Bed of Nails (3 page)

“Phew!” Jock recoiled. “What’s that stink?”

“The Mud Man,” Rudi said, nodding toward room A2-12.

“The
Madman?
You call him that?”

“The
Mud
Man,” Rudi repeated, taking more care with his diction.

Jock peeked through the window.

“Oh, I see,” he said.

“We’ll clean him up later. Once he’s through re-sculpting his face with his evening shit.”

The way Rudi saw it, this was outer space, these two wards with eleven beds each angled out from the nursing station like a pair of horns. The station was positioned in the crook of the V so its cockpit windows could watch both halls for alien trouble. Twice an hour, one of the nurses left the module for a spacewalk out here among these monsters.

“Room 13,” Rudi said, approaching the next door. “That’s where the Ripper hides when he’s here.”

Jock eyed the last and first names on the card in the slot for A2-13. “Why’s he called the Ripper?”

“You don’t recall the case? It made headlines around the world a few years back.”

Jock had been off on he-man junkets in the outback of Australia, crocodile-wrestling atop Ayers Rock or some such acts of derring-do. He’d come to B.C. as a foreign nurse, lured by the government’s recent recruitment scheme. The pay was good, and there were new challenges to conquer in a sportsman’s paradise.

“I don’t read the papers.”

“Oh,” said Rudi, not surprised. “In that case, I’d better fill you in. It happened on Deadman’s Island, miles off the West Coast. You’ve read Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None?
”

Jock shook his head.

Rudi shook his too. This hunk with the sun-bleached hair infused with new meaning the term “dumb blond.” Were there actually people in this world who hadn’t read—or seen—the best whodunit ever written? The story had been filmed at least four times.

“Inspired by that book, the Ripper invited thirteen guests—mostly writers—to a mystery weekend at a secluded hideaway, then he killed them off one by one in gruesome ways so he could precipitate a great occult event.”

“What ways?” Jock asked.

“Ingenious booby traps. A good example is the hogger. You know how a deli cuts meat with a slicing machine? Well, the Ripper rigged a corridor with a series of spring-activated knives hidden in horizontal slits along the walls. The floor stepped down several inches every two feet. A guest chased the Ripper into the gallery. On reaching the far end of the hall, the Ripper flipped a switch that turned each terrace into a pressure plate. Stepping on one snapped a razor-sharp sickle from one of the slits in the walls, and because the floor was terraced, each blade whacked off a thicker chunk. Forward momentum hacked the pursuer’s legs down to stumps, and when the amputee toppled, his hands and arms were reduced too. Unable to support himself, he pitched onto his face. That was sliced off by the final blade.”

“Human salami,” Jock said.

“Diabolical, eh?”

“What great occult event did he hope would result?”

“Astral projection.”

“Huh?”

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

Rudi ushered Jock into the Ripper’s private room. Stepping across the threshold, the younger nurse flicked on the overhead lights, which were recessed into the ceiling so they couldn’t be broken. The space measured six feet across by ten deep. A bed with a brick headboard at one end was bolted to the wall in the far left corner. Beneath the window opposite the door, a plain shelf with no drawers served as a desk. An open cupboard with no hangers stood in the blind corner behind the door. Because no other furnishings were permitted in Ash 2, piles of books were stacked on the bare floor. The books covered subjects as diverse as the history of Jack the Ripper and modern astrophysics. Photos, maps, charts, and calculations culled from their pages were arranged in a series of juxtaposed collages that papered the cinder-block walls.

“Weird,” Jock said, following the mural from the space beside the headboard around to the facing wall. “It looks like some kind of tunnel from here to there.”

“Or from there to here,” Rudi added.

“I don’t get it.”

