Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “Amen,” punctuated Wes.

  “Having converted Atiu, Williams set sail for Mauke and Mitiaro with Rongomatane in tow. The last time the cannibal chief had landed on their shores, here’s how those inhabitants ended up. This passage is from William Wyatt Gill, one of the early missionaries in the Cooks. I call it the shitty end of the stick.”

  A third rummage in her black bag produced a clip of photocopies. Handed one, Zinc read:

  It was customary to prepare the body in this wise: The long spear, inserted at the [anus], ran through the body, appearing again at the neck. As on a spit, the body was slowly singed over a fire, in order that the entire cuticle and all the hair might be removed. The intestines were next taken out, washed in sea-water, wrapped up in singed banana leaves (a singed banana-leaf, like oil-silk, retains liquid), cooked and eaten, this being the invariable perquisite of those who prepared the feast. The body was cooked, as pigs are now, in an oven specially set apart, red-hot basaltic stones, wrapped in leaves, being placed inside to ensure its being equally done. The best joint was the thigh. In native phraseology, “nothing would be left but the nails and the bones.”

  “Given the choice between that and Christianity,” said Petra, “how eager do you think the cannibalized residents of Mauke and Mitiaro were to convert?”

  “That fast,” Yeager said, snapping his fingers.

  “With those three islands converted, Williams was ready for more. Rongomatane had attacked Rarotonga several times, so he had Williams sail his ship around to the same beach on which Cook’s crew had landed almost fifty years before, to line up the stern with the rock that’s still in the lagoon. Off they sailed in a beeline—”

  “To Black Rock,” completed Zinc, “where Papeiha waded ashore with the Bible held over his head and cooked that banana on the burning idol of the ariki of Rarotonga.”

  “Banzai!” said Pigeon, the cry of the kamikaze. “There was no stopping the guy.”

  “Sure there was,” Petra replied, rotating her hand as if barbecuing a roast on a spit. “Eventually, everyone’s luck runs out. The pagan gods got their revenge in 1839, when Williams was killed and cannibalized on the Vanuatu island of Erromanga.”

  “Or what about Charles Darwin?” Grimmer said. “He sailed through the Cooks on that famous voyage of the Beagle in … in … When was it that he was here, Petra?”

  “It was 1835, I believe.”

  “The Origin of Species. The Descent of Man. Earthshaking books came out of that trip. The law of the jungle. Survival of the fittest. What if Darwin went ashore to explore the flora and the fauna of these islands, and what if the island he selected was one of the stragglers yet to be converted? Is that what inspired his theories? Did he write another book about his adventures, a book he had yet to publish at the time he died, a book that was suppressed for some mysterious reason, and only now has come to light because you found it?”

  “I like that,” Zinc said.

  “If you want it, it’s yours,” offered Wes.

  “Put that in writing?”

  “You bet.”

  “If I was a writer,” Petra said, “the tale I would tell is about a cult that challenges the blue laws. No sooner did they convert the cannibals in the Cooks than those London missionaries imposed a Christian police state. The people on Rarotonga lived inland, so the zealots uprooted their villages and moved them to the coast, where each could be controlled by the ring of churches we saw. Here on Atiu, the local villagers lived near the coast, so they were hauled inland around a central church, and that’s why they all dwell on five landlocked streets today. A street for each village. Like a five-armed octopus.”

  Wes held up the map again and jabbed the center of Atiu with his finger as Petra elaborated.

  “Christianity always comes with a price. That’s why they pass the collection plate around. Along with the gospel came smallpox, whooping cough, dysentery, measles, and flu. The population shrank by two-thirds. Cook Islands’ mourning was something to behold. Death was referred to as ‘going into the night.’ When someone ill died, relatives went berserk. They gashed their flesh with sharks’ teeth until blood gushed down their bodies. They blackened their faces and cut off their hair. They knocked out some of their front teeth as a token of sorrow. They shrieked a death wail until they lost their voices. And they shuffled about in grave clothes dyed red with candlenut sap and dipped in the black mud of a taro patch to give them a reeking stench that was symbolic of the putrescent state of the dead.

