The Haunting of the Gemini (22 page)

Eddie sat at his tiny school desk humming a lullaby. “You will always bear the mark of the twin. You are everyone's twin.” He leaped up and raced for the cell door. “You are the open gate to hell, like it or not.”

* * *

I let go of Eddie's hand. The murmurs of other visitors drifted past. The guards still stood at their stations. I pulled my hand away and opened it, palm up. The writing was gone. He looked around the room in a panic. “You brought all my victims up with you! Didn't you, Jackie?”

I settled into my chair. “No. They came on their own to confront the person who cowardly killed them.” He covered his eyes. I reached out and yanked his hands down, and he pushed back and out of his chair.

The guard rushed over, demanding, “Sit down, or I'll put you down.”

Eddie squirmed under the authority and apologized. But I saw his eyes drift down to the guard's gun. He licked his lips. Always wanting the power.

The guard sat him back in his chair. I could still see the desire for the gun in his eyes. “Eddie, let go of the demon.”

“No, never,” he said. “It's what keeps me alive. And someday I shall be out. I will find you. You can't shake me off that easy, Jackie.” He stared at me like he was gearing up for something. And, boy, was he.

“Oh, I saw your mother,” he said. “All done up like a whore and—”

I stopped him. The idiot had no idea. “If you did, you wouldn't be alive to speak about it.”

He scoffed at me. “The priest couldn't help her. God was too busy, Jackie. She was like you. Having this extra-special intelligence, this passage to the other side.”

I started, “Eddie, this isn't about my mother—”

“Don't you call me mother. Wash your mouth out with poison, you little bitch,” the voice of my mother came out of Eddie. It was one of many that came out of him during the hours I spent with him. He mimicked people I love, people I have lost—trying to break me so he could slide inside and then out the prison gates he would go.

“Now that we tested each other in person, in the flesh, what do you want me to say, Jackie?” he asked, back to being Eddie. “That I'm sorry?”

Now I was the one scoffing. I knew he would never apologize. He started touching on different subjects, and throughout it all, he did not blink once. Occasionally, he would close his eyes in pleasure or triumph, but that was it. I realized that you don't notice when a person blinks, but you sure notice when he doesn't. It was one more demon-tainted trait in a being full of them.

“Let's talk about us, Jackie,” he said. “You know I can go into anyone I choose, any crack, and live through that person. But only you, the medium, can see me. There has to be a better name for your gift. It's extraordinary. I bet there must be a high price on your head, knowing the things you know. And it's how you deliver that makes you so fascinating.

“Look at these walls and watch the magic show begin,” he demanded. “Look! Now don't cheat.” I looked around the visiting room, from the ceiling on down. I saw people chatting, a guard chewing gum a few feet away. I glanced back at Eddie and saw him squeeze his eyes shut and hold his lips tight until saliva foamed from one corner. I knew what he was doing—causing a psychic illusion.
Here we go
, I thought.

Large cockroaches began to pour out of the seams in the ceiling. Thousands poured out until I couldn't even see the wall anymore. They engulfed the guard, covering his face, going into his mouth, sticking to his chewing gum, running up his shirtsleeves and down his collar and into his nose. The sound of their wings and legs rubbing filled my ears as they took over the entire room, going in and out of every human opening possible. And everyone acted as though nothing was wrong.

“Are you done?” I asked. I closed my eyes tightly and made my own psychic illusion of a large hole in the wall. It became a suction hose and pulled every last bug in before snapping shut.

“Very good, Jackie!” Eddie clapped his hands. He was already thinking of his next trick, though. He told me he could make the guard not see and then use the opportunity to snap my neck. He would make sure no one noticed until all the inmates were back in their cells. Then there would just be a dead woman and a prison guard in the room. The guard might go down for murder, he said gleefully. But a second later, his ego backed off that goal.

“But again, that would be my work,” he said. “You don't think Michelangelo would let someone else take his work!”

And if I had learned anything, it was how proud Eddie was of his “work.”

“Why do you think Patricia contacted me from the grave using your body?” he asked.

I sat and looked at him. “Why, Eddie? You tell me.”

