Ripper

by Michael Slade

  The Deadman’s Island killers were Devlin and Quirk.

  Obviously one of them was Philip Craig’s heir, inheriting when his parents died in the Pan Am crash. In sole possession of the island since 1988, he and his accomplice had rigged the traps. Outbidding all contenders for the Mystery Weekend, they’d sent Elvira a list of sleuths to invite including themselves. Both Devlin and Quirk had allegedly written unpublished books.

  Prior to last night’s séance, Quirk guarded the Banquet Room door while Devlin armed the crossbow. Zinc was marked as victim number one, but that plan was foiled when he wheeled Quirk to his place. No wonder Quirk was sweating: the crossbow was aimed at him with heat from two fires melting the ice instead of one, while Cohen stood behind the wheelchair blocking any retreat.

  A deadly game of chicken resulted from a twist of fate, and there was Devlin sitting nearby doing nothing to help. Was Quirk pissed off? Did they have a falling out? Which Devlin thought was a tantrum? While Quirk plotted revenge?

  One kink in that scenario nagged Zinc: he’d have sworn Quirk wasn’t faking when he dragged his useless legs away from the table. Escaping a severed jugular by a millimeter was hardly the time for a smokescreen performance. But if he was disabled, who was this with Katt?

  It was Devlin who doused the lights on the stairs to hang Leuthard. Devlin who backed the trip to the bar where Leech was acid-bathed. Devlin who lured Smith to the scythe by seeing an eye at the peephole. Devlin who was the only sleuth—except Bolt and Darke—without an alibi for Quirk’s “death.”

  Quirk, his partner.

  The plan was to snuff their next victim in God’s toilet, so Quirk asked Zinc to wheel him up to the cliff. Supposedly stoking the boiler, Devlin used the coal chute to sneak outside. He circled through the precipice woods to the bluff, stepping on the punji stake lid to set that trap, while broadcasting fake screams through a portable mike. Zinc diverted, he “attacked” Quirk on the crest, where those in the Banquet Room saw him push the wheelchair toward the cliff, before losing sight of the struggle on the far slope. The chair minus Quirk plummeted over the edge, and muscular Devlin carried his accomplice down to the beach. Chandler’s rescue party followed one set of prints.

  The killers knew where to step for solid rock, so they positioned Quirk as bait for the quicksand trap. Did Devlin vanish behind the waterfall tumbling from above, or was there a camouflaged cave along the shore? With Holyoak dead and Zinc nearly sucked into the sinkhole, the beach foray was scrubbed without confirming Quirk’s death. After the duped rescuers were gone, both killers returned to Castle Crag by a shorter alternate route. That’s why they weren’t seen cresting the bluff by those in the Banquet Room, and how Devlin steamed in the Turkish bath long before Chandler and Melburn arrived.

  Devlin didn’t know Quirk was plotting revenge. If he was the dominant half of the team, he’d assume submissive Quirk would lick his crossbow wound. So Devlin went ahead with their plan to trap the next sleuth, unaware his partner was out to trap him. A chance Quirk got with the Turkish bath.

  Lacking an alibi for Holyoak and Quirk, and nudged by the lie about the gallows nails, Devlin became Chandler’s prime suspect. Both killers knew he’d be told to enter the steam bath first, so the plan was not to use the trap this time. Quirk hid somewhere in the house after his bogus “death,” probably in a hollow wall with access to the cellar. When the sleuths rushed upstairs to the snakepit bed, he wheeled himself past the boiler and cranked the dumbwaiter up to the Billiards Room. There he armed the razor tape in the Turkish bath, then returned to the cellar to sweep away the wheelchair tracks. Off guard, Devlin entered the bath and got his throat slit.

  But again the kink nagged.

  If Quirk could walk and being disabled was all an act, why wheel the chair across the cellar? And why the extra wheelchair stored in here, a passage in the wall of what had been Quirk’s room? The wheelchair from the Mainland had crashed to the beach.

  Zinc noticed a handrail screwed to the ceiling, running the full length of the Hogger Gallery. If Quirk could walk and being disabled was all an act, why the rail to pull his useless legs along?

  Was Quirk crippled and one of the island killers?

  Did Devlin—another killer—push him over the cliff?

  If so, who killed Devlin in the steam bath?

  This demon who could walk and now had hold of Katt?

  A third killer on Deadman’s Island?

