Bed of Nails (19 page)

As canapés, he is served the tips of several noses nipped off by the high priest and roasted like marshmallows on a stick over a fire lit to heat the oven stones. To feed the meat into the king’s mouth in such a way that it won’t touch his lips and be defiled, the server uses a peculiar wooden fork, a
culanibakola.
That’s because the flesh isn’t just for him but is also being fed directly to the
kalougata,
the spirit of the god of war responsible for the victory, who is physically present within the king at a cannibal feast.

The eating is in his honor, and the god wants his share.

The reverend, it would seem, can take no more of this blasphemy. He and the cannibal king are locked in a tug-of-war for the souls of these Fijians. The man of God still stands at the chapel door with his Christian cross held high in the air, as if that should be enough to bring the pagans to their knees. Inside the threshold of the church, I can just make out the sickly form of the old missionary on his deathbed. When he first set foot on this island years ago, he introduced a plague of biblical proportions in the guise of European diseases. But now the old man is stricken with one of the local infections, and the reverend sent to replace him lacks the clout of a new germ-infested God.

“In the name of the Father …” the reverend shouts.

Some of the cannibals turn.

“In the name of the Son …”

Attracting more attention.

“In the name of the Holy Ghost …”

Including the cannibal king.

“Uh-oh,” I say. “You’ve really done it now.”

The advantage of being a time traveler to the past is that you enjoy the benefit of twenty-twenty hindsight. What the reverend has yet to understand is what he’s up against. Historians will later unravel the inherent logic of Fijian cannibalism. I know, because I digested their books before I time-warped here.

Veikanikani
—cannibalism—is founded on the worship of ancestor spirits. Spirits reside in the spirit world of Bulu and manifest themselves on this island through the cannibal king. As such, this cannibal king is a living god who, in exchange for raw women supplied to his harem in the form of island virgins, imports a plentiful supply of
bakolas
to bake into cooked men, which the islanders can offer as sacrifices to the spirits of Bulu.

Any man, if his spirit survives, can enter the spirit world. In battle, ancestor spirits guide their descendants. The spirit of a body clings to the corpse for four days after death. Sacrificing and eating an enemy’s body destroys his spirit before it can enter the spirit world to become a power source for those trying to eat you. Killing means nothing. Eating brings glory. The more damage done to the
bakolas,
the better. Powerful is the cannibal king whose
mana
—effectiveness—is fed to his subjects. And nothing brings home the bacon in that regard better than long pig from victory in war.

That might not make sense to the reverend, but it makes sense to me.

Different countries. Different customs. Different gods.

“Vakatotoga!”
the cannibal king yells, pointing one of his chubby fingers this way.

The big guy is really pissed off. The reverend has riled him to a pique of fiendish ferocity with that holy-roller rhetoric beneath the Christian cross. True, the missionary may be a disciple of the Lord, but the cannibal king is a
living
god among these man-eaters, and also the
waqa
—the vehicle—for the god of war.

“Vakatotoga!”

My blood runs cold.

I know the meaning of that word, and it scares the living bejesus out of me.

Somehow I doubt the reverend’s cross will offer much of a shield against this horde of naked, war-painted cannibals thundering toward the mission, their feet splashing through the stream that separates there from here, each brandishing a weapon of some kind: spear; sling; bow; or club in one of two sizes, the heavy, wooden, two-handed type that pounds you into a pulp or the smaller missile club for throwing. It doesn’t bode well that some warriors are still erect from having mixed sex with death, and now here’s an opportunity to show off for the womenfolk.

Sorry, Rev.

I’m outta here.

Vakatotoga,
I leave for you.

With a jerk, I feel myself yanked back into the astral plane as that cosmic yo-yo retreats through the humming wormhole in space-time and returns me to the here and now of Seattle today …

Suddenly, the spark of consciousness returned to the Goth’s eyes. The psycho was back at the writing desk that faced the mirror that could have been a window into the occult realm. The stench of insanity faded as the killer’s psychosis slipped back into a latent state. The clock on the desk read 2:43. In fifteen minutes, the panel was set to convene in Tomb A. “How to Write a Horror Best-seller: Is There a Demon You Can Sell Your Soul To?”

