Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “Like me,” said the Ripper.

  “That I can accept. How did you do it? By astral projection back in 1888?”

  “Is that a guess?”

  “Not really. I’ve read your file. You laid out how you did it on the walls of Room 13. Nice touch: Room 13. Here and in Miller’s Court. But there lies the practical problem for me. Going back. Time travel into the future is nothing more than a technological challenge. But time travel to the past undermines the laws of physics.”

  “The grandmother paradox.”

  “Exactly,” said DeClercq. “What happens if I go back in time and shoot my granny dead when she’s a little girl? One consequence is that I will never be born. But if I were never born, how could I go back and shoot my granny dead? If we could tinker with the past, that would undermine every notion we have about cause and effect. That would produce causal chaos. Instead of our actions today influencing tomorrow, our influence would be on yesterday. It’s all very well for you to believe that you have opened a wormhole and can tunnel back and forth through space-time at will. But if I give in to the idea that you can loop back into the past, then every notion I have about the nature of reality and my relationship to the physical universe is overturned. If you can mix up the past, present, and future, what happens to free will?”

  “It doesn’t exist,” said the Ripper. “Except in the occult realm.”

  “Ah.” DeClercq sighed skeptically. “The timeworn debate between astrology and self-determination. Is my destiny sealed, so I have no vote? Or is it in my own hands, so I can alter it if I want to? No, I don’t buy it. Life isn’t mapped out. I’m not following some screenplay written in the occult realm. Time’s arrow points in one direction, and that’s toward the future.”

  The Ripper set the tarot deck down on the table.

  “Pick a card,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The Mountie chose a card from the twenty-two spread out facedown across the surface.

  The Ripper gathered up the rest.

  “I know your card.”

  “How?” asked DeClercq.

  “A glimpse into the future. I saw you turn it over.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “It’s the Hanged Man. The key to time travel. And the key to free will.”

  DeClercq flipped the card.

  It was the Hanged Man.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “But there’s a practical problem. If time can be warped in both directions, why is there only you? If time travel was possible, surely there’d be other time tourists. That’s why you’re not the Ripper. That’s why you’re just a nut.”

  That got to him, as DeClercq had known it would.

  “I’m not the only one!”

  “How do you know?” snapped the Mountie.

  “Because I showed someone how to open the way.”

  “Who?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “I already do. It’s either Bret Lister or Wes Grimmer.”

  The Ripper blinked, suddenly realizing that he had been duped. But instead of exploding in rage over having been thwarted again, the psycho began to giggle. His pores opened wide to fill the room with a gagging stench. The black holes behind his eyes grew more vacuous, and the skin of his face drew in taut. His lips receded to expose his jutting fangs, and the hand that held the phantom food curled toward his mouth, his bony index finger extending to pick at his ivory grin.

  “I have your flesh between my teeth,” the Ripper taunted.

  Then he grabbed the Hanged Man card off the table, stood up, and left the interview room. DeClercq could hear him laughing all the way to Room 13.

  On his way out to the parking lot, the chief stopped at Central Control.

  “I hear you have computer problems,” he said to the security guard. “A virus or worm ate your visitors’ record?”

  “Swallowed it but didn’t digest it,” the man replied. “A tech stuck his finger down the system’s throat, and it coughed up the missing data earlier today.”

  “Check a patient for me?”

  “Give me the name and I can tell you everyone who’s seen him. Plus the date and time.”

  The Mountie gave the guard the Ripper’s real name.

  The guard pulled up the record.

  “Thanks,” said DeClercq, then he returned to his car.

  From the parking lot in front of the psychiatric hospital, the chief placed a call to Special X. He asked the cop who answered to find an address for him, an address that matched a name he’d seen twice today: in the record of the Ripper’s visitors and back at the office on his Strategy Wall in the pinned-up report from Ralph Stein on the World Horror Convention.

  With the address in hand, DeClercq drove through the marshlands on Colony Farm Road until it intersected with the Lougheed Highway. A turn left would take him back to Vancouver, but instead the chief angled right. From here, the road followed the Fraser River inland up its valley, along a route known as the Bible Belt.

