Stone Shadow (24 page)

Because they are identical. Eyes, nose, mouth, even ears. Perfectly formed from the convexities to the concavities, twins so startlingly, shockingly alike their appearance staggers the viewer. But they are just little children. Molested. Tortured. Abused. Their twin lives an unending nightmare of depravity. They wait silently, waiting for the next pain or degradation or moment of terror.

In a world like this, where endogamy is the norm, these twin children are a trick played by the dark forces of nature, a unique gift with endless possibilities for the cruel and perverted mind to explore.

The little boys jump as they hear the familiar slam of the door. It is the sound that means the man has shut the door of his mud-encrusted pickup and soon he will come in the shanty.

The screen door bangs like a gunshot as he stomps in bellowing “Sister—"

“Eh?” A young, heavyset woman sits sprawled on a rump-sprung, worn sofa.

“Git over here, you-uns,” he says, roughly pulling his sister by the hair, and she yelps in pain, making him bark out a laugh as he pushes the shoulder straps of his filthy overalls off, letting it drop around his ankles as he pulls her mouth on to him.

The woman begins to suck on the huge penis that her brother has jammed into her mouth but a paroxysm of pain stabs her swollen belly and she jerks away with a scream of anguish.

“What ‘n Hades wrong with ya now, ya’ bitch sow?"

“UUUhhhhh,” she moans, “it's a comin', Cletus. Do sump'n. AAAAAHHHHHHH!"

“Ah'll do somp’ by dog-swallers,” he says and kicks her viciously in the abdomen. She screams and he laughs raucously, yanking her back on him and ejaculating into her screaming mouth and across her face.

The sister/wife writhes on the floor. It is a size-14 Ozark Workboot abortion. The fetus will be fed to the dogs outside as the twins watch. They will be nurtured in this hellish caldron of incest, madness, and murder.

E
ichord had a yellow legal pad in the seat beside him as he drove toward Donna's residence, and he popped the cap off a felt-tipped pen with his teeth, driving with one hand and trying to print with the other.

When he got to a stop sign he looked to see if he could read what he'd been writing on the pad and he saw:

1. Judge?

2. Court order?

3. Interior?

4. Houtcheson?

5. Exterior teams? Other?

6. Ukie/danger?

7. Noel/danger?

8. Joe H./APB?

9. Hosp. records?

10. Demon

But it was printed De Mon, and a DEMON was a DEtection MONitor device, one of the few pieces of sophisticated “wizardry” that he was willing to put much trust in. It was night eyes.

He uncapped the pen again and printed:

11. Randy Vincent?

12. New drug?

This was something Mandel had alluded to. A possibility he didn't want to overlook.

And then he folded the piece of paper, tucked it away, and put the iffy, murky, and entirely bloody mess out of his mind for the next few hours.

She liked his flowers, she said, and he thought she looked very pretty and told her so, and without a trace of malice she suggested they have something cold to drink before they go, and he said fine, and the idea was to pick a movie from the listings in the paper, and she brought each of them a glass of very fresh and very chilled orange juice, which was wonderful, and she told him she liked to squeeze some fresh juice every day and he said whatever it was he said and they just sort of relaxed and sat side by side looking at the newspaper listings and talking softly and sipping their juice and then they put their juice down and he leaned over as if to kiss her and you know how it is sometimes when you start to kiss a stranger and the noses aren't quite right it's something you don't think about but that first time the faces have never been that close and the other person's nose and mouth feels funny at first but this felt very natural except that when he kissed her she appeared very demure and it was just a gentle and exploratory kiss but she opened her mouth so wide when she kissed him it kind of surprised him and he responded and the soul kiss was deep and long and then another and then the papers fell to the floor along in there somewhere Clint and Charlie and Sally and James and Goldie and Michael and Kathleen all sliding to the floor in a wrinkled pile and his hands were touching her and she didn't stop him and oh my well now this woman was so soft and cushiony and sexy and warm and time passes as it has a way of always doing and she is over him, and the clothes are down there with Michael and Kathleen and all of them and straddling him with her long hair falling loose around her face and down on the porcelain skin and then the hair is swinging loose all over them and it feels like corn silk against him when it touches and her large full breasts with big erect nipples hard as fingertips jiggling as she moves back and forth astride him, his hands holding her gently at first by the waist and then dropping down on her hips and moving her back and forth in a soft but strong and steady rhythm of new lovemaking a sliding and persistent heat of bodies moving together against a background of such quiet noises the sound of their flesh and a faint click as a refrigerator makes some ice in another room and a faraway traffic sound and the faster breathing and a sheen of perspiration and it feels so good and she says

“I'm"—and a whimpering noise—"I'm almost there."

