Ripper (17 page)

South of 33rd, the building facades were dirty and graffiti marred the walls. Signs had burnt-out letters and the gutter litter was cheap. Traci Lords and
The Best of Buttman
competed with
Batman Returns.
Intending to case the joint and return tomorrow, DeClercq turned right at 29th and checked the address numbers. The street was one block up from historic Tin Pan Alley. Midblock, with the colophon of a vampire bat, he found a grungy sign:
 FLY-BY-NIGHT-PRESS.

He was surprised to find the lights on and someone moving inside.

The man who answered the door hadn't slept for three days. His face was puffy, flushed, and blue bags weighed down his eyes. Stubble darkened his jaw like a kid with melting chocolate ice cream. He had rings on every finger, and studs through one of his ears. His hair was gathered behind his head in a mane that reached his waist. He wore a belted green tunic stolen from Robin Hood, and biker's boots jangling with chains. Protecting his heart 'was a starburst badge admitting him to the past few days' Fantasy

SF Horror Convention in San Diego. "Police?" he asked, sleepy-eyeing DeClercq. "This won't wait, huh? I just got in." The Mountie assumed the NYPD left a message on his machine.

Fly-By-Night Press occupied the front room on the ground floor. The room was cold from lack of heat, but clanking radiators hissed to overcome that. The walls were papered with book jackets, posters, and movie bills: Karloff, Pin-head, Savini, and
Deep Red;
Lorre,
Eraserhead, Raw Meat,
and Vlad the Impaler; Cronenberg,
Re-Animator, Godzilla,
and
Peeping Tom;
the art of Beardsley, Clarke, Finlay, Brundage, Coye, and Bok. Backed by a cardboard cutout of Leatherface waving his trademark chainsaw, a battered desk was piled high with manuscripts and galley proofs. On it sat a jar of eyeballs, hopefully plastic, and a coffee cup fashioned from a skull.

"We're a small press," the man said. "Just me and a couple of friends. Whispers, Scream, Dark Harvest, and Grant aren't worried yet."

DeClercq saw his opening to break the ice. "Would Lovecraft be around today if not for Arkham House?
The Outsider and Others
is the cornerstone of my collection."

The man blinked. "You
are
a cop?"

"Chief Superintendent DeClercq." He flashed the shield.

"Roger Korman. No relation." Testing him.

"King of the A's?" DeClercq said, tapping the galley proofs.

Korman laughed. "Want a coffee? Fresh made to keep me awake."

"Thanks. Black. No sugar," DeClercq replied.

In the far corner sat a table with a Mr. Coffee machine. High on one wall pneumatic Elvira burst from her plunging gown. Ogling her cleavage from the other wall were prostheses masks of Grizzle, Gusher, Blasted, Decay, and Mangled. A Crypt Keeper puppet hung above the coffeepot.

"How many books have you published?" DeClercq accepted the mug. Steam rose like a genie from the ceramic shrunken head.

"Five on sale. Six in the works."

"Jolly Roger
your latest?"

Korman nodded. "A thirty thousand print run sold out in a day. I hope you don't think
I
killed those women to jack up sales? After the
Publishers Weekly
piece, I wouldn't be surprised."

"What piece was that?"

The publisher frowned. "The guy on the phone said that's what you wanted to talk to me about. Told me to wait here till you arrived. I only came in to gather orders off the machine. Teach me to answer after-hours calls."

"What piece?" DeClercq repeated.

"Every one of our books has been trashed by
Publishers Weekly.
I'm convinced it's run by little old ladies with blue hair. They seem to want the guarantee
This won't scare you too much.
Give them real horror and they piss their pants."

"Those that can, do," DeClercq said. "Those that can't become critics."

"We sent them a copy of
Jolly Roger
in galley proofs. What we expected was the usual unsigned pan. Instead this guy did a feature titled "Gutter Fiction," decrying the nadir to which the serial killer novel had sunk. The first thing frightened people do is burn artists in the square."

DeClercq agreed with
Publishers Weekly,
but held his tongue.

