“Damn right,” Smith said.
“Glen? A quick one?”
“A quick two or three,” Devlin said.
“Lou?”
“Never been accused of turning down a drink. World’s become a clutch of wine-sipping wusses. Y’ever see Bogey or Mitchum snub a belt? Coming, Officer? Men from the boys.”
The Drawing Room was dark, lit only by the candles burning low in Chandler’s hand. Devlin thumbed his Zippo to enhance their glow, light enough to see the bottles calling them like Sirens from the bar across the room, tucked in the far corner beyond the fireplace that backed on the Ballroom. Monet’s “The Women in the Garden” graced the mantel.
The floorboards creaked as Leech traversed the room, the carpetless planks of the same blond oak as that wainscoting the walls, pegged in the manner of a more artistic era. Near the bar stood a pedestal with a metal vase on top, no doubt once filled with fresh flowers like those festooning the ceiling moldings and patterned on the sofas.
What happened next seemed to Zinc to happen in slow motion, every detail seared into his long-term memory, Leech ahead with Smith, Bolt, Devlin, and him behind, Leech going wobbly-kneed as he reached out a shaky arm, playacting a wretch fresh from the desert who stumbles across a bar, head turning to flash them a ham’s grin then turning back again, one foot on one plank as his other stomped the next, that floorboard supporting the vase and pedestal at its end, when suddenly Leech’s ankle sank into a hole. For a moment Zinc thought the wavering light was playing tricks on his eyes, seeming to levitate the vase and pedestal in the air, arcing them in a trajectory toward Leech’s face, until he realized the plank wasn’t pegged to the floor but hinged instead on a fulcrum like a teeter-totter. Leech’s foot stomping this end had launched the vase like a catapult, liquid in the container splashing his face an instant before the metal rim smashed his mouth.
The screams … the shrieks … the gibbering could only mean …
ACID!
Sulphuric acid or nitric acid would have been bad enough, but this was hydrofluoric acid in concentrated form. Were it not for the murkiness shrouding the room they might have seen the mist, rising from the vase like miasmic breath. More akin to thin oil than water, the acid that burned Leech’s flesh and eyes was a clear viscous liquid stored in metal because it eats glass. HF is usually used to clean cast iron, copper, and brass, or to etch fancy patterns on windows. What it does to human flesh—was doing to Leech right now—is an abomination unfit for human eyes.
At least he didn’t see it.
His eyes were dissolved.
“AAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!” Leech bellowed, thrashing about on the floor, his face fuming and blistering as if sloughing off. “UUUUURRRGGGGG!” as great gobs of flesh were clawed from his cheeks by his nails. Acid inhaled down his windpipe and throat while gasping from the double whammy of shock and being hit in the mouth was causing rapid necrosis of his esophagus and lungs, mushing them soft and squishy until Leech could no longer scream. Zinc saw patches of skull peeking through the bubbling porridge.
The acid smelled of almonds.
He’d never eat almonds again.
“What’s that!” Devlin blurted, swinging his Zippo around.
“Where?”
“There. In that hole.”
“I don’t see a thing.”
“It’s gone, but I’m sure I saw someone’s eye!”
A peephole was drilled through the wall between the fireplace and the bar. Devlin ran toward it, but Smith got there first. “You killed my partner!” he shouted, flattening himself against the wood to peer into the hole, while behind him Leech convulsed and did just that, dying when the acid corroded too much meat from his bones. The ravenous liquid literally ate him to death.
Fffichunkk! Fwwwappp! Zinc heard the sounds before he saw the blade, then Smith went into spasms and sank halfway to his knees, shakin’ all over like he was in tune with a fine riff of rock ‘n’ roll, stopping there, not crumpling further, because the scythe blade slingshot through the hole spiked from the back of his head like a shark’s fin.
“No, Devlin,” Zinc yelled as the young man kicked the wall, the fury in the blow causing the wainscoting to jump, then Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham! a line of scythes burst through the boards at chest level.
Devlin was almost impaled. Smith stopped shaking.
The booby traps are booby trapped, Chandler thought. As Bolt—the tough guy—threw up.
