Extreme Instinct

  EXTREME INSTINCT

  Robert W. Walker

  PROLOGUE

  Yet when I hoped for good, evil came; when I looked for light, then came darkness. The changing inside me never stops.

  —JOB 30:26, 27

  June 11, 1997

  Las Vegas at Dusk . . .

  “You will ensnare her. Bring her to me.” The Antichrist's voice kept repeating in Feydor Dorphmann's head.

  Feydor imagined doing it, imagined trapping his victim, tying her on the bed, making the phone call, and igniting the victim's body with the gasoline and torch.

  As crazy as it had all sounded when he had first heard the scheme, he knew now that it could be accomplished.

  He also knew this was the time and the place.

  With a convention of medical examiners in attendance here at the Grand Flamingo Hilton hotel, the challenge Satan posed for criminal investigators, and one in partic­ular, meant that Evil would triumph as Evil always did in this world. Nothing Feydor could do now would stop cos­mic forces beyond his ken.

  Feydor had robbed a man at knifepoint two nights be­fore. With the money he'd stolen, he had bought some clothes and had cleaned himself up to where he didn't recognize himself. He had also purchased all the necessary items, everything that his god had told him he would need.

  With the Dark One whispering in his ear, Feydor had his courage bolstered and engaged the young woman in small talk at the bar—talk of the weather, the hotel trap­pings, the news reports coming in over the TV at the back of the bar. When she left, he shadowed her out to the underground parking lot where she had bags to carry in. He pretended their meeting in the lot this second time was purely coincidental, and while she didn't believe it, she nodded when he offered to help with her bags.

  She seemed most suspicious of him, yet she allowed him near her. Then he realized that with her keys outstretched, she meant to threaten him with a small canister of Mace attached to her car keys.

  “Stay back,” she warned. “I know that my father has sent you.” Feydor wondered if she meant that her father was Satan himself. “Put your hands where I can see them,” she com­manded.

  Instead, Feydor struck her with a sudden, vicious jab of a hypodermic needle into her shoulder, while simultane­ously grabbing the hand holding the Mace, the stream go­ing astray. She dropped to her knees, slumped against the car, her key ring with the tear gas attachment rattling against the concrete. She had buckled instantly when he jabbed the hypodermic—filled with a strong sedative— into her soft flesh. She yielded with a mere yelp, like a pinched dog. Her blood quickly absorbed the drug and sent it through her body, dizzying her brain.

  Feydor felt an instant charge of power course through his body. He'd felt the same high when he had killed Dr. Stuart Wetherbine some months earlier back in San Fran­cisco. Feydor's intentions were suddenly being realized. Driven, he told himself. I am driven to carry through with this.

  Next he snatched all her bags from the trunk and re­placed them with her now inert body. He stopped to stare at her pretty young face, the tender lines and contours, momentarily wondering who she belonged to, who she might be, but Satan yelled, “Stop that instantly!”

  “Feydor! What are you doing here? What in God's name?” It was Dr. Wetherbine's voice, somehow here, all the way from the grave, Wetherbine's new home since the institute in California.

  “What in God's name, indeed, Doctor,” Feydor barked in reply. “I'm obeying my master.” The gaunt Dor- phmann spat out his words, “Satan is my god now, not you, Doctor.”

  “You are a fool. Satan will betray you. He betrays all of us, everyone. Give it up!”

  “No! No, I give you up, Dr. Wetherbine. You!”

  Feydor recalled how Wetherbine, with his owl eyes framed in horn-rimmed glasses and his face covered in gray beard, had followed him from his office that day, spying on him, interested in seeing if Feydor had stopped taking his medications. Wetherbine made a lousy detective, and Feydor knew he was being trailed. He led the doctor into an alleyway where Satan screamed in a fit of rage for Wetherbine's blood. Satan had gotten his wish when Fey­dor lifted the knife and brought it down sixteen times into Wetherbine's heart.

  Ever since, however, Dr. Wetherbine continued to in­terfere, as now.

  “You can go to Hell, Wetherbine,” Feydor suggested, a slight grin finding its way to his sad countenance. “But I've got a way out... a way out....” He pointed to the moaning, shaking figure of the girl in the trunk.

