Hob braced his arm against the left side of the shaft and barely managed to keep from falling in. The cloth, more than a ton of it, shook the whole mill as it hit the bottom.
Hob, staring down, could see no sign of Pete at the bottom of the shaft, only the jumbled, piled rolls of cloth, like white logs. But he could imagine what the fall and the crushing impact of the cartload of fabric had done to Pete.
Someone on the first floor, hearing the crash, had started the emergency siren. Hob’s weavers were leaving their jobs now — Mrs. Tully already was standing behind Hob. He turned around and shook his head. “Go shut down your jobs,” he yelled. “Shut them down. Clock out and go on home.”
“We still got an hour and a half,” Clyde Venable objected. Hob read the words from his lips; Clyde, at the back of the crowd, was too far away to hear.
“You won’t be docked,” Hob shouted. “You won’t be docked. Full pay tonight for everybody. Shut down and clock out. We’ve had an accident.”
The weavers went back to the looms. One by one the machines stopped. When the last one quit, a strange and disturbing silence descended. The weavers, all of them middle-aged or older, looked sheepish in that unaccustomed quiet.
By then they all knew what had happened. They were reluctant to leave at first, but they clocked out and drifted downstairs in groups of three and four. When the last one was gone, Hob called the main office again and told Jay what he had done.
“Fine.” O’Hara’s voice was distracted. “Damn, Hob, what made him do it? Randall had no business in the weave shop. What the hell made him do it?”
“I don’t know. Looked to me like he meant to do it, though. Was he drunk, you think?”
“I don’t know. Ambulance is here now.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Are you kidding? Oh, God, Hob, I gotta call his wife.”
“Listen, you want me to get the third shift started up? Or call it off tonight?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Call it off. Would you stay to close everything down?”
“Sure.”
“Oh, God.”
“What’s wrong?”
“They just took him out. I can see through — oh, my God, oh God in heaven — ”
Hob winced. In the haunting silence of the mill, over the telephone line, he could clearly hear the sound of Jay O’Hara vomiting.
11
Clarice Singer had left her post in the ticket booth to chat with Beebee Venner, behind the concession stand, during the last show. “The one next Tuesday looks scary to me,” she said.
“Movies don’t scare me none.” Beebee had dropped out of high school at sixteen, two years ago, convinced that she looked twenty-one and could marry any boy she chose. Now that she was eighteen and still single, she seemed to be trying to look sixteen again, and she incessantly chewed and snapped bubble gum. She popped it now. “Hope it keeps old creepy up in the booth, though. He come down to use the phone tonight and kept lookin’ at me like he wanted to take my clothes off.”
Clarice, three years older than Beebee, looked over to the steps leading up to the office and the projection booth before she answered: “Don’t mess with him, girl, he’s married already.”
“Yeah.” Beebee popped her gum. “I feel sorry for his wife, married to that old redheaded thing.”
“You just see he don’t get a poke at you with his own old redheaded thing,” Clarice whispered.
Beebee guffawed. Just then the feature ended and the doors swung open. It was a good crowd, even for a Friday night, and several people spoke to the girls or stopped to buy a candy bar on the way out. Joey Fulham, who had been ushering, came behind the counter to put up his flashlight and cap. The hubbub died down until finally the three were left alone. “Well,” Clarice said, “looks like goin’-home time to me.”
“Run and see if anybody’s asleep in the seats, Beeb,” Joey said, stretching.
“Kiss my rusty bucket, Joe Fulham. You got to usher tonight, you go check it out.”
“I’m tired.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to set and watch a movie,” Beebee told him. “Anyway, I gotta check out the ladies’ room.”
Grumbling, Joey turned on the houselights and went down the left aisle. Beebee grinned and winked at Clarice. “Wanna go up to the ladies’ with me? Old Andy’s still up there.”
“Okay,” Clarice said. “Oh, I’ll be glad to get home and soak my feet tonight.”
