“Mom!” Katt yelled. “Shake a leg!”
Luna’s skirt fell to her knees as she stood up. To CanLit critics, her novels of occult erotica were “fused with Darke sexuality,” the result of secretly playing with herself in public while she observed. On the bus, in the park, researching in libraries, one hand filled her notebook while the other put a smile on her face. Always ready for the muse, Luna went bare underneath.
The Erotic Witch practiced Wicca, the “craft of the wise,” enhanced by any black art that tickled her fancy. Broomsticks, bubbling cauldrons, black pointed hats, and pacts with the Devil were foreign to her faith, a religion that worshiped the ancient gods of wind, rain, rivers, fire, earth, and trees. Over this pagan pantheon reigned nature’s king and queen: he the Horned God of the hunt, she the Moon Goddess of fertility.
Luna—for the moon—had gone through many “horned gods.”
The bigger the horn the better, so her latest was Lou Bolt.
When they fucked, she liked to fuck in front of other women.
It was a father/mother kink with her.
The room in which Luna wrote was her coven and sanctuary. It had a Druid corner with a papier-mâché Stonehenge, stocked with oak and mistletoe reaped by a golden sickle onto a white linen cloth. There was a photo of Lindow Man, sacrificed by Druids, and recently uncovered in a British bog. An ethereal painting of Graves’s White Goddess backed the altar, flanked by the “tree alphabet” and passages copied from Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Near the door was a collage shaped like a mandala, concentric snippets from the I Ching, Egyptian/Tibetan Books of the Dead, the Key of Solomon, the Hebrew Kahbala … Lunar knowledge was Luna Darke’s passion.
She opened the door decorated with an Evil Eye.
“Mom,” Katt said, exasperated. “What took you so long?”
“Communing with the muse, Katarina.”
The fourteen-year-old rolled her eyes and held out the phone.
Luna Darke had a secret that went back fourteen years. Back to 1978 when Nona Stone—her real name—left that Maryland breakdown clinic and hitchhiked to Boston. She’d spent the next day hanging around the city’s maternity wards, shopping hospital nurseries until she found the perfect child. A cute-as-a-button baby girl, one day old.
The maternity ward was open during daily visiting hours. The beads around the newborn’s neck gave her the mother’s name. Phoning the hospital and claiming to be a relative obtained further information. The mother was nursing the infant when Nona knocked on the door to her room.
“Mrs. Baxter?”
“Yes?”
“My name’s Lenore Dodd.”
“Are you a nurse?”
Nona smiled. “I’m studying nutrition. One of our assignments is to interview new mothers. Would you give me an hour once the baby’s home?” She held up a research outline, complete with graphs and charts. “You might benefit from what I’ve learned.”
The mother said, “What’s to lose? Give me a call.”
Two weeks later Nona phoned the Baxter home. The mother, weary from walking her baby all night with a bout of colic, listened to her suggestions for home remedies. Within the hour, Nona was at her door.
Sipping tea in the kitchen, they talked about Pablum and Dr. Spock. When the baby cried in her crib, the mother went to comfort her and pick her up. Entering the nursery she was struck on the back of the head, the blow stunning her long enough for Nona to tie her securely and stuff a gag in her mouth. Panic-stricken, she came around to find the imposter packing a bag with baby clothes, followed by the infant who was zippered in on top.
Baby and baby-snatcher vanished out the door.
Hands still tied, the mother ran crying to the next-door neighbor’s for help. “She’s taken my baby! She’s taken my baby!” she mumbled through the gag. The street was deserted, the kidnapper gone.
The upshot was another mother lost her family.
Her precious baby.
Whom Luna raised as Katt.
Katt passed her “mom” the phone and retreated to her room. Depeche Mode’s “Route 66” could be heard through the door.
“Luna?”
“Yes.”
“Elvira Franklen. Have I called at a bad time?”
“For fifty thousand dollars I’ll drop anything.”
“Just rang to say both planes leave Coal Harbour tomorrow at two. Thunderbird Charters. Big totem sign by the sea. Bowen Island to Horseshoe Bay, Highway 1 to Stanley Park, left at the Westin Bayshore and right on the waterfront road.”
