Mental Man

William Todd Rose

 

My therapist uses metaphors tailored for my unique situation. He speaks of the Fortress of Solitude with which I surround my true feelings. The Bat Cave tunneling into my psyche, so deep and dark that the secrets I hide there never know the warmth of enlightenment. In my subconscious, he says, there’s a decrepit Gotham teeming with super villains; their sole purpose in life is to tear me down, to find my emotional Kryptonite and destroy me. They have names like Chronic Depression, Acute Anxiety, and Persistent Avoidance. With their henchmen, they’ve banded together to form an axis of evil known as the PTSD, and the fate of my inner Metropolis hinges upon their defeat.

He prescribes me pills and sits cross-legged in his chair, scribbling occasionally on his steno pad while I levitate the frog figurines lining the bookshelves in his office. This is a nervous tic that causes Dr. Thompson to peer over the top of his glasses as he peppers me with open-ended questions. Never something I can answer with a simple yes or no, these queries are specifically designed to draw me out.

“Why do you feel, Rob, that you’re not living up to your full potential?”

Why, indeed.

In comic books and movies, people like me always have their counterpart, their polar opposite. Madmen hell-bent on world domination, misguided scientists who use their creations to fulfill their own twisted desires. An archenemy, if you will. And the existence of these rivals defines the hero just as much as his powers or costume. If not more so. In the real world, however, things are quite different. Junkies sweating through withdrawal rob liquor stores, jealous wives kill their husbands in fits of passion, and drunk drivers screech away from the bent and twisted frames of bicycles. There’s no ultimate nemesis whose apprehension will make the world safe for decent, law-abiding citizens. Just an endless string of beautiful losers with their own sob stories and justifications. And without someone sitting on the other side of the teeter-totter of good and evil, you end up busting your hump against the unforgiving earth time and time again. So how’s that for a metaphor, Doc?

See, I never really wanted this shit to begin with. I was just this kid doing his best to grow up in a neighborhood where shards of shattered beer bottles littered the sidewalks like so many broken dreams. You grew up tough in this type of hood or you didn’t grow up at all. Since there really is safety in numbers, I fell in with a bad crowd and used my powers for the good of the gang. Door locks fractured as easily as ice with only minimal concentration, and security cameras played back static once my electromagnetic field wiped the tapes clean. I struck as quietly and efficiently as sudden death, knocking out security guards before they even realized that they’d just heard something rustle behind them. But my biggest contribution was sensing when the time was right to split. Before sirens could be heard wailing in the distance, I knew five-oh was on the way; I could see the black and white cars zipping through traffic, their lights strobing blue and red against the graffiti covered walls as radios crackled with chatter. Almost as if I’d left my body and was in a different time and place.

The problem is, I developed a taste for downers, see. I popped Seconal like they were Jujubes and rode the waves of relaxation right into my downfall. With my senses dulled and reaction times so slow that I could have passed for just another member of the gang, it wasn’t long before I was picked up. Extortion, strong arm robbery, larceny, breaking and entering, conspiracy, and racketeering: the boys in blue had me by the balls. Tried as an adult, I would be looking at fifteen to twenty years in a state correctional facility with no chance of parole. But all that would just go away if I took the deal they had on the table. Come work for us, they said, and we’ll make sure you keep getting pussy instead of being somebody’s bitch.

Sometimes I think I would have been better off just serving my time and eventually trying to find my place in a world that had moved on without me. Maybe then, I wouldn’t find my cheeks wet with tears when I watch young couples run hand in hand through the rain. Maybe I wouldn’t feel like the walls of my silent apartment are closing in and that an invisible hand grips my throat when the panic attacks set in. Maybe I could actually appreciate life.

As it is, I sleep about thirteen to fourteen hours a day. I insist that powers like mine burn a lot of energy—that I need time to recharge my batteries, so to speak. Dr. Thompson, however, says it’s escapism. Wrapped in dreams, I am safe from the quiet voice in my head that whispers I’m not good enough, that I’m just a freak and will never fit in, will never know what it means to be truly loved instead of having just another booze-soaked romp with a horny groupie.

“What’s wrong with horny groupies?” I want to know. He says they’re a poor substitute for true affection and are only feeding my need for validation. I say I just want to get my jollies and get out. That I want at least one thing in my life simple. We’ll never agree. Not on the bimbos and not on the sleep.

Regardless of why I sleep as much as I do, I always awake to the same thing: my phone ringing in the darkness as insistent as a needy lover. The muffled voice on the other end breaks up as reception fades in and out. I rub my eyes and scrawl an address on a scrap of paper. Too-strong coffee that tastes bitter and burnt at the convenience store around the corner, a couple of No-Doz washed down with the scalding liquid, my cigarette ember winking in the rearview mirror as I stifle a yawn: This is my wake up routine, what people like me have instead of a hot shower and healthy breakfast.

