Robert Walker - Primal Instinct

Matisak had been careful and controlled around others, and around tape recorders. He didn't want to slip up or say anything that could be used against him when his parole board sat, but everyone except Matisak knew that no amount of good behavior and cooperation with the FBI interviewers over the years was going to win him a free walk on the first go-round.

Somehow, Matisak figured this out. Dr. Arnold, Matisak's keeper all these years, might have nastily explained it to him in a fit of his own, earning Matisak's undying hatred. Actually Matisak hated everyone, and in particular, his rage had fixated on Jessica Coran, who had unmasked him and caused his capture and eventual imprisonment.

Here on the plane with the hum of flight in her ears, she now imagines Matisak's moves there in the asylum. He manages first to slip some small item into his cage, no small trick in the maximum-security nuthouse where all transactions are handled through a revolving door in a glass cell. Then comes the injury, self-inflicted. Though Matisak is wise to medical procedures, so he may have staged a masquerade, a supposed natural injury, say a bleeding ulcer or blood frothing from the mouth. Then comes the transportation to the hospital ward, and the subsequent lapse in security, ending with three deaths and the disappearance of Matisak, who, using a doctor's coat and badge, wallet and credit cards, waltzes out to a car belonging to the murdered doctor and drives off into the night without objection from anyone.

She now silently curses the scenario she has painted in her mind, wishing to quell it, to rest for the long haul ahead, but her mind and Matisak play on.

Then Matisak speeds across the country, no doubt leaving a trail of bloodless bodies in his wake. He exchanges cars somewhere along the way, and the fiend stops in Norman, Oklahoma, to send her a wire, having learned of her whereabouts through Dr. Arnold, who'd always taken some perverse pleasure in taunting Matisak with her comings and goings, always keeping him apprised of her whereabouts in some sick, childish game that had gone on between doctor and patient, captive and keeper throughout their relationship. This long after she had stopped visiting the asylum on a routine basis, refusing to deal with Matisak after the Claw Case, in which he had sought to undermine her confidence even from his asylum cell.

She had made pilgrimages to the maniac for only as long as he had useful information to convey, and for as long as her own tortured psyche could withstand the visits. She had made the examinations and taped interviews for the same reasons she'd conducted interviews with Gerald Ray Sims and other serial murderers, for the good of the cause, to carry on Otto Boutine's work and only because it had fallen on her to do so; Matisak would only communicate through her, at his deranged insistence, and so she had gone, playing along with his prurient game in her official capacity only in order to learn what the FBI might from Matisak about his fatal and instinctive working methods, his selection of victims, and the way his mind worked. Matisak got off on it, sitting opposite her, having her there to gaze at and lust for, giving him a sick sense of hope for the future, hope that he might taste of her blood a second time. She normally wouldn't have subjected herself to such an ordeal, but she knew the necessity of learning as completely as possible the inner psyche of a creature like Matisak. Besides, it proved a useful shield against certain of her superiors who sought to remove her at the time, claiming her incapacitated, not physically but emotionally. But she had shown O'Rourke and she had proven to Paul Zanek what kind of metal lay beneath her skin. At the same time, her superiors had a case file on Matisak the size of the D.C. phone book, and they knew as much as humanly possible about how the madman had created such an elaborate fantasy: “I am descended from vampires, and genetically coded a vampire from birth.” The sickest thing about the belief was not that he believed it, but that he acted on it every chance he got.

Now his chances are excellent to stupendous. Now here he is in the year 1995, taking every opportunity to drink the blood of others, not content with medications to control his urges, ill content with the idea he could feed his cravings with ox blood, chicken blood, or any number of other substitutes. No, this one is bent on feeding in the manner of his supposed forebears! He should've gone the way of Lopaka Kowona, but the state of Illinois didn't see it that way.

Now, no doubt, bloodless bodies litter the trail he has blazed to Norman, Oklahoma.

Now, Jessica thinks with renewed awe, this obsessed lunatic, enraptured with me, is out there in the heartland, hunting me as if I'm some sort of filthy carrion for him; his throat and tongue and taste buds are watering for my blood a second time. It isn't going to happen.

“ Warm thy blood Hawaii,” he said in his sardonic message. It is clear to her that Hawaii in the poem means her, that he meant the word to mean Dr. Jessica Coran. “Warm thy blood Coran… Make ready for T-”

A demented, psychotic vampire is after me again.

She can think of nothing else.

She wonders if she can stand the long flight back to the mainland. Her ankles, which have not troubled her since the trek to Kahoolawe, begin to throb, and she wishes she'd kept her cane for something solid to hang onto, if for no other reason.

Matisak's insane eyes fill her mind. He's already gaining control. She feels a silent shiver run through her nervous system and she imagines the plane filled with ghosts that would crawl up from within her the moment darkness descended.

She remembers the madness of Lopaka Kowona. She recalls the insanity of Gerald Ray Sims, who'd killed himself in his cell, claiming demonic possession. She recalls Simon Archer, the notorious Claw. None of them frighten her.

But Matisak does.

She can think of nothing else…