  Occult awareness from his subconscious mind, this assessment flashed through Zinc’s brain in seconds. Scrambling clear of the wheelchair, he turned down the gallery, in time to see the hogger cut Melburn down to size.

  The hogger was adapted from the lumber industry.

  B.C.‘s main resource.

  The gallery resembled a hopscotch run. Like a terraced garden, the floor stepped down several inches every two feet. Skull dragged Katt, limp as a doll, down stairs at the far end. Melburn, dashing full bore, stepped on the first square. Pressing the plate snapped a sickle in a horizontal arc, cleanly slicing his foot off to the depth of the step. When his other foot hit the next sunken square, that hogger blade whacked off a thicker chunk, the sickle hidden under the floor and the terrace being two inches deeper. Momentum propelled his shrinking stumps down the checkered steps, as snap! snap! snap! larger steaks were carved from Melburn’s legs, toppling him so his hands, wrists, and arms pressed the plates. The whirling machetes thwacked them short too, snapping until his legs and arms were gone, ceasing only when blades cutting into his groin and shoulder jammed. The last terrace step sliced off his face.

  Zinc stopped a foot short of the dismembered man, almost pitching headfirst into the hogger himself. Alex reached around him to grab Melburn’s spear, dropped when the first blade severed his foot. Zinc couldn’t cock the crossbow as the lever was back in the hall, left on the floor beside Elvira’s corpse.

  Skull and Katt disappeared down the far stairs. The hungry hogger blocked any chase. Blood squirted everywhere from Melburn’s stumps. “Quick! Downstairs! The Ballroom!” Zinc said.

  PROWLING DEAD

  6:22 P.M.

  As they passed Elvira’s corpse, Zinc grabbed the goat’s-foot lever from the floor. They bounded down the dogleg stairs four steps at a time, groping the banister in the dark when their candle blew out. Entering the Ballroom by the door left of the hearth, they saw the beam of a flashlight extinguish behind the Satan idol. Before Craig III sealed it off to build his trap, the Hogger Gallery had overlooked Craig I and II’s soirées. The stairs down which the demon had dragged Katt exited through a secret door in the wall beside the idol.

  Zinc and Alex ran toward Satan’s rump.

  Rounding the idol’s hooves, they reached the trapdoor behind as it swung shut, then heard a bolt snick into place as they tried to claw it open.

  “The cellar!” Zinc said, seizing the flashlight Skull had left on the floor.

  Sprinting for the stairs between the Scullery and the Kitchen, then guided down the steps by the electric torch, they ran west into the pit chipped from die bluff rock, backs to the dumbwaiter, boiler to the right. Rats squealed in protest as they scampered from the light, clearing a path to the concrete pillar the other side of which was the makeshift morgue.

  “The idol’s directly above,” said Zinc. “Which means the trapdoor route’s inside this pillar.”

  Alex tensed. “Where’s the rest of Wynn?”

  The armchair sat in the makeshift morgue where Chandler and Melburn had left it, the wings still snapped shut on his flattened skull, but all that remained of Yates’s body was the stump of his neck protruding below the chair’s wings. The bodysnatcher had decapitated him.

  Cohen, Leuthard, Leech, Smith, and Devlin were also gone. Either the dead were prowling, or someone had dragged them away. Someone who’d left a trail of blood around the hollow pillar, a trail Zinc followed to the only side he hadn’t seen. The side with an iron door in the ten-foot square.

  Ear to rusted metal, Zin
c heard footsteps retreating below. He tried the handle but the door wouldn’t budge. It would take a week of chipping to breach the pillar.

  “Now what?” Alex said.

  “The cliff’s hollow. That’s how Devlin ascended from the beach. There must be a cave from the shore to Castle Crag.”

  Alex nodded. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Down steps chipped from the wall of the limestone grotto, past stalactites and stalagmites lit by smoking torches, Skull carried Katt into the Magick Place. Among the swaying idols of the Nootka shrine, he cut the clothes from her body with the Ripper’s knife. Closing the lid of the Ripper’s trunk, stocked with those talismans listed in Levi’s Haute Magie, he bent Katt facedown over the chest and lashed her wrists and ankles to the ringbolts in the blood-trough pentagram. Then he climbed the steps to the Ballroom trapdoor. Unbolting it, he flicked the switch that released the hellhounds.

  Skull hid behind Satan while Zinc and Alex dressed in the Hall, donning parkas from the cloakroom for their trek to the beach. When the front door slammed behind them, he scaled the dogleg stairs.