  WRATH OF GOD

  Tangaroa, Cook Islands

  Again, the engines revved up to a screaming pitch, and the plane was off down the runway and climbing up into the blue. Seen from the air, Atiu resembled a low-crowned hat with a flat outer rim. It lacked the soaring skyline of volcanic Rarotonga, for the uplands were nothing but a domed plateau. Smack-dab in the center of everything was a big white building with a bell tower in front, the largest mission church in the Cooks. Five limestone roads radiated out like tentacles wrapped around the cluster of five converted villages. The cannibal Rongomatane had built a marae for the first missionaries, and a stone marked the spot—as one did on Rarotonga—where Papeiha had preached the first gospel sermon on Atiu. Back then, human bones had littered Atiuan maraes, but today a hundred tivaevae quilts in as many appliqué colors hung on clotheslines strung across the green common in front of the big CICC church for the current minister to judge.

  The unscheduled flight from Atiu to the deserted satellite island of Tangaroa took less than ten minutes. The only passengers on board were those on the Odyssey. The lights of the cockpit’s instrument panel barely had time to change from orange for takeoff to green for leveling out. No sooner did Zinc hear the Bandeirante’s undercarriage retract beneath the engines than it was time for the wheels to lower. He had to admit that he was falling in love with this Brazilian plane, with its quaint windshield wipers on the outside of the cockpit windows.

  Zinc’s first glimpse of Tangaroa took his breath away. The island itself was a jungle-green volcanic hump surrounded by the eroded remains of an uplifted dead coral reef. Like a string of pearls or blossoms on a lei looping out into the sea, a new reef had formed on one side. The surf-topped necklace, dotted with the sandy islets of a dozen motus, encircled the dazzling turquoise pool contained within the endless blue depths.

  Then up, up, up the magnificent atoll seemed to rise to meet them, until—bump … bump … bump—the plane skipped along a crunched coral airstrip that hadn’t jounced wheels for months, or more likely years. With a whistle, both turbo engines died. One of the pilots emerged from the cockpit to open the door and lower the self-contained staircase. But if Zinc thought that would release him from the fuselage oven, escape was not to be. So witheringly hot was it outside the portal oval that he might as well have been an ant tracked across the ground by a sadistic kid with a magnifying glass. Luckily, the safari hat that had seen Zinc through Africa was designed for this. He plunked it on his head for respite from the glare.

  Ahhh! Shade!

  No need for the kid with the magnifying glass in Bret Lister’s case. The lawyer-turned-writer was already burned out. As he and Zinc lugged the last of the luggage from the hold behind the wing to the edge of what was supposedly a runway, the cop opened a conversation with “This has to be one of the most beautiful lagoons on earth. Hard to believe it hasn’t attracted a resort.”

  “Tangaroa is cursed.”<
br />
  “How do you know that?”

  “I was in the Cooks a few years back.”

  “Doing what?” Zinc asked.

  “Recuperating. After I got out.”

  The words “of the nuthouse” went unsaid.

  “Were you here?”

  “No, on Atiu. Until I was flown to the hospital on Rarotonga.”

  “An accident?”

  “Uh-huh. I got struck by lightning.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Nothing funny about it. All I heard was a noise like the snapping of a twig, then I lost a few seconds of my life. My next recollection is of hitting the ground.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “You saw Atiu. Everyone lives up on that domed plateau. Including tourists. The freshwater supply comes from rain collected and stored in tower tanks. A thunderstorm raged over the island while I was there. It rained so hard that gardens got pummeled flat. The woman who kept the guest house asked me as a favor if I would check the rain gauge for her. I waited for the downpour to subside before I popped an umbrella and went outside. Big mistake. We were in the eye of the storm, with the thunderhead right above, so the next bolt of lightning went straight for the spike of my umbrella. The shortest distance to the ground was achieved by zapping down my spine. Knocked flat, I soon got up and moved around for half an hour as if I had escaped unscathed, then I collapsed and couldn’t move a muscle for three weeks.”

  “Was that in the Raro hospital?”

  “Yeah. They flew me there to recuperate from my recuperation on Atiu.”

