Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

When he had killed his mother that day on the precipice, it had come about in a moment of passion born of sheer rage when she told him that he must earn his own way, that she could not in clear conscience provide for his needs a moment longer after having financed his education at Southwark and having learned of the indelicate indiscretion he had committed with another boy there. Southwark wanted no part of Warren, so she had nowhere to send him, and this angered her.

“ After I die, Warren, then all this will be yours, Warren, but until that time, Warren, I would like to see you strike out on your own, Warren, make a go of it, Warren, make Mummy proud, Warren, make as much of yourself as humanly possible, Warren… show me some backbone, Warren… After all, you have an education now, Warren, far more than when I started out in life. Then… well, then… we will see… don’t you see that it’s for your best, Warren?”

They were the last words she ever uttered to him, the last sounds aside from the scream that echoed all the way back up to him.

Since that day, he found himself inextricably drawn to kill others, women in particular. He had killed things before, small birds and animals, and there was the incident at Southwark in which he had tortured the homosexual boy who had made advances. He had lured the boy to a desolate place and kept him trapped there for forty-eight hours before anyone suspected him of having a hand in the disappearance. The nude boy’s body was covered in welts and bite marks. He hadn’t killed the boy, but he might well have, if given more time.

And nowadays he continued to torture and kill, but it all had a purpose, a reason. He targeted only women who reminded him of his mother when she was a young, stupid little tramp. His kill spree had begun with whores and prostitutes along the Thames River in the White Chapel District, women who were closer in age to Mother when she’d died, but he had slowly worked his phantasm of murdering the old sot over and over again so often that he grew tired of the game; he wanted more, especially now. Nowadays, his greatest dream was to kill Mother’s spirit, the soul spirit which visited and tormented his mind whenever he slept, and he had to destroy it before Tauto, in His eyes.

Warren had not known Tauto when he had killed out of rage. Now he wanted to introduce Mother to Tauto, in the only way that such an introduction could occur. He also wanted to destroy her at an early age, before she turned twenty, before she had an opportunity to turn his life into a shambles. He wanted her when she was not much more than a child. He wanted most to kill her at a time in her life before she had given birth to him.

The corpse he’d just thrown overboard was now out of sight, flushed from the wake of his ship like so much refuse. He wondered what authorities would make of this last one, all those chemicals pumped into her… the hook in her back…

It would be such a deviation from the others. He had experimented on some of the others’ limbs, a hand here, a leg there, but this was the first time he had left one whole, preserved body. It would serve only to confuse and anger the faceless people who pursued him. The recent papers carried a photograph of a pair of FBI investigators, one a man, the other a woman, who were in dogged pursuit of clues leading to his whereabouts, or so the reporter said. A total exaggeration, so far as Warren could make out. Still, he knew that when his skin told him to get, he should get, and so he had instinctively decided to flee.

He returned now to the wheel and steered his ship, the ocean pleased with his work, in harmony with him. He was one of two beings in the universe which the ocean smiled upon. The other was his god.

He returned in his mind to those first killings in London. He had enjoyed each better than the one before, his ritual of humiliating and creating suffering in his victims becoming more and more elaborate as he went, more exciting and satisfying as he continued building onto the ritual labyrinth of inducing pain and horror in his prey. They were all so easy to kill; but it took some imagination to torture them, and so his imagination grew.

After his thirteenth victim, he began to keep a record of his activities-”perversions,” the press called them. His diary chronicled his methods of torture, but also his work in attempting to perfectly preserve one of his victims-a thing which if accomplished, he could stop killing, he was sure. If he could find a way to capture Mother’s soul and keep it captive inside a perfectly preserved double of her, then he wouldn’t have to go on killing; there would be no point, and he would be at peace with Tauto.

When he’d first started killing, most of the women, at first, little resembled his mother except in age and habit- they were all whores. The London Times and other newspapers in England had called him a modern-day Jack the Ripper because he worked the infamous White Chapel District where the Ripper had done his work. But he was no ripper. He took no delight in mutilating the beautiful female form, and he detested the odor and the sight of blood. He didn’t cut the bodies open. In fact, other than suffocating and drowning them, he barely touched his victims during his first forays into murder. At first, he was rather shy about it, actually, rushing it and running quickly from the deed.

The elaborate scheme to somehow fetch his mother from the nether regions into which he himself had sent her, to return her to himself so that he might inflict eternal suffering on her, only evolved over long time and experience with murder.

Those first fledgling attempts at feeling something, of making contact with his own soul, with which he had become unfamiliar, were important bridges. They were bridges leading to the soul of his dead mother as well, although he had been awkward, crude and blind in his murdering meanderings. Only when he found the teachings of Tauto and read them, understanding that all things in life carried a spiritual double, did he realize that it might be possible to recapture the moment of murdering his mother through the soul of a stand-in. Rudimentary as they were, those first killings became the cornerstone upon which he had built a relationship with his god and his deceased mother.

Tauto, in his great wisdom, told Warren to leave London and to seek his mother’s image in younger women, women who in every way mirrored her as she was the year of Warren’s birth. He calculated that she was between sixteen and eighteen when she gave birth to him, so he had sailed from England to America in search of a fresh start and a fresh approach to his problem. Now, in the land of milk and honey, along the sun-drenched coasts of Florida, he had found what he had come in search of many times over…

Still, he remained unfulfilled, his need insatiable, so long as Mother remained aloof and out of reach, capable of tormenting him at will.

He brought his pleasure craft into the wind and looked forward to his return trip to the Keys and beyond, perhaps a little trip to the Gulf of Mexico and the east coast of Florida. He’d heard that Tampa Bay and the Naples area were both beautiful this time of year…

Jessica yawned even as she worked over her microscope at the crime lab this morning. She hadn’t gotten much in the way of sleep the night before, tossing and turning due to her earlier argument with Eriq and a late-night phone call from Dr. Kim Desinor which only solidified the fact that their killer was a sailor, and an elusive one at that. The psychic’s take on the killer told Jessica she was looking for a man with a frightful multiple personality disorder, possibly schizophrenic, with a brain full of voices, certainly delusional and possibly hallucinating. “This man convinces people to go off with him, Kim,” she’d challenged Desinor. “How can he be hallucinating and in control at the same time?” “I get the picture of a complex personality-complex.”