  “The missionaries, of course, knew a good thing when they saw it. So there they stood, in the midst of all that suffering, with Bibles held high as they beseeched the islanders to cast out sin and join the church to drive away the plagues.”

  “Praise the Lord!” Wes intoned, mocking an evangelist at a revival meeting.

  “And what about the blue laws?” Petra said. “What was it like to live in a Christian heaven on earth? Sunday—the Sabbath—was strictly observed. A curfew was levied at seven in the evening to force people to pray at the church. Since Sunday was a time for worship and nothing else, children were banned from playing and making noise of any kind. Instead, they were corralled in Bible schools and had to learn the Old and New Testaments by heart. Sunday observance was so strict that it was illegal to walk from one village to another, and food for the Sabbath was cooked on Saturday so smoke wouldn’t desecrate the air.”

  “Praise the Lord!” Wes repeated, banging the map as if it were a Salvation Army drum.

  “Dancing was prohibited. Tattooing was outlawed. And as for sex, that became tapu. It was illegal for an unmarried woman to be pregnant. An unmarried couple who slept together were paraded up the main street to the beat of a gong, in front of a missionary who denounced their offense. A man who strolled with his arm around a woman after dark was forced to carry a torch in his other hand. The blue laws were enforced by a system of paid snitches. Fines imposed on sinners were split between police and judges. Policing became such lucrative work that one of every six people was a cop on the take.”

  “Praise the Lord!” extolled Wes.

  “Christ!” said Petra, flashing with anger. “Have you any idea what it’s like to live under a jackboot like that? My dad was a holy-roller, so I know only too well. It makes you want to lash out at whoever grinds you down. The missionaries had free rein in the Cooks, until the British took formal control in 1888.”

  The year of Jack the Ripper, Zinc thought.

  “As soon as word got out that there were souls to save down here, they all came stampeding in to lasso their share. The London Missionary Society became the CICC, the Cook Islands Christian Church, still by far the largest denomination. Others include Roman Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Assembly of God, Baha’is, and Apostolic Revival Fellowship.”

  “You missed one,” Bret said, a voice from the wilderness.

  “No,” said Petra. “I saved them for last. True Gospel Mission was the harshest of all. They turned Tangaroa into a leper colony. If I was a writer, my story would go like this: In came the Bible-thumpers to battle the elder gods. By desecrating Tangaroa with disease, they not only defiled the gods’ sacred marae, but also spawned a cannibal cult bent on revenge. For generations, the insult has passed from parent to child in the form of a tattoo that is etched on each successive throat, and now is the time to settle the score.”

  “I’ll write it!” enthused Pigeon.

  “First come, first served,” she said.

  “Okay, folks,” Wes said. “Time to go back in time.” Their unscheduled flight to Tangaroa had just been called.

  “The new ariki,” Bret grumbled venomously.

  “Taunga, Bret. Taunga. That’s more my style. Why go for half the power if you can have it all?”

  “What’s a taunga?” Pigeon asked, busily scribbling notes. Revved up by the plot that Petra had outlined for him, the paper-pusher pursued his ticket out of law.

  “The taunga was a
god-box. The priest who talked to the gods. He would go into convulsions to communicate with them. On returning to a rational state, the god-box would voice the gods’ will. If he declared that the gods no longer lived in the ariki, that was the end of the current leader’s reign. Since there was no appeal from the word of the priest—after all, it was the will of their gods—the taunga’s mana was more powerful than the ariki’s.”

  “The power behind the throne.”

  “Right. As I am to Bret. After he shamed himself by poisoning us with bad beer, the gods abandoned Bret to reside in one of you. Which one will be revealed by sacrifice on the marae.”

  “Hey, Wes.”

  “Yes, Bret?”

  “See this, pal?”

