Terrorscape (Horrorscape)

by Campbell, Nenia

  And I would be responsible.

  She knew this as a fact deep down in her bones; it had been her responsibility to kill him. It was as if he were an animal that had gotten a taste for human blood and needed to be put down, and she were the one with the rifle. It was kill or be killed, and by failing, she had unleashed something dreadful.

  Something she alone could fix.

  But only if I look.

  How juvenile that mindset was, as if she were a child hiding from the monsters under her bed and saying, “If I can't see them, they can't see me.” She was little better than an ostrich with its head buried in the sand, too frightened to even fight back.

  I tried fighting back. I lost. Val's resolve lasted all of two days. Her computer haunted her like a ghost, taunting her. Each time she logged on to do schoolwork she felt a twitch of neural connections from brain to finger that demanded—no, compelled—her to do the search.

  It nibbled at her brain during every waking hour, as consumptive as any disease. All she could think about was whether she should look, and what she feared she might see, and whether what she feared she might see could be any worse than the actual thing.

  Not knowing was worse than knowing, surely. Reality couldn't be as terrible as her own runaway imagination. She was driving herself crazy this way, slowly, like a pot of water left to boil on low.

  Crazier, anyway. That was what she told herself, anyway, as she pulled the laptop in bed with her. That was her rationale. It sounded a heck of a lot better than sheer morbid curiosity, which was a pretty compelling factor in and of itself.

  What am I doing? I shouldn't be doing this. Val entered “Redhead Murders” into the text bar and hit 'search' before she could change her mind. Because in the split second it took to make the search, she wished she had. But it was too late.

  Results flooded the screen. News articles, blog posts, interviews, Tweets, and video links.

  Oh God, Val thought, when she saw the pictures of the victims, staring back at her with eyes the same shade of green as her own. She swallowed, and toggled back to the articles, unable to look at the images any longer.

  There were at least nine documented cases.

  All the girls found were dead, except for one Sheila Cavanaugh in Arizona, who had been subjected to sexual and physical assault, and then left for dead in the desert. She had died of complications unrelated to her injuries. Severe dehydration. She had been unable to identify her attacker.

  The youngest was fourteen-years-old. The oldest was twenty-four. Most of them were raped before they were killed. Some of them had been mutilated. This, too, had been done before death.

  Forensic investigators believed they were knifewounds. They didn't say how, or where, but she could imagine. Oh God, she could imagine. The carved up chess-pieces Lisa and Blake had received in the mail, splashed in red paint. Val had seen him kill before. Seen him draw in the anticipatory breath. Seen him take pleasure in the agonizing pain of others.

  She had been one of them, after all. The murders had started in December— only a few months after his game—with sixteen-year-old Angelica Peters. None in January. Two in February, with the first documented rape case occurring on February 14th. Some reporter had postulated that this serial killer had a twisted sense of humor, and Val thought, sickly, You have no idea.

  Her eyes shifted to the next link. No deaths in March, April, or May. Then three in June. One of those was Sheila, who had been left out in the hot Arizona desert for the buzzards to feast on. That was also when it seemed like he'd begun marking the bodies.

  None in July.

  Another three in August. California. Oregon. Washington. Fear tied up her solar plexus in knots as a horrible thought occurred to her. She clicked the browser's back button, looked at the location of the Angelica Peters case. Connecticut leered back at her. West Virginia. North Carolina. Ohio.

  He's working his way North. And then a moment later, she corrected herself. North-West. No murders in September so far—unless you counted Blake. They wouldn't, of course, since he wasn't a girl and didn't have red hair but….

  What if he was faking at being a serial killer? What if this was some sort of high-stakes diversionary tactic?

  No, that didn't make any sense.

  And then Val remembered that closet at his house, paneled with beasts of prey, chess moves, flowers—and photographs of her. Photographs riddled with dozens of tiny holes where he had thrown darts at her likeness. Killing her hundreds of times in effigy with the merest flick of the wrist.

