Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  Is that what happened to Ruryk?

  He got too close to the picture?

  The thought went poof! the moment the door between Monet and Manet opened, for the art in the frames paled beside that framed by the door.

  Genny, Robert gasped.

  Dr. Anda Carlisle could be his second wife. In her thirties, with vivid green eyes lit by intelligence and something more, with hair chignoned back from full lips and classic cheekbones, and with a body that curved her suit in all the right places, she was the revenant of a joy wrenched from him too soon.

  Ruryk introduced them. "Anda Carlisle. Robert DeClercq." The cool touch of her handshake sent sparks along his nerves.

  First Macbeth. Now Carlisle. What was happening to him? The onset of satyriasis? The birth of a dirty old man? He saw himself as a figure on a Grecian urn in the Louvre, half human from the torso up, half horse below, lasciviously chasing nymphs through the forests, lubricity evident from the prong that poked from between his legs. "Man, is that guy ever hung!" Katt had exclaimed, wide-eyed.

  Katt, he thought. It's you.

  For suddenly he saw himself sitting in a dark room with all the shutters closed against the light outside, pictures of Kate, Jane, and Genevieve rotting away with him, a musty, cobwebbed shell locking out emotions which had hurt him to his soul, when in stomped Katt to throw open the shutters and draw the curtains wide, demanding he come outside and walk the spring flower gardens with her. Katt was a cancer of beneficence now metastasizing breaths of fresh air into other dormant dungeons of his well-being.

  Like his libido.

  If he could replace a daughter, he could replace a wife.

  And here was Genny reincarnated.

  Smiling at him.

  "A shrunken head," Carlisle said. "Symbolic of our profession. I hope you brought it with you. This I want to see."

  "Sorry," DeClercq replied, producing photos of the tzantza from his carry case. "The actual remains are at the morgue." The head shrinkers scrutinized the head shrinker's art, passing the pictures back and forth several times; then Ruryk led the two across to the "cozy corner" of his office, where sure enough, beside the chairs, stretched a comfy couch.

  A daydream of Anda reclining naked flashed through Robert's mind.

  Careful, he thought, or that's where you are going to end up.

  A libido repressed for a decade does wicked things to your head.

  "From out of the blue someone sends me a shrunken head. No note. No follow-up phone call. Just the grisly trophy. To me that raises three psychiatric questions. Who would hunt a human head? Why would that person then shrink it? And why would the hunter anonymously send me the result?"

  Carlisle flipped open a notebook she withdrew from her suit. "Headhunting is a common historical practice. The word conjures up visions of Stone Age tribes in the Amazon basin and Papua New Guinea, but there's hardly a culture in which headhunting has not played a part. The Celts of Europe and Britain considered the human head a supreme source of spiritual power. Wrote a Roman: When Celts kill enemies in battle, they cut off the heads and fasten them to the necks of their horses. They nail the heads to their houses, like hunters do with wild beasts they kill. They embalm the heads of illustrious enemies in cedar oil and keep them carefully in a chest to show off to strangers, proud that one of their ancestors, or their father, or the man himself refused to sell any of them for their weight in gold."

  "I'm descended from the Celts," said DeClercq with mock umbrage. "From the Gauls of northern Europe Caesar conquered."

  "And I'm descended from the druids of Stonehenge," Carlisle replied. "My point is the cult of the head was central to our cultural past. A Celtic warrior who took home the heads of enemies returned with not only proof of victory, but also the spirits of the dead who became his slaves. That's why the Celts collected and compared 'brain balls.'"

  "Jeffrey Dahmer," said DeClercq. "He drilled holes in the skulls of his victims and poured in acid to make them zombie slaves."

  "Same motivation. Celtic fantasy permeates New Age throwbacks. And what about men's movement types beating their drums in the woods? Tap a psychotic into both and what's the result?"

  "You've done a lot of work."

  "I'm hooked by the puzzle. When George informed me why you two were meeting on a Sunday, the mystery in it drove me to the library. If we time-travel forward from the Celts, we find my people spiking heads on Traitor's Gate, and chopping Mary, Queen of Scots, and Anne Boleyn in two. The key, however, lies in what your people did. During the French Revolution and Reign of Terror that followed, aristocrats put to the guillotine watched the blade descend faceup. The executioner would then seize the severed head from the basket and hold it out to the crowd. To the crowd's delight he would talk to some and show them their headless bodies, as the human brain can survive for up to a minute on its cerebral blood-oxygen supply."

