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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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More significantly, Grove noted without passion or surprise the inclusion of
himself
in the inconographic evidence. He had some difficulty looking at the close-ups of his own face during that horrible exorcism ritual last year, but even
those
proved helpful. They began to provide a link—in Grove's mind, at least—between the killer and himself, between the killings and Grove's exorcism, between the ancient symbol drawn on the floor of Geisel's cabin and the markings left at the storm-lashed crime scenes.
But what
was
the link? Judging from the bizarre little shrine in the corner—with its broken cassettes and ribbons of videotape—the Doerr kid had seen De Lourde's home movie of the exorcism. But then what? How did that initial viewing explode into this convoluted pathology? How did this poor, sick kid go from simply seeing a ritual on video to becoming this elaborate, fetishistic, homicidal maniac? Grove felt as though the answers were very close but still just out of reach. Like a word on the tip of his tongue, or a vague melody in the back of his mind that would not go away.
Grove was going through the piles of doctored photographs when a loud crash out in the living room made him jump. He set down his work and made his way out of the secret room, through the pantry, and into the kitchen. He immediately saw the problem. Fiona had arrived.
“Help me open the windows, Grove, come on!” Kaminsky was yelling, struggling with the painted-over old windows along the front of the living room. Evidently a piece of flying aluminum siding had slammed into the front door, shattering the slender pane of window glass near the top.
“What are you doing!” Maura stood behind him with her back pressed against the adjacent wall, eyes wide, almost in a stupor. A bullet hole was visible in the wall only inches away from her head. “We're not waiting the storm out
here!
Not
here!
”
“I am sorry, Miss County!” Kaminsky grunted as he quickly wrestled open a window. “But now I am afraid we have no choice!”
Something thumped across the roof, sifting plaster dust down from the ceiling, as Grove rushed over to a side window and muscled it up. “What are we
opening
windows for?” he hollered at Kaminsky.
The Russian was moving the sofa over to the door, wedging it against the screen. “In order to avoid air pressure blasts!” he explained with a grunt. “She will blow out sealed windows with the greatest of ease!”
Grove helped him. It took both men only a couple of minutes to go through the entire bungalow, lifting double panes, cranking open smaller hinged windows. They worked quickly, without comment, spurred on by that strange, moaning whistle that had been intensifying over the last half hour. There were all styles of windows. The bedroom, for instance, with its tasteful sleigh-back bed and profusion of pillows, had two of those old-fashioned louvered-style windows. Kaminsky flipped them open, letting the wind-driven mist have its way with the room. The bathroom had a narrow screened window above the toilet, which Grove cranked open, and then punched out with a single right jab. The tiny screen pinwheeled into the wind, then vanished in the darkness. Time was ticking away.
A few minutes earlier, Kaminsky had explained that Fiona's outer wind bands were just arriving, and it was only going to get worse now. They needed to find a place to safely sit out the storm, and they needed to pray that the ensuing flood did not reach into the University District before the arrival of the eye.
At last, they got every window open, the rain misting inward now on surges of wind.
Kaminsky ordered everybody out into the living room then, his voice barely audible above the whistling freight train. “Okay, here is the deal! We need to find a spot that is surrounded by a reinforced ceiling and walls!”
“If such a place exists,” Grove said, looking around.
Lightning flared again, streaking the darkness outside the front windows.
“There's no crawl space,” Maura informed them. “I already checked.”
“Foundation's a cement slab,” Grove said.
“Goddamned cheap postwar bungalows,” Kaminsky growled, tugging at his damp beard, scanning the archway, the hall, the front vestibule.
A massive sonic boom erupted outside, making all three of them jerk. It sounded like an antiaircraft cannon, its echo vibrating the sky before being swallowed by the whistling roar of the wind. The electricity flickered. Lamps fizzled—the power wavering off and back on.
“The hell was that!” Maura said.
“Probably a power station,” Kaminsky said.
“Aren't we supposed to sit in the southeast corner?” Grove asked.
“That would be a good idea if this were a tornado, Grove, but this is not a tornado, this is not even remotely a little bit like a tornado!”
