Chapter 28: Rain Rain Go Away 07
Hestal gazed at Albanino with the look of a predator on the eve of tearing its prey apart. Albanino had once seen a similar expression in the eyes of that coyote—humans and irrational animals were so alike in such moments.
When Hestal spoke, there was a rough, hoarse quality mixed into his voice. He slowly rose from the pool of blood, staggering slightly from the numbness in his limbs. The sound drifted from between his lips like the breath of Death itself: “Are you satisfied now?”
“If I were so easily satisfied, would that disappoint you even more? You can think of me as the blind Phineus, forever coveting the feast I cannot obtain beneath the talons of the Harpies.” Albanino retorted.
“Then let me ask another way,” Hestal said, almost calmly—though the tone rang insincere when there was still a blood-dripping knife in his hand—”are you being pleased by what I’m doing?”
The smile at the corner of Albanino’s mouth seemed to widen just a little. He answered, “From a purely sensory standpoint, I do seem to be pleased. But no, Hestal, I want more than this.”
“Or perhaps you simply enjoy watching others dance gracefully under your strings, watching them run into walls everywhere yet be forced to fight bloodily. Sometimes I suspect you harbor the same feeling toward Olga Morozer and Officer Hardy—a feeling of toying with them.” Hestal pointed out.
Hestal stepped forward, stepping into the viscous pool of blood. Then he bent down and picked up the knife that Elliot had dropped on the ground earlier, examining the sharp instrument with a stern expression.
“Are you accusing me of taking pleasure in toying with you?” Albanino let out a laugh, blinking cheerfully. “No, let me be honest: I want to reach more of your inner self—not the mask of pretense covering your face. I want to see your Dionysian passion.”
Hestal smiled mockingly: “So are we discussing aesthetics now?”
“We’ve been discussing aesthetics from the very beginning, haven’t you realized?” Albanino replied calmly. “You’ve been hiding beneath the mask of perfect rationality for too long. When you live among people, you cannot tell others what you truly think, nor can you demand their understanding; your madness is mostly bound beneath the surface of rules, to the point where I’ve glimpsed the crumbling places beneath your mask. So I look forward to the moment your mask slips: just like that moment earlier, when you were in the midst of utterly irrational killing—that cruelty makes you more beautiful.”
“Madness.” Hestal spat the word with a cold sneer.
“Or, if you’ll allow me, I’d be happy to use a different word.” Albanino said softly, “—’divine madness.'”
As soon as Olga jumped out of the car, she was drenched by the rain.
The rain had grown so heavy that she could barely see the road ahead. Even for a Westland autumn, this kind of weather was quite rare. During the downpour, the temperature dropped extremely low, and every gust of wind mixed with raindrops made people shiver uncontrollably.
She squinted and saw the fully armed SWAT officers jumping down from the back of a vehicle ahead, guns in hand. Officer Hardy and McCade were a little further back. Hardy held one hand over his brow to block the rain that kept streaming into his eyes, and shouted to Olga, “Is that Albanino’s car—?”
Olga looked in the direction Hardy was pointing with his other hand: a red Chevrolet sports car was parked by the roadside. It was a very common model, and not expensive either, but Albanino did seem to be quite fond of it.
The problem was, there was no one in the car.
“So what do you plan to do now?” Albanino asked with great interest. “Bart and the FBI will be here any minute. Are you just going to retreat back into your rational shell like this?”
“Officer Hardy would think I went a bit too far with this killer, Johnny.” Hestal spoke in a very slow, measured tone, though Albanino was well aware that the fanatical gleam in his eyes had not yet faded.
—That much was indeed true. Elliot Evans’s corpse, lying on the ground, had been stabbed many times, and the entire scene was so gruesome that Hestal might well face charges of excessive self-defense. As a lawyer, Hestal was clearly well aware of this too. He reversed the grip on Elliot’s earlier knife with his left hand, holding it in a reverse grip, then slowly, slowly grasped the blade with his other hand.
“I suppose if I’d inflicted those wounds on him during a mutual knife fight between the two of us, it might make more sense—the only pity is that in that case, I couldn’t look as unscathed as I do now.” Hestal said, head lowered. His right hand’s five fingers tightened around the blade, then he smoothly drew the blade out from his closed palm—the next moment, blood began dripping steadily from between his fingers.
It looked excruciatingly painful, but Albanino suspected the adrenaline had temporarily dulled the pain. Hestal’s nerves were still highly strung up to this point: perhaps precisely because Albanino himself was still present.
