Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  As he crooked his arm and swung behind the stalactite as if it were a square dance partner, Zinc glanced back at the mouth of the cave. Seen from here, the upper and lower speleothems could be fangs in a set of gaping jaws. Where the sunbeams hit crystals in the glistening formations, they sparkled like pearly whites in a toothpaste commercial.

  What was that?

  Another cry?

  The Mountie stepped into the dark.

  The switched-on beam of his flashlight took over from the sun. He was courting suicide by caving in the Cooks with just this single source of light. The rule of thumb was to carry three. Some of the caves through the makatea were known to go on forever. One of them, Teruarere—meaning “jump,” because you had to jump down to get in—snaked into the earth on the island of Mangaia for at least a mile, and probably a lot farther, as no one had ever reached the end. Other caves were festooned with endless chambers. On Mauke, Motuanga Cave—or the Cave of 100 Rooms—extended out toward the sea and under the reef. You could hear the waves crashing above you in the outermost reaches.

  The extent of this cave could be similar to those. Barring a sinkhole where the ceiling had caved in, every vault from here on was born in perpetual blackness and would never see a smidgen of the light of day. With each step Zinc took, the maze would grow more convoluted. The main “going” channel might bifurcate, or branch off. Such multiple passageways might twist, turn, double back, loop, intertwine, and reconnect. Crawlways, fissures, pools, sumps, pits, potholes, and slides might lurk ahead. There are many ways to die in a cave: you can drown, fall, be crushed to death by loose rocks, or simply get lost and starve. So what if he were to drop and smash his only source of light? Or what if the batteries ran out of juice? Here, in the bowels of this island, Zinc would be smothered by a blackout, with no escape but to feel his way out.

  Imagine that.

  Or better yet, don’t. For little fears beget bigger fears and can then spin out of control.

  Especially if your biggest fear is fear of being buried alive.

  What was that?

  Click … click …

  Movement overhead.

  Jerking the beam of the torch up, Zinc thought he spied a bat. That was all he needed: rabies underground. The flashlight struck a stalactite, but it didn’t break. The dripstone rang with a deep organ tone. Flitting past it was a tiny swift-like bird. Called a kopeka, it nested in the caves. When kopekas flew outside to hunt insects, they never landed. Only in here did they rest. By chattering a series of clicks and listening for the echoes, the birds used echolocation to navigate among the dripstones the same way a bat does.

  Click, click, click, click …

  The cave was suddenly alive with birds.

  And there it was.

  Yet again.

  Definitely a laugh.

  Two tunnels led out of the kopeka cavern. Like the bird, Zinc used echoes from the laughter to choose which route to take. There had to be a catchment basin of some sort above, for halfway along the passageway to the next belling-out, water began to drip copiously into the tunnel. By the time Zinc reached a cool grotto that domed above a mineral pool, the floor was a wallow of orange mud. The ooze clung to his runners, letting go reluctantly with slurps, burps, and gurgles. Tree roots and vines hung down from the ceiling like fairy-tale ladders, as if this were a subterranean mimic of Jack and the Beanstalk.

  With no trail of bread crumbs like the one Hansel laid down so Gretel and he could find their way back through the wicked woods from the gingerbread house, and with no ball of string like that Tom Sawyer used as a guide to return him home from his underground adventure, Zinc would have to rely on his own sense of direction. So at every junction along his descent into the belly of Tangaroa, the Mountie glanced back to store a memory of this route in reverse.

  It pays to have been a Boy Scout.

  From here on, the Grimm Brothers’ realm took on a grimmer tone. Eerie apparitions seemed to hover just beyond the reality of the glow of the flashlight. The dripstones closing in on Zinc transmogrified into gargoyle demons. Creeping and crawling, slithering and scuttling in the blackness beyond the beam, cave-dwelling troglodytes skulked in the nooks, unseen by the spelunking Mountie. Protruding from the razor-sharp walls of honeycombed coral skeletons that were hemming Zinc in as he passed along this tube like waste down a cancerous intestine were the fossils of prehistoric denizens of the deep.

  Look at the teeth on that one.

