Jeepers creepers.
Yesterday, Thursday, Tommy had greeted Freddie and Charlie at SeaTac Airport, where their flights from back east and down south had landed within ten minutes of each other. No sooner were the Zombie Hunters together in one place than Tommy pulled the program guide for this year’s horror convention out of his pocket and said, “Maltby Cemetery. Friday night.”
Flipping through the six pages of panels and events scheduled for the next three days, and several more pages of short biographies about those at the convention, Tommy arrived at the closing article, “Spooky Seattle: A Ghost Tour of Haunted Sites,” and jabbed his finger at this:
MALTBY CEMETERY—According to Ripley’s Believe It or Not, this is one of the most evil places on earth. Maltby Cemetery was founded in the 1800s by a family of Satanists so they wouldn’t have to be buried in sacred ground. Fifteen gravesites surround a hole in the center and descending into that pit are thirteen cement steps that lead to nowhere. These are the infamous Thirteen Steps to Hell. It’s said that if you count off the steps as you go down, when you reach the last step—Step Thirteen—you will suffer a glimpse of your spirit in hell. Local lore maintains that over the years, some have vanished into the pit, never to return, while others have crawled out stark raving mad. The cemetery is haunted by a woman dressed in ragged nineteenth-century garb. Because the graveyard is a magnet for Satan worshippers, it is omitted from local maps. Hidden away on the right side of the road up to Maltby from Redmond, it can be located twenty miles east of Seattle on a survey grid with these coordinates: T27N R5E.
“Damn,” Freddie said. “The program gives away the location. Half the convention will beat us there.”
“No,” Tommy assured him. “It’s not on the bus tour. It’s out in the boonies. And who knows how to read a survey grid?”
“Do you?” Charlie asked.
“I got it all worked out. I had a surveyor convert the coordinates to a tourist map. We’ll be the only ones there,” Tommy replied.
So, earlier tonight, the Zombie Hunters had ventured across Lake Washington on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge and continued east on Highway 520 all the way to Redmond, at which point they turned north on the country bypass that led to Maltby, with Tommy reading the map until he said, “Stop here.”
“I told you,” Freddie groused. “Company.”
An old VW van was parked off the road on the right.
“Naw,” said Tommy. “It must be a breakdown. Who in their right mind would be out here tonight?”
“Us?” said Charlie.
“That’s debatable, dude.”
And so the fearless Zombie Hunters had ventured off the deserted road into the black woods, their only guide the flashlight sweeping back and forth in Freddie’s hand. The beam caught ominous shadows lurching and shambling through the trees like zombies stalking them for the meat on their bones. This was their night of the living dead, and it was as if they were the last three survivors on earth. A shift in the wind had waved the limbs looming over them like clutching giants who could pluck them from the ground at any moment. Then, abruptly, Tommy had stopped them dead in their tracks.
“Hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“People talking.”
“I don’t hear a thing.”
“Neither do I.”
“Must be that raggedy woman who haunts the place, bro.”
And that’s when Freddie had spotted the gravestone.
So here they stood, shivering in the teeming rain, puffing on the fat joint that Charlie had rolled, their collars turned up against the cold and their bare heads bowed together in a huddle to keep the sparks at the lit end from snuffing out.
“Wow!” said Freddie, his voice warbling as he struggled to hold in the smoke. “That”—he exhaled the sweet billow—“is awesome shit, man.”
“Everything’s better in Texas.”
“This weed’s almost as strong as that acid hit that made Freddie wet his pants.”
“I did not wet my pants.”
“You pissed yourself. Didn’t he, Charlie? Remember, Freddie said he saw a psycho with an ax?”
“Man, am I stoned.”
“Me too,” Freddie agreed.
“So who’s got the balls to follow me down those steps?”
“Lead on, Brother Tom.”
“Let’s fuckin’ do it.”