MOTHER MASK
Saturday, December 5, 1992, 12:25 A.M.
When Captain Cook passed Deadman’s Island in 1778, heading east to Friendly Cove at Nootka Sound, the island was a native burial ground. Hence its aboriginal name translates as Deadman’s Island.
Of all the native cultures in the Pacific, the Nuu-Chah-Nulth—the Nootka—developed the most spectacular sea-hunting techniques. Hunting whales was a dangerous job that required the help of magic, so Nootka shamans built a Whalers’ Washing House at Yuguot, their name for Friendly Cove. The Washing House drew its power from grave-robbing and ritual sacrifice. Tsaxwasap, a shaman of great magic, was one of the first to use the Whalers’ shrine. The Washing House he inherited had only four skulls, so he intensified the power of this magic place by stocking it with corpses, skulls, and kidnapped babies. The magic worked for many whales were lured to Nootka harpoons by the power of the dead.
The Whalers’ Washing House at Yuguot was used for 300 years. Post-Tsaxwasap ritualists added carved wooden idols to the shrine: frowning, laughing, singing human-shaped deities and a pair of cedar whales. The shrine was “bought” under cover of night in 1904 by George Hunt, a collector with the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Never displayed, the Washing House now gathers dust in a Manhattan storage cellar.
Sometime in the 1840s, the offshore graveyard became taboo. Believed to be haunted, the island was shunned after boats of mourners who rowed here to bury their elders never returned, and the same fate befell a party dispatched by the chief to investigate why. What actually happened was a Washing House shaman succumbed to a coma and was thought to be dead. Tree-buried on the island, he later revived, and here, marooned and demented, built his own Washing House in the blowhole cave. His secret shrine was powered by skulls from the island’s many graves, and the sacrificing of those he ambushed when they landed to bury their dead. With all B.C. to plunder as a new colony, the British ignored this barren hump of rock in the sea, so Angus Craig I had no trouble buying it from the Department of Indian Affairs in 1903. By then the demented shaman was dead, and none but the Craigs and Demoniacs ever knew the secret Washing House was here …
Here beneath Castle Crag where crashing Pacific waves hurled spray through the blowhole at the foot of the cliff…
Here where the wind whined across the black lagoon to rock the cave idols like Frankenstein Monsters coming to life …
Here where Craig II’s stuffed hell-hags perched on the carvings to add a little Black Magick to this Magic Place…
Here where the Ripper’s trunk brought from the Mainland by two of the sleuths waited for Skull to reprise Miller’s Court.
It was after midnight and Zinc Chandler sat alone in the room he’d shared with Yates. The deaths of Cohen, Leuthard, Leech, and Smith had freed up enough rooms so each of the remaining sleuths (except Katt) had their own. “When you get to be my age,” Wynn had said, before he hobbled off toward Elvira’s room, “you live each day as if it’s your last. The way things are going, that may be true, so if the Reaper wants me, he’ll find me with her.”
“Chivalry lives,” Zinc said, tipping a pretend hat.
“Hell no,” the old man said. “I want her to protect me.” His parting words were: “If you haven’t read Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls by your age, I’d advise it … if we survive.”
Between then and now, Zinc had interviewed each sleuth in turn, searching every bedroom under the pretext of looking for traps. He’d hoped to find a cooler in which ice could be stored, or something in
dicating one of the guests had been to the island before, but in the end all he found was another puzzle. Somehow the black deed-trunk Melburn and Devlin had lugged up from the cove had vanished. It was in none of the bedrooms, and no one claimed ownership. As all the baggage had to be humped from the beach to the house, and some of the sleuths had trouble enough getting themselves up the slope, the two men had grabbed the nearest items, and that was one. So where was the missing trunk now?
In searching Luna and Katt’s room, the Mountie had checked the canopy over the four-poster. The Wilkie Collins story mentioned by Wynn in mind, Zinc didn’t want the mother and daughter smothered in their sleep. The canopy, however, was a flimsy affair: little more than a crocheted sheet stretched under the overhead frame. As a hidden weapon, this terribly strange bed was pretty mundane.