Across the front of the bungalow, rain spumed through the gaping windows, beads of moisture already coating the chairs and the rug and the sofa. Grove smelled the cold, wet, briny sea in the air, and he shivered. In minutes the ocean would arrive in New Orleans like an Old Testament God, cleansing the labyrinthine streets of Babylon, washing away hundreds of years of human history.
“Wait a minute!” Kaminsky had become very still, gazing over at the archway into the kitchen. “Wait just one minute!”
Grove was looking at him. “What ... ?”
Kaminsky lumbered across the room, then ducked into the shadows of the pantry.
“Oh no. No way.” Maura looked ill.
“Take it easy, kiddo.” Grove went over to her, put his arm around her.
Maura was shaking her head. “No, no, no, no, no ... I'd rather take my chances under the kitchen table.”
Kaminsky emerged from the pantry, his eyes bright with enthusiasm. “Six-inch concrete walls ... steel-reinforced ceiling. No windows, Grove. It is perfect ...
perfect.
Come on, help me gather some things.”
17
At 9:03 p.m., central standard time, an emissary from hell named Fiona arrived in the darkness—unfurling biblical weather across southeast Louisiana's Brenton Islands, and up through the Atchafalaya Swamp. It was a mortal assault on an already scourged land, and this time, very few people, rich, poor, or otherwise, were around to witness it. Abandoned dinghies and old condemned shrimp boats along the decaying harbors of Terrebone Bay levitated into the air, riding the black waves and slamming into cypress groves and shore stations. Bayous boiled and shifted in the zero-visibility darkness. Tarpaper roofs peeled off buildings and spun into the ether. Miles and miles of shoreline palms and tupelo trees bent over sideways in the savage winds, the torn and shredded fronds and leaves filling the sky like a flurry of birds struggling to escape.
The devil wind pushed north, chewing through the delta, turning the swamp into a witches' cauldron of floodwater and churning, shivering wetlands. Piers buckled and broke apart in the furious gales, tumbling for hundreds of yards into the bogs. Tiny backwoods villages virtually imploded, telephone wires popping, streetlamps exploding like Roman candles.
The official time of impact on the city of New Orleans that night would be noted in most histories as 9:53 p.m., when Fiona's concentrated winds arrived in Algiers. At that point, any reckless souls still remaining—hunkered down in their storm cellars or safe rooms—would have heard that eerie train whistle noise rising to mind-numbing levels. To human ears, the sound began to resemble a colossal, insane choir, singing completely out of tune. The ferocious winds accompanying that sound ripped through the narrow streets, flaying open buildings with the impassive efficiency of a giant can opener. The refurbished levees barely held up in those early hours. Rain strafed the streets, machine-gunning the sides of buildings with enough force to leave dimples the size of bullet holes. Live oaks along the graceful river walks convulsed as if strangled by unseen assailants. And the huge, black, snaking Mississippi undulated and rose in the darkness to precarious levels, sending whitecaps over the sides of Tchoupitoulas and Decatur, drenching the West Bank Bridge.
When this hellish tabernacle finally descended upon the French Quarter, the area was transformed, the demonic chorus rising into a mad crescendo. It seemed, at that point, as though the entire Vieux Carré had begun to vibrate, all the wounded buildings and narrow, litter-strewn alleyways shaking as though in a great earthquake. Right at that moment, in fact, just north of St. Louis Cathedral, at the dead end of a deserted side street, under a gentlemen's club identified only by a broken neon sign that said
LIV NUDE IRLS,
a different sort of transformation was taking place.
Down a short flight of steps, behind a storefront door labeled
MADAM TINA'S HOUSE OF CHARMS,
a lone figure huddled in the corner, on the floor. Slender legs drawn up against his chest, face buried in his hands, he wept uncontrollably as the mad choir rose all around him.
What was he doing here dressed like this? How did he get here, in the middle of another apocalyptic storm? This was once a place of comfort for him, a place he came for solace. The owner, Tina Lucien, was a sweet old Haitian gal who smoked a corncob pipe and played checkers with him. But now everybody was gone, and the world seemed to be turning inside out, and he had no memory of coming here.
The tears poured out of him, streaking his face, dripping off his jutting chin. His skin, the color of café au lait in the dim light of the powerless voodoo shop, was filmed with sweat, and his stubby, gnawed fingers trembled as he hugged his knees against his chest. The long, black, muslin duster that draped his body—as well as the chains and hooks and instruments that dangled off his belt—looked oddly out of proportion to his wiry, brown form ... like the clothes of a long-dead grown-up, found in an attic, draped over a child playing dress-up. The pointed black cowl on his head looked especially awkward now.