“Because I needed you to free me once and for all.” He was trying to convince me that he had been in control of all this from the beginning. That he had been the one who sent Patricia to me so that he could get my attention and use me for his own ends. Bullshit. Patricia had found me on her own. Patricia had found her freedom, and I'd helped her. Eddie could sit there and rationalize all he wanted, but his victim had escaped him. He had no power over her anymore.

“And you took her away from me.” He continued talking. “I kept her in prison—my prison—dying over and over again. Can you imagine reliving your death over and over again? Climbing those steps in that drug-infested park. Thinking I wanted to fuck her. I watched her struggle like a pig. The first few blows staggered her. Confusion, disoriented, bleeding. The shock across her face.

“It was like a young boy catching Santa Claus coming down the chimney covered in snow and frost, shaking bells and unloading his sack of bodies—I mean goodies—for all the little boys and girls . . .” Sometimes his tangents made very little sense. “Anyway, I was so thrilled to watch her. When I had enough of her fighting to get up, I stabbed her. The more I plunged the blade, the blood would come up at me like striking oil! Squirt! Squirt!

“You know the amazing thing—I didn't have any blood on me. I couldn't figure it out. Sure, a little on my hands . . . I walked away. Not run, walked. My master covered me. Oh boy, was I going to take down so many.

“Sure, I wanted my prisoner back. I used to stick my finger in the bullet holes and dig around while she moaned. I needed some entertainment. And you took her away.” He glared at me. “You know the Bible says ‘An eye for an eye.'”

I met his gaze. “Yeah, Eddie. It does. It also says ‘And thou shalt not kill.'”

He laughed. “Good one, Jackie.” Because, to him, that was a joke.

TWENTY-THREE

Crime writers, newspapers, television—they all paid too much attention to the victims, he said. I stared at him. What the hell was he talking about? They were the
victims
.

“Exactly!” he said. “Only when the person is killed do others have sympathy. Where were they when she was roaming the streets? And strapped down in restraints in those mental institutions? Selling her body? I only ask for the truth to come out. We all see the descent, but no one speaks about it. Let's just hint around. I'm not saying she is less a victim. But why does everyone care after the fact? Ask yourself that.”

He had a point on this one. Most people don't care when these lost people are alive, when they can still be helped, when they can still be saved. It's a lot easier to pretend they are not there. That is where we as a society fail. We lock up the killers, but we don't care for their victims before it's too late.

* * *

He eyed me. “Okay, Jackie, what is the question you're holding back?”

In some of our numerous telephone conversations, he had eluded to actions or phrased sentences in a way—like referring to people as dessert—that made me think he had done something unspeakable.

“Did you ever cannibalize anyone?” I asked.

“Oh, I hate that word. It seems so animalistic,” he said. “Does licking a bloody knife fall under that? The flesh is much too tough. And how would I cook them with Mom in the house?”

He paused and looked at me.

“I have my ways, Jackie. Ask yourself this. Where did all the blood go? Let's look at our friend Patricia. One hundred gaping wounds and gunshots, and the pigs thought she overdosed?”

I thought about Patricia, so cruelly forgotten by society, and then so cruelly used by Eddie. I looked in his unblinking eyes and knew he was scoffing at my compassion.

“Getting into my mind is dangerous, Jackie,” he said. “But we can't stop that. You were meant to catch the stars that fall from the blacked sky, the souls of others before being damned to hell. We are both on the same road, you on one side, me on the other.

“Is your cross heavy, Jackie? I see the pain in your eyes. Put it down, hand it to me—that bag you wear around your neck. Pull it off and throw it in the sewer. Denounce your faith.”

I was not wearing my mojo bag, with its amulets, herbs, and hair of the great wolf and of my father—it never would have made it past the security screening—but I knew what he meant. He wanted me to cast off all of my beliefs, my ancestral protection, my best defenses against the devil. Yeah, right. I wasn't stupid. “I couldn't wear it into the prison,” was all I said. I wanted to see where he would take this line of talk.

“You know you don't have to,” he said. “You embed it in your flesh. I smell it on you.” Yet he really thought I might give it up?

“Not a chance in hell, Eddie,” I said. “Your god may want me, but my God holds my hand.”

He smiled. “Why be tormented your whole life? Your mother, Mary, didn't win.”

“Yeah,” I replied, “but I'm not her.”

