Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  But soon the shrieks are muffled by more banana leaves. To close the oven, the cooks layer them on top of him, followed by four thatches of coconut greens. The greens act as a buffer between the bakola and the top level of his underground coffin, for what buries the missionary alive to stew in his own juices is a thick crust of sand.

  Four and twenty blackbirds?

  Naw, it takes just one.

  And when—after four to six hours of subterranean baking—this pie is opened to set a dainty dish before the king, somehow I don’t think the blackbird will sing.

  But I’m not here for nursery rhymes.

  Vakatotoga is my lure.

  That shout from the cannibal king galvanizes ghastly action in the bone grove. The reverend I saw last time on the threshold of the mission chapel still grasps the Christian cross despite his nakedness. He will be a tougher nut for the king to crack, but if there is a fate worse than this, I’d like to see it.

  The burly head-smashers take custody of the reverend from those who currently hold him, then, each grasping an arm, run him over to one of the trees as yet unadorned with trophies. The chief carver follows with his bamboo knife. In times of war, the carver doubles as a battle surgeon, for no one knows the human body like a cannibal butcher, which makes him an anatomical expert in the art of drusu.

  “Lord, no!” the missionary beseeches as the blade cuts a slit in his belly. The carver reaches in and pulls out a glistening coil of the reverend’s small intestine. Fijian sail needles—saulaca—used for boat construction have been fashioned from the shinbones of prior human meals. The carver uses one of the long, slender needles to nail the intestine coil to the trunk of the shaddock tree. Then, with blows to his back from their muscular arms, the burly pair wind the reverend around the tree in a grisly version of Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush, played with his unraveling bowels.

  In effect, he ties himself to the trunk.

  Like Fathers Brébeuf and Lalemant in the hands of the Iroquois, the missionary tries to pray himself into martyrdom. He speaks to God as if he is standing in the crowd, and urges his Christian converts to suffer along with him that they might die well and join him in the everlasting peace of paradise. It’s the same bullshit my granddad used to preach at home in Mission, until I fixed him.

  The king has obviously had enough crap too. A wave of his flabby arm prompts the carver to jab a fishhook—also created out of human bone—through the tip of the reverend’s wagging tongue. No more will he take his Lord’s name in vain, for a tug on the fishing line yanks out the offensive flesh like a toad going for a bug. The slash of the bamboo blade vanishes in a mist of blood.

  A separate blaze is being stoked for this barbecue. The reverend’s silenced tongue is spiked on a long stick in the same way a hot dog is at a weenie roast, then it’s broiled over the flames. At the same time, a skull fashioned into a drinking cup is held under the reverend’s chin to catch his gushing blood. Once the tongue is cooked enough for a royal palate, the meat and drink are fed to the cannibal king. Not only does the Fijian eat the blackened tongue in front of its previous owner, but he instructs his priest with another wave of his jiggly flab to stuff a portion back into the mouth of the reverend.

  It’s the last supper for the holy man.

  “Vakatotoga,” taunts the king.

  Is the reverend praying? Pleading? Screaming for his life? From the mewls and gargles he utters, it’s hard for me to tell. What I do know is that his message isn’t getting across, for nothing affects the relentless cutting of the carver’s knife. As each successive joint of meat is severed from one of the reverend’s living limbs, it is passed to the cook who has caught the blood shed in a basting dish. As with an assembly line, cooks come and go to and from the barbecue, where each joint is flamed in the ironwood blaze. Then each joint is taken to the king, who is fed a morsel in front of the shrinking man’s eyes before what remains of that flesh is salted and packed away in the royal snacking chest, to be chewed on like beef jerky for weeks to come.

  After each bite, the cannibal king points to his mouth.

  It is the ultimate insult.

  “Your flesh is caught between my teeth” is what that means.

  Vakatotoga is the torture of being eaten alive. The reverend dies from loss of blood and brings it to an end. His head is handed to the high priest to add to the counting stones. The bones of his torso are harvested to wedge in the crooks of the tree.