Albarino watched, fascinated, as he created several similar wounds elsewhere on the body: on the arm, the shoulder, and below the ribs. The one below the ribs was even quite deep, and blood quickly soaked through his shirt at an alarming rate. Albarino suddenly asked, “You have self-harmed before, haven’t you?”
“Obviously I survived it.” Hestal lightly sidestepped the topic, using a relatively clean corner of his shirt to wipe his fingerprints off the knife’s handle, then carefully placed it back into Elliot’s hand so that Elliot’s fingerprints would be re-imprinted on it.
Albarino shrugged, unbothered by his evasion.
He watched as Hestal tossed the wiped knife back into the pool of blood—exactly where it would have fallen from Elliot’s hand if he had collapsed naturally—then kindly reminded him, “You know, wounds inflicted by others and self-inflicted wounds have somewhat different shapes. Some very experienced forensic examiners can tell the difference.”
“I know.” Hestal adjusted the knife and straightened up—during which he couldn’t help but sway slightly from the wound beneath his ribs—the black cold pool in his eyes no longer seemed so turbulent, but that blue still burned like a cold flame. “That said, aren’t you precisely that ‘very experienced forensic pathologist’?”
Albanino was briefly taken aback, then abruptly burst out laughing.
“Alright, as you wish, Mr. Amalite.” Albanino couldn’t suppress the smile at the corner of his mouth, yet he had more or less realized what was coming next, so he subtly adjusted his stance. “But then what? Do you have some other plot point arranged for this forensic pathologist that I should know about?”
“This forensic pathologist entered the killer Johnny’s apartment alone,” Hestal stated in a low voice, unconsciously licking his blood-stained lips with the tip of his tongue as he paused between sentences. “And at this moment, I—as you know, an ordinary person who has never experienced such a scene—had just escaped from the killer Johnny’s hands in a very terrifying way. At a time like this I was extremely panicked, and when another person appeared at the basement doorway, I instinctively…”
“Attacked him.” Albanino knowingly finished the sentence for him, that smile still hanging at the corner of his mouth. “Stress response—a very clever excuse, Pianist.”
What happened next occurred all at once—for instance, Hestal lunged at him like a nimble leopard, and they met somewhere in this blood-scented void, collided, and tumbled onto the floor splashed with crimson liquid as if plunging into a river of blood.
Albanino swore he had indeed heard a splashing sound, like a fish leaping from the water, and at the same time blood was slowly soaking through his coat. When Hestal nimbly locked his neck, he drove his knee into the other man’s abdomen, and because of a deliberately inflicted wound on the other’s body, Hestal let out a hiss, his voice unsteady.
—Of course, that strike still didn’t stop Hestal from driving the butterfly knife in his hand into Albanino’s shoulder.
The blade of that knife was narrow and sharp, the wound’s location wasn’t very vital, and the cut wasn’t very deep either—it just hurt like hell in the moment. Hestal used that knife, his entire body, and the hand clamped around Albanino’s neck to pin Albanino in place, like that butterfly they had talked about before, in the metaphorical sense.
“Is this what you wanted to see?” Hestal hissed in his ear, his voice cold. “Killing? Madness? When you drive a person to this point, just for—”
“Id.” Albarino gasped in reply, one of his hands fumbling to grip Hestal’s hand that held the knife, prying his fingers off the hilt one by one, “The essence deliberately suppressed, the burning soul, the place your power can reach.”
Hestal released the knife, then punched him in the face.
The small grunt of pain that spilled from Albarino’s throat was worth remembering. Hestal could see the trajectory of the blood splattering out and slowly sliding down—Albarino’s teeth must have cut his lip. How that drop of blood fell into the overflowing pool of blood, stirring up a few splashes of deep red, was a scene that could almost be traced from memory alone.
Then they both heard the sound of police breaking down the door, chaotic footsteps rushing toward the depths of this underground space. Hestal released Albarino’s neck, and was then pulled into the other’s arms.
At that moment, he had no intention of resisting, so he felt Albanino’s lips graze messily across his mouth, and there they both tasted the thick, metallic tang of blood. When the police finally burst in, fully armed, Albanino’s uninjured hand was already resting on his hair.
“It’s all right,” the other man said, reassuming the mask of the Chief Medical Examiner of the Westland City Forensics Bureau, his voice laced with a faint, barely perceptible tenderness. “Relax. It’s over now.”
Hestal was not truly all right—in every sense. First of all, he absolutely could not appear to be all right, and he hated that from the bottom of his heart.
