As the Mountie focused his flashlight on this pitiful gallery, the beam picked out the picture of a pale-skinned little girl. She was the only Caucasoid kid among the Mongoloid faces, and DeClercq had no doubt who she was. At about the same time as the closing of Mission’s residential schools had deprived the dirty old clergyman of his dormitory hunting ground, the deaths of his son and his daughter-in-law—the new blood in charge of the mission—in that highway crash had delivered their orphaned child into his perverted hands. A pedophile is a pedophile for life, and without another channel for his lust, he had probably first raped her at a very tender age.
“Jesus Christ!” swore DeClercq as his foot hit bottom.
Caught in the pool of the flashlight beam as he swept it around the black hole to get his bearings was a figurative bed of nails upon which lay the decomposed remains of the lecherous old debaucher. Half-skeleton, half-mummy, the missionary was stretched out, face up, in his tattered Bible-black suit on a foul mattress crusted with dried juice that had seeped from his desiccated flesh. The pants were torn open at the crotch to get at his groin, and what had been removed from between his legs with the vicious slice of a knife now hung on a crucifix that had been turned upside down on the wall over the head of the bed.
Approaching the corpse, the chief focused the beam on details.
The bony wrists of the missionary were lashed behind his back in the manner of the Hanged Man.
From his emasculated groin jutted a stiff black dildo instead of his penis, the artificial phallus fastened to the bed frame as if erect.
The lower jaw of the fleshless face hung open in a silent scream at whatever had immediately preceded his death. The scalp and its hair, however, still clung to the skull.
That the old reverend had rotted away down here in a hellhole of his own making was obvious. But DeClercq grasped that he had descended into the hidden depths of another psyche as well—that of the old man’s granddaughter.
When God turned a blind eye to her repeated rapes at the hands of his pious servant, the child had turned to the elder gods of a faith antithetical to the one in which she was baptized. Years later, the Goth had wreaked revenge down here on her tormentor, and then blasphemed the church up above by conjuring the occult realm.
Down this well of her warped psyche, the Goth would sink every so often with her hammer and nails to assume the missionary position of psychosexual release. Here, with her legs spread wide and straddling the dildo, the Goth would fuck herself as frantically as her tormented soul demanded, and having recreated the ritual of abuse, she would hammer nail after nail into the old man’s dead head.
The crown of his cracked skull had been replaced God knows how many times with a substitute of wood that had been covered with the scalp torn off the original bone.
Was she hammering in Christ’s crown of thorns?
Was she hammering in the nimbus of the Hanged Man?
Perhaps it was both.
DeClercq couldn’t tell.
But one thing was certain in his mind.
The Goth was out there, swimming with her own deep-seated monsters way beyond the reef.
BEYOND THE REEF
Tangaroa
Zinc has time-traveled back to 1779 in Kealakekua Bay, and here he sits in his red serge, among a squad of Royal Marines sporting the same color, in a rowboat that bobs in the surf just offshore as Captain Cook shoots a Hawaiian dead on the beach. What a change in the natives’ attitude since Cook was first here earlier on the voyage, when he discovered this group of islands in the North Pacific while on his way to America to search for the elusive Northwest Passage. He called them the Sandwich Islands, for the Earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, and when he landed on the beach of this Polynesian paradise, the Hawaiians fell flat at his feet as if he were a god.
The Arctic thwarted Cook as it had all others before him, so to loll away the winter in pleasanter climes before venturing to the West Coast for another attempt at the passage, the Resolution and the Discovery returned to the Sandwich Islands. What a spectacular sight it was for those tall ships to sail into Kealakekua Bay. They were met by nine thousand Hawaiians in fifteen hundred canoes, with hundreds more on surfboards or swimming in the sea like a school of fish, backed by thousands more lining the beaches. The return of Cook had lured the king himself out to greet him, and when the captain was escorted ashore by Koa, the high priest, Hawaiians by the thousands fell prostrate before him.
