Primal Scream

by Michael Slade

  Eat me ...

  Eat me, Sparky . . .

  Yes, child. I'm baaack . . .

  Sparky froze.

  Eat me, Sparky. Take your Mama awaaay . . .

  "But . . . but . . . you're dead. You're buried in New Orleans."

  Selena turned, frowning, and beckoned up the bank. "Who you talking to, babe? Come on. Let's go!" Reaching for the waist button, she fumbled, loosened her shorts, paused for dramatic effect, and pushed them down. Naked as Genesis, Eve was back in Eden.

  Heat flamed up from the sun-drenched bank.

  Dazzling pools studded the surface of the mud.

  Acid made the mud seem to climb Selena's legs, mud fingers reaching for the shorts coming down and off, as one leg suuucked out of the goo, then the other.

  Selena stood spread-eagled before psychotic eyes.

  Horrified, Sparky stared at the thatch of the hippie's crotch.

  Tzantza? whispered a voice from the dungeon in the Canadian's mind.

  Feet suuucking through the mud, Selena climbed the bank. As she reached for her shoulder bag stored on dry ground, the hair tumbling around her face became a nest of snakes, Medusa leering at Sparky while the serpents in Eden lashed like whips and snapped their fangs, dark eyes black with fury and hate, demons released from the Pandora's box open in Sparky's mind. A purple wasp with orange wings buzzed by. A howler monkey screamed in the canopy above. Hot shivers jittered through Sparky's gut as the hippie withdrew an ebony fetish from her macrame bag. The two-faced Janus head with back-to-back devils' tongues curving up to lick the jungle air brought forth dread.

  "Don't l o o k away, babe. I got the hots for you. Just walk right into me, and let the a n i m a l loose. Come on—"

  and eat me, child. Take your Mama awaaay!

  With a growl Selena clutched Sparky's arm as her other hand, with the devils in it, went for the shorts. Panicking, Sparky pulled away, slipped, and fell in the mud. Selena laughed as the shorts tore, baring Sparky's groin. She tossed the garment up the bank and straddled the acidhead sprawled at her feet. Through tear-blurred eyes, on hand and knees, Sparky gazed up.

  The mobile hand closed on the grip of the sheathed knife.

  Selena squatted slowly as pubic hair and genitals came to life.

  Tzantza? No, not tzantza but. . .

  The black mat rose up on haunches from her crotch, working eight legs of various lengths covered with long, coarse hair, two pubic wisps waving hypnotically at the stoned gaze below. Above the obscene fat sack of a body jutted what looked like a watch tower hung with bulging round eyes. The spider sat back on four legs, the front four clawing air, then dropped to scurry furtively over Selena's sex.

  The hippie sat down on Sparky as the Janus-tongues vanished.

  "Feel that, babe. F e e l i t. Have I got a treat for you."

  "No!"

  Sparky . . .

  "GO AWAY!"

  "Yeah, slip it deep inside. Now fuck me, babe."

  I hate you, Mother! Daddy, help me, pleeease!

  Selena bucked with a violent jerk, the thrust from her body slamming Sparky hard against the bank, squirts of mud spewing out from the impact. The hippie thrashed convulsively, limbs flailing and eyes bugging as lips twitched the danse macabre. Unearthly sound issued from where the knife impaled her throat, a whistling akin to someone sucking a clogged pipe.

  Sparky yanked the blade savagely across the tubes; then Selena disappeared in a crimson spray.

  High-pitched screeching from the trees above, as a colony of monkeys worked out their excitement, followed by other creatures lurking in the jungle—only to stop abruptly to leave a path of silence, along which came a shriek of such terror and ecstasy that it could set the standard for primal screams . . .

  This wrench of blood lust . . .

  Sparky's first orgasm.

  "Let it out, Sparky. Scream and scream and scream. Are you your father's spawn? Or do you belong to me? If you're mine, prove it tonight in blood."

  Sparky's eyes flew open.

  Ecuador was gone.

  All that remained of that memory was the screaming which echoed around the walls of this dungeon like that dungeon in New Orleans.

  Was this hallucination, or was this real?

  Torchlight glinted bronze winks off several gold rings.

  Rings through the lips of a woman's sex.

