The Devil's Cinema (23 page)

Gilles started to run, but the attacker cut him off as he pulled out a gun.

“Get down on the ground! Put your head down!” The attacker roared, gesturing with the handgun.

Gilles thought he was going to die.

“Put your hands behind your back,” the stranger's deep voice ordered, “and don't move.”

He fell to the floor and tried to look up, but the stranger yelled at him repeatedly to keep his head down.

The next thing he knew he had duct tape over his eyes. Gilles was blind, lying on the cold concrete, feeling totally helpless, panicking. “Take whatever you want,” he pleaded. “Take my wallet. Anything. Just let me go,” he begged tearfully.

“If you cooperate, this will only be a standard robbery.”

Gilles didn't dare move. All he could hear was a jingling sound. Horrible thoughts came in flashes of terror behind his taped-up eyes.
No one knows where I am. This man is going to rob me, abduct me, kill me
. The jingling continued.
Oh God. He's going to rape me!

Gilles made a split-second decision. In desperation, he decided to fight back.

I'd rather die my way than his way
.

He ripped off the duct tape and jumped to his feet. “I can't go down like this!”

It startled the stranger. “Get back down on the ground! Get back down on the ground!” He swung the handgun toward him.

Gilles waited for the bullet. No time to react. His mind was racing.

Grab the barrel of the gun. You can do this
.

In that instant, in a space occupying no more than a half-second of time – although it felt so much longer – he saw the stranger's outstretched hand grasping the firearm, moving it closer to his head. Aiming.

Gilles lunged, palm toward the enemy.

His fingers touched the barrel. His eyes fluttered open in surprise.

Gilles realized the gun was a fake.

He felt the hard plastic in his hand, realizing with exhilaration the weapon weighed just half the weight of a real gun. It gave him a newfound hope. He wasn't afraid of the gun anymore. And his confidence suddenly exploded in rage, adrenaline fuelling a wild bout of courage: he could fight off this weaponless fraud.

Gilles ripped the gun out of the stranger's hands. He clasped on tight and tried to break the gun, crush it, smash it in two. He spotted black handcuffs on the floor and picked them up.

“Put those down!” the masked man shouted excitedly.

But Gilles ignored him. He tossed the fake gun into a corner and wrapped the handcuffs around his fist like a set of brass knuckles. Gilles took a long look at his attacker. Realizing the handcuffs wouldn't dent the stranger's mask, he discarded them and clenched his fists.

The two collided. They wrestled, arms and hands ripping, grasping. Their feet jostled as they pushed and shoved each other in the scuffle, both trying to gain the upper hand.

Gilles clasped his hands tightly around his attacker when the man lunged forward and head-butted him in the face. The mask struck hard against his nose, his eye, and he recoiled from the stinging pain.

The stranger sneered. “Because you're not cooperating, this is the way this has to be!”

The duo struggled and spun around several times in the near darkness. The stranger threw a hard punch at Gilles's left temple, but he was too high on adrenaline to feel its full impact. They continued struggling furiously, smashing from one end of the garage to the other. Arms flailing, fingers pulling and tearing, Gilles tried to rip his attacker's mask off, but the man kept dodging him.

Gilles lifted one leg and swung it as hard as he could at the groin of his masked attacker. But the man just ducked out of the way and he kicked nothing but air. The stranger tried to kick him back. Gilles kept punching the man in the chest, avoiding contact with the hard plastic mask.

Then, as they struggled, Gilles felt some kind of pouch on the man's waist. He shuddered.

His attacker could be armed with a knife. Gilles knew he had to escape quickly if the man had such a weapon on him. This brawl could end his life.

Gilles figured that if he let his attacker continue to hit him, he could slowly manoeuvre himself toward the bay door, each punch sending him closer to the exit.

The punches kept battering the left side of his head. But there seemed to be no method to the attack. It was unorganized, chaotic. He tried to focus on what he could see of the attacker's face, hoping to remember the details later.
Maybe freckles
. Gilles glanced again.
He could have red hair
. He
was moving too fast for him to be sure, and the mask and hoodie covered nearly everything else.

Gilles stepped away, then took another baby step. The door was close. He pushed the man back, but his grasp held on tight, the stranger's fingers clawing into his jacket. Gilles slipped his arms out, letting the jacket slide off in the grasp of his attacker.

Freedom neared.

Gilles dropped to the floor and rolled under the partially opened garage door. He started crawling, palms pushing himself past the edge of the garage and down the driveway. He grabbed at soil and rocks. Out of breath and exhausted, he could barely keep going or even lift himself up. Maybe the stun gun baton had really knocked him out, he thought. All his energy was drained.

Gilles gasped for air, crawling feverishly through patches of dying grass and dirt. Behind him, the stranger was back on his feet. He ducked under the garage door and started walking toward his prey. Gilles could hear him drawing closer and he pushed himself forward again, fighting to keep moving, to find help. But the stranger was upon him, grabbing him by his ankles, and pulling hard.

Gilles struggled to hold him off, fingers digging and scratching into the ground. He reached for a rock, but just then the man pulled hard and the rock slipped out of his hands. He flailed his arms about uselessly as he was dragged all the way back to the garage.

