Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  The modern Mounties stood side by side in front of the juxtaposed pinups. Way back in 1921, this heritage building—once known as the Heather Stables—had been a barracks for 200 redcoats and 140 horses. Befitting its royal pedigree, DeClercq’s office gazed out across a vast expanse of green lawn at Queen Elizabeth Park on the crest of Little Mountain. The morning sun beaming through the front windows highlighted the bloodshed in the photo of the dangling victim so that it glared as red as a Horseman’s scarlet tunic.

  “Quad superius,” Chandler said as he tapped the tarot card.

  “As above,” DeClercq translated.

  “Sicut inferius,” said the inspector, sliding his finger across to the crime-scene photo.

  “So below,” the chief translated. “You even remember the Latin?”

  “For the past two days, Alex and I have rehashed the Ripper case. And I reread Deadman’s Island, her account of our ordeal.”

  Mentioning Alex, the Ripper, and Deadman’s Island flashed Zinc’s memory back. Etched in his mind as vividly as if it were this instant in time was the first glimpse he had caught of Alexis Hunt. The floatplane was rocking at the dock in Vancouver’s harbor. All but one of the crime writers invited to a mystery weekend at an as-yet-undisclosed location were aboard. The event had been auctioned off to aid Children’s Hospital. The secret benefactor who had outbid all rivals had challenged the sleuths to match wits with a “real cop” for a $50,000 prize. If the cop won, the prize would also go to charity, so C/Supt. Robert DeClercq of Special X had been asked to provide a good detective for a good cause. Zinc Chandler had mostly recovered from a bullet to his head, but he was still suspended from active duty until the aftermath of the Cutthroat fiasco was sorted out, so that’s how he found himself seated among the slew of writers in the floatplane.

  A Mickey Mouse assignment.

  Or so he had thought.

  Barely discernible through the rain was the city’s downtown core. Huddled like an urchin at its feet was the shack of Thunderbird Charters. From the hut to the floatplane out on the water stretched a gangway and the heaving pier. The woman sea-legging down the gangplanks struggled against the Pacific squall, suitcase in one hand, umbrella in the opposite fighting the wind to block the slanted rain. Her black coat flapped about her like Batman’s cape, revealing a black pinch-waisted jacket and black jeans tucked into black cowboy boots. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail and clipped with silver heart-shaped barrettes, but wayward strands dancing about her face masked her features. Only as she climbed up into the plane did Zinc grasp her beauty: eyes as azure as South Seas lagoons, delicate bone structure around a most kissable mouth, with the grace of a ballerina in every move. It was the cliché of love at first sight, and Zinc’s heart was gone.

  It still was.

  Their destination had turned out to be the hellhole of Deadman’s Island. Their secret benefactor was none other than Jack the Ripper. Not the real Ripper—for that monster was long dead—but a rabid psychotic who thought he could use the Magick of the Tarot to conjure Jack from the there and then of East End London in 1888 to the here and now of modern-day Vancouver.

  The ensuing carnival of carnage had cut short the careers of most of the writers lured to the island. One by one, the psycho had picked them off in fiendish ways, and had Zinc not thwarted him before he could sign the final occult symbol in blood, there would have been no survivors to tell their tale of horror. That task had fallen to Alex, during the many months she spent at home in Cannon Beach, Oregon, nursing Zinc back to health from a stabbing at the hands of the psychotic Ripper. Deadman’s Island became the title of her resulting book.

  “I assume the Ripper’s still locked away on Colony Farm?” said DeClercq, pulling the inspector’s mind back to the Strategy Wall.

  “Yes,” replied Chandler. “I phoned FPH. He’s confined in Ash 2, the high-security ward.”

  “What about visitors?”

  “No one suspicious. His only visitors are his lawyer and support staff from that law firm.”

  “Wes Grimmer still his counsel?”

  “Uh-huh,” replied Zinc. “But the Ripper is so far gone that he may never be fit to stand trial.”

  “Is this the work of a copycat?” The chief forked two fingers of one hand at the Hanged Man card and the photo of the suspended corpse pinned to the Strategy Wall.

