Ripper

by Michael Slade

  Left to right across their path the floor was void of prints, the bristles of a broom having whisked back and forth. Right led to the makeshift morgue; left led where? They followed the sweep marks to the dumbwaiter shaft.

  The lift was in the cellar so they cranked themselves up, noting the dusty box was swept clean too. Halfway up, they stopped at the Scullery hall, where Chandler went to raise the door he and Quirk had used, before turning 180 degrees to try the back panel instead.

  The dumbwaiter secretly opened into the Billiards Room.

  “Who?” Melburn said.

  5:50 P.M.

  The five survivors huddled in Chandler’s room: Melburn, Franklen, Hunt, Katt, and him. The women had locked themselves in while the men carried Yates to the cellar, admitting them to the sanctuary hours ago. The way Zinc saw it, his room was safe. If the crossbow was meant to kill him first, that plan only thwarted when he switched seats with Quirk, why hadn’t the killers finished him off while he slept? The answer had to be his room wasn’t rigged with traps, for if it was, with all this traffic, they’d be tripped by now. For safety, the group would stay locked in here until they were rescued.

  Elvira lay on one of the beds, grieving and racked with guilt. Drifting in and out of sleep, she mumbled, “All my fault.”

  Katt sat on the floor holding Elvira’s hand. Chewing her lip, she curled a strand of hair around her finger.

  Ballerina grace replaced by grim determination, Alex crouched beside the door with a knife in each fist. From the glare in her eyes she’d have no compunction stabbing their tormentor in the back.

  Melburn sat on the bed right of the jamb. Like a bayonet affixed to a lance, he’d tied a butcher knife to the end of the spit. Aimed at gut-level should the killer burst in, he drummed his fingers nervously on the steel.

  Zinc sat beneath the window opposite the door, the prod of the cocked crossbow resting on his knees, the goat’s-foot lever beside him on the floor. One hand gripped the trigger handle as the other held the bolt above the stock. Less than a second would arm the bow and hurl the quarrel at any intruder at 200 miles an hour.

  Tick …

  Tock …

  Tick …

  Tock …

  Minutes passed.

  The storm outside was a blizzard of blinding snow: white snow, gray snow, black snow, as the day wore on. It was now dark beyond the windows, the sole light within two flickering candle flames. Outside this room, outside this house, deathtraps lurked. Every floorboard or patch of ground might hide a killing device. Every wall could mask the killer staring through a peephole. Wind whining under the eaves was the castle’s breath. Creaking joists and timbers were its arthritic limbs. Listen hard enough and you could hear the house laugh, crazy cackles proving it was sentient and alive.

  Elvira stirred, rubbed her eyes, and sat up on the bed.

  “I have to use the toilet,” she said.

  GUILLOTINE

  Vancouver

  5:56 P.M.

  The Mad Dog hit the hammer as they left Ravenscourt, the siren a lone wolf in the wilderness. Craven sat beside him in the passenger’s seat, with DeClercq, Chan, and George behind them in back. Granville Street was a whiteout that ceased to exist. Snow fell like an endless curtain crumpling to the ground, slushing the windshield so they couldn’t see, while turning the tarmac into a skating rink. Some with summer tires, few with chains, ghostly cars slid sideways down the road, jumping the curb and bumping each other like a kiddies’ carnival ride. The Mounties code-three’d to the airport at ten miles an hour.

  By penlight, DeClercq read The Guillotine.

  Until I met Angus, I was a hollow man. Cored by Dianic witches. Witches like my mother …

  Shunned socially, and physically frail, Samson Coy had retreated into a fantasy world. There he imagined himself the strongest man on Earth, a slave chosen to champion the cause of his king. Though single-handedly attacked by hundreds of men, he defeated them and saved his master’s life. In gratitude, the king granted him liberty; but he refused, a willing slave who preferred to serve. Often there were banquets where each master led his slave into the dining hall by a chain around his neck. Unlike the others, Coy was joined to his king by a thin gold thread he could easily snap with a toss of his leonine head. His naked physique drew murmured aahs from the crowd.

  It’s the slave who makes his owner king, noted DeClercq, for he’s the strongman who maintains the kingdom for his master. Coy desires subjugation to another, and at the same time yearns for supremacy. The king’s his alter ego. A role tailor-made for Angus Craig III.