“See how it’s arranged? Those scribbles on the wall beside his pillow are Einstein’s theory of relativity and notes from Hawking’s
A Brief History of Time.
They lead into the tunnel from this end. The tunnel is a mishmash of occult symbols that spiral across to the other wall. That end of the tunnel is fashioned from a deck of tarot cards. The map feeding into it charts the East End of London in 1888. Marked on the map are the five crime sites where Jack the Ripper’s victims were found. The two lines connecting the first four sites intersect to symbolize an inverted cross. The photos arrayed around the map are morgue shots and letters from the Ripper case.”

“So what’s the tunnel?” Jock asked.

“Do you know what a wormhole is?”

The younger man frowned at such a dumb question. “A wormhole is a hole burrowed in wood by a worm.”

The kid was no rocket scientist, that was obvious. Rudi wondered if it was worth the effort it would take to explain wormholes to him. But Jock was already weaving through the maze of books to study the photos around the East End map. Among the shots of Jack’s victims snapped at the morgue was the note mailed with a human kidney to the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee on October 16, 1888. It read:

From hell

Mr Lusk

Sor

I send you half the Kidne I took from one women prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer

signed

Catch me when

You can

“Was Jack the Ripper a cannibal?” Jock asked.

“Our Ripper, too,” Rudi replied.

“You mean he thinks he’s Jack the Ripper reincarnated?”

“No, he thinks he’s Jack the Ripper
himself.
”

“You’re right. He’s sicker than Yorick. Where’s the Ripper now?”

“Time-traveling,” Rudi said.

 

“The Ripper has a visitor,” Julie advised when Rudi and Jock returned to the nursing station. The Forensic Psychiatric Hospital had a staff of 375 for 242 patients. The nursing crunch had resulted in a shortfall of therapists, so both men and women now worked in all wards of Ashworth House. “I thought it wise, in light of his condition earlier, to have you escort him.”

“Okay,” Rudi said.

“Okay,” Jock echoed.

In Ash 2, there were three wards off the nursing station. The open wards that V’d from the front windows had unlocked doors. However, if a psychotic became troublesome by acting out, he could be locked away in the seclusion ward, the door to which branched off the rear of the nursing station, between the security monitor that spied on those who sought entry to Ash 2 and the meds room that held the drugs dispensed to keep patients calm.

When the Ripper went time-traveling, the staff moved him to the seclusion ward.

Strangely, the door to that ward was kept open for a better view of the corridor. There was no need for Rudi and Jock to buzz the key reader with their fobs—the electronic passes that registered who opened which door at what time in Central Control—so the pair walked straight to the Ripper’s locked cell.

“What’s he doing?” Jock asked, peeking through the window.

“What does it look like he’s doing?”

“Chewing his cud.”

“See any food?”

“No.”

“Nor do you want to. What the Ripper thinks he’s eating is organ meat from his latest victim.”

The Ripper sat cross-legged on the floor, enjoying Catherine Eddowes’s kidney. Blood dribbled down his chin and dripped from his fingers as he chewed the dark delicacy with relish. Kate was the name she had offered him at the mouth to Mitre Square, but now that he had traveled here by the wormhole through space-time, the hindsight of history informed him that Kate was merely her working name. The seclusion room in which he dined was starker than his sleeping quarters in the unlocked ward: just an oblong cell with a toilet and a sink, and a bed that consisted of a mattress on the floor, wrapped in a strong sheet that wouldn’t tear. Kate’s uterus lay in the pool of blood congealing between his thighs, tempting him as dessert.

The door swung open.

“You have a visitor,” someone said.

The Ripper glanced up at the pair of nurses blocking the threshold. One was Rudi. Wiry, fine-boned, in his mid-forties. The hulk, however, was new to Ash 2. Too big, too blond, he looked dumb as dog shit. No doubt his talent as a nurse was largely in his size.

“I need things from my room.”

“We’ll stop on the way,” said Rudi.

Kate’s kidney in one hand, her uterus in the other, the Ripper left seclusion under guard.

