarette smoke, with a strong possibility of urine.

  There were four one-dollar bills in his wallet. He handed them to her. "It's all I've got."

  "That's okay," she said. "My name's Rhonda. I live over in Jersey. In Union City."

  "Nice to meet you," Hal said.

  "What's yours?"

  As he replaced his wallet, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the broken triangle of a mirror above the sink. A pair of watery, bloodshot eyes stared stupidly at him above bloated cheeks covered with graying stubble.

  "I said, who are you?"

  Hal stood motionless, transfixed by the sight. "Nobody," he said softly. "Nobody at all."

  He didn't hear the woman let herself out.

  You're the best, kid. The best there is.

  That was what the chief had said when Hal turned in his resignation to the FBI. The best there is.

  He turned on the tap in the sink. A thin stream of cold water trickled out, disturbing two roaches that had apparently spent the night in a Twinkie wrapper stuffed into a brown-speckled styrofoam coffee container.

  Hal splashed water on his face. Hands still dripping, he touched the scar on his cheek where the piece of glass had cut him during the fire.

  That was the problem: Too much of the dream was real. If it were all dragons vaporizing on contact, he could handle it better. But most of it was exactly as things had really been. The fire, the boy, the laughter . . . that crazy bastard's laughter . . .

  —Look, Woczniak, nobody else could have saved the kid, either. You went into the burning building, for chrissake. Even the fire department couldn't get into a gasoline fire. SWAT couldn't go in. You've just spent five months in the hospital for that stunt. What'd you expect, magic?

  —Maybe.

  —Well, welcome to the real world. It's got psychos in it. Some of them kill kids. That's not the way we want it, it's just the way it is. I'm telling you, you did a good job. You're going to get a citation as soon as you're out of here.

  —A citation.

  —That's right. And you deserve it.

  —The kid's dead, Chief.

  —So's the psycho. After four months, you were the one who found him. You were the one who figured out why he went after the kids.

  —I was the one who let him kill the last one.

  —Nobody expected him to blow himself up.

  —I could have stopped it.

  —How?

  —I could have shot him and covered the grenade.

  —With what? Your body? Jesus Christ. How long you been with the Bureau, Hal? Fifteen years?

  —Sixteen.

  —That's a long time. Don't throw it away just because you got too close to one kid's family. Believe me, I know what it's like. You see pictures, home movies, you have dinner with the parents 'cause you've got nothing else to do at night . . .

  —I'm out, Chief.

  —Listen to me. You find a girl, maybe you get married. Things are different with a wife.

  —I said I'm out.

  Hal Woczniak left the hospital five and a half months after the fire that had killed Jeff Brown and his abductor. He left with no future and a past he wanted only to forget.

  Funny, he thought as he walked down the glistening hospital sidewalk toward the bus stop. He had just spent half a year in the same hospital where the killer had found Jeff.

  His name was Louie Rubel, Hal remembered. He had worked as an orderly in the Trauma and Burn Unit from which Hal had just been released. Using the Visitors' Registration records, Rubel would pick out boys of the right age among the visitors and then stalk them on their home turf. Before he got to Jeff Brown, he had already killed and mutilated four other ten-year-olds. Each murder had reenacted the first killing, that of his better-favored younger brother.

  Woczniak led the FBI team that cracked the case just as Rubel was about to murder the Brown kid. It had looked like a perfect collar, with evidence in place, the boy alive, and a confession. No one had counted on the killer's own sense of drama.

  As the authorities approached the house, Louie Rubel announced that he had sprayed the place with gasoline. Hal ordered everyone on scene to freeze. When they did, Rubel took a grenade out of his vest pocket and pulled out the pin with his teeth.

  The next few seconds were pandemonium, but Hal remembered only silence, a silence welling and gradually filling with Rubel's high, shrieking, monstrous laughter. He laughed until the grenade exploded. He blew himself to bits in full view of the police, the FBI, SWAT, and an ambulance crew.

  A moment later the house went up like a torch, but Hal could still hear the laughter.

  He had run into the fire, run to save the red-haired boy, kept running even after the shard of glass had ripped his cheek in two and the flames burned away the hair on his arms and chest and head, had run into the upstairs room where the boy was sitting, tied to a chair. You're safe, Jeff, just a second here, let me get these ropes off you . . . Jeff . . .

  And he carried Jeff Brown out the window and tried mouth-to-mouth on him right there on the roof while the SWAT boys nearly roasted themselves pulling a tarp over to the wall beneath them. But it was too late.

  Hal came to in the hospital a week later. His first thought was the memory of the boy's lips, still warm.

  You're the best, kid, welcome to the real world you'll get a citation for this what'd you expect?