“I know the dock. I’m already packed.”
“Make sure you bring your thinking cap. You’ll have competition. The Mounties are sending Inspector Zinc Chandler to sleuth the prize.”
“We’ll see,” Luna said. “I’ll be there by two.”
“Now if only the weather behaves, at least until we land.”
“It was a dark and stormy night …” Luna said, and hung up.
Billy Idol’s rock the “Cradle of Love” rocked Katt’s room. Luna knocked, opened the door, and stood on the threshold. The walls were papered with hundreds of pictures cut from magazines: Benetton ads, one with a white wolf licking a black lamb, Smirnoff ads comparing a breaking wave to the calm sea, sexy bare-chested men in Jordache and Versace jeans. There were posters of Costner, Carrere, and Schenkenberg, of U2, the Mode, and Public Enemy. Hats hung from the bedposts and clothes littered the floor. Katt stood bopping in front of the mirror, mastering a casual pose. Parental presence crashed the scene.
“Mom, you’re supposed to knock.”
“I did. You’ll get tinnitus.”
“Is Ms. Black Sabbath speaking? Ms. Zeppelin and Deep Purple?”
“Katt, I was in diapers when they were big.”
“You wanta believe, Mom. Don’t be a moo.”
“A moo? You call your mother?”
“You like poo-stain better?”
“Where’d I go wrong?” Eyes toward the sky.
“Other way, Mom.” Katt pointed down.
The kid was one of those fortunates who can wear anything. On her, a potato sack with gumboots made a statement. Most of her clothes were hand-me-downs salvaged from rummage sales, which, by adding this to that, she recycled as chic. Today Katt wore baggy jeans and a white T-shirt, with a man’s charcoal pinstripe vest on top. Black octagon glasses perched on the tip of her nose, while atop her head was a black Mad Hatter’s hat. A Tarot card—the Hierophant—was stuck in the band.
“I’ll be gone two nights. You’re sure that’s okay?”
“Mom, I’m here alone each time you go see The Man.”
“One night. Never two. Don’t want Home Alone.”
“Accept I’m an adult. Another year and I can drive.”
“A year and a half.”
“Whatever, Mom.”
“No parties. No boys. No one in my room.”
“Cross my heart,” Katt said, making the Catholic sign.
“How’d you get so conservative?”
“I wonder, Mom?”
Luna closed the door on the Beastie Boys’s “Shake Your Rump.” She put the hall between her and Katt’s cacophony. In her room, she cleared the desk, revealing the pentagram. On it, she spread her Tarot cards in the Ancient Celtic Method of Divination.
The Queen of Swords. Her Significator. A strong independent woman. From the suit pertaining to matters of power and position.
Will Lou and I triumph to win the prize this weekend? She concentrated on the question as she shuffled the deck, cut the pack into three piles, and dealt with her left hand.
First Card faceup on the Significator. “This covers her,” said aloud. Showing the general atmosphere relevant to the question. The Wheel of Fortune. Ever turning to unfold fate.
Second Card faceup across the First. “This crosses her,” said aloud. Showing opposing forces, for evil or good. The Lovers. Isolation ends through bonds of honor and trust.
Third Card faceup above the Significator. “This crowns her,�
� said aloud. Showing what she hoped would result from the question. The World. Attainment of wealth and prosperity.
Luna smiled. The cards were falling in place.
Fourth Card faceup below the Significator. “This is beneath her,” said aloud. Showing her past experience relevant to the question. The Queen of Rods, reversed. Infidelity and deceit.
Fifth Card faceup left of the Significator. “This is behind her,” said aloud. Showing the influence just passed or passing now. The Moon. Darkness magnifies fears and dangers.
Sixth Card faceup right of the Significator. “This is before her,” said aloud. Showing the influence operating in the near future. The Devil. Our most destructive impulses are unleashed.
As Luna dealt Cards Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten, she mulled over what Franklen said on the phone. Make sure you bring your thinking cap. You’ll have competition. The Mounties are sending Inspector Zinc Chandler to sleuth the prize.
Fat chance, Luna thought, thinking back five years. Wasn’t he that cop shot in the head in Hong Kong? Hardly a match for her and Lou Bolt combined, channeling their joint brain power through the muse of sex.
