The Rib From Which I Remake the World

by Ed Kurtz

  She crossed her arms over her breasts and cocked an eyebrow at him.

  “You look like hell,” she said.

  “You should stay in your room,” Jojo said. “For now.”

  “You want a bromo?” She angled a thumb to point behind her, into her room.

  “No, I don’t want a bromo. I want you to go back into your room and shut the door.”

  She smiled, if only slightly. It sent a queer shiver up Jojo’s spine.

  “Are you going to make me?”

  “I won’t, but when the sheriff’s men get here . . .”

  “All right, all right—cool your barrels, cowboy. I’ll play nice.”

  “Good,” he grunted.

  “But I’ll still have that bromo if you decide you want it.”

  “Thanks.”

  “See you later, cowboy,” she rasped as she gently shut the door.

  Jojo stood stunned for a moment, then slowly turned to see that the door to the horrible abattoir behind him remained wide open—the crazy skirt couldn’t have missed it. Yet she sure as hell acted as though she hadn’t. Or as if it really didn’t bother her in the least.

  Footsteps pounded heavily up the steps at the mouth of the hall. Jojo directed his attention toward them as Ernie Rich emerged like a ghost.

  “Jojo Walker, goddamnit!” he hollered as he stomped up the hall. “What in the hell do you ’spect you’re doing, traipsing all over this mess? You ain’t no deputy no more, in case you went and forgot.”

  “No, sir,” Jojo grumbled reflexively. He stepped back from the door and gestured at the room with his chin. “I guess you’d best have a look in there, boss.”

  “And I ain’t your boss neither, thank the Lord on high—”

  The sheriff’s words were choked off the second he saw the first long smear of blood on the floor. As he sidled up to the doorway, Ernie Rich removed the wide-brimmed felt hat from his grey head and gawped at the nightmarish scene in 214.

  “Oh, my sweet Jesus,” he whispered.

  “Ernie . . .”

  Rich whipped around, snakelike, and snarled at Jojo: “What kind of hotel are you runnin’ here, anyhow? That poor son of a bitch been ripped apart, for chrissakes!”

  “You don’t say.”

  “Don’t you patronize me, Jojo Walker—this . . . this!” Rich pointed a trembling finger at the gore-soaked room. “That don’t happen in Litchfield, do you hear? It just don’t!”

  “Actually, boss, it did.”

  “Put that iron away, would you?”

  Jojo flushed and jabbed the gun back into its holster.

  “And stop calling me boss, you goddamn idiot!”

  Arching an eyebrow and flaring his nostrils, Jojo leaped forward and stabbed a forefinger into the startled sheriff’s chest.

  “Look, Ernie—this here is my hotel, understand? When I’m here, I’m responsible for it and everybody in it. That’s what they pay me to do, by God, and that’s what I’m doing up here same as you: trying to sort out what in the hell went on in that fucking room.”

  “If you was really responsible for it,” the sheriff seethed through clenched teeth, “this terrible thing wouldn’t of happened in the first place.”

  Jojo’s brow scrunched up and his face darkened considerably. He could feel his fist tightening at his side, almost beyond his control, revving up like an engine to haul back and knock the top lawman in Litchfield on his ass. But before he could, the last door on the left groaned open and the tweed-jacketed man from the night before stepped sleepily into the hall, sans tweed jacket. He rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers, yawned dramatically and shuffled down the carpet toward the tense, angry men in front of 214.

  “Say, what it this?” he grumbled. “It’s the middle of the night, you know.”

  Jojo uncurled his fist and took a deep breath. Ernie Rich offered one last remonstrative look at him and spun around to address the sleepy man.

  “There’s been a murder, sir.”

  “A murder!”

  “We don’t know that yet,” Jojo said.

  “Oh, for the love a’ . . . what do you reckon, Walker—a grizzly bear came in through the window? Or do you ’spose it was a gorilla?”

  “A gorilla?” the sleepy man asked, confused and not a little irritated.

