Bed of Nails (29 page)

“You missed one,” Bret said, a voice from the wilderness.

“No,” said Petra. “I saved them for last. True Gospel Mission was the harshest of all. They turned Tangaroa into a leper colony. If I was a writer, my story would go like this: In came the Bible-thumpers to battle the elder gods. By desecrating Tangaroa with disease, they not only defiled the gods’ sacred
marae,
but also spawned a cannibal cult bent on revenge. For generations, the insult has passed from parent to child in the form of a tattoo that is etched on each successive throat, and now is the time to settle the score.”

“I’ll write it!” enthused Pigeon.

“First come, first served,” she said.

“Okay, folks,” Wes said. “Time to go back in time.” Their unscheduled flight to Tangaroa had just been called.

“The new
ariki,
” Bret grumbled venomously.

“
Taunga,
Bret.
Taunga.
That’s more my style. Why go for half the power if you can have it all?”

“What’s a
taunga?
” Pigeon asked, busily scribbling notes. Revved up by the plot that Petra had outlined for him, the paper-pusher pursued his ticket out of law.

“The
taunga
was a god-box. The priest who talked to the gods. He would go into convulsions to communicate with them. On returning to a rational state, the god-box would voice the gods’ will. If he declared that the gods no longer lived in the
ariki,
that was the end of the current leader’s reign. Since there was no appeal from the word of the priest—after all, it was the will of their gods—the
taunga
’s
mana
was more powerful than the
ariki
’s.”

“The power behind the throne.”

“Right. As I am to Bret. After he shamed himself by poisoning us with bad beer, the gods abandoned Bret to reside in one of you. Which one will be revealed by sacrifice on the
marae
.”

“Hey, Wes.”

“Yes, Bret?”

“See this, pal?”

The taunted lawyer-turned-writer held up his ballpoint pen. For an instant, Zinc thought Bret Lister was going to stab himself in the Adam’s apple. But instead, the insulted man marked his throat with an ink streak black enough to be a tattoo.

As Zinc was about to leave the terminal hut for the plane, Petra crooked her finger to summon him. Tearing the top sheet off her sketching pad, she handed it to him and walked away.

The illustration was a cartoon along the lines of those produced by Gahan Wilson for
Playboy
magazine. Macabre, but with a wicked sense of humor. The skillful drawing depicted a stretched-out pig skewered on a barbecue rod turning over a fire. The pig—a play on the sixties epithet for a cop—had Zinc’s features caricatured in porcine form, a Mountie’s Stetson plunked over its ears. Down in the bottom corner was the cutest little cannibal you ever saw: Petra Zydecker bare-breasted and wearing a grass skirt. A knife in one hand, a fork in the other, she licked her tongue around her lips with gourmet gusto.

The cartoon’s caption read “Long Pig.”

The words in the dialog bubble that ballooned from the cannibal’s mouth were “I may just eat you up.”

Port Coquitlam

Late yesterday, a package had arrived at Special X. In it was Det. Ralph Stein’s report, complete with backup documents and photographs, on the current status of the Seattle investigation. DeClercq had spent last night and this morning in front of the Strategy Wall in his office, pinning witness statements and forensic reports to the corkboard as a rapidly expanding collage gobbled up adjacent space. Colored threads connected links like a spider’s web, and by the time the chief was finished, he could have been Spider-Man; but if so, his plate would have had no juicy fly on it for dinner, because the Seattle dragnet as yet had caught no one inside its meshes.

There was lots of buzzing, but nothing stuck to the glue.

And so it was, this afternoon, just after lunch with the pathologist Gill Macbeth, that DeClercq had taken his aging Benz out for a spin. Driving east on the Lougheed Highway as it wormed inland up the Fraser Valley along the north bank of the river, he’d squinted through the gray drizzle that blanketed this dismal day until he spotted the line of diminishing elms that stretched south to the water. The Benz had turned off the highway at Colony Farm Road. Flanked by the mushy marsh of the Fraser and overhung by dripping trees, his car had humped the bumpy pavement of the spookiest mile on the West Coast until it parked at the riverside hospital for the criminally insane.

“It’s the Ripper, Chief. It all goes back to him.”

That’s what Zinc had told DeClercq on Monday morning, after the inspector returned from Seattle. The chief had hoped that Stein’s report would throw up a lead for Special X to pursue. It hadn’t, so the Mountie was here to time-travel back for a motive.