Lightning crackled outside, sending silver tendrils down into the shadows.
In that moment of flashbulb brilliance Michael Doerr noticed a small voodoo doll on the floor a few feet away from him. Made of old cloth, candle wax, and modeling clay, and shaped like a little old lady, her face like a rotten apple core. She had probably fallen during one of the wind tremors. But in that single instant of searchlight brightness, as the winds keened, Doerr sensed something both important and terrible radiating off that little doll, which seemed to be staring up at him with her tiny little metal-button eyes.
Tina Lucien had probably made that little “soul” doll herself, the fabric of its clothes soaked in a mixture of her favorite perfume and her own urine. She'd probably stuffed it with tea leaves and chicken bones and human hair. The lungs were tiny balloons filled with Tina's own breath, the spine a long fishbone. There were secret things in there as well. Magic things.
But more than anything else, the
essence
of it, the
presence
that the doll gave off in that single moment of illumination, those little shimmering eyes staring, waiting, knowing, registered suddenly in Doerr's terror-stricken mind as a clue, a key to his sickness, a window on his fractured soul. The soul doll was created to be a golem—an artificial creature possessed by an elemental spirit.
Was Michael a golem, too?
Throughout his childhood, throughout the years of institutions and medication and group homes, he had heard voices in his head, telling him to do things, things he didn't
want
to do. He had fought to push them away, ignore them, erase them. He had almost succeeded, too. Almost found a way to live a normal life. Made it all the way to Tulane, to grad school, to Moses De Lourde's inner circle. But the memories would always be with him, the voices always inside him like a cancer or a virus that hides in the cells, but no other voice in his head would speak to him as loudly, would penetrate his soul as violently, would fill him with such poison, as the one that came the day Hurricane Katrina blew into town... .
 
 
Running down Bourbon Street, still clad in his hospital smock, his skinny brown ass hanging out, the winds swirling like mad voices overhead, his wrist still bandaged from his fourth attempt at suicide, Michael Doerr hurls through the rain toward his last salvation: De Lourde's Dumaine Street row house. Michael has nobody else to turn to, no money, no way to get out of town, no hope, nothing. Only Moses De Lourde. Only his old mentor and lover.
He reaches the Dumaine Street gallery house and frantically scales the steps. Bang-bang-bang! Knocking furiously on the back door. No answer. Michael finds the spare key under a flowerpot and goes inside.
Nobody home.
Oh God, what's going to happen to him? With the hurricane closing in, the rain like a machine gun on the glass and the tiles! Michael turns on the lights—thank God the power's still on—and he goes into the living room and he cowers in the corner. He buries his face in his hands, stringers of snot looping off his chin. Pitiful ... just pitiful. He looks down at his wrist where the jagged vertical gashes have soaked through the bandage, staining the gauze a deep eggplant color. Absolutely pitiful.
He couldn't even kill himself properly ... and now the chronology of the last couple of years plays through Michael Doerr's brain like an old nickelodeon flicker show: falling so madly in love with the professor, becoming his little bitch boy, his little lapdog, and then following him all the way to the Yucatan. But his relationship with the older man had been doomed from the start. De Lourde had already begun to drift away from the young grad student by the time they embarked on their expedition. Michael felt alienated, unloved, betrayed. And then the debacle in the Yucatan began to unfold.
Getting caught in that hurricane was bad enough, but what really yanked Michael off his spindle was that mummified boy. A victim of savage abuse, Michael had empathized so much with that sad little corpse. Sacrificed to the angry nature gods, discarded like a piece of garbage.
Michael Doerr returned to the States a broken soul. Deep down inside, something had torn away, snapped apart, leaving a gaping hole in its place, a huge empty cavity. But just as water seeks its lowest point, a flayed-open soul hungers for sustenance, hungers for something to fill it. His nights were tormented by dreams.
In his nightmares he saw that little mummified boy, his ancient eyes geeked open in death like petrified white marbles. He saw other things. He saw his abusive father coming for him with empty black eye sockets. The man used to wear these little trademark dark granny glasses, and that affectation got incorporated into Michael's dreams. Michael would awake each morning wanting to tear his own eyes out of his skull. He wanted to burn down buildings, he wanted to cut himself, he wanted to drink drain opener.
