Robert Walker - Pure Instinct

Quantico, Virginia

Jessica Coran was not one to believe in the supernatural or visions, quests or even overzealous dream characters who bartered for attention, but there seemed no way to elude the faceless, nameless entity that now nightly climbed into her bed and invaded her mind with its presence. Was it a he, a she, corporeal or cloud, a disguised human image larger than life with a heavily made-up mask? Or was it truly nonhuman, some god of the night, immortal? Too dark, too nebulous in its contours, a shifting outline, detail lacking… too unreal to pinpoint… just out of mental reach, yet threatening… ever threatening. Person, place or thing? She could not know, not for certain.

All she felt was an overwhelming sense of pressure and bulk. The thing took up space, and usually that meant on her chest as she slept. It insisted on being listened to, but the damned thing never spoke a word. Excruciatingly painful, extraordinarily frustrating, it was a mindful creature without a mouth or words to convey its thoughts to her, like a wounded animal unable even to whine, its limbs working as if on strings controlled by a puppeteer.

Was it some sort of supernormal yet real visitor which moved about her room and increased her weight against the bed when it straddled her? Or was it, as her shrink, Donna Lemonte, no doubt would say, some dark portion of herself that had clawed its way from out of her own psyche to the surface?

No telling… at least not from what was known; information sadly lacking… evidence inconclusive… no basis for discovery…

At one moment she thought it the ghost-or at least the vestibuled memory-of Otto Boutine, her first love, who'd died while saving her from a killer's grasp. Then she thought it her father's spirit, or that part of him which lived on in her, come with a warning, a foreboding. But in either case, she ought to be able to make out the features, to reinvent them fully and distinctly, even happily, but this she could not do.

Now, even as she slept and pondered these questions, she believed that a resolution was possible, and that perhaps-just perhaps-the phantom was a conglomerate of faceless victims from the many and various serial-killer cases she'd worked over the years, all come to finally collect…

Hardly scientific or logical, she knew, but dream disturbances weren't exactly something she could pop under her microscope or slice into with her scalpel and examine more closely. Behind her closed eyelids she could only stare at the dark, inky mass which blotted out all light and made the air in her lungs stale with heat and fear. Her visitor spoke out of a blank hole, the face a wall, but only slight, meandering gibberish surfaced, as if the words had too far to travel to live once they found her. The words came out as a meaningless hum like that of a refrigerator, mindless and mechanical; still, it all felt like an ominous, rational warning, something to protect her or send her flying over a cliff, the topmost precipice of which she only narrowly engaged on bare toes.

The idea of flight-any flight-was soothing, inviting, despite the consequences. So she stood, as it were, on the verge of plummeting down into the Grand Canyon of her soul, but what or who waited at the bottom for her? A comforting father? Otto? Love everlasting in Hawaii with Jim Parry? Or would Mad Matthew Matisak be there at the bottom, the vulture's patience rewarded, his talons sunk deep into her throat?

Jessica started from the dream just as her body hurled over the side of both the dream precipice and the bed. She'd once again been earnestly mindful of the blocked and retarded warnings, but that forceful, steady-like-a-tuning-fork message had kept right on, emanating from the deaf and dumb night image that she somehow knew was there to help her, despite the Grim Reaper costume it chose to appear in.

The warm yet fetid feeling emanating from the silent shadow was similar to the one she'd felt not long ago at a mountaintop shrine in Hawaii where a shaman, a psychic of sorts, had foretold her unappetizing future, which had, to a certain strange degree, already come true. The aged shaman had predicted that she would corner her prey in a land of red paths where the glinting sun would bathe all in the hue of blood orange. And then James Parry and she had in fact located Lopaka Kowona, the worst serial killer in Honolulu's history-or what was left of him-after his own people had finished with him, resorting to a primal instinct that had turned her stomach.

Now the old shaman's words rang anew in her ears during every silent moment, as if he had not been speaking of Hawaii at all, but of Oklahoma, U.S.A., where the red earth mingled with a bloody sun and an even bloodier new manhunt for the escaped madman, Matthew Matisak. The manhunt had come to a dead end after the initial find of an assortment of bloodless bodies in Oklahoma, Matisak having drained his victims of their precious heart's milk.

Using an ordinary surge machine found in a nearby barn, the monster had only become more hideous and resourceful since his original captivity two and a half years before.

“ Alone with the Devil,” she mourned aloud. “At three in the morning anyone's allowed a little madness,” she continued aloud, as if speaking were an antidote, an autonomous reaction like a shiver to cold. Maybe she could find the timbre in her voice to chase off the demons.

She'd been reading before bed from a volume of Mark Twain's writings still on the table just above her head. Maybe she'd try to go back to Samuel Clemens's witticisms for respite. Three in the morning and she couldn't sleep. Was it the Prozac? Some people had a marked increase in insomnia as a side effect. Or was it the disturbing, unseeable, untouchable visitor now nightly in bed with her? “Fuck this,” she shouted to the room, still sitting on the floor beside her bed. She drew up her knees and rocked back and forth, tears freely coming even as her father's faraway words whispered in her ear: “Be strong, Jess… be brave, but don't ignore informed fear.”

Outside, both at her door and below in the lobby, armed and ready, special agents of the FBI guarded her as if she were the First Lady. This annoyed her no end. It was a condition placed on her by Bureau Chief Paul Zanek, and she was damned sick of it altogether after the first week, much less now after six agonizing months-the length of time Matisak had remained at large.

She was sick of playing the victim; sick of being the hunted instead of the hunter; sick of Matisak's having turned her life inside out; sick of the games and the psychological toying he performed with each murder, leaving word at each slaughterhouse that it was all done for her, so that he would be strong, healthy and in control when he came for her. Sick of other agents thinking she had somehow been responsible for the fiend's latest kill spree.

What was worse yet was the fact that her once-pleasant, protective apartment had now become her compound, her cage. Working sporadically on cases at the lab with bodyguards over each shoulder hadn't helped the situation.

She snatched at the bedside table, foolishly grabbing a handful of wires and turning over her clock and telephone, sending up a cacophony of metallic noise and crying out, “Dammit! I want out of this bloody Hell!”

Instantly her bedroom was invaded by two armed men in neatly attired suits and ties, prepared to blow away all evil, but quite literally unable to do so, their steady eyes and guns searching for the invisible intruder that never was, save in her mind.

“ Take it easy, Sims, damnit all!” Her arms waving, she told Loydd Sims, shift commander this watch, “Just a bad night.”