  “Killing me in effigy,” Val whispered, staring at the screen. Maybe this is what Lisa had meant, accusing her of taking others with her. Gavin couldn't find her, so he was killing young women superficially like her. Giving himself a temporary sense of closure while also sending her a message: When I find you, this is what awaits you.

  Then she remembered Lisa's cryptic message— Are you frightened? Except it wasn't Lisa who sent that message, but Gavin. She knew that just as surely as she knew her own name.

  Just like that, as if the final piece of a puzzle had slipped into place, everything made sense. He had expected her to make the connection before now. If he had one weakness, it was assuming that others would be able to follow his own brilliant, snarled chain of logic. He was taunting her, mocking her.

  Hunting her. Her stomach churned, and she had to dash to the bathroom to keep from throwing up on the rug.

  He's going to kill me.

  But how could he? He had no idea where she was. Val clung to that like a life preserver. He doesn't know where I am. And even if he did, her name was different. She met her unfamiliar eyes. She was different. A leopard couldn't change its spots, but other animals could. They could change their colors, make themselves drab. Blend in with the environment. Val rinsed with mouthwash and when her breathing had returned to the normal rate she did a search on serial killers.

  A lot of them were motivated sexually or by pleasure; for whatever reason, killing tapped into the dopamine pleasure pathways, reinforcing them to kill again and again. Their patterns of killing were cyclic with resting periods in between dense clusters of victims. There were a few names she recognized offhand and the comparisons made her sick.

  She did a search on “Gavin Mecozzi.” The chess sites she remembered from freshmen year had been eclipsed by articles headlining his participation in the murders from that one horrible night. There were also pictures from the trial. Nothing recent, apart from speculation about his disappearance, and reward offers for any information pertaining to the former.

  She looked at that picture of him in the dark suit with that studied look of solemnity, and her heart ached when she saw his handsome face.

  Nobody had linked him to the killings. And why would they? He wouldn't leave evidence behind; he was a grandmaster at chess, used to thinking several moves ahead each game. He would take into account all possibilities, from greatest to least likely, and plan for each accordingly.

  Val looked at the picture of him again, the one that had made her weep when she was fourteen and had only just learned what it was to have your heart broken—not just broken, but toyed with, battered, and completely annihilated. There was something….

  She went back to the other open tab with the articles about serial killers. Yes. There had been a photo there, too. One of those terrible men at trial. He had the same expression on his face. It chilled her, that similarity; it was a sort of malleable penitence that could just as easily become amusement in another form of light. Those dead, soulless eyes….

  Gavin had the most intense stare. Most people couldn't look another individual in the eyes for too long without feeling uncomfortable, but his eye contact had always been unflinchingly prolonged.

  The phone rang. Val stared at it, as if it had become a scorpion poised to sting her with its phenom. She considered letting the call go to voice mail. But what if it was important?

  What if it was Lisa? One look at the caller ID told her it
wasn't, but she picked up anyway, averting her face so her shaky breathing wouldn't be audible over the line. “Y-yes?”

  “Hey. Is this Val?”

  She forgot to turn away this time. “W-who is this?”

  “It's Jade. You know, the party—Mary's friend.” “Jade?” Her lips felt numb. She realized that she had been compressing them, to keep from gasping in anticipation of bad news. “Oh. Oh, thank God.”

  “That's an unusual reaction.” His voice was light. Deceptively so? Val didn't know him enough to tell. “No, I was just—um, yeah, yeah I guess it was.” She forced a laugh. It sounded fake to her own ears. Maybe he'd chalk it up to the connection. “Sorry.”

  “It's cool. So anyway, I was gonna ask you if you were still up for coffee. Maybe tomorrow?” “Coffee. Tomorrow.” Val closed her eyes and tried to pull up a mental calendar. It turned up blank. There was no room for coffee in her world. All she could see were the eyes of those young girls. Of the killers. “Okay.”

  “See you at six?”

  “Okay,” she repeated.

  “Are you feeling all right? You sound sick.” “Fine. I'm fine. Allergies. You know.”

