Bed of Nails (13 page)

“What was the name of those jokes?”

“Geiners,” said Alex.

“Find any?”

“Sure. In a psychiatric journal. What did Ed say to the sheriff who arrested him? ‘Have a heart.’ Why won’t anyone play poker with Ed? He might come up with a good hand.”

“Macabre.”

“We laugh to keep from crying.”

“Kemper,” said Zinc. “He was the giant?”

“Six-foot-nine. Three hundred pounds. He decapitated his sisters’ dolls when he was a boy, then decapitated coeds after he became a man so he could have sex with the headless bodies. First, he’d strip them and pose them in a bath, so he could take Polaroids of them whole. Later, he’d chop up the bodies and store most of the meat in the freezer, except for what he would cook in a macaroni casserole. Having elaborately set the table, he would display the Polaroids behind his plate, then eat the meat, staring at them, until he reached orgasm. The frozen flesh would last him a month. On his arrest, he was asked, ‘What do you think when you see a pretty girl walking down the street?’ Kemper replied, ‘One side of me says, I’d like to talk to her, date her. The other side of me says, I wonder how her head would look on a stick?’ When convicted of eight murders, he told the court he thought a fitting punishment for him would be death by torture.”

“When was that?”

“In the early 1970s.”

“Lucas and Toole. Another biggie. Why the question mark?”

“We have only their say-so about eating flesh.”

“The next four draw a blank.”

“They’re recent Americans. Stanley Dean Baker was stopped for a hit-and-run in California. ‘I have a problem,’ he told the officer. ‘I’m a cannibal.’ He was snacking on the fingers of a social worker whose heart he had devoured raw. Daniel Rakowitz lived on New York’s Lower East Side. He killed his girlfriend in 1989, then boiled her head to make soup out of her brain. Scrawled on the door of his apartment was this gibberish: ‘Is it soup yet? Welcome to Charlie Gein’s Ranch East. Home of the Fine Young Cannibals.’ Albert Fentress was in Poughkeepsie. He cooked and ate the testicles of a young man he’d chained in his basement. Arthur Shawcross fell from grace in Vietnam. The GI roasted and ate ’Nam kids. When he went back to New York, he switched to women. There, he ate vaginas, and not in the usual sense.”

“Heidnik. The harem guy?”

“Right. Philadelphia, in 1986. He kidnapped and imprisoned six women in his cellar. One died in a pit filled with water and charged with a live wire. Another died after she was hung by her wrists for a week. He cut up that body, ground some flesh in a food processor, mixed it with dog food and made the others eat it. Police searching Heidnik’s house found a charred human rib in the oven and a forearm in the freezer. His lawyer described him at trial as being ‘out to lunch.’”

“Jeffrey Dahmer. The modern Ed Gein.”

“There must be something in Wisconsin’s water. Another charnel house. A human head on a refrigerator shelf. Skulls stashed in a closet. Body parts crammed in a plastic barrel. Hands decomposing in a lobster pot. An array of dry bones in cardboard boxes. A freezer full of viscera: lungs, livers, intestines, kidneys. Individually wrapped portions of hearts, thighs, and biceps, some of which were tenderized, with the fat trimmed off. His favorite meal was biceps—he claimed they tasted like filet mignon. Dahmer killed seventeen men he picked up in gay bars.”

“What I remember,” Zinc said, “is the zombies. He drilled holes in the skulls of still-living men and poured in acid to dissolve their brains to mush.”

“And more jokes.”

“Geiners?” said the Mountie.

“Jeff ‘the Chef’ Dahmer’s mom came over for dinner. ‘Jeffrey,’ she said, ‘I really don’t like your friends.’ ‘Then just eat the vegetables, Ma,’ he replied.”

“I remember one,” added Zinc. “What did Jeffrey Dahmer say to Lorena Bobbitt, the woman who severed her husband’s penis with a knife? ‘You going to eat that?’”

“Which brings us to Andrei Chikatilo—Russia’s ‘Mad Beast’—who lured at least fifty-odd victims into lonely woods and attacked them like a monster. In the twelve years prior to 1990, he cut out tongues, bit off nipples, sliced off noses, gouged out eyes, and devoured genitals, which—according to his captors—left him with a gagging case of halitosis. He holds the record as the worst serial killer of modern times. Close behind is Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev of Kyrgyzstan. At least forty-seven victims were in the ethnic cuisine he served to his neighbors. Dzhurmongaliev told police that two women provided enough meat for a week.”

“Why the nickname Metal Fang?”

“His false teeth were made of white metal.”

“Nelson. The local guy. Does he count?”

“Is it cannibalism if you cut someone open and eat the
contents
of her stomach? Another question mark.”

“That’s a lot of Morlocks,” Zinc summed up.

Alex nodded. “It’s shocking to see so many people-eaters gathered in one place.”

