William Krueger - The Devil's bed

Although he didn’t fully understand the horror of incest, Nocturne understood his mother’s pain. He exploded with a howl, and he charged his grandfather in a blind rage, driving him back against a bureau. The old man struggled to defend himself. Finally he grasped a heavy jar from the bureau and swung it against the side of Nocturne’s head, shattering the thick glass. The boy dropped to the floor and entered into his beloved dark.

He woke on the cold, cement floor of the basement. How much time had passed, he couldn’t say. His head hurt. He was thirsty. He stood up, dizzy, and made his way to the steps. Daylight seeped through the narrow gap between the bottom of the basement door and the kitchen floor. He tried to let himself out, but the padlock was still in place. He heard the floorboards of the kitchen creak. The padlock rattled and snapped free. The old man opened the door. Nocturne’s grandfather stood in a blaze of light and held a shotgun aimed at the boy. Nocturne squinted painfully and turned his face from the glare. The old man grabbed him harshly by the arm and pulled him into the light. He shoved Nocturne ahead of him toward the stairway, up to the second floor, down the hallway to the bedroom where Nocturne’s eyes had been truly opened. He forced his grandson inside.

The curtains were drawn against the sunlight. His mother lay in bed, covered by a dirty, wrinkled sheet. She stared up at the ceiling. Her arms were outside the sheet, slightly spread away from her body, each wrist bound in white gauze that was stained red. To Nocturne she seemed an angel fallen to earth, an angel who’d come to rest on that old bed, an angel with red-tipped wings. She blinked, but she didn’t seem to be aware that her son was there.

“Like her mother,” the old man spat. “Weak.” He stepped between Nocturne and the woman on the bed. “Are you like her? Or are you like your father?”

Nocturne looked into the old man’s eyes and understood everything.

He could feel a tearing inside, as if the flesh and the bone were splitting, as if he were giving birth to another self. From a place he’d never stood before, he looked back and saw the boy who’d walked with his mother in the beauty of the night, who’d held her while she wept at the sad music of the phonograph records, who’d learned a kind of happiness in the solitary dark with his books and his gadgets and his imagination and her as his sole companion. The new part of him looked at that child with deep contempt, for clearly the world was a different place, much simpler than he’d ever imagined. There were the powerful and there were the powerless. There were those who created nightmares and those who lived them. Nocturne had been one of the victims. But no more. In the world as he now understood it, there was no room for weakness.

He faced the old man and he heard his own cold voice answer, “Like you.”

Nightmare had been born.

Ibelieve it was very soon after he discovered the incest that he killed his grandfather and his mother,” Dr. Hart said.

“Whoa. He confessed to that?” During the story, Stuart Coyote hadn’t touched his coffee. It no longer steamed in the cup in his hands.

“Another inference of mine.”

“Killed them in anger? A sense of betrayal? What?” Coyote asked.

“Where his grandfather was concerned, I think David considered it justice, retribution. In his world, there was no law but the law of his grandfather, and death the only recourse.”

“And his mother?”

“Anger at her betrayal is certainly a possibility. But I’m more inclined to think he believed he was setting her free.”

“Anger’s got my vote,” Coyote insisted. “Christ, who wouldn’t have been pissed?”

The patient who’d been working in the little garden in the courtyard stood up. Dirt circled the knees of his pants like brown patches, and he made a brief effort to brush himself clean. He looked down at the flowers he’d tended, then stared up at the sky that was fractured by wire mesh.

“Keep in mind that David’s understanding of the world came largely from what he experienced in that dreadful house,” she said. “His knowledge of what was beyond his basement he’d acquired largely from his reading and the radio. It would be as if you or I were trying to understand the cannibals of Borneo simply from reading textbooks. I think he was more outraged by his mother’s suffering than by the incest. The killing ended her pain and his grandfather’s tyranny. In his mind, the act was reasonable and justified.”

“How did he kill them?” Bo asked.

“He blew up the house.” Her brown eyes strolled between Bo and Coyote. “Swift and terrible.”

Bo shook his head. “This all seems predicated on believing what he’s told you. Do you have any facts that support his story?”

“Facts?” She smiled patiently. “He was placed in St. Jerome’s Home for Children after he was discovered outside the burning remains of an isolated farmhouse in Isanti County. Investigators found explosives and other related materials in the barn. They determined David’s grandfather was a man they’d been attempting to trace for some time, a man who called himself Short Fuse. In letters to the media, he’d taken responsibility for nearly a dozen bombings over a three-year period. All this was almost a quarter of a century ago, but I’ve checked the newspaper accounts. As far as I can tell, no suspicion ever fell on David. He was quite clever, even then.”

“Is he criminally insane?” Bo asked.

“I would have expected his childhood experiences-neglect, abuse, exposure to incest-to contribute to psychosis. However, in David’s case, I believe what resulted would better be characterized as an alternative reality. He is, in many ways, predictable because he lives according to an ethos. Not one many people would necessarily condone, but certainly understandable.”

“Help us understand,” Bo said.

“All right. You or I might consider killing someone in a fit of anger. We don’t because we’re conditioned to believe it’s wrong to kill. In war, however, to kill becomes the moral imperative. For God, for country, for our comrades. And we hold in high esteem those who kill best. Think of David Moses as existing internally in a state of perpetual warfare. He kills not out of cruelty, but because it is in complete accord with the world as he understands it.”

“If that’s true, why hasn’t he killed more?”

“He intimated that he has. Many times.”

“A serial killer?” Stuart Coyote asked.

“Not if I’ve interpreted correctly what I’ve pieced together. A hired killer, Mr. Coyote. An assassin.”

“A hit man?”

“Dr. Hart,” Bo put in, “you said that before the killing in Minneapolis, Moses had no criminal record, is that right?”

“None that we’re aware of.”

“Men who do that kind of work are generally well known to law enforcement.”

She didn’t seem at all inclined to withdraw her conjecture.

“You believe all this?” Coyote asked incredulously. “Don’t you think it’s possible he fooled you? Or maybe that he was so deluded he made it all seem convincing?”

“With a man of David’s intelligence, anything is possible. You indicated you’d seen the scars on his arms.”

Bo nodded. “Self-mutilation?”

She shook her head. “Cicatrization. Ritual scarring. If I’ve put his story together correctly, he carries a scar for each killing. Those of least importance are on his appendages. The greater the import, the nearer he puts them to his heart. Another thing. He’s very sensitive to sunlight. He prefers to wear sunglasses even indoors. He’s been checked. There’s no medical foundation for such a sensitivity. But to David, it’s real.”