  Where were all these lies coming from? She had never been a good liar. Even as a child, she had found it easier to admit guilt and tell the truth.

  This isn't me. Fear was transforming her, rewiring her. She was metamorphosing into a version of herself she no longer recognized, and that frightened her.

  She didn't think Jade would buy such an obviously contrived excuse—she wasn't even sniffling —but he must have because he said, “See you tomorrow then? At the Student Union?”

  “Uh-huh.” Val waited until she heard him hang up. She stared at the phone in her hand. The details of their conversation started to turn hazy, just seconds afterward. She felt as if her mind were floating and her limbs were lead weights keeping it anchored down. People were dying. People were dying because of her. And she had a date.

  Reality chose that moment to hit her with all the subtlety of a grand piano. She would never be able to have a normal life; the past would catch up to her, no matter what she did. And even if the past didn't, Gavin would. The two were one and the same.

  (I am her future—and she is simply that: mine.) Val pitched down the phone and sobbed.

  ▪▫▪▫▪▫▪ The student cafeteria was a small, comfortable place with paneled white walls and plastic tables. Comfortable was not the word Val would use to describe her current state of mind. Awkward, nervous, paranoid—yes. Comfortable? Not so much.

  Serial killer facts and trivia floated in her head, periodically bobbing to surface like monsters from the deep. Their murders were often based on fantasy and fetishism, paraphilias so terrible that no normal person would ever act upon, let alone possess them.

  She couldn't stop wondering whether Gavin had done any of those things she'd read about. Cannibalism. Necrophilia. The sick sorts of acts that were universal in the repulsion they caused. She had seen him drink blood, her blood, as if it gave him a sort of erotic thrill. Vampirism. She shuddered.

  College was supposed to be her safe place. She had dyed her hair, changed her name. Only her parents knew her address and phone number, although Lisa probably knew the latter too. Now.

  Poor Blake. Poor, poor Blake.

  His only crime had been surviving.

  Val chose an empty table near the back of the cafeteria. She tried not to fixate on the automated doors. Snatches of conversation drifted towards her but she couldn't make heads or tails of any of the actual words. The muffled tones, pitches, and inflections merely fed into her hysteria, mimicking the voices in her own head.

  Nobody here knows who you are. Rather than comforting her, this thought made her feel lost, adrift in a frightening sea of malicious strangers. She glanced down at her watch. Five minutes. Five tortuously long minutes.

  Mary had arrived home as Val was getting ready and had talked her into dressing up. Now Val felt prissy and overdressed. How embarrassing if he stood her up. Everyone would know.

  Pathetic. Tears pricked at her eyes. As if everything else wasn't enough, she had to deal with rejection, too. She blinked them back. What little pride she still possessed commanded that she not cry. Not until she was alone, where no one would see her bleed.

  “Hey—you made it.”

  She lifted her head.

  Jade was holding two ready-made espressos in one hand, a textbook in the other. His outfit was more formal than it had been at the dormal. He wore a blue shirt the same color as his eyes with a jean jacket. Peeking out from beneath his shirt collar was a cowrie shell necklace.

  It's good that he's dressed up, right? Assuming it was for her. Mary would know. Mary was adept at picking apart these situations. She wasn't.

  “Do you need help with those?” she asked, in apropos of other conversational gambits. “Nah, I got it. Used to wait tables at Denny's.” He set the drinks and the book down on the table without spilling a drop. “Speaking of waiting, were you here long?”

  “Me? No. I just got here. You said six, right?”

  “Yeah, I'm early. My watch runs fast.” He sat down, dropping his backpack on the seat between them. Because it's convenient, or because it's a barrier?

  “Oh,” said Val, who did not wear a watch. “You feeling all right?”

  “Allergies.” That was the excuse she had given him wasn't it? She smiled ruefully. “I'm a little better now, though.”

  “That's good.” He smiled back. “I was beginning to worry that I was going to end up drinking both of these myself—until I saw that clock.” Jade nodded at the one on the wall. “Then I felt like a total geek.”