  “It could be,” said the inspector. “The Ripper’s occult motive was all over the media at the time of his arrest. And Alex set it out in detail in her book.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “The M.O. is different, Chief. Our Ripper hanged four women in Vancouver at locations selected to form an inverted cross on a street map of this city. That mimicked what Jack the Ripper might have done in the East End of London with his first four victims. Then our Ripper lured a final female victim to Deadman’s Island to kill her at a ‘Magick place’ so that astral projection would propel his consciousness into the occult realm. Jack the Ripper might have done the same with his fifth and final victim in Room 13 of Miller’s Court. But here we have a single victim who is male, and the cross seems to be formed in how the man was strung up.”

  “So it isn’t the Ripper. And it might not be a copycat.”

  Chandler nodded. “The Tarot has enough influence on its own to spawn an occult killer.”

  “Refresh me, Zinc.”

  The Tarot, Chandler explained, is one of the great systems of divination. The others are the I Ching and Scandinavian runes. Tarot magic is “in the cards,” as each symbol relates a seeker to the physical and spiritual worlds. Symbols evoke both conscious and subconscious reactions, so it is believed that each card opens a door to the occult mind. The word “occult” means “unknown” or “hidden.” Occult manifestation occurs when subconscious insight enlightens the conscious reality of the seeker. Divination empowers the mind to bring the occult into being, so the cards reflect what is, has been, and will be. The Magick is in the seeker’s transmutation.

  The origin of the Tarot is an unsolved mystery. The deck has worn many guises through the centuries, but the basic meaning of each symbol has remained the same. A tarot deck consists of seventy-eight cards. The fifty-six in the four suits are called the Minor Arcana, and they evolved into modern playing cards. The twenty-two symbolic pictures are the Major Arcana, and those images reflect the occult’s Greater Secrets.

  Occult power is omnipotent. That’s the basic law. All things—including us—reflect a greater power—the greater power of the occult realm.

  So what’s “up there” …

  Quod superius …

  Projects “down here” …

  Sicut inferius …

  And manifests itself as what we call reality.

  “As above, so below.”

  The Tarot hides the key to the occult realm. Find that key and a seeker will gain occult power. The Greater Secrets of the Major Arcana have been attributed to many sources. To Egyptian hieroglyphics in history’s oldest book. To the kabbalistic lore of ancient Hebrews and nomadic gypsies from India. To the city of Fez in Morocco, where symbols were used as the common language of diverse cultures. Even to refugees from Atlantis, who encoded dark wisdom in the deck as their doomed land sank into the sea.

  “For Jungians,” Zinc said, “tarot symbols represent the archetypes of our collective unconscious. Whatever their origin, the Greater Secrets were mysteries even back in the Dark Ages. The oldest deck found in Europe dates from 1392.”

  “That’s the problem,” said DeClercq. “The Tarot has stood the test of time. Anything that old takes on sacred meaning. The world is full of true believers seeking Greater Secrets. What motivates a suicide bomber to kill himself in the name of Islam? How many witches or heretics were burned at the stake in the name of Christ, and how many ‘heathens’ were enslaved by zealous missionaries? If that’s the curse of divine religions espousing peace and harmony, what’s the power of the Tarot, which is tied to the black arts?”


  “Power enough to motivate murder.”

  “And captivate a psycho.”

  “Especially—” Zinc began.

  “The Hanged Man,” finished DeClercq.

  The most obscure card in a tarot deck is the Hanged Man. To hang upside down is a time-honored symbol for spiritual awakening. Odin, the Norse god, so hanged himself on Yggdrasil, the wonder tree, so he could gain mystical power to read the fortune-telling runes. Yoga practitioners stand on their heads to move energy from the base of their spines to their inverted brains. Caught in a moment of suspension before all is revealed, the Hanged Man symbolizes sacrifice to gain prophetic power. Reversal in life is possible through reversal of mind. This card hides the key to the occult realm. That’s why it encodes the most sought-after Greater Secret in the Tarot.

  The Mounties studied the pinned-up card.

  “Remember how it works?” Chandler asked.