  Within a minute, he came down with Franklen in his arms, trailing her intestines like a pet snake. Now he had six bodies to power the Washing House, plus two-thirds of a body: headless Yates.

  Six and two-thirds.

  666.

  The number of the beast.

  The wind was fierce but the snow was waning as they rounded the castle, trudging through drifts up to their knees to clamber up the bluff. Crossbow in one hand, goat’s-foot lever and flashlight in the other, Zinc led the way to the crest overlooking the cliff. Using Melburn’s spear like a punter’s pole, Alex followed in his footsteps.

  The dogs attacked on the far slope of the great divide.

  One a neutered male, the other intact, both Rottweilers burst from the precipice woods. Everyone has a nightmare dog and Rottweilers were Hunt’s: heavily muscled, wide-headed brutes, 140 pounds, black with tan markings like a Doberman, stubby tail behind, glowing eyes in front, snarling through ivory fangs bared by pulled-back lips. Rabid goobers drooled from their muzzles.

  Zinc cocked the crossbow and scrounged for the bolt cut from Cohen’s heart. Spear held like a Roman legionnaire, Alex backed down the slope toward the edge of the cliff. Hyper, pacing, panting, growling, both hounds snapped at her, probing for a chance to grab her arms so they could pull her down and ravage her throat. Forced back, Alex teetered on the brink. The Rottweilers went for the kill.

  Zinc fired the quarrel at the nearest hound. The whistling bolt struck its flank just behind the rib cage, piercing a major organ from the pitch at which it howled.

  The wounded dog turned on him.

  The other dog leaped at Alex.

  The butcher knife bayonet missed the Rottweiler’s heart by an inch as the animal’s weight rammed the spit through its chest and out its back so it slid down the skewer like a barbecued pig. The giant paws hit Hunt’s breasts to give her a powerful push.

  Her left foot slipped over the edge.

  No time to reload the crossbow with his pen, Zinc dropped the weapon into the snow. Front paws dragging its useless hind legs, the wounded Rottweiler came at him, gnashing foaming fangs as it neared. One bite was all it would take to infect the Mountie with hydrophobia, the only doctor on the island now clogging God’s toilet. The hound lunged for his foot, his knee, his thigh, his balls, whatever. One little nip and it would have revenge.

  Caught in a rock crack under the snow, the spit through the other dog stuck straight up like an aerial. Impaled, the Rottweiler ran round and round like a top, trying to slash Alex with its teeth on each pass. When suddenly the aerial partially dislodged, allowing the dog to reach her with its rabid fangs, Hunt jerked back and …

  Her right foot slipped over the edge.

  Goat’s-foot lever gripped in both hands like a devil’s pitchfork, Zinc rose to his full height and rammed the tines down as hard as he could on the other dog’s skull. Saint George and the Dragon, he powered the lance with his two hundred pounds, driving the fork through the Rottweiler’s head and neck, until both tines struck rock below.

  He looked up as Alex slipped over the cliff.

  For a moment her outline graced the roiling sky, wind rending the clouds so a moonbeam shone through, sheening her face silver as her eyes met Zinc’s, “Katt …” the only word she had time to mouth. Then she vanished behind the cliff, swallowed into the black maw that dropped to the beach and the sea.

  The speared dog gnashed and thrashed as he drew near, guarding the edge of the cliff with its rabid fangs. Zinc retrieved the crossbow from the snow, and cocked it with the bloody goat’s-foot lever. Wrenching the bolt free from the dead dog, he slotted the quarrel into the stock’s trough.

  No, save the shot, he thought. For Katt’s captor. What if you miss or the bolt rips through? Then all you’ll have is your ballpoint pen.

  Turning, he trudged to the path down the cliff, and began the zigzag descent to the beach.

  Behind him, the dog howled at the hidden moon.

  And that’s when the taste of licorice filled his mouth.

  MILLER’S COURT

  6:37 P.M.

