Ripper

by Michael Slade

  Utopia ended because the Beast sacrificed a cat. While incense burned and Crowley signed the pentagram with his staff, the animal was stretched across the Abbey’s altar. Loveday botched the job of slitting the cat’s throat, so he was forced to drink a cup of its warm blood. Gagging, he collapsed and later died on the day Crowley predicted from his horoscope. Mussolini expelled the cult from Italy.

  Crowley published his Confessions in 1929. This work contains the passage quoted in Jolly Roger. He later expanded the story about Vittoria Cremers and the trunk in his essay “Jack the Ripper.” It mentions five ties, not the original seven, and identifies the trunk’s owner as Robert Donston Stephenson, a London physician. The doctor wrote contemporary columns on Jack the Ripper for Pall Mall Gazette. His work for Lucifer, an occult journal, was published under the pen name Tautriadelta.

  Tau is a Hebrew/Greek letter written as a cross or T.

  Tria is the Greek number three.

  Delta—Greek for D—is triangle-shaped.

  Tautriadelta.

  Cross-three-triangles.

  HOOKERS

  Vancouver

  Thursday, December 3, 1992, 3:17 A.M.

  Fog lights on and both naked corpses in back, the van crept along the shore of foggy Point Grey. Past Jericho Beach, Locarno Beach, Spanish Banks, and the Plains of Abraham, it snaked uphill toward UBC tipping the tonguelike bluff. On a clear night, across English Bay to the right, you could see the whole North Shore and Lighthouse Park. One of the houses near the park was where DeClercq slept, but now his home, the mountains beyond, and the harbor were gobbled up. There was only mist, vapor, smog, and cloud, knifed by the van’s yellow fog lights.

  Skull was driving.

  High above Tower Beach where concrete gun emplacements had watched for the Japanese, past the cairn commemorating Captain George Vancouver’s meeting with Spanish explorers Valdez and Galiano in 1792, the van reached the Law School where Chancellor Boulevard joined the foreshore road. Turning right, then right again on Cecil Green Park Drive, it skirted the School of Social Work and the Alumni Association. Finally, engulfed by fog that scaled the cliffs to smother the point, the makeshift meat wagon parked in the faculty lot.

  Killing the engine and fog lights, Skull climbed in back.

  Chloe and Zoe lay side by side under a roofing tarp, their skinned faces staring up like ivory death’s-heads. The cross-bones painted on their chests had warped as gravity flattened and sagged their breasts. Baited fishhooks jabbed Chloe’s torso, while Zoe had a narrow zigzag ladder down her front.

  “Hurry,” Crossbones whispered from the passenger’s seat.

  Gripping her hair, Skull doubled Zoe like a jackknife. With one gloved hand he held a butcher’s hook to the nape of her neck while the mallet in his other hand drove it home. Yanking the rope attached to the hook, he secured the spike deep in her brain.

  “See anything?” Skull asked.

  “Just fog,” replied Crossbones.

  “Keep a sharp lookout. And honk if anyone comes.”

  Opening the side panel, Skull stepped out. Mist seeped into the van to shroud the hookers. Skull wore a white parka with a white hood. On his upper lip was a fake mustache. Tucked in his pocket was a Beretta .40 semiautomatic. He looked like the Grim Reaper once he raised the hood.

  Looping the hook’s coiled rope over one shoulder, Skull hefted Zoe’s corpse from the van. Crossbones heard him grunt under the dead weight, watching through the passenger’s window as killer and victim were swallowed by the fog.

  Ten minutes later, Skull returned unburdened. He climbed into the driver’s seat and switched on the motor. “One down, one to go,” he said, pulling out of the lot.

  “You’re sure you got the right pole?” Crossbones asked.

  “Positive. I checked the photo archives of The Sun. The Headhunter nailed her to the Dogfish crosspiece.”

  Off Cecil Green, the van turned right toward Wreck Beach.

  7:01A.M.

  John Doe—his real name—made a living from postcards and advertisements. He’d awakened at six A.M. to check the weather outside against the forecast in The Sun. Another front of rain clouds threatened from the west, their vanguard drizzle gathered in the fog, while to the east it was clear. Doe anticipated dawn would offer mystic shots so he drove to UBC and parked at the Museum of Anthropology. Millions of tourists visit the West Coast every year and most consider totem poles the essence of this city. As Doe gathered his equipment from the Mazda’s trunk, a plane— DeClercq’s flight to New York—took off from Sea Island across the Fraser River.

