Bed of Nails (36 page)

Tangaroa

Zinc was trapped in the nightmare of a thousand horror films. Someone is fleeing down the hall in a deserted or abandoned building, or someone is scrambling through a sludgy sewer underground, or someone is down on his hands and knees for a frantic crawl along the air ducts of a space station, while back there, hard on the heels of the fugitive lunch-meat, is a chainsaw-wielding hillbilly, or a toxic-waste-slobbering genetic freak, or a creature from another galaxy. With every roadblock encountered by its prey, the relentless monster draws inexorably closer. So how in hell does someone get out of this?

In Zinc’s predicament, he was literally caught between a rock and a hard place. Having fled into this hole behind the throne of bones, the Mountie found himself dodging as fast as was feasible—and that wasn’t nearly fast enough to gain headway—along a narrow tunnel that twisted and turned through the razor-sharp edges of the honeycombed coral in the bowels of the
makatea.
One slip, one trip, one stagger and stumble because of the uneven floor, and he would be sliced to ribbons by the limestone shredder.

Sort of like catching your thumb while grating cheese.

Except a shredder this big would strip him to the bone.

The torch was a blessing, and the torch was a hindrance. Lose the light and he would have to run this gauntlet blind, reducing his flesh to a skeleton with every flail in the dark. But to be the Olympic torch runner in this hell-bound tube was to light the tunnel for both Grimmer and himself.

Here I am.

All lit up.

Take your best shot.

All that kept the Mountie from taking a spear in the back were the twists and turns that had both men dodging. Hit a straightaway and Zinc might as well have a bull’s-eye pinned to his spine.

Occasionally, a dark nook indented one of the walls. A cubbyhole, however, offered no sanctuary. Duck into one of the dents and he would be a dead duck, for sure. The torch would give him away.

Think! he thought.

Think …

Think …

Shit!

His internal compass had told him that they were in a loop. Just as Halley’s comet has a string-of-pearls orbit around the sun, flying out into deep space before returning to our central light source about once every seventy-five years, so this tunnel had taken them out and away from the Kingdom of Bones, only to arc them back gradually to the other side of the cavern from which the chase had begun. Stretching ahead was the straightaway that Zinc feared, and it led to a bend at the far end with torchlight smudged on its curve.

Back to the cavern.

Back to Yvette.

Putting her back in danger.

Think!
Zinc thought. Use what you have at hand.

A torch.

A knife.

A dent in the wall.

Hurling the torch as hard as he could toward the bend ahead, Zinc sidestepped into the nearest nook. Seconds later, the beam of Grimmer’s flashlight swept around the final curve before the straightaway; it was followed by the spearman, hot on the Mountie’s tail. Kicking his foot out from the dark hiding place into Wes’s path, Zinc tripped his pursuer and sent him sprawling along the tunnel. The flashlight and the speargun clattered to the floor as Grimmer threw out both hands to bear the brunt of his fall. The lawyer hit the ground within reach of the weapon, and as Zinc came out of hiding to engage him, Wes pawed at the trigger grip with his bloody palms.

His palms, but not his fingers, for they were either dangling from the razor-blade walls or lying like cocktail sausages on the floor to either side.

Zinc gripped Grimmer by his shaved head and stabbed the blade into his back. The lawyer bellowed as the stainless steel sank deep, a snarl magnified by the cramped tube and echoing out in both directions up and down the tunnel. Again and again, the knife rose and fell, until there was no fight left in Zinc’s adversary.

Two down.

None to go.

Time to free Yvette.

Gathering up the flashlight and the still-armed speargun, Zinc ventured on to the bend, which was illuminated by light flickering in from the remaining torch flanking the throne of bones. As he exited from the tunnel into the cavern, he caught a hint of something at the corner of his eye, a moment before he was clubbed unconscious by someone who had been waiting for the Mountie to emerge.

Lights out.

Mission

Down the rungs of the ladder, DeClercq sank into a perverse pit of someone’s deviant sexuality. At one time, this had been a secret darkroom where that unholy degenerate had developed, printed, and pinned up pornographic photos of naked Native kids being abused in the residential school’s dormitories. It became obvious to DeClercq that the hand that took these pictures was also the hand that had once gripped the pulpit above as the reverend preached his true gospel. The same hand had wielded the strap and a yardstick in the missionary school that the Native kids in these photos had attended. That hand had gripped the terrified hearts and minds of children who were forced to submit to rape and sodomy. The hand of the old missionary, who apparently used this dark hole to carry out his darkest ritualistic desires. Girls or boys, it didn’t matter to the lecherous man of God, as long as he could fuck them with his staff and his rod, then pin these yellow, curling photos up on the wall as his masturbatory stimulant for in-between times.

