Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  At first Grove felt as though he were sinking very slowly into the primordial earth, his body gradually morphing into the black stone floor, a million years of history flying by with that syrupy time-lapse speed; his organs, bones, and flesh putrefying, hardening, fossilizing, vanishing into the ground, never to be seen again.

  The killer moved around behind him and started dragging him headfirst across the pulverized rock toward the iron scaffolding.

  Even in his altered state Grove knew where the killer was taking him. They were inching toward the mouth of that bottomless well known as the Back Shaft—more than ten thousand feet deep. That’s where they were going.

  Down the rabbit hole.

  There was a bump as Grove’s shoulder blades scraped the lip of the pit, and Grove nearly swallowed the poison capsule, now wedged between his cheek and molars. Everything began to spin, the darkness puckering around his one good eye, the light irising down like a silent-movie fade. Grove summoned all his strength to keep his eyes open.

  The killer lifted Grove up by the arms and set him into an antique iron basket—a coal scoop that years ago had doubled as a conveyance for miners—that dangled from a cable at the top of the shaft. In the darkness the massive enclosure squeaked with Grove’s weight like old bones creaking.

  In his dwindling awareness Grove could feel the cold root-cellar air suddenly waft up around him. He could smell the damp, putrid decay. The iris continued closing down. It was so dark now Grove couldn’t see anything.

  That pinching sensation worsened around his left ankle as though tiny teeth were biting into his flesh. What the hell was that? A rat? With his tongue he moved the vial of potassium cyanate between his two back molars. Now all he had to do was bite down.

  Bite down and avoid the horrors about to come: from his studies Grove knew that the next stage was torture, and not only could he avoid that by killing himself, he could also ensure at least a Pyrrhic victory.

  The monster would be denied.

  The enclosure creaked again as the monster climbed into the basket beside Grove, who now lay on his back. A stone fell through the bottom grate beneath them, and it fell and fell and fell and fell and fell and it seemed to go on falling forever and ever. Grove couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t use any of his senses.

  He prepared himself to bite down.

  In the last little scintilla of light, probably from the distant dying methane glow, Grove managed to glimpse the silhouette of the monster once known as John Q Public, hovering over him in those close quarters, rippling tattooed muscles gleaming with sweat as he grasped the ancient cable—

  —and he began to let out twelve inches at a time, slowly lowering the block-and-tackle-style pulley with a squeak-squeak-squeak—

  —and the enclosure began to slowly descend into the bottomless pit, the asshole of the world, the last circle of hell—

  —and Grove passed out before he got a chance to bite down.

  FORTY-SIX

  The killer remembers his birth—not necessarily on the surface of his consciousness, but on a cellular level, in his marrow, as a bird remembers its route of migration—an ash tossed on the whirlwind, an invisible parasite lost in the atmosphere. He remembers the years and years of darkness, adrift in the vacuum of limbo. But most of all he remembers the moment he was finally reborn, made flesh: that hot day in August when the FBI man locked him in that airless interrogation room with the coffee stains and yellow nicotine walls and cracked panel of mirrors, a million fractured faces staring back at him, drilling holes in his brain. He will never forget the moment their eyes met like an atom bomb erupting in his soul: the spirit of a vanquished twin entering him.

  Now it was time to fulfill the ancient prophecy whispered in the secret passageways of his brain, uttered in Old Languages, a ghostly voice from the abyss. To meet his Other, to face his double in hell.

  To bring about the End Days.

  To make the exchange.

  At the threshold.

  Now.

  The enclosure hit rock-bottom, a depth of 12,311 feet, at precisely 1:17 A.M. Eastern Standard Time. The killer—known to African relief workers as “the boy without a name” and to the junkies back in Chicago as “The Measuring Man” and to the Feds as “John Q Public”—finally released his grip on the iron cable, the wound in his side oozing blood.

