Ionic Resurgence
Book Two of
The Doll Man Duology
By Howard Hachey
FLUKY FICTION
Newport, ME
Ionic Resurgence: Book Two of The Doll Man Duology
by Howard Hachey
Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-9987173-6-4
Ionic Resurgence is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Published by Fluky Fiction
Copyright © 2018 by Howard Hachey
www.flukyfiction.com
Last night I woke up with someone squeezing my hand.
It was my other hand.
-William S. Burroughs
Chapter 1
April 10, 2006
8:31 a.m.
Hampden, ME
Kieffer Halpern hadn’t slept since 4:00 a.m. yesterday morning. Too absorbed in his research to hear the school bus’s rumbling diesel engine and wheezy breaks make its usual stop at the corner, his body and mind wavered. His shape, no more solid than curled bands of smoke drifting through a closed room, had succumbed to the wait. For days, all thought—all energy—was being focused into his work. Blood sat like cold grease in his veins; all effervescence of youth fizzled dry. Another subatomic particle, Kieffer existed in two planes at the same time.
Out here: a dying speck like the rest of us. Inside his own head: seated with the Others at the roundtable.
By the time he shut down his overheated laptop and pulled his sandbagged eyes up to the clock, it was already 8:31 a.m. School had officially started one minute ago. The last time he remembered checking the clock, it was 7:15.
Last night.
He’d been studying copied case files and old news articles for almost two days straight. Digging, he found over fifty written manuscripts of suspect interrogations, two dozen separate sets of detective notes spanning every investigation, and hundreds of pages of forensic reports.
And, of course, that fruity composite drawing.
Link by link, page by page, it all started to make sense. Once the pieces fell, Kieffer couldn’t stop plugging them together.
Flashbulb images of Wayne’s Room of Death kept his mind from locking shut. He couldn’t get them out of his head. Their fuzzy mouths stretched open; hot glue gun eyes fighting nature’s collapse. Every time Kieffer closed his own, he saw them: furry little jokes trapped in an insufferable limbo on an old man’s shelf. Mouths held open with toothpicks and pipe cleaners in silent screams to eternity. Barbaric trophies that told only their keeper the true story.
Until now.
That Saturday night and Sunday morning fused together seamlessly. Completely tranced, Kieffer set out to recover every bit of information he could on The Doll Man. Most of the information wasn’t easy to find, but Kieffer was resilient. The questions wouldn’t stop until he knew.
It finally dawned on him Sunday night that his intense research was no longer for a stupid school project on serial killers; this was a personal matter of life and death. Kieffer searched and scoured the web until there was nothing left. His back ached from having to balance the weight of his sagging skull like a fisherman's over-casted line for hours on end; face melting to a ghostly electric white. At no point did he get up to eat, drink, piss, or shit. His brain was much too busy absorbing strands of data to account for what his body needed. It had the insatiable urge to assemble everything—to clean the dirt from the bones beneath him.
Kieffer knew he was onto something big. Something real big.
He didn’t want to ignore all of Ashley’s calls and texts over the past two days, but had no choice. Kieffer wasn’t going to lie. He owed Ashley more than that. But, it would be a miracle if she wanted to see him at all now. And why would she? He was a coward. A phony. He knew ignoring her wouldn’t do him any favors later, but he needed the time to find any kind of plausible explanation. If he was going to tell her the truth, he had to do it right. Once he got the facts straight, the solid facts, he would present his case to her. From there, they would figure out a plan. Whether she would believe it or not, he didn’t know. He only hoped that it wasn’t too late. Not only for himself, but for Them.
Both of their lives would be at risk once the truth came out.
In a kind of grandiose sense of divinity, it made sense that Kieffer would be the one to inadvertently solve the biggest murder mystery in New England history. The Doll Man had plagued his thoughts from the time he discovered him just two years prior. Unanswered questions and quiet speculation of the unknown killer found their way into every normal activity of his life.
Imagine it: not being able to wash dishes without seeing little fingers reaching up through the soapy water like tickling strands of rotting seaweed. To see a single set of footprints follow yours in fresh snow, small and unassuming, then, disappear. To masturbate to beauty, while your mind lapses uncontrollably to scenes of charred flesh and lime-dusted bodies. Watching the grass and trees move past you on the interstate, when suddenly you think you see a little girl’s collapsed skull collecting daisies in a shallow ditch. Its torn, grey mouth plugged open with rocks and dirt; long weeds that refuse to wait for the maggots to eat.
Kieffer couldn’t lick a stamp without wondering if The Doll Man, now retired, had a fixed address or P.O. box—convinced he was above capture. Now, it all made sense. It was as if Kieffer subconsciously had a premonition of things to come. All his prior obsessive interests seemed like subtle training for this very day.
Or, in a more realistic sense, this was all just another case of dumb luck.