  Feydor came back to himself, to this place and time, finding himself staring down at the girl's angelic face, framed as it was in short-cropped blond hair, her cream- colored complexion and freckles inviting to the touch. He reached down, caught a tear on his fingers, and tasted of its saltiness. She had wide, almond-shaped blue eyes held open by the sudden rash of the drug, seeing yet unseeing.

  He closed out all light when he shut the trunk on her. He then scooped up her keys, unlocked her car door, and tossed her baggage into the backseat, where he began searching through it all, scavenging.

  He could hear her moaning through the car cushions.

  Looking around, he saw no one; and no one saw him.

  She had said that she was staying at the hotel, and he had located the room key in her purse. He would wait until dusk to get her up to her room, there to begin Satan's work.

  Feydor lifted the dehydrated and drugged woman from the trunk of her car where he'd deposited her earlier. The heat of the Las Vegas sun had done much to debilitate the woman. Easily led, she felt like putty in his hands. Satan had been right. Feydor got the young woman to her feet. She represented nothing to him but a means to an end, a sacrifice to all the traitors who ever strode the earth. He knew little or nothing about his victim personally; and he hadn't learned much about her from her purse and luggage, only that she was staying at the hotel tonight with plans for leaving on a bus tour the following morning.

  For six long years Feydor Dorphmann, now twenty-nine years of age, had tried to get help from any quarter; he told everyone who would listen all about the shadow peo­ple he saw in the irises of his eyes whenever he stared long into a mirror. He admitted to seeing drowning people in fire pots of seraphim wax or white mud that spat, spewed, and bubbled; he saw great, fanning fire pits vom­iting forth cloud after continuous cloud of choking, eye- irritating sulfuric smoke: Acid smoke, his mind had named it.

  Spectral as it all was, he nearly asphyxiated on the sul­fur. His eyes burned and his ears bled with the silent screams the shadow people emitted. It was all so obvious to Feydor, but apparently invisible to everyone else. For he could see into the spectral world, and he could see the gaping, widening mouths pull apart with flames licking, turning their visages into molten wax.

  There was a certain fascination about it all. In fact, he'd grown so accustomed to the spectral burnings of the wretched and damned that he felt certain he could carry through with Satan's wishes.

  He certainly didn't want Satan pissed off at him.

  At one time he readily told people about the visits from creatures not of this earth—grisly little beasts with human features and limbs that stuck like pitchforks from their gnarled, gnome like bodies. Some a melding of human, an­imal, insect, and plant life, but all of these ugly little fel­lows came on their all-fours for only one reason: to keep an eye on Feydor, to keep track of his comings and goings, and to report back. And when Dorphmann told the doctors all about these insect and animal succubi—Satan's famil­iars, Hell's agents—-the doctors had simply placed him into an earthly infemo, locking him away in an insane asylum where they pumped him full of drugs to dull the phantoms and the phantasma-gloriosa, as one young medical man had kiddingly termed his complex mental problem. They had
so enjoyed his case. They'd enjoyed experi­menting with various psychoactive drugs on him in an at­tempt to cure his so-called severe hallucinatory and schizophrenic tendencies and problems—his fantastic fan­tasies and overwhelming fear of the Antichrist. But there'd only been one way to overcome his fear of the Dark One, and that was to agree with him.

  The doctors had claimed he had fixated on the Anti­christ, Satan himself, and that he had fixated on helping to combat Satan's enemies. Satan, known also as the Ruler of Wind, feared any assault on his godlike powers. In an attempt to protect himself and his rule, Satan used weak men, men like Feydor, or so Feydor had surmised around the psychobabble of his therapy.

  Dr. Stuart Wetherbine had understood, up to a point. He'd once told Feydor, “Yes... we know that people are sheep, that we are all such fools.”

  “Precisely,” agreed Feydor.

  Wetherbine had continued, “People in general haven't the slightest idea that should the Antichrist select any one of them, that they, too, could become Satan's tool, his instrument or plaything.”

  Feydor nodded vigorously, adding, “Satan's slave.”

  “So many naive among us who fail to understand that Satan is capable of overwhelming anyone he may choose, that 'there for the grace of God go I....”