  There is nothing more vivid than seeing something with your own eyes. Thanks to my deal with the Ripper, I have the key to the wormhole that time-warped me here. Thanks to having witnessed vakatotoga in the flesh, I now have enough inspiration to come up with a suitable South Seas revenge to satisfy my half of the bargain with the Ripper.

  So, turning from that scene of carnage in the trophy grove, again I propel my consciousness up into the astral plane and travel back through the occult realm …

  The sketching pad on the Goth’s lap was covered with horrific details drawn during the trip. The psycho still sat in the center of the huge bed. On the sheet of paper that captured the fates of the two Christian missionaries, the facial features of the old man being lowered into the oven pit were those of the minister who had preached in this church before it was converted to the worship of the elder gods. The features of the reverend being eaten alive were familiar too: switch his stripped-off black suit for a red serge uniform and you would have the spitting image of Insp. Zinc Chandler.

  “It’s time,” said a voice from the pillow on one side of the bed.

  “Time flies when you’re having fun,” said the Goth.

  “The flight leaves at three-thirty.”

  “Right. Let’s pack.”

  They were off to the Cook Islands.

  On the Odyssey.

  CAPTAIN COOK

  Over the Pacific Ocean

  April 17 (Two days later)

  “The almost certainty of being eaten as soon as you come ashore adds not a little to the terrors of a shipwreck,” noted the botanist Joseph Banks in his journal during Captain Cook’s first voyage around the world in 1768, when a storm threatened to sink the Endeavour off the coast of the cannibal islands that became New Zealand.

  Now that, thought Zinc, is adventure.

  As a farm boy marooned on the flats of Saskatchewan for all those years of misspent youth, Zinc had escaped by daydreaming himself into the skins of the great explorers he studied at school and the even greater superheroes he encountered in the movies, in the comic books, and on the TV programs produced by American pop culture.

  As Radisson, Zinc was tortured by the Iroquois.

  As Tarzan, he swung from vine to jungle vine.

  As Davy Crockett, he went down swinging at the Alamo.

  Adventurers, in this day and age, are a doomed species. It used to be that all a bored youth had to do was follow that sage advice to “Go west, young man.” But whether Christopher Columbus or Buffalo Bill, point your compass in that direction and you could end up as dinner or lose your scalp. In the case of Columbus, west gave us a new word: “cannibalism.”

  That noun was first used by Columbus in his journal on November 23, 1492. On his initial voyage to the New World, the great explorer met the peaceful Arawak. Caniba—an Arawak term—was a corruption of cariba, meaning “bold,” the label the Caribbean Indians of the Lesser Antilles used to describe themselves. When their neighbors, the Arawak, cribbed it for their own use, the term became an insult meaning “extreme barbarity.” Columbus misinterpreted caniba as Khan-iba because he was searching for the Orient to meet the Great Khan of the Mongols. He also linked it to canis—the Latin word for “dog”—and because Pliny, the classical author, had populated the far edge of the world with man-eating Cyclopean and dog-headed tribes, Columbus put two and two together to equal three after the Arawak warned him of man-eaters too. “I therefore repeat,” he journalized on December 11, 1492, “what I have said several times already: that the Caniba are none othe
r than the people of the Great Khan, who must be neighbors to these. They have ships, they come and capture these people, and as those who are taken never return, the others believe that they have been eaten.”

  Columbus returned to the New World in 1493. On that voyage, he finally met the Caribs on the island of Guadeloupe. There, he discovered mutilated body parts and a severed head in an abandoned Carib village. That seemed to confirm the accusations of the Arawak, and when Columbus’s adventures were widely disseminated in De Orbe Novo in 1511, Europeans learned how “the wylde and mysterious people called Canibales or Caribes … eat mannes flesshe.” From then on, it was seared into the collective consciousness of Europe that cannibal tribes plagued such newly discovered lands.

  Which was true, as Captain Cook found out.