The sketching pad still lay on the desk, but the top sheet was no longer blank. Judging from what was drawn on the paper, it had gone time-traveling too. The Christian mission in Fiji was rendered in minute detail, as were all the atrocities of the cannibal feast. In going back to do research for next week’s Odyssey, the Goth had chosen Fiji from among the many cannibal islands of the South Pacific because Fiji was the source of eyewitness accounts dating back to the mid-1800s, a time when and the place where Western explorers recorded the utter horror of
vakatotoga.
Because
vakatotoga
was the fate planned for the Mountie, the Goth’s research into how to perpetrate it would require another trip.

But now it was time to jab the hook through the cop’s cheek and begin to reel him in.

The Goth cleaned up and left the room.

“Hello, everybody. My name’s Wes Grimmer, and I’m the author of this book,
Halo of Flies.
”

The lawyer-turned-writer held up his just-published novel so that the conventioneers packed into Tomb A could see it. The buzz from the earlier confrontation had lured them here in droves, probably hoping to witness one attorney-cum-scribe throwing a punch at the other. If nothing else, it was sure to be a hot debate.

“We’re missing a moderator,” Wes said, “so I’ll get things going. The topic we’re here to discuss is ‘How to Write a Horror Best-seller: Is There a Demon You Can Sell Your Soul To?’ My answer is yes. That demon is
you.
”

Scattered laughs.

“How many of you here are really serious about being writers?”

A sea of waving hands shot up from the audience.

“Sinclair Lewis asked the same question of a room full of aspiring writers when Columbia University invited him to deliver a lecture on the writer’s craft. On seeing the hands go up, Lewis said, ‘Well, why the hell aren’t you all home writing?’ The lecture over, he walked back to his seat and sat down.”

Laughter.

“Imagine that I have hurled the same scolding at you, so you’ve gone home to sit at your desk and write that best-seller. What are you going to write about so it rings true?”

Again, Wes held up
Halo of Flies.

“I don’t know
what
you’ll write about,” he said, “but I do know
where
you’ll find it.”

“Hold the book higher,” Bret Lister piped in, “and repeat the title. Your blatant self-promotion is too humble, Wes.”

“Here we go,” Ralph muttered to Zinc. The cops were standing at the back of the room.

“Have some couth, Bret. You’ll get your chance.”

“When hell freezes over, if you keep hogging the mike.”

The two men could not have sat farther apart and still been at the same table. The table was up on a dais at the front of the convention hall, with four chairs arranged behind it. Wes sat at the left-hand flank, Bret sat at the right-hand flank, and the chairs between them sat vacant. Heavyset and brawny, Wes—in his early thirties—was at least ten years junior to Bret. Though this was a horror convention, Wes wore a blue blazer with a tie, as if to let everyone know that he was a high-powered courtroom titan in his other life. But so as not to seem completely out of place, he chose a silk tie hand-painted with the jacket of
Halo of Flies.
His toughness was topped off with a skinhead’s coif to give him the Vin Diesel look.

“So you’re sitting at your desk about to write,” said Wes, “trying to think of something to write about. That’s when you recall what I said about selling your soul to the demon that is you, and you wonder what the hell I meant by that. Well, look at me.”

“Surprise, surprise,” said Bret.

Wes ignored him. “Who here knows what Creative Anachronism is?”

A few hands.

“Creative Anachronism is a worldwide organization of followers attracted to medieval times. As a hobby, they dress up in the costumes of pre-seventeenth-century Europe to reenact everyday life as they believe it was in that nonindustrial era. Born out of the late sixties, it appealed to the mind-set of back-to-the-land hippies, like my father and mother, who were flower children in the Haight.”

“Peace, love, and have a nice day,” mumbled Bret.

“Thanks to LSD, my dad soon tired of playing that game. What he desired wasn’t fairs and get-togethers but a time machine to take him back. Unable to obtain that, he moved my mom, my sister, and me to the backwoods of British Columbia to cut us off from modern times. We dressed like they did in the 1600s, and lived in a house without electric power and running water. We had no machines of any kind. The Amish were futurists compared with us.

“Then one day, a black goat was born in our barn. My dad saw the meddling of witchcraft in that, and because my mom and sister were the only females around, he became convinced that they were possessed. In the end, he went berserk and hanged the two of them from the sturdiest limb of the oak behind our house. Overwrought by what he had done, my dad then hanged himself from the same tree. I was four.

“Three days later, a pair of lost hikers found me sitting on the ground, staring up at the three of them suspended in the air. My memory has shut out their faces. All I can recall is the ring of flies around my father’s head.”

Wes held up his book a third time.

