Bed of Nails (16 page)

“Where do we find him?”

“Try Tomb A. That’s the big convention room around the corner. Mort caught the panel that just let out.”

“The one that caused the hubbub?” interjected Zinc.

Yvette nodded.

“Why the buzz?”

“Our guest of honor is being eclipsed by his rival. That, combined with the Tarot murder that brings you here.”

“Who’s your guest of honor?”

“Bret Lister. Know him?”

“Yes,” said Zinc. “The lawyer-turned-writer.”

“Bret wrote a couple of psycho-thrillers based on his law practice. His third book has a publication date that coincides with this convention. He registered for the con as an attendee, but when our scheduled guest of honor died suddenly, Bret was asked to step in. He has the draw of having been committed to an asylum, and his latest book is a
roman à clef
about the Hanged Man murder.”

“The death in Vancouver?”

“Uh-huh. A year and a half ago.”

“What do the Romans have to do with it?” Ralph asked.

Yvette raised an eyebrow.

“That’s a joke,” said Stein.

“Do you know what a
roman à clef
is?”

“No, Ms. Theron. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a novel about real events and characters under the guise of fiction. From the French for ‘novel with a key.’”

“He’s an etymologist,” Zinc explained. “He studies bugs.”

“Who are you two? Laurel and Hardy?”

“I’m Laurel,” Ralph said.

“So I see.”

“What’s the title of Bret’s new book?” asked the Mountie.

“Crown of Thorns.”

“Publisher?”

“Grave Subjects. It’s a specialty house. Dark fiction.”

“
Crown of Thorns.
Sounds religious. Like
The Exorcist,
” said Ralph.

“The cop in the novel,” Zinc asked, “what’s he like?” If a
roman à clef
is about real events and characters, he knew he was probably in this one. Not only was he the investigator involved in the real Hanged Man murder in North Vancouver, but he and Bret Lister had crossed swords in several murder trials before the lawyer flipped out in court and was sent to Colony Farm.

“To be honest, I haven’t read it. It just came out.”

“Good timing,” Stein said dryly. “Thanks to the new Hanged Man murder here.”

“Thus the buzz,” echoed Yvette.

“You mentioned a rival?” Zinc said. “A writer challenging Bret as guest of honor?”

“In a strange coincidence—almost a twist of fate—Bret’s isn’t the only novel being published this week about the Hanged Man murder in Vancouver.”

“Another
roman à clef?
”

“Halo of Flies.”

“Like the Alice Cooper song?”

Yvette nodded.

“Publisher?”

“Penguin.”

“A major house.”

“Two books. Same source. Guess who’s playing second fiddle?”

“Bret Lister.”

“There’s more. They used to be law partners.”

“Who’s the rival?” Ralph asked.

“Wes Grimmer. Know him?” Yvette asked the Mountie.

“Yes,” Zinc replied.

Grimmer was the Ripper’s lawyer.

Morbid curiosity hooked its barb through Zinc’s cheek, then tugged the Mountie across the hall toward the art gallery. As the cops had turned away from Yvette and the registration table to head around the corner to catch Mort—“That’s French for ‘dead,’” said Ralph—Montgomery in Tomb A, Zinc happened to glance through the open doors of the gallery and spot the lure.

“You go, Ralph. I want to check this out.”

Stein followed Zinc’s gaze. “I’ll bet you do,” he said.

“I wondered how long it would take you to notice Petra,” teased Yvette.

“Petra,” warned Ralph. “As in ‘turn to stone.’”

“Careful,” cautioned Yvette. “I’ll sell you a garland of garlic.”

“The cross will protect me,” Zinc replied.

The cross in question was in the painting that lured him in through the doors. The grisly image was displayed on the outer wall of a maze of panels in the center of the ballroom. Fifteen feet of empty floor stretched from the doors to the painting, beside which was a vacant chair so ornate that it could only be a throne. In front of the throne stood a filigreed stool fanned with tarot cards.

The cross was a Christian crucifix that had been staked upside down on the crest of a Golgotha mound that could be Calvary. The naked man crucified to the wood was the Hanged Man. Both hands were joined behind his body at the small of his back. His left leg was pinned in place behind his right thigh. Instead of being crucified by nails pounded through his hands and feet, he was impaled on countless spikes that jutted toward the viewer as if the cross was a vertical bed of nails. The points that skewered through his flesh were red with dripping blood, and the sky beyond roiled with a deeper red that could be Satan’s wrath. The figure’s brow was pierced by a line of longer nails that protruded from his forehead like a blasphemous crown of thorns.

The image bore a title card.

The Antichrist,
it read.

The Mountie noted the artist.

Petra Zydecker.

Zinc’s curiosity was piqued by a puzzling detail. The painting was secured to the display panel by corner latches, and through the eyebolt of each was a padlock. Intrigued, Zinc craned his head around to one edge of the canvas, where to his further puzzlement he found that
The Antichrist
hid another painting.