Kieffer knew that his insight into the killer's background played a huge part in unraveling the secret, but that couldn’t be everything. Hundreds of professional criminal psychologists and detectives have been searching for The Doll Man for nearly four decades. Why not one of them? Trained professionals from around the country with much more insight and experience than Kieffer would ever know had failed at every turn. The other percentage of his luck could be chalked up to perfect circumstance. He was at the right place at exactly the right time. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have found Wayne's Room of Death. Someone or something had guided him there. Or so it felt now that a definitive picture was starting to form. Divine intervention aside, it was all too surreal. The sheer chance that this could happen to anyone, anywhere, was astronomical. A million to one odds wouldn’t even begin to cover it. A fact that forced Kieffer to hurry home and start digging through online resources to uncover the truth.
Expecting to immediately squash the suspicion that’d been burning holes through his brain with a few clicks of the mouse, he was dumbfounded by the third hour when fact after fact kept matching up. Suspect profiles made by the FBI described Wayne to a T. Even the plaques of death, with very few details to go by, could be accounted for in leaked crime scene descriptions and photos online. The strange symbols and pieces of clothing all coincided with every official and nonofficial source. Kieffer doublechecked and triple-checked all the evidence he could find. All matched in some way.
But it wasn’t enough. He needed concrete evidence.
Assumptions and coincidences are good for jack-shit. Kieffer knew that. There were plenty of coincidences throughout history, most nothing but. Like the legend of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car license plate bearing the end date of WWI, impossible things sometimes correlate themselves for no reason. Albeit, an interesting coincidence, it was still just that. If Kieffer was right, there had to be at least one piece of physical evidence left to prove
or disprove his theory. Otherwise, he would be powerless to act.
Act on what? One of the inner voices chimed in as Kieffer raced his way to school, unaware of his legs, What you gonna do if you prove Wayne is The Doll Man? Slap his wrists and tell him he’s a bad boy?
Truth was, Kieffer had no idea.
At this point, all Kieffer really wanted was closure. He’d worry about the consequential stuff later. The temptation of solving a forty-year-old murder mystery buried his moral sense of obligation. Deep down, way in the bottom of his frenzied mind, he knew he would have to turn Wayne in once there was substantial proof of his guilt. But until then, he thrived on the thrill of the hunt, mentally scouring the little hunches and clues that he had.
Just a block from the school now, Kieffer’s nerves got the best of him. He broke into a full-out run at the sound of the first period bell.
Back still aching and knees stiff, Kieffer hopped up the school steps and burst through the swinging front doors. They slammed shut behind him with a loud CLANK! Almost an afterthought, the unusually silent lobby quickly disappeared behind him. He made his way to his first period class. He got three steps into the deserted hallway lined with lockers before the sight ahead halted him.
Something horrible.
Layer upon layer of blood, guts, and tangled body parts lined the long hallway from one end to the other. From where he stood, Kieffer could see human entrails spewing out of open lockers. Brownish-yellow streaks of fresh bile and muscular jelly leaked through the vents in long strips onto the tiled floor. The archaic smell of stale blood quickly filled his nostrils, leaving a coppery taste at the back of his throat. V-bent arms and legs sprang out of the vented doors like bushels of crooked weeds. Dented severed heads of his fellow classmates lay jumbled on the floor in a soup of their own spilled shit and gristle. They all seemed to be facing him; their cue-ball eyes and bloody atrophied mouths hung lost in egress. No organization to the rows of miscellaneous parts could be found—random piles of torsos barricaded classroom doors like Cambodian stockades. The meticulous order and categorization found on the shelves of Wayne’s Room of Death wasn’t here. This was animalistic slaughtering like nothing Kieffer had ever imagined.
To him, the whole scene looked like the aftermath of a giant living wood chipper walking its way through the school as everyone was out getting their books. The blurry mess streaked from floor to ceiling narrowed the entire width of the dark hallway to a single gutter. A red trough. Numbed, Kieffer stood a gawking pale statue, unable to grasp the amount of carnage spilled at his feet.
What… in the fuck?? he asked himself, taking two heavy steps forward without thought. The tacky blood under his sneakers made his steps feel slick, unbalanced. His eyes searched through the remains for anything still alive until the sounds of approaching footsteps catch his attention.
A tall, dark figure appears at the far end of the hall.
Kieffer couldn’t make out who it was; the frosted light pouring in from the panel doors behind him only gave a faint outline. Judging by the shape, the tall figure was a man. A very slender man with a confident stride and wideset glasses placed on a narrow head. Kieffer could also make out the smoky tail of a lit cigarette in one hand. In the other, something round and unfamiliar dangled. The odd shape pendulously banged against the man’s right thigh as he walked slowly in Kieffer’s direction. Stopping just short of the long river of blood dividing them, the man stood; silent.
The hall became so still that Kieffer could hear the buzzing of the flies as they burrowed and chewed on the dunes of disassembled meat. Bubbling, bloated flaps of grinded flesh no doubt already teeming with micro-biotic filth.
Scared clueless, unable to move, Kieffer stood at the crimson river’s rusty shore.
The man flicked his cigarette into the gutter, where it loudly sizzled out and sank. Without warning, the man hurled the object in his right hand down the hall in one long underhand swoop. The bulk he carried must have been heavy. Its descent gained momentum, sliding closer and closer to where Kieffer stood, bloody tiles greasing its way. Kieffer watched in paralyzed fear as the round object closed in, slowing to a stop a mere ten inches from his feet.
