by Rick Wayne
In the old days, people all over the world, from Peru to Siberia, consulted a witch doctor when a family member fell victim to a sudden, strange, undiagnosable illness. In Greenland, tupiluq is the name of both the ghoul and the ivory totem the local shaman will carve to imprison it—or use to send it to your enemies. For an extra fee, of course.
If I was right, that meant neither vinegar nor raw iron nor running water would have any effect, a fact confirmed by the totem he was clutching in his hand, whose chain had enough iron to throw off anything susceptible, like a jinn. Just one more reason why carrion ghouls are just about the worst kind of infectious spirit. Because their hosts are sick, they can burrow deep and get a tight grip. You can’t just scare them out with talismans and holy water. It takes violence. You have to pry them away. From the inside. Like pulling a tick.
That meant, first, I had to know where the sickness was. That’s usually not a problem for a witch doctor, who has the help of the family to share all the relevant details. I had fuck-all.
Second, I absolutely, positively could not be wrong. If you go stabbing things into the wrong body part, or if it’s not a carrion ghoul after all, well . . .
The good news, if you could call it that, is that there’s a foolproof diagnosis, or so our ancestors have taught us. If you can get close enough to see it, the reflection of the world in the glisten of the eyes is always upside down.
I looked at the heavy salt ring. I didn’t have a choice. I was gonna have to get inside with it. My adversary seemed to understand my thoughts, because he smiled an awful, knowing smile and lowered the gun.
“Alright,” I whispered. “You wanna fight, let’s fight.”
I had exactly one advantage. It takes a lot out of a spirit to worm its way into a new host, especially a witch doctor, who would know how to resist. On top of that, this one had been yelling, on and off, for an hour or two at least. Already his breath was long and irregular. He looked tired. Thirsty, too. I just needed a distraction.
I showed him my empty hands, like a stage magician before a trick. He watched them intently with those horribly bloodshot eyes as I reached into the pocket of my slacks and pulled out my keys. A small pocket knife dangled. I showed it to him, as if to say “See? Nothing to worry about.” I opened the inch-long blade. It was sharp. It slit the skin of my forearm with no trouble. I clenched my teeth and hissed. It stung. It wasn’t a big cut, but it was enough to draw blood.
The old witch doctor licked his lips as I slipped my keys back into my pocket and stepped toward the circle, arm bared. He stood and stepped back from the edge, making room for me, but his eyes didn’t move from the deep red liquid slowly growing into a fat drop on my skin.
I lifted my foot to step inside the ring when he shouted and shoved the .38 in my face. I was close enough that I could hear the metal jostle with the motion and I froze. He sniffed the air once. Then twice. He was still clutching the totem in his left hand—no doubt to keep it away from me—and he lifted it and tapped his chest.
I knew what he meant. He could smell the silver.
Fucker.
I scowled as I unhooked the talisman. But since my arm was still bleeding, the drop ran as soon as I moved. He watched it jump from my elbow and hit the floor in a tiny splatter.
It was only a moment. But it was enough.
I ripped the talisman from my blouse and thrust it forward. It spun in the air, glimmering, and he flinched and turned with a growl. I sprang forward and the gun discharged the very second I knocked it away. The bullet hit the wall as I tackled my adversary to the floor.
See, kids? This is why you always, always, always supersize your salt rings. His head landed right next to the far edge. If that circle had been any smaller, my tackle would’ve forced him across the seal, and then who knew?
I had all my weight on him as I dangled the talisman in front of his eyes. I was sure I’d got the better of him then. But I was wrong. Fucker was strong. I could feel it immediately. That was why the old man had had so much trouble. In an instant, I knew I’d never be able to hold him. I leaned down quickly and caught my reflection in the glisten of his bloodshot eyes.
Definitely upside down.
He lifted me. Like I was nothing. He couldn’t approach the talisman, so he let go of the totem, which bounced on the floor, and lifted the whole of me with hardly any effort. That kind of strength was unusual. It meant he was old—damned old—which made sense, I suppose, given his language of choice. I should have paid more attention to that.
