Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “So what’s the tunnel?” Jock asked.

  “Do you know what a wormhole is?”

  The younger man frowned at such a dumb question. “A wormhole is a hole burrowed in wood by a worm.”

  The kid was no rocket scientist, that was obvious. Rudi wondered if it was worth the effort it would take to explain wormholes to him. But Jock was already weaving through the maze of books to study the photos around the East End map. Among the shots of Jack’s victims snapped at the morgue was the note mailed with a human kidney to the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee on October 16, 1888. It read:

  From hell

  Mr Lusk

  Sor

  I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

  signed

  Catch me when

  You can

  “Was Jack the Ripper a cannibal?” Jock asked.

  “Our Ripper, too,” Rudi replied.

  “You mean he thinks he’s Jack the Ripper reincarnated?”

  “No, he thinks he’s Jack the Ripper himself.”

  “You’re right. He’s sicker than Yorick. Where’s the Ripper now?”

  “Time-traveling,” Rudi said.

  WORMHOLE

  “The Ripper has a visitor,” Julie advised when Rudi and Jock returned to the nursing station. The Forensic Psychiatric Hospital had a staff of 375 for 242 patients. The nursing crunch had resulted in a shortfall of therapists, so both men and women now worked in all wards of Ashworth House. “I thought it wise, in light of his condition earlier, to have you escort him.”

  “Okay,” Rudi said.

  “Okay,” Jock echoed.

  In Ash 2, there were three wards off the nursing station. The open wards that V’d from the front windows had unlocked doors. However, if a psychotic became troublesome by acting out, he could be locked away in the seclusion ward, the door to which branched off the rear of the nursing station, between the security monitor that spied on those who sought entry to Ash 2 and the meds room that held the drugs dispensed to keep patients calm.

  When the Ripper went time-traveling, the staff moved him to the seclusion ward.

  Strangely, the door to that ward was kept open for a better view of the corridor. There was no need for Rudi and Jock to buzz the key reader with their fobs—the electronic passes that registered who opened which door at what time in Central Control—so the pair walked straight to the Ripper’s locked cell.

  “What’s he doing?” Jock asked, peeking through the window.

  “What does it look like he’s doing?”

  “Chewing his cud.”

  “See any food?”

  “No.”

  “Nor do you want to. What the Ripper thinks he’s eating is organ meat from his latest victim.”

  The Ripper sat cross-legged on the floor, enjoying Catherine Eddowes’s kidney. Blood dribbled down his chin and dripped from his fingers as he chewed the dark delicacy with relish. Kate was the name she had offered him at the mouth to Mitre Square, but now that he had traveled here by the wormhole through space-time, the hindsight of history informed him that Kate was merely her working name. The seclusion room in which he dined was starker than his sleeping quarters in the unlocked ward: just an oblong cell with a toilet and a sink, and a bed that consisted of a mattress on the floor, wrapped in a strong sheet that wouldn’t tear. Kate’s uterus lay in the pool of blood congealing between his thighs, tempting him as dessert.

  The door swung open.

  “You have a visitor,” someone said.

  The Ripper glanced up at the pair of nurses blocking the threshold. One was Rudi. Wiry, fine-boned, in his mid-forties. The hulk, however, was new to Ash 2. Too big, too blond, he looked dumb as dog shit. No doubt his talent as a nurse was largely in his size.

  “I need things from my room.”

  “We’ll stop on the way,” said Rudi.

  Kate’s kidney in one hand, her uterus in the other, the Ripper left seclusion under guard.

  The Ripper was dressed in the jogging suit issued to all Ash 2 patients—a dark navy-blue sweatshirt with matching baggy sweatpants—and he wore a pair of Velcro runners on his feet. It looked as if FPH had outfitted him for comfort, but the real reason for the casual attire was that no hangers would be required in his room. As for the nurses, they wore street clothes: plain short-sleeved shirts, blue jeans and loafers. In fact, the relaxed dress code was strictly enforced to fool patients out of viewing them as psychiatric nurses. No ties, so there was nothing to seize, cinch, or convert into nooses. No logos or T-shirt prints to set off the unstable.

  They walked down a hall lined with peach walls and a peach floor with blue stepping-stone squares. The walls were forged from cement blocks reinforced with steel grating, so beneath the benign facade was a corridor cage. Instead of bars, the windows had horizontal slats. But they, too, were a clever sham, for the glass in them was Lexan—an unbreakable polycarbonate resin—and inside the slats were backup bars that rotated so hacksaw blades could not grab hold. Also, the nurses carried pen alarms for protection. Trigger the beam in any direction and it would bounce off the confining surfaces until it hit a sensor in the ceiling, and that would set off a general alarm to summon the entire staff of Ashworth House to quell trouble in less than thirty seconds.

  With patients like the Ripper, security was crucial.

  The interview room, however, could not be bugged. Among other uses, this was where Ash 2 patients instructed their lawyers, so solicitor-client privilege dictated the need for privacy. Privacy was also necessary for tonight’s meeting, for what brought the Goth and the Ripper together was a plot to commit murder.