With the benefit of hindsight, Zinc grasps the undertones. Legend has it that Lono, the god of peace, happiness, and agriculture, sailed away from these islands long ago, with a promise that one day he would return to Hawaii. News of the white man’s landing a year ago had spread, so all the islanders were here to welcome their god home. What Cook failed to grasp at the ritualistic ceremony that followed his return was that he was being deified.
Unfortunately, the whites overstayed their welcome. The crews of the two ships ate a lot of food, while the continuing presence of this god in their midst diminished the power of the king and his priest. The island returned to normal once the ships sailed away, but now a damaged mast brought them back, and what was once worship of Cook turned to hatred.
A stolen rowboat was the catalyst for this clash. Cook reacted with the same tactic he’d used with good results in the South Pacific when some of his crewmen deserted on the first voyage. He went ashore with armed marines and seized the Hawaiian king to hold him hostage until the boat was returned.
At the moment, as Zinc sits bobbing in the surf offshore, Cook has managed to abduct the king as far as the beach, where he is currently surrounded by two or three thousand Hawaiians intent on stopping him. In a show of force meant to keep the mob at bay, the captain shoots one of the islanders dead with his pistol. Such is the awe in which Cook is still held by the natives that none will touch him face to face. But when he turns to summon this rowboat into shore, Cook is clubbed from behind by Koa, the high priest. That blow exposes the false god for the mortal he really is, and now the enraged islanders fall upon Cook in droves, stabbing him repeatedly with their knives as he flounders in the shallows.
The marines in the boat with Zinc open fire.
The fighting onshore is hand-to-hand.
The surf around them reddens from the bloodbath.
Zinc must have time-warped forward to escape from the battle, for suddenly he is standing on the deck of the Resolution six days later. Hoping to save the island from shelling by the ships’ cannons, Koa has delivered all that can be found of Cook’s remains. The Hawaiians’ belief that some of his bones might hold magical power resulted in the dismemberment of the captain’s body, so what the British have for burial at sea is Cook’s skull, some leg and arm bones, and his hands. That the remains are genuine is proved by one of the hands, which was disfigured way back in 1764 by a powder horn explosion off Newfoundland.
It occurs to Zinc as he stares at Cook’s bones that there is a moral here: when true believers believe they have encountered the supernatural in the real world, that break with reality can get you killed …
Too many bones.
For with each echo of that moral in his mind, Zinc sees the bones in front of his eyes double in number, until he’s engulfed by them …
Throbbing pain at the back of his head kept blurring the Mountie’s vision, but eventually it focused on the scads of skulls around him—each one lit up like a jack-o’-lantern, with candles in its eye sockets and slack-jawed mouth—covering the walls, lining the pillars, and molded into a throne.
This nightmare that was the Kingdom of Bones turned darker when Zinc tried to move. His wrists were tied together in the small of his back. He had been dragged from the mouth of the tunnel, where the blow to his head had occurred, across the floor of the skeletal cavern to the center of the marae. Here he lay, face up, like some impending blood sacrifice to the elder gods. And once he realized that one of his legs had been tied across the other to mimic the Hanged Man, Z
inc grasped that a sacrifice was exactly what he had become.
But a sacrifice for whom?
Still dazed, he looked around.
And that’s when he glimpsed her, lurking like a trapdoor spider in the darkness of one of the tunnels. Only as she skulked out of the wormhole and into the flickering glow cast by the skulls did he spot the hammer in one hand, the fistful of nails in the other, and the diver’s knife gripped in her teeth like a pirate’s cutlass.
The Goth glared down hungrily at her next meal. Did the man meat see her grin behind the horizontal blade? Clang! She dropped the hammer to one side of his head. Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink … She let the fistful of nails rain down to the other. Then, crouching, she withdrew the blade from between her teeth, letting it squeeeak like fingernails scraping on a blackboard as she tugged it sideways across her enamel. The cop winced from the nerve-shredding noise and tried to cower farther away as she slit the side of his trunks. A firm yank whipped his swimsuit off like a diaper from a baby.
