Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  “Here it comes,” the old man mumbled in a warning voice, gripping the handles of his walker with knuckles so white and arthritic they looked petrified.

  “Here comes what?” Drinkwater held onto a cabinet for balance.

  “This ain’t possible.” Jamie Lou’s eyes were huge and aimed up at the ceiling as though she were watching for some dark miracle.

  Drinkwater spun toward a strange sound suddenly coming from outside—actually it was the sudden absence of sound: all the droning crickets and insects and burbling tree frogs, so omnipresent in the Allegheny Mountains, abruptly ceased with the violent suddenness of a CD cutting off. “What? What is it?!”

  The old man closed his eyes and braced himself. “Hell’s been opened up,” he murmured.

  Drinkwater gawked at the old man, and was about to scream something else at him when she felt the first vibrations resonating like the tines of a tuning fork beneath her feet. The sensation made her freeze.

  When Drinkwater was a kid, she used to visit a cousin in Chicago who lived by the elevated train tracks. Every night, Drinkwater would lie in a bunk near the window and count the seconds before another deep vibration would begin gently shaking the darkened bedroom. The shaking would rise and rise as the train approached, until little Edith had to slap her hands over her ears and brace herself against the bed frame for fear she would be vibrated right out of her bunk and onto the floor. When the train finally passed in a magnificent clamor of sparks and noise, it felt as though the walls were going to fall down on top of her. This feeling—magnified about a billion times—was exactly how Drinkwater felt right at this moment: as though a gargantuan train was headed for the RV.

  “Get under something!”

  Jamie Lou’s scream reached Drinkwater’s ears like the echo of a pistol shot, slightly out of synch with what she was seeing: the teenager lurching under the table, her mouth moving, but sounds getting jumbled all together. The noise swirled around Drinkwater now, glass breaking, the distant crack of timbers like mortar fire, and a roaring waterfall sound getting closer and closer, louder and louder, until the rushing white noise started sounding like a runaway train, a mad broken runaway train, as the vibrations made the RV convulse and buckle and crack down the middle.

  Drinkwater dropped to the floor, curling into a fetal position and shrieking.

  The floor shifted beneath her. Something popped like a firecracker in the wall, a gout of sparks spitting from an electrical outlet. The old man was under the table now next to his granddaughter, who was sobbing uncontrollably, but Drinkwater heard very little of their voices, the noise of broken pipes and groaning metal pounding in her ears. The chassis buckled beneath them.

  Drinkwater slammed her eyes shut then, as cold greasy water came spraying down on top of them, and she started praying like crazy, she prayed to God that Grove had not unleashed something unnamable down there, something vast and inexorable—a genie that could never be put back. God would answer her frenzied query soon enough.

  Over the next few moments, in fact, Drinkwater would begin to learn the true nature of what Grove had done in that mine—

  —which began six hours and fifty-seven minutes earlier, with Grove’s journey into darkness.

  PART III

  The Wormwood Event

  And in the lowest deep a lower deep Still threatening to devour me…

  To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

  —JOHN MILTON, Paradise Lost

  The true nature of the murderous psychopath may be too painful for the sane to face: that they are us.

  —ULYSSES GROVE, The Psychopathological

  Archetype: Toward a Statistical Model

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  The first thing Grove noticed upon entering the Pithead building at exactly 6:51 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, after flipping on his heavy-duty flashlight and playing it across Peg-Board panels laden with rows of old dented miner hats, long forgotten and furry with dust, was the absence of a hole in the ground.

  Where the hell was the shaft?

  He stood there for endless moments, his back against the wall, his heart thumping. He had no idea when and where and how he would ambushed—the killer could be lurking right there in that vestibule building—so he didn’t move for a quite a long while, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness, allowing his heart to calm down.

  At length he got a fix on the immediate area just inside that rusted metal door—the lock bore the scars of a recent jimmy-stick, undoubtedly the entrance through which John Q had passed at some point over the last few days—and then, very slowly, he scanned the light beam across filthy aluminum walls. The beam flitted across dusty objects that confirmed Old Man Clinger’s overview of the place.