“Jackie, did anyone ever tell you Satan loves you? Your eyes are mirrors, holding the image of the suffering, the dead. Blue as the sky, oh, you do shine.”

* * *

Eddie had already told me several times about how he'd loved to break into houses and spy on people. What was he thinking as he did that?

“That unsuspecting moment is so thrilling,” he said, leaning in and licking his lips. “Now, don't ask anything yet, Jackie. Let's not get ahead of ourself [
sic
]. I want you to feel what it's like—not that you haven't, but why spoil the fun now? Begin to paint the picture in your oh-so-amazing mind . . . and feel the sheer panic when I was spotted sitting quietly in a chair, right in the next room.

“I didn't want to run right away. I wanted to see her flee . . . I didn't know her name, nor did I care to. But I feel her heart in my hands. Not a feeling like that in the world . . . I see her heart beat so fast her blouse was moving . . . her eyes popping out of her head . . . Her breathing was so heavy I could taste her breath, that gasp of air that struggles to come out.” People think you scream in a situation like that, but you don't, he said. The mind can't accept it and the reflexes don't act quickly enough.

During one break-in, a woman about twenty-five years old came out of the bathroom to find the Zodiac Killer in her room. All these years later, the memory still makes him smile. “It looked like she saw a fucking ghost.” She ran out and told her parents, who were in another part of the house. They called 911, and the operator asked who was in the house. The woman said she didn't know. “She looks back as I stand, looking directly at her, giving her time to take in every feature. Make no mistakes, I didn't run all the time . . . I come closer, out of the shadow and there in the flesh I stand. In that one moment, just one moment, I become a legend. And she knows in her heart and soul, the Zodiac lives.”

He had apparently saved up his dramatic flair for me. He was definitely on a roll now.

“I turn and slip out the same way I got in, through a very tiny crack. We both know those cracks, Jackie.” He explained how he'd exited out the back, jumped a fence, and come walking out onto the main street about forty feet away. He heard the woman give the arriving cops a description of a large black man. The police even stopped and asked Eddie if he'd seen anyone with those features while he was standing on the street. “Why didn't she see me for who I am? Thank you, my master, for blinding the weak sheep.”

Eddie loved that part, too. Hanging out at his own crime scenes. “Not so much to watch the excitement—cops throwing their hands up, the frustration on their faces, the hustle of going nowhere fast. I was learning my power over others. The best way to move was right alongside of you. The best way to hide is right in sight.”

* * *

“Eddie, what do you do all day to occupy your mind?” I knew, of course, that he enjoyed torturing me psychically, but I did wonder what else he did to fill his time.

He's housed in isolation and even eats alone. Breakfast is cereal in a cup passed through a slot in the door, and maybe an apple. That's at 5:00 a.m. Lunch is at 11:00, and is bologna and plastic-tasting cheese between two slices of bread. Dinner is at 3:00 p.m., and he gets two slices of bologna and some shredded lettuce. Once in a while, he'll get a grilled-cheese sandwich, and on holidays, a cookie. They won't give him a prison job, because they don't trust him. He insists he's too fearsome for anyone to come near him, for anyone to violate him like others are in prison all the time. He reads anything that has to do with war, murders, weapons, or history. He's allowed one preselected movie a month, but he only watches it if it matches those interests. He reads the Bible but twists it to accommodate the devil. He said he isn't allowed to attend the prison church. The man of the cloth will stop by his cell for a quick visit and hand him the yearly calendar, then flee.

“The church claims to help people in need,” he said. “I went because I was killing. Something was inside me, forcing me, driving me. I was only the passenger at that time . . . I went to the church and spoke, telling the priest something was inside, taking over, and soon it will be too late.”

He said he felt like he was the rot in the walls, covered with dry wall and plaster and pretty paint. But punch a hole through those layers, and they would have found him.

“I tried to get away from this, whatever this was. I took the test for the army. I failed by two lousy points. Two points—can you believe this? There were guys with visible track marks on their arms, sweating bad . . . I hated them. You could smell the fiends a mile away. Even the piss on them, it seeps through their pores.
They
got accepted. It was obvious I was being stopped.”

I kept listening, the little desk chair hard against my back.