The Ripper was dressed in the jogging suit issued to all Ash 2 patients—a dark navy-blue sweatshirt with matching baggy sweatpants—and he wore a pair of Velcro runners on his feet. It looked as if FPH had outfitted him for comfort, but the real reason for the casual attire was that no hangers would be required in his room. As for the nurses, they wore street clothes: plain short-sleeved shirts, blue jeans and loafers. In fact, the relaxed dress code was strictly enforced to fool patients out of viewing them as psychiatric nurses. No ties, so there was nothing to seize, cinch, or convert into nooses. No logos or T-shirt prints to set off the unstable.

They walked down a hall lined with peach walls and a peach floor with blue stepping-stone squares. The walls were forged from cement blocks reinforced with steel grating, so beneath the benign facade was a corridor cage. Instead of bars, the windows had horizontal slats. But they, too, were a clever sham, for the glass in them was Lexan—an unbreakable polycarbonate resin—and inside the slats were backup bars that rotated so hacksaw blades could not grab hold. Also, the nurses carried pen alarms for protection. Trigger the beam in any direction and it would bounce off the confining surfaces until it hit a sensor in the ceiling, and that would set off a general alarm to summon the entire staff of Ashworth House to quell trouble in less than thirty seconds.

With patients like the Ripper, security was crucial.

The interview room, however, could not be bugged. Among other uses, this was where Ash 2 patients instructed their lawyers, so solicitor-client privilege dictated the need for privacy. Privacy was also necessary for tonight’s meeting, for what brought the Goth and the Ripper together was a plot to commit murder.

“I’ve thought about it,” the Goth said, once they were alone. “I’m willing to pay the price.”

“There can be no turning back.”

“I understand.”

“The sign
must
be drawn in blood.”

“No problem,” said the Goth.

“In addition, you must shed blood for me.”

“I’ll do whatever it takes for you to give me the key.”

“Whatever?”

“Whatever.”

“Then pick a card,” said the Ripper.

The interview room in which they conspired was eight feet by ten. The stark furnishings were two chairs and the table between them. Could a room be duller and more antiseptic than this? Where was the gaslight? The wainscoted walls? The carved library table? The high-backed wing chairs? Missing was any sense of art or atmosphere. This sterile box was a metaphor for the outside world, where the Goth—born out of place and out of time—was trapped for life.

Unless …

Hopefully …

The Goth picked a card.

En route from the seclusion ward to here, the Ripper had fetched three visual aids from his room. The first was a plastic coffee cup with a finger handle. The second was a shatterproof hourglass of the type used to time a boiled egg. The third was the twenty-two-card deck now stacked on the table between them, from which the Goth selected the face-down significator.

“E = MC
²
,” said the Ripper.

“Einstein’s theory of relativity,” replied the Goth.

“Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.”

“Space and time are relative, not absolute concepts.”

“How did Einstein formulate that?”

“Thought,” said the Goth.

“What is thought?”

“Energy sparking neurons in our brains.”

“How?” asked the Ripper.

“A smidgen of energy lights up a brain neuron and is released as heat.”

“Hold that thought,” said the florid psychotic.

A foul, metallic smell like rancid goat cheese permeated the room. There’s the sweat of work, the sweat of fear, and there’s this—the sweat of insanity. The stench oozed out in chemicals dispersed as the Ripper’s aura. The Goth was intoxicated.

“The big bang,” said the Ripper.

“The birth of the universe.”

“The cosmic seed was a featureless point of space-time, speckled with tiny lumps of radiation. Then
bang
”—the Ripper thumped the table—“and the universe grew. The tiny lumps evolved into larger lumps, and eventually into galaxies, stars,
us.
Now back to that thought you’re holding. Where’d you store it?”

“In my memory.”

“How?”

“The same way a computer stores memory. In it, energy moves an electron within the hard drive. In me, it lights up a neuron in the memory bank of my brain.”

“So you remember the past?”

“Yes.”

“Why can’t you remember the future?”

“Because time runs forward.”

