David Wiltse - The Edge of Sleep

It made no sense, of course, but sense was hardly the point. What it lacked for Becker was the emotional linkage that was necessary for him to follow the killer’s tortured route. There seemed no handles for Becker to grasp the killer’s mind. In other cases Becker had always managed to find a way to grip the thoughts of the madman. He had been forced to go deep within himself to uncover the murderous impulse in his own soul in order to do it. The price had always been high, but he had always done it The intuitive connection had always given him the scent of the killer and allowed Becker to follow him. Even when the trail had gone cold, Becker had always had the image of the killer in his mind because, at least for a moment of chilling introspection, he had been able to step into the killer’s skin, to breathe his overheated air, to feel the tremor of excitement in the killer’s heart as he committed his crime.

As he had told Karen, it was neither trick nor magic, but an act of courage and honesty that allowed him to look at himself without disguise or hypocrisy. But in this case it had abandoned him. He knew only what it was to be Lament’s victim, not Lamont. There was something wrong, something hidden in the crime, or in Lamont, that Becker could not find within himself.

Becker stared at Jack’s window. He imagined himself standing here now with the heart of a monster. But a human monster, a child who had grown to adulthood and become a monster, twisted and shaped that way by someone or something, or a thousand insistent somethings, so that now he stood as misshapen within as a gothic gargoyle. Becker imagined that he had come to take the boy who slept within that house before him. To slip within the room, past the sleeping parents, to lift the child from his bed and steal away into the night. Why? To what end? Becker knew the ultimate end, of course; the child must die, but killing him was not the point. The point lay in the six weeks of living. And it was not sexual. That was the most bizarre aspect to Becker. It did not conform with anything he knew or had intuited about the other monsters who came before this one. Sex was always a part of it.

Then forget the part he did not understand, he decided. Start with what he knew, let that draw him into the rest. First to steal the child. Experience that. Feel what Lamont feels when he sees the victim, sense the excitement, the dread, the irrepressible urge.

Becker stared at the light in Jack’s window until it seemed to narrow and focus itself. The light became a tunnel in the darkness, the only way to move, the only way to get where he needed to go. Silently, Becker approached the tunnel of light.

Like his mother, Jack had kicked off the sheet and lay exposed upon the bed. He wore shortie pajamas with a fire engine motif. The walls of the room were papered with athletes in action, kicking, catching, running, vaulting, and posters of football players adorned the walls. Jack looked even smaller and sweeter by comparison. He seemed to lie in a pool of innocence within his room, his little boy’s limbs and sleeping face in sharp contrast with the hard-edged adults upon the walls.

As he peered through the window at such sweet guilelessness, Becker tried to feel the urge to violate it, the raging, irresistible compulsion to have it, to seize the innocence and make it his own by devouring it.

The boy moved slightly in his sleep, rolling toward the window. It was, if there is such a thing, the face of an angel, and the monster at the window had to have it. Not because he hated it, for who could hate an angel? But because he loved it. The monster loved his victims. Lamont stole the boys because he loved them. It had to start from love, Becker felt. Only later did something go wrong and turn that love into an emotion that ended in death. But now, seeing the boy for the first time, the sense of love was close to awe. The desire to possess the boy was enormous, it made his body ache with hope. The monster turned from the window and started toward the door.

Karen was dreaming that someone was breaking into the house and then she was suddenly awake and aware that the exterior door was sighing shut against its pneumatic stopper. She was out of bed and had her service automatic in her hand before she remembered that Becker was with her. When she saw his side of the bed was empty she realized he had already heard the noise and responded.

She came around the door in a crouch, her weapon extended and held in both hands. Pausing for her heart to quiet, she moved forward into the darkened house, stopping every few feet to listen.

The living room was empty, and the kitchen. The light from Jack’s room was on and it pulled her toward it like a beacon. Outside her son’s room she paused again, her skin tingling with anxiety. She could hear the boy, moaning slightly as if in a dream, but she was aware of something else, another presence in the room.

Karen stepped into the doorway and saw a naked man leaning over her son.

“Don’t touch him, get your hands off him!” she said. Her voice was as menacing as a growl in the dark.

“I wasn’t,” Becker said. He turned his head slowly, very slowly, to face Karen.

Karen saw who he was now, but her position did not change. Her hands held the pistol steady and pointed at the center of his torso.

“Stand away,” she said. Her voice was still like the rasp of a file on metal.

Becker moved two steps from the bed and slowly lifted his hands above his head.

Karen looked at Jack, who tossed slightly in his sleep. He was obviously all right, undisturbed. She looked again at Becker, taking time enough now to really look at him. For the first time she realized he was wearing shorts. In her initial, panicked glance she had thought he was completely naked. The look on his face was wary, watchful, but not guilty.

Karen lowered the gun.

“Come out,” she said, her voice now a whisper. She was immensely relieved that they had not awakened Jack. It would have been some sight to see, his mother waving a gun at her near-naked lover, who was standing over his bed. How many years of therapy would be needed for that one, she thought.

Becker followed Karen into the living room, his hands still over his head.

“Stop that,” she said. She turned on a lamp and sat in the overstuffed chair opposite the sofa, the gun in her lap, no longer pointing at him.

Becker lowered his hands and sat on the sofa. Karen glanced at him and then away. His face was a mask of grinning irony. It did little to hide the hurt in his eyes.

“I thought…” she started. She could not say what she thought.

“You thought I was going to abuse him.” Becker said.

“I heard someone come in the house, it’s, what time is it, it’s three in the morning. I thought you were a burglar.”

“You knew it was me.”

“Christ. Becker, it’s three o’clock in the morning…”

“You saw I wasn’t in bed, you knew it was me.”

“Coming in and out of the house in the middle of the night? Why would I think it was you? There’s a naked man leaning over my son…”

“And you knew it was me and you thought…”

“I reacted. I just reacted, I didn’t think anything…”

“You’re still thinking it. I don’t blame you. I’d be thinking the same thing.”

“I wasn’t…” she said weakly.

“The world seems to be full of it these days. We’re swimming in it. It comes from everywhere-priests and fathers and boyfriends and baby-sitters… Paranoia seems very justified.”

“I know you. John, I know you wouldn’t…”

“How? How do you know?”

“Because I know you.”

Becker laughed. Cruelly, Karen thought.

“Nobody knows anybody that well. Including their shrink.”