Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  “It was Bret’s idea to bring Wes into our unholy bed. Bret got off on the three-way sex we had with Cardoza, and Wes was searching for a father figure to fill the void created by the real one who hanged himself. Any man I fuck stays fucked forever. Once in, Wes wanted in all the way, so we wrote him into the plot we had hatched to lure you here.

  “It was my idea that they split up Bret’s novels, then have a falling-out. Publishing thrives on publicity hooks. You saw the effect the rivalry had at the convention. People flocked to see if Bret would try to punch out Wes. Eventually, the last laugh would be Bret’s, when it was revealed that he was the author of both books. It’s like the guy who sent War and Peace around to several publishers under a different title and got back a slew of rejections. The same with Faulkner’s The Reivers. Or A Confederacy of Dunces. The author killed himself when he couldn’t get into print, and it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. The Hitler diaries? The ‘autobiography’ of Howard Hughes? A dupe or a hoax gets attention.

  “Poor Bret.”

  The Goth glanced back at him.

  “You ruined his master plan.

  “You seem to make a habit of ruining master plans. The hatred the Ripper has for you goes beyond the wrath of God. I grew up on sermons about the fire and brimstone of hell. But that’s nothing compared with what the Ripper wants done to you, and that’s what I owe him for giving me the key. Revenge is a dish best served cold, he says, so I was free to take my time in luring you here.

  “Why here?

  “Look around. You’re in the charnel house of the elder gods. How many souls in torment abandoned these bones? How much mana did the cannibals who created this marae consume in here? Is this not a Magick place, like Jack the Ripper’s Room 13 in Miller’s Court? The symbols in the Hanged Man needn’t be signed in blood at a Magick place to conjure a complete cycle of occult manifestation, but how much more powerful will the experience be if they are? We’re going to find out, you and me, by sacrificing you to the Tarot. For every nail hammered into the nimbus around your head—and they’re short enough to just pierce your brain—we’re going to eat a piece of raw meat cut out of you.

  “All they’re going to find of you is your skeleton. As for me, not a trace will remain in the here and now. I was born out of time in a banal and mundane age, and now that I have all the time in the world, I’m off to live it, and I’m not coming back. Your bones will make the news, and the news will reach the Ripper. And if you concentrate real hard, I’ll bet you can hear his laughter.”

  The Goth began to chuckle.

  The stench of goat cheese permeated the grotto.

  She let go of Zinc’s petrified cock and cast aside the knife. Then she stood up and shucked off the top of her blue bikini.

  “I said that if you played your cards right, you’d get to see my tattoo. Well, here it is.”

  The Goth stripped off the bottoms.

  The lashings that tied Zinc’s hands and feet were those that had appeared to tie Yvette to the throne of skulls. In a bid to buy time so he could free himself from the biting ropes, the Mountie had kept his mouth shut while Yvette played the Ripper’s mouthpiece. But it was of no use. He was bound too tightly. His wrists were cinched together beneath him in the small of his back, and the ankle of his straight leg was fastened to some sort of natural cleat on the floor.

  He couldn’t get loose.

  This nightmare had turned Freudian with the baring of her tattoo. Not a mark marred the rest of Yvette’s flawless body, but her vulva was shaved as hairless as that of a virginal little girl, and etched into the skin around the maw of her vagina was the wormhole mouth of Great Cthulhu—Lovecraft’s elder god—whose tattooed tentacle face seemed to writhe like Medusa’s snakes in place of her pubic hair.

  And now the Freudian monster was going for Zinc’s cock.

  Straddling his groin with her legs spread wide, Yvette squatted down to within an inch of him. She hovered over his Viagra-induced erection like the sexual image in Petra’s Jaws of Death turned upside down. One hand reached out to fetch the hammer that was waiting beside his head, while the other hand selected one of the short nails. The point pricked into his forehead above the center of his eyes, and aiming its trajectory to slam the head of the nail, Yvette raised the hammer.

