Project Cain (32 page)

I kept walking, and the canyon below finally revealed itself. All the brick ruins and overgrown cart paths and concrete foundations. Half a dozen hills and ravines framing ancient mine openings into the more ancient earth deep below. Most of them blocked with decrepit wood structures and signs of danger. Still the gaping black spaces just behind were even darker than the night. A darkness from hell.

A darkness formed almost like a curious eye, a mouth forming its first word . . .

Then, despite my best intentions, all my earlier tough-guy declarations, it became a night of ghosts and dead people after all. Safe to say they were officially running things now.

•  •  •

This “ghost” I saw—the face forming in the landscape below—was Ernie Miller.

(Dahmer’s eighth victim.)

This was NOT the Castillo figure I’d seen earlier. I still didn’t realize who that’d been.

No, this was something else.

And at first I didn’t know it was Ernie. I thought it might be Oliver or Errol.

While researching Dahmer, I’d studied and memorized ALL their names.

His victims.

This face filled up almost the entire canyon. Broad nose, full lips.
Definitely a black guy. Then I recognized the unmistakable line of a mustache above his smile. Most of Dahmer’s victims happened to be black, and I’d narrowed this face down to three guys. And please don’t think I’m racist or something for not being able to tell these three men apart, because it was an enormous dark face made of boulders and rotted wood beams and shadows and bushes and piles of hundred-year-old brick. Not exactly the world’s clearest image.

My first instinct was to simply turn away. What I always did. OK, sure, maybe this genetic memory had snuck into my conscience, but I didn’t have to keep it there. All I had to do was look away, think about something else for a while, and the image would slowly burn off in my memory. I’d tell myself later it was nothing.

But now I had names to go with these faces. Real names. Real people. This wasn’t some hallucination. This was a human being who’d been broken by my genetic father in every way a human can be broken. How the memory of his face had crossed over with Dahmer’s DNA into mine was a riddle for the scientists. Or maybe a priest.

In any case, however I was seeing this man, I WAS seeing him. He WAS part of my history. He deserved better than my just turning away.

And I’d read Castillo’s
Odyssey
book. I knew how to handle ghosts, right? You don’t run from them. Don’t hide. Or scream. Or attack them.

You talk to them.

So I talked . . .

•  •  •

Spoke the words out loud and everything.

And felt like a total idiot.

The first time I tried, my voice was so quiet, I barely heard myself. I tried again louder. First thing I asked was WHO ARE YOU? It
seemed the polite thing to do. (It’s what Odysseus would have done.) I tried again and asked: What is your name?

I swear the name ERNIE came into my head. Not spoken. No ghostly whisper on the summer wind or any crap like that. Just a word, a sound, in my head.

ERNIE.

My heart was pounding now. The “summer wind” was icy, super-cold. I wanted a jacket or something, curled my arms around myself. I’d read that Ernie Miller had moved from inner-city Chicago to Milwaukee to escape the bad crime rate in Chicago. He’d met Dahmer outside a bookstore a few months later.

What do you want? I asked.

Nothing.

What do you want to tell me? Again, spoken out loud. Talking to an entire canyon. Castillo and my father were probably below, listening to my muted echoes. Laughing their asses off or shaking their heads in embarrassment for me. Right then I got this feeling of
hyper-
embarrassment. But not my own. This was way more. This was something else entirely. A feeling bordering on anger. Disgust.

Shame.

I got the sense that being a victim was no fun. No good.

All Ernie Miller was was another victim. Number 8.

I had no clue about his family, talents, plans, occupation, hopes . . . etc.

Only a few family members and friends got to know this stuff.

To the rest of the world, he’d become only number 8. September 1990. 1 of 17.

Let’s just say it was a feeling I could relate to.

•  •  •

I wasn’t sure if this was me talking to myself or if I’d really tapped into some other spirit/memory/soul. Even as I thought this, images formed in my mind . . . images of people. His family, I assumed. And then . . . And then NOTHING.

Because right at that moment SHE showed up.

Yeah, her.

The lady in the black dress. THE THING ON THE BED.

That bitch.

•  •  •

Where once I’d seen Ernie’s face—getting clearer, and closer, and smaller each passing moment—now was this terrible darkness. Like the sky had just collapsed in exhaustion onto the desolate ground below. Or maybe the mines had barfed out all the blackness they had. Up from the ground or down from the night sky, I didn’t know. I just know that that whole canyon had turned pitch-dark in about two seconds. All the rubble and unkempt trails. The mines.

Gone. Replaced now by a small gleaming white face in the center surrounded by an outspread black dress. Its ridges and folds from the shadows and ravines. Her dark spreading out, running up the hill toward me.

But she wasn’t there for me, I told myself.

She’d come for my father.

So, this was not
my
ghost to talk to.

And I turned and ran.

•  •  •

Back at the car I rested up against the side hood. Catching my breath. Still freezing cold. Kept murmuring my new mantra of: “Extreme for Life, Extreme for Life.” Trying it out to see if it might really stick.
Which apparently worked just fine for evil visions because she did NOT follow me up that hill.

It had little effect, however, as I was about to find out, on real people.