Of what?

Something more profane?

Or obscene?

The Mountie’s suspicion switched to an array of smaller paintings that had been arranged like an aura behind the throne. Each depicted a tarot card drawn at random from a deck composed of both the Major and Minor Arcanas. The Queen of Swords sat on a throne similar to this one, with her sword held high in one hand and the head of a man gripped by his hair and dripping blood from his severed neck in the other. The High Priestess was a black voodoo witch, zigzag patterns painted on her face, with a headdress of grass and animal horns. The Fool, as usual, had his back turned to the viewer so a cat could pull down his pants with bared teeth. The Wheel of Fortune was a rounded rack that spun off broken bodies while it snapped healthy ones. The Devil was a goat with a huge erect phallus, and chained about its hoofs was a harem of nude women. The Ace of Wands was a female hand whipping a cat-o’-nine-tails. The Ten of Swords was a naked man sprawled dead in a flood of gore, his chest run through by ten blades …

And so it went. Card after card. Sex and violence.

Eros and Thanatos.

There was an ebb and flow to the Morbid Maze. The gallery must have cleared out for the toxic debate between the guest of honor, Bret Lister, and the spotlight grabber, Wes Grimmer. But having drained their bladders or chugged a beer in the bar, the fans were returning to the gallery for an interlude with the dark seers who exposed their malignant psyches in the maze of panels beyond. To keep ahead of the jabbering crowd, Zinc U’d around one side of the moveable wall backing the throne and entered the labyrinth of horror. Ghastly monsters lurked around each hinged corner, and he felt like Theseus stalking the Minotaur, that mutant with the head of a bull on the body of a man, through the bone-littered tunnels beneath the kingdom of Crete.

Creepy stuff, thought Zinc.

Fear. Despair. Superstition. Persecution. Paranoia. Captivity. Pain. Torture. Sex. Sadism. Madness. Death. War …

Such were the themes.

One artist was fixated on damsels in jeopardy. His body beautifuls all wore clinging gossamer gowns with slits or tears that revealed garters and nylons above high heels. Each had her mouth open as if caught in a scream, for the perils that threatened her closed in like the jaws of a vise from both in front and behind. In fleeing from one menace, she would be snatched by another—damned if you do and damned if you don’t. A hooded skeleton rowed a boat after a victim who was waist-deep in a lake of blood from which a dozen male hands emerged to claw at her clothes and grope her buxom torso. A horde of green-faced dwarfs with teeth filed to points as sharp as their dual-fisted knives came after a terrified woman about to plunge into a well of filthy, wallowing madmen. White-haired, toothless, dirty old men clutched at another as she climbed a ladder to an attic where hook-handed bald ogres were dissolving bodies in barrels of acid. Those already captured were in worse predicaments. A woman sat with her hands and thighs protruding forward through locked stocks as a buzz saw began to pass across the face of the wooden clamp. And finally, a reluctant bride stood at the altar in the grasp of a hunched giggler with burning eyes and twisted features, while a blindfolded priest with a noose around his neck joined them together for all time in unholy matrimony.

Zinc assumed the artist was male, but the signature read “Godiva.”

“You’ve come a long way, baby.”

The next artist was obsessed with the mask and the face. The mask was the false face presented to the world, the pie crust of civilization that hides the truth of human nature. The face was spawned by evolution out of primal ooze. Here, Dr. Jekyll faced a mirror reflecting Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray faced the picture that exposed his debauchery, the Phantom of the Opera faced the false front of the mask torn from his deformed features, and the Masque of Red Death was discarded to show the putrescent flesh beneath.

Around the next corner, Zinc faced a blackout curtain. On parting the slit down its center, he entered a tent-like area with a canopy shutting out overhead light. The dark room contained just a single painting, but it was so big that the canvas covered the height and length of its wall. The stretch of art was entirely black except for two tiny figures in a spotlight beam. Only by approaching the center of the painting could the Mountie fathom who they were. He smiled as he recognized the naked Adam and Eve, complete with an apple in Adam’s hand and a serpent coiled around the trunk of Eden’s tree.

Without warning, a burst of black light lit up the canvas. Zinc had tripped a sensor by closing in on the panel, and what the rays brought to life in the black morass that spread beyond the boundaries of his limited vision was a panorama of such brutal bloodletting that he—seasoned cop though he was—recoiled in horror.

The atrocities faded.

Did he see what he thought he saw?

Only by tripping the sensor again could he dispel his doubt.

Which he did.