  He fell back against the side of the basket, making the iron struts squeak in the stony silence and utter blackness of the shaft. His big hands were greasy with blood and perspiration. His lungs ached. It had taken nearly three hours to get to the bottom rung of the E, moving slowly and steadily, a foot per second.

  Eyes adjusting to the dark, the killer crouched down and blindly felt around the corrugated steel floor of the enclosure. He found the small penlight that he had stashed there in a wad of cloth, picked it up, and clenched it between his rotting teeth like a cigarette holder. He clicked it on.

  Black snow danced in the beam. Particles of coal-ash, floating on convection currents, made it impossible to see more than inches beyond the narrow beam of the penlight. The air smelled of scorched brimstone and char, as thick as gauze on his naked body, on his face, in his eyes, as he stood there, very still now, gazing down at that limp form lying in a heap in the corner of the scoop.

  Taking pained breaths, the killer tried in vain to get more of the poisoned air into his lungs, but the madness and secret voices inside him drove him on. He needed to get to the sacred site as soon as possible.

  It took him a while to get Grove’s flaccid body out of that rickety enclosure, then down the twenty or thirty-some yards of obsidian black tunnel to the sacrificial shrine. Legs cold and stiff from the knife wound just below his rib cage, the monster dragged the FBI profiler by the shoulders, the man’s heels making tiny tracks in the cinder-dust. When the monster finally reached the slab, he found a single bare cage-light hanging overhead. The light had been hastily wired to a small car battery.

  He flipped the light on.

  Behind a veil of black snow, barely visible now in the haze of lamp-ash, the six-inch sheet of shale, elevated by boulders, lay at the heart of the killer’s sacrificial shrine, which resembled a crude Aztec altar. The hollowed-out skull of a German shepherd that John Q had butchered in a Valesburg parking lot sat upside down at the head of the slab, a bowl for Grove’s blood. Countless ribbons of bloodstained fabric, all colors and patterns, dangled over the table like birthday decorations.

  Crime-scene investigators had puzzled over the missing strips of fabric torn from the victims’ clothing at half a dozen scenes. But Grove knew the moment he saw the swatch torn neatly off the edge of Barbie Allison’s lavender Dior scarf that these were talismanic souvenirs—maybe even something deeper and more ritualistic.

  With surprising ease the killer lifted Grove’s body onto the slab.

  The old battered Samsonite suitcase lay open on the cinders at the foot of the platform. The killer knelt down by it and fished through its contents for a moment, until he found the clippers.

  He plugged the device into the battery, then came around to where Grove’s head lolled off to one side of the table.

  Then, in the fog bank of black ash, he started giving Grove a haircut.

  It took less than five minutes to shave Grove’s head, first with the horse-clippers, then with an old Gillette electric razor. Fine wisps of tightly coiled black fuzz flew off into the flurry of ash flakes, or floated down like tufts of black cotton to the cinder floor, the buzzing noise echoing in the distant bowels of the empty dark tunnel. John Q prayed silently, in a dead language, as he worked. When he was done, he stood back and admired his work.

  Something caught his attention on his own chest, and he looked down, the penlight shining off his bulging pectoral muscle. A downy fleck of Grove’s fuzzy black hair was adhering to the monster’s skin, halfway between the twin tattoos, the ones depicting measuring tape curling around his nipples. He rubbed the hair away and part of the tattoo strea
ked. The monster looked at it. He rubbed the tattoo some more, and more of it came off. Delicate lines smudged and streaked away like old paint.

  The temporary ink had done its job well—the illusion had fooled even the most suspicious authorities. Now it was time to bathe in the profiler’s blood and wash the rest of John Q Public away.

  And make the exchange.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Grove awoke in fits and starts, the searing pain penetrating his narcotic hangover. At first, his eyes managed to only flick open a centimeter or two, letting in a quick flash of something moving across his body, barely visible in the fog of black ash, something resembling the silhouette of a killer hunching over Grove’s midsection, working on him in the shifting shadows of that swaying bare cage-light. Then his eyelids sank again, still too heavy to manage.

