“And Joachim Kroll?”
“Germany’s modern cannibal. Between 1955 and 1976, he choked and raped fourteen females in the Ruhr. If the flesh was tender, he would cut steaks from their buttocks and thighs. Kroll was a lavatory attendant by trade, so it’s ironic that he got caught because he plugged the toilet in his apartment building with guts: the internal organs of a four-year-old girl. In Kroll’s flat, where he lived with a harem of rubber sex dolls, the police found plastic bags full of flesh in the deep freeze and, bubbling in a saucepan on the stove, a stew made out of the girl’s hand, with potatoes and carrots.”
“Two Frenchman?”
“One, in fact,” said Alex. “Claux was a mortician who ate strips of flesh cut from the muscles of cadavers in a hospital morgue. He used to prowl graveyards and dig up fresh corpses to drink the blood mixed with human ashes and protein powder. Sagawa was a Japanese living in Paris who ate a Dutch woman. He said her flesh tasted like raw tuna. That’s a sushi I don’t want to try.”
“Albert Fish was the old man who ate that young girl?”
“Grace Budd. In New York, in 1928. He turned her ‘meat’—as he called it—into a cannibal stew, complete with carrots, onions, and bacon strips. He spent the next nine days locked away in his room, savoring his dreadful meal and masturbating compulsively. Fish made the mistake of writing a letter to Grace Budd’s parents, describing in sickening detail what he had done to their daughter. On arresting him in 1934, police found a collection of newspaper clippings about Fritz Haarmann, ‘the Butcher of Hanover.’ No one knows how many children Fish killed and ate during his travels through twenty-three states.”
“As I recall,” Zinc said, “when Sing Sing Prison tried to fry him in the electric chair, he short-circuited his execution because he’d inserted a phalanx of needles into his groin.”
“Twenty-nine, I believe. He’s the oldest man put to death in New York State.”
“Ed Gein we all know. The man behind Psycho.”
“And The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And The Silence of the Lambs.”
“Busy Ed. Why the question mark?”
“One respected author thinks he wasn’t a cannibal.”
“And you, Alex?”
“Before his first grave-robbing, Gein confessed, he’d been reading adventure stories of headhunters and cannibals. Psychotically fixated on his dead mother, he kept her room like a shrine. The headless and gutted corpses of the women he butchered were hung upside down from a rafter like dressed-out game. Inside his shambles of a house, police found soup bowls made from skulls, chairs upholstered with human skin, a shoebox full of female genitalia, faces stuffed with newspapers and mounted on a wall like hunting trophies, and a ‘mammary vest’ flayed from the torso of a woman, which Gein would wear to pretend he was his mother. In a frying pan on the stove was a human heart. Since he draped himself in female flesh, I find it hard to swallow—no pun intended—that he didn’t try to ingest Mother too.”
“What was the name of those jokes?”
“Geiners,” said Alex.
“Find any?”
“Sure. In a psychiatric journal. What did Ed say to the sheriff who arrested him? ‘Have a heart.’ Why won’t anyone play poker with Ed? He might come up with a good hand.”
“Macabre.”
“We laugh to keep from crying.”
“Kemper,” said Zinc. “He was the giant?”
“Six-foot-nine. Three hundred pounds. He decapitated his sisters’ dolls when he was a boy, then decapitated coeds after he became a man so he could have sex with the headless bodies. First, he’d strip them and pose them in a bath, so he could take Polaroids of them whole. Later, he’d chop up the bodies and store most of the meat in the freezer, except for what he would cook in a macaroni casserole. Having elaborately set the table, he would display the Polaroids behind his plate, then eat the meat, staring at them, until he reached orgasm. The frozen flesh would last him a month. On his arrest, he was asked, ‘What do you think when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?’ Kemper replied, ‘One side of me says, I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side of me says, I wonder how her head would look on a stick?’ When convicted of eight murders, he told the court he thought a fitting punishment for him would be death by torture.”
“When was that?”
“In the early 1970s.”
“Lucas and Toole. Another biggie. Why the question mark?”
“We have only their say-so about eating flesh.”
“The next four draw a blank.”
