Ripper (42 page)

The sort produced by a throat suddenly filled with bile.

The bath belched red steam as Zinc yanked open the door.

A mist of blood.

Stepping across the threshold, the Mountie waved his arms, trying to clear the vapor so he could see. Through rents in the steam cloud, he caught glimpses of Devlin thrashing about on the floor, one hand clutching his neck which geysered spurts of blood. "Check the room!" Zinc shouted. "His throat's been cut!"

Circling the bath, Melburn jumped twice to scan its roof. Yates blocked the Billiards Room door and checked the hall outside. Zinc twisted the floor-level tap to shut off the steam, his other hand compressing Devlin's neck to stem the arterial spurts. As mist curled out the open door without being replaced, the crimson cloud clogging the bath began to dissipate. The blood across the floor was marked by no tracks but his own, and Chandler found himself alone with the dying man. Devlin's eyes fluttered, beseeching him, as the bloody hand that had gripped his throat flopped to the tiles. His index finger extended like a piece of red chalk,

moving across the floor to smear a shaky line. Then it lifted and moved again, until gripped by a shudder of primal fright, Chandler's only suspect died. His last will and testament was:

Possessed

10:16
A.M.

"Check the room . . ."
        ". . . the room . . ."
            ". . . the room . . ."

"His throat's been cut . . ."
        ". . . been cut . . ."
            ". . . been cut . . ."

"Devlin's dead . . ."
        ". . . 's dead . . ."
            ". . . 's dead . . ."

His ear to the
other
door of the dumbwaiter, the door to the Billiards Room, not the Scullery hall, the killer listened to the commotion around the Turkish bath. Zinc's voice echoed from the room-within-a-room, around the perimeter of the outer chamber, then into the lift hidden behind the false wall. "
Devlin's dead"
made the killer quiver with expectation. "Possess me," he murmured as the dumbwaiter rose.

Power surged through him like lightning zapping his spine, a jolt of Black Magick from his occult mind. The foreign Doppelganger filled him to the brim, and suddenly his penis was stiffer than it had ever been before.

The lift stopped.

He listened.

Then he raised the door.

Stepping out, contraption in hand, Skull tiptoed down the hall.

Danger from being in the open added to the thrill, as did the voices of the women in the Mountie's room. Easing open the door to the room across the hall, he entered, closed it, then slid back the secret panel to the Hogger Gallery. He stored the contraption in the long recess, shut the panel, and returned to the hall. Tiptoing across to eavesdrop at Chandler's door, Skull mouthed the words of the Ripper Incantation:

"Hellish, Earthly, Heavenly . . . Tautriadelta . . . God of the Crossroads and the Closed Path . . . King of Night, Guiding Sight, Enemy of the Sun . . . You who rejoice to sec blood flow . . . You who wander the streets at dark . . . Thirsty for the terror in harlots' souls . . . Lord of the hellhounds' bark . . .
Helon Taul Varf Pan Pentagrammaton . . .
Bring me Jack the Ripper . . . He Who Knows The Way .. ."

His mind's eye gazed upon the squalor of another era, when gaslight and yellow fog chilled the bowels of London, when Nichols
(Helon),
Chapman
(Taul),
Stride
(Varf),
and Eddowes
(Pan)
fell to the Ripper's knife, harlots' blood to sign the Tetrad Cross of the Hanged Man. Then he stood in Number 13, Miller's Court, hunched over Mary Kelly
(Pentagrammaton),
carving the Seal of Solomon into her flesh, signing the Triad of the Hanged Man with her blood. Cut, slash, rip, tear, opening the Closed Path. Cut, slash, rip, tear, forming the Three Triangles in this Magick Place. Cut, slash, rip, tear, launching his Doppelganger into the Astral Plane, there to work his will on the Occult Realm, conjuring Satan's Legions in the here-and-now, summoning them through Rituals in
De Occultus Tarotorum.