As the Mountie focused his flashlight on this pitiful gallery, the beam picked out the picture of a pale-skinned little girl. She was the only Caucasoid kid among the Mongoloid faces, and DeClercq had no doubt who she was. At about the same time as the closing of Mission’s residential schools had deprived the dirty old clergyman of his dormitory hunting ground, the deaths of his son and his daughter-in-law—the new blood in charge of the mission—in that highway crash had delivered their orphaned child into his perverted hands. A pedophile is a pedophile for life, and without another channel for his lust, he had probably first raped her at a very tender age.

“Jesus Christ!” swore DeClercq as his foot hit bottom.

Caught in the pool of the flashlight beam as he swept it around the black hole to get his bearings was a figurative bed of nails upon which lay the decomposed remains of the lecherous old debaucher. Half-skeleton, half-mummy, the missionary was stretched out, face up, in his tattered Bible-black suit on a foul mattress crusted with dried juice that had seeped from his desiccated flesh. The pants were torn open at the crotch to get at his groin, and what had been removed from between his legs with the vicious slice of a knife now hung on a crucifix that had been turned upside down on the wall over the head of the bed.

Approaching the corpse, the chief focused the beam on details.

The bony wrists of the missionary were lashed behind his back in the manner of the Hanged Man.

From his emasculated groin jutted a stiff black dildo instead of his penis, the artificial phallus fastened to the bed frame as if erect.

The lower jaw of the fleshless face hung open in a silent scream at whatever had immediately preceded his death. The scalp and its hair, however, still clung to the skull.

That the old reverend had rotted away down here in a hellhole of his own making was obvious. But DeClercq grasped that he had descended into the hidden depths of another psyche as well—that of the old man’s granddaughter.

When God turned a blind eye to her repeated rapes at the hands of his pious servant, the child had turned to the elder gods of a faith antithetical to the one in which she was baptized. Years later, the Goth had wreaked revenge down here on her tormentor, and then blasphemed the church up above by conjuring the occult realm.

Down this well of her warped psyche, the Goth would sink every so often with her hammer and nails to assume the missionary position of psychosexual release. Here, with her legs spread wide and straddling the dildo, the Goth would fuck herself as frantically as her tormented soul demanded, and having recreated the ritual of abuse, she would hammer nail after nail into the old man’s dead head.

The crown of his cracked skull had been replaced God knows how many times with a substitute of wood that had been covered with the scalp torn off the original bone.

Was she hammering in Christ’s crown of thorns?

Was she hammering in the nimbus of the Hanged Man?

Perhaps it was both.

DeClercq couldn’t tell.

But one thing was certain in his mind.

The Goth was out there, swimming with her own deep-seated monsters
way
beyond the reef.

Tangaroa

Zinc has time-traveled back to 1779 in Kealakekua Bay, and here he sits in his red serge, among a squad of Royal Marines sporting the same color, in a rowboat that bobs in the surf just offshore as Captain Cook shoots a Hawaiian dead on the beach. What a change in the natives’ attitude since Cook was first here earlier on the voyage, when he discovered this group of islands in the North Pacific while on his way to America to search for the elusive Northwest Passage. He called them the Sandwich Islands, for the Earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, and when he landed on the beach of this Polynesian paradise, the Hawaiians fell flat at his feet as if he were a god.

The Arctic thwarted Cook as it had all others before him, so to loll away the winter in pleasanter climes before venturing to the West Coast for another attempt at the passage, the
Resolution
and the
Discovery
returned to the Sandwich Islands. What a spectacular sight it was for those tall ships to sail into Kealakekua Bay. They were met by nine thousand Hawaiians in fifteen hundred canoes, with hundreds more on surfboards or swimming in the sea like a school of fish, backed by thousands more lining the beaches. The return of Cook had lured the king himself out to greet him, and when the captain was escorted ashore by Koa, the high priest, Hawaiians by the thousands fell prostrate before him.

With the benefit of hindsight, Zinc grasps the undertones. Legend has it that Lono, the god of peace, happiness, and agriculture, sailed away from these islands long ago, with a promise that one day he would return to Hawaii. News of the white man’s landing a year ago had spread, so all the islanders were here to welcome their god home. What Cook failed to grasp at the ritualistic ceremony that followed his return was that he was being deified.