“They’re recent Americans. Stanley Dean Baker was stopped for a hit-and-run in California. ‘I have a problem,’ he told the officer. ‘I’m a cannibal.’ He was snacking on the fingers of a social worker whose heart he had devoured raw. Daniel Rakowitz lived on New York’s Lower East Side. He killed his girlfriend in 1989, then boiled her head to make soup out of her brain. Scrawled on the door of his apartment was this gibberish: ‘Is it soup yet? Welcome to Charlie Gein’s Ranch East. Home of the Fine Young Cannibals.’ Albert Fentress was in Poughkeepsie. He cooked and ate the testicles of a young man he’d chained in his basement. Arthur Shawcross fell from grace in Vietnam. The GI roasted and ate ’Nam kids. When he went back to New York, he switched to women. There, he ate vaginas, and not in the usual sense.”
“Heidnik. The harem guy?”
“Right. Philadelphia, in 1986. He kidnapped and imprisoned six women in his cellar. One died in a pit filled with water and charged with a live wire. Another died after she was hung by her wrists for a week. He cut up that body, ground some flesh in a food processor, mixed it with dog food and made the others eat it. Police searching Heidnik’s house found a charred human rib in the oven and a forearm in the freezer. His lawyer described him at trial as being ‘out to lunch.’”
“Jeffrey Dahmer. The modern Ed Gein.”
“There must be something in Wisconsin’s water. Another charnel house. A human head on a refrigerator shelf. Skulls stashed in a closet. Body parts crammed in a plastic barrel. Hands decomposing in a lobster pot. An array of dry bones in cardboard boxes. A freezer full of viscera: lungs, livers, intestines, kidneys. Individually wrapped portions of hearts, thighs, and biceps, some of which were tenderized, with the fat trimmed off. His favorite meal was biceps—he claimed they tasted like filet mignon. Dahmer killed seventeen men he picked up in gay bars.”
“What I remember,” Zinc said, “is the zombies. He drilled holes in the skulls of still-living men and poured in acid to dissolve their brains to mush.”
“And more jokes.”
“Geiners?” said the Mountie.
“Jeff ‘the Chef’ Dahmer’s mom came over for dinner. ‘Jeffrey,’ she said, ‘I really don’t like your friends.’ ‘Then just eat the vegetables, Ma,’ he replied.”
“I remember one,” added Zinc. “What did Jeffrey Dahmer say to Lorena Bobbitt, the woman who severed her husband’s penis with a knife? ‘You going to eat that?’”
“Which brings us to Andrei Chikatilo—Russia’s ‘Mad Beast’—who lured at least fifty-odd victims into lonely woods and attacked them like a monster. In the twelve years prior to 1990, he cut out tongues, bit off nipples, sliced off noses, gouged out eyes, and devoured genitals, which—according to his captors—left him with a gagging case of halitosis. He holds the record as the worst serial killer of modern times. Close behind is Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev of Kyrgyzstan. At least forty-seven victims were in the ethnic cuisine he served to his neighbors. Dzhurmongaliev told police that two women provided enough meat for a week.”
“Why the nickname Metal Fang?”
“His false teeth were made of white metal.”
“Nelson. The local guy. Does he count?”
“Is it cannibalism if you cut someone open and eat the contents of her stomach? Another question mark.”
“That’s a lot of Morlocks,” Zinc summed up.
Alex nodded. “It’s shocking to see so many people-eaters gathered in one
place.”
“Your book may end up too heavy for the masses.”
“At least it will serve one purpose: if fiction readers come across a psycho-thriller involving cannibals, they’ll have no difficulty suspending disbelief.”
“Amen,” said Zinc.
“So,” said Alex, returning to the stove, “what say we have a hearty meal of Eloi curry, then settle back and watch a double bill of The Time Machine?”
“Sorry. I can’t.”
“Party-pooper. Why not?” she asked.
“I’ve got a tentative date tonight with two possible suspects at the Lions Gate.”
“Mona’s bar?”
“Afraid so.”
“Will she be there?”
“An irresistible hunk like me, how could she not?”
“In that case, buster, you’d better come with me.” Alex took Zinc by the hand and pulled him toward the bedroom. “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be of no use to Moaning Mona.”
