Ripper

by Michael Slade

  “He was the black sheep … black goat of the family.” Luna winked at her devilish play on words. “Bora with money, so no thrill earning it, he found excitement in occult circles. Angus II spent time with Aleister Crowley in Sicily, then gathered his own disciples: the Demoniacs. They were Lost Generation silver spoons like him, who gathered on Deadman’s Island each year to celebrate Samhain.”

  “Samhain?” Alex said, glancing back at Zinc.

  “October 31st. Halloween. The most important night in the Witches’ Calendar. Pagan New Year. The Celtic Feast of the Dead. When summer’s fecundity changes to winter’s barrenness. The night when the veil between the spirit and physical worlds is lifted. The festival where the dead return to consort with the living. The night outside of time.”

  “You know a lot about it.”

  “I’m a witch,” said Darke.

  Angus Craig II (1889-1957) had one son, Philip Craig (1937-1988). When Philip inherited the estate on his father’s death, the will stipulated he couldn’t sell or alter Castle Crag. Philip converted to fundamental Calvinism that year, and never again set foot on blasphemous Deadman’s Island. A pack of roaming guard dogs kept the curious away.

  “The beach sign,” Zinc said. “The skull and crossbones.”

  “How’d Angus II die?” Alex said.

  “Natural causes. In his sleep.”

  “And Philip Craig?”

  “He and his wife were on the Pan Am flight that exploded over Scotland.”

  “Who inherited from them?”

  Luna shrugged. “Philip’s kid. If he had one, I guess. That was after the novel, so I lost track.”

  The central tower of Castle Crag loomed above the flanking house like Satan’s throne. The lightning bolts behind it might have been the wrath of God. Quarried from the island where the garden pool was sunk, the scummy water stagnant with dead weeds, the granite blocks of the castle were stacked in irregular “snail creep.” Gray on gray behind the sheet of dismal rain, sandstone and andesite trimmed the battlements. The tower walls were three feet thick. The castellated effect of the central keep extended to lesser towers tipping both wings. Hemmed between the central and peripheral bastions, peaked gables and chimneys jutted in classic Tudor style. The Elizabethan gables fronted by timbers in plaster work, their split-slate roofs were scratched by the outstretched limbs of gnarled trees. Gargoyles and griffins guarded its menacing heights.

  The house looked deserted.

  The door was unlocked.

  Drenched and awed, the group entered the Receiving Hall.

  The footsteps of fourteen trespassers echoed in the vault above.

  Wouldn’t you know the lights didn’t work.

  The generator was dead.

  “A stiff belt and a hot bath’s what I want,” said Bolt. “This place looks like Bela Lugosi should be home. I’ll take the ladies upstairs and check the accommodations. You guys split up, reconnoiter this floor, and get us some heat. We’ll meet back here.”

  “Yes, sir,” someone grumbled factiously, but no one balked. Every dog gets one free bite.

  The Receiving Hall was double-storied with a dogleg staircase running up the left side, the banister finished with carved newel posts. The staircase began near the marble hearth built into the far wall, climbing halfway, then doubling back to meet the upper gallery above the fireplace. Mounted on the gallery, a massive-antlered deer’s head stared down at them. Left and right of the hearth on both floors were corridors that branched into the gabled wings flanking the central tower. The hall was paneled in dark walnut with mullioned casements above, the furnishings Jacobean around leather inglenooks, with British India and Axminster carpets on the floor. The doors on either side of the hearth opened into the huge Ballroom beyond, suddenly turned electric blue by another lightning flash.

  Ladies first, Bolt gallantly followed the women up the stairs, eyes locked on Hunt’s ass for the entire climb.

  Buddy, you and I are going to come to blows, Zinc thought.

  Nursing his leg, Yates stayed behind with Adrian Quirk, who questioned the old man about solving locked rooms. They conversed by the hearth while Yates stacked a fire, building it from paper, kindling, and logs he found in the hamper. The man in the wheelchair supplied the match.

