Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

by Kim Newman

  Loesser discovered Jackson Greene, a talented penciller with a bent for the macabre. HIC’s busiest artist, Greene signed himself ‘Gruesome’. The most memorable – which is to say, horrible – HIC stories were Loesser-Greene collaborations. They brought out something in each other – more like Leopold and Loeb than Gilbert and Sullivan. I once decorated a room with Mary Kelly’s insides, and even I’m disgusted by some things Loesser and Greene have put on paper. It is not the analyst’s place to moralise, though.

  Despite the increased sales, Loesser was troubled by the thought that Mendel – whose unfulfilled ambition was an illustrated Torah – would have despised the lurid trash which kept the coffers filled. He see-sawed between pride in the work and self-loathing.

  Two years into analysis, the patient was reconciled to oedipal feelings about the absent patriarch and the smothering mother. That little cocktail fed many stories about murdered parents clawing out of their graves to avenge themselves on worthless grown-up children. His lingering neuroses worked for him. So long as he was troubled, he had fresh horror ideas – which meant not falling back on plagiarising old radio shows or pulp magazine tales and hoping no one noticed.

  No sooner had Loesser gained some sort of equilibrium than the spotlight of the censorious fell on comics and he cracked up again. Now, he was beset by educationalists, church organisations, picketers and politicians. With his industry under attack, the patient needed two and sometimes three sessions a week.

  ‘It’s what the comics are about,’ he said. ‘Paying for your sins. The guy who snuffs his father to take over the dry-cleaning business gets flattened in his own press. The dame who swindles the clown gets her guts pulled out like an everlasting string of handkerchiefs. Now, it’s the comics’ turn to pay… and that guy is the zombie father and the killer clown…’

  ‘That guy’, my patient’s new nemesis, was Dr Reuben Hofstedtler, a member of my profession. In magazine articles, with a Reader’s Digest choice best-seller (The Pied Pipers of Perversion) and appearances on radio and television shows, Dr Hofstedtler branded comic books as the root cause of juvenile delinquency. I’d not run into him on the cocktail party circuit, but those who had said he was a man of mystery, perhaps even a fraud. For a start, he was a caricature shrink: Viennese accent, grey beard, thick eyeglasses. He had supposedly given up a lucrative Park Avenue practice to devote himself to his anti-comics campaign, though he still worked downtown in the free clinic for crazy, mixed-up kids where he had formulated his theory. He had noticed that the worst junior hoodlums were readers of mind-rotting stuff like Annals of Crime and Morgue of Horror, which he described as ‘play-books for delinquency’.

  Hofstedtler struck me as a Jekyll-and-Hyde character – sincere in his initial concerns about the not-so-funny funnies, then hopped up on the attention his crusade brought him. He was doing good, altruistic work with young people most of my colleagues wouldn’t go near, but turning into a professional pundit brought him a whiff of celebrity. Now, he was hooked on fame. In his own way, he was as well-known as a sports star at the top of their game or an uncaught mystery murderer. Reuben Hofstedtler was the Comic Book Killer.

  His methodology was less than scrupulous. A few thin anecdotes cropped up over and over in his articles and broadcasts. They were repeated by everyone else who took up his cause and organised a comics-burning party. A copy of Weird Planet Stories was found in the home of a teenager who drowned after driving a stolen Mustang off the Brooklyn Bridge. Three issues earlier, Weird Planet ran a story about a Martian crashing a spaceship into an asteroid. Very incriminating… except there was no proof the thief saw the earlier issue or even that the comic in his home was his. He had three younger brothers. And he died drag-racing with other kids who’d stolen cars without prompting from the funnies. Loesser, who had an in with the police sources who kept Annals of Crime going, ferreted out the truth of this and other commonly retold anecdotes. Newspapers which publicised Hofstedtler’s ‘findings’ had no interest in covering an evil comic-book publisher’s refutations.

  Reuben Hofstedtler was proof that if you drop enough Freud and Jung into your ravings, you can get people to believe anything. Just ask Abner Polk.

  ‘I’ll show that shrink, Carmody. I’ll see him flayed alive before that committee. Eyes boiled like eggs. Teeth pulled with pliers.’