Lesson learned.
Only now I was in real trouble. I sacrificed the talisman by throwing it in his face, which caused him to flinch and swat it away. He had to let one hand go for that and I fell on my ass. The action pulled me free of his other hand, and I scrambled to the fallen gun and threw it outside the ring. It landed hard on the bathroom tile just as I felt my adversary bite into my calf. In the scramble, my nice department-store slacks had worked up my leg, revealing my skin. I felt teeth puncture my flesh. To the muscle. He hadn’t bit me the way an angry child bites you, to inflict pain. He bit me the way you bite into a tough steak, the way you bite something you intend to tear loose with your canines and swallow. He was eating me, and I screamed. It hurt. It hurt so bad my hands started shaking involuntarily and it took every last ounce of self-control not to turn around and push and kick and fight him off, which is every creature’s natural response to being eaten alive. Instead, I whelped and whimpered as I used my flat palms to drag my torso in an arc across the hardwood. My quivering fingertips brushed against the wooden figurine, but they only managed to knock it farther away.
“Fuck!”
That’s when he pulled with his head and tore a flap of blood-wet skin from my leg.
It’s the weirdest thing, let me tell ya. It hurts like a motherfucker, of course, but it’s the raw sensation that gets you. Your dermis lifting. Air on your muscles.
I screamed again. And I meant it this time, every last unintelligible syllable. It was primal—a completely irrational, uncontrollable wail. And with it came panic. There had already been a gunshot. If my scream was enough to convince my colleagues to burst through the door, if they saw us like that, they would’ve opened fire. No questions asked. Not only would the old witch doctor be dead before he hit the floor, I would be fucked. Because now I was seriously wounded, which meant if his host died, the carrion ghoul would rush out of him and into me, which I’m pretty sure was the whole point of the attack. He had seen that I was some kind of authority figure. Once he was inside me, someone was sure to let him out of the circle by rushing me to the hospital—an entire building of sick people for him to feed on.
There was no way I was going to let something that powerful get loose. In my body.
I kicked the old man with a heeled boot, right in the mouth. Once. Twice. Three times. But all I did was loosen some teeth and bloody the guy’s lip. Not that I’m weak or out of shape or anything. I was quite the kickboxer there for a while. This ghoul simply didn’t care. I went to kick again and he knocked my leg out of the way and lunged for my face. I got the old man’s dirty, sweat-salty, nicotine-stained fingers in my mouth and up my nose and I gagged. The ghoul forced my head back and down the floor. Hard. He opened the witch doctor’s mouth over me, like he was going breathe himself out. It stank like cigarette ash.
That was it.
“Thanks,” I said.
I head-butted the guy. It didn’t do much, but it was enough for me to lunge for the totem. The ghoul’s powerful hands grabbed me immediately and pulled me back. But I didn’t fight. I let him take me. I turned and rammed the wooden point right into the old guy’s chest, into his lungs.
The room dropped underneath me—as if the entire building, the entire city, had suddenly sunk four feet in space. I fell hard, along with everything else. The TV toppled and smashed on the hardwood. Books and pictures scattered. Water burst from the toilet. The lock in my hand clicked shut from the force, and that was it. I
collapsed, panting hard and in hella pain.
I heard banging on the front door. The handle jiggled and there were loud calls for a battering ram.
“Shit.”
I didn’t have long.
I struggled to my feet, where I discovered immediately that my right leg could no longer support my weight. Blood trickled down my skin into my shoe. I grabbed the unconscious old man by the arms and dragged him, limping, through the scattered salt to the bathroom. I pulled a heavy bath towel from the rack, wet it in the still-churning toilet, and wiped the blood off his mouth. I checked the hole in his gown from where I’d plunged the sharp end of the figurine. The skin underneath was clean and bare. And he was breathing.
