Bed of Nails (9 page)

They met in the same interview room at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital out on Colony Farm where they had conspired four days earlier to commit bloody murder. The Goth was already seated on one of the two chairs flanking the bare table in the austere, antiseptic cubicle when Rudi ushered in the florid psychotic from Ash 2’s Room 13. Like before, the Ripper was dressed in a dark navy-blue sweatsuit and Velcro runners. Again, his eyes were black holes that seemed not only to suck the flesh of his face into his skull, but also to tug the Goth out of the here and now and into the occult realm. Once more, an odor of rancid cheese permeated the claustrophobic nook.

The door closed.

The Ripper sat.

The psychos faced each other.

The one the Mounties knew about.

And the one they didn’t.

The Ripper set the tiny hourglass down on the table between them so the sand of time could flow from the past to the future. Stacking the twenty-two cards of his Major Arcana facedown beside the egg timer, he pushed the deck toward the Goth and said, “Pick a card.”

“I picked a card last time.”

“Yes, the Hanged Man.”

“That’s my significator. I don’t want another one.”

“You have no say in the matter. The Magick is in the cards. If you are truly chosen, the Tarot will say so.”

The Goth picked a card randomly from the deck.

“Turn it over.”

The Goth obeyed.

What stared up at them from the table was the Hanged Man.

“Study your card,” the Ripper said. “What number do you see at the top?”

“The number twelve. In Roman numerals.”

“How many signs are there in the zodiac?”

“Twelve,” the Goth said.

“That’s why the Hanged Man is the most important card in a tarot deck. The twelve symbolizes a complete cycle of occult manifestation in the here and now of our reality.”

“The number of
my
significator.”

“Yes, chosen one.”

“Yours too?”

“I thought so. But then I made a mistake.”

“What mistake?”

“I saw one too many occult symbols in the card.”

Using the index finger of his left hand—the Devil’s hand—the Ripper outlined three hidden symbols on the face-up card. In the mind’s eye of the Goth, the Hanged Man looked like this:

“One leg is bent across the other to form a human cross. The cross—or tetrad—signifies the number four. There are four points to the cross. You see that symbol in the Hanged Man?”

The Goth nodded.

“That’s why I ripped the first four whores where I did in London. Back in 1888, when I was Jack the Ripper. Plot the sites on a map of the East End and you will see that Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Long Liz Stride, and Catherine Eddowes were sacrificed where they were to signify the inverted cross in the Hanged Man.”

“Did that work?”

“Sort of. Signing that occult symbol in blood opened the closed path to the astral plane.”

“To a time warp?”

“If you like.”

“To a wormhole?” the Goth added.

“I didn’t know it as a wormhole back then. With Einstein yet to be born, there was no expounded theory of relativity. I thought in terms of the theory of the Order of the Golden Dawn—Mathers, Crowley, Stoker, and Waite, the member who drew this card. Wormhole, time warp, astral plane. It matters not what term we use—all lead to the other dimension of the occult realm.”

“Why did you remove the organs?”

“To eat,” the Ripper said. “But that doesn’t matter. As long as the sacrifice sheds human blood.”

“To sign the cross?”

“
And
the triangle.”

The Ripper licked his lips as if savoring his last taste of blood. The tips of both canines peeked down from behind his upper lip like Dracula’s bloodsuckers.

“Back to the card. You see the triangle hidden in it? Both arms are folded behind the Hanged Man’s back to straight-line its base. The top of his inverted head—as indicated by the nimbus—is the tip of the obscure occult symbol. The triangle—or triad—signifies the number three. There are three sides to the triangle.”

Another nod. “Did you sign that in blood?”

“Yes, in the way I ripped Mary Jane Kelly to shreds in Room 13 of Miller’s Court.”

“To do what?”

“Project my astral double into the astral plane.”

“Your consciousness?”

“Or doppelgänger. Choose the term you like. The effect of signing the triad in her blood was my astral projection.”

“How?”

“Four times three equals what?”

“Twelve,” the Goth replied.

“The number of the Hanged Man. Multiplying the tetrad four of the cross by the triad three of the triangle equates to the Magick number twelve on this card to complete a cycle of occult manifestation. E = MC
²
. Energy, mass and the speed of light are interrelated. By astral projection, I hurled the energy of my mind into the astral plane of the occult realm.
Quod superius, sicut inferius.
‘As above, so below.’ Since what’s ‘up there’ projects ‘down here,’ as soon as my astral double vanished into the other dimension of the time warp—of the wormhole—the past reality of Jack the Ripper’s autumn of terror in London, 1888, disappeared as well.”

“You vanished?”

“I time-traveled. That’s why they didn’t nick me. Jack escaped to the future reality of what is now present-day Vancouver.”

“Why here?” the Goth asked.

“Because of my mistake.”

“The
third
symbol?”

“Right. I read the nimbus wrong. See how the belt and the braid down the front of the Hanged Man’s jacket form a second cross? And how his collar joins with the nimbus around his head to form a circle? Combined, they seem to signify an inverted Mirror of Venus, the ancient occult sign for the female sex.”

“A circle atop a cross. The symbol’s still in use.”

“I know. Which compounded my error. The Hanged Man signifies sacrifice to obtain occult power. But sacrifice of whom? Of women, the symbol suggested. That’s why I ripped those whores in the East End: to sign the third symbol in blood. When astral projection landed me here in Vancouver, I knew I had made a mistake.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t end up where I wanted to go. Yes, I’d found the time warp into the occult realm, but I couldn’t control the power surging around me. Somehow, I had read the Hanged Man wrong. Tarot power is controlled by those who interpret the symbols in a proper deck correctly. Instead, the power of the Tarot controlled me, projecting me unwillingly here to serve
its
purpose.”