Most of all, he wanted to kill.
But somehow, through force of will, through Tina Lucien's healing magic, he fought these powerful impulses. He directed his burgeoning madness inward, directed it toward himself. He drank himself into oblivion, consumed enormous amounts of antidepressants and sedatives and wine and absinthe. He saw visions. Between September of 2004 and August of 2005, he tried to kill himself three times and spent weeks in the psyche ward down at City of Martyrs Hospital in Algiers. But then reports of a major tropical storm out in the Atlantic began filtering through the news channels, and Michael Doerr sensed a change coming, a reckoning.
Her name was Katrina.
Now, on the night of her arrival, Michael Doerr huddles like a wounded, frightened bird in Moses de Lourde's deserted apartment, just waiting, waiting for death to come and take him into its whirlwind. He has nowhere left to go. He will die in Katrina's hellish embrace, in her violent arms. The building is starting to tremble. Books falling from shelves, power flickering. The sound of a freight train coming across the black gulf filling the air. But Michael doesn't hear it anymore because he sees something then, something that calls out to him.
On the floor, at his feet, a videotape. He saw it once before. De Lourde said something cryptic and mysterious about it, such as, “Oh, that's going to be in my memoirs one day, or at least Ripley's Believe It or Not, but nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to look at that until I'm dead,” and now Michael crawls toward it like an animal sniffing the droppings of its prey. He picks it up. Shakes it.
The electrical power is about to sputter out. Quick! Before everything goes dark, look at it! See what that old queen was hiding! See what was so precious to that old faggot! Michael stuffs the videotape into the VCR next to the computer, and he presses Play.
He watches for a moment without even taking a breath. He cannot move. He sees the shaky, handheld image of Ulysses Grove jerking violently, slipping off the edge of his sweat-stained bed, then sprawling to the floor, while a priest and a shaman mutter litanies over him, and the picture goes haywire for a moment.
Michael blinks. His blood freezes in his veins. Somehow he knows this is important, very important, maybe the most important thing he will ever see in his whole miserable, pathetic life. On the monitor, the thing inside Ulysses Grove has separated from its host like a white membrane separating from an egg yolk, and the second Ulysses Grove flops to the floor like a helpless game fish on the hull of a boat, and then this new Grove turns to the camera, and the thing doesn't look like Ulysses Grove anymore, it looks like a shriveled, blackened, cancerous alien. It trains its jaundiced, hooded, reptilian eyes on the lens. It looks directly at the screen, black lips peeling back away from sharp little yellow fish teeth.
“—Hello, Michael—”
Then everything happens at once, very fast, so fast that Michael isn't sure whether he heard his name being spoken by the creature on the screen or by a voice in his head, but it doesn't matter, because at that exact moment there is a huge crack of thunder outside, and a flash of brilliant magnesium-white light off the computer monitor, and a great eruption of energy plumes off the little screen like a transparent bubble being pressed out of a tube, and it jumps through the air at Michael, and it strikes him dead center between his eyes.
The impact knocks him backward with the force of a battering ram, sending him sprawling to the floor, supine, gasping for breath.
For one horrible frenzied instant Michael Doerr feels as though he is drowning, but not underwater, and not exactly in fluid, but rather in
darkness
. The texture of it—if asked, he could only describe it as a slimy, dark substance like oil—envelopes his face, oozes down his throat, floods his lungs and his belly and his bowels. He shudders at the impossible voltage running through him, his fingers clenching and his arms jerking with palsy.
The lights go out.
Now Michael lies there in the blackness, the twitching slowly subsiding like the tics of an insect dying on a frying pan, his soul convulsing at the toxic substance spreading through him. Michael grits his teeth so hard now he hears them crack in his ears. It feels as though a pair of great, blackened, papery eyelids are opening in his brain, looking out at the world through the eye holes in his skull. Then the eyelids slowly close. And there is nothing left but the darkness and the great heaving winds of Katrina outside the gallery, shaking the town down to its moorings, whistling through the oaks, the intermittent lightning turning the whole scene into a slow-motion dream.

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