  “No, sir,” the sheriff said, “there weren’t no gorilla. There’s a fella been killed in here, I’m sorry to say, but don’t you worry. I’m the sheriff here in town, and I got one of my deputies downstairs right this minute. Nothin’ to be alarmed about—just go on back to your room and let us do our job.”

  “But . . . but that’s Pete’s room.”

  The sleepy man suddenly wasn’t so sleepy anymore. He was wide awake, and shocked to all hell. He lunged forward, shouldering the sheriff out of the way to get a view of the gruesome scene in the room—a veritable slaughterhouse.

  “Oh,” the man moaned, “oh, Christ!”

  Rich took a hold of the man’s shoulders and swung him away from the door.

  “Please, fella,” he begged, “don’t do that to yourself. You don’t want to see that mess.”

  “Pete . . . oh Jesus, that’s Pete.”

  Was Pete, Jojo silently corrected him. Now Pete’s just meat.

  Still holding onto the shaken man, Ernie Rich craned his neck to look at Jojo.

  “These here them movie people?” he asked.

  Jojo nodded. “Six of ’em. Er—five, now. A woman and four men.”

  Rich frowned. To the man, he asked, “And what’s your handle, anyhow?”

  “Muh—my handle? Oh, you mean my name.”

  “Well, you got one, ain’t ya?”

  “It’s Phil. Phil Gossell.”

  “All right, Mr. Gossell: why’nt you get on back to your room and sit tight. I reckon I’ll have a passel of questions for you folks, but first things first. Just sit tight, you got it?”’

  “Sure,” Gossell said. “God in Heaven, this is . . . well, it’s just terrible. Terrible.”

  He kept muttering terrible, terrible all the way back to his room. After the door creaked shut, the bolt crunched home.

  “Sounds like a Yankee,” the sheriff commented, half to himself. “Or a foreigner, maybe.”

  “Maybe he’s been taking elocution lessons,” Jojo suggested.

  “You always was a funny guy, Walker. Real funny.”

  “Sure, I’m a regular Bob Hope.”

  “Get downstairs,” the sheriff commanded. “I’ll have questions for you, too.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to get everyone you want to question in the same place?”

  “You tellin’ me how to do my job?”

  “Heavens, no.”

  Rich grimaced.

  “Get!” he barked.

  Jojo got.

  The questions were all predictable, conventional cop stuff, and he answered most of them with the same simple statement: “I don’t know.”

  In fact, nobody knew anything. Everyone heard the scream, but that was all they heard. Nobody saw a thing—nobody apart from the young blonde “nurse” whose statement didn’t make any sense at all. She’d seen the whole awful affair, she said, but it wasn’t a murder, it couldn’t have been, because there was no murderer. The poor bastard just came apart at the seams, as it were. Dr. Hornor insisted on taking her home for observation, an insistence to which Ernie Rich only begrudgingly relented. The general consensus then and there was that the poor woman—she said her name was Elaine Weiss, and no, she wasn’t really a nurse—had seen something too terrible to bear and paid for it with her sanity. Rich feared he’d never get any clear leads from her. Hornor told him he was probably right.

  By the time the doc took off with Elaine Weiss and Deputy Mortimer took off with the various parts of the late Pete C
happell in six plastic bags, every guest had been thoroughly interrogated and each of them was as thoroughly unhelpful as the next. One of them, the man Jojo identified as the world-renowned sexologist Dr. Elliot Freeman, said he assumed it to be a scream of “erotic passion” (his words). Another fellow who described his role in the roadshow as pasting notices around town advertising the picture, claimed he hadn’t heard anything at all; he’d drank himself into a stupor and could hardly hold his head up during the questioning.

  The woman, a raven-haired beauty an inch taller than Ernie Rich in her heels, left the sheriff speechless and sputtering. She maintained a bemused smile throughout the interview. She told him when you stay in enough hotels and motel lodges, you learn to ignore little things like blood-curdling shrieks of terror. Like the rest of them, Rich asked her how well she knew the deceased. And like the rest of them, she responded that she barely knew him at all—of the entire entourage, Pete Chappell was the newest recruit, having only come aboard in Kansas City last May.