Now he was forced to sit in the ambulance, because his wound was clearly not severe enough to send him directly to the hospital. Bart Hardy had found an umbrella from somewhere and stood holding it at the entrance of the ambulance cabin. The police coming and going more or less cast worried glances at the poor victim—even Officer Hardy himself, and he had just seen the bloody scene Hestal had created in that basement.
“Uh,” Hardy said, his voice hesitant. Clearly, addressing a question to someone he already knew made the whole exchange considerably more awkward. “Has he—have you—?”
“You’re asking whether the killer, Johnny, sexually assaulted me?” Herstal asked bluntly, and saw Hardy visibly flinch. “If we’re talking about specific forms of penetration, I don’t think so.”
He couldn’t be bothered to inject much fragility, confusion, or wavering into this conversation—they both knew he wasn’t that kind of person. Hardy steadied himself, then chose to be honest: “This is… unusual. The killer, Johnny, isn’t the type to be patient for that long.”
Clearly, judging by the utterly ruined state of Herstal’s trousers, Elliot Evans was indeed not a patient man. What he was wearing now was a set of hospital scrubs from the ambulance; all of his previous clothes had been carefully collected into evidence bags by the officers and taken away. Herstal knew he might never see them again in his lifetime—though, of course, he didn’t particularly want to see them again either.
“He’s not a very patient man,” Hestal agreed, carefully adjusting the ratio of fear and vulnerability on his face, hoping not to arouse too much suspicion from Hardy. “However, I believe I persuaded him.”
Hardy looked at him as if he were some kind of rare animal.
Hestal quirked the corner of his mouth into a bleak smile devoid of any humor: “He has delayed ejaculation—psychogenic, I’d guess.”
When Elliot placed his hand on the skin of Hestal’s abdomen, he still felt a wave of physiological revulsion.
Elliot’s fingers trembled as he waged a grueling battle with his belt buckle. Hestal watched his face, catching a glimpse of utter frenzied excitement and a trace of strange unease in the young man’s expression. He considered for a moment, then asked: “Did you and the others who were here before do this?”
The other party stalled for a moment, then answered almost in a mumble: “Yes, but I didn’t… I couldn’t—”
Yes, no semen had been extracted from the victims’ bodies. CSI had initially assumed the killer wore a condom. But to put it bluntly, looking at Elliot’s current state, Hestal really couldn’t imagine where he was going to pull a condom out from. It was a bitterly ironic, almost comical realization. Hestal thought about what Elliot’s evasive attitude really meant, and then suddenly it dawned on him.
“You can’t do it, can you?” he asked.
Elliot’s face looked even a bit more flushed: “I—”
“It doesn’t matter, and besides, it’s not your fault.” Hestal spoke in a tone of feigned gentleness, and the other party did not yet have the ability to discern the falseness in his voice. “It will get better in the future. You must be patient.”
“…Would it?” The other person’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“With me, it’s inevitable,” Hestal said softly, a measured hint, so hypocritical and casual. “Considering the time we’ll be spending together in the future, you shouldn’t have to worry about the time it takes. You can take it slow.”
Elliot swallowed gently.
Hestal looked at him, tilting his head slightly, exposing the submissive curve of his neck. This tasteless serial killer clearly liked that sort of thing. Then, he said slowly, “You can start with the part you’re capable of. I think, tonight, you can fuck my thighs first.”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m Scheherazade, scheming in every possible way just to see the sun rise another day,” Hestal said dryly.
“You’ve already done very well,” Hardy comforted, though the shock in his eyes had not yet fully faded.
“You say that because everyone else is dead,” Hestal pointed out.
For a brief moment, Hardy wore a slightly awkward expression, because Hestal was in fact telling the truth: although strictly speaking, Elliot Evans’s corpse was still lying on the basement floor at this very moment, having clearly died a very gruesome death, this could hardly be counted as a victory.
“You’re going to need help,” Hardy then said. “I suggest you attend psychological counseling or a support group or something like that. Seriously, it would do you good.”
“After I killed a person and assaulted Dr. Bax?” Hestal asked sarcastically.
“You didn’t mean to. In that kind of extreme situation, no one could control themselves.” Hardy said sincerely. “Just… relax, okay?”
Hestal let out a low hum and pulled the blanket tighter around himself. The wounds on his body ached faintly, and he didn’t need to put much effort into feigning a fragile and pale expression to conceal the bloody truth. Albanino was probably sitting in another ambulance right now, having someone stitch up his wounds.
To be fair to Hestal, driving the knife into Albanino’s shoulder had been the best part of the day.
—This wasn’t over yet.