Now Zinc sat on the edge of his bed hoping to get some sleep, (“. .. avoid alcohol and sleeplessness. And never—I repeat never—miss taking your drugs …”), a chair wedged under the door handle because none of the locks had keys, while he stared at the shrinking guestlist—Katt’s name added—that Franklen gave him on the plane:
Lou Bolt
Zinc Chandler
Sol Cohen
Luna Darke Katt Darke
Glen Devlin
Elvira Franklen
Stanley Holyoak
Alexis Hunt
Al Leech
Pete Leuthard
Barney Melburn
Adrian Quirk
Colby Smith
Wynn Yates
The person who rigged this madhouse was cunning indeed, killing four people quickly without exposing him or herself. Anyone milling about the castle before dinner could have armed the crossbow and ice-locked its trigger. The killer sat innocently at the banquet table while heat from both hearths committed the murder. Any one of the sleuths.—except Quirk and Yates—could have tripped the short circuit on the stairs, having previously closed the fireplace doors so the hall would be dark, before shoving broken-armed Leuthard who couldn’t grab the noose to break his fall into the stairwell gallows. The floorboard in the Drawing Room was kept from pivoting when they arrived by a small wedge he’d found thrown behind the bar. Once the generator was going, an electric magnet held the board in place, then the power failed and the trap was set. The Fffichunkk! Fwwwappp! heard as the scythe blades burst through the wall told the Mountie how that trap worked. Hinged at the bottom and pulled back at an angle, the scythes were propelled like slingshot rocks by springs or elastics attached to the other side of the wall, and released by pressing the boards on this side or by the person whose eye Devlin said was at the peephole.
A nook and a peephole.
The walls had ears and eyes.
And if they tried to follow, more deadly booby traps?
Diabolical, Zinc thought, as someone knocked at the door.
“Who is it?”
“Alex.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Not yet. But there’s a door between Bolt’s room and mine. He’s been drinking steadily since you spoke to him, and I don’t want to wake up to one of his hands over my mouth and the other between my legs. May I spend the night with you?”
Zinc leaned forward to release the door, eyes sweeping across the bedside table as he reached for the chair, and that’s when he noticed his bottle of Dilantin was gone.
And never—I repeat never—miss taking your drugs …
2:02 A.M.
Wind whipping the black lagoon into whitecaps blew the torches around them like candles on Satan’s birthday cake, curling greasy smoke through the Whalers’ Washing House, enveloping Skull and Crossbones in the Devil’s breath. The stalactites and stalagmites yawned like demon’s teeth around Hell’s mouth, as errr … urrr … errr … urrr … the wooden idols groaned, and the mounted skulls and dust-eyed mummies glared sightlessly. The cage that held the sacrifice in the German Expressionist’s film had long since rusted shut from the clammy dampness. The pentagram trough that gathered her blood sixty-seven years ago was clogged with sand, so Skull scraped it with a chisel to ready it again, then set the Ripper’s trunk down on the three triangles so the rings screwed into the tips of the four lower points flanked it. Opening the lid exposed the knife, bloodstained ties, suicide’s skin, candles of human wax, nails from a murderer’s gallows, and jar of grume mushed from Lyric’s gutted organs.
“You did nothing!” Crossbones shouted.
“Like your mom said. You set yourself up.”
“What about the Guillotine!”
“What about it?”
“You promised to protect me!”
“And you’re supposed to help.”
“We have an agreement!”
“Which you broke. Leaving me to do all the work.”
“All! I built the traps! Without me, you couldn’t pull it off! Can I help it if—”
“You’re psychosomatic. She knew it. I know it. And so do you. Some Superman.”
“That’s not fair. It’s just I … Sometimes I … I don’t know who I am. She cored me. That cunt. That’s why I need you.”
“And now that the Power is mine, I don’t need you. Open the door. Bring down the bodies. Cut the woman. And I’m into the Plane.”
“I want the Power, too.”