  “Seemed like a nice enough boy,” she added with an indifferent shrug. “I’m sure someone will miss him.”

  With only one witness, and her completely unreliable to the point of utter futility—“She’ll be in the bughouse before this is done,” Rich said—the Sheriff’s Department was at an impasse. The window latch had not only been locked from the inside, but the whole frame was painted shut ages ago. And naturally, no one could say they saw anyone come down the stairs or elevator either before or after the incident.

  “So either one of them up there did it,” Jojo said to his former boss before the latter made his exit from the hotel, “or the crazy girl ain’t so crazy.”

  “She’s nuts all right, and not like no fox, neither. No sirree, it’s got to be one of them Yankee sons of bitches up there.”

  “Which one of them looked like he could pull a man’s head off with his bare hands to you, boss?”

  Ernie Rich narrowed his eyes by way of response and stormed through the front doors. As they swung outward, a shock of orange daylight shot into the lobby, blinding Jojo. He threw an arm up to protect his eyes from the fast approaching morning, feeling as always a little bit like a vampire from a horror picture.

  Once the authorities were gone, Mr. Hibbs—who had been lurking in corners, mopping his great bald head and twitching like a morphine addict in intense silence all night—emerged from the sitting area and reasserted his domain. He scolded Charles for coming within spitting distance of the cashier’s cage, sternly informed the incoming maid that she had her work cut out for her in Room 214 (her last hour on the job, as it turned out, before she quit without notice), and demanded to know why he bothered to pay a house dick to keep the hotel in moral order when the guests were just going to end up dismembered in their rooms anyway?

  It was all bluster, Jojo knew, and he successfully talked his way out of it, citing the fact that he had done everything according to policy and that not every awful thing could be prevented, no matter the precautions taken. Hibbs sulked, Charles went home, and the day crew came shuffling in to the terrible news. At a quarter to eight, Jojo retrieved the key to one of the vacant rooms on the third floor and stamped up the steps, careful to avoid looking down the dreaded second floor corridor on his way up.

  In Room 301, he stepped into the shower, the water hot, and washed off the sweat. As soon as he got out again and towelled off, he immediately began to sweat anew, his pores leaking like a billion faulty faucets. With an exasperated groan he stepped back into the stall and ran the shower a second time, this round ice cold. But he still sweat.

  And under the cold spray, he puzzled over the unseen Barker Davis, the name on the Palace marquee, and why his face remained unseen and unquestioned throughout the whole bloody affair. Jojo did not believe for one minute that any of the strange people on the second floor were really running the show—none of them seemed competent enough for the job, save for the woman, whose name he never quite caught. No, this fellow Davis—this phantom—was somewhere about, yet as far as Jojo could tell he’d never set foot in the Litchfield Valley Hotel. So what gave? And why hadn’t Ernie Rich inquired into this gaping piece of mystery?

  Why hadn’t Jojo?

  He redressed, locked the room up and made his way back down to his office. The whispers among the day crew were in full swing, replete with shocked gasps and hands covering trembling mouths. Jojo ignored them all, avoided their eyes, and secluded himself in the hot darkness of his quarters, where he laid out on the cot and sweated out the morning and early afternoon through a fitful sleep loaded with ominous nightmares.

  Chapter Seven

  She dreamed of an open field, razed farmland, stained brick-red with blood and covered with corpses, most of them arranged like crosses. She walked among them, her movement impeded as though she were in water, careful to step around the largely incomplete bodies, their severed parts made cruciform with gory spines and dripping crossbars. In places the ruptured bodies steamed in the heat, and black swarms of flies descended en masse to feed on the putrid mess and leave their yellow eggs. She hurried past them, deeper into the grue, her bare feet slapping at the hot earth sticky with blood. In the near distance, a church loomed big at the field’s edge, ringed with sickly looking pines, its façade peeling from white to grey. A silhouetted figure emerged from the double doors, a man whose arms rose slowly until he too resembled the cross: the Revered Shannon, she realized—someone familiar, someone safe. She quickened her pace, splashing through the deepening putrescence towards her saviour.

