Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “Or maybe it’s truly a dead end.”

  “Let’s hope,” said DeClercq. “We’ve got a man dead in his room, and we’ve got two innocent people shot dead in the bar. And we’ve got a lot of property damage on Low Level Road. The papers are convinced that a pair of psychos ran amok and—thanks to you—were taken down before more people died. Internal won’t touch you as long as you’re the hero, so quietly check out the various angles as if you were tying up loose ends. And if you hit that dead end, leave it at that.”

  “Let’s hope,” said Chandler.

  “I know what you’re thinking. What if the pimp and hooker only supplied Cardoza with the drugs, and the reason they bolted from the bar was because they were coked up and afraid you were going to bust them for trafficking?”

  “That’s possible.”

  “I agree. In which case, there may still be two psychos loose. But at the moment—based on what we know—that possibility is a dead end too. If the Tarot is driving them to kill, we won’t know that for sure until they kill again.”

  ROOM 13

  “Murder!” she cries as I muffle the word by clamping my left hand over her mouth. Already naked except for a dingy linen chemise, Mary Kelly sits on the edge of her corner bed in cramped Room 13 of Miller’s Court, waiting for me to undress and join her on the bare sheet. The bedclothes, pushed down to the foot of the mattress, lie rumpled close to the chair on which her garments are neatly folded. By the guttering glow of the single candle on the bedside table, its flame flickering from the draft blowing in from the yard outside through a broken window, I see stark terror staring at me from her wide-open eyes. Up jerk her flailing arms to ward off the bite of my knife as I push her back flat onto the grubby sheet and wrench her head sideways to bare the carotid artery, which is pulsing wildly in her corded throat. Slash after slash is intercepted by her forearms, and the blade rips jaggedly through her shredding defenses until she cowers away from the pain. I go for the jugular, still exposed despite her struggling, and slit that half of her neck to the bone.

  Blood sprays the wall on the far side of the bed.

  I stood drinking earlier in one of the public houses on Commercial Street when Black Mary Kelly approached to ask if I would buy her a gin. “Make it worth my while and I’ll buy us the bottle,” I said, so that’s why we left the pub and angled into Dorset Street to wend our way here. There’s no better place in the East End for what I have to do, and I knew that the moment she told me we could drink and fuck in Room 13 of Miller’s Court.

  Room 13!

  Surely a Magick place.

  Number 26 Dorset Street had once been a house. This three-story brick-front on the north side of the cobblestone road is now divided up into rooms let out to whores. Dorset Street has more than its fair share of common lodging houses, and the building across from the archway that leads to Miller’s Court rents three hundred beds every night. Here in the shadow of Spitalfields Church and Market, Mary and I escaped from the midnight rain by ducking under the dripping arch into a narrow passage between Number 26 and the chandler’s shop next door. We groped through the darkness toward the squalid cul-de-sac of open yard beyond. Miller’s Court was deserted as we emerged, squared by six sooty houses with dirty whitewashed faces and begrimed green shutters. In the yard were dustbins and a pump. On our right as we quit the passage were two doors. The first accessed the upstairs of Number 26. The second, at right angles to it and facing us in the corner nook, was the door to Mary’s crib.

  Unsteady on her feet from drink, Mary opened the door.

  Before Number 26 was converted into separate rooms, this down-and-out hovel was the back parlor of the original house. A false partition was all that cut it off from Number 26 now, but because it had a private entrance off the common yard, it was renumbered Room 13 of Miller’s Court.