  Closed File

  West Vancouver

  It was nine that evening before DeClercq returned home. He parked the Benz (the old-fogey mobile, to Katt) in the carport off Marine Drive, released Tchaikovsky's Little Russian symphony from the CD player, picked up the box of cold pizza for Katt, then waded out into the sleet. The firs along the path descending to his waterfront house stood black against the clouds sheened gray by the lights of the whitened city. The latest symphony by Metallica greeted him at the door.

  Something streaked past his feet down the entrance hall.

  "Katt? Can you hear it?" he yelled to their living room.

  "Katt? Can you hear me?" A more sensible question.

  The streak again, across the hall from the library to the living room, where Katt was curled up with Conan Doyle in the Holmes chair.

  "Can you hear yourself think?"

  "Huh? Can't hear you, Bob."

  "Is that blood dribbling out your ears?"

  "Thanks. But I already ate."

  He walked to the volume control and turned it down a hundred decibels. The Annotated Sherlock Holmes dropped into her lap as Katt's hands flew up to protect her ears from the sudden quiet, a dramatic flair resembling Munch's The Scream. "Not cold turkey!" Katt cried. "I can't take withdrawal."

  The streak shot from behind the curtains and leapt to the arm of the chair, arching its back as if to hiss at frowning DeClercq. "Don't worry," said Katt, heading him off at the pass. "This cute little guy is borrowed. He's on loan to try out."

  "To try out for what?"

  "A permanent position."

  "What position?"

  Katt grinned. "Guard cat."

  DeClercq pointed at Napoleon, asleep by the Watson chair. "We have a guard. Trained to bite." Hard to know which amazed him more: that she could think through the racket or the shepherd snooze?

  "The dog's asleep on duty," countered Katt. "Backup is what we need."

  "His name?"

  "Doesn't have one. Poor lost waif." Hand under his belly, Katt plucked the tabby from the armchair, a move the kitten reacted to by nipping her thumb. "Owww. You little bugger."

  "He just named himself."

  Katt's turn to frown.

  "Katt-nip," quipped the Mountie.

  Twenty minutes later, the pair sat reading side by side in the Holmes and Watson chairs, the Holmes for Katt—"I'm more flamboyant"—and the wingback Watson for him. Between them blazed the hearth.

  It was Dr. Stanley Holyoak who had made a Holmesian of Katt. The two had been trapped together on Deadman's Island during the Ripper case, before he was sucked down God's toilet on a quicksand beach, and now he was fossilizing under the Pacific.

  A Colonel Sanders lookalike and the foremost Sherlockian this side of the Atlantic, Holyoak had informed Katt, "A pastiche is a story that takes its origin from someone else's work. Unlike a parody which pokes fun at its source, a pastiche is a serious imitation. I create Holmesian pastiches. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle penned four novels and fifty-six stories about the Great Detective and his friend Dr. Watson. This work we call the Canon. By 'we' I mean Sherlockians, who gather in scion groups far and wide. Sleuths like the Baker Street Irregulars in New York, and the Northern Musgraves in Britain, and the Red-Headed League in Australia, and the Stormy Petrels here."

  "Cool," Katt said. "But what do you write about"

  "Unresolved puzzles in the Canon."

  "Puzzles like what?"

  "Like whether Holmes was educated at Oxford or at Cambridge . . ."

  DeClercq was a firm believer in fostering imagination. As a boy his had run wild, and wher
ever it took him, the fantasy was fed by his guardians. DeClercq was nine when his father died. His dad was an artist before the war and a pilot during it. Ironically, after fifty ops over Germany and North Africa, he was killed by a drunk driver on a Montreal street. The struggling artist left his son a set of lead soldiers, his pilot's flying log, and a series of paintings planned for a book.

  Withdrawn, the boy spent months alone in his room, arranging the soldiers for bombing runs. That Christmas he received a medieval fort and a miniature cannon that shot tiny shells. This was back when imagination, not lawsuits, designed toys. The lead soldiers depicted the Norman Conquest of Britain, and for hours, days, weeks, he holed up in his room, shooting the figurines off the battlements. A single, well-placed soldier took him two weeks to hit.

  Tactics and patience.