“What purpose?”

“We’re together, aren’t we? The mistake I made as Jack the Ripper, it seemed to me, was in not
hanging
those first four whores in 1888. The Hanged Man depicts the three symbols hanging from a T, so my contemporary self corrected the 1888 mistake by
hanging
four women in Vancouver to signify what I thought must be the proper tetrad four in the card.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No. The Hanged Man’s Mirror of Venus hangs
upside down
. I hanged the Vancouver women
right side up
. That just compounded my original error and opened this end of the
same
wormhole that projected me here from 1888. And I didn’t get to finish signing the triad in blood on Deadman’s Island thanks to the meddlesome cop who’s responsible for locking me up in here.”

“Which brought us together.”

“What brought us together was the will of the Tarot. I was sent here to meet up with you and pass on the Magick key.”

“Why don’t you escape from FPH like you did from the East End? By astral projection?”

“I can’t, because the cop stopped me
before
I could kill the female I slashed with the triad symbol on Deadman’s Island. Botching the cross denied me control over my occult power, and failing to sacrifice the triangle here means I can corporeally manifest myself back in 1888 London, but I can’t vanish from the reality of here and now.”

The Ripper flipped the hourglass over on the table.

“Back and forth …”

The hourglass flipped again.

“From here to there to here … That’s all I can do. The Tarot has made me a prisoner of my past mistakes.”

“So that’s why you gave me a
different
key to the occult realm?”

“Yes,” said the Ripper. “The proper key has to be the tarot card itself.”

The madman tapped the Goth’s significator displayed on the table between them. “You don’t have to sacrifice four victims to sign the cross. Nor do you have to sacrifice a fifth to sign the triangle. That Mirror of Venus I thought I saw was just an illusion. The jacket worn by the Hanged Man is irrelevant to the key. Therefore, so is the female occult symbol. What matters is that you signify the tetrad and the triad in blood by sacrificing a
man
and hanging him upside down to
literally
manifest the symbol of the Hanged Man on this card.”

“Like you told me to do?”

“Yes,” said the Ripper. “The important detail is the nimbus around the head. Without it, the inverted triangle won’t have its tip, and the sacrifice will fail to signify the proper Magick.”

“Have you seen the news?”

“No, I just returned from 1888.”

The Goth dropped a file on top of the tarot card and flipped it open. The file was full of clippings from several local papers about the murder at the Lions Gate and the subsequent high-speed chase.

“I did it,” said the Goth. “I signed the key in blood.”

The Ripper read the clippings. “And?” he asked when he had finished.

“I
am
the chosen one.”

“You found the wormhole?”

“And time-warped where I wished. Astral projection took me back to the island of Tangaroa in the nineteenth century.”

“Why there?”

“Like you, I have a hunger to sate.”

“Have you warped elsewhere?”

“I go where I please. All the inspiration in the occult realm is mine to use.”

The Ripper fingered one of the clippings in the file. “What about the two killed in the car chase?”

“Scapegoats,” said the Goth. “They sold cocaine to the sacrifice I hanged
before
he met up with me.”

“Why choose him?”

“That was my earlier ruse. He was producing a film called
Bed of Nails.
My plan was to sign the nimbus with a halo of nails pounded into the skull, so I figured that by picking someone at work on that movie, I’d fool the Mounties into suspecting the killer might be linked to that production. The film’s being shot in North Vancouver. That’s why I picked the hotel bar as my hunting ground. It’s where all the movers and shakers in the industry hang out.”

“A double ruse.”

“Yeah, I lucked out.
Bed of Nails
and a pair of kinky dealers from L.A. The cops investigating the case will hit as dead an end as the pimp and the hooker did.”

“How’d you lure the right cop?”

“The one you want killed?”

“Him!” snarled the Ripper, stabbing a finger at one of the tabloid photos in the file.

“The sacrifice I stalked in the bar had just flown up from L.A. Kill an American and that brings in Special X. As luck would have it, the Special X cop was him.”

“Luck be damned,” the Ripper cursed. “It’s the will of the Tarot.”

“A deal is a deal. I owe you,” said the Goth. “That’s why I’m here today—to pay up. Give me the go-ahead and the cop will be dead by tomorrow.”

“Not so fast. Why rush? You have all the time in the world.” The Ripper flipped the hourglass over between them. “Revenge like mine is a dish best served cold. Of all the ways there are to get even with someone who fucked you over, what’s the most degrading death you can imagine?”

“Eat him alive.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s the ultimate horror. What better way to exact revenge than by consuming your enemy piece by piece in front of his eyes, and then flushing him down the toilet as a pile of your shit?”

“Could you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Then set it up. And I want him to know that your meal is billed to
my
account.”

“To do it right might take a year and a half.”

“You have a plan?”

“Yes.”

“And a place?”

“Tangaroa.”

“Good,” said the Ripper. “Take all the time you need.”

The psycho clawed his fingernail across the face of the Mountie in the photo of him and Red Beard astride the hog on the front page of
The Province.
The same Mountie who’d stopped him from signing the triad on Deadman’s Island, and the cop who had locked him up in here to rot.

“Eat him for me,” said the Ripper.