Here lately, the scenes are always the same as well. A suburban home with a carefully manicured lawn surrounded by the stereotypical picket fence. The mailbox by the street will look like a wide-mouth bass or a caboose or a miniature replica of the house at the other end of the sidewalk. The street will be roped off with yellow tape while neighbors dressed in bathrobes and boxers cluster on the sidewalks, whispering to one another as their faces change color in the lights of a dozen police cars. Cruisers, unmarked sedans with flashers shining through windshields, the obligatory ambulance and van stenciled with the letters CSU. Just another day at the office.

Last night, I walked into a living room where the walls were covered with the arc of arterial spray. Blood had pooled on the white shag carpet in glistening puddles, and books were strewn across the floor from a toppled shelf. Sprawled half-way across the couch was a pretty blonde with one boob hanging out of her ripped nightgown. Her wrists were bound with the all-too-familiar silk rope, and silver duct tape had sealed her screams. He’d slit her throat, just like the others, and paraded her around the living room, coating the walls with her ever-diminishing blood supply before tossing her onto the sofa like a toy that had lost its sparkle.

Lying face-down between the kitchen and living room was a balding man, and the back of his head looked like a dented car door that had been splattered with red paint balls. His tighty-whities were stained brown from voided bowels, and his right hand stretched across the carpet as if, even in death, he were grasping for the Louisville Slugger that was just out of reach. The baseball bat itself was pristine. No spatter or clumps of hair stuck to the polished wood. No cracks. It wasn’t one of the murder weapons but a line of defense that ultimately proved useless.

I knew without being told that the children were upstairs. Each in their own bedroom, their hands staged over their eyes as if trying to block the horrors they’d witnessed and their throats mottled and bruised. Every mirror in the house would be shattered; if there were any family pets, they would be dead as well. In the second house, we’d found an empty bottle of bleach beside a tank of tropical fish floating upside down. In the fourth, a Scottish terrier had been strangled with its own leash, and the boy’s hamster lay by the baseboard, just beneath a sunburst splatter of blood on the blue bedroom wall.

There was something different about this scene however, something that told me our unsub was becoming even more brazen, more confident in his ability to kill with impunity. For scrawled across the wall like crimson finger paint was a message: You will never catch me.

“It’s our guy, Mental Man. Same MO.” Detective Wyler frowned beneath his bushy mustache and snorted air through his nostrils, attempting to clear his sinuses of the coppery tang in the air.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” I grumbled, purposefully ignoring the corny nickname Wyler keeps trying to stick me with.

“Captain says the feds are coming in on this one by special request. So if you’re gettin’ anything, now’s the time to shine.”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture the living room as it had been. Before the yellow evidence markers had been propped across the floor. Before the walls were streaked and smeared with wasted life. I reached into the past with my mind the same way I’d searched for cops in my misspent youth, probing time and space as if it were a film I could manipulate at will.

Mr. Cooper awoke to a thump from downstairs. Sitting up in bed, he stared into the darkness, listening past the hum of the air conditioner for whatever it was that had pulled him out of a dream in which he was just about to bend his secretary over a desk. As he sat there, the tinkle of breaking glass awoke Mrs. Cooper as well and she sat up, clenching the sheets just below her chin. With her eyes wide with panic, she pushed her husband out of bed and hissed, “Stanley, there’s someone downstairs.” I could feel her heart pattering like a frightened rabbit and smell the stink fear leaking from the beads of sweat on Stan’s brow as he swung his feet over the edge of the bed.

He tiptoed across the room, freezing in place as the floorboards squeaked beneath his substantial weight. With eyes clenched shut, he stood as still as the dresser and listened with his head cocked to the side. His stomach felt as if the White Russian he’d downed before bed had turned rancid, and he made a silent promise to God: Let everyone be okay, and I’ll never think about Annette like that again. I’ll be a good father, a better husband—just let everyone be okay.

When there was no response to his misplaced step, he crept to the bedroom doorway and snatched the bat that leaned against the wall with the deftness of a master thief.

Mrs. Cooper watched him disappear through the door and plucked the phone cradle from the night stand. She didn’t notice that the keypad didn’t light up as she dialed 911. In fact, she had no clue until she placed the receiver to her ear and heard nothing.

The line was dead.

Her cell phone was in her purse downstairs.

Help was not coming.