  Coy met Craig at Havelock Ellis School. He considered Angus closer to Nietzsche’s Superman than anyone he knew. Handsome, virile, and good at sports, Craig’s supremacy was evidenced by the fact he always called ‘the shots in his group. Soon Craig was master of the slave in Coy’s fantasy, and Coy longed to make the illusion real.

  What drew them together was Coy’s machines, the Rube Goldberg contraptions he designed when bored in class. Craig suggested they invent the perfect killing device, inviting Coy to Ravenscourt that Thanksgiving. There Coy wowed him with a trap he called “The Hogger,” and Craig reciprocated by masturbating him in the pool house. “Tighten your sphincter muscles as you’re about to come. That delays ejaculation so we can start again. But if you really want to blast, try a hit of this.” Whereupon he cracked an ampule of “popper” under Coy’s nose, bent him over the changing bench, and taught him who was master.

  Back at school, Coy joined the Dungeons and Dragons game, to the utter amazement of those in Craig’s clique.

  Samson was the perfect foil for Craig’s addiction to “kicks.” He rationalized every act in Nietzschean terms. “You’re above common laws, just as you’re above the common run of mankind.” As a team they stole the cricket trophy at school, which they buried in the garden by the front door. “Blow me,” Craig said after, and Coy got down on his knees. Servicing his master, Samson came in his pants.

  Christmas Day at Ravenscourt, Craig popped the panel to Lucifer’s library. “Granddad’s will stipulates this house and our island home must be kept as they are. If my father disobeys, he is disinherited and I become heir. That suits him because he performs exorcisms in here, but no one’s been to Deadman’s Island since 1957. A caretaker guards it with a pack of dogs.”

  That night while Craig’s parents slept upstairs, the boys performed a ritual from one of the grimoires, conjuring vanguard demons from Hell. Skull—the master demon— possessed Craig. Crossbones—the slave demon—possessed Coy. When they returned to school in January, the Doppelgangers were fed into the Dungeons and Dragons game.

  And so began The Guillotine.

  Like Watson to Holmes and Boswell to Johnson, Coy assumed the role of Craig’s biographer, recording his rise to the status of “Master Criminal of All Time.” The ensuing months saw Skull & Crossbones’s crimes increase in seriousness, success at one level encouraging the next. Craig’s thrill was in the clever planning of each offense, and voyeuristic kicks from the mayhem produced. While plotting, he brimmed with excited animation, drawing his chair close to conspire in breathless whispers. Committing the act, however, he was calm and cool, while Coy tingled in anticipation of “serving the Superman.” At last I’m loved, he wrote in The Guillotine.

  One day Craig discovered the keys to his car fit vehicles of the same make. That night Skull & Crossbones launched their “runaway spree.” Stealing a car, they’d leap from it while rolling downhill, abandoning the vehicle to crash dramatically. Then they’d drive by to see if anyone was hurt, Craig grinning at the damage while the cops scratched their heads. Mouth in Craig’s lap, Coy enjoyed head of a different kind.

  Soon they were torching cars parked on deserted streets, dousing them with gasoline and speeding away. Once they ignited a Buick in which lovers were having sex, forcing the naked couple to crawl out screaming from third-degree burns. Craig blew a geyser before Coy could unzip his fly.

 
Then came Britain.

  While Samson studied engineering and philosophy, Craig purchased explosives on the black market. Setting bombs Coy built off around London, the pair would mill through the gawking crowd, countering comments about the IRA with Islamic terrorist theories of their own. Craig reveled in knowing the truth while no one else did.

  The peak was Mitre Square.

  Standing in Ripper’s Corner under a shrouded moon, Skull conjured Jack the Ripper through occult possession. On his knees with Craig’s cock down his throat, shivering with ecstasy from sucking it in the open, Crossbones heard the Ripper speak through Skull’s lips. “Only the Ritual will make you Beast. Execute it properly and all the power of Hell will be in your control.”

  “Why am I excluded?” Crossbones asked.

  “‘Cause I’m up here and you’re down there,” Skull replied.

