Bed of Nails (2 page)

Watkins blows his whistle.

He is summoning help.

But Jack the Ripper no longer kneels in Mitre Square.

I have dematerialized into the mist that swirls around the body of the whore, around the grimy streets of Whitechapel.

The lamplight catches her.

It doesn’t catch me.

For I am streaking along the wormhole that burrows through space and time, heading thousands of miles west from London’s East End and more than a century forward from 1888, until once again I am safe in my hideout here at Colony Farm.

I have the kidney.

I have the womb.

And I’m home in time for dinner.

Port Coquitlam, British Columbia

November 1

The eeriest mile on the West Coast was no longer eerie. It used to be that you would drive inland from Vancouver and turn south off the highway onto sinister Colony Farm Road. The farm was wedged into a crook at the junction of the Coquitlam and Fraser rivers, and the spooky road cut through the foggy flatlands along both flanks to reach what was then the Riverside Unit for the criminally insane. Colony Farm dated from 1905, a period when the principal causes of insanity were thought to be heredity, intemperance, syphilis, and masturbation. Work therapy was in vogue as a cure for lunacy, so the government purchased a thousand acres way out here in God’s country as a place to work the loonies. Essondale was the name of the asylum built on the slope of Mount Coquitlam to the north; through its bars the locked-up inmates had a river view. Parents who wished to frighten their kids away from “self-abuse” would threaten to send them to Essondale.

Essondale.

Does that not
sound
like a loony bin?

The “work” in “work therapy” was done on the flatlands below. A 450-acre patch was diked and ditched as Colony Farm, and by 1911, the slave labor at Essondale was producing more than seven hundred tons of crops and twenty thousand gallons of milk. Colony Farm was described as having “the best-equipped barns, stables, dairy equipment, and yards in Canada, if not the continent.” Befitting that picture-postcard image, a line of elm trees was planted along one side of the road that bisected the farmland.

The Second World War saw major advances in treating the insane. Electro-convulsive shock therapy—ECT—was introduced in 1942. One hundred and thirty-eight Essondale patients were strapped to restraining chairs the following year. With gags wedged between their teeth so they wouldn’t bite off their tongues and electrodes taped to their temples to zap in therapeutic juice, their brains were cooked to unscramble their minds. Psycho-surgery arrived in 1945. Disruptive inmates were treated by neurosurgeons who lobotomized them, separating the troubled chunks from their “good” gray matter. Insulin shock was used to plunge others into a chemical coma.

Now do you feel better?

A new facility built at Colony Farm was intended to house veterans injured in the war. The complex, however, was never used for that. Instead, Essondale was revamped in the postwar years. The asylum on the mountain became Riverview, and the war vets’ hospital a mile away on the miasmic flats spreading out to the Fraser became the Riverside Unit for the criminally insane. There, only the spookiest psychos were caged at the end of the eeriest mile.

Riverside.

Does that, too, not sound like a madhouse?

The rising moon beamed down on the flats as the black van turned off the highway onto Colony Farm Road. If the Goth had driven across this lonely marsh a few years ago, it would have seemed as if Halloween had summoned its monsters and demons here after last night’s festivities. Leaves shedding from the skeletal limbs of the overhanging elms would have tumbled about the windshield for the entire mile. The fleeting form of a werewolf might have lurked in the jerky shadows between the tree trunks, its chilling howl masked by those of local coyotes baying at the full moon. And surely those wisps exhaled by the murky marsh were ghosts haunting the graveyard of some forgotten tribe, for the bank at the end of this road was an Indian reserve.

The farm, however, had not been worked for many years. That neglect had resulted in ditches not being drained, which had caused water to rot the roots of the towering elms, and that in turn had brought several trees crashing down across the road. It was only a matter of time until someone got crushed, so the government had been forced to fell all but a few of the trees. Consequently, the eeriest mile had lost its creepy shadows, and the road the Goth drove tonight was a wide-open space of moonlit grass, thistle, and bramble mats.

Gone, too, was the brooding haunted house.

Its back to the dikes along the polluted Fraser River, the Riverside Unit for the criminally insane had exuded an ominous mood. On a full-moon night like tonight, the light of lunacy would shine down upon the three floors of that dual-winged snake pit. Through the crosshatched bars in rows of darkened windows would glare the eyes of freaked-out men trapped inside, accompanied by screams from those with cooked and cut-up brains. Black crows perched along the eaves of the flat roof would caw at cars that ran the gauntlet of the eeriest mile.

But no longer.

For Riverside was rubble.

All that remained of the booby hatch that housed the damned in a not-so-distant past was an empty, overgrown lot behind a chain-link fence. Sixty million dollars—that’s what it had cost to construct the new Forensic Psychiatric Hospital at Colony Farm. Built not a stone’s throw away from the old asylum, FPH resembled a gated residential enclave in an upscale rural neighborhood. Sixteen buildings set in seven and a half landscaped acres surrounded by fields, like those around the lot out front, where the Goth parked the van.

A walkway approached a gate wrought out of vertical bars and a connecting circle. Beyond the gate stretched green lawns, with Fir Hall located in the center. There, patients went to school and attended chapel. Radiating from the hub of the hall, spoke-like paths joined it to residences ringed around the wheel’s rim: the Birch Unit, the Cottonwood Unit, Dogwood House, and such. This side of the gate, the walkway was bordered by the Golden Willow administration building on the left and Central Control in the Birch Unit opposite. Hidden behind Central Control was Ashworth House, where the hospital’s high-security psychos were confined. Ash 2 had the wards reserved for the homicidal maniacs of FPH. Ash 2 was the destination of the Goth.