Her bladder felt so full that her abdomen ached, and chills crept over her arms and scalp. Part of her insisted that she get out of bed, that she gather the children and crawl out the window if she had to. She had to go, she had to run, she had to do it now.

But she couldn’t. Her muscles felt as if they’d turned to stone, and a single, reoccurring thought overrode instructions from her brain: The realtor said this neighborhood was safe; he said it was safe, damn it, safe.

A muffled grunt from downstairs was followed by a thud so loud that windows rattled in their panes. Then silence.

“Stanley?” Her whisper was more of a plea than a question, a desperate petition for all to be right in her little cookie cutter world. “Stanley?”

There was a tightness in her chest; somewhere beneath breasts that still ached from her recent mastopexy, a scream built the pressure required to shoot up through her vocal cords. Her hands trembled as the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees, but wisps of hair were plastered by sweat to the back of her slender neck.

She heard footsteps on the stairs. Slow. Deliberate. Methodical.

“Stanley…you’re scaring me.”

The hallway light flicked on, and Mrs. Cooper scrunched her knees against her chest as she pressed her back against the padded headboard. She wanted to curl into a ball so tightly that her body collapsed in on itself, that she simply winked out of existence.

“Damn it, Stanley, I swear to God, if you’re messing around…”

The shadow of a man stretched across the hallway carpet. She could no longer hear anything other than her own blood whooshing through her veins, and the back of her throat stung with the bitterness of bile.

“S-Stanley…” No longer whispering, her husband’s name bubbled from her quivering lips as tears glistened in her eyes.

The shadow grew larger.

Closer.

Just on the other side of the wall now, separated only by a few inches of plaster and wood. Warmth spread across her crotch, but the acrid stench of urine was blocked by the snot bubbling from her nose.

She would see him. Any second now.

Her killer revealed.

Pain, guilt, remorse, agony, despair, terror. A tsunami of emotion and sensation crashed over me as the scene exploded in a brilliant burst of light like a flashbulb going off in a darkened room. I found myself pulled into the fetal position on the floor, my throat raw with Mrs. Cooper’s released scream and tears warming my cheeks.

Wyler was crouched beside me, his face looming so close that I could see the crater-like pores on the tip of his bulbous nose. He didn’t offer a helping hand as I struggled to sit up but finally vocalized the question his eyes had asked all along. “Anything?”

I shook my head and gulped in lungfuls of cool air as I wiped my eyes with the back of my knuckles. Though not looking directly at my unofficial partner, I could feel the heat of his gaze as it burned into my soul.

“Damn it, Mental Man, you better be gettin’ us some usable shit. I mean it, you son of a bitch. You know what the papers are callin’ this guy? The Suburb Slayer. How well do you think that’s going to go over with the mayor?”

The Suburb Slayer. This madman is the closest thing I have to an archenemy. He’s always there, looming on the outskirts of my perception, taunting me with his proximity while remaining thoroughly cloaked in shadow. Seven families so far and, if experience holds true, we won’t have to wait long for the eighth.

Seven families. Twenty-six lives. Two months.

I want this fucker so bad I can taste it. He haunts my dreams, a faceless shadow dancing on graves that bulge as if they’re about to explode with the expanding gasses of the corpses below. His laughter echoes through the corridors of my mind, mocking me with haughty arrogance as I stumble about in the darkness like a blind man. Every waking hour I spend touching the possessions of corpses, revisiting their final moments again and again as I search for some little detail I may have previously overlooked. I feel their fear and pain, experience their deaths without ever so much as a glimpse of their attacker, and cry until my eyes are in a constant state of puffiness.

Our destinies are inexplicably intertwined now, two strangers in a city of thousands engaged in the most primal of dances. Hunter and prey. Predator and quarry. He stalks his victims and I chase him, always a few steps behind, always just out of reach.

You will never catch me.

Just you watch me, asshole.

Just you fuckin’ watch me.

#

Family number eight. Lucas and Laura Wilson—their children Larry and Lana, ages eight and eleven respectively. I used to hate theme families where the names all played on a single sound or letter, thinking of them as being more like a franchise than an actual unit. But the Wilsons changed all of that. Four more lives snuffed out in the middle of the night, four more bodies waiting for me to use my powers to explore the last moments of their lives. Four more chances to catch this sadist who slaughters families as easily as I change clothes.

There was a new message on the wall at the Wilson’s: They are Mine.

It’s another jab that I take personally. When I finally catch this bastard, I’ll crush his bones like I used to shatter locks when pulling a heist. The little ones first, the thin ones in his wrist and the metatarsals within the toes; his joints will pop out of socket as if smashed with a ball peen hammer, and I’ll make him experience every second of agony I’ve suffered through while revisiting his victims.