  “

  It was then that Feydor's eyes grew to saucer size and he revealed, for the first time, the red brain thoughts firing his insides and coursing through his very being. He'd pro­nounced his truth in calm understatement, so as not to frighten Wetherbine, because at the time, Feydor had be­lieved that perhaps he had finally found another human soul who might possibly understand. It was a requiem he repeated to Wetherbine three times before he realized that Stuart Wetherbine was just like all the others.

  He'd told Wetherbine, “Satan feeds me filthy, crawly things to eat, and I become those things I consume, the things I eat. Satan scalds my mind, brands my brain, and while I am screaming, he... he adjusts me, rewires the circuitry so that I am now his puppet on a synaptic string....”

  Feydor had once been a practicing psychiatrist, before the Evil Wind began to whisper in his ear.

  When the bastards at the mental institute weren't treat­ing him like a highly interesting case or a piece of card­board, they had treated him like a child. All the while they were pumping him with more drugs—and getting his drugged consent to go farther—until one day, suddenly, he was told to go home, to have a nice life... that he was cured so long as he remained on his medications. But this came only after long years of learning precisely how Feydor's doctors wanted him to behave, to duplicate the exact mannerisms and beliefs the white-coated army expected. His newfound behavior had worked, for when he began to do as they wanted, when he shut up about the horrors he saw behind his eyelids, they finally released him to a half­way house. Following this, he continued in Pavlovian fash­ion to tell them what they wanted to hear. He learned to deny his own reality, learned to deny Sa­tan and Satan's enormous revelations to him. The doctors wanted lies... that he knew neither Satan nor the ways of the Antichrist... so, he had given them lies that bespoke his healing.

  Still, none of the pull and draw of Satan's grim gravity had ever truly been reduced, not a whit of it, which he learned for sure after taking his last pill for what his doc­tors called religious-linked psychosis nervosa. They said it was a psychotic condition that engendered hallucinations— in Feydor's case, hallucinations surrounding religious icons and beliefs—but that his condition also caused strong allergic like reactions in the skin and orifices. This was their explanation for the red scaling of his skin, the purple-red palate, the red eyes, the pounding, pumping, burning blood in his ears.

  Feydor Dorphmann and Dr. Wetherbine alone knew the true cause of the red. Where it came from, how it came to be, who and what brought it about, and that no amount of medical attention would ever, or could ever, eradicate the red.

  The red filled his brain.

  The red fed on his soul.

  The red was forever with him, unless he made a deal with the Devil.

  When he said yes to Satan, the scaly, itchy redness sub­sided, the heat below his skin, and the puffiness about his eyes, and the fire in his mouth scaled down to an accept­able, tolerable level. A kind of green glow engulfed his mind and staved off the red. And now he found it—the red—getting better since having abducted the girl, since doping her up and arranging for her cremation. . ..

  What relief from his demons came, however little it might be, was welcomed, and he'd spread the green relief over his body like a balm. This relief was promised him if he'd follow his instinctual need to rid this world of what Satan considered necessary, and how better to do so than to do his bidding.

  Satan talked to him in many voices, many tongues, acid and green, creamy and white, buttery and yellow, putrid and rancorous and bile-tasting in his mouth, burning pok­ers in his ears whenever the Antichrist became angry with him. Still, no matter how many voices there were, no mat­ter how many disguises, still Feydor knew that all their voices and inflections and dialects channeled through one voice: the voice of his god, the voice of the Dark Angel, the ruler of storm and calamity.