The nurse who opened the unlocked door to the interview room to usher in the patient he had escorted from Room 13 in Ashworth 2 was an effeminate fellow in his forties named Rudi Lucke. Rudi gave the chief a glance of casual assessment, then stepped aside so his charge could enter the eight-by-ten-foot cubicle with its bare-bones furniture. Though he didn’t know it, DeClercq sat on the same seat the Goth had occupied a year and a half ago, when the pair of like-minded psychotics conspired to set the trap that was about to snap in the South Pacific.

DeClercq could smell him before he could see him.

The odor of rancid goat cheese was a stench the Mountie had sniffed before. On more than one occasion, he’d been in the presence of a borderline psychotic when the suspect’s latent madness turned florid in front of his senses. He had seen that shadow of vacancy pass behind the psycho’s eyes, had smelled that metallic stench seep from his pores, and had felt the hackles rise on his own skin, for he knew he was face to face with the darkest threat in the world: a human mind powered with an awesome potential to kill and destroy, but with no rational being to keep it under control.

It had been years since the chief last faced the Ripper. From one side of the doorjamb, he moved into the frame, and the first thought DeClercq had was, He’s cannibalizing himself. Like a terminal anorexic, the Ripper was skin and bones, an animate human skeleton who moved into the room. Little wonder, for he seemed to eat imaginary food. In one hand he gripped a tarot deck that was real enough, but the bony fingers of his other hand gripped empty air. Whatever he thought he held in it, the meal was delicious, for as he lowered his scrawny body in baggy blue sweats onto the chair opposite DeClercq’s, he sucked the juice out of his phantom food with lip-smacking relish.

The nurse shut the door.

The stench permeated the room.

“I’m Chief Superintendent DeClercq.”

“I know who you are.”

The Mountie set the two nonfiction books he had published down on the table between them.

“I’m not here about your case. I’m here about a book.”

“A book about what?”

“Jack the Ripper.”

“You’re writing a book about me?”

“That depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“Whether or not you’re the Ripper.”

“I am.”

“Prove it.”

The psycho held out the nonexistent food in his empty hand and flashed his werewolf fangs.

“What’s that?”

“What does it look like?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s a human heart.”

“Whose heart?”

“Mary Kelly’s,” the Ripper said, biting into the fantasy flesh and tearing off a piece. Both pupils had blown their irises to form black holes that sank forever into his diseased brain. So intensely did he concentrate on that internal wonder that the fleshless skin of his skeletal face seemed to be sucked in too. To look at the Ripper was to look into a living skull that was forsaking its hold on life in the here and now in favor of existence in another dimension.

Could he time-travel?

Let’s find out, thought DeClercq.

“The greatest unsolved puzzle in the annals of crime is the identity of Jack the Ripper. Though Scotland Yard mounted an extensive manhunt in the East End, Jack came and went as he pleased, ripping apart five hookers and tearing out their organs. Then he vanished into thin air, and despite the attempts of literary Ripperologists over the years, his identity remains a mystery today.”

Munch …

Munch …

Munch …

The Ripper chewed and listened.

“The courts say that you’re too insane to be tried. That’s why we have you locked away in here. You say that you’re Jack the Ripper incarnate, and that you found a wormhole through the astral plane from 1888 to now. If that is Mary Kelly you’re eating—Jack’s fifth and final victim—how did you get her heart unless you can travel
back
as well? You didn’t have the heart when I arrested you on Deadman’s Island.”

The Ripper smirked.

Munch …

Munch …

Munch …

“If you’re insane, I’m wasting my time. If you’re Jack the Ripper, I have a blockbuster of a book to write. So which is it? Are you a nut or the Ripper?”

DeClercq had thrown the gauntlet down on the table. He paused a moment so the question could sink in. The Mountie knew the history of this Ripper in real life, the psychology of the killer who had trapped and murdered all those writers on Deadman’s Island, so he felt confident that the psycho’s craving for personal worth would compel him to go for the bait.

“Time travel into the future, that I can accept. All it requires is the means to travel fast enough. Einstein proved that time is elastic. It can be stretched, bent, and warped. He also proved that gravity slows time, that time isn’t fixed. Time is relative. And to top it off, Einstein showed how portals could worm through space-time.”

The Ripper leaned forward. The hook was in. DeClercq was itching for a chance to jerk the line.

“Experiments in space have proved Einstein right. Because forces of gravity and speed warp time, time runs faster in space. Atomic clocks on rockets and long plane rides have picked up microseconds. A Russian cosmonaut who spent two years in orbit speeding around the earth in the Mir space station leaped one-fiftieth of a second ahead in time. So if we could find a way to hurtle ahead at a rate anywhere near the speed of light, we could travel through time.”