  Magic?

  It had been almost a year since the incident.

  The face in the broken mirror above the sink, the loser's face, shook as if it were powered by an overheated engine. His eyes—a stranger's eyes—were glassy and staring. His teeth were bared.

  He turned off the water. The roaches returned.

  "Screw it," he said. It was time for a drink.

  It was always time for a drink.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the western part of Hampshire, on a hill turned black from a hundred fifty years of exposure to the soot-belching factories and oil refineries of industrial England, stood an asylum for the criminally insane.

  Since the early 1970s, it had been called Maplebrook Hospital, but no one in the vicinity ever mistook the forbidding Victo
rian edifice for a place of healing. The Lymington locals knew it as the Towers, a prison whose thick walls exuded pain and madness.

  The Towers housed fifty-eight patients on four floors, excluding the basement. There, in a dungeon reserved for lunatics of especially heinous disposition, lived one lone inmate. He had no name.

  Or so he claimed. One of the points that had irked all the legal personnel involved with his trial was that no legal document concerning the man's identity seemed to exist. In the end, the prosecutor charged that the man had made a life's work of so obfuscating his personal records that no one in Britain's legal network, including the defendant's own barrister, had been able to find a single fact about him that was not contradicted by some other fact.

  The man was an artist of sorts, the creator of grotesque sculptures showing human beings in the throes of violent death. Although they had never been exhibited en masse, several of these works had been sold to private collectors around the world. One had been on permanent display in New York City's Museum of Modern Art. None had ever been signed by the artist.

  It was when one of these, an eerily realistic statue titled "Washerwoman" which depicted a plump, middle-aged female with an axe embedded in her chest, was en route to a buyer in Berlin that the search for the nameless artist began.

  The delivery van carrying the piece skidded on a wet curve on the Autobahn and crashed through the guardrail. The driver of the van was thrown from the vehicle, as was the statue. Carefully wrapped though it was, "Washerwoman" was cleaved lengthwise, from the point of the axe blade.

  The axe proved to be real. So did the blood on the edge of the blade. The corpse inside was almost perfectly preserved.

  When the artist was arrested, he said only, "The point of entry was always a weakness in that piece."

  After the ensuing publicity about "Washerwoman," the New York museum donated its sculpture to Interpol to do with as it liked. Two other owners came forth, demanding to have the price of their statutes refunded.

  When asked how many pieces there were, Mr. X—as he had come to be known to Scotland Yard—smiled and said, "Twenty-three."

  He was charged and convicted on four counts of murder, and sentenced to live out the remainder of his days in the asylum at Lymington.

  The other nineteen sculptures were never recovered. In underground art circles, the price of an "X" skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

  Now, four years after his incarceration, the sculptor sat at a table in his basement cell, a threadbare blanket around his shoulders to ward off the perpetual dank chill of the place, reading an Urdu text. He had been a model prisoner almost from the beginning, and the nearest big library—at Bournemouth—had agreed to provide him anything he requested, as long as each order first received the approval of Maplebrook's director, Mark Coles.

  Dr. Coles had never objected to the prisoner's reading matter. The doctor was, in fact, constantly struck by his patient's literary sophistication. The solitary inmate relegated to the basement was obviously a brilliant man and, from Coles' observation, a gentle and civilized one as well, with impeccable table manners, elegant, well-modulated speech, and a bearing which could only be described as regal. Were it not for the former director's written instructions that the man be kept permanently in solitary confinement, Coles would have moved him to a ward for less-disturbed patients long ago.

  It was still something Coles considered every day. True, the man had allegedly killed an orderly with his bare hands on the day of his admission to Maplebrook, but even the most violent patients were capable of change. Besides, Coles often thought, the former director's methods were less than conducive to rehabilitation. Faced with life imprisonment in a place like the Towers, anyone might have attacked his jailer in a similar manner. The dead orderly's neck had been broken. It could well have happened by accident during a panicked scuffle.

  Mark Coles was thirty-six years old, the youngest doctor to head Maplebrook in its century-and-a-half history. In the three months since his appointment as director he'd ordered all the interior walls painted, engaged a nutritionist, introduced music and television, increased the wattage of the lights, instituted recreational team sports, installed an auxiliary generator so that the inmates could stay warm during the winter when storms regularly knocked out the electricity, and paid daily visits to each of his fifty-nine patients.

  But the lone prisoner in the basement was by far the most interesting of Dr. Coles' charges. He was, in fact, perhaps the most interesting human being Coles had ever met. Standing nearly seven feet tall, with black hair that grew past his shoulders and an Elizabethan-style goatee, he would have been physically imposing even had he possessed an ordinary mind.