“Your book may end up too heavy for the masses.”

“At least it will serve one purpose: if fiction readers come across a psycho-thriller involving cannibals, they’ll have no difficulty suspending disbelief.”

“Amen,” said Zinc.

“So,” said Alex, returning to the stove, “what say we have a hearty meal of Eloi curry, then settle back and watch a double bill of
The Time Machine?
”

“Sorry. I can’t.”

“Party-pooper. Why not?” she asked.

“I’ve got a tentative date tonight with two possible suspects at the Lions Gate.”

“Mona’s bar?”

“Afraid so.”

“Will she be there?”

“An irresistible hunk like me, how could she not?”

“In that case, buster, you’d better come with me.” Alex took Zinc by the hand and pulled him toward the bedroom. “By the time I’m done with you, you’ll be of no use to Moaning Mona.”

Like the Time Traveler in Wells’s novel, Zinc’s mind was transported forward by a vibrating machine. In his situation, the device summoning him back to this rainy veranda at Minnekhada Lodge from the memory of Alex seventeen months ago was the silent cellphone vibrating in his pocket. It was one of those ironic coincidences in life—considering the secret plot that was currently unfolding in Seattle to turn the Mountie into the Goth’s food—that of all the pleasant recollections Zinc retained of her, the one that had captured his mind tonight involved
You Are What You Eat.

The inspector checked the number recorded on his cellphone. The area code was Seattle. The number didn’t click.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Zinc, it’s Ralph Stein.”

“Ralph? It’s been a while. I can barely hear you.”

“Rain on my umbrella.”

“It’s pouring here too. Where you calling from?”

“Outside Ted Bundy’s house.”

Twenty Miles East of Seattle

On bone-chilling nights like this, the undead do crawl from their graves. Charlie Yu could hear them moan in the wind that drove the rain through the skeletal trees, their gnarled limbs creaking overhead like rusty elbow joints, and he could see their foul breath from beyond the grave emerge in miasmic puffs that swirled in from the darkness around the flashlight’s beam. Freddie, the torchbearer, led the way into the hidden cemetery from the deserted bypass that ran up to Maltby from Redmond, north of Lake Sammamish. Tommy, the map reader, was their middleman as the three skulked single file into the dark unknown, for he was the one who could understand the X-Y coordinates on the survey grid. Charlie, the pot supplier, brought up the rear. His task was to roll the joints that skyrocketed the anxiety level of the Zombie Hunters so their hearts were tripping like jackhammers in their throats as they penetrated deeper into the foreboding fright night of this
verboten
netherworld.

“Look,” Freddie whispered, pointing dead ahead.

“Eureka!” Tommy crowed when he saw what was caught in the pool of light.

“What is it?” Charlie asked, trying to see around the pair, who were blocking his view.

“A gravestone.”

“Eldritch!”

“There’s another one.”

“There should be fifteen gravesites, give or take,” Tommy said.

“I can barely see them for the weeds,” Charlie said, stepping aside to peer around his buddies.

“Speaking of weed,” Freddie hinted. “It’s time to roll them joints, Brother Charles.”

“Whoa!” gasped Tommy. “What’s that in the center?”

“Jesus H. Christ! It’s got to be the pit.”

“Do you see what I see at the rim?”

“A step.”

“A concrete step.”

“The Thirteen Steps to Hell.”

Once a year, the Zombie Hunters met somewhere in the States for a fright-fest. Charlie came in from Texas with the loco weed. They had tried acid once, but that was overload, and Freddie—though he denied it—had pissed his pantaloons. He came in from Rhode Island, the home state of the dark prince, H. P. Lovecraft, so Freddie considered himself a maestro of the macabre and, consequently, the natural-born leader of the Zombie Hunters. Usually, it was his job to pick a haunted destination worthy of conquest by the intrepid trio. But Tommy hailed from Seattle, and this year he was one of the organizers of the World Horror Convention, currently under way in his hometown, so it had fallen to him to choose the spookiest spot around.

Maltby Cemetery had won hands down.

Freddie, Tommy, and Charlie had first met in Nashville, Tennessee, lured to that city’s World Horror Convention by the opportunity to have Richard Matheson, the guest of honor, sign their well-thumbed copies of
I Am Legend.
Standing one behind the other in a line of fans slowly snaking up to the signing table, they had engaged in a lively debate about the merits of that novel. Was it the ultimate vampire story, better than
Dracula?
Was it the inspiration for
Night of the Living Dead,
which Freddie had called “The best goddamn fucking fright flick ever filmed, in my humble opinion”?

“Hear, hear,” Tommy said. “Imagine what it must have been like to be in your car at a drive-in in 1968 when that black-and-white shocker flashed on-screen.”

“Bet it’s the only drive-in movie more memorable than what went on in the backseat.”

