The Canyon Killer
by Ron Sanders
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
He’s slinking ahead, but not so irresistibly this time. I could reach him, if only I could work my way free of this slow-motion spacewalk. He moves like smoke, seeping between obstacles: just a shape, a head and torso propelled by four rapidly firming limbs. Down a broken walkway to a gutted cottage stripped black by wildfire.
He’s solidifying: all that heaving, driving haze is fleshing out before my eyes. I lunge to take him by the shoulders, but my forearms slam together just as he reaches the napping old woman. My long wail of protest splinters and fades.
Now he has her by the throat. He’s lifting her up the wall and he’s choking her with a feverish, an almost libidinous savagery. For a single black heartbeat he pauses to look back. And I’m drifting in tight, wrists locked, fingers closing and cramping as the woman’s head bobs and bounces, as her arms slap left and right against the wall. Then with one final, impassioned squeeze, the nosy old witch is silenced.
* * *
Kicked in the lobby’s restroom door. Shaved and hacked off hair by the fistful. A careful combover to cover the scar. A little pomade and a found baseball cap and I look almost human.
Gazing slackly in the glass, I flickeringly remember being up and about earlier, warily feeling out the neighborhood with my hefty new roll. And I pulled it off, even running on automatic pilot. The sporting goods outlet provided pocketed jogging sweats and a pair of top-notch running shoes. Way more important: I bought a pocket-sized high-tech programmable alarm. It’s a bitch to deal with in my present state but, once I figure it out, I’ll set it to vibrate at ten-minute intervals.
Again my gnarly reflection is replaced by that nagging image, by that image that’s been burned into memory: Everybody in that store was just STARING at me!
The scales are falling from my eyes! I’m finally getting the unadulterated picture: that wildly paranoiac event was an oh-so timely newsflash; a wake-up call to my weary white ass, and the collective view of all these precious, milling, artsy-fartsy gleeps: Monster At Large!
Just so. The fog lifts. While I’ve been wrestling with my own demon, this geeky little community’s been quietly freaking out. And now their big bad bogeyman’s out of the bottle. It’s in the air, man; in the sweat marks on the doorknobs, in the half-prints on the floors: that panicky vibe bawls from every newsrack, leaks from every local’s lips, burns in every crossing guard’s eyes. There are warnings taped to windows, sketches tacked to walls. How long before the whole town is just crawling with cops? How long before it’s all feds and vigilantes? How long before they find the old lady’s body?
* * *
Late afternoon.
I’ve been stepping in it all day: falling out on benches, cussing out shopping carts, freezing up in crosswalks.
This stupid alarm’s got a mind of its own. It goes off when I least expect it, razzing my every attempt at programming with its every ironclad algorithm. It’s constantly redirecting me to functions I could give a good long holy crap about, using visuals on its little integrated screen jerkily mimed by some retarded ex-librarian or other. But at least it’s kept me from keeling over in public. And now it’s coming on dusk.
I’ve got to end this ride tonight.
I’ve got to OD while I’m able.
I’ve got to put myself out of my own misery before I really blow it and the whole goddamn thing starts all over.
I’ll buy out that scurvy snake Oscar. My whole begging wad, man, every ripped-off dollar of it, for just one long, electric, bitter white rush into night.
* * *
This time that savvy eye glints rather than gleams.
Oscar, sitting insolently on the steps’ thigh-high safety wall, wags his head sardonically as I shamble up, windmilling my arms for balance. He gets to his feet and moves to block the entrance.
“Are you deaf? Didn’t I say you wasn’t to come around here no more? Now split.”
“This is different.” I peel down my waistband to reveal an arsenal of hundreds and fifties. “I want quantity this time.”
“What did I just say, asshole?” Oscar shows his silver caps. “I told you to split. We don’t do business no more. You ain’t welcome, you ain’t wanted. I don’t know you, punk.”
From my tensing jewels comes an antediluvian call for malice, sweet malice. Whatever that line is people aren’t supposed to cross, the prick’s definitely stepped over it this time. Without considering the likely consequences, I get right in his face.
“And fuck you, bitch! Why do you have to be such a dick all the time? And why can’t you get it through your fat head this is no casual pop-and-go! I want it all, man! I may be nothing more than a piece of shit and a nuisance to you, but I’m a complete menace to the rest of the world. And, whether you do get it or not, I’m not gonna let it happen again! So why don’t you just do us both a favor, punk, and get the hell out of my way.” I brush him aside and begin making my way down.
“You keep going down them steps, boy, and you sure as hell ain’t gonna be coming back up. You hear me?”
I whirl and climb, my rage rising with me. But even this brief surge of passion leaves me giddy and spent. On the top step, I miserably embrace that low running wall. “Please, man, please.”
