Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

“And the triangle.”

  The Ripper licked his lips as if savoring his last taste of blood. The tips of both canines peeked down from behind his upper lip like Dracula’s bloodsuckers.

  “Back to the card. You see the triangle hidden in it? Both arms are folded behind the Hanged Man’s back to straight-line its base. The top of his inverted head—as indicated by the nimbus—is the tip of the obscure occult symbol. The triangle—or triad—signifies the number three. There are three sides to the triangle.”

  Another nod. “Did you sign that in blood?”

  “Yes, in the way I ripped Mary Jane Kelly to shreds in Room 13 of Miller’s Court.”

  “To do what?”

  “Project my astral double into the astral plane.”

  “Your consciousness?”

  “Or doppelgänger. Choose the term you like. The effect of signing the triad in her blood was my astral projection.”

  “How?”

  “Four times three equals what?”

  “Twelve,” the Goth replied.

  “The number of the Hanged Man. Multiplying the tetrad four of the cross by the triad three of the triangle equates to the Magick number twelve on this card to complete a cycle of occult manifestation. E = MC2. Energy, mass and the speed of light are interrelated. By astral projection, I hurled the energy of my mind into the astral plane of the occult realm. Quod superius, sicut inferius. ‘As above, so below.’ Since what’s ‘up there’ projects ‘down here,’ as soon as my astral double vanished into the other dimension of the time warp—of the wormhole—the past reality of Jack the Ripper’s autumn of terror in London, 1888, disappeared as well.”

  “You vanished?”

  “I time-traveled. That’s why they didn’t nick me. Jack escaped to the future reality of what is now present-day Vancouver.”

  “Why here?” the Goth asked.

  “Because of my mistake.”

  “The third symbol?”

  “Right. I read the nimbus wrong. See how the belt and the braid down the front of the Hanged Man’s jacket form a second cross? And how his collar joins with the nimbus around his head to form a circle? Combined, they seem to signify an inverted Mirror of Venus, the ancient occult sign for the female sex.”

  “A circle atop a cross. The symbol’s still in use.”

  “I know. Which compounded my error. The Hanged Man signifies sacrifice to obtain occult power. But sacrifice of whom? Of women, the symbol suggested. That’s why I ripped those whores in the East End: to sign the third symbol in blood. When astral projection landed me here in Vancouver, I knew I had made a mistake.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t end up where I wanted to go. Yes, I’d found the time warp into the occult realm, but I couldn’t control the power surging around me. Somehow, I had read the Hanged Man wrong. Tarot power is controlled by those who interpret the symbols in a proper deck correctly. Instead, the power of the Tarot controlled me, projecting me unwillingly here to serve its purpose.”

  “What purpose?”

  “We’re together, aren’t we? The mistake I made as Jack the Ripper, it seemed to me, was in not hanging those first four whores in 1888. The Hanged Man depicts the three symbols hanging from a T, so my contemporary self corrected the 1888 mistake by hanging four women in Vancouver to signify what I thought must be the proper tetrad four in the card.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No. The Hanged Man’s Mirror of Venus hangs upside down. I hanged the Vancouver women right side up. That just compounded my original error and opened this end of the same wormhole that projected me here from 1888. And I didn’t get to finish signing the triad in blood on Deadman’s Island thanks to the meddlesome cop who’s responsible for locking me up in here.”

  “Which brought us together.”

  “What brought us together was the will of the Tarot. I was sent here to meet up with you and pass on the Magick key.”

  “Why don’t you escape from FPH like you did from the East End? By astral projection?”

  “I can’t, because the cop stopped me before I could kill the female I slashed with the triad symbol on Deadman’s Island. Botching the cross denied me control over my occult power, and failing to sacrifice the triangle here means I can corporeally manifest myself back in 1888 London, but I can’t vanish from the reality of here and now.”

  The Ripper flipped the hourglass over on the table.

  “Back and forth …”

  The hourglass flipped again.

  “From here to there to here … That’s all I can do. The Tarot has made me a prisoner of my past mistakes.”

  “So that’s why you gave me a different key to the occult realm?”

