Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

“ The true artist works with his emotions-all of them, the entire cascade of feelings, don’t you see? Both light and dark are released through and reflected in his art.”

“ Released… reflected?”

“ Yes… placed through a prism, released out into the world and out of himself, perhaps to save or at least hold on to his sanity.”

She nodded and probed further. “And you’re saying this is a healthy exercise?”

“ Oh, extremely… like writing out one’s anger or fears for the purpose of releasing the demons. Excellent and cheap therapy, if only people knew.”

She thought of her sessions with Dr. Donna LeMonte, which had come to an abrupt end when Donna decided that seeing her any longer would only turn the psychiatrist’s couch into a crutch. At first Jessica had been infuriated, but it had actually proven beneficial when they struck a compromise and Donna began accepting her letters as therapy, an outpouring of all her grief, guilt, remorse and anger over the years since she’d become an FBI agent.

“ The criminally insane, however, don’t know what to do with art; they must have a real time forum, a tangible medium, something other than clay to carve on, is that it?” she asked.

“ Uncontrolled, unfettered madmen make poor music, the Mozarts and the van Goghs notwithstanding. The criminally insane take artistic license beyond sanity.”

“ And therefore are no longer involved in pure art but in a tainted, compromised danse macabre wherein victim becomes medium, weapons tools and materials to reach not creation but destruction?”

“ Creation is turned inside out, yes; destruction becomes the demented means to creation, and that is why he is no longer a true artist, for now he is working less with art and the stuff of dream and nightmare to mirror his soul as he is with real time and real victims, and art becomes skewered on the lance of insanity.”

“ You’ve given a lot of thought to this, haven’t you?” she asked.

“ I have…” He hesitated. “Since these killings began, yes, I have.”

“ So, if I’m understanding you… the artist on a subconscious level may feel, for instance, that his mother was a victim to his father all his life, and this incenses him as much toward his mother as his father?”

The final copy Eddings needed required another dime, but he didn’t have it. Jessica fished in her purse for change and came up with a quarter, which the machine gobbled down.

“ Every monster has to have a willing victim,” Eddings agreed. “The artist has a powerful sense of justice”-the hum and flash of the Minolta copier punctuated his words-”and the fact that the monster’s mother, the creature who brought him into this world, nurtured or neglected him, the fact that she allows herself to be humiliated and whipped like a dog all the child’s life then leads him to ambivalence, yes. By the same token, a parent, mother or father, who physically or sexually abuses a child sows the same sort of seeds of hatred, which in later years spring forth full-blown as rage.”

She wondered how much Eddings was speaking of their phantom killer and how much of himself. He seemed turned inward for the moment, as if searching in some secret looking glass of his own.

“ By ambivalence, you mean he finds himself in the unenviable position of having to both protect and cherish his mother right alongside detesting and hating her?”

“ She asks for it! She steps right up to it; she allows herself to be a victim, and this feeds his rage toward all women.”

“ I see, I think…” “Instead of going out to victimize other women as some men would do, the artistic-minded among us resolve the conflict in more creative endeavors, from building a business to writing a poem-creativity is born of pain, no matter the pleasure it gives…”

“ Do you write poetry, Mr. Eddings?”

“ I don’t, no, but I have a novel I’ve been shopping around for years.”

“ By fashioning a world or a poem inside which women are brutalized, you’re saying no harm but rather good comes?”

“ In the fictive world, we are in constant control of the props, the staging, the curtains, all the strings, my dear, so that it is safe to unleash these passions, however evil, however bleak and destructive or raw to the bone, perhaps so that we do not act on these same impulses in the real world as the Night Crawler obviously has.”

So this explains the little man’s interest in the killer, she thought. “And you think all men have such ingrained feelings toward women?”

“ Given our genes? Given our race, our heredity, our primal instincts or that leftover-from-another millennium beginner’s brain we all started with and still carry around inside here like a ticking bomb?” He ended by poking his cranium. “Yes, I’m afraid so. Even those of us who deny it in both appearance and deed are saddled with it. yes.”

“ So you are yourself a writer, other than at the newspaper, I mean?” she asked.

“ I’m working on my second novel, yes. Working toward publication.”

“ Oh, really? And what’s it about?”

“ It’s something of a nasty little mystery coiled around the newspaper business, the spiraling injustices one young reporter faces at the hands of his superiors, one of whom is a woman not unlike the owner of the Heralds rival paper, for which I used to work. If it ever sees the light of day, I’m through in this town, certainly at the Herald, you can bet on that.”

She wondered just how deep his anger toward this woman ran. “But the writing keeps you sane?”

“ Precisely.”

She momentarily wondered who was the real victim here in this little obit man’s world, where he had squirreled away his hatred and anger only to resolve it amid black ink markings hidden like glyphs in an undiscovered cavern, an unpublished book, a poem like hellering’s. Or was the true victim the target of C. David Eddings’s venom, the mystery woman he mentioned? She further wondered if Eddings was sleeping with the woman he hated so much, and if so, what made him so full of rage. Her control over him? His need for her? Or the fact that he was the leak at the Herald, giving away the trust of his current bosses, and perhaps that of a woman he truly loved? In any case, he seemed a walking basket of nerves strolling along a needlepoint of stress as a result, all in the name of love, or hate. In that moment she caught a glint in his eye that told her he had seen the understanding in her eye, and in that instant, she saw a reserve of anger leaving a trail just for her.

Santiva noisily rejoined them, remarking on how nudity in paintings by the old masters like Rubens was perfectly acceptable in libraries like this, but that a brown paper wrapper had to go around the cover of Penthouse. He got no response from either Jessica or Eddings, who instead extended a sheaf of paper to him. Santiva accepted a copy of the hellering poem. “Ahh, good,” he crooned. “Now each of us is armed with words which we share with the killer…”

“ And thoughts and emotions, Eriq,” she replied as Eddings reached for her change at the bottom of the copier.

Eddings had gone silent. He extended fifteen cents to Jessica, and in the exchange she felt a well of emotions firing the little man’s spirit.

“ Do you think the Night Crawler is insane then, because he acts on his hatred?” she asked Eddings.

Eddings removed his glasses, cleaned them with a handkerchief and nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“ Then he’s no artist.”

“ No doubt in my mind. He may think of himself as an artist; he may have once been an artist, but once the killing started in this world, the artist in him no longer existed, you see. If Picasso were ever to have killed anyone before he painted out his bare emotions of slaughter and rage in Guernica, then the depiction of raw murder and carnage of that awful war would have fallen flat. As it is, it moves anyone who sees it. Why? Because he emptied the vessel from which the emotions flowed directly into the painting, and not into a world without a frame… Had he gone out and killed someone in retaliation for the real Guernica debacle, he could not have brought the passion to bear on a world both confined and radiated by form.”