“You’re not worthy, nowhere man. You’re here to suck my cock. You’re here to wipe my ass. You’re here to serve me, and nothing else. How powerless are you? Watch,” Skull sneered, snatching the Mother Mask from Crossbones’s hands. He reached into the open trunk for the Ripper’s knife.
“That’s mine! You promised! Give it back!”
“Make me,” Skull taunted. “Come and get it.”
“NOOOOOO!” Crossbones cried as the knife ripped through the mask, cutting Brigid Marsh’s skinned face in two.
“The Ripper wants Skull, not Crossbones,” Skull said. “It’s my castle, my cave, my Miller’s Court. A skull’s a skull with nothing else, but crossbones mean nothing without a skull. I’m Skull. You’re Crossbones. Without me, you’re nothing, slave.”
The knife sliced off the nose.
“YOU … YOU … YOU … !” Crossbones shook with rage.
“Stop me, Superman. You can do it, puss.”
Slice, and the eyes were gone.
Slice, and the mouth.
Shreds of the Mother Mask hung like paper dolls.
Crossbones tried to stop him.
But the restraints held.
… Etched around Wonderland were quotes from Lewis Carroll, one of which, unknown to DeClercq, was a prophesy:
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.
PART III
WITCHES AND DEMONS
While I live, the Owls!
When I die, the GHOULS!!!
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Written beside an epigram on fate
HUMPTY-DUMPTY …
Vancouver
2:05 A.M.
Humpty-Dumpty was the name Special X gave the man with the fractured skull. While he lay in a coma in Lions Gate Hospital where surgeons worked frantically to patch his broken head, across town at HQ the Queen’s Horsemen spent the night trying to piece together who Humpty was. Humpty carried no ID—all they found were three Tarot cards in his pocket and the Tautriadelta-carved ax—but he was dressed in U.S. Army combat fatigues. Since every U.S. soldier is fingerprinted and palmprinted for security, Humpty’s hands were inked and printed at the hospital. The prints were sent to Ottawa, then to Washington, D.C., where U.S. Army Intelligence promised to reply ASAP. On that front, all the Mounties could do was wait.
The West Van cops located a stolen van parked near Robert’s home with a bloody moth-eaten rug in back. The Forensic Lab up the street at 5201 Heather was now doing tests.
At two A.M., Chan suggested DeClercq take a break. Jet lag, time change, the stress of the a
mbush, and worry sagged his face. “Go see how your dog is and keep in touch. I’ll man the fort till the Yanks get back to us.”
Napoleon was still in surgery when he finally got to the vet’s, the storm doing everything it could to cut him off at the pass. There were complications, he was told, so Robert slumped in a chair to wait and must have nodded off, for the dream that came to him was one that had plagued him for years.
In the Shakespeare Garden of Stanley Park stand two trees. “Comedy” was planted by actress Eva Marsh; “Tragedy” by Sir John Martin Harvey. Since the 1920s each has grown into its name, “Comedy” lush as you like it and “Tragedy” as stunted as Richard III.
Between their trunks, arms outstretched, Janie runs toward him, her frightened voice crying “Daddy! ” plaintively.
No matter how hard she runs, she draws no closer to him.
And in tonight’s dream, Napoleon runs beside her.
“Chief Superintendent?”
He’s dead, Robert thought before he opened his eyes.
“Napoleon’s out of surgery. He’s going to be fine. I’d say you owe the obstetrician a bottle of the best.”
Robert exhaled a half-forlorn sigh. If only he could awake from the dream and hear the same about Jane. Twilight between sleep and life was when it hurt the worst. “Thank you,” he said.
It was near dawn when he returned to Special X, climbing the stairs to the second-floor hall with his office at the end, in which he found Chan, Craven, and Macbeth waiting. Outside, the gale was blowing pedestrians off their feet. Unless the rain slackened, it was time to build an Ark.
“Humpty’s name is Garret “Corkscrew” Corke,” said Chan. “Discharged from the Air Cavalry for going psycho in Vietnam. The Bureau opened a file on him when he ran this ad in Foreign Legion magazine.”
DeClercq scanned the fax:
Mercenary. Vietnam vet. Action in Africa.
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