  Two days before his tenth birthday, cancer claimed his mom. His aunt gave Robert her present: Battles That Changed the World. Who fought whom, where, why, and how the victor triumphed, illustrated with the paintings by his dad. Robert pinned those tactic maps around his new room: Marathon, Hastings, Blenheim, Quebec, Saratoga, Waterloo, Gettysburg ... to slide lead soldiers about the floor to re-create each battle.

  Doting on the orphan as if he were her son, the maiden aunt in Quebec became his guardian. When he was fourteen, she took him to Britain and France. There he discovered the second floor of Foyle's Books, an entire room of which was military history. Redcoats, bagpipes, and singing swords. Maps stained royal red by an empire on which the sun never set. Entranced by the Iron Duke and Nelson Touch. That Charge of the Light Brigade into the Valley of Death. The Well at Cawnpore and Relief of Lucknow in the Sepoy Mutiny. The Opium War with China. The Defense of Rorke's Drift. Gordon of Khartoum. That Road to Mandalay . . .

  "Thin Red Line, is it?"

  The bookseller snooped over the Canuck's shoulder.

  "Surely all the color you need guards your western frontier?"

  The deaths of his dad and mom veered what De-Clercq read toward the macabre. A list of his favorite stories said it all:

  Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart"

  Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

  Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"

  Matheson, I Am Legend

  Ellison, "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream . . ."

  This realm of fantasy recruited him into the RCMP, where imagination and tactics propelled him to the^ top. Serial killers are always fantasy-motivated, so he used his forensic imagination to fathom sick minds and then field maneuvers to take them down. Now Katt was adamant that she was planning to be a Mountie, too, while he was guardian and guiding light to her, so he assumed the sacred task of feeding her whims.

  Holmesians thought Doyle's fantasy world more real than reality.

  And there was no better RCMP training than solving unresolved puzzles in the Canon.

  So he had bought her the Annotated Holmes.

  The first thing Katt did was remodel the house for a school photo project. "Everything is multimedia these days, Bob." They found the Holmes and Watson chairs at an estate auction, Katt having played Santa Claus with her wish list seated on DeClercq's knee. Chairs book-ending the fireplace, the Watson to the left, the teenager had set-decorated the mantel behind. A jackknife transfixed unanswered correspondence to the wood, while a photo of Kate, DeClercq's first wife, stood in for Irene Adler, always "the woman" to Holmes. A cocaine bottle was near the looking glass, beneath which hung a Persian slipper stuffed with shag tobacco, over the coal scuttle filled with cigars.

  "I need your revolver," Katt said, "to add the final touch. Holmes adorned the wall with a script V.R. and crown—for Victoria Regina—punched out by firing a box of cartridges."

  In the end, she had to settle for cardboard bullet holes.

  So here they sat, the two of them, reading side by side on this winter night, Napoleon—dubbed Baskerville—asleep nearby with Catnip asleep between his paws (One gets the feeling, thought DeClercq, the cat's here to stay), when Katt glanced up from the Canon and said, "Here's a good one."

  DeClercq—a faithful Watson—put down the closed file.

  "The puzzle," Katt enthused, "is this. Holmes says the snake he thwarted in The Adventure of the Speckled Band' was an Indian 'swamp adder.' Not only is there no such snake, but there are no aquatic venomous snakes in India. There is a puff adder, but it's African. We know the Canon never lies, so how do we explain? Could it be the snake's name was local vernacular Holmes picked up? We're told the 'adder' left 'two little dark punctures' in its victim. The only snake that leaves such marks is the Indian viper."

  "So Holmes battled a viper?" said DeClercq.

  "The snake was yellow with brown specks, thus 'the speckled band.' Most Indian vipers are brown with black rings. Its hiss was 'soothing, like that of a small jet of steam escaping from a tea-kettle.' Of the two Indian vipers, the Russell's Viper is silent, then hisssses if aroused. But the Saw-Scaled Viper makes the right noise by rubbing scales as it coils and twists. Watson writes the snake had a 'puffed neck.' The only snake that does that is the cobra."

  "So Holmes battled a cobra?" said DeClercq.

  "Cobras must strike repeatedly to inject poison in killing amounts. As a result, they leave several marks. They can't scale a bell rope, as described, or answer a master's whistle, since they're deaf. Truth is, Bob, no snake fits the speckled band."