They went upstairs. The rest rooms were off a short hall to the left at the head of the stairs. No one was in the ladies’. When they came out, they found Andy McCory standing beside the stairway. “Time to go on home,” Clarice told him.
“I can’t,” Andy said, gloom in his voice. “I gotta clean up. Besides, Mr. Badon ain’t back yet.”
“Well, it ain’t too bad tonight,” Beebee said. “Most of ’em bought orange drinks and popcorn and not so much gum and candy. Just pickin’ up empty cups and boxes mostly. Be awful after the kiddie matinee tomorrow, probably.”
“Yeah,” Andy said. They left him and went downstairs. Joey was getting into his jacket.
“Ain’t nobody left,” Joey announced. “You look in the men’s room, too?”
“You shut up,” Beebee told him. “You got a dirty mind.”
Joey grinned and Groucho-wiggled his eyebrows at her. “You come on home with me and I’ll show you what my dirty old mind is like.”
“I’d have to be pretty hard up before I’d go home with somethin’ like you,” Beebee said. “You lock the back exits?”
“Tight as a drum. You want to usher tomorrow?”
“Huh. With a roomful of screamin’ kids? You ast for the usherin’ job tonight, you can just take it tomorrow, too, Mr. Smarty. Let’s go, Clarice.”
They left the theater. Outside, each went to a separate car. It was a few minutes past eleven; downtown looked empty. Clarice thought it was dingier, somehow, than it used to be. The leaves were starting to turn already, not really very much, but you saw some brown and yellow in them in the daytime, and now there were pieces of windblown paper and trash caught in the trees on the Square, too. She thought about going shopping tomorrow — Mr. Badon had paid them all in cash, as usual, when she had first come in that afternoon — and decided she would look for something warm, a nice sweater, maybe. It was getting so she felt cold, alone in the ticket booth.
Clarice’s way home led down Long Street (originally named Longstreet Street, after a Civil War general, its name had been shortened by people who thought its true title sounded too much like a stutter), past the Municipal Cemetery. It was closed at sunset, but still, driving past its long hedge and its brick archway, she got a minor case of the creeps at night. Lately she had thought once or twice that she had seen someone inside the grounds as she drove past, wistful shapes crowding behind the iron-barred gates hung in the archway. She had found a way of dealing with that, however.
She looked steadfastly at the other side of the street as she drove past the entrance. Tonight she saw nothing unusual.
Yes, Clarice decided. A sweater, definitely. A sweater would be nice.
12
Mr. Williams had left his son in the same room as his wife. He had brought a length of rope, good half-inch hemp, upstairs with him earlier. Now he tied a slipknot in one end, worked it back and forth until it slid smoothly, the noose going from large to small with almost no effort. He pushed the screen out and climbed onto the porch roof. The air was cool, the sky overhead good and dark.
From the porch roof he clambered up to the second-floor roof, steeply pitched. The brick chimney was in the very center. Mr. Williams slipped the free end of the rope around the chimney, tied it together, tugged hard at the rope to test the knot. He grunted with the effort, but there was no give.
He walked down the roof beam, feet tilted in opposite directions, to the end. He looked down. It was a thirty-foot drop from here to the ground: this was the high side of the house. He had about twenty feet o
f rope left, he estimated.
A metal hook had been screwed into the facing board of the house just under the peak of the roof, a guide for the television antenna wire. Mr. Williams stooped and wound the rope once around the hook.
He glanced down at the street. A man stood under the streetlight, a tall man clad in black. Mr. Williams grinned. The man in the street nodded.
Mr. Williams slipped the noose around his neck. Dead is dead, he thought, and stepped off the roof.
The impact pulled the metal hook right out of the wood, splintering off a foot of the facing board at the same time. The unrestrained rope slid down the pitch of the roof and deposited Mr. Williams on the ground not far from the front-porch steps.
However, considering what the rope had done to Mr. Williams’s spine, that place was as good to him as any other would be.
Under the streetlight, the man in black smiled. “Dead is dead, Mr. Williams? How does it feel to be wrong?”