  “Never judge a book by its cover,” she said. “Didn’t you learn that at the WHC convention? All those normal-looking fans who transformed into the outré for the masquerade. Petra might not remember meeting me at Bible camp, but I remember her. Chilliwack and Mission are cheek by jowl in the Bible Belt. She fit the goth stereotype, so you thought she was a goth. But what’s on the surface isn’t always what’s inside. I used Petra to blind you concerning me. To be a goth isn’t a fashion statement. It’s a state of mind.”

  Her eyes went dead.

  The shadow within was back.

  “Take this, Grandpa!”

  And in went the spike.

  So powerful was the pneumatic force of the speargun that it drove the shaft through Yvette’s head and spiked the barb out between her blue eyes. The force propelled her forward as she crashed down dead on Zinc, so she failed to spike herself on his penis as planned, and the barb jutting out of her plunging face missed spiking his own head by inches. The hammer clanged down to spray chips of the marae at his cheek, and the nail rolled safely off his temple.

  The speargun gripped in Petra’s shaking hands was the same one Zinc had seized from Wes’s corpse and dropped at the exit from the tunnel when Yvette knocked him unconscious. She loomed above the Mountie like a catatonic female William Tell, her heart racing in the cage beneath her heaving breasts and her muscles twitching from tension pent up by what she had done.

  “I killed her,” Petra said, as if doubting the fact. Her tone was flat. Her stare was blank. Her face jerked from side to side.

  “Good,” Zinc soothed. “Now get her off me.”

  Breathing raggedly and moving like a zombie, Petra grabbed hold of Yvette’s hair and hauled her from his body.

  “Untie me,” Zinc said.

  The goth queen didn’t move. Still shuddering, she stood staring at his drug-engorged erection.

  “Easy, Petra. Easy. Let the tension go.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. Let it out.”

  Her eyes were still locked on his penis. She nodded her head. Sex and death were her fantasy. Now they were hers in real life.

  “Let’s work it out,” she said.

  And untied her bikini bottoms.

  “You may not want me,” she said, straddling him. “But I want you,” she added. “And the way I see it, lover. You owe me.”

  EPILOGUE

  STACKED DECK

  Port Coquitlam

  May 23 (Five weeks later)

  He was called the Congo Man by staff who worked at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital on Colony Farm because he was a refugee from war-torn Africa. In fact, the Congo Man wasn’t from the Congo Basin or one of the countries that takes its name from that African river. He was from Liberia—at least as near as immigration authorities could tell, since he had fled to Canada with just the clothes on his back—but Rudi Lucke had experienced Carnival in the Caribbean a few years ago, where he had heard that calypso tune by Mighty Sparrow, and because the lyrics about never eating white meat yet seemed to fit the crime that had brought the landed refugee to FPH, Congo Man was a sobriquet that seemed to sum him up.

  The Congo Man was a King Kong of muscular power. Politically correct that metaphor wasn’t, but in the fantasies that ruled Rudi’s secret life, he saw himself as Fay Wray in the giant’s massive grip. The Congo Man had arms as big as most men’s legs. The Congo Man had a chest that would fit shirts from Jones’s Tent and Awning. The Congo Man had a head that made a bowling ball look the size of a pea.

  The charge against the Congo Man was that he had cooked a child in a canning pot. The trial had become a cause célèbre fueled by the lurid details of the murder: the gi
rl, being white, conjured up countless cartoons from the last century depicting pale explorers bubbling in black cannibal pots.

  From 1989 to 1997, Liberia had drowned in the blood of a vicious civil war. Backed by a culture based on warrior initiation, secret Leopard Societies, and human sacrifice, seven warlords had used every weapon at their disposal—including sorcery, blood-drinking, and cannibalism—to slaughter opponents in merciless bids to seize control of the country. Young fighters, stoned on drugs and alcohol, were encouraged to assimilate the power of the slain by eating parts of them. As for the Leopard Societies, who knows what went down in their secret rites, but the allegation is that after Charles Taylor clawed his way to the top in 1997, he oversaw the torture, dismemberment, and cannibalization of enemy soldiers within the presidential palace.