  An old rolltop desk sat nearby, probably once stationed there to induct new miners or process time cards but now congealed shut in the eternal darkness, lined with filth and age. Ramshackle wooden chairs lay along the wall to the left, most of them overturned and cocooned in spiderwebs. Stalactites of dust-lined calcium deposits hung down from the ceiling like fuzzy icicles. Kerosene lanterns spoke of old-fashioned eras.

  It was hard to tell in the dark, with his one good eye, but the room seemed to stretch at least fifty feet or so, terminating at a wall drifted with trash. A doorway to the right—now boarded with Sheetrock—most likely led to the washhouse, and to the left, another sealed door was probably the lamp cabin.

  According to Clinger, miners would emerge at the end of each day, exhausted, wheezing, their faces black with dust, hauling their lunch buckets and water jugs. They would go to the lamp cabin and return their headlamp and battery for recharging. In return they would receive a brass tag, like a coatroom token, embossed with their ID number. Batteries were engraved with the same numbers.

  A Peg-Board wall full of hooks near the door, like the board on which keys are hung in a parking garage, displayed the brass ID tags of miners currently on shift. In the event of a cave-in or some other disaster, the board would tell rescuers how many souls were trapped. At Wormwood, with all its misadventures, some of the miners had come to call the board “Death Row.”

  The second thing Grove noticed about that outer building was the smell. The moldy rock floor and cobweb-filmed walls exuded a kind of acrid metallic must, like the inside of a book that hadn’t been opened for centuries. Grove’s nose—finely tuned from years of failed gourmet cooking experiments—recognized lower notes beneath the mélange of filth. Assorted vermin long since decayed to dust, dried animal droppings, desiccated rats.

  He froze.

  Right up until that very moment—as his body became very still, very rigid and tense—he had secretly harbored doubts that John Q Public was indeed waiting for him there, somewhere in the depths of that deserted mine. Grove’s intuition had tricked him more than once in the past. His calculations had frequently been wrong, his inner voice off the mark. And he knew if he allowed himself to think too hard about the wisdom of walking into a trap, he would check himself into a rubber room. But right then, as the beam of his flashlight brushed along the edge of something shiny on the far wall, he knew with unalloyed certainty that he had come to the right place.

  His destiny had brought him here, his whole life leading up to this single act.

  Death waited for him in the darkness below.

  A few minutes passed. Hard to tell how many. The passage of time had already started breaking down in the dark, like a yolk separating from the white. At last Grove managed to make his legs work and went over to the far wall.

  He dropped his duffel bag. It made a loud clanking noise that did not echo in the dark airless chamber. He knelt and unzipped the bag, trying to gather his thoughts, ignoring the voices whispering like night breezes in his midbrain. He found his surgical gloves and snapped one on each hand.

  The blood on the wall was fresh. It looked like raspberry jam clinging to the ancient aluminum bulwark.

  Grove went over to it and brushed a rubber-tipped finger ac
ross the outer lines of the design. Was it human or animal blood? It didn’t really matter—the drawing was proof positive that John Q lurked somewhere in the labyrinth below, and it made the back of Grove’s neck prickle: the gun-target silhouette from his class.

  It was a perfect rendering, carefully drawn in simple thick outlines, the bulbous head, the rounded-off shoulders, the circle around it. The style was like a finger painting done by a brilliant child: the faceless archetype in all its blank, dead, impassive glory.

  Grove stepped back and shone the light around its edges. There was a second blood-painting about eight feet away: another rendering of the silhouette, almost an exact copy, staring blankly back at him. Two generic silhouettes of every-killers.

  A perfect pair.

  Grove’s spine went cold. It was a message meant for him and him alone.

  Wait, wait a minute, wait a minute. He stared at the twin silhouettes, stared and pondered. In the space between the symbols, a stack of uneven panels of plywood leaned against the wall—the wood so old and gray and petrified it looked like flint—and he realized there was something behind the plywood.