"To rationalize horror"—Korman washed his face with one hand—"is to try to rationalize rock and roll or the roller coaster. If it doesn't grab your primal core, then I can't explain it to you. We live in a brutal world, so horror collects in the mind. Only the foolish let it fester, bottled up in the dark. We have to exercise horror in order to exorcise it. The best part of the roller coaster is when you get off. Highbrows don't understand you gotta lance the boil. They shake their heads in bewilderment when some bottled-up guy goes berserk with a gun."

The man was in verbal freefall from lack of sleep. "Am I in trouble? For publishing a
novel
? Can't anyone separate fact and fantasy these days? Why does the piece on
Jolly Roger
interest the FBI?"

"The FBI? You mean the NYPD?"

"The guy on the phone said FBI. So who in hell are you?"

"Royal Canadian Mounted. About the Vancouver murders."

"I'm confused."

"Frankly, so am I. The reason I'm here is to track down the face behind
Jolly Roger.
Who uses the pen name Skull & Crossbones as a mask?"

"Oh boy," Korman said, slumping into a chair.

"You don't know?"

"Haven't a clue. The manuscript arrived by mail and I replied that way. We correspond through a Vancouver post box."

"Correspond with whom?"

"Skull & Crossbones. I promised him secrecy. That's why he published with us."

"He?"

"She? It? Them? Damned if I know."

"Death's-Head Incorporated holds the copyright?"

"That's
my
company. The rights are held in trust."

"Whose idea was that?"

"Skull & Crossbones. It's like King and Bachman, except
nobody
knows."

"Who cashed the advance?"

"We don't pay one. Just royalties calculated on sales."

"So the
only
contact you have with the author is through Skull & Crossbones at a Vancouver post box?"

"Reg Skull, actually. That's the name used."

"Hell of a way to do business."

"I thought it was cool. Having a ghostwriter, in every sense."

"Got the address?"

While Korman shuffled through his files, there was a knock at the door. The pair who entered were so well-groomed they had to be with The Suits. "Who are you?" the slickest asked, staring at DeClercq.

"RCMP. Special X. The
Jolly Roger
murders. What brings you here?"

"The Bureau's doing a background check for Barbados police. New York critic got his head crushed on a Caribbean cruise. Looking for motive. Grasping at straws. Checking the authors he slammed. Wrote a piece in
Publishers Weekly
titled "Gutter Fiction." Filleted
Jolly Roger,
published by this . . . house?"

The Hanged Man

Vancouver 

10:15
P.M.

The origin of the Tarot is an unsolved mystery. The deck has assumed many guises through the centuries, but the basic meaning of each symbol has remained the same. A Tarot deck consists of 78 cards: 56 in four suits called the Minor Arcana (these evolved into modern playing cards) and 22 symbolic pictures called the Major Arcana.

The Major Arcana (or "Greater Secrets") have been attributed to many sources: Egyptian hieroglyphics in the oldest book in the world; the kabbalistic lore of the ancient Hebrews; to the Chinese, or Gypsies who brought them from India; to the city of Fez in Morocco where symbols were used as a common language among diverse cultures. To Jung's disciples they represent the archetypes of our collective unconscious. Perhaps the wildest theory is refugees from Atlantis created them to encode their wisdom as the doomed continent vanished beneath the sea.

Whatever the Tarot's origin (Why not ask the cards?) the oldest deck surviving in Europe dates from 1392 at the end of the Dark Ages.

Most modern occultists connect the Tarot to the Kabbala, a complex system of Jewish lore that mythically reads the Scriptures to penetrate their mysteries and foretell the future. The Kabbala greatly influenced magic and mysticism
throughout medieval Europe.
Grimoires
like the
Lemegeton,
the
Picatrix,
and the
Clavicula Salomonis
—
sorcerers' spell-books for conjuring demons—derived their "words of power" from this lore.

The Kabbala holds creation is the product of vibrations. Its symbol for the universe is the Tree of Life. The Tree

grows from the underworld to the stars, from subconscious enigmas to spiritual awareness, from the past to the future through the now. Ten positions or "sephiroth" on the Tree of Life symbolize the creative vibrations. Twenty-two paths of power connect the ten positions, each secretly linked to one of the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. The letters are linked to the twenty-two cards in the Tarot's Major Arcana.