  All but wading through the gore, she twisted past the thickening filth, the sun rapidly descending behind the pines, a thumping panic developing in her breast, beating a harsh rhythm that insisted she reach the church before darkness fell. Only God in Heaven could help her now, and she somehow knew for the first time that God was only to be found within the peeling, rotting walls of his musty house of worship, that there was no help and no hope beyond the confines of the church. And despite the alarming hot wind that poured out of the dilapidated structure, hotter even than the stifling, rancid air that swamped the field, she pressed on, practically swimming now, desperate to reach Reverend Shannon before the death-imbued darkness overtook her.

  Yet when she came near enough to see that it was not the Reverend Jim Shannon waiting to welcome her, but rather a man entirely strange to her, it was much too late—the hot wind had become a vacuum, drawing her in, directly into the waiting arms of the man with the jaunty little bowtie and the pockmarked face. He grinned, his teeth yellow and blunt, and opened up his white coat to reveal a startling display of tiny bones dangling over his chest, hundreds of them, babies’ bones, held together with wire and clacking in the noisy wind.

  “Welcome home, Theodora,” he said, and she tumbled through the air into his grasp.

  After that, Theodora knew only darkness with no air.

  And she awoke gasping, clawing at the bed sheets, certain that she was buried in the ground with the remains of a thousand infants, among them her own lost son.

  Chapter Eight

  Jim Shannon had heard quite enough. His hollow face reddened and his concave chest expanded with deep, angry breaths. He felt downright medieval: like a minor lord whose small dominion was overrun by infidels, heretics, savages intent on raping the daughters of his realm and laying waste to the goodness his hegemony had bestowed to the faithful under his tutelage. Such threats were nothing new—the Devil never tired, even if his adversaries quite often did—but this newest menace to Litchfield, as described in shocking detail by plump Mrs. Hutchins who got apoplectic in the telling of it, was surely the worst yet.

  At the centre of it, as usual, was that blasted Russell Cavanaugh.

  Always pushing his luck, that one. Orgies of sex and violence, half-naked women and glorified murder gracing his appalling little screen every other week. It was disgusting—and made all the more disgusting when Sh
annon considered how easily seduced God’s children tended to be. They weren’t bad people, most of them, but putty in Lucifer’s hands, oh yes! Not every member of his flock—real or hoped for—could maintain the consistent moral and spiritual fortitude of Emma Hutchins. This much was perfectly clear.

  At least, that was how he presented the case to her. The truth of it was Jim Shannon could not get his hackles up about these sorts of trivial complaints anymore. It had stopped making sense ages ago, along with most of everything else around him. Be it dirty films, or Barry Malarkey’s place serving whiskey and hops now, or that old deputy he and his congregation had helped to shame right out of his livelihood for running around with that coloured girl—none of it seemed to be his place anymore. None of it much seemed to matter at all. But still, the good Reverend Jim Shannon had a part to play, and he played it well. If ever Litchfield decided to establish a summer stock company, Shannon figured he’d be a shoe-in. He’d been acting his heart out for years, now.

  So Mrs. Hutchins came to the reverend with hat in hand, her ruddy face stern and her voice clear in the way it got when matters could not possibly be more serious. She spoke not of things she didn’t fully understand, because she had actually seen the whole shocking mess and she would have given that Cavanaugh an earful had he been around to receive it. Instead, she went directly to church. And Shannon heard the whole of it, from the first reel to the horrible last, so that he need never be subjected to its depravity himself.

  “Yes, of course we will organize a picket,” he told the exasperated old woman. “I’ll get on the telephone straight away, and you might call some of the ladies in your sewing circle while we’re at it, Mrs. Hutchins.”

  “But will it do any good? I remember when we came down on that awful place like a swarm of locusts, just a couple of years gone now, I reckon. It was that adultery picture then, you remember?”