“And to think it was shot for a measly hundred and fifteen thousand bucks,” said Charlie, tossing in his two cents.

“Relentless,” Freddie said.

“Just like
I Am Legend.
”

“What a book. What a theme.”

“Robert Neville is the last man alive on earth,” Charlie said. “And everyone else is a vampire hungry for his blood.”

“By day, he’s the hunter. By night, he’s the hunted,” Tommy said.

“Barricaded in his home, praying for dawn—how long can he hold out?” said Freddie with obvious glee.

“Damn good question. How long must
I
hold out till I get to meet the man?”

Charlie stood up on his tiptoes. “I can see Matheson’s head.”

“You know what’s wrong with vampires today?” said Tommy.

“Yeah, Anne Rice,” Freddie replied.

“The books are all about chicks in gowns who yearn to get sucked while they’re fucked.”

“Romance and horror,” Charlie scoffed.

“Yuck,” said Freddie. “Give me relentless monsters who want to tear us limb from limb so they can gobble the raw flesh off our bones.”

After the signing, the three had moved on to the bar. There, as pint after pint of beer foamed down their gullets, they had dissected the nitty-gritty of
Night of the Living Dead.

“Know why zombies make the best monsters?” Charlie had said.

“’Cause the dead rising from the grave is one of our oldest fears,” Freddie replied.

“Why’s there no great zombie novel?” complained Tommy.

“’Cause zombies came out of voodoo and went straight to film, where all they did was lurch around like mindless robots.”

“Until Romero. And
Night of the Living Dead,
” Charlie said.

“Not only are the dead rising from the grave, but for the first time on film, they are rising to
eat
us!” Freddie added.

“His zombies are as bent as movie monsters come. Not only do his living dead have an insatiable hunger for our flesh, shambling and stumbling and lurching around to get their hands on you, grasping and clawing at anything that stands in their way until they can rip out your entrails and devour them with glassy-eyed intensity—but those who fall prey to them become zombies too,” Charlie said.

“You a writer, dude?”

“I’m trying,” Charlie confessed.

“It’s
I Am Legend,
isn’t it?” Tommy said.

“It’s more than that,” Freddie said. “It’s the ultimate nightmare. In
Dead,
you’ve got these desperate people trapped in an old farmhouse near a cemetery with zombie cannibals closing in all around. But all they do is panic, squabble, and make stupid decisions that turn them into meat. Romero destroys every comforting notion we have. Family ties don’t matter—”

“Yeah,” rejoiced Tommy. “The dead brother tries to eat his living sister. The little girl kills Mommy with a garden trowel, then mindlessly munches on Daddy’s remains.”

“Courage isn’t rewarded.”

“Heroes don’t triumph.”

“What’s the use? No one survives. Characters we’ve come to like are ripped apart and devoured bone by bone and organ by organ in front of our eyes
.
Even the black guy—our main man—gets through the night only to be mistaken for a zombie at the end,” Charlie said.

“Shoot ’em in the brain,” Tommy advised, imitating the voice of the
Dead
’s hick sheriff.

Freddie signaled the barman to tap them another round.

“It’s nihilism run amok,” he said.

“No logic in death,” said Tommy.

“Death is nothing more than nonfunctioning flesh. The zombies’ only reason for ‘living’ is to propagate death. Because its horrors break every taboo, the film reduces death to the loss of all we value,” Charlie said.

The three contemplated their empty beer mugs.

Charlie belched as the next pitcher of suds arrived. “We’re deep, dudes.
Deep.
”

“Yeah,” said Tommy, nodding. “I’m glad I met you guys. At last, a pair of geniuses who think like me.”

“Genii,” said Freddie.

“Huh?”

“That’s the Latin plural. You gotta learn to speak a dead language, pal.”

“To zombies!” said Charlie, raising his refilled mug.

“To cannibals!” said Tommy, upping the toast.

“To us!” said Freddie. “The fearless Zombie Hunters!”

Wobbly mugs clinked.

“Shoot ’em in the brain!”

So that was the first night these three had set out on a quest to test their mettle, abandoning the convention hotel to find somewhere spooky in Nashville where they could seek the paranormal. From sea to sea, America is rife with haunted enclaves and bad places. Each subsequent year, the three had converged at the World Horror Convention, first to score the John Hancock of the guest of honor on books and albums in their horror collections—in Stanford, Connecticut, Peter Straub; in Atlanta, Georgia, Alice Cooper; in Eugene, Oregon, Clive Barker; and now, in Seattle, Bret Lister—then to venture forth to the eeriest local place to face the evil dead.

Jeepers creepers.

Yesterday, Thursday, Tommy had greeted Freddie and Charlie at SeaTac Airport, where their flights from back east and down south had landed within ten minutes of each other. No sooner were the Zombie Hunters together in one place than Tommy pulled the program guide for this year’s horror convention out of his pocket and said, “Maltby Cemetery. Friday night.”