  “How’d you get home?”

  “I sent for Wes. The Law Society had him looking after my clients while I was suspended. That was before we had a falling-out. So that fucker flew in to take care of me, and instead of accompanying my crippled body back home, he put me on a plane by myself and took three weeks off to skin-dive in the Cooks.”

  “On Tangaroa?”

  “Ask him. But I doubt that. This place is cursed. It’s not on tourist maps.”

  “Cursed how?”

  “Ghosts, to start. Do you have any idea how many people were killed, butchered, and eaten here?”

  “No,” said Zinc.

  “Perhaps thousands. Then after the Christian missionaries flooded in, the Bible-thumpers who took control of Tangaroa turned it into a leper colony.”

  “True Gospel Mission?”

  “Uh-huh,” grunted Bret. “The threat of leprosy is a biblical curse. It’s like that island in Hawaii.”

  “Molokai,” the Mountie supplied.

  “Right. Father Damien, the Martyr of Molokai. Well, that proves the curse, eh? Even with Jesus as his savior, the priest still succumbed to leprosy. Same here. They might as well have staked a skull and crossbones on the beach. And Lord knows they had enough of those to use.”

  “Did True Gospel own the island?”

  “No one owns land in the Cooks. It belongs to the Cook Islanders. It can’t be bought and sold. The best you can do is lease it from them for a maximum number of years.”

  “Does True Gospel still hold the lease?”

  “I have no idea. But from what I heard on Atiu from the guy who sold me the bad beer, Tangaroa is still cursed. Archeologists from Japan came here to study the marae, and they all came down with dengue fever on the dig. Of course, they may have got that on Rarotonga, but it makes a better story if it was here.”

  Damn, thought Zinc. I forgot to buy DEET.

  “Did the lightning strike have any after-effects?”

  “Yes,” said Bret. “I see things.”

  “What sort of things?”

  “Read my novels,” he said.

  Crossing the makatea was like treading on shattered glass. Bret Lister was in a talkative mood born of nervous tension—every so often, the muscles of his jaw would clench spasmodically—so Zinc let him ramble in the hope that Bret might give something away. The jilted man who “saw things” explained that Tangaroa is a geological anomaly. Eleven million years ago, it began as a volcano cone that rose out of the sea. Over time, the pyramid eroded and slowly sank, while coral grew on the submerged rim to form a reef. Then two million years ago, Rarotonga, the youngest island in the Cooks group, was born from volcanic paroxysms that caused a buckling of the adjacent seafloor. That upheaval raised Tangaroa above sea level, and it left the fringing coral reef high and dry to transform itself into the rugged and holey makatea beneath their feet. However, unique among the Cook Islands, Tangaroa tilted, and the seafloor on the downside created a new coral atoll with a string of sandy islets ringing the turquoise lagoon seen from the plane.

  “Watch your step,” Bret warned, “or you’ll be cut to ribbons. Fall and you’ll land on a bed of razors.”

  “It looks like rock.”

  “It isn’t. It’s millions of skeletons. Do you know how coral reefs form?”

  “Yes,” Zinc replied. “Small jelly-like polyps secrete limestone casings around themselves. Their exoskeletons combine to create coral formations.”

  “Even the minutest of creatures can build a gigantic structure. The Great Barrier Reef of Australia is the largest structure on earth. It can be seen from outer space. Working together, polyps have built a home for great white sharks. Weird creatures, polyps. Each has a central mouth surrounded by tentacles. Sound familiar?”

  “Cthulhu,” said the Mountie. “Lovecraft’s monster.”

  “How well do you know the Mythos?”

  “Just the basics,” Zinc lied.

  “See the parallel?”

  “No. Sketch it for me.”

  “Cthulhu dwells in the corpse city of black R’lyeh, which is sunk deep in the dark depths of the Pacific. There, he sleeps entombed with the others of his monstrous race. Someday, we’re told, that city will rise above the waves, and the call of Cthulhu will summon the widespread members of his cult to the uplifted corpse city so that we might throw open the black door behind which he slumbers. Freed, the elder gods will slay their way around the world until they have retaken the realm from which they were once expelled.”