“It came to me—this thing, a dark figure—when I was very young, and detached from family. Alone. I was a good candidate. I was already isolated, I guess, not really loved. I'm not making excuses.”

He kept on, talking about different things and then coming around again to religion.

“I'm just telling you the church is full of shit . . . They come by the prison to spread the word of pure bullshit. I can hear his thoughts as he walks by my cinder-block cage, doing his sign of the cross. Such lies. Hands me a calendar, of all things. The time I took from others, and the time I seem to have plenty of.” He contemplated this for a moment, then continued. “His thoughts . . . ‘I can't wait to get out of this place, grab a beer and a sandwich.' Father, I know what you're thinking! He runs past fast. I call out, ‘I have sinned, Father, in the most unforgivable way. But so have you. I don't hide behind a cross. You do, Father. Satan didn't pound those nails in, Father. Man did!' He took off like a little girl.”

The chair started to hurt, but I stayed still.

“Jackie, I have so much time. The devil won't let me die. I'm not getting soft, just stating a fact. Look at me. I haven't aged,” he laughed.

He was right. He hadn't visibly aged at all. Compared with photos I'd seen of him from his court appearances in the 1990s, he looked just as good, if not better now. I stared at those black eyes, which bored into me. “Jackie, do you realize with your gifts what you could have done?” I did not respond. He told me to look at my hand, the one Patricia had scratched earlier. I unfurled my fist and saw now the sign of the Gemini, red and welted like a hot branding.

“You will always carry me with you,” he said. “But the challenge will be—can you stop the evil . . . hold it down? It will come to you always in the form of a sign. Oh, do you have your work cut out. Angels and demons aren't that far apart. We are the chosen ones.”

I looked at my hand and closed my fingers tightly over the sign of my haunting.

“We are the same, Jackie. We fight for the same thing. I want it to be known that evil is pure and exists. And you fight to take it out of people. So we both know the truth.

“And yes, I'm a killer. I don't care about humanity. I don't feel bad for the body count—maybe a little because my plans got messed up. The devil Abaddon got mad, and, well, here I am. I don't care about the world. I don't care about time. I don't care about going before a parole board. I don't care about the families. I don't regret a fucking thing.”

He talked faster and faster. “I do care about what weapons can cause the most damage—how many people can be taken down at once. I do like to watch the news, all the horrible things . . . I'm the man you tell your children about . . . I'm the night . . . If the world knew what you now know, I don't think they would go out after dark . . . I like to read about the occult, because it's as real as the nose on your face—as real as that New York City morgue, as that insane asylum. As real as over one hundred stab wounds and some shots . . . I like looking at symbols and signs on a dollar bill . . . I like candy.” He took a breath and smiled. “I like you.”

I kept my hand in a fist. Why, I asked, did he want me to tell the public about him—about his many unknown killings, about how he kept Patricia's spirit hostage, about how he can move from person to person?

“It's simple, Jackie. You are my confessional booth. You know what's in my mind and body. The world should know the truth. And only you can see past the mirror into the world that waits—good and bad. You see it all. You are the twin, a victim of murder that came back and slowly remembered. Remember, nothing is by chance.”

“Are you scared, Eddie?”

“No, I'm scared of nothing. I know what lies past this life. And I know how to come back, just like you.”

* * *

After the police arrested Eddie, someone wrote a true-crime book about him and the crimes they knew of at the time. This was also funny to him, even all these years later.

“He spoke to my mother. Gave her a few bucks to go in my room and interview her. She needed the money; I don't blame her. But if my own mother didn't know me, what could she tell him? . . . Don't make me laugh. So you show pictures of my room? Big shit.”

He stared at me with those unblinking eyes. “Now, if you let me into your head and write who and what I really am and all the many things I've done . . . if you're able to hold my soul as you did, Jackie, now you got a fucking story to rock the hand of death . . . Live with me a few years, even a week, and you got a story no man has.”

That author never sat down with him, Eddie said.

“You had the balls, Jackie—to not just sit with me but listen for years about the faces of evil that I evolved into. You let me into your head, your safe place, to solve the puzzle. Big-shot detectives became tortured and obsessed chasing that dragon but were scared to confront me. They go by [the] textbook. You go by foot. You became me to see exactly what I have done.”