Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

by Kim Newman

  ‘Hi, Dr C,’ said Loesser, far more relaxed than when I’d last seen him. ‘Have you met Jackson Greene? The Norman Rockwell of slaughtered families. The Vargas of decapitated showgirls.’

  So this was the legendary ‘Gruesome’. You’d never think to see him that he was capable of his art. Some might say that of me.

  Greene snapped off a military salute and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’

  Loesser pencilled notes in margins. He kept having ideas. He threw his thoughts my way as well as at his artist.

  ‘How about a comic about analysis?’ he said. ‘Instead of the Morgue Meister or the Dread Druid, we could have a head-shrinker host. Dr Alan List? Tales From the Couch. You up for endorsing that, Dr C? Could you open your files? We like “authenticated cases” at HIC.’

  ‘There’d be ethical concerns,’ I said.

  He wasn’t disappointed. And skipped on to the next thought. ‘Maybe a book about cavaliers and duellists?’

  I was here to see if I could firm up the connection between comic books and the Switchblade Stabber rather than as part of the analytic process. However, a picture above Loesser’s desk told me something that ought to have been a breakthrough. First, I wondered why my patient had a photograph of his arch-enemy on display… then I saw that the thick-spectacled, bearded, disapproving old fellow in the black-bordered frame was not Dr Reuben Hofstedtler but the firm’s founder, the Loesser of Loesser & Son. Mendel greatly resembled Hofstedtler. So, this was why Loesser took the anti-comics campaign so personally and responded with such vicious stories. It was transference, an identification of the troublesome foe with the distant father, who was dead and would therefore never give his son the approval he craved.

  Hofstedtler could have been Mendel Loesser’s brother.

  No one knew Hofstedtler’s family background – or even if Hofstedtler was his real name. Could this whole comic-book kerfuffle be an oedipal story writ large? Did that extend to the Stabber?

  Greene and Loesser went through a whole issue of Morgue – four stories, all drawn by Greene, all written by Loesser.

  ‘Gorgon Beard’ was the lead-off, and Greene had already provided cover art. There was a tale about an escaped homicidal maniac serving cyanide to barroom bores… ‘What’s Your Poison?’ One of a series about a shambling creature composed of a downed German bomber crew and a mystic fungus, ‘The Mass Strikes’. And a standard anecdote about an unheeding anthropologist who falls foul of an ancient moon cult… ‘What the Hecate!’

  Naturally, the last story piqued my interest. I didn’t let it show.

  ‘Know where I got the idea from, Doc?’ Loesser asked.

  I shrugged, coolly.

  ‘You,’ he said.

  I had a scalpel in my pocket – I always did – its blade encased in a cork.

  ‘In your reception room, you have that hunk of statue. It’s a Hecate. Three women in one. What a nightmare! I looked the old hag up. We’re always looking for cults. We’ve done voodoo too often. And plain old Satanism is just as tired.’

  ‘I wanted Hecate on the cover,’ said Greene. ‘But Mr Loesser prefers the chin-gorgon. Do you collect such things, Doctor?’

  ‘I know what the statue is, but it has no particular significance,’ I lied. ‘A present from a patient. Some say analysis is a modern cult. People come to me the way they once went to priests. As channels to hidden wisdom. To help them change their lives.’

  I only now noticed a glint in Greene’s eye. On the street, you’d take him for a young exec. If he were carrying a portfolio, it would be art for a brand of vermouth or new cool-tasting cigarettes. Not multi-limbed mushroom masses or disturbingly accurate pagan sacrifices. The glint was what made him ‘Gruesome’. Another compartmentalised man. Like poor outmoded Moon Mask, he had a secret identity. Like me, John-better-known-as-Jack.

  Greene was slight, compact. Smooth-shaven. In a wig and dress, he could pass for a woman. He was tense – chewing gum as if it were a serious business, making strange knuckle-cracking gestures. He had artists’ hands. He could shade a line perfectly, but maybe also punch through brick.

  Loesser let it all out… on the couch, in his stories.

  Greene just had his art. So far as I knew.