The Zombie Hunters wore a mismatched uniform. Underneath, the three were bundled up against the cold, but over top, each had pulled on a favorite T-shirt garnered at a past convention. “Fangoria” read Tommy’s torso. “Bad Moon Books” said Charlie’s chest. “Cemetery Dance” prophesied Freddie’s pecs.
Closing on the beckoning pit sunk into the muddy ground, the zonked Zombie Hunters paused at the edge of the abyss for a passing of the torch. Careful not to shine the flashlight down into the hole, for that would spoil the thrill, Tommy allowed the beam to creep forward to the step at the rim and no farther.
“Step One,” he said, then down went his foot.
“Step Two. Step Three. You with me, fellas?”
“Roger,” whispered Freddie.
“Aye,” said Charlie. “Bringing up the rear.”
“Step Four. Step Five.”
The beam of the torch descended no deeper than the outer edge of the next step down.
“Step Six. Step Seven. Step Eight. Don’t piss yourself, Freddie. Remember, I’m here in front of your unit.”
“I did not piss myself.”
“Step Nine. Step Ten. As I recall, it wasn’t raining that night, dude.”
“It’s sure as hell raining now,” Charlie said.
“Step Eleven. Step Twelve. This is it, guys. One more step down and we get a glimpse of hell on earth.”
“Quit yakking, Tommy.”
“Yeah. Let’s roll.”
“Step Thirteen,” Tommy announced, planting his shoe in the mud at the foot of the sinkhole, then sweeping the beam forward to illuminate whatever lurked in the darkness beneath the Thirteen Steps to Hell. And that’s when he saw the ax.
As the torch flipped end over end out of Tommy’s grasp, it flickered a “now you see it, now you don’t” nightmare in front of Freddie’s eyes. When the psycho with an ax appeared in the blinking pit of light and shadow, Freddie thought it was an acid flashback to his prior bad trip. Then he remembered that Tommy had organized this trek into the hinterland, and he figured his conniving buddy had set up this shock to yank his chain. But then—
Whack!
The ax cracked down on Tommy’s crown, cleaving his skull open in a spray of blood and brains.
Freddie pissed himself.
The maul, a fitting name for this ax-shaped weapon, was as wide at the back of its wedge as a sledgehammer. The descending blade sank as deep as Tommy’s shuddering shoulders with a sickening crunch. When the axman jerked the handle up and down to free the steel V, the wedge squeaked against shattered bones and wrenched out of Tommy’s bisected brain with a sucking sound.
The beam winked out.
As Freddie turned to scramble back up the Thirteen Steps to Hell, the last thing he saw before the tumbling flashlight hit the concrete were the gouts of gore splattered all over Charlie Yu’s twitching face. Then it was pitch black down in this hellhole, and Freddie sensed he was an ax stroke away from taking a bone-crushing blow. So, with hands that clutched and clawed like those of the cannibal zombies in Night of the Living Dead, he grabbed hold of Charlie and tried to pull him down the steps so that he could crawl over his buddy and turn him into a buffer between the blade and himself.
Clang!
Too late.
Sparks and chips flew as the steel struck a step.
Freddie’s shriek in the darkness echoed in the pit. Blood spewed as Charlie struggled to break free, flailing his limbs like an overturned crab in a frantic attempt to climb the slippery steps backwards. Freddie’s hands still clutched him, so the terrified Texan swung his body from side to
side to throw off the inhibiting drag. The result was that Charlie got whapped in the face by the mushy stump of a severed limb. Now he, too, was screaming.
Whack!
Clang!
The maul kept hacking at Freddie. His other arm suddenly let go, releasing Charlie to roll over onto his belly and clamber his way up the Thirteen Steps to Hell on hands and knees.
Step Eight.
Step Seven.
Step Six.
Step Five—
Then someone grabbed his ankle.
“Nooooooooo!” Charlie wailed as he bumped back down into the pit, his chin bouncing off each concrete step in turn. The dazzling glare of a heavy-duty flashlight lit up the blackness from behind his head, and as Charlie tried to push himself up from the bloody steps, a silhouette of his own head shadowed the cement under his eyes, and over that outline loomed a dark blur, descending fast.