  The harlot’s crib we entered was about twelve feet square. As the door swung in to our right, it knocked against the table beside the corner bed. Mary struck a match to light the candle on the table, and by its glow my eyes surveyed Room 13. The only furnishings apart from the bed and the table were two chairs by the fireplace opposite the door. The wall on the yonder side of the bed was the added partition, and where it met the hearth in the far corner, an open cupboard yawned, revealing bits of crockery, some empty ginger beer bottles, and a crust of bread. The sole decoration was a cheap print of The Fisherman’s Widow above the fireplace, which, I noted, had a kettle but no fuel. So destitute was Mary that she couldn’t afford coal. The pair of windows to our left gazed out on Miller’s Court, the smaller one closer to the door having the broken pane. The makeshift curtain that covered the hole was an old coat, and through the opening I heard the gurgle of rainwater rushing down the pipe affixed to the bricks.

  How pathetic.

  Mary Kelly was a social parasite.

  “Give us a drink,” Mary slurred, extending her hand for the bottle of gin.

  “And?” I said.

  “Don’t worry, luv. I’ll do right by you.”

  I passed her the bottle and watched her take a swig. Much younger than the other whores I’d ripped, she was—I would say—about twenty-five. If not for the ravages of drink, she might have been a comely lass, with her fine head of hair, fair complexion, and inviting blue eyes. Vanity kept her from covering that mane with a bonnet or a hat, and beneath her shabby dark skirt and the red knit crossover draped around her shoulders hid the most alluring figure Jacky’s knife would ever gut.

  “Let’s see what you’ve got,” I said.

  And so I watched her strip.

  The force of my attack has shoved Mary across the bed. The spurts from severed vessels create a blood-spatter pattern that forms an M on the far wall. The crown of her skull is in the corner where the headboard of the bed abuts that false partition, and the sheet beneath is saturated with so much blood that it is seeping through the mattress to pool on the floor. Patiently, I wait for the spurting to cease. Then, satisfied she’s dead, I haul Mary’s body back to this half of my feather-down dissecting table.

  The curtains over the windows will keep outsiders from peering in at my work. The candlelight, however, might attract a nocturnal friend to Mary’s door, for it would not be glowing if she weren’t still awake. The safer illumination would be a fire on the hearth, since that might be lit to keep the harlot warm as she sleeps. There is no fuel, but there is laundry heaped on the distant chair: a boy’s shirt, two men’s shirts, a black crepe bonnet, and a white petticoat. Stuffing it all into the fireplace, I ignite it with the candle, and once I have stoked a blaze suitable for work, I snuff the wick between my fingers.

  It is almost four a.m. by my pocket watch.

  Time constraints curbed Jacky’s fun with the first four whores. To signify the cross hidden in the Hanged Man, it was necessary for me to kill them outdoors. Each was merely a quarter of the tetrad four, so each had to add to the occult symbol signed in blood on the cobblestones of London’s maze of streets.

  For the triad three, I can take my time.

  Bloodlust overcomes me as I begin to rip. With all the time in the world, I revel in taking Mary Kelly apart piece by piece. So intoxicating is the absolute freedom to allow my mind to go berserk that hours of time have slipped away before I rein my lustmord in, and when—panting as hard as if I had just run a few miles—I once more flip open my bloody watch to check the current time, I find the hands aligned north and south as six a.m.

  “Her face,” I mutter. “I must sign the three on her face.”

  Before carving the triad into Mary Kelly’s flesh, I sweep my eyes around the room to survey my handiwork.

  Bong …

  Bong …

  The steeple bells toll the new day.

  Bong …

  Bong …

  It’s Lord Mayor’s Day in London town.

  Bong …

  Sorry, Your Worship, but you’ll be upstaged.

  Bong …

  ’Cause Jack the Ripper wi
ll steal your show.

  The room is a butcher’s shambles. What a sight to behold! Mary’s folded clothes are the only sign of order. The garments on the grate have burned down to ashes and embers, and amid their glow I can still see the rim of the black bonnet and a fragment of the underskirt. Relighting the half-melted candle on the bedside table, I hover over what remains of God’s creation.

  Even God has finally met His match.

