by Louise Welsh
Jackson chuckled. “This one does. I spent a summer working in one as an undergraduate.”
“Then you know the machine they call the speed ironer?”
Jackson nodded. “Sure. They run damp flatwork through them, mostly sheets and linen. A big, long machine.”
“That’s it,” Hunton said. “A woman named Adelle Frawley got caught in it at the Blue Ribbon Laundry crosstown. It sucked her right in.”
Jackson looked suddenly ill. “But… that can’t happen, Johnny. There’s a safety bar. If one of the women feeding the machine accidentally gets a hand under it, the bar snaps up and stops the machine. At least that’s how I remember it.”
Hunton nodded. “It’s a state law. But it happened.”
Hunton closed his eyes and in the darkness he could see the Hadley-Watson speed ironer again, as it had been that afternoon. It formed a long, rectangular box in shape, thirty feet by six. At the feeder end, a moving canvas belt moved under the safety bar, up at a slight angle, and then down. The belt carried the damp-dried, wrinkled sheets in continuous cycle over and under sixteen huge revolving cylinders that made up the main body of the machine. Over eight and under eight, pressed between them like thin ham between layers of superheated bread. Steam heat in the cylinders could be adjusted up to 300 degrees for maximum drying. The pressure on the sheets that rode the moving canvas belt was set at 800 pounds per square foot to get out every wrinkle.
And Mrs Frawley, somehow, had been caught and dragged in. The steel, asbestos-jacketed pressing cylinders had been as red as barn paint, and the rising steam from the machine had carried the sickening stench of hot blood. Bits of her white blouse and blue slacks, even ripped segments of her bra and panties, had been torn free and ejected from the machine’s far end thirty feet down, the bigger sections of cloth folded with grotesque and bloodstained neatness by the automatic folder. But not even that was the worst.
“It tried to fold everything,” he said to Jackson, tasting bile in his throat. “But a person isn’t a sheet, Mark. What I saw… what was left of her…” Like Stanner, the hapless foreman, he could not finish. “They took her out in a basket,” he said softly.
Jackson whistled. “Who’s going to get it in the neck? The laundry or the state inspectors?”
“Don’t know yet,” Hunton said. The malign image still hung behind his eyes, the image of the mangler wheezing and thumping and hissing, blood dripping down the green sides of the long cabinet in runnels, the burning stink of her… “It depends on who okayed that goddamn safety bar and under what circumstances.”
“If it’s the management, can they wiggle out of it?”
Hunton smiled without humour. “The woman died, Mark. If Gartley and Stanner were cutting corners on the speed ironer’s maintenance, they’ll go to jail. No matter who they know on the City Council.”
“Do you think they were cutting corners?”
Hunton thought of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, badly lighted, floors wet and slippery, some of the machines incredibly ancient and creaking. “I think it’s likely,” he said quietly.
They got up to go in the house together. “Tell me how it comes out, Johnny,” Jackson said. “I’m interested.”
*
Hunton was wrong about the mangler; it was clean as a whistle.
Six state inspectors went over it before the inquest, piece by piece. The net result was absolutely nothing. The inquest verdict was death by misadventure.
Hunton, dumbfounded, cornered Roger Martin, one of the inspectors, after the hearing. Martin was a tall drink of water with glasses as thick as the bottoms of shot glasses. He fidgeted with a ball-point pen under Hunton’s questions.
“Nothing? Absolutely nothing doing with the machine?”
“Nothing,” Martin said. “Of course, the safety bar was the guts of the matter. It’s in perfect working order. You heard that Mrs Gillian testify. Mrs Frawley must have pushed her hand too far. No one saw that; they were watching their own work. She started screaming. Her hand was gone already, and the machine was taking her arm. They tried to pull her out instead of shutting it down – pure panic. Another woman, Mrs Keene, said she did try to shut it off, but it’s a fair assumption that she hit the start button rather than the stop in the confusion. By then it was too late.”
“Then the safety bar malfunctioned,” Hunton said flatly. “Unless she put her hand over it rather than under?”