Luna wished she’d asked Franklen who else was coming.
With luck, there might be pussy to join in their Wicca games.
HOUSE OF HORRORS,
ROOM OF DEATH
Cannon Beach, Oregon
4:00 P.M.
Alexis Hunt
423 Madrona Way
Cannon Beach, Oregon 97110
June 15, 1990
Wiseman & Long, Publishers
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10110
Dear Sirs:
Re: HOUSE OF HORRORS:
THE CASE OF H.H. HOLMES
What Jack the Ripper was to Britain last century, H.H. Holmes was to the States. He was America’s first serial killer.
Holmes was the alias of Herman Webster Mudgett, a handsome man with a waxed mustache whose charm was catnip to women. 1888, the year of the Ripper, saw him working as a druggist in a Chicago pharmacy on 63rd Street. Opposite the store was a large vacant lot, which Holmes purchased to build a hotel. He planned to profit from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
“Holmes’s Castle” was completed in 1891. It was a three-story Gothic folly of 100 rooms, festooned with battlements, bay windows, and turrets. Holmes built his madhatter’s mansion in a stop-start way, hiring and firing different crews for different sections. The end result was a crazy-quilt maze of absurdities. There were rooms without doors, and doors that opened on solid brick walls. One elevator had no shaft, one shaft no elevator. There were false ceilings, trap doors, and hidden stairways. Several greased chutes plunged to the cellar.
Guests of the hotel began to disappear. Most of those who vanished were young women. When Holmes was arrested for insurance fraud in 1894, Chicago police searched the premises. What they found was a house of horrors.
Every room had a peephole so Holmes could watch the women undress. The cellar was divided into torture chambers. One had a dissecting table overhung with surgical instruments. Another was asbestos-lined with a gas jet to blowtorch those within. A third was equipped with a rack. Bones were scattered about the floor and there was a lime pit surrounded by vats of acid. A giant stove served as a crematorium.
Holmes recounted twenty-seven murders in his memoirs. He seduced female guests on the third floor, chloroforming each before dropping her into an airtight room he called “the vault.” The room was sealed with a glass lid so he could watch the woman awake, panic, and claw the walls. Lethal gas was pumped in through a hole in the ceiling so she would die a horrible choking death. Lassoing the body by the neck and hoisting it up, Holmes dispatched the corpse to the cellar down one of the greased chutes. There he dissected the woman and burned her remains, saving choice “specimens” for experiments in his “lab.” Sometimes he’d use the asbestos room for a change, or butcher the woman alive and screaming in a soundproof cell.
Holmes was hanged at Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896.
The castle, he wrote in his memoirs, was designed “for the pleasure of killing my fellow beings, to hear their cries for mercy and pleas to be allowed even sufficient time to pray …”
I am a graduate student at the University of Oregon. My psychology masters thesis is on H.H. Holmes. Holmes was convinced one side of his face showed signs of “degeneracy, ” explaining why he killed. A common nineteenth-century theory was each side of the face reflects a different personality. The left side is “natural,” the right “acquired.” If you place a mirror down the center of your nose, your two left sides and two right sides form different people. Holmes wrote of “the malevolent distortion of one side of my face and of one eye—so marked and terrible that… Hall Caine… described that side of my face as marked by a deep line of crime and being that of a devil …”
Would you be interested in a true crime book about America’s first Jekyll and Hyde?
Yours truly,
Alexis Hunt
423 Madrona Way
Cannon Beach, Oregon 97110
November 17, 1992
Wiseman & Long, Publishers
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10110
Attention: Chris Wiseman
Dear Chris:
Re: ROOM OF DEATH: THE CASE OF DR. MARCEL PETIOT
Dr. Marcel Petiot was a Paris physician. He joined the French Resistance during World War II. In March of 1944, attention was drawn to his surgery at 21 Rue Lesueur by foul-smelling smoke belching from the chimney. Searching the house, police found the offending stove in the cellar surrounded by the remains of twenty-seven hacked-up corpses. Other body parts smoldered in the furnace. The doctor fled, but was arrested nine months later. He confessed to killing sixty-three people.