  Wearing what are now the tatters of her linen slip, Mary lies face up on this half of the bed with her head turned on its left cheek to stare blankly at the door. Her hair fans out through a welter of blood like kelp in a red sea. So deep are the cuts to her throat that the bones of her neck are notched. Circular incisions removed both breasts, and along with the mammary tissue went the muscles down to the ribs. Intercostals between those ribs were cut through too, and the contents of her thorax are visible in the crevices.

  Both arms are mutilated by the jagged defense wounds. The right limb is slightly angled from the raw mass of her torso, and it rests on the mattress with its forearm supine and its fingers clenched. The left arm is close to the body, with its elbow flexed at a right angle so the hand lies across the open abdomen. Both legs are splayed wide apart with obscene invitation, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk and the right forming an obtuse angle away from the groin. My experiment in anatomy has laid her bare. From her cunt to her costal arch, I’ve ripped her open, and what was once inside her belly is strewn about the bed. Mary’s uterus, kidneys, and one breast are tucked under her head. Her liver and the other breast are down by her feet. The intestines coiling from the empty cavity slither like a nest of snakes at one flank, while across the pit, by her left side, is her spleen. Heaped on the bedside table is a mound of red flesh stripped in three large flaps from her pelvis and legs. The jumble contains skin, fascia, and muscles removed from both thighs, part of her right buttock, and Mary’s sexual wares. Her right leg, almost denuded of flesh, shows the white of its bone. Empty of viscera, her abdominal cavity now contains only stomach remnants of partly digested fish and potatoes from her last meal.

  All in all, I’d say the slashing, skinning, and gutting of this whore is a work of art.

  Rembrandt in blood.

  Having harvested Mary’s heart from her pericardium by reaching in through the ripped diaphragm below her lungs, I have the meat for my victory feast. Signifying the tetrad cross in the blood of the previous four has opened the path to the astral plane, so all I must do to complete the full cycle of occult manifestation is to carve the triad three into Mary’s face. As I repeatedly slash the Hanged Man’s hidden triangle into her flesh, I hack off Mary’s nose, cheeks, eyebrows, and ears until she is beyond recognition. So frenzied is this gashing that the blood-soaked sheet on the far corner of the mattress where I initially slit her throat is shredded too.

  Suddenly, the coat that serves as a curtain billows and a cold wind blows in through the open pane. The embers on the hearth explode into a spray of sparks that transmogrify into cosmic stars as the features of Room 13 turn hazy and fade to black. The gin bottle in one hand, the knife and the heart in the other, I feel my consciousness project into the astral plane, streaking along the wormhole that burrows through space and time, hurtling thousands of miles west from London’s East End and more than a century forward from 1888, until I rematerialize in Room 13 at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital on Colony Farm.

  Drenched in blood, I sprawl on my bed and bite into Mary’s heart, washing her sweet meat down with cheap gin.

  Port Coquitlam

  Along the hall from the Ripper’s room, Rudi Lucke sat daydreaming at the desk in the nursing station. He saw himself pinned to the mat in a wrestling ring by Jock Ogilvie, the sun-bleached hunk who’d patrolled the wards with him on the night after Halloween. In Rudi’s wakeful wet dream, the croc wrestler from the Australian outback had him face down on the canvas so that all he could do was squirm. To a roar of approval from the crowd swarming forward to ringside for a closer look, Jock tore the skimpy shorts off the vanquished nurse’s magnificent ass. Lord knows how many cable subscribers would watch Rudi being conquered on the sports network—

  But—poof!—those imaginary screens went blank when the call came in from Central Control.

  Sighing, Rudi raised that magnificent ass off the chair and left the station to stroll to Room 13 of Ash 2.

  The Ripper’s psychosis was still in a florid state, but the killer was no longer locked away in the seclusion ward. This being a hospital, not a jail, the madman was back in his regular room. Rudi glanced in through the oblong judas window in the door, and there the Ripper lay on his back beside the left-hand wall.

