Grave Instinct

ONE

Duval County, Jacksonville, Florida June 6, 2003

Grant Kenyon grabbed his head in his hands and pleaded, “Stop asking me to kill. Stop making me kill.” Grant sat upright in the lonely Jax-Town Motel bed in his empty room, catching glimpses of his mirror reflection as if it were someone else. “It is someone else. Sure,” he said aloud to himself, yet if he worked at it, he recognized something in the twisted image-the boyish face, the sad and deep-set eyes. But here in the semi dark, there was something else going on… Nothing fit-not his features, not his manner and not this place so far from his wife, Emily, and little Hildy. Staring into the looking glass, he felt that the real Grant Kenyon had fallen into it and metamorphosed into what he now saw. “It's really not me, this guy in the mirror. It's some other force that has hold of me.”

He lifted the beer and toasted to the uncanny image toasting back, and he hated what he saw.

He clawed his way to a standing position and, once sure of his footing, Grant bellowed and charged at the reflected image now moving toward him-that other entity-and they nearly collided where they met, face-to-face. “What the hell do you want from me?” he asked the stranger in the mirror.

“ Just do what you're told,” replied the other.

“ Leave me, now! I don't want this… this kind of life… this possession of me by… by you.”

His reflected image in the half-light showed an irregular brow, eyes too close together, a crooked nose larger on one side than the other, a sad set of dark eyes, a mouth in perpetual downturn. Do I feel as bad as I look? He wondered.

“ I've grown 350 percent since your ancestors crawled out of the muck, Grant,” his reflection said, as if it had a brain independent of his.

Grant beat a fist on the bureau top and glared at his Hydelike reflection. “Damn you, how many times're you going to tell me that? How fucking many times? I am pleading with you, my insistent brain, to never repeat that goddamn number again.”

“ Three hundred fifty,” it replied.

“ I've heard it all before.”

“ Your simian ancestors discovered that eating the brains of their enemies increased their mental capacity,” the reflection said. “Read about all the folk remedies of the Chinese, Tibetans, Hindus and Arabs.”

“ I know… I've heard you say it a thousand times. I know man's brain is a stimulant, an aphrodisiac, a medicine to expand the powers of rational mind.”

The man in the mirror grimly replied, “Then you know why we're doing what you're doing.”

“ I'm not doing a damn thing. You… you're doing it,” he replied to his reflection. “And I won't allow it again! Not once more. I forbid-”

“ Not once more. Not once more,” mocked his mind of the distorted image. Then the voice turned deadly serious. “What are you saying, Grant?”

“ I'm saying, don't lie to me. It's not working. I know it's a twisted obsession, a morbid craving that-”

“ Me? Lie? But me is you and you is me, Grant.”

“ All that crap about your being somehow special, the descendent of all the prophets, all the philosophers, all the teachers, the wise men and the great spiritual leaders since time began.”

“ How then do you account for me, Grant? The most highly organized material substance on Earth-the human brain?”

“ You're just an organ, an electrochemical factory.”

“ Nonsense! I am the great raveled knot, the-”

“ I've heard it all be-”

“- world has ever known. I am the enchanted loom, the giant-”

“ I don't want to hear it!” Grant tore out tufts of his hair, hoping the self-inflicted pain would blot out the voice inside the him inside the mirror. It failed to help.

“ Within this 'chemical factory,' as you call me, are the secrets of the universe. 1… you… us… we have the blood of kings running through our veins, Grant. The molecules of Plato and Aristotle. We… us… we're on the verge of complete enlightenment, on the verge of becoming pure energy, Grant. You must understand that?”

“ So hang in there?” he scoffed at his reflection. He then violently shook his head, while his reflection maintained calm. Staring directly at his own forehead, he said, “Mind… mind you are so damn repetitive, so please, I'm begging you. Shut off! Piss off!”

For a brief second, his brain was silent. Then it said to him, “I need nourishing until the metamorphosis comes, Grant.”

“ I ought to just kill you.” “I am you, Grant, and you art I, and we are what we art.”

“ We are what we are?” Grant asked.

“ So you must feed me.”

Grant thought of the taste of the gray brain matter he had already fed on. He had tried it in casserole form, even in Hamburger Helper to mask the taste. “Feed you… from the brains of virtuous young women.”

“ As virtuous as we can find. Now feed me.”

“ But it's murder, what you've made me do.”

“ God doth work in mysterious ways indeed. His wonders to perform.”

“ Now you're claiming to be God? At least it's a new approach.”

“ God is in the over mind, the cosmic mind, Dr. Grant.”

“ What more can you possibly want from me? Already I've taken two lives, two souls for you.”