  He reached for the panels and shoved them aside with a grunt.

  The doorway behind the wood was molded out of aluminum casting. About the size of a submarine hatch, it lay wide open, displaying the utter darkness on the other side, a darkness that seemed to have a weight and texture to it not unlike tar. Now Grove remembered the old man explaining the mine’s layout, and the fact that access to the shaft would not be in the outer building, but would instead lie further in.

  Grove went over to the duffel bag, knelt down, and as carefully and silently as possible started removing his “hit kit.”

  Since traditional sidearms were out of the question, he pulled out an eleven-inch-long Randall-style knife made by a Kenyan blacksmith. The blade was serrated along one edge and sheathed in buttery brown leather—a family heirloom meant to kill ibex that he had thrown into his bag back at Pelican Bay because he was going on instinct now. The sheath was engraved with a Swahili phrase: Ukwenda babili kwali wama pa chalo.

  He aimed the flashlight at the sheath, and looked at the engraving. He blinked. The darkness must have already been working on him. He blinked again, and shook his head, because he saw something crawling across the end of the sheath like delicate little veins spreading in the grain, like silken spiderwebs branching in the darkness, beginning to form words: Nnn nn nn nn n n nnnn d d d d d deya ndeya ndeya no mwana ndeya ndeya no mwana wandi munshila ba mpapula—

  Grove dropped the knife.

  It made an inordinately loud clatter in the dead stillness of the Pit shed, and Grove tensed all over, his testicles shrinking up into his pelvic bone, because the knife sheath was telling him to cross over into the land of shadows, to sacrifice himself, to martyr himself, but if there was one thing Grove didn’t need right now it was more advice from visions. He was there to kill a killer, and that’s all he was going to do. Nothing fancy. Nothing mystical.

  He looked at the sheath.

  It had returned to normal.

  Grove let out a tense sigh. He realized he was breathing very quickly already, almost panting. He had to get his brain under control.

  He attached the sheath to his belt, then dug in the duffel for the rest of his supplies. He found the stun gun—about the size of a cigarette pack, with a pistol grip—its hardwired spike carrying fifty thousand watts of persuasive voltage. He stuffed the stun gun into the back pocket of his jeans. His hands shook slightly. But it wasn’t unmanageable.

  Nearly a dozen other items came out of the duffel and went into the pockets of his duster, into small nylon packs attached to his belt, or onto a strap around his neck: night-vision goggles, oxygen mask, small digital camera, batteries, stainless-steel handcuffs, a smaller halogen penlight with a head strap, protein bars, a small pickax, a bottle of water, and the poison pellet in its sinister little government-issue vial.

  That last item—which he stashed in the inside pocket of his duster—screamed madness at him. The futility of what he was doing, the folly, the hubris, the waste—it all came bubbling up through him like a wave of doom. He was supposed to be the master of this strange obscure corner of law enforcement called behavioral profiling. Now look at him. Obliging a madman, walking into certain death. Was it possible the monster shared his DNA?

  His bloodline?

  The final item transferred from the duffel to Grove’s person was a small handcrafted pouch made of doeskin by an anonymous African artisan. Inside the pouch were essential talismans—bones, feathers, beads, animal paws, and lucky charms—acquired over a lifetime of secret ruminations. He put the pouch in his pants pocket and zipped the duffel bag shut.

  It was time to surgically remove the cancer. He rose and took a deep breath.

  Then he passed through the door into the darkness on the other side.

  THIRTY-NINE

  Residents of Valesburg, Kentucky, had good reason to steer clear of Wormwood Mine. First drilled in 1897, the new mine was part of the decadent Gilded Age of industrialization—an era during which the vast, rich coal deposits beneath the Allegheny Mountains began feeding America’s insatiable hunger for that black narcotic known as fossil fuel. But there was something wrong at Wormwood from the start.

  Maybe it was simply bad luck. Maybe it was something about the soil, or the way the earth had been breached. Or perhaps there was something sacred about this “driftless” region of Kentucky. Geologists refer to areas that remained stationary during the glacial shifts of the Paleozoic period as “driftless.”