  “Sort of,” said DeClercq. “It’s been a while since I last read the Ripper file and Deadman’s Island.”

  “The seeker blindly picks a card from the Major Arcana—”

  “His significator.”

  “—to reveal his inner being.”

  “In the case of our Ripper, that card was the Hanged Man.”

  “For Jack the Ripper too.”

  “Or so our Ripper thought.”

  “Because of the theory of the Golden Dawn.”

  The Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in nineteenth-century Britain by S. MacGregor Mathers. Members of the Dawn included Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, Aleister Crowley, the notorious Satanist, and A. E. Waite, who designed the card of the Hanged Man pinned to the Strategy Wall. In 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper, Mathers penned The Tarot: Its Occult Signification. His theory—adopted by the Dawn—was that the Tarot was a door through which seekers could work their will on the universe.

  How?

  By astral projection.

  Between the occult realm and its reflection as the here and now of reality lies what Mathers called the astral plane. Psychic vibrations pulse through that cosmic medium to create our physical world. The Dawn thought it possible, with the right key, to intercept those wavelengths before they reflected down here. If the Tarot hid the key to the occult realm, properly ritualizing its symbols would not only open the closed path to the astral plane, but also enable the seeker to project his own consciousness toward the occult realm so that his “astral double” could intercept and alter the psychic vibrations before they arrived to reflect as the here and now, thereby changing the illusion of our reality.

  Heady stuff.

  Do you want to be a god?

  All it required was the right tarot card properly ritualized and the seeker could manifest occult power under his control.

  “Did Jack the Ripper ritualize symbols in the Tarot?” wondered DeClercq.

  “Our Ripper thought so,” Chandler replied.

  “That’s the problem with symbols—they get ritualized. A symbol that captivates the imagination elicits a more profound response than the actuality it represents. A dying Catholic fears death and the afterlife until a priest gives him last rites and signs him with a Christian cross to open the door to heaven and everlasting peace. Did Jack the Ripper visualize a cross in the Hanged Man, and ritualize signing it in female blood to open the door to the astral plane and occult power?”

  “I see a cross.”

  “So do I.”

  “And so did our Ripper.”

  “The intriguing question is, did Jack?” said DeClercq.

  What’s baffling about the first four killings by Jack the Ripper is that those four murder scenes—when plotted on a map of London’s East End—symbolize the four points of an inverted cross. The chance of that being coincidence defies all odds, so did Jack the Ripper consciously kill four females at those predetermined spots? By Scotland Yard’s estimate, twelve hundred prostitutes haunted those streets, so finding a suitable sacrifice for his knife was no problem. Equally puzzling is why Jack was not caught. Despite the tight police dragnet and roaming vigilantes, the Whitechapel demon repeatedly vanished into thin air.

  Where did he go?

  Into the astral plane?

  “That’s what our Ripper thought,” said DeClercq.

  “And that’s why he’s at Colony Farm.”

  The Mounties switched focus from the pinned-up tarot card to the crime-scene photo beside it. Minus the Hanged Man’s belted jacket, the naked corpse suspended upside down by one leg from the hotel room’s ceiling beam mimicked the obscure card in the flesh. The body’s left ankle was tied behind the right thigh to position it in place. The wrists were cuffed together at the small of the back. And a halo of nails—like a crown of thorns—was hammered into the skull.

  “So,” said DeClercq, “does the same psychology apply here? Like our Ripper—and perhaps Jack—did whoever killed this man find motive for murder in the Tarot?”

  “A tarot card was left in the room,” Chandler said. “The Hanged Man was used to chop six lines of cocaine. Traces were found on a table by the front windows.”

  “Three people?”

  “Looks that way. Two lines apiece. One for each nostril of the vic and his two killers.”

  “Coke and the Tarot. A spooky combination. If the killers were in the grasp of cocaine psychosis, God only knows what motive they saw in the card.”

  “The pimp and the hooker were jitterbugged by blow. That’s why they shot up the bar downstairs.”

  “What evidence do we have that ties them to the vic?”

