Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series)

by Douglas Clegg

  “Are they gone?” he whispered.

  She answered him with fire.

  Carly whispered to Teresa, “The knife.”

  Teresa stretched as far as she could to reach the fishing knife which had fallen in the dirt.

  She said to Mark, “Marky! Help...Mommy needs help...” She pointed towards the knife, which was just a few feet from him.

  Mark took a step towards the fishing knife.

  It lay in the dirt, its metal shining red in the unholy light from the flares.

  The images of Jesus on the cross seemed to dance in the flickering glow.

  Trey came to full consciousness. He reached for the gun, but it wasn’t near him.

  Agnes, cuffed to him, dragged him up to his feet.

  “I had to do it,” she said, tears streaming down a face which still looked like a tigress ready to spring. She held the gun in her hand. “I had to. You were going to run off with her. You were going to forsake me. I couldn’t let you. I knew it was the flesh that drew you. I knew that. I did it for us. So our love would not be tainted...”

  She pointed the gun towards Carly. She drew Trey towards his wife and children. The handcuffs chafed his wrist. “When she dies, you’ll understand.”

  “I do understand,” Trey said. “And I love you.”

  A glimmer of hope sparkled in Agnes Hatcher’s eyes.

  For the first time since he’d been in his twenties, Trey thought she looked human. She was no longer the Gorgon or the Surgeon, but a much-abused girl who had not been allowed to fully develop. She looked like the most pitiable creature on the face of the earth. In a moment, he remembered her life: the torture as a young girl, the rape, the darkness that was forced to blossom within her mind.

  “If you love me, you’ll watch her die,” Agnes said. She aimed the gun for Carly’s face.

  Carly’s eyes grew wide with terror.

  Trey brought his free hand to Agnes Hatcher’s face. He turned it towards his own. He kissed her strongly, passionately. “It’s me. It’s Jack,” he said. Then, he took the gun from her hand. “Let me murder the whore.”

  Carly whispered, “Trey?”

  “Shut up!” He yelled at her. Then, softly, to Agnes, “We can always be together now.”

  “Do you forgive me?”

  “For what?”

  Her mood suddenly changed. She wasn’t buying the act. She went for the gun. “You’ll know when I kill her. Your eyes’ll be opened.”

  Using all the strength he could muster, Trey jerked the handcuff. The gun dropped without firing. He and Agnes fell to the floor of the chamber. He groaned as he felt her knee connect with his groin, hard. She ground her knee into him there. He retched, and jabbed his elbow into her stomach.

  She scratched at him, blindly, as if fighting for her life. He punched her as hard as he could in the face. She bit down hard on his neck, drawing blood. They wrestled to the well—the rim of rocks at its edge keeping them from falling over. She managed to bring him down. She rolled on top of him, and put her face close to his.

  She foamed at the mouth. It was like having a bobcat sitting on top of him, small but strong and mean. “I’ll make it right,” she spat at him. “It’s not your fault.” Through the wild look on her face, he saw into her eyes. She was a child there, they were swirls of colors, and she was lost within them. It was like watching someone where half their soul was at war with the other half. “It’s not your fault. It ‘cause of me, what I did. That night.”

  And then a calm came over her. She half-smiled. “I know you love me. I know I was wrong.”

  Her strength seemed to mellow, and she was no longer a heavy weight bearing down upon him, but light. He felt he could push her off.

  He was about to do just that.

  And then, as if fulfilling some destiny, she rolled over the edge of the chasm.

  73

  Trey held onto one of the stone markers at the edge of the great well with his free arm.

  The handcuff with Agnes’ weight pulling on it, sliced into his wrist like a razor.

  If he tried, he could pull her up.

  He could save her.

  All his training had been to save and help and understand.

  But this woman was a monster.

  This woman had stabbed his wife in her side.

  This woman would’ve tortured and killed his family.

  If he raised her up from the pit, even if he could, she would tear into him like a lion. But something within him still believed that she could be saved. That something in that monster soul could be salvaged.

  Carly crawled slowly, snake-like, to the edge of the precipice. Teresa crawled along with her, still handcuffed to her.

  Carly gripped Trey’s arm where the handcuff was cutting into his wrist.

  Agnes, dangling, but holding on, too, to what she could of the walls of the natural well. “Jack,” she whispered, “please, help me. I love you.”

  Then, she tugged harder on the handcuff, kicking out from the wall. She didn’t want help being brought up to safety.

  She wanted to bring Trey over the edge with her.

  74

  Carly held the fishing knife up in her free hand and brought it down.

  She hacked at Agnes Hatcher’s wrist, cutting deep into her flesh.

  Carly sawed with the knife until Agnes’ small hand, bloody and torn, slipped loose from the cuff.

  75

  Agnes dropped into the darkness of the pit.