  Today, these driftless regions are as rare as black diamond deposits. They lay beneath the bedrock like stubborn prehistoric roots. Their marrow is as old as the solar system, their minerals and sediments reaching back to the formation of the earth. Cultists believe these driftless regions offer pipelines to the netherworld.

  Since the establishment of their town in 1811, citizens of Valesburg, Kentucky, have preferred not to think about it.

  Grove found a second vestibule-style room, this one smaller than the outer chamber, with a cobblestone floor.

  The darkness thickened like a soup, congealing around him, absolutely no moonlight penetrating the low ceiling now. He paused.

  He looked over his shoulder, then turned around and around, the beam of his flashlight threading through ancient motes of dust and age, the particles floating like luminous plankton in the sea of black.

  The beam landed on a rusted enclosure resembling a construction manhole, surrounded by battered stanchions and sawhorses. Part of the lift had been broken away, the bent pole lying on the floor.

  Grove went over to the shaft and shone his light down inside the elevator.

  His pulse quickened as he saw the gaping hole in the floor, and the deeper blackness within it, showing through the jagged maw. The mine shaft appeared to be about eight to ten feet in diameter, plunging down into utter darkness darker than the inside of a womb.

  Someone had taken a crowbar to the elevator’s floor, someone with incredible strength, snapping rivets with the ease of ripping buttons off a shirt. With no electrical power, that someone would have had to climb down the step-pads embedded in the wall of the shaft.

  Grove took a deep breath, his duster laden with supplies, already feeling as though it weighed a ton. He climbed into the elevator enclosure, the flashlight hanging around his neck. It took him a few minutes of grunting effort to lower himself through the hole in the floor, guiding his movements mostly by feel.

  At last he got his right toe wedged into the first rung of the footholds.

  He began to descend.

  In the early days of the mine, ponies would power the conveyor belts and coal carts, and gas lamps would light the shafts and corridors. In its second year of operation, twenty-three men perished underground when gas lanterns ignited the flammable coal dust that hangs like veils in the airless tunnels. Cave-ins would occur on a weekly basis. Giant drill bits
periodically breached into the nearby Mannehequa River, flooding the labyrinth, drowning miners and shutting down operations for months.

  But these mishaps were expected—they were the standard risks of the day.

  Wormwood, unlike other mines, had a second tier of misfortune that many attributed to otherworldly sources.

  In just over seven decades, Wormwood Mining Company lost more than two thousand men in the darkness below its pit sheds. Many deaths were unexplained, many bodies never recovered. Scores of fatalities—often listed euphemistically in company reports as “environmental”—were self-inflicted. Miners ate the muzzles of shotguns, spattering their brain tissue across the lampblack. Or they threw themselves down shafts, or emptied their veins into the cinderdust. Madness at Wormwood was as common as the dry, hacking cough of a lifetimer.

  In 1927 a drill operator died of blood loss after severing his own penis with a cable cutter and tucking the organ neatly into his lunch bucket. Four years later an entire crew went blind, just spontaneously lost their sight. And then in 1948 a strange radio transmission came up from the bottom of shaft number four, where a dozen miners had been cutting a new branch.

  The message, a nearly unintelligible garble of laughter and sobbing, was received only minutes before the branch caved in, killing all twelve men. Court-sealed transcripts included the following: “We opened it…horrible…alive…the end of us…the end of all of us.”

  Grove steadily descended. One step at a time. One handhold after another. His heavy breathing echoed in synch with his movements, his eyes dilated and hyperalert. After every step he methodically glanced downward, but all he could see in the swaying beam of his flashlight—which still dangled from his neck—were the endless footholds plunging down into the black void.

  The lining of the shaft, a rough, pebbly surface of minerals and earth, hovered only inches from his nose as he descended, and smelled of mire and offal. A narrow iron rail ran along each side of him, and the rungs, at least a century old, were made of stone, carved into the shaft wall like big thumbnails.