  "The head lives on?"

  "In soma, cases consciousness survives. And that's why headhunting hypnotizes us. In the Age of Discovery we sent forth ships. They returned with tales of savage collectors in far-off lands. Of the Dyaks of Sarawak on Borneo island, who cut off and smoked the heads of their enemies over a slow fire to impress intended brides. Of the Ilongots of the Philippines, who hacked off heads as therapy, which cleansed the hunter of negative feelings of envy, grief, or hate. Of the Iroquois of America, who stripped the scalps from foes, or the totem tribes here, who returned from raiding their neighbors with heads in woven baskets.

  "The irony is," Carlisle continued, "that while we condemned headhunting, we were headhunting, too. Seventeen thousand human remains are collected in the London Natural History Museum, including five heads of African bushmen severed as trophies back when they were shot on sight. Blown off and seized by Captain Southey as proof to cash in on Commander Smith's offer of a pint of grog for every kill, the head of Xhosa King Hintsa was taken to and remains in Britain. The head and genitals of the Hottentot Venus are stored in Paris, while New Zealand has a collection of tattooed Maori heads, and Australia saved that of Jimmy Ah Sue, hanged in Brisbane in 1880, to study his criminality. In 1913 the Montenegrins of the Balkans were still headhunting, and for decades the Soviets collected brains—Lenin, Gorky, Sakharov—to gather the anatomical roots of greatness."

  Anda closed her notebook on these skeletons in our closet.

  "So, responding to your question, Who would hunt a human head?, I'd say any psychotic who hears echoes out of our genetic past, or any mad scientist who considers ethics a bore, or any psychopath who seeks the ultimate thrill, for what could be more vicious to J a sadist than a victim aware that its head has just been cut from its body?"

  The more intelligent the woman, the more attracted was DeClercq. Anda Carlisle had his barometer rising by the minute.

  "But more intriguing," said Carlisle, "is why this head was shrunk. Only the Jivaros of Ecuador were head shrinkers, so perhaps your killer once resided in South America. Shrinking a head warps it into something else, a fetish with psychic links to us thought by Jivaros to have magic power, for stitching the lips shut locks the spirit inside. Psychiatrists, however, use 'fetish' in a special way. To us, a fetish is an object or nongenital part of the body which arouses habitual erotic response or fixation. Query: Is this shrunken head a fetish with subconscious meaning?"

  Robert caught a subtle whiff of Anda's perfume. It was the same scent Gill Macbeth wore. He wondered if he was developing a fetish of his own.

  "Toes, feet, high heels, jackboots, stockings with garters, panties, jock straps, corsets, leather, rubber, raincoats, velvet, satin, gloves, whips, scarfs, hair, braids . . ." listed Carlisle. "Robert Bloch—the author of Psycho—opens The Scarf like this: Fetish? You name it. All I know is, I've had to have it with me. Ever since I was a kid . . . For me, that captures the essence of fetishism."

  "Hair," said DeClercq.

  "Hair," Carlisle agreed. "In Psychopathia Sexualis Krafft-Ebing describes the case of P, a man compell
ed to publicly cut the hair of girls. He was arrested with a collection of sixty-five tresses. When he touched the hair with the scissors he had an erection, Krafft-Ebing wrote, and, at the instant of cutting it off, ejaculation. Another could only orgasm while sucking on braids of hair, while a third gathered pubic posies from women with red hair to bind with black silk ribbons and place in a scrapbook recording each lover's name and the date she was seduced. King Charles II of England owned a wig made from his mistresses' pubic hairs. A British serial killer named Christie confessed to killing eleven women in 1953. He collected their pubic hair hi an old- tin to masturbate with later."

  "I've seen that tin," said DeClercq. "In the Black Museum at Scotland Yard."

  Anda grinned. "I'm lecturing you?"

  "No," replied Robert. "You're providing focus. How might this kink have come about?"