I botched the Cross,
a voice within his head confessed.
I
didn't
hang
the harlots to form the Tetrad, and thereby failed to manifest a perfect 4, which multiplied by the Triad 3 produced an imperfect 12. Denied a complete cycle of zodiac manifestation, Hell's Legions couldn't break out of my occult mind.

Study the Hanged Man.

Read the Tarot
grimoire.

Learn from
The Patristic Gospels.

And you will be The Beast . . .

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.

His ear to the door of the room upstairs in Castle Crag, Skull chose the
Pentagrammaton
for
his
Miller's Court.

. . . & Loeb

Vancouver
     10:18
A.M.

The Headmaster stood in the main hall, surrounded by Taiwanese parents listening intently as their interpreter translated his words extolling the virtues of Havelock Ellis School, when DeClercq and Craven marched in the front door. He said nothing as they approached, but
Shitty ass bum fuck
was written all over his worried face.

"Who's he?" DeClercq asked, holding out the grad photo while pointing at the student next to Coy.

"Chief Superintendent, now is not the time. These good people have braved this storm in hope their sons will benefit from the Havelock Ellis tradition. You may wait in my office while—"

Craven verbally kicked his erudite balls up to his chin. "Headmaster, you're under investigation for obstructing a peace officer in the lawful execution of his duty. You have the right to retain and instruct counsel—"

Whatever strings or elastics held this sack of bones together gave, causing his posture to collapse in a heap.

"Angus Craig III," the elitist sighed.

Angus Craig III was born June 30, 1964. He was now twenty-eight.

The Craig family pioneered the Province of British Columbia, amassing a fortune from natural resources and land development. Angus Craig I immigrated from Scotland in 1871. In 1909 he built Ravenscourt, one of the most impressive mansions in Shaughnessy. Ravenscourt was lavishly designed, with a 2,000-bottle wine cellar, grounds laid out like Kew Gardens, tennis courts, and indoor-outdoor pools. Until the 1930s, Shaughnessy was home to the city's upper crust: mayors, MPs, senators, lieutenant-governors, and supreme court justices. All Craig scions attended Havelock Ellis School, which was supported by large family grants.

Grants
too
large to jeopardize.

The cops sat in the Headmaster's office leafing through school records to get a fix on Craig. Hair slicked back like Rudolph Valentino, the matinee idol beside Coy in the grad photograph had a world-belongs-to-me look in his hooded eyes. Lithe and muscular, he excelled at cricket, tennis, aquatics, and rowing. Well turned out, Craig preferred ties to casual clothes. "I doubt he's done an honest day's work in his life," the Headmaster said.

Craig was a natural leader among his hedonistic friends. The group always did what
he
wanted even if the others agreed on something else. A kinetic bundle of energy addicted to "kicks," he was a rah-rah enthusiast who had to be top dog. On the surface, Craig was the perfect Havelock Ellis boy. "But inside he seethed with psychological turmoil," the Headmaster said.

"Why?" asked DeClercq.

Philip Craig, the boy's father, was a devout Calvinist. He punished Biblical transgressions by his son the Old Testament way. Calvinists blindly accept the supreme authority of the Scriptures and the irresistibility of divine grace.
Spare the rod and spoil the child
was Philip's creed.

Age four, young Angus came under the care of a governess. Miss Struthers, in her forties, was prim and repressed. A harsh disciplinarian, she was critical of minor faults and quick to remedy them with the bristles of a hairbrush. Ambitious in molding her silver-spoon charge, she was anxious he become "the ideal boy." All playmates were "unworthy" of him, especially girls who were all "little tramps."

Miss Struthers called her live doll "Angel Face," and in private insisted Angus call her "Sweetie." She liked to bathe in the same tub as him, repeatedly washing his genitals so they were "spanky clean." She encouraged Craig to rub her head to foot, then suck her toes, which were "piggies that went wee-wee-wee all the way home." Her breasts were tipped with "strawberries" he was told to lick, and playing "doggy and pussy" was his reward for being good. This meant wrestling naked with "pussy" on all fours while "doggy" wriggled up her back . . . until the day Philip Craig caught them in the act.