  Turning right, the other eight entered the North Wing. Another bolt of lightning lit the Ballroom to their left, outlining a twelve-foot image of Satan at the far end, all hell breaking loose as the storm battered the windows beyond. Rain pelted the shimmering multipanes with the force of hail, while each boom of thunder warped their reflections like funhouse mirrors. Rump to the room and obscene face craned back to glare at them, the Devil’s hindquarters were those of a goat with large bestial balls, and a wooden penis (jointed like a sword. He was the black sheep … black goat of the family. Rumor is a coven once conjured Satan here.

  “What say we do a quick once-over to get our bearings,” said Zinc, “then retrace and explore in detail?” The others agreed, so they scouted the wing. Miss Deverell had said when solving a mystery always draw a map, so during the tour Zinc withdrew his notebook and sketched:

  The oceanside door next to the Ballroom led to the Drawing Room. Open and airy, with large bow windows, it would be sunny on a decent day. The hardwood floor and wainscot-ting were of blond oak, the ornate ceiling moldings festooned with native wildflowers. Tucked in the far left corner beyond the fireplace was a fully stocked bar. The furniture was green and white, the vases Tiffany: altogether, a very feminine room. No dust, Zinc thought. The scene of the crime’s been prepared.

  The Taxidermy Room blocked the end of the corridor, lodged in the tower that tipped the North Wing of Castle Crag. The workroom reminded Zinc of the Bates Motel, with its knife-marked wooden bench and trophies on the walls. All that was missing were Anthony Perkins and Mummy’s corpse downstairs.

  In front, the Office that shared the tower was a thoroughly male domain: Edwardian desk, pipes in racks, boxing gloves and blunderbusses mounted on the round wall. The painting above the desk was British Colonial: a print of Fripp’s “The Last Stand of the 24th at Isandlwana.”

  Bookended by the Office and the Receiving Hall on the coveside of the wing, the Craig Library was a bookworm’s dream. From dark beams crosshatching the ceiling in chessboard motif, walnut shelving dropped to the hardwood floor, spread with a blood-red Persian carpet. The library desk, library table, and library reading chairs were inlaid or upholstered with fine Australian hides. Spanning every subject, the leather-bound books were those of a Renaissance man.

  Angus Craig II did it in the Library with a knife, thought Zinc.

  As the tour passed through the Receiving Hall to reach the South Wing, Yates and Quirk were discussing Carr in front of a cheery blaze. The voices of the women echoed down from upstairs, punctuated by a dirty laugh from Bolt.

  Slap him, Alex, Zinc thought.

  Beyond the other entrance to the Ballroom on their right, the door across the corridor led to a surprise! The brass plaque beside the jamb read billiards room, but someone had gutted the interior to install a Turkish bath. The freestanding structure, basically a tiled box, was in the center of the room where the pool table had stood. Lockers, showers, and benches surrounded the bath. On the three sides without u door, the black-and-white tiles were mosaiced to form pentagrams. Hell on Earth, Zinc thought. Will that feel good.

  “Let’s find the boiler and crank this baby up,” he suggested, wringing his soggy sleeve onto the floor for emphasis.

  “Hear, hear,” the group responded.

  Past the Banquet Room on the oceanside of the corridor, the Kitchen was in the tower at the end of the South Wing. There, next to the Scullery, they found the cellar door.

  “Someone got a light?” Zinc asked, trying to see down the stairs.

  “I do,” said one of the men who’d lugged the battered reed-trunk up from the cove. He handed Zinc a Zippo which the Mountie flicked.

  Twenty creaking steps led d
own to the bowels of Castle Crag, the basement chipped from the bedrock of the promontory. If the house above was in a state of suspended animation, as clean and dusted as the day it was abandoned in 1957, the cellar below—like Dorian Gray—hid the passage of time. The floor was grimy with dirt and soot; the ceiling with cobwebs. The lighter’s glow caught furtive shoe-level eyes, moments before rodent feet scampered away in the dark. The wind whistled through unseen cracks high in one of the walls, chilling the crypt like a burial tomb as it fluttered the flickering flame. They followed a trail of footprints through the layer of grime.

  The tracks led to the boiler.