The first swing of the battering ram cracked the frame but didn’t completely dislodge the bolt. I hobbled back to the living room and snatched the totem. When the door gave way and the patrolmen ran in, I was sitting on the toilet seat next to the moaning witch doctor. I had the rolled towel pressed to the back of my bloody calf.
“What took you so long?” I asked. I showed them the blood on the towel. “I’m gonna need a stretcher.”
My colleagues swarmed around, Ballantine and Rollins and everyone, trying to make sense of the scene—the scattered salt, the shattered television, the fallen books and pictures, the wet walls, the blood on the hardwood. They tried to carry me out of the apartment, but I absolutely refused to move from my porcelain throne until the paramedics came. Once I was on the stretcher, one of the EMTs tried to take the towel but I pointed across the room instead and demanded my necklace. I used some nasty cuss words to make everyone feel awkward and forget about the towel.
Ballantine took my statement at the hospital while a young male resident stabbed my leg with a series of fat needles. I got a local anesthetic, a bunch of precautionary vaccines, and a shit-ton of stitches. He didn’t say that he knew I’d been bitten, but he knew I’d been bitten. I said the old man was basically harmless but that he might’ve had dementia or something and that I’d tripped and fell over the TV, which was why it was broken, and that was how I’d gotten cut.
“What about the gunshot?” she asked.
“He didn’t understand why the cops were there. He was scared. He was sweating. His hands were shaking. I convinced him he wasn’t in danger, and when he went to lower the weapon, it slipped and discharged.”
She didn’t believe me. At all. But she didn’t ask too many questions. Since no one had died and I wasn’t pressing charges, there was no real incentive to make a big deal out of anything. That would’ve done nothing but piss off a colleague and elicit more paperwork. So she gave me a look to let me know she wasn’t an idiot and called it a day.
That night, I treated myself to a Cuban from my secret stash. I sat on my balcony in my underwear with my bandaged leg on the railing and smoked that cigar to a nub while pulling swigs from a bottle of fancy champagne. Just me and my drinking buddy: a foot-long wooden figurine, wrapped in a tarnished chain and locked tight. I snuck it out swaddled in the towel like the little baby Jesus. We had a nice chat that night. Pretty sure all he did was curse me in Aramaic. Something about a book.
The next day, I left the pain pills at home and walked with a pronounced limp into the office. I sat at my desk. I unlocked the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and pulled it open with a grunt. It was getting heavy. And full. There was a painted mask, a goblet, a small collection of carved votive candles, a handful of polished stone bezoars, feathers, false talismans, a pygmy head, ampules of holy water, the teeth of a saint laid into a tarnished silver Coptic cross, a broken wand, a rabbit’s foot, the taxidermized claw of a giant extinct salamander, wood-framed eyeglasses with crystal lenses, and more. I tossed the wooden figurine onto the pile, rolled the drawer shut, and locked it.
I looked around the office. “The Killing Field” was stuffed. A few of my colleagues were chatting. Lieutenant Miller was getting herself a coffee at the fancy new grind-and-brew vending machine. I turned on my computer and typed my password and a pleasant ding welcomed me back. I wondered how many different chimes the software company had tested before they settled on that specific one.
I sat back and looked at the screen.
I couldn’t prove it, but it sure seemed like there was a helluva lot more shit happening lately. And of the serious kind, too.
So. I wanna tell you a story. About a man named Will King, an NYPD detective, like me.
King investigated the 1928 disappearance and presumed death of 10-year-old Grace Budd, who left home to attend a birthday party and never returned. There wasn’t much to go on. In fact, there was nothing at all. No body. No eyewitnesses. No physical evidence of any kind. Little Grace simply vanished, so no arrest was made for a full two years—that is, until Charles Edward Pope was accused of the murder by his estranged wife. Mrs. Pope claimed her husband had confessed to her, but since there was nothing for a jury but her word against his, Charles was found not guilty in December, 1930. He went home a free man after spending 108 days in jail on nothing but an accusation. I’m sure, when he got there, he had a few choice words for his wife.