Interval 2:
Of Souls and Shadows
1
Beliefs in the essential fragility of the human soul are almost as widespread as beliefs in the soul itself. In an impressive number of cultures, the incarnate or discarnate soul of an individual is believed to be susceptible to various types of injury or even to outright theft . . . .
Natives of the Caribbean visualize the soul as a colony entity, made up of separate spirits inhabiting the various parts of the human body, each with its own volition. If one of these miniature souls is injured by a curse, a corresponding debility appears in the portion of the body where that spirit holds its seat, and the composite, or great, soul is thereby weakened as well.... According to the Guarani, the soul may depart from the body altogether during states of trance or during exceptionally deep sleep. During these intervals, the soul may wander in the physical world or in the realms of the dead, and dreams or visions record these adventures. The soul is held by these people to be extremely vulnerable during its absence from the body, and often souls are destroyed utterly as they seek to enter the afterworld....
Some Chinese believe that each man has two souls, a superior soul, or hun, and an inferior soul, or p’o. Under certain conditions, a powerful wizard may abduct the hun from a living person, leaving the body animated by the baser p’o, an entity capable of the most revolting excesses.... As recently as 1892, the brutal murders and mutilation of an American missionary, his family, and his servants were blamed on a man whose soul had been taken from him.... In some ways the p’o may be regarded as all that is animalistic, dark, and evil in human nature.
- Hugh T. Kantor, “The Vulnerable Soul,” from Transactions of the World Ethnology Association, vol. 6, no. 3, 1939
2
The following document is a translation of one found in a cache of several dozen by Master Sergeant John Kirby, United States Army, at Dachau Concentration Camp, spring/summer 1945.
MEMORANDUM
TO: CAMP COMMANDANT WEISS, DACHAU FROM: DR. S. WECHSEL, EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE
27 OCT 1942
In order to clarify the events of the last two weeks, I present the following information: the Russian prisoner of war, Churikin, born 18 June 1921, was transferred to me on 28 Sep for experiments in high-altitude stress. As the RF SS wished those prisoners already sentenced to death to be the subject of the most dangerous experiments, I selected this Russian for a decompression experiment which I was certain would be fatal. As I reported at the time of the first experiment (24 Oct), “You may be assured that the Russian will certainly not survive and will be dead by the date given for his execution.” Contrary to my expectations, the man survived three repetitions of the decompression experiment. No other subject has survived even one. Since the RF SS has issued an order (21 Oct) that no Russian or Pole is to be granted pardon, I have had the Russian shot. I would like to beg you the favor of returning the body to me for autopsy and preparation of the internal organs in the Camp Pathology Department, in order to record the most unusual formation of multiple air embolisms. My wife has already written to SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Brandt with regard to this matter. I remain your obedient servant,
Heil Hitler!
Your grateful servant
S. Wechsel
3
But did Jack the Ripper actually die?
The record of brutal murders, identical in most respects to saucy Jack’s work, by no means ended in November, 1888. Even a partial list reveals the scope of the mystery:
• New Orleans, Oct. 1892–Jan. 1893. Six prostitutes murdered, disemboweled, and mutilated. The heart, kidneys, and “other parts” (sexual organs?) were reported missing in two cases. No suspect ever arrested.
• Paris, summer 1897. Seven women, six prostitutes and one housemaid, butchered. The mutilations were identical to those described in the Ripper murders. All cases remain unsolved.
• Dusseldorf, 1907. Four young women, at least one of them a prostitute, were murdered and mutilated over a six-month period. All killings were done “with a sharp instrument, possibly a surgeon’s scalpel.” No arrest was made.
• Galveston, Texas, 1914–1916. A total of eleven girls and women were killed and badly mutilated here by the “Devil Surgeon.” Newspaper records indicate that at least five of the victims were “fallen women.” Though police files on the cases are mysteriously missing, surviving newspaper accounts hint at severe mutilation and theft of portions of the bodies. Police never solved the murders.