  Another sharp stinging sensation jostled him awake, this one to the left of his belly button, the point of a knife, perhaps, or an ice pick, piercing his skin. Grove’s eyes fluttered open—

  —and he jerked forward now, fully awake, his brain screaming DANGER DANGER DANGER DANGER DANGER, but something held him down, tethered him to the hard cold surface of the table or platform or bed—or whatever it was—on which he was splayed. He sucked in a breath, trying to get air into his lungs, realizing many things all at once: he lay on a stone slab engulfed in black snowfall, like Black Christmas, the air so thick with flyaway ash it looked like a faulty TV signal, a picture obscured by pixels of interference, and Grove right in the middle of it, exposed like a lamb in a slaughterhouse, his duster gone, his shirt off, his pants yanked down to his ankles, and the big naked black man hunched over his stomach hurting him, hurting him badly with something that went BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ like an electric razor.

  Grove began hyperventilating with terror as his eyesight returned, focusing on his bare stomach.

  The pain came from a tattoo needle—this freak was inking tattoos into Grove’s skin—and that seemed to awaken some deeper part of Grove’s psyche, but none of it made sense yet, he was too groggy, too confused and disoriented. He remembered nothing. He had no idea where he was, or who this motherfucker was, or why he was giving Grove a prison cell mural on his flesh. Maybe this was all a bad dream, and he would wake up at any moment.

  He closed his eyes and another tremendous jolt of pain stung his midsection.

  Grove let out a yelp, high and shrill, and the freak looked up from his work, grinning a mouthful of blackened teeth at Grove, and then Grove knew this was no dream because he could see what the big man was inking into his skin with that old electric needle that looked like a welding iron stinking of overheating transistors and scorched hair: rulers and tape measures curling like vines up Grove’s breastbone and around his pectorals.

  Now panic started taking hold, turning Grove’s innards to ice.

  “S-stop—ss-stop,” Grove finally uttered, his mouth feeling as though it were made of sand. He had no idea how he had gotten here—wherever “here” was—but it looked bad, it looked very bad. He lay at the threshold of a narrow tunnel that receded into absolute blackness, and the walls were moldering black rock, and the air swam thick with motes of charred ash, and it stank of methane down here.

  That much seemed obvious: he was down somewhere, underground, perhaps way underground. The tattoo needle stung him again, sending off alarms in his head, making him cringe, as his fractured brain crackled suddenly with a disjointed memory like a half-formed soundbite playing on a warped phonograph: “What’s left of the air’s got more damp-black gas in it than a dadburned Molotov cocktail.”

  The mine—Wormwood mine!

  Grove realized many things right then in that one gulp as the needle curled around his belly button like an arc welder cutting into his skin: he had chased this son of a bitch, this doppelgänger, this one-man freak show, down a rabbit hole, down the world’s rectum, and now it was all over. Grove was done. He was the Every-Victim. Worse than that, he was trading identities with the monster now. He was exchanging souls with the devil.

  All through this series of revelations, the killer continued painting his masterpiece, meticulously recreating the markings of the Measuring Man, every curl and filigree carefully etched in Grove’s skin now, branding him with madness, igniting his flesh with slow-burning embers of pain. Piece by piece, the transformation formed in Grove’s mind. His head had been shaved. The killer’s own tattoos were gone. The switch, the trade, the inversion. The Law of Exchange. Quid pro quo. Like shards of broken glass imploding and coming together with crystalline clarity, the Endgame presented itself to Grove for the first time.

  “Y-you’re gonna die down here, too,” Grove told the killer then.

  John Q looked up from his work, then whispered something that sounded like “suhssafuss” or “sysiphous”—Grove couldn’t tell.

  “You’re gonna die down here, asshole, right alongside me. You’re gonna die!”

  The hoarse, breathless cry took all the wind out of Grove, and all the strength flowed out of him as his head lolled back onto the slab.

  Then something else occurred to him: the pellet. The poison vial.