“The twin effect,” probed the Ripper.

“Exactly,” said DeClercq. “A space traveler with an identical twin living on earth blasts off aboard a rocket that flies at close to the speed of light on a ten-year trek to far-off stars. The twin will age a decade in the time his sibling is gone, but the astronaut will be just a year older on his return. In effect, the spaceman has leaped nine years into the future. The result is that he has traveled through time.”

“Like me,” said the Ripper.

“That I can accept. How did you do it? By astral projection back in 1888?”

“Is that a guess?”

“Not really. I’ve read your file. You laid out how you did it on the walls of Room 13. Nice touch: Room 13. Here and in Miller’s Court. But there lies the practical problem for me. Going
back.
Time travel into the future is nothing more than a technological challenge. But time travel to the past undermines the laws of physics.”

“The grandmother paradox.”

“Exactly,” said DeClercq. “What happens if I go back in time and shoot my granny dead when she’s a little girl? One consequence is that I will never be born. But if I were never born, how could I go back and shoot my granny dead? If we could tinker with the past, that would undermine every notion we have about cause and effect. That would produce causal chaos. Instead of our actions today influencing tomorrow, our influence would be on yesterday. It’s all very well for you to believe that you have opened a wormhole and can tunnel back and forth through space-time at will. But if
I
give in to the idea that you can loop back into the past, then every notion I have about the nature of reality and my relationship to the physical universe is overturned. If you can mix up the past, present, and future, what happens to free will?”

“It doesn’t exist,” said the Ripper. “Except in the occult realm.”

“Ah.” DeClercq sighed skeptically. “The timeworn debate between astrology and self-determination. Is my destiny sealed, so I have no vote? Or is it in my own hands, so I can alter it if I want to? No, I don’t buy it. Life isn’t mapped out. I’m not following some screenplay written in the occult realm. Time’s arrow points in one direction, and that’s toward the future.”

The Ripper set the tarot deck down on the table.

“Pick a card,” he said.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

The Mountie chose a card from the twenty-two spread out facedown across the surface.

The Ripper gathered up the rest.

“I know your card.”

“How?” asked DeClercq.

“A glimpse into the future. I saw you turn it over.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It’s the Hanged Man. The key to time travel. And the key to free will.”

DeClercq flipped the card.

It
was
the Hanged Man.

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “But there’s a practical problem. If time can be warped in both directions, why is there only you? If time travel was possible, surely there’d be other time tourists. That’s why you’re not the Ripper. That’s why you’re just a nut.”

That got to him, as DeClercq had known it would.

“I’m
not
the only one!”

“How do you know?” snapped the Mountie.

“Because I
showed
someone how to open the way.”

“Who?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“I already do. It’s either Bret Lister or Wes Grimmer.”

The Ripper blinked, suddenly realizing that he had been duped. But instead of exploding in rage over having been thwarted again, the psycho began to giggle. His pores opened wide to fill the room with a gagging stench. The black holes behind his eyes grew more vacuous, and the skin of his face drew in taut. His lips receded to expose his jutting fangs, and the hand that held the phantom food curled toward his mouth, his bony index finger extending to pick at his ivory grin.

“I have your flesh between my teeth,” the Ripper taunted.

Then he grabbed the Hanged Man card off the table, stood up, and left the interview room. DeClercq could hear him laughing all the way to Room 13.

On his way out to the parking lot, the chief stopped at Central Control.

“I hear you have computer problems,” he said to the security guard. “A virus or worm ate your visitors’ record?”

“Swallowed it but didn’t digest it,” the man replied. “A tech stuck his finger down the system’s throat, and it coughed up the missing data earlier today.”

“Check a patient for me?”

“Give me the name and I can tell you everyone who’s seen him. Plus the date and time.”

The Mountie gave the guard the Ripper’s real name.

The guard pulled up the record.

“Thanks,” said DeClercq, then he returned to his car.

From the parking lot in front of the psychiatric hospital, the chief placed a call to Special X. He asked the cop who answered to find an address for him, an address that matched a name he’d seen twice today: in the record of the Ripper’s visitors and back at the office on his Strategy Wall in the pinned-up report from Ralph Stein on the World Horror Convention.

With the address in hand, DeClercq drove through the marshlands on Colony Farm Road until it intersected with the Lougheed Highway. A turn left would take him back to Vancouver, but instead the chief angled right. From here, the road followed the Fraser River inland up its valley, along a route known as the Bible Belt.