  “Yes,” said the Ripper. “The proper key has to be the tarot card itself.”

  The madman tapped the Goth’s significator displayed on the table between them. “You don’t have to sacrifice four victims to sign the cross. Nor do you have to sacrifice a fifth to sign the triangle. That Mirror of Venus I thought I saw was just an illusion. The jacket worn by the Hanged Man is irrelevant to the key. Therefore, so is the female occult symbol. What matters is that you signify the tetrad and the triad in blood by sacrificing a man and hanging him upside down to literally manifest the symbol of the Hanged Man on this card.”

  “Like you told me to do?”

  “Yes,” said the Ripper. “The important detail is the nimbus around the head. Without it, the inverted triangle won’t have its tip, and the sacrifice will fail to signify the proper Magick.”

  “Have you seen the news?”

  “No, I just returned from 1888.”

  The Goth dropped a file on top of the tarot card and flipped it open. The file was full of clippings from several local papers about the murder at the Lions Gate and the subsequent high-speed chase.

  “I did it,” said the Goth. “I signed the key in blood.”

  The Ripper read the clippings. “And?” he asked when he had finished.

  “I am the chosen one.”

  “You found the wormhole?”

  “And time-warped where I wished. Astral projection took me back to the island of Tangaroa in the nineteenth century.”

  “Why there?”

  “Like you, I have a hunger to sate.”

  “Have you warped elsewhere?”

  “I go where I please. All the inspiration in the occult realm is mine to use.”

  The Ripper fingered one of the clippings in the file. “What about the two killed in the car chase?”

  “Scapegoats,” said the Goth. “They sold cocaine to the sacrifice I hanged before he met up with me.”

  “Why choose him?”

  “That was my earlier ruse. He was producing a film called Bed of Nails. My plan was to sign the nimbus with a halo of nails pounded into the skull, so I figured that by picking someone at work on that movie, I’d fool the Mounties into suspecting the killer might be linked to that production. The film’s being shot in North Vancouver. That’s why I picked the hotel bar as my hunting ground. It’s where all the movers and shakers in the industry hang out.”

  “A double ruse.”

  “Yeah, I lucked out. Bed of Nails and a pair of kinky dealers from L.A. The cops investigating the case will hit as dead an end as the pimp and the hooker did.”

  “How’d you lure the right cop?”

  “The one you want killed?”

  “Him!” snarled the Ripper, stabbing a finger at one of the tabloid photos in the file.

  “The sacrifice I stalked in the bar had just flown up from L.A. Kill an American and that brings in Special X. As luck would have it, the Special X cop was him.”

  “Luck be damned,” the Ripper cursed. “It’s the will of the Tarot.”

  “A deal is a deal. I owe you,” said the Goth. “That’s why I’m here today—to pay up. Give me the go-ahead and the cop will be dead by tomorrow.”

  “Not so fast. Why rush? You have all the time in the world.” The Ripper flipped the hourglas
s over between them. “Revenge like mine is a dish best served cold. Of all the ways there are to get even with someone who fucked you over, what’s the most degrading death you can imagine?”

  “Eat him alive.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s the ultimate horror. What better way to exact revenge than by consuming your enemy piece by piece in front of his eyes, and then flushing him down the toilet as a pile of your shit?”

  “Could you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then set it up. And I want him to know that your meal is billed to my account.”

  “To do it right might take a year and a half.”

  “You have a plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “And a place?”

  “Tangaroa.”

  “Good,” said the Ripper. “Take all the time you need.”

  The psycho clawed his fingernail across the face of the Mountie in the photo of him and Red Beard astride the hog on the front page of The Province. The same Mountie who’d stopped him from signing the triad on Deadman’s Island, and the cop who had locked him up in here to rot.

  “Eat him for me,” said the Ripper.

  PART II

  MORLOCKS

  The bodies were hung from the rafters above,

  While Eddie was searching for another new love.

  He went to Wautoma for a Plainfield deal,

  Looking for love and also a meal.

  When what to his hungry eyes should appear,

  But old Mary Hogan in her new red brassiere.