  In one palm, the Ripper held something he was eating. Whatever it was, the imaginary delicacy bestowed upon him more gourmand pleasure than any real food offered at FPH could ever give.

  In his other hand, he seemed to grip a bottle. From the way he winced each time he guzzled a phantom swig to wash down his repast, Rudi surmised the liquid in the non-bottle was strong booze.

  He’s time-traveling, Rudi thought as he swung open the door, and his eyes followed the wormhole tunnel through the series of collages that ran from the math calculations beside the Ripper’s head, spiraling around to the occult symbols on the far wall and ending up at the tarot cards and photos of Jack the Ripper’s hapless victims snapped during London’s autumn of terror in 1888.

  “You have a visitor,” Rudi said.

  THE KEY

  They met in the same interview room at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital out on Colony Farm where they had conspired four days earlier to commit bloody murder. The Goth was already seated on one of the two chairs flanking the bare table in the austere, antiseptic cubicle when Rudi ushered in the florid psychotic from Ash 2’s Room 13. Like before, the Ripper was dressed in a dark navy-blue sweatsuit and Velcro runners. Again, his eyes were black holes that seemed not only to suck the flesh of his face into his skull, but also to tug the Goth out of the here and now and into the occult realm. Once more, an odor of rancid cheese permeated the claustrophobic nook.

  The door closed.

  The Ripper sat.

  The psychos faced each other.

  The one the Mounties knew about.

  And the one they didn’t.

  The Ripper set the tiny hourglass down on the table between them so the sand of time could flow from the past to the future. Stacking the twenty-two cards of his Major Arcana facedown beside the egg timer, he pushed the deck toward the Goth and said, “Pick a card.”

  “I picked a card last time.”

  “Yes, the Hanged Man.”

  “That’s my significator. I don’t want another one.”

  “You have no say in the matter. The Magick is in the cards. If you are truly chosen, the Tarot will say so.”

  The Goth picked a card randomly from the deck.

  “Turn it over.”

  The Goth obeyed.

  What stared up at them from the table was the Hanged Man.

  “Study your card,” the Ripper said. “What number do you see at the top?”

  “The number twelve. In Roman numerals.”

  “How many signs are there in the zodiac?”

  “Twelve,” the Goth said.

  “That’s why the Hanged Man is the most important card in a tarot deck. The twelve symbolizes a complete cycle of occult manifestation in the here and now of our reality.”

  “The number of my significator.”

  “Yes, chosen one.”

  “Yours too?”

  “I thought so. But then I made a mistake.”

  “What mistake?”

  “I saw one too many occult symbols in the card.”

  Using the index finger of his left hand—the Devil’s hand—the Ripper outlined three hidden symbols on the face-up card. In the mind’s eye of the Goth, the Hanged Man looked like this:

  “One leg is bent across the other to form a human cross. The cross—or tet
rad—signifies the number four. There are four points to the cross. You see that symbol in the Hanged Man?”

  The Goth nodded.

  “That’s why I ripped the first four whores where I did in London. Back in 1888, when I was Jack the Ripper. Plot the sites on a map of the East End and you will see that Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Long Liz Stride, and Catherine Eddowes were sacrificed where they were to signify the inverted cross in the Hanged Man.”

  “Did that work?”

  “Sort of. Signing that occult symbol in blood opened the closed path to the astral plane.”

  “To a time warp?”

  “If you like.”

  “To a wormhole?” the Goth added.

  “I didn’t know it as a wormhole back then. With Einstein yet to be born, there was no expounded theory of relativity. I thought in terms of the theory of the Order of the Golden Dawn—Mathers, Crowley, Stoker, and Waite, the member who drew this card. Wormhole, time warp, astral plane. It matters not what term we use—all lead to the other dimension of the occult realm.”

  “Why did you remove the organs?”

  “To eat,” the Ripper said. “But that doesn’t matter. As long as the sacrifice sheds human blood.”

  “To sign the cross?”