•  •  •

I’d climbed back into the car. Trying to somehow get warm even though it was, like, eighty degrees outside. Trying to enfold myself. Separate myself from the rest of the world for a little while. Closed my eyes.

Then the side-door window exploded.

•  •  •

Glass went flying everywhere. All over me.

I jumped up in my seat. Looked around frantically.

The back window now splintered. Something slamming against it out of the darkness.

I lunged for the car’s horn. I think I managed to press on it twice before someone grabbed me.

Hands reaching through the shattered window beside me.

Pulling me back away from the horn. Yanking me up and out through the side window.

Shards of glass digging into me as I passed. Ripping into my skin.

Someone was laughing.

•  •  •

There were three of them.

I swear I gave a decent fight, considering.

•  •  •

I recognized Ted immediately. He smiled. Hi, Jeff.

Where was Castillo?

The second boy was smaller than me, darker, older. He just kept throwing rocks at the car.

Where was Castillo?

The third and final kid had kept quiet throughout. Hadn’t laid a hand on me yet.

He walked up slowly.

We were just about the same height, but he leaned forward to get right in my face.

It was like looking at a dark foggy mirror.

He placed his cold hand on my cheek.

Hi, he said.

I’m Jeff, he said.

•  •  •

Then he kinda beat the shit out of me.

•  •  •

You hear his blood. From a mile away, you hear it. Like sobbing. Wet gasps. Panting. Gulps of air. The one who gave you life, the FATHER who must be killed for the SON to assume his proper throne. The others are here too. His other sons. You sense three—no . . . four of them. You are to kill them all also. But not tonight. Tonight is for the Father. Those are the orders. The Father is with the other one, though. The Warrior, the one who shot you two nights ago. You know he has killed before also, but he is different, he does not yet kill for . . . for fun. A minor complication. He will just need to die first. You draw the blade again. You feel the blade slicing across his back. Now the good doctor, the Father, Jacobson. One hand around his throat, lifting him off the ground. The other, the hand with the knife, stabs forward. . . .

T
he night my father left, he’d told me I was part of the special 5%.

That when living conditions become too crowded in any environment, 5% of the population will resort to violence to achieve its goals.

They’ve done studies with rats. Perfectly calm and nonviolent animals until they’re introduced into an environment with limited resources. Limited food, mates, and space. Then 5% of the previously nonviolent rats get medieval. They murder other rats. Rape other rats. Eat other rats. Even though they’d never done any of these things when in small groups or appropriate space. It was just part of their nature to adapt. To survive and thrive in a more challenging environment.

These are the dominant ones, my father said. The ones meant to rule their world.

That’s, I guess, who I was with now.

•  •  •

We were in a house. That’s all I knew. But I didn’t even know what state I was in anymore. The last ten hours had been a blur of slaps and punches and being locked in the trunk of some car and simply
collapsing in exhaustion. I figure I was in the trunk at least six hours. Maybe more.

Back at Winter Quarters they’d wrapped duct tape around my ankles and wrists and locked me in the trunk of their car. I could hardly breathe in there. I wanted to puke so bad. I couldn’t believe the smell. (Later I would learn they’d kept and transported the nurse, Stacy Kelsoe, in the trunk for more than a week.) I passed out from the reek, I think. Every so often I came back to consciousness. I remember hearing them come back to the car, could hear their ragged breaths and cursing through the backseat. They were excited.
Something
had happened. Strange memories and visions trickled into my brain again. Then the car peeled out to muffled laughter, and we were off.

And I kept wondering what had happened to Castillo. What had happened to my dad?

Such strange images still in my head. Faded but . . . The rest was only a blur. A nightmare.

They’d stopped about a mile down from Winter Quarters. To cut my feet. They were looking for my tracking chip. I told them I didn’t have one. They just kept cutting anyway.

How they found the house hours later, I don’t know. I guess Castillo wasn’t the only one willing to bust into a deserted home. This one was a raging mess, however. It’d probably been condemned. Wires were hanging everywhere. In a lot of the rooms the walls had been half-busted. Torn drywall and exposed moldy studs.
Like exposed bone,
I thought.

They dragged me into what had once been a family room, I guess.

It was the middle of the day, I think. I still don’t know these things entirely.

Every step I took, I left a fresh crimson print.

The kid named Albert, Albert Young, was told to watch me for a while. He tried tying me up to this old wood chair in the room but failed completely. Kept muttering to himself the whole time. Guy was weird. I mean really F-in’ weird. He moved weird. Spoke in a weird high voice. His sentences broken into small bites. Robotic almost. Like he was less used to talking than I was. For all I knew, this was true. Maybe the guy was only really four years old. I think the other two guys hated him also.

Albert had been made entirely from the DNA of Albert Fish, who’d been killed in an electric chair way back in 1936. His genetic source had raped, murdered, and then
eaten
as many as a hundred children. He even sent letters to his victims’ parents, describing every detail.
How she did kick, bite, and scratch
, one letter reported to the grieving family.
It took me nine days to eat her entire body.
With a hundred confirmed kills, he’d acquired several nicknames, including, “The Werewolf of Wysteria,” “The Brooklyn Vampire,” and “The Boogeyman.”