Ripper (10 page)

"Who do we send?" Chan asked.

"Me," DeClercq replied.

Beast 666

10:45
P.M.

The city resembled London in 1888. Fog crept along the streets, snuffing hazy lights, while behind the veil lurked a crazed stalking team. Lugging a briefcase filled with books on Aleister Crowley, Jack the Ripper, and the Tarot, DeClercq left Special X for his West Vancouver home. Driving through Stanley Park and over Lions Gate Bridge, he sensed something evil brewing tonight. At twenty miles an hour it took forever to inch home, but finally he parked the Peugeot off Marine Drive near Lighthouse Park. Here beside the Pacific the fog was pea soup.

Tendrils of mist choked the firs lining the path to his house. The sloping asphalt beneath his shoes was slick with soggy leaves. No light followed him from the street and none beckoned ahead. Napoleon's disembodied bark reminded him of Baskerville's hound haunting that far-off moor. The bay beyond the hulk of his house was invisible, deep-throated foghorns the only clue it was there. DeClercq unlocked and opened the front door.

The German shepherd greeted him in the dark entrance hall. Robert took a moment crouched on his heels to nuzzle the brindled face of his canine friend. The dog had been with him since the day he buried Genevieve, a gift from Commissioner Francois Chartrand. The pup was left on his doorstep in a kennel with a note:
I won't say "Happy New Year," just "Life Goes On." His name
Is
Napoleon. He'll see you through.

That the dog had done.

DeClercq entered the kitchen off the hall to his right. He searched the fridge for a snack to share with the dog, tossing Napoleon the bone after he prepared a roast beef dunker for himself. Boiling the kettle, he filled a bowl with Oxo French Dip, then carried a meal tray down the hall to the living room.

The living room was dead.

Colder than a tomb.

Causing the loneliness of the house to wash over him.

The windows facing English Bay were milky cataract eyes. To the left was a dining nook set for one; to the right a large greenhouse jutting toward a shrouded beach. Within were the roses Robert hybridized, and his favorite reading chair. Right of the greenhouse was a massive stone hearth, spanning that entire side of the room. Near the fireplace ticked a grandfather clock engraved with the proverb
Time Is a Thief.
Pictures of Kate, Jane, and Genevieve lined the mantel, confirming the wisdom etched around the clock. The hardwood floor creaked as if from the tread of too many ghosts.

While DeClercq ate, Napoleon stripped the bone of meat, then began to gnaw it to get at the marrow.

"Sorry, boy," the Mountie said, taking it from him. "We don't want splinters inside you."

Returning to the kitchen to wash the dishes, DeClercq re-boiled the kettle to steep a pot of Earl Grey tea. He carried the tea tray along the hall and set it down by the stereo. Rummaging through the CDs, he found his favorite piece of music, the second movement of Beethoven's "Emperor Concerto." As Wilhelm Kempff's piano filled the empty gloom, he and Napoleon entered the library left of the fog-shuttered windows.

A few years back, this was the spare bedroom of the house. Here he'd opened Blake's trunk to begin the Cutthroat case. Now all four walls were shelved floor to ceiling with books. Every volume he had purchased since he learned to read was either displayed here or stored downstairs. The only furniture was an Edwardian table and Marlborough chair, the surface spread with Morris's
Pax Britannica
trilogy-

Robert reshelved the volumes, then poured a cup of tea.

He fetched his briefcase and fanned the books on Aleister Crowley, Jack the Ripper, and the Tarot around the table. '

Cracking Wilson's
The Occult,
he flipped to the chapter "The Beast Himself."

He read till the grandfather clock struck the witching hour.

November of 1947, a bewildered old man lay on his deathbed in Hastings, England. Reputed to be a cannibal and sacrificer of children, he'd lived a life of sex orgies, drugs, and Satanism. Known as Frater Perdurabo, Beast 666, and "the wickedest man in the world," he'd published texts designed to invoke demons and had practiced rituals that drove those around him to madness and suicide. The Beast's unholy mission was to replace the worship of God with worship of the Devil. Now his bald cranium glistened with sweat, his eyes full of tears as his face twitched spasmodically. "After all I've done!" he cried. "Is this the end?" It was (at least as far as we know) and soon the Beast was dead.