  Criticism of comic books had not diminished since Loesser started running stories every other issue in which characters with names like ‘Robbin Horsetrader’ or ‘Carbon Hosefeathers’ suffered horrible yet ironic fates. ‘Who Heeds the Head-Shrinker?’, featured on the cover of the latest Morgue of Horror, was the tale of ‘Dr Huffalingumpus’. Having blamed the ills of modern society on the pernicious influence of sinister South American shamans, Dr H wakes up on his couch in the last panel with his head literally shrunk. ‘Mmmm… mmmm…. mmmph,’ he fumes, trying to squeak a scream through sewn-together lips. The Morgue Meister cackles, ‘Guess the Doc really was “small-minded”, eh, kidettes… heh heh heh!’

  I efficiently compartmentalise my life – the secret of psychological health. I am a Martini-swilling bachelor man-about-Manhattan, a calculating career criminal, a justice-minded public servant, a registered Democrat for Stevenson, a murderous Hecate worshipper and a dedicated mental health professional – all at the same time. I may write a book, The Compartmentalised Man. It would be a bestseller.

  Most people let their separate selves bleed into each other, disastrously. Loesser was a champion of constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech and a scholar of the literary tradition of Poe, Hawthorne and Henry James… but also an infantile whiner, who responded to any criticism by flinging bloody dung. When commentators said his horror comics were horrible, he loudly denied the charge but wrote more stories like ‘How to Kill Friends and Mutilate People’.

  I suggested that venting wrath against Dr Hofstedtler in four colours was counter-productive. ‘Who Heeds the Head-Shrinker?’ wouldn’t win support for Loesser’s anti-censorship position, soothe his ulcers, keep him off bennies or increase sales. Pestered by Hofstedtler’s followers, newsstands were returning unsold bales of HIC titles without ever displaying them. Loesser had made personal an argument which could more usefully be conducted dispassionately – which only helped Hofstedtler. At first, for fear of libel or treading on the toes of major publishers who might own a tiny comic-book line, Hofstedtler fudged details of the specific comics which drove his patients to crime. Then, he relied on a few out-of-context panels to illustrate articles, or descriptions of particularly appalling incidents which misrepresented grotesque comedy as straightforward sadism.

  To keep up the heat, Hofstedtler needed a villain. A Hitler or an Ethel Rosenberg or a Red Knife. A sinister, dangerous mastermind who did intentional harm. Sheldon Loesser fulfilled that role. He was the sweating, wild-eyed face of horror comics. As an in-joke ‘Gruesome’ Greene made the Morgue Meister look like his publisher. This backfired when Loesser became more unkempt. Photographs of him all seemed like mugshots. He perpetually sported that rumpled hair and shifty look of the just-arrested and about-to-be-arraigned.

  The last panel of ‘Who Heeds the Head-Shrinker?’ showed Loesser as the Morgue Meister chortling over the fate of Hofstedtler as Huffalingumpus. Another Carmody, tucked away in his compartment, reacted to Gruesome Greene’s delicately rendered, tiny, shrivelled head – with its life-sized panicking eyes, stitched lips and inevitable bone-threaded topknot – by giving vent to a hearty, Hecate-pleasing heh heh heh…

  Get the point, kidettes?

  The session ended at 10.45, signalled by a buzzer loud enough – if needs be, and with some patients they certainly did – to rouse me from a doze. I wrapped things up and ushered Loesser out. A couple of familiar faces loitered in my waiting room. Special Agents Finlay and Dwight.

  Kendall Finlay was big, untidier than Hoover liked his G-Men to be and had a mild, placid look. He was the keener mind, the dangerous man on the team. Healthy and balanced, c
alm and sceptical. A patient dog-owner, a crossword solver and a jazz aficionado. I had to be careful with Finlay. Loose threads in the Polk case troubled him. We regularly spitballed possible avenues of further investigation. No results yet, of course. With luck, I could keep steering him away from the unbelievable truth. Marion Dwight was small, dapper, ferret-faced. Cruder, limited, crass. His mommy stuck him with a girl’s name – no matter that it was also John Wayne’s – and gave him regular enemas until he was fifteen. Now, he hated women so much he could easily be nudged along shady paths to firm but erroneous conclusions. He’d shot two men and one woman in the line of duty, and been commended for his killings. Finlay confided that he felt any agent who took a life – which he’d never done – should be obliged to undergo analysis, a notion which tickled my interest. I can see advantages in asking the questions and filling in the forms.