“There,” she said. “That’s better.”
A few strokes and the Mountie was rock hard in her hand. As hard as her grandfather used to get in his living years, and as hard as the dildo that now jutted up from his ghastly remains.
“It’s no use trying to fight it. You’re no match for Viagra. That’s a powerful cocktail coursing through your veins. Viagra is formulated for limp dicks. It works by boosting the blood supply to flaccid flesh. Give it to a virile stud in the overdose that I forced down your throat, and the result is that your cock will still be stiff long after you’re gone.”
The Goth bent down and bit into the Mountie’s chest. She ripped a morsel of flesh away from one of the lacerations he had gained during his grim squeeze through the makatea crawlway.
“You taste good.”
Blood dribbled down the chin of the cannibal queen.
“You’re trying to piece it together. I see it in your eyes. You fear you’re going to die without knowing why. Don’t fret. That’s not going to happen. Why? Because the reason you’re here is you. I promised to tell you. That was the deal.
“The only way it all makes sense is by lateral thinking. Don’t look for logic in anything we did other than creating a setup that would lure you here.
“Why kill Romeo Cardoza at the Lions Gate? Sure, the film Bed of Nails created a convenient smokescreen to buy time for the rest of my plan to unfold. And yes, the bar full of hookers and pushers offered us an ideal hunting ground—not to mention the fact that you took off after that other pair all because they sold him the blow the three of us snorted upstairs. No, the real reason for snuffing a Hollywood producer was to bring in the Special External Section of the RCMP. And because you were the cop who had dealt with the Tarot back in the days of the Ripper’s reign of terror on Deadman’s Island, the Cardoza killing was sure to attract you.
“There, the hook was baited.”
The Goth, still stroking Zinc’s engorged penis, turned and blew a gory kiss from her sanguine lips at the skewered remains of Bret Lister, who was slumped against the wall.
“We killed Cardoza, Bret and I. Which gave him the inspiration to write Crown of Thorns and Halo of Flies jointly with Wes, and gave me the inspiration for the paintings you saw—signed by the Goth—in the gallery at the convention.
“Get the picture?” she asked.
“It took a year and a half to put that together. Then, last Friday in Seattle, Wes and I waylaid a man we chose at random, spiking his head upside down on a stake outside Ted Bundy’s house and hanging the rest of him like the Hanged Man at the bottom of the Thirteen Steps to Hell in Maltby Cemetery. Why, you wonder? For two reasons. The similarity with the Cardoza hanging was sure to bring you to Seattle. And with Ted Bundy’s house on the ghost tour and Maltby Cemetery pinpointed in the program, you were bound to end up at the horror convention, where we were waiting for you.
“There, the hook was in.
“Crown of Thorns and his previous psych remand were certain to make Bret your prime suspect. But he had an alibi for Friday night. So that was sure to shift your suspicion to Wes and his Halo of Flies. But when Bret nailed the Cthulhu artist during the masquerade, Wes had an alibi. They couldn’t be in it together. They hated each other too much, as everyone—including you—witnessed in their bitter rivalry at the convention. No way would Bret allow himself to be so humiliated in public unless their literary animosity was real. So the only avenue left for you to smoke out the Tarot killer was to join the Odyssey, which was about to fly off to the Cook Islands.
“We knew you’d go, of course. How could you not? It was already in the papers—if you read between the lines—that you were taking a trip to the South Pacific on forced medical leave. The Cook Islands offered you a chance to kill three birds with one stone. Coming here would keep your boss happy, would allow you to investigate Bret and Wes together in a closed environment, and would let you play the protecting hero in a South Seas romance.
“So here you are. Exactly where I planned. The whole affair, from start to finish, was a trap for you.”