  "There must be a solution. Isn't that the cardinal rule?"

  "And so there is, Bob, in this mighty brain." Katt tapped her temple with one hand, while the other held a book Reptiles of the World aloft. She nodded toward the greenhouse off the living room beyond the Watson chair. "What do you do in there? Hybridize roses, right? Cross breeds to produce something with the characteristics of both. I think Dr. Grimesby Roylott, the villain of the story, crossed a Gila monster with an Indian cobra. The hybrid had the monster's ears to hear the whistle, legs and claws to climb the rope, and potent venom combining the poisons of each. Mix both colorings and you get the speckled band. Best of all, my answer originates in the Canon. In 'The Adventure of the Creeping Man' Professor Presbury crosses himself with an ape."

  Pleased with herself and all grin, a Cheshire Katt sat back in the Holmes chair.

  Imagination, thought DeClercq. You have what a cop needs. For the realm of the psychotic is the supernatural.

  " 'Fess up, Bob. What has you engrossed? The folder you're reading has cobwebs and dust."

  "It's a closed file. The Headhunter case. The file dates back to the eighties, Katt."

  "By 'closed' you mean 'solved'?"

  "I thought so back then. The Headhunter taunted me with pictures of hacked-off heads on stakes. This week I was mailed a shrunken head. Why would a copycat taunt me more than a decade later in such a parallel way? A voice at the back of my mind insists something from the Headhunter file has overlooked meaning now."

  "Like what?"

  "I have no idea. But the paramount rule of being a cop is never ignore a hunch."

  "Can I see the photos of the crime scenes?"

  "It's 'may I,' Katt. And the answer is no. They're too horrific."

  Groaning, the teenager rolled her eyes. "Deadman's Island was more brutal than any photo can be. I want to be a cop, Bob, but you're protecting me. What you need"—she patted the Holmes chair—"is a session with the world's foremost consulting detective."

  A hand shot out for the photos.

  "Consult me, Bob."

  Reluctantly, he passed them across, then watched a mix of emotions play over Katt's face. That fascination which draws us to auto accidents and other intimations of mortality. Revulsion from the increasing ferocity of each kill and the sexual sadism behind the mutilations and rapes. Empathy with the victims, then fright as she realized, but for the fate of time and place, each dead woman could be her.

  "October 25," outlined DeClercq. "Two fishermen pulled a headless body from the Fraser River. The naked and de
composing floater's fingerprints identified it as prostitute junkie Helen Grabowski. Autopsy revealed she was stabbed in the neck, then her head was cut off with a nicked blade that marked one vertebra. Sexual assault was inconclusive, but both breasts were slashed through the nipples."

  "Mother hate?"

  "Possibly."

  Katt examined the progression of Grabowski photos. "Who's the black guy in the mug shot?"

  "John Lincoln Hardy. Grabowski's pimp. He was into voodoo and importing cocaine."

  "Was she the first victim?"

  "The first found. But the next day two kids uncovered a skeleton minus a skull while playing on a hillside in North Vancouver. Both the top vertebra and branches cut to cover the remains bore nicked knife marks like those on the floater. Cuts on the ribs could mean the breasts were slashed. From prior bone fractures, Interpol later identified the skeleton as that of a German backpacker, Liese Greiner, who vanished. while on a camping vacation here."

  "Sick!" said Katt. "The killer sent you these!" one hand she held out two Polaroids, each of a severed head mounted on a stake. The ravages of heroin identified Grabowski, whose black hair framed the whites of rolled-back eyes, as blood drooled from both corners of her slack mouth. Greiner's hair was black, tangled, and matted with gore. A sliver of pupil peeked under hooded lids. Her lips were round as if frozen in an incomplete scream.

  "Both photos were sent to The Vancouver Sun before I took command of the Headhunter squad."

  Cautiously, Katt shuffled the pictures to the nes corpse.

  "Joanna Portman was a nurse who didn't arrive home from work early one morning. She'd stayed that night at St. Paul's to deliver a baby. At two a.m. the following day, October 29, two students parked necking on UBC's campus got caught in a freak snowstorm. While cavorting in the blizzard they found Portman crucified to a totem pole behind the Museum of Anthropology."

  Katt stared wide-eyed at the photo.