  Their crimes had all been furtive, not face-to-face acts, but now Craig suggested “nutting a bum.” His plan was to cruise London for a lone derelict, lowering his pants to loop piano wire around his balls while he was passed out, each yanking an end of the wire to nut him and run. Later they’d phone Scotland Yard anonymously to report the “gland robbery.” When Coy recoiled from die risk of overt maiming, Craig told him to fuck himself and their friendship fell apart.

  November to April, Craig shunned Coy. To find a new accomplice, he haunted Soho clubs, making friends easily with his money and poise, but dumping them just as quickly when they weren’t awed by his mind. His plans were dead in the water now that Coy was gone from his orbit, causing dark mood swings to deep depression. Blackballed by the Brits as a wonk, Coy, too, was unable to fill his void.

  Without Angus, I’m a nowhere man …

  The pair renewed their friendship with The Guillotine, a contract Craig signed Skull and Coy signed Crossbones in blood. The first covenant deemed both parties Supermen. Coy promised to assist Craig in his crimes, now focused on Tautriadelta’s Great Occult Event. Craig promised to sex Coy after each murder, and to credit the Jolly Roger killings to both demons. Coy could question any of Craig’s plans, unless Skull insisted “The Ripper wills it.” Speak those words and Coy had to submit.

  Coy wrote in the notebook:

  Lust, greed, and hatred motivate the common man. Our acts are murder for murder’s sake: pure murder for mental stimulation. Each is as easy to justify as an entomologist impaling a bug. Curiosity is the right of Supermen. Just as great painters once attended the torture chamber to study muscles working in the faces of those on the rack, so we do whatever satisfies our interest. It cannot be wrong for Supermen to commit superacts. It is their destiny.

  DeClercq closed The Guillotine and switched off the light. He considered the title a fitting one. Just as the beheading device needs two guide posts for the blade to drop, so these crimes resulted from the interplay between both personalities. Each man felt inadequate unless there was someone else in his life to complete him.

  Craig displayed the symptoms of a classic psychopath: lack of empathy, remorse, and guilt; egocentric grandiose plans; impulsive, deceitful, manipulative, irresponsible, glib, superficial behavior; and—above all—lust for aggressive excitement. Like all serial killers born from “parental” abuse, he courted detection and punishment by playing cat-and-mouse with the police. The Jolly Roger murders weren’t an isolated spree; they climaxed an illness that developed over years. Unable to get “kicks” from his crimes unless he had an audience, his adulating “gang,” he needed Samson Coy to fulfill his fantasy.

  Coy had a disintegrated personality before he met Craig. The Dianics had seen to that. Starved for affection and a sense of identity, he craved someone to fill the hollow and satisfy his subserviant sexual needs. Coy lacked the balls to commit these murders by himself, but fate made Craig the “superior” who fulfilled his fantasy. You cored me, cunt, Coy wrote of his mother. Craig and the demon Crossbones filled that hollow.

  Just as one post doesn’t make a guillotine, so this case could not be grasped in terms of either man. It truly reflected the interweaving of both personalities. These murders weren’t the acts of one, they were the acts of two. Chance brought the posts together and some sort of alchemy fused their fantasies. Neither understood the importance of living his own life, so Craig became Skull and Coy became Crossbones, but in effect they became Skull & Crossbones. In the sum of their psyches, the two were one.

  “The chopper will never fly in this,” Chan said. The words were barely out of his mouth when a van crossed Granville against a red light, slamming the Mounties broadside to spin them around. Before the Mad Dog could brake to a halt, they were involved in a seven-car pileup.

  It’s up to you, Zinc, Robert thought.

  FLUSHED

  Deadman’s Island

  6:05 P.M.

  Eye to the peephole through the wall at the end of the Hogger Gallery, Skull watched the survivors emerge from the bedroom across the hall: Chandler with the crossbow, Melburn with the spear, Hunt with two kitchen knives, then Franklen and Katt. The call of nature had flushed them out, for he knew they wouldn’t piss and shit in each other’s presence. Doing your business in public was the one taboo the civilized couldn’t countenance.

  Hand on the button, Skull watched them approach the trap.