  The taunted lawyer-turned-writer held up his ballpoint pen. For an instant, Zinc thought Bret Lister was going to stab himself in the Adam’s apple. But instead, the insulted man marked his throat with an ink streak black enough to be a tattoo.

  As Zinc was about to leave the terminal hut for the plane, Petra crooked her finger to summon him. Tearing the top sheet off her sketching pad, she handed it to him and walked away.

  The illustration was a cartoon along the lines of those produced by Gahan Wilson for Playboy magazine. Macabre, but with a wicked sense of humor. The skillful drawing depicted a stretched-out pig skewered on a barbecue rod turning over a fire. The pig—a play on the sixties epithet for a cop—had Zinc’s features caricatured in porcine form, a Mountie’s Stetson plunked over its ears. Down in the bottom corner was the cutest little cannibal you ever saw: Petra Zydecker bare-breasted and wearing a grass skirt. A knife in one hand, a fork in the other, she licked her tongue around her lips with gourmet gusto.

  The cartoon’s caption read “Long Pig.”

  The words in the dialog bubble that ballooned from the cannibal’s mouth were “I may just eat you up.”

  TIME’S ARROW

  Port Coquitlam

  Late yesterday, a package had arrived at Special X. In it was Det. Ralph Stein’s report, complete with backup documents and photographs, on the current status of the Seattle investigation. DeClercq had spent last night and this morning in front of the Strategy Wall in his office, pinning witness statements and forensic reports to the corkboard as a rapidly expanding collage gobbled up adjacent space. Colored threads connected links like a spider’s web, and by the time the chief was finished, he could have been Spider-Man; but if so, his plate would have had no juicy fly on it for dinner, because the Seattle dragnet as yet had caught no one inside its meshes.

  There was lots of buzzing, but nothing stuck to the glue.

  And so it was, this afternoon, just after lunch with the pathologist Gill Macbeth, that DeClercq had taken his aging Benz out for a spin. Driving east on the Lougheed Highway as it wormed inland up the Fraser Valley along the north bank of the river, he’d squinted through the gray drizzle that blanketed this dismal day until he spotted the line of diminishing elms that stretched south to the water. The Benz had turned off the highway at Colony Farm Road. Flanked by the mushy marsh of the Fraser and overhung by dripping trees, his car had humped the bumpy pavement of the spookiest mile on the West Coast until it parked at the riverside hospital for the criminally insane.

  “It’s the Ripper, Chief. It all goes back to him.”

  That’s what Zinc had told DeClercq on Monday morning, after the inspector returned from Seattle. The chief had hoped that Stein’s report would throw up a lead for Special X to pursue. It hadn’t, so the Mountie was here to time-travel back for a motive.

  The nurse who opened the unlocked door to the interview room to usher in the patient he had escorted from Room 13 in Ashworth 2 was an effeminate fellow in his forties named Rudi Lucke. Rudi gave the chief a glance of casual assessment, then stepped aside so his charge could enter the eight-by-ten-foot cubicle with its bare-bones furniture. Though he didn’t know it, DeClercq sat on the same seat the Goth had occupied a year and a half ago, when the pair of like-minded psychotics conspired to set the trap that was about to snap in the South Pacific.

  DeClercq could smell him before he could see him.

  The odor of rancid goat cheese was a stench the Mountie had sniffed before. On more than one occasion, he’d been in the presence of a borderline psychotic when the suspect’s latent madness turned florid in front of his senses. He had seen that shadow of vacancy pass behind the psycho’s eyes, had smelled that metallic stench seep from his pores, and had felt the hackles rise on his own skin, for he knew he was face to face with the darkest threat in the world: a human mind powered with an awesome potential to kill and destroy, but with no rational being to keep it under control.