Unfortunately, the whites overstayed their welcome. The crews of the two ships ate a lot of food, while the continuing presence of this god in their midst diminished the power of the king and his priest. The island returned to normal once the ships sailed away, but now a damaged mast brought them back, and what was once worship of Cook turned to hatred.

A stolen rowboat was the catalyst for this clash. Cook reacted with the same tactic he’d used with good results in the South Pacific when some of his crewmen deserted on the first voyage. He went ashore with armed marines and seized the Hawaiian king to hold him hostage until the boat was returned.

At the moment, as Zinc sits bobbing in the surf offshore, Cook has managed to abduct the king as far as the beach, where he is currently surrounded by two or three thousand Hawaiians intent on stopping him. In a show of force meant to keep the mob at bay, the captain shoots one of the islanders dead with his pistol. Such is the awe in which Cook is still held by the natives that none will touch him face to face. But when he turns to summon this rowboat into shore, Cook is clubbed from behind by Koa, the high priest. That blow exposes the false god for the mortal he really is, and now the enraged islanders fall upon Cook in droves, stabbing him repeatedly with their knives as he flounders in the shallows.

The marines in the boat with Zinc open fire.

The fighting onshore is hand-to-hand.

The surf around them reddens from the bloodbath.

Zinc must have time-warped forward to escape from the battle, for suddenly he is standing on the deck of the
Resolution
six days later. Hoping to save the island from shelling by the ships’ cannons, Koa has delivered all that can be found of Cook’s remains. The Hawaiians’ belief that some of his bones might hold magical power resulted in the dismemberment of the captain’s body, so what the British have for burial at sea is Cook’s skull, some leg and arm bones, and his hands. That the remains are genuine is proved by one of the hands, which was disfigured way back in 1764 by a powder horn explosion off Newfoundland.

It occurs to Zinc as he stares at Cook’s bones that there is a moral here: when true believers believe they have encountered the supernatural in the real world, that break with reality can get you killed …

Too many bones.

For with each echo of that moral in his mind, Zinc sees the bones in front of his eyes double in number, until he’s engulfed by them …

Throbbing pain at the back of his head kept blurring the Mountie’s vision, but eventually it focused on the scads of skulls around him—each one lit up like a jack-o’-lantern, with candles in its eye sockets and slack-jawed mouth—covering the walls, lining the pillars, and molded into a throne.

This nightmare that was the Kingdom of Bones turned darker when Zinc tried to move. His wrists were tied together in the small of his back. He had been dragged from the mouth of the tunnel, where the blow to his head had occurred, across the floor of the skeletal cavern to the center of the
marae.
Here he lay, face up, like some impending blood sacrifice to the elder gods. And once he realized that one of his legs had been tied across the other to mimic the Hanged Man, Zinc grasped that a sacrifice was exactly what he had become.

But a sacrifice for whom?

Still dazed, he looked around.

And that’s when he glimpsed her, lurking like a trapdoor spider in the darkness of one of the tunnels. Only as she skulked out of the wormhole and into the flickering glow cast by the skulls did he spot the hammer in one hand, the fistful of nails in the other, and the diver’s knife gripped in her teeth like a pirate’s cutlass.

The Goth glared down hungrily at her next meal. Did the man meat see her grin behind the horizontal blade?
Clang!
She dropped the hammer to one side of his head.
Clink, clink, clink, clink, clink …
She let the fistful of nails rain down to the other. Then, crouching, she withdrew the blade from between her teeth, letting it
squeeeak
like fingernails scraping on a blackboard as she tugged it sideways across her enamel. The cop winced from the nerve-shredding noise and tried to cower farther away as she slit the side of his trunks. A firm yank whipped his swimsuit off like a diaper from a baby.

“There,” she said. “That’s better.”

A few strokes and the Mountie was rock hard in her hand. As hard as her grandfather used to get in his living years, and as hard as the dildo that now jutted up from his ghastly remains.

“It’s no use trying to fight it. You’re no match for Viagra. That’s a powerful cocktail coursing through your veins. Viagra is formulated for limp dicks. It works by boosting the blood supply to flaccid flesh. Give it to a virile stud in the overdose that I forced down your throat, and the result is that your cock will still be stiff long after you’re gone.”

The Goth bent down and bit into the Mountie’s chest. She ripped a morsel of flesh away from one of the lacerations he had gained during his grim squeeze through the
makatea
crawlway.

“You taste good.”

Blood dribbled down the chin of the cannibal queen.

“You’re trying to piece it together. I see it in your eyes. You fear you’re going to die without knowing why. Don’t fret. That’s not going to happen. Why? Because the reason you’re here
is
you. I promised to tell you. That was the deal.