Aleister Crowley was born in 1875. His wealthy parents— Crowley's Ales—belonged to the Plymouth Brethren, one of the most repressive Calvinist sects. Rebelling against their beliefs, Crowley attacked what they worshiped and elevated what they hated. His mother thought him possessed by a monster in the
Bible:
the hellish Beast 666 from the Book of Revelations. "I am," he replied.

Crowley went to Oxford, where he flirted with witches' covens, and there, between episodes of chasing women and boys, immersed himself in the realm of black magic. In 1898—through alchemist George Jones—he joined MacGregor Mather's Order of the Golden Dawn, the foremost occult group in Britain. Crowley rose rapidly through its secret degrees, and when the Dawn split in 1900, sided with the more extreme Paris Lodge.

Crowley's flat in Chancery Lane had two occult rooms. The White Temple contained an altar surrounded by mirrors. One evening in 1899, Crowley and Jones returned from dinner to find its door unlocked. The altar within was overthrown and Crowley's magic symbols were strewn about the floor. Both men claimed they saw half-materialized demons marching around the room. The Black Temple was more bizarre. Its altar was supported by a handstanding negro carved from wood and a skeleton anointed with sparrows' blood. There Crowley and Jones swore they conjured Buer, a demon who commanded fifty of Hell's Legions.

Crowley traveled extensively. In Mexico, he sought to make his reflection vanish from a mirror. In Ceylon, he studied Eastern mysticism. In Egypt, using the alias Prince Chioa Khan, he undertook an invocation that changed his life. Seeking direct contact with Horus, the power behind the Dawn's Tarot ritual, Crowley mixed drugs and incantations until he summoned Aiwass, henceforth his guardian demon. Aiwass dictated the
Liber Legis,
which became the foundation of Crowley's Magick.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
In China, Crowley smoked opium and became addicted.

Crowley was obsessed with the Tarot. He designed his own deck, which he interpreted in
The Book of Thoth.

By 1908 he had his own cult: the Argentinum Astrum, A:A, or Silver Star. Like the Golden Dawn, it developed rituals to gain Magick powers. Crowley shaved his head and lived on mescalin. He dressed in robes akin to those of the Ku Klux Klan. While entertaining mistresses in their home, he hung his wife upside down in the closet, driving her insane. Crowley stressed the sacramental use of sex. During a Paris ritual, he publicly sodomized disciple Victor Neuberg. To "serpent's kiss" lovers, he filed his canine teeth to points. His current Scarlet Woman he branded on the breast. Claiming his shit was sacred, he defecated on carpets.

In 1909 Crowley experienced possession. He and Victor Neuberg performed the ritual in the North African desert. Crowley wanted Choronzon, a demon mentioned in sorcerers'
grimoires,
to occupy his body temporarily. While Neuberg sat protected by a circle, Crowley sacrificed three pigeons in a triangle. As the invocation to Choronzon was recited, Neuberg swore he saw phantoms swirling about his master.

Denounced in Britain, Crowley sought Utopia in Sicily. Accompanied by his disciples and current Scarlet Woman, he founded the Abbey of Thelema in a decrepit villa in 1924. As Crowley slipped deeper into drug addiction— chronicled in his novel
Diary of a Drug Fiend
—
foreign Satanists flocked to the Abbey. There they found Crowley staging nightly orgies in his Chamber of Nightmares decorated with demons. Women coupled with animals as the Beast slit each rutting beast's throat.

One of those lured to Thelema was an Oxford graduate named Raoul Loveday. Loveday dragged his wife Betty May along, where, under the influence of heroin and cocaine, Crowley told her, "I knew Jack the Ripper. He was a magician, one of the cleverest ever, and his crimes were the outcome of his Magick studies. The Ripper was a well-known surgeon of his day. Whenever he was going to commit a new crime he put on a new tie." Crowley showed Betty May a trunk containing bloody neckwear.

Utopia ended because the Beast sacrificed a cat. While incense burned and Crowley signed the pentagram with his staff, the animal was stretched across the Abbey's altar. Loveday botched the job of slitting the cat's throat, so he was forced to drink a cup of its warm blood. Gagging, he collapsed and later died on the day Crowley predicted from his horoscope. Mussolini expelled the cult from Italy.

Crowley published his
Confessions
in 1929. This work contains the passage quoted in
Jolly Roger.
He later expanded the story about Vittoria Cremers and the trunk in his essay "Jack the Ripper." It mentions
five
ties, not the original seven, and identifies the trunk's owner as Robert Donston Stephenson, a London physician. The doctor wrote contemporary columns on Jack the Ripper for
Pall Mall Gazette.
His work for
Lucifer,
an occult journal, was published under the pen name Tautriadelta.