  How Zinc Chandler wished that he had a time machine. Oh, to be Marco Polo or David Livingstone. Oh, to be free to go where no one had gone before, to venture into the great unknown beyond the outer edge of all current maps. He knew he should be thankful to have been born Canadian. At least his country still had a frontier, and that—truth be known—was why Zinc had joined the Mounted Police. Yes, he’d had far-flung adventures on duty with Special X—his body was marked by the scars he’d brought back as souvenirs—but somehow that experience wasn’t as satisfying as pure adventure.

  Air New Zealand’s Flight 53 from Los Angeles to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands had left the City of Angels for the South Seas at 10:15 p.m. this Thursday night. The inspector’s travel plans were in disarray, thanks to a bomb threat at Los Angeles International Airport yesterday. Three days before that, in the final hours of the World Horror Convention in Seattle, Zinc had sought out Yvette at “the dead dog party”—that farewell blowout at which all the remaining booze and food is consumed by those conventioneers who stay until the last dog is hanged—to tell her that he wished to venture out on the Odyssey.

  “You want to be a writer?” she had asked.

  “I’ve had enough of copping.”

  “Why don’t I believe you?”

  “You tell me.”

  Yvette cocked her head, closed one eye and arched a quizzical eyebrow on the other side. “I think you think that either Bret or Wes is a killer.”

  “I do?” said Zinc.

  The blonde nodded. “You think one of them killed that producer in North Vancouver a year or two ago, then used the experience to plot his novel. You think the same person killed the businessman whose head was found spiked upside down at Ted Bundy’s house and whose body—the rest of him—was strung up like the Hanged Man at the bottom of the Thirteen Steps in Maltby Cemetery.”

  “Why kill him?”

  “To promote the killer’s book.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Exactly,” said Yvette. “You think the same madman hammered a slew of nails into the face of the Cthulhu sculptor who was killed here in his room last night.”

  “Why kill him?”

  Yvette shrugged. “The killer’s running amok.”

  “The problem with your insight is their maze of alibis. Bret was in bed with Petra when the headless victim was killed. Wes was in bed with Petra when the Cthulhu monster came calling.”

  “Someone’s lying.”

  “Who?”

  “Probably Petra. And that’s why you want to join the Odyssey. To find out for sure.”

  Drifting away from the party, they had moved out to the pool area to escape from eavesdroppers.

  “There could be another reason.”

  “Oh?” said Yvette.

  “I don’t think you’re safe on a trip with Bret, Wes, and Petra. You need someone to watch over you.”

  “Someone like you?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “I doubt if I’m in danger. You may have noticed that all the dead so far are male.”

  “So far,” Zinc said. “But winds do change.”

  “There could, of course, be another reason why you want to come along.”

  “What’s that?”

  “To seduce Petra … or me.”

  “Petra maybe. But you, I doubt.”

  “You never know,” Yvette replied, “unless you try.”

  And so she had conspired with Zinc to turn him into a stowaway on the Odyssey. The wannabe writers and their published gurus were set to fly out of Vancouver—by way of L.A.—for Rarotonga on Tuesday of that week. At 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning, they would land in the Cooks, and after spending a day recovering from jetlag and loss of sleep, the group would island-hop to Atiu at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday. Because Zinc had a budget conference at Special X on Tuesday, his departure would follow twenty-four hours later. Air Canada would land him in Los Angeles at 6:35 p.m. on Wednesday evening, then he would connect with Air New Zealand at 10:15 that night, and when he landed in Rarotonga at 5:00 a.m. Thursday morning, he’d hop a ride to the resort where the Odyssey members were snoozing, and be there to surprise Bret, Wes, and Petra when they awoke. Off the group would fly to Atiu at 11:00 a.m., and he would set foot on Cannibal Island with the Eloi and the Morlocks.

  That was the scheme.

  But you know what the poet said about “best-laid schemes.”

  The bomb threat at LAX was one of those terrorist future shocks still rattling from 9/11. The result was that Air Canada didn’t touch down in L.A. until Air New Zealand had hightailed it out of town. The Kiwis being the only carrier to the Cook Islands, Zinc had to wait another day to connect with Thursday’s flight, which meant he would land in Rarotonga too late for the hop to Cannibal Island. The upside was that he got to fill a gap in his life experience by finally spending a day on Tom Sawyer’s Island and in the haunted house at Disneyland.