The Tarot-Kabbala connection was made by French occultist Eliphas Levi in
Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie,
1854. Levi's theory spread to Britain where it was adopted by the Order of the Golden Dawn. Members of the Dawn included Aleister Crowley, A.E. Waite, and Bram Stoker, the author of
Dracula.
In 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper, S. MacGregor Mathers (cofounder of the Dawn) wrote
The Tarot, Its Occult Signification.
By linking the twenty-two trump cards of the Major Arcana with the twenty-two paths of power on the Tree of Life, the Dawn saw the Tarot as a means through which members could work their will on the universe.

"The Magick is in the cards."

Tarot Magick is based on the law
Occult power is omnipotent.
All existing things—including us—are reflections of a greater reality. This greater reality is the Occult Realm, so what's "up there" projects "down here."
"Quod superius, sicut inferius,"
occultists say. "As above, so below."

Between the Realm and its reflection lies the Astral Plane. Through this psychic medium pulse the Tree of Life's vibrations, wavelengths that create the here-and-now. The Dawn believed it possible,
with the right key,
to change the physical world we know by intercepting Occult vibrations
before
they reflected here. If the Tarot held "the Key to the Astral Plane," its symbols,
ritualized,
could open "the Closed Path to the Occult Realm." By "astral projection," a Dawn adept could then hurl his consciousness into the Astral Plane, sending his "astral double"—or Doppelganger—to work his will by changing the vibrations ritually. Through Tarot Magick, the adept could conjure Occult demons. All that was required was the proper Tarot deck.

A.E. Waite produced the popular Rider deck in 1910. He interpreted his cards in
The Key to the Tarot
and
The Holy Kabbalah.
Aleister Crowley, befitting his status as the most notorious Satanist of this century, designed his own deck full of erotic symbols. He interpreted his cards in
The Book of Thoth.

The most obscure card in any deck is the Hanged Man. Hanging upside down is an ancient symbol for spiritual awakening. The Norse god Odin hanged himself on Yggdrasil, the wonder tree, to gain mystical power to read the fortune-telling Runes. Yoga practitioners stand on their heads to move energy from the base of the spine to the brain.

In Waite's Tarot, the Hanged Man dangles from a T-cross, the Hebrew letter
tau.
The cross is made of living wood to symbolize the Tree of Life. Both arms are folded behind his back to form the base of a triangle with its tip—the man's head—pointing down. One leg is bent across the other to form a human cross. The geometrical figure hidden in the Hanged Man is that of a cross combined with a reverse "water" triangle. This signifies multiplying the tetrad by the triad. The tetrad—or cross—equals 4: the triad—or triangle—3. Multiplying them produces the number 12. Twelve is the number of signs in the zodiac, symbolizing a complete cycle of manifestation. The Hanged Man is card 12 in the Major Arcana.

In Crowley's Tarot, the Hanged Man is crucified to an upside down cross. Does the inverted cross denote the Black Mass? His triangle is upright, not reversed, as Beast 666 explains in
The Book of Thoth:

"The legs are crossed so that the right leg forms a right angle with the left leg, and the arms are stretched out at an angle of 60 degrees, so as to form an equilateral triangle; this gives the symbol of the Triangle surmounted by the Cross, which represents the descent of the light into the darkness . . ."

Crowley's Hanged Man was painted on and nailed to the crack house wall.

Waite's Hanged Man was one of the cards at the end of
Jolly Roger.

The city jail is part of the cop shop at 312 Main. The VPD Public Safety Building squats in the center of Vancouver's other skid row. 22,000 prisoners pass through the jail each year, one of whom lodged tonight was Karen Lake. Nick inormed the Main Street blues manning the PIC desk beneath a photo of the queen, then walked through the building to the lane out back. The loading bay at street level under the jail was large enough for the sheriffs' prison van. Nick entered the alcove and walked to the rear. He buzzed the fifth floor to send the elevator down, identifying himself and smiling for the security camera. The lift door opened and up he went.

The fifth-floor booking area was to the left. The cops on guard were laughing at a chess set made from toilet paper, spit, and cigarette ash. One of the jail's regulars had left it behind. His personal issue .38 being held for evidence, Nick stored his replacement gun in the booking office and kept the locker key, then freewheeled the elevator to the fourth floor. The lift buttons worked between the third and fifth stories, but not down to the street, which the guards controlled.