  No end to him. No end to his being.... Certainly no end to his being in Feydor Dorphmann's head, unless Fey­dor obeyed, faced the tests, conquered in the name of the Prince. Satan. Satan was without end.... No end to his pattering about the coiled recesses of Feydor's mind and intestines, playing havoc with Feydor's sanity and bodily functions down to his sexual requirements and ejacula­tions. No end to the wailing, the tolling of the bells, the cacophony of animal and bird and jungle bug noises in the inner ear, noises that were constantly nibbling away at his strength, sapping him of any resolve. He hadn't told Weth­erbine or any of the other doctors the half of it. He had attempted suicide, several times, but the Beast within wouldn't let him die. Suicide was not an option. The Beast needed him... or rather, needed Feydor's limbs, his eyes, his mouth, his body to go about in this realm of reality, on this plane of material existence. And so Feydor's body was chosen, and for a time Feydor had felt a surge of elation at having been a chosen one, an outpouring of pleasure in knowing that some supernatural being had selected Feydor Dorphmann to do its bidding. After killing Stuart Wetherbine and finding Wether­bine's notebook in his breast pocket, Feydor realized that the doctor had understood more than any other man alive. Satan read Wetherbine's words over Feydor's shoulder that night. Then Feydor's headaches came, the nausea and vomiting, the sick, empty feeling in the gut and the tug to earth, as if all of the entire force of gravity was being focused on Feydor. Soon Feydor learned to detest his fate, detesting his lot in life, detesting the things that now lived inside him, but more importantly and beyond all detesta­tion, he feared. He lived in constant fear. He feared when the Devil of devils, when Satan himself, came calling. And lately, he came often.

  Wetherbine knew this much, but his counsel and his medications were no match for such supernatural powers.

  In the end, the institute had put Feydor back on the street. Only Dr. Wetherbine had held out against approving his release, but the good doctor's objections held up mat­ters for a mere month.

  Feydor had seen a lot of television at the institute, par­ticularly CNN, which he enjoyed. He enjoyed seeing the clear mark of Satan the world over, and what better place than on CNN—live? Disasters both natural and man-made abounded, murder was rampant, Satan was afoot.

  The tube said it was so every day.

  It was on the tube that he caught his first glimpse of the target Satan had set for him. Her name was appended to a degree, a medical degree: Dr. Jessica Coran, praised by the reporter interviewing her as the FBI's number one serial-killer catcher.

  Feydor was no serial killer, nor would he ever be—not in the strictest sense of the word, he told himself—but now Feydor saw his mission clearly. And this felt good and right and correct; it felt like Satan's hand at work. That all these years of badgering Feydor had been for a reason,
this reason had to do with Dr. Jessica Coran, for she, like Wetherbine, knew too much about Satan's comings and goings, knew too much about his business.

  For Feydor a whole new hope opened up. He now had a plan; finally, a way to end his misery, a way to leave this world on the even keel he had begun, a way to ante up and bow out with grace and dignity and perhaps escape Hades in the bargain. It was a plan posited in his brain by no mere hellion emissary this time, but by Satan himself; it was a plan Feydor had at once agreed upon, and it had brought him to Las Vegas to kill a young blond woman he didn't even know. God must be forgiving of me, he thought, not daring say “God” aloud, for if He understands that Satan is, after all, the breeder of all serial killers walking this world, that 1 am nothing, a mere vessel, a helpless conduit through which the master killer of all time has chosen to continue his awful work on Earth, then God must save a place for the likes of me....

  Satan had come to Feydor, had selected him specifically to fulfill a task. It was Satan, and not Feydor Dorphmann, who had become fixated on this path of pending destruc­tion of life, this murderous romp, and nothing and no one could dissuade Satan from his plans for the woman Satan most hated of all women in this dimension. How better to destroy her than through Feydor Dorphmann, Satan had said, whispering a coiling message that slithered through Feydor's brain and being.

  Sometimes Satan took the form of a dense black shadow that lay over Feydor like a heavy blanket; other times Sa­tan existed as a mere milky cloud, sometimes a mad, slav­ering hound, sometimes a horned goat, an eyeless bat, an enormous spider larger than Dorphmann himself, sitting in the corner of a ceiling. More often of late, he came as a hunched-over, horned gargoyle sitting squarely atop Feydor's chest whenever he tried to sleep, sucking in Feydor's breath while the helpless mortal lay there exhaling.

  Still other times, the Devil came as a solid black cube turning on an axis directly between Dorphmann's eyes, square in the middle of his forehead, boring into his brain, a black inkblot, threatening to turn his mind to ink and infinite pain as well. The Beast would chum up the head­aches, the ringing in Feydor's ears, making it a constant, hateful, debilitating irritation, threatening to explode inside Feydor's brain.