  Seeing regulation federal agent suits and hats, Loesser started sweating like a junky two days past his last fix. He was expecting a subpoena to appear before the Senate Sub-Committee on Juvenile Crime.

  Finlay was considering my Hecate Chiaramonti. The statue, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, represents the goddess as three-bodied, like Siamese triplets joined at their backs. Originally, she held pairs of torches, keys and daggers, but three of the arms were broken off – only a single dagger and the keys remained. Finlay examined the Trimorphe statue as if it were evidence, which in certain circumstances it might be. His jacket hung open, showing his shoulder holster.

  Dwight was looking sideways at Charmaine, my secretary, hoping there was political significance in her red sweater… imagining her stretched out in a shredded slip on a Crack of Doom cover, subjected to the Dread Druid’s interrogation techniques.

  Loesser got out of the office, sharpish… omitting to leave a cheque with Charmaine, for which we’d bill him interest next time. At least we’d have a new topic for discussion: his fear of the authorities.

  Not an irrational fear, though. What kind of a fool doesn’t fear authorities?

  ‘Jack, sorry to barge in, but we’ve got another one…’ said Finlay.

  ‘A kook case, just the way you like ’em,’ said Dwight.

  I’d expected this. I take all the newspapers. I know the crime sections.

  ‘Come into my parlour, agents,’ I said. ‘Charmaine, fend off my eleven o’clock dipso, shift my noonday pansy to next week and refer this afternoon’s shoplifter to Dr Lark…’

  * * *

  ‘Your gang war isn’t a gang war,’ I said. ‘It’s a person.’

  Finlay and Dwight weren’t floored by the announcement. They wouldn’t have come a-calling if they hadn’t worked it out.

  We were in my consulting room. Charmaine fended off all-comers.

  In 1888, Scotland Yard didn’t immediately connect the individual Ripper murders. So many women died violently in the rookeries of the East End that my crushed flowers were lost in the crowd. Some offerings escaped the history books because the police – not privy to the ritual – didn’t recognise all my tell-tales. One of the ‘canonical’ victims was someone else’s kill, the nose-rotted Whitechapel version of Abner Polk settling a score with the drab who gave him the pox.

  The same thing was happening now.

  Five juvenile delinquents stabbed – four fatally – in the Lower East Side didn’t look like one man’s work. They were padding the butcher’s bill from a long-standing territorial war. The Counts, the Blades, the Shillelagh Boys and the Hoppers all had men down. Tit-for-tat assaults, rumbles and face-offs spread across the city. Father Molloy, a priest who worked as a missionary among the hoodlums, got the leaders together for a ‘peace conference’. Someone shot him in the face for his pains, so the battles flared again. The toll was in the low twenties so far this year. The wounded overwhelmed local hospitals. An inordinate number of clumsy young men reported accidents with non-serrated bread knives or cylindrical doorjambs. Little of this bloodshed was of interest. However, someone was out there, shy at present, but growing confident…

  ‘I’m simplifying for effect,’ I told the agents. ‘Of course there’s a gang war now. The police will have to crack heads and fill cells. But that’s literally not a federal case. Nevertheless, you’re here…’

  Finlay and Dwight looked at each other.

  ‘We have a new friend,’ I announced. ‘Did he start the wave, or is he surfing it? It doesn’t matter. He hides inside the war, like some hide inside fog, taking a boy here and there. Careful to pick off kids from different gangs, so survivors won’t talk to each other and sense the beast among them. He wears their colours… or at least can pass in their streets and alleys and vacant lots. My first guess would have been Father Molloy, but he’s obviously off the suspect list. We can’t rule out a cop or someone else who’d get a pass… a social worker, a delivery boy, even a prostitute. The precision gives him or her away, and serves as a signature. He’s in two minds about anonymity. It’s necessary if the work is to continue, but every artist wants to read the reviews. He uses his prey’s weapon of choice, a switchblade knife… and he’s good with it. One insertion, high up in the back, four or five vertebrae down, severing the spinal cord, then a good solid shove. The heads loll forward, like broken dolls. The light goes out in their eyes. Does he look at that, hold up the head by the hair, and try to catch the moment of dying?’