“Yes,” he said, giving the word three syllables.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. Ah.” A lover's conversation. Almost.

Almost. Oh. OHHhhh. OHHHHHHHHHH.... OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I'M COMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMINNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGG,” she tells him.

“Yeah. Come on. Cum,” he tells her.

“UUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM."

“AHHHH."

And she laughs out loud at him as about five cubic centimeters containing around a billion spermatozoa go making a night deposit in the hot, wet vaginal vault.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAA,” she tells him, “not bad,” laughing, leaning over and kissing him on the mouth like she means it. And she holds him tight, locked in her arms and covered in her sweet-smelling silky hair and soon there was a soft rocking again as he grew inside her and stiffened in the hardening liquid fires and she rode him across the finish line in a screaming, whimpering wild wet slippery climax and a big kissy finish and then for a while there was just gentleness. And it appeared that both of them had slaked their thirst and it was a soft and easy time of contented cuddling and he whispered to her that she was his high-school hayride fantasy and she asked him if that was because she reminded him of wet straw and dripping eggs and they both agreed that this beat any movie they could have gone to and they agreed that each preferred sweet romances to hot glances and that they preferred cuddly hellos to mean good-byes and they had a long and intimate discussion about such things and then much later they both decided they would further explore the nature of desire.

H
e did not remember driving in from the Lido, only parking his vehicle, so absorbed was he in the planning process of the minutes and hours to come. He did his mental homework with the same meticulous concern for detail that he'd exercise the moment when it all started coming down around their ears. Pure copper now, cold and objective. The thing beginning to collapse like so many of the big ones did, as much from the weight of the paperwork as from the skein of unraveling events. Getting very close. And this crazy mother had taken off more people than a plane crash and there were lots more lives at stake. And that's when you sometimes have to take chances and play a little fast and loose.

And Jack moved into high gear, the day sliding along slicker'n possum fat, greased by MCTF and the fates, Eichord playing out his hand with a cop-friendly judge as if it were high-stakes poker. Letting it slide into place with the judge's reticence sending phrases like probable cause and reasonable doubt and civil libertarians flowing along the phone lines like honey. And by noon he had the court order and several other things as well.

There was some trouble about the home entry. The friendly judge wasn't quite all that friendly. There were statutes here and Supreme Court rulings over there and violations of privacy somewhere else, and he'd already gone out on one helluva limb with the drugged-hypnosis thing, so Eichord tap-danced off it and went on to other things.

And he got MacTuff to reach out for him and games were played and probable cause got found, and it's like corruption, it's just part of the Big Picture we're always hearing about, but when you're laying a trap inside the famous Noel goddamn COLLIER residence, ole buddy, you better flat make sure there are some deep dip probables to get you through that door.

“Hello.” Or wait outside in the tall weeds like they do on TV.

“Doc?” And one other thing.

“Yo.” You better make it WORK.

“It's me."

“Right."

“I talked to the judge this morning."

“His honor was cooperative?” he asked hopefully.

“Sure—to a point."

“You and I being friends of the court and all."

“Uh-huh."

“So nu?"

“Let's do it."

“Uh, yes. But you don't sound terribly gung ho about the thing. You fear repercussions? Because if that's it I told you I'd take full—"

“No, no. Not really."

“No?"

“Well. He laid it out for me pretty clear. If it goes badly it doesn't matter one hoot in hell that Ukie gave permission. We're laying the foundation for a nice mistrial."