  “We?” said Zinc.

  “Learn to role-play, Chandler. There are millions of stories around us waiting to be told. But if your mind’s eye can’t see them, you’ll never be a writer. To be a writer of fiction, you must see the unseen. So tell me what we’re standing on.”

  Bret stamped his foot on the makatea.

  “Dead coral?”

  “No, R’lyeh. Underfoot is the corpse city where Cthulhu sleeps, lifted up from the bottom of the sea.”

  “So where’s Cthulhu?” Zinc asked, playing along.

  “In his cave.”

  “What cave?”

  “Inside the makatea. Think about it. We’re standing on limestone. After this reef uplifted, the polyps died and were flushed away, leaving holes like in Swiss cheese. What remained behind to fossilize were their exoskeletons, now as hard as rock and as sharp as knives. Stub your toe on the makatea and you’ll lose it. The volcanic core of Tangaroa is higher than down here. What happens to runoff when it rains or there’s a hurricane? Water runs into the dead end of this makatea ring, and it has to burrow and erode a tunnel to the sea. The result is that the dead coral becomes riddled with caves.”

  “I don’t see any.”

  “You will when we land on the beach. The Eyes of Tangaroa stare at the lagoon.”

  He’s been here before, Zinc thought. I feel it in my bones.

  The Mountie recalled his first glimpse of Bret Lister at the World Horror Convention, when this human lightning rod staked his claim to the Cthulhu model. He also recalled the dead sculptor, who’d had all those nails hammered into his face to fashion the maw of Cthulhu in a pincushion of human flesh.

  Role-playing was one thing.

  Acting out was another.

  So now Zinc knew whodunit.

  The psycho who “saw things.”

  The Lovecraft obsessive.

  The barman who served spiked bee
r.

  The motive was easy: Bret was psychotic. By definition, he had suffered a break with reality. First, the lawyer had lost sight of the dividing line between what was real and what was paranoid delusion, and his outburst in court resulted in a custodial remand to Colony Farm. There, he had come under the evil influence of the Ripper and his psychotic theories of the occult realm. Upon being released, Bret had taken that secret with him back into the world. Then, while convalescing in the Cook Islands, he had been struck by a bolt of lightning akin to the wrath of God, and that bolt not only fried his brain but also made him believe that he was given a second sight to gain glimpses into the Lovecraftian landscape of another dimension.

  Like Cthulhu’s realm.

  Or Rongo’s realm.

  Or the realm of the elder gods.

  Seeing is one thing. Experiencing is another. Bret had inserted the Ripper’s Hanged Man key into the lock of the door to the occult realm by hanging the Hollywood producer Romeo Cardoza upside down in the room at the Lions Gate. Did Petra Zydecker team up with Bret for the North Vancouver murder? Were they the couple having three-way sex with Cardoza when someone pounded the crown of thorns—the nimbus of nails—into the American’s skull? Or did Bret waylay Cardoza after the producer had snorted coke and cavorted as the sandwich spread between Gord and Joey, the drug-pushing pimp and the lounge lizard hooker who died in the dead-end chase?

  Either way, Zinc was now convinced that Bret was the North Van killer.

  The experience of having committed that murder had obviously inspired Bret to write Crown of Thorns. The year and a half needed to finish the manuscript and get it published had created an interval that had also been sufficient for Bret’s ex-partner—Wes Grimmer—to write a rival thriller—Halo of Flies—about Bret’s Hanged Man murder, and to have it published in the same month by a more prestigious house.

  A weak reed anyway, Bret Lister snapped.

  So why the Hanged Man murder in Seattle last Friday night? And why the separate displays of the corpse—spiking the head upside down in front of Ted Bundy’s house and hanging the headless body upside down at the foot of the Thirteen Steps to Hell in Maltby Cemetery? Was Bret hoping to rectify an error he thought he had made in signifying the Tarot symbols in North Vancouver? Or was that just a madman’s crazy way to promote his novel? Or—because Bret had an alibi for that murder—did he hope to frame Wes Grimmer for the crime?