  The Congo Man, the prosecution had submitted, was not a refugee who left such horrors behind. Instead, because he suffered from a disease of the mind, he came to Canada and cooked up a recipe for disaster that involved a boiled child in a pot.

  So incensed had been the trial judge by the inflammatory facts that she had flouted the law to put the Congo Man away. British Columbia’s courts have a nasty habit of assigning judges with no criminal experience to high-profile cases. The case was a minefield of evidentiary problems. The Congo Man had been one of the homeless living on the streets. The pot in which the girl was cooking was found under a bridge. A dearth of credible testimony linked the Congo Man to the pot. The little there was came from a camp of drunken bums. Not only had the accused refused to confess to police, but he had refused to speak to pretrial psychiatrists as well. The shrinks were left to psych him from the details of the crime, a crime that the Crown could barely pin on him.

  None of that had concerned the trial judge in the least. She’d been a whiz at real-estate transactions in her day, so she knew how to close a tricky deal. In the end—she was the judge—she had shipped the Congo Man to FPH to get his head shrunk.

  All of that, however, had concerned the court of appeal. Less than two hours ago, in a stinging judgment, their lordships had overturned the shaky verdict against the Congo Man and ordered the mental hospital to turn him loose.

  The Congo Man was about to fly over the cuckoo’s nest.

  “You look relaxed,” DeClercq said.

  “I am,” replied Chandler.

  “So tell me, what did you do after that mess on Tangaroa?”

  “Went to Aitutaki. You should see the lagoon. It’s unarguably the most beautiful in the world.”

  “Sandbars?”

  “You bet. As far as your eye can see. And not a Friday footprint to crowd you off.”

  “Blue water?”

  “Turquoise. Aquamarine. Blue’s too mundane a word for what we snorkeled.”

  “We?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We as in she?”

  The inspector winked.

  “Ah, Tantric yoga. No wonder you’re so relaxed. It’s amazing what five weeks of sexual healing in the sun will do.”

  “I’m a new man.”

  “Does she have a name?”

  “Yes. But you’d recognize it.”

  “Is there a future?”

  “I doubt it. We have only one thing in common.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “Not quite. There’ll be a sequel. Same time next year.”

  “In the Cook Islands?”

  “Or somewhere hot. We’re going to meet once a year—and only once a year—until the fun burns out.”

  “So tell me how it happened.”

  “I took someone else’s advice.”

  “What advice?”

  “‘Don’t judge a book by its cover.’”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t. Once she took the cover off.”

  This conversation took place as both Mounties drove from Special X to Colony Farm in the chief’s aging Benz on Chandler’s first day back at work from his South Seas odyssey. It was a glorious spring day of hot sunshine that piqued erotic memories in Zinc’s mind of canoeing out to a pristine sandbar surrounded by dazzling fish to make tropical love under coconut palms that might drop a nut on your head.

  Live dangerously, he thought.

  At the end of the eeriest mile on the West Coast, DeClercq parked his car in the hospital lot. As they climbed out of the vehicle to approach the modern gates, a raven like those that once haunted the Gothic eaves of the old Riverside asylum landed on the fence.

  “‘“Take thy beak from out of my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the Raven, “Nevermore,”’” Chandler quoted from Edgar Allan Poe.

  “He may not agree to see us.”

  “As long as he sees me. I want him to know I’m alive and kicking, despite his puppetry.”

  “It’s no use charging him. He’s not fit to stand trial. The Ripper is about as mad as any man can be. Even if he stood trial, he would have an ironclad defense of insanity. The result is that he’d end up exactly where he is. It’s a dead end, Zinc.”

  “And I’m the end he wants dead. It’s as if the sword of Damocles is poised over my head. There it hangs by a thread, and any day it could fall, depending on the string-pulling by the Ripper.”

  “We can’t deny him a lawyer. He has a right to counsel. FPH is a hospital, not a jail. So we can’t cut him off from access to other patients. And as for that occult tarot deck of his, the Charter of Rights protects his freedom of religion.”