“The only way it all makes sense is by lateral thinking. Don’t look for logic in anything we did other than creating a setup that would lure you here.

“Why kill Romeo Cardoza at the Lions Gate? Sure, the film
Bed of Nails
created a convenient smokescreen to buy time for the rest of my plan to unfold. And yes, the bar full of hookers and pushers offered us an ideal hunting ground—not to mention the fact that you took off after that other pair all because they sold him the blow the three of us snorted upstairs. No, the real reason for snuffing a Hollywood producer was to bring in the Special External Section of the RCMP. And because
you
were the cop who had dealt with the Tarot back in the days of the Ripper’s reign of terror on Deadman’s Island, the Cardoza killing was sure to attract
you.

“There, the hook was baited.”

The Goth, still stroking Zinc’s engorged penis, turned and blew a gory kiss from her sanguine lips at the skewered remains of Bret Lister, who was slumped against the wall.

“We killed Cardoza, Bret and I. Which gave him the inspiration to write
Crown of Thorns
and
Halo of Flies
jointly with Wes, and gave me the inspiration for the paintings you saw—signed by the Goth—in the gallery at the convention.

“Get the picture?” she asked.

“It took a year and a half to put that together. Then, last Friday in Seattle, Wes and I waylaid a man we chose at random, spiking his head upside down on a stake outside Ted Bundy’s house and hanging the rest of him like the Hanged Man at the bottom of the Thirteen Steps to Hell in Maltby Cemetery. Why, you wonder? For two reasons. The similarity with the Cardoza hanging was sure to bring you to Seattle. And with Ted Bundy’s house on the ghost tour and Maltby Cemetery pinpointed in the program, you were bound to end up at the horror convention, where we were waiting for you.

“There, the hook was in.

“
Crown of Thorns
and his previous psych remand were certain to make Bret your prime suspect. But he had an alibi for Friday night. So that was sure to shift your suspicion to Wes and his
Halo of Flies
. But when Bret nailed the Cthulhu artist during the masquerade, Wes had an alibi. They couldn’t be in it together. They hated each other too much, as everyone—including you—witnessed in their bitter rivalry at the convention. No way would Bret allow himself to be so humiliated in public unless their literary animosity was real. So the only avenue left for you to smoke out the Tarot killer was to join the Odyssey, which was about to fly off to the Cook Islands.

“We knew you’d go, of course. How could you not? It was already in the papers—if you read between the lines—that you were taking a trip to the South Pacific on forced medical leave. The Cook Islands offered you a chance to kill three birds with one stone. Coming here would keep your boss happy, would allow you to investigate Bret and Wes together in a closed environment, and would let you play the protecting hero in a South Seas romance.

“So here you are. Exactly where I planned. The whole affair, from start to finish, was a trap for
you.
”

Like all psychotics in a borderline state, the Goth was teetering on the brink. Her words seemed rational, but she struggled to get them out, and the stink oozing out of her betrayed the chemical changes taking place beneath her skin. There was a battle going on inside between Jekyll and Hyde, her latent psychosis threatening to turn florid at any moment, and the outcome of that was bound to be the eating-up of the Eloi surface she wore for the masquerade of so-called reality by the Morlock that was lusting for blood deep in the pit of her brain.

Her crazed eyes locked on Zinc’s drug-swollen penis, and her bloodred lips pulled back from her teeth.

“My, my, Grandpa, what a big cock you have.

“All the better to nail you, Little Red Riding Hood.

“No, no, Grandpa. I’m the one with the nails.”

And then it was gone, that ominous shadow that had passed behind the dilated pupils of her wild, glittering eyes.

“Ssssex,”
sibilated the Goth, hissing like that sexual serpent did in biblical Eden. “What won’t a man do if given the opportunity to indulge in his wildest fantasies with the wanton woman of his darkest, deepest desires?

“I met Bret years ago, when he was a lawyer crusading for Native victims of sex abuse at missionary schools. My grandfather was guilty of that when he ran True Gospel Mission. My family had been missionaries among the cannibals on Tangaroa in the 1800s—that’s our first mission church out on the lagoon—so I had heard tales of the Kingdom of Bones for as long as I can remember. After Bret’s breakdown from overwork and his lockup in the psych ward on Colony Farm, we got together and fucked our brains out for mutual therapy. I told him I wished to see this cave, so he brought me here, and that’s when he told me about meeting the Ripper on Colony Farm, and that Jack knew how to open the door to the occult realm.”