  Unused for decades, the boiler was the old cast-iron coal-burning type. Whoever had cleaned the house upstairs had not stoked it for warmth. The firebox at the bottom was fueled through a heavy peekaboo door. The internal steam drum on top was fed by manifold boiler tubes. Pipes emerged from the drum to heat the house above. The main pipe paralleled the floor for three feet, then right-angled up to a ceiling duct where octopus arms reached for the upper floors. A thin secondary pipe ran vertically up from the boiler’s top to a five-inch-square vent that led to the Turkish bath directly overhead. The flat top of the boiler was eight feet off the floor.

  “Gentlemen,” Zinc said. “Time for a vote. Are we sexist pigs stuck in old ways who insult the women by insisting they steam first? Or third-stage males who treat them like equals and let them catch pneumonia?”

  “Third stage!” the chorus erupted.

  “While I prime the boiler, you hunt for the generator.”

  The coal bin was under a funnel against the east wall, the top of the chute sealed by a wooden hatch. Half full, the bin’s once-shiny lumps were dull with dust. A rusty shovel stuck from the pile at an angle. Zinc pulled it out and used the tip to unlatch the firebox door.

  Soon the murky cellar was bathed in a hot red glow. Steam collecting in the pipes clanked them like Marley’s chains. He heard the men laughing in the Turkish bath above, getting to know each other before the “Seance with a Killer” in the Banquet Room tonight. As he climbed the cellar stairs to join them he thought, No doubt that asshole Bolt will want to strip and steam with the women.

  He almost forgot to take his Dilantin.

  THE DEVIL’S

  PICTUREBOOK

  Between Manhattan and Vancouver

  4:17 P.M. Vancouver Time

  DeClercq replaced the Airfone after speaking with Chan and Craven, then dug Jolly Roger out of his briefcase. He sat in the aisle seat on the right side of the plane, with the middle seat unoccupied and a nine-year-old boy gazing out the window. The boy was traveling alone to Prince George to visit his grandmother, a copy of the Hardy Boys’ The Mystery At Devil’s Paw tented in his lap. Most of the other passengers watched the in-flight film.

  DeClercq opened Jolly Roger to the Tarot spread.

  The Hanged Man. Judgement. And the Devil.

  The Magick is in the cards, he thought.

  The trick was to find the right bounce between chaos and order, free-thinking irrational images from his subconscious limbic brain, then using his powers of rational focus to forge connecting links, flipping from chaos to order to chaos to order like brainwave tennis, until the final configuration had the power of occult conjuring disciplined by his rational mind.

  Go with the flow, he thought.

  I think, therefore I am.

  Pose the problem to the cards.

  Alakazam!

  Skull & Crossbones write Jolly Roger. The novel’s about a series of murders in an anonymous city. The only clues to the killer’s motive are a passage from Crowley’s Confessions and three Tarot cards reproduced at the end. The passage concerns Jack the Ripper and leads to Tautriadelta, die “Black Jack” suspect in the Ripper case. Tautriadelta—cross-three-triangles—hoped the Victorian murders would evoke a Great Occult Event. To precipitate the Event, the first four women were killed at sites that formed a tau cross, then the final victim was cut to ribbons indoors at Number 13, Miller’s Court.

  Cross-three-triangles. Speak to me, Tarot.

  Waiting for his flight to board at LaGuardia three hours ago, DeClercq had called a statistics professor at Columbia U. The question he’d put to the woman was: How do you calculate the probability of finding four bodies randomly distributed in a city so they form the points of a cross? You draw a map, the professor had said, and mark it with a grid. Eight squares down and eight across will do. 8 x 8 = 64, so the chance of the first body being found in that particular square is 1 in 64. The chance of the second body being found in its square is 1 in 63; the chance of the third 1 in 62; and the chance of the fourth 1 in 61. Therefore, the chance of that cross happening randomly is 1 x 1 x 1 x 1 over 64 x 63 x 62 x 61. So the answer to your question is: The probability of four bodies being found in that area so they form that particular cross is 1 in 15,249,024. With odds like that, logic says the distribution was planned.