  Her cheeks were like roses when kissed by the sun,

  And she let out a scream at the sight of Ed’s gun.

  Old Ed pulled the trigger and Mary fell dead,

  He took his old ax and cut off her head.

  He then took his hacksaw and cut her in two,

  One half for hamburger, the other for stew.

  —“A Visit from Old Ed,” anonymous “Geiner” about the Plainfield Ghoul

  AMAZING GRACE

  Coquitlam

  April 11 (Seventeen months later)

  A few miles northeast from Colony Farm—where the Ripper was safely confined in Room 13—loomed the social and architectural anachronism of Minnekhada Lodge. Minnekhada was the Sioux word for “beside running waters,” and the name was brought to the West Coast in 1904 when Harry L. Jenkins left the United States to make his fortune as a lumber baron in what were then the untamed wilds of British Columbia. His 1,650-acre Coquitlam farm—nestled between the heights of Burke Mountain and the marsh flats of the Pitt River—faced a panorama of natural splendor that stretched across the Fraser River valley to the snowy cone of Mount Baker, seventy miles to the south in Washington State. In 1932, the farm passed to another lumber magnate, a man who would four years later become the king’s lieutenant governor here in Lotusland. To reflect his royal position, Eric Hamber built Minnekhada Lodge. Conceived as a stately British home rusticated by the realities of a besieging wilderness, the house was fashioned as a Tudor-style Scottish hunting lodge that lorded over the countryside from a commanding knoll.

  A pair of Celtic towers thirteen feet in height flanked the gateway to the lodge on Oliver Road. The drive up the knoll passed to the right of a turquoise swimming pool, then looped behind the manor to a courtyard plaza. A statue of Pan playing his flute graced the fountain in front of the main door. That door opened into an entrance hall with a floor checkered by black and white tiles. The banquet room beyond was a double-storied vault. The redbrick fireplace just left of the entry faced Dutch doors and windows that opened on the veranda. Spindled oak staircases ascended both sides of the room to balconies beneath the arched trusses and cedar beams of the dormered Jacobean roof. The master bedroom was tucked beyond one balcony, and off the other, the lodge boasted a genuine royal suite.

  A steady stream of royalty—including the Queen—had partied and slept beneath the roof of Minnekhada Lodge. Lord Tweedsmuir and his sons had played polo on the manicured lawns out by the stables. Hunting parties had ventured out onto Addington Marsh to blast shotgun pellets at the waterfowl while drinks were served from a nearby cabin, extending bar service into the wilds. Returning victorious to this banquet room, the royals would swap their deerstalker caps and tweeds for black ties and fancy gowns aglitter with jewels. Served by cooks and maids in starched uniforms, they would dine on the game they had bagged while a pet monkey fetched them bananas from a fruit bowl in the center of the table.

  Seeing how Her Majesty the Queen was still commander-in-chief of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, what better site could the Mounties of Special X have chosen for tonight’s regimental dinner than Minnekhada Lodge?

  God save the Queen.

  Time, they say, heals all wounds. That’s the optimist’s point of view. A pessimist will tell you that time inflicts wounds, too … and the past year and a half had not been kind to Zinc Chandler.

  Emotionally and physically, Zinc was a wounded soul. Losing the love of his life to death had hollowed out his heart to leave him empty and alone. At one point, he had teetered on the edge of suicide, and he might have eaten his gun if not for a fortuitous call to duty from Insp. Bob “Ghost Keeper” George and Sgt. Ed “Mad Dog” Rabidowski. That call had ultimately flown the three of them to Ebbtide Island on a rescue mission. In the pyrotechnics that followed, the RCMP helicopter had crashed into the sea, knocking Zinc out when his head hit the fuselage. That downing had concussed his already injured brain and seen him hospitalized, spending weeks convalescing from the blow. Tonight’s festivities marked his return to red serge, but though this dinner had been organized to honor the heroic three, as far as Zinc’s zest for life was concerned, he too had passed away.

  Going through the motions.