Flipping through the six pages of panels and events scheduled for the next three days, and several more pages of short biographies about those at the convention, Tommy arrived at the closing article, “Spooky Seattle: A Ghost Tour of Haunted Sites,” and jabbed his finger at this:

MALTBY CEMETERY—According to
Ripley’s Believe It or Not,
this is one of the most evil places on earth. Maltby Cemetery was founded in the 1800s by a family of Satanists so they wouldn’t have to be buried in sacred ground. Fifteen gravesites surround a hole in the center and descending into that pit are thirteen cement steps that lead to nowhere. These are the infamous Thirteen Steps to Hell. It’s said that if you count off the steps as you go down, when you reach the last step
—
Step Thirteen
—
you will suffer a glimpse of your spirit in hell. Local lore maintains that over the years, some have vanished into the pit, never to return, while others have crawled out stark raving mad. The cemetery is haunted by a woman dressed in ragged nineteenth-century garb. Because the graveyard is a magnet for Satan worshippers, it is omitted from local maps. Hidden away on the right side of the road up to Maltby from Redmond, it can be located twenty miles east of Seattle on a survey grid with these coordinates: T27N R5E.

 

“Damn,” Freddie said. “The program gives away the location. Half the convention will beat us there.”

“No,” Tommy assured him. “It’s not on the bus tour. It’s out in the boonies. And who knows how to read a survey grid?”

“Do you?” Charlie asked.

“I got it all worked out. I had a surveyor convert the coordinates to a tourist map. We’ll be the only ones there,” Tommy replied.

So, earlier tonight, the Zombie Hunters had ventured across Lake Washington on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge and continued east on Highway 520 all the way to Redmond, at which point they turned north on the country bypass that led to Maltby, with Tommy reading the map until he said, “Stop here.”

“I told you,” Freddie groused. “Company.”

An old VW van was parked off the road on the right.

“Naw,” said Tommy. “It must be a breakdown. Who in their right mind would be out here tonight?”

“Us?” said Charlie.

“That’s debatable, dude.”

And so the fearless Zombie Hunters had ventured off the deserted road into the black woods, their only guide the flashlight sweeping back and forth in Freddie’s hand. The beam caught ominous shadows lurching and shambling through the trees like zombies stalking them for the meat on their bones. This was their night of the living dead, and it was as if they were the last three survivors on earth. A shift in the wind had waved the limbs looming over them like clutching giants who could pluck them from the ground at any moment. Then, abruptly, Tommy had stopped them dead in their tracks.

“Hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“People talking.”

“I don’t hear a thing.”

“Neither do I.”

“Must be that raggedy woman who haunts the place, bro.”

And that’s when Freddie had spotted the gravestone.

So here they stood, shivering in the teeming rain, puffing on the fat joint that Charlie had rolled, their collars turned up against the cold and their bare heads bowed together in a huddle to keep the sparks at the lit end from snuffing out.

“Wow!” said Freddie, his voice warbling as he struggled to hold in the smoke. “That”—he exhaled the sweet billow—“is awesome shit, man.”

“Everything’s better in Texas.”

“This weed’s almost as strong as that acid hit that made Freddie wet his pants.”

“I did
not
wet my pants.”

“You pissed yourself. Didn’t he, Charlie? Remember, Freddie said he saw a psycho with an ax?”

“Man, am I stoned.”

“Me too,” Freddie agreed.

“So who’s got the balls to follow me down those steps?”

“Lead on, Brother Tom.”

“Let’s fuckin’ do it.”

The Zombie Hunters wore a mismatched uniform. Underneath, the three were bundled up against the cold, but over top, each had pulled on a favorite T-shirt garnered at a past convention. “Fangoria” read Tommy’s torso. “Bad Moon Books” said Charlie’s chest. “Cemetery Dance” prophesied Freddie’s pecs.

Closing on the beckoning pit sunk into the muddy ground, the zonked Zombie Hunters paused at the edge of the abyss for a passing of the torch. Careful not to shine the flashlight down into the hole, for that would spoil the thrill, Tommy allowed the beam to creep forward to the step at the rim and no farther.

“Step One,” he said, then down went his foot.

“Step Two. Step Three. You with me, fellas?”

“Roger,” whispered Freddie.

“Aye,” said Charlie. “Bringing up the rear.”

“Step Four. Step Five.”

The beam of the torch descended no deeper than the outer edge of the next step down.

“Step Six. Step Seven. Step Eight. Don’t piss yourself, Freddie. Remember, I’m here in front of your unit.”

“I did
not
piss myself.”

“Step Nine. Step Ten. As I recall, it wasn’t raining that night, dude.”

“It’s sure as hell raining now,” Charlie said.