  One thing Loesser expressed in the early days of his analysis – before Dr Hofstedtler manifested as his nightmare nemesis and crowded out all his other concerns – was guilt over the industry-standard wretched deal HIC gave its artists. Thanks to contracts drawn up by Mendel Loesser’s lawyers in a more innocent age, anyone working for HIC who wasn’t in the Loesser family got royally shafted – poor upfront payment, no royalties, no participation in ownership of characters and stories, not even the return of artwork. Greene, whose style was as unique as his ‘Gruesome’ signature, was HIC’s outstanding artist but earned only pennies. Once, Loesser had been agonised by the possibility that Greene – upon whom his whole line depended – would desert HIC and land a better-paying syndicated newspaper strip. Now, of course, no newspaper would touch anyone tainted with horror comics and Greene was stuck in a fast-shrinking ghetto. If Hofstedtler got his way, Loesser would at least still own a print shop. Gruesome would be gone, man, gone…

  Though Greene and Loesser seemed to collaborate amicably, their relationship must be complicated. If Greene could afford analysis, it’d be interesting to know what seethed under his crew-cut – besides murdering Reuben Hofstedtler over and over in print, he had a habit of working caricatures of a dismembered or mutilated Sheldon Loesser into stories. The Morgue Meister took his horror lumps every issue.

  I wanted – more than ever after seeing Mendel’s picture – to know about the feud between Loesser and Hofstedtler. On the couch, my patient told me how he felt… now I wanted facts, not feelings. Where did this hostility come from, specifically? How had the enemies first met? Had they met? I know Loesser offered to debate with Hofstedtler in the public forum of his choice, but the pundit didn’t bite; he wanted to preach, not argue.

  Before I could ask anything, a commotion began beyond the partition.

  Breaking glass, shouting, the secretary’s high, thin scream.

  We rushed out of Loesser’s den. It was all I could do not to pull my scalpel.

  A man lay broken-backed on a desk, on fire. He had leaped or been thrown through a big window. The glass was smashed inwards. Wind and noise blew in, lifting papers off desks. People out on the street were chanting something.

  A man in shirt-sleeves and tie – an art editor, I think – dumped a bucket of sand on the burning figure, smothering the flames. It was an articulated dummy. Comic books were tacked to it, like armour or decoration. They had been lit before the thing was catapulted into the HIC offices.

  ‘That bastard,’ exclaimed Loesser. ‘He’s behind this! Hofstedtler! It’s just a step from burning comics to burning comics writers…’

  ‘…and artists,’ said Greene, quietly.

  Loesser was red-faced, infuriated, raving. Greene smiled grimly, looking at the smoking human piñata. It was like a British Guy Fawkes dummy or a waxwork witch.

  What did he see through the eyes of ‘Gruesome’?

  Someone had the presence of mind to telephone the police.

  I looked through the broken window. Outside on the sidewalk was an angry parents’ group, holding up placards bearing anti-comic-book slogans. ‘HIC = Hellish Infernal Cr**!’ ‘Protect Our Children – Ban Horror and Crime!’ ‘Comics Kill!’ They were burning more comics in barbeques brought along for the purpose. Mostly middle-aged women, with a few male long-hairs in the mix and a couple of bruisers who had the whiff of hired muscle. The cops had already shown, but no one owned up to tossing the burning dummy.

  ‘The coward’s not here, you note,’ said Loesser. ‘Hofstedtler’s never at these Klan meets. Does the broadcasts and the articles and lets shills and minions do the street thuggery. It’s the bund all over again.’

  I looked at the crowd of shouting faces.

  Was t
he Stabber out there? It would fit his profile.

  ‘This is why the work is important,’ said Greene.

  …or was our new friend this side of the lines?

  * * *

  Finlay and Dwight caught up with me after office hours, in a diner. We took a booth and again went over the state of the Stabber investigation. The papers were spread out on the table. Dwight side-glanced at the waitress, hungry for more than chili. Finlay was focused on the case, but frustrated – lots of developments, but no progress.

  ‘So someone else noticed the comic books?’ I said.

  ‘Or wants the connection made,’ Finlay observed, shrewdly.