  Maybe that was the only way to prevent the master plan, prevent the switch. Probing his mouth with his tongue, he couldn’t feel it. Horrible thoughts popped and crackled in his brain as he remembered the way the tiny vial had been wedged between his left cheek and molar. Gone now. Gone. Had he swallowed it? Was it already too late?

  Chills poured down his body as the tattoo needle tracked down his pelvic bone toward his genitals. He looked down the length of his body and saw his flaccid penis lying sideways across his pelvic bone, a slug, the most sensitive part of his body.

  He turned away, slamming his eyes shut. “Get it over with! Getitoverwith!”

  When he opened his eyes he saw the small translucent capsule on the slab next to his head, lying in a tiny puddle of bloody saliva. The side of his face was moist from his pink drool. The vial must have fallen out of his mouth at some point during the torture.

  The pellet was intact.

  Grove craned his neck toward the capsule of potassium cyanate, his swollen lips close enough now to suck it in with the reverence of a congregant consuming the host.

  Something stopped him. Maybe it was the odd and unexpected sensation of warmth. Rising in him. Pouring over him. Taking the pain away. Warmth unlike any warmth he had ever encountered, warmth that spread through his tendons like velvety honey. Or perhaps it was the strange, incongruous flow of thoughts that suddenly ran through his mind at that darkest moment, in that darkest possible place on earth, like a poem—the face of baby Aaron in the sunlight, the sound of Sarah Vaughan’s gorgeous voice hitting the high C in the chorus of “Lover Man,” the touch of Maura’s breath on the back of his neck, the first smoky-sweet sip of espresso in the morning, the smell of sassafras stewing in a gumbo—all of it coalescing into one great ebullient affirmation that made him spit that goddamned capsule out.

  Chances are, though, it was none of these things. Chances are it was the pinching sensation around his ankle that had been bothering him since he had entered the mine approximately eight and a half hours ago.

  He finally glimpsed, out of the bottom edges of his eye, the source of that pinching.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  At the bottom of his shackled right leg, where his pants and underwear were bunched around his ankle, the edge of a leather strap peeked out from under coal-stained cotton cuffs. The significance of that strap, which had been digging into the thin flesh just beneath his ankle for hours, registered over the space of a nanosecond in Grove’s forebrain, and whether it was fate or divine intervention or sheer dumb luck, Grove realized in that briefest of moments that his chronic absentmindedness had finally paid off.

  In the gloomy yellow shroud of light, the killer paused, lifting that infernal buzzing needle from Grove’s burning midsection.

  Grove sucked in a labored breath, his lungs aching unmercifully, the pain from the needle
radiating up the back of his tailbone, up his spine, and throughout his frozen limbs. He marshaled his strength then, focusing his thoughts down to a single act, a single chance, a single opportunity that was about to present itself.

  The monster turned his back suddenly to change a color cartridge.

  At once Grove quickly tensed his right leg against its leather shackle, and then strained his right hand in its strap, to see if he could reach his ankle.

  But it was no good.

  It was no goddamn good.

  Grove closed his eyes, straining furiously in the dark, straining and straining.

  The tips of his fingers, blackened from coal dust and cramping with exertion, would only come to within about six inches of the fabric bunched around his ankle, and no matter how hard he strained to bend his knee backward, stretch his fingers downward, and strain and strain to bring those two extremities together, he couldn’t reach the errant strap of leather poking out of the wrinkled fabric.

  That strange warmth rose inside Grove again with the radiance of a fever.

  The monster turned back to his masterpiece with a new color to inject into Grove’s flesh. The ashy snow of dust and gaseous fog had grown so thick now, stirred up by all the hectic movement, it was hard to see the killer’s face, the cone of light from the cage-bulb like a whirlpool, sucking everything up into its artificial heat. Grove couldn’t breathe. He was burning up with alien warmth, struggling to see through that soupy atmosphere that had fermented over the decades into rocket fuel as flammable as liquid nitrogen.