  “We’re thwarted.”

  “The Ripper holds all the cards.”

  “How long do you think till he comes after me again?”

  “Only time will tell.”

  Having cleared security at Central Control in the Birch Unit, they waited for a nurse to come from Ash 2. The nurse who fetched them was Rudi Lucke, but the message he brought from the Ripper was a negative one.

  “He won’t see you.”

  “Where is he now?” Zinc asked.

  “Outside, in the airing court that opens off Ash 2.”

  “Can we get a look at him?”

  “Follow me.”

  They tailed the nurse along a hallway and through a security door, then angled into a corridor with Lexan windows down one side. Beyond that see-through barrier lay a sunny exercise yard, with basketball hoops and a volleyball net for the athletically inclined. For those who wished simply to hang out, there were benches and sun umbrellas.

  “Who’s the black guy?” Zinc asked.

  “We call him the Congo Man. The court of appeal overturned his verdict. He gets out today.”

  “Christ, get in a fight with him and you might as well have Tyson going for your ear.”

  The Congo Man straddled a bench facing the Ripper. If that bench were a teeter-totter, the gravity of the black man would launch the white man into outer space.

  The Ripper turned.

  Had he read Zinc’s mind?

  Or was it their movements in the hall that caught his attention?

  For a moment, the Mountie and the psychotic locked eyes.

  Then the Ripper grinned and ran a finger meaningfully across his throat.

  The Congo Man and the Ripper shared an interest in Magick. That’s why the African had come out to bid farewell to the psycho. Their conversation yesterday had revolved around the borfimor of the Leopard Men, the “medicine” bag of each Liberian secret society that spiked a man’s virility if it was anointed with human fat boiled down in a pot. They were soldiers of misfortune, that ragtag army of teenage killers who fought a war with red scarves, dark glasses, and AK-47s. The Poro was the “bush school” where elders taught them the ancient ways, like how to use a leopard knife—a two-pronged weapon with double-edged blades set at an angle into the handle—to rip out an enemy’s throat. The “bush devil” had to be fed, so they ate human meat from the same pot that had boiled and anointed the borfimor.

  The Ripper had listened.

  This morning, it was his turn to confide secrets. The Congo
Man’s imminent release meant there was much to tell, so as the African’s eyes grew wide with lust for the power to time-travel through the occult realm and beyond, the Ripper told the cannibal about the key that was hidden in one of the cards of the Major Arcana.

  “What card?” the man-eater asked.

  “The Hanged Man.”

  “Give me the key?”

  “Only if you’re chosen.”

  “How?” asked the cannibal.

  “The Magick is in the cards. If you deserve the power, the Hanged Man will choose you.”

  On the bench between their groins, the Ripper stacked the twenty-two cards of his tarot deck. His fingers fanned the facedown spread with the deftness of a gambler on a Mississippi steamboat.

  “Pick a card,” he said.

  The Congo Man picked a card.

  “Turn it over.”

  The cannibal flipped the card.

  The card was the Hanged Man.

  “You are chosen.”

  “Give me the key.”

  “If you’ll do something for me.”

  “What?” asked the African.

  The Ripper leaned over to whisper in the larger man’s ear.

  The Congo Man wore a black patch over the socket that had lost its eye during the Liberian civil war. His other eye, however, was able to take in Zinc.

  “Is that a deal?” the Ripper asked.

  The Congo Man nodded. He listened intently while the psychotic showed him the Magick key in the Hanged Man card, then he got up from the bench and lumbered off toward the two FPH guards who would soon release him from the psych ward’s walls.

  Watching him depart, the Ripper scooped his tarot deck from the bench and fanned the cards out, facing him, like a poker hand. Of the twenty-two different cards that should make up the Major Arcana, all twenty-two in the Ripper’s deck were the Hanged Man.

  Pocketing the stacked deck, he stood up and glanced blankly in Zinc’s direction as he walked across the exercise yard to return to his room. The wicked grin still curled his lips, but his eyes now lacked the spark of consciousness.