“You can’t. There’s a stainless-steel facing above the safety bar. And the bar itself didn’t malfunction. It’s circuited into the machine itself. If the safety bar goes on the blink, the machine shuts down.”
“Then how did it happen, for Christ’s sake?”
“We don’t know. My colleagues and I are of the opinion that the only way the speed ironer could have killed Mrs Frawley was for her to have fallen into it from above. And she had both feet on the floor when it happened. A dozen witnesses can testify to that.”
“You’re describing an impossible accident,” Hunton said.
“No. Only one we don’t understand.” He paused, hesitated, and then said: “I will tell you one thing, Hunton, since you seem to have taken this case to heart. If you mention it to anyone else, I’ll deny I said it. But I didn’t like that machine. It seemed… almost to be mocking us. I’ve inspected over a dozen speed ironers in the last five years on a regular basis. Some of them are in such bad shape that I wouldn’t have a dog unleashed around them – the state law is lamentably lax. But they were only machines for all that. But this one… it’s a spook. I don’t know why, but it is. I think if I’d found one thing, even a technicality, that was off whack, I would have ordered it shut down. Crazy, huh?”
“I felt the same way,” Hunton said.
“Let me tell you about something that happened two years ago in Milton,” the inspector said. He took off his glasses and began to polish them slowly on his vest. “Fella had parked an old ice-box out in his backyard. The woman who called us said her dog had been caught in it and suffocated. We got the state policeman in the area to inform him it had to go to the town dump. Nice enough fella, sorry about the dog. He loaded it into his pickup and took it to the dump the next morning. That afternoon a woman in the neighbourhood reported her son missing.”
“God,” Hunton said.
“The icebox was at the dump and the kid was in it, dead. A smart kid, according to the mother. She said he’d no more play in an empty icebox than he would take a ride with a strange man. Well, he did. We wrote it off. Case closed?”
“I guess,” Hunton said.
“No. The dump caretaker went out next day to take the door off the thing. City Ordinance No. 58 on the maintenance of public dumping places.” Martin looked at him expressionlessly. “He found six dead birds inside. Gulls, sparrows, a robin. And he said the door closed on his arm while he was brushing them out. Gave him a hell of a jump. The mangler at the Blue Ribbon strikes me like that, Hunton. I don’t like it.”
They looked at each other wordlessly in the empty inquest chamber, some six city blocks from where the Hadley-Watson Model-6 Speed Ironer and Folder sat in the busy laundry, steaming and fuming over its sheets. The case was driven out of his mind in the space of a week by the press of more prosaic police work. It was only brought back when he and his wife dropped over to Mark Jackson’s house for an evening of bid whist and beer.
Jackson greeted him with: “Have you ever wondered if that laundry machine you told me about is haunted, Johnny?”
Hunton blinked, at a loss. “What?”
“The speed ironer at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, I guess you didn’t catch the squeal this time.”
“What squeal?” Hunton asked, interested.
Jackson passed him the evening paper and pointed to an item at the bottom of page two. The story said that a steam line had let go on the large speed ironer at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, burning three of the six women working at the feeder end. The accident had occurred at 3.45 p.m. and was attributed to a rise in s
team pressure from the laundry’s boiler. One of the women, Mrs Annette Gillian, had been held at City Receiving Hospital with second-degree burns.
“Funny coincidence,” he said, but the memory of Inspector Martin’s words in the empty inquest chamber suddenly recurred: It’s a spook… And the story about the dog and the boy and the birds caught in the discarded refrigerator.
He played cards very badly that night.
*
Mrs Gillian was propped up in bed reading Screen Secrets when Hunton came into the four-bed hospital room. A large bandage blanketed one arm and the side of her neck. The room’s other occupant, a young woman with a pallid face, was sleeping.
Mrs Gillian blinked at the blue uniform and then smiled tentatively. “If it was for Mrs Cherinikov, you’ll have to come back later. They just gave her medication.”