The rain had not yet let up. Albanino sat in the ambulance, letting the doctor tend to the wound on his shoulder, the exposed skin trembling slightly from the cold. It was at that moment that Olga slipped into the ambulance, draped in a disposable raincoat.
“Are you all right?” Olga asked.
“I’m fine. Is your next line going to be ‘I told you so’?” Albanino asked with a smile.
“I really don’t want to say it, but I really did tell you so. Didn’t I tell you to wait in place for us to regroup with you?” Olga snorted.
“The worst outcome you imagined didn’t happen.” Albanino shrugged. By this time, the doctor had already stepped back after bandaging the wound, and Albanino quickly grabbed a blanket and draped it over himself.
Olga looked at him with a teasing expression. “You got stabbed clean through, and there’s a mangled corpse lying in the basement. I’m not sure this counts as a good outcome.”
“It’s better than Killer Johnny producing another corpse. Besides, I don’t plan to sue Hestal for personal injury. Anyone could misjudge in that kind of tense situation—it was me who appeared too suddenly.” Albanino replied.
He looked toward the other ambulance—beyond the web of interwoven lights from several police cars, Hestal was over there, though his expression was hard to make out. His wound wasn’t particularly deep; stitches would suffice, no need to go to the hospital.
Albanino thought for a moment, then asked, “What do you think the prosecutor’s office will make of it?”
“I imagine they most likely won’t press charges against him. After all, the killer had a knife, and with a criminal record like that—if he hadn’t fought back, he’d certainly be dead by now.” Olga let out a laugh, blinking thoughtfully. “The prosecutor will take into account that injury assessment report you just provided. Once the wounds heal, they’ll probably evaluate his degree of disability. Though I doubt it’ll even amount to minor injury… but the opinion you provided now will help them reconstruct what happened in that basement.”
Albanino kept smiling: the opinion he’d provided at the scene would tell others that the killer Johnny had indeed intended to use that knife to kill Hestal. On that point, Hestal certainly knew how to make the most of what was available.
He ought to understand that Albanino wasn’t particularly keen on letting law enforcement insert themselves into this competition.
Then, Olga suddenly asked again, “But there’s no point in considering things that won’t happen. I’m rather curious though: when you went down to the basement, what did you feel? —I mean, when you saw him covered in blood?”
Albanino gave her a strange look. “Why would I feel anything? I’ve seen far too many corpses in my line of work. The gruesome scene our dear lawyer created in that basement doesn’t even rank.”
Olga smiled secretly and lowered her voice a little. “Because color is a spiritual force. I think he suits red very well.”
They were silent for a while, watching the police come and go inside and outside the cordon. Elliot Evans’s corpse and the remnants of his tragic love were zipped into a body bag and carried out on a stretcher by the police. The puddles gathered on the ground were filled with the red and blue reflections of police lights, torn to shreds by the rain.
After this rain stopped, Johnny would never go out to play again.
“You’re right,” Albanino said frankly after a moment, “he does suit red.”
Note:
[1] Phineas:
King Phineus of Thrace possessed the gift of prophecy, but he angered Zeus by revealing too many divine secrets. The gods cursed him, causing him to suffer eternal hunger on a desolate island, with abundant food before his eyes that he could not eat. Whenever Phineus tried to eat, the Harpies (the snatcher spirits) would fly over and steal his food.
[2] Regarding Dionysus:
In this piece, it refers to the “Dionysian spirit” in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche believed that the Dionysian spirit symbolizes the release of emotions, with its principles tied to frenzy, excess, and instability. In its early sense, the Dionysian spirit referred to a tragic intoxication achieved through the fusion with the essence of cosmic life from individual suffering and destruction; later, it came to mean a tragic intoxication derived from the absolute meaninglessness of life.
[3] Divine madness: that is, “the gift of the gods.”
This involves Plato’s philosophical and aesthetic views: Plato believed that beyond the material world there exists an immaterial world of Forms. The world of Forms is real (and perfect), while the material world is unreal—a vague reflection of the world of Forms.
Plato believed that artists’ inspiration comes from a state of madness, that is: when poets behold the beauty of the earthly world, they recall the true beauty of the world of Forms, and so their souls detach from their bodies and fly to heaven, reaching the state of “madness,” thereby creating excellent poetry. This madness is the result of divine possession.
[4] Id: Freud’s famous concept—the id is the natural expression of primal desires. In performing its function, the id seeks to relieve excitement and tension and to release energy.
[5] Scheherazade: A character in *One Thousand and One Nights* (*The Arabian Nights*), the bride who married the brutal king who killed a bride every day, and then told the king a story every night to stay alive.