Whack!
Clang!
Charlie never saw the sparks.
GHOST TOUR
Seattle
April 12 (The next day)
Zinc Chandler was mildly surprised to find waiting at the arrivals gate for his flight from Vancouver a Seattle cop who whisked him from SeaTac Airport to a nearby helipad, where a police helicopter sat ready to fly him into the hinterland. It was still drizzling, but far less than the deluge overnight, and as the rotor whirling above their heads blew the rainwater on the Tarmac away, the chopper lifted up into the sodden gray sky.
The pilot gave Zinc a verbal tour through his cockpit headphones as they flew northeast over Seattle toward the Cascade Mountains. Puget Sound and the Pacific retreated on their left.
“Mount Rainier,” the pilot announced, pointing to the snowy volcanic cone dominating the horizon thirty miles away to the southeast. “If that baby ever blows like Mount St. Helens did, it will be one of the deadliest eruptions ever.
“In 1947, an Idaho businessman flew a private plane past the peak en route to Oregon. Supposedly, that’s when he saw nine circular objects hovering in single-file formation. He described them to a reporter as each being about the size of a DC-4, and he said they flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across water. That’s where we got the term ‘flying saucer.’”
Their flight path took them over the lower tip of Lake Washington to the upper tip of Lake Sammamish, farther inland. The Cascade Mountains formed a white backdrop. This morning, the overcast sky made for a brooding vista.
“Lake Sammamish State Park,” the pilot said, indicating an area to the south of the dark body of water. “That’s where Ted Bundy drove his VW Bug in the summer of ’74 to rape and kill several women he picked up near the picnic benches.
“And that,” he added, pointing farther east toward the Cascades, at a distance that Zinc estimated to be around thirty miles from Seattle, “is where you’ll find Snoqualmie Falls. The water plunges a hundred feet more than Niagara. Remember ‘Twin Peaks’?”
“Who killed Laura Palmer?”
“That’s where it was shot.”
The pilot set the chopper down on a country road to the north of Lake Sammamish. To prepare for the landing, a pair of county sheriff’s cars angled across the pavement to block off a section. As Zinc removed the cockpit headphones from his ears, the pilot gave him a thumbs up. The Mountie stepped out into the drizzle, where Det. Ralph Stein of Seattle Homicide waited for him on the shoulder of the road.
The helicopter took off and banked its rotor southwest to return to Seattle. The sheriff’s cars moved aside to reopen the road so that no fewer than four coroner’s vehicles could drive in to park. Now, that was an ominous sign.
“Ralph.”
“Zinc.”
The cops shook hands.
“How are the ankles?”
“Wet weather makes ’em throb, and the added weight doesn’t help. How you faring? Alex and all?”
“Up and down. You know. Losing her broke my heart. To cope, I threw myself into work, but the chief’s not happy. He’s ordered me off to the South Pacific for some R & R. I’ll probably get my knuckles rapped for coming here.”
“The South Pacific? I wish! Let me take your place?”
“Go pack.”
“No need. On a day as wet as this, I’m wearing trunks instead of Jockey shorts.”
“What’s with the four meat wagons?”
“One for each vic.”
“That bad?”
“Uh-huh. We don’t want to mix up the pieces.”
Det. Ralph Stein was bigger—much bigger—than when they had last met. Their cop-to-cop relationship went back several years, to an investigation into a blackmailing scheme run by a pimp who’d recruited underage girls for sex across the border. Later, Stein’s accident had taken him out of the joint manhunt that came to be known as the Hangman case, whose repercussions had ultimately cost the Mountie the love of his life. In the aftermath of those personal tragedies, Zinc had paid a visit to Ralph while he was recuperating at home, talking shop for hours in Stein’s kitchen.
“You bring ’em?” Ralph asked now.
“Yes,” said Zinc.
“Where’d you get ’em?”
“From my locker.”
“You said they were hold-back evidence?”