“ It's not enough.”

“ It's not? Well, tell me, what is enough with you? Three, six, nine, nine hundred?”

“ We are seeking out the over mind, the cosmic being here, Grant. No one said it was going to be easy!”

Someone next door pounded loudly on the wall. The clock flipped to 1:35 A.M. Some teens or children raced down the hallway en route to or from the pool, even this late. Their racing shadows slowed to peep beneath his door.

“ So you want me to dissect another person for her brain… Why not dead children like Daryl Cahil did in Newark and Morristown in '89 and '90? You sure he wasn't on the right track?”

“ No dead bodies. We tried that, remember, at your morgue? As for children… too much uncontrolled thought and nervous, directionless energy, and you don't need that.”

“ No… that's a certainty.”

“ Young women are pliable, their minds energetic and well modulated and, Grant, don't tell me you get no satisfaction out of it. You may be able to lie to your ego, but you can't lie to me, Grant old boy.”

“ How can I derive pleasure from it? I have no conscious memory of it happening until you fill me in. You got a name?”

“ It's 'Phillip' if it helps, and I have enough conscious memory of the feedings for both of us, Grant, so no guilt afterward.”

“ But none of this… it's not normal.”

“ Normal is as normal does. What's normal, Grant? What's normal enough. p”

“ For me or for you, you mean?”

“ For anyone. Look, just accept it, and get on with it. If you can't face yourself, Grant, then I'll do it for you. A nice compromise for that tiresome phrase, 'To thine own self' all that…”

He turned to the bed, his reflection doing the same with the reflected bed in the mirror. Each curled up in opposite dimensions, each wary of the other, but Grant in this world could not move away from his brain sitting atop his head. He momentarily wondered if the guy in the mirror could escape his brain. Then he wondered what he meant by “his brain.” Was it sensible to say that his mirror image was carrying his brain as well as his features? Or was the mirror-man's brain separate from his own?

“ No more thoughts of getting rid of us. OK, Dr. Grant? All that'i behind us, right?” His brain spoke now from the coiled recesses and fissures of the cerebral cortex.

“ No… no such thoughts.”

“ I know… I've been monitoring.”

A knock at the door. The food from a carry-out deli that specialized in giving the customer what he wanted. Grant prayed the delivery boy was a boy and not a girl. He got up, found his wallet and opened the door on a pimply-faced young man with a dour and sleepy look. They exchanged food for money, and Grant returned to bed with the food and drink, giving silent thanks for the specialty order-a cheese, egg and brains calzone and a bottle of V8 juice. “Brain food,” he muttered and bit into the calzone.

Kansas City Public Library The following day

THE nineteen-year-old community college student had nowhere but the library to work on her paper, since the computer center was closed on Sundays. She had set up everything she needed and had begun surfing the World Wide Web for information on the brain and functions of the mind for her term paper assignment. She logged on to something dealing with the cosmic mind, the strangest Web page she had ever come across. She forgot about her term paper and simply read:

The flesh, blood and body of man is nothing to the brain which houses the soul.

“ That's beautiful,” she said aloud. She read on:

As the great thinkers and poets of all time have pointed out time and again-the beauty of the soul lies in the mind. The brain stem, the medulla oblongata, the pons Varolii, the reticular formation, the cerebellum, the cranial and trigeminal nerves, all these masterful works control every movement of the body down to the twitch. The tenth cranial nerve alone controls the ear, neck, lungs, heart and abdominal viscera. It controls breath and digestion, all at the direction of the mind.

Man's brain is larger than that of ten prehistoric reptiles that measured one hundred feet long but whose brains were the size of walnuts. According to evolutionists, man's brain began growing at an unprecedented rate one million years ago. Strangely, the mind of man is, a million years later, still trying to determine its own power and energy, and the source of that energy. Many cannibalistic tribes reported to eat the brains of their enemies killed in battle claim they have touched on that power, glimpsed it, as a result of brain-feeding. If you are interested in knowing more about the mystery of the collective universal soul inherent in the brain, read on.

The student hesitated, unsure she wanted to read on. There seemed to be something ominous about this information. Still, it was intriguing, and if there was something to it-that cannibals had some sort of insight into the very deepest inner workings of the universe through a recognition of the soul housed in the human brain-then perhaps she ought to write her paper on that. But who would believe it?

She paused her hand over the keys, trying to decide whether to move on to some information more in keeping with an encyclopedia or to continue on this strange Web page. Either way, time was running out. That paper and Mrs. Weston weren't going to wait. Maybe the safe and conservative road was best, after all.

But her eyes, unlike her fingers, weren't poised. They read on…