  The Nootka Whalers’ Washing House hummed with the power of the dead, six and two-thirds corpses reviving dark forces in this Magick Place. The bodies of Cohen, Leuthard, Leech, Smith, Devlin, Franklen, and headless Yates ringed the pentagram beneath the Ripper’s trunk, satisfying the Tarot’s Judgement card. The instinct for worship is so deep a well in the human soul that if we do not worship good, we will worship evil. The number of the beast—six hundred and sixty-six—is studied imperfection, always falling short of seven which The Bible’s Revelation touts as symbolic immaculacy. There are seven churches in Asia, seven seals on the book of doom, seven trumpet woes, seven deadly sins, seven bowls of God’s wrath, etc. Neither the Hebrews nor the Greeks had numeric symbols, so they used letters of the alphabet as numbers. The number of the beast—666—is a cipher which spells a name, a name that represents utter wickedness. The “number of the beast” is the “number of a man,” so just as Jesus is 888 in the Sibylline Oracles, so 666 deciphers as Skull.

  That’s how Skull saw it.

  Untying the cords that bound Katt facedown over the trunk, he flipped her over faceup like Mary Kelly in Miller’s Court. The stupefying effect of the chloroform weakened, so Katt moaned as he locked ring-cuffs around each wrist and ankle. Securing a long rope to one of the floor ringbolts, Skull looped it through the cuff clamped to Katt’s left ankle, then ran the rope across to the ring by her other foot, threading it through the right ankle cuff, before running it up to lash both wrists in the same manner. Finished, he wound the rest of the rope around his arm.

  Katt came to and struggled against the bonds.

  To test the give, Skull slackened the rope so her limbs came off the floor, then yanked it tight to arch her back over the trunk.

  Katt opened her eyes as he stuck the shreds of the Mother Mask to her sweaty face.

  The tide was ebbing, and there was no sand. A barren beach of black rock stretched before him, with unseen blowholes sucking brine. As no one could survive that fall without the sea to net them, did Alex lie broken in the darkness by the cliff? With Katt facing death and a seizure coming on, Zinc had no time to hunt for her body. The quicksand threat removed, he stumbled forward, drawn by a smudge of light behind the waterfall. Was that a cliff-face blowhole like the wells at his feet, the mouth of a cave that wormed up to Castle Crag? A cave into which the demon and Katt had descended?

  Zinc slipped on a strand of kelp and fell to his knees. Barnacles gouged his flesh as the crossbow fired its bolt at the sea. He reached into his pocket and found his pen gone, probably lost during the fight with the dogs. Left with an unarmed weapon, he staggered to his feet, but the onrush of epilepsy toppled him.

  Tick …

  Tock …

  Tick.

  The Dilantin clock stopped.

  Co
wed by pain, Zinc had the worst headache of his life. With each heartbeat, agony arced along the neural path his seizure took before, from the indent in his forehead back to his ear. Fingers pressing his temples, he tried to quell what hurt by blocking the route. When that failed, he envisioned a square in his mind, then struggled to force the pain into this cage. Nauseated, his vision swirled. Closing his eyes, opening his eyes, closing his eyes again, he tried to blink the seething world into focus. Zinc was on a moonlit shore undulating as if he viewed it from the bottom of a deep dark pool.

  In front of him was a warning sign.

  BEWARE OF ATTACK DOGS, embellished with a skull & cross-bones.

  Over the crossbones, his mind superimposed the X Devlin tried to scrawl on the floor of the Turkish bath.

  Skull drew the blade of the Ripper’s knife across Katt’s stomach toward her forming breasts, carving the first line of the first triangle into her skin. As blood seeped from the slit, his penis jumped. He cut the second line, then the third. As he finished the symbol, the Dark Wood of the Astral Plane materialized in his head.

  Wherever else Hell may be, it was in his mind.

  The Dark Wood is a forest of dead gray trees, each gnarled limb a gibbet from which hangs a male corpse. Harpies nest in the branches of this repulsive grove, flapping their wings and chewing the flesh from the bones of men. She-wolves gaunt with hunger prowl the forest floor, fangs nipping the genitals from those who hang above. A ghostly owl perches on the shoulder of each corpse, and each white face mirrors the face of Skull.

  Cut …

  Cut …

  Cut …

  Skull carved the second triangle into Katt’s skin.

  Now the Dark Wood reveals the Mouth of Hell, opening the Closed Path to the Occult Realm. Three-headed Cerberus, the snake-tailed hound, guards the infernal pit within Leviathan’s mouth, the Hellhole a black hole through the dead trees, shaped like the maw of a huge carnivorous beast, a pair of yawning jaws with no body attached, rotten-toothed, gummy, and drooling slime. A fat flaccid tongue lolls inside, grunting for fodder like a ravenous hog.