Barely lucid, Kieffer forced his eyes down to the shape; what he saw broke the little sanity he had left.
Dripping with thick gobs of coagulated blood, Ashley’s decapitated head lay at his feet like a busted candy apple. Dirty, filth-covered face upturned to his; eyes wide and lips stretched in a grimace of unhinged terror. Her dark, vein-lined cheeks shivered uncontrollably as if using every muscle left to keep up the defiance of death.
“You just had to go putting your fuckin nose where it didn’t belong, didn’t ya?” the man’s deep voice echoed from down the hall. “Was it worth it?” Through the menacing voice Kieffer now knew who the shadowy figure was. But worse, The Doll Man knew who Kieffer was, too.
“Why?” Ashley’s severed head belched, thick blobs of black mucus oozing from her empty eye sockets. A purple tongue slid restlessly back and forth in her waxy mouth like an overgrown nightcrawler. “Why couldn’t you just be happy with me?”
That was his breaking point. Kieffer took two long steps back towards the lobby doors before a deafening boom thundered from down the hall. He felt no pain, yet, the immense soundwave that rolled over the river swept his feet clean out from under him. He heard his head slap against the floor with a hollow THUD.
Confused, Kieffer laid numbly on his back, once again unable to move. The booming echo dispersed into every empty classroom. He could hear heavy booted footsteps approaching; splashing through the shallow waters of spoiled youth. Kieffer tried with all his might to get to his feet, but it couldn’t be. It was as if the guts and loose tissue squished underneath him were somehow still alive, leeching onto his skin and pulling him to the floor.
Seconds slowed as the boots got louder. Closer
Soon, a familiar face replaced the blood-splotched ceiling filling his limited vision.
“Wanna hear a joke?” Wayne asked, face clenched with deranged anger as he towered over Kieffer. An ugly, silver-eyed vulture picking at its prey as it lay waiting for release. Wayne’s smooth cheeks and dark frames were stained with dark brown patches of filth. The smile curling across his chin got wider and wider as the question tumbled down the empty hallways. Eyes blazing wildly with fires of ancestral rage, Wayne said, “How many children does it take to put out a campfire?”
Unable to answer, Kieffer gritted his teeth and stared. His eyes grew dry, failing to shield the onslaught of heated breath pluming out of Wayne's crooked mouth. He was helpless. Reduced to the capabilities of just another corpse waiting to be dismantled.
Standing back up, Wayne raised the gun to Kieffer’s face: “One—if he’s already mulched.”
Kieffer woke up just as the hammer sparked shut.
Clawing at the desk in front of him for stability, he gasped for air; heart pounding wildly against his chest. Unaware of ever falling asleep, he looked at the clock and immediately regretted doing so.
8:31 am.
Teetering on the brink of psychosis Kieffer again grabbed his phone, bookbag, jacket and shoes and rushed off to school. He walked the ice-sheeted streets as fast as he could without falling. Three blocks later, he slipped ass-backwards into a puddle, scuffing up the inside of his palms on the salt and ice. Hot skin permeating over dry frost, Kieffer scrambled back to his feet. The nightmare was still fresh in his mind. He could still feel those pulped guts biting his skin; an open sore of soft, hallow-fanged barbs slivering through pores and muscles. So vivid that now he questioned whether he might still be asleep at his desk.
But, just like in his dream, Kieffer pushed onward.
He had to know the truth.
At any cost necessary.
Chapter 2
April 10, 2006
8:54 a.m.
Hampden, Maine
Ashley sat impatiently in her first period class, picking at the paint-chipped cuticle
of her right hand with growing unease. Kieffer had never gotten ahold of her like he said he would. Over twenty-four hours had passed without a single word between them. He never logged online or responded to any of her calls. He blew off every text, something unusual even for someone as recluse as Kieffer. She was up half the night on both Saturday and Sunday waiting for an answer, but got nothing in return.
Every minute or so, she would glance over at Kieffer’s empty desk. He always sat a few rows down from hers, even when it wasn’t assigned seating. Kieffer was odd like that. She gave the vacant spot quick looks every now and then, making sure he hadn’t slipped into class without her noticing. Ashley was pretending to listen to Mr. Adler’s lesson on the most commonly used devices in contemporary literature when the familiar sound of the classroom door creaking open paused everything.
There, disheveled and panting in the doorway, was Kieffer.
“Mr. Halpern,” Adler said as he turned from the whiteboard and faced him, “how nice of you to join us. I trust you saw the main office before arriving?”
Kenneth R. Adler was a short stocky man in his early fifties with a horseshoe ring of grey-streaked brown hair and an imperial mustache that sat at the bottom of his droopy face. He had been teaching at Hampden Academy for over twenty years, a well-known fact that he wasn’t particularly proud of.
Barely there, Kieffer handed Mr. Adler his tardy slip and quickly sat down at his desk. Adler read the note and then silently scanned the waxy figure. He mentally noted that the boy’s skin was much too pale; his eyes ringed with dark circles. Not wanting to catch anything and preemptively use his saved sick time, Adler acted fast.
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