As the attacker attempted to raise the garage door high enough for both of them to slide under, he released his grip on Gilles momentarily, giving him a second chance to escape. He pushed away and leapt to his feet, stumbling sideways and nearly crashing into the old maroon-coloured fence. But he steadied himself and bolted once again around the corner and down the alley, heart booming in his chest.

As he staggered toward the crossroads where the alley meets the walking path, Gilles spotted a young couple out for an evening stroll. “Please!” Gilles gasped, trying to find his voice as he stumbled again, collapsing at their feet. “There's a guy attacking me.”

The couple looked down at him.

“He's trying to mug me!” Gilles cried.

Just then, his attacker emerged from out of the alley.

“That's the man!” Gilles groaned, holding his stomach. He slowly rose to his feet.

The couple looked on in terror at the approaching figure who looked like someone out of a horror movie, his mask still covering his face as he lumbered closer toward them.

“Oh, hey friend!” the stranger said cheerfully, trying to feign friendship.

But the young couple wasn't buying it. Terrorized by the sight of a masked stranger, the woman took off down the path. Her boyfriend stayed behind momentarily, before he also fled, leaving Gilles on his own. But their presence had been enough to make the stranger skittish and he retreated as well.

Gilles watched as everyone scattered. He was more angry than scared now and determined to return to the driveway to get to his truck.

He moved slowly, quietly. He placed each footstep silently on the alley pavement, looking all around him and wondering where his attacker had fled. As he neared his parked truck, he could see under the partially opened garage door. A pair of feet was pacing frantically back and forth. His jacket was still on the floor, but he wasn't going in there again to get it.

Gilles jumped into his vehicle and locked the doors. He jammed the key in the ignition, gave it a crank, and slammed the gas pedal to the floor. He was driving on adrenaline.

He was nearing a major roadway when the whole experience finally hit him, and then his heart really started to pound. It was like getting hit in the face with a sledgehammer: the shock, the fear, the panic. Everything started hurting, especially his ribs and the side of his face.

He felt sick to his stomach. He had to stop.

Gilles pulled over down a side street, got out, and dry-heaved. He grabbed a bottle of water he had in his truck, twisted the top, poured some over his burning face, and downed the rest.

He was exhausted. He laid down in his vehicle, motionless.

When he finally arrived at home, he saw in his bathroom mirror that he had a huge welt forming on his head. His clothes were torn. And he hurt everywhere. He grabbed a bag of frozen vegetables out of his freezer, wrapped it in a towel, and placed it on his head.

He fell asleep.

When he awoke a few hours later, it dawned on him to check his computer.

He rushed over to his desk. He started up his web browser and logged back on to
plentyoffish.com
. But “Sheena” was gone.

All her correspondence with him had been deleted. Details of their dinner and movie plans were now missing. All of her flirty messages had disappeared, along with all of his replies.

He tried to find her dating profile.

It had vanished too.

T
WITCHELL CRINGED WITH EVERY
phone call and spotted police cruiser. Each passing day, however, confirmed that the incident had likely – and remarkably – gone unreported. He felt his confidence bloom. He wrote about it later as he expanded on S. K. Confessions:

Deleting Sheena's dating profile minutes after the struggle had been a very good idea too, just in case police were ever called. But Twitchell was under the impression that Gilles had received the threatening message he had written, warning him that he would “hunt him down where he lives when he least expects it and finish what I started” if he ever went to the police. But deleting Sheena's account minutes later had also erased that message before Gilles had a chance to read it.

Twitchell's paperwork for a real firearm had not yet arrived. Joss had been his reference, as he requested, and the legal papers signed, authorized, and approved by the police but still delayed somewhere in the mail. Twitchell couldn't legally buy himself a gun. Not yet.

The fake firearm he had used was owned by a local movie prop company. Clearly, it didn't fool anyone. If he was to continue with his plan, he would need to change his tactics.

O
N
S
UNDAY
, O
CTOBER
5, two days after her last contact with Twitchell, Renee sat at her computer in Ohio, cup of coffee in hand. “What were you up to this weekend?” she inquired. She had the whole day to herself, but her mind kept returning to Twitchell. She felt like he had awakened a part
of her that had lay dormant for years. “Stun gun … that's a good idea,” she told him. “But I think when it came to cutting her up in little pieces, I would choke.” She thought his plan would leave too much forensic evidence behind. “Where's all the blood going to go when it's time to pull the plastic down?”

Renee viewed their discussions as intriguing, but upon reflection, she reminded him that an invisible line always separated her from the violence they envisioned together. She was never going to be a potential killer. “That's what dark fantasies are,” she concluded. “Just a fantasy.”

W
HEN
T
WITCHELL READ
R
ENEE'S
message about stun gun batons, he must have chuckled to himself as he retracted his stated method. He warned her there were several unforeseen flaws:

Renee called him an “evil genius” for his fantasy. “Oh, the horribly awesome things we could accomplish together,” she laughed.

“I'm perfecting a few of them, but don't tell anyone,” he replied.