  It had been years since the chief last faced the Ripper. From one side of the doorjamb, he moved into the frame, and the first thought DeClercq had was, He’s cannibalizing himself. Like a terminal anorexic, the Ripper was skin and bones, an animate human skeleton who moved into the room. Little wonder, for he seemed to eat imaginary food. In one hand he gripped a tarot deck that was real enough, but the bony fingers of his other hand gripped empty air. Whatever he thought he held in it, the meal was delicious, for as he lowered his scrawny body in baggy blue sweats onto the chair opposite DeClercq’s, he sucked the juice out of his phantom food with lip-smacking relish.

  The nurse shut the door.

  The stench permeated the room.

  “I’m Chief Superintendent DeClercq.”

  “I know who you are.”

  The Mountie set the two nonfiction books he had published down on the table between them.

  “I’m not here about your case. I’m here about a book.”

  “A book about what?”

  “Jack the Ripper.”

  “You’re writing a book about me?”

  “That depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “Whether or not you’re the Ripper.”

  “I am.”

  “Prove it.”

  The psycho held out the nonexistent food in his empty hand and flashed his werewolf fangs.

  “What’s that?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s a human heart.”

  “Whose heart?”

  “Mary Kelly’s,” the Ripper said, biting into the fantasy flesh and tearing off a piece. Both pupils had blown their irises to form black holes that sank forever into his diseased brain. So intensely did he concentrate on that internal wonder that the fleshless skin of his skeletal face seemed to be sucked in too. To look at the Ripper was to look into a living skull that was forsaking its hold on life in the here and now in favor of existence in another dimension.

  Could he time-travel?

  Let’s find out, thought DeClercq.

  “The greatest unsolved puzzle in the annals of crime is the identity of Jack the Ripper. Though Scotland Yard mounted an extensive manhunt in the East End, Jack came and went as he pleased, ripping apart five hookers and tearing out their organs. Then he vanished into thin air, and despite the attempts of literary Ripperologists over the years, his identity remains a mystery today.”

  Munch …

  Munch …

  Munch …

  The Ripper chewed and listened.

  “The courts say that you’re too insane to be tried. That’s why we have you locked away in here. You say that you’re Jack the Ripper incarnate, and that you found a wormhole through the astral plane from 1888 to now. If that is Mary Kelly you’re eating—Jack’s fifth and final victim—how did you get her heart unless you can travel back as well? You didn’t have the heart when I arrested you on Deadman’s Island.”

  The Ripper smirked.

  Munch …

  Munch …

  Munch …

  “If you’re insane, I’m wasting my time. If you’re Jack the Ripper, I have a blockbuster of a book to write. So which is it? Are you a nut or the Ripper?”

  DeClercq had thrown the gauntlet down on the table. He paus
ed a moment so the question could sink in. The Mountie knew the history of this Ripper in real life, the psychology of the killer who had trapped and murdered all those writers on Deadman’s Island, so he felt confident that the psycho’s craving for personal worth would compel him to go for the bait.

  “Time travel into the future, that I can accept. All it requires is the means to travel fast enough. Einstein proved that time is elastic. It can be stretched, bent, and warped. He also proved that gravity slows time, that time isn’t fixed. Time is relative. And to top it off, Einstein showed how portals could worm through space-time.”

  The Ripper leaned forward. The hook was in. DeClercq was itching for a chance to jerk the line.

  “Experiments in space have proved Einstein right. Because forces of gravity and speed warp time, time runs faster in space. Atomic clocks on rockets and long plane rides have picked up microseconds. A Russian cosmonaut who spent two years in orbit speeding around the earth in the Mir space station leaped one-fiftieth of a second ahead in time. So if we could find a way to hurtle ahead at a rate anywhere near the speed of light, we could travel through time.”

  “The twin effect,” probed the Ripper.

  “Exactly,” said DeClercq. “A space traveler with an identical twin living on earth blasts off aboard a rocket that flies at close to the speed of light on a ten-year trek to far-off stars. The twin will age a decade in the time his sibling is gone, but the astronaut will be just a year older on his return. In effect, the spaceman has leaped nine years into the future. The result is that he has traveled through time.”