  The protest at the HIC offices was prompted by press reports linking the death toll on the Lower East Side – all of it, not just the Stabber’s take – to comic books. The papers didn’t yet know there was such a person as the Switchblade Stabber. But they had crime-scene photographs of dead kids with comics.

  Finlay blamed cops for letting the pictures get in circulation.

  I understood the friction between the FBI and the NYPD. Whitechapel was on the borderline between the jurisdictions of two different police forces who wasted time going over each other’s work, squabbling about procedure and missing the obvious. That had worked to my advantage. I now deliberately sought such hinterlands. The police had enough trouble keeping a lid on the gang war and didn’t even want to admit there was a calculating murderer in the mix. Unless results showed up soon, Finlay and Dwight would be pulled off the Stabber and assigned to non-phantom cases.

  Some helpful citizen had written anonymous letters to the papers claiming that comic books were behind the violence on the streets. Not so long ago, they would have been filed in the waste-paper basket. In this climate, they got printed.

  Hofstedtler was all over it. He was quoted, mostly from his book. Loesser, self-appointed representative of ‘the industry’, was allowed to respond. His quotes ran under pictures of him looking like a public enemy and blown-up Gruesome panels.

  One rag ran a centre-spread alternating the crime-scene photographs with climactic images from crime and horror comics. Actual pictures of murdered children were deemed less offensive than drawings of vampires and famous criminals. The paper had found a way to run both, while condemning HIC for pandering to ghoulish tastes.

  ‘This garbage shouldn’t be allowed,’ said Dwight. ‘For kids.’

  ‘Have you got anything on who the Stabber might be?’ asked Finlay.

  ‘I’ve gone over everything and worked up a profile,’ I said.

  The agents looked eager. At this stage in the Red Knife investigation, I had presented them with a detailed description of Abner Polk that listed everything about him but his name. I figured they hoped for another miracle.

  ‘Our man is about sixty, but rugged,’ I began. ‘Not physically appealing, under average height… white, protestant, American – probably with German or Swiss ancestors… unmarried, with deeply repressed homosexual tendencies – perhaps with a long-term male best friend, but most likely celibate… reveres his mother, and thinks of her as a saint no other woman could match… in a job with official authority, but frustrated by limitations placed on him by the law… wild rumours circulate about commonplace perversions – transvestism, sado-masochism – but they are exaggerations, people around him picking up on desires he could never act on… vain, obsessed with position – the type who looks through the papers and listens to the radio, poring over every mention of him… jealous of others who achieve prominence in his line of work, and willing to undermine or betray them, especially when it’s imputed he lacks the courage they display in the field while he collects honours from behind a desk… paranoid about his position, prone to using blackmail, backroom influence and edge-of-illegal methods to maintain it… petty, vindictive, fanatical about others’ appearance… prejudiced against ethnic minorities… a staunch patriot, yet willing to ignore constitutional liberties… a stutterer who overcompensates by speaking rapidly, stressing odd words… a Freemason.’

  * * *

  Having set Finlay and Dwight on the trail of J. Edgar Hoover, I finished my steak and again made my way downtown.

  One name kept cropping up all over this case – but I’d still not met Dr Reuben Hofstedtler. Time I got the measure of my professional colleague. He had a hand in the game, somehow. A hand with a red jack showing.

  Crusader against horror comics. Radio ‘personality’. Selfless psychiatrist. Mendel Loesser lookalike. Caricature Freudian.

  Yet another compartmentalised man.

  And maybe a fraud.

  Hofstedtler’s shingle listed his affiliations. APsaA, APA, NYPSI. However, the directories of the American Psychoanalytic Association, American Psychological Association and New York Psychoanalytic Society – all prominently displayed in my office – didn’t list him. I had called the APsaA membership secretary and been told Hofstedtler had a pending application, but his paperwork wasn’t yet complete. The little formality of establishing his credentials and qualifications (if any) remained to be tidied up. It’s not so hard to furnish the corroborating degrees and records to get a listing. My own directory entry is convincing, though it doesn’t cite the actual medical qualifications I obtained in 1883. Same story at the APA and NYPSI. I even wondered about Hofstedtler’s M.D. – supposedly earned in Vienna. Thanks to Anschluss, the war, the deportation and murder of the Jewish population, and partition by the occupying powers, Vienna was one of the best cities in the world to have records lost or destroyed. Yet Hofstedtler was trusted by everyone. He had the accent, after all. And the beard.