Like the Time Traveler in Wells’s novel, Zinc’s mind was transported forward by a vibrating machine. In his situation, the device summoning him back to this rainy veranda at Minnekhada Lodge from the memory of Alex seventeen months ago was the silent cellphone vibrating in his pocket. It was one of those ironic coincidences in life—considering the secret plot that was currently unfolding in Seattle to turn the Mountie into the Goth’s food—that of all the pleasant recollections Zinc retained of her, the one that had captured his mind tonight involved You Are What You Eat.
The inspector checked the number recorded on his cellphone. The area code was Seattle. The number didn’t click.
“Hello?” he answered.
“Zinc, it’s Ralph Stein.”
“Ralph? It’s been a while. I can barely hear you.”
“Rain on my umbrella.”
“It’s pouring here too. Where you calling from?”
“Outside Ted Bundy’s house.”
THIRTEEN STEPS TO HELL
Twenty Miles East of Seattle
On bone-chilling nights like this, the undead do crawl from their graves. Charlie Yu could hear them moan in the wind that drove the rain through the skeletal trees, their gnarled limbs creaking overhead like rusty elbow joints, and he could see their foul breath from beyond the grave emerge in miasmic puffs that swirled in from the darkness around the flashlight’s beam. Freddie, the torchbearer, led the way into the hidden cemetery from the deserted bypass that ran up to Maltby from Redmond, north of Lake Sammamish. Tommy, the map reader, was their middleman as the three skulked single file into the dark unknown, for he was the one who could understand the X-Y coordinates on the survey grid. Charlie, the pot supplier, brought up the rear. His task was to roll the joints that skyrocketed the anxiety level of the Zombie Hunters so their hearts were tripping like jackhammers in their throats as they penetrated deeper into the foreboding fright night of this verboten netherworld.
“Look,” Freddie whispered, pointing dead ahead.
“Eureka!” Tommy crowed when he saw what was caught in the pool of light.
“What is it?” Charlie asked, trying to see around the pair, who were blocking his view.
“A gravestone.”
“Eldritch!”
“There’s another one.”
“There should be fifteen gravesites, give or take,” Tommy said.
“I can barely see them for the weeds,” Charlie said, stepping aside to peer around his buddies.
“Speaking of weed,” Freddie hinted. “It’s time to roll them joints, Brother Charles.”
“Whoa!” gasped Tommy. “What’s that in the center?”
“Jesus H. Christ! It’s got to be the pit.”
“Do you see what I see at the rim?”
“A step.”
“A concrete step.”
“The Thirteen Steps to Hell.”
Once a year, the Zombie Hunters met somewhere in the States for a fright-fest. Charlie came in from Texas with the loco weed. They had tried acid once, but that was overload, and Freddie—though he denied it—had pissed his pantaloons. He came in from Rhode Island, the home state of the dark prince, H. P. Lovecraft, so Freddie considered himself a maestro of the macabre and, consequently, the natural-born leader of the Zombie Hunters. Usually, it was his job to pick a haunted destination worthy of conquest by the intrepid trio. But Tommy hailed from Seattle, and this year he was one of the organizers of the World Horror Convention, currently under way in his hometown, so it had fallen to him to choose the spookiest spot around.
Maltby Cemetery had won hands down.
Freddie, Tommy, and Charlie had first met in Nashville, Tennessee, lured to that city’s World Horror Convention by the opportunity to have Richard Matheson, the guest of honor, sign their well-thumbed copies of I Am Legend. Standing one behind the other in a line of fans slowly snaking up to the signing table, they had engaged in a lively debate about the merits of that novel. Was it the ultimate vampire story, better than Dracula? Was it the inspiration for Night of the Living Dead, which Freddie had called “The best goddamn fucking fright flick ever filmed, in my humble opinion”?
“Hear, hear,” Tommy said. “Imagine what it must have been like to be in your car at a drive-in in 1968 when that black-and-white shocker flashed on-screen.”
“Bet it’s the only drive-in movie more memorable than what went on in the backseat.”
“And to think it was shot for a measly hundred and fifteen thousand bucks,” said Charlie, tossing in his two cents.
“Relentless,” Freddie said.
“Just like I Am Legend.”
“What a book. What a theme.”
“Robert Neville is the last man alive on earth,” Charlie said. “And everyone else is a vampire hungry for his blood.”