• Atlanta, October 1922. Four Negro women murdered, one every Saturday night. All bodies slashed, disemboweled, and mutilated. No arrest made.
• Tokyo, 1928. Four murders of Geishas, all done with a sharp instrument. All cases unsolved.
• San Francisco, 1931–1932. Five unsolved mutilation-murders of young girls by the “Bayside Killer.” Heart and kidneys missing in two cases.
• Buenos Aires, spring 1939. An incredible sixteen murdered and mutilated young women over a span barely ten weeks. All were killed “with surgical precision,” and twelve were mutilated. An unconfirmed report says that the police recovered the heart of one victim from an alleyway half a mile from the corpse — and that the heart continued to beat for two days and nights. No killer was arrested.
• New York City, 1947–? More than a dozen cases of the ritualistic butchering of prostitutes have been with details now familiar to us: the bodies disemboweled, the internal organs cut loose and rearranged, portions missing. Of all the murders, not one case has been solved.
And these instances just scratch the surface!
Considering them, it is natural and necessary to ask: Is Jack the Ripper really dead?
It would seem he is not.
Yet, if he were a man, the Ripper would today have to be very old, a doddering killer in his eighties or nineties.
The thought is absurd. If in fact all these killings have been perpetrated by one being, that being is not a man.
The next question, too, is natural and dreadfully necessary: If he is not a man, what in God’s name can he be?
- James Bradlee, The Ripper Lives! A Paperbound Library Original Book (New York: 1955)
4
The JEW is the slimy head of this octopus [i.e., communism] and the NIGGER is its arms!
If God-fearing White people do nothing, godless communism will CHOKE THE LIFE from White America!
The time has come for White men to ACT!
We must CUT THE LIVING HEART out of this monster and SPREAD ITS GUTS for the world to see!
- No author credited. “Communism: Death of the White Race?”
(Pamphlet distributed in Gaither, Georgia, by the White Knights of the Grand Imperial Klan, September 1954)
5
MINISTER PREACHES HELL, SLAYS FIVE
Reverend Penton Adams of the Church of Sanctified Apostles was a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher.
The thirty-three members of his Tamid, Oklahoma church saw him as a spirited evangelist who was not afraid to stand against Satan and all his evi
l machinations.
But last Sunday, after an unusually strong sermon claiming that “Hell has broken out on earth” and that the faces of his parishioners “are the devils’ faces,” Reverend Adams drew from behind his pulpit two Colt revolvers and opened fire on his stunned congregation!
Adams wounded eight people in all. Three died immediately and two more succumbed to their wounds in the next two days. Finally Adams took his own life.
“He stuck the barrel in his mouth,” reports Sarah Four-feathers, a parishioner, “and he pulled the trigger....”
- The Tabloid Informer, page 2, June 19, 1956
6
Headlines from the Atlanta Journal, September, 1957:
MAD CHICAGO RIPPER SEIZED - KILLED 8
NASHVILLE SCHOOL GUTTED BY DYNAMITE
“ON THE BEACH” A TERRIFYING, CREDIBLE WARNING TO WORLD
CARRIE AIMS DEADLY WIND AT BERMUDA
TWO INSANE CONVICTS FLEE MILLEDGEVILLE
STUDENT HURLS LYE AT CLASS. 19 BURNED
8 NEGROES ENTER LITTLE ROCK SCHOOL FIGHTING FLARES
MYSTERY IN N. GEORGIA TOWN
MURDERS, SUICIDES UP
Part III
Horror Flicks
Nine
1
After the shocks of Sunday and Monday, the rest of the week was almost normal.
The Williams tragedy was first to be discovered, before dawn on Saturday the fourteenth, and was perhaps the most distressing to the community. The Williamses had relatives both in New Haven and in Gaither; they had been faithful members of the Harmony Baptist Church; and Mr. Williams had more friends than he had ever bothered to count, for he had been an easygoing man, good-humored and free with praise and small loans.
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