Twenty-one Rue Lesueur was a deathtrap. Petiot told wealthy Jews he could smuggle them out of Nazi-occupied France. At night, desperate fugitives arrived at his surgery with their savings and precious possessions. The doctor gave each a shot “against malaria,” which he said was prevalent where they were going. The Jews were then led to a small triangular room with rough cement walls and asked to wait. Each inoculation was actually poison. As the poison took hold, Petiot watched his prisoners die through a peephole in the wall.
The doctor was tried at Seine Assize Court. Among the exhibits were forty-seven suitcases filled with 1500 articles of clothing. Having earned, a fortune from his crimes, $75,000 from one family alone, Petiot was convicted and sentenced to death.
Approaching the guillotine on May 26, 1946, he asked permission to relieve himself. Request denied, his last words were, “When one sets out on a voyage, one takes all one’s luggage …”
Encouraged by the modest success of House of Horrors, I plan to write a series called Trapdoor Spiders. Room of Death: The Case of Dr. Marcel Petiot will be Book II. Do you want it?
Yours sincerely,
Wiseman & Long, Publishers
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10110
November 27, 1992
Alexis Hunt
423 Madrona Way
Cannon Beach, Oregon
97110
Dear Alex:
Americans like to read about Americans. A Frenchman fifty years ago won’t do. Besides, we’ve got plenty of “trapdoor spiders” here. Write a book on Ed Gein, the Plainfield Ghoul. He inspired Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Or one on Jeffrey Dahmer, the Milwaukee Cannibal. Either subject, and you’ve got a contract. Same terms as the last.
Best,
She dropped the rejection letter onto her desk and frowned. Three months of research wasted, cut off at the knees. Time she might have spent with her ailing father instead. Her loving father who’d died of brain cancer here last week. Here in the house of horrors. There in the room of death.
The Witch’s House, she thought.
Spanning the window in front of her stretched the sa
nds of Cannon Beach. As seagulls dipped and glided above sea- slapped Haystack Rock, foaming wave upon whitecapped wave broke on the crescent shore. Mist exploded from the rock like artillery shells lobbed by the mythical cannon that named this part of the coast. A ghost—Alex, not her father—shimmered before the scene, wind from the west shaking her reflection on the pane. Blond hair back in a ponytail tied with a big black bow, slender small-breasted body sheathed in a black turtleneck sweater, blue eyes plucked from a summer sky staring back at hers, Alex met her Doppelgänger face-to-face. Beyond the ghost, a girl and her father combed the beach for shells.
“The Witch’s House,” she whispered, verbalizing thought.
The girl and her father combing the beach brought back memories. When Alex was young, she and her parents vacationed here each summer, abandoning inland Portland where her dad was a high court judge. Her earliest fear was toddling this beach hand in hand with him, surf pounding to the left as gulls squawked above, nearing this house all shiplap and shutters weathered gray by the sea. “That spooky place,” her father confided, “is where the old witch lives,” playing off Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which they had recently seen. Wide-eyed, Alex stared at the gnarled tree guarding the door, a hunchbacked monster with six crooked arms and too many claws. Letting go of her father’s hand, she moved to the oceanside, putting him between her and the gables’ evil eyes. Then donkey like she tugged him away from the hag’s abode.
Since then, the Witch’s House had been a bonding thing with them. For twenty years they’d walked this beach every summer, Alex moving to the left each time they neared the house. Her father always laughed and gave her a hug, once confessing, “Alex, you are my life.”
Three years ago a car crash had claimed her mom, followed three months later by her dad’s first fit. The tumor had seized him epileptically while sitting in court, the consequent neurosurgery carving out part of his brain. Unfortunately, the doctors couldn’t get it all.
That’s when Alex bought the Witch’s House.
Here, after radiation treatment, she nursed him as best she could. She fed him well, read to him, and walked him down the beach, still sharing a laugh when she used him to protect her from their house. The tumor returned with a vengeance, and treatment was out of the question, so Alex bravely watched the cancer eat him alive. Researching Petiot bolstered the lie life went on as before, while the house became a house of horrors, which soon had a room of death.
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