Everything about FPH bored the Goth to death. Just the occultist’s luck to be trapped in such an insipid era, when all aspects of dark mystery were bled from life and in their stead was substituted pablum for the mind. Milieu therapy. That’s what this snooze of a pleasant, peaceful place had devolved into. A curse upon these banal, mundane times. Gone were those malevolent trees haunting the eeriest mile. Gone were those caws of “Nevermore!” from dark ravens on Poe’s House of Usher. Gone were those gibbering screams from brains mutilated in the name of weird science.

Gone, gone, gone …

So that’s why the Goth was here.

While the Goth was clearing security at Central Control, a nurse named Rudi Lucke was making rounds in Ashworth 2, checking the patient rooms on both ground-floor wards. Five staff worked the three-to-eleven shift, and each knew from past experience that tonight would be more testing than usual. The word “lunatic” had been removed from the Mental Hospitals Act in 1940, but as with later attempts at political correctness, that didn’t exterminate lunacy from real life. For whatever reasons—psychological, physiological, or a mix of both—patients committed to mental hospitals worldwide got more agitated or psychotic on nights when the lunar disk was full.

Nights like tonight.

Yorick wasn’t the real name of the man in A2-5. The name on the card in the holder beside the door was “Burton, Percy.” First name last, last name first.

“We call him Yorick,” Rudi said, “on account of the skull.”

The remark was aimed at the young nurse who accompanied Rudi on rounds. A recent arrival from the outback of Australia, Jock Ogilvie had been commandeered from Ash 1, the wing responsible for assessing any unstable accused remanded by courts to see if they were fit to stand trial. On full-moon nights, extra muscle was imported into Ash 2, the higher-security ward that treated NCR-MDs, those determined by law to be Not Criminally Responsible on account of Mental Disorder. The Australian bodybuilder dwarfed Rudi and was the perfect muscle for the job.

“Listen,” Rudi said, cupping an ear.

A stentorian voice boomed so loudly from A2-5 that there was no need for Jock to amplify.

“Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy …”

“Recognize it?”

“No.”

“Shakespeare’s
Hamlet?
”

“Sorry,” said Jock with a shrug of his gorilla shoulders. “Not my cup of tea.”

“
Hamlet.
Act V. The graveyard scene. The prince of Denmark and Horatio are onstage when gravediggers accidentally unearth a skull. The skull is that of Yorick—”

“Is Hamlet the Danish prince?”

Rudi blinked. Were there actually people in this world who didn’t know that? “Yes,” he said evenly, like he did with the vacuous patients. “Hamlet’s the prince.”

The Aussie smiled, pleased with himself. Brawn but no brains, Rudi thought.

“Hamlet takes the skull and holds it out in his hand. Peek through the door, Jock. What’s Yorick doing?”

The door to room A2-5 was blue. Though the wing was sealed, the doors in this ward were unlocked. FPH was a hospital, not an asylum, so patients were free to leave their rooms at will (under the watchful eyes of the nurses stationed at one end of the hall) to go to the communal toilets, the kitchen and dining room, the TV room, the smoking room, and the quiet room for reading. Rounds were made every half-hour to ensure all was well, the procedure being that a nurse would stroll the lengths of both wards to take a surreptitious peek through the judas window in each patient’s door.

“Christ,” said Jock, peeking in. “Is that skull real?”

“The original was. That’s why Yorick’s here.”

The Aussie bent closer for a better look through the window.

“Yorick was a local actor who couldn’t land the role of Hamlet. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet holds out the skull of the jester who used to entertain the royal court. The prop ignites the prince’s thoughts on death and mortality. Yorick convinced himself that a genuine skull would help him master the role, so he rushed to the apartment next door and decapitated his neighbor. He cooked the head in a pot on the stove to boil away the flesh. When police arrived to investigate a complaint about the smell, they found Yorick rehearsing the graveyard scene. Addressing the dripping skull of his headless neighbor, he was delivering the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ lines.”

“And
this
skull?” Jock asked.

“Plastic,” Rudi replied. “We purchased it at a Halloween store. It keeps Yorick happy.”

Five inches wide by three feet tall, the window was a vertical slit through the door. Positioned off-center, near the handle, it gave Jock a view of the entire room except for the corner by the hinges. The lights were out and moonbeams slanted in through the opposite window. A thin, naked man stood silhouetted against the lunar glow. He held the plastic skull out at arm’s length in one hand so that the skeletal features of the prop faced him. As the thundering thespian recited Hamlet’s speech, his other hand was engaged in “self-abuse.”

“How abhorred my imagination is!” Yorick hammed with gusto. “My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.”

Crushing the lipless teeth of the skull against his own slobbering mouth, the patient in A2-5 engaged in passionate French kissing with the prop. The overpowering ecstasy of mastering the bard prompted Yorick to explode in an anticlimactic climax.

“He shoots, he scores,” Jock reported.

Sports held no interest for the older nurse. Rudi’s self-image was that of a sensitive, artistic, thinking man.

“I can’t make out the writing on the wall,” Jock said.

“That’s where Yorick scrawled his last will and testament.”

“He’s got stuff to leave?”

“His skull,” Rudi explained.

“The plastic prop?”

“No, Jock. The real skull inside his head. He bequeathed it to the playhouse to use in performances after his death. In the end, Yorick will appear onstage in
Hamlet.
”

“Humph,” Jock grunted. “He’s really out of his head. I’ll bet he’s the most psychotic patient in Ash 2.”

“No,” said Rudi. “That would be the Ripper.”

While the Goth was being led from Central Control in the Birch Unit out front through a series of high-tech security doors to an interview room in Ashworth House, Rudi and Jock rounded the V-angle in Ash 2 to check the other open ward.