  76

  Trey held his wife and children as close to himself as he could get them. He tore his shirt off and wrapped it around Carly’s side to help stop the wound up. He wanted to drown in the feeling of their skin, their smell, their sound, their taste as he kissed Mark’s forehead and Teresa’s cheek. He held his wife the longest, and they cried.

  When he felt the strength, he helped Carly up. “Maybe you should go get help,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “We’ll make it back to the boat. I’m not going to leave you.”

  Carly was feeling weak, but she leaned against him as they walked back down the winding path of the cavern. Teresa held Mark’s hand, but kept one hand on her father’s back as he walked, just to make sure he was there.

  When they came to the lower exit from the caverns, they saw that the water had risen. The boats were gone, washed out with the tide.

  “So, what now? An earthquake?” Carly asked, keeping her sense of humor intact.

  Trey held up the flare. He set Carly down at the edge of the path. He instructed Mark and Teresa to stay with her.

  Trey Campbell walked out into the dark sea, flare held high.

  The water reached his chest, and he found a rock to climb onto.

  He waved the flare back and forth, trusting that someone would see it and send help.

  Within an hour, he saw the lights of another boat. As it got closer, he saw that it was an old fashioned fishing trawler. A man on board waved a lantern, and Trey shouted, waving the flare faster until it seemed like he’d painted the sky red with it.

  77

  She heard him. The shout. Like a cry of joy.

  Agnes Hatcher lay on a slanting rock shelf of the monk’s well. The smells all around her were of sea anemone and urchin, and dead fish. The water was gently lapping at her back where it had risen with the tide. She would drown, or die from the fall. Or she would live and starve, too weak to call out for help—and then die slowly in several days. It didn’t matter to her.

  She stared up the sheer wall to the white chalk of the cavern, which seemed to glow in the dark. A memory came to her, not of a basement in Whitechapel, nor with the man who had taken her from the gas station restroom.

  She was ten, and at her parents’ house. It was her birthday, and her father was taking her to the park to ride the ponies.

  The memory was brief but intense: like a birthday candle just before it was blown out.

  Her small hand within her father’s larger hand.

 
Warmth.

  She could not move, no matter how hard she tried. She felt the blood pulsing from her wrist.

  It was like being in that room again at Darden.

  Restrained.

  But the cloth was off her face. She could see. At least, she could still see.

  Sight was its own kind of freedom.

  Her lungs hurt, and breathing was difficult. All her energy went into each breath.

  Minutes later, she heard the rush of water as it flooded the well-like chamber.

  The salt stung the stab wounds in her wrist. But pain was distant, like the crashing waves outside the caverns.

  Death was like going home. It had to take you in when there was nowhere else to go.

  She was going home, finally. After all this time.

  She awaited, patiently, the next incarnation.

  It came to her, not as the sea rushing over her face, nor as the blood drained from her body, but as a cloak of fire in her mind.

  78

  After the old fisherman had located them and brought them back to town, and after Carly got patched up at a local clinic, they had spent the morning at the police station, giving their statements to Oscar Arboles. They had spent the afternoon sleeping at the Breakers Hotel. He had slept in a bed wrapped around his wife; his children in cots, in the same room. He didn’t know how long a time would pass until he would allow them out of his sight.

  Trey awoke to the explosions and whistles of firecrackers.

  “Oh,” he said, waking Carly. “The Fourth.”

  She rubbed her eyes. He kissed her several times before he could bring himself to get out of bed.

  “Would it be foolish to take the kids to see the fireworks?” Carly asked. She was feeling better. “I mean, after all we’ve been through?”

  “We’re on vacation,” Trey answered. “Why not?”

  In the bay, a flat barge shot off the brilliant fireworks. Yachts and sloops of all sizes speckled the horizon. A band played John Phillip Sousa marches from the docks. The beach lit up with sparklers. Tourists had packed the place in twenty-four hours.

  That night, Trey sat out in another rented boat holding Carly, while Mark and Teresa were amazed by the night fireworks.

  The last rocket launched and sprayed a rainbow of color across the night.

  For a second, Trey felt a strange tug within him. He shivered slightly.

  “Something wrong?” Carly asked, noticing his change of expression.

  He didn’t want to say what he felt. He said, “Just happy we made it through.”

  “They’ll find her body,” Carly said. “No one could survive that fall. Not even her.”

  Trey Campbell returned his attention to the falling sparkles, and to the renewed joy in his children’s faces.

  But he felt it again.

  Within him.

  She’s gone.

  He thought he’d heard her voice whisper to him, Beloved!

  Trey imagined a stone alley, and a shivering young girl standing in its corner. She watched the basement of an adjoining tenement rage with fire. As the flames shot up through the night, the girl moved closer to the fire, as if looking for something.

  “Are you there?” she asked the fire. “Jack?”