“Right. Key facts. That we found nails hammered into Cardoza’s skull was released to the media. The halo was seen by the chambermaid, so it got out of the bag. But we managed to keep the style and dimensions of the nails under wraps for use as key-fact evidence to trip up any suspects we might interrogate.”
“You still keeping that secret?”
“Yep. To thwart copycats.”
“Let’s hope that’s what we have here. I’d rather go after a copycat than a serial killer.”
“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours.”
Ralph fished in his coat pocket and withdrew his hand as a closed fist. The Mountie foraged in his travel bag, then held out a fist too. They were like children playing the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors.
“Ready?”
“On three.”
“One, two, three,” said Ralph.
They opened their fists.
“Son of a bitch,” said Zinc.
The nails on both palms were identical: non-galvanized flatheads of the same make and length.
“It reaffirms my faith in this,” said Ralph, tapping his nose. “Hard to believe there was a time before computers and high-tech gizmos when cases were linked by instinct—cops discussing their cold ones, then putting two and two together if a similarity cropped up later. The moment I saw that head staked upside down with a crown of nails hammered into the skull, I recalled what you told me about your dead-end Hanged Man case from a year and a half ago.”
“It just reopened.”
“Here, take a look.” The detective popped his umbrella to protect them from the drizzle, then withdrew a photograph of the head stuck on the stake from his shirt pocket.
“Déjà vu,” said the Mountie.
Again, Ralph tapped his nose. “We’d have gotten there anyway, even if you and I had never discussed your case. I had HITS”—the Homicide Investigation Tracking System, developed in Washington State—“check for similarities in previous local cases. Nothing. HITS widened its search to VICAP”—the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program—“but a sweep of the United States struck out too. Then HITS went to ViCLAS”—the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System, created by the Mounties—“and it came back with one link: your Hanged Man case.”
“A cross-border serial killer.”
“A killing up there. A killing down here. Is he yours or is he ours? Where does he call home?”
“I hope it’s Seattle,” said Zinc.
“It’s probably Vancouver.”
“So what have you found way out here?”
The detective led the inspector off the road into the dripping trees. Perhaps it was the weather—dismal, depressing, and gray, with wisps that could be ghosts’ breath condensing here
and there—but Zinc felt a chill of Gothic morbidity about this bad place. The trees weren’t healthy. They were diseased and gnarled. Claustrophobia closed in around the cops, and crooked limbs reached for their faces. The ground that squished beneath their shoes was wildly overgrown, and only when he almost tripped on a hidden gravestone did the Mountie realize that he was in a cemetery that time had forgotten.
The smell of death grew stronger as they approached what seemed to be a yawning sinkhole in the center of the graveyard. Out of it rose a disembodied voice noting anatomical aspects. As Zinc neared the rim of the pit to gaze down the Thirteen Steps to Hell, Ralph cautioned, “Brace yourself. It’s ugly.”
The Thirteen Steps to Hell deserved their damned name. Littering the sticky staircase were the hacked-up bodies of three young men, the maul left behind on the bottom step. The skull of the lowest victim was cleaved in two. The arms of the middle man were severed from his body. The cranium of the uppermost corpse was reduced to mush.
Zinc’s eyes, however, were riveted on the fourth body. In a hellish parody of the crucifixion of Christ, the Satanic crucifix faced the foot of the Thirteen Steps to Hell. Its crosspiece indented by blunt blows from the backside of the maul, the wooden T was stuck upright in the mud of the pit. Instead of the Roman soldiers who had stared up at the face of Christ on Golgotha Hill, forensic personnel squatted on their haunches to examine the remains of a naked man who’d been hung upside down, his right leg lashed to the beam, with his left leg tied in place behind it to sign a cross. Both wrists were cuffed at the small of the victim’s back to fashion the base of a triangle. In every way except one, the victim at the bottom of the steps was similar to the hanged man displayed seventeen months ago at the Lions Gate. All that was missing here was the nimbus of nails, because this hanged man didn’t have a head.
Bed of Nails Page 13