  The wheeze of the bagpipes filling with air should have quickened his heartbeat with joyful anticipation. The drone pipes filled the entrance hall of Minnekhada Lodge with bass a moment before the tartan-draped Mountie began to finger the melody pipe in a stirring Scottish march to lead the thin red line of Horsemen to the head table. In the aftermath of a hard-fought battle, Scottish Highlanders would hold a regimental dinner at which their commanders were piped in to prove they had survived the conflict. As the last vestige of the British colonial army, the redcoats of the Royal Mounted retain that tradition, so as the banquet hall resounded with the bagpipes’ tunes of glory, C/Supt. Robert DeClercq—the host of the dinner—followed by Dep. Comm. Eric Chan, head of the Mounties in B.C. and the Yukon, then Insp. Zinc Chandler, Insp. Bob George, and Sgt. Ed Rabidowski—the heroic three—were led single file through the entry door into the vaulted room.

  Except for the violin (and perhaps the saxophone), no instrument makes the human heart soar quite like the heavenly shrill of the bagpipes. It used to be that Zinc was moved to almost religious euphoria by the glory of this magic—for was there any greater affirmation of what it means to have a righteous soul than the sound of “Amazing Grace” brought to life by the piper?—but since the day that tune was played at Alex Hunt’s memorial, the soaring of bagpipes had left him flat.

  Going through the motions.

  This hollow shell of a man.

  Tonight, the redbrick fireplace was ornamented by a big stuffed bison head that had been removed from the stairwell that climbed to DeClercq’s office on the top floor of Special X. Bordered by RCMP flags and red-and-blue banners, the hearth emitted a cheerful glow that burnished the rustic wood decor with coppery tints. The wail of the pipes echoed down from the shadowy peak as the procession to the head table doubled back and forth among the ranks of red serge. The banquet room was arranged to reflect a barracks mess, with the head table along the side wall to the right of the hearth and the rank and file of the Mounted facing them. Every diner in this hall but one had endured six months of rigorous training at Depot Division in Regina, Saskatchewan. Regimental dinners reinforced the camaraderie that glued them into the Force. Sure, there were other police forces around the wor
ld, but all cops knew this tradition was as good as it gets.

  The thin red line.

  They always get their man.

  So why did Zinc feel so emotionally detached?

  Who were all these people?

  Nick Craven, Rachel Kidd, Rick Scarlett, Rusty Lewis—the gang was all here, but they seemed no more to Zinc than faces in a crowd. The procession reached the head table and two drams of Scotch were poured, then DeClercq locked arms with the Highlander to snap back both single malts in the time-revered tradition of “paying the piper.” Parallel lines of red serge took their seats at the long tables, at which point it was time for another amazing grace. Zinc impressed himself that he got through the delivery of “grace before meat” without shaking his fist at God in anger for what He … She … It—whatever—had done to Alex.

  You celestial psycho, he thought.

  Satan damn You.

  Burn in hell, God.

  The first plate of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding was handed to the deputy commissioner. Mounted protocol demands that the commanding officer at a regimental dinner personally serve the most junior member present at the feast. To applause from comrades seated around the honored constable, Deputy Commissioner Chan carried the serving from the head table to place it before a Native rookie sitting at the rear.

  Zinc’s sense of detachment grew with each wave of alcohol. What had begun with hard spirits served before dinner continued with multiple bottles of wine uncorked throughout the meal. The overhead lights were dimmed as a lively dessert—mincemeat with blue brandy flames dancing a jig on top—was carried in ceremoniously and portioned out with vanilla ice cream or custard to cool it down. The head wound he had suffered in Hong Kong had put an end to Zinc’s drinking—instead, he took Dilantin to ward off epileptic fits—so by the time port was being decanted for the “loyal toast,” the inspector found himself surrounded by faces flushed as red as the sea of scarlet tunics.

  It’s no fun to be sober in a crowd of drunks.

  As host, DeClercq was called on to test the “potability” of the ruby red, a ritual he performed with the panache of a natural showman. A barely perceptible nod of his head acknowledged the quality of the elixir, then a bottle was passed from hand to hand along each table. By tradition, port bottles are never set down.