  "We'd have to know the context in which the fetish developed to answer that. Freud discovered how children pass through a series of oral, anal, urethral, phallic, and genital stages during psychosexual growth. Not only does this polymorphous maturation induce various sexual thoughts, but it switches the child's focus from one to another desired sexual object. Arrest of development at an early stage, due to a severe traumatic experience or overwhelming gratification, will lead to fixation. Oral fixation. Anal fixation. Or something else. Imagination complicates sexuality. A fetish develops when the human mind fixates on something extraneous to sexual biology, and henceforth requires it for erotic response."

  "Why the rings through the lips?"

  "Rings were part of the context that developed the fetish."

  "How?" pressed DeClercq.

  Carlisle shrugged. "Body piercing is popular these days. Men and women alike skewer their ears . . . and other parts. A classic European genital pierce is the frenum, a ring of Saturn through the underflesh of the penis to encircle the glans. I'm told it enlarges the size of an erection. Imagine a pedophile with such a cock ring. He forces a boy to fellate him as a prelude to anal rape. Might that not explain this fetish sent to you? A homosexual killer guilt-ridden by the abuse? By transposing his fixation from pubic to head hair he sheds the shame of his youth, then creates a shrunken fetish to reverse the rape, sewing his symbolic anus closed against those rings."

  No blushing of the cheeks. No pursing of the lips. No hanky wringing over matters we dare not discuss. Big girls' games. Big girls' rules. God, he yearned to know what Anda was like in bed.

  "He sent the head to Special X because he wants to be caught and punished," said DeClercq. "He feels guilt over killing to avenge the rape."

  "He may have mixed emotions," said Carlisle. "What relieves guilt may also boost his self-esteem. Taunting the police to insert himself into the investigation not only sustains the thrill of the kill, but also exerts a power, control, and authority over you."

  "Me," said DeClercq. "Not the police. Why send the shrunken head personally to me?”

  "Perhaps the killer locked minds with you sometime in the past."

  That was it. That's why he was here. What American cops call gut and British cops call nose. This sense of deja vu harkened back to the Headhunter case, when that psychotic had taunted him with head substitutes, not unlike the psychology of whoever shrank this fetish and mailed it to him. That's what drove him here to reconsult with Ruryk, the psychiatrist who had helped track the Headhunter down.

  It struck DeClercq that during this entire discussion, Dr. George Ruryk, head shrinker, had not muttered a word.

  Sweat Lodge

  The North

  Monday, January 8

  Dawn broke over the plateau in the mountains north of Totem Lake. The sun rose to the east out of a sea of icebergs into an ocean of purple streaked with pink and crimson. A cloud line across the sky to the west marked an incoming storm, bringing yet another snowfall to the Skeena hinterland. The plateau was like a pothole among precipitous drops. Dancing over the tricky air currents above, fed by winds through the V'd valleys between the peaks, Dodd judged his moment carefully, then roared in to land the Beaver, pulling the plane's nose up at just the right second to touch down the skis. The plane shot up the plateau's incline at full power to turn its tail sideways at the top to keep them from sliding back down the skids. A final roar of the engine as it coughed and died, then ticking of the propeller as silence engulfed the cockpit.

  Rubbing rime off the frosted window, Spann saw the mountain cabin.

  "Looks deserted," George said. "Who'd leave a door open in this cold?" "Why land here?" Dodd asked.

  "Request from the States. A nature artist named Cy Flint is using the cabin till Disney arrives to film in the spring. When he didn't radiophone Seattle yesterday as promised, Flint was reported missing. The state cops asked us to check on him," said Spann.

  "Winterman Snow trap here?" George asked Dodd.

  "Yeah. From what I hear, his trap line wanders far and wide."

  They climbed down the strut under the wing to step into the snow. Snowshoes fixed to their boots, the trio trudged to Cy's cabin as the cloud line closed over the sky. Sunny and bright a moment ago, the plateau changed to dark and deadly, hungry wolves yelping in the forest surrounding them.

  They neared the log cabin.