  The lavatories in Castle Crag were all on the upper floor, for the house was built in an era when you hid unmentionables. The nearest toilet was next to Zinc’s room, sandwiched between the sanctuary and top of the dogleg stairs. The Mountie entered the latrine to check for traps. Skull grinned on hearing the toilet flush. He almost guffawed aloud when Chandler came out to pronounce it safe.

  Flush your ass goodbye, he thought as Franklen entered and shut the door.

  A battery-powered light confirmed there was pressure on the toilet seat.

  Skull hit the button.

  Chandler and Melburn flanked the lavatory door, at a chivalrous distance to give Franklen privacy. Hunt and Katt straddled the threshold to Zinc’s room, waiting their turn before the men.

  Thhhhhhhhllluuuuuuuppppp!

  The inspiration for the trap was an accident the airlines tried to hush up. Flush a plane toilet and the bowl is sucked dry. A mechanic who’d been drinking set the suction pressure wrong. A passenger needing to take a crap sat down on the seat so his legs and buttocks formed a vacuum seal. When he flushed the toilet before getting up, the suction sucked his intestines out his asshole. “Haven’t had a shit on a plane since I heard that,” Craig had said.

  Thhhhhhhhllluuuuuuuppppp!

  The lavatory door swung open and Franklen crawled out on her hands and knees, skirt and panties around her ankles and trailing a glistening snake, one end between her buttocks while the other was gulped down the sucking toilet. The suction came from air holes under the rim, hidden among the holes that flushed water into the bowl. She held out a shaking hand, then crumpled to the carpet.

  Turning the crossbow upside down and setting it on the floor, Chandler rushed to Franklen, with Melburn close behind. Hunt gasped and left the threshold of the room, kneeling with the men to help the disemboweled woman. Katt let out a strangled whimper, silenced before it finished. Everyone’s back was to the girl as Elvira died of shock.

  When Zinc smelled chloroform, he turned from the body, just in time to see Katt being dragged into the opposite room, a cloth in the hand of her captor clamped over her mouth and nose.

  The killer flushed from hiding was a demon in disguise, naked except for his hideous face and bloodstained bow tie, the blood so old it powdered to dust sprinkled down his chest. Owl feathers radiated from his hair, his face chalked white as a skull with zigzag bone sutures drawn in black. Eyes darkly smudged to sink them in their sockets, his penis stood erect like Satan’s downstairs.

  Skull blew a kiss at Chandler as he shut the bedroom door.

  HOGGER

  6:17 P.M.

  Spear thrown underhand as the door swung shut, Melburn was off the floor like a 19th-century Zul
u going for a lion. The butcher knife bayonet slipped through the narrowing crack, bouncing the door away from the jamb. Scooping Katt’s candle from the carpet where it dropped when she was attacked, he entered the room as a secret panel to his right slid shut. Fueled by adrenaline like a wide receiver on a breakaway to a goal, the crowd on its feet cheering for he could do no wrong, Melburn plucked the spear from the floor and nimbly tossed it again. Not only did the weapon stop the panel from engaging, but it provided a wedge so he could lever the false wall back.

  “Damn,” Melburn barked as Zinc and Alex entered the room, bashing his shin on an obstacle just inside the nook, some contraption the killer had tipped over to block his way. Stumbling across the narrow width of the secret passage, he bounced left off the opposite wall to pursue the killer down the Hogger Gallery, a sealed corridor that once overlooked the length of the Ballroom below. Spear in one hand, candle in the other, Melburn advanced so fast his speed extinguished the flame.

  “Careful!” Zinc yelled as the contraption tripped him, too, one hand striking the spokes of a wheel as he fell. The crossbow fired, but luckily wasn’t armed, for the quarrel was tucked in his shirt pocket beside his pen.

  Suddenly, like the Big Bang forming the universe, battery-powered floodlights exploded along the gallery. Shielding his eyes, Zinc looked down at the contraption beneath him. The instant before he was blinded, Melburn caught sight of Katt and the killer at the corridor’s end, and—between him and them—the worst of all the traps.

  Skull hit a button on the wall to activate the hogger.

  Secreted in the gallery when Skull rode the dumbwaiter up from the Billiards Room, the contraption was a folded wheelchair. Like film run backward to reassemble a broken cup, the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.