Robert Walker - Extreme Instinct

June 11, 1997

Las Vegas at Dusk

"You will ensnare her. Bring her to me." The Antichrist's voice kept repeating in Feydor Dorphmann's head.

Feydor imagined doing it, imagined trapping his victim, tying her on the bed, making the phone call, and igniting the victim's body with the gasoline and torch.

As crazy as it had all sounded when he had first heard the scheme, he knew now that it could be accomplished.

He also knew this was the time and the place.

With a convention of medical examiners in attendance here at the Grand Flamingo Hilton hotel, the challenge Satan posed for criminal investigators, and one in particular, meant that Evil would triumph as Evil always did in this world. Nothing Feydor could do now would stop cosmic forces beyond his ken.

Feydor had robbed a man at knifepoint two nights before. With the money he'd stolen, he had bought some clothes and had cleaned himself up to where he didn't recognize himself. He had also purchased all the necessary items, everything that his god had told him he would need.

With the Dark One whispering in his ear, Feydor had his courage bolstered and engaged the young woman in small talk at the bar-talk of the weather, the hotel trappings, the news reports coming in over the TV at the back of the bar. When she left, he shadowed her out to the underground parking lot where she had bags to carry in. He pretended their meeting in the lot this second time was purely coincidental, and while she didn't believe it, she nodded when he offered to help with her bags.

She seemed most suspicious of him, yet she allowed him near her. Then he realized that with her keys outstretched, she meant to threaten him with a small canister of Mace attached to her car keys.

"Stay back," she warned. "I know that my father has sent you."

Feydor wondered if she meant that her father was Satan himself.

"Put your hands where I can see them," she commanded.

Instead, Feydor struck her with a sudden, vicious jab of a hypodermic needle into her shoulder, while simultaneously grabbing the hand holding the Mace, the stream going astray. She dropped to her knees, slumped against the car, her key ring with the tear gas attachment rattling against the concrete. She had buckled instantly when he jabbed the hypodermic-filled with a strong sedative- into her soft flesh. She yielded with a mere yelp, like a pinched dog. Her blood quickly absorbed the drug and sent it through her body, dizzying her brain.

Feydor felt an instant charge of power course through his body. He'd felt the same high when he had killed Dr. Stuart Wetherbine some months earlier back in San Francisco. Feydor's intentions were suddenly being realized. Driven, he told himself. I am driven to carry through with this.

Next he snatched all her bags from the trunk and replaced them with her now inert body. He stopped to stare at her pretty young face, the tender lines and contours, momentarily wondering who she belonged to, who she might be, but Satan yelled, "Stop that instantly!"

"Feydor! What are you doing here? What in God's name?" It was Dr. Wetherbine's voice, somehow here, all the way from the grave, Wetherbine's new home since the institute in California.

"What in God's name, indeed, Doctor," Feydor barked in reply. "I'm obeying my master." The gaunt Dorphmann spat out his words, "Satan is my god now, not you, Doctor."

"You are a fool. Satan will betray you. He betrays all of us, everyone. Give it up!"

"No! No, I give you up, Dr. Wetherbine. You!"

Feydor recalled how Wetherbine, with his owl eyes framed in horn-rimmed glasses and his face covered in gray beard, had followed him from his office that day, spying on him, interested in seeing if Feydor had stopped taking his medications. Wetherbine made a lousy detective, and Feydor knew he was being trailed. He led the doctor into an alleyway where Satan screamed in a fit of rage for Wetherbine's blood. Satan had gotten his wish when Feydor lifted the knife and brought it down sixteen times into Wetherbine's heart.

Ever since, however, Dr. Wetherbine continued to interfere, as now.

"You can go to Hell, Wetherbine," Feydor suggested, a slight grin finding its way to his sad countenance.

''But I've got a way out a way out" He pointed to the moaning, shaking figure of the girl in the trunk.

Feydor came back to himself, to this place and time, finding himself staring down at the girl's angelic face, framed as it was in short-cropped blond hair, her cream-colored complexion and freckles inviting to the touch. He reached down, caught a tear on his fingers, and tasted of its saltiness. She had wide, almond-shaped blue eyes held open by the sudden rush of the drug, seeing yet unseeing.

He closed out all light when he shut the trunk on her. He then scooped up her keys, unlocked her car door, and tossed her baggage into the backseat, where he- began searching through it all, scavenging.

He could hear her moaning through the car cushions.

Looking around, he saw no one; and no one saw him.

She had said that she was staying at the hotel, and he had located the room key in her purse. He would wait until dusk to get her up to her room, there to begin Satan's work.

Feydor lifted the dehydrated and drugged woman from the trunk of her car where he'd deposited her earlier. The heat of the Las Vegas sun had done much to debilitate the woman. Easily led, she felt like putty in his hands. Satan had been right. Feydor got the young woman to her feet. She represented nothing to him but a means to an end, a sacrifice to all the traitors who ever strode the earth. He knew little or nothing about his victim personally; and he hadn't learned much about her from her purse and luggage, only that she was staying at the hotel tonight with plans for leaving on a bus tour the following morning.

For six long years Feydor Dorphmann, now twenty-nine years of age, had tried to get help from any quarter; he told everyone who would listen all about the shadow people he saw in the irises of his eyes whenever he stared long into a mirror. He admitted to seeing drowning people in fire pots of seraphim wax or white mud that spat, spewed, and bubbled; he saw great, fanning fire pits vomiting forth cloud after continuous cloud of choking, eye-irritating sulfuric smoke: Acid smoke, his mind had named it.

Spectral as it all was, he nearly asphyxiated on the sulfur. His eyes burned and his ears bled with the silent screams the shadow people emitted. It was all so obvious to Feydor, but apparently invisible to everyone else. For he could see into the spectral world, and he could see the gaping, widening mouths pull apart with flames licking, turning their visages into molten wax.

There was a certain fascination about it all. In fact, he'd grown so accustomed to the spectral burnings of the wretched and damned that he felt certain he could carry through with Satan's wishes.

He certainly didn't want Satan pissed off at him.

At one time he readily told people about the visits from creatures not of this earth-grisly little beasts with human features and limbs that stuck like pitchforks from their gnarled, gnomelike bodies. Some a melding of human, animal, insect, and plant life, but all of these ugly little fellows came on their all-fours for only one reason: to keep an eye on Feydor, to keep track of his comings and goings, and to report back. And when Dorphmann told the doctors all about these insect and animal succubi-Satan's familiars, Hell's agents-the doctors had simply placed him into an earthly inferno, locking him away in an insane asylum where they pumped him full of drugs to dull the phantoms and the phantasma-gloriosa, as one young medical man had kiddingly termed his complex mental problem.