  Heh heh heh…

  Dwight whistled, impressed.

  ‘You could have called, Jack,’ said Finlay, almost disappointed in me. ‘If you were so far ahead. How long have you known?’

  I’d shown off. A mistake. But in character for John Carmody, arrogant analyst.

  ‘Not long,’ I admitted. ‘The boy who lived, Tino Muñoz, sealed it. Before him, it could have been a fad among a criminal community. Like it was baseball bats to the back of the skull one year… shooting through the femoral artery in that Canadian border tussle… or the Harlem trick with the mailbag and the noose looped around the neck and the feet so the victim wakes up and breaks his own neck.’

  ‘Muñoz threw us off,’ admitted Finlay. ‘Made the cops think it was what you said, a craze… and not everybody was as good at it as the first guys.’

  ‘No, the boy who lived was lucky. The variable was the victim, not the assailant. He gave no useful description but he co-operated with the police, tried to be helpful…’

  ‘I guess being stuck in a bed for the rest of your life loosens even toughies’ tongues,’ said Dwight. ‘They call him the Talking Head.’

  Heh heh heh…

  ‘That’s a misinterpretation,’ I said. ‘If he’d been attacked by someone from a rival gang, Muñoz would have talked to his friends, not the police. Even – no, especially – if he knew who it was. These people don’t trust cops to avenge them. That Muñoz co-operated suggests this is nothing to do with the social clubs. Street corner society is like the Balkans in 1914. We may not be able to keep track of the alliances, feuds and brushfire wars, but the players do. Except they don’t know what’s stalking them. They’re children, playing gangsters. This is outside their experience. That makes them easy meat for a predator.’

  ‘Think we should let it play out?’ said Dwight. ‘Let him ice a bunch more punks until they get lucky and jump him?’

  ‘Of course not. What our friend – let us call him the Switchblade Stabber – does is unconscionable. That he chooses to do it to people the mass of our society don’t care about is no excuse.’

  ‘Like Polk and his commies?’ prompted Finlay.

  ‘This is our business,’ I said. ‘Extremes of human behaviour. Antisocial extremes. The Stabber thinks of himself as a lone wolf, a hunter thinning out the herd. He may or may not have an inciting incident – a reason to hate juvenile delinquent gangs. There are plenty around. A sister raped, a brother hooked on dope, a family business wrecked by a protection racket. Or he might be one of the curious ones, born crooked or shaped in early childhood to lack something or have a taste for the unspeakable.
He may have looked at a map and decided where he could work best.’

  How did I imagine that? Well, take a wild guess…

  ‘Given the publicity around the Red Knife case, he may be thinking of us. We caught Abner Polk. We were written up in the press, talked about on the radio. There was even a comic book. These stabbings may be a challenge. An opening gambit.’

  ‘I miss the way it was in the thirties,’ said Dwight. ‘Big-headed morons like Dillinger and Floyd posed with tommy guns for newspaper shutterbugs. You didn’t have to work out who they were.’

  ‘Director Hoover ranked his public enemies like the record charts,’ said Finlay. ‘He called them out. Machine Gun Kelly, Clyde Barrow…’

  ‘The women were the worst,’ spat Dwight. ‘Bloody Bonnie, Ma Barker…’

  ‘It was a war on crime, like the war on the Nazis,’ said Finlay – he had scars from Normandy Beach and a couple of medals. ‘Out in the open, guns blazing, bombs flying. This horror, the chess-with-corpses stuff, it’s like it is with the reds… a cold war, fought when no one is looking. Not over things you can understand like land or revenge or money, but about ideas. Stupid ideas.’

  ‘Yes, Kendall,’ I said. ‘It’s all ideas. Which is why you need an idea doctor.’

  Finlay cracked a smile.

  * * *

  I moved to New York from Chicago in 1949. Cities suit me, obviously. Look at a map of a city and you see my mind. Neighbourhoods. Compartments. Grids. Patterns. The rituals of daily life. The rituals of eternal life. Reliable public transport. A high murder rate. I could live here forever.