“Halo of Flies,”
he said, and this time elicited no snarky comment from Bret.

“The point I’m making,” Wes said, “is that if you want to tap into horrors that will cause readers to shiver and shake, you must delve down into the landscape of your own damned soul. To be a best-seller, a book has to resonate. A year and a half ago, up in Vancouver, there was a murder in which the body was strung up like the Hanged Man card in the tarot deck. The tarot image has a nimbus around its head, and that got me thinking about the halo of flies around my dad’s head. I transposed that personal horror to the characters in my book, and that’s why I’m sitting up here in front of you.”

“Wrong,” said Bret. “It’s because you cribbed my idea.”

“Don’t be an ass. The Tarot murder was all over the media in Vancouver for weeks.”

“But I turned it into a novel.”

“So did I.”

“
Crown of Thorns
came first.”

“Bullshit, Bret. The story of my dad hanging my family was in all the papers thirty years ago. What motivated me to write
Halo of Flies
is there in black-and-white for you to look up. What motivated you to write
Crown of Thorns?
The belief you’re Jesus Christ?”

Laughter.

“Now if Bret can find the courtesy to let me finish what I’m trying to pass on to you, the moral of my personal experience is this: You each have the genesis of a horror novel in your background. Perhaps you were sexually abused as a child, or you wandered off from a campground and got lost in the woods for a night, or like Clarice Starling in the novel
The Silence of the Lambs,
you had to listen to lambs having their throats cut out in the barn. It could be anything, so that’s why I say I don’t know the
what
of your personal inspiration, but I do know
where
you’ll find it, and that’s in your deepest fears. Do you want to know mine? Read
Halo of Flies.
”

Wes reached down beside him and did something out of the sight of the audience. The explosion of music that filled the room from a ghetto-blaster was so loud and unexpected that everyone jumped. What Wes was playing was Alice Cooper’s “Halo of Flies.”

Just as suddenly, the barrage stopped.

“Think about that,” he said.

Ralph was breathing heavily next to Zinc.

“Y’ okay, Ralph?”

“A shock like that, I could be dead of a heart attack.”

“Cannibals!” Wes abruptly shouted. “Do I have your attention? If you want something to write about, write about that. ‘Okay,’ you’re asking, ‘what do cannibals have to do with me?’ Well, you’ll find a connection if you dig deep enough. I can tell you how to find it, but I’m sure Bret wants me to give up the mike.”

“No!” yelled a voice in the crowd. “Feed us, Wes.”

“Lunchtime,” someone bellowed.

The room took up the chant.

“Lunchtime … lunchtime … lunchtime …”

“This guy’s a natural showman,” Zinc commented, trying to make himself heard through the din.

“Lawyers!” scoffed Ralph for the second time. “Selling snake oil is their trade.”

Wes held up his hands. “Back by popular demand,” he announced. “What I want each of you to do is to dig
waaaaay
back. Back to the days when hominids evolved from apes. Come on, people. Feel your DNA. In your skulls are three integrated brains, and the inner two are the ones we got from lesser beasts.

“Cannibalism is rare among nonhuman primates in the wild. But there is an exception: chimpanzees. Among chimps, cannibalism is a common act. Chimps are the most carnivorous of apes, and we share 99 percent of their genes.

“Are there any carnivores in the room?”

More palms shot skyward than at a Nazi rally.

“‘Taphonomy.’ There’s a useful word. That’s the analysis of human bones after death. The science that records the death history, as opposed to life history, of deceased individuals. By examining the tooth marks on ancient skeletons, taphonomists can identify the species that gnawed off their flesh. From
Homo erectus
in northern Spain eight hundred thousand years ago, to Gough’s Cave at Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England, twelve thousand years ago, to Fontbregoua Cave in southeastern France seven thousand years ago, to the Celts of Eton in Iron Age Britain three thousand years ago, to the Fremont Culture and the Anasazi Indians in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest one thousand years ago—time after time, scientific evidence establishes that man was eating man.

“Cannibalism, folks. Man-eaters evolved into us.”

“I’m a vegetarian,” a woman called out.

“Eat her!” a man retorted, to laughter all around.

Wes glanced down at the table. He was consulting notes. His facts and figures had been researched. Bret, on the other hand, faced an empty surface. Ill-prepared, he would wing it.

Oops, thought Zinc.

“Are there any Scots in the audience?”

“Aye, laddie.” A new voice.