“No, it’s for you, Mrs Gillian.” Her smile faded a little. “I’m here unofficially – which means I’m curious about the accident at the laundry. John Hunton.” He held out his hand.
It was the right move. Mrs Gillian’s smile became brilliant and she took his grip awkwardly with her unburnt hand. “Anything I can tell you, Mr Hunton. God, I thought my Andy was in trouble at school again.”
“What happened?”
“We was running sheets and the ironer just blew up – or it seemed that way. I was thinking about going home an’ getting off my dogs when there’s this great big bang, like a bomb. Steam is everywhere and this hissing noise… awful.” Her smile trembled on the verge of extinction. “It was like the ironer was breathing. Like a dragon, it was. And Alberta – that’s Alberta Keene – shouted that something was exploding and everyone was running and screaming and Ginny Jason started yelling she was burnt. I started to run away and I fell down. I didn’t know I got it worst until then. God forbid it was no worse than it was. That live steam is three hundred degrees.”
“The paper said a steam line let go. What does that mean?”
“The overhead pipe comes down into this kinda flexible line that feeds the machine. George – Mr Stanner – said there must have been a surge from the boiler or something. The line split wide open.”
Hunton could think of nothing else to ask. He was making ready to leave when she said reflectively:
“We never used to have these things on that machine. Only lately. The steam line breaking. That awful, awful accident with Mrs Frawley, God rest her. And little things. Like the day Essie got her dress caught in one of the drive chains. That could have been dangerous if she hadn’t ripped it right out. Bolts and things fall off. Oh, Herb Diment – he’s the laundry repairman – has had an awful time with it. Sheets get caught in the folder. George says that’s because they’re using too much bleach in the washers, but it never used to happen. Now the girls hate to work on it. Essie even says there are still little bits of Adelle Frawley caught in it and it’s sacrilege or something. Like it had a curse. It’s been that way ever since Sherry cut her hand on one of the clamps.”
“Sherry?” Hunton asked.
“Sherry Ouelett. Pretty little thing, just out of high school. Good worker. But clumsy sometimes. You know how young girls are.”
“She cut her hand on something?”
“Nothing strange about that. There are clamps to tighten down the feeder belt, see. Sherry was adjusting them so we could do a heavier load and probably dreaming about some boy. She cut her finger and bled all over everything.” Mrs Gillian looked puzzled. “It wasn’t until after that the bolts started falling off. Adelle was… you know… about a week later. As if the machine had tasted blood and found it liked it. Don’t women get funny ideas sometimes, Officer Hinton?”
“Hunton,” he said absently, looking over her head and into space.
*
Ironically, he had met Mark Jackson in a washateria in the block that separated their houses, and it was there that the cop and the English professor still had their most interesting conversations.
Now they sat side by side in bland plastic chairs, their clothes going round and round behind the glass portholes of the coin-op washers. Jackson’s paperback copy of Milton’s collected works lay neglected beside him while he listened to Hunton tell Mrs Gillian’s story.
When Hunton had finished, Jackson said, “I asked you once if you thought the mangler might be haunted. I was only half joking. I’ll ask you again now.”
“No,” Hunton said uneasily. “Don’t be stupid.”
Jackson watched the turning clothes reflectively. “Haunted is a bad word. Let’s say possessed. There are almost as many spells for casting demons in as there are for casting them out. Frazier’s Golden Bough is replete with them. Druidic and Aztec lore contain others. Even older ones, back to Egypt. Almost all of them can be reduced to startlingly common denominators. The most common, of course, is the blood of a virgin.” He looked at Hunton, “Mrs Gillian said the trouble started after this Sherry Ouelette accidentally cut herself.”
“Oh, come on,” Hunton said.
“You have to admit she sounds just the type,” Jackson said.
“I’ll run right over to her house,” Hunton said with a small smile. “I can see it. “Miss Ouelette, I’m Officer John Hunton. I’m investigating an ironer with a bad case of demon possession and would like to know if you’re a virgin.” Do you think I’d get a chance to say goodbye to Sandra and the kids before they carted me off to the booby hatch?”