Like all psychotics in a borderline state, the Goth was teetering on the brink. Her words seemed rational, but she struggled to get them out, and the stink oozing out of her betrayed the chemical changes taking place beneath her skin. There was a battle going on inside between Jekyll and Hyde, her latent psychosis threatening to turn florid at any moment, and the outcome of that was bound to be the eating-up of the Eloi surface she wore for the masquerade of so-called reality by the Morlock that was lusting for blood deep in the pit of her brain.
Her crazed eyes locked on Zinc’s drug-swollen penis, and her bloodred lips pulled back from her teeth.
“My, my, Grandpa, what a big cock you have.
“All the better to nail you, Little Red Riding Hood.
“No, no, Grandpa. I’m the one with the nails.”
And then it was gone, that ominous shadow that had passed behind the dilated pupils of her wild, glittering eyes.
“Ssssex,” sibilated the Goth, hissing like that sexual serpent did in biblical Eden. “What won’t a man do if given the opportunity to indulge in his wildest fantasies with the wanton woman of his darkest, deepest desires?
“I met Bret years ago, when he was a lawyer crusading for Native victims of sex abuse at missionary schools. My grandfather was guilty of that when he ran True Gospel Mission. My family had been missionaries among the cannibals on Tangaroa in the 1800s—that’s our first mission church out on the lagoon—so I had heard tales of the Kingdom of Bones for as long as I can remember. After Bret’s breakdown from overwork and his lockup in the psych ward on Colony Farm, we got together and fucked our brains out for mutual therapy. I told him I wished to see this cave, so he brought me here, and that’s when he told me about meeting the Ripper on Colony Farm, and that Jack knew how to open the door to the occult realm.”
The Goth swept her knife hand around to encompass the Kingdom of Bones.
“Have you ever wondered what it’s like to swim beyond the reef? To relinquish the safety of the lagoon that lulls little people to sleep in favor of a journey into the occult realm of the elder gods, a dimension so wondrous in the power it holds over us that reality is but a weak reflection of what it casts away? The Tarot holds its secret. The Magick is in the cards. The Bible is nothing but a shield to protect those who are afraid to look from what they’re afraid to see. Imagine the freedom to be lived if you could cast aside all taboos.
“What would you do for that?
“I’d do anything.
“So back we went to Atiu to head home, and that’s when Bret got struck by lightning, just like in the Tower, the Broken House, card sixteen in a tarot deck. The card denotes sudden change, and that’s what came about. Bret was in the hospital, unable to move. After Bret’s breakdown, Wes had taken over his law practice. Bret had referred the Ripper to Wes as a client, so I phoned Wes from the hospital and he flew to the Cooks. We made arrangements to
get Bret home. Then we stayed on, and for the next two weeks, Wes discovered sex. What it took with him was finding the right combination of drugs. All I asked in return was a favor. Get me in to meet the Ripper.
“That, of course, was easy. Wes made me a paralegal. The Ripper has yet to be tried for the carnage on Deadman’s Island, and periodically he comes up for a fitness review. The psych ward can’t deny him access to his lawyer, or to his lawyer’s paralegal. So I went in under the pretext of working on his case. Since then, there’s been the danger that you might find my name on the Ripper’s visitors’ list. But if so, I figured that would only yank the hook in deeper. When I fed you clues at the horror convention, you didn’t rise to that bait.
“There’s not much more to tell you. The Ripper gave me the key to the occult realm, and Bret and I unlocked the door by killing Cardoza in the right way to sign the symbols in the Hanged Man in blood. Open the wormhole to those wonders and you are ‘born again’ a thousand times more profoundly than any Bible-thumper can grasp. Lovecraft got it onto paper in ‘Pickman’s Model.’ In order to capture the occult realm in your art, you must reflect the experience of witnessing it yourself. I did—and do, whenever I want—and you saw what I see in my painting Morlocks, on display in the Morbid Maze at the Seattle convention. Bret did too. Read his books. Both Crown of Thorns and Halo of Flies come from the other side.
Bed of Nails Page 36