  He could be reached via his booking agent, but the only place Hofstedtler seemed to hang his hat – and then only on a part-time basis – was the Ludlow Street Clinic. Did he live there? Kept warm in a backroom by a pile of burning comics?

  On my previous visit, he was absent. The slot by his shingle for a ‘the doctor is in’ plaque was empty. I didn’t really expect him to be there at eleven o’clock in the evening, but I figured I could get into his office and rifle through it for clues about where to find him.

  I’m not a detective, obviously. I’m a doctor. And a murderer.

  Never forget. Yours ever, Jack the Ripper.

  One more stabbing hadn’t changed anything. The district was still busy, and the alleys still open for business. There didn’t even seem to be more cops about. Indeed, there were notably few uniformed officers within several blocks of the pool parlour where the Blades and the Counts were carving each other up. A semi-official rumble. Someone had taken the trouble to crank up a jukebox. Thumps, slashes and screams mixed in with the racket of that new novelty hit ‘We’re Gonna Rock Around the Clock Tonight’.

  The stink of fresh-spilled blood was in the air.

  I gripped my scalpel in my pocket.

  I didn’t need to make an offering, but… September chill was setting in. The leaves were turning. Soon, it would be fall.

  Circuitously, I approached Ludlow Street. The clinic would be overwhelmed soon, with broken heads and cut faces.

  Then, another player popped up unexpectedly.

  If not for habitual caution, I’d have tripped over him.

  Another stranger on these streets, going my way. Slight, neat, with a portfolio under his arm. Jackson Greene.

  Gruesome.

  Did he sketch from life?

  From across the lot, I watched the artist walk up to the clinic, have a brief talk with the nurse, and be allowed in.

  Had he claimed to be injured? Or neurotic and in need of analysis? One glimpse of his portfolio might be enough to earn him a serious head-shrinking.

  I waited a few minutes, for the first of the casualties – a Count with his nose mashed flat by a pool cue, hefted by two of his comrades – to be admitted. Then came a rowdy crowd. I pulled my hat down, held my face as if it were bleeding, and slipped inside with the mob.

  The injured from both sides came to the same place, which set off the rumb
le again. My favourite nurse tried to shout down the bickering, combustible kids. Two went for each other, and she had to wrestle them apart – which she did with practised ease.

  I took advantage of this distraction to slide down a dark corridor, away from the busy emergency room. The psychiatric case worker’s office was signposted.

  I hadn’t been able to see the shingle, so I didn’t know whether Hofstedtler was in. But I had a pretty good notion someone else was.

  I stood outside his door. A rim of light leaked under it.

  Listening, I heard a scuffle of sorts going on. Then quiet.

  Standing to one side – the Stabber favoured a switchblade for his pleasure but that didn’t rule out his carrying a gun for convenience – I kicked the door open, took a quick look to make sure it was safe and stepped in.

  It was a small, bare consulting room – shelves with books, framed newspaper articles about the evils of comics, and an open back door into another dark, glistening alley.

  Oh, and a couch. On it lay Jackson ‘Gruesome’ Greene, with a letter-opener in his neck. He was pouring out his troubles, more literally than most patients. He was one of his own final panels, spattered red, eyes fish-wide and dimming.

  Like me, he’d come here for an answer – presumably to the question of ‘Why are you wrecking my livelihood, you demented quack?’ – and found a different ending.

  I revised my opinion of Reuben Hofstedtler. How old and frail was he really?

  * * *

  I left the clinic by Hofstedtler’s private door, and walked carefully down the alley. It was narrow, and had several blind kinks. This hidden exit was kept clear, as if well-used. I could see the advantages.

  Hofstedtler – if that was who had done for Greene – had no reason to think anyone else was coming after him. Except he’d just committed murder. Murderers, no matter how well-practised, always think someone’s coming after them. It may be an externalisation of deeply suppressed guilt. But everyone on the street looks like a cop. Or an infernal avenger.