  "The chopper set down over there," the Cree Mountie said. Bob George had been known as The Tracker when he was a special constable on Duck Lake Reserve in Saskatchewan. He pointed at tracks treading back and forth north from the cabin. "The crew unloaded Flint's supplies and then took off." He indicated a pair of showshoe marks coming in from the south. "Those were made by someone not with Flint's party. See how they overlap the tracks from the north? Whoever left them arrived after the chopper flew off." He pointed at identical snowshoe tracks following holes in the ice crust. "Two people left the cabin, one barefoot, and didn't return."

  Noting blood drips on the half-open door and a fire log dropped outside, Spann withdrew the Smith semi-auto from under her parka. A push creaked the door open wide on frozen hinges.

  The first thing George caught on shining his flashlight into the cabin was the Christian cross smeared in paint on the floor. Wrist ropes were lashed to nails hammered into the planks at the tips of both cross arms. Vomit on the cross shaft testified that Flint had been crucified facedown, while blood drops at groin level hinted that the unfortunate artist had endured anal rape. Slashed with a knife to strip him, his clothes were scattered around.

  A quick search inside found no one home.

  The searchers followed the barefoot tracks stalked by snowshoes west from the cabin. Large, lazy snowflakes began to filter from the clouds as they moved into the forest of hoary evergreens. Camouflaged, a snowy owl on a branch above watched them.

  "If this turns into a whiteout, we'll have trouble taking off," warned Dodd. "Riding that bucking wind, it will be hard to tell if the plane's in a climb, a dive, a slip, or a stall."

  "If we don't follow now, the snow will cover these tracks," said George.

  "There!" exclaimed Spann, pointing ahead at a body spiked naked and headless to a tree trunk by two arrows through an arm and a leg. The snow surrounding the bare tree was stained deep red.

  Spann and Dodd stayed where they were while George trudged in a wide circle to spiral in on the scene, his eyes alert to anything foreign to winter terrain. "Here is where the severed head landed," he called back. "The killer's glove left finger grooves when he picked it up to carry off. Blood drops from the neck run parallel to tracks snowshoeing south."

  "Toward Totem Lake. The other archer and beheading site," added Spann.

  "We follow," said the Cree.

  "Whiteout," Dodd repeated.

  "Go if you're worried," George said. "I'll survive until the storm clears. My people have dealt with these conditions for ten thousand years."

  "Wop May," said Spann to goad Dodd. "Would he have cut and run?"

  Bush guffawed. "I'm no coward. This is my element. It's you city tenderfeet I'm thinking about. You want a te
st of manhood? Lead on, lady."

  Diffused light from the overcast infused the woods with a blue hue. Into this eerie landscape tumbled fluffy puffs of snow, white on blue like cotton batting backed by melancholy. The only sound was the crunch, crunch of snowshoes on ice crust, as deeper, deeper, deeper they penetrated unforgiving wilderness. Except for the trail made by the headhunter, the spoor around them were left by deer, moose, elk, hare, lynx, fox, wolverine, wolf, and grizzly.

  In the fearful silence predatory eyes tracked human meat.

  In a clearing canopied by towering red cedars, the three searchers found a sweat.

  The sweat was an igloo-shaped lodge fashioned from cedar boughs, then covered with animal skins to keep in heat. The door flap opened east to face the rising sun: the sun, the fire, the mound, the door, and the pit all in line. The fire, now just ashes, had heated rocks. On the mound of earth dug from the pit within the lodge, a tobacco plug tied with red ribbon and a stick tipped by an eagle feather lay in offering. The rocks, still warm from recent use, had been shoveled into the central pit within the lodge. Closing the flap had made the sweat a sauna.

  Ghost Keeper was veteran of many a sweat.

  What bothered George about this lodge was what was missing.

  When he undertook a sweat to purify himself, there were six ribboned plugs on the holy mound. Red, yellow, black, and white to symbolize the races, with green for Mother Earth, and blue for Father Sky. The ritual began with the Cree walking clockwise around the lodge before backing in, facing the sun, to return in reverse to the warm, dark womb of Mother Earth from which he was born. "All my relations" was the prayer George offered to his holy mound.

  This mound wasn't holy.

  For offered with the red-ribboned tobacco plug and sacred eagle feather was what looked like a human brain scooped from its skull.

  The skull was missing.