  But nothing about the man's mind was ordinary. He was a psychological phenomenon, for one thing, a confessed killer who felt neither remorse nor a need to justify his crimes; yet he was unfailingly charming, a man whom Dr. Coles, in other circumstances, would have cultivated as a personal friend.

  And although he would not speak about his crimes or his past, the man was completely forthcoming about neutral subjects. He was prodigiously knowledgeable about history, geography, biology, anatomy—naturally, Coles thought, given the nature of the man's artwork—weather, comparative religions, physics, chemistry, English literature, mathematics, medicine, and art, both Eastern and Western.

  He spoke eight languages fluently, knew enough to get by in twelve others, and read in fifteen, including ancient Greek, Old and Middle English, late Celtic, and Egyptian hieroglyph.

  He had no interest, however, in anything mechanical. Coles warmed with amusement when he remembered the patient's first encounter with the lid of a paste pot. Others, he explained, had always opened and closed containers for him.

  He had never driven a car nor operated a washing machine. He had never purchased anything from a vending machine. He could use a telephone, but usually left the receiver dangling when the conversation was over. He could not type. His handwriting was flowing and elegant.

  Occasionally he played chess with Dr. Coles. He always won, usually within minutes, but sometimes he deliberately ignored one of Coles' blunders in order to draw the game out toward some dazzling endgame. It was on these occasions that Coles felt he was making real progress with the man, although he often wondered after these sessions why he, the doctor, was suffused with a feeling of privilege after being beaten in a game of chess by a diagnosed psychopath.

  Still, the games were fascinating, and Coles sensed they were an avenue into the man's extraordinarily complex personality. With the right approach and the sensitive direction of a gifted therapist, the doctor was sure, that genius might yet be coaxed into productivity.

  Coles whistled a tune to announce himself as he carried a folding card table down the basement corridor. The artist, sitting ramrod-straight in his chair, gave no indication of having heard him.

  "Are you married?" Coles asked cheerfully.

  The man looked up from his book and smiled. Even seated, he was so tall that his eyes were almost level with the doctor's.

  Coles shrugged as he set up the small table just outside the bars of the cell and arranged a chessboard and playing pieces atop it. He always began his visits that way, with a disarming question which his patient was not likely to answer.

  What is your real name? Who were your parents? How did you earn a living? What games did you play as a child? What is your favorite food? How many women have you made love to? Anything, anything to open the door to that hidden, vulnerable person behind the prodigious intellect and the bestial instinct to kill.

  From the beginning, the man had ignored every question. Coles had nearly given up hope that he would ever answer one. Yet, perhaps someday . . .

  "Yes," the man said.

  Coles looked up, dropping one of the chess pieces. "I beg your pardon?"

  "You asked if I was married. I was. At least a hundred times. But I do not remember any of their names."

  Co
les blinked. It was a lie, of course, but why? For its shock value? Surely a man who had murdered twenty-three people and then covered their still-warm bodies with plaster could come up with a bigger stunner than that.

  He bent slowly to retrieve the fallen piece, a pawn. True or false, he knew, the statement had been terribly important. It was the first chink in the patient's psychological armor. He was beginning to trust the doctor.

  "When was the last time?" Coles asked casually as he took a small notebook from his shirt pocket. Don't frighten him, now, he told himself. Let him talk.

  "I believe it was in Mexico. She was a lovely creature, although rather stupid. But fecund."

  "Is she alive?" Coles asked.

  "Oh, my, no."

  Of course not. She's in a glass case in some art collector's parlor. "Did you kill her?"

  The tall man's eyes narrowed in thought. "No. I don't believe so. I did kill her parents, though. Tiresome people." He came out of his reverie with a smile. "That was some time ago, you understand."

  Coles nodded uncertainly. "You said your wife was, ah . . ."He checked his notes. "Fecund. You have children, then?"

  "Descendants."

  "As you wish. How many descendants do you have?"

  "Thousands, I imagine," the patient said with a shrug.

  Coles exhaled. Sometimes he almost forgot that the inmates here were insane.

  "Do you ever see them?"

  "Of course. They are obligated to me by blood."

  "But you've had no visitors."

  The man half closed his eyes. "I have not summoned them yet."

  "I see," Coles said.

  "By the way, I have a name."

  Coles sucked in a rush of air. "What is it?" he asked softly.

  "Saladin." He spoke the name slowly, aware that he was giving the doctor a gift.

  "Is Saladin your first name?"

  "It is my entire name."

  Coles looked into his patient's eyes for a long moment, then wrote the name down. "Why have you decided to speak with me?" he asked at last.

  "I want another cell."

  Coles tented his fingers beneath his chin and nodded.