  DeClercq set the map he’d reworked at the airport above the Tarot cards:

  One in fifteen million, two hundred forty-nine thousand, and twenty-four, he thought. Those are the odds against Tautriadelta’s Ripper’s Cross theory being wrong. Narrow the mesh of the grid and the odds go up. So why is Stephenson/D’Onston/Tautriadelta a suspect all but dismissed by every Ripperologist except Crowley, reporter Bernard O’Donnell, and writer Melvin Harris? Is occult motivation that hard to swallow? Or is it that no one to date has considered the Tarot?

  DeClercq concentrated on Jolly Roger’s Significator. As the card chosen to represent the killer in the novel, the Hanged Man held the secret of his fictional motivation. But what if Jolly Roger was the Vancouver stalking team’s version of the Ripper’s letters, namely a taunt aimed at the police and a …

  And a what?

  … and a performative utterance that’s part of the ritual!

  DeClercq stared at the Hanged Man.

  He unwilled his occult mind.

  And like an ancient sunken wreck rising from the murky depths of the sea, giving up its deadly secrets after centuries …

  There was the cross.

  There was the triangle.

  There were the murdered women.

  Not the women personally.

  But their occult symbol.

  DeClercq slashed the Tarot card with his pen:

  Studying the symbols hidden in the card, DeClercq recalled what he’d read yesterday about the Tarot. The geometrical figure hidden in the Hanged Man is that of a cross combined with a reversed “water” triangle. This signifies multiplying the tetrad by the triad. The tetrad—or cross— equals 4: the triad—or triangle—3. Multiplying them produces the number 12. Twelve is the number of signs in the zodiac, symbolizing a complete cycle of manifestation. The Hanged Man is card 12 in the Major Arcana.

  Tautriadelta.

  Cross-three-triangles.

  Three triangles.

  The pentagram, he thought.

  The Hanged Man symbolizes sacrifice to obtain prophetic power, DeClercq had read. Many say it’s the most important card in the Tarot. Jungians say it represents the turning point in our psychic life when we finally come to grips with our subconscious mind. We see the Hanged Man caught in a moment of suspension before all is revealed. The card suggests reversal in life through reversal of mind. The Hanged Man represents Mem in the Hebrew Kabbala, “seas” filled with water, which was the first mirror. Water reflects life upside down, and its spiritual function is baptism or initiation. The Hanged Man provides the means by which we access the Occult Realm.

  The card symbolizes sacrifice, he thought.

  Sacrifice by whom?

  Or of whom? he wondered.

  In the mystery of death lies hidden the secret of immortality?

  The belt and the braid down the front of the Hanged Man’s jacket form a cross. His collar joins with the nimbus about his head to make a circle. Combined, they symbolize women as an inverted Mirror of Venus. Did Tautriadelta interpret the card to mean sacrificing
women to form a tau cross would access the Occult Realm? If so, how did the pentagram—three triangles—fit in?

  The cross equals 4, the triangle 3, thought DeClercq. Multiplying them produces the number 12. Twelve is the number of signs in the zodiac, symbolizing a complete cycle of manifestation. Manifestation of what?

  His eyes slipped right to the book’s third card, the Devil with an upside down pentagram between its horns:

  Of course, DeClercq thought. Crowley’s experiments. What is Satanism about if not trying to conjure the Devil? Why perform such rituals if not to manifest the Legions of Hell on Earth under the conjuror’s control? And hidden in The Hanged Man is the ritual?

  What was it he’d read yesterday about this card? The Devil’s hand is raised to show Black Magick releases our destructive potential. The pentagram—or Seal of Solomon—is a five-point star that represents the word made flesh and mind over matter. Pointing up signifies order; pointing down chaos. The star between the Devil’s horns points down.

  Three triangles.

  The pentagram, he thought.

  Mary Kelly.

  There must be a link.

  The Ripper killed Nichols, Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes to form the cross. That part of the ritual did what: opened the path to the Occult Realm? Then he ripped Kelly to! pieces indoors at Number 13, Miller’s Court to … to …