“I’d be willing to bet you’ll end up saying something just like that,” Jackson said without smiling. “I’m serious, Johnny. That machine scares the hell out of me and I’ve never seen it.”
“For the sake of conversation,” Hunton said, “what are some of the other so-called common denominators?”
Jackson shrugged. “Hard to say without study. Most Anglo-Saxon hex formulas specify graveyard dirt or the eye of a toad. European spells often mention the hand of glory, which can be interpreted as the actual hand of a dead man or one of the hallucinogenics used in connection with the Witches’ Sabbath – usually belladonna or a psilocybin derivative. There could be others.”
“And you think all those things got into the Blue Ribbon ironer? Christ, Mark, I’ll bet there isn’t any belladonna within a five-hundred-mile radius. Or do you think someone whacked off their Uncle Fred’s hand and dropped it in the folder?”
“If seven hundred monkeys typed for seven hundred years –…”
“One of them would turn out the works of Shakespeare,” Hunton finished sourly. “Go to hell. Your turn to go across to the drugstore and get some dimes for the dryers.”
*
It was very funny how George Stanner lost his arm in the mangler.
Seven o’clock Monday morning the laundry was deserted except for Stanner and Herb Diment, the maintenance man. They were performing the twice-yearly function of greasing the mangler’s bearings before the laundry’s regular day began at seven-thirty. Diment was at the far end, greasing the four secondaries and thinking of how unpleasant this machine made him feel lately, when the mangler suddenly roared into life.
He had been holding up four of the canvas exit belts to get at the motor beneath and suddenly the belts were running in his hands, ripping the flesh off his palms, dragging him along.
He pulled free with a convulsive jerk seconds before the belts would have carried his hands into the folder.
“What the Christ, George!” he yelled. “Shut the frigging thing off”
George Stanner began to scream.
It was a high, wailing, blood-maddened sound that filled the laundry, echoing off the steel faces of the washers, the grinning mouths of the steam presses, the vacant eyes of the industrial dryers. Stanner drew in a great, whooping gasp of air and screamed again: “Oh God of Christ I’m caught I’M CAUGHT –…”
The rollers began to produce rising steam. The folder gnashed and thumped. Bearings and motors seemed to cry out with a hidden life of their own.
Diment raced to the other end of the machine.
The first roller was already going a sinister red. Diment made a moaning, gobbling noise in his throat. The mangler howled and thumped and hissed.
A deaf observer might have thought at first that Stanner was merely bent over the machine at an odd angle. Then even a deaf man would have seen the pallid, eye-bulging rictus of his face, mouth twisted open in a continuous scream. The arm was disappearing under the safety bar and beneath the first roller; the fabric of his shirt had torn away at the shoulder seam and his upper arm bulged grotesquely as the blood was pushed steadily backwards.
“Turn if off!” Stanner screamed. There was a snap as his elbow broke.
Diment thumbed the off button.
The mangler continued to hum and growl and turn.
Unbelieving, he slammed the button again and again – nothing. The skin of Stanner’s arm had grown shiny and taut. Soon it would split with the pressure the roll was putting on it; and still he was conscious and screaming. Diment had a nightmare cartoon image of a man flattened by a steamroller, leaving only a shadow.
“Fuses –…” Stanner screeched. His head was being pulled down, down, as he was dragged forward.
Diment whirled and ran to the boiler room, Stanner’s screams chasing him like lunatic ghosts. The mixed stench of blood and steam rose in the air.
On the left wall were three heavy grey boxes containing all the fuses for the laundry’s electricity. Diment yanked them open and began to pull the long, cylindrical fuses like a crazy man, throwing them back over his shoulders. The overhead lights went out; then the air compressor; then the boiler itself, with a huge dying whine.
And still the mangler turned. Stanner’s screams had been reduced to bubbly moans.
Diment’s eye happened on the fire axe in its glassed-in box. He grabbed it with a small, gagging whimper and ran back. Stanner’s arm was gone almost to the shoulder. Within seconds his bent and straining neck would be snapped against the safety bar.