  Trey tried to warn her away, but the girl pulled her cloak closer around her shoulders. She moved towards the burning building. She lifted a grate that was red from heat. The flesh of her fingers burned against it. As the tongues of fire shot up from below, the girl descended into the burning room.

  Trey thought he saw them, clutch at each other as if they were the only souls in the world. Clutch and claw and embrace as the flames engulfed them.

  He watched the sky brighten with one last shattering spray of light.

  For a moment, it illuminated the heavens.

  And then, the sky was dark, a mystery.

  Trey Campbell wondered if, somewhere safe, she would be reborn.

  * * *

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  Publisher Information

  Copyright © 1997, 2012 Douglas Clegg

  Cover Design Copyright © 2012 Alkemara Press

  Cover image courtesy of iStockphoto.com, used with permission. Image Copyright © 2006 Pascal Genest.

  eBook Creation by Book Looks Design http://www.booklooksdesign.com

  FICTION - HORROR

  FICTION - SUSPENSE

  FICTION - THRILLER

  FICTION - CRIME

  Have you read all of Douglas Clegg’s novels and collections? Here are some to check out at the link above, or at your favorite online bookseller:

  The Hour Before Dark

  Breeder

  You Come When I Call You

  The Nightmare Chronicles

  The Children’s Hour

  Naomi

  Coming of Age: Three Novellas

  Goat Dance

  Afterlife.

  And there are more!

  http://DouglasClegg.com/ebooks

  * * * *

  Red Angel

  Book 2 of the Criminally Insane Series

  By Douglas Clegg

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Published by arrangement with Alkemara Press. Further publisher, copyright and other information can be found at the end of this eBook

  Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain.

  —From the Book of Revelation.

  Prologue

  1

  Night. Twenty-three triple-fenced acres. Bright lights create an unnatural daylight glow around the facility. The low, white, institutional outposts of a state hospital.

  The Darden State Hospital for Criminal Justice on the engraved granite marker at the entry gate, flanked by a guard house and a parked police SUV.

  Within, locked doors lead to the quiet of long green corridors. Patients asleep. Restrained. Drugged. Muffled sounds as some within the rooms talk or even touch. Rules are broken when authority is removed.

  A nurse sets up meds for the after midnight shift, counting pills, sorting them into cups.

  The echoing rattle, squeak, slide of the wheels of a med cart as a psych tech and nurse move down the hall, their voices low and nearly inaudible.

  A doctor passes them, clipboard in hand, flanked by two large men in white jackets and yellow shirts.

  Sound of someone jogging down another hallway — a tap, tap, tap of shoes.

  Doors are shut; vending machine area is locked; the white light from the canteen cuts a rectangle of brightness into the dimly lit hall.

  Ward D, at the end, another corridor is closed off from the rest.

  Twin red lights set above the emergency box interrupt the white and green of the hallway.

  Two Correctional Officers stand guard in front of steel doors, each with a portal window.

  Above the doors, a sign reads: Program 28 | Specialized Treatment and Observation. Authorized Personnel | Access Limited.

  Through the porthole windows, the hall has a metallic, futuristic look.

  Rooms to the left, observation area to the right.

  Three psych techs sit at desks, but seem to ignore the rooms. Joking. Gossiping. Complaining. Voices kept low.

  The rooms are dark, behind bars and glass.

  Patients sleep.

  One of the forensics patients within Program 28 begins to wail as if to wake the dead.

  In seconds, a psychiatric technician unlocks the door, running to the patient's bedside.

  The lights come up in the room with the cot on which the patient sleeps.

  Another psych tech stands in the doorway.

  "What the hell," the psych tech says.

  "Jesus H," says the other.


  The patient, eyes closed as if he has been asleep the whole time and did not cry out, lies there, his prison issue pajamas torn across his chest.

  On his stomach are words, carved as if by sharp fingernails.

  It is a long sentence, and runs from just beneath his nipples to the small tufts of hair just below his waist line.

  The psych tech near the cot scratches his head, but doesn't for a moment stop watching the patient on the cot.

  His name is Michael Scoleri, but he calls himself Abraxas, and he was known, in the outside world, before he was sentenced to life as an SVP, and then reclassified as an SSPVS7, for carving this name on the bodies of the women he murdered.

  Before he entered Darden State, he believed he was God.

  Now, he's not so sure.

  His restraints are torn at his wrists.

  Blood all over his hands.

  On his stomach, the words:

  SUFFER THE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME.

  In smaller cuts beneath this, along his thigh, when he is inspected, there are other names, including LUCAS.

  2

  The stone angel stares with sightless eyes at the man.

  In a stone room, miles from Darden State, steam rises from a pool of water.

  The man holds a limp child in his arms, dipping the child's scalp back into the water.

  3

  Christmas is just a week and a half away. The snow-topped mountains above the Inland Empire of Southern California attest to winter, although, in the valley below, it is generally all palm trees and orange blossoms.