  It made him shiver.

  Deep in the dark zone of this cave system, where the temperature remained constantly cool no matter how hot it got outside by the lagoon, Zinc was on a journey to the center of the earth. The cop knew he was on the right trail from the blood drops and the heel scuffs on the man-made crushed coral path that had smoothed the way in since the end of the flowstone.

  The jolt of suddenly seeing the hacked-off head facing him at eye level in the stygian dark made Zinc jerk back. The hand that held the flashlight brushed against the tunnel wall. Wherever his skin touched the blades of dead coral, a red slit opened into his flesh.

  The flashlight tumbled.

  Smash!

  The beam end broke.

  The lens shattered.

  But not the bulb.

  Gingerly retrieving the torch from the floor, Zinc shone the naked beam into the next cavern. Bill Pigeon’s severed head was mounted upside down on a stake in the same manner as the head displayed outside Ted Bundy’s house. The plucked-out eyes had cried bloody tears down both cheeks, and now the inverted cranium was weeping them down its forehead. The spike of the sharpened stake stuck up out of the neck stump.

  Throughout those Cook Islands with makatea rings, you will find a spook-fest of burial caves. Tiringa ivi—“the throwing away of the bones”—is an ancient Polynesian tradition, for the body is but a mere bundle of bones once the spirit exits. When and why the bones were buried in each cave is an unsolved mystery, for they all date from the prehistoric period before the tall ships arrived. The bones in some of the burial caves are revered as those of the great-great-ancestors of the nearest village. Other bones just rot. But whatever their origin, one thing is for sure. It remains tapu to touch or move the cave bones. Do so and, at the very least, you’ll be cursed.

  This, Zinc discovered, was one of those catacombs.

  The vault he found himself in was circular in shape, with several shadowy entrances to offshoot tunnels. Picking one would be like playing Russian roulette. As the trail of blood drips stopped here with the discarded head, how would the Mountie know which one to choose? It struck him that it had been a while since he had last heard Bret’s unhinged laugh. Sweeping the beam around the floor where it met the circular walls, the Mountie saw dozens of skeletons ringed on the crushed coral, the bones of each, orange from age, gathered into a neat pile crowned by its skull.

  Were these the remains of cannibal kings?

  As if lying in wait for the unwary, a sinkhole sank in the center of the bone chamber. Water had washed away the underlying rock, causing the floor to cave in on itself. The yawning pit looked as if it had been ripped apart. The stake with the head spiked on top was wedged into the cracked seam on the far side of the opening, as if to warn the Mountie of the peril below. Only when he let the torchlight sink into the hole did he see Petra crumpled at the bottom of the rift.

  Her face was bloody.

  Was she dead?

  To find out, Zinc would have to climb down and check. Footholds and handholds indented the walls of the twelve-foot drop. Petra lay on a rocky shelf that surrounded a deep pool seething with a nest of snakelike eels. It was obvious from watermarks on the walls that the level of water in the sinkhole rose and fell with the tide, not an uncommon occurrence in the Cooks.

  However, if Zinc were to descend into the narrow pit and Bret was hiding in one of the offshoot tunnels, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel—literally—for him to emerge with the speargun and shoot down at the trapped Mountie.
r />   Was that the plan?

  Was Petra bleeding bait?

  Suddenly, the threat wasn’t to Zinc or her, for echoing down the chain of caverns and tunnels from back where the wormhole entered the makatea, a bout of madcap laughter burst from Bret. The psychotic had used a parallel path to double back to the beach, and there he had found another quarry.

  “Help!”

  A single cry.

  “Help, Zinc!”

  Repeated.

  The Mountie knew the voice. “Christ, no,” he muttered.

  Yvette was in trouble.

