Prologue
On the night the Slasher finally found the courage to kill, the quiet campus of the State University of New York at Alfred lay under a dusting of dry snow. Though the calendar showed it to be the third week of February and the fifth week of the spring semester of classes, nature worked to prove that it was still winter, and had blown the coldest temperatures of the year 1986 over the hills and trees of the little rural campus. A brilliant panoply of stars shimmered in the cold sky above, and a slice of moon slipped through thin clouds toward the western horizon.
Later accounts indicated that Tuesday night passed largely unnoticed. Though there was the usual bustle of evening activity among students brave or bundled or bold enough to test the cold, none stayed out long. By ten o’clock, almost all students had returned to their dormitories, even those who were old enough or had fake IDs good enough to get a drink at Gentleman Jim’s. By eleven o’clock, even the activity in the dorms had subsided. The students had retreated to their rooms, and the campus had largely dozed off to sleep.
Over an hour later, however, after midnight, on the top floor of the Main Gate B dormitory, Melody Parker did not sleep. A freshman in her second semester at college, she had spent the evening at the Hinkle Memorial Library, doing research for the English assignment due on Friday. She had needed to get the research done tonight because she and her roommate planned to take a road trip right after their Wednesday classes. They were going for a short tour of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where they hoped to transfer next semester. Her roommate had family in the area, and they planned to stay overnight with them on Wednesday, then to return early Thursday for their classes.
When she’d returned to her dorm room, however, she’d found a note from her roommate that the dean of the school would be present for the tour. Because of this, Melody wanted to wear her best clothes, which meant doing laundry tonight.
Out of consideration for her sleeping roommate, she did not turn on the light in her dorm room. Instead, she propped the door open so that light shone in from the suite’s hallway and common room, then went through her dirty clothes, pulled out what she needed, and put it into her laundry basket.
When she had a load ready, she dropped a blue plastic bottle of laundry detergent into the basket with the clothes, took a handful of quarters out of the bowl on her dresser, and left room G in suite 405 for what would be the last time.
No one would later recall seeing Melody as she made her way from her room on the top floor of the dormitory to the laundry room in the basement, but her movement could easily be imagined. She kept her long blond hair pulled back in the ponytail of an athlete or a dancer, both of which she was, and she moved with the poise and grace of a young woman finding her way in the world. She wore the pink cotton nightgown and fuzzy slippers her parents had given her at Christmas. From where the door of her suite connected to the hallway, it was a few steps to the side stairs, and there she descended eight flights to the basement.
Like most colleges, SUNY Alfred had started out small and had added buildings as the curriculum and student body grew. As the campus evolved, some functions were shoehorned into awkward spaces while other buildings were erected for specific functions. The Main Gate dormitories A and B, built just inside the main entry “gate” of the campus, had been built specifically as dormitories, but already their functions had begun to diverge from the original plan. When Melody emerged into the basement hall of Main Gate B, she entered a dimly lit hodgepodge of assorted rooms.
A dusty odor of concrete and steel and heat dominated the basement halls. The fluorescent lights hummed, and she could hear the deep throb of some unseen machinery as she made her way past the boiler room. Her pink slippers whisked over the worn carpet. She walked past the intensive-study lounge, through a fire door held open by a large electromagnet, and past the half-suite G5 where no one ever seemed to live.
As she passed the basement exit door, her laundry basket bumped the corner and her hand slipped from the handle. Before she could catch it, the basket swiveled down in her grip, and some of her clothes tumbled out onto the carpeted floor under the wall clock. The blue bottle of detergent thumped and skidded a short distance away, and her handful of quarters danced and spun away from her. At that moment, another student crossed her path. Seeing Melody and the little mess, he stopped in his tracks and offered to help. As he stooped to help pick up the clothing, however, a shock of embarrassment hit him as he realized he was about to pick up her panties. Her face red, Melody waved him away, and he was happy to comply. A moment later, Melody had reassembled her clothing into the basket, and she resumed her journey.
She followed the hallway as it angled right to match the L shape of Main Gate B. The last leg of her trip took her past the quiet doors of suite G6, past the industrial door to the main stairs and the blank door of the cleaning closet, through another fire door, and finally through the open door into the laundry room.
The architect had designed this section of the basement for other uses, though no one remembered them anymore. Down the hallway beyond the laundry room lay various storage and utility rooms, as well as a cavernous and strange recreation room. In the laundry room, a large fiberglass sink and a half-dozen coin-operated washers sat on the cold tile floor along the wall to the left, but the exposed hoses fastened to the wall gave the impression that the installation was temporary and the space designed for something else. On the right, a single-legged table abutted a stacked row of dryers pushed into the corner of the small room. Two of the dryers hummed quietly, their operating lights glowing. The air held the scent of soap and lint and damp clothes.
Melody worked quickly. She dropped a pair of quarters into the first washer, pressed the buttons to set the wash cycle, then loaded her clothes into it. This done, she poured a generous measure of the laundry detergent from the bottle onto the clothes and closed the lid. This part of her work complete, she recapped the bottle of detergent and put it into her now-empty laundry basket. She was about to leave when she spotted something and stopped. One of her pink and white socks lay on the floor beside the washer. She stooped to pick it up.
As she stood, sock in her hand, she felt a firm bump against the back of her shoulder. She turned around, frowning.
In the doorway of the laundry room stood a man who looked like a pulp fiction character. He was dressed all in black, with baggy black jeans, a dark shirt, an oversized black trench coat, and even a black fedora on his head. He had the hat pulled low, hiding his face in the shadows under the brim.
His manner of dress was so unusual, and his demeanor so outlandish, it took Melody a moment to notice that he held a knife in his right hand. A red liquid streaked the gleaming blade and dripped from its point to the tile floor of the laundry room.
Seeing it, Melody felt the back of her shoulder with her left hand, then held her fingers in front of her. Blood.
“Hey!” she said.
But he was already on her.
Melody Parker’s nineteenth birthday was only two weeks off, but she would never see it. Twenty minutes later, when the embarrassed student who had nearly picked up her panties returned to retrieve his own laundry from the dryers, he would find her on the floor of the laundry room, a river of blood flowing from her body to the floor drain. It would take him several minutes to recognize that she was the same girl he’d seen only a few minutes before. And it would take him decades to recover from the violence of the crime.
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