  The sun would rise in forty-eight minutes.

  Tripod over his shoulder, Pentax case in hand, Doe descended fifteen steps and rounded the museum. Out back the cliff dropped vertically to Tower Beach, the ledge between the precipice and glass-faced museum an outdoor totem exhibit. In the center of the ledge was a grassy knoll flanked by a Kwakiutl memorial pole. Topping the pole was Hoxhok, the cannibal bird, symbol of Baxbakualanuxiwae, the cannibal god, He-Who-Is-First-To-Eat-Man-At-The-Mouth-Of-The-River. Through the dark, with only a flashlight to guide his way, Doe walked the gravel path between the Haida mortuary house he came to shoot and the blackened eye of the museum. Atop the knoll he busied himself assembling his camera.

  Dawn smudged the east.

  Behind him, down a grassy track that followed the cliff, nestled the faculty parking lot at the foot of Cecil Green. There, four hours ago, Crossbones had watched Skull unload Zoe’s corpse. To Doe’s right, beyond the drop, Point Atkinson lighthouse winked across the onyx bay. Ahead, licked by tongues of mist wavering like ghostly flames, loomed the mortuary house beside the square museum. It hunched like a demon cowering in fear of dawn.

  Finger on the shutter, eye to the camera, Doe waited patiently as pale light tiptoed across the murky bluff.

  Stunned, he missed the shot.

  The mortuary house was backed by dripping trees. Its tall, thin door pole had Watchmen on top. A double mortuary pole stood in front: two vertical cedar trunks joined like a cricket wicket by a carved crosspiece. When a Haida chief died, his body was placed in a burial chest on a shelf behind the horizontal board. The carving on the crosspiece of this Dogfish Burial Pole depicted a shark sticking out its tongue. A rope thrown over the board like a hangman’s noose was hooked into the skull of a mutilated woman. Beneath her skinned face, bones were painted on her chest. A narrow black zigzag halved her torso from throat to pubic bone.

  Doe shot a roll—business first—then ran to call the cops.

  7:57 A.M.

  Eric Chan was shaving when Nick Craven phoned. He’d worked the Jolly Roger case till three A.M. with four hours sleep, so his reaction to the news was I must be dreaming. A time warp had somehow returned him to the Headhunter case.

  “It’s not a crank,” Craven said, reading his mind. “Campus security confirmed the report. A faceless body is hanging from the same totem the Headhunter used.”

  “Chief been told?”

  “Not yet. He’s winging East. I’ll airphone the plane as soon as we hang up.”

  “Where are you?”

  “HQ. Heading for UBC.”

  “Nick …”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “How far’d you get into the book?”

  “Only to the part where the first body’s hung. Had an early morning yesterday. I fell asleep.”

  “Check the fourth chapter where the next body’s dumped. Jolly Roger leaves it hanging from a pole.”

  8:01 A.M.

  The cocker spaniel was old and hobbled with a limp. The army colonel was old, too, and walked with a cane. He knew he should have the dog put down, the merciful thing to do, just as he knew when Monique went he would follow soon. A few more weeks with nature and her was all he asked.

  Monique was named for a cancan girl he’d met in wartime France. The dog wore a knitted vest with pretty pink barrettes above both ears. Rotund in his trench coat, the colonel was a sausage roll topped with a blac
k beret. As man and dog crossed the open field of Musqueam Park, the last wisps of fog turned to silver rain.

  The dog began to bark.

  At first the colonel thought Monique felt the wet chill in her rheumatic joints. She limped, however, toward the trees instead of home, telling him she’d spotted something in the woods ahead. A moment later, he, too, saw the corpse.

  Suddenly the old man was back in France, gazing up at a parachutist snagged in the trees. But he was now a she and naked, unlike then.

  Monique stood barking by the mossy trunk.

  Chloe’s feet swayed above the spaniel’s head.

  Bewildered, the colonel gawked at the fishhooked chest.

  Dimming eyes strained to focus on the bait.