  BIBLE BELT

  Mission

  As DeClercq drove over the Stave River bridge to enter Mission, it began to pour. From the Ripper’s home on Colony Farm, he had followed the Lougheed Highway inland for twenty-five miles, up the north bank of the Fraser River as the sky above the valley glowered darker by the minute. On the edge of Coquitlam, he had crossed the Pitt River just south of Minnekhada Lodge, the site of last week’s red serge dinner, and north of the junction where the Pitt joined the muddy Fraser. From town to town, he traveled along the historical Bible Belt, traversing Pitt Meadows and winding his way eastward through Maple Ridge towns with hayseed names like Haney, Albion, Whonnock, and Ruskin. Then, just before the Plumper Reach part of the Fraser, the black sky was split asunder by a lightning bolt, a fizzing flash that filled the valley, followed seconds later by a deafening boom of thunder and, as the Mountie crested the bridge that spanned the Stave River tributary, this downpour of rain.

  Ah, yes.

  The wet West Coast.

  The Fraser River has always been the aorta of this province, pumping its lifeblood from the Rocky Mountains to the sea. In the beginning, before there was written history, these banks were home to Sto:lo Natives of the Salish Nation for about ten thousand years. The Sto:lo were a peaceful people—the Eloi of that time—who were prey to Kwakiutl cannibals living by the sea, Morlocks who ventured upriver on slave-taking raids to feed the Hamatsas, their cannibal cult, and Baxbakualanuxsiwae—He-Who-Is-First-to-Eat-Man-at-the-Mouth-of-the-River—their flesh-eating cannibal god.

  In 1824, the fur trade lured the Hudson’s Bay Company upriver to build Fort Langley on the south bank. The smallpox and T.B. the white men brought cut the Sto:lo population by four-fifths. In 1858, gold was discovered on the Fraser River, and hordes of white miners came rushing in. To keep the mother lode safe from annexation by America, economic honchos at the fort that same year established British Columbia as a Crown colony. When enterprising miners began a lucrative whisky trade to add rampant alcoholism to the Sto:los’ escalating problems, the call went out for someone to save those helpless “children of the forest” and “savages in the mission fields” from the moral degradation of white men’s vices, and that—Hallelujah, Jesus!—brought the missionaries to Mission.

  The man who had answered that call to serve in the mission fields of the Lord was Father Leon Fouquet of the Roman Catholic Church. Here on the north side of the Fraser in 1862, Father Fouquet founded St. Mary’s Mission, named not after the Virgin Mary, as you might suppose, but after an Egyptian prostitute who did penance for fifty years to atone for her sins. The mission, after all, was established to eradicate immorality.

  Within a year, the Catholics had built a church and a gristmill to foster farming. But if the “children of the forest” were to be permanently weaned from their primitive, heathen culture, what the priests had to do was grab hold of their actual children. Consequently, St. Mary’s Mission also built the first residential school for aboriginal kids in the Crown colony.

  In 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway came chugging in. Among the pioneer settlers who stepped off the trains to populate the town of Mission around St. Mary’s and the railroad station were—to use the Catholics’ term—the Devil’s servants. The Protestant churches they founded sought to save heathen souls too, and soon Mission had Protestant residential schools for Native kids as well.

  “Suffer the little children to come unto me …”

  The downpour pummeled the roof of the Benz and washed across the windshield like a biblical flood as DeClercq forded the gushing streets of this riverside town of thirty thousand souls forty-four miles east of Vancouver. He was hunting for the address that matched the name of the Ripper’s visitor shortly before and after the Hanged Man murder in North Vancouver a year and a half ago. His quest conveyed him to the far side of Mission, on the edge of what is now the Fraser River Heritage Park, site of the old St. Mary’s Mission. He found the number on a sign that had been staked by the curb at the mouth of a driveway that ran along one side of a spacious wooded lot, with what seemed to be an old church buried back in the trees.

  “Private Property.”

  “Keep Out.”

  Those were the words on the sign.

  The chief superintendent parked his car against the curb and climbed out into the deluge. By the time his umbrella popped open, he was soaking wet. Ignoring the warning to “Keep Out” that had been posted at the mouth of the drive, he sloshed toward the old Gothic Revival church that lurked in the trees. Only when he got close enough to survey the entire building did he conclude that the church was now a house. What clinched it was the fact that the church was painted black.