  “According to the barkeep, he saw the vic, Romeo Cardoza, who had just flown in from L.A., talking to the pimp and the hooker—whose names were Gord and Joey—in the bar on the night the vic was killed. Gord and Joey—the barkeep thought they were brother and sister—were also up from L.A. They had been hanging out in the bar for about a week.”

  “What did the three talk about?”

  “He didn’t overhear. But Gord was a pusher who was snorting his own supply, and Joey was an S&M hooker who was into rough trade and discipline. The pair could be hired for a two-on-one, and that’s what Gill Macbeth thinks went on in the room. The base of Romeo’s penis and his anus were raw.”

  “DNA? Forensics?”

  “Nothing so far, Chief. Evidently, the killers cleaned up after they were through. The condoms used were removed. The body was scrubbed with chemicals where there could be telltale fluids. All fingerprints were wiped away. Even the bed was vacuumed of hairs and fibers. If we do find something forensic, there’s nothing to match it with. The combined destruction by the grain-dust and tanker-truck explosions obliterated both suspects.”

  “Have you traced them?”

  “Uh-uh. No prints or photos. The Olds was stolen in L.A. from a man who’s out of the country. The owner didn’t know it was gone until we told him.”

  “Does anything tie Gord and Joey to the murder in the hotel room?”

  “Just the coke traces on the table and the tarot card. We obtained a sample—no questions asked—of coke the pair had sold to another buyer in the bar. Lab tests have proved that both drug samples came from the same supply.”

  “Can we link Gord and Joey to the Tarot?”

  “They came from California.”

  DeClercq smiled. “That state does produce more than its fair share of New Age gurus, but I doubt that connection would stand up in a court of law.”

  “Manson found motive for murder in ‘Helter Skelter,’ the Beatles song. It’s less of a stretch to imagine two L.A. coke fiends getting orders to kill from the Hanged Man.”

  “The halo of nails is significant.”

  “In more ways than one, Chief.”

  “How so?” DeClercq asked.

  “They did double duty. Not only did pounding in the nails signify the nimbus on the tarot card, but they were hammered in while the three were having sex.”

  “Kinky.”

  “I’ll say. And the nails wer
e short. Long enough to pierce the skull and enter his brain, but short enough to kill him slowly, with a lot of clenches and spasms. His mouth was gagged to keep Romeo from crying out, and toxicology tests on blood drawn at the postmortem revealed a heavy dose of Viagra in his veins.”

  “A double motive?” said DeClercq.

  “Sex and the Tarot.”

  “What about the movie mentioned in the papers?”

  “Bed of Nails?” Chandler said.

  “An ironic title. How does that fit in?”

  “The film’s in trouble. Way over budget. Cardoza was a producer. He flew in from Hollywood on the day he was hanged, checked into the Hyatt downtown, then crossed the harbor to the Lions Gate to score the coke and buy sex.”

  “Where he died in a bed with nails in his head, just like the title of his troubled film?”

  “Could be coincidence.”

  “I don’t buy that. Do you?” asked DeClercq.

  “The Tarot plays no part in the film. I checked.”

  “What was Cardoza here to do?”

  “Crack some heads.”

  “But instead he got his head cracked,” said DeClercq.

  “Motive?”

  “Why not?”

  “Someone with his head on the chopping block, who’s got an ax to grind?” said Chandler.

  “You’re mixing metaphors. But perhaps the motive for Cardoza’s murder mixes metaphors too. Say someone involved with the production was going to lose his job. Or say there had been a fraud, so he might go to jail. What if Cardoza was the only one who knew, and he flew in from L.A. to confront the thief? Perhaps the thief was still back in Hollywood, and Cardoza flew in to gather evidence to nail the crook. The guy on the hot seat didn’t want that, so he hired the kinky coke freaks in Vancouver, or had them come up from L.A. before Cardoza. Their contract was to snuff the producer in a way that masked the motive, so they mixed up the metaphor of the Tarot with Bed of Nails and finished him off in a coked-up orgy of blood and sex. Luckily for the contractor, the actual killers died while fleeing from you, and we’re left scratching our heads, trying to figure out a bogus Tarot motive.”