  8:26 A.M.

  Chan was on Chancellor Boulevard when the radio squawked. The street was clogged with students on their way to class.

  “Three echo two … Four three Vancouver.”

  “Four three, go ahead … Three echo two.”

  “Report of a hanging, faceless body, Inspector.”

  Chan frowned. “Almost there. Is something different?”

  “The location. Musqueam Park.”

  “Not a second body?”

  “Ten four,” HQ confirmed. “Looks like we’ve got a double event.”

  Chan passed Craven near the museum, one car heading west, the other east. Beyond the cliff to his right lay the ocean vista: Howe Sound with the glaciers of Garibaldi, Vancouver Island across Georgia Strait, the Fraser River delta southwest around the point. After the Nitobe Japanese Gardens, the university gave way to undeveloped land. Three miles around the point from the museum, red and blue wigwags flashed in the park.

  As Chan reached Musqueam, the downpour began.

  8:32 A.M.

  Craven crouched beside the Dogfish Burial Pole out back of the museum. Minutes ago sunbeams had bounced off its glass, but now the building was wrapped in a slimy gray skin. Dressed in white overalls—“monkey suits”—Ident techs videotaped and searched the scene. Three worked swiftly to plaster cast a print before the ground became a sea of mud. A fourth tweezered something into a paper bag.

  “What’d you find?” Nick asked.

  “No idea.” The tech handed him the bag.

  “Was it dropped? Or already here?”

  “You tell me,” the tech said, as Nick looked into the bag.

  At the bottom was a soggy oval of fur.

  SOLDIER OF FORTUNE

  East of Reno

  6:40 A.M.

  Mercenary. Vietnam vet. Action in Africa.

  Available for missions, no questions asked.

  Half up front, half on completion.

  Tortured in Angola, secrecy guaranteed.

  Write “Corkscrew,” Box 106,

  Rattlesnake, Nevada.

  True to his ad in Foreign Legion magazine, Garret Corke was a Vietnam vet. Not mentioned was his discharge from the Air Cavalry as being “too vicious for war.”

  True to his ad in Foreign Legion magazine, Garret Corke had survived torture in Angola. The ordeal wasn’t as arduous as it sounds, thanks to the fact Corke did the torturing.

  The advertising world is full of deception.

  In the early Seventies, Corke shipped out to Vietnam with a thousand hits of Owsley acid in his gear. Owsley was the Haight’s best psychedelic chemist. In Asia, Corke wormed his way into the Air Cav so he could volunteer for “lurp” raids. During the day Viet Cong controlled the steaming jungle, returning to their villages after dark to sleep. Lurps were counterguerrilla raids where helicopter gunships strafed the villages at night, machine-gunning Charlie, his family, and anything else that moved.

  Corke possessed a World War I aviator’s helmet like that worn by Snoopy to battle the Red Baron. Once a raid was underway, he would drop a tab or two and strip off his clothes, donning the hood in the darkness of his gunner’s turret. A horse’s bridle lashed to it passed through his mouth. Just before the chopper swooped on a jungle village, he’d wrap his arms and legs around the mounted M-60 so he and it were one, the barrel jutting from his thighs like history’s biggest cock. Trigger hooked behind the bridle clamped in his teeth, Corke would jerk his head back to discharge the weapon, causing the gun to jackhammer his groin until he shot a load. On a good gook-kill, he’d come three times.

  Then word got around.

  “Soldier?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What the fuck you doing? Report is weird shit’s happening out there.”

  “We’re here to fuck the slopes, sir. Just following orders.”

  Twenty years had passed since then but Corke was still doing “missions.” Have gun, will travel: this New Age Paladin. Terminations, for danger pay: this modern soldier of fortune.

  Terminations like DeClercq.

  With today to prepare.

  Corke awoke at dawn to snow falling in the desert. His bivouac and the land around were dusted white. Wrapped in a zero-degree Polarguard mummy bag, he watched dawn smudge the horizon to the east. His Jeep and the “hanging tree” stood in black relief.

  Naked, he climbed from the bag.