  “I’ve thought about it,” the Goth said, once they were alone. “I’m willing to pay the price.”

  “There can be no turning back.”

  “I understand.”

  “The sign must be drawn in blood.”

  “No problem,” said the Goth.

  “In addition, you must shed blood for me.”

  “I’ll do whatever it takes for you to give me the key.”

  “Whatever?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Then pick a card,” said the Ripper.

  The interview room in which they conspired was eight feet by ten. The stark furnishings were two chairs and the table between them. Could a room be duller and more antiseptic than this? Where was the gaslight? The wainscoted walls? The carved library table? The high-backed wing chairs? Missing was any sense of art or atmosphere. This sterile box was a metaphor for the outside world, where the Goth—born out of place and out of time—was trapped for life.

  Unless …

  Hopefully …

  The Goth picked a card.

  En route from the seclusion ward to here, the Ripper had fetched three visual aids from his room. The first was a plastic coffee cup with a finger handle. The second was a shatterproof hourglass of the type used to time a boiled egg. The third was the twenty-two-card deck now stacked on the table between them, from which the Goth selected the face-down significator.

  “E = MC2,” said the Ripper.

  “Einstein’s theory of relativity,” replied the Goth.

  “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.”

  “Space and time are relative, not absolute concepts.”

  “How did Einstein formulate that?”

  “Thought,” said the Goth.

  “What is thought?”

  “Energy sparking neurons in our brains.”

  “How?” asked the Ripper.

  “A smidgen of energy lights up a brain neuron and is released as heat.”

  “Hold that thought,” said the florid psychotic.

  A foul, metallic smell like rancid goat cheese permeated the room. There’s the sweat of work, the sweat of fear, and there’s this—the sweat of insanity. The stench oozed out in chemicals dispersed as
the Ripper’s aura. The Goth was intoxicated.

  “The big bang,” said the Ripper.

  “The birth of the universe.”

  “The cosmic seed was a featureless point of space-time, speckled with tiny lumps of radiation. Then bang”—the Ripper thumped the table—“and the universe grew. The tiny lumps evolved into larger lumps, and eventually into galaxies, stars, us. Now back to that thought you’re holding. Where’d you store it?”

  “In my memory.”

  “How?”

  “The same way a computer stores memory. In it, energy moves an electron within the hard drive. In me, it lights up a neuron in the memory bank of my brain.”

  “So you remember the past?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why can’t you remember the future?”

  “Because time runs forward.”

  “Like this?” the Ripper said. He flipped the hourglass over on the table so the sand began to flow.

  The Goth nodded. “From the past to the future.”

  “So that’s the arrow of time?”

  “Uh-huh. It points in that direction.”

  “Why?” asked the Ripper.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because the arrow of time is the arrow of entropy.”

  “Who says?”

  “Hawking. You know who he is?”

  “Sure. The astrophysicist. A Brief History of Time. Supposedly the brightest scientist since Einstein.”

  “Entropy is disorder. Start with that. The reason the arrow of time is the arrow of entropy is that the beginning was a low-entropy seed, and after the big bang exploded to expand the universe, what followed was a future of greater disorder. That’s why we know a film that shows fragments of shattered porcelain coming together in the shape of a cup is running backwards.”

  The Ripper tapped the cup on the table.

  “Heat—roiling, chaotic heat—increases entropy. As you said, the energy that sparks a neuron in your brain to create a memory is released as heat. Because entropy increases in the same direction as the arrow of time—in other words, from the past to the future—that’s why memories are made in the past.”

  “Sounds logical,” said the Goth.

  “So what about black holes?”

  The eyes of the Ripper could be black holes, the Goth thought. So intense was the pull of the psycho’s stare that it seemed to suck the flesh of his face into both dark orbs, creasing and crinkling it into the squint of all squints. His upper lip receded like a rising curtain from the lower edge of his teeth, the tips of his canines jutting down like a vampire’s fangs. Here was a man, from the Goth’s point of view, who gazed at wonders that others couldn’t see.

  “How do we explain the weirdness of black holes? Collapsed stars so dense that not even light escapes their gravitational pull. Regions out there”—the Ripper’s eyes rolled back into his head—“where the density of matter approaches infinity. Black holes”—the eyes returned—“warp space and time in bizarre ways.”

  “Time warps,” said the Goth, hypnotized.

  “Black holes slurp up stars, gas, and anything else they can. What gets eaten never reappears. Since that matter is lost eternally, we’re left with the question, Where did it go?”

  “Time warps?” repeated the Goth.

  “Consider the topology of this plastic cup.” The Ripper picked it up and held the mug out between them.

  “What’s topology?”

  “The mathematics of deformations in geometric constructions. Do you see how the handle is actually a distorted extension of the cup itself? In 1935, Einstein theorized that a super-dense object would curve space-time—the combined mathematical representation of space and time—so tightly that it would form a kind of ‘throat’ linking two different regions of space. The same way a cup distorts into a handle, higher-dimensional space warps into ‘handles’ too, and those handles allow signals, or matter, to travel along their tunnels as shortcuts between regions distant in space and time.”