I no longer entertain the starry eyed vixens who twirl hair around their fingers and pop their gum as they giggle with ludicrous innuendo. There’s simply no time for pleasures of the flesh. There’s too much evidence to explore, too many details to comb through. Dr. Thompson says this proves his theory: With a worthy adversary to test my skills, I no longer need the authentication I used to receive from their lofty praises. He may be right. But I no longer care. His opinions mean less to me now than the drivel spewed by the profilers from the Federal Bureau of Intimidation.

Even my sleep patterns are evening out. I spend maybe one night every two to three weeks where I dream the majority of the day away; the rest of the time, I’m up and at ‘em after a solid eight hours of rack, ready to take on the day.

Yesterday, I even told Dr. Thompson I didn’t feel like I needed to see him anymore. His brow furrowed with concern as he leaned forward and told me how I shouldn’t be hasty. The human mind is a complex thing, he said, full of twists and turns and corridors we never even knew existed.

“In someone like you, Rob,” he said, “it gets even more complex. You really need to think about this.”

But there’s nothing to think about. The panic attacks are gone, the whispering voice in my head has fallen silent, and my tears have been replaced with resolve. I truly feel I’m finally living up to my full potential, and my unique gifts were not just some cruel trick of nature. I’m even embracing the nickname Wyler has tried to tag me with for years. Mental Man. Kind of has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

Not to say that I don’t have bad days. Everyone does. They’re just not crippling anymore. Today, for example, was an experiment in frustration. I revisited each of the eight crime scenes again, walked through each house just moments before the massacres began. This time, however, I was able to focus my powers intently. Rather than experiencing the horror and suffering of the victims, I stepped into the mind of the killer himself.

I felt the flutter of nervous excitement in the stomach, like a schoolboy watching the school slut strip off her clothes and knowing that my time as a virgin was coming to an end. Surges of power and control gushed through my veins, filling me with God-like dominion over the realms of Life and Death. I knew the thrill of carting my writhing captives around their living rooms, the sweet futility of their squirming as I painted the walls with my medium of choice.

Yet I never saw the face. With all the mirrors broken, there was no reflection, nothing I could use to make a positive ID. Tomorrow, I’ll do it all over again; this time, I’ll try to focus on the wide, glassy eyes of the victims just before they die. When the last thing they see is my face grinning at them. Maybe there, I’ll find a reflection. I have to. It’s been weeks since this bastard has struck, which means there’s another family out there somewhere whose time is short. Cuddled up in front of the television, laughing over a bowl of popcorn while the television flickers bluish light on smiling faces…never suspecting that within days, they’ll all be dead.

There’s a message on my answering machine from Dr. Thompson. He’s prattling on about the results of my most recent psychological battery, how some disturbing patterns have emerged, and he really believes I need to rethink my position on therapy. Something about fugue states. I tell myself I’ll Google that term later but recognize the lie the moment it flits through my mind. Instead, I punch the delete button so hard that the plastic casing of the phone cracks beneath my touch.

I don’t need his shit. He’s just thinking about all the billable hours he’s losing, the book that will never be finished. I’ve got my adversary now, the counterweight on the other end of my teeter totter. Who the fuck is this little man with his degree and collection of frogs to imply that I’m still broken, that I’m somehow damaged and weak? Just who the hell does he think he is, anyway?

I catch a reflection of myself in the bathroom mirror, and the stress of the day bursts from me like a demon from the gates of Hell. I feel the power swell and shoot out like a cosmic ejaculation, and the mirror shatters into a thousand pieces. Tiny pieces shower through the air, each flashing in the light and reflecting miniature images of the mask of rage my face has become before smashing against the sink and floor.

Son of a bitch. This is getting expensive. That’s the ninth mirror I’ve gone through, and as always, the outburst leaves me feeling hollow and drained. It’s as if that blast of energy latched onto every emotion I have and pulled it out in long, invisible strands.

I collapse onto the bed because I no longer have the energy to stand. My eyes sting with fatigue, and my muscles feel as though they’ve turned into overcooked spaghetti. I yawn as I close my eyes.

Somehow, I know that this will be a thirteen-hour slumber. It’s as if my body is now attuned to the Suburb Slayer and only stockpiles energy on the nights he strikes. I know my dreams will be interrupted with the jangling of the phone, and I’ll jot down address number nine, somehow feeling as if I’ve known the location all along.

In some ways, I almost look forward to it.

As long as he’s out there, my life has meaning.

My life has purpose.

I’ve finally become the hero I was always meant to be.