“I see. And your concern is—as we talked and as I mention in my memo to you on the thing I want to try with Ukie—if he's a party to the murders, as we both believe he could easily be, you could still end up with half a mass-murder team cut loose and on the street.” “It's our only game. Let's go for it."

They wished each other luck and Eichord took an incoming phone call on the next line.

“Mr. Eichord?"

“Yes?"

“Randy Vinson."

“Who?"

“Randy Vinson. I understand you've been trying to reach me."

“Oh, boy. Have I ever. Did you say your name was Vinsa?"

“Vinson.” He spelled it for him.

“That explains some of my problem in finding you. I had been given your name over the phone by Dr. Douglas Geary in Scottsdale, Arizona."

“Oh, yes!” He lit up at Doug's name.

“I worked with Dr. Geary on a murder case a number of years back and he was kind enough to try to help me examine some theoretical possibles that I ran by him. I assume you know about the Grave-digger murders in Dallas?"

“No, sorry, I haven't seen a television set in weeks. I'm doing some research work here in Switzerland and I don't know what's going on back in the States.” Eichord took him through a précis of the Hackabee case. When he hit the word “twins” it was like he'd stepped on a trip wire, and Dr. Vinson began speaking very rapidly, machine-gun fast and in a precise monotone of words Eichord didn't know. “Are these monozygotic or dizygotic,” it sounded like he was saying, and there was a long question in which the only word longer than two syllables that Jack recognized was “monovular.” Slowly, he had Vinson take him back through it and was able to answer the question. The twins were maternal twins. From a single egg. Clinical definition: monozygotic. Identical twins.

“What do you want to know?” the doctor asked.

“Lots. For example, what about a possibility of a neural pathway or plateau that would link the two twins?” He doodled Os.

“Not a possibility. It's a certainty. Absolutely."

“Just so I'll understand. How do you know?” OOO interlinked.

“The information is just coming out now. The results of years and years of research and careful testing. We're just releasing the findings. And I must tell you the findings about twins and crime are VERY spooky.” The first O becomes a P. S-POO-KY

“Did you say SPOOKY?” He remembers both Ukie and Joe saying it.

“'Fraid I did. No other word for it. Were the Hackabee twins raised apart?"

“First of all I'm not sure. I only have their word so far. The, one who is in custody claims they were together through their formative years but has been rather vague about the point where they went their separate ways. I'm not certain offhand what the other twin says. There may be a secret background of molestation. So far we can't be certain of their background. There's obvious animosity."

“Well. That doesn't necessarily mean much. Our studies showed that the environment was vital in the twins’ personality structuring, perhaps more than that of the same environment on a non-twin, but until you have third-person source corroboration there's no point in basing anything on your data. Twins scheme. They lie. Contrive. Criminal twins have a profile that is complex and interlocking beyond anything we've imagined."

“Is this telepathy thing in twins for real or is it somebody's fantasy theory or what?"

“Is there hard evidence to substantiate that there is a telepathic element stronger in single-egg twins or twins in general, than in non-twins? Monos, absolutely. You have the identical internal structure. I mean barring some birth accident, you're talking about the exact same chromosomes, genes, and the,—-” Another sentence came out that has to be translated. It was almost a parallel of listening to Ukie. Something, something, zygomorphic, bilaterally symmetrical something. RNA. Recombinant something. And Jack had made the mistake of asking him to explain one of the words and he almost choked in the deluge of chromatinic, polymerized nucleic this, and the basophilic bodies of the cell that, and the protamine or histone the other thing. Finally, Jack thought he had the beginnings of a grasp.

“How real is the ability to manipulate telepathically?"

“For a one-ovum twin it is as real as real can be. Remember, even without an aggression/passivity syndrome going you have that perfectly matched structure. The minds think alike. Work alike. Even in cases of identicals raised apart they'll choose the same color schemes, name their kitty cats the same names, everything is similar. The neural thing—the pathway you ask about—anybody has this. The problem is we can only seem to utilize it when strong, dominant, negative happenings trigger the avenue of thought. Illness. Pain. Imminent danger. Death. Think of the occasions where you've heard of or experienced something approximating the transmission or reception of so-called telepathic communication. It's been where threat, or illness, or pain, or death has been involved."