  Whether Corke was sane or not depended on the day, for psychologically he lived in a borderline state. Long-boned and lanky, with ropelike muscles and goose-pimpled skin, this morning he fingered the piercings through his metal-studded flesh. While tugging the rings through his nipples and the hooks through slits in his chest, shadows passed behind his eyes like a burglar’s image on drawn window shades. While tugging the guiche, hafada, ampallang, frenum, and Prince Albert studding his cock, his lids drooped half-mast and his jaw hung slack, then the goatlike smell of psychosis seeped from his pores.

  Ready, Corke approached the “hanging tree.”

  Though missions brought him money, comfort meant nothing to Corke. Physical and mental toughness were his holy grails, and had been since the day his dad first withdrew the “witch doctor” from his workshop drawer. “Flinch and I’ll repeat it. Cry and you get it twice.”

  The hanging tree was his version of the O-Kee-Pa Sun Dance of the Plains tribes. The metal frame beside the Jeep resembled a playground swing: two upside down Vs linked by a crossbar. A pair of two-foot chains hung from the bar instead of a seat.

  One type of Sun Dance was “Man Against Himself.” The chest was pierced with fleshhooks tied by ropes to a tree, the brave struggling against them until he ripped free. Corke had done that, but not today. O-Kee-Pa was different, for it involved suspension. The hooks in Corke’s chest beside the nipple rings were S-shaped piercings through his pecs. Gripping the bar with both hands, he chinned himself; wriggling until the S-hooks caught the last links in both chains. He lowered himself, head back, until he hung suspended a foot off the ground.

  First there was pain.

  Then pain became sensation.

  Filling him with the white light of self-transformation.

  Corke hung for ten minutes, naked except for the snow.

  Until he smelled the rotting flesh that kicked in “stalking mode.”

  Consciousness left his body, freeing him from all restrictions, and hovered overhead like a master puppeteer.

  His body was in the physical world.

  His mind in the Astral Plane.

  During the mission he’d feel no pain and have no fear.

  He was ready to stalk DeClercq.

  Like the forty-one others he’d killed.

  The music blaring from the Jeep was Ministry’s Psalm 69. “Jesus Built My Hotrod,” “Corrosion,” and “Grace.” Industrial noise for the Fourth Reich, with Corke providing the screams. Dressed in a red-checked flannel shirt, green down-filled vest, gray Wrangler jeans and anaconda boots, he looked like any other pseudo-cowboy in the West. His Stetson rode in the passenger’s seat.

  Corke parked the jeep off South Virginia and strolled into the glitz. After a gambler’s breakfast in the Eureka Casino— huevos rancheros, black coffee, and dry toast—he toured the parasites that feed
off the Strip. Cheek to ass with Harrah’s, Harolds, and the Nevada Club, a nether world of loan sharks, pawnshops, and check-cashers financed good luck. The sign outside the shop he entered read WE BUY, SELL, OR TRADE DIAMONDS AND GUNS. Superstition decreed he buy a new death-dealer for each mission.

  Beyond the Indian jewelry and Wild West souvenirs, beyond the fur coats and ratty deer heads mounted on the wall, an L-shaped glass counter displayed guns, ammunition, and knives.

  “What’ll it be?” asked the clerk, drinking his morning Coke. His face was stubbled and he hadn’t brushed his teeth. His T-shirt bore Nevada’s seal and motto all for our country.

  “.41 Mag?” he suggested, producing a nickle-plated gun before Corke answered. “Rare and deadly. A connoisseur’s piece.

  “10 mm FBI Special?” he countered, laying another weapon beside the Mag. “It’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for you.

  “All my .357s are crackers,” he added, sweeping an arm down the case to illustrate his point. Hanging from a steel rod through their trigger guards, fifty-odd revolvers hung upside down like sloths.

  “The Colt Python is my fav—” he confided, but Corke cut him short with “I’m looicin’ for a blade.”

  “Bowie’s the best.”

  “Got one o’ them. What’cha got in an I-talian switch?”

  Smuggling a gun into Canada was too big a risk. Living in this town, you learned to figure odds. The clerk placed a tray of switchblades on the counter. Instinctively, Corke selected the deadliest one.

  Kchuck! The blade snapped open and locked when he pushed the handle button. Fingernailing the catch on top refolded it.

  Kchuck!

  Now you see it.

  Kchuck!