  The desecrated house of God was characterized by pointed arches and vertical lines. The layout was simple and followed the common east-west axis of most chapels. The driveway—more a river than a road today—led DeClercq to the ominous front doors. Crafted from planks interlocked in a herringbone pattern, the door had the heavy hinges of a jail cell, and the knocker was something out of the Satanic Bible.

  What was that Lovecraft text?

  The Necronomicon.

  DeClercq rapped the demonic knob on the knocker plate.

  Rap …

  Rap …

  Rap …

  Not a sound from within.

  Was no one home?

  He stepped back from the black door and squinted up into the rain. The facade was fronted with beveled clapboards. Painted black on black above the Gothic arch of the door were three words composed of letters cut with a fretsaw: “TRUE GOSPEL MISSION.” Above the name that had graced the church in bygone times, a bull’s-eye window of red glass was set into the facade so those inside could look out on the world through its bloodshot Cyclopean stare.

  DeClercq wondered if he was being watched now.

  Soaring above the peak of the steep gabled roof was a stiletto of a steeple that stabbed at the clouds above. Its base was an octagonal tower with vertical slits for the pealing of the bell in the belfry to ring out. Spiked on top was a slender spire that rose to a point crowned with a warped Christian cross.

  Fishing out his cellphone, the chief called Special X.

  “Inspector George,” Ghost Keeper answered.

  “Bob, it’s Robert. I’m out in Mission. Standing in Noah’s flood in front of what used to be an Indian mission church. The steeple has a damaged cross. Ring a bell?”

  “True Gospel Mission?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “If you see an old reverend hanging around, arrest him,” said the inspector. “The task force wants him for a string of sex crimes.”

  “Against girls or boys?”

  “Both,” said the Cree.

  As was all too common in the news these days, B.C.’s network of church-run residential schools had been exposed as hunting grounds for pedophiles. The 1980s witnessed the closing of Native dorms. A royal commission likened the schools to Nazi internment camps. In 1994, the Mounties had launched a huge investigation aimed at ninety identified suspects. Until his promotion to inspector at Special X, Ghost Keeper was second in command of the task force.

  “The cross atop the steeple piqued my memory,” said DeClercq. “I recall you mentioning it during a red serge dinner.”

  “The cross was struck by lightning. The blast twisted the metal. It could have burned down the entire church.”

  “Wh
en was that?”

  “The early nineties. Around the time the old reverend vanished. A week later, the mission school burned down.”

  “Arson?”

  “No doubt. Perhaps a former student.”

  “An open case?”

  “Yep. Both the fire and the reverend.”

  “No idea where he is?”

  “He could be anywhere. We think one of the guys from St. Mary’s is hiding in Southeast Asia.”

  “True Gospel Mission,” said DeClercq. “That doesn’t sound like a mainstream church.”

  “It wasn’t. They were the cannibal priests.”

  “Cannibal priests?”

  “That’s what I call them. True Gospel was recruited in London in the early 1800s as one of the missionary societies that went to the South Seas to convert the cannibals discovered by Captain Cook.”

  “Captain Cook,” DeClercq said. “Zinc should be here.”

  “Yeah, I hear he’s following in Cook’s footsteps. True Gospel established its church on the island of Tangaroa.”

  “Year?”

  “Can’t remember. In the mid-1820s.”

  “What happened?”

  “The mission succeeded. The islanders had no difficulty accepting Jesus and the Last Supper—especially the part where he shared his flesh and blood with his apostles.”

  “It’s a weird concept,” DeClercq agreed. “Holy Communion. The rite of the Eucharist.”

  In Roman Catholic doctrine—they call it transubstantiation—it is not enough that the communicant should believe he is eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ; at the instant of Holy Communion, when the wafer and the wine are consumed, they are said literally to turn into the body of the son of God.

  “Cannibalism is inextricably linked to that Christian rite, so that’s what True Gospel missionaries used to convert the Cook Islands cannibals to their church.”

  “What brought them here?” DeClercq asked.

  “The Kwakiutls. Having transformed the South Pacific’s cannibals into converts, the missionaries set out to accomplish the same result with the North Pacific’s man-eaters.”