Threatened with never working again unless she "burned the demon lust out of the boy," Miss Struthers tied Angus to her bed and dabbed his balls with Absorbine Junior while reading
The Bible
aloud. Angus didn't speak a word for the next two years, forcing his mother to confide in the Headmaster when it was time for school. Craig boarded at Have-lock Ellis though his family lived nearby, and that was the year the Craigs' grant to the school doubled.

The first sign of trouble emerged in his art. Angus drew pictures of faceless women and crucifixion scenes. Then he began to steal articles that had no value to him, thrilled by knowing where the booty was hidden while its unhappy owners didn't. When questioned about the pilfering he lied, sometimes by omitting facts, sometimes by artful misleading, sometimes by false claims. "Not once did he show any sign of guilt or fear. I felt he was destined to be a lawyer," the Headmaster said.

Craig was fascinated by criminals and crime. After lights out, he read by flashlight in bed: evil mastermind books like Christie's
And Then There Were None
and the James Bond SPECTRE novels. Angus dubbed himself Dr. Jekyll and "Mr. Hide," bragging he was Jack the Ripper, Billy the Kid, Al Capone, John Dillinger, "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Heath, Haigh, Christie, and the Boston Strangler all rolled into one. Above his bed hung a paperback cover torn from Mary Roberts Rinehart's
The Bat.
Picture: a Hydelike face from the eyes up peering out a window. Blurb:
He was the master criminal of all time!

The boy had daily sessions with the guidance counselor. Asked whom he admired most, the answer was Moriarty. Asked why, he said, "Like him, I want to lead a devoted gang." Life's greatest pleasure was proving yourself intellectually superior to others. So adept would Craig be at planning crimes that he and his gang would escape detection by the finest sleuths. Only the gang would know his secret identity, leaving the rest of the world baffled by "Mr. Hide." Asked why his fantasy didn't include crimes committed alone, his answer was "Then there'd be no one to appreciate my skill."

"Craig's IQ?"

"One sixty."

"Fifty points
below
Coy's," DeClercq noted.

His final year, Angus acted like he owned the school. "In a way I guess he did," the Headmaster said. "His parents died in a plane crash in 1988, leaving him sole heir. The day he inherited, our funding stopped. That's what forced us to turn to Asia."

Craig's grad year was marked by three incidents. When one of his English essays earned a failing grade, someone called the school and asked for the instructor. On answering, the teacher was told "Drop your pants and stick the receiver up your ass." Ten minutes later, the heckler phoned again. Informed the instructor wouldn't take the call, he left the message "Tell him he may pull it out now."

Incident two involved a stripper named Brittany. The night before elections, Craig smuggled her into the senior dorm. Every boy was offered the chance to lie on the floor with a fifty-dollar bill between his teeth while Brittany squatted and picked it up with her nether lips. The next day', Craig was elected school president.

Incident three concerned a game of Dungeons and Dragons. As Dungeon Master, Craig controlled the roles played by the other boys. His friends were stunned when he brought Samson Coy into the game, peeved at having a geek infiltrate their clique. Craig conjured a pair of demons—"the vanguard from Hell"—which lurked about the players, threatening to possess them. Eventually the fiends chose their human hosts, and that night a junior boy was sodomized in the latrine. Afraid, he refused to finger the culprits.

"The demons had names?" DeClercq asked.

The Headmaster nodded. "Skull, the master demon, possessed Angus Craig. Crossbones, the slave demon, possessed Samson Coy."

While DeClercq and Craven were at Havelock Ellis School, Chan returned from the King of Siam to Special X. It was slippery going, thanks to the wintery storm. Waiting for him on his desk in the Computer Room was a printout from the Motor Vehicle Branch listing every Nissan 300ZX licensed in the province. The Capilano Watershed guard, according to Craven's report, thought the owl-prowler's plate was ZMY 353. The Seymour Watershed guard thought it started with a Z and had a Y. There was no ZMY 353 on the list.