Tau
is a Hebrew/Greek letter written as a cross or
T.

Tria
is the Greek number three.

Delta
—
Greek for
D
—
is triangle-shaped.

Tautriadelta.

Cross-three-triangles.

Hookers

Vancouver

Thursday, December 3, 1992, 3:17
A.M.

Fog lights on and both naked corpses in back, the van crept along the shore of foggy Point Grey. Past Jericho Beach, Locarno Beach, Spanish Banks, and the Plains of Abraham, it snaked uphill toward UBC tipping the tonguelike bluff. On a clear night, across English Bay to the right, you could see the whole North Shore and Lighthouse Park. One of the houses near the park was where DeClercq slept, but now his home, the mountains beyond, and the harbor were gobbled up. There was only mist, vapor, smog, and cloud, knifed by the van's yellow fog lights.

Skull was driving.

High above Tower Beach where concrete gun emplacements had watched for the Japanese, past the cairn commemorating Captain George Vancouver's meeting with Spanish explorers Valdez and Galiano in 1792, the van reached the Law School where Chancellor Boulevard joined the foreshore road. Turning right, then right again on Cecil Green Park Drive, it skirted the School of Social Work and the Alumni Association. Finally, engulfed by fog that scaled the cliffs to smother the point, the makeshift meat wagon parked in the faculty lot.

Killing the engine and fog lights, Skull climbed in back.

Chloe and Zoe lay side by side under a roofing tarp, their skinned faces staring up like ivory death's-heads. The cross-bones painted on their chests had warped as gravity flattened and sagged their breasts. Baited fishhooks jabbed Chloe's torso, while Zoe had a narrow zigzag ladder down her front.

"Hurry," Crossbones whispered from the passenger's seat.

Gripping her hair, Skull doubled Zoe like a jackknife. With one gloved hand he held a butcher's hook to the nape of her neck while the mallet in his other hand drove it home. Yanking the rope attached to the hook, he secured the spike deep in her brain.

"See anything?" Skull asked.

"Just fog," replied Crossbones.

"Keep a sharp lookout. And honk if anyone comes."

Opening the side panel, Skull stepped out. Mist seeped into the van to shroud the hookers. Skull wore a white parka with a white hood. On his upper lip was a fake mustache. Tucked in his pocket was a Beretta .40 semiautomatic. He looked like the Grim Reaper once he raised the hood.

Looping the hook's coiled rope over one shoulder, Skull hefted Zoe's corpse from the van. Crossbones heard him grunt under the dead weight, watching through the passenger's window as killer and victim were swallowed by the fog.

Ten minutes later, Skull returned unburdened. He climbed into the driver's seat and switched on the motor. "One down, one to go," he said, pulling out of the lot.

"You're sure you got the right pole?" Crossbones asked.

"Positive. I checked the photo archives of
The Sun.
The Headhunter nailed her to the Dogfish crosspiece."

Off Cecil Green, the van turned right toward Wreck Beach.

7:01
A.M.

John Doe—his real name—made a living from postcards and advertisements. He'd awakened at six
A.M.
to check the weather outside against the forecast in
The Sun.
Another front of rain clouds threatened from the west, their vanguard drizzle gathered in the fog, while to the east it was clear. Doe anticipated dawn would offer mystic shots so he drove to UBC and parked at the Museum of Anthropology. Millions of tourists visit the West Coast every year and most consider totem poles the essence of this city. As Doe gathered his equipment from the Mazda's trunk, a plane— DeClercq's flight to New York—took off from Sea Island across the Fraser River.

The sun would rise in forty-eight minutes.

Tripod over his shoulder, Pentax case in hand, Doe descended fifteen steps and rounded the museum. Out back the cliff dropped vertically to Tower Beach, the ledge between the precipice and glass-faced museum an outdoor totem exhibit. In the center of the ledge was a grassy knoll flanked by a Kwakiutl memorial pole. Topping the pole was Hoxhok, the cannibal bird, symbol of Baxbakualanuxiwae, the cannibal god, He-Who-Is-First-To-Eat-Man-At-The-Mouth-Of-The-River. Through the dark, with only a flashlight to guide his way, Doe walked the gravel path between the Haida mortuary house he came to shoot and the blackened eye of the museum. Atop the knoll he busied himself assembling his camera.