“Consider the case of your countryman Sawney Bean. Sometime in the 1600s, he and his incestuous brood hid in a cave on the Galloway coast, less than ten miles east of Edinburgh. When the king’s men hunted that clan down, their hideout was exposed as a charnel house with dried, salted, and pickled people hanging on hooks.

“That’s your background, Scotty. Build on it. Consider what goes into that haggis served at a Robbie Burns dinner and you’ve got a horror story.

“Who has Chinese ancestors?”

Several waving hands.

“Those hands I see. Ko Ku, anyone? Cannibalism was thought—and is
still
thought—to have a medical and nutritional purpose. Dating back to the Tang Dynasty of the seventh to tenth centuries
AD,
the remedy of Ko Ku dictated that a faithful child cut off a portion of his thigh or arm and serve it to an ailing relative as the last medicinal resort. Princess Miao Chuang offered her severed hands to her father, so she was deified.

“Now what about you, ungrateful child that you are? A traditional parent has slaved his entire life, day and night, in the family restaurant so that you can hang out at the mall. Now he’s got brain cancer and thinks he needs a dose of that remedy to survive, so at night he tiptoes into your room with a meat cleaver from the kitchen to harvest the filial medicine you haven’t offered to Dad.

“Chop. Chop. Munch. Munch.

“Don’t like Ko Ku? Try Ko Kan. That’s when you offer your liver instead, preferably by cutting it out yourself. Traditional Chinese medicine recommends thirty-five human body parts that will cure various ailments if consumed. China currently has a ‘one-child policy’ to curb population. The result is that on the mainland and in Hong Kong, there’s a thriving black market in human fetuses to eat for rejuvenation. Today, an aborted baby costs three hundred dollars.”

“Anyone for takeout?” someone shouted.

“Now, now,” Wes said. “Westerners can’t be smug. Surely you’ve heard of placenta-eating? Look it up. You’ll find all kinds of recipes on the Internet. Supposedly, it reduces the effect of postnatal depression in new moms. Any women here ever suffered from that? Well, there’s your story. The mother of a newborn has postpartum depression. So first she eats the placenta, and when that appetizer works—or doesn’t work—she goes for her baby.

“In the 1800s, eating ground-up Egyptian mummy was a common cure-all in Europe. Ever had food poisoning? Use that experience. Curse of the mummy is a time-honored theme. A bad dose of mummy and the cure could be worse than what ails you.

“Do we have any teachers? Good,” said Wes on seeing several hands. “Imagine you’re teaching in Guangxi during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1968. Mao set his fervent young Red Guards loose to express their class hatred, and in one school they turned on their teachers and ate them as food. Is the duty of a teacher not to feed young minds?

“Have we any sailors? All hands on deck.”

More waving.

“Avast, ye hearties. ‘The custom of the sea’—that’s the euphemism for eating the crew to survive
in extremis.
In 1710: the
Nottingham Galley,
a clipper ship out of Boston. They ate the carpenter. In 1765: the
Peggy,
bound for New York. They ate the black slave. In 1816: the
Medusa.
It hit a reef off Africa, forcing a hundred and fifty people onto a raft. Only six men weren’t eaten. In 1821: the Nantucket whaler
Essex
was rammed by a sperm whale halfway between Hawaii and the Galapagos Islands. The incident is immortalized in
Moby Dick.
The human body yields, on average, sixty-six pounds of edible meat. That was the food in the lifeboats. In 1845: the Franklin Expedition. While trying to find the Northwest Passage across Canada’s Arctic, Franklin and his crew got stuck in the ice. A nine-hundred-mile death march to civilization degenerated into man eating man.

“So, sailors, ask yourselves what you might do if your only chance of survival was the meat on your buddy’s bones. And hey, if you can’t get your imaginations around that, ask yourselves what he might do to you.

“Are there any hikers or skiers in the room? The Donner Party. That’s one you probably know. While heading west to California in 1846, they ran afoul of winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Of those eighty-seven pioneers, half were eaten in an orgy of cannibalism. Same with Alfred Packer in 1873. He ate four gold prospectors. Snow’s a good setup for lots of horror stories. The famine in the Volga after the Russian Revolution, the siege of Leningrad by the Nazis in the Second World War—both forced Russians to eat Russians. The winter of 1999 saw meat shortages in the Ural Mountains, so Alexander Zapiantsev invited the residents of his apartment block in for a New Year’s Eve dinner. Unknown to his guests, the roast he served was Valdemar Suzik.”