A loud burr comes from my left front pocket. We both see the fabric vibrating.
Immediately Oscar is a live wire. “What’s that!” A hand finds his back pocket and I hear the characteristic click of a switchblade. “You’re one dead narc, motherfucker.”
“No, no, no, man! It’s just an alarm. I’m still learning to program it. I keep trying to tell you: I can’t let myself fall asleep!”
“Back off.”
I feel the blade’s tip poking my belly.
“Please. I swear, just this once.”
“I said back off! And I don’t wanna be seeing you no more. If I catch you on my street again, I’ll kill you.”
I clumsily backpedal down the sidewalk, turning in time to see a police cruiser nosing around the corner, recovering in time to force a believable shuffling jog. That familiar beam lights me up before swinging onto Oscar, now stargazing serenely on the gaily painted little wall. At the corner I pause to glance back. Oscar is talking jocularly with the officers, who haven’t left their car. It’s obvious they’re sifting for something bigger than pissant dealers.
Fumbling, faltering, feeling my way. Edging into a blind corridor between buildings, crumpling behind a clutter of trash cans. Even as I’m massaging my screaming temple, two official vehicles momentarily probe the scene with their spots. The helicopters, as always combing the hills, have begun to comb the town.
Pull out the alarm — the LED winks cheerily — tentatively set it for ten minutes, and for five-minute repeats thereafter. Back in the pocket. Back on my feet.
Scrabbling at the walls. Kicking through the rubbish, a flutter of Jacksons spiraling in my wake. Hanging from a fire escape ladder, rust breaking off in my fingers. Letting go; first the left hand, then the right. Withering. Wilting.
Slipping like silt as the black earth rushes up to meet me.
* * *
Down the alley and between the parking lots, all the way to the sidewalk, he throws Oscar into a chokehold, ferociously breaks his neck, and drags him back the way he came. He drags him right through me. Comes a nagging hum and insistent vibration. He hurls back his head, throat arched and apple popping. My body heaves and crashes. That shuddering racket rises and rises until its components collide behind my eyes. And I’m being pulled out of sleep’s murk like a fish on a line.
The combined sound and motion whirs and rattles to a close. Rapid eye movement is renewed. He hauls Oscar’s body back up that bisecting walk, frantically bashing the forehead on pavement as he goes. Another burring of the alarm, somewhere on the line between grogginess and complete insensibility: five minutes have passed; it seems like five seconds.
He collapses and recovers, blurs and congeals, fiercely embraces the splayed corpse. With gathering fury he repeatedly smashes its face on the ground, against a wall, again on the ground. I’m woozily turning in pursuit when my entire frame seizes up. Teeth gnashing, toes curling, I autonomically inhale to the roots, and immediately my heart’s hammering in my skull.
He pauses his mauling to look all around, a cheetah at the kill. The rapid throbbing intensifies. His eyes, two white holes in the night, widen with mine. When I reach the very limit of inhalation, we simultaneously lurch and explosively exhale. The purlieu sharpens and dims, gradually stabilizes.
He resumes dragging Oscar down the alley. I lunge in pursuit, but my arms and legs are becoming increasingly uncooperative, even as he’s growing weaker and weaker. We’re beginning to stumble and sag. At a third burring, he slumps just outside the old hotel’s shattered window, finally forcing himself inside one semiopaque limb at a time.
I draw myself brick by brick along the wall, bellowing in a vacuum as Oscar’s body passes through the frame. Pulling myself into the room is like fighting quicksand. He looks up, tears his nails out of Oscar’s eyes and goes for mine. Just then the alarm shocks us back into alignment. I grab a sheet from the bed, knot it around his neck, and squeeze my way out of slumber. His hands find my eyes, but I have leverage enough to stand on the bed, enough to loop the sheet around a wall fixture, enough to use my body weight to draw the sheet tight. I sink back down until we’re face to face. And my mouth spews an ugly black mantra while his translucent lips writhe in perfect sync:
Die, you son of a bitch, die. Die, you son of a bitch, die. Die, you son of a bitch.
Die.
* * *
THE CANYON KILLER MURDERS
Their Impact and Aftermath
All available data regarding the Canyon Killer Murders point conclusively to derelict Owsley Martin as the sole perpetrator. Martin was a vagabond living since his late teens in the hills of Topanga Canyon, drifting down to the community when he required sustenance: one of those hit-and-run relics of the hippie era now known colloquially as “coyotes.”
He was discovered hanged by his own hand in an abandoned hotel off of Deep Ridge, the instrument of his demise being a noose fashioned from a sheet taken off a bed in one of the hotel’s ground-floor bedrooms. The mangled body of a known drug dealer, one Oscar Benecito, was also found in the room, but forensic analyses demonstrate he expired prior to Mr. Martin, and was therefore not a party to the actual hanging.
