Robert Walker - Darkest Instinct

She would never come back to reincarnate the body of an older woman with wrinkles and a chicken neck. It stood to reason.

Besides, the police had thrown a scare into him. Two bobbies had come to his flat, soliciting information about Pauline, who’d lived a few flats down. She was reported as missing at the time, her body as yet unfound. No one knew that she was tied and weighted down at the back of his boat, a small craft with a barnacled bottom, hardly capable of floating; no one knew that Pauline was below the surface of the water, awaiting the time when he could experiment on rejuvenating her in the form of his mother.

When all his experiments failed, and when finally he relented, releasing the body into the Thames, he decided it was indeed time to leave London and England altogether, to seek out new hope and opportunity in America.

Warren had made the trip over the vast ocean in solitude, testing both himself and his knowledge as a sailor. It was a rigorous crossing, a marathon, and the sea almost engulfed him during one storm, but he had prevailed, and during the long, lonely lull days when the wind had abandoned him, he had read again the Book of Tau and the teachings of Tauto, especially the teaching that all life was reincarnated, that all life-forms sought out their doubles and bonded with their double spirit in an effort to grow. His spirit could only grow if he could fetch back his mother’s, then destroy it completely so that it could not return to this life ever again.

He recalled his earliest childhood memories of life at the back of a brothel, of being chained for days to a bedpost. “For your own safety,” she’d lie. He recalled beatings, both physical and mental, which he endured in stoic silence for so long that Mother thought him unfeeling, unreachable. But he had felt plenty.

The trip over had taught him that Tauto was on his side; that Mother’s spirit deserved capture and punishment. The trip over had also taught him that there was no predicting the future.

“ Hell, look how far I’ve come,” he told himself now, folding his arms over his chest, allowing the wheel to turn the ship inward toward landfall as he maneuvered his craft toward shore.

He was keen-eyed now, intelligent, cunning, self-taught. “One must not allow the constraints of time, place, kinship or birth to confine, curtail or otherwise handcuff the superior self,” he instructed himself in the words of Tauto. “Otherwise, one is robbed of character.” He saw the warming lights of the shops, hotels and restaurants ahead, and this made him smile.

“ One must instead actually invent one’s future,” he told the sky and himself. “And so I have, and so I have…”And so he had changed who he was, he thought. He had escaped the mold, the construct, the working definition everyone had held true of him, beginning with Mother.

Women had held sway over him his entire life; first Mother, the other whores she consorted with and the chorus line in the various theatres and then the matrons at the school. Everywhere he turned, women were there with their rules and order, constantly pecking at him. Women had held so much power over him for so long that he had, for a time, begun to think that this was the way of the world. But no more. No longer could others imprison him; he disallowed any constraints. He could flex his mind, he had become a flexible fellow.

He had begun to take the power from them; he was taking the power from them. He truly hated them, each and every one, but Mother in particular.

Without realizing that he was falling back into his old habit of dwelling on the past, he now flashed memories of himself as a weak and ineffectual child, tormented and abused by his mother. She would tie him naked to the bed and burn him in unspeakable places with her cigarette in order to keep him in line, to maintain control and power. Sometimes she’d use a hot lightbulb, and sometimes she’d use electrical shocks. She did it when he wet the bed; she did it when he spoke back; she did it when he cried over broken things.

Mother would use ropes, garter belts, guitar strings-anything at hand. She’d use multicolored scarves, the sort used by clowns in the theatrical troupe they traveled with. She’d twist one scarf about his hands and another about his feet, and shove a third deep into his mouth, gagging him to the point of suffocation and unconsciousness. He often awoke in a black closet, locked from the outside. She let him know every day who was in control, and she let him know that she detested him-that he was the cause of her failed career and her failed life. That he was a miserable wretch. That he was exactly like his miserable father whom he had never known.

Then she changed. She mellowed and became the charming lady of the stage persona, all an act. Yes, quite certainly, she had matured, but by then, so had he; he gave her no more trouble and seldom exchanged words with her, or anyone else for that matter. Warren went hiding in books instead, searching for the meaning of life, for a clue as to why he was ever born…

She became settled, and when she met the man from Grimsby who promised to take her away from the theater and settle her life once and for all, Warren was sent to the best finishing school money could buy, Southwark. Warren didn’t flourish at Southwark, nor did he “finish” well. In fact, he remained a loner, absolute in his noncommunication, a stone. But Southwark pointed the way, not only because he learned there how delectable it was to make another human being suffer the kinds of torment and pain he had endured at Mother’s hands, but because it was there, one day in the dusty stacks while researching a paper on comparative ancient religions, that Warren came across the doctrines of the Tau.

It was a magnificent book, one he had to have, so he stole it from the library. Within its pages, the book revealed a whole new life for Warren in the teachings of Tauto, a twelfth-century monk whose life was significantly influenced by Eradinus, one of the eighty constellations of Taurus, the “bull in the sky.”

The ancient monk Tauto meditated and prayed and after a lifetirfie of diligent study finally became one with his god, Eradinus. Young Warren Tauman was immediately taken by Tauto’s plight-both a solitary and a deformed figure, having by some accounts a hunched back and a club foot, he was banned by his order for “occult practices” and “perverse sacrifices” to his god.

Tauto shared himself with his god, becoming his instrument on Earth. Warren was at peace and oneness with his god, as was Tauto so many years before; together, they shared so much. They shared the same symbols and icons such as the Tau cross, and even the same name: Tau(man)… Tau(to)… Tau(rus). Now, in the twentieth century and nearing the twenty-first century, the name Tauman, Warren decided, was but an extension of Taurus and Tauto, for he had so much in common with the historical Tauto and the god Taurus.

He had read of how Tauto’s victims were repeatedly strangled at the altar erected for his god; he had learned that Tauto believed that anyone willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, as he had, of becoming the living instrument of his god on Earth, would one day become a significant part of that god’s being in the next life.

Warren had read also about how Tauto himself had died, at the hands of commoners who stoned him to death out of fear and ignorance and revenge, for he had sacrificed a large number of lives to his god by then. Warren fully expected to die at the hands of the ignorant masses who were currently provoked by what they termed a killing spree and what he called necessary sacrifices, offerings to his god on high.

One of the few luxuries Warren managed to get from his mother’s newfound wealth upon marrying Sir William Anthony Kirlian of Grimsby was a telescope. She said she wished to “encourage the boy’s interest in the stars.” Many a night, he had used the telescope at the precipice over which he had thrown Mother, there in search of the constellations of Taurus and Tauto in particular. Warren believed himself a reincarnation of the self-taught monk of the twelfth century. With his telescope, he had discovered the light of Era- dinus as if all over again. That light-Eradinus himself- began talking to Warren. First it was in a low, unintelligible voice in the tongue of a forgotten language, but soon, after Warren learned to open his mind, the gibberish became clear, the words concise, the voice in his head now a comforting lull, a welcomed visitor from afar, from the stars. Warren easily, blissfully opened his mind, soul and heart to the godly voice that now spiraled about the convoluted corridors of his sometimes fevered brain. Once the voice of Tauto breached Warren’s inner mind, there was no question but that he had to seek out all the power denied him all the years of his life, and not surprisingly, he began his concerted effort at regaining power and control over his life within his new family. First old Kirlian must go, the voice told him, and then his mother.