“Like this?” the Ripper said. He flipped the hourglass over on the table so the sand began to flow.

The Goth nodded. “From the past to the future.”

“So that’s the arrow of time?”

“Uh-huh. It points in that direction.”

“Why?” asked the Ripper.

“I don’t know.”

“Because the arrow of time is the arrow of entropy.”

“Who says?”

“Hawking. You know who he is?”

“Sure. The astrophysicist.
A Brief History of Time.
Supposedly the brightest scientist since Einstein.”

“Entropy is disorder. Start with that. The reason the arrow of time is the arrow of entropy is that the beginning was a low-entropy seed, and after the big bang exploded to expand the universe, what followed was a future of greater disorder. That’s why we know a film that shows fragments of shattered porcelain coming together in the shape of a cup is running backwards.”

The Ripper tapped the cup on the table.

“Heat—roiling, chaotic heat—increases entropy. As you said, the energy that sparks a neuron in your brain to create a memory is released as heat. Because entropy increases in the same direction as the arrow of time—in other words, from the past to the future—that’s
why
memories are made in the past.”

“Sounds logical,” said the Goth.

“So what about black holes?”

The eyes of the Ripper could be black holes, the Goth thought. So intense was the pull of the psycho’s stare that it seemed to suck the flesh of his face into both dark orbs, creasing and crinkling it into the squint of all squints. His upper lip receded like a rising curtain from the lower edge of his teeth, the tips of his canines jutting down like a vampire’s fangs. Here was a man, from the Goth’s point of view, who gazed at wonders that others couldn’t see.

“How do we explain the weirdness of black holes? Collapsed stars so dense that not even light escapes their gravitational pull. Regions out there”—the Ripper’s eyes rolled back into his head—“where the density of matter approaches infinity. Black holes”—the eyes returned—“warp space and time in bizarre ways.”

“Time warps,” said the Goth, hypnotized.

“Black holes slurp up stars, gas, and anything else they can. What gets eaten never reappears. Since that matter is lost eternally, we’re left with the question, Where did it go?”

“Time warps?” repeated the Goth.

“Consider the topology of this plastic cup.” The Ripper picked it up and held the mug out between them.

“What’s topology?”

“The mathematics of deformations in geometric constructions. Do you see how the handle is actually a distorted extension of the cup itself? In 1935, Einstein theorized that a super-dense object would curve space-time—the combined mathematical representation of space
and
time—so tightly that it would form a kind of ‘throat’ linking two different regions of space. The same way a cup distorts into a handle, higher-dimensional space warps into ‘handles’ too, and those handles allow signals, or matter, to travel along their tunnels as shortcuts between regions distant in space and time.”

“To a parallel universe?”

“Through another
dimension.
”

“What dimension?”

“The occult realm.”

The Ripper switched the cup for the hourglass. The timepiece sat in his palm so the sand continued to flow.

“Ordinary journeys transport us through three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. In effect, we follow the same mathematically curved trajectory across the surface of this planet that a worm follows to crawl around the surface of an apple.”

The Ripper’s index finger caressed the upper bowl of the hourglass.

“But what if we could access a higher-dimensional shortcut where space-time had warped into a tunnel that pierced the innards of the apple like a wormhole? Not only would travel to a distant point on the surface be greatly shortened, but we would also be able to time-travel within that higher dimension.”

“Back
and
forth?” asked the Goth.

“Why not?” said the Ripper. And with that, he turned the hourglass over on his palm so the sand of time reversed its flow from the future to the past.

“A time warp,” said the Goth.

“A time warp,” agreed the Ripper.

“Can that be done?”

“I’ve done it many times.”

“You found the wormhole through space-time?”

“I found
a
wormhole from there to here. How else do you think I traveled from the East End of London back in 1888 to the future of here and now?”

“Why Vancouver?”

“I don’t know. The Magick is in the cards. It must be predestined that I meet
you.
”

“To give me the key?”