  “No.” “Oh, yes. I hate to break it to you but I'm pretty geeky, Val.”

  “Even so, that'd still be a lot of coffee.”

  “I had a calc test. It burns up a lot of energy.” She doubted that. Jade didn't have the dark circles under his eyes that most college students had. She'd have noticed—his fair complexion hid no imperfections. Jade seemed like the kind of person who could run on fumes for miles. Just like Mary.

  God, the two of them had probably been terrors in high school. Val could only imagine. But thinking of high school made her think of—other things.

  She took a sip of coffee. It was too hot but good. Completely unlike the swill Mary kept letting mold in mugs on her window sill. Her lips twitched into a reflexive smile. She had taken to calling them Mary's “Petri dishes,” and rather than taking offense Mary had let out a hearty guffaw.

  Her roommate was a bit of a slob—they both were, really—but she was a kind slob. Too kind to have such a dysfunctional roommate.

  “You have that look on your face again.” She put her cup of coffee down too quickly. A bit of milky brown liquid sloshed over the side. “What look?”

  “Like you're a million miles away, and wouldn't mind being even farther if you could.” Val swallowed. He was rather dead on the mark there. She smiled the way she always did and said, “Not a million. Try eight hundred.”

  “Homesick?”

  No, sick of home. “Something like that.”

  “Missing anyone in particular?”

  “No.” Too defensively.

  “No one?”

  His eyes lingered on hers until she looked down at her own cup and wondered if she had said too much. The bitter taste of the coffee clung to her tongue with the acridness of bile and she found herself swallowing excessively in order to keep it down.

  What the hell was she thinking, saying a foolish thing like that? Was this some kind of Freudian slip? An acknowledgment of her own hidden guilt struggling to slip free from the snare of her subconscious like a fly caught in a spider's web?

  I wish he would stop looking at me like that. It's like he can see right through me. If he could, though, he'd be running for the hills. “Are you always this thoughtful?”

  “No. Yes. I don't know.” She looked down at her hands while she played with the coffee lid.
/>   More minutes ticked by, broken by bursts of laughter coming from other tables. Periodically Jade tilted his head in that direction, a faint smile on his mouth, as if he wished he were laughing, too.

  “So, um,” she fumbled for another opening, “a little bird told me that your dad teaches Latin?”

  “What kind of bird?”

  “A Mary bird, I guess.”

  That was incredibly lame. But he laughed, bless him. “She's right.” “Can you speak any Latin?” The second those words were out of her mouth she realized how stupid that question was. “I mean, apart from what you said before. At the ice-breaker.”

  Jade leaned his arms on the table. He has nice arms, she found herself thinking. Strong. “What did you have in mind?”

  “Anything, I don't care.”

  “Alquid. Mea non refert.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Anything. I don't care.”

  It took her a moment to get it but then she heard herself laugh, and she covered her mouth suddenly feeling very shy. “That's not what I meant.”

  “Okay, you're right. Hmm. How about—” He paused. “Pulcher es.” “And what does that mean?”

  “It means, 'You're beautiful.'”

  Val stared at him. A faint pinkish tinge crept into his cheeks and colored the tips of his ears.

  Blake blushed like that, too. The fluorescent lights—the ambient chatter—the smells of commingling food and coffee—it was all too much. She needed to escape, to run, to flee.

  “No I'm not.” Val shook her head, shutting him out, shutting out the noise, the scenery. “I'm really not.”

  She needed to get out of here. Luckily, she was saved from thinking of a viable excuse. Her phone chose that moment to ring. For once, timing was ruling in her favor. Then she saw the number on the display was Lisa's.

  “Is that Vivaldi?” Val dug her knuckles into her forehead, which was starting to throb as the seconds ticked by. She was aware of Jade looking at her, that horrible expression of concern was back on his face. She toyed with the idea of not answering the phone and then decided against it. Lisa wouldn't stop calling until she got an answer, and she couldn't sit in this place a moment longer.