“By day, he’s the hunter. By night, he’s the hunted,” Tommy said.
“Barricaded in his home, praying for dawn—how long can he hold out?” said Freddie with obvious glee.
“Damn good question. How long must I hold out till I get to meet the man?”
Charlie stood up on his tiptoes. “I can see Matheson’s head.”
“You know what’s wrong with vampires today?” said Tommy.
“Yeah, Anne Rice,” Freddie replied.
“The books are all about chicks in gowns who yearn to get sucked while they’re fucked.”
“Romance and horror,” Charlie scoffed.
“Yuck,” said Freddie. “Give me relentless monsters who want to tear us limb from limb so they can gobble the raw flesh off our bones.”
After the signing, the three had moved on to the bar. There, as pint after pint of beer foamed down their gullets, they had dissected the nitty-gritty of Night of the Living Dead.
“Know why zombies make the best monsters?” Charlie had said.
“’Cause the dead rising from the grave is one of our oldest fears,” Freddie replied.
“Why’s there no great zombie novel?” complained Tommy.
“’Cause zombies came out of voodoo and went straight to film, where all they did was lurch around like mindless robots.”
“Until Romero. And Night of the Living Dead,” Charlie said.
“Not only are the dead rising from the grave, but for the first time on film, they are rising to eat us!” Freddie added.
“His zombies are as bent as movie monsters come. Not only do his living dead have an insatiable hunger for our flesh, shambling and stumbling and lurching around to get their hands on you, grasping and clawing at anything that stands in their way until they can rip out your entrails and devour them with glassy-eyed intensity—but those who fall prey to them become zombies too,” Charlie said.
“You a writer, dude?”
“I’m trying,” Charlie confessed.
“It’s I Am Legend, isn’t it?” Tommy said.
“It’s more than that,” Freddie said. “It’s the ultimate nightmare. In Dead, you’ve got these desperate people trapped in an old farmhouse near a c
emetery with zombie cannibals closing in all around. But all they do is panic, squabble, and make stupid decisions that turn them into meat. Romero destroys every comforting notion we have. Family ties don’t matter—”
“Yeah,” rejoiced Tommy. “The dead brother tries to eat his living sister. The little girl kills Mommy with a garden trowel, then mindlessly munches on Daddy’s remains.”
“Courage isn’t rewarded.”
“Heroes don’t triumph.”
“What’s the use? No one survives. Characters we’ve come to like are ripped apart and devoured bone by bone and organ by organ in front of our eyes. Even the black guy—our main man—gets through the night only to be mistaken for a zombie at the end,” Charlie said.
“Shoot ’em in the brain,” Tommy advised, imitating the voice of the Dead’s hick sheriff.
Freddie signaled the barman to tap them another round.
“It’s nihilism run amok,” he said.
“No logic in death,” said Tommy.
“Death is nothing more than nonfunctioning flesh. The zombies’ only reason for ‘living’ is to propagate death. Because its horrors break every taboo, the film reduces death to the loss of all we value,” Charlie said.
The three contemplated their empty beer mugs.
Charlie belched as the next pitcher of suds arrived. “We’re deep, dudes. Deep.”
“Yeah,” said Tommy, nodding. “I’m glad I met you guys. At last, a pair of geniuses who think like me.”
“Genii,” said Freddie.
“Huh?”
“That’s the Latin plural. You gotta learn to speak a dead language, pal.”
“To zombies!” said Charlie, raising his refilled mug.
“To cannibals!” said Tommy, upping the toast.
“To us!” said Freddie. “The fearless Zombie Hunters!”
Wobbly mugs clinked.
“Shoot ’em in the brain!”
So that was the first night these three had set out on a quest to test their mettle, abandoning the convention hotel to find somewhere spooky in Nashville where they could seek the paranormal. From sea to sea, America is rife with haunted enclaves and bad places. Each subsequent year, the three had converged at the World Horror Convention, first to score the John Hancock of the guest of honor on books and albums in their horror collections—in Stanford, Connecticut, Peter Straub; in Atlanta, Georgia, Alice Cooper; in Eugene, Oregon, Clive Barker; and now, in Seattle, Bret Lister—then to venture forth to the eeriest local place to face the evil dead.
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