  “To a parallel universe?”

  “Through another dimension.”

  “What dimension?”

  “The occult realm.”

  The Ripper switched the cup for the hourglass. The timepiece sat in his palm so the sand continued to flow.

  “Ordinary journeys transport us through three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. In effect, we follow the same mathematically curved trajectory across the surface of this planet that a worm follows to crawl around the surface of an apple.”

  The Ripper’s index finger caressed the upper bowl of the hourglass.

  “But what if we could access a higher-dimensional shortcut where space-time had warped into a tunnel that pierced the innards of the apple like a wormhole? Not only would travel to a distant point on the surface be greatly shortened, but we would also be able to time-travel within that higher dimension.”

  “Back and forth?” asked the Goth.

  “Why not?” said the Ripper. And with that, he turned the hourglass over on his palm so the sand of time reversed its flow from the future to the past.

  “A time warp,” said the Goth.

  “A time warp,” agreed the Ripper.

  “Can that be done?”

  “I’ve done it many times.”

  “You found the wormhole through space-time?”

  “I found a wormhole from there to here. How else do you think I traveled from the East End of London back in 1888 to the future of here and now?”

  “Why Vancouver?”

  “I don’t know. The Magick is in the cards. It must be predestined that I meet you.”

  “To give me the key?”

  “If you’re chosen.”

  “How will you know that?”

  “The card you just picked. If you’re chosen, your significator will be the Hanged Man.”

  Folie à deux is the form of psychosis in which delusional ideas are shared by two people in close association. Mental illness transfers from one to the other like a sexually transmitted disease. What the Ripper and the Goth were doing tonight was essentially mind-fucking, the smell of rancid madness now oozing from both partners.

  “Turn over the card.”

  The Goth obeyed.

  What stared up at them from the table was this:

  “The Hanged Man,” said the Goth.

  “You are chosen.”

  “Now will you give me the key to the occult realm?”

  “Yes, if you swear in return that you’ll shed blood for me.”

  “Whose blood?”

  “Do you swear?”

  “I swear,” confirmed the Goth.

  The Ripper nodded. “I want you to kill a cop.”

  THE HANGED MAN

  North Vancouver, British Columbia

  November 3 (Two days later)

  Inspector Zinc Chandler of Special X—the Special External Section of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—was fishing his regimental badge from his plainclothes jacket pocket to flash at the uniformed constable standing guard at this end of the hotel corridor, when the young Asian woman said, “I recognize you, sir. You’ll find Sergeant Kidd in the room.”

  There was no need for her to indicate which room. Halfway along this hall on the middle floor of the Lions Gate, those who made murder their business—the coroner and the cleanup crew from the body removal service—kibitzed in front of a doorjamb that had been dusted with fingerprint powder while Ident forensic techs finished combing the crime scene beyond that threshold.

  “Chandler,” the coroner enthused on spotting Zinc. “A crucifixion is one for the memoirs, eh?”

  The coroner was a ruddy-faced boozer in a gravy-stained suit who emitted an aura of strong cologne mixed with wintergreen breath mints used to mask the odor of Scotch. A jolly fellow known for his gallows humor, the coroner was on the cusp of retirement. No doubt the memoirs he mentioned were already in the works, Zinc thought.

  “A crucifixion?” Chandler asked.

  “
So I’m told.”

  “You’ve not been in?”

  “Too cramped. Too many cooks, old boy.”

  Zinc peeked in through the door frame but couldn’t see the corpse. Just the black sergeant and two techs in “bunny suits”—disposable white coveralls with hoods and full foot coverage so that the crime site wouldn’t be contaminated—vacuuming for hairs and fibers.

  “You’re thinking Easter, right?”

  “Huh?” said Chandler, turning his attention back to the coroner.

  “Easter’s more appropriate than Halloween.”

  “Oh, you mean Jesus on the cross?”

  “Right, Easter’s the proper time for crucifixion. Unless, of course, the crucifix is upside down.”

  “Is it?” Chandler asked.

  The coroner nodded, licking his lips as if it were time to wet his whistle again.

  One of the techs spied Zinc and called out, “Suits are in the bag by the door, Inspector. We’re through with that half of the room. No need to avoid the path of contamination.”

  Fetching the Ident bag from beside the hinges, Zinc removed a bunny suit and began to pull it on.

  “It reminds me of that myth from the trenches in the First World War,” the coroner said. “The rumor emerged from the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915. A Canadian sergeant, the story goes, was found nailed to a barn door with German bayonets through his hands and feet. The details changed with each retelling. He was nailed to a house. He was nailed to a tree. He was tied up with rope. He was tied up with wire. Nothing mattered but the image of crucifixion. In a Christian era, what better propaganda? A Hunnish enemy had mocked Christ’s agony on the cross. When the rumor spread to New York, Yanks began enlisting even though they weren’t in the war. And heaven help the Kraut who fell into our hands. After the crucified soldier, Canucks got a bad rep for abusing POWs.”

  “I’ve seen that image,” Zinc said.