Robert Walker - Grave Instinct

Aboriginal tribes who ate the brains of their enemies believed that this soul, once consumed-if still home within the human cortex of the brain-energizes and makes powerful the feeder, so that his soul benefits by glimpses of God, the most ecstatic of all feelings on the planet…

Wanda again pulled her eyes from the text. She clicked back to the Web home page where she had come across this information. It was created by a man named Daryl Thomas Cahil. She wondered if it were true. It must be, she guessed, if it's on the Internet.

Public library, Chimera, Louisiana Same time

Total, pure, transcendent, the cosmic mind is an ocean of light and objectivity opening onto the universe. Fed from this unseen source, the brain has a limitless potential, and it certainly exceeds the capacity of the nervous system. Men like Zoraster, Buddha, Muhammad, Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Lao-tzu, Shakespeare, Blake and Byron-sages, prophets and seers-have tapped the radiance of the cosmic ocean, but these are minds above the ordinary. The rest of us must take our share of the trickle from the cosmic spring.

Greater minds than ours know that the cosmic con-sciousness-the universal soul-has shown itself to men in heightened or altered states, in moments of high intensity as in the presence of death!

Do not hesitate to take that portion of the mind you have a right to.

The fifteen-year-old Chimera high-school student backed his chair away from the computer, puzzling out just what this guy in New Jersey was saying to him. The young man was a straight-A student and a member of the Key Club; he had a civic sense of duty. He had stumbled onto the website while looking for information on how the brain worked for a school paper.

“ What's this guy saying?” he wondered aloud.

He returned to the keyboard and opened on a chat room. In the room, people were talking back and forth about brains-and how to prepare them. Some put forth recipes, and while it was ghoulish and it made the young man squirm in his seat, he imagined it all that brand of stupid humor reserved for the adolescent mind, a demographic that Rick Trewalen sometimes felt ashamed to be a part of. The words on the screen, however, became worse when he encountered a strange section of the site that spoke of the Skull-digger.

Some of the people in the chat room made the Skull-digger out to be a hero, someone capable of doing what the rest of them only dreamed about. While they fed on animal remains for their needs, he had tapped into something these nutcases referred to as the Rheil thing.

“ Can't even spell 'real,'” the kid said to the computer.

He then went to a telephone and called Information for the closest FBI office. An agent named Sorrento asked young Rick if he could forward what he had on his screen to his office.

“ Sure… sure, I can do that.”

After performing the operation, Rick was drawn back to the screen. He wanted to see more. As disgusting as the site was, he felt a strange fascination with it.

When he finally became exhausted with the Web page, he checked to see if he had any incoming messages. A few keystrokes and he was staring at his message board. Two from friends, one from the Mail-Demon. This meant he'd keyed in some wrong digit in the message to the FBI. He'd have to try all over again, and pray he'd written the address correctly. But first, he decided to contact his two friends and clue them into the weird website he'd stumbled onto.

By the time Rick got back to attempting to contact the FBI, it had gotten extremely late. He'd do it tomorrow. He picked up the scrap of paper he had written down as the agent's E-mail and stuffed it into his jeans pocket, and after signing out, he rushed home on his bike.

New Bern, North Carolina Same night

GRANT Kenyon felt a great frustration coming over Phillip, and a growing anger directed at him from Phillip. He could not effect a kill tonight, no matter how hard he tried. The only possible victim he'd been able to locate was an obvious street slut, hardly virtuous, his mind told him, hardly adequate. He'd gone hunting on his computer as well, contacting several local women, but in all cases they could not come out and play.

None of his powers of persuasion worked tonight.

So he had cruised every downtown bar and grill and nightclub. Nothing presented itself. No opportunity came. It simply wasn't meant to be, unless he got bold and forcibly abducted his prey. Phillip pushed him to do just that, the urge to feed outweighing all other considerations.

He grabbed a tire iron he kept beside the seat, got out of the van and approached a couple coming out of a movie theater. He quickly moved on the man, pounding one hard blow to the head, sending him reeling and falling against his car. At the same time, Grant grabbed the girl and yanked her toward his van. She kicked and screamed for help. Taking hold of her neck, he cut off her breathing and plunged the Demoral into her forearm. Attempting to pull open the van door and place her inside, he didn't anticipate her strength and resolve, as she kicked the door closed.

Another man came racing toward them, his hands raised, prepared to fight. Panicked, Grant pushed the girl into her would-be savior, and he rushed around the front of the van and got into it.

He'd left the motor running, and now he backed out, hitting the prone boyfriend and tearing off as the bystander helped the young woman to her feet.

He tore away, watching the result of his second failed attempt to abduct a North Carolina woman, first Fayetteville the month before, and now New Bern. Maybe I'll give up on this state, he told himself and Phillip, who was already berating him for failing to get what they'd come for.

Sometime later, miles from the failed attempt, Grant grew weary-eyed and fatigued. He found a Motel 8, pulled in and got a room. He parked his van against the wall, opened the rear and snatched out his wireless laptop computer.

In order to keep his computer tracks hidden, he often used public computers at libraries and hotels, but sometimes he opted for the convenience of his laptop. He felt an urge now to communicate with others of a like-mindedness tonight. He knew of several websites devoted to the brain. Some were quite technical, scientific, medical, while others were far from it, what one would call far out-ideas about the brain that predated any modern knowledge of its workings. Some were devoted to arcane beliefs, long since refuted by modern science. However one site, which he had followed since its inception created by Daryl Cahil from his asylum cell, agreed with Grant's belief that the brain was the seat of the soul.

Kenyon had chronicled Cahil's arrest, incarceration and recent release. It was on Cahil's website that Grant had learned about the Island of Dr. Benjamin Artemus Rheil. Cahil had put forth his idea along with a crude sketch of the two-inch island of tissue. He depicted it in a cross shape with a bulb atop it.

The idea that you needn't consume the entire brain to consume the soul, but rather simply consume this island of tissue had appealed to Grant. On the other hand, Phillip, who loved the taste of gray matter, remained fixedly unconvinced of Cahil's ideas. As a result, Phillip dictated feeding on the entire sword and sheath-soul and brain.

Still, Phillip also grew fascinated with Cahil's ideas. Grant argued with Phillip repeatedly over the issue, and to settle it, Grant had cut away at his and Phillip's first victim's brain until he found Anna Gleason's Island of Rheil and announced to Phillip, “Since you disbelieve Cahil's theory, I'm sending Anna Gleason's Rheil to Daryl. You can't mind that, can you?”

“ Why should I?” Phillip had responded. “It is not the site of the soul or the portal to the cosmic mind-to God or the God-force-as Cahil preaches. The brain itself is.”