  So here Zinc sat, in seat 20J on Flight 53 while the flight attendants cleared the remains of the late-night after-takeoff meal for The Count of Monte Cristo, the first of multiple in-flight movies. Instead of watching swashbucklers skewer each other with épée and foil, the Mountie dug out the book about Captain Cook that he’d used as a shield against the chief’s wrath over flouting his no-work order, and he settled in to set sail for the South Seas.

  Avast, ye hearties!

  In an obscure village and of obscure parents—a local girl and a Scottish farm laborer—James Cook was born in Yorkshire in 1728. At seventeen, the youth left home for a life at sea, which would be his all-consuming passion for the next thirty-four years as it carried him off to the uttermost ends of the earth.

  In Whitby, Cook apprenticed with shippers in the coal trade. Time off was spent studying navigation, astronomy, and mathematics, until he was self-educated to a level of expertise. Eventually, in 1755, he joined the Royal Navy. So honed were his skills at conquering the sea that in barely two years he had advanced from able seaman to master’s mate to boatswain and finally to master in charge of running a ship.

  During the Seven Years War, a bitter conflict between Britain and France over which Crown would reign supreme in North America, Cook mapped the hazardous St. Lawrence River for the Battle of Quebec, and later Newfoundland, to create charts that were so good that they would be used for more than a century. When, in 1768, the British decided to send an expedition to the newly discovered South Seas island of Tahiti so that scientists could observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, the Royal Navy selected Cook as the seaman to sail them there. His secret mission, however, was to thwart France, which, having been pushed out of North America and India, was seeking to annex new territories in the unknown vastness of the South Pacific. Up for grabs was a mythical land, the huge Southern Continent, which no one had seen.

  Cook set sail from Plymouth on August 23 with Sir Joseph Banks (of the cannibal comment) and ninety-two men. The Endeavour was the kind of ship that Cook knew best, a Whitby collier designed for hauling coal. With its wide bows, raised poop, and square stern, the bark was a stubby little vessel, but what it lacked in sleek beauty it made up for in sea-keeping qualities.

  Cook’s ship was all brawn. />
  Crossing the equator, the Endeavour headed for South America. As the ship approached Cape Horn, at the southern tip of that continent, the weather turned nasty. An icy gale pitched and rolled and yawed and corkscrewed the Endeavour about, draining the men of energy from bracing themselves against the motion. Finally, on January 24, 1769, Cook sailed around the Horn and into the South Pacific. From that date on, the history and future of the South Seas changed forever.

  Cook arrived in Tahiti on April 13, after a voyage from Britain of eight months. What he found was a sun-drenched paradise of blue skies and bluer lagoons, where white torrents gushed down forest-green slopes and palms nodded lazily over sandy beaches. Tahitian females practiced free love, so while the scientists set about observing the transit of Venus, the Endeavour’s crew were off fucking their brains out. Two of Cook’s men—Gibson and Webb—took leave of their senses, and when it was time for the ship to sail, they deserted to the hills with their girlfriends. The method Cook used to force their return was to seize half a dozen local chiefs and hold them hostage until the Tahitians betrayed both deserters. Once the men had been handed over for punishment, the Endeavour set sail with two agreeable islanders, Tupia and his boy servant, Tiata. Launched with a rousing send-off by hundreds of Polynesian canoes, Cook ventured out into the great unknown.

  The ship sailed fifteen hundred miles south to forty degrees latitude without sighting the mythical Southern Continent. The weather was abominable in the Roaring Forties, so, having reached the limit imposed by the lords of the Admiralty, Cook turned north and west. On October 7, the British spotted land. The ship was off the east coast of New Zealand. Hoping for a welcome like the one they had received in Tahiti, the first Europeans stepped ashore—and met venomous hostility from the Maoris. With tongues stuck out as their way of expressing defiance, armed warriors with tattooed faces and feathers in their hair attacked Cook and his men. In a series of bloody skirmishes, the British shot ten Maoris, then were shocked to learn that their adversaries ate enemies killed in battle.