A large sum secured in the waistband of Martin’s sweatpants lends credence to the popular belief that this was a drug deal and robbery gone tragically wrong, an ill-planned event culminating in a spontaneous outburst of unbridled temper and violent remorse. Regardless, armchair conjecture cannot be substantiated. The underbelly chroniclers, street-culture enthusiasts, and amateur criminologists must ultimately yield to the only viable conclusion: this once-glamorized incident was really nothing more than a crude murder-suicide.
Longtime residents remember Martin as intense and exceedingly antisocial, prone to bizarre behavior and empty nights lost in frenzied tirades. According to several locals who had spoken fleetingly with Martin during the two weeks of murders, he had complained of an inability to stay awake, and of a penchant for acting out his bloodthirstiest fantasies during rapid eye movement sleep, as though, through some kind of weird supernatural dream bifurcation, his unstable innermost being might spontaneously erupt to commit mayhem on enemies old and new.
A number of the aforementioned witnesses received the distinct impression that Mr. Martin was mentally disabled; others, that he suffered from sporadic attacks of acute narcolepsy. The state’s autopsy reveals Martin was actually a victim of hypothalamic damage involving the body’s circadian regulator, that aspect which controls the sleep-wake cycle in otherwise healthy beings.
Whether or not the hypothalamus is diseased or has suffered injury, rapid eye movement sleep, which normally sets in around an hour after one drifts off, occurs much sooner in those who are sleep-deprived. There is speculation that, had a narcoleptic Martin regularly succumbed to the vagaries of rapid eye movement sleep, the onset in his compromised state would have been near-instantaneous.
However, serum albumin indicators establish that Martin was not a narcoleptic, that he had, in fact, functioned without measurable sleep for an astonishing fifteen days. Based upon tests performed on subjects awake for even half that duration, the overriding tax on his mind and body must have been incredible, producing psychopathic delusions, highly erratic motor impulses, and a complete inability to differentiate between fancy and reality.
Various specialists have published opinions over the years, in both The Lancet and in Nature. Their consensus: Owsley Martin was a man who, paradoxically enough, only dreamt he was asleep.
Although fingerprints, DNA analyses, and hair-and-clothing vestigial evidence prove beyond contest that Owsley Martin was the lone culprit in the Canyon Killer Murders, there were two additional deaths in the community, and three in the abutting canyon, that have been attributed to a so-called copycat killer, due to their striking similarity to the Martin slayings. The victims — a hitchhiker, a shopkeeper, a deputy sheriff, a tourist, and a deep canyon squatter — were all murdered and mutilated with Martin’s trademark ferocity and were forensically determined to have been dispatched, one by one, in a meandering line leading from the community to the hills. Outside of the immediate signs of struggle, no actual physical evidence exists to help cast light on the identity of this mystery figure.
A massive operation was undertaken in Topanga Canyon, with nearly three square miles initially cordoned off as a possible crime scene. Some two hundred squatters were promptly rounded up, cited, and expeditiously expelled through the highly commendable efforts of Los Angeles County sheriffs and L.A. firefighters.
Detained squatters were interviewed in depth as to their gut impressions of the late Owsley Martin. Results were consistent, man to man: Martin was described as an insular and most disagreeable individual, indefatigable in his stomping treks and spiraling diatribes. Several members of a peripatetic Canyon commune, The Wandering Soulflowers, recalled chancing upon Martin at the bottom of a dry gorge after he had split open his skull in a harrowing fall. Although barely conscious, he had viciously rejected their aid and, following an amazingly quick recovery, initiated wild advances upon the terrified Soulflowers, using threatening language that one member famously recounted as “incandescent demonic psychobabble.”
Over a period of eighteen months the entire area was segregated by conjoined lengths of razor-wire fence, in the locally famous Hands Helping Hands project, a county-funded enterprise that, ironically, provided strong temporary employment for those very evicted squatters.
The Canyon is now an indigenous wildlife sanctuary, rigidly protected by officials and citizens alike. Off limits to all civilians, it is rigorously patrolled by county inspectors and by periodic helicopter runs. No unauthorized person has ever entered the sanctuary.
Yet there are scores of residents, even now shaken by the grisly murders, who whisper of an odd nightly phenomenon. It’s just human nature, of course: urban legends are born in the imagination rather than in fact.
Still these dwellers lock their windows and doors, still they clamor to congressmen and councils, still they swear of a black figure roaming the hills, raving through the night of an invasive slumber, and screaming to the moon of an unknowable, of an insurmountable, of an unimaginable rage.
Copyright © 2023 by Ron Sanders