For a time, it seemed like that would be the end of it. But in 1934, four years after the trial and six years after the murder, Grace’s mother received an anonymous letter, purportedly from the killer, which described in bald tones how he had enticed the girl into his room on the pretense of needing help, how he had quickly removed his clothes on her way up the stairs so as not to get her blood on them, how he had strangled her and butchered her body, and how he had eaten it, roasted in the oven, over a period of nine days. The note ended with the “reassurance” that the girl had died a virgin.
“But I could’ve done it,” he said. “If I’d wanted to.”
Mrs. Budd was illiterate and had to have her eldest son read the letter to her, after which she gave it to the police. Although there was nothing distinguishing about the page, it had been delivered in an envelope that was marred in one corner. Once dampened and viewed under a magnifying glass, the mark revealed an emblem containing the letters N.Y.P.C.B.A., for the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association. After interviewing the Association’s employees, Detective King discovered a janitor who admitted to stealing some stationery, although he claimed to have left it in an apartment he had rented on East 52nd. King got the names of all the recent tenants from the landlady, and there in the middle—much to his surprise—he saw one he recognized.
Albert Fish was a real grandfatherly type. He had a bit of a shamble to his walk. He was warm and soft-spoken. He was a father of six and visibly delighted in his youngest grandson. He read the Bible and could quote it prodigiously. By all accounts, he was a liked and respected man, and at 68 years old, with a head of gray hair and that sideways gait, he was the picture of harmlessness. Which is why, without a shred of physical evidence to link him to the murder, Fish had been quickly exonerated, despite that he had actually been the last to see Grace Budd alive—when he accompanied her to the birthday party with her mother’s blessing.
The landlady on East 52nd informed Detective King that Albert Fish no longer lived there, but he’d been receiving money from his son and was due one more check, which had just arrived. King decided to wait outside the room until his quarry came to collect the letter, whereupon he intercepted the soft-spoken old man and asked him to come to the station for questioning. Fish agreed, but as soon as Detective King turned, the doting, Bible-reading, gray-haired father of six produced a razor blade and tried to slice the policeman’s neck open. He failed and was subdued and arrested and ultimately brought to trial.
After the arrest, Albert Fish claimed to have committed close to a hundred murders in a number of different states, although he was only ever linked to nine and was only ever convicted of one—that of Grace Budd, for which he received the electric chair. Prior to the trial, he described a pair of involuntary ejaculations he’d experienced while he dismembered the little girl’s body, and since it could never be
proved whether he had eaten her or not, the motive was described as sexual and no account of the supposed cannibalism was given to the jury.
What is true beyond a shadow of a doubt, however, is that the kind and elderly Albert Fish, who spent all that time reading the Gospels, regularly heard the voice of God emanating from his Bible, which he carried everywhere—a voice that commanded him to torture people “with implements of Hell.” What’s true is that he liked to beat himself with a nail-studded board and to stick wool soaked in lighter fluid in his anus and light it on fire. What’s true is that he liked to insert needles in his scrotum. And to leave them there. An X-ray revealed more than two dozen were present at the time of his arrest—so many, in fact, that the electric chair shorted in the middle of his execution and kind old Albert Fish had to wait in excruciating agony, half electrocuted, while they reset the switches and finished the job.
I imagine Detective King was changed by that case. I would’ve been. I bet he was changed by the knowledge that he’d had the killer from the start and had let him go. I bet he wondered how many people had been killed in the intervening years. I bet he never again made the mistake of presuming innocence just because the alternative was inconceivable. I bet he was proud of the fact that he’d finally caught Grace Budd’s killer and had seen him punished. I bet it never made up for all the ones that got away.
Why am I telling you this?
Because despite what you see on TV, or hear from the government, that’s hardly ever how it goes. And I don’t just mean about cannibalism and needles in scrotums. I mean about who gets caught and who gets away.