So vast was this slaughterhouse for pagan gods, so all-consuming was this abattoir of hell’s demons, so terrifying was this butcher shop of macabre dread, that it would take a hundred bursts of black light to grasp its full potential. The painting was a visual dare—How much of this can your mind stomach?—with “stomach” being the operative word. It was as if the entire cosmos fed on one food: bloody joints of human meat. And not just humans in the
Homo sapiens
sense, though there were plenty of those being cut up on butcher blocks—or spiked to hang from celestial hooks, or skewered to roast over cooking pits—but also the hominids who evolved into us:
Australopithecus, Homo habilis
, and
Homo erectus.
Flesh-eaters from another dimension joined cannibals from this one, each rendered so that the outstanding features were fangs and demented eyes
.
One creature was a jumble of scales, warts, wounds, and pustulate mush. Another was quasi-human but had gnashing teeth in those sockets that should have housed sight. Ghouls played with bones stripped of stewing flesh, like the one Zinc glimpsed who decorated each skull with a scalped wig. The roots of Eden’s apple tree squirmed out like a can of worms, and through the dark woods that tangled from them pranced Pan-like fairies fingering flutes made from hollowed ribs. Zinc digested grisly bits of the overwhelming whole until he had seen much too much. Whoever had conceived this mind fuck, painting it must have consumed at least a year, and all that while, this labor of love was feeding off the theme of cannibalism.

You Are What You Eat.
Alex’s unwritten book.

Did this nightmare have a title?

Zinc searched for the card.

There it was.

Morlocks,
he read.

And the artist?

The painting was signed “The Goth.”

The monsters of the Cthulhu Mythos were waiting for the Mountie when he emerged from the claustrophobic labyrinth of dark art on the far side of the maze. Wonders can be done these days with cold-cast porcelain and acrylic resin, as evidenced by the detailed models displayed on the tables in the sculptors’ area. The exhibit was laid out beneath a banner blaring “LOVECRAFT’S REALM.”

Wandering over, Zinc read the quote from horror writer H. P. Lovecraft on its poster:

All of my stories, unconnected as they may be, are based on the fundamental lore or legend that this world was inhabited at one time by another race who, in practicing black magic, lost their foothold and were expelled, yet live on outside ever ready to take possession of this earth again.

 

The models on the table brought Lovecraft’s realm to life, for each was rendered in exquisite detail. Zinc recognized the Nightgaunts—shocking black things with oily skin, horns and wings, and a suggestive blankness where their faces ought to be—posed so they clutched and flew and lashed their barbed tails. And Azathoth, the blind idiot god, that amorphous blight of confusion that bubbles and blasphemes at the core of infinity. And Yog-Sothoth, the all-in-one and one-in-all that isn’t yoked to laws of time and space, but instead dwells in the interstices between the planes of the universe, a wormhole that waits as a conglomeration of iridescent globes, shifting and hovering like flying saucers. In the center of the table—befitting his place in the Mythos—crouched Great Cthulhu in all his glory—the dominating claws on his hind and fore feet; the long devilish wings on back of his scaly, gelatinous green, bloated and corpulent torso; the squid-like head. The sculptor left no doubt about the subconscious inspiration for this grasping creature. With its mass of tangled tentacles writhing around a labial-lipped maw, the face of Great Cthulhu was a carnivorous cosmic cunt trying to suck every man born of woman back into its ravenous black hole.

“Don’t even think about it.”

The threat emanated from behind the Mountie’s shoulder.

“I’m buying that.”

Zinc turned to face the voice.

“Hello, Bret.”

“You slumming, Chandler? It seems they’ll allow
anyone
into this convention.”

The last time the inspector had seen the lawyer was during his final outburst in court. His wild, unruly hair prematurely white, his face ruddy from too much drinking after work, the fingers of the fist he shook at the judge nicotine orange from chainsmoking, Bret was screaming, “You fucking Nazi!” in the public gallery as sheriff’s deputies waded through his circle of die-hard disciples to snap handcuffs onto the firebrand and wrestle him off to jail. Now in his late forties, and having switched careers from law to thriller-writing, Bret Lister, despite the passage of time, had not lost his intense demeanor. Pugnaciously, his face challenged Zinc with its thrusting chin. His phrases were delivered at a staccato clip, and his long and lanky body was strung tight with ropy muscles. His torso-hugging T-shirt, tucked into blue jeans, bore a stenciling of Petra Zydecker’s
The Antichrist.
The same image was on the jacket of the book in Bret’s hand, and emblazoned across both Hanged Men were the words “Crown of Thorns.”

“I have an alibi,” Lister said.

“For what?”

“Friday night.”

“Do you need one?”

“That’s why you’re here.”

“Is it?” Zinc asked.

“I’m way ahead of you.”

“Are you?”

“Always. Here, as well as in court. I can read your mind.”

“Can you?”

“You’re Ted Bundy’s favorite cartoon.”

“How so?”

“Dudley Do-Right.”

“Never seen it.”

“It’s about a bumbling Mountie and his true love, Sweet Nell, who is forever being tied to the railroad tracks by the cartoon’s mustachioed villain, Snidely Whiplash. Ted Bundy could mimic the voices of all three characters.”